Today is my birthday, and I always observe my birthday, one way or another.
Here is a nice sad song written by Joni Mitchell, which I first heard in the movie
“Alice’s Restaurant.”
Aging children: I am one.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Purple
When I started at my current place of work, way back in 1987, I decided
early on that I would use a red pen whenever possible. “Red for danger,” I
thought. Also, I remembered all my
teachers who’d used red pen to correct, and comment, and chastise. It was my turn to see what it felt like.
Well, it is now almost twenty-five years later, and I keep a
whole spectrum of colors of pen at my desk. Red is still my favorite: it stands
out, and it’s hard to ignore, and sometimes (as when I’m correcting or amending
an employee data document) it is absolutely essential.
But I bought some Flair pens on a whim some time back, and I
am now completely enamored with purple.
Purple is rich and royal.
It’s also gay sometimes, depending on whom you ask. (Did you know
that the creator of the modern pride flag, Gilbert Baker, assigned meanings to
each of the colors? Purple is “spirit.” I like it.) “Lavender” has for a long
time been a code word for the gay community. (For a long time I wore a lavender star on my
lapel, and told people it was the symbol for gay rights. One of my gay friends
told me that I shouldn’t wear it because it might get people riled up. I
laughed. “No one even knows what it means,” I said, and I was right, because –
let’s face it – I’d made the meaning up.)
I need to buy some more purple Flair pens. They take me back
to my childhood, when Flair pens were new.
And I can tell people it’s a political statement, and they
actually believe me!
People: purple is a color,
for god’s sake!
Monday, July 8, 2013
Voices
Sometimes, when I’m falling asleep, I hear voices: odd
snippets of conversation. I’m sure it’s all in my head, and I’m half-dreaming.
But sometimes I can hear my mother’s voice, or some other person long dead, and
it’s exactly their tone of voice.
I usually can’t quite make out what they’re saying, and when
I can, it doesn’t make any sense, which tells me that it’s mostly a dream.
Funny how my brain produces these old voices out of nowhere
and replays them for me.
A friend told me once that, after his mother passed away,
he’d call his aunt from time to time, just to hear her voice, because his
aunt’s voice reminded him of his mother’s voice.
I understand this perfectly. What voice did we first hear?
Our mother’s voice. They say you can hear it even when you’re in the womb. It
must naturally be a very calming thing (although my mother was not perhaps the
most calm-inducing person in the world).
And I like fooling myself sometimes. As more of my family and
friends pass away, I feel better sometimes with the idea that maybe they’re not
dead after all. I see and hear people all the time – in crowds, on the sidewalk
– who look and sound, almost, like the people I used to know. My heart leaps up
and I think: it was a mistake after all. They’re not dead.
And, just for a second, it makes me feel better.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
For Sunday: "Bimbo's Initiation" (another Max Fleischer cartoon)
This is another Betty Boop cartoon. It’s got the same
dreamlike animation as the others I’ve posted recently, and is definitely
creepy in spots. But it’s worth watching.
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Reading in the bathtub
We never had a shower in the house when I was growing up,
but only a bathtub. I know for a fact that my mother never took a shower until
the morning of my sister’s funeral in 1995. (She was terrified of it, and I had
to talk her through it, from outside the bathroom.)
I take showers most days, because they save time. But on
weekends, and during vacations, I take baths.
Baths are lovely and luxurious. You can add salts if you
like, but they really only create stains on the porcelain. All you need is hot
water – the hotter the better, as hot as you can stand – and a bar of soap.
And a book.
Naturally one reads in the bathtub. I remember Anne Parrish’s comment
about her copies of E. F.
Benson’s “Lucia” novels being stained by being “dropped into brooks and
baths.”
Well, of course we drop them! Our hands are wet as we turn
the pages.
This kind of use marks a book. It lets everyone know that it
was well-beloved. I have lots of used books, and I can tell you in every case
whether or not their previous owners read them lovingly.
Some have marginal notes. Some have greasy spots, probably
where crumbs fell while their readers ate. And some have been dunked in water, and
then carefully (or not so carefully) dried.
My own books – the books I bought brand-new – reflect this
too. Some are pristine. Others are in terrible shape, dog-eared and stained and
ragged and broken-spined.
Care to guess which ones are my favorites?
Friday, July 5, 2013
Self-branding
We all have Internet identities, don’t we? All of you who
are reading this have one, in one way or another. You have an avatar, or a
photo. You have an online bio. You probably have a more-or-less-clever alias (I
use “Futureworld” for my blog identity, which isn’t terribly clever, but I’m foolishly
fond of it).
So: we are all branding ourselves.
Branding used to be reserved to companies and vendors and
businesses, to whom it was important. They had images and slogans. I think of James
Joyce’s “Ulysses”:
And that was written more or less a hundred years ago.
The other day I was walking to the office, and I saw one of
those big commercial trucks with the company name painted all over it: ROYAL
FLUSH PLUMBING. On three sides of the vehicle there was a big image of a cute guy in a kilt, with a big smile and a wrench over one shoulder.
We stop at the same intersection, at a red light. I glance
over at the truck, and the driver. I do a classic triple-take: I look at the
driver, and the image on the side of the truck,
and again at the driver.
And he grins, and waves at me, and the light turns green,
and he drives away.
It’s him! It’s the kilt-and-wrench guy!
He must be used to people reacting the way I did, but he was
evidently still very pleased that I’d recognized him. Well, why not? He had his
face plastered all over his truck. He likes
being recognized.
He knows everything there is to know about branding.
(Postscript: I told the first part of this story to my
friend Apollonia. I hadn’t gotten further than a description of the picture of the
guy with the kilt, and she said, “Oh, you mean Royal Flush Plumbing.”)
(And then she blushed a little.)
(My goodness!)
Thursday, July 4, 2013
For the Fourth of July: the National Anthem, from "A Boy Named Charlie Brown"
I’m not terribly patriotic, so I never know what to put here
for these patriotic holidays.
Then I remembered this very cute little segment from the 1969 animated movie “A
Boy Named Charlie Brown,” in which Snoopy manages (with very limited means)
a very dramatic presentation of the National Anthem.
Enjoy.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Movie review: "Man of Steel"
Partner and I saw “Man of Steel,”
the new Superman film, last weekend.
As a film, it mostly stinks. The more you think about it,
the worse it gets. Imagine Pa Kent telling young Clark that he maybe shouldn’t
have rescued a schoolbus full of children, because he might have revealed his
secret identity!
It’s basically a
redo of the second Christopher Reeve movie from 1980. General Zod is back
from Krypton. There’s a big battle for the planet Earth. Guess who wins?
Many critics have pointed out that this Superman doesn’t
seem to care much about collateral damage. His extended battles with the
villains take out a big chunk of Manhattan, ahem, Metropolis. This is strange
for someone who, to paraphrase him, “just wants to help people.”
And so on, and so on.
But there are two bright spots.
One is a new plot point: Lois Lane (played by Amy Adams) is the
first one to figure out that Superman is Clark Kent, very early in the movie.
There’s a cute scene at the end of the movie when she’s introduced to him in
disguise, and she does a very comical little double-take at him. This, for me,
is a relief; the whole secret-identity thing is a little exhausting sometimes,
and – let’s face it – if you can bend steel in your bare hands, you really
shouldn’t be all that worried about people knowing your real name.
The other bright spot is Henry Cavill.
You know I tend to gush over beefily handsome actors. Well,
here goes again. Henry Cavill is just about perfect. He has an adorable smile
and a wonderful profile, and he has the face of an angel and the body of a
Bengal tiger on steroids.
All through the movie, all the while I was hating the
tiredness and confusion of the plot and direction, I was loving me some Henry
Cavill.
If you haven’t seen it on the big screen yet, skip it. Wait
for the DVR / Blu-Ray / Netflix version.
Because you don’t need to see it on the big screen, but you really
owe it to yourself to see Henry.
He is the stuff that dreams are made of.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Pizza and cheese sandwiches
A few Sunday mornings ago, the beloved Bill Geist did a story on “CBS Sunday Morning” about a grilled-cheese sandwich
festival/competition in Los Angeles. (Americans have fetishized cheese
sandwiches, just as they fetishize everything.) There’s a category in the competition
for sandwiches with bread and cheese only; there’s a category for “exotic”
sandwiches, with ingredients like pork ribs and pesto; and there’s a dessert
category, which is a cheese sandwich incorporating something sweet.
Partner sniffed at the second category. “Those aren’t cheese
sandwiches,” he said haughtily. “Those are rib sandwiches with cheese.”
“Why aren’t they cheese sandwiches with ribs?” I asked
innocently.
He glared at me. “Obviously the ribs are going to overpower
the cheese.”
I don’t get this. It’s a sandwich with cheese, so it’s a
cheese sandwich. Who cares what else it has on it?
Evidently I am not a food purist.
This reminded me of something from Elizabeth David’s “Is
There a Nutmeg in the House?”, but I couldn’t find my copy to give you an
exact quote. Here’s a general paraphrase:
“I was looking at the menu of a local pizza restaurant, and
noted that there were pizzas with bacon, and ham, and even pineapple. I am sure
these are very interesting, but they are not pizza. I am not sure what they
are.”
I worship the immortal soul of Elizabeth David, and
would never disagree with her. But I have to disagree with her here.
“Pizza,” for me, is a thing that looks like pizza: sauce and
cheese on a round flat bread-like crust. One of the original “pizzas” was the
Neapolitan pizza margherita, which is red / white / green like the Italian
flag: tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, basil. Another “authentic” Neapolitan
pizza has an egg baked on top. (I love this, by the way, because I encountered
it often in Tunisia, which is about six inches below Italy on the world map.
Most of my American friends are either hilarified or disgusted by the thought.)
Sorry, kids: food is food. Pizza is pizza, whatever you put
on top. Cheese sandwiches are cheese sandwiches, whatever you cram into them.
I just made myself hungry.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Bees, and why you need to care about them
I have been hearing about colony collapse disorder
since the mid-1980s, when I lived in Tunisia and actually knew some beekeepers.
Their hives were dying, and they had no idea why it was happening.
It’s now a worldwide problem. The European Union is voting
on the subject soon, and I hope they vote sensibly.
Do you realize that our crops – our food sources – almost
entirely depend on bees? Bees are the key to pollination. We farm bees just as
we farm crops like corn and beans, but the bees are not so reliable anymore,
because of this damned colony collapse disorder.
It may be a fungus. It may be the overuse of certain
insecticides. It may be some mysterious illness. It may be Gaia’s revenge on
mankind.
At any rate, the European Union is taking steps by banning
certain pesticides which seem to be implicated in the colony collapses. An
English friend of mine, Oma, recently posted a blog about the movement to ban
these pesticides.
I know what you’re thinking: Who cares about bees?
Answer: if you don’t care about bees, you’d better change
your mind, and fast.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)