Ladies, I salute you.

Maira Kalman's blog is one of my favorite parts of the NYT. It's half comic and half diary, and Kalman's observations and ideas are presented in a beautiful, artful way. This latest entry made me tear up a little, and wish I could be more. You may recall my admiration for Ruth B. Ginsburg- a significant portion of this entry is devoted to her. Most poignant is this frame.

Taken from The New York Times, credited to Maira Kalman.

"I return to court to hear Justice Ginsburg speak to law students. And in answer to the question, 'How does it feel to be the only woman on the court?' she answers simply, 'lonely.'"

In other, important news, it's my dad's birthday. Happy day to you, Stephen Raymond Cronk. I love you, and you are the best principal I know.

Not So New Music Tuesday

Ok, I know I am the last person on earth to get around to listening to the Vivian Girls. You can judge me lightly or you can judge me hard, but friend, I cannot say when I set this record down and forgot about it. Everyone was so hot over these ladies in late 2008, and I had/have a pretty vicious case of Overthosebrooklynbandsitis.

Looking for something to listen to today, I felt remiss in my duties, and I decided it was time to give the Vivian Girls' self-titled debut the benefit of a Tuesday. Because, as Amy Granzin over at Pitchfork offers, "They deflect the knee-jerk criticism the most effective way possible: with an armful of kick-ass songs." Two handfuls is more like, and so with ten songs that clock in at under 22 minutes, this album just seems so... manageable.

Listening #1 I have something to confess. I love a good short story, and I fell in love with flash fiction and nonfiction a couple years ago. I fritter away my hours reading stories of a thousand words or less. Punk and post punk appeal to me when the music has that same vigor, force, and precision- Mission of Burma's Vs. will always own a part of my heart. In this respect, the Vivian Girls are a little frustrating, because in the first half of their album they evoke this very well, before tepidly embarking on two lackluster, three plus minute long, Shirelles-esque*, doo-wop influenced pop songs.

You are at your best when you keep it under two minutes, ladies.

Listening #2 On their myspace, the Vivian Girls describe their sound as "Punk / Shoegaze / Surf" - they certainly have elements of those things, but I just can't get into it. The best of their songs is probably "Wild Eyes"- which is heady and short and evokes the Shangri-Las in a way I appreciate. I will be on the look out for their sophomore effort, to see how these musicians refine their sound and work out their intentions. In the interim, I am going to shelve the Vivian Girls in favor of a post punk/early girl groups Tuesday playlist line-up.



* Listening to the Vivian Girls makes me realize how badly I want to collect doo-wop era girl groups on vinyl.

I'll never own a Kindle.

April 22nd was Book Day. What a thing. A magical thing. Here's a late survey in celebration of the best kind of print material.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Neil Gaiman, closely followed by a five way tie between Margaret Atwood, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J.D. Sallinger and Virginia Woolf.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I have two copies of Franny and Zooey, the one I read as a kid and wore all to pieces and the nicer copy I got at the used bookstore recently.

3) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Florentino Ariza. But I think it's more that I want to be in love in the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about love.

4) What book have you read more than any other?
Maybe Lonesome Dove? Oh, and Ender's Game. I like to reread books that make me feel like a 13 year old boy.

5) What was your favorite book when you were 10 years old?
Number the Stars. I had a fixation on all things Holocaust right after I went through my Egyptologist phase.

6) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
I know this may get me slapped, but I really did not like Dead Until Dark.

7) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Bone! Hands down.

8) If you could tell everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?
The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino.

9) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
If you mean read to completion, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. But after three passes, I still haven't managed to finish Underworld, Mr. DeLillo.

10) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
The French. Bovary's my biznatch. Boudelaire's my boy.

11) Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer?
Shakespeare.

12) Austen or Eliot?
Austen.

13) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Well, I don't do biographies or autobiographies, and sometimes, I choose to ignore major award winners and Sallie Tisdale's advice.

14) What is your favorite novel?
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. See #8.

15) Play?
"Baby with the Bathwater", Christopher Durang

16) Poem?
How about top 5- in descending order- "Dream Song 14" by John Berryman, "What Narcissism Means to Me" by Tony Hoagland, "La Beauté" by Charles Baudelaire, "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" by Gerald Manley Hopkins , and the clear favorite "On Living" by Nazim Hikmet.

17) Essay?
"A Room of One's Own"- you saw it coming.

18) Short Story?
"Hands" by Sherwood Anderson from the perfect Winesburg, Ohio or "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" by Stephen Crane.

19) Non-Fiction?
Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

20) Graphic Novel?
Sandman by Neil Gaiman.

21) Memoir?
*tumble weeds pass* I only like to read my friends' diaries, the more embarrassing the point in adolescence, the better.

22) History?
The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

23) Mystery Or Noir?
Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot ftw.

24) Science Fiction?
Farnham's Freehold, Robert Heinlein

25) Who is your favorite writer?
When I read Italo Calvino, I feel like he wrote just for me.

26) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
William T. Vollmann. I despise gloomy self-indulgence, and I will fight it to the last.

27) What are you reading right now?
I'm in the final throws of The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell.

Judicial Oversight

My parents are educators, you may or may not be aware. I have, as a result, always had a real and obvious bias towards teachers in most political disputes. I will, on any given day, side with a teachers' union in a contractual dispute. I believe that teacher retention is the real key to community building and reforming public education. As a result, I have sometimes overlooked issues of student rights. I think, in retrospect, this has been an oversight on my part.

I don't object to hall monitors, to drug dogs sniffing lockers, to metal detectors in school entrances. I don't think public schools are necessarily the most dangerous they have ever been, as some pundits of increased school security have claimed. Regardless, there are many more guns in the world today than there were in 1960, many more drugs, and many more students. It's a numbers game.

A member of the ALCU (card carrying!) since I was 16, I have tended to be a little lax on my civil liberties agenda inside of school walls. I mean, I railed against searching cars with the best of them, but again, that's outside the exit.

Let me get to my point. In 2003, a then 13 year old Savana Redding was commanded to remove her clothes by officials at her school. They had a "hunch" that Miss Redding, pictured below, had prescription ibuprofen that she was sharing with classmates. After they could find no pills in her backpack, pockets, shoes or socks, the two intrepid investigators demanded that she pull down her bra and panties and "shake" to see if any pills would be dislodged.

Image borrowed from the NY Times - photo credit Jim Wilson

While Justice Clarence Thomas seems to think that nudity in a school setting is a hilarious aspect of the adolescent right of passage, I would go so far as to call a forced strip down inhumane and callous. Antonin Scalia, everyone's favorite anti-choice relic of the Reagan administration, displayed his usual eloquence.

"You’ve searched everywhere else. By God, the drugs must be in her underpants."

Really? How about, you have searched all the places you are allowed to search? How about, if you think that there are illegal drugs, you call the police? The point is, a hunch doesn't give you the right to make a young lady take her clothes off.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as usual a voice of reason in a He-Man Woman Haters judiciary, questioned the process of the investigation, noting “But there were no questions asked at all," on the subject of the hunch and Miss Redding's spotless record. Good call, Ruth B.

These school officials were clearly abusing authority, and if there were a real ongoing drug issue, there would have been other opportunities to catch the culprit. Opportunities that probably would not have required a humiliating scare tactic that will undermine many students' view of the fairness of school.

Because, friends, if there's one thing teachers and principals have to be in order to maintain the trust necessary for a good school, it is fair. You know what is not fair? Strip searching an honors student who may have been carrying prescription headache medicine. But then maybe I am being cavalier- whoa buddy, that aspirin alternative will mess you up.

The Court will rule, and in all likelihood, it will rule against Miss Redding. Here's my prediction (I've been watching too much ESPN lately) 6:3, Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Breyer, Alito*: Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter.

*Gag me.

Mademoiselle le Robot

For her thesis at NYU, Interactive Telecommunications Program student Kacie Kinzer has come up with a thesis project so charming, so clever, so twee, it is liable to melt your heart.

I present to you the Tweenbot.


Miss Kinzer has created a few human directed cardboard robots. Clearly conveyed on each is a destination, a goal. Without human help, the robots cannot get where they are trying to go. The idea is to observe the interaction of people with unknown communication technology. So far, her observations have been positive- no robots have been stolen or damaged, and all have wound up at their destinations.

"Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the 'right' direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, 'You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.'"- Kacie Kinzer

Email Kacie Kinzer at tweenbotinfo@gmail.com if you want updates on upcoming robot missions. I know I do.

Your Girl vs. Modernity

The power went out yesterday, for several hours- I was there for one. I did what you would expect. Lit my candles, took a long, hot bath, and read. When the electricity came back on I was almost disappointed. I need to go camping.

I need to go camping in this sleeping bag, from artist Eiko Ishizawa.

Nerd Alert

Dear Friday Night,

Some might argue that I am wasting my youth, sitting on my sofa drinking summer beers, tuning into Fox with religious zeal every week at 8.

These ladies beg to differ.

Eliza Dushku right, plays Echo on Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Summer Glau, left, plays Cameron, a terminator, on The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

First off, let's get past the obvious "hubba, hubba." They are babes- kind of similar looking babes in black tank tops. They're also role models. Pretty, smart, tough broads who kick ass, and tend to rescue the hapless men around them far more often then they need to be rescued themselves. They're two of the female leads on my two favorite shows, Dollhouse and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

I went to a women's college, and I am proud to say I'm a feminist. A few years ago, after Buffy left the scene, there was a retreat from the strong female protagonist in television. You wound up with your Meredith Grays and your Desperate Housewives. Recently, television as a whole has re-embraced the sassy lady. From Tina Fey's Liz Lemon on 30 Rock to the recently departed and much missed Starbuck of Battlestar Galactica, I'm excited to sit down to TV that offers intelligent, layered portrayals of women.

Fox, in particular, has led this charge. Their line-up is replete with professional women, from Temperance "Bones" Brennan, who heads up a forensic anthropology team at the "Jeffersonian" a fictionalized version of the Smithsonian on Bones to Special Agent Olivia Dunham who is in charge of a special division of the FBI on Fringe. The ladies of Fox are leaders in their fields. They command respect. They're the kind of women you can show your daughters as examples.

On Friday, you get three strong, unique women. Sarah Connor, an untraditional working mother, is the complete package, a woman who has completely transformed herself into guerilla warrior in order to fight androids from the future. Cameron is a machine developing a conscience. Echo...well, Echo is a little difficult to explain in a tidy sentence. All the same, I love Fridays. I am sometimes moved to clap, or to shout "yes!" by the incredible, imaginative plots. I say, good job, Fox. Maybe you can do something about your news now.

Regards,

Lindsay

My current favorite webcomic.

Check out Nedroid- it's the tops.

Hero of the Week

I'm in the midst of reading The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. It's a series of stories, connected musings, on the impact of puritan ideology in America. She kind of sloughs through the usual fear/hatred of our bodies, witch hunts as the original national pastime, and the Christian nation tracts in favor of a more thorough examination of the idea of what our puritan legacy really is. She argues it's the notion of the "city on the hill," verbosity, and public education. That's all good and fine. I love her points, but I love her tangents more.
Sarah Vowell, incidentally, is not my hero of the week. But she does get points for introducing me to Chief Osceola of the Seminole people. How did Osceola snag this dubious honor? When he rejected Andrew Jackson's relocation plan, veiled as the Treaty of Payne's Landing, he stabbed it through with a knife. Other chiefs of higher seniority had signed and agreed to move the Seminoles from their native Florida to Oklahoma. It sounded like a bad deal to Osceola. So he led the resistance until he died, captured in a federal prison, of malaria. His objection to Jackson's treaty, apart from the obvious, came because of Jackson's pro-slavery stance. Married to a black woman, and well aware of white perceptions of natives, Osceola was far from keen on giving Jackson anything.

It takes a specific kind of badass to stab a treaty. My friend, May, once claimed that if she could travel back in time only once, it would be to punch Andrew Jackson in the face. I'd like to travel back in time to be Osceola's best friend.

A pair of shoes I will never buy but perhaps always pine for.

Courtesy of Pale Horse Design, I give you Zombie Stompers. Aren't they just so ugly-awesome?

Shoes are not really my thing, you may be surprised to learn. They haven't been since I was in high school. I am solidly a boots sort of lady, and I tend to buy shoes I can wear with colors other than black, green and purple. That is to say, I bring a level of practicality to my shoe purchases I don't put into play in many other aspects of my life.

But these are majestic as they are frivolous.

My big, practical purchase of this week is a mattress! Double-sided pillow top with a new box spring. I know, I will stop talking dirty when we are all drowsy in our respective workplaces, but it slays me. I am so well-rested, so revived, you may as well give up any hopes of stopping me.