In Which I Am It.

Tagged by Ike:

A book that changed my life (besides the Bible):
Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller was definitely the right book at the right time for me. Though I can't credit it alone for the change, it prepared me for an episode of major transition in my life -- the kind of transition that starts inside and works its way outward.

A book I’ve read more than once:
Oh, there are so many. Some books are just that good, others have more to offer as you grow, and then there are the ones I revisit because they're sitting on my shelf and I can't remember what they were about. (In recent years, these last are generally being considered for discarding.)

I think the only book I've read twice in a row may be Moominsummer Madness, by Tove Jansson. I don't know how old I was, but I wasn't ten yet. I remember finishing it in the dentist's waiting room, regarding it with a happy sigh, and then opening right back up to the first page to start over again. Jansson's sweet, quirky Scandinavian fantasies were, to my young mind, the very height of imaginative revelry, and her characters became my best friends.

A book I would take with me if I were stuck on a desert island:
A blank, unlined Moleskine.

A book that made me laugh:
I remember chuckling quite a bit this summer over To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis.

A book that made me cry: [I've re-inserted this category, which was mysteriously missing from Ike's list]
Here's a secret about me: all it takes is the right cue, and any story can have me in tears. It doesn't have to be well-done; it doesn't have to be worthy of the emotion; all it has to do is evoke the right sentiment, or play the right chords on the soundtrack, and voila! I'm all sniffly.

With that said, the last book that I felt earned my tears, rather than just pushing my buttons, was The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. Man, that book got sad.

A book that I wish had been written:
I was going to say that I wish Peter Beagle would write a novel in which the quality of the story matched the quality of the prose and the characters, because he's one of my favorite authors, but somehow he hasn't written one of my favorite novels. But then I remembered that I haven't read all of his books yet. Besides, his road trip memoir, I See By My Outfit, is one of my favorite books, and may very well be largely fiction for all I know.

A book that I wish had never been written:
There are so many books without which the world would be none the poorer (trust me, I know these things) that to wish any one of them out of existence would be like wishing a single leaf off your lawn in autumn.

A book I’ve been meaning to read:
My "To Read" list currently includes 94 titles -- not to mention all the books on my shelves I haven't read yet but aren't on that list. Here's one that's in both locations: The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain, by Alice Weaver Flaherty.

I’m currently reading:
Icelander, by Dustin Long (fiction)
Getting Things Done by David Allen (nonfiction, I fervently hope)

Consider yourself tagged if your name starts with:
you'd enjoy answering questions like these, and haven't done it yet.

Olly-olly-oxen-free!

Which Concerns a Number of Small Things.

I've been using a generic-brand detangler that comes in a plain white bottle, decorated solely with black text. After many showers, the bottle has begun to lose its letters. An R will go sliding gracefully down its curved side, or I'll find an E plastered across my thumbnail. It's so surreal, and I can't even figure out exactly why. Is it that I'm watching two-dimensional animation on a three-dimensional surface? Or is it that I'm interacting with the text in a way that none of my English courses ever even suggested?

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Have I fallen off the ABC-2006 bandwagon? No! Well, maybe. What letter is it again?

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LJ friends, I'm sorry that LiveJournal and Blogger can't seem to play nice together. I would fix it if I knew how.

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Here is a song I recorded at Piri's house on Labor Day. It is a smallish MP3 file, featuring a toy melodica with rather reluctant reeds.

Arrowwood - Trees with Sweaters

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On the drive home from Bumbershoot (incidentally, anything by Yonder Mountain String Band is an ideal soundtrack for road trips through western Washington), I passed one of those annoying video signboards. You know the kind I mean. This one appeared to be advertising a nearby casino. As I passed, the phrase $10,000 CRAPS! was flashing over and over.

I'll let you write your own punchline.

In Which I Get All Arted Up.

I think this is my ninth year of Bumbershoot. I'm pretty sure it is. That's hard for me to believe, because the entirety of my Bumbershoot experience just kind of blurs together into one continuous colorful panorama.

Not to say that it hasn't changed over the years. It has become less weird and more corporate, less relaxed and more regulated. Gone are the relentless background rhythm of the drum circle and the impromptu hippie dance party by the International Fountain. Now they search your pack for contraband (like water bottles!) when you enter the mainstage area, and the only entity allowed to sell CDs on the premises is the ever-overpriced Tower Records (sorry, buskers, you lose). Every year The Man clutches it a little tighter, and every year I like it a little less. But there remains so much to like that I'm still a long way from not liking it.

One thing that was new for me this year was making the pilgrimage alone. I stayed at Piri's, and she joined me at the 'Shoot on Sunday, but Saturday I had all to myself. It was different, not having anyone else's input to plan the day around. It had its advantages (easier for one small person to weasel her way to the front of an audience) and disadvantages (no one to distract me from the fact that I felt kind of lousy, physically speaking).

Laura Veirs was definitely the highlight of Saturday. She's fun to watch on stage; she so obviously loves what she's doing, and intermittently acknowledges the audience with a gentle, slightly self-conscious smile. I remember thinking that if grrlpup were an alt-folk star, her stage presence would be similar. The Rogue Wave show was nice, and that's really all I have to say about them: they're a nice band. A little bland, but easy on the ears. Under the heading of not-so-bland, both The Epoxies and Deerhoof opened their acts with the songs I posted last week! That made me absurdly happy, like I'd just won a prize or something. The Epoxies were really loud and frenetic and '80s-weird, convulsing and leaping all over the stage. Deerhoof was the most musically diverse band I heard all weekend, with as much diversity as possible packed into every single song. Their act eventually devolved into the kind of experimental music that leaves you wondering whether it's the music or the audience that's being experimented upon. (I admit it, Bomyguava: I didn't even try to see Of Montreal. Or Kanye West, for that matter.) Cloud Cult had, not one, but two painters creating art on stage during their show. I only managed to catch Lady Sovereign's last song of the evening, but I mean, come on, that's about how much consecutive Lady Sovereign I could have stood anyway. It was great to hear her holler "Thank you, Seattle!" in her adorable cockney accent, though. (If you're having trouble imagining it, replace the 'tt' with a glottal stop and you'll get the idea.) Two bands I ended up watching that weren't on my schedule: P:ano (pretty soft sleepy music with, yes, a piano) and The Can't See (fairly boring, actually).

Sunday was less about getting to the next show and more about just hanging out and enjoying time with Piri. After the intense crowd-immersion and dance fever of the New Pornographers and Spoon, we wandered around browsing booths and art exhibits until Vashti Bunyan played. She was well worth seeing, even though her fragile voice and warm, hushed music would have been better suited to a more secluded venue than an outdoor stage in the Seattle Center. We left after Vashti, skipping Mates of State because the day seemed complete without them (and I've seen them before anyway).

As for the art, there was the mesmerizing Fire-Pod, which was "played" by a keyboard in choreography with canned industrial music. Even more startling, however, was a fine arts exhibit called Softly Threatening: Artwork of the Modern Domestic. Okay: imagine walking into a velvet-draped room in which is crouched a pure white stag, his side gashed redly open, and blood and entrails spilled everywhere. I mean, more guts than could possibly fit inside one deer, and they're spread out and draped all over the floor, and even cover an entire chandelier. Now blink a few times, and realize that every piece is meticulously crocheted, knitted, stuffed, embroidered and beaded, from the stag's pearl-covered antlers to the beaded velvet liver at your feet. Is it beautiful? or gross? Or both?

The other highlight of the exhibit for me was a row of jars of homemade candies, each designed to communicate the personality of a specific member of the artist's family. The flavors were surprisingly eloquent, even without the brief descriptions that completed the portraits. Synesthesia never tasted so good. Oh, and then there was Knitta....

Of course, half the fun of Bumbershoot is the people-watching, which could be a substantial post all by itself. I know I'm not going to get around to writing that, so instead I'll just leave you with the best t-shirt slogan of the weekend: I put the sexy in dyslexia!