Right Something Every Day

Okay, I cannot say I actually do that--right something every day. But I do write every day, as long as email and text count as writing (and I say they do so they do). I suppose one would be insufferable if you were in the business of Righting things Every Day. Or maybe one would be a knight or person infused with mission?
But I am a pretty straight (okay, wavy) and narrow kind of person. I like to know what the structure or pattern of something is so I can understand, follow or change it. I do believe there are certain things that are right (dogs) and certain things that aren't (evil, so-called "benign" neglect, many things). Last night I pushed myself to watch the film Blackfish, about orcas in capitivity, particularly the orca Tilikum, who has killed trainers and a trespasser at Sea World and his previous park, Sea Land in Victoria, BC. The film was especially hard to watch. I have loved orcas for many years now and been lucky enough to see them in the wild near the straits of St. Juan de Fuca. Seeing wild orcas was a singular, holy experience for me. It was, as people in the documentary describe it, being in the midst of awe and wonder.
Seeing orcas at Sea World is heartbreaking. Such beauty and intelligence, imprisoned and trotted out to perform. I even saw Tilikum once, b/c the entry fee I paid to visit an artificial reef nature park included a free ticket to Sea World. So Christmas eve in 2011 Tilikum and I were together. He was the largest orca I've ever seen, brought out at the end of the show to amaze guests with his size.
When I lived in Seattle I avidly followed the plight of a stranded orca calf who got lost amidst the fishing boats in the sound and the attempts to bring her to open water. It was an amazing collaboration of people, groups, governments, agencies to save something wild. Blackfish showed the opposite--the horrific act of hunting and capturing orcas in the same waters in the 1970s.  I'm sure some of the same orcas were there for both incidents--capture and release. They must find humans so strange, so misguided.

http://www.change.org/p/seaworld-please-free-tilikum-and-your-other-orcas-to-a-sea-pen-for-rehabilitation

The Auto

Much of my thinking in and about automobiles is indebted to the indeliable and tremendously missed Anne Friedberg. Friedberg spent much of the 1990s and 2000s in her car, traversing greater Los Angeles and like a good Angeleno, used that time for social and professional phone calls, planning, work. Friedberg loved automotive visuality--the windshield itself glimmering like a giant screen. She wrote of drive-in movie theaters and the transport of cinema itself. She was Auto Magic.

At the time, I was on the other end of the phone quite often, working with Anne to run a small cinematheque. Tethered to my land line in my studio apartment I often wished for the freedom of the road that I lacked.

Since those days, I've become a bit of an auto-naut. I like cars with manual transmissions, specifically hatchbacks. I think I saw The Italian Job one too many times. I'd love a Mini-Cooper of my own but I'm stickler for fuel efficiency. A hatchback strikes me as a particular mid-century, modern car dream: modular (my seats move down, up, out if needed) and transformable. It is a Jetsons car. I like that self-sufficiency. I also like to be able to pick up furniture at thrift shop should the need present itself. Now that I live in Michigan, where cars are such an important part of history and the economy, I think about them differently. They are not the dream-machines of freeway living one has nightmares inside of out West. Cars are the things grandfathers built, they are tied to the vast and now abandoned plants that pepper the region. They are smog. Haze. Money. Most of all, cars in Michigan remind me of money--of what cities have it and what don't and where the cars and car companies took them. Still, I am an American after all. I love my car. I crank the stereo up when I drive to campus and relieve that early sequence in The Silence of the Lambs: "Oh yeah, alright, take it easy baby, make it last, make it last all night, She was An American Girl."

In cabinet one...

Over the years I've started and abandoned many a blog. I am always writing, or at least my imagination is such that when I am thinking carefully, cautiously, in my head my thoughts are prose. Of course the cleverest of such prose occurs when I'm unable to capture it and write it down--while at the wheel of my car (Auto) or asleep or in some setting (yoga class) that isn't conducive to putting pen to paper. Like my head, my prose and the subjects of my thoughts are scattered. They are much like a cabinet of curiousities, a wunderkammer or what Joseph Cornell used to call his "boxes." There are scraps of this and that and the other, all mashed together by some tangential connection I cannot quite make apparent but want very much to imply. This blog is an attempt to earnestly record and connect then, my automatic thinking and my wunderkammer through the "magic" of the technological record--that pilfered image or linked story. Here you shall see my treasures. Enjoy the show.