The Beat

"The Beat" Max and Yulia's showdance routine, 2006 International Rhythm division Ohio State Ball and broadcast on PBS as part of "America's Ballroom Challenge." Awesome.

Thunder snow possible tonight!

One of the joys of living in Minnesota is weather excitement. Just a few days ago, there were dire mutterings of drought because the total snowfall had been so low--we had a "snow deficit." They even had to cancel the Beargrease sled dog marathon because there was not enough snow up north. But, because this is Minnesota, where the weather is always a surprise, we are now in the middle of a "Winter Weather Event." This weekend we are projected to get at least a foot of snow in the Twin Cities--a very unusual event for a February. Meteorologists are all grinning with excitement. Snow plow drivers are on call.

"If a forecast high of 16 inches or more falls in the Twin Cities, it would be:

• The greatest single snowfall in the Twin Cities since 16 inches fell on March 8-9, 1999.

• Among the 10 heaviest continuous Twin Cities snowfalls."

The press is making sure to keep us aprised, with lots of advice:
"Roads may become impassable tonight with "thunder-snow" falling at the rate of 2"/hour at times. Consider a Plan B."

Diane and I did decide to cancel our afternoon outing because under the snow that is falling now is a layer of ice from the freezing rain that fell last night. These are the kind of conditions that cause those spinouts, where you brake and then try to control the skid as you keep on sailing through the crosswalk. It's a scary feeling.


My plan B? leave the car where it is, lounge around with the cat, prepare my classes for next week, write those pesky overdue letters so I can stop feeling guilty about them, cook up some yummy meals for the coming week with the supplies I laid in at the grocery store, maybe watch one of the Netflix movies I have sitting around (Rushmore, Election) and, of course, the Oscars! I told my graduate student class that watching the Oscars could be considered a homework assignment, because we are talking about the relationships between popular/mass culture and literature in Mexico, and three Mexican directors have films in the running.
If I get too stir-crazy, I may venture out with my storm gear later on to see "The Lives of Others" which has opened at the Uptown and is supposed to be a great, great movie.
The rest of my family is at the beach near Valencia this weekend, but they are going to miss the thunder snow, Woohoo!

Esme Rodriguez and The Mystery King

I love this video! "Remember my friends, heterosexuality isn't normal, it's just common."


Ballad Of Cleo And Joe
by Cyndi Lauper


Every day the clock kicks off the beat.
Little Joe struggles just to get up on his feet.
Waits in his platforms for the right train to come.
Sipping his coffee another day has begun ...

Little Joe got work for minimum wage.
Tries to get through another dead beat day.
At five o'clock he comes home to change,
Takes him many hours just to rearrange...

And he works his body just to be somebody.
There's a woman in the mirror looking like a dream.
And he works his body...
And he feels somebody...
And the working boy becomes a dancing queen.

Every night the DJ kicks off the beat.
Little Cleo's jumping just to get up on her feet.
Waits in her platforms for the right song to come.
Sipping her cocktail another night has begun.

And he works his body just to be somebody.
There's a woman in the mirror looking like a dream.
And he works his body...
And he feels somebody...
And the working boy becomes a dancing queen.

Every morning the clock kicks off the beat.
Little Joe struggles just to get up on his feet.
Waits in his platforms for the right train to come...

Casa Sirena on Isla Mujeres

I want to go here, this lovely place run by a former Twin Citian on Isla Mujeres. I was last there around 1980, I think. I got a wicked sunburn.

MN Reps. Keith Ellison and Tim Walz on the war in Iraq

Keith Ellison

Tim Walz

ice-skating

After long weeks of sub-zero weather, we have been thrilled to be able to walk around with our jackets unzipped now that the temps are above freezing. Of course it means that the thin layer of old snow has melted and the brown frozen mud is exposed. It will probably snow again this week, and we hope it will snow enough to end the fears of drought, but the birds I heard chirping this morning sounded as happy as I am that the sun is out and the air feels mild and gentle. A great day for skating-- Ana and Jose have posted some video clips about their adventures skating on Lake Superior up in Duluth.
Here's another video "Superior Skating" from the MNStories vlog. I love the sounds of skates on the ice.

And just because I found it, here's a mash-up of Zidane and gold-medal skater Plushenko.

Berkeley nostalgia

It is February, so the plum trees are blooming in Berkeley. I went off to college at UC Berkeley in 1974, and ended up living there, with time out for travels, until 1988. I never owned a car there, so I walked, biked or rode buses the entire time, except when a roomie or boyfriend with a car gave me a ride. I'll be going back for a brief visit over Spring break to see my family in SF, and I'll take day to get over to the East Bay to see one of my colleagues deliver a keynote talk at a graduate student conference. Here's a picture of the courtyard in Dwinelle Hall, where I spent a lot of time over the years, reading for my classes.

Berkeley has probably changed enormously since I've left: I haven't been back much. So I'm going to take a virtual tour through Walking Berkeley, a site that combines the idea of "walking every street in your town" with photos and stories about the history of the places. I plan to walk in the Botanical Gardens, and visit the Rose Garden.

Sad news for grapefruit lovers who are taking Rx meds

I am in mourning today. I love grapefruit and I can't have it any more. And yes, I realize that diabetics, folks with severe food allergies, Celiacs disease, have it a lot harder. But I'm still going to be sad.
I just found out last night that grapefruit and grapefruit juice, which I love, can interact with many classes of prescription medications (including the two I have to take). It affects the way the drug is absorbed, with the result that you may be getting a higher level of the drug in your blood than prescribed. While in some cases the side effects may be minor, in some other cases they can be quite severe and even cause liver damage. This is bad news for me because apparently the grapefruit interaction last more than 24 hours, so even if you drink the juice in the morning and take your meds at night, you will still get the interactions.
Here's an article that is in medical jargon, and here's a version for those of us without medical degrees. I did a fair amount of Google-type research last night, enough to verify that the risks are real, but that there is a lot of inconsistent information out there about which drugs interact.
Bottom line, as always is TALK TO YOUR DOCTOR AND YOUR PHARMACIST. I plan to do that today to see if the two medications that I need to take every day mean that I need to avoid grapefruit. I had some the other day, and it was so good!

A love song for Valentine's day

Natalie Merchant, "Wonder"

Oh no! not another upgrade!

OMG, this is so totally me when I got my first computer and started learning to use Word Perfect back in 1987! I just had an anxious conversation with the IT person about the upcoming upgrades to Windows Vista and the new Office interface.
Update: OK, so the supertitles are English and the subtitles are Danish, but does anyone know what language they are speaking? Norwegian?
Updated update: Ken kindly pointed out that at the YouTube site, if you click on the little side text, it explains that they are indeed speaking Norwegian, and the subtitles are in Danish. Gotta brush up on my research skills!

you're on candid camera

On Thursdays at the Walker Art Center, admission is free, and there are often lectures or films. We had a little something at the Wolfgang Puck restuarant 20.21, and then saw a program of three films that are part of the series Expanding the Frame.

Here's the program description: "In an era that revels in the voyeuristic cult of celebrity and celebrates surveillance on reality TV, these works sharply critique our society under watch: Rebecca Baron’s How Little We Know of Our Neighbors; Deborah Stratman’s In Order Not to Be Here; and Julia Meltzer and David Thorne’s It’s Not My Memory of It.".

Baron's film includes the story of the Mass-Observation Movement, which I had never heard of before; this New Yorker article gives a great account of combination of anthropology, surrealism, and mass wackiness. This film was a traditional documentary, telling a story through images, sound and interviews. The other two films were much more experimental, or rather much more deliberately non-Hollywood narrative, and hence somewhat more demanding to watch.

In Order Not To Be Here has multiples segments that look as if they are footage from surveillance cameras: parking lots, ATMs, store aisles, spaces around buildings, in corridors. At night, when people are not in those spaces, but you can hear sounds of dogs barking, cars or trains going by, police sirens in the distance, these scenes look likes places where something is about to happen. But nothing does. When a camera is trained on something for more than a few seconds, for up to half a minute, and NOTHING SEEMS TO BE HAPPENING, you are forced to look differently. You notice the sounds, you start to speculate on what the image might mean. You fight off annoyance or tedium, or you surrender yourself to a kind of trance-like receptivity in which you suspend your narrative expectations (although they never really go away) and let the images and sounds wash over you, as in a dream. What is happening becomes your feelings about the images, your relationship to the sequence. The opening and closing sequences DO contain more traditionally narrative elements that frame these static shots in light of surveillance, apprehension and escape, so the overall effect is one of expectant paranoia (not an especially pleasant experience, but a fascinating one). In looking for more information about this film, I discovered this site, Peripheral Produce where one can purchase DVDs of experimental film.

Where to find great film writing on-line?

The Suburban World used to show movies. I wish it still did. For most of the fifteen years I lived in Berkeley, I lived just a few blocks from the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive. I don't know how many hundreds of movies I was able to see for just a dollar or two at the PFA--I wish I'd kept a list! Here in the Twin Cities, the U Film Society and The Oak St.Cinema, the Walker Art center's film festivals and the Landmark Cinemas serve up more films than I can possibly see, but I do miss being able to stroll a few blocks to the PFA.

Last year, someone made a new year's resolution to see fifty movies and blog about them. I thought it would be fun to keep a list of movies we were seeing in my agenda, but lost track after just a month--not a priority. So this year, I'm going to list the movies I'm seeing either in the theaters, on TV or through Netflix, with links to IMDB. Quite a few of these are films I think I need to see for work, and some are films that have been in the Netflix queue for so long I've forgotten why they're there in the first place.
That way, when my swiss-cheese memory reduces me to saying, "YOU know, that movie with that guy, the one who was in that other movie...." I'll be able to look it up. I haven't decided yet if I'll include movies that I've seen before and see part of again by accident on TV (Four Weddings and a Funeral).
I don't have time or the inclination to write my own reviews, but I love to read great writing on film and popular culture.I am looking for sites that feature really good writing about film. Portal sites like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes give access to lots of reviews and user comments, but you have to wade through too much trivia to get at the good stuff.
Here are some sites I plan to check out for more substantive reviews and discussion:
Film Comment's Top Fifty list, Green Cine, Blog Critics, The Guardian's film blog, and we can't forget Pajiba!

How Plan B really works

It prevents ovulation. Therefore, there is no egg to fertilize, no embryo, no "abortion" as some folks mistakenly believe. Here is the way it works, as explained by PZ Meyers, a real, live biologist who specializes in embryology.

Library Thing

ChaskingMoksha mentioned a new site she'd found, Library Thing, so I checked it out. Two hours later, I realized that this could be as addictive as IMDB. It's not a great idea for me to get distracted right this minute from work, but hey. Sign up (easy-peasy) and you can catalogue your books! This may not seem terribly interesting on the face of it, but it turns out to be much more than making a list: the interface is really easy to use. Go to your bookshelf, start typing in the names, and it will pull up all the information about the book from Amazon, or the Library of Congress, or other sources. You just click to confirm the correct information, and the book is added to your library. Your library can be displayed either in list form or as a "bookshelf" with pictures of the covers. The real fun comes because the list also shows you which other members have read or tagged your books; you can get recommendations, read reviews, and more. Check out the page called "zeitgeist" to see how many ways you can connect. You get to do 200 books for free, then there are some fees, but it's not expensive. Since 200 books hardly makes a dent in my library at home, let alone what I have at the office, I started with the books I have in my bedroom: these are usually the ones I haven't read yet, or want to reread. I'll definitely be exploring this over the next few months.

I have always been a book hoarder, but because I've moved so often, there have been times when I've made the decision to sell or give away a lot of books. Sometimes I wish I still had the hundreds of paperback science fiction books I'd bought for a nickel apiece with my allowance when I was in Junior High in bookstores like The Green Apple in San Francisco--they had such great, lurid covers. But there were just too many moves, and as a poor student often sharing a bedroom, I had almost no room for them. I got tired of sleeping with all my books. So some of them had to go.

When I moved to Minnesota, all I brought were my clothes, my computer, my pots and pans and 35 boxes of books. I swore I would never sleep with my books again; they could live in another room of the house or in my office. But about four years ago, I gave away almost ALL of my books in French. They had been acquired lovingly, one by one, in the used bookstores of Paris and Berkeley, and mailed across the country when I moved away from California. There they sat, taking up a wall of bookshelf space in my office for years while I pursued other interests. Finally, I realized that my new books were piling up on the floor, and that these books hadn't been touched in years. If I wanted to reread Proust, I could go to the library and get an edition with bigger print. So, I chose a few that I couldn't part with, and then I lugged boxes of memories up two flights of stairs to the French department, and left them on a bench in the hall with a sign that said "take me!" Even as I was leaving the boxes, colleagues were beginning to hover. They all claimed they too many books as well, but the lure was more than they could resist. In three days, all the books had found a new home. The shelves in my office weren't empty for long.

Ballroom on TV!!

Woo-hoo! After a few years of ballroom drought, PBS is back with a series called American Ballroom Challenge. There will be five episodes, airing on Wednesdays at 7 (your local times may vary). I missed the opener, the American Smooth competition, last night, but they'll show it again a few times before next week's American Rhythm competition. These are professional competitors dancing together, not pro-am (teachers and students) or amateur couples. They are also competing in American Style, not International. International style, danced in the rest of the world, is strictly competitive, not social, and dancers start learning and competing as children. American dancers often start as teens or adults, and many begin dance as a social hobby. It is the dance teachers, often poorly paid, who compete as professionals. But on TV, what you see is the glamour and the cream of the crop.
This time around, the shows will devote more attention to each category, with showcase dances as well as the competition itself (filmed at the Ohio Star Ball) and some behind-the-scenes segments about how the dancers get ready.
Here's a clip from last year's show, an exhibition that incorporates some West Coast Swing


From my very limited experience with ballroom competition as an amateur competitor and volunteer for USADanceSport (formerly USABDA) championship competitions, I have developed a huge admiration for the level of athleticism as well as the dance virtuosity of ballroom dance. Of course, like any competitive sport, it has its dark side, eloquently documented in the book Glamour Addiction. The author, Juliet McMains is both an academic and a former professional ballroom competitor. She accurately describes both the joys of dancing itself and of the ballroom life, and the exploitation and rip-offs of the industry. It may not be an easy read or a comfortable perspective for many, but I think she is absolutely right on. Back when I was dancing at an Arthur Murray studio, a bunch of students got together and filmed a "Dancaholics Anonymous" meeting as a joke/gift for an instructor. It was a joke, but all of the things we said were true: "first you start with one pair of shoes. Next thing you know you're up to five, and they're all in the trunk of your car in case you need to dance." "I started out with one private lesson a week. Next thing I new, I was up to five, and borrowing money to pay for all those dresses." "I knew I was in trouble when my husband and I were lying side-by-side in bed together, moving our feet to practice our routine."

But kids who are lucky enough to grow up with dance studio parents can start to learn at a very young age, and develop the skills to compete on the level of the International Dancers. I've seen these young dancers compete three times now, and they are amazing.