| Date: | 2012-04-29 22:14 |
| Subject: | iKafka |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  aggravated |
My dad, with assistance from the in-laws, sent me money for an iPad for my fortieth birthday, which is ridiculous and awesome — and not the source of the aggravation.
I placed an order last night at store.apple.com, indicating that I intended to pick it up at the Cambridgeside Galleria. They had the correct model in stock, so my order, they said, should be ready within an hour of placing it. They would send me an email.
This afternoon, around 2:30, about 15 hours after placing the order, the email had not yet arrived. My order status said "Processing" and "In stock for pickup." I called the Cambridgeside store to ask what was up, and got transferred (invisibly) to the central Apple number. She was sympathetic, and told me their order system had been down for maintenance. "Call the local store to see if your order is ready," she said. "I did," I said. "That's how I got you."
Armed with the secret override code for the automated system ("SALES REP"), I re-dialed the number, and reached someone at Cambridgeside. "Oh yeah," he said. "We filled that order this morning. You can come down and pick it up. If you don't have the email, just bring the order number and a photo ID."
"Woot," I said.
After an eight-mile bike ride in an eighteen-knot headwind, I arrived at Cambridgeside, and told the floor rep I was there to pick up an order. She asked if I'd received the email, and I explained the situation. I showed her my order number and photo ID. She disappeared into the back — for sort of a long time. Ten or fifteen minutes. Eventually, someone else asked, "Are you still waiting for your order?" I nodded, and they vanished into the back after her.
After a while, she emerged, carrying an iPad box. "Good news and bad news," she said. "We have your model in stock, and I can sell you one right now."
"Great!" I said. "And the bad news?"
"Your order hasn't reached us yet, so it wouldn't fulfill your order."
"The what now?" I said.
"If you bought this iPad, your order would go through later, and you would own two iPads," she said. "But we can cancel your online order, and then you can just buy this one!"
I thought about this for a moment. "Gotcha," I said.
We went over to a big iMac, and I logged in to my order page. "Just click 'cancel'," she said. I clicked cancel. Nothing happened. "'This order cannot be cancelled,'" she read. "Hmm."
She instructed me to call Apple, to get them to cancel the order. ("Buying from Apple is usually really seamless!" she said — which, to be fair, I believe. "Can I get you anything to make you more comfortable?") I navigated the automated system until it said it was going to connect me to a human. Then it hung up. I tried again, and it hung up again.
(All this time, an iPad very much like the one I'd purchased was sitting next to me on the desk. It was not the one I'd purchased, however, and I could not leave with it, unless I bought it as well. Had I not placed the order online, and just gone to the store like a normal person and bought it, I would have that iPad right now.)
Eventually I got through to Apple, and they told me they couldn't cancel the order either. It was in the ether, between them and Cambridgeside, and no mortal hand could turn it aside. By this time it was 5:00, which happened to be the time I was supposed to meet ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) adfamiliares in Harvard Square for dinner, so I called her to apologize, then left.
One hour and twenty-three minutes later, at 6:23, I received the email saying my order had cleared.
Not sure when I'll be able to make it back to East Cambridge.
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With little fanfare, but many FaceBook well-wishings, I turned 40 yesterday. I did laundry, looked over some proofs for work, grilled some burgers and asparagus, watched a little TV with my lovely wife. Perhaps if I didn't acknowledge it, it would go away. No such luck.
On Monday, I got glasses. (See icon.) Seemed like a good time for it; I went my first forty years without, and can go the next forty with. (At 80, I can replace them with vat-grown night-vision eyes with neon purple irises.) My distance vision had been squintily blurry for a while; now it's like someone has Windexed the world. "Sorcery!" I quietly mumble, but only because I am accustomed to my unaugmented perspective being correct. A sudden improvement seems uncanny, like the world has been sharpened, not my vision.
Tonight, adfamiliares took me out for a stunning meal at Oleana, a Middle Eastern place in Cambridge. We split a chick pea terrine, a stuffed burrata, a canoe-shaped pastry ("pide") filled with creamed nettles and mint, greens with toum (a garlic sauce), and quail kebabs. For dessert, two amazing plates: one with a rich chocolate kanayif (sort of a bird's-nest pastry), sheep's milk sorbet, and a chocolate "crème bruléette"; the other with an unbelievably light caramel-drizzled bread pudding and mulberries in honey. I swooned.
Tomorrow, we bike to a sheepshearing festival. That's the sort of thing old people do, right?
Baa.
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I believe I just saw a corpse delivered to the local CBS station.
I was biking home along the Charles when I saw a helicopter pass overhead. It was dark enough that all I could make out were a few lights and the machine-gun sound of its rotors, but it looked huge — like one of those giant military helicopters, or a flying aircraft carrier from a superhero comic. Then I realized it wasn't big, just close.
I remembered there was a helipad very close by, at WBZ-TV. I tracked the helicopter through the treetops and arrived just in time to see it touch down across Soldiers Field Road from me. An ambulance was waiting in the parking lot, about a hundred feet away, with no lights or sirens. The EMTs waited for the rotors to stop turning, then slowly wheeled a gurney to the helicopter. Five minutes passed. I couldn't see much, due to distance and darkness, but I saw something placed on the gurney, and sheets being arranged. When they returned to the ambulance, the gurney was surrounded by a cordon of three or four people from the helicopter. I continued on my way.
The lack of urgency and sirens makes me think this was a dead body, but I don't know enough about coroners' procedures to understand why the handoff was made in the parking lot of a TV station. Perhaps it was a CBS helicopter, and someone died while it was in flight. Or perhaps the helicopter was transporting someone in critical condition to the hospital, and when they died en route it was diverted to a less busy helipad. Or perhaps the nearest hospital (Mount Auburn, presumably) doesn't have their own helipad.
Does anyone have a better notion?
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| Date: | 2012-03-25 23:03 |
| Subject: | MoS Def |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  pleased |
kdsorceress, who has a membership, took me to the Museum of Science today. There were the usual awesome things, like the room of math and the dinosaurs and the lightning fossil, and an unusually large number of geckos, which were the current special exhibit and the chief excuse for this visit, and also some new things that struck me as particularly nifty:
- A basin with rice in it, which could be mounded into hills and valleys. An overhead camera monitored the height of the rice, and a projector projected images onto it: colored maps of elevation, slope, water flow, shadows, and...a fifth thing that escapes me at the moment. The result being that you could form a mountain and a lake with your hands, then a moment later see them painted orangey and blueish, respectively, in an instant topo map. Above the basin, a video screen displayed a POV image of the landscape someone standing on the edge of the basin would see.
- A big thermal-imaging screen, which displayed a moving image of my heat map. I saw that my moustache was cooler then my face, and turned it invisible by breathing on it, and jogged in place for a while and watched my chest turn orange, and drew designs on myself with a fingertip. Very fun.
- A nice implementation of a tabletop cloud chamber. These are commonplace, but, despite having a degree in physics, I'd never seen one in person, and stared at the vapor trails of alpha particles and beta particles for a good long while. We saw one alpha trail that took a sharp corner, which presumably marked an impact with one of the
water alcohol molecule nuclei in the cloud.
- The museum has five different models of wind turbine on the roof, connected to a big bank of screens and buttons and diagrams that allow you to see how each one is performing at a given moment, and how they've performed over time. One model was clearly best at high wind speeds, producing power scaled to wind speed all the way up to 60 mph; another clearly gave the best performance at moderate speeds, but shut down above about 30 mph; another crept along with very little output, but was able to output something even at speeds as low as 5 mph.
- They have a singing Tesla coil now, like on the internets, that played a very creditable William Tell Overture. You can see a video of an audience volunteer playing a tune on it on the Wikipedia page for singing Tesla coil.
Excellent excursion!
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Last night, prior to running off to Everything Is Terrible! I was just putting in a DVD of the 1958 B movie Fiend Without a Face when I decided I wanted popcorn. The popcorn package had this extremely simple recipe for kettle corn on the back, which I tried, became addicted to, and now pass on to you:
- Use half as much oil and sugar as popcorn. If you want to pop half a cup of popcorn kernels, use 1/4 cup of both oil and sugar.
- In a lidded pot large enough to hold the popped popcorn, heat the oil over medium-high heat until shimmering. Heavier pot is betterer.
- Dump in the popcorn. Immediately sprinkle the sugar over the popcorn and put the lid on, clamping it tight with your hand.
- Start shaking the pan on the burner. Do not stop until the popping stops, which will be in about two minutes.
- Remove from heat, remove lid, and sprinkle with kosher salt to taste. The salt will trickle down through, sticking where it needs to.
The end result is fluffy popcorn coated in a crisp, glassy layer of sugar that causes the kernels to adhere lightly to one another in fantastic shapes, not nearly so densely as in a popcorn ball. 1/4 cup of popcorn was a good amount for me alone — it produced perhaps a quart of popped popcorn. I intend to experiment with other oils and sugars.
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That.
There was this....
There was....
Okay.
So, imagine — imagine Koyaanisqatsi, except it's more disturbing, and there's a smoke machine on stage. Just a relentless, plotless barrage of images and jarring music and unsettling mirror effects, for like an hour and a half. With a smoke machine. And also Koyaanisqatsi is made entirely from found footage of dogs. Only it's actually not Koyaanisqatsi but The Holy Mountain, which I have not seen, remade with the found footage of dogs, including Bible-toting dogs and surfing dogs and Wishbone and werewolf transformations and ghost dogs and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. And then after the credits roll three anthropomorphic Banana Splits-style dog-mascots come onstage and urge the audience to throw VHS copies of Jerry Maguire at a dog-catcher with elongated forearms while Bruce the Cat, who is a guy in a black face stocking and cat ears and a suit, plays Radiohead's Creep on a mini keyboard.
That...actually happened.
I am broken. It took 'til like ten minutes from the end, but it broke me.
This is why I love. This. Town.
(Also I love my wife, who reminded me that Everything Is Terrible! was going to be at the Coolidge, which I now know I can bike to in ten minutes flat if I need to.)
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| Date: | 2012-03-17 21:04 |
| Subject: | Rabies, babies |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  sore |
Yesterday, I was crossing the street to Diesel, and walked between a dog tied to a parking meter and a soup bone about four feet away from it. Like a moron, I reached down to pat the dog on the head, saying something like, "Aww, look, you have a bone!"
After he let go of my knee, there was a hole in my jeans and a two-inch laceration on my leg.
Like an even bigger moron, I continued into Diesel rather than waiting for the owner to come by so I could ask whether the dog had been vaccinated for rabies. By the time I emerged from checking my knee in the bathroom it was gone. If I'd remained, this story would have ended last night; as it was, I spent the evening (after an excellent dinner at carpenter's house) doing research on rabies.
Turns out that rabies has been all but eliminated in housepets. There were zero cases of rabies in Massachusetts dogs in 2010, and exactly one case of rabies in a Massachusetts human since 1935 (he got it from a bat). This dog was owned, the attack was provoked; the chances of me developing rabies from the bite were infinitesimal.
But if symptoms developed, it would be too late to do anything. No do-overs. I would die.
In other words, I would be betting my life on the hope that this dog had not somehow missed getting its shots, and not gotten into a fight with a raccoon last week. Rather than Gambling With Death, I biked to the Mount Auburn clinic this afternoon, where, over the course of two hours, I received eleven injections: one in each arm, five into the wound itself, and four in my butt. (The five in the wound were all from one needle, but five punctures, half a cc at a time.) Only one or two of the shots were actively painful; they use fine-gauge needles, which for the most part I barely felt. The doctor and the nurses were all pleasant and sympathetic, and to a one seemed pained that I'd had the misfortune of getting bitten by a dog a) who almost certainly was not rabid and b) whose rabies status could not be verified. (One of them asked, "Was it, uh, with his mouth that he...bit you?" That confused me.)
I go back again on Tuesday, next Saturday, and the following Saturday, for one shot in the arm each time. After that, I will be IMMUNE TO RABIES, as well as tetanus and (randomly) whooping cough. (The new tetanus booster is a) permanent and b) also effective against pertussis.) The bite is not infected; dog bite infections present within 24 hours, the doc said, and only 20% of dog bites (as opposed to 80% of cat bites) become infected. I am a bit sore in one arm, and in a couple of spots on my butt. My co-pay was $20.
All in all, much better than I feared. And now I can play with bats all I want, because I am IMMUNE TO RABIES!
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I went to Arisia last weekend, and got my geek on for two nights at the beautiful Westin Waterfront.
To get the bad stuff out of the way first — and there always seems to be bad stuff, doesn't there? — Sunday afternoon did not go well. There was some drama and unhappiness late Saturday night, which meant I slept poorly and woke up early, after which I had to run off and give blood. Long story short, I spent about six hours of Sunday sitting in the lobby, shivering, cultivating a new nervous tic, and reading most of Farewell, My Lovely. A string of people came by to chat with me — Eric from the dreidel party, kdsorceress's roommate Genni and mom werewulf, Otavia and David and Theodora — but for the most part I read and glowered and shivered until someone came and made me go to the sauna-like pool room to warm up. I need a more realistic strategy to get through that phase of the con, 'cos what I've been doing just isn't working. I've figured out that retreating behind a book for some social retrenchment is perfectly fine, healthy even, but six hours is a bit excessive.
Now, the good:
( Cut for goodness and photographs. )
So, overall a success. 2/3, anyway.
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The first line of the first post of each month of 2011:
I'm beginning to worry about the new year.
On Saturday, I was confronted with a mystical word square from the third century, a palindrome intended to confuse demons. Something in my soul has loosened, as though it's been given a half-turn counterclockwise with an allen wrench. Piles of snow still lurk about, dirty and shrunken, like the aliens at the end of an alien invasion movie, when they're dying in sad heaps.
There were eleven people in my house on Friday. Together we climbed a mountain, called Kebo, whipped by wind and menaced by thunderstorms.
And then it was over. My hands were shaking, I couldn't catch my breath, but I did it. There was suddenly something in the corner, something like a skinned seal. Once again, I feasted on flesh.
I'm still free. Look out your window.
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| Date: | 2011-12-18 00:44 |
| Subject: | Christmas cheer |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  baffled |
I just got back from Rare Exports, a Finnish movie about a team of miners who excavate Santa Claus, at the Brattle. It was probably the weirdest and most unsettling Christmas movie I've ever seen — it looks like horror, but it's not really horror, unless it is. It's certainly a Christmas movie. I suspect I might understand it more if I were Scandanavian. I'll recommend it even though I'm not.
But that's not why I'm here. I'm here to relate the bizarre, passive-aggressive exchange I had immediately after the movie. Due to cookie-baking, I arrived a little later than I like — about six minutes before curtain. I grabbed a nice seat anyway, then went down to get free popcorn with my membership card before it expires tomorrow. The line was long, and I found myself making my way to my seat in the dark during the first ten seconds of the movie (i.e., the company credits).
Eighty-six minutes later, the credits were over, we were applauding, and I was standing up to leave. A woman's voice said, "Excuse me. Could I ask you a favor?"
"Sure!" I said, and turned around with a Christmas smile on my face.
I saw a woman who'd been sitting three rows back from me, plain-faced, about my age. She said, "You're very tall. I didn't see any of the subtitles."
"Um," I said. "Gosh, I'm sorry. If you'd said something at the start of the movie, I'd've been happy to move over a seat." (That might not actually be true — I'd chosen my seat because there was nobody sitting directly behind it, and moving over would've inconvenienced someone else. But anyway.)
"That would've created a disruption for everybody," she said.
"Well, you could've moved, right?"
"That would've disrupted the movie too."
"So, instead, you decided to passive-aggressively buttonhole me after the movie?"
"In the future, could you please be sure you're sitting in your seat at least a few minutes before the movie? I didn't see any of the subtitles."
I blinked at her. "You," I said, "are a real sweetie. Merry Christmas!"
Then I left.
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Cliché of the day: I feel like a new man.
I've been habitually tired for a long time — I'd guess six months, but it could be longer. I didn't feel rested when I woke up, I felt more or less foggy and thick during the day, and about three hours before bed my brain turned itself off. That last is the worst — those are my most consistent writing hours, and I spent a lot of nights staring at the screen with oatmeal in my head before giving up and going to watch an episode of CSI. If anyone's been thinking to themselves, "Hey, jere7my's been a little off lately. He's not as sharp as he used to be," you're right. (I don't know if anyone has, but it's seemed obvious to me.)
I had a lot of theories. I messed with my breakfast choices; I fretted about my caffeine intake pattern; I speculated on lingering illnesses I might have; I tried to link it to biking (or not-biking). Most upsettingly, I worried that I was just getting old — that fogginess and dullness were part of the progression of my brain toward senility, and it would keep getting worse.
Then I noticed three things: One, I woke up refreshed in other beds, at Arisia and at my mom's and in Bar Harbor this summer. Two, I was feeling pressure points when trying to fall asleep in my bed, and felt generally dense and heavy. Three, our mattress was about seven years old, which Consumer Reports says is close to the end of a mattress's useful life.
Bing.
Last Saturday, we went to Watertown Mattress, where Mike the helpful and gregarious made us lie on a half-dozen mattresses, steered us toward the ones he sensed we'd like, ratcheted down the prices until we relaxed, and told us mattress lore. (Q: Why are most modern mattresses one-sided, when the advice has always been to flip them every few months? A: Because the fire code changed in 2006, making it more expensive to bring mattresses up to code. Manufacturers cut costs by fireproofing only one side of their mattresses.) I nearly fell asleep on one of his mattresses, and we bought it.
Yesterday, three fellows wrestled a new Simmons Graball Plush Firm up the stairs and a sagging old Sealy Posturepedic down the stairs. Last night I had my first sound, restful, uninterrupted night's sleep in...I don't know how long. I bounced out of bed, was pleasant to my wife during breakfast, and had a clear head all day.
It's only been one night, of course, but I am optimistic that this is going to make a major difference in my quality of life. If you're sleeping poorly and your mattress is older than a first-grader, you might want to follow suit.
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| Date: | 2011-12-05 02:26 |
| Subject: | The long autumn |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  accomplished |
Look out your window. Does that look like December to you? If it does, you're not in New England. I'm still riding my bike; I'm not buying a December MBTA pass, because it wouldn't pay for itself. Today I biked downtown.
As much as I like my riverside route, sometimes it's good to bore straight into the heart of the city on Comm Ave., passing through the distinct bands of Brighton, Allston, BU, Kenmore, then under the Charlesgate overpass and into the rarefied atmosphere of brownstones and broad avenues. I end up in the same place, but it makes me feel more urban. Friendly exchanges with adventurous drivers stoke my adrenaline.
I was on my way to the Bazaar Bizarre, to do me some handcrafted local-artist Christmas shopping. One dollar got me in the door. I was afraid, as I passed BMWs and Audis and Mercedeses on Tremont, that I was going to find a lot of sterilized-for-rich-people art, but the music was loud (it featured the Smiths!) and there was a healthy dollop of alt-people and hippies stirred in among the middle-aged women in tailored suits. I bumped into Dirk T., who was manning the Boston Comics Roundtable table, and chatted with a few artists (including one fairly awesome comic artist who also paints badger skulls). There were felted rocks and circuit board pendants and butterfly earrings and whimsical animal-head hunting trophies made out of felt petals and fancy s'mores and all kinds of things like that there, all under the fabulous dome of the BCA Cyclorama.
I got a few prezzies for people, but was called away earlier than expected when adfamiliares called to tell me she'd finished carolling with the 99% at Occupy Boston and wanted to meet for dinner in Chinatown. My standard bánh mì place was closed due to construction next door, but we got equally good bánh mì at 163 Vietnamese Sandwiches, with an avocado shake (for her) and a startling hot-condensed-milk-and-egg drink for me. (Startling because hot.) Tasted good, but it might be the worst possible beverage to spill all over yourself and your bike and your coat as you're walking your wife to Downtown Crossing.
Then across the Longfellow Bridge and up Beacon to Diesel, where The Book That Is Not Called Word Up, Stratocaster! is coming into focus.
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| Date: | 2011-11-26 01:58 |
| Subject: | Feed me |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | thankful |
Thanks to irilyth, those of you who want to follow my writing blog in the context of LJ or DreamWidth can do so:
http://slowpalace-feed.livejournal.com/
http://theslowpalace-feed.dreamwidth.org/
You can leave comments on the feeds, but I may forget to check them, and they'll disappear after some number of weeks; permanent comments should go to the blog itself.
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I'm happy to announce I've launched my professional writing blog:
http://theslowpalace.blogspot.com/
Check out the post! It has a post!
My writing thoughts will mostly end up there rather than here, though I'd like to set up an LJ feed for it. (I think I need someone with a paid account to do that for me. Volunteers?)
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I'm still free. The icicle bars of winter haven't yet slammed shut, though recently another cyclist called out at an intersection: "It's the last good day!" That didn't quite turn out to be true, but I can see a long icy gray stretch of bus-riding and slush on the horizon.
That encounter was two Tuesdays ago, when I used the unseasonable warmth to bike to Lynn Woods (here's my GPS trace), enticed by names that could have come from a D&D map: Dungeon Rock, the Stone Tower, Pirate Boulder, the Wolf Pits! I spent a couple of hours hiking a loop of the southern half of the park, hitting Dungeon Rock, the Stone and Steel Towers, Walden Pond (not that one), Penny Bridge. It's an easy hike, with stone or wooden stairs taking you up and down slopes, and in mid-autumn an exceptionally pretty one, with red-orange-yellow-green foliage reflecting from mirror-still ponds. Off the main carriage roads, I only saw three other people the whole time. (Friendly dog-walkers abounded on the roads.)
Dungeon Rock and the Stone Tower are sometimes open, but not while I was there, alas. I'm told that Dungeon Rock descends 135 feet into the bowels of a stony hill; shining my flashlight around the cracks in the door, I saw a staircase plunging steeply into blackness. Gotta go back when I can convince the ranger to let me in!
I highly recommend Lynn Woods for low-impact hiking and nature appreciation. I found it more varied and welcoming than the Fells, for all that the Fells are a bit bigger (2600 acres vs. 2200). I took quite a few photos, and I'm very happy with the way this set turned out — do check it out. ( Highlights below the cut! )
The full set is here. I've also put together a collection of all my Boston-area park explorations, to encourage people to explore the green we've got.
I had such a nice time that I forgot that night drops like a guillotine at this time of year — half of my 18-mile return trip was in the dark, which was a bit of a knuckle-biter. What's more, Google Maps sent me into a nest of short streets and big box stores with fenced-off lots, which got me a little turned around. By the time I was approaching Harvard Square, I was anxious and distracted enough that I caught my tire on the lip of a concrete apron that wasn't quite flush with the asphalt, and took a tumble. I escaped injury, but my rear wheel was bent out of true; happily, Ace was able to fix it in half an hour for $20.
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| Date: | 2011-10-28 21:37 |
| Subject: | Cold river |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  thoughtful |
It was a cold ride home from Davis Square tonight, but damn do I love the Charles on a cold autumn night. Perfect reflections in a black mirror, sodium streetlamps and taillights and boat slips, somehow brighter and sharper and more real than the things reflected.
I finished the second draft of The Mayor's Skin last night, and at Diesel tonight I think I figured out what it's trying to say. Now I just need to cut away all the things that don't say that, and sharpen all the things that do.
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Last Saturday was one of those wonderful days you only get once a season, if you're lucky. I spent the afternoon riding out to Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge in Stow (about 21 miles each way, plus 4 miles of hiking — map). Assabet is covered over with a dense canopy of tall pines, so there's very little undergrowth, and everything is hushed. Every so often a huge, abandoned concrete bunker rises from the forest floor — Assabet used to be a military compound, and the army stored munitions and troops there during WWII. It lends a Lost Civilizations vibe to the whole place. Also on tap: very pretty wetlands (with plenty of frogs), a crystal lake, and twenty-some miles of hiking trails linking it all together.
The ride was perfect — ideal weather, farmland and forest to ride through (once I cleared Waltham), largely downhill on the way back. While planning my ride, I happened to notice that my route would take me within a mile of the homestead of Lorenzo Maynard, whose tomb I photographed at Mount Auburn last week, so I look a little loop through downtown Maynard to see it. On the way home, I passed by a herdlet of red calves just on the other side of a fence, so I stopped for a while to watch them romping and lowing and chewing. I sure do like the flexibility biking gives me.
When I got home, I had just enough time to shower and change and throw some pasta inside me before I had to set out for Davis Square to catch Beaver with kdsorceress. It was a variety burlesque from the folks who bring us the Slutcracker, starring J. Cannibal and satirizing the Tea Party. It was vicious. I was helplessly laughing for much of it — it put me in mind of the National Lampoon in their heyday. The Virgin Mary (Lolli Hoops) did a hooping striptease to Lady Gaga's Judas, then gave herself a Caesarean on-stage and danced with the baby Jesus. Rick Perry was Rickrolled, then encountered an abortion-on-demand vending machine (complete with vacuum noises) in "one o' them godless east coast shoppin' malls." A preacher testified about Christ as Penis. Sarah Palin did an involuntary pole dance, then helped to raise a Pride flag, Iwo Jima-style. It was relentless, crude, uncompromising satire...with boobs. Not something you'll find in the mainstream, and even if I didn't agree with every nuance of their message I was pleased to see artists taking a loud, unapologetic stand.
As an aside, I'm also pleased that I can hike-n-bike 56 miles in a day now and not really feel it. I was a little stiff the next day, but quite functional.
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| Date: | 2011-10-07 21:53 |
| Subject: | I remember mori |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  artistic |
I visited Mount Auburn on September 25th, sans camera, and was kicking myself so much that I returned on the 30th. They've been restocking the grounds with appropriate wildlife of the mid-19th century, and the place is overrun with frogs, each one flinging itself into the pond with a strangled "Mreep!" at my approach. ("Seen any toads?" one caretaker called to me. "We put 1500 American toads in here in May, but I haven't seen 'em.") On my first visit, I saw two wild turkeys, hundreds of puffball fungi, and a baby turtle the size of a muffin-top poking its beak up to eat algae in Willow Pond; on my second I saw an adult turtle and literally dozens of bull- and green frogs. No toads.
( Wildlife photos! )
( Wilddeath photos! )
See more on Flickr.
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On Sunday, I biked to the MFA to check out their "new" contemporary art wing. (It's really just rebuilt and repurposed.) The space is airy and light, creating a sort of neutral-uplifting backdrop for the art, but they took a wrong turn by silkscreening explanatory blocks of text in each gallery ("Look around you! In this gallery, you'll see common objects used in uncommon ways!"). It creates a distancing Contemporary Art for Dummies feeling, and doesn't permit visitors to approach the art on their own terms. They also wrote out the guidelines for visitors in white neon, making a winceish "Is it art?" sort of installation that diminishes the rest of the collection. Getting past that, though, the collection itself is quite nice, charming and witty and powerful and inspiring by turns. I like the joke inherent in spelling out "INTENT" in incandescent bulbs, then letting them burn out until the message is illegible. A fellow struck up a conversation with me about the gorgeous, glossy, almost mechanical black mirrors of Fred Wilson's Iago's Mirror, and a young journalism student asked to photograph me contemplating a plaster cast of a morning shave. I most enjoyed the soft black closeness of their video installation gallery, where I sat watching a meditative underwater shot of a woman standing on a melon in the Dead Sea for about fifteen minutes.
It's good to immerse myself in contemporary art from time to time. I'm highly dependent on artistic self-confidence to carry me through this period of my writing career; seeing the many many ways people have managed to create art in the last half-century helps me tattoo THERE'S NO RIGHT WAY TO DO IT on the inside of my forehead. It's a message I needed to hear. Then I rode to Harvard Square to catch the tail end of the Honk! festival, and had it colored in with glitter and feathers and fried plantains.
Also: Neal Stephenson read from Reamde at the Coolidge, and while he has a typical geek's public speaking skills I was well entertained. A couple of weeks prior, I saw Betsi Feathers Burlesque at the Coolidge, and was impressed by their level of professionalism. Lots of choreography, very nice costumery. The dancers themselves were less alt-chick than I am accustomed to seeing; they looked like they'd stepped out of a glossy magazine, for the most part, which is not really my thing. But I had a good time.
Coming up: there's a Dali exhibit at DTR Gallery on Newbury Street (through 10/21), which I need to get to. I also want to get to the ICA after 10/7 to see the Dance/Draw and Swoon installations. The MoS is apparently hosting a huge travelling Pompeii exhibit, which adfamiliares and I are interested in; I'm also keen to see the fractals show in the planetarium. This weekend, J. Cannibal and the folks who bring us the Slutcracker are mocking the Tea Party at the Somerville with Beaver. The HMNH has a new "Life in the Extreme Deep" exhibit, with a talk-n-reception on the evening of 10/12.
Finally, my tires have been behaving themselves for weeks now, ever since the Ace guy found the tiny sliver and I put on a new Bontrager LT-3 tire. I think I'm going to bike out to Assabet Wildlife Refuge in Stow this weekend...and I'm laying track in my mind for a bike ride to Montréal and back next spring. Eep.
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Once again, I feasted on flesh. J. Cannibal hosted his eleventh Feast of Flesh at the Coolidge this weekend, and I went with a troop of Scottish dancing folk to nibble on a horrific goodie bag and watch creepy burlesque, death metal, a zombie costume contest, and Dario Argento's ridiculously over-the-top Demons. (I'd been confusing it with Night of the Demons; Demons was much better, for some values of the word.) The winning zombies were a nicely realized zombie bride and a crowd-pleasing Dry Bones from Super Mario Bros. The rumor was that this was to be the last FoF, as J. Cannibal is moving out of state, but he says he's decided to return for XII and XIII. Hooray!
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