Archive Page 2
As Promised: A Taste of Tupelo
As promised, here are some pictures from The Summit, a “boutique” hotel in Tupelo, Mississippi. There was an annual furniture mart in town which resulted in full-bookings at the more bland and predictable establishments such as the Holiday Inn Express. Anyway, we only stayed here for one quick night before driving into Little Rock. In Little Rock, we stayed at the Crown Plaza, which may have had the most comfortable beds and bedding I’ve ever encountered in a hotel. Keegan asked if he could please bring his bed home; regretfully, this was not a possibility, but I did bring home a couple of bottles of the complimentary lavender linen spray.
The red bathtub in Tupelo:
Notice this isn’t a jacuzzi of any sort, just a big old tub.
…just in case you want to watch tub activities from the bed there is a wall of glass. There is also a mirrored wall across from the bed, which I neglected to immortalize digitally.
Yes, that is a very large dining room table. Don’t you love the chandeliers? The bathroom in this room was also gigantic, but it had a plain white tub. I took the below photo while standing behind the “bar,” which did indeed have a sink, fridge, bar-top and stools, though it was about as modern as the red tub.
There was an abundance of not so great Elvis themed paintings.
Filed under: traveling | 2 Comments
As promised, Rocksploitation put on a rocking show at Limerick Junction last night. The occassion was a CD Release Party for Rocksploitation’s self-titled debut album. We only stayed for the first set, but it was a great show as usual. Stephanie rocks the drums. I sometimes can’t get over Adam’s voice. And Eric tears up the bass. And I abuse active verbs.
This 16 song compact disc brings the trio’s stripped down sound to your living room, where you can enjoy their take on the most easily imitated aspects of 1950’s rock and roll, Merseybeat, and garage rock in comfort and (depending on your living room) style. What’s more, it’s all done in just over 30 minutes, because Rocksploitation is the only rock and roll group that respects your busy lifestyle. All the other bands are just narcissists who only care about themselves, so don’t give them your money. The exceptions to this rule are of course, anyone we’ve played with, who’s helped us, or is thinking of helping us.
The band-mates of Rocksploitation are awesome folks and good friends of mine. That said, many people suck. College started a couple of weeks ago, and because of this fact there was an elevated level of douche-baggery going on among the population infiltrating the VA Highlands on this holiday Sunday. Before we even made it to the VA Highlands, we tried to stop for dinner at a restaurant in Emory Village, but then got back in our car and fled in horror.
We then stopped for dinner at Diesel. Our appetizer and my salad were tasty, and at first I wondered what was wrong with the Creative Loafing guy that gave such a salty and downright nasty review of Diesel’s food. However, our main dishes were truly sub-par. I can’t even go into all of it. But my Green Tomato Burger with a black bean pattie had neither a big juicy piece of fried green tomato, nor the spicy horseradish promised on the menu; the black bean pattie was not legally a pattie, but sort of slop. The black bean slop was tasty, but I’d wanted a burger, and particularly a slice of fried green tomato with some spicy horseradish on it. There were many other variations of burger I could have ordered if I did not want these two things. They didn’t even have Matt’s entree and just served him something else, which was quite ridiculous. If you’re going to be a bar with some food, then do that and simplify your menu so you can actually rise to the occassion. If you’re going to be a restaruant, then, well, I don’t know what you should do, but something. Now we know.
We saw some good friends at Limerick and listened to great music. But the crowds grew, and then it was time to go. It was time to go when I started wishing I had a fire extinguisher to spray people. Before we left I apologized to the woman sitting next to me at the bar for our departure. I’d been prepared to pretend I was her long lost friend, should any of the numerous bozos hassling her cross the line.
Coming Soon: Chronicles of my vacation to Arkansas and Louisiana, including, but not limited to, an unfortunate Elvis themed “boutique” hotel in Tupelo. I took pictures.
Filed under: Atlanta, music | 1 Comment
What Happens When We Actually Follow Through With The Mode of Reasoning We So Ignorantly Propose
There’s a nice satirical rebuttal to that absurd proposed regulation I wrote about earlier. I find it quite brilliant.
Filed under: musing | 0 Comments
An MTV interview leads Stephanie to finally spill the spicy beans on her rock star husband’s secret Harry Potter band: Gred and Forge. I am so elated for Stephanie and Jarrod. I can’t believe what good secret keepers they are. It sounds like the Chicago/Terminus trip was completely awesome. And the music is GOOD.
Filed under: music, reading | 0 Comments
James Joyce Irish Pub
Well, we can say we did it. Last night we went to the James Joyce Irish Pub. We went because we felt we needed to complete our mission of having visited every Irish bar in town. We can all agree that Atlanta is not the most happening place for such a mission, which can explain our perpetual disappointment with many such establishments.
First of all, the place is not a pub. It’s more like a Fridays. There were a good number of kids there when we arrived: the tail end of the dinner crowd. We waited for the four-year-old boys perching on bar stools and playing with the video trivia machine to fall on their heads; we certainly didn’t want this to happen, but it really did look inevitable. Alas, it didn’t happen and all youth left unscathed. The place did have a bar and booze, but it was all too new and clean and full of Irish themed schlock to pass itself off as a true pub. We felt like we were in the burbs. It felt like the high school hangout, but then I reasoned that the kids at the end of the bar possibly were twenty-one, and then I felt old.
As a couple, we always attract the crazies. Strangers always approach us to talk about something or other, or we will walk into the middle of some poor girl being harrassed by a drunken old dude. Last night, we met Holly. I saw Holly when we first came in; she was drinking a gin and tonic. Later, Holly found us at the bar and introduced herself. She was not in possession of all her faculties. We had to talk to her for a very long time. She insisted, many many times, Matt looked like Giovanni Ribisi, which I don’t think is true. Anyway, she was all over us, perching on the backs of our stools, asking the same questions over and over….then telling me how good-looking my guy is and how I did good. I have heard this more than once from drunk women in bars. I nod. She rambled over to me later to tell me I was so cute! It could have become a bad situation if it had escalated beyond the point where she gave me, and then Matt, a freaking kiss on the cheek. I thought Matt might lose it, but he restrained himself from communicating any obvious disgust to the booze-addled Holly. A man said to us between interactions, she’s been giving everyone the creeps all night.
We won’t be going back. Not becuase of Holly, but because the pub was not really a pub; there wasn’t any good vibe going on. On a revelatory note, the place turned out to be next to Skips, the hot dog place, and I had been wondering Where in the hell is that Skips hot dog place people talk about? Mystery solved. Not that I eat hot dogs, but I’m not that familiar with the whole Avondale Estates area. We’ll be sticking to our regular haunts, especially Limerick Junction. Since The Angel closed, we are eagerly awaiting the opening of The Grange Public House.
Filed under: Atlanta, doing | 0 Comments
Initially, I was turned off by Gregory Maguire’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister because of its appearance. Everything about it’s design—the image on the die-cut cover, the thickness of the pages, the large size of the font, the illustrated decals in the corners of the pages, the illustrated page opening each chapter—makes it look like a children’s chapter book, like something a fifth-grade girl would hold precious.
However, it is only one of two Adult Fiction Cinderella adaptations I have on my list to read; the rest of the books are YA. After immersing myself in YA for the past few days, I wanted to dive into Maguire’s book to see if I could see any glaring differences between the two genres, especially given the books are working with similar characters, tales, and tropes. Maguire, having authored several books for adults and children, seems to have found his niche.
Althought the font is pretty huge, Confessions comes in at 368 pages. It took a few chapters to get into, but after that it became quite fun. I’ve thought about what makes this story fun. There’s certainly comparable treachery and poverty to what is in Bound, which I wrote about before. But even being YA, Bound was a serious historical novel. Confessions is a historical novel set in seventeenth-century Holland, but serious it is not. It’s campy. That’s the best word I can think of—campy. Once I settled into the campiness of the story—the characters, the scenes, the dialogue—it was a nice ride. What it reminds me of, really, is the most campy of all day-time soaps: Passions. Remember the town witch, Tabitha, and her dwarf doll-boy? I suppose if you like yourself some Passions, you might like some Gregory Maguire.
Filed under: book review | 0 Comments
Bound
I just finished Donna Jo Napoli’s YA spin on Cinderella: Bound. I’d recommend Bound to any YA reader. In addition to simply being a good story with interesting characters, Bound could be used in the classroom to discuss adaptations and the recurrence of tales across cultures and times. My only criticism is that the ending unravels very quickly; perhaps I just wanted more. Bound is listed as a Kirkus Reviews Editor’s Choice and a Booklist Top 10 Historical Fiction for Youth.
Set in a cave in ancient China, Xing Xing is subservient to Stepmother and Wei Ping, her step-sister with bound feet. Xing Xing is good at poetry and calligraphy, and she’s a dreamer. Guided by the spirits of her dead mother and father, Xing Xing works to escape the consequences of Stepmother’s greed. Napoli works with classic motifs of the older Cinderella stories, including reincarnation of human spirit into an animal and the power of the animal’s bones to help the one in need. Xing Xing is exceptionally clever and resourceful, as well as compassionate.
Filed under: book review | 0 Comments
NaNoWriMo
Is anyone a veteran of NaNoWriMo? I’ve been resistant to the idea for some reason…..oh yeah, grad school and mommy-hood, those reasons. However, I feel pretty grounded now when it comes to working and writing. I have a spiffy new office on the bottom floor of my place; my office used to be upstairs. I hadn’t estimated what a positive change moving the office downstairs would be. Now, I can’t imagine how I ever worked upstairs—right now I’m sitting next to a ten foot by five foot panoramic window. I kid you not.
My primary work-related goal for the rest of the year is to complete my MFA degree. Comprehensive exams are the last two weekends in October. I’ve submitted my novel to my advisor, but I’m unsure of how much revision will have to go into that manuscript. Hopefully, that won’t be that big of a deal. So, October. I’m teaching the mini-mester, which also ends in October. All of this everything-culminating-in-October business got me thinking about NaNoWriMo, which is in November. Besides revising the MFA thesis, completing a directed reading, and continuing to work for the magazines I work for, I don’t have much else work-stuff going on until I graduate in December. Wait, that somehow doesn’t sound like not much else all of the sudden. I felt very optimistic about it last night. Eh. I will plan on it. I’m telling myself I can do anything for a month. And it would be awesome to have two completed manuscripts in hand, even if one is a rough draft, by the time I graduate.
I’ve been researching modern adaptations of the Cinderella tale for my directed reading. I’ve also been reading a lot of Joyce Carol Oates, as well as a huge chunk of short fiction in preparation for exams. I keep coming back to the ideas of Gothic romance and horror. I’ve become slightly obsessed with Nantucket, or more so the idea of a small New England island with lots of empty big houses in the off-season, old history, isolation, the water, the fog and cold. I think I’ll let all these ideas brew for NaNoWriMo…perhaps a modern spin on the Cinderella tale and the Gothic. I’ll go with a young male protagonist Byronic hero. A haunted house estate. A devious woman femme fatale, a love interest damsel in distress, a villain. A mystery hereditary curse.
Filed under: writing | 1 Comment
Top Ten Graphic Novels
From Guardian Books, Top Ten Graphic Novels by Danny Fingeroth. What are Fingeroth’s criteria?
“Here are my subjectively chosen top 10 graphic novels. But why these? The very nature of a guide is premised on the idea that, a) here are the things that someone with a reasonable amount of experience reading and thinking about comics feels are the coolest things out there, and b) here are some things that, like them or not, the author of said guide thinks are essential for anyone conversant in the medium to be familiar with.
“But for my top 10, I decided to take the crème de la crème, the graphic novels that I most enjoyed. These are graphic novels, some famous, some less well-known, that do what all great literature does, in that they give you such a pleasurable experience while reading that you’re simultaneously eager to uncover the ending, yet also dreading it, knowing that the experience will then be over.”
I like this list. If anyone would like to buy or send me any of these top tens, I will try not to object. It will be hard on my psyche to not reject such overly-lavish and fantasitic gifts, but by the grace of god I will work to do it. Test me.
Filed under: reading | 1 Comment
Oh, Bush Administration! You are so prolific in your exhibitions of idiocy…I am humbled.
I can’t believe what I just read over at The Wall Street Journal: Treating the Pill as Abortion. Yeah, right. And everyone knows that forcing insurance companies to not pay for birth control pills would be an awesome step forward for humanity and women’s health. That would be totally cool with everyone, and fair, especially taking into account the fact that older bc pills are cheap as dirt and who knows how much insurance companies shell out for Viagra and other men’s ED drugs. Oh! And it would make so much sense, economically, for an insurance company to refuse to pay for birth control and then, in turn, have to pay for…more pregnancies! And more babies! (Shhh, we all know there’d be more real abortions, too. But let’s be ignorant and pretend that’s not true.) Here’s a bit:
Dozens of Congressional Democrats — including presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama — have signed letters of protest blistering the proposal. His Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, declined to comment. Administration supporters say the left’s concerns are overblown and very few women would have real difficulty getting birth control. Still, some on the religious right are hoping the regulation would create some obstacles. If the draft regulation were to prompt some insurance companies to drop coverage for prescription birth control, “that would be fantastic,” said Tom McClusky, a strategist with the conservative Family Research Council.
Tom McClusky, you are the rare entity who makes me wish for a true hell in which for you to go burn. ASAP. I also have a slight suspicion that our government might have better things to do than, oh, I don’t know, messing with things that aren’t broken and making life harder for its citizens. I’m just one person, but it seems like there might be other things on the agenda.
Filed under: what's new | 0 Comments
