"Blago gets the boot"

I think I'm going to miss Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Seriously, the guy had really begun to win my sympathy in his last few days in office. It's not that I disbelieve the charges against him, nor that I thought of him as a particularly venerable political figure. Rather, it occurs to me that for much of my adult life, I've been growing accustomed to watching the winners in politics act like gloating, petulant jerks, even as ever more of their victories could be chalked up to fiat, dishonesty or error, while the losers were expected to behave politely and contritely, in the interest of stablity and decorum. Reading excerpts this morning from governor Blagojevich's final address to the Illinois senate, I realized that I had begun to get a special pleasure from watching a loser defiantly refuse to give in, even as the tide of inevitability rose all around him. Having spent the last few weeks recoling from the sickening grey spectacle of George W. Bush leaving the presidency with the false air and gestures of a gentle, respectable statesman, it's been a refreshing change for me to watch a villain boldly refuse to go quietly. If all politics is theater, Rod Blagojevich's was at least an impassioned, compelling performance.

Warmth and light

On Thursday, I looked up from my email at 6 p.m. to discover, though the sun had sunk behind the mountains, there was still light in the sky. Friday was brilliant and clear, with a high temperature in the 60s. A bright sunrise filled my bedroom with early light, and it occurred to me that I've been waking progressively earlier recently, in little bits and increments. I drove to the grocery store in a sweatshirt, with the windows down, listening to the Hallmark Sounds of Halloween tape that Marianne gave me. In the evening, Marianne, Andrew and I walked to new resident artist Amy Tavern's housewarming party. The warmth and light of the day were liberating; in the winter, I feel trapped, cut off, but Friday I felt a part of the world, free to walk around in the open air. It was like being reborn. Today it is chilly and gray; winter is far from gone, but I have gotten a hopeful reminder that it won't last forever.
In Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris writes,
"Weather Report: February 10 - Spring seems far off, impossible, but it is coming. Already there is dusk instead of darkness at five in the afternoon; already hope is stirring at the edges of the day."

A dream

A few nights ago, I dreamed that my grandmother was still alive and making dinner for my father, my aunt and I. She was cooking very slowly and we were tired of waiting, so dad took me out to eat instead. As we ate microwaved pizzas at a folding table in the freezer aisle of a grocery store, he looked me in the eye and told me I should give up art and become a writer. The next morning on the radio, Garrison Keiller quoted someone famous (whose name I can't remember now), saying "How does one become a writer? Try to do something - anything - else." So by that reckoning, dream-dad, I'm right on track.

A new age of Hollywood musicals?

I think it's time for the crowd of young Hollywood filmmakers who keep giving us mediocre depressing-and-uncomfortable-life-situation comedies with brilliant, loony musicals buried in them to admit that they are better at creating brilliant, loony musicals than depressing-and-uncomforatble-life-situation comedies. Seriously, Nicholas Stoller, jettison the rest of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and just show us the Dracula puppet rock opera. And Andrew Fleming, why not cut the dead wood that makes up the other 60 minutes of Hamlet 2 and just present the musical in it's entirety? Dare to let go of your ironic detachment, take sugar over saccharine, stop acting like you're too smart for the things you're good at and we (the audience) are too smart for the things we enjoy, and you may just begin a new age of Hollywood musicals.

Last night,

I woke up suddenly from a dream I can't remember, my heart filled with terror and self-loathing. Today, I feel as though I am lost in the woods, and I don't know how to find my way again. So I think that for now I will live in the woods. I've got The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross with me, and I will read by the winter light filtering through the trees. I may also watch the Ravens game tonight. For some reason, Baltimore has been very much on my mind lately, and I find myself strangely interested in the outcome.

Do you read the New York Times?

I do sometimes, most often while waiting for paint, oil, or wax to dry, because there is a stack of last year's Sunday Times kept in the wood studio for use as drop-cloths, and I usually find it depressing. It's not because of the quality of the journalism, which is very good, or the political bias, which tends to coincide fairly often with my own. It's the tone of the writing, and the aesthetic stance that informs it, particularly in articles about music and art. There's a knowingness to it, a sort of numb hipsterish point of view that yearns to be moved, but has seen too much, and is too dismissive of each new thing it sees to let it happen, as though it believes it has already thought critically a few steps ahead of the artists. Reading the Times, one might be led to believe that beauty can be found only fleetingly, in weariness, like a tiny delicate flower in a big ugly city, and it sometimes leaves me feeling tired and angry.