reading list

i've added a reading list...and i'm taking suggestions. i've got to get organized, i say, as i'm constantly writing book titles doesn on tiny scraps of paper, then clipping them all together, and hoping i won't lose them.

so a blogger list seemed a bit better.

coming soon: after the buying of the home, i'm going to force myself to read every book i own but haven't yet finished/began, before i am allowed to buy more books.

that is neither here nor there--suffice to say that the list will get much longer before it gets any shorter.

romeo & juliet (dire straits)

i owe my musical tastes to many friends and family members who have handed over suggestions, mixed tapes, made casual references, disparaging remarks, sung along on car rides...

today i am listening to a mixed cd (the graduated version of the mixed tapes of my teen and early college years) compiled by amanda, and given to me sometime within the last year. included is a song we both heard for the first time when we were with our friend sara schnaar (who is now married, and has a new last name). incidentially, sara also introduced us to the movie empire records, which uses the song as well.

sara was one of the high priestesses of my musical education; she passed on joni mitchell, dire straits, the rolling stones, bob dylan, the who, tori amos, sarah mclachlan, ani difranco, and on and on and on. we'd sit in her parents living room, or in amanda's bedroom, or in the car on the way to big boy or a basketball game, listening to tapes we'd made from her dad's fantastic cd and record collection; to this day, i can't hear the indigo girls' "closer to fine" without mentally reliving a drive down a dirt road, trying to keep up with jesse malouf, the windows down, early fall, singing at the top of our lungs.

maybe sara was such a good teacher, as she was taught well--her parents are some of the most down to earth, great hearted, honest, and progressive people i've ever met. we're lucky they settled in holly, and not in royal oak or ferndale or any other mecca for progressives.

friends like sara, parents like rod and julie--they give me hope that jeremy and i (being strange liberal vegetarian non-profit career parents) can stay in lansing, can pass on to evie what we love or think matters, and perhaps not have to fear that evie will reject my love for johnny cash, or jeremy's pink floyd penchant...

favorite line from the song for today:

Juliet when we made love you used to cry
You said I love you like the stars above I’ll love you till I die
There’s a place for us you know the movie song
When you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong juliet ?

bonus points for the allusion to west side story, which was of course loosely based on romeo and juliet--this i learned my freshman year of high school, in mr. harbron's class.

how impeccably circular it all is, no? somewhere in all this, there is an essay--the learning of shakespeare, the singing of the songs, the old friends, the homes and living rooms and albums of our own; and the fall, the lovely golden fall.

terry gross...uggh

terry/terri gross annoys the bejeezus out of me. few annoy me more.

except today, when her guest is none other than lame -o ben affleck. check mate.

gag me with whatever's closest...which seems to be this nalgene bottle.

why, oh why, national public radio? it is terrible enough to have to listen to her silly, randomly off-topic, juvenile questions...but now you are double-teaming your faithful listeners with a dose of moron-squared?

praying for patience...

jasper johns

thinking of jasper johns, with a nod toward tim lane.

there's something whimsical and yet deadly serious all at the same time about this piece--grey alphabets.

once, when evie was still a tiny-tiny (less than three months old) tim and i took her to the kresge museum on msu's campus. if memory serves me correctly, that was the day tim discovered a jasper johns sketch tucked away in one of the back rooms of the museum.

one of the great unknown treasures of the museum--the other being warhol's gold marilyn. and evie, asleep on my shoulder, didn't see much of it. sigh.

just when you thought it couldn't get any worse....

...the oregon ducks go and redesign their unifroms, which were already perpetual winners of "the most hideous get-up since tonya harding's jurassic park disaster".

the story is here....along with explanation of the 384 combinations of ugliness possible.

but the real treat is the photo...

which i wanted to post but i'm having issues with photobucket making my pics unreasonably large. fret not: you can see the ugliness at the link above.

at long last

evie at the park with her tio christian, photos by lola.

yes, that is a winnie the pooh bear...one of 4 different toys she insists on taking to bed with her.

ah, my little one.