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Sunday, April 19th, 2009
At The Song in My Head Today, Holly is thinking about Alan Price's "O Lucky Man!", on the occasion of Price's 67th birthday. A fine song to have in one's head:
posted afternoon of April 19th, 2009: Respond
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I watched Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty last night (and thanks, Dave, for the recommendation!) and found it... mesmerizing? hilarious? yes, and Pythonesque. This is funny because while I've always thought of Monty Python's humor as "surrealistic," I think this is the closest approximation of their style that I've seen in the work of an actual Surrealist. I wonder what vectors of influence are working -- obviously the Pythons were familiar with Buñuel's work, and I expect Buñuel watched their shows, though I don't know what the timeline would look like; The Phantom of Liberty came out in 1974, a year before The Life of Brian and after Flying Circus had been running for a couple of years.* The individual sketches are hilarious, and the transitions between them are kind of brilliantly jarring -- I am going to watch the movie again tonight because I felt like there was a thread linking the sketches that I was not picking up on because the thread was spinning so fast. Take a look at this sketch on Defecation, which is embedded inside a lecture on moral relativism that the professor (the guy with glasses) is giving at the police academy (hence the cut to the mostly empty lecture hall midway through):
I was thinking as I watched this about the Samuel Beckett quote I read recently, to the effect that he writes in French because he feels too fluent in English -- and really liking listening to the French dialogue in the movie, struggling with the help of the subtitles to understand it. It seems to me like listening to or reading a language you don't quite understand, and the process of understanding what is being said, really opens up some interesting new passageways in my brain.
 * I don't know how many seasons they made Flying Circus for -- it premiered in 1969, may well have been finished by 1974.
posted morning of April 19th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, April 18th, 2009
I am finding book IV of The Lord of the Rings, the story (so far) of Frodo, Sam and Sméagol journeying towards Mordor, to be the most compelling reading of the first two volumes. I'm really tuned in to each of the three characters and sensitive to what's happening with them. In most of the rest of the book I have been liking it more as a visual experience -- a painting of words -- than as a story. I am very much in awe of Tolkien's ability to create a world, even if the story is not always making it for me -- this is making me feel good about the idea of reading the Silmarillion next, which I understand to be mostly world-creation rather than story. I found this dialogue between Frodo and Faramir (at the end of Chapter 6) very moving -- suddenly this style of writing dialogue, which has been seeming very stilted to me, is making sense:
‘...Do not approach their citadel. ...It is a place of sleepless malice, full of lidless eyes. Do not go that way!’
"But where else will you direct me?" said Frodo. "You cannot yourself, you say, guide me to the mountains, nor over them. But over the mountains I am bound, by solemn undertaking to the Council to find a way or perish in the seeking. And if I turn back, refusing the road in its bitter end, where then shall I go among Elves or Men? Would you have me come to Gondor with this Thing, the Thing that drove your brother mad with desire? What spell would it work in Minas Tirith? Shall there be two cities of Minas Morgul, grinning at each other across a dead land filled with rottenness?" "I would not have it so," said Faramir. "Then what would you have me do?" "I know not. Only I would not have you go to death or to torment. And I do not think that Mithrandir would have chosen this way." "Yet since he is gone, I must take such paths as I can find. And there is no time for long searching."
Some bits of the language in the book are coming back to me from my previous reading of it. I seem to remember that when I read Chapter 9 of book III, "Flotsam and Jetsam", that was the first time I had ever seen those terms, and I looked them up in the dictionary and endeavored to throw them into conversation for the next little while. (If memory serves the distinction is that flotsam is wreckage floating away from the wrecked ship, where jetsam is wreckage that was jettisoned from the ship prior to its sinking.) I remember the name "Morgul" but thought somehow it was the name of an evil character or species, not part of an evil city's name... Either way it is certainly a bad-sounding handle.
posted evening of April 18th, 2009: 1 response
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Friday, April 17th, 2009
My dad sends along this picture of Freddie ("Freddie Mac", their foreclosure kitty):
posted morning of April 17th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Via the have_moicy group, I just found out about this site: CROZ.FM offers MP3's of independent origin -- i.e. audience recordings, radio broadcasts, demos etc. -- for download. There is a huge variety of music available -- listed by artist at the bottom of the front page -- just glancing at it I can see plenty of stuff I'd like to listen to.
posted morning of April 16th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, April 13th, 2009
 Last month, Saramago wrote a note about his dogs Camões and Pepe, and speculated that a Portuguese dog in the White House would be "an important diplomatic success, from which Portugal should work to get the maximum advantage in its bilateral relations with the United States..." -- today Bo is in the White House -- "the Great Danes and the hounds of Pomerania are dying of envy" -- but Saramago is critical:
In any case, allow me to say that I have a serious reservation that I must express: one cannot have any idea what a Portuguese Water Dog is, to put around his neck, to photograph him, a collar of flowers, as if he were a Hawai`ian dancer. At only six months of age, Bo is not yet fully aware of the respect that he owes the canine branch into which he had the luck to be born. ...
posted evening of April 13th, 2009: Respond
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Congratulations to Elan’ Rodger Trinidad, who has been nominated for the 2009 Eisner Award for his story "Speak No Evil," about the role of migrant laborers in extracting the mineral bounty of space. A great strip, check it out.
I did not realize Mr. Trinidad works for the Simpsons animating shop; but he does. The first episode which he participated in, "Four Women and a Manicurist," will be premiering (in the US) on May 10th.
 * Sorry.
posted evening of April 13th, 2009: Respond
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This one has some potential! Many strands of weirdness from my own life and from the books I'm reading come together to bring us last night's dream:
 A dwarf modelled on Gimli is in charge of the divine source-code control system, which is (bizarrely IMO) quite similar to ClearCase1. A fix is in place which will allow people to "survive floods" -- as I understand it, Noah's flood is the intended meaning here; there is also a quick image of an infant being baptized. But because of a miscommunication, the dwarf releases this patch to production2 reality with code from an improper branch; people start dying in floods right and left, and the dwarf is dying of shame, possibly suicidal. We leave the dwarf and follow a different coder, who is figuring out what went wrong -- turns out different meanings of "flood" were getting mixed up. The flood addressed by the patch was not one of water but a sensory flood -- the modified code allows people to see Dust, which is overloading their cerebral cortices and causing them to stop functioning. Some very pleasant dream-images around here, and I soon woke up.
 1 One advantage to a ClearCase-like system, it would allow for the designers to model an HDM sort of branching multiplicity of universes.
2 There was no mention in the dream of a test platform, but this is of course an interesting question -- could our reality be a test platform for new designs and bug fixes?
posted morning of April 13th, 2009: 4 responses
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Sunday, April 12th, 2009
We're back in New Jersey; the trip is over, we're back in one piece. This morning (Easter Morning)  dawned bright and clear (and a little chilly), and we took the metro in to DC for one more look at the mall. We walked down to the tidal basin to look at cherry blossoms -- but yesterday's rain had brought most of them down. Walked around the perimeter of the basin and took some photos of the Jefferson Memorial (which I had pretty much forgotten even existed -- the sun shining on its marble dome took my breath away), and then up to the WWII Veterans' Memorial. I was kind of lost in thought as we walked through it and then along the reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial, though perhaps not the correct sort of thought -- I was wondering about what my response should be to these national memorials. I love to look at them and to linger over their lines and surfaces, but they don't  generally call to my mind the thing memorialized -- my response is æsthetic, not emotional or patriotic. The Lincoln Memorial seized hold of my eye from all the way down the length of the reflecting pool and would not let go -- the way it was framed in the bright blue sky was just intensely beautiful; walking along that path, watching it get slowly bigger, then up the steps and into the room itself, pretty awe-inspiring. I had my closest to what I'm thinking of as an appropriate "memorial" response when Sylvia and I were standing inside, reading the text of Lincoln's second inaugural address.  (And also, perhaps, a little later when we were walking by the White House, and I found myself thinking of Nixon.) Sylvia turns out to be pretty good at taking pictures of monuments; the one of the Jefferson Memorial above is hers, and so is this one looking up at Lincoln. Lots more pictures at the Family Album. The "inappropriate response" thing hit me the hardest, I think, at the Vietnam War Veterans' Memorial -- I was noticing and eating up the geometry of the thing, the sheen of the marble and the way it reflected the paths and the people and the flowers people had left, rather than reflecting on the memory of that war -- a war which is very close to being within my first-hand memory, though not quite there. Ellen got a beautiful photo of some chrysanthemums that a visiting middle school class had left in a soldier's memory:
posted evening of April 12th, 2009: 1 response
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Saturday, April 11th, 2009
Today, we went to the mall, and the museums. The weather was damp and grey; we spent all morning in the Museum of American History, then had lunch and split up. Ellen went to the Hirschhorn; Sylvia and I spent a couple of hours in the Museum of Natural History, then went to buy a scoop of ice cream and play cards together. (Sylvia is getting better at cassino, beat me at one game.)
The American History museum has a great deal of stuff to see. I really liked the "Art of the Letter" exhibit on illustration, and the science exhibit seemed like it had potential but by that time Sylvia was getting restless and we did not really spend enough time on it to get it. Julia Child's kitchen is great. At the Museum of Natural History, the skeletons and taxidermy are of course the main draw, but I was surprised to see what a nice small insectarium they have.
Now we're back at the hotel, and the sun has come back out. We're going to go take Pixie for her walk along the river. Hope everybody's holiday weekend is going well.
 Update: so, we walked not only down to the river but across a little pedestrian bridge we had not known about to Theodore Roosevelt Island, a little bit of wilderness in the middle of the Potomac; and then we walked up this big elevated pathway called Freedom Park. (Funny thing: when we got to the other end of the pathway we found the gate there was locked and we couldn't get out; we found our way out by circling around, and then we saw the sign for "Freedom Park" on the outside of the gate -- Sylvia said, "Funny it's called Freedom Park when we were locked in," which was the exact thing I had been thinking.) I'm enjoying finding our way around Arlington and D.C.
posted afternoon of April 11th, 2009: Respond
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