agent of entropy

I wasn't really expecting to have the day off tomorrow, but it worked out in the end. So very excited about sleeping in past 6:30 am! So, if I've got the day off tomorrow, that means tonight was my evening to go out and do a thing; it was a ~13 hour workday and exhausting, but Sarah texted asking if I wanted to go out to a show. (With homemade dinner first! Perfect. Otherwise I may well have eaten leftovers and passed out at home at 8pm.) It's Nola Fringe Festival this week, and sadly I missed one of the shows I'd wanted to see, but this one turned out to be fantastic: Fringe, Fishnets, Feathers, and Felt: The Hurricane Party. You know it's a good show when you come home with your cheeks sore from grinning and laughing. As advertised, there were indeed Puppets! Dancing Girls! Live Jazz! Comedy! and Meschiya Lake! Also, it had probably the most charming palmetto bugs (i.e. giant cockroaches) I've seen -- I much prefer palmetto bugs when they are actually dancing girls in iridescent brown-gold lamé costumes, and then when they're not only dancing girls but also the stagehands. Take note, New Orleans: please have all the insects that invade my rooms turn out to be mischievous dancing girls in shiny costumes.
There were also charming swing-dancing Jailbirds in stripy crow costumes, Caroline Fourmy (being much more vaudeville-hilarious than in the bits behind that link, which are her + her jazz band) and the Camel Toe Lady Steppers. I do love this town.

Two nights ago, at the food-truck shindig atop the deserted strip mall, there was another 80s-vintage wood-paneled station wagon in the parking lot, and I was all excited because I've seen all of maybe 1 or 2 others in all of New Orleans. Today, there was another (different, and maybe even 70s-era given the profile and color scheme) wagon parked up on Carrollton, near where I live.

Also, while driving home, a song / spoken-word piece came on the radio (on WWOZ, of course) that I have only heard in two places: played live by a band called Stark Raving Chandler in a tiny bar in Charleston on a poetry slam night, once; and on the CD that I bought from them that evening...oh, what, 15 years ago? Something like that. A strange experience, to be driving (in a slightly-older version of the wagon I was driving back then, also coincidentally) and have Chris Chandler suddenly come on the radio with a meandering piece about history and truth and time, following someone doing a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows".

Tomorrow's the po'boy festival (there is always some kind of festival here; often several at once), and it's conveniently just down the street from my house. If I'm up early enough to dodge the crowds, I'll wander down there. I heard rumor of a shrimp remoulade po'boy, and various other rare po'boy sandwich creations. (Also, daylight! I could be outdoors in it! Amazing.)

So, first, sleep. Lots to get done tomorrow (sadly, much more than "eating po'boys in the sun").

i'm at home, typing with tea and toast in front of the big windows, and outside everything is soaking in a deep rose light. the holly-berries, the red motorbike, the fallen petals of the little tree-shaped camellia across the street, they all glow like props on a theater stage. and the bare tips of the treebranches are a deep and almost violent red, catching this light on all their intricate rainwet surfaces.

the sunset is behind me, behind the house and the long rows of streets, the streetlights just starting to fire up, behind the huge graceful crane-giraffes in the port of Oakland, each one lit up with its own brilliant constellation and surrounded by the deep yellow flashes of sodium-lights. and the sunset is even farther than that, beyond the bay and the hills of the city, travelling on across the western ocean.

and in front of me is the rainstorm that came down through the hills this afternoon, brushing aside the bright mid-afternoon in-between-the-showers sunshine and laying down a thorough slant of grey rain. the deep grey is shading to blues now, with the sun fading, and only the very tips of that one tree are catching the last bit of sideways rose light.

i spent the latter half of the day thinking that today was Friday, rather than Thursday, and now it's nearly two in the morning and time to sleep soon, especially if i'm back to needing so much more sleep than normal. more science tomorrow, and maybe my data and my chip will behave properly.

but, since i want to give my brain some brief respite before sleeping so i can finish my cocoa and perhaps not have nightmares about animated meat, a brief movie review: Lunacy, Jan Svankmajer's new film.

Svankmajer introduces it himself with a blasé speech about how it's a horror movie and not art, because art doesn't exist anymore, except as a "sort of trailer for the reflection of Narcissus". and it is a horror movie, and as D. pointed out after the movie, it's got that classic horror-movie trepidation where you know what's going to happen, and that it's going to be bad, and you watch the characters blunder through it anyway. there's a good bit of speechifying that makes a summary of the extremes of philosophy from the past two centuries or so, roughly coming out to "absolute free will/indulgence" vs. "control and punishment" vs. a sort of naive and shallow religious moralism. with, ya know, the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allen Poe, the French Revolution, a blasphemous orgy, a therapeutic funeral, and stop-motion animated meat. (yes, stop-motion animated meat. go watch the trailer. or don't, if that's not something you want to see, obviously.)

yeah. i think i'm glad i watched it, and i am glad that i saw it in the theater rather than telling myself that i'd rent it later, because i probably wouldn't, and i'd've had a hard time sitting through the whole thing if it was easier to get up and walk out. it was thoroughly disturbing in a number of ways, and there's some interesting bits for thinking-about, and Svankmajer is (as always) really, profoundly strange. i've often had a hard time watching his films, though with Conspirators of Pleasure and perhaps also Faust, it was more because i kept falling asleep. Alice is the only one of his full-length films i've watched all the way through. it's worth, at the very least, watching some of the trailers or movie-clips to see his stop-motion animation, because his talent and skill with that is impressive. (edit: a-ha! YouTube wins again. here's a copy of Svankmajer's short Darkness/Light/Darkness. probably not worksafe, and also involving small bits of animated meat, but mostly just clay, and generally just really neat.)

another and rather more thorough review here: "Lunacy: Svankmajer's political allegory".

mmm, 2am writing. so crunchy. time for sleep.

more science today, testing out my experimental setup. a good solid day's worth of work, even with getting in late and taking a bit of time to have coffee with asarwate. and on sunday or monday i'll have data to play with and look at and pull numbers out of, which is fun.

i walked the ~3 miles home both yesterday and today. not strictly the best idea today, as i hadn't had much for lunch or anything for dinner, but it felt good to stretch and work the muscles some. stopped at Pendragon on the way home to pick up more books and found three: a beautifully-bound edition of Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, Cometbus' Mixed Reviews, and Reading Lolita in Tehran, which i've been meaning to read for awhile.

and, lastly: for the last little while, as on many evenings just after sunset, i've been hearing heavy low rumbling that sounds very much like distant, steady thunder. i'm in Oakland, where it's most definitely the dry season. anybody know what that rumbling is? i like to think that it's thunder, because i miss the storms and the lightning, but that doesn't seem likely.

. coughing again, and tired. i'm hoping this is just from overdoing it a bit over the last few days.

. Pirate movie tonight with vyrin and maybe snowninja7 and uboat, 8:45pm at the UA theater by the Emeryville Public Market, if anyone else wants to come.

. Desert Arts Preview ("a sneak preview of the 2006 Burning Man artists") at the Crucible, tomorrow (Wednesday) night from 7-11pm. free. banzai for fire and metalwork.

. plums! picked ~3 gallons of cherry plums at the Moneypit yesterday with snowninja7. we got about half of them pitted before i left, and she made very tasty bulgolgi. i've got a bunch of peaches & nectarines in the freezer already for jam-making, and am waiting impatiently for the blackberries to get ripe. oddly, no loquats.

. and lastly, a link: Action Cats, now with lazers!!

happy Mardi Gras!
eat, drink, be merry! make some noise, make some trouble, get out and shake up the world a little!
laissez les bon temps roulez!

i'm pretty much packed and cleared out, but still have a few more errands to run. also a sore-throat plaguey sort of thing seems to be trying to catch me, but i'm dodging as best i can. in any case, i'm betting that i won't be leaving the bay area until tomorrow morning, unless l_stboy comes up with something i haven't thought of.

but...ya know, i'm just fine with that. i'm done with work, i'm free, and my time and my days are only my own...which means that "running late" doesn't mean anything at all right now. and i'd rather take it easy tonight and get good sleep than try to rush out the door.

also: i didn't manage to pull together any visiting-before-going-away thing, so there's a lot of people i'm not going to get to see in person to say goodbye to. i'm sorry for that, but...i'll be back in june, so i'll just have to see all of you then. or at Roast...

the house is clean again, mostly. the stag-print is hung up on the wall again, and looks much better there than propped on the couch. i don't have a nasty hangover, have remembered to eat breakfast but not yet lunch or dinner, and haven't entirely forgotten about my laundry. a slow, good day, but i could really use another 6 or 7 hours of solid productivity before i sleep. oh well.

neat things:
there's an article in this month's Science about using ice formation in a relatively simple process to fabricate complex inorganic/organic composites similar to nacre or bone. bits like that are why i think materials science is so damn cool.

cuteness, from violin:
baby otter! it looks like a tiny, fuzzy, grumpy old man. hee!


and also, behind the cut, a baby sloth. it makes me involuntarily do the "awww cute" face. ( baby sloth at the beach. )

one of the finest compliments i've been given in a long time, also from violin:
"When you throw a party, it sounds like 12 hours in God's own Waffle House."
(...where God's own Waffle House has mimosas and liquor and dancing and pool, and a suave man in a fedora putting the music on the near-infinite jukebox...)

*smile* yesterday was a fine, fine day.

tomorrow is the SquidLabs Light Salon, 7pm.
"We feel we need to bring back heckling as an art form. We haven't had enough. So if you don't bring a cool idea, demo, or hack, bring some damn fine heckling. And if you don't bring an idea, a hack, a demo, or some heckling, then you really should bring some wine."

wednesday is Corteo!

next week is the opening of a metalwork show called "Iron or..." at Cellspace. december 15th, 7-10pm.
also, from The List:
dec 10 sat The Dead Hensons at 12 Galaxies, S.F. a/a $5 kids/$10 adults 4pm ** (early show)
dec 16 fri Von Iva, Hey Willpower at Independent, S.F. 21+ $10/$12 8:30pm **

friday: work-as-usual, with some further planning as to how to wrap things up so that nothing comes crashing to a halt when i leave. half-unexpected downtime in the evening, low and sad and hard, but a good thing. wrote a fair bit, untangling the internal fallout from the past week. talked to geeta a little.

saturday: went shopping for an electric hand-mixer (yay kitchen gadgets!), then a quick run through the farmer's market right at closing time. picked up satsumas, concord grapes, three large bunches of celery, apples, raspberries (red and yellow). ( and then there was a party. )

sunday: a slow, lazy, and somewhat-hungover morning. i misread my clock and ended up half an hour late for asarwate's play. ( play, good parking karma, comedy of errors, Red Elvises )

unfortunately the late nights all weekend and allergies left me feeling too sick and tired and sore to go to DeathGuild with jencallisto and plymouth. one of these days i'll make it down there...

. gym with fyfer, tomorrow
. potluck/dinner party on thursday, maybe
. Fruit is playing a short show in San Rafael at 6pm this thursday. i'm pretty sure i can't make it, but they look interesting.
. on friday, Jethro Tull plays at the Paramount (but i'm not going because the cheap tickets are $55), King Cobra plays at the Hemlock, and Harvest, a play which asarwate described as a 'dark comedy about organ harvesting in India' (and he should know, 'cause he's in it) opens at the Durham Studio Theater, Dwinelle Hall, on Berkeley campus. i'll probably go to one of the latter two shows.
. saturday there's a clothing swap and also Writers with Drinks, at which Peter S. Beagle (along with several others) will be reading/speaking
. and then on sunday i want to make time for doing art or making things. but possibly i will just sleep, instead, or have hot chocolate with little marshmallows or coffee ice cream in it.

also, so that i don't lose track of it:
Serenity fanfic, from coraline. contains spoilers.