I watched "Les Visiteurs" last night - I'd seen it before and enjoyed it, and thought I'd give it a try without the subtitles. Good thing I knew the plot already, let me tell you. But part of the trouble I had following the dialogue is that at least half of it is done in formal/archaic French, due to the fact that two of the main characters are a chevalier and his servant from the 11th century who get transported into the 20th century due to a witch, an accidental shooting, and quail's eggs, or lack thereof, in the time-travel potion. Hollywood did an English remake a few years back that I haven't seen, but I recommend the original French version.
Plus Jean Reno is very sexy. Even while wearing dripping-wet long underwear.
The also very sexy Lilian is in the photo above (I know, he's married, but memories run long), taken on a hot August day in 2007, about halfway through our walking tour of Paris. He was very kind to drive me there and wander around with me, and buy me dinner at an outdoor cafe. I'd love to live in Paris. Someday soon, I hope, after I finish my degree in French and find a job over there. According to my calculations, I'll be done with all my classes in 2012, so I'll have my own personal end-of-life-cycle and move with the Maya into the next iteration of existence, this one where I get to live in France. I'm looking forward to it.
When I was 18 or 19, living in Eugene and majoring in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of Oregon, doing various odd jobs during the summer, I spent a day at the Oregon Country Fair. That would be 26 years ago now, I believe. My memories of that day are (1) wearing one of those tube tops we all wore back then; (2) getting sunburned where the tube top didn't cover me; (3) eating a really nasty tofu dog (I was a vegetarian then); and (4) gawking at a man wandering the fair clad only in a purple elephant codpiece. Last Thursday I went back to the Fair, hoping for better food and more naked men. I was not disappointed in either direction.
I was part of the "Fire Choir" - a group of amateur, professional, and semi-professional singers and musicians (two pianists and a percussion section) who were to perform Orff's "Carmina Burana" for the opening night celebration, while a troupe of fire dancers flung fire around, acting out the sort-of-story in the libretto: pious monk discovers sex and drinking, ends up being redeemed by true love. The performance was open to the public, and the canvas shell was set up outside the fairgrounds, but I'm not sure who other than the fair workers was there for the performance, which took place on Friday at dark, after the fair closed. But there were several hundred, maybe over a thousand - maybe more, I'm really bad at judging numbers - in the audience. On Thursday, we had about 50 people watching us from their seats in the grassy field.
I'd sung with several of the people in the choir before, in Portland Symphonic or Bach Cantata Choir, or other smaller groups. I didn't recognize anyone from the Eugene Concert Choir.
The fire dancers included stilt-walkers. This woman wore large feathered wings and acted out the death of a swan, at the appropriate spot in the performance. Hm. No, maybe it was the other woman wearing a white outfit on stilts. There were several of them. You can see the fire truck in the background - there just in case things got out of hand. Too hot too handle, you might say. No mishaps though, either at rehearsal or during the performance.
We ran through the piece on Thursday evening, and then I went back to the campsite where several choir people were staying, and where I completely failed to get a good night's sleep. Several of the others were talking, and then after they went to bed, there was a large group in the next field over who were shouting and whooping it up in general, plus with fireworks. And when they were done, I think I dozed off for a few minutes, but then it started to rain, and I hadn't put the rain cover over the tent, as it had been a nice clear night. I said 'to hell with it' and just let the raindrops splash on my face through the mesh of the door. And then it was sunrise, and thank goodness the camp kitchen was serving coffee. And that I'd brought bug spray, as the mosquitos were ferocious.
After two cups of highly-sweetened coffee and some fruit salad, and a lovely chat with Jim Hook - we've been friends/co-singers for a long time, but this was the first chance I'd had to catch up with him since I got back to Portland - I grabbed my towel and shampoo and headed over to the Fair to get a shower. We didn't get paid for doing this performance, but we did get "day worker" passes, and if I'd wanted to, I could have gotten in free all three days of the fair. I took advantage of this to bypass the weird outhouse-y rent-a-shower arrangement in the camp, and headed to "The Ritz" - a small complex of saunas and about five dozen showers, all out in the open. You pay your six bucks, you put your clothes etc. in a cubicle, and you take a shower with about six dozen other people at once. It was like Breitenbush on steroids. I really enjoy being naked in the open air, I must say. I'll have to check out naturist colonies - especially if they're in France, and have a goat-cheese manufacturing sideline.
Showered and refreshed, I headed back to the camp to drop off my stuff and hustle to the main Fair gate, where we serenaded people for a while, hoping to pull in more audience members for the evening performance. And then I was too hungry to wait, and went into the Fair myself, passing more stilt-walkers and women in floaty skirts and leafy headbands, and hyper children and more tie-dye than I've seen in a month of Sundays. The first thing at the gate was a crank-operated standing music machine, where rotating wrenches banged pipes and made a tune, sort of. Clever, though.
I think "Tofu Palace" was where I had the nasty tofu dog many years ago, so I skipped this food vendor, and ended up having raspberry lemonade and aggressively healthy fried rice, with red cabbage and sprouts and gomasio and sunflower seeds. It did give me the energy to start walking through the fair.
Being early in the day on Friday (the first day) it wasn't as crowded as I was told it gets, but it was more than crowded enough for me. Lots of candles/wood carvings/batik/tofu/dried flowers/artwork for sale. I bought a print of a painting titled "The Rooster's Dream" by the artist Shanna Trumbly, but wasn't really tempted by anything else for sale. Of course, there were no other chicken-related arts & crafts that I could see ...
I think I walked everywhere it was possible to walk, but I seemed to be going in circles a few times. I remember that from my last visit, too. It's not a huge area, but the way it's laid out makes it easy to lose your way, even with a map.
Several of the vendors had sleeping lofts above their booths. I think that would be fun.
A procession came through, made up of mostly people dressed in lime green, one with a sign that said "The End of the Lime is Near." There were other parades, of stilt-walkers and people dressed like sweet peas or water lilies or something (I think) but I didn't take pictures of everything. One completely naked man wandering around, and several almost, and many many young women without tops, whose breasts had been decorated with spangles and paint. And many paunchy baseball-capped 50ish men who were taking pictures of said spangly breasts. Though there was one woman who was so artistically decorated I almost asked if I could take a picture of her chest. But I didn't. It was very beautiful, though.
After a few hours, I was losing energy and getting overheated, and so was thrilled to find a Coconut Bliss cart serving chocolate dairy-free frozen treats. That cooled me off enough that I could make my way back to camp to tear down my tent (thanks, John!) and get packed up, as I planned on leaving right after the performance.
The performance went well, in spite of starting a good bit later than we'd been told (call was 7pm, and we didn't start singing until 9pm or later) and in spite of a conductor who wasn't as familiar as she might have been with the music, I think; it's a good thing at least half the choir knew the piece really well, especially in the middle "In Taberna" section. But we got through it, to a crashing and fiery finale, and rousing applause from the audience. Well, see for yourself:
I headed south after work on Thursday with a cooler full of rillettes and a flat of raspberries (thanks to Kate and Ben for letting me use the car!) and after some traffic issues around Wilsonville which delayed me only about an hour and a half, arrived at Mom and John's house, up in the mountains between Gold Beach and Brookings, overlooking the ocean, or at least you could twenty years ago before the trees grew up too tall. Fog on the coast that night, but clear up there, lovely stars in the cool of the midnight hour.
We made a tart with apricots and the raspberries, on gluten-free pie crust, glazed with melted apricot jam.
We took a walk through the woods and high meadows, listening to the insects and breathing the air. And Mom listened to me talk on and on about things that were troubling me, things I'm doing/have done wrong, ways I'd like to get better, and offered sympathy and good advice. Good to have a Mom.
We sat out on the deck playing Scrabble and being buzzed by hummingbirds; two feeders, one on each end of the deck, both mobbed almost constantly by up to seven birds at a time, the sound of their wings in stereo like being in the world's largest beehive. When the feeders are empty, the hummingbirds come to the window and hover there, glaring, until Mom or John goes out to replenish the sugar water.
We puttered around the yard and garden. I talked to the chickens and picked peas, sat in the hot tub in the chill of the evening and the cool of the morning. We read in companionable silence in the living room.
I spent Saturday morning (after gluten-free crepes with sour-cherry sauce and goat cream cheese, YUM!) with my friend Larry, talking about everything and nothing as we do each time we get together. It's like continuing a conversation that we've been having for twenty years, even if a year goes by between sentences, sometimes. I'm lucky to have a friend like that. My neck got sunburned, sitting out on his front steps, petting the cat.
But not as sunburned as my legs got on Sunday, when we took kayaks to the Rogue River. I can't believe I forgot to put sunscreen on my legs! But it was a great river trip, starting at Foster Bar, with a lunch break on a sandy bar after the Twomile rapids (exciting video footage to come! I hope!) to eat rillete wraps and cherry tomatoes and leftover steamed green beans, a lazy glide past mergansers and Western pond turtles sunning themselves on the rocks, osprey and eagles overhead, and a final fight against the wind before pulling out at Cougar Lane. Couldn't have asked for a better day; it was cloudy and cold on the coast, but bright and sunny inland, with just enough breeze to keep it from getting too hot, though the breeze turned into that kayak-flipping offshore wind too soon.
I left for Portland over the mountain road to Powers, which I'd never done before - a lovely drive up and over from the Rogue (the dry side) to the Coquille (suddenly much greener), then on to 42 to I-5 and home, my thighs burning from the sunburn. The first thing I did when I got back to Portland was to stop by New Seasons for a large tube of aloe vera.
Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation – but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades. This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food – but all that is changing. There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, "So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world." There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums. You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown – Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood – and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled inhistory. The living world is not "out there" somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.
The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe – exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a "little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven." So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
Paul Hawken Commencement Address to the Class of 2009 University of Portland, May 3, 2009
I thought with school over, and no church choir job, and no Bach Choir rehearsals, I'd have lots of free time to blog, and perhaps I do, but I'm using it to do things that I then don't have time to blog about. Not that you're all waiting by the computer for my next post, of course. I read a lot of blogs myself, by people who seem much more entertaining and interesting, with intelligent commentary about current events and 21st century feminist philosopy and movie reviews, and then I come here and post pictures of chickens.
I've been feeling odd lately about my life, in that when I was growing up, I was told that I was so intelligent and wonderful that I had the potential to do great things. And I never really got around to doing anything great, in the grand scheme of things. No doctorate, no cancer research (got cancer, but not the same thing), no Fulbright scholarship, no bragging rights for the parents or writeups in the hometown newspaper, not that we ever stayed anyplace long enough for me to have a home town, really, except Ashland, at the end.
At 45, I have half my life behind me, and it's full of wonderful things and really stupid decisions and thoughtless actions and generous impulses, more taking than giving on balance, though I'm trying to correct that, and a string of jobs that never went anywhere, some of which I really liked and some of which I just did. It's been better these last few years, as I've gotten a better idea of what I want to do, but there's still the nagging feeling that I'm not living up to my potential. Kind of like this blog, which is what started me talking about this. I could be crafting elegant prose, rather than clucking and squawking about the minutiae of my daily existence. I think when I started this blog, I had aspirations towards doing that. Now I am aspiring to smaller goals, nothing earth-shaking, and I'm happy about it, so why am I worried that I'm not satisfying other people's expectations about/for me? When I don't even know if they have any?
Well. Back to the weekly update. I got a student rush ticket to see "Rent" on Wednesday, and decided to be a bit bohemian with my dinner, so had a green salad and steak frites at Carafe. I don't eat beef often these days, and it's nice to have a well-prepared piece of meat when I do. Their béarnaise sauce is well done (though could be a bit brighter with the herbs).
I had never seen "Rent" when it first came out, and wasn't even that familiar with the songs. The music was really, really, loud and it was hard to understand a lot of the words, especially when the audience cheered at lines or entrances. This was/is the final tour with the original cast members Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp, and I was told there are "groupies" that follow the tour around. I don't think I'd want to see the show more than once, but it was good. I know the emphasis in the production was originally on AIDS and the gay/alternative lifestyle, but I found myself focusing more on the portrayal of homelessness - not the living-in-rundown-loft type, the out-on-the-street type. While AIDS is of course still an issue, at least in the US it seems to have moved into more of a managed care category, like diabetes. HIV/AIDS is something people "live with" rather than something they die from, though that happens too, naturally. But it doesn't seem to be what you'd write a rock opera about in 2009. And even though President Obama and his administration (are you listening, Mr. President?) are doing their best to NOT live up to campaign promises to get rid of DOMA and DADT and anything else that turns "gay" into "other/alien/wrong", public perception (with certain obvious exceptions) of same-sex relationships etc. has changed and continues to change. The definition of "normal" is much different for my nephew's generation than it was for my own at his age.
But homelessness is a problem. A growing concern. The people that I see every single day on street corners, with cardboard signs and downcast eyes. I carry around granola bars to give out but that seems inadequate, especially when I get to go to Broadway shows and eat in restaurants. That's a scale I need to work more on balancing.
On a more cheerful note, peas! and carrots! I used to hate peas and carrots, prefrozen pasty nasty metallic-tasting PLEASE don't make me eat them vegetables. Having never been homeless and hungry as a child, I thought being forced to eat peas and carrots was the cruellest of fates, even when salted with my tears. Now, however, while I still avoid the frozen bagged variety, I'll gladly pick the snap peas off my vines in the garden and cook them until just tender with slivers of fennel and sweet onion, with chopped fennel fronds mixed in, and eat them with a salad of grated carrots in lemon juice, the sweet taste of the peas complemented by the sweet/sour crunch of the carrots. Now for a time machine, so I can take these delights back to my despairing younger self ...
And berries at the market today, the first blueberries already. I didn't get cherries because the blueberries looked so good. So much to eat, and so little time. I bought fava beans and sweet salad onions for the grill, and a big bag of green beans which are there already, competing with the last of the peas and asparagus. Piles and mounds of summer squash and the first of the non-hydroponic tomatoes, but I passed on those. Bought some grass-fed ground beef for tonight or tomorrow, and a small rump roast (and free stew meat!) for the freezer. Wasabi cream cheese and lots of rillettes and some pate to take down to Mom and John's next week. I'll get more fruit at the Wednesday market to take there, too. I am so lucky to have all of this abundance to choose from, and the means to enjoy it. Hope you're enjoying the fruits of the season as well.
STORRS, Conn. – For hundreds of hours, Ebenezer Otu-Nyarko has been studying “pok-cluck-cluck,” “cluck-bawk-bawk” and “cluck-cluck-cluck.”
It might earn him an advanced degree.
Otu-Nyarko, a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut, has focused his research inside the school’s poultry barn, where microphones hang from the ceiling and every cluck, bawk and pok is recorded. He and professor Michael Darre are trying to understand the language of chickens.
“This is not ‘let’s translate chicken to English,’ ” Darre said. “We are trying to find out their language and what their vocalizations mean.”
