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Some things I enjoyed last night:

• ( movies! )
  
  
• ( art! )
• ( more movies! )

In 2000, I decided to try to be not just a consumer/patron of art but a producer/creator. I mostly think it was a good decision, but it's good to be reminded once in a while how much fun it is just to take in art until you're stuffed.

Just back from seeing Kris Delmhorst and Erin McKeown at the Independent. I may have more to say about that later, but for now, I'll just note that all night, between songs, my mind kept straying to this lovely acoustic guitar fragment that I couldn't quite place. It was about an hour into the show before I began to suspect that it was the intro to "Can't Take Our Love Away". Well done, Josh!

Some things that are coming up: Sunday afternoon we have a set by Bev Barnett and Greg Newlon and one by Russell Barber. Sadly, Chelsey Fasano had to cancel. I may play a short set to fill time, if the need arises.

Next Saturday, Sam Shaber is playing a Sunnyvale House Concert. I've been to a couple of these, they're very comfortable and the host has good taste in booking, and cake. Paul doesn't have a PA of his own, so I'll be bringing mine for this one.

And next Sunday at Barefoot we have Valarie Mulberry and David Gunn, the Invisible Cities, and Sheltering Sky. With singer-songwriters, indie pop, and Celtic folk, this is a pretty eclectic mix; I'm looking forward to it a lot.

Again culled from feministblogs.org:

"How Not to Make Me Ex-Gay"

Poster from the CrimethInc gender subversion kit

Photos from the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls final concert

Motivated by nostalgia, but compromised by expedience, I ended up at Borders for lunch. I, Coriander, a fairy tale or novel about a girl in seventeenth century London, looks intriguing, but it was A Field Guide to Getting Lost that really made my pulse quicken. I may have to violate my new book embargo.

Via Arthur Silber, in my head today is Edna St. Vincent Millay's Dirge without Music.

Some links I've been thinking about this week, many of them from feministblogs.org:

Alley Rat: "Yesterday I had the eerie (and familiar) experience of being invisible."

Feministe, photoshopping: "What am I doing? I asked myself. With all of the writing Jill and I have done on beauty culture, here I was editing my photos before I released them to the world. I show the world my real face every day. Why was I so uptight about showing my face to my digital contacts?"

A popular science article this week described a neurological study on perception of vocal gender, indicating that "women's voices are more difficult for men to listen to, and process information from, than the voices of other men," mostly because we process women's voices with the parts of our brains that are concerned with melodies. A striking theory, but, it turns out, not what the study said at all. Here's what it said.

My old nemesis, the New York Times, published a piece on "girl crushes", apparently taking great pains to make clear that that feeling of breathless anticipation you get when you think about your special friend of the same sex isn't gay.

How beauty norms for women constrain male desire, from an atypical man's perspective, and a daughter's.

Ah, The Onion: First-Time Novelist Constantly Asking Wife What It's Like To Be A Woman. "According to Becky, Kitner asked, 'What type of food would a woman try to eat if she were trapped in a walk-in freezer? How about a piece of liver? Would that be it? If I were a woman, I think that would be just perfect. But I don't know. You tell me, Becky.'"

Sheerly Avni picks Ten Hollywood Movies That Get Women Right. I'm always happy when someone else likes Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman, but Fight Club is an odd choice.

How do police know if they should shoot a suspected terrorist in the head? The signs are eerily like autism.

The Pirate vs. The Giant Squid!

Hey, if you live around here and are looking for something to do tomorrow night, two of my favorite musicians are playing a show together. Nick Bartunek and Colin Carthen are at Blue Rock Shoot at 7:30. Both of them have great songs and great voices--you can hear for yourself with a click or two. Download Nick's "The Saddest Film," it's worth keeping. (Colin, when are you gonna make your songs downloadable?)

If, like me, you already have plans tomorrow, you can see Nick tonight at the Gaslighter with a bunch of bands I don't know, and Colin Sunday afternoon at Barefoot, along with The Lost Missouri Letters and Corpus Callosum.

Tonight's discards include:

• Manuals for devices I no longer possess.
• Computer games for antique operating systems.
• Professional journals, including one of my few publications. Good times.
• Notes from past jobs.
• Notes for doomed spare-time projects.
• Notes from professional conferences I went to in the 1990s.

People in my profession sure talk about some boring stuff! But did you guys know I saw Douglas Adams give a speech? Neither did I! My notes from that session say "Douglas Adams".

For the first time in I don't know how long, today I felt like I had time to see a movie and knew of one in current release that I really wanted to see--actually, two. Unfortunately neither Broken Flowers nor Last Days is playing in San Jose, so I just hung out at the cafe for two hours instead. Surprisingly, monkey587 was not there.

Former journalist Robert Novak will be taking some time off from CNN, at the network's request, after his on-air outburst today. The first page of Google News results was a fascinating mix. In order:

• A satire piece.
• 63 articles about Novak's latest public defense for exposing a CIA agent.
• More satire.
• Novak's previous defense.
• One (1) article about the freak-out, from a site called WebIndia123.
• Two articles about how CNN is "standing by" him (before today's incident).
• A partisan "press release" claiming Novak is likely to be indicted for treason.
• The same "standing by" articles, reprinted by different sources.

One of Norah Jones's favorite albums is Mule Variations. This doesn't make me as happy as the Outkast-Kate Bush connection, but it does make me happy.