some like it hot

He was more dangerous. He did things to Minnie that were not nice. I think what happened was that he became so popular – this is my own theory – they gave his cruelty and his toughness to Donald Duck. And they made Mickey a fat nothing. He's too important for products. They want him to be placid and nice and adorable. He turned into a schmaltzer. I despised him after a point.

Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak commenting on the changes that came to Mickey Mouse over time in Tuesday's Guardian.

In the article, when he's not telling "parents worried by Wild Things to 'go to hell'", he's recounting how the monsters in his classic children's book were based on relatives who came to his house when he was a child. Immigrants who spoke little English:

They grabbed you and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do. And I knew that my mother's cooking was pretty terrible, and it also took forever, and there was every possibility that they would eat me, or my sister or my brother. We really had a wicked fantasy that they were capable of that. We couldn't taste any worse than what she was preparing. So that's who the Wild Things are. They're foreigners, lost in America, without a language. And children who are petrified of them, and don't understand that these gestures, these twistings of flesh, are meant to be affectionate.

It's a brief crotchety frightfully endearing piece -- especially the part about how he and his editor battled over whether or not to say that Max's dinner was "still hot" -- as opposed to "warm" -- and less likely to burn a little boy. He won the battle by conveying: "how dopey 'warm' sounded. Unemotional. Undramatic. Everything about that book is 'hot'."

Mr. Sendak, I adore you.

Fallen.

made animate

Photo: Terry Border

The young Joyce was a frequenter of the Dublin Hermetic Society and was intrigued by the notion that things could be endowed with consciousness. You didn't have to be a Theosophist to sense such potentials; writers and artists had similar intuitions.

The painter Cézanne, for example, said that the apples he painted were 'filled with thought'. Other modernist artists were moved by the sight of inanimate objects that had suffered rejection. 'This morning I visited the place where the street cleaners dump the rubbish,' Van Gogh reported. 'My God, it was beautiful.'

From Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd, a new release and remarkably good read that is my first step in finally tackling Joyce's Ulysses.

Apparently I'm not alone in giving up early in. According to Kiberd: "Ernest Hemingway worshipped Joyce as the leader of intellectual Paris in the 1920s, yet his copy of Ulysses lies in the John F. Kennedy library with all but the early and final pages uncut."

Those final pages would be the dirty bits.

I mention it now because Terry Border's Bent Objects: The Secret Life of Everyday Things has also just been released to the wild, and his mimetic objects (which you may know from his blog) animate the thoughts that most of us are guilty of -- that these things that populate our lives may well have a life of their own.

Crazy thoughts, maybe, or simply absurd -- and absurdity, we now know, is good for the brain.

So there's the hook: Just like the great Modernists, Bent Objects is good for the brain. Your brain. And whichever brain you may choose to grace with a copy this holiday season.

Plus, it's a whole lot of fun.

<end>Bald pimping from a Bent Object's fan.</end>



Related:
apparition with an appetite »
he revealed himself to me in the cheese »
outlook not good »

speaking of eats

Sakurako Kitsa makes captivating bento (and documents them on Flickr) »

BTW: have you ever tried to follow the Japanese provision of eating five colors for every meal? Been trying. It's hard.

street value

How much is a speech by Barack Obama worth? Five billion, apparently.

The final meeting of Group of 8 leaders [in July] in L’Aquila, Italy, started with $15 billion already on the table. Then President Obama gave a speech evoking the Kenyan village where his father herded goats as a child. In countless villages like it, millions of people face hunger daily, Mr. Obama said, and after he finished speaking, the pledges jumped by $5 billion, according to several officials present.

In Experts Worry as Population and Hunger Grow in this morning's New York Times.

The meeting in question concerned hunger, which is now part of the daily existence of 1.02 billion people worldwide.

Neil MacFarquhar goes on to write that "those pledges remain murky" and quotes a "financial official involved in the talks who was not authorized to speak publicly" who expresses the realities behind those good intentions:

The good news is that the political class considers this important and wants to do something about it. But nobody has 20 billion and spare change in their sock drawer.

Related (and a little more upbeat): California’s Food Banks Go Locavore »

oh! and if you want to feed someone without leaving your laptop, try Free Rice is Nice »

¿entiende?

Chief Almir Surui
Originally uploaded by Earthworm

Right now, under current development models, a standing forest is always worth less than its extractable parts.

Forests are very important for the welfare of the indigenous people and for the world. We want to show concretely, practically that you can have quality of life and economic development, with an intact forest.

Chief Almir of the Surui tribe of the Amazon, through an interpreter, commenting in the San Francisco Gate about an initiative under way to digitally document their cultural connection to the rainforest in which they live, and in documenting it, preserve it.

The tribe is "using tools like Google Earth, Google Maps, Blogger and YouTube. [Google Earth is] in the process of providing mobile phones with Google's Android operating system that include new software to automatically tag photographs with locational information and upload to Google Earth."

Chief Almir has a $100,000 bounty on his head, and 11 chiefs of neighboring tribes have been shot and killed during the last decade by, it is believed, loggers and miners who would much rather have easy access to the "extractable parts" of the rainforest in which he lives.

The power of this project, fueled through a partnership with Google Earth Outreach, is how technology has given the Surui people the opportunity to tell their story through a medium that is indigenous and accessible to the western world.

It catapults their story -- which from a distance seems quaint and of another era -- into this time; into our time; and anchors it squarely in a true and actual place that we can see, that we can find, that we can now more clearly imagine as real.

Through Google Earth we witness the devastation that they are suffering on the ground. Through Google Earth we hear their stories, we learn what matters to them, we make contact.

To my mind this mode of storytelling makes the need for compassion and assistance immediate and pressing.

It is all the more remarkable because it subverts our traditional colonial methods in which the white man visits indigenous tribes and acts as translator of their stories.

In this case, the people tell their own stories to an audience who can hear and understand.

There is no more powerful act than that: a simple story, well told, and received by hearing ears.

Inside me I realized the need to use internet technology as a tool to make my people's situation known.

-- Chief Almir

baguette etiquette

baguette tradition 1,00
Originally uploaded by .....antonio.....

1. On entering, greet the salesperson with 'Bonjour, madame,' or 'Bonjour, monsieur,' and make eye contact.

2. Pay with coins -- or small-denomination notes -- unless you're spending 20 euros or more.

(...)

13. Close out your visit with 'Merci, au revoir. Bonne journée!'

From 13 Tips for Visiting a Parisian Boulangerie (so complicated) in the Premiere issue of Afar Magazine, a U.S. publication, which (reasonably) assumes that Americans must be coached in the proper etiquette of saying hello and goodbye when entering a shop.

Additional tips: don't dither over the bread (#8) and #5, if you're eating alone ask for a demi-baguette (porker).

Apologies for the lack of link: the folks at Afar haven't gotten around to posting their publication online yet.


Related: kappa maki »

expired.

Autumn leaves, Morton Arboretum
Lisle, IL

Shot with expired Polaroid film
Holga, Polaroid back

falling.

falling.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone from
the Morton Arboretum

Lisle, IL

speaking of small trades

What this does is accentuate the trend towards best sellers dominating the market. You have a choke point where millions of writers are trying to reach millions of readers, but if it all has to go through a narrow funnel where there are only four or five buyers deciding what’s going to get published, the business is in trouble.

William Petrocelli, an owner of Book Passage, an independent company that has stores in San Francisco and suburban Corte Madera, California, commenting in the New York Times on the price wars that emerged yesterday between Amazon and Walmart on upcoming releases.

good for the brain (try a bag)

Photographed by Vogue Fashion Photographer Irving Penn (who passed away earlier this month) in Paris, London and New York from 1950 to 1951, Small Trades is Penn's "most extensive body of work" which he revisited and reprinted over the decades. According to the LA Times Penn switched from gelatin silver prints in the 1950s to platinum printing in the 1960s:

In silver prints, light-sensitive particles are suspended in emulsion that sits on the paper's surface. In platinum prints, light-sensitive emulsion is absorbed into the paper's weave.

The former are darker, more brittle, emphasizing silhouettes. They underscore the pictorial image.

The latter are richer, more subtle and luxurious. Platinum prints stress the physical art object.

His subjects are tradesmen and women. A coal man, a chamois man, firemen, charwomen, a sculptor's model, a Rockette, a seamstress, a commis (Parisian busboy), ballroom dancing instructors, a milkman, a road sweeper, a chestnut seller.

Shot against an old theatre curtain, chiefly in natural light, in full majestic dignity.

Irving Penn: Small Trades
9 September 2009 - 10 January 2010
at the Getty Center in LA

See the New York Times feature on the exhibit »

where I am not.

Long story. But this weekend's New York trip that was to have salved the wounds of the canceled London trip has been canceled due to illness.

That's two in three weeks.

I'm beginning to have serious doubts about whether the Yucatan, home of both the Mayan site of Dzibanché and raging outbreaks of the swine flu virus, is really in the cards for Christmas.

Maybe this just isn't my season to travel.

Any hoo: Vintage TWA travel poster courtesy of Grain Edit, via Aesthetic Interlude.

magnifiedcent

Looks like a Paul Klee to me -- but it's actually doxorubin in methanol and dimethylbenzenesulfonic acid magnified 80x as shot in polarized light by Lars BechNaarden of the Netherlands.

Cited by Wired Magazine in 35 Years of the World’s Best Microscope Photography, via boing boing and @timoreilly.


Paul Klee, Red Balloon via artsmarttalk

acquiring china

Mr. Hoo is a patient man, and not one for clutter. It took a while for the question to arise because it took a while for the cupboards to brim over with the fine bone china stuff.

It took awhile but eventually, last night, he did ask: What is all this?

I don’t know, I told him, but I think it has something to do with Grama.

I’ve been acquiring china. Twice now I’ve been married and not once did I register for the things girls register for. My china has long been a mashup of expedient pieces acquired as needed, and gifts received.

Chief among the gifts are pieces from the Noritake Angela pattern that my grandmother used when we were young. She sent it my way in the ‘90s when she acquired a complete replacement set from my aunt of something altogether different, hand me down china lush with English botanicals.

The Noritake Angela pattern is not lush.

It is simple and serene. It is to the point and appropriate for the purpose.

It is detergent proof.



Grama passed along to me a tall stack of dinner and salad plates, and an assortment of fine china tea cups. Delicate all, and most have not survived. The remnants that did were chipped and sometimes scuffed from many cuts into many steaks with the lovely scrimshaw knives that my grandparents acquired in Alaska.

Since her death I’ve been trawling eBay and acquiring pieces of the discontinued pattern. The salad plates were long gone, shattered in random incidents. They have been replaced and multiplied. As have the tiny bread and butter plates; delicate all, not bone china but bone china like, rimmed with a fine pursed lip like the English teacups I picked up in Vancouver.

I’ve opted for two pieces that I never saw in my grandmother’s collection: a platter and a serving bowl, because their scale was just right (diminutive, of another era) and the lines were simple, pure, as they should be. I’ve opted out of others -- the tidbit tray with the ornate silver handle protruding from the center, the bulbous covered casseroule dish -- because the aesthetics were untrue to what I recall of the spare mid-century modern lines that limned my grandparents’ home. That outlined my one true home.

This last weekend I chased down some saucers to give three tiny china cups a foundation to stand on, and determined that really as long as I was piecing these I should pick up three more china cups and six saucers total to add to the four complete that I already --- oh dear. Soon I can serve coffee to ten.

It is unlikely I will ever serve coffee to ten, and will instead have to explain to Mr. Hoo why the cupboard is full of sweet tiny teacups, empty boned vessels, that conjure to my grieving eye the morning steam and mist of coffee brewing in my Grama’s kitchen.

watch me

Video: Black Dynamite Trailer

He's making the world a decent place -- to DIE.

From the Black Dynamite movie trailer, which will be in theaters this Friday.

This is either going to be really good -- or super bad.

According to Michael Jai White, the actor and filmmaker who plays Black Dynamite, the character for a "Ninja-slaying, lady-melting, blaxploitation-style hero" came to him while listening to James Brown's Super Bad on repeat.

The New York Times notes that "a boom mike makes a cameo early on," and the movie "features a climactic kung-fu showdown at the White House between Black Dynamite and Richard Nixon."

proceed & be bold

Illus: Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.

I learned of the letterpress work of Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. in the tired hours of the late afternoon yesterday, as the result of a random conversation with @lzinger at the grocery store about how rutabagas are a little like turnips and a little sweet potatoes. And how they are not. By the end we were talking about Twitter, which is how the acquaintance led to this.

Come to find out she made a movie about the man, whose kinetic letterforms absorbed the better part of my evening.

Proceed. Be bold.

Update: Proceed and Be Bold will screen at the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival on October 24th & 26th »

making tracks

Shot this a little while back in Elmhurst but opted not to
post it. Out of room on my mobile so I need to offload it
somewhere -- let's see it it's worth keeping.

Shot with my Sidekick.

lovin' spoonful

The robin in Mary Poppins's London is an American robin.

Better still – and striking an early blow for gay rights – the two red-breasted robins shown building a nest together are both male.

From The 20 worst science and technology errors in films: A far-from-definitive list of the 20 most annoying science and technology errors in films, from slow-moving lasers to extraterrestrials who use Windows Vista in this morning's Telegraph.

being ware, part 2.

Video: Chris Ware on making stuff

p.s. Being Ware, part 1 »

very ape

On November 24th Christie's of London will auction the 22-inch armature used in the 1933 film 'King Kong' to allow the animated ape to scale the Empire State Building in the final scenes, according to the Associated Press.

"Christie's said it hopes to get up to 150,000 pounds (about $240,000) from the figure's sale."



Video: King Kong 1933

premature acclamation

I want to thank you for all the generous advance coverage you've given me in anticipation of a successful career. When I actually do something, we'll let you know.

Barack Obama, Junior Senator from Illinois, addressing the Press at the Gridiron Club's Annual Dinner on March 11th.

I originally blogged this snippet on 19 March 2006, which also marked my official coming out as an Obama fangirl.

I pulled it out and shook it off this morning in response to the announcement that Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Come on, kids. Give the guy a chance to get something done first.

speaking of Rashomon

The Danger of a Single Story.
Chimamanda Adichie speaks at TED.

mash it up

I don’t want to be premature here, but I’d say tentatively that this does appear to be the greatest thing of all time.

Devin Coldewey of CrunchGear, cited in the Telegraph, commenting on PhotoSketch, developed by students in China, which uses a stick figure drawing to search available online imagery and mash appropriate shots together into a photo montage.

Unfortunately the rush of interest appears to have brought the PhotoSketch site down.

So you're just gonna have to wait for it.

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

gathering tones in illuminant mode

Illus: David Hockney

I've always wanted to be able to paint the dawn. After all, what clearer, more luminous light are we ever afforded? Especially here where the light comes rising over the sea, just the opposite of my old California haunts.

But in the old days one never could, because, of course, ordinarily it would be too dark to see the paints; or else, if you turned on a light so as to be able to see them, you'd lose the subtle gathering tones of the coming sun. But with an iPhone, I don't even have to get out of bed, I just reach for the device, turn it on, start mixing and matching the colors, laying in the evolving scene.

The artist David Hockney explaining to Lawrence Weschler why, in part, he's taken to creating works on his iPhone using the Brushes application, in David Hockney's iPhone Passion in the 22 October issue of the New York Review of Books.

Hockney chiefly uses his thumbs to sketch his iPhone works because "the thing is, if you are using your pointer or other fingers, you actually have to be working from your elbow. Only the thumb has the opposable joint which allows you to move over the screen with maximum speed and agility, and the screen is exactly the right size, you can easily reach every corner with your thumb."

The New York Review of Books has posted a slideshow of Hockney's iPhone sketches »

roiling boil

The most important program on your computer is your web browser.

Narration from What is a browser? created by Jason Toff, an Associate Product Marketing Manager at Google.

Toff's statement, which he makes twice in his one minute video, caught me off guard, in a frog in a boiling pot of water kind of way. Maybe I've been working on websites too long, but I still think of my trade as marginal. (When I first started telling folks I developed web sites I often heard: "what's a web site?")

So getting online is now the most important thing we do with our computers?

I guess it is.

I also think Toff is doing a valuable service with his what is a browser primer -- seeing how it wasn't too long ago that MSN.com went down and folks called Microsoft tech support to tell them "the Internet is broken".

what remains

This is the image that remains with me after watching Kurosawa’s Rashômon (yeah for only the first time -- I'm catching up on my greats): A woodsman walking alone through the forest, the camera moving fluidly, magically, through the treetops at a distance, and everywhere the strength of the soaring cedar.

We learn later, watching the DVD special bits, that the dolly is rooted on a rail on the ground and so it must be that we’re looking down and long across a slope, but that reasoning comes later. Just now there is pure magic in how the camera glides through the trees, and I’m reminded of the airy distance that breathed between the oaks of the savanna at dusk, when walking I heard the sonorous hoot of an owl just a little bit distant, stopped and held still to see (after a beat, then three) the giant bird break his bluff and wing his massive bulk through the trees.

It’s all around us in this masterpiece of a movie, the cedar. The manic thief knows his one calm moment as he naps in the lap of one fragrant giant, warmed by the sun, the celluloid nearly redolent with the perfume of its baking wood. He peers skyward under the influence of the breeze and captures a glimpse of the woman he will blame for his motives (whom he blames, pardon me, for his woody) and she too is stalwart and cedar like. Miyagawa’s masterful camera pans her heel to head just as he panned the stewards of the forest, from burl to overstory.

The cedars will be witness to the crimes the camera spares us -- the assault on the wife; the murder (the suicide?) of the husband. This none-of-us-knowing is what, of course, provides Rashomon with its potency as each player unwinds the narrative of the grove’s events in his or her own telling in which he or she is (as it always is) the hero of the story.

What remains with me are the trees.

a plurality of facemasks

A garment device convertible to one or more facemasks wherein the garment device has a plurality of detachable cup sections. Each of the cup sections has a filter device, an inner portion positionable adjacent to the inner area of the user’s chest, and an outer portion positionable adjacent to the outer area of the user’s chest. The garment device has at least one securing device detachably coupling the inner portions of the cup sections to one another, and the garment device has at least one other securing device attached to the outer portion of at least one of the cut sections. This other securing device is operable to: (a) detachably couple the outer portions of the cup regions to one another; and (b) for each one of the cup sections, attach the outer portion of said cup region to the inner portion of said cup region after said cup region is detached from the other cup region, thereby converting the garment device to a plurality of facemasks.

Abstract for Patent Number 7255627, aka Garment device convertible to one or more facemasks, by Elena N. Bodnar.

Bodnar's invention for a brassiere that converts into a plurality of facemasks is worth mentioning because 1) on account of it, she was awarded an Ig Noble Prize on 1 October and 2) this may well be the only opportunity any of us will ever have to see the esteemed Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, and two of his Nobel peers, wearing what appear to be C-cups in a very public way.

Photo: Ig Noble Winner Elena N. Bodnar with Nobel Laureates (from left to right) Wolfgang Ketterle, Orhan Pamuk and Paul Krugman

perfect home sick movie.

(Yeah, so, I'm a little behind on my movie watching. This couldn't have come at a better time. Thanks, sis, for the disc.)

lost weekend

My little brother used to do this: get so worked up about an approaching holiday that when Christmas or Easter or some other goodness hit he would awake in an explosion of vomit.

Sick.

I've been spared the effluence, but when the fever that sneaked in on Tuesday rocketed skyward on Wednesday it became more than clear that the bag I packed optimistically the night before for London wasn't going to board that evening flight to Heathrow, and neither was I.

So no London for me. At least not until the Spring.

See you then, Friends.

anatomy lesson

I don’t wish to touch hearts. I don’t even want to affect minds very much. What I really want to produce is that little sob in the spine of the artist-reader.

Vladimir Nabokov as quoted by Arthur Krystal in yesterday's New York Times Book Review.

tell me a story

Posting by cameraphone from the
Illinois Storytelling Festival
at Dominican University,
River Forest, IL

a fine web we weave

Photo: Fred R. Conrad for the New York Times

Not one thread ever broke on the loom — it’s that strong.

Nicholas Godley, an American fashion designer living in Madagascar, remarking in today's New York Times on the textile created from the silk of the golden orb spider, which he and a colleague and a legion of assistants painstakingly gathered and wove.

That spectacular saffron color is native to the silk -- no dyes were applied.

The strength of the spider silk is no surprise, given the research that Randy Lewis has conducted into the marvelous material »

as cited

Attended the Saturday afternoon sessions of NIU’s conference on Crafting a Maya Identity. (The link appears to have expired or else the server died, so apologies for the lack of reference.) The afternoon sessions were concerned with “Indigenous Kitsch” -- tourist art in the Yucatan that has no historical antecedent outside the tourist trade, although in recent years the handicrafts have drawn from Classic Maya bas-relief for much of its subject matter.

The conference was accompanied by a lovely exhibit of artists’ works, and many of the Mayan artists were in attendance.

The usual questions about “is it art” were asked, as were questions of cultural identity. Not mentioned (unless it was covered in the morning sessions) were textiles as art and/or kitsch. Witness: I have in my possession some lovely table runners and pillow cases from Mexico and Guatemala, and although they were created on traditional Mayan backstrap looms and borrow from traditional patterns, I’m pretty sure the Classic Maya didn’t have a lot of call for pillow cases like these.

Mary Katherine Scott, who curated the exhibition and in part organized the conference, presented her paper on “Representing the Maya: When is it Appropriate to Call ‘Appropriations’ Art”. She drew extensively on referential imagery to explicate her subject matter -- Andy Warhol’s works put in an appearance as did Roy Lichtenstein. An extensive scattering of classic Mayan and Olmec artifacts were also visually referenced.

When she didn’t reference her own photographs to M.K. Scott, she referenced the imagery, almost universally, to Google Images.

I had hoped to ask her about it during Q&A but there was none following her presentation, and the panel discussion led to more interesting topics, and I had no interest in derailing it with this small matter.

But is it a small matter? To cite a reference engine that has no agency of its own as a source for imagery? Google Images only points to images created by others, and the actual citations could easily have been obtained by clicking through to the destination page and culling the reference from the parent source. Something, certainly, that this scholar had to do, because she used large images, not the small thumbnails that are rendered for Google Image search.

In each case she would have found a human being or an institution responsible for the making of that image. In each case it is that person or organization that should have been cited.

Not only was it horribly ironic that in presenting her criticism of historical appropriations she would have inappropriately appropriated imagery without proper attribution (say *that* three times fast); but I found it especially troubling, as someone whose trade depends upon architecting websites so that they may be found via Google and other channels of discovery, that she would have referenced a transitory source. Google Image search results may well change from day to day, depending upon the availability of the site serving the image and its competition with other images. There is no promise or contract in place that will ensure an image found there yesterday can be found again today. Perhaps if M.K. Scott had cited the keyword used to trigger the query the citation would be more complete and have a better chance of being reproduced, but really? Has the Chicago Manual of Style approved citing a search engine as an appropriate citation?

Please tell me no.



p.s. The image above is a holga shot from the Epcot Center sometime back when I was in Orlando for a conference. It’s Disney’s version of a Mayan pyramid, and it’s all kinds of wrong. If you care to reference it elsewhere please go with “Photo by: Dayna Bateman who posts to Flickr as suttonhoo.” Even though the image may sometimes be found in Google Images.

(de)creed

I shot this with my holga just after I visited the Lutheran ladies in the church kitchen off to the right where they were laying out the lemon bars and the brownies for the public reception following my grandmother’s service. Just after I carried in the trays of pickled herring which I was concerned no one would eat and everyone devoured. Just before the funeral began.

We had a private reception later, for family, in the little boating community where my aunt and uncle live, overlooking the water in the summer afternoon light. The buffet was (if I remember right) stacked high with shrimp and fish and steamed clams and thoughtful vegetable preparations. Delicious. Polished. A bit distant from the grief.

The reception in the church gym was fed by rye bread and cold cuts and lefse gone wrong (no no no: we do not mix the sugar and the cinnamon into the butter before we spread it and roll the little pancake. no.). It was just like all those buffets held in church gyms: suits and skirts looking strange against baseboards and the worn and weary free throw lines scratched out on the floor. Old friends and family counting the years, catching up, tallying the time.

I associate my grandmother so strongly with this church that I burst into tears when my aunt suggested we might have her service somewhere else. Childish tears which I tried quickly to bury. It wasn’t my call, I had no right to protest, but I was relieved when it came around in the end to this and we remembered her in the pews where she raised her children and churched her grandchildren.

Where she recited the Apostle’s Creed like a magic incantation and comforted her heart with hymns sung from memory. Where she shuffled the pages of her program and engineered that transference that is so crucial to people of formal faith: that others hold the same hope, believe the same stories, light the same candles.

Where she tried so hard to save our souls.

sincerely yours

There's a quiet scene in the movie Julie & Julia where Julia Child travels to Boston from Paris with the co-author of her momentous cookbook to meet a friend who is in publishing.

We've heard about this friend all the way through the movie, and it only becomes clear when they arrive at the train station that Julia has never actually laid eyes on her.

They're pen pals. They've been pen pals for many years.

Meryl Streep plays the bit brilliantly: a little dismissive in a "don't you worry about it" way when her colleague appears alarmed that she's never actually met this important contact. Because so much depends upon this friendship now -- it will be the bridge that gets the cookbook published, and they both seem to know it.

At last the friend arrives and they know each other instantly. The clip isn't easily found online which isn't surprising because it contains no pots or pans; there is no food in the frame, or ecstatic eating. There are only the words, at least as I remember them -- "my dear friend"-- spoken low as the small woman arrives in a rush and takes both of Julia's hands in her own, welcoming her from far way, knowing her from old.

It's my favorite scene of the movie.


I'm firming up plans for a long weekend in London and afield where, among other lovely things, I'll be meeting up with some of my pen pals.

The giddy: it grows.

don't know when I'll be back again

You can fly around the globe in Google Earth using the flight simulator feature.

(Mr. Hoo tells me that "everybody knows that.")

Found, along with the answer to life, the universe and everything, in Google easter eggs: 15 best hidden jokes in today's Telegraph »

ghost stories

ghost stories
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Spending a working evening in Ann Arbor bridging two meetings, which means leaving the office around 5.30 for the Sweetwater Cafe where they make my ginger/honey/lemon tea the way I like it (and list it on the menu even), and then dinner at Zola where their fish can be trusted (tonight it's salmon; before -- miracle of miracle -- it was halibut cheeks, that strange facial meat that shreds like crab).

More work to do still -- it's been this way for a while now, will be this way for a while longer, and for now that's okay.

I've been listening in to the music and the margins of conversations all evening and I have been deciding things: Those two at the cafe were in love; he a little more than she. These two beside me now as I nosh my asparagus at the bar are sleeping together, or getting ready to, or did once, but are not in love. They're not believing enough. Not in each other, not in themselves, not in love.

The waitress is rude, but only because she's better than this and uncomfortable serving people when she should be served. Her parents are well off and are bankrolling her tuition at UofM but insisted she take a job for spending money. She wears the pearl studs she received for her high school graduation.

I suspect none of these assertions are true.

If I talked to any of these people for even a little while I would learn a hundred truths that would undo the glue of my fictional narratives.

But tonight I prefer my cocoon.

Posting by cameraphone.

like the lady says

like the lady says
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone from
Ann Arbor, MI

can't you see

Photo: Pablo Casals, 1954 by Yousuf Karsh

Years later, when this portrait was on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I was told that an elderly gentleman would come and stand in front of it for many minutes each day. When the curator, by this time full of curiosity, ventured to inquire gingerly, “Sir, why do you stand day after day in front of this portrait?” he was met with a withering glance and the admonition, “Hush, young man, hush - can’t you see, I am listening to the music!”

The photographer Yousef Karsh, via his website, which came to me via @duckunix. (thank you)

dirty job

I always thought of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as birdlike -- small, fragile, hollow of bone. Unlike Mr. Hoo who is a Supreme Court junkie and voraciously follows each session and season, I don't know the quirks and predilections of our nine justices: I know only their rulings, their dissents, their precedent making and citing as a mass.

Which may be why I wasn't expecting her strength. She is wiry, yes, and petite; Bader Ginsburg stepped onto the stage at Spertus last night wearing a jeweled open throat v-neck which I only remark upon because it was unsettling and unexpected to see bare a throat that is usually bound up by lace. She wore a black diaphanous shawl over her shoulders, wing-like.

She was there to speak on From Benjamin to Brandeis to Breyer: Is There a Jewish Seat on the U.S. Supreme Court? (her host, Spertus, is a Jewish learning and cultural organization in Chicago) and she delivered a solid history lesson on Judah Benjamin, a soon-to-be Confederate who was the first Jew to decline a Supreme Court nomination in favor of a Senate Seat, and then on the anti-semitism that Brandeis faced even within the court (his peer McReynolds would habitually leave the conference room when Brandeis spoke and refused to be photographed with his peer).

Her lecture was serviceable but unremarkable. It was in the question and answer session that my crush grew and during which it became apparent that she's no sparrow -- she's a gryphon. Fierce, watchful, talons at the ready, guarding our golden hoard of Justice from thieving self-interests.

Slow and deliberative in her response, as I suppose anyone might be on whose words the fate of weighty matters relies, she spoke with careful conviction and supreme confidence without a shade of arrogance on the questions put to her -- Should a judge rely more on empathy or impartiality? Did she expect that Roe v. Wade was headed for an upset? In which direction did the Court's sympathies lie regarding death penalty cases? What about that Hilary movie?

She spoke of how she keeps in her chambers the words in Hebrew from Deuteronomy: "Justice, Justice; Thou Should Pursue Justice," and it's true that every opinion she shared last night was steeped in this conviction. It was a like a fragrance that couldn't be laundered out, no matter the succession of spin cycles. It pervaded every word, chosen and delivered.

Whether she came by the unwavering solidity of her character through an early predisposition or through a life of public service in which she has pursued justice as her day job, I don't know. But I hung on every word. It was impossible not to. Her conviction that public discussion is a public duty. Her confession that death penalty cases and the 11th hour vigils that are a matter of course when one comes before the court are "the one part of the job I dislike. I dislike it intensely," and yet she will not recuse herself from these cases as other Justices have done (on the grounds that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment), because she feels it's important to have a voice in these matters.

It's a dirty job, and I'm glad we've got a dame on the bench to get it done.


Related:
The Opposite of Law »
Nothing Like a Dame »

2 1/2 horsepower sandwich engine

Sandwich, IL was known for its ag engines and industrial corn
husking/shucking power from the 1880s until they sold the plant
to the New Idea Co. in Coldwater, Ohio in 1930.

That's when the jobs went away.

Posting by cameraphone from the Sandwich Fair.

how it's done.

Biscuits & gravy with a side of scrambled eggs
at the Sandwich Fair.

Posting by cameraphone from Sandwich, IL

Est. 1888

Posting by cameraphone
from Sandwich, IL

Surface Area Required To Power The World (revision)

Surface Area Required To
Power The World (revision)
Originally uploaded by mkandlez

New information design crush. Mccandelish's whole stream is a dream.

Be sure to embiggen this one.

staying alive

Robert Reich on the Public Option

I love how Robert Reich lays thing out. I remain mystified by folks who don't think we have a responsibility as a wealthy, populous nation to provide affordable health care for our citizenry. I haven't blogged about it before now because I get apoplectic just thinking about, and that leads to complete incoherence.

We need this. Now is too late, but it will have to do.

What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.

—President Barack Obama citing Senator Ted Kennedy in his health care address on Tuesday

one great leap for manny klein

Barnett Hoffman on Old Jews Telling Jokes

Mr. Hoo and I have a running Monday date with Simon Schama and his show the Power of Art where Schama conjures up the stories of the lives of great artists and never leaves me without believing that making art is as hard as it is worthwhile. (And also is very likely to get you laid.)

Come to find out that Schama also applies his quintessential head bob to the telling of Jewish Jokes: he'll be appearing at the Spertus Center during the Chicago Humanities Festival in November doing precisely that.

Simon Schama Tells Jewish Jokes
Sunday, November 8 from 12 noon to 1 pm

Simon Schama Tells Jewish JokesWorld-renowned historian and cultural critic Simon Schama is best known as the droll, erudite host of the BBC’s A History of Britain and Simon Schama’s Power of Art. But he also indulges in a secret passion: collecting and recounting Jewish jokes. Schama joins Chicago Humanities Festival artistic director Lawrence Weschler to share some of his jokes and unpack their complex cultural resonances in a sort of klezmer slapdown.

Simon Schama is professor of history and art history at Columbia University and the author of over a dozen books. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

Tickets are $10 in advance, on sale September 21. $15 cash at the door. Students and teachers eligible for free tickets. For tickets, call the Chicago Humanities Festival at 312.494.9509 or visit www.chfestival.org.

John Hodgman will be there too. Different venue.

I love Fall in Chicago.
See you there.

49 days

 

A friend of mine is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist and when she learned of my Grandmother’s death she asked when. “I’ve started the prayers,” she said.

Her tradition believes that the soul hovers about for 49 days before making its departure. There are things to settle before one may go; matters that must be attended to. She laughed a little when she told me, saying: “So precise.”

Forty-nine days.

For the duration of those days candles are lit, prayers are said, offerings are made. Goodbyes are, perhaps, forestalled.

Until the 50th day.

Which is today.

09.09.09

Video trailer for District 9 (which came out a few weeks ago)

Video trailer for Tim Burton's 9 (premiering today)

And Nine (embedding disabled upon request) coming out this November »

Yeah. I don't know what's up with all these 9s either. Just thought it was curious.

wild thing

Video Trailer: Where the Wild Things Are
Hope.
Fear.
Adventure.

I can get into that.

Plus the kid looks a whole lot like my Portland honey, J-H.

The movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are opens October 16th.

Sendak's book terrified me when I was a kid. Not in a nervous Cat in the Hat kind of a way; in a subverting the dominant paradigm I want to do that too kind of way.

Of especial interest is the documentary that director Jonez has also made about Where the Wild Things Are author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, a clip of which is available via the NYTimes website (left side rail) »

The documentary airs Oct 14th on HBO. (Or so says the NYT. Nothing online at HBO about it quite yet.)

spill(ed)

spill(ed)
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone on Sunday Morning from home (sweet home).

o'hare oasis

o'hare oasis
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Picking up some freight near the airport. Spotted this along the way.

Posting by cameraphone.

do you see what I see

I don't know what the SAAM camel sees, but thanks to the Museum of Animal Perspectives I've got a good bead on what a cranky cow is all about.

Update: Swapping in an armadillo because the cow has evaporated -- as have most of the videos in MAP's stream. So goes the Internet.

gloomy sunday

Video: Paul Robeson sings Gloomy Sunday

I’ve sat in on classes where people are talking about the ’30s and about civil rights and about Martin Luther King, and there’s this gap, as if this man never existed. He’s one of the giants of the civil rights movement, and no one knows.

Joan Landzberg, who witnessed the Peekskill Riots at 13, speaking in today's New York Times of performer and civil rights advocate Paul Robeson who was the headline act of the concert that kicked off those riots.

According to the Times:

Born in 1898, the son of a slave who became a minister, he was the third black student admitted to Rutgers University. He became the dominant college football player of his time, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, was class valedictorian and earned a law degree from Columbia University.

He almost single-handedly legitimized black spirituals and folk music as an art form and became perhaps the world’s most famous concert singer as well as a renowned actor. His performance in “Othello,” on Broadway in 1943, was one of the most celebrated of his time. He was befriended by Jawaharlal Nehru, Noel Coward, Sergei Eisenstein, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Emma Goldman.

He became a pioneering and uncompromising human rights advocate. He spoke out against segregation decades before the civil rights movement began, and was a fierce opponent of colonialism when that was barely an issue.

It's fairly certain Robeson's Communist sympathies are the reason he doesn't appear in our histories.

Tomorrow night there will be a musical celebration of Paul Robeson in Peekskill, NY hovering quite near the anniversary of those riots (which the People's Weekly World has written about at length).

Robeson Celebration
September 4, 2009 8:00pm
Paramount Center for the Arts
Peekskill, NY
An Evening with Friends, A Celebration of the Legacy of Paul Robeson
A benefit concert featuring David Amram, Roy Haynes, Ty Jones, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, Kenneth Anderson, Beth Lamont, Jon Batiste Band, Ray Blue and more special guests

frigid.

Photo: Mark Menjivar

A refrigerator is both a private and a shared space. One person likened the question, "May I photograph the interior of your fridge?" to asking someone to pose nude for the camera. Each fridge is photographed "as is." Nothing added, nothing taken away.

Photographer Mark Menjivar, in his artist's statement for You Are What You Eat, a photographic series of refrigerator interiors.

No permalink available, unfortunately, so click on Project > You are what you eat from the link to find the work.

I learned of Menjivar's fascinating photos in the September | October 2009 issue Orion Magazine.

I considered shooting my own fridge for this post and then decided against it. Too naked.

Although I might be tempted to take a timed interior shot for the In the Fridge Flickr group »

From one of the group's admins, Roo Reynolds:

I hate to sound weird, but this group is for photos taken from inside refrigerators with the door closed. All other images are liable to be removed from the pool. Thanks.

under the bleachers

Even though I'm not a big sports fan I'm a huge fan of the spaces beneath the bleachers (and not for the reasons you might think).

The hidden space created there; the muffled noise and din of feet and voices overhead; the blast bright lights slicing through the slats into the dark; the smell of wood and dirt; the chill of night games, Fall in the air.

ella es el matador

It’s a testament to the filmmakers of the strangely moving Ella es el Matador (She is the Matador) that, regardless of what you think about bullfighting, you want to see these women in ring.

And you want to find one of your own.[1]

Airing on PBS POV in September »


[1] Figuratively.

their anniversary

One sun drenched afternoon in Boulder while I was hiking the trail behind my place I met up with an awkward academic on the summit ridge. I had planted myself on a rock and he came over the hill, nowhere near the trail, dressed in clothes not entirely designed for hiking with a big wooly sheepdog in tow. He was visiting from Korea, staying with friends. The sheepdog belonged to his hosts.

He really wanted to talk, and I was polite but a bit icy, because I didn't.

He kept talking.

For nearly an hour we talked on that ridge and I learned about his engineering work before I learned, most importantly, about his loss.

His story spilled over like a faucet left open, the kettle overfull.

Some few years before he and his wife had been visiting New York when, on the return, she was bumped from the flight. He had something to attend to so he went ahead rather than staying behind with her. Her flight the next day, the one she boarded with their first child in her belly, was KAL Flight 007, which was shot down shortly after that by Soviet aircraft when it errantly violated Soviet airspace.

She never returned home.

His every gesture was saturated with anguish and regret.

Today is the anniversary of that flight.

I hope he has company. I hope he has someone to talk to.