Tonight’s dream spectacular featured me, drunk, unable to put the car out of reverse and consequently executing careering donuts up and down the lawns of an unfamiliar and well-to-do suburban neighborhood. I was of course seized by a mob of wealthy teenagers who beat the holy fuck out of me. It is the beating part of the dream I recall most vividly.
In other dream-related news, I have been awakening once a night from a foreclosure nightmare. How I hate home ownership.
why izzit that my boy kitty Simon smells of maple syrup?
I dreamt that Viv and were traveling through china by train, and on debarkation, became separated. I awakened as, in the dream, I scrolled through my cell phone’s contacts, looking for someone to call or text for help.
Far too much to do today.
Dropped a pair of cat-pee carpets off for cleaning, an exercise in the defeat of yankee economics and a clear demonstration that end times are at hand for the US: it would have been cheaper to actually just buy new rugs.
I went forward with the cleaning as one of the rugs had sentimental value to me, having dumpstered it some decade past.
Clearly, I don’t understand, and may actively hate, my native culture’s system of economics.
Went to the Crumb show at the Frye, which I must say is really worth hitting, especialy considering it is FREE. They have some real grails of Crumbology on display, such as the famous bathtub orgy late-60’s Fritz the Cat sequence and two or three original, unpublished childhood Arcades.
The real revelation, though, and I don’t think I’m alone in noting this, is Bob’s extraordinary sensitivity as a colorist. It’s consistent – the Arcade covers from his teenage youth show it, and he’s still executing these incredible technicolor miniatures fifty years later.
The highlight was overhearing some sixty-year-old Jersey transplant explaining to his eighty-year-old deef ma why Crumb’s explorations of sex and misogyny were so important. I think she kept going “huh?” to the guy just so he’d have to yell out why Angelfood McSpade’s gargantuan ass was in fact a mitzvah, and a liberation.
The most interesting moment was coming up to the aforesaid Angelfood McSpade strip just as a fifty-ish African-American church-lady in a pink pantsuit came over to look at it. I couldn’t read her reaction, but I’m sure that she was having a more complex set of personal responses to the strip than I ever could.
NYT: “safety experts say the influx of electronics is turning cars into sometimes chaotic — and distracting — moving family rooms.”
Who, I say, who will provide me with a little EMP keyfob that nukes the DVD of lane-drifting fool ahead of me or alters the windshield-mounted, blindingly bright GPS navsystem such that the shortbus-promoted driver ahead turns off?
America awaits!
Mid-City residents finish their rebuild: Bart and Christie are finished with their post-Katrina rebuild. The Times-Picayune rightly chooses to celebrate the event with not-terribly-subtexted images of fecundity and fertility, Christie being pregnant and the twain the very personification of a hoped-for rebirth of the Crescent City.
It should be noted that New Orleans remains a place with such deep-rooted dysfunction as to boggle the mind, and that Bart and Christie’s neighborhood remains plagued by gun violence and, like much of the city, abandoned and half-destroyed buildings. For all of Bart’s chipper attitude and the Times-Picayune’s boosterism, the couple’s choice is one which at a minimum requires personal bravery and epic quantities of positive thinking.
I corresponded heavily with Bart in the aftermath of Katrina and what I thought at the time remains true: as goes New Orleans, so goes the nation. If post-Katrina New Orleans can effectively transcend our shattered and oligarchically burdened means of governance and commerce, so can the rest of the country. If New Orleans fails, so will the rest of the country.
Bart and Christie have chosen to work for the renaissance of New Orleans, to work to save and cherish the American heart. They are both patriots and heroes, and I feel sure either would be discomfited by my take on this. I admire their choices.
publicdimension.ch points out how to kluge a local real-time transcoded stream with the help of VLC. Not quite what I need, but interesting nonetheless.
Party CAUCUS: The word and its history.
My summary: despite the greco-latinate spelling and first recorded use in the diaries of one John Adams, ain’t nobody whut knows whar it come from, ‘ceptin that it’s 100% Amurrkin, and thar’s them what say it’s a word we ‘uns come to borry fum the Algonkians er other percursory native types hereabouts.
Among that them, it should be noted, is the linked article’s author, someone better qualified to judge the evidence than I, I’ll warrant.
Lately, having a forethoughtless moment hereabouts, I realized I was without any species of vermouth. The situation threatened to crimp my daily martini intake, which is the ethnically-prescribed one on arriving home from work.
Happily, I have found that a decent midrange sake does the job, and frankly, even improves upon the original.
1 oz sake
2 oz gin
Shake over cubes until you fear frostbite in your extremities. Decant over one, preferably Goya, pimento-stuffed green olive.