Month: July 2008

My friend Matt Belanger and fellow artists Ven Voisey, Sean Riley have a new show up called lumens: networked realities: (re) connecting the adamses. I love the stories behind the lamps here . This is what Matt is great at, finding unique ways of eliciting stories.

And here is Matt, looking more and more like a hippie every day, I must say. Congratulations Matt and Ven and Sean!!

[Video removed because the link no longer works.]

The other night the cats were playing with something and I looked over and my mind registered “bug” and so I ignored them. I don’t like them to kill anything, but it’s a compromise I’ve made. In the morning I found a dead mouse where they were playing. I cried and cried because I could have saved him.

The next night I had a shot at redemption. I saw Finney pounce, and sure enough a little mouse was hanging half in and half out of his mouth. I ran over, turned Finney upside down and shook him. I didn’t know what else to do, I wasn’t going to reach into his mouth, although maybe I should have. But the mouse fell out with no visible cuts so I had acted in time. The mouse went tearing around the apartment, Finney went tearing after the mouse, and Buddy weirdly just watched. Finney caught the mouse AGAIN. God, I hate myself. I had to free the mouse AGAIN, it was just awful for everyone, me, the mouse, Finney.

UPDATE: I just realized my account was wrong about how I finally saved the mouse and so I edited this post. I blocked how it really happened. After I had rescued the mouse from Finney a second time he got away from me and I couldn’t find him. Finney did. A THIRD TIME. He had taken it into the bathroom and the bathtub, his favorite torture chamber, because they can’t get away and he can play with them and kill them at his leisure (okay, that is smart of Finney, in a fiendish, evil way). I grabbed Finney and locked him out of the bathroom while I got a box and caught the mouse, which was admittedly easy now that he was trapped in the bathtub, poor little guy. He still had no cuts or bites that I could see.

I took him downstairs and released him on the street by the garbage cans (food). I don’t know that his chances for survival are all that better on the street, but at least I saved him from one possible awful fate. Maybe only to die at another, but I did my best.

Plans for today: brunch with a friend and hopefully later I’m going to Hellboy with another friend.

The picture is a postage stamp commemorating Leo Lionni’s mouse character Frederick. My mouse looked kinda like that except his expression was more like, “Assholes.” (To me and Finney. Buddy he has no beef with.)

I meant to show Finney doing his favorite thing, batting things off my desk, but the blue highlighter apparently scared him. And what is that music I’m playing? I own it and I can’t identify it. Palestrina? Byrd? YES. Definitely Byrd. We just performed this a few months ago.

Reading The Death of Ivan Ilych yesterday was such a mistake. Made me feel completely bleak, of course. What was I thinking?? I had to re-create the distance to death that Tolstoy so brilliantly and effectively showed his character lose. We are ALL going to have to face that, the one time when we’re no longer going to be able to say, “Well, at least I’m not dying now.”

The funny part of all this is how Tolstoy showed Ivan Ilych’s desperation about how he lived his life, did he live it rightly or did he waste his time. So what do I do with that awareness? Make videos of my cats knocking things off other things (thank you, Monty Python). I am so Ivan Ilych, in his pre-marriage phase.

I cracked up when I saw this picture in the Times of people doing walking meditation. It’s something I learned when I learned MBSR (Mindful Based Stress Reduction) and I actually love this technique, but when you do it you look like the walking dead. I only do it in my house, but I’m dying to try it walking along the river, or anywhere outside, but you need privacy which I don’t have. These people may look funny, but at that moment they probably felt so alive.

I finished The Secret Life of Bees and I’m sorry to say that in the end, it never really fulfilled the promise of the beginning. It was no To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m now reading The Death of Ivan Ilych. Oh Tolstoy. I love you.

SYTYCD Roundup. I think it’s pretty obvious Comfort and Thayne are going home. I feel bad about Thayne. First bad choreography, and then a bad partner. I was glad to hear Mia’s comments to him. Thank you, Mia. I wish there was some way Thayne could stay. He’s a better dancer than Twitch, but people love Twitch so that’s not going to happen. What else? There were a few routines that were so good I had to watch them more than once. Katee and Joshua, both routines. I so disagreed with the judges about Joshua’s waltz — I was blown away by his gracefulness. I guess I have to believe them that he wasn’t doing things technically correct, what do I know, but I didn’t care. I loved watching him. The Bollywood routine!! Courtney and Gev, still growing on me, loved seeing Pasha again, more Pasha please, Kherington and Twitch’s krump routine … the Bollywood routine!! I think I watched that four times.

I was so thrilled to see a video of Dr. Elizabeth McMahan on YouTube. She was one of the scientists who worked at the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. She was nicknamed BettyMac to distinguish her from Betty Humphrey, who was there at the same time. I interviewed BettyMac when I was in Durham, and she’s been very helpful ever since. In fact, I just pulled out my file on her because I only recently gained enough understanding of physics to realize that something she said in a letter to the famous physicist John A. Wheeler was kind of ahead of its time, and so now I have to re-read it and his response to her to see what he thought of it.

The full length version of the video is up at the Rhine Research Center, where she gave the talk, and a shortened version is up on YouTube [the video has been taken down].

BettyMac made this drawing while on a trip to Pitcairn Island in the late 90’s, I believe. (She left parapsychology and went on to become a very respected entomologist.) I couldn’t immediately find an explanation for it. It must have been something she witnessed while there, but that is just a guess. I have four volumes of an autobiography she wrote and I just love love LOVE the drawings running all through them. I found some of them here and there while going through the Duke Archives.

I would have taken one if I had the least bit of a criminal streak. But no. Those nuns did their job well. I don’t believe in God, but there is right and there is wrong.