Little Reviews

Poem for Wednesday

2009-07-15T00:19:00.001-04:00

My Aunts
By Meghan O'Rourke

Grew up on the Jersey Shore in the nineteen-seventies.
Always making margaritas in the kitchen,
always laughing and doing their hair up pretty,
sharing lipstick and shoes and new juice diets;
always splitting the bills to the last penny,
stealing each other's clothes,
loving one another then complaining
as they walked out the door. Each one with her doe eyes,
each one younger than the last,
each older the next year, one year
further from their girlhoods of swimming
at Sandy Hook, doing jackknives off the diving board
after school, all of them
being loved by one boy and then another,
all driving further from the local fair, further from Atlantic City.
They used to smoke in their cars,
rolling the windows down and letting their red nails
hang out, little stoplights:
Stop now, before the green
comes to cover up your tall brown bodies.

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From this week's New Yorker.

I have nothing exciting to report from my day (laundry, kids, finally finished reorganizing post-trip), but I had a lovely evening because Paul decided we needed to celebrate Bastille Day properly and made French onion soup and cassoulet, then put on a DVD he'd made from a torrent someone had posted of the 2006 Les Miserables revival (undoubtedly recorded illegally, and with a terrible Fantine, but hey, it's been so many years since I saw the original cast in the pre-Broadway run at the Kennedy Center that I'll take what I can get). I suppose The Scarlet Pimpernel would have been appropriate but I don't have a DVD of any of the Broadway incarnations, though I'm sure I saw a concert performance with Linda Eder on public television at some point.

It's not France, but here are some photos of the French Quarter. Like so many here, I am getting up early to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (with birthday girl Gblvr, plus Hufflepants, and Paul and my kids are coming too, though Daniel does not want to be seen with me and my friends and may sit elsewhere), so I am off to bed!

Poem for Tuesday

2009-07-14T00:16:00.002-04:00

As Fish
By April Bernard

They play us as fish are played,
nameless they tug on the line.
One who has it in for me yanks my mouth
against my wishes. She once fed me
air that tasted like violets
melting and since I have been ravenous,
snapping at the least hint of sustenance.
If I knew her name I could offer at her shrine
a candle, a scrying, a fish fry,
to beg for mercy, but my offense
was too great for such gestures
as I can manage.

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I dropped my kids off with my parents and spent a lovely Monday with Dementordelta being girly. We went to Lebanese Taverna to pick up lunch, then came home and watched the pilot of a certain television series starring Paul Gross that...oh, fine, we're watching Due South -- the pilot and first three episodes so far. I am utterly loving Ray V, so please don't start telling me how much better I will like Ray K, if you are one of those people so inclined, and please don't tell me why I should skip all the Ray K episodes either, since such discussions are why I avoided the series until Slings & Arrows made it obvious I need to see everything Paul Gross has ever done in his life. Even The Witches of Eastwick when it's on this fall, though I despise the book with a fiery passion and I hate the movie despite its having three actresses I adore.

In addition to food and Paul Gross, we went to the mall to the cheap glittery jewelry store to buy necklaces and earrings with seahorses and snakes -- everything there is like $8.99, so you can get a few -- and then stopped in Build-a-Bear because Dementordelta had discovered that you can stuff owls, then buy Harry Potter glasses and wizard robes for them. (I didn't get one; in addition to having spent too much money on a glittery turtle necklace, I figured that Adam would owl-nap it as soon as he got home.) They are very cute, however, and you can get sound boxes that make them hoot. Then we came back here and watched more Due South until she had to go home.

Cajun Encounters Swamp Tour:

I have an internet question and an offer. The question is, does anyone know whether there is a way to have some pages from one's web site removed from the Wayback Machine at archive.org without having to block the entire site using robots.txt? I recently learned, while researching whether my Geocities sites had been archived -- everything has been moved from them and updated years ago -- that the original version of my personal web site archived there still has material that I really don't want on the internet connected to my real name, but I am happy to have my reviews and the rest left as they are. The offer is, I have a bunch of Dreamwidth codes; does anyone still need one? Send me a message here or e-mail me, if so.

Happy Bastille Day, for those celebrating. And the obvious, and the even more obvious.

Poem for Monday

2009-07-13T00:44:00.000-04:00

Ktaadn
By April Bernard

What was lost, again, the hot sap
that burnt my throat with, well why not, joy.
Did I own in or just borrow it
from eyes that should be cool but were not, were hot.
A moment's forgetting, did I turn to see
some other sort of startle in the grass,
did I stoop to heal the afflicted
beasts that lost their eyes and wings.
How often is too often, what if
this heat tore through me constant
as the sky I tear apart, claiming,
This is mine, well what of it.
Let's see who's still standing when I burn, again,
when the mountain is set to the match.

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We had a pretty quiet Sunday -- laundry, a bit of shopping, some reading, lots of e-mail debate about Torchwood. In the afternoon the kids went to the pool. In the evening we went to Vertigo66's younger son's birthday party, which was a lot of fun -- I don't get to see her whole family, or her sister's family, very often, and a friend of both of ours from high school was there as well.

A plover with a rusting cannon beside it on the human-constructed island of Fort Sumter.

This is how the fort looked during the approach aboard the Spirit of Charleston...

...whereas this is an artist's rendition of how the fort looked on the night the Civil War began, displayed in the museum on the island.

The museum also contains artifacts recovered during excavations, like the toothbrush without bristles and the ink bottle in this display.

Around the walls of the fort, one can see such wildlife as pelicans...

...and crustaceans, both fiddler crabs and little black crabs that I understand may be an invasive species in the river.

Here are the flags of Fort Sumter: The 33-star Union flag that flew on April 12-13, 1861, when the Civil War started; the circular 35-star Union flag raised on February 18, 1865, once the fort was under Union control again; the flag of the Palmetto Guard, the first Southern flag to fly at Fort Sumter; the state flag of South Carolina, featuring a palmetto and a gorget; the Confederate Stars & Bars; and the Stainless Banner, with a small Confederate emblem representing the states that seceded after the battle of Fort Sumter plus states claimed by the Confederacy.

And here are my kids on the gangway back to the boat.

After we got home, we watched Rasputin, which I had only seen previously on slowly rotting VHS tape, but the wonderful Xena2001DE pointed me toward a torrent and now I have a fairly decent DVD converted from an AVI file. There's a lot of Russian history glossed over or just plain rewritten, but I love Alan Rickman's complete abandon as the title character, Ian McKellen's misery as the failing tsar, Greta Scacchi's unhappy dignity as the tsarina, James Frain's subtle sleaziness as Yusupov and the little boy, Freddie Findlay, who plays the tsarevitch. Plus it's a very good-looking production.

Poem for Sunday

2009-07-12T00:30:00.001-04:00

The Going
By April Bernard

The cloth edge of certainty
has shredded down to this:
God and love are real,
but very far away.
If I go to Istanbul, will I return?
That is not one of the permitted questions.
When I go to Istanbul, how will I bear to return?
I could slip into the small streets
that lead away from the souk, then run east
to the high plain and the Caucasus --

It's all alone, the returning,
the going. The cloth,
a soft holland whose blocks of blue and lemon
once cheered me in a skirt,
now dries dishes. God and love
are very far away, farther even
than the mountains in the east.

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"This is the first poem of my new book, Romanticism," writes Bernard in Poet's Choice. "I was standing in front of my kitchen window, looking north (not east) at the Vermont mountains and drying dishes with a fraying cotton (not holland) cloth, when the phrase came to me: 'God and love are real, but very far away.' I had bought the fabric (of many more colors than just blue and yellow) in Amsterdam more than a decade ago...I also unconsciously feared, as the poem makes explicit, that if I ran away to exotic lands, I might never come back to the responsibilities of my life as a mother."

It was a gorgeous day -- a bit overcast, not too hot -- so we figured that it was the perfect afternoon to go to Butler's Orchard to pick blueberries, particularly since we'd read that it will be a short blueberry-growing season this year because we had a wet spring and a relatively cool early summer (we have a lot of fireflies this summer for those reasons, too). Apparently Butler's Orchard now leaves the giant slides and rubber ducky derby tubs that used to be for the pumpkin festival only open throughout the growing season. And we stopped in the farm store to get apple butter, pecan maple syrup, blueberry popcorn and other necessities. Previous photos here.

We got home around 4:30 p.m. and spent the rest of the evening, with a long break for dinner, watching the entirety of Torchwood: Children of Earth. I doubt it will surprise anyone when I say that I was extremely disappointed in the last hour and a half...and I don't mean in terms of the behavior or fates of the characters. I mean that the writing, particularly in the last installment, simply went to crap. This didn't shock me -- denouements have been the bane of all the big Doctor Who arcs of the modern era -- but given how superlative the pacing and dialogue were in the first three installments, the sudden reversion to late X-Files "let's just destroy everything and hope characters weeping suggests the grand importance of it all" was pretty pathetic.
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Spoilers galore and random thoughts!
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Let me start by saying that I loved Gwen pretty much throughout, though I'll readily admit that the deck was stacked in her favor; she didn't have to make any really horrific decisions, just the standard ones like whether to blow out the brains of the guy sent to kill her or whether to terminate a pregnancy that initially thrilled her once she got a reminder of the terrible things that can happen to children. For the most part I was happy with the characterization of all the women in the miniseries, from the heroic Lois to the kick-ass Johnson to Ianto's harried sister, even the gratuitous "we don't need to give her a life because she's Jack's daughter" Alice. (Note: of course I think motherhood includes having a life, but we get to know so little about her besides, after having her thrown in our faces as insta-family, that I was not inclined to care about her.) I'd have watched the miniseries just for Gwen being so on top of her game -- HER game, the one that involves police work and thinking that one child saved is a triumph -- and for Lois, who's like everything I loved about Rose, Martha, and Donna all rolled together.

I'm only a passing Jack/Ianto fan; given how few gay relationships we ever see on TV that aren't wholly focused on the relationships as what's most central to the characters' lives, I like them in principle, and I've appreciated the character interaction, including some of the things other people don't like so much -- I like that Jack has always held Ianto at arm's length, that he's like the Doctor in "School Reunion" explaining that knowing someone can spend their entire life with him while he has to live on past them makes it just too painful to get too deeply attached, and I thought this miniseries complicated that beautifully. I was not really devastated that Ianto died as he did -- everything he did seemed perfectly in character, even having lied about his family to Gwen, having secrets he never shared with any of them -- and I thought Jack's reaction was really perfect, devastated in the moment but not guilty or stricken with paralyzing grief.

I can't decide whether Ianto's suggestion to his sister that he's not really gay, it's only Jack, is a form of defensiveness or simply how Ianto sees the world...it would be nice if someone having gay sex on Torchwood actually considered himself or herself gay. I liked how quietly furious Ianto was with Jack for never telling him about the 1965 children, and then how they had exactly the same argument Frobischer had had with his wife, you don't really talk to me, you hide behind work as a reason to avoid intimate conversation...it really explodes the gender dynamic that drives me insane on Doctor Who sometimes, where the women are always the nurturers and the Doctor is always the aloof genius, to have the same dynamic here between two men. It's all right with me that Ianto doesn't consider himself gay because otherwise I think it might come a bit close to butch-femme stereotyping instead of just being who they are and part of the dynamic of their particular relationship.

Considering how long Jack has lived as a human on Earth, he's still a total moron about expressing himself as a human being. Han Solo seems like Mr. Sensitive compared to Jack. When someone asks why you picked him as one of a group of children to be handed over to aliens, you come up with a kinder way of explaining it than "You wouldn't be missed." When your dying lover tells you he loves you, you don't cut him off. Given the number of really terrifying detached-from-emotion men in this miniseries, from the Prime Minister to the military goons to the Evil U.S. General Stereotype, you'd think Jack would want to live up to Frobischer's belief that he's better than them. (Frobischer doesn't seem cut off from emotion so much as unable to process the extremes; I will never understand why he went home and killed his family instead of killing the Prime Minister, then hiding his children somewhere safe, like it was easier for him to know they were going to be dead and he was going to be dead and none of them could ever possibly be made to suffer any more. And those daughters were awesome -- "WE WANT A PONY. WE WANT A PONY." -- I'm really furious with him for not fighting harder for their lives.)

The pacing of the first four hours is amazing -- feels much shorter than it is, certainly shorter than the endlessly dragging Return of the King and various "action" movies of less duration -- and even some of the more just-plain-icky stuff, like Jack encased in concrete -- I swear these writers take pleasure in killing Jack in the worst possible ways -- seems fitting with the overall darkness of the storyline and sense of desperation. The Prime Minister is utterly, chillingly creepy, much scarier than the mad Saxon -- calling children "units" when he offers sixty of them, buying right into arguments that his cabinet's children should be protected and poor children should be sacrificed first -- really all the casting is terrific, and though I wish we'd seen more people of color particularly in London which wasn't nearly so white when I've been there, I love that there are people of all shapes and sizes and bad teeth, which we never get on US TV.

But, but, but, but, but. The 456 simply don't make sense to me. They're addicted to human children like a drug, so they...come to the planet, put in a fairly polite request, and don't make any show of force until someone directly threatens them with a war. If they can kill every man, woman and child on the planet -- and we've no reason to believe they're lying -- surely they could simply take the children they want, as many as they want, and more, so they can bring home a breeding colony and never have to deal with annoying human adults again? (I'm thinking of Octavia Butler's utterly terrifying short story "Bloodchild," where aliens discover they can incubate their larva in humans, so they bring the women to breed more humans while they implant the dangerous larva in the males, a gruesome extended meditation on the aphorism that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament).

Bottom line, I find the plot gimmicky, which didn't bother me during the first three and a half hours when it was unfolding with such breathtaking, devastating effect, but really irritated me toward the end. This is Sophie's Choice on a planetary scale, except it isn't, because it's more like the cabal from X-Files in league with the aliens and even they made sacrifices at the highest levels. These aliens clearly understand national boundaries and borders, since the kids say different numbers representing 10% from each country, though they all speak in English, Let's get real: the first thing the UK under this repugnant Prime Minister would do, having an inside connection, would be to suggest that the aliens take 15% from every country in North America, South America, Africa and Asia in exchange for taking none of their own.

In an ideal world, once they found out the aliens were using the children as drugs, everyone would simply have stood firm and said no -- if the aliens annihilate the planet they can't ever come back for more, so it's an empty threat on their part to kill everyone. And honestly, isn't it obvious that last time it was 12 kids, this time it's millions, and next time it's probably going to be 50 percent? The aliens don't appear to age, and I assume they do reproduce, so they'll need a growing stock of human children to feed their cravings. (I'd love to know about the riots when the internet and Twitter and Facebook went down all over the world, because that would have been a necessity the moment the roundups started.)

I loved Gwen's line about how sometimes the Doctor must look at this planet and turn away in shame -- where the hell was he during the Holocaust, anyway? But we're already in la-la land, where the government simply releases Gwen and Rhys based on their own promise not to tell the world what the government did because it would just cause more chaos (and give me a break, people still deserve to know that their PM is an idiot as well as a murderer -- how could he ever have thought Frobischer would go along with a plan to sacrifice Frobischer's children, he'd never have explained the plot, he'd just have had people show up at Frobischer's house to "inoculate" and take away his kids while Frobischer was busy at the office). Bad, bad writing just to get to the resolution the writers wanted.

Which brings me to Alice and Steven. I figured they were Dawn Summers the moment it was revealed that they were Jack's biological family, because why give Jack a biological family except to manipulate Jack? In the midst of the giant fake-o ending, where Gwen is hugging a little girl and sighing happily that the world has been saved while the militia have dropped their guns, even though they haven't received any orders telling them that it's over and they can stop rounding up children, I couldn't feel anything for Steven. I probably would have been much more bothered if it had been some random child he'd befriended on the street in Cardiff than his grandson, but since they tossed a biological connection at us, giving him a cheap-and-easy family just so they could take it away, it really left me quite distant and cold.

In summary, I understand all the complaining people have done about things they didn't like in the miniseries, but for the most part, those aren't the things that really irked me about Children of Earth. I don't like lazy writing and attempts at emotional shortcuts. It was a disappointment to me from an intellectual rather than an I'm-so-sad sense -- I feel like they just had no clue how to wrap things up, so they hoped the actors could make the over-the-top dialogue and scenarios work. And, good as the actors are, they really couldn't.

Poem for Saturday

2009-07-11T00:44:00.001-04:00

Twin Cities
By Carol Muske-Dukes

It was the river that made them two—
The mills on one side,
The cathedral on the other.

We watched its swift currents:
If we stared long enough, maybe
It would stop cold and let us

Skate across to the other side.
It never froze in place—though
I once knew a kid, a wild funny

Girl who built a raft from branches
(Which promptly sank a few feet out
From the elbow bend off Dayton’s Bluff),

Who made it seem easy to believe.
We’d tried to break into Carver’s Cave,
Where bootleggers hid their hot stash

Years after the Dakota drew their snakes
And bears on the rock walls and canoed
Inside the caverns. We knew there were

Other openings in the cliffs, mirroring
Those same rock faces on the other shore—
And below them the caves, the subterranean

Pathways underlying the talk and commerce,
The big shot churches, undermining the false
Maidenliness of the convent school from which

My friend was eventually expelled for being
Too smart and standing up for her own smartness.
Too late, I salute you, Katy McNally. I think

That the river returned then to two-sidedness—
An overhung history of bottle-flash and hopelessness.
I see you still—laughing as the lashed sticks

Sank beneath you, laughing as you did
That morning when the river lifted
Its spring shoulders, shrugging off

The winter ice, that thin brittle mirage,
Making you believe
We were all in this together.

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Another from this week's New Yorker.

My mother took my kids to play miniature golf and swim in the water park at Bohrer Park in Gaithersburg, so I had the afternoon to myself. I went out to get a jewelry holder for earrings and key rings, spent twenty minutes deciding between two, bought one of them, came home, concluded it could not be made to fit in the space where I intended to put it even after I did some rearranging, went back and exchanged it for the other, came home again and fit it in nicely. Consoled myself about this schlepping by buying myself Bath & Body Works' White Citrus roll-on perfume, made the mistake of trying that new True Blue Morocco Sweet Fig & Argan lotion, now keep sniffing my wrist and wishing it came in a spray or some other form of perfume because I have too many lotions as it is (and that goes as well for the Cedarwood & Spice body scrub, which I would never use, but it smells soooo good). Why am I so fragrance-fickle? I just bought some wonderful, ridiculously inexpensive Nag Champa roll-on oil in the Atlanta Underground from one of those vendor carts, but I hate wearing the same scent two days in a row!

As for the rest of my day, I wrote and posted a review of "The Game", which no one will have read yet since I forgot to send the link to the TrekToday staff until about five minutes ago, which is probably just as well because I actually like that episode and any time I've said anything nice about Wesley Crusher, lots of people have had mean things to say to me about it. And we had dinner with my parents. And I burned a DVD of Torchwood: Children of Earth (which I keep wanting to call Torchwood: Children of Men, which I suspect is not merely coincidence but Freudian slip) so my whole family can watch it, if we can stand it. I think everyone here knows by now that I have issues with Doctor Who and Torchwood -- I had plenty of unfriendings after I made my feelings clear during last season's Doctor Who -- so my expectations are considerably lower than I suspect a lot of people's were, but I still want to think it's interesting enough to justify whatever gets done to the characters.

The Friday Five: Food Favorites
1. What is your favorite vegetable? Wasabi peas. I'm not a big vegetable enthusiast; I am five years old that way.
2. What is your favorite salad dressing, sauce, gravy, or condiment? Raspberry vinaigrette if it's salad; hollandaise sauce if it's eggs or salmon; and there can never be too much pepper, garlic, or vanilla.
3. What is your favorite culture's food (American, Chinese, Creole, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Soul Food, Southern U.S., etc.)? There is no way I could possibly choose. I will eat Creole, Indian, Greek, Lebanese, Persian, Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, real Italian (the kind with olive oil rather than tomato sauce), or Ashkenazi Jewish (a bagel and a schmear) any day of the week.
4. What is your favorite beverage? Fresh-squeezed pink grapefruit juice mixed with pure (no corn syrup) cranberry juice.
5. What is your favorite food? I cannot choose among aged sharp cheddar, creamy hummus, and milk chocolate.

Fannish5: Name your five favorite works of historical fiction, and why you love them.
1. The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian. Really I cannot say enough about the entire Aubrey-Maturin series, but this is the book that first sold me on it, so there you have it.
2. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. First fictional alternative I ever read to Shakespeare's version of Richard III, and a great mystery novel besides.
3. The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman. A bit more romance novel-y, but also a longer novel about Richard III and his England.
4. The Treasure of Montsegur by Sophy Burnham. Because the Cathars and their fate have fascinated me for a long time.
5. Silk Road by Jeanne Larsen. An utterly engrossing novel about Tang Dynasty China that should possibly be categorized as fantasy, but it's very evocative of Chinese mythology in a way that seems completely fitting with its era.

One of the Asian small-clawed otters at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta.

The beluga whales diving in their enormous tank.

Colorful fish and coral in the Atlantic coral reef exhibit.

A tree frog (sadly, I don't remember what species).

Anemones in the tidal pool touch tank.

With color distorted from the massive sea tank, an indication of how much bigger a whale shark is than a sand tiger shark.

And here is the awesomely big manta ray, with eyes that spawned a hundred alien imitators.

At the other end of the size spectrum, here are underwater garden eels popping their heads up from the sand.

Poem for Friday

2009-07-10T00:06:00.000-04:00

A Dream
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell . . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write.

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From this week's New Yorker.

My intestines are officially angry at the way I've been eating so I have to stop. When I stopped eating pork and beef ten years ago, I admitted to myself that if I ever got to New Orleans, I was probably going to take a weekend off, because while I can live without a cheeseburger forever, I really, really wanted to eat gumbo and jambalaya properly just once (we make it at home with chicken sausage and sometimes veggie sausage but it's really not the same, and it's not like I ever kept kosher). Then I had CalTort yesterday and again today, since Hufflepants was here and I'd promised to take her and the kids out given that all we had in the house was tuna. Now I feel very bleh, though I will readily admit that I'd rather have stomach trouble than a migraine.

Hufflepants brought over her stick insects so we could see them, and they were awesome, chomping away on leaves that camouflaged them and completely ignoring us and the cats. In the evening, for some inexplicable reason, older son wanted to watch the Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit, which is always good for a laugh (John Huston as Gandalf!), then I had to watch the Next Gen episode I need to review tomorrow ("The Game" aka "Video games are dangerous and only Wesley Crusher can save you!"). Here, have some more views of Ruby Falls and its surrounding cave:

Although Rock City -- atop Lookout Mountain -- is in Georgia, Ruby Falls -- inside Lookout Mountain -- is in Tennessee.

To reach the waterfall, one walks through caverns, some very low and narrow (they were blasted out to make them wider for visitors) and some high and grand like this one, with chandelier-like formations at the top.

Since all of the cave must be illuminated artificially, the formations are lit with mood-setting color like these stalactites and stalagmites.

Many of the mineral deposits have colorful names, like this one, which leans out over the pathway to the falls...

...or like this one, which resembles a horse's posterior.

This odd formation is known as the Elephant's Foot.

Here is a view from behind the falls. The color comes from artificial lighting in the cave; its name comes from Ruby Lambert, wife of the man who led the exploration group that discovered the waterfall.

Behind my kids in the cavern, you can see the large lights installed to illuminate the waterfall. You can also see all the water vapor in the air; it's about 60 degrees all the time in the cave but feels warmer because it's so moist.

I haven't been watching Torchwood, am waiting till next week when the whole family can watch, had been spoiled in advance though I'm still not sure exactly how my source knew everything she knew, am just not that invested in it because Doctor Who has made me hold the franchise at arm's length -- I know the producers favor tragic, egotistical, lonely, messianic, superhero male characters with everyone else (women, love interests of either gender) solidly supporting, unattainable/unreachable, oft-idealized and too-oft disposable. I don't know how the miniseries ends as a whole and am fine with being spoiled; I'd rather be warned about the sorts of things that happened to Donna and Toshiko than surprised by them.

Poem for Thursday

2009-07-09T00:28:00.001-04:00

Reverence
By Sarah Manguso

Love not the rider but the old rider,
the ghost in the saddle: Obey that ghost.
A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip.
But we are not good horses.
We bolt. We stand still in bad weather.
We rely on things we know are unreliable,
it feels so good just to rely.
We are relied on.
But I do not know who knows that bad secret.
I do not see who sits astride my back,
who cuts my flank so lovingly on our way to the dark mountain.

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We had a relatively calm Wednesday. Adam's best friend is off to Niagara Falls for a week and came over in the morning to say goodbye. We went to California Tortilla for lunch because they were having a giveaway event with everyone getting coupons and free food and stuff; I also got a light-up chili pepper necklace, hee. Plus the post office delivered my Transparent Tarot, which is exactly as amazing as it sounds. (I haven't tried reading with it yet, I just played with the cards a bit to see the imagery and how it overlays -- I use Tarot for brainstorming/blockbusting rather than divination, and it seems like the perfect deck for creative visualization.)

The biggest waterfall at Rock City on Lookout Mountain, Georgia, just outside Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Rock City originated Wall Drug-type advertising on billboards with the proclamation, "See Seven States!"

The boys under the famous "thousand-ton balanced rock" along the garden trail.

They were more enthusiastic about the swinging bridge, which offers terrific views of Chattanooga as one walks to Lover's Leap.

Rock City Gardens has an enclosure with white fallow deer...

...and a raptor show with this barred owl, plus a screech owl, a vulture that follows the guide around the audience, a bald eagle and more.

And in case the natural beauty is not enough, the Fairyland Caverns have a Mother Goose Village with blacklight-lit depictions of nursery rhymes.

Personally, I prefer the caverns in their natural state.

The kids and I rewatched two very good movies in the afternoon and at night because Daniel has been working on dystopian fiction for his summer reading: Equilibrium, which is wildly derivative and very silly in its plot but has great performances by Christian Bale, Sean Bean, Taye Diggs, and William Fichtner, and Minority Report, which has my favorite Tom Cruise performance by a long shot and some of my favorite Spielberg directing as well (the visual metaphor of the film is about eyes and not trusting what one sees, and there are some very interesting gimmicks related to that).

Poem for Wednesday

2009-07-08T00:39:00.001-04:00

Hello
By Sarah Manguso

One says Hello to the other and the moment falls from the other moments like a pebble from dark space, and again, Hello, calling to the other as if falling onto the other from dark space, and after some hours the word itself is like the small sounds we make when we touch each other with our mouths, and Hello, Hello, and now, if one wanted to greet the other, to say I greet thee, to separate the sound of the call from the other sounds, which are not calls to the other but to the space from which the pebble falls and into which time moves in all possible directions and we do not, one could not.

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"I moved into a cabin in the foothills of the White Mountains in order to isolate myself, 11 years and several hundred miles from the memory of my 1995 diagnosis with the neurological disease chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy," writes Manguso in last week's Poet's Choice. "Thus separated from my actual life, I thought I would be able to remember it clearly enough to write about it. During this vacation someone else cooked and delivered my meals. I ate, slept, walked, swam. The rest of the time I functioned as a memory machine, remembering and writing. But then, in the middle of my vacation, I fell in love, and life recommenced. I had to move forward and look backward at once. The past and present interacted...this prose poem, a love poem, is about the summer that I lived and wrote in the present and the past."

My Tuesday was all about catch-up chores, enlivened by the Michael Jackson memorial which we watched on CBS once we realized that TV Guide was going to run scrolling TV listings throughout and CNN was going to talk over the mourners even more than Katie Couric. CBS ran commercial-free for more than two and a half hours, to their credit, though I am still utterly flabbergasted that this event is being treated like Princess Diana's funeral -- even if none of the really vile allegations about Jackson and little boys are true, how so many people can go on about the Christian saintliness of a man who gave alcohol to minors and called it "Jesus juice" is completely beyond me. I get his importance to Motown and to African-Americans in a broader sense, but come on -- MLK Jr.'s children, and Sheila Jackson Lee using a funeral as a bully pulpit, while Michael's much-altered body is cradled in a golden coffin? Farrah Fawcett, who died the same day, expended her comparatively low-key celebrity power on drawing attention to domestic violence and cancer research...where's her public outpouring of mourning?

Fort Sumter seen beneath the bowsprit of Belle Poule at Harborfest in Charleston the weekend before last.

French sailors aboard the Belle Poule.

A sailor climbing in Europa's rigging.

The USS Yorktown docked permanently at Patriot's Point, across the river from Harborfest.

The schooners Pride of Baltimore and Spirit of South Carolina beneath Charleston's Ravenel Bridge.

Another visitor from our area, the schooner Virginia, which we've seen in various ports closer to home.

Here are Belle Poule and Etoile with Romanian barque Mircea and Russian barque Kruzenshtern in the background at right.

On shore, there was a pirate encampment with a lovely view of the setting sun.

We had dinner with my parents, since we hadn't seen them in two weeks, then we watched the new Sci-Fi show Warehouse 13 (I can't call it "SyFy" -- sorry, it's like if CBS suddenly decided it wanted to be "See B.S." yet be taken seriously). I recognized the lead actress from Slings & Arrows and the male lead looks a bit like a less pretentious David Boreanaz, and with a show like that, I figured the chemistry between the leads is as important as the plot (because let's face it, X-Files had some very stupid plots). And I did like the leads, though I did not much like the storyline -- I really detest woman-crazed-by-neediness stories whether they involve vampires, ancient artifacts, or just typical stereotyping -- I can forgive Sanctuary-type CGI filler backgrounds but they had better get better plots than this one. Even so, it held all our interest for its two hours and I'm pretty sure we'll watch again next week.

Greetings from Home

2009-07-07T00:39:00.001-04:00

Our original plan for Monday was to go to Grandfather Mountain and see the views from the mile-high swinging bridge, but it was drizzly and foggy when we woke up in Tennessee, so we concluded that it might not be a good day for that activity and headed into Virginia toward Natural Bridge instead. Like the Wisconsin Dells, this is a place of enormous and unique beauty, surrounded by some of the tackiest tourist traps known to Americans.

The bridge is over 200 feet tall, has George Washington's initials carved into it, and is surrounded by waterfalls, caves used for Civil War munitions, a replica of an Indian village, and beautiful wildlife. The town features a zoo with white tigers, a wax museum with an animated Last Supper show, a dinosaur attraction whose signs seem to imply that the South could have won the Civil War if only they'd had a dino cavalry, a toy museum with a huge collection of Star Trek and Star Wars action figures, and best of all, a full-size styrofoam replica of Stonehenge.

Daniel and Adam at Natural Bridge's main attraction, painted by Frederic Edwin Church and once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

The Monacan Indian Nation helped to create the Native American village of 300 years ago just down the creek from the bridge.

We saw damselflies, caterpillars, and this spectacular spiderweb...

...plus this snake in the creek.

George Washington supposedly carved these initials into the rock of the creek, an act that would be considered vandalism today...

...an act commemorated at the wax museum, which also has biblical scenes and a Civil War display in which Lee, Davis and Jackson are the heroes.

But my favorite attraction by far is Foamhenge. Having seen the real thing, plus the Maryhill Stonehenge on the west coast, though not yet Carhenge, it was necessary to see this replica too.

According to this exhibit, Stonehenge may have been created when the sorcerer Merlin levitated the bluestones from Ireland to, and I quote, "Salisbury Plane." I don't believe that the beer is an intrinsic part of the exhibit, however.

Tuesday I have at least six laundries to do. Sigh.

Greetings from Johnson City

2009-07-06T00:33:00.001-04:00

Another quickie from Tennessee since we have to get up early on Monday. We got up Sunday morning and went to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, which is terrific -- two separate buildings, both designed in some ways like Baltimore's and Boston's big ocean tanks, but a more sophisticated version -- one houses ocean life, the other river life, and both have a top floor and many side galleries around the central tank with smaller animals and special exhibits (in this case, one on turtles and architecture, another on jellyfish and glass art, plus a fabulous penguin enclosure with a baby macaroni penguin and several gentoos sitting on eggs). Despite the holiday weekend, it wasn't very crowded, so we got to pet lots of animals in the touch tanks (rays, sharks, guitarfish, sturgeon -- not just little crustaceans here -- plus a rat snake held by a staff member), see lots of birds in the jungle and forest rooms, and have butterflies land on us.

After lunch we walked across the glass bridge to the Hunter Museum of American Art, which was free for the first Sunday of the month and is co-sponsoring the glass exhibit on jellyfish with a Dale Chihuly seaform display. There is also a special exhibit on views of the American West, plus collections of American impressionists, nautical paintings, and contemporary sculpture. I'm sure there was more, but we didn't have time to see the whole museum before we got on the road to Johnson City. On Monday we're going to see Grandfather Mountain, which has the highest swinging bridge in America and a wildlife center, before driving all the way back to Maryland which we will hopefully reach before the middle of the night!

Daniel and Adam petting a shark in the enormous touch tank at the Tennessee Aquarium.

These proud macaroni penguins are parents to the fuzzy chick hiding under his mother at right...

...while this pair of gentoo penguins is incubating the egg in the rock nest the male is gathering pebbles to build.

Adam in the middle of the giant spider crab tank.

The shark tank at the Tennessee Aquarium is smaller than the one at the Georgia Aquarium but it's easier to get close to the animals behind the glass.

This glass bridge connects the aquarium campus (which also includes an IMAX theater and places to eat and buy souvenirs) with the Hunter Museum of American Art, which has one historical mansion-style building and one new glass building.

You can see how thrilled the kids were by the time we reached the portrait collection. *g*

Jon Kuhn's beautiful Crystal Quadrille in the modern sculpture gallery. (No photos were permitted of the Chihuly installation since the museum doesn't own the rights to the artwork.)

Greetings from Chattanooga, Day Two

2009-07-05T00:36:00.001-04:00

Quickie because it's late after fireworks and we had a very full day going back and forth between Georgia and Tennessee at various Civil War and natural wonder locales. We started at Chickamauga National Military Park, the nation's first, created in 1890 and celebrated with a barbecue by soldiers who had fought for both Union and Confederate armies in the very bloody battles there. Then we drove up Lookout Mountain, picnicking and visiting Point Park, the north end summit which the Army of Tennessee used as a base to fire on Chattanooga before the Battle Above The Clouds. The weather was beautiful -- much cooler in the mountains than it has been on the Mississippi -- and it was a clear day, perfect for sightseeing from high peaks.

Later in the afternoon, we went to Rock City, one of America's first official tourist traps, created by the man who invented the first miniature golf franchise. He and his wife bought property among the fantastic rock formations of Lookout Mountain, and she created gardens with figures from fairy tales that her husband then opened to the pubic. There are also deer and rehabilitated raptors on the property. After that, we visited Ruby Falls, in America's deepest commercial cave on its second-busiest day of the year. The rock formations and waterfall were spectacular, but the caverns were so crowded that it took over two hours to do what's usually a one-hour tour. After a quick dinner at the hotel, we walked to Chattanooga's waterfront on the Tennessee River to watch the city's Fourth of July Fireworks.

The castle-like Wilder Brigade Monument, marking the hill at Chickamauga that Union Colonel John T. Wilder and his men held despite repeated Confederate attacks.

Like Gettysburg, there are acres of land covered with monuments that mark the spots where each unit fought and where soldiers fell.

Atop Lookout Mountain, there are wonderful views of the Tennessee River valley below as well as more monuments.

Rangers and reenactors were giving a demonstration of equipment, uniforms, and weapons in the national park.

Here are me and the boys in front of just one of the many wonderful formations in Rock City.

And here are Paul and the boys at the edge of one of the most dramatic.

The formations deep within Lookout Mountain are even more spectacular. This is Ruby Falls.

Chattanooga had a public Independence Day concert followed by fireworks by the waterfront, with free seating available to all at the public park.

We will spend most of Sunday at the aquarium and other museums before leaving Chattanooga!

Greetings from Chattanooga

2009-07-04T00:05:00.001-04:00

We left Louisiana this morning after touring Honey Island Swamp with Cajun Encounters, where our very entertaining tour guide Greg took us by covered boat down the Pearl River into the swamp. Adam spotted the first alligator of the tour, though we got to see several others -- the tour guides lure them out by tossing marshmallows into the water, which the alligators apparently love -- plus turtles, dragonflies, herons, bald cypress, and several other birds and insects. It was very hot out but the swamp was shaded and the air was lovely when the boat motored down the river, and because they swamp has no stagnant water, there were no mosquitos.

We stopped for lunch at a huge Chinese buffet and sushi bar in Mississippi, where we also went into Best Buy to get Michael Jackson's Number Ones, having concluded that since it's the soundtrack for this road trip already courtesy the news, we might as well enjoy it. Then we drove through Alabama and a corner of Georgia into Tennessee, where we arrived in Chattanooga just as the sun was setting behind AT&T Stadium. Once the baseball game ended, there were fireworks that we could see clearly from our tenth floor hotel room window. Since we had CDs on rather than radio news, I have only one question regarding Sarah Palin, which is: WTF? But then, in my quick skimming of the pundits on the internet, that seems to be their reaction too!

One of the alligators of Honey Island Swamp swims out of the duckweed in search of marshmallows.

The land in and around the swamp is protected wetlands, so no hunting is permitted, but apparently bringing tourists out to see gators is not considered sufficient disruption to be banned.

Paul filmed the alligator as it followed the boat.

This is a real "marsh mallow" -- a relative of the hibiscus.

There were numerous dragonflies among the plants and occasionally in the boat with us. Regrettably, we did not see the legendary Honey Island Swamp Monster.

Anne Rice is a member of the Nature Conservancy and requested that the scene where Louis and Claudia dump Lestat into the swamp be filmed on Nature Conservancy land in the Honey Island Swamp. This is the spot, by a slowly rotting cypress tree that was struck by lightning.

Before we left New Orleans, we drove through the Garden District and went to see Anne Rice's onetime house, Rosegate, upon which she modeled the Mayfair home in The Witching Hour. It's for sale for a little less than $4 million if anyone is interested!

Here is a view of the stadium and fireworks in Chattanooga from our hotel room window.

Have a very happy Independence Day, or, if you live outside the U.S., a great weekend!

Greetings from New Orleans, Day Three

2009-07-03T00:04:00.000-04:00

We started the day Thursday driving out of the city past famous above-ground cemeteries to Destrehan Plantation, the 1787 manor on the Mississippi River that produced indigo, then sugar, then served as a refinery for Amoco before the manor house, slave cabins, and some of the other buildings were restored. The plantation has an 1804 document signed by Thomas Jefferson that appointed Jean Noel Destrehan to the council that governed the Louisiana Territory, plus reproductions of the papers that transferred the Louisiana Purchase from Spain to France to the United States. There's a tour of the home describing the lives of the plantation owners and their slaves, plus an outdoor demonstration of how sugar was refined there. It was beastly hot once outside the climate-controlled mansion, but we got to see dragonflies, lizards, and various birds that live along the Mississippi, including a flock of egrets.

We had a small lunch so that after stopping in a couple of stores, we could have beignets at Cafe du Monde. I think older son ate five of them. We walked to the Voodoo Museum and Voodoo Spiritual Temple, both off Dumaine, plus we visited the French Market and the Jazz National Historical Park, where two rangers were giving a terrific demonstration of the range of music developed and played in New Orleans, primarily blues and second-line funeral spirituals. We had dinner at Café Beignet, as much because the live jazz band Steamboat Willie plays at the Music Legends Park location on Bourbon Street as for the food (more gumbo, jambalaya, muffaletta, and fresh-squeezed lemonade, plus Paul stopped for a hand grenade at Tropical Isle because we figured we had to have that or a hurricane). I know a lot of people find the French Quarter loud and tacky these days but I really love it -- I adored standing on a corner at the start of a thunderstorm with live jazz behind me, live zydeco across one street and live blues-rock across another, watching people dancing to different rhythms.

A massive, nearly 200-year-old live oak tree draped with Spanish moss in front of the manor at Destrehan Plantation.

Here are Daniel and Adam in front of the manor house, which served as a home for oil executives and then for vagrants before Amoco turned it over to a volunteer group committed to its restoration.

Visitors to Cafe du Monde on Decatur Street enjoying beignets and iced coffee in the heat.

The best national park ranger show I have ever seen -- live music at the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park.

The Joan of Arc statue in the French Market, America's oldest city market, is a copy of an 1880 Emmanuel Fremiet statue from the Place des Pyramides, Paris.

Marie Laveau, Priestess Miriam and others appear in photographs over an altar in the Voodoo Spiritual Temple on Rampart Street.

Daniel and Adam at the entrance to Music Legends Park, with Cafe Beignet in the background.

Steamboat Willie playing jazz in the park. We only heard part of a set because of an evening thunderstorm, but it had cooled off -- plus there were spraying fans -- so it was very enjoyable, particularly with gumbo.

On Friday, sadly, we are leaving New Orleans, though we are going on a swamp tour before we head back into Alabama.

Greetings from New Orleans, Day Two

2009-07-02T00:25:00.001-04:00

Wednesday was our 19th wedding anniversary, and we had a delightful day in New Orleans to celebrate. In the morning we went to Jackson Square, where we toured the Cabildo, St. Louis Cathedral, and the Presbytere. The Cabildo is now part of the Louisiana State Museum, and houses exhibits on regional history and music, but it was originally the seat of Spanish government (and later housed the mayor and state supreme court) and the Louisiana Purchase documents were signed here. The cathedral is a Catholic minor basilica and was restored for the American Bicentennial. The Presbytere was built on the site of the residence of the Capuchin monks and currently has an exhibit on Zulu and Carnival, including the most amazing costumes I've ever seen.

We ate lunch in the park in Jackson Square before walking to the aquarium past the mule-drawn carriages, riverboats, National Park Service center, and dozens of French Quarter antique stores and praline shops. I knew nothing about the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas before we got there, quite the opposite of my experience with the Georgia Aquarium, and it turned out to be a nice surprise -- the penguins are very accessible and so are the sharks, rays, and other animals in the big ocean tanks, nothing was crowded (including the stingray touch tank), there were many exhibits on local ecology plus a rainforest with birds and snakes, and in general it's a great place especially with kids.

We walked around a bit in various shops (Voodoo, hot sauce, Mardi Gras souvenirs) but we were very fried from the heat, so we went back to the hotel for some late-afternoon pralines and air conditioning before we headed out again to go to Cajun Cabin, having opted for highly-rated gumbo and jambalaya over live music since the kids wanted to swim. Tomorrow night they're going to hear jazz whether they want to or not. I have bought only the tackiest, most touristy souvenirs for myself and others here and must contemplate proper keepsakes when we get back from Destrehan Plantation in the morning!

This is the Rue Royal behind St. Louis Cathedral, but I cannot resist a "Moon Over Bourbon Street" reference. (We're going to drive by Anne Rice's house tomorrow too, though I can't bring myself to go on a vampire tour!)

The room in the Cabildo where the Louisiana Purchase documents were signed, making New Orleans and a great deal of territory beyond officially part of the United States (at least, according to various European empires, with some heated debate by the Spanish about where the Texas border should be).

Inside St. Louis Cathedral, visited by Pope John Paul II in September 1987.

The boys with some of the fantastic costumes in the "100 Years of Zulu" exhibit in the Presbytere.

The wide view of Jackson Square -- Andrew Jackson's statue at the center, surrounded by flowers and plantain trees, with the Cabildo, Cathedral and Presbytere from left to right in the back.

A riverboat in the Mississippi River near the aquarium.

Penguins at the Aquarium of the Americas, one of several Audubon facilities in the city (there's also a zoo and "insectarium" where one can snack on bugs).

A mule-drawn carriage near the market in the French Quarter.

Greetings from New Orleans

2009-07-01T00:07:00.000-04:00

I am writing this from the Ramada Inn on Bourbon Street, former location of the French opera house at the corner of Toulouse, where we have returned after a fabulous Cajun dinner at La Bayou -- I'm sure there are better restaurants in the French Quarter but I'm not sure there are many where one can get so many different dishes so well done for so little money -- and wandering around stores selling Mardi Gras beads, voodoo charms, fleur de lis jewelry, images of women my sons probably did not need to see (well, they had probably seen them before, but they didn't need to see them with me around!) and vampire collectibles. It's all utterly delightful, particularly since we are in the quiet part of the hotel where the all-night music can't be heard at 2 a.m.

We started our day very early in Pensacola, since we had good weather -- big breakfast buffet, then a couple of hours on the beach, where we saw lots of fish and comb jellies in the clear water, followed by a visit to the Gulf Islands National Seashore visitor center and their exhibits on sustainable lumber, shipbuilding, and wildlife in the region. It started to rain hard before we could walk the circular path by the water, so we went on to Davis Bayou in Mississippi after a quick stop for lunch. There were no alligators in the swamp that we could see, but there were turtles, crabs, fish, dragonflies, herons, and lots of other wildlife.

We made a brief stop in Biloxi to see the lighthouse and beach, then drove over the Louisiana border, across the enormous bridge spanning Lake Pontchartrain, and into the devastated area of New Orleans near the water there, with dozens of buildings still abandoned or partially collapsed. The French Quarter, however, is very lively even at this hour on a weeknight, with both the music and adult nightclub scenes thriving. Thus far we haven't done any serious sightseeing so I'll save city photos for tomorrow and stick with the delights of the waterways of Florida and Mississippi...

The sky over Pensacola Beach early Tuesday morning.

An exhibit at the Gulf Islands National Seashore visitor center on the advantages of live oak as a building material for wooden ships includes this model of Old Ironsides' construction. ("She's Yankee-built, sir. Will, here, he was getting married, and his wife's second cousin works in the yards, so Will saw the ship out of water...and he described it to me, and I knocked you up a model.")

Little fiddler crabs scuttling across the mud at Davis Bayou.

There were also big blue crabs stealing bait off fishing lines...

...as well as turtles in the alligator swamp...

...and herons in the tidal marshes...

...and dragonflies all around the plants both near the water and in the desert-like dune areas.

Biloxi's 1848 lighthouse is the only lighthouse in the United States to stand in the middle of a four-lane highway, and it survived Hurricane Katrina, though presently it is under construction. Much of the rest of the city features big casinos -- I felt like we'd stumbled into Atlantic City.

Wednesday we will visit Jackson Square and the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas!

Greetings from Pensacola Beach

2009-06-30T00:35:00.001-04:00

It is currently storming in the Florida panhandle, but I don't care because I got more than an hour in the Gulf of Mexico in the early evening, where the water was warm, the air was relatively cool (it was nearly 100 in Mobile earlier in the day), and there were few people and lots of seashells. I didn't know what to expect, having never seen the Gulf before this afternoon -- I didn't find mole crabs, but I did find little burrowing coquina clams like in the Carolinas, and there were herring gulls, laughing gulls, and pelicans all flying over the water which had fairly good-sized waves in the wake of the afternoon's thunderstorms.

Earlier in the day, we left Georgia and drove into Atlanta, where we picnicked at a very warm rest stop before heading into Mobile to visit the Museum of Mobile in the Southern Market, which used to be City Hall. There's a temporary exhibit on Florida's East Coast pirates -- pieces of eight and artifacts from the Atocha wreck, plus maps, weapons, and illustrations of Drake (considered a pirate in these parts apparently), Teach, Bonny, Read, Gambi, Lafitte, et al. There are also history exhibits on the city and the region, including a replica of the hold of a slave ship, the interior of a Confederate submarine, one of Mobile-born Hank Aaron's home run balls, several historic carriages and house models, and an exhibit on Mardi Gras in Alabama.

Daniel and Adam in the pirates exhibit, which had videos of old pirate movies...

...as well as guns, cutlasses, armor, sailing equipment, and treasure including silver coins and copper blocks.

Here are the boys in the model of a Confederate submarine, which looks considerably less fun to travel aboard.

One of the many early artifacts of the region in the historical exhibit downstairs.

A statue in downtown Mobile of Confederate naval hero Raphael Semmes, captain of the commerce raider Alabama, which took dozens of prizes. After the war and his trial for treason as a U.S. naval defector, he taught philosophy at LSU.

The USS Alabama, which saw a great deal of action in the Pacific in 1944-45, is in Mobile Bay's Battleship Memorial Park.

The view from our room at the Hampton Inn in Pensacola Beach.

Here are the kids when we first arrived at the beach, before they determined that the water was warm enough to take their shirts off and stay a while.

Tuesday after some morning beach time we are off to Biloxi and New Orleans! I hear there was a coup in Honduras, but the news here still seems to be the All Michael Jackson, All the Time channel, except for five minutes on Billy Mays...

Greetings from Union City

2009-06-29T00:06:00.001-04:00

We spent Sunday in downtown Atlanta, which had some very entertaining aspects and some disappointing aspects. I readily admit that we have been spoiled when it comes to aquariums -- we've seen the best, in some cases behind the scenes, in both the U.S. and the U.K. -- but many people and tour books both had said that the Georgia Aquarium was a can't-miss attraction, so we had rather high expectations. We were very disappointed to learn that the penguins are completely off display unless one pays $50+ a person for a behind-the-scenes tour -- outside our budget, given that the aquarium has an entrance fee (and they nickel-and-dime you inside for everything from the Titanic touring exhibit, which is fair enough, to the short Disney-ripoff looking movie, which we skipped, to plastic bags for lunch leftovers which...don't get me started, and they yelled at me for taking a photo of the "Hairy Otter" t-shirt display in the gift shop, possibly because they stole the logo from the Maryland Zoo). We didn't find much Southern hospitality there.

So while the Georgia Aquarium is a must-see for anyone obsessed with sharks, given that it has enormous whale sharks in a fantastic ocean tank that also has many other species of sharks, rays and fish, and there are several touch tanks terrific for kids, I don't think the aquarium comes close to the Cincinnati Aquarium in overall impact, and I prefer the more low-key style of the Baltimore, Boston and Chicago aquariums (I haven't been to the latter in many years, so perhaps it has changed, but I don't remember huge advertising billboards, prominently placed gift shops, or crowds so thick that it was impossible to see most of the smaller tanks up close without waiting a long time). I find it ironic that World of Coca-Cola, which is an entirely commercial enterprise with all the tourist-trap insanity implied -- a steampunkish Coke "happiness" film, a 4-D presentation about Coke around the world, a room running Coke advertisements over the years -- feels lower-key and less hyped than the aquarium in some ways.

Our plan for the evening was to have dinner somewhere downtown, hopefully with Krabapple, but she has a sinus infection so we didn't get to meet up with her, and when we arrived at the Atlanta Underground after a quick stop at the Georgia State House, we discovered that it closed an hour earlier than we thought, so we went through quickly on the main level which is most of what survives of pre-Civil War Atlanta -- the city was founded as a railroad crossroads, and a depot (the one from Gone With the Wind) once stood where the Underground is now, created during the 1920's when viaducts elevated the streets and left the old storefronts below the surface. We missed the Martin Luther King site entirely -- it closed even earlier. So we went back to the hotel, took the kids swimming, and cooked Indian food in the microwave in our room to save money for dining in New Orleans!

It's hard to get a sense of exactly how enormous the whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium are without seeing how they compare to everything else in the tank and the people sitting outside watching them. That's one in the upper left.

The boys pose outside the beluga whale tank. The animals are delightful, but I can't help but compare this exhibit to the one at Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, where one doesn't have to pay a fortune for a behind-the-scenes tour to see them surfacing above the water and playing with toys.

Me outside the Pacific reef tank, which is a wave tank, so the water gets churned every minute and gets the little sharks swimming.

The manta ray, which is in the big ocean tank with the whale sharks, is pretty amazing to look at.

At several points in World of Coca-Cola, we laughed and said, "We paid for this?" It's even more a celebration of Coke than the gratuitous references in old Columbia Pictures movies (one of Ghandi's Oscars is there), but there's no denying that Coke has been a part of all our lives.

Just about every place we went, someone wanted to take our photo and sell it to us for $20. I managed to take a photo of all four of us in reflection in this display in the World of Coca-Cola of an old fountain soda shop.

We enjoyed all of the Coke tour, which is not free like the Hershey factory tour, but ends with all the cola you can drink...and that includes flavors from Latin America, Europe, and Asia as well as eight kinds of Coke plus the rest of their U.S. products (Sprite, Minute Maid, VitaminWater, and many others).

Here is the central crossroads of Underground Atlanta, where Pryor Street meets Alabama Street. Now it's an urban mall with bling, sports team memorabilia and inexpensive restaurants, but at one time it was the heart of the produce district beside the heart of the Southern railroad.

Monday we will leave Georgia, visit historical stuff in Mobile, then head to the beach near Pensacola!

Greetings from Atlanta

2009-06-28T00:36:00.001-04:00

After arriving from Augusta in the late morning, we spent nearly the entire day at the Atlanta History Center. This fabulous museum has a main building with several interactive museum exhibits on the history of Atlanta, the Civil War, and the Olympic Games, plus a historic research center, extensive gardens and woods, and two historic houses -- the Swan House, which was originally the main building on the private estate, and the Tullie Smith Farm, whose main house was moved to the property to become part of the collection and has other buildings restored or brought from other local farms. (The Margaret Mitchell House, which we stopped at briefly late in the day, is also part of the museum.)

We had lunch in the Coca-Cola Cafe (a Chick-fil-A covered with historic Coke posters and decorations), then walked to the Swan House, the 1928 home of the Inman family who inherited a fortune from cotton futures. The library and master bathroom are really stunning, as is the massive fountain out front. Then we wandered in the 100-degree heat to the farm, where we saw sheep and chickens as well as the large farmhouse and reconstructed slave cabin. Back at the museum that houses the Atlanta History Museum and Centennial Olympic Games Museum, we went through the large Civil War exhibit with artifacts and short films covering each year of the war from Atlanta's perspective, and the kids tried out the rowing machines and bikes in the Olympics exhibit which has the only complete collection of Olympic torches and medals in the U.S.

Daniel and Adam outside Swan House. No photography was permitted inside, but trust me when I say it's as opulent as one would expect from this exterior.

Here are the boys and the sheep at Tullie Smith Farm, wilting in the heat.

Adam strikes the winner's haughty pose in the Olympics exhibit. You can tell how much Daniel did not want to be in this photo. Paul didn't care.

Daniel was more willing to race his brother in the interactive display upstairs.

Here is Adam in the Civil War museum exhibit on the siege of Atlanta conducted by General Sherman.

Life-size figures of Union and Confederate soldiers with their gear -- there were rifles, ammunition pouches, and packs to pick up to give a sense of the weight of what they had to carry.

The Atlanta History Museum follows the city's development as it went from a rural railroad crossing to a huge modern metropolis, with particular emphasis on the ethnic, racial and class contributions and tensions that shaped its character.

Margaret Mitchell's house will have a grand reopening of the home and Gone With the Wind exhibition...next weekend.

Sunday we will visit the aquarium, Coca-Cola factory, Underground, and Martin Luther King memorial!

Greetings from Augusta

2009-06-27T00:19:00.001-04:00

We have left Charleston after a fabulous day at the waterfront there, starting with a morning walk from our hotel to the Spirit of Charleston, which took us on a half-hour cruise past the Charleston coastline and the visiting tall ships to Fort Sumter. I learned a lot -- for instance, I didn't realize that the entire island upon which the fort stands was built on an underwater sandbar -- from the audio tour on the boat, which covers both the historical background and some of the architecture of the city. Adam and I stood on the forward deck for the whole cruise watching the pelicans, swallows and seagulls, plus Pride of Baltimore under sail and tugboats directing enormous freight tankers to the deep-water docks. It was very hot within the fort where the Civil War started, though also lovely, with little fiddler crabs and arthropods among the rocks.

After the boat ride back, we went to the South Carolina Aquarium, which mostly focuses on native species though it has a visiting exhibit on Magellanic penguins on loan from SeaWorld. We picnicked on the tables behind the aquarium overlooking the harbor, then we went to the dive and feeding at the big sea tank, which has sharks, a sea turtle, moray eel, and a lot of fish. We also spent a lot of time in the "outdoor" exhibit of shore birds, turtles, crabs, and fish found near the harbor (the room is surrounded by mesh but is open to the air and has local plants). And we saw the Carolina rainforest, an exhibit on rivers with otters and snakes, the touch tank with horseshoe crabs, urchins and rays, an interactive exhibit on camping with skunks and owls, and the aforementioned penguins, whose feeding we attended. In the late afternoon, we drove to Augusta, where we had dinner in our hotel room and took the kids to the pool.

The boys at the entrance to Fort Sumter, which Confederate fighters captured from the Union at the start of the Civil War.

From inside the fort, one can see the Charleston riverfront as well as the wildlife that lives in the brackish water.

Here is a view from the upper level of the guns in the fort as well as the boat that brought us there.

Harborfest visitor Pride of Baltimore under sail -- we passed her in the river on the way back to the dock -- with some of the area's gorgeous waterfront houses in the background.

The U.S. Coast Guard barque Eagle in the water in front of the Custom House.

Russian four-masted barque Kruzenshtern and Romanian barque Mircea. Kruzenshtern lost most of her foremast in a storm while sailing to Charleston.

Adam with one of the visiting penguins at the South Carolina Aquarium.

And a glimpse into the Ocean exhibit, which holds 385,000 gallons of salt water and has hundreds of fish, plus a loggerhead turtle.

Saturday we go to Atlanta to see Civil War sites and Gone with the Wind settings!

Greetings from Charleston

2009-06-26T00:17:00.001-04:00

We are in glorious South Carolina, which was mired in gubernatorial scandal this morning but that has been wiped off the front pages by the definitive end of my childhood via the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. That was all anyone was talking about as we traveled today -- the former not entirely surprising given her well-publicized struggle with cancer, the latter a total shock. It's always interesting to me how people feel this sense of having something in common with total strangers via celebrity deaths, even someone as controversial as Jackson was in recent years.

The other running theme of our day was stray cats, several of whom tried to adopt us (and it's probably a good thing we weren't going home, or the first one would probably have succeeded). After saying farewell to that cat outside the motel, we went to Petersburg National Battlefield, which has a museum and several large earthworks preserved -- its most famous feature, the Crater, was created by a massive mine explosion that killed about 300 Confederate soldiers instantly. We also went to a reconstructed Union trench site with cabins and an underground magazine. Then we drove to Bentonville for lunch, site of a smaller Civil War battle, and into South Carolina where we stopped briefly at South of the Border, which remains as tacky, stereotypical, and goofy as ever.

Now we are in Charleston, where we arrived around dinnertime and ate during the late afternoon thunderstorm that broke the heat. Afterward, we walked from our hotel down to the waterfront, where the ships for Harborfest had arrived -- some were sailing under the bridge giving tours, like Pride of Baltimore, but most were docked, and we got to see both ships we'd visited before (the Schooner Virginia, the Mircea) and gorgeous big ships like the Dutch Europa, the Russian Kruzenshtern (which broke a mast sailing to Charleston), and the French schooners Etoile and Belle Poule. The sunset was glorious as we walked back past the customs house and old market; we had Ben & Jerry's after we passed the fiddler crab-filled marsh, listening to cicadas and watching the bats fly above the trees.

Earthworks at Petersburg National Battlefield recall the months-long siege of the city as well as the trench warfare tactics of World War I adapted from Civil War innovations.

This is the monument at the Crater, where hundreds of soldiers on both sides lost their lives -- the Confederates largely in the initial blast, the Union soldiers when confusion after the explosion allowed the South time to regroup.

The historic district of Petersburg, with stone streets and buildings that in some cases have been standing since the American Revolution, has antique shops and this pub that serves fried green tomatoes alongside shepherd's pie.

Here are my kids at that iconic monument to bad taste, South of the Border, which clearly wants to be Wall Drug but lacks the fabulous setting and historic character.

Tall ships like Europa, at left, have gathered in Charleston for Harborfest this weekend.

We got to watch a beautiful sunset. You can see some of the color behind the Etoile and Belle Poule.

Here is one of the little crabs that lives in the marshy area between the dockside warehouses and the water.

Mule-drawn carriages are a popular way to see the city. This one is stopped across the street from the old market.

Greetings from Petersburg

2009-06-25T00:44:00.002-04:00

No poems while I'm traveling -- it's too complicated to keep straight what I've already posted, sorry. I spent the early part of the day fighting with an Avery template to print address labels for Adam's Bar Mitzvah thank you notes, then panicked, sent the kids to the pool, packed, and got out of the house as rush hour was ending, which was the perfect time to brave I-95 South.

It wasn't yet dark after 9 p.m. when we reached Richmond and met Dementordelta for ice cream. Then we headed on to Petersburg, where we'll visit the battlefield in the morning before heading to Charleston -- after tracking down rubber bands for Adam's braces, since he somehow managed to lose his package of them between our house and the motel. I am hoping the CVS in town has them; if not, it may be an interesting (hah) day tomorrow.

Here are the last of my Baltimore photos from last weekend:

Seven Foot Knoll lighthouse, a screwpile lighthouse moved into the city once a land-based tower was built nearby, now part of the Baltimore Maritime Museum.

The wheel of the Lightship Chesapeake, also moved to the Baltimore Maritime Museum after duty protecting sailors.

The imposing USS Constellation is the newest ship to join the maritime museum's passport-ticket system, though it is the oldest of the ships in the harbor.

It is relatively rare for a ship with taller masts than the Constellation's to visit, but the Cisne Branco is one of the largest to dock in this part of the harbor.

Here is Federal Hill seen through one of the Cisne Branco's life rings.

And here is the Cisne Branco from the bridge of the Chesapeake.

Birds nest on top of both the USS Torsk and the USCGC Taney. Here is a small visitor to the latter.

Hibiscus flowers have been planted all around the Inner Harbor.

Shouting love to Hufflepants who is taking care of our kitties! Hope they are letting you get some sleep!

Poem for Wednesday

2009-06-24T00:01:00.001-04:00

The "World-Famous" Lipizzaners
By Julie Bruck

They trail the trademark Royal Lipizzans,
a day or three later, eschewing big arenas
named after software for more questionable,
outdoor venues, county fairs like this,
where you wander among pygmy goats at dusk
to locate the gate, always pay cash.
There are fewer white stallions here,
and they don't jump as high, but the crowd
of fat men, angular women, and their sleepy,
sun-kissed kids cheers wildly and stomps
its boots in time to brave Beethoven squeezed
from two tiny speakers. That's the way,
Santa Rosa, barks the commentator
in his iridescent blue suit, a decade
or two past Vegas. These horses
love it when you make a lot of noise!
So do the red-uniformed women riders,
who grin resolutely through quadrilles,
caprioles, and airs above the ground,
broadcasting their teeth. Best of all,
these horses like to jiggle from the ring,
halt, then bolt breakneck for the barn—
whee! Hang the rules! A stud stampede
of Royal Riding School truants! Oh, less
than venerable Viennese, elbows pumping
their horny white stallions barnward
at suicidal speeds, driving Santa
Rosa mad with glee, as mushroom clouds
of dust ascend under the klieg lights,
coating our throats! Get a load of how
they do this in California, oh, Emperor
Franz Josef, oh, Elisabeth, mournful
Empress, oh, Troy Tinker of the blue neon
suit! We eat this dust, we yell for more.

--------

Another from this week's New Yorker.

We are leaving town tomorrow afternoon, meaning that today was spent doing necessary chores like laundry, tracking down the books the kids want to read in the car, tracking down necessities at Target that we didn't track down the last time we were at Target, and more laundry. I still need to burn a bunch of photos to disc in case of computer catastrophe, and I still need to pack pretty much all the practical stuff, but I have most of tomorrow for that while the kids are hopefully at the pool.

We had dinner with my parents, though I was a bit foggy since I had a seasonal migraine. And now I am spazzing about all the things I may forget to do but am too tired to do any of them. So instead I am listening to Hoawrd Dean talk to Stephen Colbert about health care (though not his own apparent plastic surgery and who paid for it, I note), and have my cat ignoring me in favor of sleeping on the new bath mat purchased earlier in the day.

The USS Constellation seen behind NVE Cisne Branco in Baltimore last weekend.

Another view of Cisne Branco, this time from the gun deck of the Constellation.

Adam tries out one of the hammocks on the deck below.

The wardroom and officers' quarters have recently been restored.

In fact, the quarters are quite roomy compared even to the captain's quarters on the USS Torsk and most of the officers' quarters on the USCGC Taney.

The dispensary has been restored as well.

An older ship's wheel is on display in the small museum outside the ship.

Here are the Constellation (at right) and Cisne Branco (at left) plus a few harbor dragon boats seen from the bridge of the Lightship Chesapeake.

Poem for Tuesday

2009-06-23T00:42:00.001-04:00

Five Houses Down
By Christian Wiman

I loved his ten demented chickens
and the hell-eyed dog, the mailbox
shaped like a huge green gun.
I loved the eyesore opulence
of his five partial cars, the wonder-cluttered porch
with its oilspill plumage, tools
cauled in oil, the dark
clockwork of disassembled engines
christened Sweet Baby and benedicted Old Bitch;
and down the steps into the yard the explosion
of mismatched parts and black scraps
amid which, like a bad sapper cloaked
in luck, he would look up stunned,
patting the gut that slopped out of his undershirt
and saying, Son,
you lookin' to make some scratch?
All afternoon we'd pile the flatbed high
with stacks of Exxon floormats
mysteriously stencilled with his name,
rain-rotted sheetrock or miles
of misfitted pipes, coil after coil
of rusted fencewire that stained for days
every crease of me, rollicking it all
to the dump where, while he called
every ragman and ravened junkdog by name,
he catpicked the avalanche of trash
and fished some always fixable thing
up from the depths. Something
about his endless aimless work
was not work, my father said.
Somehow his barklike earthquake curses
were not curses, for he could goddam
a slipped wrench and shitfuck a stuck latch,
but one bad word from me
made his whole being
twang like a nail mis-struck. Aint no call for that,
son, no call at all. Slipknot, whatknot, knot
from which no man escapes—
prestoed back to plain old rope;
whipsnake, blacksnake, deep in the wormdirt
worms like the clutch of mud:
I wanted to live forever
five houses down
in the womanless rooms a woman
sometimes seemed to move through, leaving him
twisting a hand-stitched dishtowel
or idly wiping the volcanic dust.
It seemed like heaven to me:
beans and weenies from paper plates,
black-fingered tinkerings on the back stoop
as the sun set, on an upturned fruitcrate
a little jamjar of rye like ancient light,
from which, once, I took a single, secret sip,
my eyes tearing and my throat on fire.

--------

From this week's New Yorker.

I had a lovely day with Dementordelta, Gblvr, and Hufflepants. The former got here first and we watched some Merlin and I dragged her to the bank with me. Then we met the others for lunch at the mall food court -- easiest place with all of us plus my kids. And after a stop in Hot Topic to check out the new Harry Potter merchandise (which seems sadly outnumbered by the new Twilight merchandise), we came back to my house, sent the kids to the pool, and watched Nobel Son (because some of us wanted to watch Alan Rickman and some of us wanted to watch Eliza Dushku).

The opening sequence was so graphically violent that I wasn't sure I'd make it through the rest of the movie, but the rest of it was largely quite entertaining, though this is very black comedy -- terrific cast (Mary Steenburgen, Danny DeVito, Bill Pullman), unpredictable script, most amusing car chase sequence I've ever seen (in a mall via remote control). Parts of it are actually quite sad, though Alan is hilarious as a man completely infatuated with himself. When the movie ended, I showed them the business card scene from Arrested Development and we had cookies. Here are some photos of Cisne Branco in Baltimore yesterday:

Dementordelta brought me a DVD about Faberge eggs with an emphasis on the ones we saw at the VMFA in Richmond, so we watched that in the evening and did chores in preparation to travel in two days when Hufflepants will be watching our cats. Tomorrow means lots of laundry!

Poem for Monday

2009-06-22T00:20:00.001-04:00

Small Comfort
By Katha Pollitt

Coffee and cigarettes in a clean cafe,
forsythia lit like a damp match against
a thundery sky drunk on its own ozone,

the laundry cool and crisp and folded away
again in the lavender closet-too late to find
comfort enough in such small daily moments

of beauty, renewal, calm, too late to imagine
people would rather be happy than suffering
and inflicting suffering. We're near the end,

but O before the end, as the sparrows wing
each night to their secret nests in the elm's green dome
O let the last bus bring

love to lover, let the starveling
dog turn the corner and lope suddenly
miraculously, down its own street, home.

--------

We spent Father's Day with my in-laws visiting ships in Baltimore, a perfect day for such an activity since the longest day of the year wasn't overly hot and the waterfront was beautiful. Cisne Branco was visiting Baltimore from Brazil, and had brought her own band, which was playing jazz in front of Harborplace. We visited her first, then walked around to the USS Constellation, whose crew recently finished restoring her wardroom and officers' quarters, and its partner the Baltimore Maritime Museum, which includes the USCGC Taney, the submarine USS Torsk, the Lightship Chesapeake, and the Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse (which no longer stands at Seven Foot Knoll but in the Inner Harbor). The schooner Lady Maryland and Chesapeake Bay Buy Boat Mildred Belle were docked just below the lighthouse.

We had dinner at Blu Bambu, an Asian fusion restaurant chosen by Adam (pretty good, very inexpensive), where we had hoped to eat outside but couldn't find a table out of direct sunlight, which ended up being just as well because there was a fire in a nearby outdoor trash can that sent smoke billowing all over the area for a couple of minutes. Then we walked back around the Inner Harbor toward where we were parked, stopping for a couple of minutes to look at the tall ships again and to listen to Elvis impersonator Jesse Garon who was performing in the amphitheater between the Light Street Pavilion and the Pratt Street Pavilion. After we sent my in-laws off to visit friends in Annapolis who have sailed down from New England, we came home to watch Merlin on American TV.

The restored 1854 USS Constellation seen from the relatively new Brazilian ship Cisne Branco.

Cisne Branco brought her own band, which played Latin-style jazz and pop music.

My in-laws and kids enjoyed the summer solstice on deck in the sunny harbor.

The Urban Pirates ship Fearless was cruising the harbor, plundering and pillaging...well, actually giving free rides for Father's Day.

We visited the USS Torsk, a World War II-era sub built in Portsmouth and credited with sinking three Japanese ships in the Pacific...

...and the Coast Guard cutter Taney, where conditions were nearly as cramped as on the submarine.

Lady Maryland was docked near the lighthouse. Her pink-and-green trim is immediately recognizable.

In the evening, there was a free concert by a performer we'd seen as Elvis on the beach at Ocean City a couple of years ago.

Poem for Sunday

2009-06-21T00:54:00.001-04:00

The Expulsion
By Katha Pollitt

Adam was happy -- now he had someone to blame
for everything: shipwrecks, Troy,
the gray face in the mirror.

Eve was happy -- now he would always need her.
She walked on boldly, swaying her beautiful hips.

The serpent admired his emerald coat,
the Angel burst into flames
(he'd never approved of them, and he was right).

Even God was secretly pleased: Let
History begin!

The dog had no regrets, trotting by Adam's side
self-importantly, glad to be rid

of the lion, the toad, the basilisk, the white-footed mouse,
who were also happy and forgot their names immediately.

Only the Tree of Knowledge stood forlorn,
its small hard bitter crab apples

glinting high up, in a twilight of black leaves.
How pleasant it had been, how unexpected

to have been, however briefly,
the center of attention.

--------

"The Garden of Eden -- a nice place to visit, perhaps, but would you have wanted to live there? Wouldn't it have been a little boring?" writes Pollitt in this week's Poet's Choice. "In my poem, everyone is glad to be rid of Paradise, so timeless and static and perfect. Now, Adam and Eve will get to have complex, difficult relations full of blame and seduction, like real men and women; the animals will be real animals, alien beings in nature, not our toys and servants; and God, who exists outside of time, will enjoy himself watching human beings spin out their endless tragicomic story...will they mess it up? Probably." The poem is from The Mind-Body Problem, coming out this month.

We had a bunch of chores to get done on Saturday before we leave town next week -- going to World Market to get some food for the trip, going to Petco to get cat litter, going to CVS to get drugstore necessities...nothing all that exciting, in other words, other than following the protests in Iran. Here are some photos of the animals who enlivened our chores:

We often have rabbits in the neighborhood, but this is the first one we've ever seen in the bushes right at our intersection.

I took this photo out a car window, but the rabbit seems fairly unafraid of people -- I just hope the ones with dogs keep them on leashes like they're supposed to.

We always stop to look at the animals at Petco when we go to get cat litter. Fortunately the SPCA was not there with kittens today (that's how we got Cinnamon and Daisy.) Sorry for the low-quality pics, I only had my phone with me.

The mice are adorable -- I love how there always seem to be several on the wheel at once, riding upside-down -- but we are not silly enough to try to bring one into the house, given how the aforementioned Cinnamon and Daisy will attack the glass sliding doors just to try to get at the ones that live on our deck.

Unlike the other two, Rosie is much too ~~blobby~~ dignified to attack a door just to try to catch a mouse. In fact, the one time our hamster got loose, she merely herded him up to our bedroom for us to catch.

It is much less work for all three cats to sit on or near the kitchen table and try to use their psychic cat-mon powers on us to get us to feed them.

In the evening we watched Interview with the Vampire, which I am embarrassed to admit that I never saw all the way through...I was with Anne Rice, I thought her original dream cast of Sting and Daniel Day-Lewis, or at least Gabriel Byrne and Julian Sands, should have played Louis and Lestat, and I couldn't imagine liking Tom Cruise in anything. I must confess that either time has mellowed me or Twilight has lowered my standards. Because the movie was worth watching to me from the moment very early on when Lestat, flying above the tall ship, bites Louis's pretty, pretty throat. This is so much hotter than Carlisle biting Edward that comparisons are silly, and I thought Carlisle biting Edward was the hottest scene in that movie.

Cruise couldn't act any better then than he can now (which is to say, the perpetually depressed Louis has more emotional range than the ostensibly fiery Lestat), but it's really quite fun to watch 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst acting circles around him. And Antonio ohhhyes Banderas mmmmm! As Brad says when he almost kisses him before storming away in a very pretty huff, "You are dead, and you want me to quicken you once more." Woohoo but I'd have liked to watch that! *coughs* My point being, there are lots of attractive young men swearing eternal passion and stuff, and given that Anne Rice's idea of a powerful female character is one who wants to kill 90 percent of the men in the world (QOTD), it's just as well that the only woman of note here is a perpetual child.

Have a blessed solstice and a happy Father's Day if you are celebrating either! Otherwise, have a nice Sunday!