Below are the most recent 12 friends' journal entries.

Friday, November 6th, 2009
primordial1	11:52p	Everyone else has left...  the CD has changed from 80s to remixed 1940s jazz. I shouldn't, but I miss the days when this switch signaled  drunken pseudo salsa dancing around the kitchen. Because you know what?  Some days, happiness really is being twirled around the kitchen by someone you thinks loves you. If it was a better day, I'd go twirl myself.  But it isn't. So I'm going to go smoke. Current Mood: tired and emotional Current Music: Felix da Housecat's Heavenly House Remix - Sinnerman; Nina Simone (Comment on this)
primordial1	1:25p	Forgive me Father for I have sinned... It's been who-the-fuck-know-how-many days since my last confession. ( Aka 5 True Things. )</div> Today I don't want to be a policeman or a princess.  Today I want to be a mercenary.
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
merovingian	10:38p	Existence I park up the hill from my house, because gravitational potential energy is a good way to keep car thieves at bay. In the driveway near me was a car with a bumper sticker that read "MY OTHER CAR IS TOTALLY PANTOMIMED" and as I started up my car, I saw a guy (dressed in normal clothes and without benefit of greasepaint) walk out to the empty part of his driveway, about ten feet to the left of his existing car, mime sitting down and turning the keys, and suddenly become whisked off by some unknown force at the speed of an automobile. I followed him, of course, as he sat hovering a few feet in the air, zipping along the street at the speed of traffic. He got to a gas station, and parked in a spot with no pump, then paid the attendant nonexistent mimed money, went to a blank spot in the parking lot, and pretended to pump his nonexistent car. While he was inside getting his change, I was tempted to pretend keying his car, but I didn't. I just sort of stared at it. He came out and we had a conversation. Well, I talked but he communicated his side of the conversation very effectively with gestures. He's proud of his pretend sportscar (but he does have a mimed bumper sticker on it that says "MY OTHER CAR EXISTS") and likes his job. He works for the worldwide sinister conspiracy that watches over us all! He doesn't do the spying work, though. He's a technical writer. He takes all the data from the spying, and the Panopticon camera, and so forth, and compiles that information into the clean, concise, glossy-photo dossiers that you always see the conspiracy has in the movies. There's a lot of hard work in collating all that data into a meaningful dossier, but it's engaging work that uses his skills, and the benefits are great, so he's pretty happy. Technically, he's not allowed to talk about it, but, you know, technically, he didn't. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
kajafoglio	10:55p	Halloween Hit us Hard DSC01694 Originally uploaded by studiofoglio. I was going to only show my monster table when I was working on something interesting, but, in the interest of full disclosure, here is what my table looks like today. It's desperately in need of a clearing off, especially since I have some things I want to get done before Windycon. Steamcon was absolutely fantastic, and I'm thrilled to hear they're planning to do it again next year. I've got the first day we can apply for dealer's space marked on my calendar. The art guests were Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett, whose long-awaited book Boilerplate is finally out. As soon as I can pry it away from Phil, I look forward to reading it. He keeps going on about how amazing it is. I can't wait to find out for myself! Halloween was madness. Experiment #1 wanted to be Death. But not just ANY death, he wanted to be Death from the Discworld. So I made a little Death of Rats to go along with him. Unfortunately, the Death of Rats isn't quite finished, because while I was working on him, three pallets of books arrived unexpectedly in our driveway, and no help was nigh. (We expected them early this week, and they really ARE supposed to call first...) So Phil and I moved the whole mess ourselves. Fortunately, the rain had stopped, and it was a gorgeous, cool autumn day. The wonderful truck driver actually backed into our driveway and helped us drop the pallets right where we needed them, so at least we didn't have the usual "fun" of carrying the books up the driveway. So, yes, the new reprints are in. Now to get volumes one, two and three reprinted, and nine in print. Gah. It never ends! Anyway, the Death of Rats was finished enough to thrill the kid and be adorable for trick-or-treating, but I want to finish him properly before I post pictures. Experiment #2 was a pirate queen, because she's ALWAYS a pirate queen. So her outfit only needed minor repairs and tweaks. Whew. This year, I got her a little Folkmanis parrot puppet. So cute! (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
merovingian	2:43p	the coming of archy (today my LiveJournal is in disguise as Maria's, and I believe that means that I post poetry!) by Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel," 1927 The circumstances of Archy's first appearance are narrated in the following extract from the Sun Dial column of the New York Sun: Dobbs Ferry possesses a rat which slips out of his lair at night and runs a typewriting machine in a garage. Unfortunately, he has always been interrupted by the watchman before he could produce a complete story. It was at first thought that the power which made the typewriter run was a ghost, instead of a rat. It seems likely to us that it was both a ghost and a rat. Mme. Blavatsky's ego went into a white horse after she passed over, and someone's personality has undoubtedly gone into this rat. It is an era of belief in communications from the spirit land. And since this matter has been reported in the public prints and seriously received we are no longer afraid of being ridiculed, and we do not mind making a statement of something that happened to our own typewriter only a couple of weeks ago. We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about on the keys. He did not see us, and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operating the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started. We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before. After about an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of the poems which are always there in profusion. Congratulating ourself that we had left a sheet of paper in the machine the night before so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination, and this is what we found: expression is the need of my soul i was once a vers libre bard but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach it has given me a new outlook upon life i see things from the under side now thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she catch rats that is what she is supposed to be fore there is a rat here she should get without delay most of these rats here are just rats but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him he used to be a poet himself night after night i have written poetry for you on your typewriter and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet comes out of his hole when it is done and reads it and sniffs at it he is jealous of my poetry he used to make fun of it when we were both human he was a punk poet himself and after he has read it he sneers and then he eats it i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat or get a cat that is onto her job and i will write you a series of poems showing how things look to a cockroach that rats name is freddy the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat but something smaller i hope i will be a rat in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then dont you ever eat any sandwiches in your office i haven't had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings and paste and leave a piece of paper in your machine every night you can call me archy (6 Comments |Comment on this)
ebourland	12:20p	Louise Glück's "October" Today I read Louise Glück's "October". I read it every October. It's an injured reply to violence. (Domestic violence and early family violence is what I guess -- the exact violence is not clear but does not need to be, the poem works anyway.) The poem, about twelve pages long, is sad and beautiful. Available in a chapbook from Sarabande. Glück is not someone I would trust, personally -- I would not want to be her friend or her student, for example. I would not want to be married to or live with her. She's violent her own self, emotionally violent. And takes herself very seriously. Reading between the lines of her poems, the idea of her I get is: very smart, but dramatic and manipulative. I could be wrong entirely and maybe she is a jewel of a person through and through. Years ago I heard her read at LoC at the beginning of her term as Poet Laureate. Sycophants in the audience, sighing after every poem, one sitting directly behind me. A class of students was there probably under compulsion, and they shuffled and whined. She read very well, though, at a lectern in the front of the crowded room. I've read all of her published poems since her second book "The House on Marshland" and her poems continue to move me. They avoid, just barely, excessive drama. They're stark and damaged and they work really well. I'm cautious about Glück (and her disciples). Meanwhile I admire her. Happy Hallowe'en. Boo! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
merovingian	2:51p	Silver If I got these, I would be the coolest werewolf hunter ever. Who's with me? ( Cut for werewolf-hunting recruitment. ) But now that I think about it, maybe what a werewolf-hunter really needs is this. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
ratmmjess	5:15p	"You ask me why I struggle so/I say, 'with great power comes great responsibility.'" So I'm reading Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870-1910 (Rudolf Wagner, ed., SUNY Albany 2007), and it's chock-full of interesting and even imagination-provoking stuff. Some quotes from the first half of the book: "...Hankow merchants...were mostly compradors of foreign firms in Shanghai and got the news about their own city from the foreign-owned Shenbao...." "In this formalized sense, a public sphere did exist in premodern China not only in fact but also in the social imaginaire of how things could be, should be, and had been in the utopian past when sages had ruled the land. It appears in such notions as the 'thoroughfare for articulation,' yanlu, the way for open articulation to the emperor by society and lower officials of critical opinions concerning the state and its officials. It was a standard remonstrative figure of speech that this thoroughfare had to be kept open so as to prevent dynastic collapse." "Oe of the most-quoted derogatory terms for journalists, 'polished scoundrels' (siwen bailei) does not come from the general public but from Empress Dowager Cixi's edict ordering the persecution of journalists in October 1898 after the Hundred Days Reform." Of Cai Erkang, the beau ideal of Chinese journalists of the 1890s, we learn, among other things, that his pen names were "Master of the Steelpot," "Immortal Historian of Intensive Aroma," and "Old Man Plucking Fragrant Iris." In 1876, "the Great Wall was at this time already famous and much depicted in the West, but it had not become a national symbol in China, where it was rather remembered as the place of wasted corvée days." The British Consulate's disdain for the Chinese papers was based on the major publisher's "'pandering' to his Chinese readers by failing to treat the queen on a par with the Chinese emperor. The title ying wang, 'English prince,' puts the queen into a slot reserved for imperial relatives and some higher tribal chieftains." More broadly, Joining the Global Public has a large amount of material on the intensively competitive world of Chinese journalism from the 1870s to 1910. Confession: I didn't know there were Chinese newspapers then. But there were, and they were largely (but not entirely) modeled on American and English newspapers. Joining the Global Public tells you about how, why, what, and when they published, and about who published them. Most interesting to me is Ernest Major (1841-1908), a Briton who was, in the words of modern Chinese scholars, a “true friend of China” and created newspapers by and for the Chinese, not the Europeans in China. Joining the Global Public tells us a lot about Major and his reporters and editors, and Major’s numerous areas of expertise, attitude toward his newspaper’s competitors, and approach to journalism. And…well…I’m irresistibly drawn to comparing Major to J. Jonah Jameson, mapping the other editors and reporters described in Joining the Global Public to Daily Bugle employees, and thinking about the possibilities of a Chinese reporter, Bi Ping Tou, who is bitten by an earth tiger spider and gains the proportional abilities of a spider—just as the Boxers are becoming active.... Current Mood: busy (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
kajafoglio	10:18p	Maid of Fail maidoffail_grey Originally uploaded by studiofoglio. Here's the whole picture, I had to crop it when I made my LJ icon. Phil drew this a while back just for fun. We're still wondering what "Maid of Win" would be like... Edit: Oh, and also I suppose we can blame... TOOO MUUUCH MAAANGA! (As if there is any such thing...) (38 Comments |Comment on this)
merovingian	8:56p	Hybrid Vigor "I've decided," my friend said, "that from now on I'll only eat food that comes from hybrid cultures. You know, like a Chinese restaurant that starts selling donuts because it's next to a police station. Or Zante's Indian Pizza, in San Francisco, where you can get a curry pizza. Indian buffets that serve a few Chinese dishes, or British-Indian cuisine, or Tex-Mex, or pretty much anything Jamaican. Maybe I'll drive down to Los Angeles and see if Poncho & Wong's is still open. Heck, I'll even take a pseudo-Indian hippie place, or a burger from a Chinese-American restaurant or Korean ribs from an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet. Anything that comes from an intersection of multiple cultures, I will eat." "I think this is a good plan," I said, "and I will support it in any way I can." "I'm glad I have your carte-blanche support," she replied, "because the other part of my plan is that I pour one hundred live tarantulas into your bed every night. Also, no take-backs." Darnit! I don't want tarantulas in my bed, but she said no takebacks! There's no way to get around that. Current Music: future echoes of the Wild Things soundtrack I plan to buy (10 Comments |Comment on this)
jacksonpublick	5:48p	Let The Sun Shine In The second episode of the fourth season of The Venture Bros. airs tonight on adultswim. Entitled "Handsome Ransom," it was the first script we wrote for this season--back when we still thought we'd be doing 13 episodes straight through and starting production immediately after pre-production of season 3 finished. ...Which also means it was written when Michael Jackson was still alive... Too soon? Anyway, those who were confused or annoyed by last week's convoluted premiere can relax...this one's a pretty straight forward comic ransom romp. It picks up a little while after the events of the premiere, and it's got The Monarch in it. So you won't have to think too hard and you can watch it all regular and just enjoy it and stuff. Assuming the network actually shows both halves of it. We Love You, JP Kevin "Batman" Conroy guest stars in this episode, and he was a total joy to work with. A real pro who was game for whatever we threw at him and, if anything, almost got a little too into the role. Current Music: Cheap And Cheerful -- The Kills (259 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
merovingian	10:04p	"I was into this dying sun before it was cool," the satellite told me sadly. (6 Comments |Comment on this)