listen to it twice and try to get it out of your head.  dare you.

Tags: la la la la la
Current Music: Comedian Harmonists

"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that's when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can't defend themselves? That's like saying 'sic 'em' to a dog,"

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/15/gun.toting.teachers.ap/index.html

Tags: faulty logic
Current Location: the great state of Texas
Current Mood: embarrassed

Things to do when you're bored.

Tags: penguins
Current Location: 2 hours til freedom

"The glare of the computer

Oh blinding! blinding! sensitive pupils.

That's what I get for beer times."

Tags: bleh
Current Location: Hell
Current Music: Ringing and pounding

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/TV/06/06/odd.scholarlybuffy.ap/index.html

Tags: academia, buffy
Current Location: Front Desk
Current Mood: predatory
Current Music: John Cage

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/business/04insure.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Time to move to Canada.

You should probably see the whole list. (again)

Tags: health care, suckage, white people
Current Location: Museum front desk
Current Mood: working
Current Music: Homeless saxophone player

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

Tags: rich assholes
Current Location: Harry Ransom Center
Current Mood: complacent
Current Music: The clicking and clacking of shoes on marble.

You claim skill in every art
and knowledge of every science.

Yet you cannot even hear
what your own heart is telling you.

Until you can hear that simple voice,

How can you be a keeper of secrets?
How can you be a traveller on this path?

Ito Jakuchu, Japanese (1716–1800)
Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon
c. 1770
Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
Hanging scroll, ink on paper
45-1/4 x 19-1/16 in. (114.9 x 48.4 cm)
AP 2005.01

This charming painting depicts a mother gibbon dangling her baby by the arm as she hangs from a tendril suspended from a tree. The title of the painting is a reference to the Zen Buddhist concept that simple people and animals often mistake the reflection of the moon for the moon itself. In this case it is both the baby gibbon and its mother who are trying to grasp the moon’s reflection in the water—though not physically depicted here, its presence is understood. The subject also alludes to the dilemma of the human condition: we reach for the unreal (in this case the reflection of the moon) instead of looking for proper spiritual substance. Jakuchu has imbued the subject with both humor and affection—the gibbons may be confused, but if they stop searching for the truth, all will be lost. And although the moon is not actually represented, its round shape is mirrored in the gibbons’ faces.

Beginning in the 1760s and throughout the 1770s Jakuchu spent extended periods of seclusion at the Obaku Zen temple of Sekihoji, south of Kyoto. This painting corresponds to that period, when Jakuchu increasingly chose to depict Zen subjects executed in ink-monochrome style in which basic and geometric forms would assume prominence over any approximation of realism.

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Richard Wagner - The Niblung's Ring (1848-1874)

Wagner's the Nibelung's Ring is a huge music drama in four parts, stretching over four separate nights of three to five hours each.  This work, a quarter-century in the making, surely counts as the supreme example of a Romantic tendency toward the grandiose.  The Ring grew so large because of the sprawling material Wagner wanted to cover.  It encompasses large portions of the most famous of all Germanic or Norse legends.  It involves gods and goddesses, giants and dwarfs, magical prophecies and transformations, a dragon, an invisibility cloak that reminds us of Harry Potter novels - and, in the midst of it all, very human feelings and actions.  The Ring counts as one of the towering artworks of all time, comparable to blah, blah, blah (comparisons the megalomaniac Wagner would have enjoyed).
    The first night, The Rhine Gold, shows us events whose consequences will be played out over the following three nights: A precious lump of gold at the bottom of the Rhine River is stolen from its rightful owners, the mermaids of the Rhine, by the dwarf Alberich, and then is taken again from him by the gods.  The stolen gold, forged into the ring of Wagner's title by the dwarfs whom Alberich commands, carries with it a curse.  It makes all who possess it,even Wotan, the leader of the gods, renounce the love that could save them from its corruption.  "Love" is meant her in the broadest sense, to include erotic love, a parent's love for children, and finally human compassion in all its forms.
    Over the following three nights of the Ring - The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods - generations pass.  We see the gods, humans, and dwarfs - and a giant, transformed into a dragon- brought to grief by their lust for the gold.  An innocent hero, Siegfried, is born who can defy the gods and their corrupt order, but even he dies through treachery arising from everyone else's pursuit of the ring.
    Wagner employs all this elaborate mythology to tell a simple modern tale.  His basic theme is the moral decline of the world, brought about by greed for money and hunger for power.  In the guise of Norse gods, gnomes, and warriors, one group after another of nineteenth-century society is shown destroying itself in the pursuit of the gold.  Even the renunciation of love entailed in possessing the ring is an allegory, turning the old myth into an indictment of bourgeois biases toward work and discipline and away from emotion.

Tags: anti-semite, appropriation, lotr, wagner