strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Mar 31 04: clank
What’s up with the sudden outbreak of robots in the Quarks? Don’t know. Robots are just cool, I guess.
conserving momentum
While I wait for “Slow” to come back from beta readers (we’re at v0.1 at this point), I’ve started working on the next piece. This one has a much longer title, which I won’t be publicizing just yet. Much pre-draft world-defining going on. With luck, I’ll be able to shift gears back to “Slow” when the time comes. With more luck, one of these will be in really good shape in time for the Viable Paradise deadline. (June 21, if not well sooner.)
Incidentally, OmniOutliner is the greatest thing ever. OS X users should just buy it now. You’ll figure out what to use it for soon enough.
Mar 30 04: it’s brini!
Discovered a crazy thing this evening: Brini Maxwell is alive and well and living on the Style Network. Those of you who know the weirder corners of New York City cable may remember her as drag’s answer to Martha Stewart. Her show ran from 1998-2003 on public access and, later, on the ‘leased access’ channel that most New Yorkers associate with Robyn Byrd. She was sublime: genteel suburban charm with just the merest frisson of camp. She’s even got a Wikipedia entry…
Brini’s got a whole new thing going. It’s set primarily in a glam-ass studio setting rather than the “somebody’s apartment” feel of the earlier series. Her domestic-disaster friend Mary Ellen (think Brenda Vaccarro meets late-stage Judy Garland) also seems to have vanished. But she’s back to give household tips from a planet of Tupperware, engraved thank-you cards, and daisy-printed dresses. Longtime fans will be delighted to hear that the fabulous theme music is pretty much intact.
The thing that Paul and I found most notable is how, well, straight the Style Network is playing it. Nowhere in the ads promoting it—or even the SN official website—is the whole ‘drag’ issue raised. Either you realize it or you don’t, and Bree is good. Which means that they’re actually airing two different shows at the same time. As Brini would say: how economical! Why didn’t you think of that?
Fortunately, I think both versions work pretty well. It’s not perfect: the episode I saw this evening seemed a little low on zing to me. The pace has slowed down just a little, and it couldn’t sustain the energy so well. But still, it was Brini in all her magical late-sixties white-glove fabulousness. Her visit to the recycling center was a hoot…and honestly, her ‘use a dead umbrella as a collapsible lingerie drying-rack’ trick was genius. I’ll try to report back after I’ve seen a couple more episodes.
Mar 29 04: deep down; down deep
File under Cool New York Stuff: the website Undercity and the Urban Postmortems at Dark Passage. In which people go poking around where they’re not supposed to be, and take interesting and/or beautiful photographs. The Dark Passage people also play peculiar parlor games. I wonder what they are, exactly?
Of related interest—and yes, I keep posting this link, but that’s because everybody really should read it—is an article published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists entitled Mysteries Under Moscow.
Mar 27 04: houseguests
Few entries just now because the boys from England are here. Peter and Robin are these friends of ours who live in Oxford and are utterly delightful company. We love them. Last night: glamorous drinkies with the gang at the Campbell Apartment. This morning: walking down to H&H for breakfast provisions. Right now they are playing a duet at breakneck speed on the piano. I think we’re about to go to Brooklyn to see the museum.
Spring is finally underway. The weather is in the high sixties. I’m thinking maybe it’s kilt weather.
Bliss.
Mar 22 04: three wands
It’s not even ready to be sent to the beta readers, but: The first draft of “Slow” is done. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is a recognizable plot. The bits of stuff that made me want to write the story in the first place are all in there, along with a number of things I didn’t anticipate.
Praise be to all attendant spirits and to muses great and small.
Mar 21 04: heartrending tragedy
The TWiVo broke! No, not the old one that was already broken. The new Time-Warner DVR unit that I spent Monday’s lunch-hour swapping the old broken one for. It died in a spectacular cascade of the sort of seizures that rendered the last one unusable. In the middle of watching the Stargate SG-1 season finale. The drive is now totally inaccessible. God knows when we’ll get a techie in to figure out what the hell is going on.
So…aaaiiieeeee! What do I do now? I don’t wanna wait until the June rebroadcast to find out if the world gets saved from certain destruction by the evil Goa’uld System Lord Anubis!
Yeah, yeah. I know. Of course it will. And this is a pathetic thing to be freaking out over. But I just need to know how the world gets saved from certain destruction by the evil Goa’uld System Lord Anubis. Hi, my name is Andy, and I’m a narrative junkie. I can’t help it.
Did anybody happen to tape it? Anybody?
Mar 18 04: idea
Okay, I’ll make this quick because I should really really be asleep right now. But I have a meeting with Elena Faro, Tax Lady Extraordinaire, tomorrow at lunch and I’ve been running numbers out so she can crunch them.
St. Patrick’s in this town is ridiculous. Mobs of tourists from god-knows where, plus ten skillion college students and high-school students and the occasional intrepid middle-school student getting drunk and falling into gutters already streaming with green Bud Light. As if it’s not already hard enough to negotiate the sidewalks in Midtown right now. Fie. My mother’s family is of British Isles Mongrel extraction, and there’s some Irish in the soup there somewhere, but this ‘holiday’ does nothing for me. And I’d love to embrace an Old Country, so that’s a disappointment.
So I have a better idea. How ‘bout a pre-Christian Irish Parade? Let’s all paint ourselves with woad and run naked, blue, screaming, and with weapons a-flailing down Fifth Avenue.
Needless to say, ILGO would be welcome in this parade.
Come on, who’s with me?
Mar 16 04: mad cow
It is starting to stick.
The snow is coming down in great waves and it’s often hard to see the other side of the street with any clarity. Yesterday was sunny and gorgeous and I walked the streets of the city in my shirtsleeves, but today we have been yanked backwards into winter with such force that many of us have lost our hats and eyeglasses and minds. The heat of yesterday and the days before has been drawn out of the sidewalks and into the slushy gutters, and the walkways are starting to vanish under a horrible wet grey paste.
Yesterday was beautiful. It was one of those first-days-of-spring days where you can hardly restrain yourself from dancing down the street instead of walking, because some fundamental part of you has left your body and soared five blocks ahead of you, is shaking hands with the hot-dog vendor, is handing out daisies to overlayered tourists, is singing Rufus Wainwright songs at the top of its lungs. Paul and I got up at 6:30, went to the gym, got to work on time, went to rehearsal eventually, and I beamed like a fool straight on until bedtime. The Rossinni fugues made me want to do little interpretive dance moves in the back row that the tenor next to me described as ‘the Stevie Nicks ballet.’ I couldn’t help myself. I was practically vibrating with existential joy. If I could have bottled it, I would have given it out for free to the entire world and watched its ills be resolved in time for lunch.
But yesterday is over now. The joy carried me through morning swim practice, but by the time I reached the train the first snow was falling. It will continue off and on, I am told, through Friday. And not long after that the wolf Fenris will swallow the sun, and we will all die as the world slowly succumbs to the ice.
Well, okay, or maybe not. But still: March is supposed to go from lion to lamb. It started as lamb, instead, and has careened through lion and panther and ginger kitten and loris and cicada and agouti and unseen bird that smacks into the window and hides in the bushes somewhere. Bring on the spring already. I am vanishing beneath the slush.
Mar 11 04: paper tiger
Anybody who read newspapers in the 1980s and early 1990s should fondly remember Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson. It was (imho) the best thing going in the funny pages at the time, by a mile, and probably the best strip we’d seen since Walt Kelly’s Pogo. It had Kelly’s lovely draftsmanship and sly take on human nature; it had the gentle soul and goofy surreality of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. It had art, it had smart, and it had heart.
And then it ended. Watterson retired the strip at the height of his game. At the time we heard whisperings that he was going to bring out something new sooner or later, but gee, it’s been eleven years already and there’s a whole lot of nothing out there. Watterson himself has had nothing to say on the subject: back when I was “in comics,” he was widely known as a grouchy misanthrope who shunned the public eye. He did not do interviews. That hasn’t changed a jot. The man just vanished.
Or so it seemed. Cleveland Scene ran this article about him last November, which I just stumbled across. What’s he up to? We’re still not sure, and he’s still not talking. It’s well worth reading, though, if only to make you want to go leaf through the strips again.
And if you do, a couple of resources: first, the site that hosts the interview itself, Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn’s, a dazzling compendium of Calviniana. It recently launched—and this is the really cool bit—a searchable database of the complete run of strips. That’s right! You could, for instance, read all the Calvinball strips in one go! The strips are all in black and white, but still. Such goodness. For your daily fix of the strip, you can also hit Universal Syndicate’s official site, which is frankly less fun. (But gives you those gorgeous Sunday strips in color.)
And while I’m on the topic, I hope—I pray—that Universal Syndicate recognizes a brilliant idea when they publish one. That gi-normous Far Side Compendium? C&H is the perfect next candidate. I’d buy one in a heartbeat.
while I were out
Right, so: I’m back. The “too angry to type” thing metamorphosed into “too busy to write.” We’ve painted the bathroom (bashful blue) and kitchen (buxton blue). (Apparently the sky is sort of bashful, whereas buxtons are complex and New-Englandy and have a grey thing going on.) We’ve also hung a big new mirror in the bathroom and taken other steps appropriate for the happy onslaught of houseguests we expect in the month to come. Most exciting. You should see.
We’re also rehearsing rehearsing rehearsing: presently Rossinni’s Petite Messe Solenelle and three performances of Stravinski’s OEdipus Rex and a whole bunch of Jerome Kern songs for a thing at Carnegie with Skitch Henderson and the New York Pops.
Meanwhile, outside the bubble, life has whirled on. My delightful niece crawled for the first time on Sunday afternoon, a whole two feet. Her mother cried. I would have too. I really need to get a mess of photos of her into the Gallery. What kind of uncle am I? And spring has peeked in through the window a couple of times, and then lost its nerve and then gone wandering off somewhere, leaving us all off-balance. And then Persephone died, from a fall during a seizure. Cristi Lamb was a warm and wonderful woman whom I saw maybe twice a year at SDMB events, and beyond that communicated with only via the boards. In thirty seconds she could make you feel like you’d been having lunch together twice a week all your lives. I was not one of her closest friends, but I was a big fan, and I will miss her. My heart goes out to all the people who feel her loss, especially to her kids, whom she loved fiercely.
Oh, and I’m still trying to finish a draft of Slow.
So it’s not as if I’ve been sitting staring at the wall feeling outraged. The world is too full of things to maintain a single-topic state for too long, no matter what the stimulus.
Make no mistake, though: somewhere in the pile I am still also pissed off. I listen to people ask, “Won’t this render marriage meaningless, though? Doesn’t it inevitably lead to somebody being able to marry a dog/a nine-year-old/a tree?” Of course it doesn’t. Dogs, children, and trees don’t have legal standing in this society. We don’t recognize them as adult people, capable of making informed decisions about how they want to live their own lives, and entitled to any number of citizen’s rights. Can you get your tree a driver’s license? A passport? A seat on a jury? And it’s not as if we haven’t revised our definitions of marriage before: Kevin Drum’s brief response to the ‘you can’t change human tradition’ argument is better than I could write. Others argue that gay couples don’t need marriage, because they can just ask a lawyer to reverse-engineer the complex web of legal relationships that marriage automatically confers. Leaving the not inconsiderable expense of such an undertaking aside (which we could compare with the thirty bucks or so that Britney spent for her marriagette), there are many rights and responsibilities that gay couples cannot obtain by any means. Many of them are federal in nature, which means they wouldn’t necessarily apply if we saw a hodgepodge of state-specific sort-of-equivalent-to-marriage things pop up. Atrios recently ran a nice summary of the 1,049 federal rights catalogued by the GAO back in 1999 that were available only to married couples.
This leads us, then, to the theological arguments, the things like this that are still appearing all over the place. This country is not a theocracy. Exodus 21:7 gives God’s blessing to selling your daughter into slavery, but we as a civilization gained the moral maturity to disagree with God on that one a long time ago. If the underlying rationale for the FMA boils down to “god says queers are icky,” then you’re out of luck. Freedom of religion, which is one of the fundamental points we were trying to make when we started this country, means that no religion gets to trump anybody else’s, nor may it make decisions for those who do not adhere to its precepts. Nobody is going to force any church to marry a couple of queers if its tenets say they shouldn’t. But no church, big or small, should have veto power over the civil rights of others in the world outside its sanctuary. Enshrining that kind of discrimination in the Constitution with a big old exemption written across the top runs contrary to everything that this country stands for.
That’s what I think. I may not write about this again for a while, because it’s hard enough keeping up with the political scene and there are any number of folks out there who cover it better than I could. Plus it looks like the FMA is dead in the water already, and I hope this turns out to be the case. But in the meantime, if people are going to accuse me of trying to undermine Western civilization, forgive me if I take it a little personally.
Mar 10 04: parting the red wig
So I was talking about this product with a friend here at work today…
ANDY: Okay, I can identify all the plagues but the upside-down one on the bottom. What is that, Hair on Fire?
KAREN: Apparently he’s a little hailstone, although Estelle suggested it could be the Plague of Clowns.
Oh, right. You remember:
“And Moses spake unto Pharaoh, saying, let my people go; but the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and Pharaoh would not release them. And so Moses did as the LORD had said, and struck himself with in the face with a pie, and bade the children of Israel to do likewise; and soon afterwards all of Egypt shook beneath the tread of big floppy shoes. And the LORD sent a multitude of clowns into the land, and the children of Egypt ran in fear from the honking noses and the pratfalls and the little yippy dogs jumping and dancing, and the juggling pins falling upon the ground like hail, and their dreams were troubled by the unnatural smiles and the hair upon the heads of the clowns, which was as flame. And everywhere was the shpritzing of the seltzer bottles, and still Pharaoh would not release the children of Israel.”
Estelle and I agree that this would be the bit where the Seder really got fun. (And then I thought, actually, it would probably start to feel like Purim, which confirms that I’ve been living in this town a long time now.)