Flea Circus

We all went to this Lotus Blossoms kids’ fair event yesterday.  (Lotus is the big Fall world music festival, and it has occasional spin-off events throughout the year).  I was charmed and impressed.  A big elementary school gym filled with booths offering different crafts & activities from world cultures.  Some pretty neat stuff: making masks [...]

Pony, Moth, Kitten, Mouse

Two new stories.
Iris, a touching tale of the overcoming of cross-species prejudice and divisions:
One day there was a little mouse.  And the mousie once found a cat.  And the cat said that it wanted to be the mousie’s friend.  So they went to the park.  And they went on the slides for a long time.  [...]

Full of Kitten

I read an interesting book this week by a political theorist named Jane Bennett called The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics.  It’s basically an argument against the Weberian theory that modern life is characterized above all by “disenchantment.”  One of the categories of modern “enchantment” she considers concerns what she calls cross- [...]

Todd Snider, Tree huggin’ lazy-ass hippie

Todd Snider seems to come to town every year around spring break for two nights of shows, and I’ve always missed him, but finally caught him last night.  Snider is in his early 40s and has been playing for almost 20 years; is from Portland Oregon originally, started his career in Austin as a devotee [...]

Visit to Louisville

We took an economical, two day one night spring break trip to Louisville.  Stayed in the historic Galt Hotel on the riverfront which in the 19th century hosted such guests as “Jefferson Davis, Stephen Douglas, Edwin Booth, Charles Dickens, P.T. Barnum, Tom Thumb, and presidents Lincoln, Grant, Taylor, Hayes and Buchanan.”  And now us.  We [...]

Movie Roundup: Gran Torino, Frozen River, Coraline, Happy-Go-Lucky

We went to see Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino and rented Frozen River (the indie movie for which Melissa Leo got a surprise nomination for Best Actress) soon after. Both are Obama-moment films, I thought, with a narrative drive towards an ethnically-diverse/ multi-racial family, and a repudiation of old-style (racist) whiteness or white Americanness.  In [...]

Genius of Mark Gormley

Have recently discovered the amazing and certainly not gormless Pensacola, Florida sensation Mark Gormley, of the haunting falsetto, jutting hip stance, inexplicable video animation and mise en scene, and trademark pleated jeans, golf shirts (what does he have in the pocket?), and upper chest band-aid. Here’s a useful overview of the career that [...]