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In the fall of 1972, my parents drove me to the University of North Dakota for my freshman year. Everything I needed was packed in a brand-new royal-blue aluminum trunk: a crazy-quilt afghan that my mother had crocheted for my bed, thirty dollars' worth of new clothes, my Berlitz French Self-Teacher, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (a gift from my father), a framed photograph of my grandfather Mooshum, and a beaded leather tobacco pouch that he had owned ever since I could remember, and which he had casually handed to me as I left, the way old men give presents.
Other freshmen were already moving into their dormitory rooms when we arrived, with their parents helping haul. I saw boxes of paperbacks, stereo equipment, Dylan albums and varnished acoustic guitars, home-knitted afghans, none as brilliant as mine, Janis posters, Bowie posters, Day-Glo bedsheets, hacky sacks, stuffed bears. But as we carried my trunk up two flights of stairs terror invaded me. Although I was studying French because I dreamed of going to Paris, I actually dreaded leaving home, and in the end my parents did not want me to leave, either. But this is how children are sacrificed into their futures: I had to go, and here I was. We walked back down the stairs. I was too numb to cry, but I watched my mother and father as they stood beside the car and waved. That moment is a still image; I can call it up as if it were a photograph. My father, so thin and athletic, looked almost frail with shock, while my mother, whose beauty was still remarkable, and who was known on the reservation for her silence and reserve, had left off her characteristic gravity. Her face and my father's were naked with love. It wasn't something that we talked about—love. But they allowed me this one clear look at it. It blazed from them. And then they left.
I think now that everything that was concentrated in that one look—the care they had taken in bringing me up, their patient lessons in every subject they knew how to teach, their wincing efforts to give me my freedom, the example they had set of fortitude in work—was what allowed me to survive.
The trunk was quickly emptied; my room was barely filled. Then, books to my chest, I curled up beneath the afghan and looked out the window. I understood right then that I would be spending most of my first semester in this position.
White girls at the time listened to Joni Mitchell, grew their hair long, smoked impatiently, frowned into their poetry notebooks, and pretended to fuck everything that moved. The other girls—Dakota, Chippewa, or mixed-blood like me—were less obvious on campus, and mainly very studious, although a couple of women swaggered around, furious in ribbon shirts, with American Indian Movement boyfriends. I didn't really fit in with anybody. My roommate was a stocky blond girl from Wishek who was so dead set on becoming a nurse that she practiced bringing me things—a cup of water or, when I had a headache, aspirin. This was annoying, but we got along. I spent most of my time in the library, anyway. I hid out there and read my way through the poetry section until I hit on my favorites—all writers who had died young or gone crazy or disappeared into war. After Keats and Shelley and Byron, I skipped ahead to Lowell, Wright, Sexton, and Plath. Then I went back to the First World War, found Wilfred Owen, and wandered the campus dazed by "Strange Meeting," thinking about his remarkable use of the verb "groined" and mumbling, "And by his smile I knew that sullen hall." Next, I turned to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Apollinaire. Searching for clues on how to make my way to Paris, I floundered toward the American expatriates. And then one drizzly afternoon I found her—my muse, my model, my everything. Anaïs Nin.
My attraction was hard to explain—she was so artistically driven, so demure and yet so bold, and those swimming eyes! I was lost in soul-to-soul contact. I checked her out of the library again and again, but when the summer came I found I needed her more than ever. I had to take her home with me. Anaïs. I bought all her diaries—the boxed set—a huge investment. By the time I went back to college in the fall and moved into a beautiful old half-wrecked farmhouse off campus, I was soaked in the oils of my own manufactured delirium.
Like Anaïs, I reviewed every thought I had. All trivia became momentous, my faintest desire a raving hunger. I, too, kept careful diaries now. Each notebook had a title taken from a diary entry by Anaïs. That fall's diary was called "Sprouting in the Void." I wrote long letters to my brother, Joseph, who was studying biology at the University of Minnesota. He wrote short ones back. My third or fourth cousin Corwin, with whom I had been madly in love in fifth grade, had driven me back to college, and I'd read aloud from Anaïs's diary all the way. He'd liked it only when she was having sex; otherwise, he said, she was "way up in her head." But now he visited me whenever his band was in town. He played the fiddle with a mad energy. Our childhood romance was a joke between us. He was a pot dealer and supplied my friends.
I kept Anaïs with me at all times, but every now and then the differences in our lives bothered me. For instance, Anaïs had had servants to feed her and clean up after her. Even her debauched lovers had picked her clothing up off the floor; her dinner parties were full of social dangers and alarms, but when they were over she never had to do the dishes. As for me, I'd moved into a household of local poets and hippies, and everyone was dirty. I tried to be, too, but my standards of cleanliness kept me from truly entering into the spirit of the times. I had learned from my mother to keep my surroundings in order, my dishes washed, my towels laundered. The sagging clapboard house where we lived had one bathroom. Periodically, because nobody else ever did, I broke down and cleaned. It made me hate my friends to do this and resent them as I watched the filth build up again afterward, but I couldn't help it. One night, I had grown so miserable about the bathroom that my fastidiousness overwhelmed my fury. It was past midnight, but I got a bucket, a scrubbing brush, and a box of something harsh-smelling called Soilax. I ripped an old towel into four pieces. I wet down the bathtub, the toilet, and the sink, and shook the Soilax evenly across every surface. With a putty knife, I began to scrape away the waxlike patches of grease, hair, soap, and scum, the petrified ropes of toothpaste, the shit, the common dirt.
It took me a couple of hours and the light in the bathroom seemed glaring when I quit, because I'd emptied the fixture of dead flies. But as I contemplated my work a few lines of poetry occurred to me:
My brain is like a fixture deep in dead
How I long for my thoughts to shine
Disperse your crumpled wings, college
students and professors of U.N.D.
Let your bodies blow like dust across the
I jotted them down in the notebook that I carried in the hip pocket of my jeans, and then headed downstairs to the living room, where a party had just begun. It was a welcome-home party for a draft-dodging poet who'd walked back across the Canadian border and was going to go underground, as he kept saying, loudly. But, first, he was going to take a shower in my clean bathroom. I deserved to drink wine. I remember that the wine we had was cheap and very pink, and that when I was halfway through a glass of it Corwin took a piece of paper from a plain white envelope and tore off a few small squares, which I put in my mouth.
Anaïs had tried everything—she would have tried this! "Spanish dancer," I cried to Corwin. She had been in love with her cousin. "Eduardo!" I said to Corwin, and kissed him. This all came back to me much later. At the time, I was not aware that I had taken lysergic acid, even after all its effects were upon me—the hideous malformations of my friends' faces, the walls and corridors of sound, the whispered instructions from objects, the panicked fear that rendered me unable to communicate at all. I locked myself in my room, which I soon realized was a garden for lizards, geckos, garter snakes, and some exotics, like a hooded cobra, all of which passed underneath the mopboard and occasionally slid out of the light fixtures. I was in my room for two days, sleepless, watching reptiles, moving in and out of terror, unaware of who I was, unaware of how I'd come to be in the state I was in. I should have been hospitalized, I suppose, but my reclusiveness was so habitual and the household so chaotic that no one really noticed my absence.
On the third day, the reptiles were replaced by the occasional amphibian and I began to sense a reliable connection between one moment and the next, to feel with some security that I inhabited one body and one consciousness. The terror lessened to a milder sense of dread. I ate and drank. On the fourth day, I slept. I cried my heart out the fifth day and the sixth. And gradually I became again the person I had known as myself. But I was not the same, for I had found out what a slim rail I walked.
My fear kept returning. It was as though, in those awful days, I'd switched inner connections and now the fear seemed hardwired in me. I couldn't stop shaking at the slightest unexpected movement. I endured panic attacks, momentary breaks with reality, daydreams so vivid they made me sick. On campus, I watched the well-fed, sane, secure, shiny-haired, and leather-belted students pass me by. I was now convinced that I would never be one of them, that I should leave and find my place among the less than healthy.
I got my Psych 1 professor (the course was nicknamed Nuts and Sluts) to help me find a position as a psychiatric aide. That winter, I packed a suitcase and took an empty, overheated Greyhound bus to the state mental hospital, where I trudged through blinding drifts of cold and was shown to a room in a staff dormitory.
My room was small, the walls a deep pink. I had a single bed with an Oriental-print spread—pagodas, winding streams, bent willows. There was a mirror, a shiny red-brown bureau, a tiny refrigerator on a wooden table, a straight-backed blue chair. I took the refrigerator off the table and made myself a desk. I'd met none of the other aides yet. There were rules against noise, against music, because the people on the night shift slept all day. My shift would begin at 6 A.M. So I showered down the hall and dried my hair. I laid my uniform out on the chair, a white rayon dress with deep pockets, panty hose, thick-soled nurse's shoes, which I'd bought at J. C. Penney. In the room above me, that night, a couple made love over and over. The springs creaked, increasing speed, until there was a crescendo, silence. Then laughter. Each session lasted about ten minutes.
I woke in time to shut off the alarm just before it rang. I boiled water in my little green hot pot and made a cup of instant coffee. It was still dark outside. I put on a long black coat I'd bought at Goodwill, and walked across the frozen lawn to the ward where I was assigned. The nurse coming on duty introduced herself as Mrs. L., because, she said, her actual name was long, Polish, and unpronounceable. She was tall, broad, and already looked tired. She wore a green cardigan over her uniform and a nurse's cap pinned to her fluffy black hair. She was drinking coffee and eating a glazed doughnut from a paper bag. "You're welcome to share this with me," she offered in a dull voice. She turned to one of the other aides coming on and said that she'd had a rough night. Her little boy was sick. She and the aide knew each other well, and the talk swirled back and forth for a few minutes.
"What am I supposed to do?" I asked in a too bright, nervous voice. "Can you give me something to do?"
"Listen to this." Mrs. L. laughed. "Don't worry, there's plenty. None of the patients are up yet."
"Except Warren," the nurse who was going off duty said. "Warren's always up."
I walked out of the office into the hall, which opened onto a huge square room with green and black linoleum tiles. The walls were a paler green. The curtainless windows were rectangles of electric-blue sky that turned to gray and then normal daylight as the patients rose and slowly, in their thin striped cotton robes, began wandering down the corridor that led into the common room. Everyone looked the same at first—men and women, young and old. Mrs. L. handed out medications in small paper cups, and said to me, pointing, "Go with Warren there and make sure he takes it."
So I went with Warren, the night owl, an elderly—no, really old—man with long arms and the rope-muscled body of a farmer who has worked so hard that he will now live forever, or, at least, beyond the reach of his mind. His tan was permanent, burned into the lower half of his face, his hands, and a V of leather at his neck. He was already dressed neatly, in clean brown pants and a frayed but ironed plaid shirt. He liked to walk. He popped the pills down without missing a step. I watched Warren a lot that first day, because I couldn't believe that he would keep it up, but he didn't stop for more than a breath, filling up on food quickly at the designated times, then strolling up and down the corridors, crisscrossing the common room, in and out of every bedroom. To everyone he met, he nodded and said, "I'll slaughter them all." The patients answered, "Shut up." The staff didn't seem to hear.
The first day's schedule became routine. I woke early to record my dreams and sensations, then I dressed, putting a pen and a small notebook in my pocket, plus a miniature French dictionary I'd sent away for. I noted everything, jotted quickly in a stall on bathroom breaks. At breakfast time, I walked through the underground steam tunnels to the dining room. I ate with the patients—pushed my tray along the line and waited to see what landed on it. Farina, cold toast, a pat of butter, a carton of milk, juice if I was early enough, and coffee. There was always coffee, endless transparent acid in stained and sterilized Melmac cups. Ravenous and forgetful, I ate what they gave me, no matter what. I did the same at lunch. Mashed turnips. Macaroni and meat sauce. Extra bread, extra butter. I began to think of food all day. Food took up too much of my diary. There was nothing new to say about it in English, so I described it in French. Soon there was nothing new to say about it in either language.
I was assigned to an open ward. The patients could sign themselves out if they wanted to walk the ice-blasted grounds. I spent a lot of time making and unmaking beds. Sometimes it was my job to sit with the patients who did not want to go anywhere. If they didn't want to talk, I wrote. Nobody cared—I said that I was training to be a psychoanalyst. I filled a thirty-nine-cent notebook every few days. I knew all the patients' routines, their delusions, the places where their records were scratched and the sounds repeated. More than anything else, I realized, it had to be boring to be crazy, to think the same sequence of thoughts and come up with the same set of bizarre conclusions, to voice those conclusions using the same words, several times an hour, day in and day out. It was hard to get people off their tracks. Because I was new, I kept trying.
One morning, Mrs. L. was in her office, admitting a new patient, a young woman who sat with her back to the door. I paused as I was passing. There was something about the woman—I didn't know what, but I felt it immediately. A heat. She was wearing a black dress. When she swivelled in her chair and smiled at me, I saw that her eyes were black, too, and her lips very red. Her skin was pallid, shiny, as though she had a fever. Her blond hair, maybe dyed, was greasy and dull. She was about my age. Her teeth had thin spaces between them, which made her look frightening, predatory, like an animal.
"This is Nonette," Mrs. L. said.
I felt a small electric jolt and said, "Is that French?" That was it—she looked French.
The new patient didn't answer, but looked at me steadily, her smile becoming a false, unpleasant leer.
Mrs. L. pursed her lips and filled in her forms. "Nonette can sleep in No. 20. Here's the linen key. Why don't you help her settle in?"
"Fetch my things along," Nonette ordered.
"Evelina's not a bellhop," Mrs. L. said.
"That's all right." I lugged one of Nonette's suitcases down the corridor. She smiled in an underhanded way and dropped the other suitcase once we were out of Mrs. L.'s sight. She waited while I carried it to her room, and watched as I took her sheets, a pillowcase, a heavy blanket, and a thin cotton waffle-weave spread from the linen closet. Her room was one of the nicer ones, with only two roommates. It had built-in wooden furniture, not flimsy tin dressers, and the bed was solid. It even had all four casters on the legs.
"What a fucking dump," Nonette said.
I said nothing. I was supposed to be pleasant.
Nonette's mouth twisted open in scorn. I left.
The next day, she was extremely friendly to me. When I walked onto the ward, she immediately grabbed my hand, as though we'd been interrupted the day before while having some wonderful conversation, and she tugged me toward the freezing glassed-in porch, where patients went to talk privately. I sat down beside her in an aluminum lawn chair. I was wearing a sweater. She had on a thin cotton button-down shirt, with a necktie and men's chino pants. Her shoes were feminine kitten heels. Her hair was slicked back. She was an odd mixture of elements: she looked depressed but also—it could not be denied—chic. Today she wore no makeup except black eyeliner, and her face was prettier, more harmonious in the subdued light.
"What do you want to talk about?" I said.
"I wanted to talk to someone my age, not those jerks, shrinks, whatever. You're not bad-looking, either. That helps. I want to talk about what's bothering me. I came to get well, didn't I? So I want to talk about how really, truly sick I am. I've talked about it, I know I have, but I haven't really told it."
"O.K., go ahead."
She paused for a moment, then she leaned toward me, and when she did her whole face sharpened.
"If I could just be born over," she said, "I'd be born neutral. Woman or man—that's not what I mean. I wouldn't have a sex drive. I wouldn't care about it, need it, or anything. It's just a problem, the things you do that you hate yourself for afterward. Like take when I was nine years old, when I had it first. He was a relative, a cousin, living with us for the summer."
"Where?" I asked.
"Not in stupid France," she answered. "Anyway, he comes in without knocking and kneels by my bed. He uncovers me and starts giving it to me with his mouth. And I'm, like, at first I don't know what—ashamed of it. I could get a hook for my door. I could tell on him. I don't, though, because I get so I want it. He strips naked. He teaches me how to jerk him off. And then he does it to me again.
"I'm a little girl, right? I don't even wash very well. Next time, he brings along a washcloth and cleans me first. We have a ritual. Where are my mother and father? They sleep at the other end of the hall, with the fan going in their room. And my cousin is a fucking Eagle Scout! Is he trying for a fucking merit badge? Anyway, he goes home. I already feel different. I am different. There is a smell on me, sex, that no one else in my schoolroom has. I look at the older boys. I know what's coming. I go searching for it." She laughed suddenly, drawing away. "Look at you. You're, like, fascinated."
She stared out the window. "I'm not French," she said gently. "I'm fucked up. I'm in a state hospital. I think I want a sex-change operation. I want to be a man so I won't have to put up with this shit."
"I'm not giving you shit."
Her mouth gaped mockingly. "Oh, look at you, trying to be tough. You're not tough. You're, like, a little college girl, right? Who the hell cares? I'm from the university, too. I have a Ph.D. Pretty Hot Dick. I'm a man, posing as a woman. You want proof?" Then her face closed in, bored. "I'm just kidding. Get the fuck away from me."
"I'm sorry," I said to her. "You're really beautiful."
She wouldn't say anything, wouldn't look at me now.
"You're an Indian or something, aren't you?" she mumbled. "That's cool."
I went back to the common room and played gin rummy with Warren, who couldn't concentrate. I didn't think he was taking all his medication, but if he'd discovered a way to hide it he was pretty slick.
A policeman was standing in the office the next morning, drinking a cup of coffee with Mrs. L. He'd just brought Warren back. The day before, Warren had marched out of town. He took a narrow road that ran west, and was discovered twenty miles away as he crawled into a farmyard. He had fallen and bloodied the side of his head. He was sleeping now, sedated, and it was not until late afternoon that he rose and came out to sit in the lounge, the side of his head swollen and bandaged. I sat down next to him.
"I hear you had a bad day." These words popped out of my mouth. I was curious. Perhaps it was cruel to be so curious. I asked about the voices he heard—if they were hard on him.
He straightened, shrugged a little. He was wearing a yellow shirt that looked almost new. He ran a hand up his face gently, exploring the damage with his fingers. Then he turned to me, his eyes moist and red. "I did it because they told me—" he started, but he choked on what he might have said and his voice was a crow's croak. He rubbed his face with a fumbling hand and closed his eyes. And then I saw, around the edges of his face, in the balled musculature and the set of his eyes and jaw, that he was in a waking dream. He raised his arms. He recoiled. He sat down in a chair and began taking apart some invisible thing in his lap. Then his hands froze and he lifted his head, gazed off to the side in a fugue of stillness, listening.
Nonette and I were sitting on the frigid sunporch. She had told the story about being raped by her cousin, the Eagle Scout, to every nurse, aide, doctor, and patient available. It was just a conversation opener. Here, of course, it was not supposed to matter whether or not the story was true—the important thing was her need to tell it. I had been trained to believe that. Nonette was wearing a men's black suit and a Charlie Chaplin-style black bowler that were too big for her and comically masculine. Suddenly she reached out and took my face in her palms, leaned toward me, and kissed me. I didn't resist at all. It didn't even occur to me to resist. All I thought was, How shall I describe this in my diary? There was nothing strange about it, not then, or at least it was no stranger than the other occasions on which I'd kissed someone for the first time. There was the same thrill, the same hush of attraction and mutual daring. Only she was supposed to be crazy, I was supposed to not be crazy, and we were women.
"That was nice." She drew back into her chair, crooked one leg up, and hugged her knee. She stared at me, assessing my reaction. I was suddenly and completely charged with an electrifying embarrassment. I forced myself to rise, and stumbled, awkward and big, to the door of the sunporch and the entrance to the ward. She was still watching, smiling now.
Soon the dinner call came, but she was too tired to eat. "I'm sick," she said as she walked past me. "I'm going to bed."
"Are you O.K.?" I asked. She ignored me.
Later, I was sent down the ward to check on her. She had slid underneath the covers with all her clothes on. I could see her shoes sticking out at the end of the bed. I stood for a long time, watching, hoping that she would move.
I had escorted a patient to the beauty parlor late one morning, and was returning alone through the underground steam tunnels when she was suddenly there, walking toward me with no escort.
"I have a pass." Nonette grinned, stopping when we were face to face.
There was no one else in the tunnel, which was whitewashed and warm, lit by low-wattage bulbs, and branched off into small closets and locked chambers full of brooms and mops and cleaning solutions. Her face was clear and bright, her hair a rumpled silver in the odd light, her eyes calm and free of makeup. She was as beautiful as someone in a foreign movie, a book, or a catalogue of strange, expensive clothes. Her eyes were dark, with green in them, brown, every color. I could almost taste her mouth again, fresh with toothpaste. She was wearing jeans, a white sweatshirt, sneakers, and gym socks. I was wearing my cheap scratchy white uniform with tucks and a front zipper. She put her fingers on the tongue of the zipper at my throat.
"Are you wearing a slip?" she said.
I took her hand and held it around the wrist, my thumb at her pulse.
"Stop, stop." She pretended to resist, but her voice was soft. "Here." She pulled me, but pulled me only because I did not let go of her wrist. I followed her around a corner, then through a door, and we were right in the middle of the pipes, some wrapped with powdery bandages of asbestos, some smooth, boiling copper conduits. My cap snagged, and I let it fall. We ducked under a nest of pipes and walked down some stone steps to the other side, a kind of landing, completely enclosed. Behind us there was a wall of rough flagstone that smelled of dirt, of fields in summer with the sun beating down after a heavy rain. The heat brought out the smell.
"Let's sit down," she said. "I'd like to get you stoned, but I don't have anything."
I was still holding her wrist. There was barely room to stand. The pipes grazed the tops of our heads. We sat down together. I was shaking, but she was very gentle, not like she'd been the first day. And, anyway, it wasn't how I'd thought it would be. After the first few minutes, there was nothing frightening at all about kissing her or touching her. It was familiar, entirely familiar, much more so than if I'd been touching a boy for the first time. Our bodies were the same, and when I touched her I knew what she was feeling, just as she knew when touching me—it seemed both normal and unbearable. We didn't take our clothes off, just felt each other lightly on the arm and throat and kissed. Her face was soft, like flower petals.
She said, "That's enough." Any longer and we'd have been missed.
As I walked back down the corridors and onto the ward, I began to imagine our story. Nonette had come here in obvious need, and I was here for her. I had come here not knowing that she was what, or who, I'd always needed. And she was here for me. A week, maybe three, and she would be all right. I'd leave with her, go to Fargo or Minneapolis or wherever. She would come with me.
"Nonette said you asked for a patient visit." Mrs. L. sat behind her desk, a stack of forms beneath her spread hands.
"Yes," I said, though I hadn't. But I was smiling, slowly blooming at the idea. Nonette's idea.
"We like to encourage our aides to work with the patients during off-duty hours, and I don't see anything wrong with it, as long as you know that she presented here with some real problems."
"I know that. I've talked to her about them."
Mrs. L. waited, watching me a little too carefully. I was not supposed to know a whole lot about each patient's personal history, at least not more than the patient wanted me to know.
"Look," I said, "she told me about her cousin forcing himself on her. I know that she came here out of control, though I still don't know exactly what precipitated it. I don't know what she's dealing with at home, at school, or if she's going back there. The thing is, I really like Nonette. I'm not doing this because I feel sorry for her."
Mrs. L. bit her lip. "Your motives are good, I know that. But you've got to understand: she's on lithium, and we're adjusting her dosage. She's depressive, and then she has her manic spells."
"We're just going to make a batch of cookies."
Mrs. L. smiled approvingly and signed the pass.
There was a small kitchen in the basement of the aides' residence, just one room with a stove and some cupboards, a fridge, an old wooden table painted white, and six vinyl chairs. Nonette and I made molasses cookies, leaving them soft in the middle, then took them upstairs to my room. The cookies were still warm as we ate them, crumb by crumb, sitting on my bed. We drank cold milk. Later, we took our clothes off. It wasn't strange at all, the covers pulled back, the willows bending over streams and bridges. She had small breasts, pointed, the nipples round and slightly chapped because she didn't wear a bra beneath her men's shirts.
She was older than I was by two years and knew so much more. She kneeled over me and spread her legs with a clinical cool, then began to laugh. We laughed at everything I'd never done, and then we did it.
Just before nine-o'clock curfew, I walked Nonette back to the ward, a bag of cookies in one hand.
"Do you think about, you know," I finally asked her, at the door.
"Do I think about what?"
Nonette looked at me, her face bland and empty, smiling. She looked like a girl in a ski commercial. Healthy. In my room, when she came, she'd made me look into her eyes, deep with pleasured shock. Now those eyes were scary cheerleader eyes.
"Do I think about what?" she said again.
I looked down at my boots. About what's going to happen to us, I wanted to say. But I didn't. The night was so cold and dark that the snow made squeaking noises as it settled in drifts around the big, square yard. I could hear the trees, tall black pines, cracking. I stood there as Nonette walked into the hospital, as the glass-and-steel doors shut behind her with that movie-ending sound of metal catching, holding fast. The locks were automatic, but I tried them once, anyway, as she disappeared down the bright corridor.
"I'm going home next week," Nonette said one morning. "My parents decided it was O.K."
Her parents? Why hadn't I ever seen them? A sudden burst of energy pulsed from the center of my chest. I clapped my hands fast, making sounds to divert the awful feeling, and then I wrung them in the air, shedding the pain like drops of water.
Nonette looked at me and shook her head. "Are you all right?"
I caught my breath, let it out slowly. "Have they been down to visit?"
"Sure. You work days. They drive down in the early evening."
"Next week, next week."
My face stretched into a stupid smile, and she twinkled back. She's not O.K., I thought. She's crazier than I am if she can deny this. She must be. I tore my gaze away and felt a deep body flush, as though my ribs were glowing hot, like the bars of a grill. My mind spun a series of wild questions: If she weren't crazy . . . if this weren't out of the ordinary . . . if it couldn't be helped . . . if I were wrong . . . if people could see . . . if she left here . . . if it meant nothing to her . . . if she didn't care about me at all . . . I stepped away from her. She had a lovely face, so gentle, a pretty face. A prom-queen face. She was wearing a blue sweater, a plaid skirt, and knee-high stockings—ultra-normal Midwest catalogue clothes—now that she was well.
"Come and see me," she said.
"Sure! I will!"
She didn't mean it—of course she didn't. I was part of what she thought of as her illness, a symptom of which she believed she had been cured. She, on the other hand, was what I was looking for. I could hardly breathe for wanting her. I walked away with my hands shaking in the scratchy cloth of my pockets. I kept going, without punching out, and walked back down the corridors of the hospital, out the doors, and across the snowy central lawn.
I called in sick the next morning and the morning after that. Two days went by. I couldn't make it to the telephone anymore. I could barely force myself to get up and walk to the bathroom. Once I was in bed again, a kind of black-hole gravity held me there. Acid flowed back into my brain, and I could see creatures moving in the Chinese landscape of my bedspread. I threw it on the floor. Gray curtains came down. I put my grandfather's tobacco pouch under my pillow and tried to remember what he said when he prayed. I couldn't think of a single word. The air was painful. I breathed pain in and out, and its residue clung to my lungs like tar, making each breath a little more difficult.
A week went by, and then Mrs. L. came to the door and called, "Can I come in? Can you answer?" I tried. I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. It was such a peculiar feeling that I started to laugh. But there was no sound. I went to sleep again, slept and slept, and, the next time I woke, Mrs. L. was in the room, sitting beside my bed, and she was using the voice she used with the others.
"We're going to move you," she said. "We've called your mother."
Which was how I ended up in Nonette's bed after all.
I was sitting on the cracked green plastic sofa in the common room, wearing my nurse's shoes, only now no uniform to go with them, just baggy jeans and a droopy brown sweater. I'd talked to my mother on the phone and summoned up the energy to convince her that I was all right, that I only needed a rest and would be back in school in time for the next quarter. I'd told my mother that I would use this voluntary commitment as a rest period, but the fact was I was afraid, afraid of losing my observer, the self who told me what to do. My consciousness was fragile ground now, as thin as forming ice. Every morning, when I opened my eyes and experienced my first thought, I was flooded with relief. The I was still there. If it went, there would be only gravity to guide me.
Warren walked into the common room and saw me sitting on the sofa. He came over, in his careful and dignified way, and stood before me. He was wearing his yellow shirt, along with a rust-colored jacket, a striped tie of rich burgundy silk, and gray woollen slacks: his best clothes. His shirt had French cuffs. Instead of cufflinks, he had used safety pins.
"You should have cufflinks," I muttered.
"I'll slaughter them all," he said.
"Shut up," I answered.
I lay there for days and more days. I did not get out of bed. I did not read Anaïs Nin—she couldn't possibly help me now. I was past all that, and, anyway, she was the one who had got me into trouble by providing the treacherous paradigm of a life that I was too backward or provincial or reservation-bound to pull off. I no longer wanted adventure. The thought of Paris was a burden. I would never see the back of Notre-Dame, and the coffee I drank would always be transparent.
My mother and father came down to see me every weekend. All I did when they visited was cry in sympathy for their worry over me, or fall asleep, but after they left I missed them. I thought about how I had grown up with the certainty of my parents' love, and how rare a thing that was, and how unaccountable and shameful my breakdown was, as was the fact that I had just loved a woman to the point of literal madness. I was just a nothing, half-crazy, half-drugged half Chippewa.
One day, Corwin came to see me.
I was surprised but not embarrassed. He'd learned where I was from my aunt. He remembered the acid he'd fed me, and he felt that he should look me up. He was dressed in a long black riding duster, with a strange orange hunting cap pulled down over his eyes. Under the duster, he was carrying a violin case.
"Sit down."
I gestured with a cigarette. I tried to look bored, but actually I was excited to see him.
Corwin sat in a plastic armchair and rested the violin case on his lap. His face was long, his eyes dark and Indian. He had a short scraggle of unmowed beard. His ponytail flowed out from under his cap.
"So," he said.
"So," I said.
We nodded for a while, like two sages on a hill. Then he opened the case and picked up his fiddle. As he tuned it—an unfamiliar sound—the other patients began to wander out of their rooms and down the corridor. The nurses ventured from their station and stood, arms folded, chewing gum. Their mouths stopped moving when Corwin began to play, and some of the patients sat down, right where they were, a couple of them on the floor, as if the music had cut through the room like a scythe.
After the first run of notes, the music gathered. Corwin played a slow and pretty tune that made people's eyes blur. Warren stood stiff and tall, rooted in the center of the linoleum. Others swayed or looked as if they might weep, but that changed quickly as Corwin picked up the tempo and plucked out a lively Red River jig. At this point, Warren began to walk around and around the room, faster and faster. The music ticked along in a jerky way, and then something monstrous happened. All the sounds merged for a moment in the belly of the violin and filled the room with distress. Alarm struck us. Warren stopped walking and backed up flat against the wall. But Corwin drew some note out of the chaos in his hands, and then drew it farther up and up, until it was unbearable, but at the very point where it might have become a shriek that note changed a fraction and broke into the most lucid sweetness.
Warren slid down the wall, his hand over his heart as if he were taking a pledge. His head slumped onto his chest. The rest of us sat down, too. Calm rained upon us, and a strange peace slowed our hearts. The playing went on in a penetrating, lovely way. I don't know how long it lasted. I don't know when or if it ever really ended. Warren had fallen to the floor. A nurse plodded over to check his pulse. The violin was the only thing in the world, and in that music there was dark assurance. The music understood, and it would be there whether we stayed in pain or regained our sanity, which was also painful. I was small. I was whole. Nothing mattered.
When the music was just reverberations, I stood up. The nurse was checking her watch and frowning first at it, then down at Warren, then at her watch again. I stood next to Corwin as he carefully replaced his violin in its case and snapped the latches down. I looked at my cousin and he looked at me—he gave me his wicked, shy grin and pointed his lips in a kiss, toward the door.
"I can't leave here," I said.
And I walked out of that place.
When I left the hospital with Corwin, I took my purse and my diary and nothing else. I left behind Anaïs—the entire boxed set, annotated. I didn't know if I could actually bear leaving the safety of the hospital, but I just kept going until we reached Corwin's car. I'd lost a lot of weight and hardly exercised, so I was dizzy and had to ask Corwin to stop the car once so that I could puke. He told me that he had stopped selling drugs. He was straight now, he said, which gave me an opening.
"Well, I'm not. I'm a lesbian," I told him.
He said that I couldn't be. I didn't dress like one.
"Like you'd know," I said.
He said that he did know. He'd been around. "They dress like me, aaaay."
We drove along quietly for a while.
"I'm really sorry that I gave you that acid, man," he said. "Did it, you know, change your head around?"
"You mean did it make me a lesbian?"
He nodded.
"I don't think so."
We drove some more. We'd known each other stoned, sick, and drunk. We'd beaten each other up in Catholic school. So the silence between us was comfortable, even a relief. I looked out the car window. The world was beautiful all along the road. The fields were great mirrors of melted water. And the light was clear and golden, blazing on the slick surfaces. I started to feel better. It was as if telling my news to someone I'd known my whole life had lifted a great weight from me. Every morning in the hospital, I'd awakened and felt normal and then remembered about Nonette. Corwin's taking my confession in stride removed some of the dark glamour from my feelings.
"Do you actually know any lesbians?" I asked.
"I've played in bars all over, but I don't know any just to talk to," he said. Then, a moment later, "Or any I could set you up with, if that's what you want."
A heated flush rose along my collarbone.
"Hey," Corwin said after a while, "you don't have to go anywhere with this thing just yet. Take it easy."
I didn't answer, but after a while I felt happier, thinking that he was right.
As we passed onto the reservation, I saw that the ditches were burning. Fires had been set to clear the spring stubble, and a thin glaze of smoke hung over the road in a steady cloud. After Corwin dropped me off, I sat outside with my grandfather Mooshum, drinking cool water from tall galvanized water cans. It occurred to me that I'd be all right. I didn't have to do anything, not right away. I didn't even have to record my sensations in a diary. I could just sit with Mooshum, drinking water. As the sun went down, light shot through the smoke and turned the air around us a dark gold that cast an unsettling radiance on the trees and houses. Mooshum and I watched as the light began to recede. It was very cold, but still we sat until the darkness had a brown edge to it, and my mother came to the door, expressing no surprise at seeing me there.
"Come in here, you two," she said, her voice gentle. ♦


text:
Jitka Sloupová
Stage director: Daniel Špinar
Dramaturgy: Milan Šotek
Sets: Dragan Stojčevski
Costumes: Linda Boráros
Music: Victoria Parker
Light design: Přemysl Janda
Performance with English subtitles.
A bitter comedy from the part of Great Britain that is so dangerously similar to our home … Or otherwise: there was once a father, who had two daughters and one mother-in-law. His wife has fled to London. The mother-in-law is vulgar, yet extraordinarily spontaneous. One of the daughters does not know what to do about herself, another dates a Marxist, and the third falls in love with an actor who has arrived to shoot a film about the poet Yeats. A standard British family, in whose life – tragic and comic alike – it is not difficult to recognise that of ourselves.
Approximate running time, including intermission:
2 hours, 15 minutes, one 20-minute intermission.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Freedom in the World
You are here
2008 Scores
Freedom Rating (1 = best, 7 = worst)
Civil Liberties (1 = best, 7 = worst)
Political Rights (1 = best, 7 = worst)
In September 2007, the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda was threatened for printing a cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad as a dog. The cartoon sparked separate protests by Sweden's Muslim population. Also in September, the home of television reporter Trond Sefastsson was illegally raided by police.
After centuries of wars and monarchical unions with its neighbors, Sweden emerged as a liberal constitutional monarchy in the 19th century. Norway ended its union with the country in 1905, leaving Sweden with its current borders. Its tradition of neutrality, beginning with World War I, was altered somewhat by its admission to the European Union (EU) in 1995 and was further eroded by a more pragmatic approach to security presented in 2002. However, Sweden has continued to avoid military alliances, including NATO.
Voters rejected adoption of the EU's euro currency in a September 2003 referendum, despite strong support from government and business leaders. The "no" vote was attributed to skepticism about the EU and fears regarding the possible deterioration of welfare benefits and damage to the economy.
Just days before the referendum, Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was killed in a knife attack in Stockholm. Her killer, Mijailo Mijailovic, was sentenced to life in prison. An appeals court found that he should be committed to psychiatric care instead, but the Supreme Court confirmed the prison sentence in 2004. The appeals court ruling had been met with general dismay and elicited criticism of the Swedish psychiatric care system.
In the September 2006 parliamentary elections, a four-party, center-right alliance headed by Fredrik Reinfeldt of the Moderate Party defeated the Social Democratic Party, which had been in power for 12 years and all but 10 of the previous 89 years. The Social Democrats won 130 seats in the latest balloting. The Moderates took 97 seats; the Center Party, 29 seats; the Liberal Party, 28 seats; the Christian Democrats, 24 seats; the Left Party, 22 seats; and the Greens, 19 seats. High unemployment was a major issue in the 2006 elections.
In September 2007, a bounty of some $100,000 was placed on the lives of cartoonist Lars Vilke and editor Ulf Johansson of the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda for their publication of a cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad as a dog. The Islamic State of Iraq, a militant grouping affiliated with al-Qaeda, issued the threat amid condemnation of the cartoon by Muslims in Sweden and leaders of several Muslim nations. Prime Minister Reinfeldt publicly supported the paper's right to publish the cartoon.
Separately that month, the home of reporter Trond Sefastsson was illegally raided by police following allegations of fraud and bribery. Police seized journalistic material, including Sefastsson's computer.
Sweden is an electoral democracy. The unicameral Parliament, the Riksdag, has 349 members elected every four years by proportional representation. A party must receive at least 4 percent of the vote nationwide or 12 percent in one of the 29 electoral districts to win representation. The prime minister is appointed by the speaker of the Riksdag and confirmed by the body as a whole. King Carl XVI Gustaf, crowned in 1973, is the largely ceremonial head of state.
Seven political parties are currently represented in the Riksdag. The largest is the Social Democratic Party, also known as the Workers' Party, which ruled for most of the last century with the aid of the Left Party and the Green Party. Other parties include the Moderates, the center-right Liberals, the Christian Democrats, and the Center Party, which focuses on rural issues.
The principal religious, ethnic, and immigrant groups are represented in Parliament. Since 1993, the indigenous Sami community has elected its own parliament, which has significant powers over community education and culture and serves as an advisory body to the government.
Corruption rates are very low in Sweden, which was ranked 4 out of 180 countries surveyed in Transparency International's 2007 Corruption Perceptions Index. However, there have been political scandals in recent years. Liberal Party secretary Johan Jakobsson resigned after it was revealed that the Liberals had repeatedly hacked into the computer systems of the incumbent Social Democratic Party in early 2006 to obtain campaign strategy secrets. Jakobsson admitted that he had learned about the activity but did little to stop or expose it.
Freedom of speech is guaranteed by law, and the country has one of the most robust freedom of information statutes in the world. However, hate-speech laws prohibit threats or expressions of contempt based on race, color, national or ethnic origin, religious belief, or sexual orientation. Sweden's media are independent. Most newspapers and periodicals are privately owned, and the government subsidizes daily newspapers regardless of their political affiliation. Public broadcasters air weekly radio and television programs in several immigrant languages. The ethnic press is entitled to the same subsidies as the Swedish-language press. The newspaper Nerikes Allehanda sparked a row in September 2007 by publishing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad depicted as a dog. Foreign death threats were made against the paper's cartoonist and editor, but their freedom of speech was defended by Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. Separately that month, the home of a TV4 reporter, Trond Sefastsson, was raided by police and his journalistic material was confiscated following accusations of fraud and bribery for collecting money from the family of a convicted criminal to write favorable about him. In October, a court ruled that because of the seriousness of the accusations against Sefastsson, the police had the right to retain the computer containing 10 years of investigative reporting data for TV4.
Religious freedom is constitutionally guaranteed. Although the population is 87 percent Lutheran, all churches, as well as synagogues and mosques, receive some state financial support. According to the U.S. State Department, two Muslim women were awarded financial compensation in separate discrimination cases in 2007, having been denied employment for wearing headscarves. Academic freedom is ensured for all.
Freedoms of assembly and association are guaranteed, as are the rights to strike and organize in labor unions. Domestic and international human rights groups generally operate without government restrictions. Trade union federations are strong and well organized, representing about 80 percent of the workforce. One of the largest demonstrations the country has ever seen occurred in October 2007, when over 12,000 people gathered to protest drug and alcohol abuse. The demonstration was prompted by the death of a 16-year-old who was murdered at a party by his intoxicated peers.
The judiciary is independent. Swedish courts are allowed to try suspects for genocide committed abroad. Swedish prisons generally meet international standards, although overcrowding and lengthy pretrial detentions sometimes occur.
The government maintains effective control of the police and armed forces. However, in May 2005, the UN Committee against Torture ruled that Sweden had violated the absolute ban on torture in 2001 by expelling two terrorism suspects to Egypt, where they were eventually tortured. The late foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was eventually found by a parliamentary investigation to have approved the deportations.
In 2003, Sweden passed a hate-crimes law that addressed attacks against homosexuals and covered hate speech. Reverend Ake Green was sentenced in 2004 to one month in jail for hate speech after denouncing homosexuality in his sermon, but the conviction was overturned in 2005. In April 2005, Leif Liljestrom was sentenced to two months in jail for posting material offensive to homosexuals on his website. He was cleared in 2006 on the grounds that he had simply expressed his Christian views, but he was then sentenced to one month in jail for allowing others to post offensive materials on his website.
Sweden was ranked at the top of the Migrant Integration Policy Index in 2007. However, the country changed its immigration policy that year, disallowing family reunification for "quota refugees." Family members will now have to apply separately for visas. After an influx of Iraqi refugees in 2006, Sweden also made it more difficult for Iraqis to seek asylum in 2007 by requiring them to cite specific threats of violence.
The state gave formal recognition to adoption by gay couples for the first time in 2003. In 2005, the country granted lesbian couples the same rights regarding artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization as heterosexual couples.
Sweden is a leader in gender equality. Some 47 percent of Riksdag members are female, and half of the government ministers are women. Although 80 percent of women work outside of the home, women still make only 70 percent of men's wages in the public sector and 76 percent in the private sector; the government has announced efforts to close this gap. According to the U.S. State Department, in 2007 the government launched a $118 million four-year action plan to combat violence against women.
The country is a destination and transit point for the trafficking in persons, particularly women and children, for sexual exploitation. The 2004 Aliens Act helped to provide more assistance to trafficking victims, and a "special ambassador" has been appointed to aid in combating human trafficking.


text:
Look, it's not that we want to see people fight on South Beach. It's just that we're purists.
So color us disappointed that Jersey Shore star Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi's headline-making fracas on Ocean Drive Saturday evening is pretty much the worst and most awkwardly staged reality TV "fight" we've seen in some time. And oh, the false advertising!
"JWOWW ran over screaming "What the f--- happened?" yelled Yahoo!'s OMG blog.
"Snooki...Slaps Man & Throws Food," exclaimed Radar Online. "EXCLUSIVE VIDEO."
Radar says Snooki and castmate Jenny "JWOWW" Farley were at Ocean's 10 doing shots when it all started.
"She was in a good mood, but this particular guy was obviously interested and she wasn't," witness Fred Hernandez said. "She told him, 'Don't f--- with me' so he snatched her drink and walked off."
A friend of the rejected man came over to demand an apology. He said, she said, and then she slapped and he drenched in return.
That EXCLUSIVE VIDEO -- which you can view here -- pretty much sums up everything that's always wrong with second seasons, and mostly wrong with reality TV in general:
The cast are now so famous that all of Ocean's 10 is standing around Snooki in a nearly mute circle, staring at her as she sits plopped in a bar chair surrounded by crew and awaiting her cue.
The "perpetrator" obviously just wants to be on TV (you'll never convince us he's putting his heart in that drink toss; such poor form).
JWOWW acts completely unsurprised -- and at best might be considered to be "walking fast" and "talking loud."
Sigh. Really, MTV: if we've got to put up with you, the least you can do is not make it all so obvious.
Oh. Right. Er...carry on.


text:
Hoppy Easter!
Buttercup bunny.
Easter is a time of renewal in every sense of the word! The earth is awakening after a void, cold and colorless winter! This time of year makes me feel so alive and grateful for every breath I take!
All I have to do is throw open the windows and feel the warming breeze against my face. In no time, I open the door and I am astounded by the beauty I see and hear and smell! The camellia bush right outside my door is in bloom with white, pink, and candy-striped flowers. The river birds sing with the glory of just singing! And the river, ah, the river flows swiftly with the added snow melt and splashes the wild ducks on its way to the sea, searching, ever searching. The daffodils sway in the gentle rolling wind and in the distance the mists of the mountain swirl innocently through the pines. I shudder to think of living in a world devoid of color and possibilities!
The wild babies begin to peer bravely through the growing blades of grass and the greening blackberry bushes! Bunnies! Glorious bunnies! Nothing sweeter in the whole world!
My late husband, Ron, and I raised rabbits and we had so many wondrous times working together! Seeing that big bear of a man, taking care of those newborn bunnies, made my heart sing! So every year at this time, my memories take me back! I realize how lucky I am! I know in my heart when I step onto Heaven's soil, he'll be waiting for me, bunny in hand!
Blue cornflowers in a field of green...
Goldfinches in an azure sky...
Blessings from on high.
Silver waves in a whispering stream...
Red-winged blackbirds in an apple tree...
Blessings from above.
Purple martins sing their love songs...
Sweet, pink camellias mingle in yellow moonlight...
Blessings from God.
Two-times a lady...
My own little corner...
Lavender-blue, dilly, dilly...
Sleep, my lovelies, sleep.
I'm a cutie-pie!
The Easter Bunny Song
Oh, the Easter Bunny's coming, she's the one I long to see.
She's got eggs in her basket, she's bringing them to me.
I'm looking out the window and I hope she gets here quick,
I need marshmallow bunnies and a little chocolate chick.
Oh, I love Easter Sunday and it comes round every year
Right now I'm so excited cause the Easter Bunny's here!
The Easter eggs are lovely, with swirls on them because,
The Easter Bunny paints them with her little furry paws.
We'll take the eggs and hide them, all up and down the hill,
And I'll go back to find them with my little brother, Bill.
We will pile up all the goodies and I'll eat all I can take,
And then end Easter Sunday with a big old belly ache.
Oh, the Easter Bunny's coming, she's the one I long to see.
She's got eggs in her basket, she's bringing them to me.
I'm looking out the window and I hope she gets here quick,
I need marshmallow bunnies and a little chocolate chick.
I need marshmallow bunnies and a little chocolate chick.
I need marshmallow bunnies and a little chocolate chick.
Disclosure: I wrote this blog post while participating in the SocialMoms and Hop blogging program, for a gift card worth $25. For more information on how you can participate, click here
About Hop:
Blending state of the art animation with live action, Hop is a comedy about E.B. (voiced by Russell Brand), the teenage son of the Easter Bunny. On the eve of taking over the family business, E.B. leaves for Hollywood in pursuit of his dream of becoming a drummer. Once there, he encounters Fred (James Marsden of the X-Men series, Enchanted), recently fired and determined to pull his life together. Feigning injury, E.B. persuades Fred to take him in, and Fred finds himself living with the world's worst houseguest. Back on Easter Island, the Easter Bunny's second in command, an oversized chick named Carlos, seizes E.B.'s disappearance as an opportunity to plot a coup. Ultimately, Fred and E.B. are Easter's only hope and they find themselves returning to Easter Island, locked in an epic battle to save the beloved holiday. The film is helmed by Tim Hill, director of the blockbuster Alvin and the Chipmunks and produced by Chris Meledandri's Illumination Entertainment (Despicable Me).
More info: http://www.iwantcandy.com/
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text:
October 9, 2000, Section E, Page 1Buy Reprints
In Ang Lee's soulful action film, ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' Chow Yun Fat strides onto the screen proud, erect and easy; he's Cary Grant with a ponytail. His witty reserve is used beautifully here, and the picture is more fun than it has a right to be.
Any collaboration featuring Mr. Lee, Mr. Chow, Michelle Yeoh, Yo-Yo Ma and the wizard martial arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping is bound to spike expectations through the roof as well as start more than a few hands scratching heads in confusion. What are these guys doing working together? They're applying their specialties to a Hong Kong action movie that rings with confidence, and is being shown tonight as the closing film of the New York Film Festival.
Mr. Lee takes the action form, which often attacks the screen with energy and movement, and creates a placid surface that offers a new perspective and a spirituality not normally found in these pictures. In terms of action nothing much takes place for the first 10 minutes. That's so he can set up the incredibly complicated plot, which has as much romance, intrigue, free-wheeling action -- and rousing silliness -- as any five Hong Kong throw-down fests. This is no small feat, given the dizzying amount of exposition in these movies. Outrageous plot pile-ons certainly take place in ''Tiger'' -- a practice as ritualistic as having a martial arts master and student square off against each other, also a part of the picture. Fans of the genre will giggle with delight over the canny way Mr. Lee handles the intersections, and audiences new to these films will shudder with excitement. Mr. Lee puts things together artfully and stages this movie like a comedy of manners; it could be ''Sense and Sensibility'' with a body count.
The script, by James Schamus, Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Long, incorporates the rusty machinery that's a part of almost every culture's folklore. Li Mu Bai (Mr. Chow), legendary martial artist, is tracking the murderer of his master. Poised, fit and self-assured, he can handle anything except his feelings for the lithe, pantherish Yu Shu Lien (Ms. Yeoh, who gives one of the most adult and deeply felt performances ever seen in such a movie). They talk about the intrigues with the intensity others append to matters of the heart. Jen (Zhang Ziyi), the tremulous and spoiled daughter of the governor of the province, is fascinated by Shu Lien's glamorous life: that a woman can have so many adventures and such freedom is marvelous to her. The refined Jen is to be married off into respectability. By night, though, she's a masked and cunning thief and fighter, out to steal the Green Destiny, an invincible blade once wielded by Li.
A mouthful of plot, and that doesn't even take into account the battles with the spurned female warrior Jade Fox. ''Tiger'' uses the familiar twists of the willful young heroine and combines them with the tradition of ''The Scarlet Pimpernel'' and ''Zorro,'' only this time the foppish young noble is a fiery young woman determined to taste a life denied her. And because she ends up being the ruination of others, with the added complication of the love that Li and Shu Lien dare not pursue, it's as if Mr. Lee and his team were out to fold parts of ''The Bostonians'' into this mix.
It's a heady and delirious brew, too. The action is dexterously produced, thanks to the martial choreography of Mr. Yuen, best known to American audiences for the high-flying fights of ''The Matrix.'' The action in ''The Matrix'' was put together with a process called Bullettime, and here it should be termed Ballettime, as the performers soar gracefully over rooftops and up the sides of buildings as softly as leaves dancing in the air on an autumn day. Mr. Lee has found a way to make even the action feel poetic and spiritual, while sparked by a high adrenaline content. The first fight scene, which brings all the principals together, will make you want to applaud. And each action sequence builds on what has come before, increasing the stakes with a dignified hilarity.
At times ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'' is like a compendium of every line from a Hong Kong action film ever made, and the cliches include someone intoning, ''It only looks so pure because blood washes so easily from its blade'' about the Green Destiny.
Mr. Lee brightens the stockpiling by giving the picture a knockabout, screwball comedy bounce. With pairs of lovers expressing their affection through nose-to-nose physicality, it could be ''Hit Me, Kate!'' Because the women are treated as generously as the men -- and are more important to the narrative -- ''Tiger'' is just the film for an audience transfixed by the weekly girl-power cool and soap-opera bloodshed of ''Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.'' Ms. Zhang is just as commanding a presence as Sarah Michelle Gellar, and even now Internet sites devoted to her talents are probably being created: the typing heard 'round the world. The picture frees the genre from being part of a man's, man's, man's world.
The formality is just part of the texture, which Mr. Lee uses for purposes other than comedy: he also exploits the calm for its ominous purposes, to build suspense. (The ringing sound that emanates from the admiring strokes given the Green Destiny emphasizes the toll of the violence.) And Mr. Ma's gorgeous -- sometimes almost weeping -- cello solos speak to the tragic elements. ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Tigers'' glides through the trees like its characters; it's an epic that breaks the laws of gravity.
Directed by Ang Lee; written (in Mandarin, with English subtitles) by James Schamus, Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Jung, based on the novel by Wang Du Lu; director of photography, Peter Pau; edited by Tim Squyres; music by Tan Dun; action choreographer, Yuen Wo-Ping; production designer, Tim Yip; produced by Bill Kong, Hsu Li Kong and Mr. Lee; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 120 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown tonight at 9 P.M. at Avery Fisher Hall as the closing-night film of the 38th New York Film Festival.
WITH: Chang Chen (Lo), Chow Yun Fat (Li Mu Bai), Cheng Pei-Pei (Jade Fox), Lung Sihung (Sir Te), Michelle Yeoh (Yu Shu Lien) and Zhang Ziyi (Jen Yu).


text:
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text:
Many cultures start January 1st with various rituals meant to bring luck and good fortune in the coming year. It's no surprise that my favorite of these traditions involve what some consider to be lucky foods. The Italians have their lentils, usually served with a delicious sausage called cotechino. The lentils round shape represent coins, signifying wealth in the New Year. Many think that eating pork is lucky with the pig symbolizing progress and the rich fat content signifying wealth and prosperity. The Chinese enjoy very long noodles to ensure a long life usually with shrimp, whose curve is said to resemble the hunched back of an elderly person. The Spanish eat 12 grapes at the stroke of midnight for luck, each grape representing a month of the year. It's not as easy as you'd think. Round foods are also common as the shape is said to signify a complete cycle or a complete year. And hey, if I can eat my way into some good fortune in the New Year, then why not?
Posts Tagged 'peas and rice'
eat your way into good fortune … Hoppin' John
Posted in holidays, main courses, seasonal, tagged braised greens, collard greens, hoppin' john, lucky food, new years food, peas and rice on January 1, 2013| 3 Comments »


text: A Community Profile is a detailed report about your community. The printable report describes the population and the social, economic, and physical conditions of the selected area. SAVI contains about 2,000 pre-defined communities that you can choose from, or you can create a custom community. Build a custom community by clicking on the map or searching by name. You can save your custom community for future use. Go to My Communities to view your saved communities.


text:
NEW YORK, Aug. 16 (UPI) -- The Museum of the Moving Image in New York says it plans to honor Australian actor and entertainer Hugh Jackman at a dinner this December.
The event is to take place Dec. 11 at Cipriani Wall Street.
"We are thrilled to be honoring one of the world's most beloved and talented performers," Carl Goodman, the museum's executive director, said in a statement Thursday.
Jackman is perhaps best known for playing Wolverine in the X-Men movie franchise. His other film credits include "Australia," "Scoop," "The Prestige" and "The Fountain." Later this year, he will play Jean Valjean in the screen version of the musical "Les Miserables."
Jackman has also starred in the Broadway productions of "The Boy From Oz," "Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway" and "A Steady Rain."


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More than 300 members of the clergy are calling on the Texas Legislature to boost funding for women's health programs.
Leaders of Methodist, Buddhist, Presbyterian, Jewish, Baptist and Unitarian congregations lobbied lawmakers on Monday asking for more spending on birth control programs. They said poor women in particular need government-funded contraception.
Speakers at a press conference said that too often people use religion to oppose allowing women to control their reproductive systems.
Politics from around the world.
Pastor Larry Bethune of the University Baptist Church in Austin said the faithful want women to be healthy and to make healthy choices.
The Legislature cut funding for women's health programs in 2011. Republican lawmakers are talking about restoring some of that funding, but routing it through primary care doctors rather than dedicated women's health clinics.


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Off-Campus and Graduate Programs
Proactive Learning
Off campus courses, workshops, field trips and other types of training can be fun, educational and help you get into that graduate program or that job you want. Learn more.
Off Campus Programs
Want to gain broader experience and additional skills? Supplement your studies at UW Oshkosh with field studies Programs and semester programs at other institutions. There are many fascinating field studies opportunites sponsored by organizations within the U.S. and abroad. There are also one and two semester environmental programs that are academically focused. Consider these as an enrichment experience during summer or during fall or spring semester. Learn more.
Graduate Programs
In some fields, you'll need to get an advanced degree to pursue the career you want. In other fields, an advanced degree may help you start off at a higher level and get the dream job. But you need to know what the graduate programs are. Learn more.


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For centuries, people in India, Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand have been eating the leaves of the Malunggay tree as a part of their food. Many Asians eat the leaves of Malunggay like spinach and the fruit like asparagus.
Called "Malunggay" in the Philippines, "Sojina" in the Indian Subcontinent, and "Moringa" in English, it is a popular tree. Both the leaves and the fruits are very nutritious and contain many other minerals.
Malunggay is an amazing plant, loaded with the most nutrients (amino acids, proteins, vitamins and minerals etc.), which help to prevent health problem that are caused by malnutrition) and also contain Antioxidants including Vitamin C and beta carotene which may help to reduce the effects of ageing.
500mg (60Vegicaps)
Price: $ 8.69


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Type 2 diabetesOverview
Type 2 diabetes is a common condition
Type 2 diabetes is a condition that causes too much sugar in your blood. It can cause serious health problems if not treated.
Symptoms of type 2 diabetes include needing to pee a lot, feeling thirsty all the time and feeling very tired.
Treatment for type 2 diabetes includes medicines and changes to your diet and activity levels to help control your blood sugar levels.
Page last reviewed: 08/08/2017
Next review due: 08/08/2020


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Political Initiatives With a Spiritual Basis
World leaders are spurring political action on many fronts that is increasingly aligned with spiritual and ethical goals as a path to environmental sustainability: The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals include objectives inspired by spiritual and ethical tenets such as ending poverty, promoting gender equality, protecting the oceans, ensuring sustainable food production, and protecting forests and biodiversity. To protect indigenous groups that have been harmed by oil drilling and climate change, indigenous pavilions and Rights of Nature tribunals will occur at the COP 21 meetings in Paris in December 2015. The Earth and its vital ecosystems are beginning to receive the respect and legal protection that was previously reserved for humans. For example, in New Zealand earlier this year, a river was legally granted the rights of personhood.
Taking Individual Action Based on Spirituality
An over-dependence on logic, technology, and economics got us into this mess. So it makes heart sense—soul sense—that spirituality, intuition, and reconnecting with nature may be the only way out. Let us consider a new definition of spirituality. Spirituality as our system of deeply-held beliefs that allow us to go beyond politics, beyond economics, beyond societal norms in order to make decisions for the common good of all beings. Beliefs that connect us to the very heart of who we are and what we know is most important. Although it may be difficult, we can rise above materialism and societal norms when we know it is the right thing to do. When we recognize that we are harming each other, that our everyday actions are depleting the resources of Mother Earth who gave us life, that by accepting the modern dream of materialism and consumption we are reducing the possibilities for future generations to thrive and pursue their own dreams …When we accept these truths into our hearts and allow our true nature to respond with full emotion and allow ourselves to feel the longing for a better way of living … Then, at that very moment, our spirituality opens up a new space of clarity within us, where we fully internalize the conviction that each one of us has the universal responsibility to make the world a better place. Then, suddenly, we know what it is that we need to do in the world. How our small, precious set of skills and our unique viewpoint can lend a vital force and power to the vast movement that is occurring in the world at this time.
Every one of us has talents that can make a powerful and positive difference in the world. It may be your beautiful singing voice. It may be your talent for public speaking or your ability to bring together diverse groups of people for a shared goal. Or it may be your knowledge of farming, finance, software development, or manufacturing that can lead to a breakthrough in sustainability. We all have a part to play; it is just a matter of finding your inspiration, and that can only come from the deepest reaches of your heart and soul.
Source: http://www.pachamama.org/blog/the-spiritual-side-of-environmentalism, by Jocelyn Mercado


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If The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is any indication of what's to come, Lord of the Rings faithfuls have reason to be hopeful that the director will create another captivating round of adventures.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the first installment in Peter Jackson's new Middle-earth trilogy - once again based on the beloved fantasy world created by author J.R.R. Tolkien. After director Guillermo del Toro left the project, Jackson returned to the director's chair and expanded the would-be film series - originally conceived as a two-part adaptation of The Hobbit storyline - into a full-on Lord of the Rings prequel trilogy.
While the plot of Part 1, An Unexpected Journey, and Part 2, The Desolation of Smaug, offer a relatively straightforward storyline, the mystery surrounding Part 3, There and Back Again, has left many fans wondering if Jackson and New Line Cinema sacrificed a quality Hobbit adaptation in favor of a third opportunity for box office earnings.
There and Back Again is set for release in summer 2014, so it'll be awhile before we can definitively weigh in on that trilogy decision; however, if The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is any indication of what's to come, Lord of the Rings faithfuls have reason to be hopeful that the director will create another captivating round of adventures in Middle-earth. An Unexpected Journey does not match the scale established in Lord of the Rings, but there are still plenty of eye-popping visuals, enchanting action set-pieces, and intriguing character cameos, to prevent the film from being the underwhelming (and cheesy) experience that some skeptics were anticipating. In fact, the more intimate storyline, centered around reluctant/adventure-loving hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), his thirteen dwarf companions, and the renowned Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), often outshines similar plot beats from The Fellowship of the Ring.
In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, a pre-Lord of the Rings Bilbo Baggins has abandoned his thirst for adventure in favor of a safe and comfortable life in The Shire. For years, Bilbo has preferred the quiet of Bag End, his Hobbit-hole, a well-stocked pantry, and the warmth of his fireplace to the beauty and terrors of the lands beyond his home - until Gandalf the Grey knocks on his door.
The wizard invites the hobbit on a quest to help a band of dwarves retake their homeland, The Lonely Mountain, from a ruthless and dangerous dragon, Smaug. Unwilling to resist the chance for adventure, Bilbo agrees to accompany the group, which is led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), heir to the King Under the Mountain crown. The company faces challenge after challenge, and - unbeknownst to even the wise Gandalf - bears first witness to a dangerous sequence of events that will haunt the next generation of hobbits, dwarves, elves, and men.
Unsurprisingly, there are several similarities between An Unexpected Journey and The Fellowship of the Ring, most notably the core premise (a ragtag group of heroes on a life-or-death quest through the wilds of Middle-earth); however, Jackson's latest installment is differentiated by a number of smart filmmaking choices and solid character dynamics that were present in the Tolkien source material - especially the multifaceted Bilbo Baggins.
Freeman gives a sharp and charming performance as the brave hobbit - adding nuance to a role that draws stark contrast to Elijah Wood's turn as Frodo (who enjoys an especially light-hearted cameo return). Unlike the Lord of the Rings protagonist, Bilbo revels in his adventure - even when he's in over his head - with a solid balance of wit, humor, and bravery that translates into genuinely entertaining (as well as emotionally impactful) scenes. Even though the tone of The Hobbit novel is a bit lighter compared to Lord of the Rings, the film version of Bilbo easily fits into Jackson's darker overarching movie universe - which should be a relief to viewers that were put-off by the rowdy dwarf antics that have dominated the movie adaptation's marketing.
In fact, the dwarves successfully walk a very fine line between jolly goofballs and downright tough-as-nails warriors. Many of their respective combat sequences aren't just exciting, they include unique action beats that are especially impressive when you take into consideration the blend of camera tricks, CGI, and practical prosthetics used to make onscreen interactions look believable when dwarf, goblin, hobbit, and wizard parts all collide in battle. A flashback sequence that establishes Thorin as the leader of the dwarf company is especially impressive, and could rival fan-favorite battles from Return of the King - cementing the character as one of the toughest brawlers in Middle-earth.
Several subtle (and some not-so subtle) changes lead to tense and exciting action sequences, complete with imaginative visual spectacle, helping to ratchet up the relatively modest Hobbit source material storyline - and produce a film experience that matches the thrill and breadth of the original film trilogy. That said, franchise fans will also appreciate many iconic character moments in An Unexpected Journey - notably the fateful game of riddles between Bilbo and Gollum (Andy Serkis). Jackson manages to provide even the quietest scenes with weight - as certain developments carry impact far beyond the short-term Hobbit-centric storyline.
Unfortunately, not all of the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings bridging serves the story at hand - resulting in a lengthy film (169 minutes) that contains a few overlong or disjointed scenes. All of the Lord of the Rings foreshadowing is interesting, but at times it undercuts the importance of the current objective (Smaug and the Lonely Mountain). It's clear that The Hobbit story could have likely been told in two films and, as a result, viewers will probably be mixed on the success of the bridging scenes in An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, as well as There and Back Again; however, the extra content hardly undermines the quality of Jackson's latest effort - even for especially cynical moviegoers.
Adding to the controversy is the director's choice to shoot in 48 frames-per-second - a format that results in hyper-realistic visuals but, as many filmmakers argue, is so true-to-life that it can actually be a distraction - depriving filmgoers of immersion. We've put together a separate editorial discussing the successes and shortcomings of The Hobbit in 48fps but, with regard to a review recommendation, without question the format is worth experiencing - if for no other reason than to form your own opinion (assuming there's a HFR 3D-ready theater near you). 48fps can be disorienting at first, but An Unexpected Journey makes smart use of the presentation - delivering a number of jaw-dropping visual set pieces. There are plenty of movies that we would not want to see in 48fps and, much like 3D, filmmakers should be smart about when to use and avoid the format, but Jackson's Hobbit movie is a worthy (and encouraging) trial run.
In the long run, The Hobbit prequels could be weakened by Jackson's expanded three film plan, but if Part 2 and Part 3 are as enjoyable as An Unexpected Journey, it'll be hard for moviegoers to complain. The film includes everything that made the original Lord of the Rings trilogy so memorable - action-adventure, charm, humor, and breath-taking fantasy battles. Sure, a few extemporaneous Lord of the Rings elements slow things down and distract from the core Hobbit storyline, but overall, the director has once again presented audiences with a captivating and exciting trip to Middle-earth.
If you're still on the fence about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, check out the trailer below:
[poll id="477"]
Let us know what you thought of the film in the comment section below. If you've seen the movie and want to discuss details about the film without worrying about spoiling it for those who haven't seen it, please head over to our Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Spoilers Discussion.
For an in-depth discussion of the film by the Screen Rant editors check out our Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey episode of the SR Underground podcast.
Follow me on Twitter @benkendrick for future reviews, as well as movie, TV, and gaming news.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is rated PG-13 for extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images. Now playing in 2D, 3D, IMAX, and 48fps theaters.


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Obviously, the landscape of the American League East obviously changed dramatically yesterday, but we're gonna go ahead and try to forecast matters anyway. It's hard, but we must tredge forward, regardless. We must stay strong. Some bad predictions:
1. Boston Red Sox. We kind of have a feeling Manny Ramirez is going to knock in 160 runs this year. Plus, Coco Crisp raps.
2. New York Yankees. What if A-Rod turns out to be great in the clutch and the Yankees still don't make the playoffs? Who dies then?
3. Toronto Blue Jays. A.J. Burnett is already hurt. This is going to be ugly.
4. Tampa Bay Devil Rays. They're out of last! They're out of last!
5. Baltimore Orioles. We would raise them a spot of Brian Roberts would change his first name to "Bip."
So, you got thoughts on this? We bet you do. Bring it, in the comments.


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Elstree gets £2m investment for £4.5m growth plan; will host a number of BBC's "most popular shows" from 2013.
Elstree Studios owner Hertsmere Borough Council has accepted a £2m loan from the Hertfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership's (LEP) Growing Places Fund towards a £4.5m expansion project.
The money will be used to clear four acres of land at the studios and construct new film and TV production facilities.
The remaining £2.5 million for the project will be provided by the council from its reserves, with management hoping to begin work on the site early next year.
As well as creating jobs for the local community, Elstree estimates the project will bring in at least a further £0.5 million per year for the studios.
Recent films to make use of Elstree include Comes a Bright Day and The King's Speech, as well as TV shows including The Voice, Big Brother and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? but a lack of studio capacity has meant business has had to be turned away.
According to studio officials, Elstree is preparing for "an as yet unnamed major Hollywood feature" which will move in in January and a number of major TV shows, including ITV's Dancing on Ice. Big Brother is also preparing its new season.
Council leader and chairman of the board of directors at Elstree Studios, Morris Bright said: "I am delighted with the unanimous cross-party support given to this project by the council. This is the largest investment in the site in 15 years. Both the council and the studios are looking forward to moving ahead with this exciting project for the benefit of the media industry and the residents of Hertsmere.
"Elstree Studios are a key part of our local economy and a source of great pride to residents. Despite the economic downturn, the studios remain busy around-the-clock, and from next year will also be providing a home for the BBC and some of its most popular shows for the next two and a half years while the BBC Studios at White City are being rebuilt."
Roger Morris, managing director of Elstree Studios, said: "This is excellent news both for Hertsmere and Hertfordshire. The additional production facilities will ensure that Elstree Studios remain one of the UK's most popular studios for film and television production.
In its 80s heyday, the studios hosted films in the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and James Bond franchises.


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by Mary Price Lee & Richard S. Lee
The new glow that TreVi Pizza Pasta BYOB brought to 21 East Glenside Ave., Glenside, when it opened on April Fool's Day (no joke), starts with the inviting décor in blues and whites. It just shouts "Come on in!" And the interior doesn't disappoint. Simply-set tables fill two dining rooms and seat up to 85, in a homey split-level pattern with the kitchen taking up the lower level rear. Two murals, one in each room, set the tone for casual family-oriented and kid-friendly dining that is elegant in all but price.
Both murals are by noted artist, Murrie Gayman. The original, of the canals of Venice, was painted over 50 years ago for TreVi's predecessor, the near-legendary Rizzo's Pizza, and was restored when Gayman painted its companion, the Trevi Fountain in Rome (made famous by the movie and song, "Three Coins in the Fountain").
But the real glow of TreVi comes from its 25-year-old owner-chef, Joe Burke. Joe's enthusiasm, talent and dedication, we predict, will make him an ever-growing presence in the area's culinary community over the years. (Remember, you read it here first!). He is as proud of TreVi as he is of his wife, April, and kids Angelina and Joseph.
Joe comes from a foodie family on both sides. His father, Joe Sr. — who is often in the kitchen with his son — owned Piazza Pizza in Northeast Philly for many years and for 15 years operated J. Cabot Café in the Curtis Building downtown. His mother, Gina, runs J. Cabot Catering, now based at TreVi. Mom is also in the kitchen, as needed.
The pizzaiolo (pizza maker) is John DiSalvo, a cousin. Bob Williams, former sous-chef at Ambler's upscale Dettera, is also aboard in the TreVi kitchen. As if that weren't enough food bona fides, the whole family, 15 on both sides, recently toured Italy, where Joe took down recipes while enjoying the scenery. To ice the cake, he graduated from The Restaurant School in Philadelphia where, as a student, he visited Paris, Dijon and Burgundy, learning all the way.
Nice as Joe is, all this praise wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on if the dining experience didn't glow, too. Believe us, it does. For starters, the menu is varied enough to please any taste; this isn't just pizza and pasta in the too-often-encountered red gravy sense.
These are thin-crust, New York-style pizzas, crispy and light. "I spent time in Grimaldi's and Lombardi's in New York," Joe said. "Now, those are pizzas! I once ate 24 different [New York-style] slices at once," he went on. "Know how I felt? Tired!"
Other menu highlights include five antipasti ($7.50 – $11), four salads ($6 and $7), four panini ($8.50 – $9.50), five pastas ($12 – $17) and seven small plates ($6 – $10.50). Also, there are 10 gourmet 12" pizzas ($12 – $16) and 16" classic pizzas with lots of toppings ($13 with some toppings slightly higher).
From the so-called small plates, we chose Crispy Calamari ($8.50). The generous, lightly breaded portion came with a fra diavolo dipping sauce that was assertive but not "whoo!," an excellent opening to a memorable meal. Next, we shared a gourmet pizza that actually was gourmet: a crispy thin crust with spinach and tomato graced with a light cheese sauce ($11). One of us chose a Penne Rigate, served in an egg and cheese sauce with peas and the delicious heft of paper-thin slices of prosciutto ham, a very generous serving for $13. The other opted for a daily special, fresh pan-seared Scottish Salmon on a bed of orzo, sun-dried tomato and spinach, a nifty value at $14. The salmon was perfectly done, seared enough to add a touch of crunch on top, leaving the body tender and moist.
"I was worried we wouldn't have this dish tonight," exclaimed Joe. "I kept waiting for the fish purveyor to show up. Believe me, it's fresh."
"I know," one of us replied. "The fish truck almost blocked Glenside Avenue as we were coming in."
Joe also commented that the idea of charging a corkage fee for customers who bring their own wine is "ridiculous." He has selected his servers well, too; our lovely waitress, Teresa Fitzpatrick, a longtime Glenside resident who had also worked at Rizzo's, brought everything from coffee to Tiramisu, and personified service at its best. And the Tiramisu ($6), a TreVi-made version of this Italian classic, was the best we'd ever had.
"When we opened, a lot of the Rizzo family came," said Burke, "and they really loved what we're doing. What a compliment! And even though we're still pretty new here, we're getting lots of repeat customers."
One thing is for sure: we will be among them.
TreVi Pizza Pasta BYOB, 21 E. Glenside Ave. (just off Easton Road), Glenside. Reservations, 215-884-9100 or www.trevibyob.com. Open Tue-Fri, 11:30 a.m. – 10 p.m.; Sat. 4 – 10; Sun 4 – 9. Closed Mondays. Take-out available. Metered street parking and adjoining municipal lot, free after 6 p.m.


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Picked this book up from the library last weekend. First glance, "Hey something to flip through at home", thinking one cruise through would be enough. According to plan, once home, flip through I did. More then once as a matter of fact. This is a great little book.
Simple formula of taking pictures of people with their bikes from various cities around the U.S. It all works and I found myself studying the photos in detail, checking out the people and bikes, but more importantly - the cool backgrounds. Well done portraits of people and their two wheel rides. If you ever have the need to photograph people and bikes, one awesome little reference book.
Another reason this book works is due to the majority of fixie hipsters contained within. Fixie hipster I'm not, so that subculture of bikes and uniform was a cool change of pace, over the usual carbon race rig and wanna be racer look. A look I've seen plenty of and guilty of myself, so nice change of vibe to see people in normal street clothes mixed with bikes. Fixed gears, tattoos, urban transport, hipster scene. It's all good and makes for some great pictures.
Book by Matthew Finkle and Brittain Sullivan. Based out of Boston. Nice job.


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Unfortunately I had to miss the nginxconf for this year, but with it going on right now I got a bit nostalgic and dug out my t-shirt from last year and noticed an easter egg I hadn't seen until now. On the back of the shirt are the headers of a HTTP response with the line:
Set-Cookie: nginxconf=Q29tZSB0byB0aGUgZGFyayBzaWRlLCB3ZSBoYXZlIGNvb2tpZXMgZHVyaW5nIGJyZWFrIHRpbWUK
Which, if we base64 decode it, translates to:
Come to the dark side, we have cookies during break time
I don't remember the cookies being very good, though, hopefully that's something they fixed for this year. 🙂
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From wrestling world champ to heavyweight rock star
Chris Jericho and Fozzy ready for Uproar Tour
The Rockstar Energy Drink Uproar Tour is the biggest rock festival every summer. This year is no different with a lineup that features Shinedown, Godsmack, Staind, Adelita's Way, POP, Deuce, Redlight King, Mindset Evolution, In This Moment, Thousand Foot Krutch, Candlelight Red and Greek Fire, along with a few others.
The two-stage tour will play the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion north of Houston on Saturday, Sept. 15, with gates opening at noon. A few tickets still remain ($89.25-$25.25) via Ticketmaster.
One band ready to make headlines on the tour is Fozzy. In case you know or don't know, Fozzy's lead vocalist is WWE superstar Chris Jericho, also known as Y2J. Before you roll your eyes or jump to a judgment, know that this is no novelty act.
Formed in 1999, the band originally sang cover songs of other rock artists and recorded two albums worth. Then, lights began to shine brightly as they recorded three original albums, and they are touring now in support of their fifth record — Sin and Bones on Century Media.
The Examiner spoke with the man himself, Chris Jericho, about the method behind the Fozzy madness.
How does it feel to be included on the biggest rock festival of the summer?
We are very elated about this tour. We think it's been a long time coming and we've put in a lot of hard work to make it to Uproar. This is the biggest tour we have ever done in the United States. We've done a lot of touring, and our last tour — we did 60 different countries. But never an official tour from coast to coast, nor at this level. Very excited, but more importantly, we are ready for this. A few years ago, we may not have been ready for this, but we are ready to kick ass and be a highlight of this tour every single night. A lot of people that are fans of Fozzy, a lot that may not heard us, or have no idea about us will have a chance to see and hear us play. At the end of the day, we want to be the band that everyone is talking about.
Five studio albums, and the first two were cover albums. Then came the first original album with All That Remains. Why was then a good time for original material?
The cover thing kind of came about very strange. We were signed right off the bat with Megaforce Records, which was owned by Jon Zazula. He published Metallica in 1983, and with Anthrax in the early '80s. He loved the concept of the cover record and cover band. After a few records, we knew we wanted to continue as a band and we knew we had to move forward and do our own thing. So, that's what we decided to do. It's almost like the two tales of Fozzy. It's like the two tales of Pantera. The original Pantera started almost as a glam band with the makeup and puffy hair, and then there's the Pantera that became legendary when they changed their style and look.
Let's talk about the new record Sin and Bones.
Chasing the Grail (previous album) was a huge record for us. That is where we really honed in on what the Fozzy sound is, which is very heavy (guitar) riffs with very melodic vocals. It's like if you took Metallica and crossed them with Journey or Coldplay. When it was time to do Sin and Bones, we signed a really big record deal with Century Media, so we knew we had to take things to the next level. We knew there would be different styles of songs on the record, but we wanted them to have the same tone. We wanted this to be Fozzy's Black (Metallica) album. If you listen to the Black album, all 12 songs fit a certain vibe. It's not a concept record, but there is a cohesiveness to that album that Metallica hadn't had before, and that's what we wanted. We wanted to tell a story through 10 songs, and I think we achieved that.
Your single 'Sandpaper' features M. Shadows of Avenged Sevenfold. How did that come about?
I was a big fan of Avenged Sevenfold when their album City of Evil came out in 2005. When 'The Rev.' (James Sullivan, drummer) passed away and M. Shadows took over on drums, I heard he was a big fan of wrestling, and we met and became very close. We played with them last year when we replaced Sevendust on the Uproar Tour for a week of shows and we got really close to Avenged, and they became fans of Fozzy, as well. When doing 'Sandpaper,' I thought it would be cool to have him on the chorus and pre-chorus. I called him up, listened to the idea and loved it. He put a lot of time of time and effort into that song. He went above and beyond to be involved to the point in doing the video with us. It's a mutual admiration society as well as being a close friend of mine, so it was a natural fit.
Being a WWE superstar, was it hard to be taken seriously in the music world?
Absolutely. That's one of the reasons we have gotten as far as we have because we have earned the respect of people who knew this was real. We will continue to do Fozzy as long as we possibly can. The lineup we have is the best lineup we have ever had — all across the board. When people heard the album, All That Remains, yeah, album of the year, whatever, then they heard Chasing the Grail, and people began asking, 'Are these guys for real?' And now we have Sin and Bones. If someone keeps knocking on the door, you are going to answer it. If the person knocking on your door is a hot Playboy model, you are going to say, 'Why in the hell didn't answer the door earlier?' We know what we can do, and we believe in ourselves. We aren't going anywhere. When people in other bands – and fans – start understanding that, then they respect and realize that these guys had to go the extra mile to do this, which made us a better band. We are no different than 30 Seconds to Mars. Huge band. Who's the lead singer? Jared Leto. What does he do? He's an actor. Is he an actor when he's on stage? No. He's good at those two things and made a career out of those two things. It's the same thing I am doing with Fozzy.
Fozzy is not just you and a bunch of guys. You've got a great lineup with you.
They are very good musicians. You won't find a better groove drummer in the business than Frank Fontsere. You won't find a better rhythm guitar player (than) Rich Ward. His tone is legendary. Zakk Wylde loves him and sends him guitars in the mail, just because he likes him. Matt Tuck from Bullet for My Valentine worships him. Paul Di Leo has played bass with Adrenaline Mob, Paul Simon, Billy Joel to Ace Frehley. When Billy Joel needs a touring bassist, Paul gets the call. Billy Grey, our guitar player who has been with us for years, is ready to make a big name for himself. I've been playing in bands since I was 12. I didn't wake up one day and say I wanted to be in a rock 'n' roll band. I wanted to do this way before I got into pro wrestling, and I'll still be playing when I am 62 years old. I'll be the guy up the frickin' Applebees. You know, the one sitting in the corner with a guitar.
You get the same rush on stage with the band as you do at WWE events such as 'Wrestlemania' and 'Raw?'
I have the ultimate passion for music. I couldn't and wouldn't be doing this if I didn't. A couple of years ago, I would do a WWE show, then a couple hours later, I would do a Fozzy show right after in same town. One night, I worked a WWE show in Madison Square Garden in New York City in front of 18,000 people. Then went to play the Tribeca Rock Club in front of about 100 people, but I had the same passion of doing both. A lot of people can't find one job they love. I have been fortunate enough to find two that I love. I have nothing but high expectations for the future for the band.