Whole Hog BBQ, No. Little Rock AR
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06.30.08
06.28.08
wide world of Wayne
Some rather surprising John Wayne propaganda that I think Fresca might be particularly interested in. Wayne shirtless, with airbrushed nipples. Wayne shirtless, wrestling with another man on a rope ladder. Wayne with what looks like quite a lot of blush on his manly cheekbones. Wayne physically disciplining women while maintaining a charming countenance. Sort of like Kirk, only totally not.
You’ll see what I mean when you watch Fresca’s inaugural video masterpiece. One day, she’s gonna write this book and I’m going to enjoy every second of reading it.
world war I propaganda posters
From the JM Davis Museum. Rhetorically fascinating. One day, I'll team-teach a grad seminar with Mr. Husband on propaganda. He'll handle the visual rhet angles and I'll handle the media distribution angles and we'll both talk about the rhetoric of it all.
contemplative monkey is contemplative
From the beer stein collection at the JM Davis Arms and Historical Museum in Claremore, OK. Not normally our cup of tea, but we were driving down the street, the Supreme Court decision on the right to bear arms was announced, and the museum appeared in front of us. So of course we had to go and consider the matter.
06.26.08
what you’ve heard, it’s all true
Tom Waits is indeed a blind carny.
Tom Waits is also, in actual fact, a street preacher with sandwich boards and a megaphone.
Tom Waits is that uncle you heard all those stories about.
Tom Waits plays a solid two hours.
Tom Waits is shockingly human.
Tom Waits stands on a two-foot platform rimmed in blinky lights.
Tom Waits understands that not all of those lights should work at one time.
Tom Waits yells about the monitors until they’re right, but the yelling happens via maniacal gestures to stage right.
Tom Waits does more with dust, glitter, and a low-slung klieg light than most performers do with lasers and an inflatable penis.
Tom Waits is a master of minimalist gesture.
Tom Waits directs his band with almost Zappa-like precision, albeit with very Waits-ian maneuvers.
Tom Waits is the most physical performer who never really moves from the spot he’s standing in.
Tom Waits tells clueless crowds that clearly they’ve never worked together before.
Tom Waits responds to shouted requests with a growly "yeah yeah yeah" and then plays whatever he planned on playing.
Tom Waits puts together absolutely impeccable set lists.
Tom Waits is his own backup singer.
Tom Waits does surprisingly controlled falsetto.
Tom Waits forgets his lyrics and fills in with “blah blah blah” and it’s just as magical, maybe more so.
Tom Waits works a mirror-ball hat like nobody’s business.
Put another way:
I listened to The Mule Variations incessantly during the late nights of my Master’s degree, back when I was still working until 1 or 2 in the morning. For that reason, it was a good time to discover Get Behind the Mule* — and because I was dating Mister Husband and thrown up against my many intimacy issues, it was also an excellent time to have Come On Up To The House engraved on my soul. I didn’t expect him to play either one, what with that record being nearly 10 years old now. And he played both: a surprisingly subtle version of the first one and a slightly raucus version of the last one.
*Dissertating ain’t a bad time for a song that contains I'm diggin all the way to China / With a silver spoon / While the hangman fumbles with the noose, boys. I should pull this one out of the stacks.
Put yet another way:
In the same way that I want to write an essay like the first 14 minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West, one day I also hope to accomplish so much with just a pocket full of glitter and my own strange voice. But while the first might happen, I don’t think the second will.
And also, for Sal, who I think will want to know:
The band was very, very tight. Set list is here. The Brady Theater is a nice enough venue: 2,800 seats (extended via folding chairs last night), dusty, historical-ish. Our seats were okay (good enough for bad photos) and I considered them good seats because they were located on the inside of the building.
06.25.08
i came around the corner and there were all these funny little faces.
All from the Karl and Beverly White Fishing Tackle Museum at the Oklahoma Aquarium. Art is often where you weren’t looking for it. (50 or so more here.)
06.23.08
lock and dam
I am astonished
because it appears that someone on the other side of my apartment complex has purchased the car I traded in a few months ago. Same make/model, same dings on the door, same rust on the spare tire bar. Gotta take a closer look, but I'm 94% sure it’s the same Kia Sportage.
06.21.08
on being friends with certain sorts of people
So I would be dancing around and doing my scat, singing along what they were doing. And just watching those guys go into another world, with their sounds, you know, and the expressions of their faces changed and their behavior was different... something comes over them, some kind of extraordinary force comes over them... moves them, you know, strange feeling, or maybe just a huge kind of epiphany, suddenly, skies open up and you can see eternity.
— Roswell Rudd, qtd. in Larry Fink’s Somewhere There’s Music
Viz Fink, see also this and this:
our water was off all day yesterday, so we went to the Zoo.
And also ran errands and stuff.
stalking the wild red pants
On Tuesday, we drive to Tulsa to see Tom Waits on Wednesday, and then on across to visit the fambly. And then we come back here and don’t go out of our apartment for a couple of months because we really, really miss home and we feel a little off-kilter.
I’ve never seen Waits live, despite my years of fandom. I always meant to get around to listening to him, and then right after I starting seeing Mister Husband he played ... what? Heartattack and Vine, maybe — yes, definitely —for me one Sunday and that was it. I spent the rest of that cold January afternoon sitting in the light from the patio windows and playing every Tom Waits CD I had time for (he has them all, every one, plus boots) and then running off with a handful of the rest, and it’s pretty much been like that ever since. His music is a constant in our house. (I also teach vocal ethos with it, which both annoys and enthralls my students.)
Johndan linked to recent Q&A from the Anti blog and the borrowed beats Waits edition. Of course I love it all, but there are two things I wanted to pull out and post here:
Q: What’s heaven for you?
A: Me and my wife on Rte. 66 with a pot of coffee, a cheap guitar, pawnshop tape recorder in a Motel 6, and a car that runs good parked right by the door.
This makes me feel less like a freak, obviously, because if you substitute ‘cheap-or-not-so-cheap cameras’ and ‘a decent, free Internet connection;8217; for the cheap guitar and the pawnshop tape recorder, that’s pretty much my favorite thing in the world.
And then there’s this one, which I’m filing next to my question for all of you about your sounds:
Q: What are some sounds you like?A:
1. An asymmetrical airline carousel created a high pitched haunted voice brought on by the friction of rubbing and it sounded like a big wet finger circling the rim of a gigantic wine glass.2. Street corner evangelists
3. Pile drivers in Manhattan
4. My wife’s singing voice
5. Horses coming/trains coming
6. Children when school’s out
7. Hungry crows
8. Orchestra tuning up
9. Saloon pianos in old westerns
10. Rollercoaster
11. Headlights hit by a shotgun
12. Ice melting
13. Printing presses
14. Ball game on a transistor radio
15. Piano lessons coming from an apartment window
16. Old cash registers/Ca Ching
17. Muscle cars
18. Tap dancers
19. Soccer crowds in Argentina
20. Beatboxing
21. Fog horns
22. A busy restaurant kitchen
23. Newsrooms in old movies
24. Elephants stampeding
25. Bacon frying
26. Marching bands
27. Clarinet lessons
28. Victrola
29. A fight bell
30. Chinese arguments
31. Pinball machines
32. Children’s orchestras
33. Trolley bell
34. Firecrackers
35. A Zippo lighter
36. Calliopes
37. Bass steel drums
38. Tractors
39. Stroh Violin
40. Muted trumpet
41. Tobacco Auctioneers
42. Musical Saw
43. Theremin
44. Pigeons
45. Seagulls
46. Owls
47. Mockingbirds
48. Doves
The world’s making music all the time.
06.19.08
50 Before 50 #41: tour the American West
Figure 1: trip route
Basic Stats:
Miles driven: 7,008 (see Fig. 1)
Duration: 30 days (May 17 to June 16)
Percent of United States visited: 23 (see Fig. 2)
Day on which we finally snapped: June 14 in Utah. Got interrogated by the hotel desk clerk for not taking my husband’s name. Due to various whatnottery (time change, strange google directions), ended up being an hour late to "breakfast" with Scott and Shelley, who remained gracious in spite of it all. The lovely conversation that followed was one of the trip highlights. And then we took a wrong turn in spite of the fact that we were following them, and etc etc. It became clear it was Time To Go Home.
Figure 2: 23 % of country visited
Geographical Stats
Mountain ranges crossed: Badlands, Rockies, Cascades, Coastal Range, Sierras
Deserts toyed with: Great Basin, Mojave
Highest elevation attained: 8,000ish feet
Times the Continental Divide was crossed: twice
Temperature range experienced: 29 (-1.6 C) in Montana, 101 (38.3 C) in Nevada
Forests containing Very Tall Trees visited: 3 (Redwood National Forest, Sequoia, one more)
State with the Most Chakra-Cleansing and Crystal Billboards: Oregon
State with the Most Palm-Reading and Tarot Billboards: California
Flora and Fauna
Flora my Southern Self had not heretofore examined: sagebrush, tumbleweeds, Joshua trees, California poppies, wild seaweed forests (as opposed to the tame seaweed forests in the Monterey Aquarium)
Fauna that was also new to me: elephant seals, kit foxes (in downtown Bakersfield), tule elk
Food Stats
Times I ate tongue: 2. (Pickled tongue at Wool Growers, tacos lengua at Lino’s Tacos [see fig. 3])
Items consumed for first time: tacos de pescado, Basque oxtail stew, panna cotta, fried lemon slices
Did I actually eat so much super-fresh sushi that I am off sushi for an unspecified time? Shockingly, yes.
Unsuspected restaurant gems: Tarpy's in Monterey (for God’s sake, don’t eat at the pier) and The Oaks in Ogden, UT (thanks to Scott).
Figure 3: Tacos machaca and lengua. (photo by Mister Husband)
This all seems like a rather inadequate description. It was a long trip time wise and mile-wise, but it was also an intense experience in a lot of ways — seeing things, meeting people, and undergoing an internal sea change. (Desert change? You know what I mean.) Also, one of the awesome things that's come out of this rather perplexing year is finding out that it doesn’t really matter so much if Mister Husband and I are in separate states for 30 days or in a rolling box together for 30 days. Obviously we prefer the latter, but either way we still like each other quite a lot.
50 Before 50 #8: establish a scholarship
#8 on my list of 50 things to do before I turn 50 was to establish a scholarship. I can’t really take credit for this except in a brokerage capacity, since it’s funded by my parents, but I’m still proud of the fact that the Oliver-Breeze-Kennedy Undergraduate Scholarships in Technical Communication and Digital Literacies have been announced in my former academic home, the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at UALR. They’ll provide annual awards to two advanced undergraduates.
The long-ish family name honors generations of women who scrimped and saved and encouraged the next in the line to dream larger. Mom described this so well in one of the emails that flew back and forth during the process of setting things up:
My great-grandmother was a farm woman on the Missouri prairie in the late 1800s with little education; her main achievements were survival and raising nine children to be respectable citizens. My grandmother had only a junior high education, but she dreamed large well into her 80s and managed to accomplish many things beyond the expectations of her class and educational limitations. While I was growing up, she told me many times that her assets probably would never benefit her, or my mother, but perhaps they would edge me toward a better life. She also managed to pass on the value of dreams and her can-do attitude. My mother likewise was frugal and dedicated to helping future generations succeed - like so many women of the WWII generation, she finished high school and had a promising career which she gave up when she married my father. I was admitted to one of the Seven Sisters on scholarship but turned down the opportunity because my mother ironically did not want me moving 'so far away'. I managed two years of college but also eventually had to choose work rather than pursuit of an education. [...] Because both of us know how little it takes to destroy dreams and how long it takes to scratch together the means to achieve them, we would like to help a few people keep their visions afloat.
I wouldn’t have been able to finish my BAs without the UPS tuition reimbursement program, which paid for nearly 100% of my costs, and my graduate life has been made easier through both corporate fellowships (the Veritas fellowship during my first year of PhD coursework) and privately funded awards (last year's teaching award funded by the Brown family).
Now that my family is doing a bit better financially, it’s wonderful to be able to either pay a little back or pay a little forward, depending on how you look at it. Lotsa thanks is due to our ancestresses, my parents, and to my old teaching mentor, Chuck Anderson, for chairing the scholarship committee and doing the legal wrangling to make this happen.
new summer banner
Billie Hara is the summer artist chez Thinkery, and the new banner is in effect up above. I've been a little obsessed with diptychs myself for the past year or so, and the movement in this triptych instantly drew me in. And even though it was taken in Texas in January, it reminds me of some bits on the edges of the deserts we just drove though.
06.15.08
I've always had a terrible habit of playing with my food.
Devil's Tower, Wyoming
Wyoming has a lot of space
06.13.08
viva las vegas
06.12.08
Wordle of the Agency chapter
Because it's not possible to not think about the damn dissertation. Ever. Even in Vegas. And also, Wordle is a nifty little thingamajig.
Mojave windmills
This is a small, early Father’s Day present for my dad, who has a special love for wind farms. There are thousands of windmills set on the hills that run along the edge of the Mojave — so many that they're impossible to photograph. But that didn’t stop me from trying.
Sierras, sunset
Bakersfield
We spent a few days in Mister Husband’s hometown. I’ve been thinking about the extent to which we each internalize landscapes; he’s always made sense to me, but he makes even more sense now that I’ve seen where he’s from.
Santa Monica Pier
Mastodons in LA
06.10.08
still in Hollywood (again)
Actually, we’ve been in Bakersfield for the past few days and stayed too busy driving the Sierras and hanging with mighty Michael P to post. But I couldn’t resist finally getting to use this Concrete Blonde line for real (as opposed to then.) More anon; today we’re off through the valley to the California Museum of Photography, the Pasadena Playhouse (where my Momo worked in what, the 40s?), and Mike's hypnotism act tonight in La Puente.
06.07.08
Los Angeles
We spent part of yesterday afternoon at Griffith Observatory. Mr. Husband saw the Talking Heads at the Greek Theater in Griffith Park back in the day, and I am still jealous.
06.06.08
time
I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature—birds, fish, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further, and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime, and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life.
— Hokusai, The Art-Crazy Old Man
inspirational eyeballs
Some of the best graffiti in the world is in Venice Beach. (And I didn't shoot much of it because my batteries died.) You can't tell, but this wall is also covered in inspirational aphorisms: be the change you wish to see, too blessed to stress, and so on. Just down the way, there was an Obama booth tucked in among the henna tattoo artists, sarong vendors, and head shops.
Venice seems full of gritty hope.
zuma
Zuma Beach, Malibu
maintaining
In order to do a long road trip successfully, you gotta take maintenance days every so often. Do the laundry, buy some coffee, attend to whatever's broken. This trip seems to demand one every eight or nine days, so on Tuesday I spent a couple of pleasant hours doing laundry and reading Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch (picked up at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur). Since Mr. Husband knows the LA environs, he took off through the suburbs in search of a replacement gas cap. (The original was a casualty of air pressure changes when we crossed the Rockies. Long story.) And then we washed the car inside and out and went by a produce stand and retired to the room for local guacamole and watched the boats outside our window. And also watched The Best of Times, about the Taft/Bakersfield football rivalry. We fell asleep before we got to dessert. The End.
06.04.08
Tony's Pizza, Ventura
Point Lobos
06.03.08
elephant seals
Yesterday, just above San Louis Obispo. They’re stinkier than you might think, but still quite wonderful.
in which we arrive in Ventura
Background: Mister Husband was born in Ventura, spent his first 7 years in Ojai, and then lived in Bakersfield until his late 30s. I was born and grew up in Arkansas. Until this trip, the furthest south I’d been in California was Monterey.
Him: Welcome to Ventura, baby.
Me: Palm trees! Palm trees everywhere! Palmpalmpalms!
We check in to the hotel, run a couple of errands, and eat pizza at a roadside shack a couple blocks off the ocean. Driving back to our room, we discuss what to do tomorrow. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a...
Me: A pier! We can go to the pier! There are totally piers and palms! And surf shops! Surf shops that have an actual reason for existing!
Him: Yes, dear. There are indeed piers and palms here. Frankly, I had no idea you'd be so excited about these things.
Me: Me neither, but it’s just like everything on TV! And the movies!
Him: Well, pretty much. Only possibly with fewer shootouts, I suppose.
Me: If we go to the pier, there’ll be Keanu and Patrick Swayze.
Him: no longer even bothering to talk, just laughing at me
Me: I totally shoulda reviewed Point Break a couple more times before we came!
(Thankfully, Compatriot G and I did review Point Break back in January or so, as it is certainly one of the most awesomest movies of all time. But we are totally failing in our commitment to address each other as “Brah” [or, after graduation, “Dr. Brah”] in honor of Patrick and Keanu’s preferred forms of address in said immortal film. The point being that I am not as rusty on the intricacies of SoCal culture as I could be! Also, Anthony Kiedis’ acting career should totally have taken off based on his performance as a minor bad guy.)
PS - Patrick Swayze is roadhousin’ pancreatic cancer. As well he should.
06.02.08
Monterey Aquarium is always worth the trip.
No such thing as too many photos of jellyfish, right? Right. Click through the photo for about 672 more. OK, not really, it just seems like it. But they were totally all too magical to delete.
cephelapodmas comes late some years
06.01.08
Mr. Husband observes the ocean
Lover's Point, Monterey
below Half Moon Bay, above Santa Cruz
poppies
bouquet
Once upon a time, I was a little girl living in landlocked Little Rock, Arkansas who liked to go to the library. One summer, I found a book on tidepooling and was fascinated by the idea. So I started pestering my mother to take me down to the Arkansas River to pursue this novel activity, and she spent quite a bit of time explaining tides and what bodies of water don't have them and how moon cycles work and related whatnot. I took up looking for critters in creeks and ponds instead.
But yesterday there were indeed tidepools at one of the beaches we visited, and they were filled with anemones and mussels and wee fish. I’m sure I sounded like an eight year old as I worked my way around them and peered in, but I don’t care one tiny bit.
