Cai Guo-Qiang
This guy is both an installation sculptor, and he paints... with gunpowder. He's in charge of pyro-art at the Chinese Olympics.

Tom, if the rest of the contemporary art scene is anything like this guy, you're in for a treat.

Edit, addition: Casulo, mobile design, room in a box. Design? Yes, please?

So many things have happened in the last couple of days, I'm still not quite sure where my head's at. Let's see if I can put this in order...
1. Got an offer to go to Istanbul this summer, accompanying my sister that far on her way to the West Bank (she'll be on a school trip,) and back, after she's done.
2. Got accepted to Guilford College for art, starting summer 08. Wouldn't be able to go to Istanbul, but would be in art school, yay. Have to figure out if I can get enough financial aid to make it work.
3. Got accepted to Rockingham CC's program for creative and fine woodworking, Fall 08. May have already posted that
4. Got a short-term offer teaching highschool students stage combat for a production of Antigone that goes up the 29th! I'd be starting Tuesday, out in the county. Complete newbies, exciting to work with...but I'd almost certainly have to work this coming Friday, meaning that ConNooga isn't really a thing I can do...
5. Found out that NC State Industrial Design will actually accept a late MA applicant...So I have to get to work finishing that application ASAP. Still trying to get hold of the magical disappearing department head to talk about portfolio stuff...Ok, I'm rambling.

The upshot is that I've very suddenly gotten very busy...

Dude, if you've got leather in need of TLC, Obenauf's Heavy Duty is absolutely frickin' amazing. It's so safe you rub it in manually (the warmth helps it work,) and does very good things for my favorite hiking boots (and during the winter, my hands.) Little goes a very long way.

Added to the ever-expanding "to sew" list: a ghawazee coat (by any available name.) Eventually.

Compromise I'm not sure if I've reached before and forgotten: time competition b/w interest in musical study and dancing, resolved by decision to work harder on zills. Read some really neat exercises on syncopation today that were designed for kit drummers, but translated well.

I now have plans for Dec 21-23, 2012. Also for at least part of tomorrow. Yay.

My terribly-overdue scarf should be arriving at Khara's in the next day or two. Fringe benefit: one small victory in my ongoing Siege on the Post Office.

Elizabeth and I were talking about formative film experiences this evening. Does anyone else remember "Little Nemo's Adventures in Slumberland"? Scared the hell out of me as a kid.

qotd: How are you on the smell of lavender? Good? Bad? Associations?
qotd2: Do you like to eat flowers? Any favorites?

I'm weirdly proud of adding something new to StumbleUpon. Artist Jeff de Boer does amazing metalwork, including cat and mouse armor.

I got accepted to Rockingham Community College's Fine and Creative Woodworking program, Fall 08. I'm actually really excited about it, though I'm not going to stop looking into other stuff.

Ok, back to grading midterms...

1. play enough DDR to get warm and calm
2. run outside barefoot on a windy night like this
3. spin around in circles, in the dark, 'til you get cold
4. run back inside, make peppermint tea
5. drink tea and eat leftover raspberry cake
6 (optional). feel a little more at peace with the world?

If you're in the Duke campus area Saturday night, those wacky Persians are at it again for Sadeh night. Should be a neat event.

On "Love":

"Oh, certainly!" said the Professor. "That song is his own history, you know."
Tears of an ever-ready sympathy glittered in Bruno's eyes. "I's welly sorry he isn't the Pope!" he said. "Aren't you sorry, Sylvie?"
"Well - I hardly know," Sylvie replied in the vaguest manner. "Would it make him any happier?" she asked the Professor.

- Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno Concluded"

Just for a chaser, I went and pulled a drawer straight off its tracks.

Some deities make terrible houseguests. I can't help but find it endearing.

(It takes courage to enjoy it...)

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Language of the Norse, Older Futhark! Thirty symbols, all told. And no hardier, more warrior-like tongue has ever graced the longships of the Viki or left the Celts and Saxons in such quivering fear. There's only one drawback, that being you died 800 years ago.

for inquisitive visitors. ( golden compass quiz ) ...because an actual update would require brain.

(titled after a sociologist I don't like, and a meme that I do. Both are fairly dead, though neither to the extent some would like.)

Labels are words so dense that they collapse thought around them. They can pull in whole constellations of experience, intention, association, and history, crushing them down into an invisible singularity. How you locate them depends very much on your point of view in time and space, and the definitions you're using, but you can easily point to one and say, "Look, there it isn't!" We rarely elaborate, and with good reason; they're much easier to observe from the outside, where they interact with other concepts. They aren't usually defined by what they are precisely, because that's very hard to explain, but by the event horizon past which they inescapably aren't something else.
A label's immaterial edge is a very risky place to be. Though labels appear timeless, their boundaries and centers often move. It's technically possible to stay in orbit, but unlikely. It takes enormous energy just to stay visibly outside; the Red Queen must run as fast as she can, just to stay still. Just being too close to a label can change how individuals look to distant observers. Once inside, the labeled individual disappears - any communication attempting to escape is interpreted in terms of the label, falling back within its boundaries. Only the outwardly visible qualities of the label change slightly, with the addition of disintegrated selves.

Well, Maui's swamped and I'm glad I don't have to use Farrington Highway, but UH is relatively dry and (obviously) has power, water, etc.

Rock Band is a ridiculously cool game. I do wonder, though, if the time spent playing it might be used to actually, I dunno, learn to play an instrument. I suppose they're qualitatively different experiences, like playing DDR and actually learning how to dance. Guess it depends on what you've got time, preference and patience for.

Kudos to Tom for fixing my cellphone...with a pen. I fell down the stairs outside my dorm yesterday and I thought it was finally busted, but Tom saved me a big huge pain in the organization by going MacGuyver (sp?!) all over it. We've been trading bizarre tech support solutions of late - I recently diagnosed exactly which bit of his computer was broken by smell.

This just exploded out of my brain over the last fifteen minutes or so, and I feel like I'm so close to something, it just won't come together in my head...all fragmented. Can someone perform dream interpretation on my thoughts? It seems the most appropriate skill for patching this back together:

These are thoughts written down in as close to my subjective experience of them as I can get into words, concerning roughly, ( macrame, data storage, human nature, and time )
With detours through Ben's theory (from a late night long ago) that people uniquely impress their thought processes on their environments (which, amusingly, is echoed exactly by Marx,)) the potential nature of magic, the condition of postmodernity, and basic epistemology.

I think I've used up my parenthesis quota for the year. I need to go make tea now.

I'm increasingly convinced that I could vastly improve Western history by building a time machine, going back to Greece, and slapping the bejesus out of Aristotle at some point in his young life.

EDIT:
"Perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most "unfeminine" quality of all - that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The hubris of the god-makers, the hubris of the male system-builders." (Lerner 1986:228.)

"As long as both men and women regard the subordination of half the human race to the other as "natural," it is impossible to envision a society in which differences do not connote either dominance or subordination" (Lerner 1986:229.) I like the use of "both men and women," and "one to the other," implying that a simple reversal of who's, er, "on top" is not a solution to the problem, and that the cooperation of both (chosen or not, conscious or not) is necessary to the perpetuation of such a thing.

I like Lerner's emphasis on the historicity of gender/race/class, and reminder that women have had both constraints and agency - it removes the "helpless victim" thing. I'm not so sure about the skipping the historical complexity of gender definitions, including many instances where there have been more than two, but she's dealing with the big, dominant Western symbol-systems, so I think it's more or less Ok for the point she's making.

PS: I hereby nominate the Benjaminite War and its ostensible "solution" (Judges 19-21) for the "Most Useless Thing I've Read About All Week" award, beating out the three whole years of the "50 year Peace of Nicias" by about four hundred virgins.

QOTD: How do you know what you want? How do you figure it out? I don't care if it's life goals or what you want for lunch, I'm looking for process.

Well, now I know much more about bleach-discharge technique, and hopefully my hoodie-soon-to-be-costume didn't turn out badly. It's in the wash, we'll see. Unfortunately, even though I worked in an absurdly open room that I thought was well ventilated, I have a mild throat ache and it kinda hurts if I cough. I'm thinking this will not become my favorite fabric-y exercise.

Reading Goffman's Behavior in Public Places , got to the part about site lines, acoustic accommodation vs. jamming, and conversational closure tacts. Walked downstairs, where a roommate had music on in the bathroom. Stopped, wondering if she was about to use the space or had already vacated it. She was walking around downstairs on the phone, so I didn't want to approach, though (fitting Goffman's ideas perfectly) I had an opening for standard-need/politeness in asking her about it. Realized that she had established acoustic claim on the space by playing her music in it, and that I reacted to a social boundary as if it were a physical boundary (again ref: Goffman.) Amused. Wondered if that's part of why people object to others playing music loudly even if they don't care about the music itself - the infringement of acoustic space constitutes a breech of civil inattention.

"My labor can appear in my object only according to its nature; it cannot appear as something different from itself. My labor, therefore, is manifested as the objective, sensuous, perceptible, and indubitable expression of my self-loss and my powerlessness.
- Marx, "Notes of 1844"

A Benediction for (from?) the wrong line of work...

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