A. Birch Steen spots Willy Wonka in an unexpected place.
Neko
Straight.com Case strips it down: an interview with Ms. Case on her career and recent accolades. It’s interesting that she notes that Blacklisted is the record she picks as her first mature piece – while I personally adore everything she’s done, the songs on Furnace Room Lullaby are the ones I respond to most strongly.
whoosh
Oh, man, having a houseful of senior citizens certainly can keep one busy!
Viv’s folks have been visiting for an eventful two weeks and went home today. I love them dearly and miss them already. It’s good for my noggin to be around Spanish speakers.
In other news, Karel’s gonna get a visit tomorrow afternoon; I found out circuitously that Caleb Schaber is a) from Indiana and b) in Iraq picking up work as a stringer; and we saw Bryan Singer’s Superman tonight, which I did enjoy.
Also, I am up past my bedtime.
Heatwave
90 degrees!
Noted
NYT: Star Trek Fans, Deprived of a Show, Recreate the Franchise on Digital Video. Now Playing to Wired to the NYT.
Embarkation
This guy was begging for food at the Canadian ferry terminal as we lined up to go, and I started teasing him by pretending to eat.
He kept getting closer and closer and closer until he first perched on the rearview mirror and kept ducking his head in to drool on me with his large beak. then he hopped onto the hood of the car and kept up the smae thing. We did give him some granola bar.
When we stopped feeding him, he attempted to peck at a parking decal on the windshield.
Butchart Gardens
These fountains are animated and wave around and so forth. This is the floor of a quarry that was landscaped to form the heart of Butchart Gardens from the turn of the century to the forties, if I understood correctly. It’s hard to overemphasize how dramatic this fountain is – it’s a complex visual pun on the mind’s visual expectations on the way white water is seen in settings such as this, an upside-down waterfall in the midst of what appears to be a pocket lake in the northwest forest. Butchart Gardens may be the only time I’ve ever felt that I might have something to contribute to a critical dialog on the subject of landscape architecture.
Slide
Well, I dropped in on my pal today to pick up a guitar of mine he’s been using lately and bought a dining table from him.
He’s a sweet, caring man with a strong musical gift who seems to have made it to the threshold of middle age without realizing how his appreciation of marijuana sets him up for extended bouts of depressive, smoky bouts of unemployment. I have no idea how to help him; it’s clear his depressive and sensitive nature pre-exists the pot but he really lurves the green and it does him, as far as I can see, no favors.
Wall
The wall’s done, I’m sore, an will be going on a search mission for a pal today.
Uncertain
Tomorrow at early-thirty I’ll begin helping my neighbor build a retaining wall between our properties.
Today I heard that a dear friend who has, um, some responsibility issues, is getting evicted from his apartment.