cos

Early warning: Howard Dean is going to speak at a rally in Boston on Tuesday, September 23rd, around noontime. Location TBA. Watch the MassForDean site for an update tomorrow or Tuesday with the details. If you want to help out, come to the Boston Dean social at Marché on Wednesday evening!

I'm not getting much sleep this week... (We also have the BBC tomorrow evening, and the Paul Krugman talk on Friday)

EDIT: If you want to make sure you get an update about the details of the rally, sign up here.

estheruth's photography is on display, at a show with her mother's sculptures, at the Belknap Mill in Laconia NH. They're both impressive artists. This is Esther's first full gallery show, but her first one, her senior show at Marlboro College, was up for less than a week. Bostonians - this is well worth the trip!

The show opens tomorrow, Sunday August 24th, with an artists' reception 2-5pm. I think it stays up until September 18th. I'll be there for the opening reception. Come!

The Belknap Mill in Laconia is the oldest unaltered brick textile mill in the U.S. I found some directions online:
The Belknap Mill is located in Laconia approximately 20 miles north of Concord and 20 miles south of Plymouth.

Take I-93 Exit 20 east.  Follow Route 3 into downtown Laconia.  At the junction of Route 3 and NH 106, turn left at the stop light followed by an immediate right onto Beacon Street.  The Mill is on your right shortly after the turn.  There is free parking in the garage directly across Beacon Street from the Mill as well as beyond the Mill and on the right.

A flock of geese is flying over harsh, snowy mountains in central Asia. Watch the peaks gracefully float by, sharp edges and bright snow-covered surfaces. The geese land on the side of a mountain to rest, enveloped in shrieking winds and flying snow. They rest their heads on their backs, tucked into their feathers, to keep warm. There's a low rumble in the background, as first one, then another head pops up. The rumble grows, and, alarmed, all their heads pop up and look in unison. They take off, squawking... and the side of the mountain falls, a huge rumbling avalanche cresting on the smaller peaks.

Winged Migration is a two hour movie with no plot and few words. Just birds flying, eating, swimming, raising chicks, and doing it all over again. There's a narrator with a thick French accent who pops in occasionally, and when a new species of bird is shown for the first time, its name and where it migrates to and from appears in a subtitle - though not for all the birds. Most of them time, you just watch the birds doing their bird things.

I'm hooked. I've gone to see it in theaters four times, and I'm planning to go for a fifth time tomorrow. The only other movies in the past decade that I've gone twice to see in a theater, as far as I can remember, were the two LotR movies - twice each. I can't remember the last time I went to see the same movie three times.

It's beautiful. They got the cameras right up among the flocks of birds as they migrated - according to the "making of" commentary I saw, the birds just got used to the cameras, accepted them in their midst, and didn't seem bothered. Expansive landscapes, mountains, swamps, rivers, deserts, clouds... this really calls for a big screen.

The music is brilliant. The composer wrote an original score for this movie that includes orchestral works, vocals (and a few songs with words), and sounds from nature, especially wings beating, used as part of the instrumentation. I got addicted to listening to it and bought the soundtrack, which has been in my car CD changer ever since I bought it a month or two ago.

But more than that, it portrays a world and puts you in it. You get into a bird frame of reference. Instead of seeing landscapes as fixed, as settings where things take place, and birds as creatures that pass through... you start seeing landscapes and places as ephemeral, things that you pass by. Climates and landforms all last for a short time, to be replaced by something else. And human things are sometimes part of it all, sometimes aberration, and sometimes a blend of both. When a flock of red breasted geese flying over eastern Europe decide to land and rest at an industrial site full of machines and vehicles and smoke, it just feels wrong. Creepy. They don't belong. It makes you tense. But the flock of storks that just barely miss being fed by a peasant on their fall migration, but return to the same field in the spring - the tentative link between the peasant and the birds feels like ambassadors from alien cultures meeting briefly. There are stories in there, and also comical moments, like the birds who seem to dance to classical music, or the Clark's Grebes in Oregon running across the water and eyeing each other. There are breathtaking scenes of dramatic dives, of huge flocks pulsating in the sun...

I could watch this over and over.

Anyway interested in joining me and estheruth for a showing tomorrow sometime? [UPDATE] I'm eyeing the 7:15pm show at the Somerville Theatre, or the 7:45pm show at the Capitol (in Arlington). There's also a 7pm show at the Embassy (in Waltham), and a 9:35pm or a 9:45pm at the Capitol if people want to go late. Email me if you want to come, and which of these showings you'd want to go to.

I'm in Burlington VT, where I saw Howard Dean speak in downtown this afternoon. That speech rocked! There's a transcript and video of the speech available now at http://www.deanforamerica.com/ - if you can watch the video, do! Oh, and as an added surprise, James Jeffords and Patrick Leahy both spoke before Dean. They're on the video too.

I've been supporting Dean for president in 2004 ever since I heard he was running, now more than a year ago, and I've been actively volunteering since this winter. He's the second presidential candidate I ever remember really liking in my life (I don't count Carter in 1980 because I didn't really have a clue at the time), and I like him a whole lot more than the other one (Larry Agran in 1992). ( So here is where I explain to you why I think he's so great... )

So, in summary, I think Dean can save this country. If you're not yet convinced, go watch that speech :) You could also read some postings in the howard_dean community. Or ask me a question, or make a comment - I'll answer when I get back from this roadtrip.

If you are convinced, and want to help out, there are several things you can do, some of which don't cost any money. Dean's campaign is grassroots and self-organizing. Right now, the most important thing you can do is register to vote in the MoveOn primary. Registration closes tonight at midnight. Voting opens tomorrow, and if Dean gets more than 50%, MoveOn will endorse him. That would be a huge boost.

( some other things you can do )

I'm trying an experiment: I've created a second journal called cosmusic where I will post about live music I want to recommend. Mostly, shows I'm planning to go to. Sometimes I may post about a show I just went to that was really great, or an artist I just discovered and fell in love with. I may post about a show I'm not going to but want to recommend to people. Sometimes I'll post about live performances that aren't music, though I think those will be much less frequent, because most of what I go to see is music. Anyway, I just posted something, so if you're interested in my live music habit and wanna join me sometimes, take a look.

eeblet seems to have started a "the first time I met cos" series of comments:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/eeblet/24353.html

If you have a meeting-me story to tell, go ahead and post it there to entertain me :)

I challenge you all to write up a mock spam, expanding on the following theme:
"Portugal , you are a registered member of the Coalition of the Willing. This is an opt-in list [...]"

Combine your experience with all that "opt-in" spam, the Bush administration's coalition-inflation, and the fine new tradition of political mock spam, to entertain us all.

I recently posted in the davis_square and kith_and_kin communities:
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=davis_square&itemid=40502
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=kith_and_kin&itemid=28117

The first post is about an effort to make Somerville a civil rights safe zone, the second is a happy poly story (which is what kith_and_kin is for).

[Edit] A few days later, I also posted this, my critique of Bush's war aimed at (hopefully) informed liberals on pro_war_liberal:
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=pro_war_liberal&itemid=2397

I just noticed that LJ tells me how many comments I've posted, and as of today, I have posted 1,000 comments in the year and a half or so that I've actively been using LJ.

Obviously I've been neglecting my own journal in favor of other people's journals, where most of my posts are. That was my intention to begin with, but I wonder: Does anyone actually read my journal, on those rare occasions when I do post here? Or do y'all just friend me so I can read your protected posts, or so that you can see my name in bold on other people's userinfo when you're trying to figure out who they are, or other meta-LJ-ish reasons?

this could have been a post in my journal, but instead it is a comment in redheadedmuse's.

( well, okay, I guess it belongs in here too... )

slow learners
Live and Direct from the End of the World [added several hours later]

Of course y'all who follow my journal are already reading dr_memory regularly anyway, right?

This one is red headed: redheadedmuse
Go to the beginning and read it all! Sorry, I know I'm lame, I should've posted something when she first started that journal, so you wouldn't have so much backlog to try to catch up on. But it's worth it, so do it anyway.