Monday, February 28, 2011

Oscar Fashion 2011

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I love the way this dress is a mash-up of gold and silver:




Camila Alves looking stunning:


Some people don't look great in white, but I always think Michelle Williams looks bright and gorgeous in it:


I may be in the minority on this one, but I love Melissa Leo's dress:


But the best of all is our beloved Colin!












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Sunday, February 27, 2011

My Nephew Jared

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Dad:  Jared's going boar hunting in Georgia this weekend.
Me:  Of course he is.
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Carey Young

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The pieces in her Redshift series were created by shining light through meteor pieces:
















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Saturday, February 26, 2011

"Stand Up Comedy"

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God is love
And love is evolution's very best day




















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Friday, February 25, 2011

Buffy

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I've been watching the 1999 season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on re-runs, and they stand the test of time. "Hush" is one of the scariest episodes of TV ever, but also rich with layers of meaning. And "Beer Bad" is clever, funny, and has some damn good caveman acting.













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Thursday, February 24, 2011

Story Songs

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The rural gothic trend in music is amazing. These songs create whole worlds for the listener to enter into. Some faves:

Furr, Blitzen Trapper
White as Snow, U2
In the Valley of the Dying Sun, House of Heroes

The House of Heroes song isn't rural gothic, but it does evoke a whole time and place in which a clear narrative takes place.

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Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Faithful Place, by Tana French

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One of the many things I like about this mystery novel is its unsentimental view of the narrator's Irish mother:

Ma’s voice was a screech and still rising. I could practically feel her giving me cancer. “—and you, you ungrateful little bastard, you can’t even be bothered sitting your arse down to eat dinner with us—”

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Monday, February 21, 2011

Slip of the Knife, by Denise Mina

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This mystery novel had some nice passages in it, especially regarding women. The protagonist is a female police officer:

On her need to avoid looking like a stereotype at work: "Whole areas of comment were closed to her because she was female: emotional first-person accounts about anything, stories about children, all things domestic."

On being a middle-aged, overweight woman:  "She caught her breath on the top step, embarrassed, as she always was when she lost her breath, to be a fat woman, sweating."

On the problem with violence, even if well intentioned: "That’s the trouble with armed struggle. Even if it starts out very noble with good men putting their higher feelings aside it’s always going to be a magnet for thugs and sadists. There’s always going to be a faction who don’t want it to end, you know?"

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Sunday, February 20, 2011

In Love




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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Amused

Franz Messerschmidt's "Afflicted with Constipation" (1771-83):




















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Excited

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Friday, February 18, 2011

Get Off My Lawn!

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What is it with the toilet paper in women’s bathroom? Today at work the two humongous rolls were packed so tight in their plastic overcase that I literally could not get one square to come out. I had to reach my hand through the bottom of the casing, then maneuver inside to get the inner roll to move, freeing one square every 30 seconds or so. And have you noticed that, in public restrooms, the dispenser is placed so close to the floor that it becomes nearly impossible to use in a sanitary manner? First you have to put your hand nearly to the floor to even grasp the hanging paper, then pull down and rip every 2 or 3 inches because otherwise your hand will bump against the dirty floor. In this manner you can manage to put together 10 or 20 pieces of toilet paper scraps for one use.

How long, O Lord, how long?
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Thursday, February 17, 2011

Federal Budget Summary

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Slate's daily Kindle edition recently included an article by Eliot Spitzer on the federal budget. Here are the big facts:

a. Spending is about $3.8 trillion.
b. Revenue is about $2.5 trillion.
c. This leaves a deficit of about $1.3 trillion.

The budget is allocated thusly:

a. Defense—about $900 billion.
b. Social Security—$730 billion.
c. Medicare—$490 billion.
d. Medicaid—$300 billion.
e. Interest—$250 billion.
f. Nondefense discretionary—$610 billion.

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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Grammy Fashions

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I loved the Grammys this year! The folk rock medley with Mumford and Sons, Mick Jagger putting all the young fools in their place, Gwyneth and Cee-Lo. And fantastic fashion! I usually don't like Rihanna's clothes choices, but her dress below may very well be my favorite dress of the entire awards season. And her red hair looks fantastic with it.

























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Monday, February 14, 2011

Changeable Sky

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The sky went from blue to stormy to gray and back several times this afternoon as I was walking Rocky. It's hard to believe the photos below were taken at 3:00 in the afternoon.















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Sunday, February 13, 2011

A Primer on Happiness: The Films of Mike Leigh

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Mike Leigh is third on my list of favorite directors (Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Mike Leigh, Alexander Payne, Catherine Hardwicke). He's best known for his Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, which made a star of leading actress Brenda Blethyn. His latest film, Another Year, is another great movie about the emotional lives of ordinary people.

Ever since I saw his early film Life Is Sweet, I've admired Leigh's ability to portray happy marriages. Tolstoy famously said that all happy families are alike, and writers and actors often say that flawed characters are more interesting. But Mike Leigh's films make another case: that happiness is interesting, and unhappiness just numbing.

In Another Year, the central characters are a late middle-aged couple named Jerry and Tom, a therapist and geologist with a grown son named Joe with whom they're close. The movie starts with scenes from their work life and then transitions home, where Jerry and Tom occasionally play host to friends who are struggling, most notably Mary, a colleague who wasted her youth on a married man and is facing middle age with manic despair. Leigh is completely sympathetic with these characters, showing us their charm and a glimpse of the people they could be if they could break out of their destructive behaviors.  But he also shows how tiring they are---self-involved (as in a scene where Mary blows into a party and fails to notice a friend's new baby) and caught in their own repetitive scripts (Mary's continuing car crises).

The central motif in the movie is that of Jerry and Tom's garden.The movie is divided into four sections, each beginning with Jerry and Tom working in their garden at the start of the new season. In spring they plant. In summer they fertilize. In autumn they reap. In winter they tend and rest. And so it is with their lives. Being happy is really so easy. You study, you work, you pay attention, you care for others. You don't drink too much, you don't blow up at family funerals. But for those in emotional pain or chaos, these small things feel completely out of reach. Tom invites his lonely friend Ken to go on a walking tour in the north, to get him away and give him something to look forward to. But Ken can't even respond, is too paralyzed to take any action.

The movie ends on a sad note. Mary has spent most of the movie talking in her self-involved, manic way---about her car, about her troubles on the Tube, about her past. The last scene has her chastened, sitting at Jerry and Tom's dining room table with their family, Joe and his new girlfriend, listening quietly as they tell their own stories:  of the interesting work they've done and the places they've seen. Whole lives full of interest and challenges. The camera moves around the table, person by person, and finally lands on Mary, who sits only half-listening, just aware of her own misery. And the voices of others at the table recede to nothing---showing just how much she's trapped in her own head.

All of the acting was superb, but I have to give a special shout-out to Jim Broadbent, who has done a million movies and is distinctive in each one. He had a lanky charm here, a loose athleticism, radiating health. But the whole cast was amazing. The girlfriend, who would have been a stick figure in most movies, is fully realized, a real, specific individual. The specificity of his characters is perhaps the most rare of Mike Leigh's many gifts.
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Don't Dream It's Over

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Sixpence None the Richer does a cover of this 80s classic that I've been listening to lately. I first got the album that it's on sometime after September 11, and it became very meaningful to me. Although September 11 has taken on all sorts of baggage in the years since---thanks to the invasion of Iraq and the use of torture---at heart it was always what we knew it to be then: a group of murderous men who represented a culture that would like nothing better than to shut down Western culture, its freedoms, its openness.

Maybe I just have a melodramatic (and slightly apocalyptic) mindset, but I've always been aware of how things could go south. Looking at history, all it takes is an economic collapse, environmental disaster, military humiliation, for the dark forces to come out. People with nasty little minds are ready to turn on their neighbors, just itching for a reason to put people in their place. The world was shocked when Germany---cultured, spiritual Germany---became the source of a festering, pathological hatred during the years of Nazism. If it happened there, it could happen anywhere, given the right conditions.

Equally one can spend one's life in the embrace of a peaceful, easy life, secure in its stability, and then be confronted with historical conditions that would have seemed unthinkable a few years before. An influential book for me was The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. Corrie was an unmarried older lady living in Haarlem, Netherlands, with her elderly father and her spinster sister. She had a large happy extended family in their town and worked as a clockmaker along with her father. Think of it---reaching 50 or 60 years of age in peace and calm, Sunday dinners, quiet happiness. Settling into an equally peaceful old age. And then Nazi Germany. Within a few years, Corrie and her family, all devout Christians, were hiding Jews in their house, acting as part of a network of underground safe houses and increasingly under hostile scrutiny. Life became dominated by fear. And eventually she and her family were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Her father, her sister, and many other family members died in the camps.

All of which is to say that I have a fear of societal breakdown and the moral choices it would force me into. I like to think that as I get older, those choices would be easier to make. And after September 11, this song always made me think of a gay couple I know and how all of the forces of good in the world have stood up against the oppression:

There is freedom within
There is freedom without
Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup

There's a battle ahead
Many battles are lost
But you'll never reach the end of the road when you're traveling with me

Hey now hey now
Don't dream it's over
Hey now hey now
When the world comes in
They come they come
To build a wall between us
We know they won't win

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Thursday, February 10, 2011

What Right-Wing Militias Have in Common with 13th-Century Imams

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I'm reading a great book called The Civilization of Europe in the Middle Ages, and I just finished a section on the collapse of scientific inquiry in the Moslem world. As most of us know, the Moslem world was far ahead of the West during the Middle Ages in almost every way: science, math, medicine, philosophy. They were "the West" as we think of it now: the enlightened, open, richer society, while Europe was poor, closed-minded, and paranoid.

But the author of this book makes an interesting point: In the Moslem world, the religious authorities and the scientific thinkers were completely separate. Religious leaders were either fundamentalists or mystics. The intellectual class was made up of secular leaders: teachers, businessmen, lawyers. And while this led to a huge flourishing of intellectual freedom and thus scientific progress in the short term, it proved their undoing in the end. Because when the intellectual class reached a certain level of freedom and daring, the religious leaders freaked out and shut them down. By the 13th century, science in the Islamic world was dead.

This is in contrast to Europe, where the intellectual class and the religious leadership was always one and the same. This meant that progress was slower, incremental, hesitant. But it had the virtue of taking place within the institutions of the Church and thus being protected in a way. The religious leaders felt in control and less threatened.

This makes me think of how these right-wing militias pop up every time a Democratic president is elected. A certain class of people is deeply threatened by progressive culture, and when a Democrat is elected they panic. Except for a few areas (torture, for example) life under Obama is not very different from life under Bush. But the idea that they have lost control is deeply upsetting to these people.

And so, ironically, it may be easier to make progress under conservative governments than under liberal ones, simply because the paranoia is tamped down. I remember one liberal commentator saying that Bush had actually done a great thing by devoting a huge amount of money to battling AIDS in Africa. This passed without much public response, which certainly wouldn't have been the case if the president were Obama; we can all imagine the canned responses---think "Kenyan anti-colonialist mindset"; think "bankrupting our children."

Another example: Jesse Helms virulently opposed US aid to African AIDS efforts until Bono cornered him and put it in terms he could relate to: people with AIDS were the modern-day Samaritans; we were called to reach out to people who were despised by all. I don't know why Jesse Helms couldn't have come to this conclusion on his own, but the very same act of charity meant completely different things to him depending on whether it was framed as part of liberal culture or part of conservative culture.

I think too of the efforts to eradicate foot-binding in China and female genital mutilation in Africa. You've got to get the traditional leaders on board. It's only when village leaders are included in the process that the plainly progressive change can occur.

It's kind of galling to liberals like me to see our values dismissed by conservatives, and then embraced once they are framed as their own ideas. But if that's what it takes, that's what it takes. On any number of issues---from civil rights to environmentalism---it would be nice to hear conservatives say just once: "You were right, and we were wrong." But I'm not holding my breath.
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Monday, February 7, 2011

For Reals?

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This is the new Sherwin Williams logo:
















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Sunday, February 6, 2011

Why I Love Jezebel.com

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It tells it like it is, people. This week I learned:

* Director Catherine Hardwicke was denied an interview with the producers of the film The Fighter because, they told her, they were only interviewing male directors.

* A Republican lawmaker is introducing legislation to change the wording in legal proceeding regarding rape and stalking to refer to the target as an "accuser" rather than a "victim."

Also, I sincerely appreciate their continuing coverage of soccer players' abs.











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Saturday, February 5, 2011

"Big Driver," by Stephen King

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Warning: spoilers.















"Big Driver" is the second short story in Stephen King's latest collection, Full Dark, No Stars. I had read and liked the first story (almost a novella in length), "1922." Great pacing, characters, mood, regional tone . . . great storytelling. But I was leery of "Big Driver" once I started reading because there were certain memes (a reference to ending up in a culvert, for example) that indicated a story about rape was coming. I'm distrustful of representations of sexual violence in art for many reasons---the possibility of a voyeuristic enjoyment on the part of readers foremost among them. I ploughed ahead nonetheless to judge the story as it unfolded rather than preemptively.

I'm glad I did. It's an ugly tale, but King did as well with it as you could hope. The main character is a woman in her late thirties named Tess who is the author of a series of cozy mysteries called the Willow Grove Knitting Society. She's invited to speak at a library in a town not too far from her hometown, and she's advised by the librarian to take the backroads on her way home. On the way, she runs over some lumber with nails in it, gets a flat tire, and is soon joined by a large man in a truck offering to help her.

Tess survives the attack that follows, despite being left for dead in a culvert with the bodies of previous victims. The rest of the story follows her as she comes to grips with what has happened. The attack is brutal, mean, and nasty. Her escape from the culvert back to civilization feels absolutely right--she's terrified of every sound, every car, ready for her attacker to spring back onto her. When she finally arrives at a roadhouse and calls a limo service to come pick her up, she waits in shock as normal, carefree people come and go, as if her life is not hanging by a thread.

Tess knows that she should go to the hospital and report the attack. But her inability to do so feels completely realistic. She has a strong disinclination to do those concrete things that would be required for a police report----calling a neighbor for a ride to the hospital, sitting there and telling her story, dealing with the publicity. She doesn't want to get up. She wants to sleep, and take repeated showers, and burrow in behind locked doors. In the end it's this thought that decides it for her:  What's in it for me? Prosecution may bring relief to the families of other victims, but would it really help her in the aftermath? The attack has devastated her but it's also created a new her, a woman filled with rage and purpose and unabashed self-interest.

I admire the way that King portrays all of the stages of this process. You really feel how being a victim of a physical attack might feel. But I also admire the way he transforms our understanding of this particular character---and her own self-understanding. She starts out as a slightly pathetic middle-aged lady. She writes the kind of fiction that is not particularly respected, she has a modest amount of money and renown, her life follows a banal script, exemplified by the predictability of the library talk:  introduction by the host, affable, boilerplate talk by her, question period ("Where do you get your ideas?"), reception, $1200 honorarium. It all feels  a little cheap and easy.

But in the aftermath of the attack, the characteristics that have made her a writer rally to the fore. The imagined voices that populate her world--those of her cat and her lady detective--and the ability to imagine other voices--those of her rapist and other suspects--guide her every step of the way. In the end she feels extraordinary, not because of something that is in contrast to her previous life (the attack) but because of those things that belonged to her all along: her imagination (Where would such a person hide a wallet?), her ability to construct other scripts (What if I didn't go to the police?), and her ability to think literarily (If this were a movie, the lumber in the road would not be an accident but a trap). This is ultimately what I liked best of all about the story, that her transformation came from her own resources, that her attacker was denied the honor of agency in her life. Well done.
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Thursday, February 3, 2011

Tom Killion Woodcuts

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I just bought a book of his woodcuts of the High Sierra of California (Yosemite, etc.), and they are gorgeous. These are low-res images, but you get the idea.















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Nice Bit of Writing

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This is from Zoe Ferraris's mysery novel Finding Nouf, set in modern-day Saudi Arabia:

"He was sitting in his uncle's study on the leeward side of a titanic oak desk."

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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Sixpence None the Richer

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The last few days I've been listening to this band's 2002 CD Divine Discontent---a favorite album of mine. They have a great cover of "Don't Dream It's Over," as well as some complex and meaningful originals. One of my favorites is the last song on the album, "A Million Parachutes," which is essentially about homesickness. Even if you aren't from the place the songwriter is, everyone has a place or even a time that they miss.


















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