Sarah Roark

I find this  very illuminating.

Photo of protesters against gay marriage.

Although my particular favorite is the graphic of street-sign stick figures humping over the overturned American flag, I find the one with the two electric plugs even more revealing. Clearly to these people, the whole complex/joyous/maddening/marvelous/lifelong institution of marriage really can be boiled down to a simple act of insertion, and insertion ONLY of the proper sort and in the proper direction at that -- tab A into slot B. One is sorely tempted to take them to the Blowfish website or perhaps Toys in Babeland, or even buy them a Bend over Boyfriend instruction video, to remind them that even hetero couples enjoy thinking of their body parts as multi-use...

I went to see Circus Contraption's current production ("The Show to End All Shows"), and it was the funnest twenty-five bucks I've seen in a while. It's playing at Theo's Chocolates in Fremont. Twisted funny. I recommend.

Okay, so the first news videos of happy California couples tying the knot and cheering and crying and hugging are coming in, but I want more! more love! ;-) Let's have some jubilation in the streets folks!

 Ganked from teegarden.

http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/654147.html

Words do not express the depth of my contempt and rage. In a murder trial, is the prosecution forbidden to use the words "murder" and "kill?" Hell no. So on what planet is THIS okay?

The steampunk-themed custom guitars this dude makes are PURE SEX.

http://www.thundereagleguitars.com/

(Go under "Past Customs," check out the Villanizer and the Nautilus.)

If it was realistically possible to do that with a violin or an electric violin, I'd be so there. (Before you ask -- it's mainly a weight concern. No straps, ya see. Unless you build it like one of Mark Wood's electric violins, with a body brace thingy built in.)

From Rudyard Kipling, speaking about a miserable period of his childhood lodged with strangers, and the aunt whose house was a temporary respite for him during that period:

"Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it."

Well put.

There are few things scarier to a violinist than to suddenly find a BIG OL' NASTY splinter driven right down under your fingernail for almost the whole length of it.

Well, okay, there are worse things to have happen to your playing bits, but past that you're simply straying into the realm of the unspeakable. :-)

You'll be glad to know that after prolonged digging on both Brett's and my part, it was extracted, and an ER/urgent care trip FOR THE SAKE OF A SPLINTER was thus avoided. Which is good. I would have gone rather than risk infection, but it would have irked me.

It really doesn't feel that good, either. I can now believe this is a viable form of torture. :-)


WHEWWWWWW.

So I saw the segment of the Ellen show where Ellen Degeneres announces her engagement to Portia de Rossi, and the whole (overwhelmingly female) audience immediately stands up whooping and cheering, and Portia and Ellen are both visibly moved, and it all just makes me very, very happy.

What beautiful happiness shall be unfolding throughout California all this summer. For once, I look forward to press coverage. :-)

Good good, Obama's the nominee. Finally we can get past that mudfest (which helped nobody but the Republicans) and move on to the mudfest with McCain -- which I fully expect to be a clusterfuck in which our worst national racist and terrorist fears are shamelessly overstimulated. Hopefully the media will refrain from too much Why-Hillary-Losting...Wait, what am I saying? Nevermind. Hopefully it won't last too long.

Even though I have been more or less leaning Obama for months, and I celebrate the historic leap forward we as a nation have taken, having a black man in the general election for President of the United States! and I didn't have to wait to old age to see it! -- I will say there is also a part of my gut that takes the loss of our woman candidate as a blow. This is completely apart from any consideration of Hillary as an individual candidate, and I know it's not rational, but it is nevertheless there. It is a twinge in the little life-experience wound labeled "No, you don't get to play with us boys, go home."

Ah well. I hope our day will come again soon.

It had better.

In other jubilant news, the CA court refused to stay their ruling permitting gay marriages. This is a VERY IMPORTANT victory, y'all. The weddings will now take place. This means that any later ballot initiatives or constitutional amendments will require their backers to advocate revoking rights that are already in place, which puts them in an entirely different moral category from people who want to prevent rights from being extended. And by that time, if the entertainment business is doing their duty, we shall have had much joyous coverage of adorable California celebrities getting married left and right, and everybody will see the world failing to come to end in a lake of brimstone and virgin's tears, much as it transpired in Massachusetts.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080604/ts_nm/marriage_gays_dc

So I have a longtime student that's leaving me to go to college (schniff!) and for a graduation present I got her a CD and also a DVD of Itzhak Perlman because he was the dude who really inspired me to play the violin. Back in the 70's he was on TV a lot, and they'd always pull in for these really tight closeups and he would be making these faces of utter ecstasy. As a three-year-old, I was fully able to look upon this and think, "I want some of what HE'S having." However, when I got my own copy of the DVD I was interested to see if my long-ago memory was accurate.

Well, it was. There are definitely the ecstatic faces, but there's also something I didn't remember, which is the mischevious faces. Even just while he's tuning up for the Beethoven there's this little devilish smirk on his face, like he seriously thinks he's about to perpetrate some shit.

Totally adorable.

PS -- after watching for a bit, I really don't think the European standard of conducting upwards for the downbeat would throw me off as much as I often think it would.

Way to go California! Particularly you Republican judges who, contrary to the mudslinging, did NOT indulge in "judicial activism" but ruled on the merits of the case and the rights of American citizens. Just like you should.

There is one substantial shred of comfort from the mudfest that has been the Democratic primary process -- no matter what, in the same year we have had both the most-taken-seriously woman presidential candidate yet and the most-taken-seriously black presidential candidate yet. And neither of them were required to be saints in order to be taken seriously. (Which is a good thing, cause they ain't.)

***

So there's a YouTube of the unreleased music video that was made way back when for "As the World Falls Down" (from the Labyrinth movie soundtrack). Don't watch it. It was unreleased for a reason. It is pathetically bad. HOWEVER, it struck my interest that one of the several random threads that are hopelessly mashed together in the video is a recurring view of David Bowie in vaguely doo-wop getup, singing into a 50's style mike. Then it hit me, listening to the song later on without any video: my God, it IS a doo-wop song! (Rather similar to the astonishing realization I had listening to old Billy Idol hits on the radio, now with the benefit of decades' distance: Hey! Despite the fact that the guy dressed like a punk with the blond spikes and studded collar and all, his music and persona were in all other regards TOTALLY ELVIS! He EVEN HAD THE LIP CURL! WTF? ;-)

Anyway, this intrigued me greatly. The setting of Labyrinth, as you'll recall, is a fairytale setting. So it doesn't make any sense on the face of it that the love song in the movie should be all doo-woppy -- you'd expect a classical style maybe, or a folky early-music style, or even a pop/rock style like what's being used for the rest of the soundtrack. It doesn't make sense, that is, UNTIL you remember that both David Bowie and Jim Henson were young in the doo-wop era. So to them this was an entirely natural association. Love? First dance? Doo-wop!  It's also notable that the ostensible strangeness of the thing also flew in under my radar; but then again I grew up in the 80's when there was a massive 50's revival going on...partly BECAUSE guys of Bowie and Henson's generation were in charge of culture manufacturing...

***

Watching MST3K is actually extremely valuable for something else besides just the yuks. (Honest!) Because while all movies in the MST3K canon fail, not all movies fail for the same reasons. It's instructive to see what a movie looks like when the idea is basically good but the script is bad, or the idea and the script are good but the budget is low and the acting is atrocious, as compared to a movie that's just a mess on all fronts, etc...

***

"You know, sometimes I think I lie because I'm evil."
-- Pearl Forrester

For  those of you into MMOs, it may interest you to know that Turbine is (for the first time since launch) offering lifetime memberships to Lord of the Rings Online for $199 in honor of its anniversary. :-)

Very interesting...

A news article about an organization that supposedly went to the one village in China that produces most of the world's reproduction oil paintings, and asked the artists there to do self-portraits...interesting to see how the masterwork style that each artist imitates day in and day out mingles with the artist's own creativity...

Now I wonder if they're ever going to put a similar critical lens on the fact that Hollywood now seems incapable of making a fully original movie (not based on book, comic book, other movie, historical event, remake of a remake, sequelitis, ad nauseam)...

Okay. This is completely ridiculous.

SNOWING in MID-APRIL?

One has the desire to shake one's little fist at the Almighty and go "BITCH, PLZ."

So I kept hearing this song on JACK-FM that was beautiful, inspiring, nice use of strings, etc etc, and I'm going "What the hell is this? The lead singer sounds kinda like Roger Waters in the lower register and kinda David Bowie-ish in the upper register, and the instrumentation could be Pink Floyd *or* David Bowie..."

Mystery solved. It's "Silent Lucidity" by Queensryche. Which, Wikipedia hath revealed unto me, was formed in Bellevue, Washington.

So. There you are. Something cultural HAS come out of Bellevue at least once.

But Sarah must try. Still trying to make things happen on the manga front. Every time I walk into a Borders I'm overwhelmed at the sheer number and variety of books -- not just manga, but every other kind as well -- and I think to myself, each one of these is some author's fond dream, and 90% of them are going to go out of print as quickly as they came in, and even these are the lucky few that a) attracted a publisher's interest and b) actually made it to market. So many, many creative people with so many ideas. Am I kidding myself? Is there really room for one more?

And I look at all the snazzy marketing that has become de rigueur for even the simplest things, and I ask myself, is it really enough just to tell a good story? That is my guiding principle and article of faith -- tell a good story first, worry about positioning it later -- but maybe this is delusional? And that's assuming my stories even are good in the first place...

Then I try to tell myself, no, it must be possible. There must be room in the world for one more; there's no telling what my stories might do or whom they might touch, and there's no way to find out without trying; surely there are still audience out there for whom telling a good story is sufficient, and if not, what kind of world is that anyway?

Sigh. It's a good thing I'm well practiced at proceeding on blind faith and God-Damned Stubborn. At least no one will ever be able to say of me that I didn't try.

**

(On completely different note, I found this to be most cheerworthy: http://health.msn.com/health-topics/breast-cancer/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100199637&GT1=31024. Go science!)

I finally  went and tagged all my entries that are poems, so if'n you ever want to go check out my non-prose outpourings, go to http://doctorcaligari.livejournal.com/tag/poetry. 

Should work. Lemme know if it doesn't. :-)

 ZOMG -- NEWS FLASH --

Men may be threatened by women who make more than they do.

HORRORS!

The difference? This time it's on the Money pages instead of the dating-advice pages.

WHEN ARE YOU PEOPLE GOING TO GET TIRED OF THIS MEME? AROUND THE TIME I BUY MY FIRST HOVERCAR MAYBE?

The hilarious part is that once the article gets through the requisite handwringing about how threatened men are -- apparently it's become the journalistic equivalent of a handshake, observed purely out of duty and a sense of social nicety -- it goes on to a quite reasonable discussion about how actually successful women might not have any trouble finding men at all as long as they don't insist that he be rich as Bill G and brainy as Steven H and sexy as [insert preference here]. But you would have to get past the dumbass headline and braindead first page first.

Is it kind of become like "I'm not a feminist, but..."?

Tonight I have decided that I hate the entire motherfucking world till further notice.

Some particular sections of it more than others, sure. But in a mood like this, why bother making fine distinctions?