... Laundry.

That's right. Clean laundry, flapping in the breeze, as ecologically sound as you could possibly get.

Every summer brings yet another media focus on the Laundry Wars, where homeowners who love the fresh smell and crisp feel of sun-dried laundry go to battle with homeowners' associations and residential covenant agreements. This year, though, one newspaper decided to up the ante, by giving the undeserved time of day to this realtor, who said of clotheslines full of freshly-hung wash:

"They're unsightly by most people's standards," said Jeanne Bridgforth, a Realtor with Long & Foster in Richmond. "It gives an atmosphere of decline. You don't sense you're in a well-heeled neighborhood when you see people hanging their laundry out to dry."

Bridgforth recently showed a beautifully restored historic property on Church Hill that was listed in the $700,000 price range. "I had such a hard time selling it because the people next door always had laundry hanging from their second-story back porch," she said. "It was just an eyesore." The house went to foreclosure and eventually to auction, Bridgforth thinks, because of the negative appearance around the house.

It never occurred to her that perhaps the house was overpriced to start with? I wonder if that excuse will catch on, though ...



Backyard laundry in France, taken by meanest indian.
Click for larger image.

Sorry if this is boring ... I use these entries to go back and look at my progress / what I did / what I can learn from my mistakes. So occasionally the overdose of documentation.

Something ate all the leaves off an entire row of beans, leaving only stubs. But only on one particular row that was planted in clay. They probably tasted better.

We've had a heat wave all week. The heat index today and tomorrow threatens to reach 109-110 degrees F. Everything outdoors seems to love it, though, especially the tomatoes:


Happy tomatoes with that faint little blush they get right before they start to ripen.

( More; click for larger images )

I didn't use a filter or anything ... when I went out to pick these this morning at 7 AM, it was already so hot and humid that the camera lens fogged up, and wouldn't stay unfogged.

Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'...
- Bob Dylan, "When the Ship Comes In"


I have been following the Iranian protests/revolution with a heavy heart. When I was young, I read in the news about the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. I sat in front of our apartment and wondered what it would be like to see tanks rolling down the broad expanse of West End Avenue. Today, I can't imagine what life in Iran must be like right now. All I can do, I guess, is hope.

One thing has been mentioned ... if you have a twitter account, you can change your location to Iran and your time to Tehran time (GMT plus 3:30 hours.) There's not much consequence unless everybody does it, but it might add to the "needle in the haystack" effect if done on a mass level. Also, if you retweet anything, *do not* repeat any Iranian users' names. These people are in real and immediate danger.

I have heard that people are setting up proxies to help Iranians access the web. I have no idea how to do that, but if you do, you probably know where to go. Also, more anonymizing help can be found here.

Writer Andrew Sullivan has been working literally round-the-clock to keep abreast of events, with excellent and heart-wrenching photos.

lavenderfrost has icons.

Back in April the garden looked like this.

Then in May, it looked like this.



Some improvement, right? (click for larger image)


( Also, some rabbits' eye views of the garden... )

( Some of Mr. B's flowers ... )

Also, the neighbors' bird (aka: squirrel) feeder broke, and they haven't replaced it. If the garden gods are with me this year, they won't. So far we've been mercifully free of park rats...

Yanked from nkan02.

DO YOU BELONG IN NYC?
Absolutely.

You would never dream of moving anywhere else, and we've insulted you by even suggesting you might leave. You love every single thing about this town, right down to its adorable water-bug infestation. Click here for suggestions about how to really enjoy NYC.

Do you belong in New York City?

Below the cut are a few pictures of the corner of West End Avenue and 91st street, where I grew up.

( West End Avenue and 91st street )

It's also very odd to be able to do random searches on the internet, and find multiple photos of your old neighborhood, and even buildings you lived in.

Puffin "classic" cover of the abridged, public-domain 1911 English translation. I think this image captures well the suggestion of "living skeleton" which we are supposed to associate with The Phantom. (Sorry about the poor quality...)

( More POTO book cover art ... )

The 1925 Rupert Julian version of Phantom of the Opera (starring Lon Chaney as the Phantom) has a wide variety of movie poster art associated with it.





(click for larger image)

Those familiar with the 1925 movie have probably seen this poster, but I hadn't. It struck my eye with its more unusual perspective of Erik playing "siren." Its cold, dark palette appeals to me, and the reflection of the Phantom's cape on the surface of the water looks creepily like blood.

( More posters ...  )

It was fun ... but there weren't very many people. The vendors' booths were pretty empty, too. It might just have been the time and day that we went - at the beginning of the season, and early in the day as well.





Lacy window at the Green Lady Shop

( A few more, cut to save your bandwidth )

Thanks to the nice person who gave me a Dreamwidth invite code. I am stefanie_bean over there; however, I am *not* leaving LJ, and will probably just use Dreamwidth as a backup.

In the memewhile, a science fiction movie meme:

( Under here... )

Damn, I've seen a lot of sci-fi movies. This list doesn't even include all the babes-in-spandex action/adventure schlock.

An Old Fashioned Recipe Book: The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery (1939-2005) was what many "hippie moms" in the Seventies had on their kitchen counters. Tea-stained, spattered with bits of pancake batter, it told you how to do everything for the more self-reliant life. Its mimeographed pages came in a newsletter form and you could put it together yourself in a binder. Emery turned it out by hand in her living room as she homesteaded and raised children in Idaho. (In the photo at right, Emery stands on the right, and the other woman is holding one of the early Encyclopedias.) She promoted the compendium by driving around in an old car from state to state, to the craft and art fairs so prevalent in that era. Her children came with her and were homeschooled "on the road," and she had "one good dress" to her name. More on Emery's early adventures in self-publishing can be found in this 1975 article.)

Eventually Emery self-published six mimeograph/stencil editions on her own, until in 1977 she got a formal publishing contract with Bantam, although she still refused to rewrite some of her admittedly "strange sentences." (Imagine that; a day when authors told publishers what to do!) Even after the 1977 edition went out of print, she self-published two more "Living Room Mimeographer" versions, although in 1990 she advanced to photocopy machines, as mimeographs had become outdated and the supplies hard to obtain. Finally, in 1994, a mainstream Ninth Edition was published by Sasquatch (Canada.)

Even if, like me, you probably are probably never going to live in the country, the book describes a huge array of home arts, many of them useful no matter where you live. It also serves as a pretty good reference for nineteenth century American living, down to the nitty-gritty material details like how to build a corn-crib, raise feeder pigs in a pasture, or deliver a baby at home unassisted.

What adds to the Encyclopedia's charm is how Emery laced it with almost random anecdotes and observations. Since the Encyclopedia was published in stages, it just sort of grew, and even the 1994 edition seems impervious to today's more ruthless editing. Recently I came across this striking passage inserted in a section on hunting and dressing wild game:

I like wild animals, and I like a certain wildness in people too. I'm bothered by the extent to which writers think they have to write only what editors want, what publishers will print. I think writers have a special function and social obligation to their human community to be on the cutting edge. We need writers with bold new visions - ideas that are controversial or seemingly impossible at first glance yet may map the future. Farsighted writing that challenges the status quo tends by its nature to be unacceptable to establishment publishing, yet it's essential to society because it articulates options. Some options are radical, some bad; but hidden in the confusion of choices is a new path - perhaps a hitherto unconsidered route, perhaps a revalued treasure of traditional living - that is the best one of all. So much important thinking appears first in small magazines or is self-published. We need to keep the doors open to these voices. (pg. 571)

The early history of the Encyclopedia tells us that long before the Interent, there was a viable home/self-publishing world out there, put together by dedicated "amateurs" communicating with the world through the US mail, fairs, conventions, and by word-of-mouth. In some ways they exemplified the "wildness" of which Carla Emery spoke. Fanfiction writers, you-tubers, crafters, and so on, are some of her inheritors today.

Sorry to double-post in one day, but this deserved more than to be stuck on as an ETA to today's earlier discussion of male sopranos.

This is the abstract of an article in a musicology journal (to which I unfortunately don't have access.)

This study suggests that, against the background of early modern views of sexuality, the castrato appears not as the asexual creature sometimes implied today, but as a super-natural manifestation of a widely-held erotic ideal. Recent work in the history of sexuality has shown the prevalence in the early modern period of the "one-sex" model, in which the distinction between male and female is quantitative (with respect to "vital heat") rather than qualitative. This model provides for a large middle ground, encompassing prepubescent children, castrati, and other unusual figures. And that middle ground, in fact, seems to have been a prime locus of sexual desire: the art, literature, and historical accounts of the period argue that boys especially were often viewed -perhaps by both sexes-as erotic objects.

Further evidence suggests that this sexual charge also applied to castrati. The plausibility of such an erotic image is strengthened by investigation into the actual sexual function of these singers, which seems to have fallen somewhere between historical legend and modern skepticism. Finally, a survey of castrato roles in opera, from Monteverdi to Handel, shows how these singers were deployed and suggests that their popularity could not have depended entirely on vocal skills. Instead, I argue that castrati were prized at least in part for their unique physicality, their spectacularly exaggerated embodiment of the ideal lover. (link)

In other words, perhaps the castrato "took off" not only as a musical "ideal," but as an emblem of Baroque sexuality which transcended gender. In other words, the castrati were considered to be "hot" for their day, and highly sexualized. Perhaps that is the difference with the French sensibility (see discussion in comments below) - the French had perhaps different and less "androgynous" conceptions of both eroticism and masculine sexual appeal, and thus didn't buy into the castrato appeal.

Also, today's earlier comments are awesome; don't miss them.

A friend and Mr. B. both sent this to me - this guy's apparently a natural male soprano (i.e. not a castrato.)

A little googling turned up this video of "male soprano" Michael Maniachi sings some Handel. Maniachi achieves his sound due to his voice failing to break at puberty.

Here's Ian Howell singing some Handel, too. Howell is a counter-tenor who sings in the mezzo range.

Also, here is an interesting article on gender roles in Handel's operas. The main male lead roles were written for castrati, but there were many varied roles for women as well, as so many of the vocal roles (except for the villain or an occasional older man) were in the high registers.

I remember reading a few years ago that while the English stage lauded and loved castrati, the trend never really caught on in France:

At their height the famous castrati could be seen in operatic productions in all the major countries in westernEurope, with one exception: France had never accepted castrati, and never would. Since Lully began writing operas in the mid-seventeenth century the French had been developing their own distinct operatic style, which evolved in isolation in the French courts and palaces. French listeners valued the contrast between high and low registers, and therefore didn't care for operas in which all the leading roles were sung by high voices. This opposed the widespread taste elsewhere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the upper registers, which were better suited to florid ornamentation.

From the beginning the French seemed to dislike everything about the castrati, seeing them as an offense against the natural order. Voltaire summed up the national sentiment through the character Procurante in Candide: "Swoon with pleasure if you wish or if you can at the sight of a eunuch warbling the roles of Caesar and Cato and walking about the stage in a clumsy fashion. As for me, I long ago gave up these miserable performances which today constitute the glory of Italy and are paid for so dearly by sovereigns."

Thus when foreign operas were performed in Paris the roles traditionally sung by castrati were given to women or, as with Gluck’s Orfeo, rewritten for a natural male voice. The practice of other voice types replacing castrati had therefore already been well established by the time the castrato began vanishing. (link)

The amaryllis bloomed.

( More plants-y photos )

We're probably not going to dig up any more vegetable patch this year, but if we do, the bricks are easy to move. The whole patch got a mulching of straw, too. And the peas have blossoms on them.

Also, I just watched The History Boys, and am somewhat melancholy.

( Spoiler below )

The Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, MO consisted of thirty-three buildings built in the early 1950s. Their horrific, bare city-scapes looked like something out of the Stanley Kubrick dystopian movie, A Clockwork Orange. Initially lauded as a representative of 20th century "modern" style, it proved unlivable and in 1972 was demolished, as you can see in this video (sorry, can't embed it.)

These images are from the University of Missouri Pruitt-Igoe photography archives.


Pruitt-Igoe public space



Pruitt-Igoe playground



Pruitt-Igoe landscape


I used to wonder if the many of the cheaply-constructed, overpriced "drywall palaces" erected during the housing boom, and now foreclosed upon, would ultimately suffer the same fate. It already seems to be happening in a few places in California and Texas, as this video shows:



Andrew Sullivan opines today that:

This may be just the tip of the iceberg. Once desired, suburban and ex-urban communities with cul-de-sacs, McMansions, and long commutes could be on their way to becoming the blighted and abandoned communities of tomorrow, accelerating the process Chris Leinberger documented in his eye-opening Atlantic essay of March 2008.

What's not been mentioned, though, is how much had to be destroyed so that these boom-time developments could flourish. Even in the 1990s, I watched as block after block of charming bungalows in Clayton, MO were demolished to make way for expensive retirement condominiums. Modest ranches and frame houses which sat on lots of any size at all became "scrapers," torn down and replaced by houses as large as could legally fit on the lots. Small farms and potential homesteads were routinely broken up for new subdivisions. What resulted was sprawl and more sprawl, while inner-ring suburbs and city neighborhoods languished.

Now, the increased consciousness of "green living" and "new urbanism" has made walkable neighborhoods made up of smaller houses of character on or near public transit lines far more desirable than in the past. And it's with a certain amount of pleasure that I see banks having to demolish these not-yet-born developments before they could even be sold. Perhaps it will serve as an incentive not to build anymore for a long while.



Safe from the wrecking ball for now?

This morning I woke up with that sense of peculiar clarity which you usually get from having a deeply-involved epic dream; for instance, one of those where you are part of a band of rebels on the run from some terrible force. When you gain a tiny victory (a camoflauged hiding; a successful sniping from a secure position) you glow with satisfaction. But when the footsteps advance upon you from behind, when you hear the clank of body armor or the stomp of a boot on the steps, your throat clutches in terror.

But I didn't even have a dream like that last night. What left me with that liminal feeling upon waking, was that the previous evening before, I had watched the great actor Charles Laughton's only film: the 1954 The Night of the Hunter.

my_daroga recommended it, but said very little about it, and I was glad of that, as I think it's a movie best watched cold. All I'll tell you is that it blends German expressionism with a tiny bit of magical realism, then liberally laces it with Southern Gothic. The American writer Flannery O'Connor probably would have liked this movie.

It's an unusual experience, too, to watch a movie knowing very little about it, because we're so used to trailers which basically sum everything up for you, as well as inundating you with the film's "visual style" - thus depriving you of the surprise of *discovering* that style as it unfolds. NOTH can be watched this way because it's quite obscure. It failed miserably in its debut, which apparently so discouraged Laughton that he never made another film, instead focusing his directorial energy on the stage.

It's in some ways a "director's film;" if you do watch it, you will immediately recognize many elements which showed up as "tributes" in subsequent movies.



Charles Laughton makes a cameo as he reads in a scene not included in the final cut.

ETA: Spoilers in comments, caveat lector!

Too tired to do exposition tonight, except that there are peppers, cabbages, onions, peas, kohlrabi, and more.



Vegetable patch


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