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Pleasant Time

Pleasant Time

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Last night we had a nice relaxing dinner with visiting friends. I’ve known Frédérique since my first week of graduate school at Emory; we suffered through orientation together and have been friends ever since. That’s well over a decade now (I’m not saying how much more).

Way back when, she met and married Clark and they had Louis, who’s a couple of years older than Ben.

Freddie and Clark at our Wedding
Freddie and Clark at our Wedding

They are fun to be with, fun to spend time with. I’ve missed them tremendously since they moved to New Jersey/New York last year.

Freddie is the one who has turned me on to all this French music I’ve been obsessed with lately (especially Alain Bashung, “Madame Rêve“!). When they moved, she gave me a giant monster plant from Martinique, which I’ve managed to keep alive, as well as a dresser and a couple of lamps, and a chair, and end tables for Ben’s room and all sorts of other things.

Clark
Clark
Frederique
Frederique

She is amazingly talented. She translated some of Salvador Dali’s work for her dissertation, and she does all kinds of other writing – art criticism and history, even an opera. She’s always got a couple of projects going. One of my most memorable conversations with her had to do with art in which someone is sticking out their tongue. She’s so French, so fun, so creative. I always have a lot of fun talking with her.

John had just returned from the Artificial Life XI conference in England (among other things, he got to go to Stonehenge!) and I was working, so the dinner was carryout – rolled sandwiches, potato salad, stuff like that. I brought cookies, John brought fruit tart, and they brought Boston Creme cake – so it was all about the desserts.

Freddie and I also had a couple of hours together on Saturday for some girl talk. How I’ve missed that!

This was a day last year where we trounced around wearing furs for the “Save the Poor Abandoned Furs” project, membership: 2. Actually, I have friends that would be mad at me for joking about it, for owning fur, and for wearing it (sorry, I love fur – not siberian tiger or anything, but…).


2007 Girls in Furs Freddie in Fur

I love uncomplicated time with real friends. It’s such a treat to relax and know that your friends just like you as you are. The night cooperated by not raining so that we could socialize out on the deck.

As light faded, I tucked Ben into bed and brought out candles and we spent a couple of hours talking about politics and art and relationships and neural networks and I don’t remember what else.

It was an easy, fun, relaxing, enjoyable evening. Loved it.


Heidi and Freddie

P.S. I should have taken photographs Monday, but I didn’t think of it. These are all from previous times together.

Link Love

Link Love

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A moment to pause and thank….

Darrell at the Blog of the Grateful Bear for a very interesting set of interchanges on the death of Falwell (Jerry Falwell, Rest In Peace | Jerry Falwell, Rest In Peace: Part 2). Yours is the far better thing.

Joseph Nechvatel (the lively and brilliant) picked up my post on some of his work and put it up on his website, as though I were an actual art critic. If I had known he was going to do that, I would have been much more pretentious, used lots of made-up hyphenated words, and called for theoretical back-up. John’s the art critic in the family. I’m just appreciative of your viral creativity and creative virality. Wish we could spend more time with you. Should we try to set something up in Atlanta? Add another city to your list.

Jolly Roger at Reconstitution, The Vagina Warrior, Brutal Woman and Llama Fodder picked up on my post May She Be the New Jesus, so to speak. It’s turned up on a couple of forums, and somebody submitted it at StumbleUpon. Hit a nerve, maybe, on both sides of the debate.

Lord Matt, in Big Black Dog is Silent, expressed gratitude for all of us sweet friends who backed him up and assured him that he wasn’t exactly alone in dealing with stalker/troll/bully issues online. I didn’t actually offer much in the way of help, but I did make sympathetic noises. Sometimes it just helps to know you’re not alone. Glad it’s resolved, and that you got a bit more sleep. Watch out for burning camels.

Last – and this is an old one – Mark Glaser on MediaShift quoted me on the issue of moderating comments (this was in the wake of the somewhat controversial shutdown of comments at the Washington Post last February). Yes, I think there should be commenting guidelines, and all comments should be moderated.

In the particulars of moderating, your ideas varied from automated tech solutions to human ones. Heidi N–, who blogs at VirusHead, said she believed that human oversight was crucial to block all spam and people who practice drive-by abuse — the old curse-and-run.

“The other issue is that the owner of the domain has to be the decision-maker with regard to what can be published on their site,” she wrote. “They have every right, and a certain obligation, to maintain an appropriate level of discussion. Sometimes the line is blurry, and rather than censoring someone’s comments, I have tried to use the comments as an entry point to further discussion. There have been a couple of cases where I felt I needed to put an end to an escalation.”

Thanks muchly to some offline friends that have recently visited the blog and commented. I’ve just reconnected with Gerald, who is a dear friend from my days in Iowa City. We’re both in the South now, but just that little bit too far to pop in for dinner (hope you come and visit soon). I am looking forward to reading some of Paul’s writing (how’s the novel? tell Tina to add commenting to her blog! Are you guys ever coming back?) John E. moved from Atlanta to Jax longer ago than I want to think about now (miss you!). Big hugs to my oldest friend Mary (did you ever think we’d be friends for more than 40 years? Who knew we’d become such liberals?).