more glamour science topics:

giant squid
forensic medicine
smart dolphins
mars
how the heck did they build those pyramids?
rainforests
anything involving liquid nitrogen
string theory

My Life Clock is Way Black

being a geezer sometimes has it's advantages. As we were exiting the Fillmore last night in the usual swarm, I overheard a young guy next to me talking to his buddy about "this cool movie from the '70's I saw recently called 'Logan's Run,' the guy who played Logan was, oh, I can't think of his name, he was in 'Austin Powers'..." I looked over and said "Michael York." "Yeah, yeah," the guy said, "and who was the old guy in the movie?" "Peter Ustinov." "Yeah, right!" "...and the girl was Jenny Agutter," I added."Wow, thanks, you're amazing!" he said. Then we dispersed into the night.

True or False?

The following are lines from Beowulf:

"time is running out, a nice guy's future is at stake!"

"I do so like people being eternally grateful to me."

epics speak to me like a homie.

thinking about my past

yes, I wanted to start transitioning when I ws 19, but my ex said if I did, it was the end of our relationship. It's not that our relationship was more important than abstract notions like my "being true to myself" or whatever. It was that I was so bummed about how my body turned out that I thought that I would never be able to pull it off (c.f. "happiness=passing"). Some days I still don't think I can pull it off. So we stayed together a decade longer than we should have not because I was so devoted or tragically conflicted but because I was chickenshit.

I have a hard time forgiving myself for that.

This Is Not

this is not my body, this is not my life.
this is not the gun i used to murder barney fife.
this is not my mission statement, i'm not guarding the bottom line.
i'm not sensing the winds of change, i'm not damp from the mists of time.
this is not poltergeist weather, this is not initiation week.
this is neither the time nor place for the roping off of freaks.
this isn't razorback country, this isn't lornadoon.
this isn't the harvard business review, this isn't the harvard lampoon.
this isn't my change of clothing, this isn't clandestine.
they're not removing the tarry feathers, that isn't terpentine.

an excerpt from my life four years ago...

I feel strangely uneasy today. Like I don't know where I stand with the world. I think it was my talk with mom this morning. And possibly posting the self-history. And the whole stupid Vivian car wreck/sham marriage stuff. And Winston popping back into my life. And getting "sirred" a couple times on the phone this week. and the mystery and dread of rhinocrisis. and realizing what a shambles my finances are, and how I should forget going to Europe any time soon, and how I shouldn't even be going on this vacation next month, but it's too late to not, and knowing that I should probably just sell the house and jeep, even though that's really gonna hurt like you don't know, and feeling hopeless in this job, and seeing Sleater-Kinney last night and thinking "god, I wish that were me up there..."

a mini movie review

"Metropolis"

(no, not that one, the anime version loosely based on that one)

This 2001 state-of-the-art turgid hunk of Japanese animation is very loosely based on the 1928 (or thereabouts) Fritz Lang silent masterpiece of the same name about a technological society subsidized by proletariat oppression that is overthrown by a robot (that doesn't know she is a robot) disguised as an innocent gamin (at least I think that's what it's about). First of all, this rather long movie suffers the same annoying trait as other non-dubbed anime; that is, while the animation draws you in by virtue of the lush artwork, having to concentrate on the subtitles (made even worse in this case by being in a white typeface) creates a feeling of mental conflict that lessens the entire experience. This film uses a fairly seamless combination of cell animation and CGI (funny, the japanese apparently don't have a word for CGI, because in the credits there would be a string of japanese ideograms with "CG" stuck in the middle, then more ideograms), with the net effect similar to watching a really really elaborate and detailed episode of "Futurama." Which brings me to the other quality of this and many other otherwise beautiful anime films that bugs me: Having fully realistic, properly proportioned backgrounds populated by cartoonish characters (or worse, having some characters be realistic, while others are cartoonish). It's as if the artists feel like they have to pay some kind of homage to Uncle Walt. On the other hand, I like the anime habit of indiscriminately mixing asian-type characters with western-type characters; it gives the feeling of living in a world with no geographic barriers. Or San Francisco. At any rate, this show had cutesy people with big goofy noses and tiny pinpoint eyes interacting with gritty, realistic, physiognomically accurate revolutionaries. However, it was the backgrounds that stole the show in this movie: they were indescribably fantastic. The robots were really well done, too; they were lumbering, slow-moving things you could believe were machines, and yet even the non-verbal ones conveyed some kind of personality (one in particular that the hero befriends, a garbage-collecting unit he names "fifi", is especially touching). The directors of this movie also tried to imbue the futuristic world of "Metropolis" with a retro, jazz-age style, producing somewhat disconcerting results. The soundtrack is all be-bop, jazz, and Carl Starling-esque big band flights of fancy-- an attempt, I guess, at recapturing the "art deco futuristic" sensibility of the original Metropolis. The makers of this epic also have some kind of Babylon fixation going on, in an attempt to draw a parallel with the story of the Tower of Babel: the colossal center of power and wealth in Metropolis is called "the Ziggarut," and the strong-arm ruling political party is referred to as "the Marduks." I won't attempt to describe the plot; the plot is pretty much immaterial to enjoying this movie. In short: lotta people get shot; robots get blown up. Good anime is hyper-violent anyway (why is that?). The most bizarre sequence in the film consists of a lovingly detailed destruction of Metropolis to the tune of this old Ray Charles romantic standard whose name it's killing me not to be able to remember, while the hero is desperately trying to save the girl-robot that is the direct cause of all this destruction, while her human skin burns off and she slowly transforms into a writhing mass of electronic fury (all the while buildings are collapsing around him and he's being tossed about feather-in-the-wind style). In the end, the city is destroyed but robots and men bravely face the future together as brothers, hallelulia, amen. Metropolis is a mess, but oh what a beautiful mess.

Another one

stay drunk all the time


they say there's something
strangely depressing about portland;
man, that's my kinda town!
kinda tired of selling short
and buying my soul back long,
spending my down time in the park,
where the healthy do tai chi and falun gong;
i'm just a reliever warming the bench,
soaking up drizzle and exuding the stench
of failure and self pity, it mixes with the pine,
working up the strength to stay drunk all the time.

Words

Some of my favorite words are ones that only have meaning to me. Little glossaries from the secret language Caroline and I always meant to invent:

"zotted (adj.):" you're so tired you only have energy left to whine.

"sponselled (adj.):" tripped up by something, as when something dissappointingly unexpected happens, especially when your own inadequacies are the cause.

Life is a picnic with lots of ants that want to eat you alive.

My favorite English word is "barbarian," because the greek root is the word "barbar," which is the sound, much in the vein of our "blah blah" that the haughty greeks heard when non-greek speaking foriegners spoke. Of course, all civilized folk spoke Greek! Hence the connotation of being uncivilized. Human nature never changes.

Some of the sidewalk stencils in my neighborhood:

"who is extreme elvis?"

"monkey knife fight"

"dyke march 2001
sat june 15
2 - 4 pm
dolores park"

"input is not detected"

"protege la bodega
no tiles basura"

"excuse me, a doormat's good honest work. Only the bored and the wicked rich don't know that..." --Kristen Hersh

Last night my boyfriend came over to break up for me for the nth time. Same old: I'm living for the day, he wants something I can't give him: a family, someone he can proudly take home to meet mom, all of my time. I started crying and we ended up making love. Afterwards he ran down to the cornerstore and got us some Hawaiian Punch, P&G's contribution to my dental caries. He didn't leave until midnight, and I have to go in at 7 to work a double shift. God, I'm going to be so zotted.

The Nurse Wears Harley-Davidson Scrubs


Eating my dinner out of an emesis basin:
Oh happy world of work!
The touch of the skin of others
Oh so many others
My skin never crawls.

Eating my dinner out of a vending machine:
Oh blessed shift worker!
That nurse wears Harley-Davidson scrubs,
This one favors dinosaurs.
I wear scrubs that smell like pajamas
And ride my hips like a sensei's cord of wisdom.