drlynch's Journal

6:04pm: No idea where or when

8:39pm: The Clark, my birthday

8:00am: Happy birthday, Cooper Beech
I hope this year is a fruitful one

12:38pm: Save KRCL!
We have been talking to various friends about the situation and have finally decided what to do: unpledge.

This does not mean that we are just not returning our pledge letter or not calling during Radiothon.

This means we will be calling during Radiothon and giving them our "unpledges" of the amount that we are unpledging. We will call repeatedly (at least once an hour) to explain that we are still unpledging. We will be explaining why we are unpledging. This is not meant as maliciousness to Robert Nelson or any other dedicated volunteers (to whom we are sincerely dedicated) but as a message to Donna and the board in hopes that they can no longer ignore us.

So here it goes; our unpledge:
"I am (still) unpledging until the station commits to consulting the community before making any format changes. I am unpledging until there is a community advisory board that replaces or works alongside the board of directors with a similar amount of power. I am unpledging until there is a different way of selecting the board of directors in the event that there still is a board of directors. I am unpledging until KRCL goes back to being MY COMMUNITY RADIO STATION, Radio free Utah.



If only a few of us call, they will think we are crazy and not listen to us. But can you imagine fifty people a day--I mean fifty people a day--calling in and unpledging? Donna will have to beg us to stop--and only she can make us stop.

Please join us in calling in our unpledges during the two weekends of Radiothon.

11:35am:

4:43pm: word of the day
amphora.

it came up at work last week (as in, there was an amphora in the lot of objects that we had to inventory) and after looking it up in my spanish dictionary to confirm that it means both blister and vial in spanish (as in portuguese), i discovered a rather amusing number of english words with the same origin beyond the obvious amphora and ampulla (ampoule, ampullaceous, ampullary, amphoral, amphoric...).

now, if you USE amphoric or ampullaceous, people might think you a bit strange, but it might be amusing.

1:44pm: If ever you crossed La Notte with Boquitas Pintadas under the sign of I am Cuba and that child had a prodigious sense of the rhythm and sound of the (Cuban) Spanish language, you might get Tres Tristes Tigres. I am embarrassed to admit that i had never read it before now--I knew of it and my colleagues in graduate school spoke of it often--but it took me having time in my hand and inheriting two copies of it from my sister's mother-in-law to give me the impetus to read it. I have been taken from the beginning (parts of which I have read three or four times); it almost succeeds in making me love to hear the sound of Spanish in the way that I love Portuguese--something that I had never imagined possible after so many years of studying and reading Spanish with little more than academic objectivity (as Pete Seeger might say). Like Boquitas Pintadas, I have no idea how it translates--if one can delight in the English version they way one can in the Castilian--but I would definitely recommend it if you read Spanish.

5:32pm: More permasalt

2:32pm: Tom's


my sister lives in the bucolic polish-catholic farming community of hatfield. it is a town full of fields and tobacco drying barns. when we sit or do something on their second-story porch, we have no choice but to greet passers by on the sidewalk. they have a town museum in a tobacco barn and a good number of fruit and vegetable stands, including tom´s. if you stop at tom´s, you are likely to find a sign that reads, "i am out in the field. please help yourself and put your money in the box. tom."

i am not much for the small town life, but i do envy my sister her tom. i think i am in love. ;)

1:54pm: Permasalt

4:07pm:

(i think my proportions are off... must tweak.

1:54pm: another snapshot.

6:12pm:

1:03pm: in response to an on the media story from last week:

On last week’s program you included a story about São Paulo’s recent banning of billboards (you erroneously stated that they all disappeared on New Year’s day when in reality they have slowly come down over the last six months). From the perspective of Vinícius Queiroz Galvão most residents of the city have embraced the newly naked city and, in a rather literary turn, it has revealed ugly scars and beautiful architecture.

He and I must run in different circles. I have heard teenagers repeat the slogans of the billboard industry, asking how they will learn about the latest Hollywood blockbuster or ipod. I myself look at the mournful skeletons (such as: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drl/382619144/in/set-72157594513768586/) and cityscapes that have lost their texture and color (including: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drl/228473829/in/set-72157594513768586/; http://www.flickr.com/photos/drl/226491238/in/set-95609/; http://www.flickr.com/photos/drl/64160010/in/set-92807/; http://www.flickr.com/photos/drl/269246392/in/set-72157594207127187/). To the contrary of what your interviewee said, I think this takes away some of the odd contrasts of the city. For instance, I was for years fascinated with a giant billboard on the side of an architecturally interesting building in the midst of a large working-class neighborhood and on the block of one of the most infamous squatter residences in the city. The building’s billboard always advertised luxury products such as SUVs (http://www.flickr.com/photos/drl/3800889/) and camera phones (http://www.flickr.com/photos/drl/3800515/) to the wealthy commuters that passed the building every day while the people who lived near that particular billboard could scarcely afford such goods. Meanwhile, Queiroz Galvão discussed some favelas and slavelike sweatshop conditions that were revealed by the removal of billboards; oddly, I already knew of at least one of those favelas and had often shown my visitors how you could see into the sweat shops of Bom Retiro where Bolivians work in virtual slavery. Like the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, the billboards hid reality only to those who did not want to see. The rest of us—people who lived in those neighborhoods, those of us who walk or take the bus instead of driving, those of us who were looking for what they call, “reality” (to paraphrase Caetano Veloso)—had long ago “discovered” what was apparently unknown to Mr. Queiroz Galvão.

I imagine the happiest people in this whole situation are the graffiti artists who suddenly find themselves with hundreds of blank canvases. I am not talking about the city’s world-famous artists but the ones that try to climb the highest buildings in the city and paint inscrutable symbols on them. This (as well as illegal bills such as http://www.flickr.com/photos/drl/437660043/) is the real “visual pollution” that Mayor Kassab would like to eliminate; too bad he is less able to control the “pixadores” than the advertising industry.


also, a wonderful and sad set here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonydemarco/sets/72157600075508212/show/

10:45am: Thousand Oaks

2:57pm:

Sometime before Christmas in 2005 my mother and I invested in a toy accordion.
It spoke to us in a moment of weakness during a nightmarish trip to Wal-Mart. Yes, we do shop at Wal-Mart. Or at least we did that one time, when we anted to get a DVD for my aunt’s Christmas present. As you all know, my aunt has Down’s syndrome and lives in supervised apartments in a small town in Iowa. Their only chain store is a Wal-Mart and we thought that we could shuffle the exchange-burden (were exchange necessary) on to the apartment managers rather than my grandmother.

Do you all ever go into Wal-Marts? The first thing I noticed was the parking lot. It was, it seemed, the first time since I had returned to the United States that I found myself among normal people. Although my mom lives in a mixed-income neighborhood and our local Smith’s Marketplace (which we still stubbornly call Fred Meyer’s) does have some clientele from the “Central City”, it is still mostly soccer parents in their SUVs (and now, increasingly, our Prii) and absurdly wealthy people—yuppies, people my age, college students. Where does all this money come from? Seriously, where?

At Wal-Mart, though, they have their share of SUVs but also old Chevy sedans and pick-ups and the like. Our old Subaru Legacy Outback, one of the more popular cars in our part of town (the trend started about the time my mother bought her first one and turned toward Prii about the time my mother got her Prius) was definitely out of place in the covered parking ramp at Wally World. Her Smith and Brown stickers, so helpful in distinguishing our car from the millions of look-a-likes in the Costco parking lot down the street, just seemed like pretentious advertisements for obscure institutions with Latin-inscribed seals. Which is what they were.

We were looking for The Sound of Music which was, of course, a nightmare. I do not advise spending any time in the CD and DVD section of Wal-Mart, especially not during Christmas season. Did I mention that this was the end of a Friday afternoon in which my mother left work at 2 to do all of her Christmas shopping in four hours? As we maneuvered through the jungle of Chinese-made ugliness, my mother promised herself that we would go to Sugarhouse last and buy a c.d. for Aunt Maxine and a cookbook for Vicky and Shelly at Salt City C.D.s or Barnes and Noble where she could have a relaxing latte and I would have a soy mocha at Starbucks because the weather was frankly too crappy to bear crossing the street in the cold dark December night. My mother loves to bribe me with the promise of soy mochas, mostly because she loves lattes that she does not make herself. She views as lesser people who spend three or four dollars on a cup of coffee, but she tells herself that it is for me or my sister and not a treat for herself.

As we finished our DVD quest we started to notice the cutest little Chicano boy wandering around with a toy accordion. He was maybe four or five and hit us at a weak moment. We began scouring the toy section for the accordions. There was no question in my mother’s mind. We would buy it for ourselves.

At the time we said that we would learn to play “Happy Birthday” in time for Aunt Maxine’s birthday in January but when we got home there were so many other things to do—wrap presents, get things in boxes to send, get myself ready to go to New York the next morning. I opened the box and looked at the instruction book but was frankly intimidated. What child could ever follow these instructions? It seemed insanely complicated just to come to “Hot Cross Buns” (everyone’s first recorder song) let alone “Happy Birthday”. I left for New York and we both went to Massachusetts while the accordion stayed home. Right before Aunt Maxine’s birthday, we got the accordion out and halfheartedly looked at the booklet again, but we clearly would not be playing in time for the birthday.

The accordion stayed on the buffet for a while and then my mother put it in one of her secret storage places. I went to Brazil. Nine months later, I came back from Brazil. On my first afternoon we went with Toni to Olivera Street in L.A. While we waited for to-go boxes, Toni went out shopping for gifts; as my mother and I searched for her a few minutes later, we admired the selection of toy accordions at the kitschy tourist stands. When we found Toni, she had bought two, one for each granddaughter. Her daughter would certainly hate her for this, everyone remarked.

When we got home, the accordion (along with a harmonica) was sitting on the piano bench. The aforementioned granddaughters love to play with the piano and the last time they were over, they apparently had the joy of a more complete compliment of noisemakers. One or two days later, I picked up the accordion. I started making noise. It moved into the family room. I picked it up several other times when I felt like making noise and being annoyingly infantile. All of us deserve a bit of being infantile in our final week before turning thirty.

Our accordion has three buttons on the left side. One is the air release (so you can pull the bellows out or compress them without making noise) and two others that cause the thing to make complex sounds that I can only describe as chords. On my third or fourth one-minute session with the accordion (I can be pretty ADHD, as you might know) I discovered that if you don’t push in any of those buttons, you get simple notes. Starting with the bellows out, in and out, in and out, in and out starts the scale. Then it reverses on the lower buttons: out and in, out and in. “Maybe we will know ‘Happy Birthday’” before Steve’s next birthday!” I proclaimed. My mother was actually impressed that I had gotten anywhere with the thing.

This morning I picked it up and started playing scales while my mother was having a bathroom break in the middle of making pecan waffles for breakfast. (Have I mentioned that I sometimes make unreasonable demands of my mother? Like, a triple chocolate cake and pecan waffles by 7:30 is something that you can demand at age ten but not at age thirty, even if she does save the frosting for later.)

So I went to my little accordion this morning and realized that even though I had just barely figured out the scales and only played them four or five times (or maybe not even that many—scales on the accordion are, at least at first, excruciating), of course I could play “Happy Birthday”. I started. Let’s try starting with this note, I thought. Immediately the song began to take shape. Soon I was playing it all the way through although I am still a bit shaky at the last bar or two. Accordions, you see, are not like guitars or mandolins or xylophones or pianos. A pushbutton accordion is played by feel (as is a guitar or mandolin, I guess, but it is somehow very different). You have to remember the outs and ins, which sounds are where (both the button and if that note is an out or in) and where the damn thing changes direction. It is like you know which note you want but you can’t find the damn thing half the time. Not only that, but you have to learn to pull the thing all the way out to start and do multiple notes on ins and outs—the worst thing when playing the accordion is to find that your instrument is all the way in when you need an in note in the middle of a bar. This is not the best time to use the air release, as you might guess. It leads to some nasty gaps. Not only that, children’s accordions are made for hands even smaller than mine (if you can believe it) so this one makes my thumb hurt after a very small amount of playing.

Meanwhile, my mother has already commented that I have more natural knack for accordion than for the mandolin (not that she really knows, of course). Which begs the question: will I be playing “Asa branca” in time for São João in late June? Because I have this “Happy Birthday” thing down. In our family, this is a good thing because my accordion can now cover up our terrible sense of pitch.

4:21pm: Drive-by

5:27pm: on a sunday afternoon late in the summer


(actually, the same day i took those photos at that mountain home--but this time at the gaúcho´s)

9:33am: self portrait in a diptych


other diptychs

11:28am: our family does this thing with cucumbers: we slice them paper-thin, cover them with white vinegar and add a bit of sugar, salt and black pepper.

i eat cucumbers this way plain; i throw them on top of almost everything; i eat them in sandwiches. i always have cucumbers in my refrigerator.

when i eat them, i never fail to think of my great-grandmother. somehow the moment the sharpness of the vinegar, the spice of the pepper, the hints of sweet and salty from sugar and salt and the crunchiness of the cucumbers fills my mouth, i can see her face.

the thing is, i do not know if i actually remember eating cucumbers at her house or if they make me think of how my mother remembers her grandmother when she eats cucumbers. i think it is altogether possible that i am remembering my mother as much as my great-grandmother.

and i wonder: will my potential children or nieces and nephews think of their great-great grandmother when they eat cucumbers, even though she will have been dead well over twenty years whenever they are born?

10:34pm:

7:35pm: 8 March
On Thursday, there was a major protest in São Paulo ahead of President Bush's arrival in the city. For some practical reasons, a majority of the leaders of various leftist, union and feminist movements decided to combine political rallies against Bush with the International Women's Day events.

I went to attend part of the protest and take some pictures. I had intended to meet up with one friend but we never found one another; instead, two acquaintances found me the moment I arrived and I ended up with the feminists.

My friends (a man and a woman) were not there to protest Bush and were generally angry that the protests had been combined, even though they hate Bush. As a result, I had a rather interesting experience during the brief time I was at the march (before I had to go back to work).


women of the ruling workers´ party, which officially protested bush´s presence even as the president received him.


my friend, ana, and another feminist arguing with some anti-bush protesters over who should walk in front of the car rented by various feminist organizations (ana´s bf has his back to us on the left side)


even those there for 8 march events didn´t turn down the offer of clown noses to protest the u.s. president


CUT, the leftist union, hosted both feminist and anti-bush delegations

9:03am:

4:18pm:

i sort of rejected this a couple of months ago but it must fit my mood right now.

8:35am: some photos that i am thinking of sending off in my show proposal
http://www.flickr.com/photos/drl/sets/72157594513768586/show/

okay, there are a few that are definite no-gos, but i am also using this to show to my references who may not know my work very well and definitely don´t know what i am proposing for the show.