goddesscafe

Friday, May 10, 2002 :::

Damn Laura, you beat me to those Salon blogging stories. Googlewhack. Never heard of that.

OK, had time today between working and flirting outrageously with the freelancer we just hired so jotted down anything interesting I came across, like this note from the Peruvian government to Microsoft. I personally think this is a little too perfect and endorsement of open-source to be true, but it is a fun read.

In other fun news, the Ontario Superior Court has now officially ruled that you have to let a guy bring his gay boyfriend to the prom. One thing I do find amusing is that the guy's boyfriend is 21, good thing Canada has those liberal age of consent laws. (And he lives in Ontario, which struck down that unfortunate clause about anal sex being illegal until you are 18.)

Other educational news, when in doubt, use comics to teach physics and despite what John Stossel makes up for his corporate masters, organic food really does have less pesticide residue. (If you can't get on the NYTimes, try this from CNN, with different spin.)

Speaking of corporate masters, you knew Tivo and such were going to force product placement even further down our throats.

Fun, sarcastic article about trying to build something to warn our descendents about our nuclear waste that they won't feel compelled to dig up to see what we were so anxious about.

Finally, tomorrow I go off to see the highly bizarre play from the not-really-related to me provacateur, Romeo Castellucci

::: posted by Laurent Castellucci at 10:49 PM

An apology from Rodrigo to Laura: Sorry, If I sounded snotty and “laughingly told [you] things like "stick to writing [when]…. you don't "get,"[the artwork-this in this particular show it could so either way]..

My sincerest apologies.. My replies may have stemmed from my own massive insecurities about my role in art. Actually, I greatly admire your dedication to writing and would welcome your company to any art exhibition. If I can’t defend the value of a particular piece, why should I say it worthy?

Here's a Salon article on how blogs are skewing google results. (speaking of which, Phoca created a googlewhack with this, just as I predicted) (and, uh, speaking of tinklesauce, I think this must be Kurt's potty) And another on blogging in general.

::: posted by alura allumeuse at 2:21 PM

Thursday, May 09, 2002 :::

OK, this is too good. People are petitioning to have the name of second Lord of the Rings movie changed. The Two Towers is insensitive to the victims of September 11, they reason.

“THE TITLE IS clearly meant to refer to the attacks on The World Trade Center,” notes the petition posted at petitiononline.com and signed by more than 1,200 people. “It is unforgivable that this should be allowed to happen.”

How does one react to that?
(Interestingly, while searching the site, I could only find the petition against changing the name)

::: posted by Laurent Castellucci at 9:30 PM

Yes, since I don't do anything as cool as belly-dancing, my picture in the paper is of me drinking. Oh, Mr. Seal, the Angela in that picture is the one I was heading down to Greece to meet last summer. The Andrew is the boy I hooked her up with when I was there.
If you click the link in the pic, you will find that I have nothing to do with the story. We were just hanging at Hurley's and the Gazette photographer came up because he needed a pic of "generic Montrealers" drinking. Despite my great affront at being termed "generic", we acquiesced.

Alura, I second elissa -- a highly saucy and delectable back that you were presenting. (As a long-time fan of saucy backs, I cannot understand her surprise in discovering one, however.) As for Europe, when does your video program end? (Since I likely won't get sent to Berlin by my company, I had already promised myself I'd cross the pond on my own power.)

::: posted by Laurent Castellucci at 7:35 PM

Wednesday, May 08, 2002 :::

2002 is Gaudi International Year, celebrating his 150th birthday. (discovered this through the Psychic Reader, oddly enough) Barcelona is going nuts with special events to commemorate him. As we all know, Gaudi freaking rocks. I swear, I'm gonna be there before the year is out. I'm very seriously considering taking off for a Euro-trip immediately after my video program ends, assuming I'm still employed and have money then. Or hell, even if I don't. I've been obsessing for far too long. Anyone with me?

::: posted by alura allumeuse at 11:32 PM

Here's an article on this music/art installation I saw recently at SFMOMA with Rodrigo (note to self: do not take your attention-deficit self to museums with people who want to go to grad school for art criticism. Or to art gallery openings that you don't "get," where you will be laughingly told things like "stick to writing"). I was totally fascinated and thought that Mr. Happy Fingers would completely dig it.

A Flash art data project devoted to our favorite intersection. Man, I swear that area gets filthier by the day...where's this so-called gentrification of the neighborhood? PUNI recently did a series on the public pay toilets there. Sly Squiggle tells me he's seen heroin addicts in the toilets on the Embarcadero, though. We were there last Friday after a movie, and saw all these rollerbladers/skaters, some with locally made light-up wheels. Apparently they roll all over the city from like 9-1 every Fri night. If it wasn't so damn cold, I'd consider joining them.

Hey, someone's writing a book about Asian underground.

::: posted by alura allumeuse at 3:51 PM

1. cheers to having houseguests. rob & kristin mccormick are crashing with me for a few days, while kristin attends a conference of Retail Print Music Distributors (she heads up the sheet music section at Smith Holden Music in Bloomington).

2. accidental upside of living in a city with intense racial tension and outbreaks of violence: great public speakers. tomorrow night, cornel west*; friday night, angela davis.

3. for the national enquirer garbage-picker in us all: celebrity riders. riders are the lists of "required items" that, say, the people at the Fillmore get when a performer rolls into town. as in, "if i don't have 45 shiitake mushrooms on a pewter plate backstage, i'll never play your venue again!" for the time-challenged, my favorite few from first glance:

... moby requires 10 pairs of white cotton crew socks and 10 cotton boxer shorts at each show.
... ozzy needs to have an ENT doctor on hand backstage who is qualified to administer a B-12 shot.
... christina aguilera insists on flintstones chewables, knudsen or clover cottage cheese (knudsen or clover ONLY), votive candles, oreos, banana chips, carnation instant breakfast, 8 cans of red bull, soy cheese, dried cranberries, bottles of water (NOT evian), and about 40 other specifics.

::: posted by kevin seal at 3:49 PM

Tuesday, May 07, 2002 :::

YOWZA!!!
Alura, you look SO sexy in that pic! despite not being able to see your exotic, tribal belly, you got it goin' on! i never thought a back could be so saucy! and that blue, with those ties that just scream, "you knooow you wanna untie me, baby... but ya can't cause i'm too sexy for yo' eyes!" congrats on making the front page! you're sure to have a line of drooling east bay boys at your door tonight :)
(just like the boot, who will soon have the blogette from his new exhibit at his front door.)

(in the pic, your right arm looks to be eight feet long. young lady, have you been partaking in those dangerous tribal stretching rituals??)

::: posted by elissarita at 3:53 PM

* Not off hand, Mr. Seal. I will say this: as the owner of a G3 laptop I am looking on with envy at recent developments in Apple's stable of products. My once beautiful, state-of-the-art machine now seems tarnished and a bit sad. I would direct you to Apple's recent iBooks: they are the better computer. Take a look at the following ebay search string. (It would seem that my computer has depreciated by 66 percent, crap.)

* My most recent photo exhibits, One Woman and Portentious Pictures, Nearly Symmetrical, may be of interest. And while you're taking a look around, it may interest you to know that I have redesigned the main podgehodge page. In the spirit of the May first reboot, I have changed the thing (using some of the same graphics that have been there for awhile, but more handsomely put together, I hope.)

::: posted by the boot at 11:47 AM

a nice summary of why CARP ruling is evil and why we should defend the rights of internet radio.

okay, getting ready to delve into Laurent's multitude of intriguing-looking links... does anybody know anyone selling a G3 laptop? or any leads on getting a reconditioned (read: cheap) one?

::: posted by kevin seal at 10:13 AM

OK, so the Trib article on our class was laaame. Frederique was quoted as saying things that would never come out of her mouth, like "Be the goddess that you are" (the title of the story was "Inner Goddess") and "It's the only exercise where you get to dress up and be beautiful. That alone makes it a worthwhile activity." Riiiiiight. They also say that it's becoming a trend because of Shakira and Aliyaah. Which, come to think of it, might explain the recent presence of black and Latina teens in the class, but that had never occurred to me. Tribal style is hardly ripe for MTV, you know?

::: posted by alura allumeuse at 8:59 AM

Monday, May 06, 2002 :::

Concerning students. Yup, there were lots of students who couldn't think or write. Oddly, more were in the Journalism department in the advertising class than in the Gender studies. (Odd only because you would think decent writing ability would be a requirement for the J-school.)

You learn real fast that you better start giving as bad a grade as possible. I did my best to bring back Ds and Cs, but even if IU isn't Harvard, there are limits to how low you can grade someone.

::: posted by Laurent Castellucci at 7:32 PM

Sorry about the vanishing act, but doing the whole 30th birthday thing (At 3:33 am May 1, a Good Beltane(or even Walpurgisnacht) baby am I.

Just to scroll back for a sec (how do you do internal links on this thing, anyway?) -- English-speakers aren't frowned upon so much in Quebec as English-speaking Canadians who never learned French. That Scientific Illiteracy thing didn't surprise me, but if you read it carefully you see some of those questions are completely unfair.

I must have missed some bit involving Sean Lennon, since I didn't get that at all -- I am often dumb. And while not really attached, if we predicate blogging on new booty, my participation will drop even further. :)

Right now, I'm being all pissed off with the whole International Criminal Court thing. What isn't mentioned there but was in a NYtimes article over the weekend is that the US is also pointing out it will not consider itself bound by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties -- it would make ignoring the spirit of treaties awfully inconvenient.

Oh look, other places in the Americas might be discontent and doubt democracy. Well, since the US has done such a sterling example of supporting it...

And, of course, the assassination of Pim Fortuyn is more than a little freaky. Of course Stateside we're settling for the random violence route.

And super congrats to Ms. Alura for getting in!!! I, too, will stalk you at Cannes when you get there.

::: posted by Laurent Castellucci at 7:24 PM

i blogged this once, and the blog-gods ate it, not even leaving a thank-you note or a request for seconds. blast them.

anyway, a few of the homunculus guys and i played in an ensemble yesterday celebrating terry riley. it was for a documentary film on his piece, "in c," which birthed the minimalist composition movement back in '64.

much, much, much fun. 20-or-so musicians, most of whom had never met, reading through this chart without rehearsal. the piece works like this:

- 53 discreet little phrases
- each player repeats one phrase at a time, moving step-by-step through the 53 little musical ideas; move to the next idea whenever you feel like it
- the only rule: stay in tempo
- there's no conductor
- the result: interesting "accidental" polyrhythms and stacked harmonies; while the sitar (we were lucky enough to have a sitar player) is on the drone that is #27, the flute and string bass are on the jumpy little sixteenth-note arpeggio that comprises #26, and the saxophones are somewhere down at #31 or #32, playing a dotted-quarter-note ascending line.

i now see how much minimalist composition has in common with indian ragas, and the meditative state that one goes into while playing such a piece. after we finished (which happens after everyone lands on a minor-key trill, then crescendo and decrescendo together), we all raised our heads slowly to look at one another, blinking exaggeratedly and smiling cautiously as if we'd all emerged from a nap. we asked how long we'd been "in it," thinking it had been around half an hour. turned out to be 68 minutes.

in other friend promotion: two great public access shows for you bay area dwellers: reuben's and virgil's. also, if you want to be a circus freak, you should join the circus for which johannes directs the music.

::: posted by kevin seal at 1:02 PM

Here's a new job for you underemployed folk – sideshow freak at Coney Island*. No, really, they've got a camp for it and everything. Hey, I'll go and be a mermaid. ;)

For creativelissa, desirer of friend-promo: forwarded by the former Col.K operative Sir Kelvmore – the upcoming world premiere of Deviant Rhythms, a documentary made by a friend of Matt's (who was interviewed for it, along with a bunch of Bay Area DJs and musicians), about the influence of technology on music and world music traditions. I'm so there.

And there may be some self-promo tomorrow. My bellydancing classmate Karen just called to tell me that me and her are on the cover of the city section of today's Oakland Tribune (no web-link to the story, as far as I can see). Oh, man. There was a reporter there last week during class, and I was looking all scrungy and nerdy. I cringe to imagine the pic.

::: posted by alura allumeuse at 11:37 AM

Sunday, May 05, 2002 :::

"The court rules that of discrimination because from findings, lead aslo have effect on male sperms."

I'm trying to help my friend Chris (the aforementioned blonde bipolar musician journalist/obnoxious drunk/writer/chauffeur to L.A./philosophy grad student...Elissa says I should give people names, although I think epithets are far more fun) grade short papers for an undergrad business ethics class at San Jose State. I want to weep. No understanding of sentence or paragraph construction, tense agreement, singular/plural, spelling, ANYTHING. Not even the assignment. I got through 2 papers before giving up. "Make the misery stop!" he's moaning. Emily/Laurent, do/did you have this problem with your students? Are they illiterate, lacking critical thinking or argument skills? How can you even begin to grade something like that when they're starting from so far behind?

My mom had a student who wrote this about his San Francisco vacation:
"Once we got off the cable cat and walked one more block we were at fisherman's Warf. There were huge cargo ships and sailboats everywhere. We decided one of the first things to do there was to take a boat out to alkatraz. The ride was out was brisk and damp with views of the city and the golden gate bridge. Once we arrived at albatross there was a tour guide, which was nice because I like to go and do my own thing. The island is twelve Acres with exotic plants and birds everywhere. Alkatraz got its name form the sea galls that infest the island."

But hey, as one biz student wrote, "Different people will react differently to indifferent questions."

::: posted by alura allumeuse at 2:51 PM