Whiskers on kittens...

My poor cat Claudine has been feeling very needy and neglected lately. And by lately I mean ever since the arrival of Jazz, the dog. Claudie was a rescue kitty who apparently had mean owners before she came to live with us...mean owners who apparently did something very scary to her with pillows, since pillows are among her most feared objects. And vacuum cleaners. And small children. And most noises...

It took Claudie about two months to come out from under the big desk in the playroom and show the family how beautiful she really is. It took her another couple of months to show us her sweet disposition. It took her another six months or so to feel comfortable with us. As the years went by she got her little cat schedule down pat. Morning: Sleep till about 10, get up for some food, sleep in the playroom in the patch of sunshine. Afternoon: Sleep till about 4, have some food, sleep on the sofa in the living room. Evening: Go outside for awhile, come in for awhile, eat, sleep. Nightime: Go outside again, generally do cat things, meow at the window around dawn to come back in, eat, sleep.

With the arrival of Jazz, poor Claudine is traumatized: much noise in the backyard....funny dog smells...barking outside the window...catmint patch trampled on. But the main change is that her schedule is all wonky. There's no more sleeping in the patch of sunshine, since Jazz sometimes comes in the playroom. There's no more sleeping on the sofa in the living room, since it's next to the window to where much barking occurs. She can only go out at night when the pup is in, which means CHANGE. Kitties don't like change.

So to honor my sweet Claudine, here she is in all her bathing glory. Enjoy the beauty of a clean cat.

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Tupelo

So I'm going to the Tupelo Elvis Festival this year in ....Tupelo! Ever since I heard about it I've been singing this damn song:



Sadly, this is the onliest version of the song I can find on video. YouTube doesn't appear to have a version from before Nick Cave morphed into *insert name of old, stringy-haired, balding wino here.* WTF??? When did that happen? For so long this man was my true love, the most striking, dynamic, cool, handsome and talented performer out there. Now I wish I hadn't gone fishing for videos today. I'll leave you all with this, to wash the taste out of our collective mouths. Nick, Blixa, and the guys at their best:



"Murder takes the wheel of the Cadillac and death climbs in the back." Nice.

OH! In the shock of seeing the 2006 Nick Cave almost forgot to mention - I'm going to the bloody downtown outdoor Elvis festival to see Taylor Hicks. Woohoo, baby!

Voices

I was thinking about an odd thing last night, but made myself quit cause I was getting creeped out and it was late and I had to go to sleep. I heard a radio program once about people who set up super sensitive microphones that reach out into space or something, and they record odd sounds said to be the voices of space creatures. But what is really creepy is that they are human voices used in meaningless and inappropriate ways, as if the aliens had picked up our voices on radio waves and mimicked them, trying to reach us and communicate to us with our own words, but not having "words" of their own, doing it in a random nonsensical way.

It gave me the same feeling I had once when I heard a friend's parrot talk. The bird randomly threw back words and phrases and sounds, but in an utterly senseless way. He would make a phone ringing sound (extremely funny and kind of spooky at the same time) and then say "Hello? Oh HI! How ARE you?" over and over.

It all comes down to communication. Why does it sound so weird to hear our own language incorrectly repeated back to us? Is it just a fear of being misunderstood or is it something deeper? I tend to think that language, as beautiful as it is, is nothing more than a rudimentary attempt to transmit the incredibly complicated things which lie at the heart of the human soul. Words are all we have, and we are dependent on them to make ourselves known and understood, and in the end to give us the sensation that we are not alone. When used in a nonsensical way they show themselves as they really are, crude tools used to try to convey complex messages which often we ourselves don't even understand. Add aliens to the mix and the essence of what Freud meant by the term "uncanny" comes to light.

No wonder I turned off the computer last night.

Shiny Happy Blogs

Welcome to this odd little corner of cyberspace called ciao manhattan.

There is no rhyme nor reason to this blog. I realize that. Why the Warhol/Edie connection? I don't know. I just felt the need to blog, and Andy and Edie kind of followed me in here. Why the cutesie-pie X-Files reference? I don't know. It just seemed appropriate.

The demise of Everyone's Favorite Blog has given me time to stop and think about what I'm doing here on the computer all the damn time. I guess I'm hooked on this crap: thinking way too much about insignificant blips on the cultural radar screen, finding connections between music/ films/ books/ people, getting into fights over nothing, making friends and then losing them, all in the name of blogging. I really didn't expect to, but I feel lost now that GrayCharles.com is finally, irretrievably, unmistakably closed. Even though I was perhaps a tad instrumental in that closing...well, probably not... I am still very sad.

So the thought for today is: Why do we get an ache in our heart when something ends? I mean, if nothing is forever, how stupid are we to have regrets when something is over? We know that endings are a part of beginnings, yet we still grieve at that final glimpse of something as the door closes on it. I suppose I'm melancholy because today was the last day of the semester for me. The class I worried about, planned for, sweated bullets over, and in the end did an okay job teaching is now finished, finally, irretrievably and unmistakably over. While I have waited for this day for months, I am still very sad.

So boo fucking hoo. I better just buy myself a big box of Get Over It, as Squee so kindly suggested to me last night. Good idea. On that note I'll leave you with an amazingly goofy picture of a fellow I kind of like. Ah...I feel better already.