Peter Panning

Quick look at Natsumi Hayashi. It's an interesting area she's working in now. Her photos of herself in the air do make her look like she's floating. Not flying exactly, but for a spell immune from gravity. It's a dreamlike feeling, a transformation of full-color reality into a dream state.
 

My foreign language weekend

Friday night I watched Ingmar Bergman's Silence, a 1963 film about two sisters staying in a fictional country that may be moving toward civil war. So might they. The older sister, played by Ingrid Thulin, is a sickly translator and intellectual. The younger, played by Gunnel Lindblom, has a young son and is easily bored. In closed spaces their issues boil over.

There's more sex and nudity than I was prepared for based on the other Bergman works I've seen. I was going to say that Lindblom has a nice set of mams, and maybe she did, but it turns out Bergman used a body double for her character. The 1963 theatrical trailer plays up this aspect, which maybe was all they could do. But saying this movie is all SEX SEX SEX is no more true to it than saying that Bergman on the whole is just a miserable Nordic depressive. What this is actually is a stark psychological drama in a weird landscape.

The next night I went out to see a Spanish language play presented on a black box stage in the Elmwood neighborhood. It's about a wealthy woman—or at least one who remembers being wealthy—learning to appreciate her maid (played by a man.)

It was a very different work in a different medium. Also the play was an all ages affair, wit lots of kids in the audience. Still, in some ways they were covering similar ground.

Self defense

I recently came across Paul Muldoon in a September issue of The New Yorker. The poem appearing there actually had end-rhymes, which I wasn't sure was even legal anymore. The poem below, "The Hedgehog", doesn't rhyme. It is very clever, though. The last stanza is both funny and a little troubling.
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The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a
Rubber cushion of itself,
Sharing its secret

With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
Shares its secret with no one.
We say, Hedgehog, come out
Of yourself and we will love you.

We mean no harm. We want
Only to listen to what
You have to say. We want
Your answers to our questions.

The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.

We forget the god
Under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
Will a god trust in the world.

Deep Thoths

Interesting tidbit, and not just for the bird. Ibises were central to Ancient Egyptian religion, crucially in the person of the god Thoth. There's even a species called the African sacred ibis. And while it would be reductive to put this all down to one purpose the bird serves, the fact that they do seem to have improved the health of the Egyptian people does add context.

Because it's true

A stereotype of the old yankee—and old regional person in general—is that they'll give you directions using landmarks that used to be there but now aren't. How often this actually happens I don't know, but I feel confident in saying that it has happened.

And really, it's to be expected. If you've been around for some amount of time, you've seen changes, and you may feel that the new world surrounding you might have to earn its way into the same plane as the old one that's passing away.

Boing!

Timpani a.k.a. kettle drums are widely associated with classical music. Occasionally you'll hear them in a pop context. Ringo plays them in the Beatles' "Every Little Thing." Most of us don't think of them as jazz drums. But here they are.

Timpani tuned to some pitches sound hella cartoony.

Resemblances

They say everyone has a twin.

This is one of those things you never know when it's going to happen. Sometimes you see someone and you think you know them. Maybe you've already started to say something, or you're about to. But it turns out it's just a semi-close resemblance, and now they think it's weird you're staring at them.

Or is that just me?

Even farther

It is rather big news―if news it be―that Gary Larson might be bringing back his baby, The Far Side, in some form or other. It's an influential comic, and a timeless one, but up until now it was buried in the semi-recent past. Larson had fulfilled his promise by the time he hung up his hat in 1995, but I'm curious to see if he's done any brainstorming since then. Or piled up massive gambling debts.

The sound of...

I remember in a place I used to live the walls (+ ceilings and floors) were pretty thin. One neighbor chewed me out for my clock radio playing in the morning, which she really shouldn't have been able to hear. Also once I sneezed late at night and someone angrily thumped on my ceiling/their floor.

It's different here. Which is good, because allergy season is back.

I'm the wind, baby

The Carileon, by Sebastien Leon // Performed by Loup Barrow and the wind from Studio Sebastien Leon on Vimeo.

A percussionist is rather spoiled for choice in terms of things to strike. Nice problem to have. In addition there are sounds being made by the wind. It's kind of soothing.

Thunderdome

One weird adjustment that you have to make this time of year is the change in what it's like to take the bus. During the summer you get used to buses running somewhat close to the schedule, at least for most of the day. Certain peak-hour runs are later than others, of course. And you get used to having a reasonable amount of space, too. Then when kids go back to school you get routes that are so jammed up two buses that are supposed to be twenty minutes apart show up at the same time. There's also more of a sardine can effect a lot of the time. This happens every year but I always sort of forget.

They've commissioned new buses this year, though. Blue upholstery. At this point they still have the new car smell.

States of matter

Today I saw a smoothie being made out of spears of pineapple and fresh raspberries, blended together with orange juice. And, not to yuck anyone's yum, it's a subjective preferences, but given my druthers, I'd just eat the pineapple and berries and wash them down with OJ. And it should be just as healthy, since it's all the same stuff. Like I don't think any health benefits accrue specifically to not chewing.

An air

I've heard―and I know you've heard―about how "Ring Around the Rosie" was about the Black Plague. Given that, whatever "fair" Johnny went off to was probably an unimaginable human abattoir. Pretty song though, and nice performance.

Bring your appetite

Reading nonfiction, I don't generally have an agenda in the ideological sense. I just wander to what interests me. And sometimes I take an interest in the mundane things of this world and how they work. Recently that's led me to Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age by John A. Jakle and Keith A Sculle. There's some good stuff about the trial and error, the unexpected successes and educational failures of the fast food industry.

There is, as you might expect, a whole chapter on Ray Kroc and his wildly successful franchising of McDonald's. But it's not victories all the way through for him. Biographical notes on Kroc have to deal with the Hula Burger. The Hula Burger was...well, you can see it.

The thing is, I know people who are violently against pineapple on pizza. It's not something I'd get every time, but it's in the open air. That seems to work a little better for it than being squeezed between two halves of a hamburger bun, slathered in American cheese.

I'd guess it only lasted as long as it did because marijuana was coming into wider use.

Late summer

It's Labor Day, which is the end of the summer as far as the school year is concerned. In astronomical terms we've got three more weeks left. We're not in the middle of a heatwave now. It's just hot enough that one can wear shorts at home at night and have the ceiling fan going, and it doesn't make you chilly. It's a nice spot in the year.