Ah, the power of veganism to offend...!
NBC's list of concerns, from PETA:
"Apparently, NBC has something against girls who love their veggies. After we submitted our proposed Super Bowl ad, which features a comely crop of models demonstrating their fondness for fresh produce, NBC nixed the ad, saying it 'depicts a level of sexuality exceeding our standards.' No joke, this is straight from NBC—so stop fondling your fruit salad right now and read the list of shots NBC requested we cut before they’d reconsider:
* licking pumpkin
* touching her breast with her hand while eating broccoli
* pumpkin from behind between legs
* rubbing pelvic region with pumpkin
* screwing herself with broccoli (fuzzy)
* asparagus on her lap appearing as if it is ready to be inserted into vagina
* licking eggplant
* rubbing asparagus on breast"
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Great music, fantastically performed!
(Press Play, and then in the upper right hand corner the "Full Screen" button will appear when you move your mouse over it.)
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Bobby Fischer: First Anniversay of his Death
Chessbase has a great article with links to sixty other articles about Bobby Fischer.
Click Here.
Click Here.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Email Petitions...
Lately I've been receiving a lot of politically oriented email petitions, that while I may be aligned with, but I'm not particularly interested in receiving. All sent from well-meaning, good-hearted people. (Many times by people that seldom send me a personal email.) In fact, the senders might not even send but the occasional petition, but when you add up all the other occasional senders sending me petitions, I end up with a pile in my in-box. And frequently a pile of the same petition sent by a dozen individuals.
How do you handle this...? I know I'm not alone. I've been requesting people not to send them, but then they get a wee bit upset with me, even if I request nicely. I could just delete, but that seems to be giving in and allowing people to hijack my time.
My suggestion: get everyone to post that stuff to their blogs...it makes it easier for us to ignore. Like this post!
How do you handle this...? I know I'm not alone. I've been requesting people not to send them, but then they get a wee bit upset with me, even if I request nicely. I could just delete, but that seems to be giving in and allowing people to hijack my time.
My suggestion: get everyone to post that stuff to their blogs...it makes it easier for us to ignore. Like this post!
Monday, December 29, 2008
Passings this year...Bobby Fischer, musicians in the New York Times...
Michael Paterniti has written an engaging piece on Bobby Fischer in the New York Times. It begins:
"Before he was secretly buried on a dark winter morning in a lonely Icelandic churchyard at the age of 64 (there were only four people in attendance at the hastily arranged funeral) . . . before his last ailing days of bad kidneys and rotting teeth (he had all of his fillings removed, convinced that U.S. and Russian agents would otherwise send radio signals to his brain) . . . before the long hours whiled away at a Reykjavik bookstore, a place that vaguely reminded him of one from his Brooklyn youth (in both, he read comic books and studied chess) . . . and before his decades of ghostly peregrinations through the world, like a profane monk or an idiot savant searching for perfect exile (from Pasadena to Hungary to the Philippines, where he supposedly had a child, and on to Japan, where he supposedly married and was arrested and imprisoned for a passport violation) . . . before his bizarre eruptions (he applauded the events of 9/11 as “wonderful news” and believed, among other defamations, that the Jews wanted to eradicate the African elephant because its trunk was a reminder of an uncircumcised penis) . . . and before the spectacle of meeting his one-time nemesis, the former world-champion chess player Boris Spassky, for an anticlimactic 1992 rematch in war-torn Yugoslavia despite U.N. sanctions against it (in front of whirring cameras, he spat on the U.S. order forbidding him to play) . . . even way back before their original 1972 meeting, called the Match of the Century, when the eyes of the world were riveted on him as a shining emblem of American will, innovation and brilliance (the match in which he took on the Soviet chess machine and single-handedly crushed it, but not before the fabled call from Henry Kissinger, urging him to put aside his jumbled demands and just play) . . . even before his brazen, almost obnoxious deconstruction of a cavalcade of grandmasters who stood in his path to Spassky (he won 20 games in a row, the longest winning streak in modern chess) . . . before he traded the rags of his youth for his new wardrobe of expensive suits . . . before his mind slowly unhinged and he became a walking paradox (the anti-Semitic Jew; the anti-American national hero, the wastrel-wizard of his craft) . . . yes, before the whole circus of his life unfolded, he was a 13-year-old kid in the first flush of the thing he most loved in the world: chess."
"Before he was secretly buried on a dark winter morning in a lonely Icelandic churchyard at the age of 64 (there were only four people in attendance at the hastily arranged funeral) . . . before his last ailing days of bad kidneys and rotting teeth (he had all of his fillings removed, convinced that U.S. and Russian agents would otherwise send radio signals to his brain) . . . before the long hours whiled away at a Reykjavik bookstore, a place that vaguely reminded him of one from his Brooklyn youth (in both, he read comic books and studied chess) . . . and before his decades of ghostly peregrinations through the world, like a profane monk or an idiot savant searching for perfect exile (from Pasadena to Hungary to the Philippines, where he supposedly had a child, and on to Japan, where he supposedly married and was arrested and imprisoned for a passport violation) . . . before his bizarre eruptions (he applauded the events of 9/11 as “wonderful news” and believed, among other defamations, that the Jews wanted to eradicate the African elephant because its trunk was a reminder of an uncircumcised penis) . . . and before the spectacle of meeting his one-time nemesis, the former world-champion chess player Boris Spassky, for an anticlimactic 1992 rematch in war-torn Yugoslavia despite U.N. sanctions against it (in front of whirring cameras, he spat on the U.S. order forbidding him to play) . . . even way back before their original 1972 meeting, called the Match of the Century, when the eyes of the world were riveted on him as a shining emblem of American will, innovation and brilliance (the match in which he took on the Soviet chess machine and single-handedly crushed it, but not before the fabled call from Henry Kissinger, urging him to put aside his jumbled demands and just play) . . . even before his brazen, almost obnoxious deconstruction of a cavalcade of grandmasters who stood in his path to Spassky (he won 20 games in a row, the longest winning streak in modern chess) . . . before he traded the rags of his youth for his new wardrobe of expensive suits . . . before his mind slowly unhinged and he became a walking paradox (the anti-Semitic Jew; the anti-American national hero, the wastrel-wizard of his craft) . . . yes, before the whole circus of his life unfolded, he was a 13-year-old kid in the first flush of the thing he most loved in the world: chess."
The whole story is here.
...And Hans Fjellestad pointed me to this lovely musical collage of great musicians that passed this year, from Odetta to Yma Sumac, Cachao to Jimmy Carl Black.....
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Duo with Cooper Baker in Eugene, Oregon
Last night Cooper Baker and I performed at DIVA in Eugene, Oregon. It is a nice gallery, with a low-key performance space that I love to play at. The awesome Don Haugen (Warning Broken Machine) hooked up the gig, he did a very short set (computer stopped working), and Sabrina Siegel followed us with a nice set. It was the first time Cooper and I played duo with electronics...and I thought it went really well. Unfortunately, no recording...
It was nice to meet some of the local artists that came out to hear us. We went to Horsehead afterwards, but then ended up at the local Rogue public house (Old Crustacean on tap!) and had a nice hang with Roger and Heather. Roger is also known as "chefkirk," an artist (and fellow vegan) who makes music with no input mixer...some very engaging music, I enjoyed the following video of one of his performances:
It was nice to meet some of the local artists that came out to hear us. We went to Horsehead afterwards, but then ended up at the local Rogue public house (Old Crustacean on tap!) and had a nice hang with Roger and Heather. Roger is also known as "chefkirk," an artist (and fellow vegan) who makes music with no input mixer...some very engaging music, I enjoyed the following video of one of his performances:
Thursday, December 25, 2008
A Pause for Pinter...
Having done incidental music/sounds for several of his plays, this saddened me, Harold Pinter was such a great playwright.
But the Pinter Pause will live on. Or will it? (Read the link.)
From the AP:
Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter dies at 78
By PAISLEY DODDS – 1 hour ago
LONDON (AP) — British Nobel laureate Harold Pinter — who produced some of his generation's most influential dramas and later became a staunch critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq — has died, his widow said Thursday. He was 78.
Pinter died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer, according to his second wife Antonia Fraser.
In recent years he had seized the platform offered by his 2005 Nobel Literature prize to denounce President George W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the war in Iraq.
But he was best known for exposing the complexities of the emotional battlefield.
His writing featured cool, menacing pauses in dialogue that reflected his characters' deep emotional struggles and spawned a new adjective found in several dictionaries: "Pinter-esque."
"Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the Nobel Academy said. "With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution."
His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives were set against the neat lives they constructed in order to try to survive. Usually enclosed in one room, the acts usually illustrated the characters' lives as a sort of grim game with actions that often contradicted words. Gradually, the layers were peeled back.
"How can you write a happy play?" he once said. "Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life."
Pinter wrote 32 plays; one novel, "The Dwarfs," in 1990; and put his hand to 22 screenplays.
The working-class milieu of his first dramas reflected his early life as the son of a Jewish tailor from London's East End.
Born Oct. 30, 1930, in the London neighborhood of Hackney, he was forced along with other children during World War II to evacuate to rural Cornwall in 1939. He was 14 before he returned. By then, he was entranced with Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway.
By 1950, Pinter had begun to publish poetry and appeared on stage as an actor. Pinter began to write for the stage, and published "The Room" in 1957.
A year later, his first major play, "The Birthday Party" was produced in the West End.
In it, intruders enter the retreat of Stanley, a young man who is hiding from childhood guilt. He becomes violent, telling them, "You stink of sin, you contaminate womankind."
The play closed after just one week to disastrous reviews, but Pinter continued to write and was most prolific between 1957 and 1965.
"With his earliest work, he stood alone in British theater up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers, too," British playwright Tom Stoppard said when the Nobel Prize was announced.
"I find critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch of people," Pinter once said.
In "The Caretaker," (1959) a manipulative old man threatens the relationship of two brothers, while "The Homecoming" (1964) explores the hidden rage and confused sexuality of an all-male household by inserting a woman.
In "Silence" and "Landscape," (1967 and 1968) Pinter moved from exploring the underbelly of human life to showing the simultaneous levels of fantasy and reality that occupy the individual.
"The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear," Pinter once said. "It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness."
"Betrayal" (1978) was reportedly based on the disintegration of his marriage to actress Vivien Merchant, who appeared in many of his first plays.
Their marriage ended in 1980 after Pinter's long affair with BBC presenter Joan Bakewell. He then married Fraser. Merchant died shortly afterward of alcoholism-related disease.
During the late 1980s, his work became more overtly political; he said he had a responsibility to pursue his role as "a citizen of the world in which I live, (and) insist upon taking responsibility."
In the 1980s, Pinter's only stage plays were one-acts: "A Kind of Alaska" (1982), "One for the Road" (1984) and the 20-minute "Mountain Language" (1988).
Off-stage he was also highly political: Pinter turned down former Prime Minister John Major's offer of a knighthood and strongly attacked Blair when NATO bombed Serbia. He later referred to Blair a "deluded idiot" for supporting Bush's war in Iraq.
He said he deeply regretted having voting for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Tony Blair in 1997.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Pinter a "great playwright and lucid, agitated and uncompromising humanist."
He called the Nobel "a belated consecration of his immense work, but also an homage to a man's courage and commitment against all forms of barbarism."
The prize gave Pinter a global platform, from which he frequently and bitterly decried the Iraq war.
"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law," Pinter said in his Nobel lecture, which he recorded rather than traveling to the Swedish capital of Stockholm.
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?" he asked, in a hoarse voice.
Though he had been looking forward to giving the Nobel lecture — calling it "the longest speech I will ever have made" — he canceled his attendance at the award ceremony, and then announced he would skip the lecture as well on his doctor's advice.
In March 2005, Pinter announced his retirement as a playwright to concentrate on politics. But he created a radio play, "Voices," that was broadcast on BBC radio to mark his 75th birthday.
"I have written 29 plays, and I think that's really enough," Pinter said. "I think the world has had enough of my plays."
Pinter's influence was felt in the United States in the plays of Sam Shepard and David Mamet.
Friend and biographer Michael Billington said Pinter "was a political figure, a polemicist and carried on fierce battles against American foreign policy and often British foreign policy, but in private he was the most incredibly loyal of friends and generous of human beings."
"He was a great man as well actually as a great playwright," Billington said.
Pinter is survived by his son, Daniel, from his marriage to Merchant.
But the Pinter Pause will live on. Or will it? (Read the link.)
From the AP:
Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter dies at 78
By PAISLEY DODDS – 1 hour ago
LONDON (AP) — British Nobel laureate Harold Pinter — who produced some of his generation's most influential dramas and later became a staunch critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq — has died, his widow said Thursday. He was 78.
Pinter died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer, according to his second wife Antonia Fraser.
In recent years he had seized the platform offered by his 2005 Nobel Literature prize to denounce President George W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the war in Iraq.
But he was best known for exposing the complexities of the emotional battlefield.
His writing featured cool, menacing pauses in dialogue that reflected his characters' deep emotional struggles and spawned a new adjective found in several dictionaries: "Pinter-esque."
"Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the Nobel Academy said. "With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution."
His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives were set against the neat lives they constructed in order to try to survive. Usually enclosed in one room, the acts usually illustrated the characters' lives as a sort of grim game with actions that often contradicted words. Gradually, the layers were peeled back.
"How can you write a happy play?" he once said. "Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life."
Pinter wrote 32 plays; one novel, "The Dwarfs," in 1990; and put his hand to 22 screenplays.
The working-class milieu of his first dramas reflected his early life as the son of a Jewish tailor from London's East End.
Born Oct. 30, 1930, in the London neighborhood of Hackney, he was forced along with other children during World War II to evacuate to rural Cornwall in 1939. He was 14 before he returned. By then, he was entranced with Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway.
By 1950, Pinter had begun to publish poetry and appeared on stage as an actor. Pinter began to write for the stage, and published "The Room" in 1957.
A year later, his first major play, "The Birthday Party" was produced in the West End.
In it, intruders enter the retreat of Stanley, a young man who is hiding from childhood guilt. He becomes violent, telling them, "You stink of sin, you contaminate womankind."
The play closed after just one week to disastrous reviews, but Pinter continued to write and was most prolific between 1957 and 1965.
"With his earliest work, he stood alone in British theater up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers, too," British playwright Tom Stoppard said when the Nobel Prize was announced.
"I find critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch of people," Pinter once said.
In "The Caretaker," (1959) a manipulative old man threatens the relationship of two brothers, while "The Homecoming" (1964) explores the hidden rage and confused sexuality of an all-male household by inserting a woman.
In "Silence" and "Landscape," (1967 and 1968) Pinter moved from exploring the underbelly of human life to showing the simultaneous levels of fantasy and reality that occupy the individual.
"The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear," Pinter once said. "It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness."
"Betrayal" (1978) was reportedly based on the disintegration of his marriage to actress Vivien Merchant, who appeared in many of his first plays.
Their marriage ended in 1980 after Pinter's long affair with BBC presenter Joan Bakewell. He then married Fraser. Merchant died shortly afterward of alcoholism-related disease.
During the late 1980s, his work became more overtly political; he said he had a responsibility to pursue his role as "a citizen of the world in which I live, (and) insist upon taking responsibility."
In the 1980s, Pinter's only stage plays were one-acts: "A Kind of Alaska" (1982), "One for the Road" (1984) and the 20-minute "Mountain Language" (1988).
Off-stage he was also highly political: Pinter turned down former Prime Minister John Major's offer of a knighthood and strongly attacked Blair when NATO bombed Serbia. He later referred to Blair a "deluded idiot" for supporting Bush's war in Iraq.
He said he deeply regretted having voting for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Tony Blair in 1997.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Pinter a "great playwright and lucid, agitated and uncompromising humanist."
He called the Nobel "a belated consecration of his immense work, but also an homage to a man's courage and commitment against all forms of barbarism."
The prize gave Pinter a global platform, from which he frequently and bitterly decried the Iraq war.
"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law," Pinter said in his Nobel lecture, which he recorded rather than traveling to the Swedish capital of Stockholm.
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?" he asked, in a hoarse voice.
Though he had been looking forward to giving the Nobel lecture — calling it "the longest speech I will ever have made" — he canceled his attendance at the award ceremony, and then announced he would skip the lecture as well on his doctor's advice.
In March 2005, Pinter announced his retirement as a playwright to concentrate on politics. But he created a radio play, "Voices," that was broadcast on BBC radio to mark his 75th birthday.
"I have written 29 plays, and I think that's really enough," Pinter said. "I think the world has had enough of my plays."
Pinter's influence was felt in the United States in the plays of Sam Shepard and David Mamet.
Friend and biographer Michael Billington said Pinter "was a political figure, a polemicist and carried on fierce battles against American foreign policy and often British foreign policy, but in private he was the most incredibly loyal of friends and generous of human beings."
"He was a great man as well actually as a great playwright," Billington said.
Pinter is survived by his son, Daniel, from his marriage to Merchant.
Nothing says Christmas better than a dead squirrel!
A merry roadkill Christmas to everyone.
I have a history of strange encounters with dachshunds...
My parents wiener dog got into the Christmas spirit this morning, bringing us a pre-gift-opening delicacy:
Mmmm....dead squirrel! Probably roadkill...which reminded me of a few roadkill links that you might enjoy this happy day:
A roadkill artist.
Roadkill recipes: Pan-Braised Squirrel.
(I wonder if you can substitute soy product?)
Generic roadkill recipes.
(Includes Moose-and-Squirrel Meat Balls.)
I have a history of strange encounters with dachshunds...
My parents wiener dog got into the Christmas spirit this morning, bringing us a pre-gift-opening delicacy:
(Click photo to enlarge.)
Mmmm....dead squirrel! Probably roadkill...which reminded me of a few roadkill links that you might enjoy this happy day:
A roadkill artist.
Roadkill recipes: Pan-Braised Squirrel.
(I wonder if you can substitute soy product?)
Generic roadkill recipes.
(Includes Moose-and-Squirrel Meat Balls.)
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Hey! I'm a published photographer...
I took this photo of some wild elk...the local paper (Cottage Grove Sentinel) publishes local photos, so, I sent them a copy...and they published it. I am now ready to receive my Pulitzer in photography... (Click the photograph to enlarge.)
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