ceci n'est pas un journal

We have one intern right now, Nicole. Nicole has a pet minpin and was eating mozzarella and basil flavored crackers. Christabel was eating vegetable delight from a Thai place and Jacob was eating an apple. He says that everything tastes better when it's free.
We got eight admissions Monday. Several baby squirrels who seem to be doing well, a skunk who is DOA and needs to be tested for rabies, a modo with neurological issues and a gull with spine damage of some sort, both who were euthanized, a chipmunk with neurological issues.

I've got nothing else and I'm hoping things will pick up again. I'm amazed at how short the original Fallout is. I did not, however, forget that in the early parts of Fallout 2, there isn't much combat at all, but the fights you do have to go through are really bad, and that corrupted save file did not let me forget that. Fuck golden geckos always and forever. But this time I'm good. I've not only saved in multiple slots, I've copied the files outside of the Windows virtual drive where you can't touch them. Mwa ha ha. I'm playing both games as a female character this time, mostly for the dialogue changes, as Fallout 2 doesn't have a perk that allows you to deal extra damage to opposite sex opponents in a game where a large majority of your human enemies are men.

I dreamt that I was in a post-apocalyptic world and one of the locales was a university town before the war, with stately buildings and great green trees and blue skies, unlike the rest of the world. There was an airship that would take animal keepers or travelers to other settlements, and an underground base.

As always, it looks like it's going to rain.

burning question: in what fucking reality are these terfs living in where Sharon, not Katelyn, is a typical name for a 35 year old woman?

Allisandra remembers me from the last time and she still has a picture so she knows exactly what day it’s on. She sings but she doesn’t sing in a band or have any music out there but maybe someday & somewhere. She has a tattoo of flowers on her ankle. She was born in Messina and has recently traveled to Sicily, where she ate pizza with broccoli on it and I’m reminded of Inside Out and pasta with pistachios and isn’t sure about pronunciation of the second vowel, which I’d IPA for you if I understood it, but I think it depends on the region, and swordfish and eggplant. Brittany is most impressed with a church in which someone sat on his back painting scenes and she can barely do that upright. She took a video of a jellyfish and I wondered if it was an Aurelia aurita or moon jelly, which has that distinctive four leaf clover of gonads. She wasn’t sure but what she does know is that they hurt when you get stung by one. Salvini’s coup stunt boomeranged on him and Italy really dodged a bullet.
Brittany has a scarf printed with strawberries. She’s Armenian. She doesn’t want to visit Armenia because she expects to be imprisoned and never make it back home again. She’s been to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and pointed out that Germans like their beer warm. On The Simpsons, I think Homer offers a beer to the Germans who buy the power plant and they’re like “my English is not perfect, but I have to tell you your beer is like swill to us. Only a swine would drink this beer”
I feel the same way about Georgia. I’d love to visit but with my luck, Russia will pick that time to annex the country.
Jamie has a tattoo of a five-petaled flower on one shoulder and a tattoo of an abstract paisley swirl and a flower bumblebee obscured by the sleeve of her shirt. On her leg, she has a sunflower and the outline of a dove, on her foot is a heart, on her other foot is the peace symbol, which various crazies will say is a broken cross but is actually the semaphore letters N and D for nuclear disarmament. Her ring is turquoise and her earrings are gold.
Emma has a tattoo on her foot that says “the other side of fear” which Google tells me is "El otro lado del miedo.” I did this backwards; her tattoo is in Spanish.

A woman had ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο tattooed around her arm. It's the last line of the Iliad and is something like "and so they buried Hector." It's Ancient Greek so Google Translate is no help here. "As the Hippodrome Hippodrome Tomb" is not a real sentence unless you're concussed.
My ability to read Greek is the biggest thing that's stuck with me from college.

April has a tattoo of the eight planets and the moon near Earth amongst constellations of freckles, a tattoo that looks like a flying saucer and arrow fused together, a tattoo of a flower. She has a vesica piscis shaped pendant with swirls.
Elizabeth, which I misheard as Eliste of all things, has giant flower earrings made of thin wire that look like tattoos because the brightest lights cast the darkest shadows.
Maeve has a shirt from the Fuzztival.

I had a blue raspberry soda from Harmony Springs.

Pagliacci has a sung introduction that summarizes the plot.
In Casta Diva, sung in Italian because this isn't a John Cage opera and there aren't enough texts in Gaulish to make an entire libretto, Norma offers a sprig of mistletoe to the moon goddess asking for peace between the Gauls and the Romans because she's in love with a Roman proconsul.
They also did a duet from Norma but I can't quite remember the context
Händel’s Giulio Cesare has fuck all to do with William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It’s a scene with Sesto, stepson of Pompey and Cornelia.
While Julius Caesar himself was played by a castrato, Sesto was played by a soprano.
In L'elisir d'amore, Belcore convinces Nemorino to join the army so he can get the money he needs to buy the love potion he needs and then gloats about how smart he is and how brilliant his plan to get rid of his rival is.
The Bear is an opera by William Walton and has only three sung roles. Yelena Ivanova Popova sings about her dead husband, who cheated on her.
They finished with a quintet by the smugglers of Carmen.

There's a collection of recently acquired photographs at the MFA, some of them iconic, most of them the first or only or highest quaity print made.

According to the pins on Theodora's bag, she’s Bulgarian and loves baroque music. She’s studying vocals at the New England conservatory. Her shirt also depict Bulgaria, as does her pendant, with a heart around Kazanluk or Stara Zagora.

Kendra was reading The Outsiders so I asked her what year she was born in and I was prepared to be sad because she was born after I read it but turns out she was born in 1996, the year I believe I read The Outsiders. And also That Was Then, This Is Now, for a class in middle school. I forget what else we read but I want to say Tuck Everlasting and A Study In Scarlet. I think we also watched the movie, which was not directed by Francis Ford Coppola and it shows. And it doesn't even try to be a period piece. No, they just shifted it to the 1980s because they had no budget.
She has a tattoo of a skull and a rose on her leg.
I know someone with a cat named Sodapop. I don't know if that's a reference to The Outsiders or not.

According to a man's shirt, his spirit animal was a white bunny wielding chainsaws. Looks like the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog updated his arsenal.
Someone had a bag from a place called Mooncake and all I can think is chookity pok.

The Straight Pride parade was today. I don't think pride is an emotion these people should be feeling. I'd have probably gone there to heckle and/or protest but I kinda forgot about it.
burning question: what is this feeling I'm feeling right now? It's like I'm sad for another person. Is that a thing? Am I going crazy?

The trees around the museum were the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
I like how they painted one of the stumps.
The original forests of Cape Cod weren’t the pine barrens we see today, the pitch pines, the red cedar, and the scrub oak merely filled in after settlers and a series of forest fires left the land barren.


[Click for art. If you are here about Fallout, you can ignore this.]

The stories say that sailors constructed sailor’s valentines on long journeys when they had nothing to do. But then some historians and collectors wondered where they got all the materials to make them and why all of the seashells used are from the West Indies, specifically Barbados (wentletraps, tellin, keyhole limpet, mussel, cowrie, chiton, mitre, olive, dove, emerald nerite snail, strigilla), and not, say, Australia or the South Pacific or the Philippines. And it turns out locals made these in workshops and sold them to sailors. You can learn to make your own! All you need is 875 dollars and a time machine that can take you back to mid-August 2019. And if you have a time machine, it won’t be difficult to obtain 875 dollars.

Sea whips are an order of coral that don’t produce calcium carbonate skeletons.
Squilla is a genus of mantis shrimp and those antler-looking things are their claws.
It used to be an inn so one of the walls can detach and raise up for use as a ballroom. The ceilings are rather low and the floor is uneven although that might just be age.


I’m impressed that she could carve an urchin’s test like that. Test coming from a word meaning amphora, not from a word meaning testimony (to virility)


these are the internal shells of a spirula, a ten-legged deep ocean cephalopod with an internal shell that will occasionally wash up on the beach.


this conch is made from clay by the artist Valerie Hegarty.


if you can’t tell, Bradford’s Iceberg (actually by Hegarty) is warped, melting into the oil-dark sea.


it’s based on this painting by William Bradford


the daguerrotype indicates that this obelisk was made in honor of a deceased family member, probably in the middle of the 19th century.


Peter Gabel - Mermaid’s Dollhouse - a 9-inch tall house with urchin test domes and spinity light fixtures and a gastropod shell mirror, upon a bed of Bahamas sand. Or maybe it was Bermuda. Same thing, right? No. Not at all.


sorry about the watermark.


There's a bookstore nearby with an impressive collection of old sci-fi magazines but I had neither the time to browse nor the money to buy anything.

Delvina has candy-colored pink hair and I think she said something about mixing all the dyes together and that was the result.

Here's my experience with getting Fallout 2 to run on VirtualBox:
Windows 98 runs Fallout but it’s a) slow and b) has no music. Fuck that. I’m not sure if I can get it to run with a lot more tweaking. NINJA EDIT: The music doesn't work (and doesn't work on other versions of Windows either) because the installer is an idiot and puts the music files in the wrong folder. This game is the Final Fantasy VI of western RPGs, in that somehow a buggy mess results in a really good game.
Windows 95 refuses all efforts to run on both VirtualBox and DOSBox. Windows 95 bewilders me. In fact, Windows itself bewilders me. Some of it is just a case of “damn you, muscle memory,” aka my Super Mario World memory of dying to the first enemy because THEY SWITCHED THE JUMP AND ACTION BUTTON ON THE SNES FOR NO GOOD REASON or every time I play Xenosaga. My theory is that Windows is a feedback loop of “people use it because it’s successful and it’s successful because people use it.”
Good Old Games used to have a Mac port of Fallout that I think used a modified DosBox. I can't get it anymore.
Windows XP, upon installing Fallout, shows the introductory video, it’s amazing, and then you get either a green screen or a smear of psychedelic color. And trust me, if I want a game that looks like Vasily Kandinsky vomited on the screen, I’d play Moraff’s Dungeons of the Unforgiven. Anyway, I don’t know what I did but even with the vanilla version I have no problems with the color but the cursor is somehow both jittery and sluggish. Think Sonic the Hedgehog getting in a fight with Flash Man. What I tried then was the unofficial patch, setting the sensitivity to 1, and then increasing the mouse sensitivity to maximum on Windows to compensate for it. Nope. I've read that Fallout ignores Windows' mouse settings. A worst-case scenario would involve somewhat janky mouse controls, not turning off sound and playing Desert Vineyards by The Moon Seven Times on repeat.
OKAY. Turning off mouse integration helps. It will require some tweaking but it works pretty well. I’ll just have to find that magic number. That's it. It's a really obvious solution and nobody's pointed it out. Everyone complains that the mouse sensitivity of 100 is way too high. And 1 moves like Mitch McConnell on valium.
I'm not sure if I need the unofficial patch.

NINJA EDIT: if you're using a retina display and a Macintosh like I am, go to diplays in the preferences and set the screen size to larger text. Bada climp. Bada clamp.

Incidentally, the last Windows OS I used was XP. I dunno, Vista came out in 2007. But Vista was only a few steps above Windows Millenium Edition.
Things that have "millennium" but not "falcon" in their name are usually terrible. The Dream Millennium sounds good.

burning question: who the fuck presses B to jump?

The Internet Archive has what I can only assume translates to several tons of out of print books. Horray! They don't have everything from my childhood (The Book of Nightmares is conspicuously absent) or everything I want to read (Book two of Lisa Mason's Pangaea, Saraband of Lost Time, Caves of Karst, Daybreak on a Different Mountain). But hope springs eternal. After all, There And Back Again by Pat Murphy is there.

A Mask For The General does have that same mood to it that The City, Not Long After does.
It’s a paean to a San Francisco that is no longer, set in an all-too-real future for America. It opens around the end of July, 2021. Brazil, interestingly, isn’t fascist in this setting. I checked, and in 1987, Brazil was ruled by a man who admired the military dictatorship of the 1960s. And in real life, Japan is content to cut itself and its pop culture off from the world. Also, there’s a moon colony.

We released the raccoons Sunday. Right now, it’s mostly Christabel, Jacob, and Primrose keeping the place (along with laundry) running until the new interns show up.

Christabel regaled us with a story of the time someone tried to microwave cookie dough. It didn’t work but it did melt and warp part of the microwave door.

Michael says the best character in all of the Lord of the Rings is the Olympics Orc at Helm's Deep.

Michael asked this about Trump's plan to nuke hurricanes.
burning question: Did Trump get his knowledge of weather from Sharknado? Because they nuked the sharknado in that. I’m not sure what it would do. It would kill the sharks but they were going to die eventually anyway and it would still be like being whipped in the face with a mop made of sandpaper. Without the sharks, it would probably just spread fallout around.

Victoria is an artist. She mostly works in abstract watercolors and acrylics, but she never has the time. Her friend does oil paintings and oil paints and turpentine smell bad and probably taste bad and make her head spin so she can’t sleep in the same room as her art studio. One of her rings is very definitely amethyst. The green ring is a combination of two stones and it looks like malachite. She’s not sure what the orange one is but it looks like amber. Or citrine. One of her rings is a silver snake. Her pendant depicts serotonin. Her bag depicts various cacti and succulents. Sculpture is one thing she never got into but she wants to.

A woman I drew looks a bit like the singer of Arc Iris.

the current exhibition in the Atlantic Wharf gallery is called Off the Clock. Art about time. Art about existing outside time and its consequences.


I’m not sure what this one is.


C.J. Lori - Prism
this is a painting from 2006 so I guess it makes sense that it’s so… TINY.
Victoria has not played Majora’s Mask. I know this because she asked me what kind of animal Twinmold was meant to be.


Dorothea Van Camp's art there looks like the one…


this is a calabi-yau manifold
the medium is a translucent collage on a light box, photographed and digitally manipulated.

A man who dresses like Ned Flanders’ hipper cousin was reading Station Eleven and found it rather eerie at times. He agrees with me that late summer is great for post-apocalyptic novels. Also planetary romances and dying earth. He didn’t say that, I did. Also autumn is best for horror and pre-Tolkien fantasy. One of the women at the table was reading Lamb by Christopher Moore which I either read in the summer between high school and college or the summer after that, and her high school English teacher recommended it to her. The other woman was reading Nights at the Circus, which she says is very dense and she’s having trouble getting into it but it’s funny at times and there are some sexy moments too. She knew Door Into Ocean was from the 1980s and
Unlike the rest of the Elysium Cycle, which use cheap-looking CGI stock images or art drawn by spider monkeys, A Door Into Ocean uses an existing cover for its Kindle edition.

John and Lily and someone who’s name may or may not be Courtney all work at the Tea Party museum, and one of their coworkers played the Duke. Courtney (?) has not only seen Measure for Measure twice, she’s acted in it. A woman with green hair that’s been like that since last September was eating a bowl of ramen she got from Bon Me.

As for Measure for Measure, it’s set in Vienna but everyone has an Italian name. Anyways, Duke Vincentio left Vienna on a mission and he’s leaving his deputy Angelo and assistant Escalus to run things in his absence, and Angelo is very giddy about enforcing all the laws, which includes a death sentence for fornication. Claudio made his intended wife Julietta pregnant and so he’s arrested and sentenced to die. The Duke, however, is actually in disguise as Friar Lodowick. Isabella wants Angelo to be merciful but Angelo will only let Claudio go if Isabella sleeps with him. Isabella is like “nope.” and Claudio is like “please?” and the Duke says “yes but Mariana, who was supposed to marry Angelo will take your place.” The provost also thinks he’s going too far. The Duke tells the provost to substitute the body of a notorious but not dread pirate in their custody who had succumbed to an illness. Isabella learns that Claudio has been executed. The Duke removes his disguise and Isabella tells him of Angelo’s seduction, but the Duke pretends to not believe her. Mariana also speaks out and they go get that friar. Escalus condemns him and Lucio removes his disguise. Angelo admits his guilt but the Duke tells him its ok as long as he marries Mariana. The Duke marries Isabella.
It’s a problem play, which means it’s not really a comedy and it’s not a tragedy either because nobody dies. In movie parlance, it would probably be classified as a drama.
It’s short enough to be performed without an intermission.
Whenever Angelo spoke, John and friends hissed. He's a nicer Scarpia, which doesn't really say much.
It's like they picked Macbeth or something. Canceled in Allston due to rain, not that I could go to that, and canceled in Easton, due to EEE. It happened at Atlantic Wharf but it was cold and the grass was wet.

Burning Question: Should I be surprised at all to find that Jenny McCarthy's zodiac sign is Cuchulainn, the Impure?

David Koch is dead and maybe that means public transit can start improving again. Alas, I think Charles Koch is the Mario of the duo, in the way that Mitch McConnell is an evil alternate universe version of Raphael the Ninja Turtle.

Olivia likes to write poetry. One of her rings is a serpent and she has the image of a snake on her bracelet.

Less is a Bore is the principle of maximalism and a retort to the edict Less Is More, which was not coined by Polonius, even though it sounds like something he'd believe in. I can find articles that talk of the curator reading interior design magazines and wondering who the hell lives in places so devoid of decor and pattern and heart. Kanye West and Kim Il Kardashian, obviously, but nobody else.

They had a scavenger hunt where you can find all the patterns. It’s surprisingly difficult. Not quite as difficult as finding things on the internet.

[Click For Art]


Sol DeWitt - Wall Drawing 280
There are over 1200 of these wall drawings by Sol LeWitt. This is number 280. This was his first done in colors, albeit minimalist primary colors.


Valerie Jaudon - Pantherburn


Nathalie du Pasquier - Untited
Detail.

Robert Kushner - Cincinnati C
We have a company whose motto is “paradise is a walled garden” gobbling up more and more of the internet. I'm not sure if my inability to do a location search on Instagram without logging in is intentional or if it's just a glitch that should be cleared up by the next time I do something like this.


Howardina Pindell - Autobiography:Artemis
She traveled in the jim crow south and noticed that some plates were marked with a red dot for their use by non-whites, which I can only assume translated to “well, we don’t have to do a very thorough job washing them.”


Miriam Schapiro - Mexican Memory


Lucas Samaras - Chair Transformation 9
Or maybe 12.


Joyce Kozloff - Tile Wainscot
This reminds me of the tile mural in Harvard Station. Wikipedia tells me it's by the same artist.


Franklin Williams - Yellow Apron


Franklin Williams - Sixteen Sweet Moments


Ettore Sottsass - Casablanca Sideboard
combines simple form with complex patterns.


Nathalie Du Pasquier - Royal
I’m bothered that most images that show up seem to be a CGI mockup of it.


Jasper Johns - Scent
Inspired by him seeing a painted car speed by.


Jennifer Bartett - 27 Howard Street - Day and Night

Betty Woodman - Window
I found something similar but not this exact thing. Is it too general a name? Yes, it is.


Robert Zakanitch - Big Bungalow Suite
It reminds me of 1970s decor.


Polly Apfelbaum - Small Townsville
She calls it "fallen painting." These are pieces of synthetic velvet, dyed and placed in a circle.


Joyce Kozloff - If I Were An Astronomer: Boston


Roger Brown - Garden of the Uncultivated


Philip Taaffe - Observatory


Laura Owens - Untitled


Frank Stella - Brazilian Merganser


Franklin Williams - Little Porcelain Boy


Schapiro - Vestiture Paris Series 2
I think that's right.


Jeffrey Gibson - DON'T MAKE ME OVER
A tunic of chiffon hung with bells and a helmet.
Reflects his Chahta and Tsalagi heritage.



The Sisters Zénaïde and Charlotte Bonaparte. Zenaida is a name meaning Life of Zeus and is the genus modos are part of.
It’s based on a painting by Jacques-Louis David


Taylor Davis - BRWG
There are three pairs of these: south, west, and northeast. This one is Northeast.


Joel Otterson - Voluptuous Desire


Diana Molzan - Untitled
Diana Molzan removed the weft threads and left the warp threads to hang.


Zoe Pettijohn Schade - Crowd of Crowds


Ruth Root - Untitled


Pae White - Bugz + Drugz
She’s inspired by ephemera like smoke, popcorn, time, birdsongs, and bugs. She has a computer program weave out randomized patterns, in the case of bugz+drugs, that is to say, insects and psychotropic plants.



Marcel Wanders - Bon Bon Chair


Sanford Biggers - Dagu
And fuck you, website, for making me take a screenshot because I can only get a 640x331 image via Google. This isn't Turkmenistan and/or 1985, no matter how much Trump wants it to be. Speaking of Turkmenistan, a city council candidate in Marysville, MI embarrassed herself.


Lisa Lou - Offensive/Defensive
It took a team of 40 people to make the bead art. The docent doesn’t know how long it took because she thinks they racked up so many hours they lost track.



Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian - Muqarnas 1
Autocorrect turned it to shakeout.
There's one like this at the MFA.


Virgil Marti - large chandelier hybrid/austrian swag/hippie piss/starman/straight rainbow
The curtains are painted on the wall.



This is a really nice picture of the chandelier, which looks like flowers attached to antlers.


Lari Pittman - Portrait of a Textile


Portrait of a Human (Pathos Ethos Logos Kairos)
Greek words meaning suffering/experience, character, expectation/ground/plea/opinion/speech/reason/discourse/proportion/word, and time for action



Betty Woodman - Of Botticelli


Apfelbaum - Pattern and Apparation


I lov the painting that looks like a boreal forest but the colors make it a deathly pale green, like there was a Mako reactor leak. You can kind of see it here. Open it in a new window. That will help.


Wangechi Mutu - untitled tumor.



I met a brindled pug-Boston terrier mix who was trying to eat a piece of dried pasta she found and her owner had hair in rotini of bright neon pink and a black dog with a little white splotch on his throat who was named Patrick and being fostered and a Bernese mountain dog. Someone called Boston Dog City.
A woman was dressed as a cyborg skeleton with green tubing for hair and a silver thing over one eye and a plush duckling clipped to her belt and she said that's how she always dresses.
A woman had a monarch butterfly tattoo and a woman had a tattoo of a woman with green curly hair in profile.
In the Seaport District are sculptures of animals made in multicolored triangle facets.

I see a few people with eye pendants or bracelets.

My journey home was spent drawing a woman who looked like a younger Lisa Goldstein, a woman with a tattoo on her ankle and a backpack with Monet's water lilies, and trying my damndest to not let my mango salad from Kala Thai leak any more vinegar than it already did.

burning question: Doesn't it sound like a lovely name for a village? Wainscotting. Wainscotting, Wainscotting, Wainscotting. Wainscotting.

I've been having strange great fortune and serendipity all summer. I guess the tradeoff is that the weather's been shit on most Wednesdays and because it was postponed until today, Gabriella couldn't make it.

A woman with curly hair and a skateboard and a glass pendant had the words “love yourself” and its mirror image tattooed below her clavicle.
A woman had spiderwebs tattooed all over her arms. There were hummingbirds and a bald eagle as well.
A woman as dark as obsidian had a white with black and gray and gold designs scarf covering her hair.

Two of the audience members danced with Boston Ballet.
Brahms was acquainted with many Hungarians who fled the failed Revolution of 1848.
The Juba Dance is the scherzo from Florence Price’s Symphony no. 1. It’s a bouncy syncopated melody that’s the predecessor to tap, ragtime, cakewalks brought over from the Congo. It has nothing to do with that Juba. The finale is a twirly tarantella.
She’s enjoying a bit of a revival. She’s probably the first black woman to have her music played by an orchestra, or at least, the first one to have her symphony performed. She studied at the New England Conservatory and was a private student of George Whitefield Chadwick. She moved back home to Little Rock and then to Chicago. Like everyone's favorite composer who is proof that Czech people in fact have syrinxes and not larynxes, she didn't directly quote existing songs in her symphony.

Apparently, the flamenco and flamingo similarity is a coincidence. Flamingoes are flame-colored, while flamenco has an association with Flanders. Not that Flanders, the Dutch part of Belgium. Or maybe it comes from an Arabic word or, like flamingoes, comes from an association with fire. Nobody knows.

Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo was birthed in 1914, as a commision from a flamenco artist asking to create a set of songs based on Roma folktales. Candelas loves Carmelo but is haunted by the spectre of her previous lover. She meets with a witch and her friend Lucia agrees to receive the spectre’s affections. The Spectre’s Bride is something else entirely. The Roma in Spain adopted local art forms and made them their own. It was scored by an ensemble of 15, and went through nine variations in a decade. The one we get is the 1915 performance for full orchestra. Along with actual flamenco dancers, led by a woman from Japan who fell in love with the dance and went to Spain to study.
introducción y escena
A fanfare on trumpet and strnigs and piano imitating guitars
en la cueva - la noche
Candelas sits with an old woman. Candelas believes the sound of the ocean an ill omen but the old woman tells her the sea’s sounds mean nothing.
canción del amor dolido
sung by a mezzo-soprano
el aparecido
Candelas senses a dark presence.
danza del terror
she dances with the spectre
el circulo mágico
the ghost vanishes and so Candelas goes to the cave of a witch, who tells a story about a fisherman, of innocence, of first love.
el medianoche - los sortilegios
the clock strikes midnight
danza ritual del fuego
Candelas dances to exorcise the spectre
canción del fuego fatuo
Will o’ the Wisp is called fuego fatuo, or fool’s fire, in Spain.
pantomimo
Carmelo suggests a decoy. Lucia dances with the spectre.
danza del juego de amor
Candelas heaps aspersions upon the spectre
final - las campanas del amanecer
The spectre falls for Lucia and so Carmelo and Candelas kiss as church bells herald the rising sun.

Full Circle - Jake Gunnar Walsh and Devin Ferreira
This was an effort to interpret the sounds of hip-hop as orchestral music. The shades of dancers were projected on the stage. Many of the dancers carried flags, including Germany, Nigeria, Cape Verde, the USA, Haiti, and Antigua and Barbuda, which I had to look up.
Choucoune - Anthony R. Green
A Haitian song of unrequited love.
Papa Loko - a folk song from Haiti orchestrated by Gonzalo Grau. It’s heavy on vibraphones. Papa Loko is the spirit of ceremonies and rituals and magick.
Dance of the Hours - Ponchielli.
I think we all know this, either from Camp Grenada or from the segment of Fantasia with dancing hippopotamuses (hippopotami is wrong and don’t use it; it’s Greek, like octopus. I think it would be hippopotamoi), crocodiles, elephants, and ostriches. Kamp Krusty is far worse than Camp Grenada. None of the indignities Sherman suffers include eating Krusty-brand imitation gruel and roasted pinecones, making bootleg wallets for export, or witnessing a bear eat the hat of a fellow camper. A nice hat. Not a MAGA hat.
This one was danced by the Boston Ballet.
Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2 is the music used in the dueling pianos scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a movie scene which my friend Sully calls a masterpiece of animation.
Rotating and color-shifting stained glass windows were projected on the stage.

A woman from Poland says that she knows very little of Harvard Square and knows a lot about Andrew Square. A woman had green and black hair. A man who was speaking Spanish had tattoos of a skull and two women, a woman with jeweled necklaces holding a blank card and a serpent, a tribal design that I assume is Mayan-inspired.

burning question: So, we have what is basically the Monastery of Madness undermining the US goverment. What manner of hellscape is this?

So it occurred to me that terfism is mostly interested in defending an idea of womanhood and never, at any juncture in time, have they defended the rights of women without it being tangential to driving a wedge against other left-wing causes.

Also, 4chan is falling for their own manufactured outrage about trans people making dating preferences illegal.
I can understand why terfs would fall for it.
I also read somewhere that Joshua MOOOOOOON is spending thousands of dollars a month keeping his site up. I can't say it will be a loss if their stalking and their basic white bread ass opinions on everything are consigned to the aether.

Veronica showed up for a few minutes. Otherwise, kinda dull. Mostly I gave tours and talked abou The Simpsons.
Jacob likes Sonic 2 a lot.
Like me, Michael never beat the final boss of Sonic 2 as a kid. He says that Sonic Spinball was terrible and Sonic 3 & Knuckles is one of the best platformers of all time.
Luke, back in 2002 at the Art Institute and not at the Wildlife Center, described Sonic Chaos as Sonic 2 with more suck.
What I do know about Sonic Chaos is that the goo is not your friend and robot coconuts are very hazardous to Sonic’s health.
The Raocow videos have taught me that Dana was on the third zone, called Mecha Green Hill. The only Game Gear Sonic I played was the second one and I found the boss of Underground Zone nigh impossible.

I read the Butterfly Revolution, which is Kamp Krusty if it were run by Ned Flanders, that is to say, the director is well-meaning but stuffy, conservative, and out of touch. Also, the camp rebellion is led by Dolph, Jimbo, and Kearney. And it gets dark.
So, anyway, I had a thought about how Kamp Krustier was the most recent godawful episode of the Simpsons and then I looked it up and learned that SJWs At Yale aired a few weeks later.

There are two things about Treehouse of Horror. One is that one segment is relatively weak compared to the other two. One is that they're either a lot better or a lot worse than the rest of the season. Unless it's season 28. And Bartificial Intelligence would have worked better as a Futurama episode. Or at least make Bart the robot.

burning question: what's your favorite and least favorite Treehouse of Horror segment?

Emma is from Glasgow, Scotland and spent two months on the Cape. You can tell she isn’t from around here because she called it Cape Cod. She has a tattoo of a rose and an abstract geometric design made of triangles and rhombuses.

There are sculptures on the Greenway: a UFO Porsche 924, a dump truck with stained glass windows depicting sea animals dumping out a heap of seaglass like emerald, sapphire, quartz, rhodochrosite, amber.

Bella is a puppy of unknown breed who is mostly brown but with a white heart marking that is totally adorable. I met a shiba inu and a very cute papillon named Penny who was black and white with brown eyebrows and loved to chase a tennis ball around. I met a dark-fawn pug who liked to jump on my leg and who tried to gnaw on my hand. Katie has a dog named Kaya with spots and with one ice-white eye and one dark eye and she was totally unfamiliar with the breeds she was a mix of until she got her.

Destiny Claymore is a pop singer with a surprisingly deep voice and an afro-mohawk.

Vitoru Kinjo is a guitarist and pianist from Brazil of Okinawan descent (his grandparents were from Okinawa) so he sung not just in English and Portuguese but in Okinawan (AKA Uchinaaguchi, which is mutually unintelligible with mainland Japanese although for whatever reason, probably politics, the Japanese government classifies it as a dialect and not a distinct language) and Tupi. There are a lot of references to Okinawan culture in Final Fantasy X and I think some themes of Final Fantasy XII tie into Okinawa, such as the tiny kingdom caught in the middle of a war between powers, which also shows up in Tactics Ogre but that I know is more blatantly about the Yugoslav Wars. It’s famous for being the place karate comes from.

Nikki has bathypelagic violet hair.
Nikki and the Sweetbriar Band did a cover of Jolene by Dolly Parton that was quite good. She's from New Jersey, a place even less known for country music than Boston. We do have a thriving bluegrass and folk scene.

Cimarron is a Colombian folk band who played harp, electric double bass, guitar, tiple, and mandolin. They also dance.

Ed Koban talked about how archaeologists have discovered three types of instruments on every continent in every culture except Antarctica: flutes, drums, and rattles. He says it’s because they mimic the sounds of nature.
Sometimes the wind takes over and plays the flutes for him.
He says he can't dance like Cimarron did.

I'm wondering if I have heard Hipshot before or if I'm mixing them up with someone else. They were way more like funk pop than hip hop, if you're wondering.

The last few bands were Grupo Fantasia, Nicholas Emden, Evens Gregoire , and Jah-Free-I.
It rained a rain show that appeared to be localized entirely within this one park during his set. I swear a few droplets fell on me earlier while I was checking out the Transplanted Roaming Greenhouse. I wouldn't gripe if it was cut short due to rain but I'm glad it wasn't. After all, they're all quite good musicians, especially Nicholas Emden. There wasn't enough rain to stop us. You'd need so much rain that you'd have to build an ark and sail to the moon.

Sara had a booth set up to justify veganism in Judaism. She had some cookbooks: the Jewish Food Hero Cookbook and Oy Vey Vegan by Estee Raviv.
Matt from college was Jewish and vegan so I think it must make it easy to keep kosher. That’s certainly a benefit, says Sara.
Meanwhile, this conversation happened:
“Maybe on a good day. And you have to say please.”
“Can I see your glasses please?”
“No, too late.”

By this time, I was wondering if they had to take out someone’s set but they somehow crammed this entire thing in one session. It went a few minutes over.

A woman had a tattoo of a mermaid with a giganterous fish tail with horizontal caudal fins like a mammal should have.

I met a woman with neon carrot and abyssopelagic black hair with tattoos of Michael Myers and some numbers carved on pumpkins, a mermaid, a witch riding a broom, and a rose. I swear I’ve met her before. I met a man with a tattoo of a great horned owl partially hidden amongst tiger lilies.


She asked this question.
burning question: why has no one invented windshield wipers for glasses?

I seriously miscalculated how long it would take me. The train took a while to arrive and there was the lingering aroma of a dump truck outside and we had to stop because an Ashmont-to-Alewife train arrived at JFK at the same time we did and I was serioulsy contemplating getting off and getting on that one but pulling that off would either be about as realistic as the sun rising blue as Neptune or a fool's errand that would add another five minutes to my journey even should I make a succesful attempt. Miraculously, I almost made it on time to get a pakora, an Indian fritter of spinach, potato, and onions with some surprisingly spicy mint chutney. Elise likes spicy food but I wouldn't recommend the fritter for Ash. Elise brought an extra sweater. I think it was nice when the sun was out but not when there were clouds. The weather couldn't make up its mind, whether to be crappier than yesterday or actually kind of nice and I wish I wore shorts instead of long pants.

Ash has his own instagram at gotta_corg_em_all.

Ginger beer is basically Gollum Juice in a can, which is a concoction Andy Serkis came up with to deal with the sore throat from hell aftermath of voicing Gollum. I kind of want the kind that has more ginger than your standard gingerale but not as much ginger as the Strongest variety.


I'm not sure who Maya and Company are. I think they may be Cover It Up.

Freylekhs is a name the fiddler and clarinetist of Ezekiel’s Wheels and guest musician Gabe on double bass gave themselves when not every member of the band could make it.
A scissors dance doesn't have to have anything to do with scissors. You can make it up as you go.
The belly dance troupe did their own interpretation of a klezmer circle dance.
He thinks John Cage wrote a piece where the wind blows the pages around.

A woman has cicada earrings that everyone thinks are cockroaches, tattoos of BB-8 and the Millennium Falcon and female yellow morph swallowtail wings on her back. She has neon carrot hair.
I haven't seen any swallowtails but I have seen a lot lot lot of monarchs.

Tato Mianzi was playing string music elsewhere.
I saw a woman who looked like Death. She had an ankh pendant and dark hair and dark eye makeup.

Amy and Shyam Nepali weren’t listed. Amy plays violin and Shyam Nepali plays Nepali fiddle, which is called a sāraṅgī even if it’s nothing like the Indian instrument with the same name. He's from Nepal, as you can tell by his name.
Nepali sounds a lot like Hindi, even to my untrained ears. I'm not sure if Nepali and Nepalese have subtle differences or if they refer to two different things or if they're interchangeable like Immeeni and Immeenish.
There was a man originally from Kolkata who sold rather nice jewelry and his wife always quizzes him on the colored stones that represent each chakra and he never passes.
I have no idea how Kalakātā got its reputation as Gary, India. What I knew about Kalakātā as a kid is that it's very far away.
A woman had a tattoo of a violet crescent moon hooked on a blue Zalera's sigil, amongst five pointed yellow stars.

One of the women in the eco-fashion show wore a dress covered in the mirrored fragments of CDs and a few wore chainmail of can tabs. One of them had a dress that reminded me of a blue-ringed octopus.

Kwaku is a Michael Jackson inspired musician who immigrated from Ghana.

A woman had a tattoo of a cattle skull and red roses with a rosary entwined around one of the horns.

Bino Barros is a musician from Cape Verde who plays what I think is their folk music with rock instrumentation. Whatever it is, it’s quite beautiful.
Mel is a shih tzu puppy whose name means honey in Portuguese. Makes sense because the Greek word for honeybee is μέλισσα (mélissa)

Alissa Cavallaro is an electropop musician from Long Island who goes to school in Berklee.

Alexis and Alyssa go to school in Boston but are from elsewhere. I told them that I’m really looking forward to when and if the Red Line and Blue Line are linked. Bashar al-Assad can pay for it. And people who use Bowdoin station. I write Bowden now because that’s how it sounds. I used to be able to spell it but now that I know how it’s pronounced, I can’t anymore.
I was really lucky, though: a green line train arrived immediately and a red line train arrived in two minutes.

burning question: Has anyone out there not experienced seeing a word and hearing a word and not making the connection? This happened to me with the word "choir." I didn't realize that a quire (sic) was a choir until high school. I guess maybe if you don't speak English. English is a language with 26 letters and a handful of digraphs and around 44 phonemes depending on your accent and dialect.

Tyler has a tattoo of the bunny from Donnie Darko on one arm, a sun on the back of the neck, and Jason Voorhees’ hockey mask on the other arm.
Tyler has short hair and long dark eyelashes and a whispery voice, black fingernails and a shirt with elephant motifs and abstract zig zag patterns in black and white.
There was a woman wtih flower tattoos and a triangle motif on her shirt, and a woman with a lizard pendant and choker.

A band called Gentle Temper was playing in front of Faneuil Hall. There’s talk of changing the name and I’m all for it and I think everyone should be for it, if only so we have a name that people can spell. Unless we decide to rename it after an Irish person. With a Gaeilge name. Ryan uses all of his limbs to play instruments, and by that, he plays a guitar and drums with a foot pedal and has jangly things on his other leg. Marion plays the bass and shakes things. She has pink hair and looks and sounds like Emma and even has some of her mannerisms like having her mouth hang perpetually open. She has tattoos of three lines and plants and a rodent of some sort and a bee and the constellation Orion and the skeleton of a whale with its outline around it, and some German. They sung a song called Triple Dog Dare that isn’t on their bandcamp, and they played a song called Sugar that is, and they played a song that Marion wrote while on the drive home from Portland, ME. They have a lightbulb in a jar.

Brigit Smith was playing guitar near Quincy Market. She doesn't really have anything online.

I’m not sure if Greenfest was shorter because a few of the artists had to bail at the last minute or if it was shorter because they made better use of their time. They relocated to the Greenway and waterfront. It's a good location, aside from having to cross the street to get food.
I got something from Piperi earlier to take advantage of the rare times they are open. Later on, I got a koshari and a samosa and finished the sketchbook with Alex.

Emma was almost named Franklin. Not if she was a boy. As a girl. Ivy wants to be in a published book of portraits. She has flat white disk earrings.

Ash is a corgi. Like Ash Ketchum, his owner, Elise, says. Some people, like me, think of Evil Dead instead.
Elise also has a cat. I also met a husky, several pomeranians, and several Frenchies.
It was warmer than I thought it would be. Not

Coley Virgo was back, with a ornate necklace of ruby red and Neptune blue and deep violet glass. She sang the national anthem. The repurposed drinking song, not the Radiohead song.

Yoham Ortiz sang the less-known and less-exported genres of the Dominican Republic, not just bachata. He combined the music of northern Brazil with the American blues. He played a song about the water situation in Flint, done in the stye of the Cuban conga.

Ed Koban was back and talked about how he was at Standing Rock to protest the pipeline, braving blizzards, and he met a man who quit his job in Russia to come here and protest.

Zili Misik has been around since 1999 or 2000, apparently. I mean, it makes sense, they use a Reverbnation. Lexi has tattoos of a scene in the woods, a face made from disassociated curves, an abstract stained glass in pastel violet and cyan and yellow and red. Cara has a long braid and tree earrings and twin tattoos on each arm. Marika has a black and white striped hat. Patricia, pronounced like Pat-rish-yi-a, I drew earlier that day. They sang a song written by the 54th Regiment winning the right to fight for their freedom, a Haitian song, an arrangement of a spiritual that doesn’t even try to hide the fact that it’s about slavery with the lyrics “no more auction block for me” and “no more whip lash for me,” and a song about the last time, unless we do something to change things.

Emily and Jake also included Adrian on fiddle. Their first song was the corniest song that they wrote and maybe you think you’re going to vomit. Emily sung a song about breaking up with the same person twice. True story. They put the words “la de da” in there as a placeholder for when they come up with better lyrics. Guess what: they didn’t. They sang about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die, and they sang a song called Effervescent Zephyr. Emily has a honeycomb necklace and earrings that Jake’s sister made.

Pat Braxton covered a song by the late… somebody… I forget. They played a song by former president James Taylor, and yes, I am aware that the president was in fact John Tyler. Cadence and Caroline didn’t know that he was dead either.

Laura Suarez is a Colombian singer-songwriter.
Jenny Leigh Miller sings folk music.
Mamadou sang about Crazy Don.
Karishma Javier is a singer from New York who came from Puerto Rico, who apparently sings in 10 languages but mostly Spanish here. She played what she described as a mixture of Spanish and Latin American music, Romany music, middle eastern music, and Indian music. She has earrings with beads and feathers and a pendant with a blue stone.
Ju has a frenchie with floppy ears so he kind of looks like a pug. She has a black shirt and a trefoil pendant. She was the only one in the group from Boston. I think. At least, I know Ben and Eric weren’t. I’m pretty sure Anderson and Riley weren’t either. Dalia has a tattoo of Venus’s sigil with a fist inside, a flower in the fist and a vine in the cross, a butterfly and vines to the side, a portrait of a woman crying black tears, a bouquet of flowers, and on her other arm, “we’re all mad here” from Alice in Wonderland, and face earrings. Annie has a circular tattoo on her wrist and wondered if she should pose for portraits. I told her to just be natural.

Jackie and Zachary did a skit while Devri were setting up. He used the name Jeffrey instead. I forgot what name Jackie used. I think it was Ida. It doesn’t matter.
Devri is an Irish band. They played Irish folk music and some Beatles songs and hornpipes on rock instrumentation plus mandolin. They decided to finish with the Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) and decided one more can’t hurt so they played a very happy song about being in a prison in Dublin. And the auld triangle went jingle jangle. Mostly a capella. One of the musicians is from Kerry.

There was a man on the blue line train with a dog and a tattoo of a death’s head moth, Acherontia lachesis or Acherontia styx or Acherontia atropos (for whatever reason, Acherontia clotho doesn’t exist), with its skull marking exaggerated.

Allison has a crab pendant on her choker. It’s for Zeromus, you see. She was born on July 6th. She was talking about the fanky new Orange Line trains and said it was the first time in her life she was excited to ride the Orange Line.
It would be my birthday today but I’m super premature.

There were people exiting dressed as Deadpool (or was it Iron Man?), Wolverine, Captain America, and someone who looks like Neo with a hook hand.
Captain America says he dresses like this every Friday but he punches Nazis every day.

burning question: why would Trump want to buy Greenland from Denmark? Doesn't he know that Greenland is a barren land that bares no green? Probably not because he only listens to Kid Rock, Kanye West, and Ted Nugent.

There was a woman on the train with abyssopelagic black hair fading to mesopelagic blue, a wishbone necklace. She has a boxer-basenji mix but no rats. I specifically asked because she looks like Caiti. Her friend, who has hair in braids and two pugs, said “Mr. Cat?! That’s a good name for a cat.” I have no idea what the context was.
There was a train too closely in front of us so we had to stop for a few minutes.
“of course it’s in front of us. Where else would it be?” the woman with braids said.
A woman had a tattoo of a mountain scene in black and white and on her other arm, the phases of the moon. Her hair was thick and dark and tied in a wild ponytail with a black velvet ribbon.
A woman who draws occasionally has a tattoo of a flower on her leg.
A woman had luminously violet hair.
A woman at the concert had a pendant with Mary of Nazareth and a tattoo of a bee framed with leaves.

The original arrangement of Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky is much less refined and a lot weirder. It also doesn’t have that fanfare. Also, I just realized that the melody at the end is a melody from earlier.
The one in Fantasia is an entirely new arrangement based mostly on Rimsky-Korsakov

So, someone must have read about the BSO’s Mahler no. 3 and Ralph Vaughan Williams symphony no. 5, and decided, hey, if you guys can have pastoral symphonies in the dead of winter, we’ll have an Antarctica-themed symphony in late summer. The weather didn’t quite work out. In fact, I dare say it’s the most unpleasant weather at one of these concerts we’ve had in years. I say that because we've had unpleasant weather more recently but only the Mayfair people are crazy enough to hold an outdoor concert before June 1st.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite
to forgive wrongs darker than death or night
To defy power which seems omnipotent
neither to change, nor falter, nor repeat
this is to be
good, great and joyous, beautiful and free
this is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory
–Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
The first movement goes from slow and brooding to shimmery and haunted, to windswept with a wordless soprano and women’s choir, that quite literally, through the use of a canvas stretched upon rotating wooden slats, to heroic if not triumphant, to exerted.

There go the ships
And there is that Leviathan
Whom thou hast made
To take his pastime therein
–Psalm 104

The scherzo depicts a ship amongst ice floes, a hornpipe in brass and a lonely string tune. And then an awkward and playful penguin dance.

Ye ice-falls! Ye that from the mountain’s brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain–
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice
And stopped at once amidst their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! Silent cataracts!
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Hymn Before Sunrise

The Ross Ice Shelf is an expanse of floating ice larger still than all of France, eerily silent and monotonously white. Through this is the quickest path to the South Pole. The music depicts that with meandering horns and flutes droning calls, the plinking of a celeste and an organ suggesting the glaciers are like cathedrals of ice.

Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,
nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time
–John Donne, The Sunne Rising

The third movement leads directly into the fourth. While Antarctica is as desolate and as bleak as the moon, the interior inhabited by nought but lichens and tiny midges and predatory nematodes and of course tardigrades, the ocean around it are teeming with life.
Long ago, there were dinosaurs, astrapotheres, litopterns, temnospondyls, trilobites. Marsupials, of course, as that’s how they got from South America to Australia.
There’s that pastoral Ralph Vaughan Williams we all know and love. In the film, this depicts scenes back in England. Captain Lawrence Oates is so badly frostbitten and gangrenous that he walks his tent to die of exposure in the -40º temperatures. I’m not saying which scale I just used. I’ll give you a hint: F = (9/5)C + 32. F to C looks more elegant than C to F.

I do not regret this journey. We took risks, we knew we took them things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.

-the last journals of Captain Scott.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott was not the first to reach the South Pole. That would be Roald Amundsen, who beat them by a few weeks.
The finale is ardous, energetic, and elegiacally heroic. It ends like the Planets, but here the voices are drowned out not by the emptiness of space, but by the unremitting wind.

In some recordings, these passages are spoken.

It felt not like Antarctica; that would be a dry cold. I assume that Titan is moist with liquid methane.

Barber’s Adagio For Strings wasn’t intended as a lament.
It was used a video with now and then pictures of glaciers and coral reefs off the coast of Caribbean islands and the Florida Keys.

Dvořák’s 7th symphony is dark and influenced by Brahms’ Third Symphony. The scherzo introduces a bouncy Czech folk dance. The second movement is a hymn tune. To the people next to me: nobody fucking cares about your dumb irrelevant middle aged white woman shit so shut up.

The train arrived reasonably quickly and I got home reasonably early. There's always a catch. This time the catch was a small child who got off by getting on his mother's nerves, and a man listening to way too loud reggae or some style of Caribbean music without headphones.

Alex plays guitar and piano but he mostly plays bass guitar.
I think I drew the same woman I drew earlier this summer. The one in the striped seafoam green and white jacket, that is. I asked her if I did and I'm not sure if she wasn't paying that much attention the other time or if she's like me and July 7th feels like way more than 39 days ago.

A woman had short hair in transverse and longitudinal waves of neon pink.

burning question: how did I end up with a bookmark from a store in Dayton, OH? Erenow, I have only been to one state that doesn't border an ocean.

So, to sum up The Lathe of Heaven: it's basically the Goosebumps book Don't Go To Sleep except good. Also, the effects are wider reaching (although they could be in that too; we see our protagonist studying Anna Karenina in literature class, not studying current events or history) and the path to the ideal isn't necessarily a good one.

Someone else said that the Simpsons see Carmen in Russian because it’s the only recording Fox Television had the rights to. I actually watched the scene and yeah, it sounds Russian.

There's a new anthology in Kratman's fictional setting, which is basically the Earth but upsidedown and there's no Australia, and somehow, it's even more heavy handed than the real thing. There's a preview on Amazon with characters named Besma and Rashid, and I think they were in Caliphate but I read that around a decade ago and there is no fucking way I'm reading it again.

Salvini is attempting a coup against the populist party.

The most apt description of Fear Inoculum is that you had an AI spend 1000 hours listening to Lateralus and bits of Ænima and then had it write a Tool song. And then appended a title from one of those fake tracklists floating around. The people who know what Maynard had for breakfast on August 12, 1999 like it. I'd probably be a lot more interested in this if I was still a teenager.
The vocals don't seem to me as worn out as Eat The Elephant's so maybe they were just sitting on that song for a decade.
The cover art looks like a self-published novel on Amazon and I guarantee when and if they have an album in 2038, when Tritoch is still chatting with the occasional spambot and Denicalis held his one hundred millionth unattended Twitch stream, the cover art will be this one except red.

She made a drawing of what I assume is herself riding a rat. There's Ada and Caitlin and Alex, and she is none of those.

Jennifer brought her African gray parrot and Senegalese parrot. The gray said something to me but then wouldn’t speak after that. He’s also afraid of store-bought toys. The Senegal shrieks, mumbles out random human phonemes, can apparently say his name which is why she didn’t change it when she got it, cackles, imitates other birds, and makes what appear to be fart sounds. Jennifer has a raven tattoo. She wanted newspapers and I suggested the Herald and the New York Post and brought up British newspapers and her first response was "The Sun." If the British came up with a newspaper worse than the Daily Mail, that would be their greatest accomplishment.


I've got nothing. Here's a barred owl.

burning question: Michael asked why Anakin needs to be from Tatooine at all and why he couldn’t be from Naboo. Because he hates sand! But does he really have to hate sand at all? Is that so important to his character? Did he choke a contractor on the Death Star because their rec room included a sandbox?

Once again, it dropped to 20% to get our hopes up. The nicest thing I can say about the weather is that they were miraculously able to get a rain location instead of canceling a once in a lifetime chance to hear something. Also, it wasn't as packed as the last time. In fact, many seats were empty, and not because people were blocking them.

I spent a bit of time at the MFA where I saw various illustrated editions of Moby Dick including one with just pictures of whales that leaves the appearances of Ishmael, Starbuck, Queequeg, Ahab, et al, to our imagination, one by Jack and Holman Wang: Ten Words. Ten constructions of felt. The whole tale.
Autocorrect wants nothing to do with Moby Dick.
I met a woman with hair of varying shades of chromista green and oceanic blue and candy violet and in two knobs. I met a woman with a tattoo of a flower with "not broken, just bent" and a snail in black and white.

A man has a tattoo of a chameleon with no legs and bird wings.

There was a haiku contest. There's a misconception about haikus. Really, they're just short poems about nature and the seasons.
sunlight
the crack
in a tiny blue egg

polar vortex
our footprints not
where we left them

caught without an umbrella
notenoughspace
betweentheraindrops

costumed tour guide
colonial dress
almost covering her tattoos

Phaudrig Croohore is an archaic form of Patrick Connor. I've always seen it as Pádraig. The woman in front of me had some gripes with the hero of the story: he crashes a wedding and kidnaps the bride. In his defence, it was an arranged marriage. She also brought up something in the program notes in which choristers found a line about "for he was the devil" obscene and Charles Villiers Stanford refused to change it.
I don't know if it's part of a larger song cycle. Recordings are scarce.
I was the one person who didn't raise my hand when the director asked who has never heard this before. This is because I looked it up on Youtube a few days before, expecting a cancellation.

Amy Beach learned to compose by pouring over sheet music.
It wasn't the first symphony composed by a woman but it was close.
The first movement is a sonata with two themes from her previous work, one a tempest and one a lyrical jig based on an Irish folk song.
The second movement is a scherzo based on an Irish lullaby. The third movement is a lento also based on Irish lullabies, first one, then the other, than an integration of both.
The fourth movement reintroduces a theme from the first movement and introduces a new theme. It plays out like other Romantic symphonies.
She was about as Irish as many Irish elk.

I got this kurkure green chutney style snack mix, made with dal (lentils), corn, and rice. The back of it says “roz milte hain life le, par silent hain why? kurkure khul jaaye toh family bann jaaye.” I think it’s either Hindi or Marathi. They also have a Naughty Tomato flavor. Green Chutney is apparently green chili, onion, garlic, tamarind, dry mango, fennel, and parsley.

Emma studies flute and her favorite palant is lavender and she missed the summer rains in Boston but she was in Baltimore at the time, where it rained a lot there too, where the public transit is nonexistent or barely existent and not existent but broken like in Boston or existent and efficient but very confusing and monotonous like in Washington DC or existent but has an offputting smell to it like in New York City. I feel like this year, it's rained a normal amount of days but rained a lot more than it normally does on those days. Also, warmest July ever, apparently. That's climate change for you, says Emma.
Emma has a pouch with a moon-mask attached and some beads on it. The nose of the mask is the trunk of a tree. It reminds me of a disk with a Darth Maul face on it I found while we were cleaning out the art room on the last day of school.
Bees like fennel, aster, rosemary, sunflower, coneflower, sage, geranium, thyme, poppy, lavender, buttercup, aster, fennel, and verbena, according to Emma's t-shirt, which says "plant these: save the bees" on it. I looked this up. Most of her shirt was obscured by a blue and white scarf. Ants like peonies and flies apparently like rhododendrons.

Katrina has a very prominent widow's peak.
I saw a guy dressed as an MRA/incel stereotypes, that is to say, a fedora and cargo shorts and a t-shir with Ronald Reagan and a tattoo that I think depicts a stahlhelm and really bad facial hair.

burning question: is it a crime against humanity to deport people to a place they've never been?

One of the birds in boarding meows.

Michael said the book he’s talking about is called Can You Brexit Without Breaking Britain?

“Lime Time. They like the sour.”
Meanwhile, she’s “getting all the goods out” of a pregnant guinea pig.
Caitlin flooded the table. “Nothing happened here,” she says, to which Jacob says “I see a spill and a massacre.” and also “you could make a mask out of it.”

Abby has never had sushi. Or maybe she has as a small child but doesn’t remember it.
Emma was eating cookie dough in a coffee cup.

She wanted to capture some hippoboscid flies for research purposes. They’re obligate parasites, some of mammals and some of birds. They’re flat and they crab walk (we got a demonstration of this) and they’re not good flyers. Bat keds look like spiders.

Abby speaking Spanish is basically Kevin Kline's character from A Fish Called Wanda. Which he does do in the Italian dub.

Once Emma tried to dye her hair with koolaid powder and wouldn't drink the stuff afterwards because she thought it would turn her insides red for years.
Your insides are already red, Primrose says.

Dova bit someone's finger. The nail wasn't painted red, though, it was just shiny.

Walker’s roommate asked where his bible is and he said “uhh, I left it at home” and his roommate’s like “oh, not to worry, I have six!” It’s like KVN discovered religion.
Primrose says that if she steps inside a church, she's burn.

Riley told us about the time her grandmother was in hospice care and she really liked birds so one time she’s like “I’m sorry but I think it’s time for her to go” and her grandmother passes and at the same time a bird crashes into the bay window.
Emma will be in Cancun. She will probably come back but not this week. Most interns are either finishing up this week or finishing up next week.

I’m listening to Phaudrig Croohoore, an Irish Ballad for Chorus and Orchestra right now and much like The Rape of Lucretia, the recording is utter shit. The chance of rain Wednesday has hovered around 40% for the last week with a peak at 50% earlier this morning and a low of 30% on Saturday.

Burning question: Would you rather fight 30-50 AR15-sized feral hogs, or one feral hog-sized AR-15?

I hope this is like Vietnam, where they lose one for every twenty they lose, yet we still win. They know that demographics aren’t on their side. I just thought they’d wait until they start dying off.
For the purposes of voting, the killer was a casualty. Trump won’t pardon him because he still has to pretend to be a decent person.
The SAVAK guy matters less because there’s no fucking way a Californian can massacre their way to the California of Reagan and Nixon.

A man had tattoos of a nude woman and the sun in a window bordered by sunflowers, with the words "beware of the phog" on a streamer, of a Babylon-bearded man wearing the head of a bear as a hood.
A woman with octpus earrings was discussing a trip to Seoul. She’s also been to Scotland. I assume her friend who had a face so expressive it was caricaturesque is Korean.
Sarah has long rust red hair and a tattoo of a flower on her arm.
A woman had bathypelagic hair and a colorful phoenix tattoo.
Some kids in a writing camp were imagining sorbets with various vegetables.


Hyman Bloom - Seascape II
This was hung in the same room as The Slave Ship.

Audrey or Harry pointed out that the shark looked rather unrealistic and this is because a) Copley has never visited Havana and b) has most likely never seen a shark, or if he did, it would be stuffed and mounted or maybe it would be washed up on the beach, not in the process of biting off some guy’s foot (his entire leg had to be amputated).
Harry’s been to Peru. Mostly Lima but also Cuzco and Machu Picchu and a llama farm.


I think I posted this before but it’s an amazing painting. Thing that sticks out in Brinley's mind is the Mondrian square in the upper left corner and the tongue or missile coming out of the horse's mouth that she doens't think was in the original Guernica.
She has seen the actual Guernica when she spent a summer in Europe. Her favorite was Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss.
It’s not about the pipeline. I think it’s a reference to “well, seems we found oil on your territory so now we have to kick you out.”

The new gallery of Islamic art is open. I remarked that it felt as cold as Arabia during the Cryogenian.


There's an exhibit on Kay Neilsen's fairy tale illustrations. His art reminds me of Yoshitaka Amano. I'm not sure if Nielsen was an influence on Amano but Persian miniatures and Japanese woodblock prints were an influence on Nielsen.
He worked on some sequences in Fantasia and he worked on, surprise surprise, The Little Mermaid but didn't live to see the finished results. -sen is usually Danish or Norwegian, -son is Swedish.


It's paired up with a collection of fairy tale photographs.


This one is based on an Iranian folk tale the artist told to her daughter during the Arab Spring. A spider catched a beautiful butterfly in his web and offers to let her go if she captuers another insect in her stead. The butterfly is unwilling to sacrifice the firefly, the honeybee, the grasshopper, or the beetle after hearing their reasons to not be eaten, so she returns to the spider. The spider tells her that she is good because she did not sacrifice any insects, so he lets her go.

Someone wrote
in second grade, I launched a protest against our grade school dress code which required girls to wear skirts in all weither. It made walking to school uncomfortable and snowball fights impossible. We girls retaliated by wearing pants under our skirts, an effect so unladylike that the principal gave up."
and
I have a voice and a presence. I can whisper, sing, or scream. And what I put on my body is one more way I can express myself. Thank you for opening my eyes."

A woman had Famfrit’s sigil on her wrist and the underside of a horseshoe crab surrounded by geometric and linear designs. She pulled out a blue mesh pouch and took some earrings from it, so I had to add those to her portrait.
A woman in a black dress had geometric designs tattooed in rings around her arm.

burning question: A caramel candy drops in a pool of grundle handwicks which wick the hand from which the wicking has handed. Did the caramel grow in hand wicking? Or, did it get stolen by the three blind grundle snackers?

The chance of rain for July 31 held steady around 40% for the previous ten days, dropped down to 20% on the day before for a glimpse of hope, and jumped up to 50% that evening. There is one advantage to being postponed: I can watch Archer. I don’t know why I’m saying advantage because that was the season finale.
It took well over 90 minutes to get from Braintree to Downtown Crossing so when Gabriella didn’t show up later, I should not have been surprised.
The automated voice said “no smoking, please” and a guy from the Netherlands, specifically Holland, said that the smoke is coming out of our ears.
Megan had a shirt with passion flowers and rose buds and peonies (at least, that's what I think they were. My knowledge of botany is pretty much "plants have cell walls and most can photosynthesize. Also, people believed that fungi were a type of plant well until the 1970s even though Haeckel considered them to be protist, which doesn't actually mean much") a tattoo of a pine tree on her ankle and a tattoo of a pineapple on her arm. I’m assuming she has a tattoo of a apple somewhere on her. I didn’t think to ask.

A woman had a tattoo of a muscular nude man with Ashley Riot’s hair firing an arrow while seated in a bed of flowers.
Hannah is fairly androgynous looking. On one arm, she has tattoos of a faceted mountain, of a pit leading to the void, a howling wolf and snowflakes and stormclouds, the words “she’s mad but she’s magic. there’s no lie in her fire” from a Bukowski poem. On her other arm, abstract curves and swirls, a sun with its cardinal spokes the points of a compass and the two between them curved, various sigils and glyphs, a quote in Spanish and the Latin words Amor Fati, a bear's paw with a spiral on it, a sailing ship amidst a raging sea. On her leg, a stag, the words “we stand steady as the stars in the woods,” a lyric by Ben Howard, and the scales of Themis, personification of order, law, and fairness, with a lachrymose eye at the base. The number XXIII is on her other leg.

The theme is hope. There is one tough stretch, a little over a year, before the elections. It's hard because there was a mass shooting today.
There was a sticker on a traffic light that says kick racism out of racists.
William Grant Still wrote Festive Overture winning a $1000 war bond in 1942, and based it on midcentury American themes: a sonata done in Hollywood style with jazz harmonies. It opens with a pentatonic fanfare.
George Walker’s Lyric for Strings is redolent of Adagio For Strings in mood, but the structure is different. Whereas the Adagio is a canon, and the Lyric is three arches of intertwining voices rising and falling, accumulating and receding.
There were four spirituals, or rather, three spirituals about God delivering Daniel from the lion’s mouth and Jonah from the whale, about Joshua knocking down the walls of Jericho, about Lazarus’s hardship in life and heaven awaiting him, while a rich man, unnamed in the Book of Luke and named simply Dives, or “rich man,” went to hell.
The thing about spirituals is that they’re about slavery. They use religious imagery. It’s usually pretty obvious too, especially in Go Down Moses. Some spirituals even had coded messages. The thing is slave owners tried to make slaves accept their lot in life.
So it’s really quite obvious that He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands isn’t really a spiritual. There aren’t any references to slaves or to slavery. It was transcribed and recorded by Frank and Anne Warner.
Michael Tippett wrote A Child Of Our Time, an oratorio of spirituals about Kristallnacht, written from 1939 to 1941 and premiered in 1944, when things went from bad to worse.
Jubilee refers to a song that spoke of a bright happy and free future.
The Chariot Jubilee is in parts a homage to the New World Symphony. You know who did that. I say this because I can’t hold the r key and get ř or ŕ or even ꞧ (used in older Latvian writings) or ȑ (whatever that’s used for, no doubt some obscure Russian language that normally uses Cyrillic or someone’s proposal for an Abkhaz Latinization that is compatible with Unicode).
David Frazier wrote I Need You To Survive after the attack on the World Trade Center, which is sung completely in unison.
Fred Onovwerosuoke wrote A Triptych of American Voices: A Cantata of the People, setting poems to music as a response to race and gender relations. The theme of the last movement is that we are more than just the ideas and stereotypes others have of us. The poem was written after the Ferguson incidents. It starts percussion-heavy and ends percussion-heavy. It is a duet between countertenor and tenor with choral backing.
Simone the dog would bark every time the audience claps. Simone is part corgi.
Show Boat is a Broadway musical about a wandering gambler who falls in love with the boat captain, and about race relations.

One man on the train ride home had a tattoo of a samurai in blue and one man had a tattoo of a feather with its barbs breaking off and becoming a murder of crows. A guy who looked like the Dravidian version of Kylo Ren was talking about how we need water for life but not fire (depends on if you consider the sun to be made from fire) but really, the ranking of Belias above Famfrit is completly arbitrary and logic has no place in zodiac rankings and how his favorite lab experiment in chemistry is when you hold strips of various metals in a bunsen burner and the flame changes color.
The thing that sticks out in my mind was The Scary Pumpkin Shack, in which the teacher brought some pumpkins: one covered with lacerations that turned indigo when sprayed with something, one that spewed a carmine foam from every orifice, and one that self-carved. I also remember an implement called a rubber policeman which a) should really be called a rubber pope even thought that might sound suggestive and b) would make a good band name.
Everything went smoothly and I thought there’d be a catch. There wasn't a catch.

burning question: do you think there’s a way Kim Newman and Kim Stanley Robinson can take advantage of Trump?

I got cherry cheesecake treasure coins for 50 cents.
Michael said that Boris Johnson is a lower-level palette swap of Trump.
He told me about a gamebook that has you take charge of Brexit and the writer is quite observant.
Elly went to Greece and brought back chocolate covered almonds. Emma was like "I wish I went to Greece."
There’s a spider in Valley’s enclosure but she’s catching a bunch of flies so Emma will let her live. There's a new Emma.
Porcupines die from panacur, for whatever reason. One of our raccoons has ascarid worms in his poop. Raccoons get worms. But we still don't want outbreaks.
D&D has a campaign setting in an environmentally degraded fairyland. And there are two DOS games based on it. Think Mad Max or Fallout in a fantasy setting. Also there are two moons with "great green seas" and "mountain islands of dizzying heights" and "mantled in steaming mists beneath which lie scarlet jungles and marshy seas." Cool.
There's also Wild Arms.
I was dreaming of labyrinths, not of fairylands.
Songbirds have two syrinxes to sing and they have to learn their songs, and sometimes we’ll have to pair them up with a similar species.
Greg told us of a bird growing up near a crosswalk and imitating a police whistle. I saw a video of a starling talking and making R2-D2 noises.
He said that a raccoon made the name Kayla with his handprints. It's probably a coincidence and that's just the raccoon word for "let me out and I'll grant you three wishes."
That's really about it. I spent a good portion of the day giving a tour.

In Iran, there was once a prominent fascist movement. Very prominent, in fact, they were involved in the 1953 coup. They were anti-Muslim. Mostly because their views are similar to a lot of Democratic Underground members: Islam = Arab religion. Arabs = backwards goatherds = bad. Iranians = Civilized Aryans who quote Rumi = good.
One of the few benefits of the Iranian Revolution is that they’re gone now. I don’t know why I’m saying “benefits” because I’m sure they’d be purged from Iranian society under the Communists as well.
There's also Jon Tron.
burning question: so an alt-righter shoots up a garlic festival and Trump is calling antifa a terror group? This isn't about terror, this is about criminalizing left-wing politics.

There was a guy with a tattoo of a knife-wielding head of cabbage with sunglasses and stick feet.

There were three egrets in the Neponset River.
Olivia has rust-red hair and a snake ring and when she was a kid, she would go down to a lake and catch garter snakes. Maddy is blonde.
Someone brought his dog on the train.
On the green line was a tricolor guinea pig.
Maeve has a pearl pendant and freckle constellations.

I don’t know if there’s an easier way to get to Magazine Beach Park via the Red Line. What I can tell you is that it is not possible to ford the Charles River in that area. I think it might be possible to slog knee-deep across the Neponset.
I got some basil fried rice with chicken from Brown Sugar Cafe, which is right near Babcock St. station and looks a lot bigger on the inside than it does from the outside. While I was waiting, the black fish with white spots was chasing a cerulean fish with a yellow tail. There were clownfish in there too, just chillin’.
I’d say Babcock St, Pleasant Street, et al are classified as part of the Fenway and not Allston/Brighton. In fact, I’m pretty sure much of Allston is outside the reach of public transit.
I also got The Lathe of Heaven for 2 dollars at Goodwill.
That must be a hell of a view from the Boston University Bridge by night.

What I was expecting was a somewhat truncated Barber of Seville with piano in English along with a few well-known arias. What I got was a really truncated book-a-minute version of The Barber of Seville with Count Almaviva (tenor) and Rosina (mezzo-soprano) singing and Patricia playing the piano and cicadas providing background noise and Lydia with a tattoo of Exodus’ sigil on her wrist and a striped barber's apron, providing narration and occasionally breaking the fourth wall and the audience making some noise during a thunderstorm scene, along with a bunch of arias, the occasional lieder or other form of art song, and even an arranged English folk song, sorted by language, ending with a duet from La Gioconda. Two in Italian, from Rigoletto and L’italiana in Algeri; two in German, from Ariadne auf Naxos and The Magic Flute; one in French, from Werther; two in Russian because it’s Omar’s favorite language to sing in, one from Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky and one, Spring Waters, Весенние воды, an art song by Rachmaninov, who had giant monster hands, two in Spanish, one by Granados and one from an operetta by Chapí; and two in English, one from an opera called The Student Prince. Also, just so you know, ten thousand miles is about 2.5 radians. In other words, it's not quite the furthest you can be from home without leaving Earth but it's pretty close.
Props to Patricia who has to play the role an entire orchestra plays.

David, with the Spanish pronunciation that sounds more like the i in Davina, had a black and white curly-furred dog named Pancho.

Jones has Strawberry Lime and i don’t know where else to find it but it is really good.

Rachel has hair the color of plums and a tattoo of a dagger on her arm but nothing on her chest, nay, that was just freckles and shadow, and had an outfit of lavender and citric shades of green and yellow. On her bag are pins of a pansy, stars against a night sky, Jake the dog, the pansexual pride flag which indicates a preference for warm colors, a Magen David, a sculpture made from clay that reminded me of Klimt.
She just graduated from Lesley, which she says is best at being an art school now that it bought the Art Institute of Boston. She says that drawing people is a great way to interact with them. She says we hear a lot of funny stuff. Neither of us would know, because we don’t speak Arabic. She says her brain has moved on to other things.
That’s why they put the map right there, she says. Everyone does it.

burning question: have you ever gotten on the wrong train? I've gotten on an Ashmont train once. I've never gone the wrong way, though.

The Cheat is grounded. We had that light switch installed for you so you could turn the lights on and off. Not so you could throw light switch raves.

I arrived a bit late because of busing so I didn't go food truckin'
There's a pig sculpture on the Greenway that I kept mistaking for a dog, and a sculpture of logs.

It was a bit small this year, only taking up two plots of the Greenway. That building was painted with two blue birds. The artist is Dutch, so no doubt they are old world birds. One is peeking his head out of a broken glass container, one is perched on a flower.
The Vivaria were cool and lit up for night but you were supposed to take a mystery box and do the thing it tells you to do with a group of people but I have no idea how you could carry on a conversation so close to the DJ. Or occasional band. Like Abraham, who wrote an end of the world romantic song and played a few covers. They don't have much stuff online yet.
I have no idea what the thank you box is. It looked like just an empty tent. It says it’s a presence-responsive beacon in the dark; an evocative moment of unexpected gratitute, felt or recceived. Maybe that was the art. Maybe the art is inside us. Maybe the art is the friendships we make at Figment.
Mal, short for Maximina Alice Lee, is a dagron with some lights and two bicycles attached and when you pedal, her jaw opens and close and her tail sways back and forth. Nearby is a lantern filled with led lampyrines of cool purple and green and blue.
She’s A Rainbow is coiled blueprints all in different colors and you can walk through. Some of them were knocked off by the wind.
Tell Your Story, Change Your Story has a bunch of cubes with stuff written on them. I remember "a border I have crossed" and "a border I wish to cross."
There was a collaborative art tent but tha was a Greenway thing. A woman participating had a fish pendant.
Stuck is two rotating circles with a hexagonal pattern of circles on them that form hypnotic mandalas, lit up in a coruscating rainbow of leds.
Happy Earth is a sphere of cups lit from inside that shifts based on our motions and a nearby plexiglas cube that also lights up.
The Dome had a garden of flowers lit up deep sea bioluminescence and in candy rainbows.
Red Tape was back and someone was failing at it utterly.
The luminous fishes were back too.
There was a mixtape vending machine. Though I have a functioning tape player, I have not yet listened to it. One of the songs is by Strangers By Accident and one of them is by Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys. The mix is called My Friends Are Awesome.
Prismcompass: There are colors on the wall and colored tubes of lights.
Someone said it looks like Dr. Who designed the control panel. He also said the tubes do important things, much like his tubes, space phrasing. It was a hexagon and had two buttons, purpose unknown, and three dials, one which changed the beats and the intensity of the light, one which had circles that went from small to large with an unknown purpose, and one that very obviously changed the color. Spin it really fast and you can have a Hyper Sonic Rave Party.
You can make your own Sporky, except with spoons instead. Jen had a bunch of new tattoos.

Andrew always forgets my name and has no idea why.

Sarah was wearing a ballgown and had a holstered tea set and a set of markers you could use to color in the lines on the dress. Kristen said we’ll keep the tea party tea partying in Sarah’s absence. We had a leaky thing of iced tea and blackberry lemonade which is quite delicious and a thing of sour cherry juice with Russian writing because Kristen asks where else are you going to find sour cherry juice and I said Iranians and some various berries and kiwis and crackers and cheese and tea cakes made with real green tea and blueberry muffins.
"Happy birthday!" Kristen paraphrased Sarah. "You're running the tea party. Horray!"
Next year, most likely Figment will fall on Kristen's birthday.
Mika has a Fallout watch that glows in the dark. As much as he appreciates 1950s nostalgia, he’ll pass on radium.

A woman had a bird skull pendant made from metal and not bone. I think her name was Zenn but maybe I’m thinking of someone else.
Lux has a fan with a dagron on it, an abstract pendant, a blue shirt and white vest.
That’s why Neesi has the socks on a hot summer’s day. The pangolin tail bashes against her legs. She had matching horns of a deep metallic blue. Her shirt depicted various nocturnal animals like raccoons and owls looking at the moon projected upon the sky and it was a similar shade of blue. Her belt was brown and depicted birds the color of dried blood.
Someone had a tattoo of a chickadee standing on a twig near a fly agaric.

A woman passing through had blue and black hair and her friend had an abstract feathery spiky design tattooed on her back.

Bi+ Mic is when people read poems.
Sterling’s writing feels way emotionally charged for a nice summer's afternoon. One of them was about saving your work even if you aren't happy with it. Sterling has a mohawk of mesopelagic blue.
Kate, who has pink hair and a t-shirt with bi-ceratops on it, told stories about Ohio and going to the Hoover Dam and that three foot wall that separates you from the abyss and a horrendous death.
Nick read a poem about capybaras. Sandra Beasley’s Unit of Measure, which I think is the only poem out there about capybaras. Nick's shirt depicts a seven-pointed star and arms and fish skeletons.
Laurie talked about transitioning and becoming a better you.
Gabi, who has curly purple hair and a t-shirt with bi in blue and pink and other smaller words in white that form a heart, read a poem about dating as a queer woman imagined as a board game with a seven-sided die which can’t exist in real life which I can prove but one where you eventually make your own rules and the game becomes more social over time. We’re the first people in the world to hear it. She read a poem about people forcing identies on her.
Most of Merlin’s poems are about Sappho. Merlin wrote a poem when Ursula Le Guin died, although you’d never know because it’s about the ocean. Merlin's hair is blonde, short on one half and long and wild on the other. Merlin has two pendants, one ornate. Merlin's shirt said "gay pride."
Kit told me that her mother likes to draw people as well but people are generally shittier in Florida and get mad. I asked her how she draws people there because there isn't any public transit and people on the street move way too quickly, and she says that usually it's at the beach but sometimes it's at restaurants.
The bisexual resource center is not hip enough for Pinterest.

Andrew tried to grab a bird from the sky.
Trish, or was it Daphne, says we leave birds alone.
Birds do not recognize human boundaries.
Andrew showed us a photo of a fledgling bird and dismissed the myth about birds knowing your scent and abandoning their babies. Most birds have a very poor sense of smell, aside from the albatross and the turkey vulture.
Jess talked about how she knows a lot of other people named Jess and they can’t even call her Purple Jess because she’s not the only Jess with purple hair who shows up to these things. She talked about port and starboard and how she's seen the coast of Finland.
Andrew, I think, said they’re all clones. Andrew has blue hair now. Dahlia has a moon tattoo, tattoos for her mother. Garrett has tattoos of a space soldier with a raygun on one arm, an uncolored Gigeresque design of an alien with a robe and big head with tubes stuck in it.
Andrew says that Big Mac Heart Attack needs to be the name of a punk band. He has a fuck trump sticker and a hail hydrate one and a few others on his water bottle.
Trish does professional stage design which is a lot more planned than random sketches.
Zoë has light blue hair and a floral shirt and was sketching her view from inside the dome.
A woman had a dress of yellow and orange and black and earrings of squares and hexagons, and a tattoo of a floral mandala.
Hope had blue glitter on her face and was dressed as a sort of mermaid, with floral sneakers and a blue and green sarong held with a clasp bejeweled in green.
Scrams has green and orange dreadlocks and hair knobs. She's the one with the Un Chien Andalou tattoo.

Fiona has NC tattooed on her wrist, which is a reference to a dystopian comic in which women who do not confirm to the patriarchy’s demands or traditional gender roles or essentialism are labeled non-compliant. Fiona's shirt had a daisy in which the androecium was shaped like a heart.
Daisy had earrings of laser-cut bright pink plastic.

David said that plant would be great if it really was a giant dandelion the size of his head.
Later on, a woman was using one of those giant dandelion things as her standard.

Simone has a tattoo that said Forgive All By Understanding All in Greek, which Google Translate tells me is Συγχωρήστε όλους με την κατανόηση όλων, because she’s half Greek and a floral mandala on the other arm, and a brown dress with floral patterns and a black vest with gold trim, silver rings and a jade pendant, and very thick curly black hair.

Alex and Trent, a more different Raven and Brianna, were painting a repurposed school bus that they were taking to Burning Man. Trent has Hey written above his nipple.
Tierra was there, with a new tattoo of a scarab beetle in lapis blue and gold that she got because she spent a few months traveling through Africa, starting in Egypt and going through Sudan and Ethiopia via the Blue Nile and maybe Kenya and Tanzania, I didn’t hear, although if she was following the Blue Nile, she’d end up at a lake in the middle of Ethiopia, not Uganda or Kenya. She enjoyed the food in Ethiopia and really liked Sudan’s people and said that they are by far the most hospitable people of any place she's ever traveled to and I’m optimistic because Sudan has really nothing going for it aside from oil refineries they can’t use because South Sudan destroyed itself in an inability to hold things together without a common enemy, and if someone wants to control the Nile, they want Egypt because that gives them the Suez Canal as well, and what that means for Sudan is that the rest of the world won't be as invested in keeping their pet dictator in power. I recognized her because of her name and also because of the other tattoos she had: coexist which I can almost write in unicode and a map of the world. She had another new tattoo, themed of burning man. Her earrings suggest that she's trying to reclaim the ok hand sign. Or it's possibly about a lack of information flow.
It was three years ago, in August, I drew Tierra.

Felix reminds me of Rebecca. Her shirt was a patchwork of various patterns. One of her earrings was a crescent moon against the night sky, one an elephant.

Madalyn has tattoos of Gacy’s clown painting and a rose on her shoulder, cats with four eyes and Danny DeVito and flowers and fish-birds on her legs, a flying saucer abducting someone with its tractor beam and flying saucers illuminating a woman’s face in sickly greens and yellows and the tarot card Death (XIII) in red and black and a goat with a fierce expression and eyes like peridots and an eyeball flower and a fly on her other arm, a sort of Venus sigil tattooed above her navel, sigils and glyphs on her fingerse. Later, she was drawing a woman with horns and painting abstract designs on her legs in fluorescent paint of chartreuse and bright orange. She had blue and yellow and red circles painted on her cheeks. She says she wants a Pennywise tattoo. She has a pendant of a rainbow tree that Noodle gave her, and metal earrings that made her ears pointy.
Noodle’s hair is half blonde and half black. She has no visible tattoos but markings in paint. Her eyes are the color of obsidian.

Deki was back, with his electroswing.
I was like "holy shit, Cowboy Bebop!" I still need to watch that.

Raven's, the Raven with long, amplified hadeopelagic green and violet and deepest darkest black hair and not the Raven who is new to Figment and has shorter hair and was painting the school bus, friend had Thai chili-lime cashews, which I've never had before because they're so damned expensive and which may be a bit dusty but still good, and which I am not really surprised to see still at Trader Joe's.

I think a drop of rain fell on me.
Lily of Lily Black and Angeni, who wore a black gown and ribbon and fingerless gloves, and Cal, who has a collection of pendants and half-red half-green short hair, and someone I can’t remember the name of, and Zoë who has some silver necklaces and rings and a tattoo of a chickadee stumbled upon Figment.

Dirt Witch is not to be confused with either the Dust Witch from Something Wicked This Way Comes, a name which I’d imagine many bands have picked for their own name, including at least one from Massachusetts, or Crap Witch, a band that sings about bad family vacations, which is not to be confused with ChoExperiment, which formed while eating mustard sandwiches and sing about pineapples, ninjas, hamburgers, and sex. Dirt Witch, on the other hand, sings of XII - The Hanged Man and the Moon and exploding suns and magicks. Tom says that they'll be back next year with a unicorn theme. Maybe Tom. I don't know. One of the guys from OFTHESUN had eyeball tattoos, including two Tool references, an eye with two irises and two pupils, an eye engulfed in flames. I'm not sure if there are any fake tracklists of The Best Of Tool, to be released at the end of August.
They formed on the northern aestival solstice, 2018.

The table held a bowl where you write things or emotions you want to let go of, a pig's skull, antlers, stiff dried roses, a gold wire wrapped wood rod with a crystal tip, a pale twig, bright stones, a stick bedight in copper bells.
Mandalina has a tattoo of a scarlet crescent moon between her breasts, below a face with hollow eyes, on her leg, the Skull Kid wearing Majora’s Mask. She was wearing an outfit of iridescent cloth and black feathers and black lace. I met her two years ago. Usually, I can remember the season but not the year. Tierra I met in summer and Mandalina I met in October. And I remember what line they were on.
I asked if I drew her before because Mandalina is an uncommon name.
Summer has a flame tattooed above her navel, a mandala of circles tattooed on her shoulder. Her hair was curly and held with a jeweled headband, she had a crystal necklace. Tina Marie had spider hair decorations and a neon carrot colored braid and spiral earrings.
For one of their songs, Mandalina had an amplified Tibetan singing bowl and Summer had a tin plate and I think Tina Marie was using a blue silly straw to blow bubbles into an amplified chalice. Sable has short pink hair in spinities and does the effects for Dirt Witch.
A woman had a pendant of Majora’s Mask.
A woman had a tattoo of an octopus mermaid with teal legs and earrings with the sigils of the 12 zodiac constellations.
Leah has pink hair and a floral shirt over a pink shirt and a septum piercing.
I told Jackie that I like patterns and I like ornate tattoos, although sometimes I’ll just abstractify the pattern. Jackie’s outfit was black linear designs against gold, with gray and black swirls inside the hood. Her hair was a sunset prism in bright neon magenta and yellow, with thin braids.

I tried to put on doom doom doom doom doodle-um-doom doodle-um-doom, doodle-um-doom, DOO-DA-DOO-DA-DIDDLE DOO-DA-DOO-DA-DIDDLE DOO-DA-DOO-DA-DIDDLE The System Is Down The System Is Down The System is Down for the tea party but couldn’t hear it over traffic.
there’s no way I’d be able to put on Pennywise Laughing In The Forest Temple or Ocarina of Rhyme or any of that for Mandalina or the woman with the pendant or for Madalyn. Even if I did have it on my iPod.

Patrick was wondering what the plural of abyss is and I said that I’m not sure but it depends on what gender the word is and what letter the word ends in and also that it’s been Latinized.
The difference between the Void and the Abyss is that the abyss is just bottomless but the Void is all around.

OFTHESUN is ritual music on guitar, bongo drum, and human didgeridoo. During their set, I thought "oh, SHIT, it's 7:10," ran to Kala Thai because I've been wanting to eat Thai food at Figment, noticed that Kala Thai closes at 10 and not 8 like I thought for reasons not related to Piperi, which closes at 3 which is really too bad because I like their food, got some papaya salad with green papaya, green beans, chili peppers, lime juice, carrots, and peanuts. Surprisingly, the mango salad with cashews is slightly cheaper.
Then I got to hear the rest of OFTHESUN's set.

A woman was dressed as a rainbow monarch butterfly with red fiber optic lighting along the veins of her wings.
There was a woman with a third eye attached to her forehead and faery wings.
He can’t find himself when he googles floppy disk armor and he said that’s because it’s a good suit and not a bad one that people make fun of. Most of it was floppy disks, but he had a mouse on his chest and gauntlets with CD-Rs and circuit board shoulderpads.
I'm bad with names. Not quite as bad as Andrew.

By that time, I couldn't see Tierra's tattoos under her windbreaker. She asked me how long it takes to fill out a sketchbook and I realized that I don't think in terms of time but in sessions.
Meg, who is of the sign of the High Seraph, asked incredulously if Meg was an uncommon name. They were eating Gushers and Sour Patch Kids in the luminous garden.

Vicky’s bear backpack was named Mishka, a common Russian colloquialism for bear (which is медведь). She is Russian but from Belgium and studies art. Her hair is short and cherry red. David and Vicky and I danced with the bear.
Sometimes it's more fun to watch things so you can see all the pretty colors.
Jackie had a whip of rainbow fiberoptic lights. Amanda had a luminous hoop. She has white puffs in her dark hair. A guy had two whips of red blue green. There wsa a guy who looked like Blond Robert Smith and he says he gets that a lot. When I left, Brianna had changed her clothes again.

Shannon and Deb were at an event at the Charles River in which people put messages or drawings on lanterns and send them down the river where I assume they are collected.
There was a woman with short candy-pink hair, a necklace with tiny silver crescent moons and stars and a heart, and rose tattoos and a tattoo of something being pierced with a bunch of arrows on the train ride home who surprisingly wasn’t at Figment. I left at 10 because of the busing and didn't want to get home after midnight.

burning question: So, do you think Tool's new album will be a Greatest Hits? Just to troll us. So I know burning questions aren't supposed to have wrong answers.