to be a rock and not to roll

O, happy day. Mark Crispin Miller has a weblog. You should read it not only because Mark Crispin Miller has pulled off the three name thing beatifully, but because he's articulate, interesting, and tapped in to so many important things.


Also, listened to the beginning of disc 2 of "Shut Up You Fucking Baby" yesterday, and ... wow.


As for the pursuit of art, I'm still trying to straighten this out. And instead of getting clearer, it's getting murkier. Is there a difference between authentic and inauthentic art? Is inauthentic art art that is weilded to manipulate? Is there even a such thing as art that doesn't aim to manipulate? This is the first time my thought has really been stymied in such a major way; sure, I've had questions I couldn't answer, but now I can't even figure out which questions are the important ones.

yay, pain!

In case I hadn't mentioned this before, "I, Asshole!" is a truly excellent blog.


Going to a Dean Meetup on Wednesday. I'll write about how that goes.

pass me a cherryapple

Okay, so you must see Lost in Translation. I'm not even going to link to a review of it, because it's so great that if you haven't heard anything about it yet, I don't want to ruin it for you. I knew nothing about it going in other than basically who was in it and that it was directed by Sofia Coppola. Her first movie (Virgin Suicides, I think) was not great, but this one is. It's great. Even if you don't like movies, see it.

Scarlett Johanssen (sp?) is in it. At one point in the movie, a guy in the row in front of us leaned over and whispered to another guy, "is she pregnant?" No. She isn't. She's just not anorexic. This is a perfect example of how far media is off from reality.

feverish left-wing poetry

Well, holy shit. There is a book about a bear who plays the saxophone. And it's out of print.

like all conflicts, it is a blur

I think that my thesis will eventually turn out to be about the place of art in daily life. Blogs, I think, are a form of artistic expression, and are thus one way in which technology enhances the ability of normal people to produce art.


I don't know where all that's going to end up yet, though. Generally, I think that art has a place in everyone's life, and that everyone should strive to produce something artistic every week or so, if not every day. I will probably not take that stance in my thesis, because it does not seem especially academic.


But this got me thinking about my own life, +art. I'm quite lucky to have had my artistic inklings encouraged and supported, materially and spiritually, by both my parents and the person I ended up with. But during the semester it's hard to get up the energy and time necessary to embark on any large artistic projects. So I picked up my quilt again.


When I was a freshman in college, I had 3 classes on MW&F, and nothing on TRs. So I had a lot of extra time. On one occasion, I went home, and having moved everything to school, I ended up using a quilt that my great-grandmother had made. It was on my Mom's bed as a child, and one of the patches was worn off by where her dog had slept toward the bottom of the bed. It is a Sunbonnet Sue quilt, although I think my great-grandmother must have made this particular pattern herself. The colored material in her quilt was from leftovers, as far as I know.


So Mom and I got a bunch of calicos and embroidery threads, plus an embroidery hoop, and traced one of the Sunbonnet Sues on the quilt to use as a pattern, and cut a pattern out of a manila folder. And so I spent a lot of free time sewing (and sewing and sewing) during my freshman year.


I pick it up from time to time and work on it. I have a total of 6 finished to near-finished squares. Other artistic trends in my life find their ways into my quilt -- for instance, one of my Sues has a beaded hatband, and another has a bead-netted pocket. I have no idea how long those will last once it's finished.


I think about my great-grandmother making that quilt, and wonder about what she did while she quilted. Did she and her buddies have bees? Did she listen to the radio? Was she all alone, in silence, just sewing with her thoughts?


While I sew, I listen to the radio (This American Life, especially) and think about how much longer I'm probably taking to make my quilt than she took to make hers. Not just that I'm into my 6th year on it, but that every stitch I make could probably have been made in half the time by her.


I have no idea how the end of the quilting process works. I know there's batting, several layers, and I know there'll be the diamonds I'm working on now, and I know that all these layers are attached to one another by the process of quilting - that is, sewing up and down through all the layers millions of times, in a pattern - but somehow I can't see myself reaching that stage. And I wonder how much she did by hand, and if she had a machine to do it with.


And a lot of the time, I wonder if I'll ever get it done.

nowhere to go but to a bar

Defective Yeti funny.

I noticed today as I was washing my plate that it was made in China. This struck me as quite strange, considering that the plate is ceramic and thus breakable. Highly breakable. (Trust me, I know.) If this is an American company, or a company based anywhere other than in China, wouldn't lower labor costs be offset by higher shipping costs? And if the company is based in China, how silly is it that some American companies probably ship similar plates to China? Why don't we keep our own plates?


Perhaps they save on shipping by wrapping the ceramic dishware in Gap sweaters.


I am blissfully ignorant about how business works. I suppose what I lack in knowledge, I make up for in the entertainment value of picturing big crates of alternating sweaters and plates.

*girl night!*

which means i'm eating ben&jerry's and taking online quizzes. quizilla's so much better than e-mode, because e-mode is so obviously market research. damn.

thanx for the yogurt

Went to the mall today. It must have been a long time since the last time I'd really been shopping in a mall, because it was really weird. I felt like I was on speed -- or at least it felt like what I think being on speed would feel like. Spastic music, blinding, swirling colors. The Gap felt like a sensory deprivation tank compared to some of these clothing stores. Poor The Gap.

So I was trying on clothes in this one store - I forget what it was - and got stuck in this shirt. It was one of these faux-hippie things - starched white cotton, lace, small red flowers - and it was too small. But because it was completely non-stretchy, the smallness was a problem. I couldn't get it over my shoulders. Tried several times. Started thinking about stealing it, putting on my t-shirt over it, cutting it off later at home - switching my "3" tag with a "2" from another door. Thought about saying, "I like it so much I'll just wear it out!" and then, again, cutting it off at home. Wondered what I would say if I ripped it trying to get it off. Figured they'd charge me for it. Tried to get one arm out as a start, but the non-stretchiness was a problem.

So finally I got it off, probably dislocating my shoulders.

dusk mountain

still plodding along.

tee hee tee hee hee hee

Oh, how I love being whined at.


Yesterday I made a Syllabus for Life and am sticking to it. My syllabus for life kicks ass. Admit it.

Heh, one of my old students has a blog that I know about because he e-mailed me once from the domain. So now I lurk and resist the urge to correct his grammar. ... How much would it fuck you up to have an old professor e-mail you to correct your grammar?

yet another post about...

Also, nobody's really mentioned the part of the video of the Book Expo where Bill O'Reilly invites Al Franken to his mothers house to "eat a bagel."

Huh.

wooly bully

So, believe it or not, the Book Expo incident that people have speculated induced O'Reilly to get Fox to sue Franken is all online. (Look for it under "Book and Author Luncheon.") This is a long video (1:30), but you can skip to the good parts -- i.e. where O'Reilly says "Just SHUT UP" to Franken (among other things). Mmmm, partisan catfight...


Molly Ivins is also present and speaks about the book she has coming out. Molly Ivins kicks ass.

pinecone paradise

The puppy is just like Super Grover and the dog is just like Kermit the Frog.


Well, I wasn't the hugest fan of Al Franken before, but after going to four bookstores yesterday (and buying potential thesis-topic books) and then ending up in one that is small and independent but never has exactly quite what I want, and spending an hour there waiting for the movie to start, I decided, well, what the hell. I'll buy and read Al Franken's book. Especially because I'd read the beginning on Salon.com and found it very funny.


And, after spending all day reading it (other's taking a shot at it now) instead of my potential thesis-topics books, I must say that I highly recommend it. It's about goddamn time someone decided to call these people out on the multitude of lies that they spew. (The book is called "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right".)


I was skeptical at first. I thought things like "how could someone really write an entire book that was just all lies and still have a successful career?" and "Al Franken probably has his own agenda and will be sort of untruthful too" and "how bad could the lying problem possibly be?" BUT. Then I read the book. And now I'm trying to find some way to trick my family into reading it too, and so they'll see why Bill O'Reilly should not be taken seriously (shut up! shut up!) and why Fox News is bad bad bad and that the media doesn't have a liberal bias, etc.


It's really satisfying, in a way, to read about all this stuff being set straight. At the same time, it's disturbing how much lying there is. More people need to spell out exactly how saying "american families will get an average of $1,100 from this tax cut" is, while technically true, not true at all considering that the average is an AVERAGE, meaning that rich families will get several tens of thousands of dollars back while lower-class families will get about $300 if any at all. Also, there were those bold-faced lies Bush told - over and over again - about the vast majority of the cuts going to people at the bottom of the ladder. Simply not fucking true. How can he get away with this?

by the way - i like your dinosaur

last night I told a stranger all about you

other and i were talking last night about morphine (the rokk starr, not the drug) and about how all his music was about drug addiction in one sense in another. then we got to talking about how it would be interesting to write a story about someone who was offered to make a deal with the devil in order to be a great (GREAT) artist, but all their art could be about would be the devil itself. but then i thought that that's just exactly what morphine did, and so wouldn't be a story at all, but an essay.

cat power's voice is like scratching a really bad itch with a porcupine. scratching so hard it hurts.

Also, I have no idea what you're talking about.

I've been thinking about how modern humor has certain forms, certain patterns. Don't know if I'm quite interested enough to go into it here at length, but I keep thinking about it. Especially when the same pattern hits me as funny over and over again. Maybe the judge of whether someone is truly funny is whether they can come up with new patterns.

I've also been thinking (at this point you're probably realizing that this post might not turn out to be too interesting - sorry) about how odd it is that we gravitate toward these male/female couples - or, to be all-encompassing or at least more-encompassing - two-person romantic clusters. 'Cause I just wonder sometimes why I can't just live with a bunch of my friends. Throw in some dogs, kids, and cats (in that order), as well as my Other, and we can each have our own rooms and sneak out our windows if we feel like it, and have House Dinners every night. Why the hell not?

Why do we only build extremely tall buildings near other extremely tall buildings?

Blogger sure is snazzy now.

Also, why can't we sleep in pods? The best night of sleep I've ever spent (well, the most interesting at any rate) in terms of innovative ways to sleep was in this HUGE pit filled with foam cubes made for practicing gymnastic flips into. Because, really, any position you wanted to assume was possible. My mind was blown. I never got to go back. Oh, and one thing I'm going to invent, for women with hourglass body shapes, is pajamas with built-in padding at the waistline so that you're never stuck sleeping on your side with your hips and shoulders caving in toward the waist. You wouldn't need them, of course, if you're sleeping in a pod or pit of foam blocks, because there wouldn't be any nasty flat surface to deal with, but in case you are banished to sleep on the floor, a board, or an especially hard mattress, you will need these pajamas.

Did you know you can get botulism by eating the contents of an extremely dented can? The video at the Student Health Center told me that.