haircuts 4 less
May 30th, 2010
Did you ever feel like you couldn’t stand your hair for one more second, that you just had to buzz it all off? This afternoon I asked my neighbor if I could borrow her clippers. She said sure, but why don’t you sleep on it. Please sleep on it. I said well, maybe, but give me the clippers. Then Holly came home and suggested that I sleep on it. I said, no, I really want to do this. Then she grabbed the clippers and ran around the house with them and hid them somewhere. I promised her that I was just going to use the #4 blade, which wouldn’t cut very much off. She said okay, and showed me where the clippers were.
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hey!
May 26th, 2010
Lookit this cool video about what seems to now be called the “Bechdel Movie test.” I just have to apologize to my old karate buddy Lizzie Wallace, who I TOTALLY stole this idea from. I tried a while ago to re-name it “The Ripley Test” after Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien. But it didn’t get any traction.
Thanks to my pals Ruth Horowitz and Jake Weisman for alerting me to this.
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a visit from a cartoonist
May 22nd, 2010
My pal Hilary Price, the Rhymes With Orange cartoonist, just came for a visit. Here’s a screenshot of her drawing a monster. I love the final touch—the eyebrow.
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hummingbird dips its nib
May 19th, 2010
…in the inkwell of life.
I just hung this hummingbird feeder outside the window by my computer. This little bird is almost constantly sipping from it. How am I supposed to get anything done?
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it strikes like lightnings
May 12th, 2010
This morning I was awakened at dawn by hermit thrushes, back from wherever they’ve been since last summer. Their song is unbearably beautiful. But instead of subjecting you to one of my feeble annual tributes, (2006, 2008) I’ll direct you to the lovely animated version of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring” that my friend Sarah Van Arsdale just made.
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“why does she have to have a sexuality at all?”
May 11th, 2010
I like that question!
Here’s how Richard Kim ends his very lucid post in The Nation.
I don’t know if Elena Kagan sleeps with women or men. I don’t know if she sleeps with anyone at all. I don’t care. What I do know is that she has never claimed to be a lesbian, that she’s never spoken out in the first-person as an advocate of gay rights and that she has never publicly discussed a romantic relationship with a woman. Gay isn’t some genetic or soulful essence; it’s a name you call yourself–and Kagan has not done that. So in my book, case closed. Elena Kagan is not gay. Is she straight? I don’t know, and again, I don’t care. Why does she have to have a sexuality at all?
In a way, the mystery about her sexuality mirrors the mystery about her legal philosophy. We just don’t know a whole lot. The Senate and the press have the right and responsibility to interrogate her about her legal opinions—not about her sex life.
*Actually, it’s in The Nation’s blog, which they call The Notion, which always seems kinda funny to me because it’s what I always called The Nation when I’d draw it in my comic strip.
my pal Lucy’s new book
May 3rd, 2010
Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s book The Big Bang Symphony comes out this week. It’s a really riveting story–I’m almost done with it. Here’s th’ video trailer!
And if you become her Facebook friend you can see the amazing photographs she took when she was in Antarctica. She’s been posting a new one every day to lead up to the book launch. Today’s is an astonishing shot of the open mouth of a wale! All pink, with big furry baleen or whatever that stuff is.
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spider webs
April 29th, 2010
Does anyone know the origin of spider web imagery in seventies lesbian-feminism? When I came out, everyone was always going on about “we are the weavers, we are the web.” Was it about reclaiming something people are afraid of? Was it some Wiccan thing? Was it because female spiders are bigger than males? Was it an association to spinning, and spinsters? Was it based on a misperception that male spiders don’t spin webs? DO male spiders spin webs? I’m able to find surprisingly little about this with my impatient slapdash google technique.
I always thought it was very cool how women would bring rope and yarn to political demonstrations, and “weave webs” by tangling everyone up together…but what’s the symbolism about? Where did it start? I have a letter from a friend written in 1981, which says, “Remember—wimmin’s webs are always connected but when they become electricity is where it all happens, when the threads of the webs become the wavelengths is when the magic begins!” Except she didn’t use any capitals and all the “o”s are turned into little women’s symbols.
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April 28
April 28th, 2010
Thank god I went out Monday and got some new deck chairs. Aren’t they pretty?
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