P.S.

I’ve always loved Fragonard’s painting The Swing. That was the first time I ever saw a guy looking up a chick’s skirt in what is supposed to be a classical work. And seriously, the dude behind them is totally lending an assist to the guy in the bushes. It also helps that the babe is WAY into it. Look at her, look at those eyes. She’s getting off more than anyone else in this painting.

I do rather focus all my art appreciation through this fairly narrow filter, yeah. All art is about sex. No really. Look at Theo van Doesburg’s major sexual work Composition VII (the three graces). That is a girly four-way if ever I saw one! Don’t tell me you don’t see it! I know it’s called three graces, but that was just to fool the clergy! There are FOUR colors, and thus four girls on a black bed. Once you overlay the original photo he used with those models it’s simple, but I think you can work out what’s a leg and what’s a hand and who has their tongue where even without it.

You don’t want to know what I think about The Nut Gatherers. I will say it makes me feel slightly icky because those two are clearly ten, but Bouguereau got slightly icky from time to time anyway, what with Cupidon and all. I’m guessing he woke up that day and said “I will paint a painting of young lesbians in love!” and everyone just went with it because he was all French and shit and who was going to tell him it was just a bit too creepy when they girls were clearly 10?

…

I do occasionally worry about what I’m doing with my time, yeah.

Beautiful Marvel

“Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” André Breton in The Surrealist Manifesto

Tru dat!

Just After Sunset

If I can’t be permitted to sleep, I shall post!

I got done with Just After Sunset last night.

I really liked Stationary Bike and N. a lot. Those two are, in my mind, some of the best stuff he’s done in years. Mute was also very good.

Willa, Rest Stop and Ayana are okay, but they didn’t electrify my brain or anything. The Cat from Hell is interesting, but not one of his best.

Harvey’s Dream, Graduation Afternoon and The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates seem like fragments that old Steve just threw into the book for the hell of it. They’re hardly stories at all, just fragments that never quite fit into another story. As such they’re too short for me to either like or not like.

I couldn’t finish The Gingerbread Girl when I got it when it first came to CD a couple of years ago and I found it just as tedious and annoying this time as I did then. So I didn’t even try really, gave up on it sooner than I did last time. I’ve still only got the idea that she gets away because that’s ALWAYS how Steve ends these stories. I didn’t get very far into A Very Tight Place before giving up on that either. It was just tedious.

I don’t know if I like this collection more or less than Everything’s Eventual because half those stories I don’t really associate with that collection. I listen to a lot of audio and the stuff in Everything’s Eventual came out sort of piecemeal. (see the audio section on the linked page) Lots of stuff came out as audio only before the actual collection came along.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes is still my favorite collection, and those are out on CD in two volumes if you don’t have them and want them on audio.

N. started a germ in my head though. I really like the idea of giving OCD behavior a legitimate reason to exist, building the story around the symptoms, but I got a little annoyed at the ending. I won’t spoil it per say, but I will mention this idea I’ve always had. I’ve had this thought for years that the difference between fantasy and horror is down to can the protagonist fight back and is there a power for good? In the bulk of horror stories the answer to both is no. Evil is strong and people just whimper in the face of it. What if you shifted the thought a little? Instead of OCD, what if your patient is a paranoid weapons freak? He thinks he needs weapons to protect against THEM only he won’t say who THEM is because A) using a creature’s name is supposed to summon it and B) he knows that the real answer (eldritch critters from beyond the void) will sound even crazier than the idea that he’s just a PTSD addled nut looking for Commies or Terrorists or Martians that are lurking around every corner. And the reasons he keeps the weapons is that he knows his Irish folk lore and so knows that iron (and steel by extension) will keep the nasties at bay. From there you build up. Not original, because I just said I’d be swiping the idea from this story, but it could be interesting.

UPDATE!

The vet agrees that Vienna is an idiot. She also says that she’s probably not really hurt beyond her little scrapes but we should keep an eye on her. Evidently if a kitten is hurt you know about it right away and the fact that she’s being perky and pouncy is a dead give away that she’s okay.

Proof of fuzzy

Sooooo here’s the thing.

Al and Folly are annoyed at all the photographic attention Fancy & Vienna have gotten lately and they want some shots to prove they still live her. Evidently those proof of life shots of V rankled them a bit.
So here we have some shots of the other two…

This shot shows one of the big problems with photographing Al. She jsut sits there. So I decided to get some of Fol and come back to her.

Here we have Folly floor surfing.

She did not know we were starting yet.

I went back for another shot of Al. If you take this and the first picture you can see that she has actually moved her head two inches to the left.

Follderal D. Stripeybutt IS the pensive kitty.

I promise you, these are all different pictures. AL is just REALLY lazy.

Folly’s tail is always in motion though.

I went for a different angle just so you wouldn’t think I was messing with you.

FALLING KITTENS!

So… Vienna is not dead. She doesn’t even seem terribly hurt. She was in the windowsill of Syd’s office, leaning against the screen, when both screen and kitten went *pop* and flew out the window. Second story window, nothing but rocks and a smallish bush to cushion the fall. Syd and I run down the stairs, out the door, on the lawn and… no kitten. Screen, yes. Kitten, no. That was my first relief, not to find her laying among the rocks because I am way to tired right now to deal with a dead kitten right now. One of the hallmarks of dead kittens is that they sort of stay in one place, what with the whole being dead thing putting a damper on their ability to move about.

So if there wasn’t the broken remains of a kitten among the rocks then there wasn’t a dead kitten. Q.E. muthafuckin D. bitach! This lead to Syd plaintively whining the kitten’s name, and sounding really scared because while we didn’t find a dead kitten it wouldn’t mean we wouldn’t find a hurt kitten.

I however know the score. Vienna is EVIL and would not die, or even come to harm, so easily. I start to walk around the side of the house because I know Vienna’s M.O. and I knew she would be heading for the front porch. See, she loves to get under the front porch because it’s dirty and spidery and while adults can climb under there they prefer not to. So she can sit there and annoy the hell out of the adults ALL DAY if she wants. I found her just heading to the holly bush and was unable to catch her before she went under the porch. However, as she ran under the porch, I guessed that she had no broken limbs. Broken limbs mean limping, not running under the porch like it’s the best game ever.

So I swung a vine at her, because little whippy vines are abundant under the porch and she likes to chase things like little whippy vines. However, just as she’d get interested in the vine, she’d decide that eating a leaf would be more fun right now and diverted her attention. So in order to show Syd that the kitten was okay I had to climb under the porch, grab the idiot kitten no, I like calling her and idiot better, and drag her out. We then brought her inside where she proceeded to pounce on Al, run around like a loon and act all kitteny. She basically thinks she just had an interesting adventure.

We’re still going to take her to the vet, in about half an hour. I intend to tell them to give her lots of shots and other traumatic things. Teach her for treating a fall from a second story window as no big deal.

Now just to prove she isn’t dead, I present the following photographs. Sorry none of them are of her reading today’s news paper or giving a review of Public Enemies or anything like that.

Here you can see the sole mark on her from the experience. A small scrape on her muzzle.

And a better shot.

This isn’t a photo of the damage, but it was such a nice shot I thought I’d share it. I’ve still got the full sized version so I may turn that into a wallpaper.

Don’t know whether to cuddle her or throttle her. Probably pretend to cuddle her and then throttle her.

And then Fancy heard I was taking pictures and wanted in on the action.

They’re all plants!

Do you suppose Fox News has it right and that Mark Sanford really IS a democrat? I mean, he must be a plant to make the republicans look as bad as possible. Just like Mark Foley, John McCain, Larry Craig* and a handful of others. My thought is this… these guys caused so much damage to the republican brand that it can’t be accidental. Why else would Sanford keep digging himself this even deep hole? As John Stewart put it this week “God killed Michael Jackson to save your ass, and you gave another interview?”

It has to be deliberate. These guys are liberal plants, since as we know no true Scotsman Republican would sink so low as to do any of these things. They’d never cheat on their spouses, molest children, have bathroom sex, get hooked on drugs, humiliate themselves by publicly chasing skirt, or do any of the things that would cause them to have such a public scandal. These fellows are far too upstanding and moral beings for that. So it must be that these are soulless liberals, willing to infiltrate the party, hide like sleeper cells for years in order to attain power and then burst forth in scandals that make the republican party appear rife with hypocrites and thieves when really they’re just doing Gods work.

Obvious really, once you think about it.

*This one isn’t Fox, but I didn’t feel like hunting around forever to find a screen cap of that one.

Classy Black and White Cat pics

Pop Trinity

I found an odd thing in Michael Jackson’s death this week. I found that I was thinking as much, or even more about Madonna and Prince. I’ve always had this loose trinity of 80s pop in my head comprising of the three of them. I’ve always found them interesting as a group, particularly since they all started to become embarrassing at about the same point. I mean really, had someone bombed the Grammy Awards in 1991 and wiped them all out, how differently we’d think of them now. No renaming debacle, no sex book, and we wouldn’t have had that ending to the Black or White video. In short, we’d have been spared seeing each of them go off the rails. Not that they didn’t do good work after, but we really watched each of them crack up in big ways during the 90s.

Madonna didn’t go off the rails as badly as the boys did, but that’s just another interesting thing about this group, the 2-1 distinctions. Madonna and Prince both had feature film careers, while Michael never managed that far. Michael and Madonna both were media accepted figures, while Prince has always been on the outside looking in. And of course Prince and Michael were given credit for their artistic merit while Madonna has greatly been dismissed for only being good at PR. There is also the fact that two of them went by on name and one went by a first and last name and a few other 2-1 distinctions but why keep hammering? Besides, you’ll always find things that two people did and the third didn’t when you’re talking about three people. I just find it interesting what things have worked out and how they have worked out.

During the 80s though, these three pretty much were pop music. Not only were they big at the time, but they and their music have endured into the present. Even when Michael was becoming frankly scary to look at and Invincible only (only he says) went to be a double platinum album, he was still packing them in because he never stopped being a great performer. No matter how many comment about Madonna’s scary arms or wacky life keep popping up, people still want to see her perform and her albums keep hitting number one. Prince is currently selling better than he did during his heyday, his last four albums all got into the top three so I guess the whole comeback thing worked for him.

Michael Jackson was always the least of the three for me though. I liked his music, but it never compelled me like the works of the other two did. Even then, Madonna is more or less just okay as far as I’m concerned. Honestly, I prefer Prince over the other two, so when one of them comes up in a big way I find myself thinking of him again. I suppose that’s why I decided to buy his new album, and snagged a copy of Purple Rain on DVD.

Well that and Holly has never seen it, which only confirms my whole prejudice against her parents who clearly kept her handcuffed to a radiator in the basement and only fed her through a slot in the door. You have never met anyone who was not only alive, but a kid during the 80s and yet seems to know nothing about that decade. If she were a brainwashed CIA plant all MK Ultra style she would have done what she was going to do by now.

Anyone keeping count?

So did Billy Mays start up a new group of three? Is that why Mollie Sugden had to die? Is there one more person still in the pipeline? I always hear “These things come in threes” from people. Well, now they’re in fives, how do we mark this on the old wives bullshit-o-meter? Is this above or below going out with wet hair gives you leprosy? Or is is pneumonia that you’re supposed to get? I can never keep this shit straight.

At least John Inman will have someone to keep him company now besides Wendy Richard. At least Frank Thornton is still going strong.