I just received "Subject: Dating 101: Dealing With the Race Factor".

The spam itself is boringly the same, but the header definitely caught my eye. (Not in tyhe way intended.)

Last spring there began to be serious advertising for a rock festival in Rothbury, Michigan. That's up the other side of the lake (beyond Saugatuck, if you know the general area). The headliners were to be The Dead, Dylan, String Cheese Incident, and Willy Nelson, with a page-long list of more, from King Sunny Ade to Ani DiFranco to Toots and the Maytalls.
WOW!!
The tickets were $250, to set up a tent next to your car, with more luxurious packages priced in line . . .
WOW!!
Ah, but the fine print giveth and the fine print taketh away. They were recruiting for at least two pools of warm bodies, one to sort garbage on the Green Team, and one to be generally necessary all over the place. Work three six-hour shifts, and your ticket is free.
WOW!!

So I have a narrative of the long weekend to do, including getting there and back, and a variety of notes on current pop culture(s).

But my bottom line was:

King Sunny Ade

Finally got to see him live. Way fun. solid

Femi Kuti & the Positive Force

Perhaps the least exciting act I caught, but that's only me.

Flogging Molly

They kick names and take butt.

String Cheese Incident

One of the most important appearances of the show, since they haven't been playing lately. They have an enormous, fun following, but they just don't do it for me. I do not mean to insinuate they're bad, but for me, personally, there just isn't that much excitement.

Zappa Plays Zappa

Dweezil does do an excellent job of reproducing his father's complicated music, but, again just personally, it was like the best cover band in the world. It is a great band, all excellent, but I felt really odd about the performance. I wonder if other fans who saw Frank live have similar feelings.

The Dead

It's not quite the same band, it's not quite the same repertoire, and the show isn't organized quite the same way, but it's the real thing. THEY ARE HOT.
I lost most of the second set to my overnight work shift (to be detailed in a future episode), but the very second song was "Eyes of the World", which totally does me, so I was ok. And I did get to see the fireworks, since they were perfectly framed by the entrance to the mess tent where I was doing light cleanup.
The schedule had said 8 - 12. The two sets were 8:30-10:30 and 11-1. When I Googled “"the dead" rothbury setlist” the next morning, there were almost 2,000 hits. It's up to about 4,000 now.

Toots and the Maytalls

He's getting old.
Does every African diasppora group have a couple of women over on one side of the stage being hot? All three I saw at Rothbury did.

Matisyahu

I didn't catch his set, but he was right before Ani DiFranco, so I did run into the Chabadniks who were there harassing unobservant Jews to lay tfillin, just this once, right now.

Willie Nelson and Family

I really enjoyed being able to watch his fingers closely on the jumbotron. He doesn't need me to remind people, hey this guy is good

Ani DiFranco

My own biggest takeaway. I'd never seen her live; I now will at every opportunity. Now I understand how outside boundaries she is. Her lyrics are well within the general area I'd expect from a "singer-songwriter", ranging from purely personal to ragingly political, and she mostly was playing a big acoustic guitar. She leaps and jumps and athleticizes like a big-time rocker, at the same time. Just whatever she likes. A seriously hot performance.

Bob Dylan and His Band

The ruin of a once-lousy voice.
He still puts his old lyrics to completely different arrangements, sometimes. Actually, I could put "still" into most of what one might say.
He was in some sort of black suit and top hat, with his five-piece band in matching white jackets, strongly suggesting a big band.

Tags: on tour
Current Location: home again
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: http://www.righteousbabe.com/ani/

I just heard about this from today's bOINGbOING, but it opened a week ago.
Is there any word-of-mouth on it?

"The time has come that the Chicago Police be honored and recognized for their contributions to maintaining law and order - and for taking a stand against Anarchy."
"The time was the hot summer month of August '68. The Democratic National Convention was about to start and the only thing that stood between Marxist street thugs and public order was a thin blue line of dedicated, tough Chicago police officers."
"For decades the collective Left has white-washed what really happened during the riots of 1968 and 1969. Chicago Police officers who participated in the riots continue to endure unending criticism - all of which is unwarranted, inaccurate and wrong."

"If you were a Chicago cop who was in the Chicago riots - we want you!"

http://www.chicagoriotcops.com/


"Chicago Riot Cops Reunion"
"DATE: Friday, June 26th, 2009"
"LOCATION: Chicago FOP Lodge"
"TIME: 7:00 pm."
"KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Superintendent Phil Cline, others TBA"
http://www.chicagoriotcops.com/3.html


Fraternal Order of Police
Chicago Lodge 7
1412 W. Washington Blvd.

This is prompted by reading yet another blog post about the problem of the reporters being much too chummy with the reported on.  "Stockholm Syndrome"  "the Villagers"  etc.
And careful news readers already know that the real financial problem was the takeover by Wall Street.  Newspapers were making very nice profits.  So they got bought up by leveraging maniacs who demanded that profit margins go up every year, year after year.  An insanity more prominent in other places, but no less destructive in journalism.

But there's something else, beneath those.  Being a newspaper reporter used to be a job.  Somehow, it got turned into a profession.  Mike Royko, one of the most famous reporters to come from Chicago, grew up over a bar.  Now there are fancy degrees in journalism.  I very strongly suspect that a lot of the fire went out when the class of the job-holders changed.  (I dunno.  Maybe I should ask Abe.)

It's a long-standing puzzle to me that it seems so much clearer to me than to many other people that one of the basic drivers of the right-wing program is sexual hysteria. "Anti-abortion"ists want to punish sexually active women. Homosexuality is so deeply provocative that it can't be talked about rationally at all.

But I just ran into another angle, which hadn't occurred to me before, on the wonderful blog Mind Hacks —

Tell me about your mother superior

I found this fascinating aside in a 1969 article on 'Psychiatric Illness in the Clergy' about a group of monks who underwent psychoanalysis, causing two thirds of them to realise they were "called to married life".
The Pope immediately banned psychoanalysis from the priesthood as a result:

[Bovet] suggests that many clergy would benefit from psychotherapy during their training. This was attempted in Mexico when in 1961 a group of 60 Benedictine monks underwent group and individual psychoanalysis. However, of the original 60 monks taking part in this experiment, only 20 are still monks ; and of the 40 who have left the monastery it is reported that "there are some who realized that they were really called to married life" (Lemercier, 1965).
The Papal Court answered this "threat" the following decree: "You will not maintain in public or in private psychoanalytical theory or practice, under threat of suspension as a priest, and you are rigorously forbidden under threat of destitution to suggest to candidates for the monastery that they should undergo psychoanalysis" (Singleton, 1967).

This was not be the last time psychotherapists cause stirrings in the faithful.
The book Lesbian Nuns, Breaking Silence contains a chapter by the former Sister Mary Benjamin of the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent in California.
Psychotherapists Carl Rogers and William Coulson arranged for the nuns to take part in encounter group, essentially a form of fashionable 60s group psychotherapy aimed as well people rather than patients for 'personal growth'.
The effect was disastrous for the convent, with hundreds of the nuns defaulting on their vows, and several, including Sister Mary Benjamin, discovering repressed lesbian desires.
The convent eventually collapsed and was closed in 1970.
There's an brief online article that also recounts this story and I was intrigued to see a footnote at the end:

Having abandoned his once lucrative career, Dr. William Coulson now lectures to Catholic and Protestant groups on the dangers of psychotherapy, with a particular emphasis upon the "encounter group" dynamic.

There's a whole novel right there in that footnote.

Link to summary of 'Psychiatric Illness in the Clergy'.
Link to online article about Dr William Coulson.

A more unusual note, from James Fallows, a journalist I admire and whose work I follow, who lives most of the time in China:
JG Ballard in Shanghai.

Well, I only missed Ada Lovelace Day by a week, but I did have an icon of her since I started this lj account.
Actually, I was just running around grabbing neat icons, until I discovered I had already maxed out what a free account is allotted, but whatever.

Anyway, I had two picks for Ada Lovelace Day, neither of which I saw anywhere else through my peephole into the lj universe.

First are the thousands of women who worked at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works. Cicero borders Chicago on the southwest, and one of the L lines goes right past where the plant was. I remember the building. Big mother!

It was the workers at the Hawthorne Works whose behavior suggested to industrial psychologists that people work better if someone actually pays a little attention to them. “The Hawthorne effect”, “a form of reactivity” was deduced from data gathered in the late 1920s – in the 1950s. Those psych guys are really on the ball!
“Thus these experiments were among the first indications that any productivity model must factor in intangible attributes such as human behavior.”


My other personal honoree is the redoubtable Caroline Herschel (1750 - 1848).
Born in Hanover, a severe childhood illness stunted her growth to four foot three, so her mother prepared her for a life as a maid. When her brother William got a job as an organist in England, she went to live (and study) with him.
She followed her brother's interest in astronomy, giving up a career as a singer, and became his assistant in his lens-grinding and telescope business.
On August 1, 1786, she found her first comet, Comet Herschel (C/1786 P1) (of, eventually, eight).
At her brother's request, she indexed the two-volume star catalog of John Flamsteed, including errata and an additional 560 stars.

After William discovered Uranus and became Royal Astronomer, Caroline was put on the royal payroll as his assistant, with a pension of fifty pounds, the first time that a woman was recognized for a scientific position.

After William's marriage, she eventually returned to Hanover, to live with another brother, Dietrich. The catalog she produced of her and William's work led to her becoming the first woman enrolled in the Royal Astronomical Society. The Kings of Prussia and Denmark gave her medals.
No errors have ever been found in her catalog of twenty-five hundred nebulae.

After he died she went back to Germany and went on making observations and calculations; no errors have ever been found in her notes. She catalogued twenty-five hundred nebulae and discovered eight comets. She died at the age of ninety-seven.

[cross-posted from General Technics]
I saw it a couple of days ago, at the $5.50 matinee. (My local mongo-plex designates the first showing of anything of the day the "matinee".)
I had always thought the neologism "graphic novel" was foolishly self-important and pretentious – until I read Watchmen. Clearly, one of the major challenges in filming it would be editing out a movie-sized piece which is still recognizable. I think the writers did a good job.
By now, there's an accumulated body of work translating comic pages to the screen. Watchmen shouldn't have posed any real challenges there, and it didn't. Nice job.


That leaves the few original bits . . . Rewriting the ending seemed unaccountable and gratuitous, and I still have no idea what the point was. The new ending is alright, but I don't see any improvement over the original.
Adding some currently fashionable kung-fu ultraviolence seemed pointless. Especially since the movie seemed willing to challenge some of the more facile assumptions about what a comics-movie ought to do.
Which leaves me with one last question: If this movie is supposed to be so Eighties, why was almost all the music (mostly well-selected) Sixties? While I came out of the theater reasonably satisfied, when I reflect that one of the high points for me was My Chemical Romance's punked up version of Dylan, that doesn't really seem to reflect well on the overall artistic success of the movie!

When people have strong emotional reactions to birthday years ending in zero, my stock response has been, “I’m not into numerology.”
I wasn’t especially excited one way or another about my own 30th, 40th, or 50th birthdays.  60 turns out to have been more significant.  I am now looking at having collections of prescriptions and of annoying physical complaints in perpetuity.

On the other hand, I’m finally moving on a different uncomfortable number.  Every few years, in periods of especially high stress, my weight would go up a couple of pounds.  Not necessarily a lot, and not all that frequently, but without ever getting back down.
I discovered a real transition at 200 pounds.  Below 200, I could see a couple of pounds difference.  (My weight ordinarily fluctuates in a several pound range.)  Past 200, small changes were no longer obvious.  And I’ve been up to a ceiling of 210 for a year or so.
Well, being housebound (it’s been a pretty severe January in Chicago) and slothful (even when I’m working at home, keyboarding isn’t much exertion!), it’s been easy to just not be all that hungry, and I’ve gotten back down to 195 and counting.  I can see the difference, and I’m happy with it.  I want to get down at least another 15, but there’s no deadline.
And just in the last week or so, I’ve had unexpected confirmation and reinforcement.  I actually can’t eat as much as I even recently could.  I just get too full.  I can’t get through every single dish (except the eggplant, which my innards can’t abide) in the Indian buffet, and I really can only finish the regular size pho, not the big one.

I have a new little kitchen trick which I’m pleased with, too.  One of my staples is granola and yogurt.  ((Who the hell is it in the Food Industry who decided that Americans don't want yogurt with the consistency of yogurt?  I don't want pectin, tapioca, modified food starch, agar, gum arabic, gelatin, or carageenan in my yogurt!))  I get cheap granola, and put in a little trail mix, which I call “granola helper”.
The last couple of years fruit juice mixtures have taken hold in the supermarkets, so, of course, there's one brand which is owned by Pepsi and one which is owned by Coke, and neither is very exciting.  But, oddly, one of our local chains has a house brand which is not only 100% juice, but cheaper than the two big brands.  So I've been using some of them for flavorings in the cereal.  A whole new horizon in granola helper!

(This is another slice of the not-fanzine mentioned last post.)

Current Location: in bed with laptop