Reviews

Don't read a review or talk to anyone, just go see Little Miss Sunshine. Damn I wish I'd written it.

I finished Allison Bechdel's Fun Home yesterday. It is a beautiful graphic memoir about growing up, reading with your father, and finally putting the family secrets all in perspective. Speaking of perspective, the drawings make use of prespective brilliantly, with the point of view shifting to help portray the story. At one moment you can be on the ground, the next looking up at children hanging off the stairs, looking down at your father catching you in the pool. It's really wonderful.

We also saw Devil Wears Prada, a perfect movie to spend some time enjoying yourself in air conditioning. It made me incredibly nostalgic for New York and the publishing world. My old haunts, my old scramble to clean the desk, my old not getting into the same elevator. The clothes were pretty awful and the story was pretty lame - she's BAD because she has to work late! But Meryl was magnificent and the girl who plays the first assistant was hillarious.

Battery! Schmattery!

So I turned on the computer the other day and got a warning that said "Your battery is low, press F1 to continue and F2 to configure."
Ahem.
So I went to the Dell Website, thinking to go to their SUPPORT page and SEARCH for information about this low code OS ERROR on their machine. They didn't have one.

Think about this. A computer company doesn't have a place on their web site that consumers can look up support information. Is this dumb or what? You can't search for HELP at Dell. There is no little link on their main page, or poking around that sends you to a support area. I later find out that's because they have a separate site with a separate url. So if you just go to dell.com you can't get HELP.

So I rooted around in the closet and found the Owner's Manual. There were two battery entries in the book, one of which says that you need to be careful when you replace the battery because it could EXPLODE.

So I googled Dell Battery Explode and found out that there is a lovely photograph of a Laptop Exploding into Flames

So for now I am just keeping the computer on.

This is a photograph of a lovely, rustic mountain art cabin.

Signs: & Things I wonder about

So it's now the tenth day of a heat wave (in West LA, the valleys have been burning up longer than that) with temps above 100 digits and I say "It's hot." It didn't bother me really, it still cools down at night (though apparently not as much as it used to according to the LA Times the low temperature has risen 7 degrees in the past twenty years because we keep on cementing things up.) Until a couple of days ago and then it had just been too damn hot for too damn long. Our apartment is un-air conditioned and so we use fans and appreciate the bit of ocean breeze that kicks up around 4:00 ish. But we're on the ground floor and it's a bit of a dicey neighborhood so I don't like to leave all the windows open at night, particularly in the bedroom. So I spent a lot of the weekend napping with my body sweating up the sheets where ever my skin touched the bed. And staying awake at night listening to the motorcycles roaring down La Cienega and homeless people routing around in the alley, while sweating.

The thing about heat this hot for so long is it saps your ability to do anything. You certainly don't want to move fast. And you certainly don't want to have the sun touch your skin. And you certainly don't want to exercise, or paint, or walk about town taking photos. Cooking seems incredibly complicated and ice cubes are in high demand, but you are too unmotivated to get up and walk the ten steps to get them.

Which makes you wonder about the commitment of all those suicide bombers in Iraq. It is hot in Iraq, temps for months in the century mark. And yet people can consistently get worked up enough to go out and blow themselves up in a crowd of civilians. I mean when it's as hot as Hades and you are going to blow yourself up, you know it's going to get quite a bit hotter when you explode. I can barely make myself go out and water the herbs in this weather and yet day after day someone is willing to strap on twenty pounds of explosive and walk in the heat to a market and blow himself up. That is a marketing message that is WORKING!

Beso

Beso trotted over here to my chair and jumped up so he could breathe on me (the way he likes to) and pushed me back into the wall because my chair is on rollers. Then he told me he was 1) bored and 2) hot and 3 I didn't put enough photos of him up on the internet.

Well I've done something about number 3 now.

Foreign Policy

An American Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists should Fall In Love With
The New York Times today continues to prove that it has a DAMN GOOD Op-Ed page. And considering the hopelessness of this week's news; the Mumbai bombings, the continuing descent into tribal civil war in Iraq, the beginning of the Hesbollah\Israel war, Geo. W. receiving a barrel of herring - it was relieving to read that there could be a game plan for trying to stop all this violence and to try and make a world that had more economic, social, political and ecological justice for all of it's inhabitants.

This is a picture of a male date palm flower. The female date palms create dates that are inedible by hound dogs while maintaining an irresistible allure to hound dogs. So it adds a sort of karma-esque aspect to life in Palm Tree Lined L.A., what goes around (and down) comes back to you one way or the other.

Reviews

This is a flower from a tree - I think it looks like parrot beaks. Anyway we've been seeing things. Last week we went on a public radio movie binge and saw the two public radio movies. Prairie Home was a stirring reminder of why some people are on radio - Garrison Keillor is very, very odd looking! And WordPlay was a fascinating reminder that Bill Clinton is smart and able to solve problems, so it made me nostalgic for the days when the U.S. was run by someone who was smart and could solve problems.
TAXIDERMY! We also popped into downtown LA and saw the Rauchenberg combine show at MOCA. This was a rather comprehensive show of just Raushenberg's combine work. It was very interesting and actually I thought it packed a greater visual punch than the Rauchenberg retrospective at the Guggenheim a couple of years ago. That show was so huge that you were beat down by the sheer output of the man. There were a couple of paintings that had a chain and a brick attached to them, so that they couldn't run away, a commentary on slavery? Who knows, but just fabulous to see a chained brick painting. And of course the famous goat combine was there. The kashmir stuffed goat surrounded by a tire and standing on a painting is a classic Rauchenberg image. And I was glad to see that it had been cleaned up and restored. The last time I had seen it the goat was rather dusty, but now it's coat gleams. The amount of stuffed animals in the show made me think that maybe Rauchenberg was into taxidermy the way David Sedaris is into taxidermy and that maybe they are related, since this taxidermy fetish is genetic; Gengis Khan --> Bob Rauchenberg --> David Sedaris. Makes sense doesn't it?
We also went to the Hockney portraits show, and I found out - once again, but like oysters you have to try occasionally to see if your tastes change - that Hockney's work leaves me cold. I did enjoy seeing a portrait of a friend of mine, but the paintings did not move me or transport me or make me think of anything except that Hockney paints a lot of paintings. He has a good work ethic.
Speaking of paintings I was cruising around and checked in on my friend M. and she put some lovely watercolours up on the web.

Watercoloursbymolly

I also found this blog site of a painter who is, I guess, attempting to paint one painting a day. At least his blog is titled one painting a day. He paints a lot of images from video games, which I guess is the next step of art dealing with pop art, and there are some images of circuit boards that I rather like. But it is this painting of toast being buttered that I think is pretty fun.

toast painting

We've also bought a lot of music, and I must say that I bought the new Neil Young album simply because he has a song called lets impeach the president, because I've never really been a Neil Young fan, that's for rather older surfer dudes, not moi. But it is a rollicking album, and Young's raspy voice makes singing along, at the top of your voice as you drive down La Cienega with your windows open very fun. "LET'S IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT!"

Yeah baby!

Signs: Reading Room

Here's an old Christian Science Reading Room sign, the building is still being used as a CS Reading Room so it is also a contemporary sign. Notice how they don't ask you to ask them about CS, like the "Ask me About Kabala" sign down the street from me. No, CS is old fashioned and discrete, they let you rest your feet in a reading room. Which is why there are fewer and fewer CSists in the world, they are not keeping up in the cutthroat competition that religion has become these days.

Speaking of a losing company; General Motors. I don't know if this is happening in your hood or not, but in LA GM is offering to subsidize your gas consumption at 1.99 if you buy one of their gas guzzling cars, like the Hummer, which gets 10 to 12 miles per gallon in the city. But after a year you're on your own sucker! I was ranting about how stupid this is and how no one would fall for such a stupid offer, and how desperate GM must be to offer this kind of money losing incentive - you know, just because I like to kick a dog when it's down. But my beloved, C. said, "Well it's just like when we were at H.D. Buttercup and that guy said that all those 90 dollar pillows were on sale at 20% off if you bought four. And we spent 30 minutes looking at all the pillows trying to find the perfect combination of four pillows because they were 20% off." Which we did, because it was such a deal, like 1.99 gas. I mean for four decorative pillows instead of paying 360 dollars we would be spending 288 dollars. On pillows. It was such a good deal. And we had picked out the four perfect pillows that would look so great on the new couch when I realized that 1) we're unemployed 2) we have hound dogs and 3) hound dogs and silk pillows that are dry clean only do not go together so the whole IDEA of DECORATOR pillows in this context was RIDICULOUSLY STUPID. And we left with out any pillows. I mean it was such an insane idea that I had to make ridiculous an ADVERB for chrissakes. That's how stupid it was. But it wasn't as stupid as paying over 50 grand for a car that gets 10 miles per gallon so you can get 1.99 gas for a year. That's just pathetic.