"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 the ‘Uncategorized’ category
“Waiter, What’s this… ‘not a fly’… doing in my soup?”
March 5, 2011Was 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.
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.
Lawrence of Arabia Sans Camel. (You Can Find Them Anywhere.)
February 22, 2011
Even in the Sahara?
Salute To Oscars (With Elephant).
February 20, 2011
Much has been made of Patton's devotion to his pit bull Willie (a/k/a William the Conqueror), but little is known of the General's wider ranging animal interests.
This is not really an old favorite, but when thinking of old Academy Award winners, image (modified) came to mind….
Enjoy the day.
Lead-In to the Oscars – You Can Find Them Anywhere!
February 15, 2011
"What he said was he's a sentimental elephant."
A Lotto Valentine
February 14, 2011
Happy Valentine's Day (Stay Dry!)
“Videot?”, Chance, the iPhone Artist?, Hercules as Zeus, Athena as Elephant
February 9, 2011
Zeus Giving Birth to Athena, as Elephant (Ouch!)
The late, sometimes brilliant, extremely troubled, Jerzy Kosinski spoke of his worries about the human fascination with electronic/video screens in an interview with David Sohn after a 1974 convention of the National Conference of Teachers of English: “For me, imagining groups of solitary individuals watching their private, remote-controlled TV sets is the ultimate future terror: a nation of videots.” This was around the time that Kosinski published Being There, a satiric novel featuring Chance, the Gardener, a simple-minded soul who has grown up literally in front of a TV, remote control as security blanket, navigating the non-video world.
Kosinski was concerned about obsession with video screens in a B.C. (“Before Computer”) age, before the years of A.D. (“All Digital”), or should I call it A.D.D. (“All hold a Digital Device”).
I am one of those people who is stuck in front of a screen much of the time. And, even as my digits punch keys and tap icons, I definitely worry about it. I assuage these worries by telling myself that much of what I am doing is good old-fashioned communication–that email are just letters; that social networks, in our geographically dispersed world, are a personalized town square; that the glow of the screen itself (like the glow of ash on the cigarettes lonely people sometimes smoke, or used to smoke) is an imaginary friend.
Yes, I know it’s not exactly the same. (Or healthy.)
As followers of this blog know, I have recently received an iPhone and become engrossed in the “Brushes App,” which allows one to make paintings on the iPhone’s screen, and even to insert iPhone digital photographs into the paintings.
Yes, working in such a small space, with your fingers, is a real pain in the itinerant.
And yet….
And yet…
Above is my Athena, as elephant, being born from Zeus’s forehead, hand-drawn.
Below is my Athena, as elephant, being born from Zeus’s forehead done on Brushes App.
You will notice that in the “Brushes” iPhone version, Zeus is not even Zeus, but Hercules. (See the lion cape.) (Meaning that the true title of this piece should be “Athena, as elephant, being born from Zeus, as Hercules.”)
And yet… and yet…
I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy drawing the Zeus on paper. With a pencil.
But. well….
Hercules as Zeus (see cape) Bearing Athena as Elephant
Way Too Early On A Saturday Morning Train – A Pattern?
January 30, 2011
Pearl Doesn't Mind Dishevelment (Or You Know What)
Saturday: I am on an early morning train way too early in the morning to be on a Saturday train.
A woman, clearly an experienced traveler on this train, slips in at the last minute, not breathing heavily. She takes the seat across the aisle and immediately takes off coat, sweater, stows bags, attaches iPod to her head, and from the top of one of her stowed bags–little totes–retrieves an inner plastic bag with knitting project and needles. She sets to work over some pieces of paper, shielded in plastic, to which she occasionally refers.
I, in contrast, who made the train with some time to spare, am still rustling around my stuff, the dog jammed beside me (inside her bag and a couple of old parkas, one of which doesn’t quite fit into the bag) an overly-heavy suitcase, my hat, my own parka, tea, purse–
The woman across wears reading glasses as she knits and has, precise, slightly pointed features (lips, chin, nose, eyebrows plucked in vaulted arches). Despite, or as part of her precision, she seems to love patterns. Her outer sweater (taken off immediately upon sieeing down) displays a snow scene with fir trees, deer, mountains, all woven into the pattern: her inner sweater (which she does not take off) is grey with pastel stripes in multiple colors; her bags are floral, one a brocaded pattern of (seemingly) rhododendra, the other water lillies in a backdrop busy with current.
She makes notes about her knitting on a piece of graph paper.
My black and grey across the aisle feels more crowded and disheveled than ever. Does the conductor give me a snide look as he takes my ticket?
Pearl, at least, doesn’t seem to mind.
ManicDDaily 
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