Whew!
OK, I know I said I’d put a Fred and Ginger post….but this number from the Nicolas Brothers has always been a favorite of mine also….and those splits….I get sore just watching!
Random example of my weirdness as a parent….
A few minutes ago I shouted at my daughter, “They HAVE to tell you about the astronomical basis of that!” I’ll let y’all figure out what that was about on your own.
You know you’d want to….
Car Nerd Ron here… (Hey, I’m from Detroit!)
Suppose you were a newly successful French film director in the mid ’70’s…
And, because you wanted to, you mounted a camera (with one can of 35mm film, 8 minutes worth) on the front of your car.
Where would you drive? Paris, of course!
So at 5:30AM, you’d make that drive….
ignoring traffic, red lights, pedestrians, and the very idea of limiting your speed at all!
Let ‘er rip! Claude Lelouch’s Rendezvous.
Dogcows and Chickens, Cont’d.
Isn’t he magnificent?! This is mockturtle’s rooster, Mac.
Now mt and Karen can tell us what breed of chickens this is and what’s so special about them, and fifteen comments down heaven only knows what we’ll be talking about!
J’s Awesome Portrait
by our longtime friend Albert Mitchell. 
(It is framed, and the photographer’s reflection in the glass accounts for the slight discoloration of what is a silvery-toned pencil drawing.) Made in 2000 from a photograph, J’s 1980-or-so acting headshot, the drawing captures much more of J’s life than the photo did. Albie knew him. When I hung this picture above J’s ashes, I felt as if I had reunited his matter and spirit for the first time since they went their separate ways.
iPhone Abstainer
To the tune of “Daydream Believer”?
As I contemplate giving in and getting an iPhone, thus joining the rest of the planet in being perpetually networked, located, and informed, a deliberate contrary resolve NOT to do so is growing stronger.
The pros and cons:
PRO
If I’m on unfamiliar turf and suddenly remember that I need something from a Walmart or a Walgreen’s or a PetSmart, I can find one nearby. (Presently, I have to save it for a separate trip.)
If I get lost I can get found again quickly—particularly helpful to one who tends to allow barely enough time to get to appointments.
The camera. I can document my life and observations like a good blogger. I am not an image person, but describing things, like sketching things, takes time and energy. A snapshot may not be worth a thousand words, but it is a thousand times faster than a thousand words.
Google, for conversation enhancement and curiosity feeding. At home, I’ll run to the computer and look something up just for the hell of it. I could see taking that functionality portable.
CON
(Note that some of my cons are precisely the things that other people would consider pros, and are even the flip side of my own pros.)
I do not want to be available to e-mail, Facebook, etc. all the time. (I’m addicted enough as it is.)
I don’t want to be staring at a screen any more than I already do. My eyes are forgetting how to focus beyond two feet away.
I do not want to have music, pictures, and the Internet available to me while riding the train, walking on the street, or waiting in line. I want to be forced to look at and eavesdrop on my fellow humans (so I can get depressed by how many of them are hunched over their iPhones or iPads or umbilically swaddled in their iPods). If I really can’t stand it, I’ll carry something to read. (For the preceding reason, probably NOT a Kindle.)
I like getting lost. Some of my best adventures and discoveries happen by getting lost. (You’d think I’d love having my own GPS because, like a stereotypical guy, I tend to stubbornly avoid asking for directions. And I’ll use a map. So why not an iPhone? Because it is one of those sense-imprisoning, sense-dulling electronic devices that take us out of the freshness of the real world and into this glazed-in, stale, stuffy perpetual airport that is the virtual world. Lemme out!!)
I like looking at things better than I like taking pictures of them, especially because getting the picture often jostles aside looking and seeing. (I didn’t get a picture of the new WTC, but “in the silver light of a rainy summer evening, it had a swooping curve like one of those mermaid Mae West dresses that nip in at the ankles, only leaner and sharper; and it had a string of starry construction lights for buttons. The bumps on my skin tingled and twinkled like stars in response. The growing shaft, silver as the silver sky, plunged stilly up out of the earth with that vaunting, rocketlike defiance that makes skyscrapers take your breath away.”)
I don’t know yet which impulse will win. The contrarian impulse may prove to be too quixotic, isolating (with no TV and no steady companion[s] I’m already living on the moon), and just plain inconvenient. I would feel like a sort of retro-pioneer, prowling a deserted antediluvian frontier where a few living fossils still find their way by deploying their senses in three-dimensional space, and obtain information by exploring or asking somebody.
All By Myself
Slept late; sat here in a daze of relief all day, working on and off, hardly moving because the kitten (spayed yesterday, that violent word like a sharp tool) is all right. Close to 7 I remembered with a start that I had a ticket to a theatre production somewhere downtown at 8. It was a preview of this, which is based on one of my all-time favorite books. I keep giving the book to people but no one seems to love it as much as I do (ever notice how often our impassioned gifts of the food, books, or clothing we love fall flat with the recipient, and vice versa? Taste is induplicable), so I went by myself, dressed up in my half-assed way. Nobody cares but me, and there’s a freedom in it.
It was at Rector and Greenwich Streets, way downtown. I never did know downtown well and I know it even less now, so I tried to Google a subway route. Google Maps was way wrong. Turns out the number 1 Broadway line train from Sheridan Square would have taken me straight to the doorstep, but Google Maps didn’t have a clue of that. It told me I had to come upstairs at World Trade Center and go back underground around the corner at Fulton Street.
And so it was that I came up out of the subway right in front of the growing shaft of the new World Trade Center building. Faster than I could react consciously, I got goosebumps. It doesn’t look like all that much from a distance, so it caught me off guard that close up it was so awesome, silver against a silver sky. I can’t find a picture that looks the way it looked. Just one more reason to break down and get a fucking iPhone. (Or is it? If I’d had an iPhone I wouldn’t have gotten lost, wouldn’t have been startled by the building close up, wouldn’t have walked by the worn-thin gravestones in Trinity Churchyard and felt bracketed by the extremes of American history, wouldn’t have had to ask surprised strangers for directions. It seems to have happened in the blink of an eye: no one looks at anyone anymore, no one gets lost and has to find their way using only their senses.)
I don’t know if the play would have made sense to someone who didn’t know the book as well as I do, but I sat breathless on the edge of my seat and, at certain key moments, cried. The emphasis on dreams, which I need to reconnect with, and the director’s essay in the program, full of Taoist ideas about the virtue of uncertainty, told me I was where I belonged. It was mostly beautifully done, with scrims and large-scale video projection that transformed the simple set into a dreamscape — much truer to the book than the PBS film adaptation released in 1980. It could have been even better. Afterwards I found the adapter/director at the door and thanked him, told him the one scene I wished he had done more with, and how one of the actors needs to speak up. I didn’t go on and on, but his eyes looked for escape; it was a busy moment for him, and I am neither young and beautiful nor old and important, so nobody cares what I have to say. And I don’t care that they don’t care. I’ll say it anyway, or not. It doesn’t matter.
There’s an absurd freedom in not mattering at all, wandering like a neutrino (the particle that interacts with nothing at all, but passes right through matter) through an island of 5 million striving, connected people. I have a feeling that later on, when my life is more mundane and perhaps more structured and companioned, I’ll be nostalgic for this.
“There’s nobody left!”
Is this serious? Nope! It is a bit NSFW (and loud!) but I’ve been getting laughs with this….. I love the very last line.
Fun with Cannibals – or – What the F*ck is Up with Canada?
In the last few days the Western Hemisphere has seen three new notorious cannibals chew their way into the news.
The first story involves the Causeway Cannibal Case here in sunny Florida. Some Haitian emegre allegedly goes nuts on ‘bath salts’, strips off his clothes, assaults a homeless man, who he then strips naked before stripping the flesh off the guys face with his teeth. In broad daylight. On the side of the road in Miami. (I contend that in his drug induced stupor Rudy Eugene got his Haitian zombie lore and his American zombie lore all mixed up. I also contend this case isn’t as unusual as you might think down here in sunny Florida. Florida is really REALLY fucked up.)
The most disturbing two details* about this case so far are that (a) several people appear to have ridden by the assault while it was happening and didn’t do much about it, and (b) that pictures of the victim (who has lived, so far, with 75-80% of his face torn off) post-attack have appeared online in numerous places.
* The most disturbing BIG PICTURE item is that this occurred at all.
I’m not going to link to this story as it has received enough publicity, and on the off-chance someone here hasn’t heard about it yet and wants to know more can find the stories easily enough. Just watch out for the pictures. (I haven’t seen them, and don’t want to see them. Beyond the gore is the simple fact that I would feel like I was violating the victim’s privacy in most indecent fashion.)
This morning another cannibal attack was reported to have taken place in the Baltimore Maryland area.
Behind the door of a townhouse on Terrapin Terrace in Joppatowne, a house of horrors. It’s here police say 21-year-old Alexander Kinyua confessed to eating the heart and parts of the brain of a missing man. Police say Kinyua’s brother went down to the laundry room of the house and saw a blanket on a box. He pulled off the blanket and saw two metal tins. Police say he opened them and saw a head and two hands. When Kinyua’s brother confronted him about this, police say Kinyua said they were animal remains and not human.
The brother then got his dad. The dad went downstairs and the items were gone.
Kinyua’s brother called police.
“Human remains, specifically a head and hands, were recovered on the main floor of the residence,” Sheriff Jesse Bane of Harford County said.
Police believe they belong to 37-year-old Kujoe Agyei-Kodie, a family friend who was living at the house.
So, that makes two. Kinyua, BTW, is Kenyan.
Tonight a bizarre story out of Canada went off the deep-end. Yesterday a foot and a hand were sent via mail, the foot to the ruling Conservative Party’s HQ while the hand was found en route to wherever. It was determined that the suspect was a male porn star named Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, aka Eric Clinton Newman aka Vladimir Romanov. Okay, so far this is pretty fucked up, and I immediately thought of Walter in The Big Lebowski, “You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don’t wanna know about it, believe me.”
They were after the porn star because police found the torso associated with the foot and the hand near Magnotta’s apartment building (he was a ‘model’ tenant), which led naturally enough to his apartment, where the killing and the dismemberment took place. And the cannibalism, The Sun now tells us. (Yes, this means some crazy Canadian fucker was running around chopping up people and eating them. This MUST have been an episode of South Park.) It has been reported that Magnotta left a video behind of the killing, dismemberment and cannibalism.
Also, the diveresity freaks can now breath a sigh of relief – Magnotta is white, so the spectre of having nothing but black cannibal stories has come to an end. No more nasty old tropes here!
But this is only part of the weirdness. Apparently Magnotta had become known to The Sun several months back because of rather disturbing videos he had posted, among other things. The Sun interviewed him, leading to The Sun asking authorities to investigate Magnotta for being, well, psycho. The authorities ultimately weren’t able to do much, in part because they didn’t know where Magnotta was. If you want to know more you can read about this case here. I’m not going to post details about his prior videos. (Annie, you’ll want to skip that link.)
Other details about Magnotta have emerged. He’s allegedly bi-sexual and bi-polar. He has dated (allegedly) a paedophile serial killer, Karla Homolka. He wrote a blog on how to disappear completely. According to The Sun, police believe he has fled to Europe. Back to The Sun’s reporting:
Two days later a misspelled email was sent to The Sun.
It told of the writer’s love for London and warned: “Well, I have to say goodbye for now. But don’t worry, in the near future you will be hearing from me again. This time, however, the victims won’t be small animals. I will however, send you a copy of the new video I’m going to be making. You see, killing is different than smoking… with smoking you can actually quit.
“Once you kill, and taste blood, it’s impossible to stop.”
Our reporters were convinced it was from Magnotta.
And so on. All this leads one to ask, What the fuck is up with Canada that it is out-weirding Florida? This is way more fucked up that the bath-salt zombie case down here.
…
Finally, I want to go on record. The Causeway Cannibal chewed a hapless homeless human being in Florida. I live in Florida. Kinyua the Kenyan Kannibal self-served his mordantly macabre meal in the Baltimore Maryland area. Some of you may recall that I lived in the Baltimore Maryland area for a few years. And the Canadian Cannibal killed his vic with an ice pick. I had nothing to do with any of these cases, and I’ve got witnesses that place me far away from the cuisine, er, crime scenes! I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, there’s no way you can prove anything!
Ambiance 