For Your Entertainment single – Deliciously Dirty

 

 

Well I think if you’re totally hot and almost appallingly charismatic and singing about holding people down and how it’s about to get rough for them and they should just enjoy it till it’s over…you can really only be Adam Lambert. Thank god we know he’s…kind of…joking.

Spicy Dark European Drinking Chocolate – the New Reason to Live

And by live, I don’t mean breathing in and out. That’s surviving. I mean live in caps drawn out with a huge deep breath,  like LIVE live.

I had the most amazing Hedonistic moment (or 30 moments) yesterday in the middle of the morning when I realized that what I really needed to do was take my lunch break NOW, by heading down the block with my new Maisie Dobbs novel to sit at the window-front bar at Cacao and sip a 2-oz. shot of their spicy dark drinking chocolate, a thick, creamy concoction that coats your throat with bittersweet chocolate, hot pepper, and ginger. So I did. I felt amazing and very grown up and European (which are some of my favorite ways to feel). And at $2 a shot, very practical as far as indulging in bliss goes, as well.

Del Inti and Modern Dance – 6th Anniversary festivites

This year Adam and I did not buy each other gifts for our anniversary. It has nothing to do with the economy, but something to do with the fact that we just bought a new car and Adam’s dream leather Ekornes chair, which has left me feeling very “full” in the acquisition category (and quite blessed). 

I am instead made very happy by a slue of awesome memories of our anniversary date on Saturday, which included dinner outdoors at the Peruvian restaurant del Inti and a performance at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. To be honest, the dinner was one of the best I’ve had, while the show (world premiers of 4 works by modern dance choreographers) was…interesting. It wasn’t what I expected. It definately stretched my artistic boundaries; though I wouldn’t go as far as Adam (“It was awful”); it was emotionally jarring but physically impressive. But DINNER…wow.

We had shrimp ceviche with mango, salmon ceviche with red onion, a huge grilled pork chop with apricots and a black bean cake, potato gratin, wax beans with olive oil, cilantro, and bacon, and summer squash grilled with garlic aoli. And an entire bottle of a delicious jammy Cab/Syrah. And cappacinos. Cappacini? Anyway, so so so good.

Adam Lambert at American Idols Live Tour: Portland 7/5

Well…when an entire stadium of people rise simultaneously to their feet and yell with a deafening frenzy for one man and one man alone, you know you’re witnessing the birth of a superstar. Plus he pulled the whole “I’m gonna drop my studded leather jacket and prance sexily about in a sparkly little tank and tight black leather pants” thing, so really…combined with his magnificent voice and great song choices, this was one of the better 25 minutes of my life.

Check out a video clip of Muse’s “Starlight” here: link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1509319618?bctid=28575591001

And this one of “Whole Lotta Love” (I didn’t take it, it was posted on YouTube by another Portland fan) – it’s fuzzy at first but gets better. And 1:34 is to die for. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFytkuisOsE

Foray Into Dance, Part 1

Inspired by my recent attendance at the Oregon Ballet Theater’s performance several weeks ago and by the insipid dread of “I’m going to be 30 in a few years and have not yet accomplished any of the things I thought I would have by that point,” a malady I find both wide-spread and incredibly motivating, I have taken up ballet.

To be honest, I have had exactly one session of Absolute Beginning Ballet, but by week’s end I will have finished the course and be ready (one hopes) for regular Beginning Ballet. I came away from last night’s class excited but sobered – I figured it would be a bit of a cakewalk this early on. I was wrong. It’s amazing how such simple movements can be so difficult. Luckily Her Excellency Elizaebeth Nielsen Sheller is complicit in my quest for straight knees and pointed toes. It always helps to have a buddy.

This is For My Husband, Who Digs Punk Rock Chicks

He also likes them heavily tattoo-ed, hard drinking, and foul-mouthed, but you know…one thing at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Not shown in picture: navy blue nail polish and new black leather studded Michael Kors birthday bag…coming next, red leather 4-inch gladiator sandals. This is rock, Foo-style.)

This is Not Liberal v. Conservative. This is Justice v. Inequality.

“Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, long identified as opposing forces for conservative and liberal groups, filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of two gay men and two gay women, arguing that a California constitutional amendment eliminating the right of gay couples to marry violates the U.S. constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process.

“Olson said he hopes the case will wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“‘This is a federal question,’ Olson said in a telephone interview Tuesday. ‘This is about the rights of individuals to be treated equally and not be stigmatized.’

“He said that he and Boies, who have become close friends in the years since Bush v. Gore, decided to collaborate on the issue.

“‘We wanted to be a symbol of the fact that this not a conservative or a liberal issue. We want to send a signal that this is an important constitutional issue involving equal rights for all Americans,”‘Olson said.”

See complete article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/26/state/n161614D94.DTL

California Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Same-Sex Marriage

Honestly, California. So many WAY LAMER states have done the right thing already. Why are you crushing my profound and honest love of you?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/27marriage.html?_r=1&hp

Star Trek and the New Power Geek

After two of my best friends recently announced they were reclaiming substantial and important pieces of their identity – (Liz: “I’m reclaiming sexy” / Joanna: “I’m reclaiming badass”), I decided it was time to finally and publicly (or at least as publically as a blog read by 8 people is) own up to a title I’ve paraded for years, but never fully embraced: I’m reclaiming nerdy. And I’m doing it in the coolest way possible. Behold, I admit it:

I Think Spock Is Sexy. AND, I’m not alone:

“If you had to boil down a hundred years of science fiction — from H.G. Wells to Philip K. Dick, from Metropolis to 2001, from Robby the Robot to Darth Vader — to a single cautionary sentence, it might be this: In the age of technology, human beings, as a race, have become so ruthlessly intelligent that they’re threatening to turn into the machines they invent. It doesn’t matter whether the sci-fi character in question is a robot, an android, a cyborg, a rogue A.I. computer, a Big Brother on surveillance camera, or a giant-headed alien invader: All are metaphors for man evolved into Automatic Man, stripped of “feeling” in an age of cerebral overdevelopment. All are pop projections of a society built, increasingly, on the cult of mind over matter.

When Star Trek first launched into network orbit in 1966, Leonard Nimoy’s quizzically handsome, slightly inscrutable, deep-voiced Vulcan Spock — a man so arch he had permanent raised eyebrows — was the most benign, and prime-time user-friendly, of these humanoid head cases. A kind of missing link between the British TV alien time traveler Doctor Who (who debuted in 1963) and Yoda, Spock, the Vulcan with the ears of an elf, the bangs of a mid-’60s turtlenecked nightclub dandy, and the manners of an extraterrestrial Zen guru, was, symbolically speaking, humanity “evolved” into a creature of ultimate, impeccable logic and wisdom. Of course, such perfection isn’t really attainable, or even necessarily desirable, which is why the flaw in Spock’s nature, his human side — the bits of emotion that niggled away at his placid demeanor — were what made him sympathetic. Yet within the temperamentally integrated rainbow coalition that was the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, Spock, the suavely rational brain man, represented something new: the coming of geek chic.

For the fans who’ve spent decades lining up at Star Trek conventions in rubber elf ears, Spock has always been, in his way, kind of cool. He’s a hero to anyone who experiences his own nature as intensely, if not overly, rational. But the whole premise of the series is that Capt. James T. Kirk is inescapably cooler. Spock is the mind to Kirk’s body, the control freak to his hothead, the rock to his roll. And so it has been for 43 years.

Until now. In Star Trek, the already smashingly popular J.J. Abrams reboot, Zachary Quinto invests Spock with a new layer of chilly-smoldering sex appeal. Early on, when he’s still a rising cadet on his home planet, he’s told that a Vulcan should allow himself to be dominated by logic not because he has no feelings, but because his feelings run so deep. (It’s the same lesson, in essence, that Obi-Wan Kenobi delivers to Luke Skywalker: The Force will be with you if you discipline your spirit.) The thing is, this represents a radical, if subtle, expansion of the Spock mojo: It turns out that he’s not quite a utilitarian logic fiend by nature — he’s just trained to be a genius at keeping a lid on his passions. And Quinto does a fantastic job of maintaining Spock’s calm, no-sweat surface but getting quietly hot and bothered underneath. He makes the war within Spock as electric, in its way, as the young Kirk’s reckless I-gotta-be-bad-because-I’ll-never-be-as-great-as-my-daddy swagger.

Geek chic, of course, is an outdated term. In the age of the Internet and the endlessly updated technological home-entertainment/office-slave gadget, we’re all geeks now. And maybe it’s only in the context of a culture that has come to require mind over matter, 24 hours a day, that a mandarin like Spock could finally pull up even with a noble macho like Kirk in the cool sweepstakes. Or maybe even surpass him. For the first time, says the new Star Trek, we’re no longer just all geeks; we’re all Spock.”

(This article was posted as a PopWatch on www.ew.com on May 9, 2009 by Owen Gleiberman.)

NEVER AGAIN Do I Want to See THIS LOOK on the Gorgeous Face of our Glam God, the Dark Lord Screamanova