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July 29th, 2008
July 26th, 2008
11:46 pm
There is no way to end Peter Pan that is not a sad way.
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July 11th, 2008
01:31 pm - 6 McKnight Artists
Maybe I post about the shows a lot, I don't know. But this show has some of the niftiest work we've been host to for a good while, so you should all come. If not tonight—with all the people, food, and excitement—then some time. But really? Neat stuff.
One artist, #3 above, stuck one of his sculptures in a beehive for a couple of weeks, and now it has these big sheets of honeycomb. Artists #1 and #4 did whole installations. More than worth the price of admission, which is free.
6 to 8; directions here.
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10:32 am - Cheating death
A patient's inability to accept his own limitations is not without beneficial side effects, he said. "I see this in the way my patients are consumed by the idea of their deaths, or their attempts to counteract death," Dr. Karasu said. "All of the philanthropy you see — the buildings named after people for giving $50 million to this museum or to Columbia — is a result of one man after another trying to conquer his mortality."*
If I were in a position to endow an institution to put my name on a building, I would demand, at least, approval rights over the design and construction. I would be a giant control freak. Otherwise, the name—MY name—could be uttered a thousand times by its querulous denizens and passers-by.
This comes to mind when I come across a family name that I recognize first from some brick behemoth around town (fundraising... it comes up). Do these wealthy people realize their immortal name is being inextricably bound to memories of indifferent design and bad food?
*original NYT article here
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July 8th, 2008
10:28 am - Uninhabited moonscape
I've heard about the Antarctic Artists & Writers Program before and thought it sounded neat. Maybe not neat enough to suffer through such an extreme climate, but pretty neat.
But looking at these photos, it occurred to me that Antarctica might be the closest thing to walking on another planet that any of us might get to experience in this lifetime. And who can read about the reaches of space without wanting to be there?
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July 2nd, 2008
12:29 pm - Goya and Twizzlers
You can't really appreciate a work until you've written about it. At least this is true of me. Like how you can't really claim to know a topic until you've taught it? I don't always parse a work until I have to dissect its merits. This is not true of the works that I love immediately (is it ever?) but that is an emotional reaction. It's different. Falling in love is always different.
On a completely different note, today I remembered the taste of Twizzlers. My sister and I used to spend days at the local pool in summer, and we usually bought Twizzlers as a break snack. Sometimes Skittles or popcorn. But strawberry Twizzlers, sunblock, and chlorinated water is a pungent sensory recollection.
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June 26th, 2008
04:37 pm - Ooh, swish!
Glass Gowns will be the height of 21st Century fashion, according to 1930s experts.
Oh man.
You have to see this.
"Yet another designer goes so far as to believe that skirts will disappear entirely. Shoes will have cantilever heels."
Not far off, aside from that "climactic belt" business.
"As for men, there won't be any shaving, colors, ties, or pockets."
Three out of four ain't bad. And they managed the gadget stuff. Sort of.
Where's my bearded spaceman with the rotary telephone strapped around his neck?
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June 17th, 2008
10:26 am
Hey everybody, it's Download Day. Go update your browsers to Firefox 3.
Edit: start your engines at noon Central Time; 10am on the west coast.
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June 16th, 2008
01:27 pm - Meme v2 - the bettering
If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a completely made up memory of you and me. It can be anything you want -- good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people don't remember about you. Or, if you don't want to post it, but want a completely made up memory from me, say so at the end of your comment and I'll reply with one. But consider posting. It's fun to see what utterly unbelievable nonsense comes up.
Current Mood: Slick meme, Lillim!
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June 9th, 2008
June 4th, 2008
02:21 pm - Douchebaggery pops up where you least expect it
Another worthwhile rumination on abortion. Events have conspired to set me to thinking a lot about feminism, of late.
First off, only last week did I stumble across the kerfluffle over the Open Source Boob Project. Since then, I've been dipping through the responses - both comments and reaction posts. The conversation was interesting, but more so was some of the follow-up. For instance, this conversation about geek culture and gender (see comments). FVR and I were watching Darkon the other night, and we were disappointed by the relative paucity of interaction with the participants out of character. In particular, we wondered why the filmmakers weren't talking to more of the female participants, who made up maybe 10% of this battle-happy LARP crew, and find out why THEY were there.
Female geeks are sort of a demographic unto themselves, a fact that gets lost in broad-brushed discussions of (mostly white, mostly male, mostly straight) geek culture. It's something I'm reminded of when reading sci-fi or spec. fiction, wherein even titles recommended by friends often chafe, in subtle and surprising ways.* The gendered-geek issue also pops up a lot in all the late conversation about galloping, rampant sexism in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) disciplines. Having largely surrounded myself with a circle of college peers that draw heavily from these fields, and knowing (or thinking) them to be, on the whole, enlightened individuals, it continues to surprise me that this atmosphere persists in these disciplines. I am sure it would surprise my mother a lot less. Sure, I have worked among sexist coworkers in the past, but they were mostly 1) fairly old; 2) not very educated (and 3, often southern). For what it's worth, I almost expect that sort of thing out of that crowd.
Last, there's that big, fat, elephant-in-the-room of a presidential race. I'm sick of hearing about it; you probably are, too. But more than the election itself, I'm sick of the demonization of Hillary Clinton. Things I think she is: aggressive, ambitious, shrewd, well-connected, tenacious. Things I think she is not: evil, rhetorically gifted, sociopathic, or appreciably worse than most serious presidential contenders. And I didn't even vote for her (it's another place where my more-battle-hardened feminist mother & I part ways).
Take, for instance, her use of the Bobby Kennedy race as an example of late-running nomination contests. Some have taken HRC's comments to mean she believes—or worse, hopes—there's an assassin in BHO's future. Such a belief isn't necessarily all that unfounded; I seem to recall reading that BHO received secret service coverage unusually early in the primary process due to threats, and he'd hardly be the first embodiment of civil-rights progress to get gunned down. Believing HRC wishes death on her opponent is cynical to the point of paranoid. I am inclined to believe she was trying to use historical references people might actually remember. This level of over-analysis happens all the time to politicians, of course, but the glare seems particularly attenuated towards women. Witness the mother whose child is missing. If she isn't crying during filming, she's taken for a monster, or a robot. As someone who doesn't do public displays of emotion, and someone not disinclined to morbid conversation, these are Turing tests I know I'd fail. And it pisses me off that they exist.
A few final notes.
On Hot Chicks With Douchebags? ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) saucepot says it all. Anybody who can look at those pictures and not think most of those people are, in fact, made for each other, has some serious competitive hostility to work through.
Now I want to see a racing horse or something named "Lady Douchebag".
On balancing a career in academe with a family? This gives me hope. I guess, kinda.
*An exception here appears to be Ursula Le Guin. Under discoflamingo's recommendation, I read The Dispossessed this weekend, and found it to be nothing if not deeply thoughtful and complex. I will keep an ear out for her in the future.
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June 3rd, 2008
May 22nd, 2008
12:05 pm - Recess
Every day, marching my rump to the car to drive to work, I pass a school, which has a playground, which is often full of kids. A playground teeming with play.
How did you use to spend recess?
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May 5th, 2008
04:50 pm
This is a swell NYT article on habits, innovation, and challenging one's mind.
What did I do this weekend?
Practiced singing & playing "Something Stupid" on uke whilst hula-hooping.
Started cataloging my back issues of Newsweek.
And drank.
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May 2nd, 2008
07:35 pm - Studio Artist Pottery Sale
NCC Studio artists are having a Mother's Day pottery sale next weekend.
If you like handmade ceramics, I encourage you to drop in and check it out. NCC is right off the highway at 25th and Riverside, there's free parking, and there'll be some really gorgeous stuff.
Some good prices too, from what I hear.
So that's 2424 Franklin Ave E, Minneapolis.
5 - 8 on May 9
10 - 6 on May 10
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02:28 pm - Memory plays tricks
I spent about an hour last night trying to remember whether I spent a year taking post-baccalaureate courses at American University, or not.
The place was intimately familiar, the faces and people I recognized, and the building was somewhere I'd spent many hours.
But equally certain was I that I'd gone home after college and gotten a job.
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April 24th, 2008
02:05 pm
The thing that mystifies me about "reusable canvas totes" is that all bags are reusable.
I reuse shopping bags until they break, and I use old bags for trash-can liners, and I STILL have bags from 2005 I haven't gotten through.
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April 18th, 2008
01:46 pm - 1. Fiction
I think I largely stopped reading fiction around college.
As a kiddo I blew through it. The fiction section of the library at Hershey Elementary was my well-trafficked homeland, mentally annotated for favorite authors and genres—I liked magic-mixed reality, historic fiction, mysteries, sea adventures, stories with kids living with distant relatives in old houses (which might be a genre unto itself?). Age and maturity do funny things to literary tastes, though, and I started growing out of my old favorites as a teenager. I dabbled in memoirs, fantasy, and classics. College continued this downward trend; I think some of my flexible reading time got preempted by the internet and accelerated socialization.
After college I found myself back in PA, working a dull gray job with no social group. I started plucking books off my sister's shelves to read at lunchtime, or (if I got to a really good part) surreptitiously under my desk. Zola. Kundera. Even YA fiction I'd missed, like The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
But never since childhood have I felt like I had a home in the fiction section. Classics are fine, I guess, but just the fact of their being quote-unquote "classics" makes the idea of reading them feel like the literary equivalent of eating your vegetables. And I like vegetables! But lost is the sense of moseying through the aisles, and happening across a little gem. They've already been ferreted up by some other truffle-hunting bibliophile.
I spoke to discoflamingo about more modern offerings. "Books which are written as part of a professor's tenure are different than mass-market books which must appeal to some level of commercial success to become popular," he said. "And the authors in both of those worlds resent the others for being inaccessibly elitist or irrelevant popcorn."
"That sounds like a concise summary of why I don't like to read fiction anymore," said I. "Either verbal tripe or child rape."
"I think that the best fiction straddles all of these boundaries, but it's difficult to find," he said. "There are just too many books being put out every year. I mean, who has time to search every university press for fiction which is not about something horribly depressing, or stacks of paperbacks at a bookstore for something which looks like it has half a brain?"
There are still books that I find, and read, and like. There are others that I find and read and shrug. For the most part, I've traded book-roulette in favor of incessant news-reading (some of you know). From the end of college through a year or two ago, bits and pieces started falling together into a matrix of systemwide policy logic. It was a bit of apophenia (write that down), but it was a bit of pragmatic quixoticism, that some solutions could be divined, and that maybe I could be part of the logicking. This is part of why I wanted to go back to school, and part of why I intend to study what I do. But that's another story.
(From this post. New topic?)
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11:41 am - Reminded by gunn and cloudscudding
Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it. (comments screened)
I'm in the mood to think about something different today.
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March 28th, 2008
11:25 am
Today I noticed the striking resemblance 'twixt warm tea and beast urine, when one of these is spilt on your desk.
This would be the moment, posterity, when I made the decision to refer to my domestic animals as "beasts." Make a note.
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