A Prayer for Shabbat

Where the world is dark with illness,
Let me kindle the light of healing.
Where the world is bleak with suffering,
Let me kindle the light of caring.
Where the world is dimmed by lies,
Let me kindle the light of truth.

(We prayed this Jewish prayer during Advent when I was working at the Catholic Church.)

Art by Lucinda Naylor

Little Animal Theatre Troupe Presents True Blood

WARNING: This is funny (I think) and cute, but also sick and wrong. Not suitable for children.

OK, so, the other day, an Anonymous Friend came over and was telling me she'd watched the first two episodes of a vampire show, True Blood, on the recommendation of an 18-year-old woman who loves it.
Anonymous Friend was shocked, saying the show is basically a graphically violent Harlequin Romance snuff film, starring a gentleman vampire and a telepathic virgin.

She started to tell me about it--I love when people relate the plots of stories that I don't want to read or see myself--and I said, "Wait! wait! Why don't you act it out with little animals? I'll film it!"
So she did, and I did, and here it is.

[If the video keeps stalling, click on "HD" in the lower right corner of the screen, to turn High Def off.]



I hope to get The Anonymous Friend to retell Charles Dickens's Bleak House next. It's got spontaneous human combustion!

365: What's "safe"?

That's me, far right (in the striped scarf and blue jeans), surreptitiously aiming my camera at the security videocam in my local McDonalds. It was about 7 p.m. last night, and I was waiting for my eggnog milkshake--only on sale at this season.

I don't think all McDs have security cameras, do they? But my neighborhood is full of economically challenged people who might get desperate for a Big Mac. I've bought a few, over the years, for people lingering outside, asking for change. They're always happy when I throw in fries too.

A while ago, on a warmer night, a brash young man stopped me on the street near my place and asked,
"Is it safe here?"
Sarcastically, "Is she safe?" gesturing back at a scared-looking pretty blonde woman in tow. Like he was demanding to know because she was being ridiculously chicken.

I was confused and asked if they were thinking of moving into the neighborhood.
No, he said, they were just looking around. It seemed he'd driven in from the 'burbs and was getting a kick out of wandering around this "bad" neighborhood, and part of the kick was dragging his girlfriend along.

I said was that it was safe enough, but they might get approached and asked if they wanted to buy or sell something (drugs or sex).

Now I wish I had told the woman that if she wasn't comfortable, she should go home, because, in fact, they could have been wearing targets:
hepped up young guy with a fight-club attitude, dragging along a terrified white girl.

I'm afraid the person she had the most to fear from, though, was this guy she was with, who thought it was fun to humiliate and control her in the guise of comforting and entertaining her.

Our Climate: The Deadly Years

Have you seen the Greenpeace posters in the Copenhagen airport, for the climate change conference that opened yesterday? Obama and Merkel here, but there are several others too.I think they got the idea from the Star Trek episode, "The Deadly Years," where the ship's officers start to age rapidly. Here's Spock and friends, working on the formula to go back in time and save Earth's polar bears.

Also time-traveling to surgically alter Mr. Obama's ears at birth. Was he born in the USA? No way, he was born on Vulcan! Like Tuvok, the Vulcan first mate on Star Trek: Voyager.

[Sorry, another image I saved long ago without noting its source. Very bad of me. I think I'll use these right away, and then they sit so long, I forget where I found them.]

What we can expect, now the UK has shut down its UFO hotline

On December 1, the UK's Ministry of Defense closed its UFO hotline, saying,

"The MoD has no opinion on the existence or otherwise of extra-terrestrial life. However, in over 50 years, no UFO report has revealed any evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom."

But wouldn't such a slackening in attitude be exactly what the aliens were waiting for before swooping down and eating all the scones?

[Very bad of me. I didn't save the link to where I found this mash-up poster, quite a while ago. Will hunt for it.]

While searching, came across this rather funny post:
"Top 5 Unexploited Film Sequels to Brief Encounter", none of them, however, employing UFOs (wait! there is one in the comments).

OK, can't find it, but I think it's from one of the movie mashup challenges on b3ta.com. Went looking again and found a nice crop of stuff celebrating Steampunk instead, including this take-off (by hype) on the Turner painting I'd posted a while ago.
(Surely everyone knows? That's a Star Wars "AT-AT" vehicle stomping on the Fighting Temeraire.)

365: Turn on the Pink Light

Still not feeling bloggy, but just to keep my hand in, here's a nod to the beautiful, glowey early evenings we've been having. Cold (20 degrees F, -6 C), but lovely for walking around and seeing what people have put on their lawns for the season. I suspect some of the people with tasteful light decor must cringe at their neighbors' musical inflatable Santas; but I like them all.

On Shore Leave

The Captain Kirk Academy for the Pursuit of Excellence is on break this week.Spock: "After what this ship has been through in the last three months, there is not a crewman aboard who is not in need of rest. Myself excepted, of course."

"Ride the Silver Fish"

Today is the first Sunday of Advent: a time to clear the clutter.
I look around this morning at fishhead masks and strips of paper seaweed strewn about my little place; my houseplants still in the bathub where I put them to make room; a ladder in the corner next to a pile of wrinkled blue cloth; coffee cups in the sink.
After a very successful and fun but draining two days of filming, I'm too stunned to clear the physical clutter.
I will consider this Sunday a day of rest:
a time to clear the clutter in my head and recharge my batteries.

I looked up the Advent readings for today, and they do not inspire me, so I listen instead to Neil Gaiman reading his "Instructions" on what to do if you find yourself inside a fairytale.
I remember well his wonderful line,
"Trust your heart, and trust your story."
But I'd forgotten he also instructs,
"Ride the silver fish, you will not drown."



"...And then, go home,
Or make a home,
Or rest."

365: Scaly

The fish are in the can. And I am to bed.

365: Family Fish

What a day! I (below, left) spent the morning making Finnish cinnamon rolls and pressing my father (in town for T'giving) and sister--all of us here with paper seaweed draped on our heads--into helping me with last minute herring costume adjustments. Then filmed the first scene of Herring for Christmas (working title) in the afternoon.

Songs of Disrobing and Exploration (youTube Homework Helper)

I took a break while the Finnish cinnamon rolls rise to respond to a query on youTube from a college guy who wrote, in reference to my video "Kirk: To His Mistress":

"Hey I noticed you did a Captain Kirk thing with john donne's elegy 19. I'm doing a powerpoint presentation on John Donne's Elegy 19 for my western lit class, What we have to do is compare how this would still be used today in present time, and i was thinking it would compare a lot to love songs for example like Marvin gaye,Temptations, and so on. We can add Youtube videos to this presentation,so if you can give me some feedback that would be awesome,I also thought about rickrolling everybody at the end of the presentation, it would be good though because the lyrics in never gonna give you up would kinda fit,lol."

Here's my reply:

Hi!

What a fun project to compare Donne to modern songs of seduction!

A couple themes pop out at me:
1) the man trying to convince the woman to take her clothes off,
and,
2) the theme of sexual exploration ("let my hands rove") being like geographical exploration

So--clothes first:

The first song that came to mind is "Tonight's the Night" by Rod Stewart--it's not exactly "present time", but it's all about seduction and getting the girl to "Loosen up that pretty French gown". I think Donne would recognize it.

Rod Stewart:Tonight's the night(Gonna be
Uploaded by la_shivi. - Explore more music videos.

For a totally different feel, a current song on the radio that mentions a woman undressing is the country-western song by Chris Young: "Gettin' You Home," though the man isn't having to seduce the woman---it's quite clear she's an equal partner:
"Walking through the front door,
seeing your black dress hit the floor,
honey there sure ain't nothing,
like you loving me all night long,
and all I can think about is getting you home."

I'm sure there are plenty more---it's a classic scene!

I don't think "Never Gonna Give You Up" is a close match, as the guy is promising faithfulness and love, and those aren't really Donne-like themes--he's pretty much a playboy in these poems.... That's why I have Kirk say "and thee" to about 20 women---it's not about monogamy! : )

As for exploration, as you know, Donne lived in an era of exploration by ship--the European discovery of "new found lands" like America. That's why I thought his poem was so perfect for Kirk, with his [space]ship: the original Star Trek was made in 1966-1969, the era of the first moon landing--a time when Americans were excited about exploration of space, and so the show imagined humans in the future--that is, Kirk & Co. in the 23rd century--being explorers. )

But I don't see that hopeful interest in exploration in current 21st century pop culture. If anything, American movies seem more concerned with disaster ("2012") and apocalypse ("I Am Legend")--the 2009 Star Trek movie, for instance, is imagines a post-apocalyptic world, at least for Spock, whose homeworld is blown up.
Off the top of my mind, can't think of a song that combines seduction and geographical exploration the way Donne does, though surely there must be some.

So, those are my thoughts on this morning after Thanksgiving.
Good luck with your project--let me know what you come up with.
My best, Fresca
________________
So, readers if you can think of songs that explore seduction AND exploration, I'd love to hear them--and I'll pass them on to my correspondent.

Oh! Perfect! A commenter notes John Mayers "Your Body Is a Wonderland"

"We got the afternoon
You got this room for two
One thing I've left to do
Discover me discovering you...
Swim in a deep sea of blankets
...Your body is a wonderland
(I'll use my hands)"

Hunting the Bonny Shoals of Herring

Who knew there was so much to herring culture? I didn't.
On Kelly's recommendation I went looking for The Herring Song, by the Flash Girls [links to last fm, where you can listen to it], and I also came across "The Shoals of Herring," sung by Ewan MacColl, who it seems is famous, if you know about folk music, which I don't. It includes the phrase "the silver darlings," which I'm guessing is where the book title comes from. I gather from the youTube comments that this is about the Scottish herring fleet out of Yarmouth harbor, that followed the herring from the North Sea.

"In the stormy seas and the living gales
Just to earn your daily bread you're daring
From the Dover Straits to the Faroe Islands
As you're following the shoals of herring."

In Support of Whimsy

I felt a little despondent last night.
bink and I keep coming up with new twists on the herring costumes, and each new idea requires several more hours with the duct-tape and scissors to make something that, in the end, looks like it's out of a grade school play.

Well, not bink's herring bones, which I'm holding here; they're a beautiful piece of design. I want to mount them on the wall when we're done filming.

While I was googling "herring skeletons" for bink, I came across this photo, below, of prehistoric herrring--their fossils are from Fossil Butte, Wyoming--fossils in the area were discovered during the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1860s).

Aren't they lovely and graceful?
They remind me of a Roman floor mosaic.

It's true that making costumes for fifteen people is maybe a bit much; but this morning I was undespondentized when I came across a youTube of this 1955 recording, below, of Alexander Calder [links to Whitney site] putting his circus toys in motion.

Toys? Art? Special effects? What's the difference?

I'd seen this movie about twenty years ago at a local art museum and never forgotten it.


Thinking of how much work Calder must have put into this, I am ready to get back to cutting out strips of seaweed.
Maybe I'll go buy myself some red tennies like Calder's later too, as reward for my labors on behalf of whimsy.

Ah, and here is Calder's 1944 mobile, Fish. From the Hirshhorn Museum.


And one more fish: The Roddenberry Trek Fish, from Gene and Majel's son Eugene:
"It's not about Creationism. It's not about Darwinism. It's about the future!
The TREK FISH simply says we can continue to discuss our origins but, as a species, should focus on what is to come."

I might even stick one on my car, if I had a car.

Kirk of the Week

It's all about the hokey pokey!
(Wikipedia describes it as a dance that involves wriggling your body parts about maniacally.)

365: Like Water for Herring

Airing out the blue cloth Laura gave me for the herring film.

The Captain Kirk Academy for the Pursuit of Excellence

Herring and pike (the green ones with teeth) masks have taken over my life. Here they are shedding silver sparkles all over my ugly couch.

i. The School of Anxiety

The "Herring for Christmas" shoot is on Saturday, and I'm anxious. I am absolutely sure it will be a hoot and entirely successful--how not? there'll be cinnamon rolls--it's just that it's full of something I usually avoid: being the leader of a group.

When I look at a dozen people, I don't see a school of herring that need direction, I see Maggie and Rose and Ben and John... and I want to attend to each individual's needs and desires. I'm also afraid lest I annoy or offend anyone, and they hit me (childhood, anyone?), so I pussyfoot around.
This is an annoying leadership style.

ii. Lead Like a Friend

"Leadership" is a word that's always given me the creeps--I hear it as Il Duce. I have to remind myself it's about helping people work together, not about being a dictator. Power comes to a person anyway, and if she doesn't know how to handle it, she can be a right fuck-up.

Like, it hugely annoys me when I show up to help someone move and they can't tell me what they need. Or you ask a guest what they want to do, and they say, "Whatever you want." Please! Tell me how to help you.

I've mostly been the sort who moves by herself, to avoid having to tell people to put that box in the kitchen, please. But I can't make movies by myself very well.
And in my life in general, at this time it seems a good thing to figure out what kind of leader I am, and to be it. I don't really know what that is.

iii. Be Who You Are

I haven't mentioned it here, but about a year ago I enrolled in the Captain Kirk Academy for the Pursuit of Excellence (C-KAPE). "Excellence" is here in the sense of what Saint Francis De Sales said: “Be who you are, and be that well.”


(I was waiting to write about this until after I learned photoshop and could create a C-KAPE poster to show you, but that's not happening.)

Kirk: Everybody, stand like this.

I moved over to C-KAPE from the How to Be Invisible College (H-BIC), where I'd studied for years. I kept failing the courses, though, so they suggested I transfer.

I love C-KAPE, and I hate it.
I want to learn how to be myself in the world with more Kirkian confidence. But, wow, the inner emotional backlash can be unpleasant. Shame, resentment, crankiness, and anxiety come out--the toolbox of the psyche that would just as soon stay hidden under the bed. They may seem little, not big hitters like rage and grief, but they're little like Laurence Olivier's dental tools are little in Marathon Man.

It's all about risk and excellence and facing our demons. It's so much nicer to meet these face-to-face, by choice, doing something we love, than to have them drop on us out of the trees.
So, bring on the herring!

Cut and Paste

I. "Windows Open on a Terrace; A Book by Francesca, 1987"


All the pages in this post are from one of my first artist's books. I made it, including the paper, when I was living in Chicago.
It's an autobiographical scrapbook of sorts: papers and oddments from various places I've lived--some of them referring to the name Rose, which I went by in my early twenties.

(Looking at it now, I'm stuck by how tidy it is, as if I was lining up the mess of my life into neat rows.)

II. Playing with Chaos

There is no object, person, or event that is not part of the interconnected whole, and therefore important, even if we can't see how, even if it's a nobody tossing a cigarette package into the gutter.
I love art and artists that reflect that.
Like Kurt Schwitters, a cut-and-paster, who put together stuff he found on the streets of Hanover, Germany.

His collages pick up on the way things blow around and bump into each other, seemingly randomly--and the way we ascribe meaning to the resulting intersections and patterns.

Filtered through the artist and therefore highly personal, there's no way this art can be purely random, of course, but it plays with the chaotic nature of reality.
I like that a lot. I didn't discover Schwitters until after I'd started making my own collages, but I see his work among the cheerleaders on the sidelines of my life.

III. The First-Line-of-Blog-Posts Meme

Blogs are often a kind of cut-and-paste art (more high-falutingly known as assemblage and collage)--or quilts, if you prefer: bloggers offer up bits and pieces of whatever they come across (in our minds or in the street), and it's only as the posts pile up that a pattern starts to from.

There's a meme that cuts-and-pastes bits of one's own blog: the "first-line" meme.
The instructions go something like this:
Choose a day of the month. Say, the day you published your blog's first post. Gather together the first line of every post you've written on that day (or the day closest to it) every month.

So, here's the first line of every post on or around the 7th of each month, since my first post on October 7, 2007. What surprised me most was how few of them (5 out of 26) are from posts about Star Trek!
______________

10-7-07: One of the things I have missed most about blogging (it's been two years) is having a place to keep found words--things I overhear, for instance, or bits and pieces of writing--like a nest where magpies keep objects that catch their fancy.

11-15-07: I'm on sabbatical.

12-7-07: Having a female body is a complex and contradictory issue in my life and the lives of most women I know.

1-7-08: I just had lunch with Sally, author of this blog:
Already Pretty.

2-7-08: I often wonder what I'm missing when people get all charged up about some fiendishly clever plan that seems like guaranteed disaster to me.

3-7-08: Inspired by Thinkery's "50 Things Before 50" list, I am starting my own, this birthday week.

4-7-08: I wrote [2 posts below] that some of us may grow, psychologically, like corkscrews.

5-7-08: In mainstream films, sex between two characters who are attracted to each other is almost always easy, once it occurs: everything gets hot and steamy and it's instant orgasms for all.

6-7-08: We've been having smashing weather lately: crackling flashing blow-down stuff.

7-7-08: Cheese cows are the tops!

8-7-08: My camera was set wrong for the low light, unintentionally showing that This Hotel Is Not in Real Time.

9-7-08: "Be afraid. Be very afraid."

10-7-08: My brain is free!

11-7-08: As I did with Gemini, I'm going to let some people born under the sign of Scorpio speak for themselves (mostly).

12-6-08: Jen left a comment on "Writing about Writing" a few posts back that got me thinking:
What does it mean to say, "I write for myself"?

1-7-09: Embedding this video has been disabled on youTube, but watch this: the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" sung by the Young @ Heart chorus, whose average member's age is over 80.

2-7-09: My iTunes informs me that I listened to "Nessun Dorma" so many times in the last three days that it has made it onto my "Top 25 Most Played" list.

3-7-09: "Let's start at the very beginning..."

4-7-09: This is the first Fly Off the Wall production to be released!

5-7-09: 11 p.m. Just got home from the new Star Trek movie.

6-6-09: Can you think of a movie that is a visual poem of London, the city, the way Manhattan is of New York, or Diva of Paris--or Blade Runner, Los Angeles in 2019 (above), for that matter?

7-7-09: I was so zonked yesterday from staying up till 4 a.m. to finish subtitling my vid in Russian, I took a long nap.

8-7-09: Annika e-mailed and asked me if I've always been interested in religion.

9-7-09: Bill is smokin'.

10-7-09: I'd forgotten there's a Finn Style store on the second-story skyway downtown.

11-7-09: Now that I've sent the Finland manuscript off, I can give some love to Fly Off the Wall's next movie.

______________
I never tag people with memes, but if any of you want to do this, I'd love to read your first lines.

The Return of the Gorn

Got the Finland ms back for revisions. Struggling to say something intelligent about racism in Finland. Nothing amusing whatsoever to post about that. [Not even the pleasure of outrage, as in my post below.]

So, I bring you creator extraordinaire Mortmere's latest bit of perfection:


Mortmere writes a [possible] plot synopsis to go with her poster:

"Thrown into the midst of Napoleonic wars by the Metrons, Kirk and his crew must re-encounter the Gorn and get the hang of maneuvering a Royal Navy ship of the line - and as if that wasn't enough, there's an annoying French royalist named Jean-Louis Picard aboard the ship... Compared to this, that little gunpowder incident near Cestus III was a picnic.”

It's Curtains

I usually roll my eyes when people bemoan the sheer idiocy of pop culture. Get a life, I usually think: It's fun! Or I want to paraphrase those bumper stickers about abortion: Don't like it? Don't watch it.
(And actually, usually I don't partake.)

But now I must join the ranks of the bemoaners, having just watched Sex and the City for the first time. See, I was writing up Finnish designer Maija Isola for my Famous Finns section--she designed those iconic poppies for Marimekko--still their most recognizable pattern. In reading about Isola, I stumbled across the info that Sex and the City featured one of her designs--Tantsu (1960), here-- as Carrie Bradshaw's curtains. Who's Carrie Bradshaw? I thought.
Turns out she's the main character, played by... um, um, um ...I'm drawing a blank. Doesn't matter. You know who I mean, right?

Anyway, I went to the library and there in the DVD bin was the movie version of S&TC. I remembered a woman telling me that even though critics panned it, she loved it because it really reflected a wide range of women's experiences. So I watched it---or, rather, I fast-forwarded through it, watching a few seconds of every chapter, looking for signs of intelligent life.
My god.
I was shocked. Really. Its suck factor went beyond "vacuous" into "black hole." My brain ended up in a cold, empty place where being a woman is all about having the right shoes.

I even found it politically frightening. It presents Americans as mindless consumers entirely self-obsessed and consumed with our real estate, clothes, and sex lives. Other people appear to serve the characters mostly as accessories, like handbags or neckties.
If you're an American looking for an answer to the piteous plea, "Why do people hate us?" you could do worse than to watch this movie.

Oh dear. The most depressing thing is, the movie's not entirely inaccurate.
End of the world? Let's see.... What textile design goes with that?

365: At Sea

I am chirping with happiness like I imagine happy herrings do because I have been reading about Linus Torvalds** so I can write him up for the Finland book's Famous People section.I always put off writing this section till the very last minute because while it's fun to meet the amazing people from any country, it's quite hard to sum up their accomplishments, especially if I don't understand them. Writing about authors, for instance, is easy enough for me; writing about computer whizzes is not.

I can't explain very well what it means that Torvalds, when he was 21, created the Linux kernel--the heart of the Linux operating system.
But I totally get his "open source" practice: Torvalds shared Linux online for free and invited people to help improve and develop it.

Open source is basically my life philosophy--so far as I can see, it's how art and science and spirit and love work best. Perhaps counter-intuitively, even economic systems benefit from this gift-giving practice. And it's something I love about open blogging too: you let your stuff swim free in the open sea. I smile to see that Torvalds blogs on blogspot.

Lucikly the first post I read was a funny one (he's got that quirky Moomin thing going) about him marveling at getting a free music CD in a box of Indian food, and not the one about him writing code, which includes sentences such as this one:
"And once I get rid of libcrypt from openssl, I get rid of two silly runtime loadable libraries that git no longer needs."
Though--how weird--I actually have a clue what that means!

Now to write up Sibelius. Explaining music in words is even harder than explaining science.

Doesn't the young Torvalds here look a little like a ... herring?
______________________
** Links to Salon article "Martin Luther, Meet Linus Torvalds":

"Nobody likes to be exploited.

Whenever an abusive power elite monopolizes one of life's essentials and offers it at ever-greater expense, people eventually get around to weighing that price against the cost of producing it themselves. And whether that essential is salvation or operating system source code, when the scales tip, people will find a way."

"The Silver Darlings": Oliver Sacks on Herring

Sometimes things conspire for the good.
J. was catching up on back issues of The New Yorker and came across this article--about herring!--in the July 20, 2009 issue:
CLUPEOPHILIA, by Oliver Sacks

I think the NYer archives its content every 6 months, at which point you have to pay to access it. So, because I love this article so much, and because it seems to have dropped into J.'s life for the sole purpose of her passing it along to me --(what if she were one of those people, alien to me, who manage to read the NYer when it arrives?)--I'm going to post the entire thing here.

♦Anyone on the sixteenth floor of the Roger Smith Hotel, in midtown, at five-forty-five on a recent June afternoon would have seen a puzzling assemblage of people in the corridor: a construction worker from Brooklyn, a mathematics professor from Princeton, a couple from Aruba, a father with an infant strapped to his chest, and an artist from the Lower East Side. It wasn’t immediately apparent what had brought this seemingly random slice of humanity together. Had one come up in the service elevator, though, an unmistakable aroma would have given a vital clue. By five-fifty-nine, almost sixty people had gathered in the hallway.

At six, the doors to an event room opened and the crowd rushed in. There, in the middle of the room, lighted, draped, surmounted by a huge glittering block of ice, was an altar: an altar covered with hundreds of fresh herring, the first of the season, just flown in from Holland. This was an altar consecrated to Clupeus, the god of herring, whose annual festival is celebrated in late spring by herring-lovers the world over.

Entire books have been published about cod, about eel, about tuna, but relatively little has been written about herring. (There is, however, a delightful book by Mike Smylie, “Herring: A History of the Silver Darlings,” and a fascinating chapter in W. G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn.”) But herring have played a great part in human history. In the Middle Ages, they were carefully graded and priced by the Hanseatic League, and supported fisheries in the Baltic and the North Sea—and, later, in Newfoundland and on the Pacific Coast. Herring are one of the commonest, cheapest, and most delicious fish on the planet—a fish that can take an infinity of forms: marinated, pickled, salted, fermented, smoked, or, as with the exquisite Hollandse Nieuwe, straight from the sea.

They are one of the healthiest fish, too, full of omega-3 oils, and without the mercury that accumulates in the big predators like tuna and swordfish. A few years ago, the oldest person in the world, a hundred-and-fourteen-year-old Dutch woman, said she attributed her longevity to eating pickled herring every day. (A hundred-and-fourteen-year-old woman from Texas attributed her long life to “minding my own business.”)

There are many species of Clupeidae, with varying sizes and tastes, from the Atlantic herring, Clupea harengus, to the pilchard (much loved in England, and often served in tomato sauce), to the tiny sprat, best smoked and eaten bones and all. When I grew up in England, in the nineteen-thirties, we had herring virtually every day: smoked herring (kippers or bloaters) at breakfast, perhaps a herring pie at lunch (my mother’s favorite dish), fried herring roe on toast at teatime, chopped herring at dinner. But times have changed, herring is no longer on every breakfast and dinner table, and it is only on special, joyous occasions that we clupeophiles can come together for a real herring feast.

The great traditions of herring are maintained by Russ & Daughters, a Houston Street emporium that started as a pushcart on the Lower East Side, nearly a century ago, and still sells the largest variety of herring in New York City. It was Russ & Daughters that organized the recent herring festival.

There are certain passions—one wants to call them innocent, ingenuous passions—that are great democratizers. Baseball, music, and bird-watching come immediately to mind. At the herring festival, there was no talk about the stock market, or gossiping about celebrities. People had come to eat herring—to savor them, to compare them. In its purest form, this meant seizing the new herring by the tail and lowering them gently into the mouth. The sensation this produces is voluptuous, especially as they slip down the throat.

Guests started from the great central table, the altar covered with new herring; washed these down with aquavit; and moved on to satellite tables, where there were matjes herring, herring in wine sauce, herring in cream sauce, Bismarck herring, herring in mustard sauce, herring in curry sauce, and plump schmaltz herring, fresh from Iceland. Oily and briny, schmaltz herring can last for twenty years; taken from the Baltic, they were a staple food (along with black bread, potatoes, and cabbage) of poor Jews throughout Eastern Europe. For my father, born in Lithuania, there was nothing to compare with them, and he ate them daily all his life.

Around eight o’clock, after two hours of eating and drinking, the pace slackened. Slowly, the herring-lovers left the hotel, still discussing favorite dishes with fellow-travellers as they went. They sauntered slowly up Lexington Avenue. One does not rush after such a banquet; indeed, one’s whole perspective on the world is changed. Some of us, the New Yorkers, will meet again, at Russ & Daughters. But the rest, after they have slept the deep sleep of the consummated herring-eater, will start counting the days to the herring festival of 2010. ♦

Kirk of the Week

Screencap from "Assignment: Earth" episode, in which Spock and Kirk travel back to 1968 Earth. I don't recall what they are really looking at. That cat, maybe, Spock was so fond of?

( I get these ST screencaps from Trek core dot com.)

Laura's Owls

When I dropped by Laura's place yesterday to pick up aqua paint for my herring set dressing, I caught her working on her latest polymer clay (brand name Fimo) creations: owls. She shapes them around eggs, which gives them their cheery fatness.I am always encouraging (harassing?) Laura to start selling her art online, so she could eventually quit cleaning houses for a living. It upsets me to see how that heavy work damages her already fragile hands. I even started a blog for Laura last year, but now I have lost the password. Some manager I'd be.Some are, but most artists I know--including me-- are not very good at administrative skills, at least at managing their own art (including writing) as a business.
There may be some self-protection going on: the art itself wants to stay small and close to home; the art-making self knows that the marketplace would knock it sideways.
Sometimes I think we may be afraid, not having the skills to deal with the bright bustle. And possibly afraid for good reason: the energy is so different from--and sometimes antithetical to--art making. For some, attending to the business-side of art is like making an owl hunt during the day.

What it takes to make art does not always coexist with what it takes to pay the bills. Yet the bills are real.
Well, this is nothing new... I'm just thinking aloud here; I don't know what to do about this conundrum myself. When I work for other people very much, my own creative self shuts down. Mostly I've always lived on the cheap, to keep my time free. But moviemaking is making me think more about this: it costs money, even just buying tag board and tin foil, as writing does not.

And then, I wonder how this money/time exchange will play out as I get older. I guess I'll find out, godwilling.

Herring Prep

Arguments Presented to God on the Behalf of Humanity, No. 34:
The amount of work people put into entirely frivolous, harmless pursuits, just for fun. Making a 1-minute video, for instance, about herring.In the past 24 hours, here's some work people put into prepping for the shoot in 12 days time:
1. John, who is going to play the man disappointed with his Christmas dinner of one measly herring, called to ask if he should start growing a beard for his role. I said yes.
2. The Finnish Friend sent me an audio file of her saying, "Herring is rather small for Christmas dinner" in Finnish.
3. Laura gave me some blue glaze and a tin of aqua-colored paint so I could paint one corner of my room, as ocean background for the herring.
4. I painted said corner.
5. bink brought over a herring-head mask to check against the wave pattern. It looked great.

Post No. 901 (775 Days)

I've been meaning to write something meaningful about the two-year birthday of this blog, like I did at post no. 438 for L'Astronave's one-year birthday. But my brain's been--and is--distracted by herring and Holland, and now the time's slipped past. I'll let these two jokers show how happy I am to be here. (Thanks for sending the photo, Art Sparker.) And, Happy Monday!