radio free europe

this is sconser hanging out in one of her fave spots, on the speaker by the window. isn't she gorgeous? i took this photo with my new digital camera, an amazing birthday gift from the divine ms. m. now i can take photos for this here blog. (dunno why there's that white frame around her. obviously i still have a lot to learn about this picture stuff.)

despite being strangely uninterested in my birthday this year, i managed to have fun and receive fabulous presents. had a fantastic greek dinner on friday night at a place in the farmers market called ulysses voyage, with ms. m and her man, 00soul, and coiledsoul. we drank delicious greek red wine and ate enormous amounts of amazing food, including the flaming cheese! the place had live musicians, and they played "happy birthday" when our dessert arrived with a candle on top. i finished off the meal with a vat of 10-year-old port, and then we all went to the grove to see pirates 3. it was a lot of silly fun, but a bit assaultive and overlong and needlessly complicated at times. oh, well. i never get tired of seeing the british navy get its ass kicked, to say nothing of watching johnny depp mince about.

saturday was party day. in the afternoon we trundled to silver lake for a crawfish boil at the home of a fellow gemini, celebrating his birthday too. the math was askew -- too many people, not enough crustaceans, so we eventually decamped to the divine ms. m's place for ribs from edendale. i heard r.e.m.'s ironically nonsensical "radio free europe" twice in the course of a few hours, as it was played at the party and also turned up on ms. m's ipod while we feasted. this seemed meaningful later, when 00soul and i headed to the "pravda" event at walt disney concert hall, which i reviewed for the l.a. times. it was djs like spooky and cut chemist and such cutting some shostakovich, prokofiev, and other russian composers into their funky, dancy, trancy thing. the evening, which started at 10 in the philharmonic's big treehouse downtown, was part of the "shadow of stalin" series examining how art survived and responded in this time of tyranny. come to think of it, this experience was also complex, assaultive, and overlong. but it did make me think, in that viscera-level way multimedia presentations do. which takes a while for the brain to catch up to. the connections between sound and image and thought were abstract but began to coalesce in my mind.

"pravda" means "the truth" in russian (ironically or something, the former organ of the communist party is now a tawdry tabloid). and there was something to be said about truth and totalitarianism in the now, in light of the democrats caving to bush on troop-withdrawal deadlines, basically b/c the administration's propaganda machine is poised to bury them in the sort of BS it's already been burping out: that the troops will go wanting for supplies b/c bush has already said he will veto any war-funding bill that has a deadline, and therefore the democrats will be hurting the troops by trying to force a set time to get them out of the place where they're being killed. ergo, the democrats don't support the troops!

note to democrats: those are words, people. desperate words, and the time is right to expose just how desperate this administration is to keep the world oriented toward its version of the truth. the democrats have to move to end this war, even if they can't actually do it. no matter what childish games the president plays. anything less than total opposition is complicity. (but the more i think about it, the more i believe they are all in on it. if you play the game, you get to keep whatever place at the table you've got. if you buck the system, you're not the loyal opposition but a little grease stain on the table.) a lot of democrats voted for the war, and, although a case can be made for them being deceived, they basically didn't have the guts to stand against bush back when he was so damn popular. and now he isn't popular at all, and they're still afraid that rove's mojo will somehow get them blamed for this whole mess, rather than bush. even though people already do blame bush! and so, paralyzed by fear, they have now made themselves chumps. again.

urf. this makes no fucking sense at all. just like "radio free europe." i mean, "deal the porch is leading us absurd," indeed.