Category: Musings

Fall Fashion

Giving my brain a rest and instead plowing through some of the pounds of fashion magazines piled up in the closet here.  I love fashion, and have torn out and saved magazine pages since I was in about 5th grade.  I’ve never really figured out the fetishitic nature of this collecting and gathering, but I just keep doing it. 

I love the big thick September fashion magazines and am happy to see embellishment and tweeds are hot items for fall, along with structured purses. 

Oh, wait, I’m reading a September 2004 Vogue.  Funny how little things actually change. 

Reading a September 2005 Marie Claire, I see that black is the new black.  Again.

Cloning

I experienced two entertainments this weekend whose central theme was cloning, one a literary novel and one a blockbuster summer movie.  One of these is theoretically "high brow" and one "low," which has started me thinking some about culture.  I’ve moved Nobrow:  The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture to the top of the To Read pile. 

Friday night we went to see the summer movie The Island with our visiting friends, Rachel and Robin Bordoli, and Aaron Cheatham.  The movie was much more scary than I expected from a PG-13 movie, but I think that’s just another sign that I’m getting older.  It was definitely entertaining, and surprisingly thought provoking.  It had excellent visual montages and settings of beautiful contemporary architecture, and the luscious Scarlett Johansson.  As with almost all movies these days, it could have been edited more tightly, perhaps down 10-15 minutes (another sign I’m getting old).  I liked the clean, crisp, well-lit visuals.  There was several good chase scenes that caused actual flinching at several impacts, but when Ewan McGregor gets on a flying motorcycle, my brain is transported into Star Wars and my willing suspension of disbelief was broken.  But it was a good seed for a lively conversation about cloning, definitions of personhood, chattel property, slavery, and immortality — which is more than I usually get from a summer movie.

Yesterday I read Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, who also wrote Remains of the Day (and several other works.  Like The Dogs of Babel, you read along for awhile before you figure out what’s going on — which is actually the same as what’s going on in The Island.  The narrator has a deliberately plain voice as she recounts stories of maturing in a boarding school setting with other clones who are to be used for organ transplants, but don’t seem to realize the implications of that.  Death is called "completion."  The eerie thing about Never Let Me Go is that it’s set in late 1990’s England, implying that these programs are already secretly underway.

Definitely still thinking about what it means to be a person..

Quad Shots

Yesterday I went to the drive through espresso place to get our morning coffee beverages.  The owner was taking the orders instead of the young woman who knows our usual order (Denali-size soy latte with 3 sugar packets for Brad, Denali-size skinny latte for Amy).  So when I told the nice man what I wanted he confirmed the order by saying, "Quad shots?"  And I thought, holy shit, is that what we’ve been drinking?!?!  Quad shots of espresso??  No wonder I’ve had some trouble sleeping this summer.  I was attributing it to the late shining sun, which is certainly part of the trouble — but I’m thinking that it’s really the radical increase in caffeine consumption that’s to blame.  I don’t know why it didn’t occur to either of us what the extra-big cup contained.  In Boulder we don’t drink coffee very often, and usually drink decaf when we do.  We have a terrific espresso maker that is fully loaded with decaf beans.  It’s a long way from a single decaf all the way to 4 shots each day.  Today we made coffee at home with strong oily French roast beans, and are starting the slow taper process back down to a low-caffeine existence.  No more Denali-size lattes for us. 

Happy Birthday to Mom

Today is my mom’s birthday, which is a good day indeed.  Her birth date is 8-6-4-2, which is a cool date.  I have a childhood friend, Hemai Parthasarathy, whose birthday is 2-4-6-8, and another friend, Dean Fiala, whose birthday is 4-5-6-7.  Those are cool birth dates, too. 

I just called my mom to wish her happy birthday and she is delighted with her new rototiller, which was a gift from her sister.  My sisters and I gave more mundane gifts of flowers and online gift certificates to Amazon and Lands End — and we all send our love.

Happy birthday, Mom!

Counting Down

I was trolling around Wikipedia after watching Wedding Crashers with Brad which I’m wont to do these days.  Our friends Dave Jilk and Maureen Amundson departed from our cloudy town on Thursday morning, just before the sunshine finally returned.  During their visit we engaged in lively conversations ranging in topic from the identity of Maria Bartiromo’s husband and the Iditarod sled dog race to various Stoic philosophers, including Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.  I thought I’d continue exploring a bit and ended up reading about Mark Antony and Cleopatra and noted that their history descends from 33 BC to 32 BC to 31 BC to 30 BC when they commited suicide and it struck me as obvious but strange that as they were living their lives they weren’t counting down in time.  They didn’t mark their own days the way we mark them now.  I’m fascinated and bewildered by time zones and calendars and the way humans create and change them.  I still don’t really get the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar by Pope Gregory XIII.  In high school chemistry, our teacher, Miss Pomeroy, had a bulletin board in the back of the classroom with the title "I Wonder…" and we could paste different items on it.  I remember putting up diatoms, but if I had to do it over again, I’d put up Time.

Who knows what we might be counting down to, what some future beings might mark our days as?

I Can See Clearly Now

the rain has gone.  After about 10 rainy cloudy sunless days in a row, my energy level had plummeted and my crankiness level was extra high.  Today, FINALLY, the sun is shining.  It is really beautiful here in Homer, especially when you can see the mountains and the ocean and a blue sky.  Here is a photo of the view from our house, taken last summer, but still visually valid.

Akview001_2