"I think, ma'am, it's the backstroke."
Have a nice weekend with good soup and better elephants!
If you have time, check out Going on Somewhere and 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson (and BackStroke Books) on Amazon. (And buy a copy!!!)
Archive for 2011
“Waiter, What’s this… ‘not a fly’… doing in my soup?”
March 5, 2011Gogol’s “Diary of a Mad…. Elephant?”
March 5, 2011
Not quite Geoffrey Rush at BAM
Re-Kindling a love for books/ Resisting the Inner Polar Bear
March 3, 2011
Speaking of gadgets (yesterday was the iPad2), I have been a victim of the Amazon Kindle of late.
Aging/sore eyes are difficult. I had not realized until receiving a Kindle for Christmas how my ocular limitations had inhibited my enjoyment of reading of printed matter. That and a relatively recent addiction to electronic screens had really limited my span.
I spend my work day in front of a computer; and yet I still couldn’t turn away from the screen–not before work, not after work, not in the middle of the night. I seemed to be like the polar bear at the Central Park zoo–you know the one who swims back and forth and back and forth and back and forth–determinedly submerging myself in a groove that ran through a small reflective surface.
With Kindle in hand, however, and my need for connection with the digital world somehow satisfied, I find myself reading constantly – not scanning bits of newspapers, blogs, videos, my own manuscripts–but reading. In an extended fashion. Books.
The only problem is that there’s so much ease in downloading a book (you can do it from thin air), that I hardly feel like trying to write one anymore.
But reading is good for writing, right?
Sure, but writing is necessary for writing.
Agh.
iPad 2! Me Too! (Abashed.) With Elephant.
March 2, 2011
I am enough of a child of the Sixties to hate to think of myself as an avid consumer. I never had a dishwasher until my fifties (and the old one I now use leaves a dried seedy residue that I try to convince myself is at least heated through.)
I have never ever had a microwave.
Forget about a GPS; one window on my second-hand car sometimes falls off.
High def TV? My daughter did not know that Big Bird was yellow until age five.
My Birkenstocks are peeling.
And yet… and yet… today I found myself chomping at the bit (ha!) for a new electronic gadget.
I tell myself it’s all about art. Followers of this blog will know that I have devoted the last couple of months to pictures made on an iPhone that has been entrusted into my care.
I will be so happy not to have to zoom in and out anymore.
But hey! I have pencils, watercolor, paper, on which I could draw and paint to heart’s content without zooming one inch.
Yes, it’s very silly, childish, materialistic, irrational.
March 11th!
Dissing Teachers- A Long Tradition (With Elephant)
March 2, 2011
The Death of Socrates by Jean-Louis David (with ManicDdaily)
Society has often been unfair to teachers. (But the current scapegoating is ridiculous.)
Was it the Cheese? (Pulling Pectoralis)
February 28, 2011
Was it the cheese?
Some things sound better than others pulled. Taffy or a leg or, even perhaps, pork are more inviting, for example, than “the plug,” or, as I found out last night, a pectoral muscle. (Maybe forget the pork.)
I think it happened at the gym. My tendency to rush around goofily is not particularly healthful when applied to weight machines.
I didn’t notice any problem when I was actually on the machines, but about an hour later, an intense pain began in the upper left side of my chest.
The pain was initially met by disbelief. (The words “angina” and “vegetarianism” just didn’t seem to fit.)
Then involuntary tears took over. (Did I mention that the pain was intense?) My protests of vegetarianism were pretty quickly replaced by all the full-fat yogurt I have eaten, the whole (rather than skim) milk that I put in my tea, and the heart attacks suffered by grandfathers.
(Yes, I was macrobiotic for a while and religiously used soy milk, but that was years and year ago.)
Agh.
In the hours of pain (did I mention that it was also kind of unrelenting!? ), I learned several important things: (i) it is hard but not impossible to tap the stopwatch button on an iPhone while also keeping a finger on one’s pulse; (ii) practically nothing in the world short of draining blood loss will induce me to go to a New York City emergency room; (iii) I have a truly wonderful husband; (iv) soy milk really doesn’t taste that bad in tea; (v) if you want to change your life, it is important to take actual concrete steps sooner rather than later.
Thankfully, I am quite a bit better today and am pretty sure that the pain was all muscular.
(What was that about changing my life?)
Hurray For Academy for Awarding The King’s Speech Best Picture – Boo to the Academy for Using The King’s Speech as Best Picture Background
February 28, 2011I gave in and watched a lot of the Academy Awards. (I’m a sucker for ball gowns. Anne Hathaway did her beautiful bubbly best to satisfy this weakness.)
The King’s Speech was a terrific film and one of the few I’ve actually seen so I was really glad that it swept up so many awards. As a less- and-less secret tapdancer, I was especially happy to hear Colin Firth’s eloquent references to joyful bodily impulses. (And as a long-time fan of Colin Firth–Team Darcy all the way!–I was really very pleased for him.)
But the use of George VI’s actual early World War II speech as a background to the difficulties of choosing a Best Picture winner was truly appalling. Who came up with that idea? What were they thinking of? Is Hollywood really so solipsistic (and tone-deaf) as all that? I have to hope that it was a small committee, a completely tasteless few. Pretty goofy.
Update re Hydrofracking – Good Luck to Josh Fox!
February 27, 2011For a chilling update on the dangers to the water supply raised by hydrofracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a high-powered form of natural gas drilling, check out today’s New York Times article by Ian Urbino. For my old post on whether or not we need clean drinking water in a fracking new world, check here. Finally, good luck to Josh Fox, writer, filmmaker, moving force behind the documentary Gasland, which has brought so much attention to this issue and is up tonight for an academy award. (The film would be a shoe-in if the Marcellus Shale were located in California.)
Not Much of a Moviegoer – Can I blame it on the computer?
February 27, 2011
Not Me Of Late
As followers of this blog know, I have spent the last several days posting images of little (or big) elephants inserted into stills from past Academy Award winning movies or current contestants. I have to confess that I am much more into elephants than Oscars. I haven’t actually seen many movies this year and I don’t know that I’ll even watch the awards tonight, or not for more than a short snatch.
It’s not that I don’t like movies or even awards shows. Time just feels very short to me, and in our digital world, I find myself increasingly impatient with entertainment that I can’t control–speed up, browse through, dip into as I please. (Even with an old-fashioned book, I can flip through/scan the boring parts–but a movie in a theater, or a tv show, without a TIVO, must be sat through.)
ADHD is mainly supposed to be a disease of children, but it also seems to becoming an ailment of rushing adults.
Some (i.e. my husband) blame it all on computers.
Computers certainly make it easier to entertain oneself in fragmented snatches. But I really don’t think that we can blame them for the frantic quality of many of our lives. The rigors of making a living today, and then of making a life once one has (more or less, for the moment at least) secured that living, seem to make rushing almost mandatory.
Of course, one can take the point of view that it’s all process, and that whatever one does (job, commute, shopping, cooking, cleaning) should be slowly savored; that each activity should be granted an equal sense of possibility. (Even movie awards shows.) My problem is that I am just not that enlightened.
So I rush, scan, multi-task. And in the midst of it, draw little elephants.
Could be worse.
Lead-In To Oscars (With Elephants). Buzz and Woody and….
February 26, 2011
Bullseye?
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