Activity, Parenting, Politics, Religion

Stop recruiting my children to your succulent chicken-eating lifestyle.

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If you CHOOSE to eat chicken, do it in private. But stop putting your chicken-eating in my face all the time. And don’t, in any way, try to lure MY CHILDREN into your lifestyle.

Anytime there’s a restaurant scene on t.v. or in the movies, I have to shield my children’s eyes. Didn’t have to worry about that only a few years ago. Now HOLLYWOOD makes it seem like choosing to eat chicken is an entirely natural thing that doesn’t bring the wrath of vengeance upon us all. It totally does! Did Hurricane Katrina happen in a non-chicken-eating country? Case closed.

Nothing angers me more than when a leader I voted for or gave money to for his moral stance on not letting chicken-eaters marry or teach ends up getting caught eating turducken. Happens too often to count.

Our nation’s morals and marriages are in the toilet. Stop eating chicken. Stop trying to get my kids to eat chicken. Back off. Eat more cows. They have got it coming. Book of Angus 4:21 “Consume not the flesh of fowl, for it is effeminancy and an abomination.”

And enough with the chicken pride parades. Do that stuff at home (at the peril of your immortal soul) but get your plumage and clucking off MY streets that MY tax dollars pay for.

Art

Sprezzatura. Good art is sticky.

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The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then procees in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality.
— Simon Schama

Sofonisba Anguissola was a famous female Renaissance painter. I hardly know anything about anything, and had never heard of her (or didn’t recall her). A book I’m reading about art and design went into a little detail about her life, and mentioned this portrait she did of herself as if painted by her mentor Bernadino Campi. I looked it up online. Though taking a painting in via computer monitor (actually, a smartphone) is awful with often terrible renditions of the colors and textures, this image made me laugh while eating in a restaurant. Then I felt really won over by the personality and wit of making us regard the painting as if we are Anguissola ourselves.

Self-Portrait with Bernadino Campi, by Sofonisba Anguissola

Sometimes when apprehending a work of art, it goes SPLAT on your consciousness and you can detect at that moment its effect will stay around with you. This was one of those moments.

Several months ago, I felt a need to dea with a portrait by John Singer Sargent by trying to write out a scenario that was part of a dream I had. During a hasty four-hour museum drive-by in the Art Institute of Chicago (airport layover) the painting held me in place in aesthetic arrest. Museum visits usually go way too quickly – wanting to witness everything in a compressed span of time. Taking mental (or camera) snapshots, but not having time to let the art in to be apprehended.

Good art is sticky.

Pop Culture, Religion

Magic power chargeups.

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Meditation (or time for calm concentration) is a Very Fine Thing. This message on the back of a van was confusing. It makes prayer like when a Pokemon charges up its power, or when one of the X-Men needs a second or two to do his/her thing. Prayer shouldn’t be like getting a bonus on a Dungeons and Dragons die roll, should it?

That noticeable smudge is bird poop on my windshield. All other smirches are on the van.

Eating, Politics

Greasy Palins, with a side of gay-bashing.

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Sarah Palin posted a goofy photo endorsing Chick-Fil-A on her Facebook Page. After joking with friends, a buddy suggested putting a caption idea I had on the photo. Voilà! Adapting Palin’s photo seems ripe for widespread meme-dom. It is obnoxious, and deserves all the internet battery it gets!

Side note: I’ve hardly ever been to Chick-Fil-A. There aren’t many nearby, and the one I know of is in a shopping mall. I pretty much am only in shopping malls on weekends, and Chick-Fil-A is famously closed on Sundays (kinda respect that, heathen that I am). So, it long seemed elusive and unattainable. Guess it will be a while longer before I ever eat there. Like, after a head injury.

Activity, Eating, History

“Too soon” for cannibal humor?

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Grim information below in the museum at the Donner Memorial Park in California (a lovely place with a nice lake, paths, impressive scenery with high hills above). Yet the location largely comemorates the famous Donner Party travelers who were stranded en route to California and had to eat about half of the people. I mean eat ALL of half of the people, not eat half of each person. Tidbit: the relatively wealthy Donner family was largely spared, most of the people eaten were poorer and/or servants.

The typo (or was it intentional?) that “Feuds and internal disagreements lowered their moral and further slowed the pace.”

Took a series of cannibal-related photos with the family around the site. Am guessing we are not the first to do so. Locals are probably tired of cannibal humor to the point where it no longer has any, well, bite to it. A rich and nutritious source of amusement for us tourists, though.

Cannibals in Polynesia refer to human flesh as “long pig”. Recommend white wine, then.

Activity, Art, Music

Pornography, strippers, art.

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“The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”
— Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Pornography. The new movie Magic Mike, about male strippers according the advertising campaign, made me think about this theory of art expounded by fictional college student Stephen Dedalus. And about desire. Dirty, dirty desire. And art.

QUICK! A photo of a chick, before the attention drops!

Dedalus’ theory is infused with the Catholic shame that evoking desire is something base and bad, exclusive of a more noble high-mindedness. Life isn’t quite that way, neither is art, but it does reflect my experiences in strip clubs.

The photo is one I took of a performer in Mary’s Club in downtown Portland as she says “Thank you!” to marchers on the inaugural day of Occupy Portland on October 6, 2011. A scantily-clad dude stands behind her, amused (easier to see if you zoom in).

It’s been more than a decade since I’ve been in a strip club. I hardly go out. I often go months without going into a bar. When I have gone to strip clubs, some of the time is spent desiring/coveting the performers on the stage. I don’t get aroused significantly, enticed is nearer the mark. Some of the time is also passed people watching, though watching people watch the same person you can has limited charm.

Mostly I wonder what the performer is thinking, and seeing through her eyes.

And I don’t feel pity, at least if the place is decent. The assumption many make that strippers and porno actresses have troubled family lives (doesn’t everyone?) and daddy issues (again, doesn’t everyone?) is condescending. Similar jabs aren’t laid at porno dudes or male dancers. It’s slut-shaming masquerading as gender sensitivity. Feh! FEH!

I have no statistics, but as this is the internet, amn’t gonna care. Stories abound of women who danced to help pay for college, knowing it was a waystation to another, better life. Or people who made a good living for a while. Who cares? Why judge?

It’s expression, it’s a mating display in controlled circumstances. An extension of the same mating/style displays we ponder when we decide what to wear because of how it looks/fits/conveys us for the day.

In strip clubs, if the vibe is good, I wonder what it’s like to be so desired. Thoughts fill of the power wielded, to have a physique that inspires want and awe from people who don’t know you. To know that and to use that to get what you need, to make a living, to hold people in thrall. To externalize that power with a smirk slays me when dancers do it.

Yes, it is possible to dwell in these thoughts while listening to lousy butt-rock music as women swirl around a pole. It is possible to have esthetic arrest and epiphanies to Motley Crüe or REO Speedwagon.

One of my favorite artists, singer/songwriter Sam Phillips, performs “The Fan Dance” in 2008.

Art, Poetry, Writing

From lump to bean

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A book of Anne Sexton poems have been on my nightstand for about a year. I can only read 1-2 poems at a time before saturation. On those nights, chances run high I’ll dream about Sexton. Mostly her voice and sitting around in living rooms and dining rooms. Don’t even know what we talk about. Tried to write her back, with Father’s Day on my mind.

Women are born twice, men once.

But for us, son, the drying off is slow.

From lump to sapling to tree to bean.

And in between we watch and attend.

Watch clumsiness turn to grace to poise to squeezing life out again.

Help from the outside, only let in in small ways.

We are builders and servants, boasters and protectors.

Anne, what would you have made of us

Had you seen us grow from lump around again to bean? Seen us

Fuller, slower than invaders and thralls.

Between you and your slender friend in a Boston cab,

Breaking away from Lord Lowell. Brobdingnag jokes.

You both would catch in my eyes when I saw you as vessels.

As I would see in yours whether I was politic and small or rescuer and hunter.

Consigning you to gray sparking damp clouds would not happen on my watch.

Talking with trained strangers and medicinal minuets probably would.

Son, see how a poem to you turns to apostrophe

Of desire and dreams and duties?

Those are all of the things we do.

Do not let them be all the things you are.

Do not be afraid to take taxi cab rides alone.

Do not take all of your taxi cab rides alone.