The Wild Winds of Fortune

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln. 

To those of all wars who gave that last full measure of devotion, thank you.

This post is really just for me.  I am under the probably delusional belief that if I actually say I am going to write about something, I will. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

I have written about several cases that were pending before the Supreme Court.  I have been remiss in reading SCOTUSBLOG the past several months, and have not written about the outcome of those cases (or other just as interesting cases).

I need to read and write about the outcome of the Stolen Valor Act case (if the decision came down, I didn’t catch it in my haphazard scanning), Golan v. Holder (zombie copyrights — the Court decided rights can be revived by Congress), the Montana navigable waters case (Montana lost), and one more case I have not written on, Blueford v. Arkansas.  This last was a recent decision, which I know only from the New York Times’ article on the case.

The Court decided in Blueford that a person can be retried on all charges even if the jury has has decided to acquit on the most serious if the jury hangs on lesser charges. I need to read the case to see if my immediate and visceral outrage over this is warranted. It was a 6-3 decision, with Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Kagan dissenting. I find it interesting that the ideological break in this case coincided with a break along gender lines as well.  I wonder how many times that has happened since Kagan joined the court.

On its surface — and an online news article is almost definitionally superficial — it seems basically unfair.  It reads like the majority was bending over backwards to give the prosecutors what they wanted. Why was it so important that the defendant be convicted on murder charges — as opposed to negligent homicide?

Was it a technical matter? Does it imply a devotion on the Court to technicalities that favor prosecutors regardless of the impact on fairness or justice? If so, how do I feel about that?  I can see ways in which this might be far less of a major deal than it seems on the surface (other than to Alex Blueford, of course).

But instead of reading and researching these posts (or working on the six other posts from the past month that lie around waiting to be finished) I am sitting at my Starbucks of choice, listening to Latin music, reading Facebook and contemplating …. nothing, really.  I thought of writing a post about the color of the sea to go with “Sky Blue,” but am currently being too lazy. I did the research, however, with a little jaunt out to Pescadero State Beach this afternoon.

Time to pack up and go home.

Have a good Memorial Day, everybody.

I have often proclaimed that I am not a Californian.  That said, I know that I would be loathe to leave the Bay Area.  It’s the weather, it’s the politics, it’s the tolerance of the odd and unusual, it’s the proximity to the ocean …

And it’s the sky.

In Florida, where I grew up, sky blue was a pale, hazy color. The light was strong, but diffuse, the blue often crowded with clouds.  Winter was the best time of year, because the humidity — and therefore the haziness — would diminish, leaving a clear strong blue sky behind. I loved it.

I have that sky much of the time here.

That crisp blue sky is the main reason summers here are at least bearable.  The length of days is overwhelming, and the strong light of summer afternoons floods into my brain causing sensory overload, regardless of the temperature.  The blue sky which emerges from the frequent morning gray marine layer soothes and helps calm my tortured synapses.  Those days when the sky is blue first thing in the  morning are more problematic, since no marine layer often means much heat, but at least some part of my psyche is happy for the sky.

Best of all is the early fall.  The days have not yet turned gray and rainy, and yet are shorter, the light more oblique. The afternoons are gold and cornflower, just made for football and late season baseball games.  The leaves often don’t turn until after the rain starts, but days when it clears out and the leaves have changed red and gold are nirvana.

In the evenings the sky deepens, cornflower through royal blue through navy into midnight as the stars come out.  It can be almost too beautiful for words.

Plenty of reason to stay.

I am watching Animal Planet’s Cats 101 with Penwiper.  They are showing a piece on “klepto-cats.”

I wonder if I should change the channel.  I don’t want her to get any ideas.

Do you know where your towel is?

I have had one singing lesson in my life, and enjoyed it immensely.  I often regret not having taken more, since I do enjoy singing, but the commute to see my voice teacher would have required a trip completely across the country.*

Elissa Weiss is a good friend; she is also a professional musician and a good teacher. If you live in or around NYC, and have yearned to learn to sing, but have been too bashful or fearful, she can help you discover your voice: her latest  “Everybody Can Sing!” workshop starts next week. (She also gives individual singing lessons. She’s great — as I said, I would love to take more lessons from her.)

C’mon, you know you want to…

*Yes, Elissa, I know I was supposed to find a local singing teacher and I didn’t.  My loss. 

In 2005, in the wake of Katrina, writer John Scalzi wrote a piece called “Being Poor” on his blog.  It hit a resounding chord in a lot of folks — even people who have never been truly poor, like myself. I made all my kids read it.

A week or so ago, Scalzi wrote a piece called “Lowest Difficulty Setting,” about how privilege in our society can be analogized to video game settings.  It’s brilliant.  If you are one of the few people who have not run across this on your Facebook or Twitter feeds, I strongly encourage you to read it.

I can tell how widespread this has become: two days ago The Red-Headed Menace came into the kitchen and said he had seen something I needed to read — and showed me Scalzi’s piece.  He had found it all on his own; it was making the rounds among his friends.

Scalzi has made explaining what can be a difficult concept a lot easier. I’m glad his brilliant analogy is getting out there, especially to young men.

This has not been a good year, on a lot of different fronts, and I keep thinking about how completely self-indulgent all of this blogging … stuff… strikes me as being. It takes up too much of my time, and I am not even really writing much lately.  The work — which brings in no income into the house, and will not in the foreseeable future — seems harder, and slower, and less… artful. I am less and less enamored of the sound of my own voice than I have ever been, and I have not really been all that in love with it for a fair while now, any possible appearance to the contrary. Discipline — write something every day, at least — has been harder and harder to come by, and frequently disappears altogether.

These feelings of self-indulgent inadequacy have been deepened by me looking over a partial rough draft of a project I have been working on for years — a partial rough draft I sent out to several people, which received minimal feedback — and being struck by the typos and other problems it contained.

In the  midst of all this self doubt, I happened to turn to my most overused resource these days, Facebook. And there, among shares of funny pictures and links to liberal leaning news stories, I found Neil Gaiman’s speech at the University of Arts commencement. The entire twenty-minute speech is well worth listening to, but one section in the middle struck me particularly hard:

And remember that whatever discipline you are in, whether you are a musician or a photographer, a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, a designer, whatever you do you have one thing that’s unique. 

You have the ability to make art. 

 And for me, and for so many of the people I have known, that’s been a lifesaver. The ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times and it gets you through the other ones. 

 Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. I’m serious. 

Make good art. 

Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. 

Make good art. 

Make it on the good days too. 

And … while you are at it, make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.
…[T]he one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. 

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right. 

The things I’ve done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about  until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea. 

I still don’t. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work? 

And sometimes the things I did really didn’t work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the house. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked.

So there it is.  I have heard this message before, and failed to internalize it, but maybe this time it will stick.

I don’t know to what extent this blog (or either of my other couple of projects) is good art, but I am pretty sure it is art, somehow. Maybe it is art only in the most general sense, just as making sweaters from cat hair is art, but it is art nonetheless.  I have a responsibility to make it as good as possible. I also have a responsibility to myself to get the other projects into good enough shape that I can do something with them. Telling myself that they will never be good enough for the world to see is unfair — especially given how much drivel ends up out there in the world.

I do feel like I am walking down the street naked, sometimes, but who knows? Maybe that’s what I am supposed to do.

Now, about that mutated boa constrictor…

On my Facebook page, I passed along a link to The Pubic Domain Review that a friend had posted, commenting “[Red-Headed Menace], this is the chance you have been waiting for to see The Battleship Potemkin.”  He responded, “This is the chance I have been waiting for to see Plan 9 From Outer Space.”

Sigh. Teenagers.

I was watching Stardust, one of my very favorite movies, and thinking about how it passes the Bechdel Test.  I was wondering how many of my movies (as opposed to those which really belong to the whole household*) do so. I don’t have that many movies (as opposed to television shows and DVDs of theatrical performances), and just about half (10 of 22) of them qualify. (Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 are simply unclassifiable, so I left them out.) The movies that I own are the ones that I really truly love.

There are animated features: The Incredibles, Spirited Away, Lilo & Stitch, Chicken Run, Despicable Me.  All of these have very strong women female characters**, and in all cases they are seeking to rescue themselves or ones they love from outside threats and return to or find one their home.

There are live action pictures Shakespeare in Love, Moulin Rouge, Dogma, and the aforementioned Stardust. (Not very many — but then I don’t own very many movies.) In two of these, the lead female characters want to become actresses. In Dogma, she wants to fulfill her mission — which she only poorly understands — and get back to her home.  More than that she is searching for God, and trying to find a glimpse of the divine in all the insanity that is happening all around her.

Out of all of the live action films, Stardust probably has the most strong women characters.  (Yes, even above Moulin Rouge.) It’s not a chick flick — I am not really a fan of rom-coms, and even ones that pass the Bechdel test tend not hold my interest: Terms of Endearment and Steel Magnolias are two of the most annoying movies ever made.  (I wish I had seen Bridesmaids — I keep meaning to rent it.) The women characters in Stardust have a diverse set of agendas — the most significant being the witches’ hunt for the fallen star.***

What interests me is not just the movies I have that pass the Bechdel Test, but how many of them do not in any meaningful way: Master & Commander, Casablanca, Hair (the movie), Young Frankenstein, and Return of the King, Up, A Christmas Story, and a Fish Called Wanda (small interactions between Archie’s wife and daughter Portia). Shrek 2 (all the conversations between female characters revolve either around Shrek or Charming), Finding Nemo (there are interactions between the Peach and Flo, but these last a matter of seconds and can’t really be called conversations), Toy Story 1 & 2, and Happy Feet, Wall-E. (If I am including the chickens, I really need to include toys, penguins, robots, and fish.)

The lack of no significant female characters makes sense in a lot of them: Master and Commander and Return of the King are war movies, pretty much. Casablanca is emblematic of its time.****  A Christmas Story is centered around a single male character, and A Fish Called Wanda plays heavily upon the sexual relationship between Otto and Wanda, and Ken’s infatuation with her, and the balance of the movie would have been thrown off by another woman in the gang.

It’s not that these are bad movies.  They’re good, as far as I am concerned, or I would not own them.  I don’t think it is that I prefer male-centered movies, per se.  I think there are honestly fewer good movies that are not romantically centered that revolve around women characters.  Where are the movies about women on the prairie? Where are the movies about the suffrage movement?  Are they out there?

If so, I think I need to seek them out.

*To members of my household: has anyone seen my copy of the deluxe edition of Citizen Kane? I cannot find it, and I want to watch the documentary Battle for Citizen Kane which is also in the set. Also, Mary Poppins has gone missing.
**The hens in Chicken Run count. I am unsure quite whether the girls in Despicable Me and The Incredibles do, but I am opting to throw them in anyway.
***Stardust contains one of my favorite movie quotes: “Nothing says ‘romance’ like the gift of a kidnapped injured woman!” As far as the witches go, seeking youth after two centuries of decrepitude becomes more understandable as I age. They still seem evil, just more understandably evil.
****Of course, on the other hand, there is Gone With the Wind (a wonderful  movie I cannot stand — the subject for a post for another day which I have been meaning to write for a while), Rebecca,  and The Wizard of Oz, none of which I own but all of which fall within roughly the same cinematic era as Casablanca.

It’s been a while since I did a long, substantive post, let alone one that breathes fire.  I plan to get back to seriousness soon, but in the meantime, this picture needs to be disseminated among intelligent cinemaphiles and science fiction buffs everywhere: a wonderful use of Legos and an iPhone.

I am in an irrationally good mood.  All in all, the world could be a worse place.

The cats are back home safe and sound.  We will need to get blood work done tomorrow as a precaution, but they seem to be just fine (albeit a little mad at us). We had taken to singing to the cats on in the car to calm them, and on the way home the Red-Headed Menace did a lovely job singing Louis Armstrong style on “What a Wonderful World.”

I just watched an exciting Preakness.  I don’t think I’ll Have Another is a Triple Crown winner, but I’ll be cheering him on in the Belmont just the same. It’s been thirty-four years since Affirmed. I think it would be good for national morale if he won the Triple Crown.

It is a beautiful day outside.

Yesterday, in between disasters, I did go and get my hair cut.  I like it, which is unusual for me. I took a picture of it so that I could remember how it was cut for the future — see profile on sidebar. It even looks good the day after getting it cut, which is wonderful.

I will be making dinner tonight: spiral sliced ham, roast potatoes, watermelon salad, homemade French bread. I may go out afterwards to a movie, or maybe not.

I have just returned from the emergency vet’s office.  Some time ago, I had spilled a bottle of Excedrin Migraine in my backpack.  I had thought I had gotten all of pills out of there, but apparently not. I found two half crushed pills on my floor this evening, and my backpack had been knocked over.

Excedrin contains acetaminophen, aspirin and caffeine.  The latter two are bad for cats, the first is deadly.  Even a half a tablet could kill one.  So both cats had to be hauled to the vets.  They were quite unhappy about this, of course — Railfan has a couple of very nasty scratches to show for this evening’s work.

P&P are stashed tonight at the vets to have fluids (after having had their stomachs pumped, and activated charcoal laid down) and other meds, and we are out 2K in vet bills.  There is no question that we did the right thing, but… ouch.

If Pandora died, I would be very sad. If Penwiper died, I would be devastated. She’s my therapy cat.

I can’t even get roaring drunk.  Rick’s Rather Rich Ice Cream (Chocolate Custard and Peppermint Chip in a waffle cone) is nice, but it is no Red Stag Cherry Bourbon and Coke.

Damn.