Antisocial Media

Just a few late-nite links in between folding the laundry and cooking a late, local, stir-fried-veggie dinner in case Sarah's hungry when she gets home from bartending at a wedding in Sonoma. Mouthful of a sentence! What happened is that I double-booked myself with catering jobs today, so Sarah, bless her, took the bartending-wedding job, while I worked at a Bat Mitzvah over in Walnut Creek. !!! Super Awesome Spherical-Tree-House Company in BC will build you your very own spherical treehouse. Just you wait until we have disposable income again... How sweet would this be in a backyard? !!! Gerhard Richter, one of my fave artists, just finished a stained-glass window commission for the Super-Cathedral in Cologne, Germany (going with the Francophile spelling since I don't know how to do umlauts in Blogger). Click the link for high-res, high-rad photo of said window. And don't worry, there's nothing wrong with your computer; it's supposed to look like that....

Here's a bunch of stuff I thought was interesting enough to email to myself at various times over the summer: ***Sidney Blumenthal declares the current Republican paradigm to be kitsch , ersatz, however you want to Allemagnize it. I tend to agree. (holy moley, this one's almost a year old--where have I been? At any rate, here's two core paragraphs: "Kitsch is imitative, cheap, sentimental, mawkish and incoherent, and derives its appeal by demeaning and degrading genuine standards and values, especially those of modernity. While the proponents of the faux retro style claim to uphold tradition, they are inherently reactive and parasitic, their words and products a tawdry patchwork, hastily assembled as declarations against authentic complexity and ambiguity, which they stigmatize as threats to the sanctity of an imaginary harmonious order of the past that they insist they and their works represent. Kitsch presumes to be based on old rules, but constantly traduces the...

If anyone knows how to un-sideways a photo uploaded onto blogger, I'm open to suggestions.

jiggety-jig. Whew. So that's it for the crazy summer travels (at least, the planned-out ones). Sarah and I got home a few hours ago. We woke up this morning at 3 am (pacific time), so I'm gonna try to keep this one short and sweet. 1: Paul and Ali's wedding was amazing. Expect more post in the coming days. Long story short, they are now married and honeymooning up in Door County; a good time was had by all; I did a better-than-adequate job officiating my first wedding, and I mailed the wedding certificate on time. 2: On Sunday, the day after the wedding, we drove up to Rochester, MN, as a family to visit my mother's mother, the venerable Grandma Karlson. We rushed up to see her because on Monday (yesterday) she had a long day in the hospital, with blood tests and biopsies to determine if growths recently found during a CAT scan are cancer; if so, what type; and then, what treatment (or non-treatment) action to take. Grandma had asked me to perform her Memorial...