AmbivaBlog

Pushy Apps.

Don't you just love 'em?  Promiscuous.  Presumptuous.  Facebook is full of them -- games and questionnaires and lists that require you to take the whole app onboard just to receive a message.  It's one of the main reasons I mostly stay away from Facebook.

But I got intrigued by Blip, a website that allows you to be a "DJ" by making and sharing playlists, when BitMaelstrom, one of my new follows on Twitter and a new user of Blip (but a longtime fellow Althouse commenter), was able to share a beautiful 16th-century motet by Orlando di Lasso.  I signed up for Blip and asked it to find anything by Claudio Monteverdi.

No, but cheerfully undeterred -- BANG!  In a second it hooked me up with 30 suggested "favorite" fellow DJs, mostly Brazilian (but not named Claudio; I cannot quite follow its reasoning -- ends with "o," maybe?), and started playing a song picked by the first one, LOUDLY.  There seemed to be no way to undo the whole deed at once; I would have to go through and "remove" them one by one.  I was so horrified I canceled my account.  

Vegetable Love

NSFW?

"I’m Sera Beak, a Harvard-trained scholar of world religions and intrepid spiritual cowgirl."

Who on earth describes themselves that way?  "Hi, I'm intrepid!"  There's some heavy-duty self-branding going on here.  Looks like the Marianne Williamson of a new generation, which couldn't relate to "bland, new-Agey writing," so this is spicier, or as some of her enthused Amazon reviewers say, "sassier" ("I say in the book, divinity likes to go topless").  Her journey, like so many of its kind, began with "[f]eeling limited by her upbringing in the Catholic Church."

Is it really true that once you step outside tradition, you're bound to end up sounding like this?  Even though I'm out there too, it seems sad and silly to me:  the "Divine Self" makes an awfully small and banal god, and the commercial lip gloss of new-age publishing tarts up the sincerity of whatever it touches.  Why I've taken to writing in the "religion" space on questionnaires, "The less said the better."

Only a German . . .

. . . would write an opera about his own cancer.  And only another German would review it like this:

"Mea Culpa" is Schlingensief's huge, heart-rending production at the Vienna Burgtheater; he calls it a "readymade opera" - certainly an apt description for this stage juggernaut with its cargo of quotations, images, musical genres, thoughts and emotions. But above all else, it's a new kind of psychodrama. A performance that whirls round Schlingensief, his soul, and his cancer like a maelstrom - a maelstrom created by a black hole that no one knows, not even the Master towards whom Schlingensief is pulling us. It is dark and distant here, but also true and vast; it is Death.

Schlingensief lays bare his innermost self and it hovers like a passion fruit in the middle of the dark stage, dripping with the scarlet juice of bitter experience, ripened by the dark sun of tribulation. Either we suffer alongside him this evening, or we experience nothing. Schlingensief doesn't make it difficult for us. Because nothing the world has constructed around cancer and the experience of death, nothing it does to deal with and repress the mysterious illness and death, is spared Schlingensief's mockery, himself and his production included. He relieves us of this burden and takes us with him into the dark void.

This part harks back to what I wrote last night:

Today, Joachim Meyerhoff is Christoph Schlingensief. Meyerhoff is wearing a dark green velvet suit and wants to convince us of his idea of building an opera house in Africa: no more cultural exchange; instead, cultural fusion. Schlingensief seriously means what Meyerhoff says. The African opera house is his dream.

The third and final act of the current production, "Ein Blick ins Jenseits" (a look into the beyond) takes place in this African opera house.

There it is, the whole issue of the white race and whether it has any necessary relationship to its historic culture -- whether that culture will go down with it, or become just one limp strand in a global gumbo rather than a classical white architectural skeleton making humans stand upright . . . and whether it ought to be making a ferocious last stand or plunging itself into the darker continents to be immolated. 

If humans are still around in a hundred or two years, the race part of this will look like a non-issue.  In fact, right now the race part is making it a lot harder than it should be to discuss the ideas and values part.

Maintenance Maintenant!

The things you have to do just to keep yourself going!  The list keeps on getting longer. 

I was already forcing myself to take supplements before going to bed even if all I wanted to do was crash.  The jig's up -- I have to floss my teeth now, or they're going to fall out.  Cleansing and moisturizing my face has now been added (thanks to Ruth Anne).  Or it's going to fall off.  And, of course, there's working out, which has the most unmistakable payoff, health-, vanity-, and mood-wise.

Now if only I knew:  what's the equivalent of flossing your teeth that you can do for your psyche?  I'm more frightened of losing heart and point and motivation than teeth.

Precious

I watched HBO's new series "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency," tonight.  I'd really been looking forward to it; I've only read one of the books (I don't read anymore, alarmingly), but I found it charming and touching, with a light touch and a deep, tacit, quirky affection for Botswana.  Then, before seeing it, I read this review, which accused it of cutesiness.  Perhaps that biased my initial impression, but I found myself apologizing to J (whose b.s. detector was fearsome and famed far and wide, though it's now somewhat muffled by hearing and comprehension difficulties) for the bright-colored, quaint adorableness of it all. 

It was hard to evade the irony of a story about lovable, innocent Africans with funny accents created by a bunch of white guys (Alexander McCall Smith wrote the books, of course; the late(s) Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack directed and produced.  Hmmm, kind of a high body count).  In that respect, I guess it makes a pair with Slumdog Millionaire.  These productions are far less colonial than they would once have been, because the white guys at the helm are now so abjectly in love with India and Africa, and so eager for collaboration and authenticity.  Long gone are the days when, for instance, all the whooping Sioux were played by Italians and Jews.  But there's still a whiff of . . . what's the word?  It's more subtle than condescension or patronizing.  Sort of like Philosemitism.

Then J fell asleep (I did my duty and wore him out at the swimming pool today) and I began to enjoy it.  Did my self-consciousness depart with his consciousness, or did the episode improve?  Probably both, but I think the latter was real.  When the issue of witchcraft as a subset of universal gangsterdom came in, it got more strong and serious and emotional.  And the characters, though comic, are not one-dimensional.  Mma Ramotswe herself enjoys a bad boy like the musician husband who hurt her physically and emotionally, even as she knows she should (and promised her dying father she would) stay away from them.  The production is pretty faithful to the charm of the books.  I think I'm hooked and will watch it again, despite my reservations.  Jill Scott is marvelous as a character from fable whose emotions are recognizably real.

(I've about decided to start watching In Treatment, too.  Anyone care to egg me on or warn me off?  Will I have to apologize to J?)

"When a female is attracted to a male, entire suites of genes in her brain turn on and off."

[S]ome genes were turned on when females found a male attractive, but a larger number of genes were turned off. "When females were most excited--when attractive males were around--we observed the greatest down regulation [turning off] of genes."

We knew that.

"It's possible that this could lead to a release of inhibition, a transition to being receptive to mating."

The same genes that turned on when the females were with attractive males turned off when they were with other females and vice versa.

That's swordtail fish we're talking about, but:

[Molly] Cummings and [Hans] Hofmann [of the University of Texas at Austin] suggest that the gene sets they studied could be involved in orchestrating mating responses in all vertebrates.

I have no further comment, except to wonder idly what's going on in the male brain.

Nonprofit Newspapers??

Pondering the possible effects of 501(c)(3) status on freedom and quality of expression.

Recipes.

Try these:

• DIJON CHICKEN:  Preheat oven to 350.  Butter bottom of baking pan(s).  Wash boneless chicken breasts, pat dry.  Coat with Grey Poupon Dijon mustard and roll in plain breadcrumbs.  (I paint one side with a pastry brush, lay the mustardy side in the breadcrumbs, paint the top and flip over.)  Lay in pan and bake 45 minutes.  Pour melted butter over the chicken cutlets and bake a scant 15 minutes more.  (Incredibly delicious for how easy it is to make.)

• ANNIE'S CHICKEN SALAD:  Chop cooked chicken breast.  Cut celery small.  Mix together with mayonnaise, pepper, salt, ground cumin, and juice of 1-2 fresh limes (amounts to proportion and taste).  OPTIONAL:  add one small drop of commercial BBQ sauce, such as KC Masterpiece Original.  [or] OPTIONAL:  add quartered seedless red grapes.

Tweeder, I Am?

Twitterholics and just culture watchers, have you seen this yet??

Hello and welcome to andasifbymagic.com the official home of official tweet reading and a place to fight the Social Media Burnout Syndrome or SMEBS.

Just so you know.

Hat tip:  Chris Locke