We’re in Arizona right now, where at least it’s a dry cold, so we’ll be light on the posting for a bit.

I lie: it’s actually 70 degrees today. Mmm, desert winter.

At any rate, I had to share this with you. Eli was watching an episode of Little Einsteins. A caterpillar was making a cocoon for itself. “Hey, Eli, is that a cocoon?” Kat said.

Eli looked at her and did all but roll his eyes. “Noooo. That’s metamorphosis.”

Jason Forrest: War Photographer (2005)

Viking sound engineers! Guitar-wielding demon things! Renegade licks from 1970s-era Chicago! Giant robots! GIANT ROBOTS!

The Knife: We Share Our Mothers’ Health (2006)

Words fail. This video is disturbing in ways I cannot explain. Iron-cross birds flying over marching headless children. Weird flowers blooming. I dunno. It’s hypnotic in a freakish way.

My posting schedule is likely to be light for a while, so I am reduced to recycling links from elsewhere. In this case the link is to A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope. See, after Star Wars episodes 1-3, a number of things in episodes 4-6 don’t make a lot of sense. Keith Martin fixes that with some elegant sleight-of-hand. Would you buy R2-D2 as one of the top members of the Rebel Alliance? Or Chewbacca as one of the Rebel’s top spies? After you read A New Sith, you will. You will.

Something I wasn’t prepared for at all. This baby already has a personality of his/her own. How can I tell, you ask? Well, for starters Eli kicked like a soccer player: short, sharp kicks and repeated often. Mostly at night, much to Stephen’s annoyance. This kid is a water ballet specialist. He/she floats, swims, pushes off from one side and rebounds on the other. I often feel like one of those clear plastic bags you get fish in. If only we could as easily peer in and see what the gender is!

The doctor assures me that this baby is doing great. However, it’s hard to not feel as if something is wrong given the huge differences I feel almost hourly. The other day as he/she was sloshing about I thought to myself, “This isn’t like Eli at all!” and I felt a moment of panic that I was comparing this kid to the one I already know so well.

Muse: Knights of Cydonia (2006)

A while back I promised you the awesomest Muse video ever. Here it is! It’s as if the band and the video director saw Firefly and said, you know, what that needs is more of everything. The Vulcan neck pinch I can understand, and I can almost give the Cylons a nod of approval, but unicorns? I can’t believe Muse released this as a single. Bombast plus vocals not starting for some two minutes does not normally make for a hit.

(And thanks to Storme for the suggestion.)

Pulp: Bad Cover Version (2002)

What kind of video do you do for a song about how your old girlfriend’s new boyfriend is just a bad version of you? Do a bad cover version of the song, complete with celebrity imitators. It gets really weird at the 2:55 mark when a Jarvis Cocker imitator shows up, only to have Jarvis himself play Brian May there at the very end.

Since that’s plenty of Britishness for one update, how about a video of French pantomime artist Jerome Murat? For bonus points, tell me how many arms he has.

Here’s where I am today. That’s two weeks worth of work there. (The reason the fabric looks pinkish here is because it’s on top of my pink sweatshirt. The fabric is actually gray.)

Here’s where I was a week ago…

Wow. You can actually see the progress!

Early on, Misty and I didn’t watch a lot of reality TV. We watched the first season of Survivor and part of the US version of Big Brother, but after that brief flirtation, we were done.

Bravo changed that. Project Runway snagged both of us in large part because its contestants have to make clothing. The creative aspect tempers the usual clash of personalities and sparks my interest because, hey, I’m always interested in the creative process.

The same dynamic is what drew us to Top Chef. In the former, contestants make clothes under various wacky constraints and have fashion and design experts judge their efforts. In the latter, contestants cook food under various wacky constraints and have chefs and food experts judge their efforts.

Despite those similarities, I find Top Chef to be far less enthralling than Project Runway. I’ve been puzzling over that for a while now. It’s not like I’ll ever make clothes, whereas I have at least a passing chance of making the food from Top Chef. And yet, I enjoy watching Project Runway more.

There are, I have decided, three major differences between the shows that explain my reaction. The first is how the challenges are set up. In Project Runway, all of the designers are given a task and work to complete it. At the end, models wear the designers’ clothes in a runway show. Top Chef episodes begin with a “Quickfire Challenge,” in which the chefs must make something very fast and under constraints that allow for the maximum product placement. Only after the quickfire challenge is complete do they move on to the “Elimination Challenge”. This two-challenge setup steals momentum from the show and keeps you from seeing much of what the chefs are doing. With as many contestants as they have, they have to move quickly to show you all of the finished dishes, and with two challenges, they can’t spend much time showing the actual cooking. The result is that I see less process in Top Chef than I do in Project Runway.

The second difference is that I can see how good a garment looks but I can’t taste how good a dish is. When a judge on Project Runway says that a dress is hanging poorly, I can look and see, indeed, that is one off-kilter dress. When a judge on Top Chef says that a dish isn’t acidic enough, I can’t tell. Watching Project Runway and listening to the judges has taught me more about how to appreciate clothes. Watching Top Chef has taught me that I don’t like Marcel’s troll-doll hair.

The third, most crippling difference is Top Chef‘s lack of a mentor. Project Runway has Tim Gunn, Chair of Fashion Design at the clunkily-named Parsons The New School for Design. Tim serves as the designer’s Virgil. He introduces challenges to them, interacts with them regularly, and gives constructive feedback as they work on their clothing. He has a dry sense of humor, a good eye, and most importantly, he seems to really want to help the designers. His caring how they do balances out the inevitable harshness of being judged. Oh, and he isn’t a judge, which levels the power imbalance between the designers and him. On the other side, there’s Tom Colicchio, late of Gramercy Tavern. The Television Without Pity folks have taken to calling his interactions with the chefs the “sniff and sneer”. He comes in while they’re cooking, raises his eyebrows, makes dismissive remarks, and waltzes out. Later he judges their creations. At no point does he give really useful feedback. During the current season of Top Chef, Ted Allen of Queer Eye fame was a guest judge and gave constructive criticism to the chefs. It was refreshing.

Two of the above are structural problems, and could be changed for future seasons of Top Chef. Being unable to judge the results, however, is a deal-breaker. Since I’m more interested in the creative process than in the human drama, Project Runway wins hands-down.

Things were going fine yesterday evening until dinner time. Eli had no interest in his food at all. That’s not uncommon for many toddlers, but it is a little strange for Eli. Thirty minutes later he was whining piteously and demanding to be held. He lay down on Misty and looked around with glassy eyes. Misty and he discussed his situation.

MISTY: Do you feel bad?
ELI: No.
MISTY: Does your head hurt?
ELI: No.
MISTY: Do your teeth hurt?
ELI: Noooooo.
MISTY: Does your stomach hurt?
ELI: No.
MISTY: Do your toes hurt?
ELI: Nooo.
MISTY: Are you suffering from ennui?
ELI: Yeah.

We were a little unconvinced, so I grabbed the thermometer from the bathroom and gave it to Misty. We put it under his arm, announcing, “Here comes the chicken wing! Make a chicken wing!” Eli obliged and waved his other arm in a Funky-Chicken-like move.

Look, it’s the only way we get him to hold still long enough to measure his temperature. Shut up.

Anyway, whoops, he had a fever of 101 degrees! Friends were coming over in thirty minutes to watch a movie, so we figured we’d need to give him some Tylenol, put him to bed, and have a good time with our friends.

I went to clean up his room and distinctly heard the next issue of Guilt magazine being flung against our front door. I put him to bed and read him a story (“Not that one, that one is too small,” he whispered softly, barely able to hold open his eyes). I covered him up and watched him shake with chills for a moment before I left the room.

The rest of the night I had flashes of us going into his room and finding him dead. He would be limp and still, eyes staring at nothing. I’ve mentioned that parenting brings with it unreasonable fears that float around in a cloud until something happens and a strike of lightning leaps from the cloud to your brain, right? Here it is in action.

I checked on him before we went to bed. He opened his eyes and stared at me, or so I thought — it was hard to tell in the dimly-lit room. “Go back to sleep,” I murmured and beat a hasty retreat. Five minutes later I went back to check on him, afraid I hadn’t really seen his eyes open, and what if he really was dead? Thankfully he was asleep and visibly breathing.

We did get up with him at around 2:30 when his whimpering woke us up. We gave him more Tylenol and some water and left his door open, telling him to come get us in the morning when he woke up. So of course by 7 he was awake and completely fever-free.

Toddlers! Aren’t they fun!

I’ve known Dr. Johnny Wink for a long time. He’s a professor of English at Ouachita Baptist University, where my dad teaches and where Misty and I went to school. He’s one of those who uses language in such a way that, when I’m done reading what he wrote, my thoughts are rearranged for the better. Yesterday I had the great fortune to read a transcript of his remarks to the OBU faculty about Martin Luther King, Jr. I begged him for permission to reprint them here, and he kindly agreed.

I suppose I should tuck this away for next year and run it on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Somehow, though, that feels wrong. Wrestling with racism and with the legacy of slavery in this country shouldn’t be confined to one day. Johnny’s words deserve to be read by others. There is no bad time, only now.

Ladies and gentlemen, I yield the floor to Dr. Wink.

Today is the 37th birthday of Susan’s and my son Gene. I’ll come back to that fact at the end of these remarks.

I sometimes think my first remission began on a day when I got on a Gulfport, Mississippi, city bus and rode from somewhere to somewhere. I’ve tried to recall the date with some precision, but I cannot. I must’ve been fourteen or fifteen, so I think this event occurred in the very late 1950’s. It may have occurred a little later.

The buses that took us around the city had in their fronts two benches of seats that faced the aisle. There was room in these seats for four or five people per bench. The rest of the seats faced the front of the bus. In the back of the bus of course sat black folks.

However, there was an exception to the unwritten rule that day.

A young woman, black and beautiful, two or three years my senior, I suspect, sat across from me. There was no fanfare about her sitting there. She sat where she sat without apology. There were no more than a dozen or so folks on the bus. I was confused. I was embarrassed. For whom was I embarrassed? For the young black woman, I think. She was doing something that was making the white folk on the bus dislike her, although nobody said anything to her.

I didn’t dislike her, but I didn’t think she should be doing what she was doing. She was creating tension. She was showing that she didn’t know her place. In her own quiet way she was being uppity. And in a myriad ways the voice of my Mississippi education had said to me that Negroes ought not to be uppity. Doing so upset a balance–a necessary balance.

And then a white girl got on the bus, a girl who was maybe ten years old. She dropped her nickel into the slot and started to sit down next to the black woman, oblivious for a fraction of second to her incipient seatmate.

But she didn’t stay oblivious for long. Before her small butt hit the seat, she saw what she was about to do. And her response was reflexive. As if she’d touched a hot stove or seen a cockroach, she came to standing attention and walked quickly away, to a more segregated seat.

And that’s when I think it began for me, my first remission from what Francois Mauriac has called one of the most voracious idols at which ever the human race has worshipped, the idol called racism.

For at that moment I was ashamed. I was ashamed of myself for having thought a moment before that this citizen of the United States of America seated across from me didn’t have the right to sit where she durn well pleased on a vehicle that was part of the public transportation system of Gulfport, Mississippi. I was ashamed of the system which had inculcated in me such an attitude as had been mine before my remission began and which had helped foster in the little white girl her reflex.

I was ashamed of being ashamed. I wanted that young woman across the aisle to know that I wasn’t like all the rest–but I was–I had been a minute before and I would be, on and off, later in my life, depending on how the remission from that long and cruel disease has gone.

And she knew it. Her beautiful eyes offered me no pardon.

Later I married Barbara Lambert of Clinton, Mississippi. Her older sister, Brenda, had been fired by a department store in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for trying to register black voters. Barbara and Brenda and Brenda’s husband Doug liberalized me. I know the word liberal has been in bad odor for the last decade or so, but, believe me when I say that back there in the Jurassic Age, in Mississippi, if you were going to go around thinking that black citizens ought to have the right to vote, you were going to be labeled a Liberal and you were going to think of yourself as a Liberal . And so I continue to wear this verbal badge with not quite as much shame as Newt Gingrich or Sean Hannity think I ought to wear it.

And then Martin Luther King, Jr., entered my life. Let me try to give you at least some small idea of just how unpopular Dr. King was on many fronts back when he was not safely dead. Bob and Dot Lambert, my first set of in-laws, were having a couple over from the that very same first Baptist Church in Clinton, Mississippi, in which Barbara and I had been married a year before. Barbara had vowed to make her wedding appearance in the church her last, for there was at the time no Civil Rights auxiliary wing of the First Baptist Church of Clinton, Mississippi. Nobody there bore the sort of witness that Barbara needed at the time.

I do not recall the name of the couple. Let us call them the Joneses. Brenda and Doug and Barbara and I were in town. Since Brenda was trying to register black voters in Hattiesburg and protesting the Vietnam War and doing all sorts of other communistic stuff, Bob and Dot were a bit antsy about the course the conversation might take when they entertained their guests.

I’ll never forget what Brenda said. “Look, all we’ve got to do is turn the conversation to Martin Luther King. I don’t like him and neither do the Joneses. We can at least agree on that.”

Brenda didn’t like Martin Luther King because she liked H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael and other folk of the Burn, Baby, Burn persuasion. The Joneses didn’t like Martin Luther King because, although he was saying precisely the same things the Joneses were hearing in the First Baptist Church of Clinton, Mississippi, every Sunday, he was, shall we say, applying those things a bit differently from the way the Joneses were applying them. A disciple of the Prince of Peace, Martin Luther King, like his Lord, came not to bring peace, but a sword, the sword of agitation, the sword of controversy, the sword of the surgeon who makes a wound to cure the cancer.

Brenda didn’t like Martin Luther King, but I did. He became my mentor. He bore witness to the very best earthly possibilities of my faith. More than any other single person, MLK taught me how to read the Bible as the living word of a living God. I watched as he took it upon himself to try to redeem the time. And what a very hard time it was to try to redeem.

How very hard it must have been to be Martin Luther King. How deep his faith must have been to have borne what he bore. Leave alone for a minute the constant threat, the constant menace of violent people, the unwritten fatwa that shadowed him as surely as did the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against a writer who dared to think about religion in a way the Ayatollah didn’t. I fear I should have been reduced to a puddle of neurotic jelly by such a threat. Dr. King was obviously made of sterner stuff than I. But leave that alone.

Think with me for a minute about being disliked by so many people solely because you’re trying to do the right thing. I sometimes wonder whether King didn’t occasionally find himself muttering with Hamlet: “The time is out of joint: O, cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.” If he did, he kept such mutterings to himself, and marched on, and, in the process, educated and ministered to poor, confused Johnny Wink and God knows how many other souls in need of such a ministry.

Brenda didn’t like Martin Luther King. J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like Martin Luther King. The Joneses didn’t like Martin Luther King. My dear father didn’t like Martin Luther King. I knew good people who didn’t like Martin Luther King. I knew bad people who didn’t like Martin Luther King. I knew all sorts of people who didn’t like Martin Luther King.

I knew people who reveled in calling Martin Luther King Martin Luther Coon. There was supposed to be a joke somewhere there. It depended partly on alliteration. King and Coon are both single syllable words that start with the same sound.

It depended on the age-old ploy of racism whereby the race being demeaned is dehumanized by means of animal imagery. The next time you watch The Hotel Rwanda, count the number of times the word cockroaches is used.

It was a pitiful attempt at a joke, but, alas, it got laughs. And I guess there is, after all, something funny–in the pathetic vein–about folks who didn’t have a morsel of this man’s dignity, courage, vision, and love of his Lord and his fellows calling him a coon. As I said a moment ago, my dear departed father, as good a man as ever I’ve known, a man who, when the chips were down, behaved decently in ever racial situation I ever saw him in, still didn’t get Martin Luther King, didn’t like him, saw him as a troublemaker, couldn’t see to see just what a prince among men this man was.

But my mom took a different tack. She always liked Martin Luther King and would take up for him on 3621 10th Street in Gulfport, Mississippi, when the conversation turned in that direction.

And a couple of days ago, when I was visiting my mom, who’s a Katrina refugee and now lives a mile from me and my wife Susan at a place called The Beverly, she reminded me of something she once said to my dad, back in the early 1970’s on the occasion of the second or third birthday of our son Gene, who, as I indicated at the beginning of a speech that is very soon coming to an end, is today doing the best he can to celebrate a birthday in the icy mess that Tulsa, Oklahoma, currently is.

Mom and Dad are at the kitchen table. It’s January 15, 1972 or 73. Dad says, “I wish Gene hadn’t been born on MLK’s birthday.”

My prescient mother says, “I’m glad he was. You just watch. One of these days Martin Luther King’s and Gene’s birthday is going to be a National Holiday.”

Björk: All Is Full of Love (1999)

Curious how many music videos use images of technology to capture human emotions. Some, like the Such Great Heights video, do it by having humans wandering around inside the technology. Björk takes a different approach, appearing as a robot being operated on. When I think of Björk’s music videos I think of Michel Gondry as director, but this video was actually directed by Chris Cunningham.

Daft Punk: Around the World (1997)

Oh, right, here’s a Michel Gondry-directed video. Here the various musical elements of the song are reified as robotic dancers: the mummies are the drum machine, the skeletons are the guitar, the spangly swimsuited girls are the synth, the robots are the vocoder, and the — what the hey are those tall guys, anyway? — are the bass. Niftiness abounds.