thunderhaven

I've set this map to stay at the top of the page so that it will continue to collect any visitors to this page, and so that I can find it easily :) So, even though you may have seen this post before, it doesn't mean there haven't been any updates since then. Just scroll down to the next post to see if there's any new stuff.

Thanks!!

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In recent years, it become a lot more common to see products placed in movies and TV shows as a form of supposedly subtle "advertising," but sometimes the effect is hilarious. I'm watching "Twister" right now (can you believe that movie is 12 years old?!?) and I always crack up near the end when our heroine needs everyone to collect all the aluminium cans they can find, and we discover that the entire population of Wakita, Oklahoma, loves Pepsi products.

That's all for now. Just a random thought I'd thought I'd share :)

(Edited at 2:45pm to add: For those who have no idea who "Alex" is or why I care, he's the guitarist for Rush, not a personal friend or anything ::shrug:: What can I say - slightly obsessed, eh? *g*)

I hadn't heard much about Alex's suit lately, I knew at least part of it had been dismissed, but apparently the US Court of Appeal for the 11th Circuit has reinstated part of Alex's suit against Frank Barner and the Ritz Hotel. The Sheriff's office, however, is still in the clear. There is, apparently, some talk of someone appealing something to the US Supreme Court, but I'm not sure exactly what since the article seems to jump around a lot. Maybe when I'm more awake and stuff it'll make more sense.

The part I found most interesting, though, is a section of the article detailing the what the court record shows as to what happened that night. The part where it talks about Justin pulling his arm free, which the cops decided meant he was violently resisting, is what the judge in Justin's criminal case determine was NOT violent and which led to the reduction of charges against Justin and the plea bargains Alex and Justin took. It also explains what happened on the stairs when Alex and the deputy fell. And, according to the court record, Justin and Alex got on the stage for a bit, and it was later, when Justin was dancing with a friend, that Barner had the sheriffs office called - he claimed that when he warned Justin about his behaviour, Justin started yelling and cursing, when, in reality, Barner hadn't even SPOKEN to Justin yet. Oh, and no blood-spitting either. He was trying to talk which a bleeding and broken nose.

Also of note, in the main part of the article, apparently Alex suffered numbness in his HANDS for about a year as a result of how he was handcuffed.

Court records provide this account:

Justin Zivojinovich had been dancing boisterously and twice got onstage where bands were playing, at one point asking the audience to cheer the band. The second time, his father also jumped onstage, playing a conga drum for a few seconds.

Later, at 11:15 p.m., when Justin Zivojinovich began dancing with a male friend, Barner radioed the front desk, asking Sorrell to phone the sheriff’s office to have him escorted out and to issue a trespass warning. She told the dispatcher two disorderly people were “just basically trashing the place . . . jumping on furniture, ripping things apart” and couldn’t be controlled by Ritz security — an account that wasn’t true.

To ensure they had all necessary information, Barner also called a dispatcher to say two disorderly people were screaming and yelling, jumping on stage, commandeering the bandstand, and giving band members a hard time. He said he’d warned Justin Zivojinovich, but he yelled back, cursing and carrying on. At the time, Barner hadn’t spoken with Justin Zivojinovich.

Deputies Knott, Scott Russell and Amy Stanford arrived and Barner exaggerated the events and claimed Justin Zivojinovich cursed and yelled when asked to leave the stage.

As his son was escorted out, Alex Zivojinovich pleaded with deputies, saying it was New Year’s Eve and they hadn’t done anything as his son asked to be allowed to go home.

Stanford warned the father to stand back and later pulled Justin Zivojinovich’s right arm up, prompting him to scream that she was hurting him. As they entered a stairwell, he pulled his arm away, straightening it. Knott pushed him, causing Zivojinovich and Stanford to fall down the stairs, where Zivojinovich landed on his chest and Stanford fell over him.

A struggle ensued, with deputies using Tasers and Stanford hitting the elder Zivojinovich’s face, and Russell punching him and breaking his nose. Although the elder Zivojinovich was paralyzed after being hit with a Taser, a deputy shot again. Justin’s wife, Michelle, went to help her husband. After they were handcuffed and led out, the elder Zivojinovich questioned Knott’s actions, spewing blood as he spoke and prompting Knott to accuse him of doing it on purpose.

The father and son were charged with a felony charge of resisting arrest with violence, which is punishable by up to five years in a state prison, but pleaded to a misdemeanor resisting charge and were sentenced to probation. Michelle Zivojinovich was charged with a misdemeanor, but it was dismissed.

And while this may not have any bearing on his actions on New Year's Eve, it turns out that Christopher Knott, who was essentially the leader of deputies that responded to Barner's call, got kicked from the force after complaints that he'd sexually harassed at least 2 women:

A four-year veteran of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office was fired in January after two internal investigations revealed he was sexually harassing women while on duty.

According to an internal investigation obtained Monday by the Naples Daily News and reported on naplesnews.com, Cpl. Christopher Knott, who started with the agency in January 2003, was fired in January after it was revealed he grabbed the shorts of a woman working at a local restaurant and told her he wanted naked pictures of her.

Another investigation revealed that Knott, 32, had been “checking out” a woman in a shopping center parking lot, and then pulled the woman over in Lee County for what she deemed to be no apparent reason.

The Bill of Rights Defence Committee is sponsoring the People's Campaign for the Constitution, which is described at the campaign site as:

The People’s Campaign for the Constitution (PCC) was initiated in March 2008 by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC), a national organization based in Northampton, Massachusetts.

BORDC developed and coordinated the Bill of Rights resolution campaign, which has involved community coalitions in 46 states. These coalitions organized to get local and state governments to defend the Bill of Rights and oppose laws and policies inaugurated under the guise of the “War on Terror” that violate these rights. Since 2002, 406 town, city, and county governments, plus 8 state governments have passed these resolutions, helping to dramatically alter the public debate on constitutional liberties since 9-11. Local organizers who were involved with those efforts provided valuable input for this campaign.

Six years of grassroots action to restore constitutional protections have led to increased oversight, congressional hearings, and many unfulfilled promises of more changes, but they have fallen short of the full restoration of constitutional rights and liberties that people who are familiar with the Constitution demand. Indeed, some of the abuses have gotten worse. The BORDC is initiating the PCC out of the recognition that we need a strategy to address the common source of the multiple threats to our Constitution, because we’ve seen that we are more numerous, stronger and, more energized when we re-unite our local coalitions to face common threats to our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The campaign is pretty new, not quite everything is set on their site yet, but I believe it to be a good cause, and wanted to encourage any of you who agree - or think you might - to check out their information and see if you want to support them also.

I actually got 2 surprises today, musically speaking. First: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is actually aware of Rush's existence! That was a HUGE shocker. Well, ok, not so much, since one of the guys on the nominating committee has said flat out that Rush will never be inducted as long as he has anything to say about it, but still.... So, the surprise? On the HoF's list of

Forbes had a really interesting story today about a forensics lab that has been getting called on by police stations across the US for help, especially when analysis of footage from surveillance cameras is needed or video tape needs to be restored before it can be analysed, since that's their speciality, though they've also been called on to help with fingerprint analysis and tracking cell phones among other things. The surprising part? This lab doesn't belong to any law enforcement agency, nor is it affiliated with any university or scientific association. It's owned and operated by, get this, Target!

Not only is Target getting called on to help out with cases, specifically murder, sexual assault and armed robbery, but they do the work on a volunteer basis. You read that right, they do not charge the police departments they're helping. All they ask for is one of the departmental patches (like the cops wear on the shoulder of their uniform) which they put on a display in their main office. So far, they have 136 patches in their collection, and have done so much work that they had to open a 2nd office to help with the volume of work.

We hear so much about evil corporations, it's kind of nice to see one that - in at least one way - is actually trying to do something that's actually in the public good.

Matt sent me this, he said it was the perfect representation of me.



I fear he's not too far off the mark. I can remember more than a few nights of furious typing while trying to make one point or another clear....

I am truly hopeless. ::sighs wistfully::

According to an article in the HeraldSun (an Australian paper,) doctors are now saying that they do not expect Kerstin Fritzl to live. Apparently, she has developed an auto-immune disorder, related to her inbreeding.

I suppose in some ways, if she doesn't survive, it might be seen as something of a blessing. Recovering from her ordeal wouldn't be easy - and it may not be possible, especially since she's the eldest. At the same time, though, it'd be sad for her to never be able to enjoy any of the freedom she helped bring to her mother and brothers.

I pray that Eir will keep watch over Kerstin, and that whatever happens, it will be what is the best for Kerstin.

This is certainly interesting. One of the lodgers - Sepp Leitner - now claims that he knew that Elisabeth was being abused in the years before she was imprisoned in 1984. This is the same tenant who said that his electric bill was unusually high and that he was evicted when he stopped paying the bill and because he had a dog (even though pets weren’t allowed.)

Sadly, he was apparently more willing to risk his “landlord’s ‘revenge’” over a big electric bill than he was over the idea of notifying the police of Elisabeth’s early abuse which led her to run away.

Also, I wonder why the father let him have a dog in his apartment for at least some period of time when pets were forbidden and he wasn’t well known for tolerating people going against his word? That just seems odd to me.

A lodger who once lived in Josef Fritzl’s House of Horrors claimed yesterday that he had known that the Austrian electrician was sexually abusing his daughter Elisabeth.

Sepp Leitner, who lived in Mr Fritzl’s house for four years in the early 1980s, said in a television interview that a female neighbour had told him that her friend Elisabeth had been raped by her father.

According to Mr Leitner, the neighbour even helped Elisabeth to run away to Vienna but the teenager was tracked down by police and brought back to Amstetten at her father’s behest. “Elisabeth was repeatedly raped by her father. She could not take it to live at home anymore and tried to escape,” Mr Leitner told the Austrian private television channel ATV.

“She had taken sleeping pills and went to Vienna. But the police found her and they, or her father, brought her back home.” Mr Leitner did not explain why he and the unnamed neighbour failed to alert the police about Elisabeth’s plight, though he hinted darkly at their fear of the landlord’s “revenge”. Mr Leitner said that he was still tormented by nightmares.

I dunno, something about Leitner is striking me as rather hinky. There have been questions raised about the possiblity of an accomplice of some sort since the sliding concrete door leading to the dungeon from the normal part of the basement weight over 600 lbs and couldn’t have been hinged by just one person. I’ll be interested to see what more we hear of from this guy.

I've been engaged in a very interesting conversation on Crimerant today about Elisabeth Fritzl, the woman who'd been imprisoned by her father and repeatedly raped by him, resulting in 7 children (one of whom died in infanthood.) I wanted to post some of the comments I made in the thread. Since I don't have permission from the other users to post their comments as quotes, I'll paraphrase their main points so you can have an idea of what I was responding to, and you can read their comments in full at the link above.

( The rest can be find behind the cut )

I just find these things so fascinating :)


( Click here to see! )

Oh.

My.

Gods.

I presume most of you have heard about the woman, Elisabeth Fritzl, who, until last week, had been held captive in a cellar by her father. He had tricked her into going into the basement when she was 18, where he then restrained her and locked her down there. In the 24 years since then, he repeatedly raped her and fathering (and grandfathering!) 7 children. One of the children - part of a pair of twins - died in infancy and he has said he disposed of the body by incinerating it. He chose to bring 3 of the remaining 6 children to live with him and his wife, Rosemarie (who had been told that Elisabeth had run off to join a religious cult and had no idea that she was actually in their basement.) He told Rosemarie that Elisabeth had dropped the children off on their doorstep, and showed her notes he'd forced Elisabeth to write in which she said she wanted them to care for the child because she couldn't. He did this on 3 separate occasions. He then also took those notes to the social agency so that he could legally adopt his own children (but, of course, he couldn't tell anyone he was the father, now, could he?)

The whole thing came to light when Elisabeth's 19-year-old daughter, Kerstin (the oldest of the children) became seriously ill and had to be taken to the hospital. How, exactly, it came out is still a bit unclear. I've read that the mother was able to slip a note into her daughter's clothing asking for help, but I've also heard that the doctors put out a bulletin asking the mother - or anyone with information about her - to come forward as they needed more information about the girl's medical history. Perhaps both are true - they got the note, and used the appeal for help to try and find out if anyone knew what had happened to her, or - if they knew or suspected the father was involved - to pressure him to produce her. Whatever the case, the father then let Elisabeth and her other two children, 18-year-old Stefan and 5-year-old Felix, out, and police picked the father and Elisabeth up. Initially, she wouldn't tell them anything, until they assured her that she wouldn't have to see her father again, and then the story came out.

I've been reading a number of blogs that are writing about the story and one thing I see a lot of is questioning if it's really possible that Rosemarie really had no idea what was happening. Her husband had told her never to go into the basement when he was there because he didn't want to disturbed while he was working (he was an electrical engineer and claimed he was working on blueprints and schematics.) Many posts I've read are quite angry and think the mother should be punished just as harshly as the father because they believe she is just as culpable as he is, as she did nothing to stop him from abusing and then imprisoning their daughter.

So far, at least, authorities believe Rosemarie's claims, and at this point - based on what we've been told so far - I do also. Of course, that may change if additional information comes out, but otherwise, yeah, I think its plausible that she really might not have known - or that she simply couldn't let herself ask any questions even if she did have any suspicions.

( Why do I think it's plausible that the wife didn't know? Read more behind the cut. )

Two related stories I've read about, though, can serve as a reminder than even amongst the depravity of our world, sometimes, there are still a lot of good people around, too. Two years ago, an 18-year-old girl named Natascha Kampusch escaped from a man who had kidnapped her when she was 10 and had held her captive in his basement. She was severely traumatized, as you might expect, and when her captor killed himself rather than being taken in by the police, she said she kind of felt sorry for him - though she denies that she was cause up in the Stockholm Syndrome that can happen to people held captive. She seems to have tried to keep a rather low profile, but when this story came to light, she said that she wants to offer the daughter and her children €25,000 to help them with whatever they need. I can only imagine that when this news broke, it took her back to her own experience - something that she wants to put behind her - but rather than shy away from the story, she's opted to reach out and try to help this woman and her family.

Likewise, Lydia Gouardo, a 45-year-old French woman who had been tortured by her adoptive father for 28 years and had 6 children by him, has reached out and offered friendship to the Elisabeth. As with the Natascha, I can't imagine that Lydia would want to relive any part of what she had to endure, and yet here she is, willing to befriend a woman who's been through a similar situation and use what she's gone through to help the daughter and her children with their own recoveries. While Lydia has said that part of her offer of friendship is so that she won't feel so alone in living with her past, it still can't be easy to reach out to someone else who's situation is so reminiscent of her own. I have to honour that kind of courage and spirit both of these women have, and I truly hope they will be able to help Elisabeth and her children as they try to recover!

There's a very long road ahead for everyone in the family. Psychologists have said that they think 5-year-old Fritz has the best chance of recovering with minimal psychological damage. Kerstin - the one who's illness lead to their freedom - and Stefan have never been outside, and because the cellar they were kept in was so small, they will likely have a permanent hunch and be unable to walk fully upright. There is also concern for Fritz because of how excited and/or agitated he gets when faced with something new (which is pretty much everything at this point, if you think about it - they only had a TV, but no books, a refrigerator, toilet, sink and beds in their cellar.) They're worried about the strain. As might be expected, the health of all three of the cellar children and their mother isn't terribly good, and the children are said to speak to each other primarily in what sounds like "growls and coos". They can speak and understand some "normal" speech, but reports are that they have to concentrate very hard to do so, and get exhausted from the stress very quickly.

It may be a long time before we can really understand how or why something like this has happened, but right now, IMO, the important thing is for Elisabeth and her children to be given the time - and the privacy - needed for them to begin healing. Some of the scars - emotional and physical - may never go away, but with the right help, I think there's a chance that they can at least have decent lives from here on out. I wish them all the best.

Well, they finished most of the major work on the house today! I'm amazed at how different it looks - it's SO much better than it had been before. The house had been a kind of dingy white with black shutters, but now the siding is kind of latte coloured with white trim at on the edges and corners - when Matt gets some of the photos on the computer I may post a couple. They replaced the back door that was on the verge of falling apart because of Xander's tendency to try to eat anything he can - plus he and Tasha scratching on it to let us know they want to come back in - with a really nice STEEL door - it's gonna take Xan a bit more effort to damage this one, I think! They put in new windows that reported to reduce energy costs by up to 35%, so that will be helpful, too! They removed all the board with wood rot and replaced them with new wood, and completely re-landscaped the area where we had some crazy, overgrown bushes. They even planted some flowers at the base of this huge maple tree we have in our front yard (oh, is that tree beautiful - in the fall, when it's leaves are all flame red and bright orange, you can actually see our tree from a few blocks down the street!)

The tree lady (there were SO many people here, I really didn't get too many people's actually names, but it's ok, because she never did get my name right either - LOL!) managed to get me a birch and a rowan that she planted in the same hole so that they'll grow up together the way the birch and elm had, and I also now have an actual red oak tree in my yard! I'd been doing some research on which trees were associated with which Gods and learned that in addition to the oak, Thor is also associated with the birch, and the rowan is associated with Sif - so not only do I have a red oak for red Thor, but I have a birch and rowan growing together to honour Thor and Sif as a couple. When they cut down my other trees, I was initially pretty distraught, but I think this will actually make for a stronger little grove out there. The Gods do move in mysterious ways, eh?

I have to say, right now, I am not only very grateful to the Gods for leading these people to us, but also to *their* God (or Gods) for encouraging the to do this kind of charitable work. I tend to be a bit cynical at times, so this kind of an outpouring of generosity just amazes the daylights out of me!

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Speaking of generosity, I saw a nice example of it today on one of the shows I watch. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal at all, but it's just nice to see stuff like this sometimes. I was watching one of the Challenge shows they do on Food Network where they bring in a bunch of cake designers who know the basic concept of the cake they're going to be making, but don't know the specifics until they get there. In this episode - (which was a repeat, so some of you may have seen it before) - the challenge was to create an engagement cake for a couple who got engaged right before the competition. It was cute - the man had told his girlfriend that they had a chance to be on a Food Network challenge helping out some of the competitors, and she - knowing he was "wanting his 15 minutes of fame" (as she put it) agreed. So, when the show begins, they two walk out there and she's not quite sure what they'll be doing, when he turns to her, gets down on his knee and proposes. Luckily, she said yes, or this would have been a VERY short episode!

Anyway, about 5 hours into the 6 hour competition, one of the cake designers collapsed and they had to take her to the hospital. That left her assistant there with an uncompleted cake. One of the other competing teams decided that they could make make their cake a bit less fancy than they'd planned, so that one of them could go help the assistant finish her teams cake, while the other guy work on their own cake. Then, when the 2nd guy got done with their cake, he went over to help make sure the assistant's cake was done.

I just thought that was the coolest thing. I mean, it wasn't like they were completely done, they still had work to do, and in order to help their competitor be able to have a finished cake to show, they actually did LESS on their own cake than they'd planned - which was something that could have hurt their own chances - to make sure that another competitor could at least have something nice to offer as well.

Sometimes I think it's sad that small things like that really affect me, because it seems like those kind of things should be the norm, not the exception, and that they're rare enough that I take notice of them, it makes me kind of sad.

Unfortunately, my DVR cut off for some reason before the couple could give their opinions on the designs, taste the cakes and decide on a winner, but I think I probably saw the best part of it, anyway.

Well, the guys came out to start the work on our house today. I'm still stunned by the scope of the work they're doing. They're not going to be able to rewire the house - at least not right now, but they are going to check all the connections in the attic to make sure they all the the appropriate caps and stuff so they won't catch on fire. Speaking of fire, they had someone from the fire department come out and get us a new smoke detector, installed in the right place, which is good (I hadn't realized we didn't have one - oops!)

Today they tore most of the siding off the house - unfortunately, they discovered a lot of termite damage, and they're going to see how much of that they can repair, and then they'll be putting new siding on the house and replacing all of our windows. They're going to rebuild the gate to our back yard and put a lock on it, remove out old shed and install a new one, dig out some concrete polls we have in the yard (no idea what they were ever for - I think probably a clothesline, but we have a dryer, so we don't need that any more,) remove the basketball goal that's made it hard for us to use part of our driveway where it's wide enough to part 2 cars side by side so that we can make use of that space, install vents and a door in our crawl space so that we can access it, but animals and such can't, fix our gutters, remove and replant the bushes around the house, replace the garage door, remove the wooden wheelchair ramp and build a new concrete one, clean out our garage so we can actually use it for once and mow our lawn.

I am SO grateful to them for the work they're doing - all at no cost to us - but there have been a few glitches along they way. Because they have to coordinate so many people, they basically just told us when they were coming. It would have been better if we'd had enough notice ahead of time so that Matt could have gotten the day off, but at least Chuck as able to be here.

While they're dong a lot of the structural work, they need us to have the dogs out of the way. They had indicated they could try to get us free boarding at a kennel, but I said I'd feel better keeping them at our vet - the charge for that is pretty minimal. They said maybe they could work out something with them, so we gave them the vets name and number. By Thursday, we hadn't heard anything, so figured things hadn't worked out and called the vet to arrange to bring the in Friday night and pick them up Monday morning. I wasn't happy about having them gone so long, but at least I knew they'd be in great care. As I was talking to the receptionist, she called over one of the nurses - it turns out the construction people HAD gotten in touch with the office, and had arranged for us to bring the dogs in Saturday morning and to even have one of the nurses make a special trip to the vet's office on Saturday night just so we could pick them up and not leave them there overnight. I was THRILLED, but it was also kind of weird calling my vet to make arrangements and having them tell me what the arrangements were. We never did get a call back from the construction people to let us know what was going on, so I'm glad we called the vet.

The hardest part for me, though, has been that they didn't run all of the work past us before doing some things. When we first moved into the house 13 1/2 years ago, one of the first things I did was add trees to our backyard. We only had one, so I got a silver maple, as a gift to Thor (only because I couldn't find an oak and maple seemed to be the closest substitute I could find,) an apple tree for Iduna, a birch for Freya and an elm for Embla (we couldn't find an ash to go with it.) During the first winter, all of the trees appeared to die, and then in the spring came back to life with new shoots and trunks. We just let them grow however they wanted, trimming branches when necessary, but otherwise, just letting them be what they wanted to be.

Interestingly, somehow, an elm trunk decided to grow right up with the birch, so that from a distance it looked like one tree with three trunks, but when you got closer, 2 trunks were white and one was brown and there was a mixture of leaves for the canopy. The elm also had two other trunks about 5 feet away, off by themselves. Well, these guys thought that those trees were leaning toward the house and that some of the branches were a bit too far over the roof, and that others were hanging over the fence and might cause damage to our neighbour's property leaving us open to potential legal liability. Rather than asking what we wanted them to do (I would have suggested cutting back the parts hanging over the house and the fence and leave the rest to grow out in the other directions) they just cut them down. They also cut down the apple tree, but I understood that one better. It had a hard time getting sunlight and was growing more horizontal down near the ground that vertical, and we'd been having a lot of problems trying to keep on top of the dropping fruit and keeping Xander from eating all the green apples. But the birch and elm tree was one of my favourites - the way that they just wanted to be together. When Matt told me they'd cut it down - without even TELLING us they were going to, I was really distraught.

The guys said that they were going to replace the trees - that was part of their plan, and that they had thought the extra elm trunk was a deformation that we probably didn't want. When Matt explained to them that the trees had very significant spiritual meaning to me and that I'd made a conscious decision to let the elm and birch grow up together like they did, they were VERY apologetic - it had never occurred to them that these were anything more than, you know, just trees. So they asked me what I'd want them to replace them with - I asked for an ash and elm planted close together (for Ask and Embla), and if that wasn't possible, then a birch with either an oak (for Thor, natch), an ash, an elm or "a tree that has bright golden leaves in the fall (for Holda), and to replace the apple tree with an oak, ash, elm, birch or "dark green fir tree." If anyone would be willing to put in a good word with the Gods of Tree Shopping for me that they can get me an Ash and Elm to grow together and an Oak for Thor, I'd be mighty appreciative!

But, as I said, overall I'm really just very grateful for all the work they're doing - we would never have been able to afford anywhere NEAR what they're doing (which is part of why its not been done sooner) and I know their hearts are in the right place, even if their communications skills could use a bit of work, eh?

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As for my happy discovery, we'd had two polaroid shots of Sabaka from the first day we brought him home almost 14 years ago, and I'd been looking for them for the last two years, since he went to the Bridge. I thought they were gone forever. Well, in the process of moving furnture around so the workers will be able to have room to get at the windows, guess what I found! I was SO thrilled!! They brought back a flood of tears and I just sat there for a bit, holding them over my heart, and then quickly put them into the picture album I have that I've kept all my concert ticket stubs in :) Hey, at least I know where they, and I keep that book in a special place so I can always be sure to find it. So that was really, really cool!

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Tonight's "Moonlight", all I can say is WOW! It was an EXTREMELY well done episode. I'd read some of the previews and spoilers about it, and it certainly didn't disappoint. If you've not been following this show, you can catch up with full episodes available to view free at the link above. It's been really well done all season, and for it's first post-writer's-strike episode it's come back running at full tilt. I don't want to give anything away, but it involves Mick and Beth trying to determine which of two leads into a murder is the correct one, Mick having to face a couple of big questions and decisions, one of the best multi-vamp fight scenes I've seen in a while and more. Part of what I love about the show is that it does a great job of blending humour, drama, romance and good old-fashioned murder mysteries. Whether it gets a second season or not will largely be determined by how well these last 4 (including tonight's) episodes do in the ratings, so I'm really hoping they'll be able to do well. This is one show I've REALLY missed over the strike hiatus and I don't want to have to be missing it all next season :D

"Art" is one of those things that tends to be hard to define because it's so highly subjective. What I might consider "art" someone else might think is "junk" - and both of us would be right, since art exists to a great extent in how a person experiences it. It's not even necessarily subject to whether we consider something to be good or bad - I could name dozens of movies that I love to watch repeatedly because they're just so much fun, but they aren't anything I'd consider to be "art," because for me, art provokes thought beyond what is simply on display.

For example, "Demolition Man" with Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone isn't much more than humorous, dumb fluff, but I watch it every change I get because it always cracks me up and leaves me in a good mood. It's not what I would call "art" but it's certainly enjoyable.

On the other hand, "United 93" isn't necessarily the most finely crafted film - I admire Paul Greenglass for bringing in several of the people who had to try and deal with the events happening on 9/11 to play themselves in the movie. Because these people are not actors, however, in many scenes, they seem a bit "wooden," and in the general terms of how I typically evaluate a movie, it's ok, but not something I would call "great." Yet every time I watch that movie, I find myself focusing on many of the different situations and issues that arose on that day. Trying to comprehend what it must have been like to be watching all this unfold in real time - not to mention trying to figure out what needed to be done - has helped me understand more about my own reaction to what happened that day. Watching the people on the plane, and hearing the kinds of things they were trying to express to their families when they realized they wouldn't see them again has led me to think more of what I want to make sure my loved ones know and hear from me before I or they leave this world. So, in terms of a movie, maybe it's not great filmmaking, but as art? FANTASTIC. It tells a story from perspectives someone who wasn't there might not otherwise be able to grasp, and it takes you out of thinking of 9/11 through the lens of what's happened to us since then, and just focus on what that day truly meant. I'd recommend it to anyone.

So defining art is a tricky thing. Still, for me, if something includes "bodily fluids" or "waste," it's not art. The only feelings I get from it are nausea and outrage - the outrage stemming mainly from the idea that someone thinks shocking and disgusting people is the best way to communicate a concept. It's not. If you piss people off (no pun intended) they're less likely to actually think about whatever message you claim you're trying to send and focus instead on trying to figure out how to prevent you from saying anything. It's completely counterproductive. Picasso's "Guernica" helped get people thinking and talking about the nature of war, and likely led to some people changing their viewpoints on war-related issues. What has "Piss Christ" or the painting of the black Virgin Mary studded with lumps of elephant dung done aside from giving a couple of so-called artists a platform from which to whine about how people want to censor them? Did either lead anyone to reconsider or contemplate their views on Christ or the Virgin Mary? Not many, I'd wager, and for that, they clearly flunk the "art test," IMO. I suppose it could be said that they do lead to a discussion of the nature of art, but just about *any* art piece can do that. The point is that art should bring to mind things that you might not have thought about otherwise or help you comprehend something you have not experienced personally. Claiming it *is* art because it gets you thinking about art is like looking up "computer" in the dictionary and finding it defined as "a machine that computes."

And yet people still make this stuff, convinced of their own profundity and thrilled at the attention they're about to receive (and yes, I realize I'm participating in that attention - I have no excuse except that I'm so tired of the trend that I currently feel a need to bitch about it.) The most recent example comes to us from Yale University. There, an undergraduate senior working on her senior project decided that she'd undertake a "nine-month process during which she claimed to have artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking “abortifacient drugs” to induce miscarriages." She made videos showing her "wearing headphones and in a bathroom tub, removing blood from her body and collecting it in disposable cups," and planned to "construct a four-foot-wide cube made from PVC pipe that would hang suspended from the ceiling of the gallery, wrapped in hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting. Between the layers of this sheeting would be thick coatings of Vaseline, which she plans to use as an “extender” for the display of her bodily fluids. Shvarts’ plans also include the projection of videos of her possible miscarriages onto the plastic sheeting."

As would be expected, when the plans were announced, there was more than a bit of controversy about the whole thing. A few days after it was announced, the artist issued a press release, attempting to explain her project. While this quote is long (and is still only about half of her entire release), I think its important as it not only is her explanation of what she did, but also of what her purported message was.

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle, the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I used to privately self-inseminate. Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding.

To protect myself and others, only I know the number of fabricators who participated, the frequency and accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of privacy, the piece exists only in its telling. This telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal and performative forms — copies of copies of which there is no original.

This piece — in its textual and sculptural forms — is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.

It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation — the part most meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and, incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed thus far) — is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood. Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading.

This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification or naming — the act of ascribing a word to something physical — is at its heart an ideological act, an act that literally has the power to construct bodies. In a sense, the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns the term “miscarriage” or “period” to that blood.

Ok, the idea of using art to explore the ideological nature of naming and labeling is an interesting one, but I think there would be a great number of ways this same message could be depicted, most of which would be more effective since the point itself wouldn't be overshadowed by controversy over how the artist is trying to *make* that point. In fact, note that in the above release, the artist, herself, describes the intended political meaning of the piece as "the aspect that has not been discussed thus far," clearly indicating that the controversy over her methods have precluded the very discussion she intended to provoke. As far as her stated goal of facilitating discussion regarding the ideological aspects of labeling things, the ambiguity she speaks of - not knowing whether the blood is "period" blood or "miscarriage" blood - immediately led me to think of it in terms of a third label, one she seems to have overlooked - "blood" blood. Since it's unclear whether the blood in question was from a periord or an abortion, to me it becomes just plain old blood, an option that contains no ideology, but assigns it to a neutral category that isn't likely to inspire strong emotions or the kind of deep thought she was going for.

The story has yet another twist to it: Yale is now claiming that it was a hoax, despite the acknowledgment that faculty members had approved her project several months ago.

According to a statement released by the University today, Aliza Shvarts ’08 was never impregnated. She never miscarried. The sweeping outrage on blogs across the country was apparently for naught.

The supposed senior art project of the Davenport College senior was a “creative fiction,” a Yale official said Thursday afternoon as students on campus and bloggers across the country expressed colossal outrage over what Shvarts described as a documentation of a nine-month process during which she claimed to have artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking “abortifacient drugs” to induce miscarriages.

“The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body,” Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said in a written statement e-mailed to the News this afternoon.

But Shvarts stood by her project, calling the University’s statement “ultimately inaccurate.”

Klasky said Shvarts informed three senior Yale officials today — including two deans — that she neither impregnated herself nor induced any miscarriages. Rather, the entire episode, including a press release describing the exhibition, was “performance art,” Klasky said.

“She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,” Klasky said. “Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.”

The artist, however, is still claiming to the public that it's creation was exactly has she had said in her press release. Interestingly "In an interview Wednesday, Shvarts said the goal of her exhibition was to spark conversation and debate about the relationship between art and the human body. She said her endeavor was not conceived with any “shock value” in mind."

Ok, then.

Over the weekend, after the artist challenged their claim that the project was a hoax, Yale announced that unless she provided a "written confession admitting that her project did not actually include the graphic acts that she had first described. He added that Shvarts will not be allowed to install her project unless she admits she did not try to inseminate herself and induce miscarriages and promises that no human blood will be displayed in her exhibit."

As of today, no such statement has been received, and the piece has been excluded from the show.

I did find one of the administrator's comments a bit amusing, however:

“I am appalled,” Yale College Dean Peter Salovey said in a statement Friday. “This piece of performance art as reported in the press bears no relation to what I consider appropriate for an undergraduate senior project.”

So, it would be appropriate for a grad student?

One last comment - while I may find this kind of art offensive and consider it completely counterproductive to the generally stated claims of those who produce it, I am *not* calling for any kind of censorship. If an artist wishes to create such material and can find a place to exhibit it, then let it be shown. If the public is not interested in seeing such works, admissions to the gallery where it is on display will most likely be down and the galleries will find themselves subject to negative press and protests. If this results in galleries being unwilling to display such works, it's not censorship, it's the capitalistic marketplace at work.

I've been watching the BBC's "Last Restaurant Standing," a reality show (but much classier than most) featuring Raymond Blanc, who runs the 2 Michelin star Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons. (Two stars is pretty impressive. In all of the UK, there are only 3 restaurants who've earned 3 stars - the highest, and only 13 that have earned 2. Blanc has maintained his rating since at least 2000 - the guide I was looking at didn't go back any further.)

Anyway, the basic premise of the show is that Blanc is looking for a couple to open a business with as partners. Each team of two has been given an empty space and turned it into a restaurant of their own design, and each weekend the restaurant is opened for business. Typically, there's some aspect of business that they're expected to showcase to demonstrate to Raymond that they have the skills necessary to help him run a place. Then each week, the three couples who fared the poorest are given a special tasks to complete, and the one who does the worst on that has their restaurant closed.

Part of what I like about it is that *all* of the "drama" is generated by how the teams handle the challenges. The only times you really see the contestants interacting (even though they're all staying in the same house) is during the elimination challenge, when members of the teams who are safe serve as assistants for the pairs trying to meet the challenge. The best part is that even though they're all competitors, when the contestants who are safe for that week are helping out the ones who are at risk, they have - as far as we've been showing - been nothing *but* fully supportive and committed to helping the team they're working with do the best job they can.

This week's elimination challenge is for the teams to create a romantic night at their restaurants. Raymond has given them 20 single young professionals who will be attending the event, and each team is responsible to find another 20 singles to pair them up with. The arranged couples will then have time to get to know each other while they share dinner.

I loved Raymond's suggestion that the two couples use their own "how we met" story as an inspiration for their romantic theme. That got me thinking about what it would be like trying to put on a romantic dinner using Matt's and my story for inspiration. We'd have to find a way to recreate the ambience of a large, upstairs meeting/children's playroom in a nearly 50-year-old stone-faced library filled with a bunch of Trekkies.