I have just discovered that I am a petty person.

You might remember that I’ve had to block a couple of guys on Plenty of Fish recently. The two most notable blockees are an alt-right racist and a Republican who didn’t actually want to date me (just to play) and who kept saying I shouldn’t want to be with non-Republicans since they’re all guys with man buns who don’t know how to fix cars.

I’m not on POF or OKC anymore, but there’s a tiny part of me that wants to log back in and unblock these guys just to rub it in their faces that I’m in a happy relationship with a culturally Jewish non-guybunned non-conservative who has already done all kinds of fixes around here, including some plumbing.

That’s petty, right?

🙂

His name is Josh.

I love The Alan Parsons Project.

Unabashedly.

And so I’m excited to see a live concert tonight at the Crest in Sacramento–last time, I had to go all the way to Napa to see them.

If you’re saying to yourself, that band’s name sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it, let me assure you that you’ve heard the music–I don’t watch sports, but I still know the first song off the Eye in the Sky album, Sirius, is played all the time when stars take the court.

You may also remember that Dr. Evil’s plan, in Austin Powers 2, to turn the moon into a death star is the “Alan Parsons Project.” “The Dr. Evil Edit” then appeared on The Time Machine album.

The Alan Parsons Project isn’t like other bands–various musicians cycle in and out–the constant is musician/producer Alan Parsons, most famous for his work on a couple of Beatles’ albums and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which got him his first Grammy nomination.

The albums the Project puts out are loosely themed. One of my favorites is Gaudi, inspired by the work and life of Antoni Gaudi, the Catalan architect, whose Sagrada Familia is still under construction (it started in 1882). It started my quest, now fulfilled, to visit Barcelona.

Other albums also appeal to the queen of the geeks side of me, with themes ranging from Keats to Poe to Freud to Egyptology.

It was probably the Eye in the Sky album I heard first–I went through all of my stepfather’s albums, looking for new friends. It was love at first listen, and I demanded that the family collection house the complete works.

One song that means a lot to me is “Prime Time,” from Ammonia Avenue. When I was a terrified 17 year old, I listened to it on repeat on the way to the hospital to have my son. “Even the longest night won’t last forever [. . .] Something in the air / Maybe for the only time in my life / Turning me around and guiding me right.]” Now, having had him in my life for 25 years, I can say it did all work out, surprisingly, amazingly, even if it wasn’t at all according to plan.

(That night did last forever, though–and by two days later, the theme song should have been the next song on the album: “Let me go home / I had a bad night / Leave me alone.”)

I’m listening to The Alan Parsons Project as I write this–my computer tells me I have 18.7 hours total.

I often listen to The Alan Parsons Project while I’m writing, which annoyed my son greatly in the Fall of 2012, when I was finishing an intensive project.

On the way to a Writing Program conference in Santa Barbara with Melissa in 2012, I relayed a conversation the boy and I had just had:

The Boy: Why are you always listening to this?

Me: I binge it when I’m writing.

The Boy: But you’re always writing!

A few days later, Karlissa spent the last day in Santa Barbara touring and wine tasting.

Near the end of the day, we were at Cottonwood Canyon tasting room. Just as our host was handing us a chocolate to have with the dessert wine pour, he mentioned his friend, Alan Parsons.

And I fell off my stool.

Literally.

I got myself up, fished the chocolate out of my cleavage, where it had fallen, and said, “The classy thing would be for everyone to pretend that didn’t happen.”

When Melissa explained why I’d been so overcome, our host insisted that the embarrassing story would be told.

“Well, when you do, tell him there’s a whole book out there written to his music.”

La Sagrada Familia

In our last post, we talked about the most famous museum heist in history–the theft of The Mona Lisa.

This week, we’re happy to report that a pair of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers have been found, after being stolen from a museum thirteen years ago.

We don’t know much more than that–the investigation is ongoing. You can read the BBC story about it here.

The Mona Lisa theft made the painting famous–Garland’s ruby slippers don’t need this kind of help–they are already the most valuable film prop in history.

This week, I was engrossed in Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark.

According to the introduction, Moon wrote the book to work through her experiences with her autistic child. She imagined a future in which children like him had access to even better therapies earlier in life and in which businesses would provide more resources (for a tax break, of course).

Our hero, Lou, narrates most of the book, though we get flashes of other points of view in third person. He is high functioning, high functioning enough to critique his mandated therapy appointments with a therapist who underestimates him.

Lou navigates pressures at work, including a new boss who thinks people shouldn’t get accessibility resources, his fencing club, friendship, and a crush.

One of the pressures is that his new boss wants him and other employees like him to try a new therapy to become “normal.”

Should we treat children with autism? Should we try to cure the hearing impaired?This is a contentious topic in disability studies–we do not have consensus on how to balance understandings of disability with difference, defect with culture.  In our current social model, of course, “disability” is a key word–without that label, protections and accommodations aren’t guaranteed. In other words, if we took the “disability” label off students who were hearing impaired, they would no longer be eligible for signing translators in their classes.

Lou and his friends have to try to both figure out how to advocate for themselves and to decide whether they want to try to be “normal” instead of who they are.

While the book was compelling, I didn’t find the ending satisfying. It felt a bit rushed.

Still, I recommend this thoroughly. I couldn’t put it down.

The Wolves is an ensemble play by Sarah DeLappe. I was excited to learn it would premiere at CapStage after it won an Obie and was shortlisted for the 2017 Pulitzer.

It’s the first play in their new season–#SearchingforAmerica.

What director Nancy Carlin gives us is indeed a piece of America.

The Wolves consists of us watching a series of warm-ups that the Wolves, a high school soccer team, do before games. It’s done in a naturalistic style.

Naturalism is related to realism, but is actually more realistic. In extreme naturalism, if people are supposed to be cooking, they would be cooking for real. If something were supposed to smell bad, the audience would smell it too. Naturalism is called “slice of life” theatre.

In this case, it means that sometimes a few characters have their backs to us–and that when these girls talk, we are experiencing what it sounds like to overhear many girls–overlapping conversations, half thoughts, and cuss words.

If this play were done in a realistic style, I probably wouldn’t like it, but the naturalism works.

We see what we see–nothing gets solved. No story gets fully told. There is no happy ending, because there isn’t an ending. The majority of the girls are juniors, so they’re not even reaching the end of senior year at the end of the play–we just get these practices–to see this tiny slice of their lives (and all the hints at more). There are colds and crushes, small deals and big ones.

The slices are familiar–what I heard as I was leaving was people remembering their own clubs in high school, their competitions, having to go to their daughters’ practices.

The play is a tight 90 minutes–and the actors are surely exhausted by the end–they’re basically playing soccer for a standard game time, after all.

This is the kind of play that really works in the intimacy of CapStage’s theatre–you’re always just a few feet away from the actors, so you’re beside them when they accidentally insult each other, when they apologize, when a fight almost breaks out over one girl leaving the other vulnerable to an older boy pressuring her for sex. We are right there with them.

We are the wolves.

About a third of the way through my guest lecture, the professor said, “I’m going to stop you there. I don’t agree with your feminist reading of the text.”

I was Professor Levin’s TA in a Shakespeare course. I already had my Masters–I’d written a book to get it, on the figure of the witch on the British stage, from Shakespeare to Churchill. Chapter One was about Macbeth, and even though I didn’t use it in the book, I’d written another chapter about witchcraft in The Tempest.

Thus, when Levin invited me to give a talk, I proposed a brief talk based on that.

The Tempest features a mage, Prospero, which is tricky, since King James really hated witches.

He had written an entire book about them, Daemonologie, in which he explained how all magic is in service of the dark forces, with tangents about how it’s possible for the Devil to impregnate a woman, since he can’t make sperm (spoiler: he gets sperm from a corpse).

While all witches were bad, he did make a common distinction between male and female magic. Male magic was “white”–it’s what learned men did, in trying to compel the spirits. Female magic was “black,” base, sexual, and destructive. Women were controlled by the devil and usually gave their body to him to seal the pact.

My point was that Sycorax, the unseen (dead) witch in The Tempest was there to foil for Prospero (she is rumored to have gotten pregnant by the devil, etc.). One could view the play with more sympathy towards Prospero due to her (and because Shakespeare allows for multiple interpretations, one might realize they’re not that different).

I got cut off, though.

I had to leave the lectern and take my seat in the back of the room, before Levin told the students that he didn’t approve of feminist theory and that they should forget everything I’d said.

Some of the students emailed me, apologizing for their professor’s behavior, saying they wished they’d been allowed to form an opinion about my point, if only they’d been allowed to hear it.

On the way out of class that day, Levin had asked where I’d gotten all that crap about James’s views.

“From his book, as I said. Have you read Daemonologie?”

“No.”

Every time I teach Shakespeare, as I am this summer, I think about this interaction.

And about the lesson.

A professor stopped a point of view he didn’t understand before hearing it out.

A male professor made a woman sit down before hearing her out.

I’m sure the students learned from that–that he would punish them for even proposing an interpretation he hadn’t thought of.

And that the sexism of King James’s time is still very much with us.

Ever wonder why the Mona Lisa is such a big deal?

Sure there’s her enigmatic smile, and the mystery surrounding the identity of the model, and the oddly fantastical landscape in the background. And, yes, she was painted by one of art history’s darling geniuses, Leonardo Da Vinci, who was also a self-taught engineer, master procrastinator, and persecuted bisexual–for all of which we love him even more.

But though Mona Lisa (who also goes by the name La Gioconda) was born in the 16th century and has been on display in the Louvre since its opening shortly after the 18th century French Revolution, she was well-known primarily among the French art intelligentsia until the early 20th century.

On today’s date, August 21, in 1911, Mona Lisa went missing, but her absence wasn’t noticed for 28 hours.  At first, museum staff assumed she’d just been misplaced. Imagine losing track of the Mona Lisa today!

In a short bit of time after the theft was announced, Mona Lisa became a worldwide celebrity. Her photo splashed newspapers around the globe and one New York Times reporter remarked that the theft had caused “such a sensation that Parisians for the time have forgotten the rumors of war.”^[1] (Pre-World War I tensions between France and Germany, had already become heated at the time.)

Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci, 1517

Two years passed before authorities recovered the painting, during which time newspaper readers everywhere followed the efforts to track her down.

The Mona Lisa had been lifted off the wall, removed from her frame, covered in a blanket, and carried out of the museum by three Italian immigrant workmen at the Louvre. As it goes with immigrant groups everywhere, Italians were much maligned and exploited in early-20th century France. It’s possible that the three thieves were simply trying to take down the master’s house, or that they thought they could profit from selling the painting on the black market, or that, as ringleader Vicenzo Perugia claimed, they were on a patriotic mission.

When he was arrested for the heist, Perugia said that he was simply trying to return a painting that Napoleon had looted from Italy to its proper home. If he sincerely believed this, he was mistaken. Da Vinci himself had given the painting to King Francis 1 during a time when the painter was living in exile in France.

Vicenzo Perugia’s Mug Shot

During the two years that Mona Lisa was in Perugia’s possession, she lived in the false bottom of a trunk in the thief’s tiny apartment. Today she hangs behind bullet-proof glass on a wall in the Louvre, and it’s hard to get anywhere near her. You’ll have to elbow your way through all of the other adoring fans to get 2 seconds with her and snap a selfie that will likely turn out bad because of her bullet-proof enclosure.

You can thank Perugia for the fact that you know about the Mona Lisa and for your lousy selfie.

Mona Lisa is highest valued painting in the world, estimated at $782 million in 2015, and the Louvre is the most visited art museum in the world, receiving over 8 million visitors in 2017. Many of those visitors come just to see the Mona Lisa, which is good for her and not so good for many of the other artworks in the museum. Just across the gallery from Da Vinci’s painting hangs Veronese’s masterpiece, Wedding at Cana, which most visitors rush by without a glance in their haste to get a glimpse of that famous smile.

Wedding at Cana, Paolo Veronese, 1563

If you’d like to know more, listen to art historian Lorraine Kypiotis discuss the theft on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Or, for an amusing take on the incident, watch Season 5, Episode 9 of Drunk History. They don’t get all of the historical details right, but watching Jack Black play Perugia is priceless.

^[1] “‘La Gioconda’ Is Stolen in Paris” Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.

New York Times (1857-1922); Aug 23, 1911.

This American Life has a fantastic story out this week about “The Feather Heist“–a flute player broke into the British Museum and took millions of dollars worth of not pinin’, but passed on, no more, ceased to be, expired and gone to meet their makers, stiff, bereft of life, resting in peace, pushing up the daisies, metabolic processes stopped, off the twig, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain, joined the choir invisible, ex-birds!

The other day, while browsing through my library’s awesome graphic novel collection, I happened upon Liz Prince’s Alone Forever: The Singles Collection.

It’s weird that I hadn’t heard of Liz Prince before, since I’m into comics and sadly often on the dating scene.

This collection is a quick read; it’s also funny and familiar, from the wild things our minds do when we first crush on someone, to the judgmental ways we read each others’ OKC profiles.

Reading this also answered a question for me.

In the last few years, it’s been hard to find a guy without a beard (I can deal with trimmed ones, but those bushy ones turn me SO off–I think it’s because that beard signaled, in my Southern childhood, a redneck/racist/civil war obsessed guy.)

Someone must like guys with beards, I’ve been thinking to myself. Who?

They couldn’t all have them if someone didn’t want that.

It’s Liz. Liz wants that.