Durga vs. Aoife: a battle for the ages

Monotheism is a bit of a shame. I must admit that I have trouble understanding why we were so keen to trade panoplies of badass gods/goddesses/demi-gods/heroes for just one guy (who doesn't have much of a sense of humor.)

Out of all polytheistic, mythological traditions, my two favorite are the Irish and the Indian mythologies. Why? Well, let me elaborate...

1) Tricksters - Both traditions have friendly tricksters. Krishna, for example, is always stealing milk maids' clothes while they're bathing.

2) Geis - In Irish mythology, if one has a 'geis' or taboo placed on them, they must obey it, no matter what. Breaking the geis could lead to grave misfortune. Cuchulainn, for example, wasn't allowed to eat the flesh of a hound...

3) Blue Skin - Hello? It's awesome. Though the blue skin of certain gods is thought to represent dark skin (ie. not aryan).

3) Gods who 'do it' - And Goddesses who enjoy themselves in the process.

4) Warrior Goddesses - Mary and Mary are nice, I guess, but they're both pretty powerless. In the Irish tradition we've got Aoife, warrior princess, and in Hindu tradition Kali, the human skull wearing, bloody mother Goddess. Irish has Morrigan, Goddess of War and Fertility and her aspects Macha and Babh who like to show up as hooded crows, and Hindu has Durga, who rides a tiger, drinks wine, and slays buffalo demons.

Zucchini a go-go

Sig and I have been completely obsessed with our community garden plot. We quite literally moved 6 tons of dirt to replace the clay with decent soil, built enormous sunk-in boxes, planted, tended, and now we're harvesting and processing. A photo record -

The garden a few months ago, all boxes in, not everything sprouted. Please note the tin-headed scarecrow.
Accidental zucchini the size of my thigh.
Fridge full of enormous zucchini.
Kitten with zucchini and pickles.

Zucchini bread. And, below, freezer with 12 quarts of frozen zucchini. As you can see, zucchini has been our main crop thus far, by volume at least.

Slice

Have you ever noticed how self-injuries (like most self-images I suppose) look completely wonky and out of proportion in your memories?

I just slipped while using one of my wedding-gift Wusthof knives, which we keep sinfully sharp, and managed to slice off a little chunk of my thumb and leave a big ugly flap hanging from my index finger. Now, I know by the amount of blood, and by sheer reason, that this is a fairly limited injury, but in my mind my finger is the size of a cucumber and that cut goes half way through it. Why is this?

I suspect this is a similar phenomenon to anorexic girls who draw themselves fat, or the reasons people imagine their pimples to be enormous and redder than they are. The play Copenhagen, which Sig hates but I love, has a brilliant line about how strange it is that the only person you can never see is yourself.

Case of You

I adore the song 'Case of You' by Joni Mitchell. My goodness does that woman have a good voice. It slides up and down, so delicate but deeply strong, giving this hint of something you can't quite detect behind the face of the music and simultaneously showing you all the way in.

I thought, though it's a little silly, that I would just print the lyrics to Case of You in poem form, for general enjoyment...

Just before our love got lost you said

I am as constant as the northern star.

And I said, 'Constant in the darkness.

Where's that at?

If you want me I'll be in the bar.'

On the back of a carton coaster,

In the blue TV screen light,

I drew a map of Canada, Oh Canada,

With your face sketched on it twice.

I am a lonely painter.

I live in a box of paints.

I'm frightened by the devil,

And drawn to those ones that ain't afraid.

I remember the time you told me,

Love is touching souls.

Well, surely you touch mine, 'cause

Part of you pours out of me

In these lines from time to time.

I met a woman.

She had a mouth like yours.

She knew your life.

She knew your devils and your deeds.

And she said, 'Go to him.

Stay with him if you can.

But be prepared to bleed.'

But you're in my blood like holy wine.

You taste so bitter and so sweet.

I could drink a case of you, darling,

And still be on my feet.

I would still be on my feet.

Sigh

I love the smell of kittens, and their furry little bellies. Ah...

Captain EO

Holy Cow! This Thursday I went to Disneyland with Sig and my little sister Holly (of the photo, incidentally). Sig and I are *very* into Disney - we have season passes, and know most of the lyrics to most of the songs in most of the movies - this in spite of the fact that many of our friends/fellow students view our obsession with confusion and perhaps disdain. Whatever man. I can't let their judgement hold back the love.

We saw a 3-D show in Tomorrowland that apparently originally played from 1986-1996 and is now showing as a tribute to Micheal Jackson. The name - Captain EO.

Those of us who remember the 80s, or who have subsequently watched, say, The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth, know that it was a crazy time, a time of weird talking puppets and men who wear sparkle make-up. But seeing talking puppets and men in sparkle make-up in 2010 in full 3-D in the middle of the day at Disneyland was a bit of a shocker.

To give a little background, Captain EO was actually directed by Francis Ford Coppola and produced by George Lucas (!) and at the time it was the most expensive movie made on a per-minute basis, 30 million dollars for ~ 17 minutes of film. You'd think with the credentials and the expense you'd get something not crazy...right?

The film begins with Captain EO and his ragtag muppet crew. They avoid some nasty space scouts and land their ship on a planet covered in robot-machinery. (Meanwhile the face of their commander keeps popping up on a hologram and scolding them, 'CAPtain eO! You ALways FAIL!) Once landed the crew sets off to find the planet's 'Supreme Leader' (!) and deliver a 'gift'. It takes them about 30 seconds, luckily, to be captured by robot-soldiers and end up in the Supreme Leader's robot-y lair. She's your typical freaky, evil robot-lady with 5 inch claws who descends from the belly of an enormous tentaculed machine to greet her visitors.

Then comes the good part, Jacko informs her that she can't see the gift he has brought, she can only hear it. His crew busts out a bunch of keyboards and synthesizers and as soon as the music starts, Captain EO suddenly has supernatural powers! He shoots these, uh, laser beam things (?) from his hands and starts turning the evil robot army into a scantily clad 80's dance troupe! They all dance, the S.L. sends more bad guys who become more dancers, and finally, after about 5 minutes of this, Micheal Jackson flies into the air and shoots her with his laser hands and she becomes ANJELICA HOUSTON in a FAIRY OUTFIT!!! And the weirdest thing is that she looks exactly the same as she does now.

It Matters if it's Black and White

Lately I've been trying to write a paper about black and white photography and the workings of the human eye, but its not quite coming together right so I thought I'd try the idea out here.

So, the back of the eye is covered in light-detecting cells called rods and cones. Rods are responsible for 'black and white' vision (cones sense colors.)

If you stare at a completely black surface long enough, your rods, which initially send the signal 'this is black' to your brain, will adjust and instead send the signal 'this is middle grey'. The same thing happens with a white surface - your eyes acclimate until the brain treats it like middle grey. This might seem strange, but it's a very useful phenomenon. It's actually the same thing that happens when your eyes adjust to a dark room, or a bright day. If you adjust to the amount of light coming in, you're better able to compare the things around you to each other, no matter how dark or light it is.

There is a way, though, to prevent the eye from treating either a black surface or a white surface as middle grey. If you place black and white side by side, your rods don't adjust. And, in fact, they send stronger 'this is black' and 'this is white' signals than they would without the juxtaposition. There is also a good reason for this - the brain is finely tuned to parse edges. It works hard to make edges salient so that you can tell where one object ends and another begins. As a result, your perceived contrast between a dark surface and a light surface is not just a function of how different the two surfaces naturally are, it involves your brain upping the perceived difference so that you can really pick it out.

(Incidentally, you also do this with color. A red surface and a green surface side by side will look redder and greener than they would individually. Ditto blue and yellow.)

How does this apply to black and white photography? Mmm, so, in intro photo classes, the teacher will make it abundantly, completely clear that when printing your photo you should always make sure that the brightest part of the picture is completely white, and the darkest part is as black as it can go - 'Get your blackest black and your whitest white.' This rule is so ubiquitous that when a professional photographer fails to do so, the choice usually makes a statement in itself. Photos without a high contrast don't quite...draw the eye. They don't look very snappy, they don't give you that excited-beautiful picture look.

Low contrast compared to...

High contrast -

My idea is that these phenomena are related - the reason black and white photographs look best with a high contrast is that black and white in juxtaposition look blacker and whiter than they do on their own. But there are a few problems: 1) even photographs printed in middle gray are 'fixed' by the brain so the edges look more salient 2) this idea doesn't explain why high-contrast photos are more appealing, just why they look so durn contrast-y.

Thoughts? Anyone?