1. I saw a traveling production of Romeo and Juliet tonight from the American Shakespeare Center. I’ve never seen it done with such humor and modern sentiment—while keeping strictly to the original play and period costuming. Both the Nurse and Mercutio were hilarious, uproarious. And Romeo looked a lot like Jonathan Rhys Meyers—particularly the crazy-eyes thing.
2. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
3. From Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,”
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Which reminds me of Romeo and Juliet, and so we’ve come full circle once again, as always, ad infinitum. Good night and good night and good night.
I wrote a real, live essay for HTMLGiant over the weekend. Click here to read “Animal Instincts: Destroying the Cult of Reason.”
from Unhappy Hipsters:
Also: We’re doing another Group Effort over at HTMLGiant. This time a story-ish type thing. Join in! Why I like doing Group Efforts: sometimes I get exhausted from the communal talk about the thing (the thing being art) and just want to make it as a community. Something exciting happens when people are talking to each other on a plane other than critical-and-theoretical.
My friend John sent me this site. The photographs are wonderful, and the story is both sad and lovely.
Ah, dads.
Join the group effort over at HTMLGiant. I’m thinking a lot about what collaboration means. Two people collaborate a lot these days, but what about shared community collaboration, imperfect and messy and sometimes ugly or other times beautiful—without a mess of unpacking or packing or digging ourselves into holes or closing language up in boxes?
I hope people respond unselfconsciously and like trees on fire. I wish everyone was a ball of green wax, melting.
I miss you, blog. I miss your toes and your little green fingernails. I miss you in the morning when the grain is fed and afternoon with jewels across your pictureframe. And along the castle walls and in its mote. I miss you for dinner. Hot out the oven. I miss your cow sounds and your chicken sounds. Scratch. You are a ceiling fan. I miss that. You are a two bit musician in a crumbling garage. I really miss that. I miss your guitar strings.
Off to see a movie, blog. I wish you could come with.
Reading Komunyakaa’s Warhorses. Wish you could read.
Eating onions. Talking on the phone with my bro. Telling a tale of woe.
(what I say to poor Josh every morning.)
This looks like a great book: Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks.
Here’s what the publisher’s description says:
Everything but the Coffee casts a fresh eye on the world’s most famous coffee company, looking beyond baristas, movie cameos, and Paul McCartney CDs to understand what Starbucks can tell us about America. Bryant Simon visited hundreds of Starbucks around the world to ask, Why did Starbucks take hold so quickly with consumers? What did it seem to provide over and above a decent cup of coffee? Why at the moment of Starbucks’ profit-generating peak did the company lose its way, leaving observers baffled about how it might regain its customers and its cultural significance? Everything but the Coffee probes the company’s psychological, emotional, political, and sociological power to discover how Starbucks’ explosive success and rapid deflation exemplify American culture at this historical moment. Most importantly, it shows that Starbucks speaks to a deeply felt American need for predictability and class standing, community and authenticity, revealing that Starbucks’ appeal lies not in the product it sells but in the easily consumed identity it offers.
That last line is what makes me want to read the book, “revealing that Starbucks’ appeal lies not in the product it sells [no shit!] but in the easily consumed identity it offers.” Isn’t Starbucks just another bullet-point in a long line of exemplars of a culture of bored and boring, thoughtless, instant-gratification-driven, soul-less freaks?
Happy Saturday. DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH MY COFFEE.
