Bionic Teutonic

This weekend, I’m going to be volunteering at a festival that some people I know put together here in Seattle, called the Decibel festival. I’m looking forward to it, as by all accounts, the festival has been amazing the last couple years. The lineup is great and there are some killer workshops being put on. Yesterday, we had a big production/ tech meeting, and at one point, Sean, the main organizer says “Well, most things will be fairly straight forward….except for stage management at Chop Suey on Saturday”. Hmmmm, that would be my job. I should have plenty of help though, so I’m sure it will be fine. Fingers crossed.

Yesterday, we also had a couple of friends over to watch an old British movie that was recommended to us called The Wicker Man, which was awesome in ways I’m sure the original film makers weren’t going for. The basic premise is that a Christian cop goes to a Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a girl on the island, and discovers that the whole island is populated by a bunch of pagans! And it just happens to be May Day! Dancing and singing! Naked fire rituals! Sex in the meadow! Hippie music! I won’t give away the ending, but I think all this was supposed to be quite shocking to the movie going public of the time (it was billed as a horror movie), but I kept thinking “hey, it’s just like our summer campout! Those are MY people!”

Also, tonight I have my first aerial class at circus school! I’m so excited about this. I can’t wait.

Can I just say how much I love doing yoga after work on Fridays? Making the transition to the weekend more than just a mental construct is cathartic. It feels like metamorphasis. By the time the practice is over, I feel like I have emerged from the work week to become my better, more beautiful self. All the stress I wasn’t even aware that I had melts away and I’m left there, lying in shavasana, feeling totally at peace.

I’m addicted to news. I admit it. I obsessively read every day’s headlines, plus any interesting stories my RSS feeds send my way. At times I feel bad about this addiction, like I could be spending my time doing much better things, but I can’t help it. Somehow, putting aside my news habit seems like giving up hope that I’ll find reason for optimism among all the tragic and depressing news. Plus, I’m fascinated with all the tragic and depressing news. I want to know the bad stuff. I want to be aware of what other people in other places are going through.

Part of my fascination is also tied to how the news filters in through various lenses. I first realized that the news is much more than simply reporting the facts during the 1st Gulf War. I was living in Germany when the war started and was exposed to one version of it, yet when I went back to the States for Christmas break, it was like watching a completely different war unfold. If a story is of particular interest to me, I’ll find several sources to read so I can get the story from several perspectives. I’m amazed at how much information we now have at our fingertips. We have access to much of what is going on in the world pretty much as it is happening. Sometimes you really have to dig to find it, but it’s usually there.

So, I got some free tickets to this year’s Bumbershoot, Seattle’s yearly music and art fest at the Seattle Center. Despite having lived in Seattle for around a decade, somehow during that time I have managed to miss it every year. So yesterday, Ariel and I headed down to check it out. Bumbershoot is a little strange in that, even though you have a ticket to the whole festival, each individual show can sell out, so there is no guarantee that you will get to see the shows you came for. Ariel and I had three things we really wanted to see.

1. Roller Derby. I had not yet made it to a Roller Derby event (mainly because they seem to sell out in around 3 seconds) but I kept hearing that it was well worth it. The atmosphere is supposedly a big part of it, and I’m sure that the crowd was much different for Bumbershoot than it is at their normal events, but it gave me a taste, and I’ll be back for more. At first I couldn’t understand what was going on. It pretty much looked like a bunch of women skating around in a circle, and randomly one of them would decide to go all hockey and check the crap out of one of the other players. Ariel looked up the rules and it all made a little more sense at that point (as it is want to do when you look up the rules). Basically, it’s a lot like Quiddich - The skater with the star on her helmet=Harry Potter, everybody else=Bludgers.

2. Jamie Lidell. Ariel and I have been really into him for a while. He has an amazing voice and most of his music is soulful and beautiful. He also oddly makes glitchy electronic music that can be quite jarring. At home we have deleted all of these songs from the playlist, but his show was sadly filled with much of it. He did do some pretty great on the fly sampling though, where he would layer his beatboxing to create some cool grooves. That was interesting, but overall I was a little underwhelmed.

3. We really wanted to go see the spoken reading of R.Kelly’s Trapped in The Closet, but after waiting in line for around 25 minutes, they reached capacity about 20 people in front of us. At some point, the fates will stop conspiring against me and I’m going to see this show! We did get to see a reading by one of the co-founders of Bitch magazine, which was very funny, and we also wandered through the poster exhibition for a while.

Bumbershoot is expensive and getting more so every year, but there are some amazing bands (not that we caught much music) and worth it I think.