One day earlier this month my horoscope more or less told me to go back to bed (what it actually said was any new endeavor undertaken that day would not be successful). The funny thing is it was a very stoopid day. Among other things I undercut a straight edge binding by less than 1/2 an inch. The result is the same as if I had undercut by twelve feet but somehow I felt it more. I also poured a cup of semi-hot coffee into a plastic-bag-lined garbage can instead of the sink & the very full jar of little snips of fabric & thread I collect when I sew into the sink instead of the compost jug.
I wonder if the day would have been so annoying if I had not read my horoscope. Or do I actually do roughly the same absentminded things everyday but this day they registered? A famous critic says (said, I am sure he is dead; all famous critics are dead right?)... Let me start again, I heard once that all art is about context. One piece may look the same as another but it is separated by context: the period of the painting, the period of the painter. the period of the viewer.
I do not think this is hogwash exactly so much as not germane. My experience of any piece of art on any given day is my own experience; the only context that matters is mine. You can see how it can be hard to sell me art, as my own context is often covered in dog hair & nothing that will be covered in dog hair should cost very much.
Not surprisingly I have a limited patience for ART that just hang around. A well crafted bowl, excellent. A quilt, well you know how I feel about that. Even a picture of a place I have been or a person I know &/or admire, wonderful. But all the so-called art in YOUR house is complete crap.
This perspective ties very nicely with all the qualities of my star sign. Apparently we are belligerent blow-hards. & a bit primitive technologically. Anyone who reads this blog knows I have only a semi-serious relationship with spell-check so maybe there is something to it.
A, on the other hand, is at the opposite end of the horoscope & according to reports is dreamy & ethereal requiring a strong sign (MINE!) to get through the day. Now that I know that, I am pretty sure I pour something somewhere wrong once a week or so.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Dear Mr. Goodell
It was with no surprise what-so-ever that I read you had reinstated Michael Vick to the NFL, with full reinstatement by week 6 of the upcoming season. I have never heard of a professional sports administrator that did not put $$ above every other standard & no one expected you would be any different. Also, I am sure it is handy for future offenders in the NFL to know "indefinitely" means less than three years.
Living in a Football Is King community, I have heard many arguments for Vick's reinstatement. I think my favorites are: they are just dogs & other players have beaten their wives/girlfriends & not drawn this much attention. I am sure both of these were factors in your decision. Whether we like it or not, there is a perception of complicity when a victim capable of speech elects not to speak.
On the other hand, if Michael Vick had rounded up his exes, put them in cages & forced them to fight to the death, the outcome would probably be somewhat different. In short, it would be out of your hands.
The world of football is plenty big enough that I am confident you will have a full & rich life without being much inconvenienced wondering what the rest of us think of you. Which is lucky because it is not much. As disgusted as I am by an ignorant animal that has never been taught to live in a civilized manner, is in fact rewarded for the damage it does, there is nothing more craven than the human being that profits from that animal's base nature.
Living in a Football Is King community, I have heard many arguments for Vick's reinstatement. I think my favorites are: they are just dogs & other players have beaten their wives/girlfriends & not drawn this much attention. I am sure both of these were factors in your decision. Whether we like it or not, there is a perception of complicity when a victim capable of speech elects not to speak.
On the other hand, if Michael Vick had rounded up his exes, put them in cages & forced them to fight to the death, the outcome would probably be somewhat different. In short, it would be out of your hands.
The world of football is plenty big enough that I am confident you will have a full & rich life without being much inconvenienced wondering what the rest of us think of you. Which is lucky because it is not much. As disgusted as I am by an ignorant animal that has never been taught to live in a civilized manner, is in fact rewarded for the damage it does, there is nothing more craven than the human being that profits from that animal's base nature.
Monday, July 27, 2009
No news is bad news
In less than a week the local uni-radio station will switch from the classical music during the day, news radio on the fringes format to all news all the time. I admit I am a big fan of NPR & am happy there will be more news programming, but I wish they had not gone quite so whole hog.
I understand the fiscal arguments (listener numbers plummet when classical music takes the air), the civic arguments (there is a dearth of fair & balanced news in our culture no matter what the for-profit news media outlets call themselves) & the music is still around arguments (the classical music 'station' will move to one of the HD radio channels) & agree with 99.9% of them. I just wish they had made a partial exception for those classical music programs produced locally.
It is not that I think the local programs are better then the national ones (I am quite sure they are not) but because I think that just as important as information from a source who is not making his salary from the guy trying to sell you a car (or a stock or a healthplan or a not-healthplan as the case may be) is knowing that someone very close by is in media. & I firmly believe that still applies, even if the area of expertise is not today's headlines but instead Gregorian chants or unfinished fugues or some other not-previously thought of aspect of classical music.
For the record I am also for keeping two other locally produced shows, neither of which I can stand: Connor Calling a christian-right view of contemporary publications from a bicyclers guide to north/central Florida to a biography of Albert & Victoria & everything in between (or not, I mean everything) & Sikorski's Attic, where guy attempts the antique roadshow over the phone. Why? It is that local thing again. The book-sjhow oftens features local authors or books of local interest, the antique guy does regualr F*R*E*E programs at the library. I do not have to agree with them or even like what they do to know that their just being here & being themselves is good for this community.
We need to stop super-starring the news readers & having the lady up the street talk about Mozart or Bach or whomever five days a week did that. Even if you do not care about Mozart or Bach or classical music period. Hearing voices on the radio we also hear in the grocery store, on the football sidelines & every where else around our lives is almost more important than what those voices say.
& that is why I wish that they had decided to keep the handful of locally produced music programs on the air, even if the hours were reduced, even they were tucked around the edges, even if they played nothing but Rachmaninoff (which I loathe), even then I would make sure I tuned in. Do not get me wrong, I will be delighted with more NPR news. But I am sorry it is at this cost.
I understand the fiscal arguments (listener numbers plummet when classical music takes the air), the civic arguments (there is a dearth of fair & balanced news in our culture no matter what the for-profit news media outlets call themselves) & the music is still around arguments (the classical music 'station' will move to one of the HD radio channels) & agree with 99.9% of them. I just wish they had made a partial exception for those classical music programs produced locally.
It is not that I think the local programs are better then the national ones (I am quite sure they are not) but because I think that just as important as information from a source who is not making his salary from the guy trying to sell you a car (or a stock or a healthplan or a not-healthplan as the case may be) is knowing that someone very close by is in media. & I firmly believe that still applies, even if the area of expertise is not today's headlines but instead Gregorian chants or unfinished fugues or some other not-previously thought of aspect of classical music.
For the record I am also for keeping two other locally produced shows, neither of which I can stand: Connor Calling a christian-right view of contemporary publications from a bicyclers guide to north/central Florida to a biography of Albert & Victoria & everything in between (or not, I mean everything) & Sikorski's Attic, where guy attempts the antique roadshow over the phone. Why? It is that local thing again. The book-sjhow oftens features local authors or books of local interest, the antique guy does regualr F*R*E*E programs at the library. I do not have to agree with them or even like what they do to know that their just being here & being themselves is good for this community.
We need to stop super-starring the news readers & having the lady up the street talk about Mozart or Bach or whomever five days a week did that. Even if you do not care about Mozart or Bach or classical music period. Hearing voices on the radio we also hear in the grocery store, on the football sidelines & every where else around our lives is almost more important than what those voices say.
& that is why I wish that they had decided to keep the handful of locally produced music programs on the air, even if the hours were reduced, even they were tucked around the edges, even if they played nothing but Rachmaninoff (which I loathe), even then I would make sure I tuned in. Do not get me wrong, I will be delighted with more NPR news. But I am sorry it is at this cost.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Cannibals are all around
A bit ago, A***** loaned me her copy of The Sex Live of Cannibals on disc. I enjoyed parts of it more than I can say; other parts left me feeling so light-headed I had to put my feet up. This book hit me in two places I live: a belief in the extraordinariness of the ordinary & the converse the ordinariness of the extraordinary. Also it made me laugh & completely grossed me out.While I was reading it, I realized I knew where I was when I got the same current-events-type updates he talks about (almost certainly weeks if not months before he did) & how I would have been happy to move to an atoll in the Pacific to avoid the bombardment of information. Or rather the bombardment of no new information. The endless loop of repeats. The on & on of nothing at all.
Which brings me to Michael Jackson. The reason the news channels are still covering Michael Jackson is it costs them next to nothing, especially when compared to paying Farsi translators or airfare to Colombo (the capital of Sri Lanka, not the crime family) or actual reporters (who have actual diplomas & actual student loans) instead of hairdressers (who have hairdressing certificates & sometimes GEDs).
There I said it. Now turn of the d*mn TV & go read a book. or talk to your neighbor. or call your mother.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Of course I have heard of cows
I went to one of the other AG universities in the country (no, not Texas A&M) & then lived off-campus while A finished his degree. I once had to call in to work because cows had gotten loose in the apartment parking lot & were slipping on the ice, making it very difficult to move them back to their pasture (& very risky if not impossible to drive).
I have better stories than that, though. After a freshman year spent in the freshman dorms, I moved to one of the all-female dorms on campus. & stayed there for the next three years (I truly never understood the desire to live in a party dorm, much better to visit & then go home, but I have always been of the do-not-sh*t-where-you-eat mentality). This particular dorm was actually one of the oldest buildings on campus & therefore adjacent to one of the oldest schools: the agricultural school. Unlike other virgin-volts/lesbo-lockups or whatever it is your school called women-only dorms this one actually had a waiting list. If you had to get up at dawn to milk the cows before class, you would want to live as close as possible, too.
This meant that pastoral views & healthful walks were literally just outside the front door. It was like being on a campus a la Jean Webster & not circa 198x at all. Except on Ag Show days. On those days the crowd in the barns could get pretty competitive & more than once I walked into the elegant pre-war marble showers to find another resident washing a sheep. No cup of black coffee wakes a person up quite like standing groggily under lessening hot water, hearing "BAAA!" & then the crash of a liberated ewe covered in soap-suds sliding down the main staircase into the front parlor & crashing usually somewhere around the piano. I heard that one once got into the big fireplace, somehow behind the firescreen & did really amazing things with the soot, but I missed it myself.
All of this came back to me a few weeks ago when I was driving back to campus to pick up A. I had his car (i.e. not my truck) & was driving past the big field one street over when out of the corner of my eye I saw it: one loan calf had made it across the cattle guard & was now slowly munching around to the street. Cattle guards can be very scary (to cows) which makes them very effective except when they fail, they fail miserably. The cow that was frightened & somehow made it across is very very very hard to convince to go back.
I quickly reversed the Honda, zoomed down the short entrance beeping the whole way. For a moment I worried it might decide the safest route was up over the hood & out onto the road, but it wheeled around & ran back over the guard, clanging & lowing. At the other end of the field I saw the farmer, rope in hand, stop his sprint, wave & walk back in the direction he had come from.
//the dorm itself was named for the Governor who vetoed funding allocations for the first women's dorm at the the school. Where I am from this is what passes for a very good joke.
I have better stories than that, though. After a freshman year spent in the freshman dorms, I moved to one of the all-female dorms on campus. & stayed there for the next three years (I truly never understood the desire to live in a party dorm, much better to visit & then go home, but I have always been of the do-not-sh*t-where-you-eat mentality). This particular dorm was actually one of the oldest buildings on campus & therefore adjacent to one of the oldest schools: the agricultural school. Unlike other virgin-volts/lesbo-lockups or whatever it is your school called women-only dorms this one actually had a waiting list. If you had to get up at dawn to milk the cows before class, you would want to live as close as possible, too.
This meant that pastoral views & healthful walks were literally just outside the front door. It was like being on a campus a la Jean Webster & not circa 198x at all. Except on Ag Show days. On those days the crowd in the barns could get pretty competitive & more than once I walked into the elegant pre-war marble showers to find another resident washing a sheep. No cup of black coffee wakes a person up quite like standing groggily under lessening hot water, hearing "BAAA!" & then the crash of a liberated ewe covered in soap-suds sliding down the main staircase into the front parlor & crashing usually somewhere around the piano. I heard that one once got into the big fireplace, somehow behind the firescreen & did really amazing things with the soot, but I missed it myself.
All of this came back to me a few weeks ago when I was driving back to campus to pick up A. I had his car (i.e. not my truck) & was driving past the big field one street over when out of the corner of my eye I saw it: one loan calf had made it across the cattle guard & was now slowly munching around to the street. Cattle guards can be very scary (to cows) which makes them very effective except when they fail, they fail miserably. The cow that was frightened & somehow made it across is very very very hard to convince to go back.
I quickly reversed the Honda, zoomed down the short entrance beeping the whole way. For a moment I worried it might decide the safest route was up over the hood & out onto the road, but it wheeled around & ran back over the guard, clanging & lowing. At the other end of the field I saw the farmer, rope in hand, stop his sprint, wave & walk back in the direction he had come from.
//the dorm itself was named for the Governor who vetoed funding allocations for the first women's dorm at the the school. Where I am from this is what passes for a very good joke.
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