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February 2, 2006 — 8:00 p.m.
Now that I'm getting on into the early reaches of middle age-dom, I find it incredibly easy to dismiss the aspirations and musing of youth...meaning my own daughters. When I don't want my peace treaded upon, I find it tempting to exile them to the living room and the television therein. Spongebob Squarepants has given me blessed solitude a number of times.
But, the nature of children is a wonderful thing. They have that fantastic ability to shake your very foundations. As I was idly wasting time today (trying to decide if I should read Tom Jones or Prometheus Bound), my 7 year old daughter came in and began a full blown lecture on the life and times of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Seriously, she knew more about the man than I did. She wrapped up her presentation with the request that I find and play "Eine Kline Nachtmusik" (her very words).
What could I do? For the next hour we sat side by side and searched the Internet for Mozart trivia. I downloaded several pieces of music and we listened to them, together.
I love being a father.
— Justin M. Stoddard
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February 1, 2006 — 7:00 p.m.
A couple of days ago, I brought up the issue of beauty. I thought I might give an example of what passes for beauty in my eye.
I find this beautiful, and painfully so:
The above is Edward Hopper's "Gas". Though I don't think this is his absolute best piece of art, I do find it strongly compelling. It speaks to me. I relate to it (and other Hopper paintings) in a way I don't or can't relate to other artists.
Now, this I merely find interesting, rather than beautiful:
This, of course, is Jackson Pollock's "Number 1". Now, to me this is more a disorganized construct (a contradiction?). Something to puzzle over; something to disassemble and reassemble. It's almost as it's a problem to be solved. I'm not saying there's no beauty here; it's just that I don't recognize it.
Now, I'm wondering why this is. Why does Hopper outstrip Pollock in the recesses of my mind? Is it a lack of formal artistic education? Do environmental aspects come into play? Am I just being "ignorant"? What, pray tell, is it?
— Justin M. Stoddard
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January 31, 2006 — 6:00 p.m.
Two posts in as many days! Eric is going to have a fit!
I've managed to clean up my gutter area a bit. It now reflects what I've read thus far this year, as well as what I'm currently perusing. Though, some of the entries under "Books read in 2006" aren't really books, but rather essays. But, oh well.
My mind had been lingering on the thoughts of aesthetics lately. Beauty, in all its forms, has always held my rapt attention. I don't know where I'm going with this quite yet. I thought I'd just throw it out there. Perhaps someone could send me an email with their specific thoughts on beauty. What is it? How do we recognize it? Is it hard wired into us or is it something we grow to appreciate as we gain life experience? Is it both?
I'll think on it a bit more and write my thoughts down when they become a little more coherent.
Anyway, it's good to be back.
— Justin M. Stoddard
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January 30, 2006 — 5:00 p.m.
I'm back!
Other matters have been at the forefront of my oft' wayward attention these past few months. I'm not promising that I'll be updating with any real frequency now, but it's a start anyway.
I've been trying to catch up on some reading these past few months. Though the gutter area on my side is not updated to show it, I've made some real progress these past few months. For example, I finally read Caesar's Conquest of Gaul. I was really quite surprised by how simply Caesar wrote. Though mainly a propaganda piece, his exploits have resonance even today.
To tie into Caesar's conquest, I re-read Patton's War as I knew it as well. One is amazed at how the two's writing corresponded so. But, perhaps that was the point. Of course, Patton never fails to remind the reader how and when he mirrored Caesar's actions nearly two millennia ago. Frightfully good stuff.
This year I've resolved to read The Harvard Classics. Of course, some of that list is old hat. The Odyssey, for example. Though I read this many years ago, I had a wonderful time reading it all over again. It's funny how your frame of context allows you to interpret the core meaning of a book. When I first read of Brave Ulysses (Odysseus for you Graecio-philes out there), it was no more than a rousing tale of adventure and...well, quite frankly, gore. Presently I understand the book to be more about the kind of hero worship you might find in an Ayn Rand novel. What, exactly is Homer trying to convey to us? I don't think this is about Penelope pining away for her long, lost husband. I think, rather that she cannot bear to give herself to a "lesser person" as it were. There is a whole well-spring of psychology here that I'm sure has been addressed elsewhere. I find it all rather fascinating.
Additionally, I have been reading Chronicles of Narnia to my daughters. This is one of the most rewarding aspects of being a father. By reading these stories aloud to a captive audience, I am, in a sense, reliving my own childhood. It is interesting to me how certain phrases trigger emotion. For example, while reading this passage, I choked up. I had to pause and recompose myself:
"We have come - Aslan."
"Welcome, Peter, Son of Adam," said Aslan. "Welcome, Susan and Lucy, Daughters of Eve. Welcome, He-Beaver and She-Beaver."
His voice was deep and rich and somehow took the fidgets out of them. They now felt glad and quiet and it didn't seem awkward to them to stand and say nothing.
Why the emotion? I don't know. Something was triggered, however. And I love it. I love every minute of it.
— Justin M. Stoddard
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February 3, 2006 — 12:23 a.m.
I haven't posted any best-of lists since early 2004, with 25 movies and 25 CDs from 2003 to praise. One of these days I'll have to go back and figure out what I liked best from 2004, but for now I may as well get started on 2005. So, with no further ado, here are my favorite CDs of 2005:
- Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane — At Carnegie Hall
- Electric Masada — At the Mountains of Madness
- John Coltrane — One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note
- Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker — Town Hall, New York City, June 22, 1945
- Sweeter Than the Day — Live at the Rendezvous, December 2004
- Adrian Belew — Side One/Side Two
- The Tiptons — Drive
- Yo Miles! — Upriver
- Painkiller — 50th Birthday Celebration Volume Twelve
- Buckethead — Kaleidoscalp
- Jessica Lurie — Licorice & Smoke
- Bill Frisell — Further East/Further West
- Brian Eno — Another Day on Earth
- Keith Jarrett — Radiance
- Robert Fripp — Love Cannot Bear
- They Might Be Giants — Here Come the ABCs
- Crimson Jazz Trio — The King Crimson Songbook, Volume One
- Garage a Trois — Outre Mer
- Milton Nascimento — Pieta
- The Decemberists — Picaresque
- Anti-Social Music — Sings the Great American Songbook
- Hal Hartley — The Girl From Monday
- Kronos Quartet — You've Stolen My Heart: Songs from R.D. Burman's Bollywood
- Monty Python's Spamalot (Original Broadway Cast Recording)
- Seu Jorge — Cru
And I might as well toss in an honorary runner-up:
- Seu Jorge — The Life Aquatic Studio Sessions
— Eric D. Dixon
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February 2, 2006 — 3:24 a.m.
The Overheard in New York book is out and available to purchase at a bookstore near you. Here's Publishers Weekly's glowing review:
Friedman and Malice give equal time to irreverent quips on race, sex, fashion, relationships and city life in this hilarious compilation of snippets from overheard conversations, showing how the people who live in New York give the Big Apple its irreverent charm. Presented in bare-bones dialog format, the book's hundreds of entries originally appeared on a popular and entertaining website of the same name, perhaps accounting for the book's "blog meets book of quotations" feel and the lack of any discernible organizational scheme; "Dude: I definitely said, 'no abortion jokes at dinner.'" and "Drunk guy: That girl's tits are huge! And it's snowing!" appear, for instance, on facing pages, but that's a small gripe for a book that packs a laugh on nearly every page. Although the book has a foreword by Marc Shaiman, the composer of Hairspray, and an introduction by bestselling author Lawrence Block (The Sins of the Fathers, The Burglar on the Prowl, All the Flowers Are Dying), it's solid enough to stand on its own. This is New York at its rawest and funniest.
So what are you waiting for?
Me, I'm waiting for a chance to actually get to a bookstore — the good ones are all over in Boise, and my new job as a copy editor, along with my ongoing freelance commitments, are keeping me quite busy at the moment. I haven't seen my dad in two days despite the fact that we currently live in the same house (he's already gone to visit my mom when I wake up, and I leave for work before he gets back — then he goes to bed before I get home, while I stay awake until the wee hours of the morning), and I've only had time to visit my mom for 15 minutes in the past two days. I only had four hours of sleep a couple nights ago, which I don't handle well — sleeping in is one of my biggest weaknesses. This crunch time should pass within a few days, but in the interim . . . whew.
— Eric D. Dixon
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January 31, 2006 — 1:53 a.m.
At least, I was. I've finally updated the archives. Last time I updated them was sometime in September, 2004, and I've been meaning to do it for quite some time. I think the final catalyst was the fact that David M. Brown linked to us over at the LFB Blog. Well, not linked, exactly, but mentioned the URL. It made me want to tidy up around here a little, the same way my mom always insisted we clean the house before company arrived. Just in case someone decided to show up, I wanted things to look a little nicer. I still don't want anyone looking in the closet or under the rugs — there's plenty of code I'd like to overhaul around here at some point, as people in the know can probably tell by glancing at the source code — but you get the idea.
It took a good chunk of time to archive 16 months of the blog at once, but not as much as you might think, really, considering this site is an entirely manual production. It was especially easy archiving Justin's posts — his months and months of inactivity around these parts allowed me to rubber-stamp his side of most of the archive pages with the standard "Slacker" non-entry I've been using for archive pages with no entries. No entries, that is, from either one or the other of us. I've decided not to create archive pages at all for weeks when neither one of us have managed the pitifully easy exercise of typing and uploading a sentence or two, as at least a token of online presence. That way, anybody clicking through the archives a page at a time won't have to slog through page after page of absolutely nothing.
The "Slacker" thing feels like a cop-out. When we started this blog almost three years ago, we vowed to post something every day. I managed to screw that up first by missing a day, and it wasn't long before Justin followed suit. We still tried to keep the page up, though, producing both regular content and anxiety dreams. And then things got really out of hand — only two or three posts a week, if that. And then Justin missed an entire week.
This was understandable — he had just moved to St. Louis, and didn't have much Internet access. But what to do? When I set up the structure of our archives, it had never occurred to me that I'd have to deal with an archive page that contained no entries from one of us. A commitment to post every day would preclude a missing week, wouldn't it? Even if we missed a day or two now and then. And my OCD meant I had to do something — it was just question of figuring out what. So I decided to fill Justin's side of the archive page with a doppelganger, Evil Justin.
Justin got to posting again after that, but pretty soon he missed another week — so I trotted out Evil Justin again. He didn't get the hint, so the following week I summoned Evel Justin from the depths of R'lyeh. Two weeks later, it was Weevil Justin.
By this point, Justin was looking for revenge, so next week my side of the page was invaded by Eric D. Hulkster. The only problem — Justin posted it on a Friday, before the end of the week, which I hadn't officially missed yet. So I had to wait until the week was over to post my next real entry.
We managed to hold it together for months afterward, posting every week until one day Devo Justin made an appearance. When I finally missed a week — for real, for the first time — four months later, Justin didn't pony up with a doppelganger. I didn't have the heart, or the time, to make one for myself, so the lame "Slacker" bit appeared for the first time. Same thing the following week. The week after that, I was still planning to resurrect the doppelgangers, apparently:
I've failed to post for two entire calendar weeks, which hasn't happened before. Surprisingly, this space remains unoccupied by satirical doppelgangers that tend to crop up during long absences. I'm sure there'll be something before long, though — those empty spaces in the archives are like a vacuum just waiting to suck in some half-hearted attempt at humor . . .
But it never happened. The magic was gone, or something. The week after that, we both failed to post. At all. For two weeks straight. Those two blank weeks were followed by two more weeks of "Slacker" posts for Justin, then another "Slacker" for me. Then another two blank weeks. And it spiraled downhill from there. I've never taken five entire months off from posting, like Justin did in early 2005, or even the three and a half months he's been gone recently. But I've been plenty scarce all the same. Hopefully we can both turn it around, at least a little.
So, do any of you actually care about this kind of self-referential blogging-about-blogging crap? Of course not. But at least I've gotten it out of my head now, so there's more room for the voices to tell me what to do.
— Eric D. Dixon
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January 29, 2006 — 9:46 p.m.
I don't know much about Steve Kubby. I've heard his name over the years, when he ran for governor of California on the Libertarian Party ticket, then helped get a medical marijuana initiative passed in that state. I'd say he fell off my radar after that, but he was never really on it.
Every now and then I get to browsing around the intarweb, though, and today I've discovered that the government is trying to murder Steve Kubby, the same way they murdered Peter McWilliams.
Brad Spangler wrote the piece I linked to above, and he's also posted a couple of updates. Brad doesn't mince words:
Please understand, this is a naked attempt to murder a man as political retribution, by means of witholding the medication (cannabis) that keeps his adrenal cancer in check.
I've always thought that more non-drug users should become actively involved in legalization efforts — it would at least limit this obvious, blunt retribution by the state. I've never tried marijuana, and I can't imagine circumstances where I would start. Then again, I've never had to stare cancer in the face. But judging by the way I've lived my life up until now, I'm clean on the drug front. Never smoked a bowl or dropped acid. Never tried a beer or a cup of coffee. I don't even remember the last time I used Tylenol, or Advil, or whatever your pain reliever of choice might be.
I don't say this as pretense that this somehow makes me better than those of you who choose, or need, to indulge; I have my own weaknesses, in spades. But in a public dialogue that treats activists for legalization as utopian stoners, would a "clean" voice at least be perceived as lacking in guile? Maybe if more non-users joined the fight to legalize drugs, people would lend more credence to the utterly persuasive arguments that legalization would simply make the world a better place.
In the meantime, lend your voice to helping one man stay alive.
— Eric D. Dixon
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