Yesterday we went up to New Jersey to get our hands on the new CDs. I’ve been really excited about these for a while – aquiver even – and for a while there was simply problem after problem after problem…. Heather was very sick through the beginning of the project, I’d get into the studio and be unable to remember words, Kristen was sick when SHE recorded her cello tracks, tuning issues not noticed until AFTER instruments were recorded… then once the audio was done problems plagued production… a couple of weeks ago I was going insane… making everything fit into templates that were slightly altered from the templates from previous years, dealing with new applications (CS4 is new and exciting!), a different colour set-up for the silk screen on the disk face – all sorts of insanity. Then the master didn’t work and I spent a day running from place to place burning new masters (this time I bloody well sent FOUR on different brands of CD-Rs) and overnighting them to the company…. issues with margins, a colour problem (I wanted a particular Pantone that’s a gorgeous warm green-black that they kept proofing as a dead cold flat black with red undertones)…
And so, with all of the chaos that went into getting the thing done, it wasn’t funny when the woman behind the counter said “oh! rob Hinkal? 10,000 blank discs? They’re ready! Oh – just kidding.”
No, not funny at all. But the important thing is that I didn’t bite this woman in the face, thus earning a jail sentence a week before the CD is released.
A gorilla and its infant at the National Zoo in Washigton DC. She spent most of her time hiding the new beestie from the prying eyes of the crowd, but eventually we got a brief peek. Of course, perhaps I should feel guilty about having gotten it: Though I don’t generally believe in anthropomorphizing animals, it’s almost impossible NOT to do so when they go around sulking like the gorilla below. It’s such a humanly emotive stance. I later caught him holding his head in what appeared to be dispair… and I doubt there are that many deeply depressed zoo keepers to learn that behaviour from. I worry we can’t have it both ways: Either we keep them in a zoo to be stared at and teased, or the PETA guys are right and we need to treat them a lot more humanely with freedom of CHOICE built into their world and a serious campaign for true animal rights. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which I believe is RIGHT though…. Enter Planet of the Apes…
(Although, now that I think about it, isn’t jail time EXACTLY what I need to build my folk cred into something huge and rockstar-like? And if you go to jail for biting someone in the face I bet NO-ONE messes with you in the Bighouse… or the SLAMMER… I’ve got to go back and watch the Great Muppet Caper and brush up on my prison lingo)
After picking up the CDs, we decided to take a road trip up to Bethlehem, PA for ice cream – but what was really supposed to be only an hour north turned into a 3 hour nightmare of traffic and that specific horror of 15mph at gear 1.5. You know gear 1.5? It’s the one that doesn’t exist between gears one and two that all the fuckers with automatic transmissions like to inhabit when they’re taking a leisurely gander at construction, accidents and exotic guardrails.
I’d never watched a cuttlefish change colours before… But damn! I felt that a bit of cuttlefish imagery would also help while talking about Cthulu. Also worthy things to hook your mind’s eye on at the moment would be the octopus we watched getting fed (not children, unfortunately) and squid from the Italian market this past weekend. Yay invertebrate cephalopods that incidentally taste great! (#1 reason not to fear Cthulu and the other Old Ones. They TASTE GREAT!!!!) Damn. When you go to see a giant Pacific octopus get fed you want a damn SHOW!!! You want tentacles reaching hungrily towards a low-paid volunteer, preferably blonde and buxom… you want a little bit of drama – and maybe a large trout being dropped into the tank, hastily shredded by eight groping arms, beak snapping! Unfortunately, you get a large man with a moustache dropping a tiny shrimp into the water quipping “I just try to keep my hands out of reach”. A woman asks what he’d do if she DID catch him and he responds: “Actually. I’m not really sure.” after which he hastily concludes the demonstration and departs.
We did eventually make it up to Bethlehem in time to get some ice cream from the Heavenly Hedgehog and then we got to wander around watching the sun go down over Christmas City. Rain flicked over us in the form of a summer shower and we had just enough time left over to visit the oldest bookstore in the country.
Okay – so – it’s JUST a “big” fish. But, when you see something huge you can be forgiven saying “Wow! That’s a MONSTER!”, right? Well – not if you say it around a 6 year-old, apparently. The poor kid spent the rest of the time in this part of the zoo saying “MOM! Let’s go! He said there were MONSTERS!!!” and the mother trying to explain to the child the concepts of metaphor and hyperbole while occassionally shooting me glares. Hehehe. Below, a REAL monster… One creature at the National Zoo, complete with placard, was NOT placed behind glass. I guess it was assumed our natural arachnophobia would keep us from actually disturbing them and I was even half-convinced they weren’t real. I leaned forward till my breath disturbed the web and finally saw that THIS one was busily chewing on something and hastily pulled back, shivering…
Afterwards we crashed back in Philadelphia with JJ Tizzou of the Osage House Concerts (and of the exquisite photography). He’d gotten a new kitten and had a recent break in so the storytelling was both intense and frequently interrupted.
Though July 18th appeared on our calendars as a rare Saturday OFF, we actually got out to West Virginia to play the birthday party of our friend Lillian. She’d seen us years ago at the Mountain Stage NewSong Festival and has been a fierce supporter of us ever since and we were really flattereed to be asked. Her house is beautiful out in the middle of beautiful nowhere, starlit and firelit and amazing. A great stage and amazing food – and strangely neon jello shooters were imbibed. We’re good musicians and occassionally practice. Sharif’s neighbours had been bugging him to have the band over for a while and we figured we’d oblige. It eventually turned into a big outdoor practice with all the neighbours pulling up chairs and opening windows. It also turned into a wonderful cookout: Heather made asparagus and I brought my sausage. And Sharif? Well… if Sharif offers you his meat, don’t turn him down. Really, don’t turn him down.
Before going to bed we hunkered in to watch the 2007 movie “Cthulu”. Unfortunately, I’m still not quite sure how to process the film: I’ve seen plenty of films that sort of centre around the theme of being gay and the difficulties that this can present, especially in regards to one’s small town roots, religious father, close-minded frat-boys, etc…. and I’ve seen plenty of films about the danger of religious cults dedicated to dark gods, also often in regards to small town roots, religious fathers and short-lived frat-boys – but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the two combined, nor with such an uneasy co-existence.
The movie definitely flicks from being a movie about Cthulu with a lead character that happens to be gay to a story about being a gay man in a family / Love drama that HAPPENS to occur as we face the evils of a Cult of Cthulu. It’s a strange mix, and I’d argue an uncomfortable one – not because of the sexuality – but simply because I was there to watch a moody Victorian horror flick!
The new trailers reflect the actual course of the movie a little bit better and it’s being distributed by a company that SPECIALIZES in “gay genre” films, but I’d been sold initially on a beautifully realized, moody horror story based on HP Lovecraft’s ultimate evil…
Last Thursday our friend Bryn came out to my Java Mammas open mic and performed with her new guitar. She was the first person to EVER ask us for our autographs and NOW look at her! Squee! Afterwards I dreamt we played a gig together and Bryn and I BOTH forgot our guitars and had to go back to the green room which apparently was a half hour drive from the show and everyone was PISSED at us. Sigh. With a last minute cancellation, we counted ourselves as VERY fortunate to have someone as talented as Hannah Spiro become our emergency featured artist for the night. And THIS week we got the Lovely Austin Stahl. One of my favourite writers, it was great to hear him play out again and he told me what I secretly ALWAYS want to hear from my features: that he’d stopped going to open mics a long time ago, but mine had reminded him why he’d Loved them.
All in all I’m kind of disappointed by the difference between a movie that follows its course and has the quiet acceptance of the relationship while getting on with bloody, slimy business vs the way this movie treats things: confrontationally. It’s the difference between a man who incidentally introduces you to his boyfriend vs the man who introduces himself, says “I’m gay” and then continues self-sexuality-referencing, insisting on that definition. It’s also the difference between insisting that we accept the facts as they are vs insisting that we should have a problem with them.
We’re in an interesting time with our acceptance of gays and lesbians in our society. There’s a very, very long way to go towards acceptance as a nation, but America HAS come out of the closet. As long as we have safe, sanitized homosexuals like those in Will & Grace we’re still okay. The scary imagery presented by racier shows like Sex and the City are a little less palatable to the average American, but still I feel we’re past the point where we should be using a club, and into the point where some subtlety is in order.
I guess you’ve got to ask if this is pop-culture or art and what the director was trying to say and what was the PURPOSE of the movie, but it was presented as a (albeit beautifully made) horror popcorn (shrimp) movie – if you get the audience in their seats through misrepresentation, I feel that you’ve got to then engage them in conversation to keep them there. I was disappointed to have the tenderness of his relationships, the beautifully shot Love scenese, etc – HAVE to comingle with YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND ME-style shouting monologues and hatreds of “your kind”. It simply confuses things.
After picking up the CDs we drove up to Bethlehem, PA to get ice cream and wander the ruins.
Anyways, you can call me prudish, but my sexuality is part of my Loves, desires and my private Life – not part of my advertised definition. Call me geeky, but my sexuality is is in my meta-tags and context, not on my splash page and menu bar.
I’m babbling. I’m disappointed in the movie because it seems to fight with itself and I was expecting something very different, very cool. Though I think it WOULD be fun to take a homophobic acquaintance to. If only we could say “oh! Look! See how beautifully we get to see the WHOLE table? Again?!”