Friends

Reading:
Jacques Barzun - From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life
Thomas Parkenham - The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876-1912
William Gibson - Spook Country

Watching:
The Comedy of Errors (1983, BBC)
Sleuth (2007)
Brick
Sleeper Cell, season two

This past Saturday, Peter Shorey ran a short acting workshop presented by the Austin Shakespeare Festival.  Mr. Shorey has had a lengthy career in the theater, and is now in his first year at the Royal Shakespeare Company.  To see Mr. Shorey in action, check out this youtube video of his performance in Shakespeare's Globe's 2003 production of Richard II.

( Details behind the cut. )

Went to Muir Woods today.

This may be old but...

what what in the butt

The play continues to ease up, but it still ate most of this week.  By Sunday evening I was absolutely beat, and I stayed that way 'til around Tuesday morning.

There was, of course, *some* time off from the play.  I squeezed in a couple of dance outings, late at night after the show with the hair-gray still in my hair.^[1]  I ran some errands over the weekend, and attended an acting workshop from a visiting RSC actor.

As for the last couple of days?  Apart from improv class, I just stayed home and wrote stuff for the blog.

Today I feel more or less recovered, but performances start up again tomorrow.  *yawn*  It makes me tired just thinking about it.

The coming week looks uneventful.  More of the play.  A couple trips to the Alamo.  No real non-play plans for the weekend, apart from the pun-off, where I will root for the improv peeps.  And then after the weekend:  three more days of quiet, sleepy recovery.

*sigh*  Someday I will get my writing and my music back.

ps My sister is just about finished with her library's collection of P. G. Wodehouse audiobooks.  What would be a good author for her to move on to after Wodehouse?

The Utterly-Useless Fact of the Week: The first two atom bombs, "Fat Man" and "Little Boy," were named after characters from The Maltese Falcon.

[1] Results:  several odd looks, and an encouraging number of compliments.
 

So much for not being a spendthrift. I just bought a beautiful Dan McCarthy print after wanting one for my study for months. I don't feel too bad about it, as his prints seem to sell out really fast, and I really, really like this one. Loveliness!

I offered to take Janis out to dinner for her birthday, so we'll be going to Bess tonight. I'm looking forward to having wine and time with the lovely lady, but I'm not too excited about the restaurant. The food is MOR, American-style comfort food, which I think is kind of boring, and the reviews on Citysearch don't sound promising at all. From my standpoint, the only thing going for this place is the pretty decor and the fact that it's owned by Sandra Bullock. I'm sure it will be fine, I'm just feeling bitchy about eating someplace rather blah after reading Karin's paean to Uchi.

On the evening of May 15th I'll be making a special appearance at Richmond Library in London (map) as a kind of spirit medium tour guide, taking people on a ghost tour of the library aisles after lights out, trying to make contact, via the books, with the dead people who wrote them.



A truly spooky evening, then, lit by torchlight, punctuated by music and spattered, perhaps, by ectoplasm.

Momus Spirit Tour of Richmond Library
Thursday 15th May, 8pm.
Tickets £3, available from Richmond Library or via Online Bookings.

( Dinner at Uchi and getting chummy with chefs. )

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( Movie you should see: Redbelt )

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( Oh, and about that pork confit )

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( Listening... )

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Also, Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica continue to pwn my soul. And new personal rule (YMMV, of course) for getting pop-culture based tattoos: the source has to have been around for at least 25 years. That means Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Blade Runner all get a pass. Supernatural, for example, does not. Nor, to my mind at least, does Torchwood, even if it is a Who spinoff.

Friday's inaugural edition of Kick Butt Blues was most excellent. We had 84 people paid, plus seven or eight additional attendees (djs and staff). The venue had their best night ever in terms of sales, too - which is an encouraging way to start an ongoing gig. I'll be guest-deejaying at the next one on the 23rd, although I'll be surprised if we get half of the attendance of the first one - it just had perfect timing for the end of finals for the collegians, plus Jerry Warwick is a nationally-known dj in the dance scene, and will draw people out who might not otherwise have gone; me, not so much. I didn't leave the coffeehouse until almost 1:30, and Susan & Keith told me at Summer's birthday party the next night that they shut it down just this side of 2:00 a.m. - an hour past the listed end time.

I slept most of Saturday, as I hadn't been getting much sleep during the week, and then being up early for court in Lockhart on Friday paired with being out late at Kick Butt just killed me. Summer's party was lots of fun, though.

On Sunday, I met Kari for coffee at Mozart's, and then did quite a lot of yard work, including potting four more blackberry bushes. I've got three or four more to dig up, but I had to quite when I ran out of soil for the pots. Based on my previous attempts, it looks like it takes about three weeks for the plants to get over the shock of being dug up, but I only lost one of the original three I potted.

My central landscape bed has exploded over the last week. Part of it is that I didn't expect to still have bluebonnets blooming in mid-May, but everything in there is just going crazy. The lantana in particular seems to be trying to overrun everything else, and my pride of Barbados went from looking like a ground-covering weed to being nearly as tall as the birdbath. I really can't imagine what things are going to look like by midsummer, although it appears that pruning the lantana is going to become an ongoing maintenance issue.

I saw my first hummingbird of the year yesterday after work, and he was back in the garden this morning. With the exception of the blackberries and roses, and possibly the lantana and jasmine, everything currently blooming in the back yard is supposed to attract hummingbirds, so I hope he'll stay around and maybe bring some friends.

It's looking like my internet radio station is going to happen, and fairly soon. More on that when it launches, but I've found a provider who will take care of all the licensing fees, so it's actually going to be in the form of a streaming broadcast instead of a downloadable podcast.

I finished Sarah D'Ameida's disappointing The Musketeer's Seamstress this evening, and began William Gibson's Spook Country. As usual, it only takes about two sentences for Gibson to completely suck me into one of his books, and this one's looking like it'll be better than Pattern Recognition, which I greatly enjoyed. I'm still making progress in The Scramble, and hope to finish it within the next week. Despite my previous plans, I may have to take some time off from African history to give my brain time to digest this book - while it's very interesting and well-written, it's also still a little like trying to take a drink of water from a fire hose.

And now it's time for bed.

I know, I know, it's not Monday anymore. Monday was eaten by office hours and student papers. Let us speak no more of it.

I've been enjoying reading Dove's earlier poems; the only book of hers I'd read before now was Thomas and Beulah, which I read relatively recently. I'm really glad I decided to focus on collected/selected volumes this year. (Next up: Audre Lorde, and then probably Jane Kenyon or June Jordan.)

But for now, a poem whose last four lines have been echoing in my head for days.

Primer for the Nuclear Age

At the edge of the mariner's
      map is written: "Beyond
      this point lie Monsters."

Someone left the light on
      in the pantry—there's
      a skull in there on the shelf

that talks. Blue eyes
      in the air, blue as
      an idiot's. Any fear, any

memory will do; and if you've
      got a heart at all, someday
      it will kill you.


– Rita Dove
from Museum
reprinted in Selected Poems

Between beginning William Gibson's Spook Country this evening and Warren Ellis writing about seeing Kode 9 last night, I was motivated to put Burial's most recent album, Untrue, on for the evening. It's one of the spookiest things I've ever heard, and complements the modern-world-as-science-fiction aesthetic of Gibson's last two novels perfectly. Ellis calls it "the sound of a drowned London".

This is Ghost Hardware:


Beyond Burial and Kode 9, I don't know anything at all about dubstep, although I'd like to learn.


More: Archangel

If you haven't heard of them, TED - or technology, entertainment, and design - is an annual conference in California in which experts on a huge range of topics are invited to give the talk of their lives - within an 18 minute format.  These talks are available here.

There is a ridiculous amount of badassery involved in these talks, like this one on how fungi might save the Earth.  Also, I have a crush on this particle physicist.

Highly recommended.

[Okay, these are coming out on Tuesdays now.]

Movies:  <none>
TV:  The Corner (Disc 1)
Books:  The Neurological Origins of Individuality [audiocourse]
... and more improv notes.

( Details behind the cut. )

Predictably, I am very intrigued by The Something Store, which--for $10--will send you something random. Well, almost. They do have a list of things they do not send, like sex toys and drugs. I want to try it, despite the fact that I've been a bit of a spendthrift this month. Perhaps "a little something-something" will be my payday present to myself next month.

Inspired by the scent chapter in Diane Ackerman's Natural History of the Senses, I indulged myself in a sample pack of perfumes from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. The scents I chose to sample are The Raven, Nocturne, Jezebel, Vixen, Medea, and Coyote, the latter of which intrigued me the most with its description: "warmth of doeskin, dry plains grasses and soft, dusty woods warmed by amber and a downy, gentle coat of deep musk."

It's been many years since I've worn perfume. I've never owned any I truly liked, and I was harshly encouraged not to wear anything smelly when I worked at the acupuncture clinic (humiliatingly, I was made to go home and wash myself once when I wore some Hawaiian lotion Mom gave me). Since then, I tended to look down my nose at overtly feminine things like perfume and cute panties as being things one wears solely to attract another person. It never occurred to me that such things could be enjoyed purely for myself, without having someone else's attraction in mind. What's funny is that, for so long, I unconsciously behaved in so many ways to attract another person despite my own feelings, and now that I'm trying not to do that anymore, indulging in girlier pursuits doesn't fill me with weird, guilty feelings.

It's made the rounds on kottke: 1001 movies you must see before you die. Even though several memes such as this have passed through my LJ blogosphere before, I feel like taking this one on. Let's see how many I've watched ( after the cut. )

During a break between household chores today, I flipped on the television and saw a commercial clip from a reality show (I think it was The Real World, actually) in which a young lady drunkenly declares, "I'm waayy hotter than that slut in the glitter belt," and... it randomly struck me that it is a crazy, amazing, and terrible thing that there are, concurrently on this same planet today, teams of disaster relief workers trying desperately to find any desperately struggling, breathing bodies left in heaps of rubble from the several recent natural disasters ...

and elsewhere, an ill-mannered, inarticulate idiot (whose "fame," I'll add, is related to his speaking) wearing a plastic helmet and a gigantic clock necklace, picking off scary women who have been offered to him, like so many nasty salmonella-riddled entrees on a picnic buffet, for TV ratings. And the biggest problem here is that I can tell you way more about that dehumanizing picnic, am more invested-- on however shallow a level-- in viewing that spectacle, than I am informed regarding the plights of the millions of people involved in the very real tragedies going on, or in what I can do to help.

I try not to feel too ashamed. I can explain. But in the end, today, I don't want to. I just want to tip the scales the other way.

May is a month of sensuality, a month in which we schlepp around ideally hot, sunny streets in the year's first flip flops (scrubbed of last summer's dust), casually displaying our slightly neglected winter bodies. Later in the summer we'll have tans, and grow accustomed to the tans of others, and be much more casually embodied.

But for now there's still a glancing winter whiteness to our bodies -- they've been hidden from the ultraviolet rays for so long. There's a seasonal self-consciousness and a prurient curiosity to our interest in the newly-revealed flesh of others. Girls have bare legs, and sit on the ground cross-legged showing the tops of their panties over the hem of their trousers. Boys sport a visible mokori bulge. Breasts are suddenly massively -- or slightly -- present. Bums are wrapped in saris or hidden in a salwar kameez.



So this is my truth, show me yours. I am wearing a straw hat, chest-revealing shirt, wristbands to match my pink eyepatch, cheap sports pants and flip flops. I am remembering, and connected to, summers past. How are you dressed this season? How are you celebrating the relaxed, stripped-down sensuality of "the May" -- and the return to public scrutiny of your body, cocooned all winter in layers of fibre?

Photographs please.

there was a giant roach in my room. i did the patented karen grab & smoosh. i hate it, but it works. thinking about losing track of that thing in my tremendously cluttered room was pretty sobering, so i did a little straightening up.

There's an off-Broadway musical based on Debbie Does Dallas. I know this because I was browsing through the soundtracks in Emusic, and it's there.

Right, then. Carry on.