| Thursday, May 25, 2006 |
 | I have to quote this at some length, because it's just so totally insane. via Monkeyfilter:
One Saturday night, Karyn recalled, "we were supposed to go to a movie. He walked out in his scrubs." Instead of taking Karyn to the theater, Frist brought her to the operating room. "To see the human body alive -- without a heart in it."
As Karyn spoke, Frist came down the stairs. "This is really who you are," she said, looking up at him. She first met Frist in the emergency room, where he treated her for a sprained wrist. "I fell in love with him in his scrub suit, with blood splattered on his clogs. I see him doing that, almost more than as a politician."
Frist, at heart, is a doctor. At 5:45 a.m., before a recent Senate workday, he prepared for a quirky slice of surgery. During congressional breaks, Frist, 54, has been known to fly to Africa to operate. But in Washington, he has quietly cultivated another practice: gorillas at the National Zoo.
Bill Frist. Senate Majority leader. Gorilla heart doctor. This would seem more heroic if we a) did not already know that Bill Frist is a deeply disturbing man, b) did not have a sneaking and entirely correct suspicion that the ghoulish delights of the come-see-a-man-without-a-heart date were just the beginning and c) did not feel that Frist, who would apparently like to discover a cure for cancer or AIDS, really ought to stop larking around trying to forcefeed comatose women and get on with it.
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| Monday, May 22, 2006 |
| It might have been better for all concerned if the United Kingdom had entered the Cybermen as their Eurovision challengers, and the Doctor had found himself atop a zepellin battling Lordi . Actually, I've rather fallen for Lordi, much against my better judgement. He is, apparently, frightened by horses, so big are they. He also looks uncannily like Roy Wood.
Having said, which, I fear the brightest star in Europe, Silvia Night, was cruelly denied a place in the finals as a result of nakedly political voting. In the circumstances, it's hardly surprising that she got a little bit upset. (NSFW).
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| Monday, May 08, 2006 |
| One element of the emotional bag of party favours I took from The Sultan's Elephant was a desire to devastate London with running battles between wood and steel war-automata. However, the trucks running behind the puppets seemed a noisy and inefficient way to wage war, although perfectly suitable for spectacle. Then it hit me. Dirigibles. Wooden warriors animated by fleets of dirigibles, tethered by steel strings. A mechanic might ask why one would not simply arm the dirigibles. That is why I am an evil genius. The dirigibles' movements would be controlled, it pretty much goes without saying, by mahogany computers. Yes, damn you! Mahogany. An endangered Amazonian hardwood. Running Windows XP. I'm evil.
First contact was with the (hopefully sustainably harvested) wooden spacecraft crashed into Waterloo Place, on Friday evening. It looked gloriously Jules Vernish, if somehow a little fake. I know, it's a crashed rocketship made of wood - verisimilitude is not exactly hydrogen.
In fact, it reminded me specifically of la Nona Hora - I think it's the artifice of the broken pavement. The impact of art on floor.
Returning on Saturday morning, I passed the Elephant and the Girl, sleeping in front of the National Gallery. Perhaps because of the centrality of the location, the crowds were growing as well, and the artefacts themselves were fenced off - too many moving parts, I imagine. There's a limit to how much you can mess up an enormous wooden kinder egg. Unmoving, and cradled by the scorpion arches of their puppeteer machines, they looked parasitised as much as asleep. Even inanimate, though, the backdrop of the National Gallery gave an impression of their size.
I say passed. Of course, what I mean is "painstakingly negotiated a route planned on the fly at Archway station". Apparently, according to the free paper passed out to commemorate the event (an odd mix of discussions of civic art and really dodgy orientalism, best avoided or ignored), this event had been in the works since 2001. As such, it was particularly masterful of the Tube to cancel half the services running through the centre of London during the largest live theatre event, apparently, in history.
And then Who, beer and DooM, which is still upsetting and inspiring me. On Sunday, predictably, the communication lines were even more disrupted than before. Nonetheless, impressive numbers had made it out - Horse Guards parade was thronged, but empty save the rocket, so over to St. James' Park, to find the Little Girl playing, surrounded by people, balancing children on her arms, manipulated by half a dozen liveried artists. How do you get that job? Each what-next was answered - she danced, smiled, blinked, then held and licked a shovel-sized lollipop with a startling, segmented tongue. As she walked off towards her ship, we headed over for the Mall, looking for the main event. We found , and their respective and respected partners and progeny. And then the elephant heading on to the Mall in what has be one of the great fuck me moments of street theatre. Forty feet high, vast legs rising and falling, with a float behind playing electric guitar and bagpipes (I know, but it worked). From the house build into its side emerged dancing girls, a eunuch, various dignitaries, the reporter (glorious in deerstalker, tweed sports coat and tartan breeches - in essence, the whole thing felt like a David Bowie concert from around the period of Lodger, as it might have been perceived from the inside of David Bowie's head.
The finale was perhaps inevitably underwhelming, after the sheer joyful impossibility of a crowd following alongside a giant robot elephant. A gigantic conjuring trick is still a conjuring trick. But the swelling, thundering build, and the sense of excitement in the crowd, was perhaps the real trick. Big love for the crowd, incidentally - in a crush of thousands, there was, at least around me, scarcely a jostle or a cross word - people pushed buggies, carried tinies on their backs, and everyone got on famously. The only cross words came from a middle-aged and rather rude French woman who complained that I was blocking her view, and that she had been waiting for half an hour. Given that I had only just arrived and was getting a better view of the elephant, that did seem a bit unfair. Quite funny, though.
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| Wednesday, May 03, 2006 |
| I rather like the idea that the melody for the Star-Spangled Banner was half-inched from a drinking song. It might explain a lot, Colbert among it. Good to see Momus getting an early namecheck as well - the man clearly is the glue that has held indie together since the age of reason.
Elsewhere, Emma for her own reasons pointed me to Monster Factory. I like very much that they have put up sketches of about eight million monsters, but do not expect to get the store up and running any time soon. this is precisely the kind of approach the Internet needs.
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