Almostgotit.com

Night time temperatures are dipping again this week, but Jerry the Rhodesian Fridgesnack has great pyjamas…

Interesting comment submitted today from someone who, by all appearances, does appear to be my neighbor David Perkins:

Hello Fans, So nice of you to appreciate my creativity and potential. Lots of types of trees on the place, I like to juggle, play bamboo flute, sit and watch the sunrise and read my mail, feed the birds. If you may be interested in becoming my wife, I invite you to be in contact.
(Comment on Almostgot.com post, “Dave’s Klezmer Band & Sperm Bank” )

I’m already married though, but thanks Dave. 

On another note, today’s News-Sentinel reports that Knoxville’s MPC has granted David Perkins’ permission to give music lessons at his home; however, Perkins’ additional request to run a Jewish sperm bank at home, through which he “offers his seed,” has been denied. 

So sorry to hear, Dave.

I’m also sorry to have missed Perkins’  pitch to the Metropolitan Planning Commission — apparently Perkins delivered it as a performance, running through the presentation at an auctioneer’s pace in an exaggerated announcer’s voice.

I wonder if David Perkins can tell what kind of voice Almostgotit is using right now?

Red Cross in Haiti (2008)

Want to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti?  Relief organizations need your help, but want donors to know that some kinds of help are definitely better than others.

InterAction, a coalition of U.S.-based international non-governmental organizations (including the Center for International Disaster Information)gives these tips:

• Cash donations are widely recognized as the most efficient and effective means of relief in the established international disaster response community.

• While they may be well-intentioned, clothing, canned goods, and other in-kind donations are *not* the  preferred choice for humanitarian contributions to Haiti.  Consider reserving these kinds of donations for needs in your local community.

• Donate wisely!  Make sure your money goes to a credible responding agency for international emergencies.  InterAction is regularly updating this list of  member agencies who are responding to the earthquake.  For more information about how to choose a legitimate charity, visit www.give.org.

“Hello!  Dave’s Klezmer Band and Sperm Bank.  Can I help you?”

That’s exactly how I plan to answer the phone just as soon as my Knoxville neighbor, David Perkins,  hires me as receptionist  for his unique new set of business ventures. 

While Mr. Perkins insists he will not be using his suburban house as a performance venue, and that the massive thing behind him with benches is simply a PLANTER, his Myspace page describes “Dave’s Place” as

A lovely home setting with performance spaces both indoors and outdoors. Theater seating around the grounds for up to 300 guests viewing four separate shows. Beautiful views and ample space to stroll..

Plus, of course, he’ll have the Jewish sperm bank, so hundreds of lucky people can, um, watch the shows and enjoy the views, or even have kids who look  just like Dave!

What more can I say?

You can’t make up stuff as good as this.  So I guess I’ll simply close  with a few of Dave’s own happy images, accompaned by his Klezmer music.

Non-starters in this week’s news:

• Why was it wrong for Harry Reid to say that Obama’s light skin and standard American dialect helped him win the presidency? The fact is, our country wouldn’t have elected a man who looked or sounded too black because our country never elects presidents who look or sound too anything, much less anything that is also TOO NEW.  (For the record: I voted for Obama.)

• Nor do I understand what’s so shocking about Sarah Palin’s saying she believed that running for vice president had been God’s will. Is there anyone alive who has not yet heard that Sarah Palin believes in God?  So wouldn’t it be more interesting to find out that she’d accepted a nomination she believed was AGAINST God’s will? (For the record: I did *not* vote for Sarah Palin.)

• And now, Avatar the movie, one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen recently, is coming under fire, and from weirdly opposite directions. However, anything so wildly popular is going to be criticized, if only to help journalists pay the rent. (For the record: no one is paying me a cent.)

First criticism: Avatar as anti-military.  The narrator TELLS us at the beginning that “this was not the military: these were hired guns.”  It’s IN THE SCRIPT, people: this is not an anti-military movie, it’s an anti-corrupt-mercenary movie.

And let’s not forget that the Na’vi natives are just as vicious with their knives, arrows and Large Strong Animals as the humans are with their machinery… vicious enough that the Pandorans actually BEAT the humans, after all. And did any of us hate those battle scenes? I rest my case.

Then there’s the “Avatar as anti-American”  critique. What interests me most about that one is the way these critics would have us all define “American.”

If “American” equals “Unrelentingly murderous, sadistic capitalists,” then I’ve understood these critics correctly, but few will  agree with them.   The rogue Jake Sully is the American hero we identify with, not his employers. I would venture to say that most Americans, conservatives especially, believe that America is the land of the free.  We LOVE that about ourselves, and when we go to war, the reason most conservative Americans will give – and the principal that most Americans in general are particularly passionate about– is the preservation of freedom and democracy. 

Not that Americans are always very good at preserving freedom and democracy when they go to war, but it would be wrong to conclude therefore that the entire country is sadistic enough to make the destruction of freedom and democracy its central purpose. 

So if the conservative critics are wrong, how about the liberal critics?  Is this movie racist?   True: the hero is white, and most of the Na’vi are played by (and resemble) people of color. However, I can’t remember if the other humans in the movie were predominantly white or not, though the American military (my strongest model, as I too am American ) is extremely diverse — in fact, it is one of the most racially diverse populations in the world. Therefore, I don’t remember the human invaders in Avatar as “white” but  as “human.” But is even a human vs. Na’vi contest race-neutral enough, given that it took a member of the advanced, imperialist human race to save the naive, native Pandoran one?   But were the Pandorans really so naive,  were the humans really so advanced, and did Jake Sully really represent “A White Messiah?” 

Perhaps it would have been more graceful if Jake Sully had been played by a black actor. I am willing to concede that point: I didn’t pay much attention to Jake Sully’s race, but that alone may be telling. Perhaps we all could use some fresher imagery.

What I did notice was that a 6 foot tall familiarly-colored person fell in love with a 10 foot tall bright blue person, and that seemed pretty multi-cultural to me.  

I also watched Jake Sully roll around helplessly on the ground, leaving his Na’vi wife and Pandora’s native deity to make  the decisive moves in the final battle. Which, as I’ve pointed out, they win.  If Avatar is indeed racist, it seems to be the human race that takes the hardest knocks in this movie.

No matter what some critics are saying, people of all political stripes are flooding the theatres in record numbers to see Avatar.  The real question about the movie, therefore,  is what makes it so much fun to watch?

Some people play faster than others, even when you put them in charge of moving Jesus’ picture around while the rest of us are Making Stuff.

That’s why we had two projects on our weekend retreat: story boxes, and tchotchke Christmas wreaths.  That’s mine, at the top, a sort of “Where’s Waldo” deal except I called it “When Pigs Fly” instead.

There aren’t any rules for making these, really.  Which is good, because hardly any of us on the retreat are good at following the rules, anyway.

First, we found the cheapest wreath forms possible.  Which you might think were the styrofoam ones, eh, except that you would be WRONG.  The wire forms were cheapest.  So some of us padded them out with newspaper and masking tape, then wrapped fabric or ribbon around the newspaper before gluing on our junk drawer and dollar store tchotchkes.

ML made this one.  She’s a professional ARTIST, it should be noted.   So please note her particularly artful use of a meat thermometer.

ML is the one who came up with the whole tchotchke concept.  She  originally suggested covering a wreath with identifiable objects and then spray-painting the entire thing (cream or white, which she felt were more updated than the gold she’d used in previous years. )

The problem was, these were so silly and wonderful after we put them together that we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to paint them.  Maybe when I pull mine out again next year, I’ll do that…

T-of-the-tiny-gold-boxes took another approach altogether.  After wrapping fabric all around the wire around the outside edge of her wreath, she pasted paper fans to the middle, topping them off with little star and butterfly trim doo-dads.  We called this one “Fan Dance,”  which also happened to be the name of one of her daughter’s ensemble performances.

After all of this whacky creativity performed somewhat under the influence of alcohol (to calm the inner critics, of course), I’ve been in withdrawal ever since, in more than one respects.

On our holiday retreat, some of the women decorated boxes.  I brought along some plain paper mache boxes and some other gift boxes I’d saved.  

One friend decorated three tiny boxes with gold spray paint and things that reminded her of each of her three daughters. 

Another found a gift box with a celophane window and covered it inside out with upholstery samples she’d brought along.  She’s VERY clever that way.

Truevyne took her box apart and made a shadow box out of the bottom of it, which she called “Lipstick sexy icecream”  (correct me if I’ve got it wrong, True)

Truevyne turned the lid of her box into this nifty mini-bulletin board.  An old ear ring makes a terrifically decorative thumb tack.

Sadly, the high school math teacher’s amazing black story box was not complete at press time! 

Next: our tchotke Christmas wreaths!em>

photo from The Snail’s Pace

Last weekend, four friends and I headed for the hills. With a corkscrew. 

We had a little North Carolina mountain farmhouse all to ourselves, each of us with her own upstairs bedroom tucked under the eaves.  

We had a living room with a fire already laid for us in the wood stove, a kitchen, but we didn’t do any cooking.  The kitchen was for coffee in the morning and later, for the cookies everyone brought plus a pot of spiced cider that simmered all day.

There was a dining room too, but we quickly turned it into our play room instead.

We spent the next two days Making Stuff, drinking margaritas in front of our wood stove, and tromping off at regular intervals to get our meals, prepared by *somebody else.*

Heavenly!

As we made things, we hung them up on the wall.  That meant moving Jesus’ portrait around a little, but we figured he wouldn’t mind.  In fact, he’s probably lucky not to have ended up pasted to somebody’s project.

It is always fun to see how creative my friends are.  Next,  I’ll post some close-ups of what we made …

Christmas came early for the Almostgotit family this year!

Our best present was having our daughter survive, and relatively unscathed, being hit by a car as she was getting off a school bus a few weeks ago.

The second best was attending yesterday’s news conference, in which Knoxville police department chief Sterling Owen outlined a new enforcement patrol that will target motorists who fail to stop for school buses.

One of our new friends who is a fab reporter (Hi, Wendy!) emailed me later to ask what we had done to get that sort of attention from the KPD. I had to respond that I didn’t exactly know, but that I certainly couldn’t take all of the credit. It seems like it was a sort of “perfect storm” – Knoxville’s Safe Kids Coalition HAD already been talking this fall to the KPD and others about school bus safety. The problem of drivers ignoring school busses truly seems to have gotten worse, recently, too, as it is my understanding that other parents have been complaining about it too.

Also, the kid who got hit happened to survive to talk about it, thank God.  She also happened to be one who lived in a politically-savvy and educationally-empowered community containing such people as my writer-friend Jenny (Hi, Jenny!) who joined me in writing letters and contacting the mayor, members of city council, school prinicipals and the like. I wrote a letter to the local paper as well, which caught the attention of a local television station (which screened a nice interview with us) as well as the interest of the Safe Kids Coalition, who also contacted us (Hi, Susan!).

I am newly impressed by the power of persistence as well as the power of the pen. I used to believe more in those things than I do now, so it was a good re-affirmation in my old(er) age. All those things we tell our kids but secretly lose faith in ourselves?  Turns out they may be true:  Speak up! Keep trying! Go to the top!

And stay in school & read a lot of books so you’ll know how to write a compelling letter when you REALLY need to!

Snowman & photo by Almostgotit’s daughter