Am I a runner now?

Number 401 is ready to run.

My daughter signed me up for the Brooklyn Pride LGBT 5K Run and I did it today - does that make me a runner, officially?

I said completed, not did well. I actually ran more than I thought I would - I alternated walking and running. But unfortunately my right hip has been hurting for a month now, and while I did recently start physical therapy for it, I really felt it by the last quarter of the race. At that point I gave up any pretense of running and just limped along to the finish line. But at least I wasn't dead last. I finished before twenty other people.

Also, they didn't actually check if you were LGBT and I doubt I was the only straight person there, so technically it was an LGBTS race.

The whole trial is out of order!

The jurors who acquitted Ezekiel Gilbert, who murdered a woman over $150, need to be sentenced to ten years for idiocy in the first degree.

My Facebook friend Katha Pollitt pointed me to this petition against this verdict. Go there and sign it.

WHO ARE THE IDIOTS WHO RENDERED THIS VERDICT?

Apparently their thinking was that since Ezekiel Gilbert believed that the escort he hired from Craigslist owed him sex for $150 - an illegal transaction in Texas - he couldn't very well use the option of small claims court. So of course since he had no legal options to attempt to get his money back HE HAD TO SHOOT HER.

This verdict must not be allowed to stand. Even if most of the people who live in Texas are morons. Even morons deserve justice.

More awesome tales of blazin' Barry

The Choom Gang

How is it I missed this awesome article from a year ago?

A Users Guide to Smoking Pot with Barack Obama

"Along with TA, Barry popularized the concept of “roof hits”: when they were chooming in the car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling."

Now that's what I call a sign of greatness to come.

Apparently it was a documentary...

I thought this Key and Peele video: Obama - The College Years was just so funny because it was so wild, the way Obama was portrayed. I only just found out how accurate it was in the New Yorker tonight:

We are now on our third straight (so to speak) President who, the evidence more than suggests, have personally flouted the laws against having possession of marijuana. But the incumbent is the first who has an irrefutable history as an “enthusiastic” (his characterization, not mine) stoner. If you read “Dreams from My Father,” then you know that Obama liked not only the drug’s psychoactive effects but also what might be called its democratizing qualities: 

I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference if you smoked reefer in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room with some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school…. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism. 

David Maraniss, in “Barack Obama: The Story,” provides some pungent detail, helpfully summarized by none other than BuzzFeed. Young Barry, leader of a Punahou School clique styling itself the Choom Gang, pioneered “T.A.”—short for Total Absorption, the polar opposite of “I didn’t inhale.” Among other recreations, the future President was into “roof hits,” a non-wasteful method of smoking pot in a car (usually that white classmate’s V.W. bus, dubbed the Choomwagon) with the windows rolled up. Once the joint was reduced to a roach but some smoke was still trapped overhead, he and his friends would crane their necks upward to whoosh in the last wisps. He was also adept at “interceptions,” i.e., sneaking an extra toke when it wasn’t his turn—a risky stratagem, punishable, if noticed, by being skipped over on the next pass-around.

The Key and Peele video actually shows Obama doing an interception. Obama really was a huge stoner.

There is actually audio on Youtube of Obama reading from this section of his autobiography, but all the ones I found are posted by outraged right-wingers so I won't post one of those.

Another good aspect of the New Yorker article - it mentions the truly appalling George Bush "joke" in the context of Obama's most recent White House Correspondents Dinner in which Obama joked that BuzzFeed was something he did in college.

So the joke was perhaps a little tasteless, if you’re the sensitive type. Not as callous as the video Bush junior made for the 2004 dinner, in which he pretended to look under the Oval Office furniture, mumbling, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.” But still a trifle discomfiting.

I still can't believe that Bush joked about not finding weapons of mass destruction. This video expresses entirely appropriate outrage about it.

Another NYCP video

This is actually the last of the five we recorded back in early April and I am incredibly relieved to be done with them. This is one of the better ten-minute plays we did, although that doesn't mean it's perfect. It's very frustrating really because the writer has a very good premise - real dramatic potential and it's about something of consequence -  the systematic rape of Bosnian women by Serbs during the Bosnian War 20 years ago.

Unfortunately the playwright didn't really make it work. The fact that the entire middle section is one character giving the other character directions is a problem.

And she doesn't even give good directions. The assassin character is going from 86th and Lex to the northern end of Times Square, on 48th Street and the Marie character, who claims to be in the US for ten years tells her to take the 6 train instead of the 4-5 express, and she tells her to go to Grand Central Station and then take the L shuttle to Times Square.

Now usually this would be a viable option, but Marie makes a big deal about what a crazy place Times Square is. So if the assassin was going to take the 6 train instead of the express she could get off at 51st and Lex and then just walk to 48th and Seventh Avenue - it's like a ten minute walk and she could avoid most of Times Square, with its legendary Bolivian panpipe music and break dancers.

Normally I wouldn't have bothered to analyze the changes needed for another playwright's ten-minute play, but since I had to video-record and then edit this thing - and I had 4 different camera angles to deal with - I got to know the play pretty well and so couldn't help but notice some of these glaring inadequacies. Once again this is a case where the writer should go back and tighten the play.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, the Marie character mentions all these little irrelevant things about Times Square including two that are now obsolete - she mentions Dick Clark and the fact that there used to be hookers in Times Square and now it's home to a big Disney store. That's old old news and I can't imagine why this woman from Bosnia who has only been in the US for 10 years would consider that at all an interesting item and especially something worth talking about to an assassin. Now if she had grown to love New York maybe you could accept that she likes to repeat the standard complaints of New Yorkers but at the end of the play she reveals that she doesn't even consider it her home and as soon as the rapist is killed she's heading back to Bosnia. So all that Times Square stuff was pointless - except as time-killing filler to get from the assassin showing up to us being told about the goal of her mission.

And then there was the fact that she waits until the middle of the play to show Sophia the gun when she could racheted up the drama from the beginning of the play by pulling the gun out then.

And one more thing - the effort the Marie character puts into making Sophia look like an American girl is utterly pointless. During the play it's established that Sophia is only there for less than one day, nobody knows she's there, and when she finally meets her target her entire interaction will consist of her saying "Greetings for Sarajevo" and then shooting him in the head. This pointlessness was especially annoying to me because I did not have a Yankees cap and had to use a NYPD cap instead - and then I did my best to ensure that the hat couldn't be read by tweaking the video during editing.

And then there was the thing about American girls wearing a different kind of lipstick than Bosnian girls. This was complete news to me and not only that, the author doesn't even explain HOW their lipstick is different.

Oy.

So the next NYCPlaywrights project is monologues, which are harder to screw up than a ten-minute play. We'll be doing readings/reviews of the semi-finalists this week and picking four - and I have the whole summer to video-record them.

So there will be plenty of time to finally finish Atlas Shrugged!

Rape deniers admiration society

There are few public intellectuals who are more absurd than Katie Roiphe, who made a name for herself by sucking up to the male media and literary establishment as their go-to female feminist-basher. Or as Alex Pareen so perfectly says in his Salon Hack List 2011:

Katie Roiphe discovered long ago that the secret to perpetual employment in the world of ideas is to be a vocal dissenter from the perceived stogy liberalism of your non-white male demographic group. Thus, the success of the Black Republican Pundit and the anti-feminist woman author. No editor ever got fired for printing a “provocative” piece in which a woman — a woman! — trashes feminists.

One of Roiphe's most grotesque attempts to avoid unemployment was to deny rape, especially date rape. Although one good thing came out of it - Katha Pollitt wrote one of her best pieces, a superb take-down of Roiphe in The Nation called "Not Just Bad Sex."

...Be that as it may, what happens to Koss's figures if the alcohol question is dropped? The number of college women who have been victims of rape or attempted rape drops from one in four to one in five. 

ONE in five, one in eight- what if it's "only" one in ten or twelve? Social science isn't physics. Exact numbers are important, and elusive, but surely what is significant here is that lots of different studies, with different agendas, sample populations, and methods, tend in the same direction. Rather than grapple with these inconvenient data, Roiphe retreats to her own impressions: 

"If I was really standing in the middle of an epidemic, a crisis, if 25 per cent of my female friends were really being raped, wouldn't I know about it?"  

(Roiphe forgets that the one-in-four figure includes attempts, but let that pass.)  

As an experiment, I applied Roiphe's anecdotal method myself, and wrote down that I know about my own circle of acquaintance: eight rapes by strangers, (including one on a college campus), two sexual assaults (one Central Park, one Prospect Park), one abduction (woman walking down street forced into car full of men), one date rape involving a Mickey Finn, which resulted n pregnancy and abortion, and two stalking (one ex-lover, one deranged fan); plus one brutal beating by a boyfriend, three incidents of childhood incest (none involving therapist-aided "recovered memories"), and one bizarre incident in which a friend went to a man's apartment after meeting him at a park and was forced by him to spend the night under the shower, naked, which he debated whether to kill her, rape her, or let her go. The most interesting think about this tally, however, is that when I mentioned it to a friend he was astonished - he himself know of only one rape victim in his circle, he said - but he knows several of the women on my list. 

It may be that Roiphe's friends have nothing to tell her. Or it may be that they have nothing to tell her. With her adolescent certainty that bad things don't happen, or that they happen only to weaklings, she is not likely to be on the receiving end of many painful, intimate confessions. The one time a fellow student tells her about being raped (at knifepoint, so it counts), Roiphe cringes like a high-school vegetarian dissecting her first frog: 

"I was startled... I felt terrible for her, I felt like there was
nothing I could say." 

Confronted with someone whose testimony she can't dismiss or satirize, Roiphe goes blank...

The New York Times T Magazine editor knew that in order to find someone to write a glowing hagiography of Bernard-Henri Levy of course they could count on patriarchy's staunchest defender, Katie Roiphe, to do the job right. Just how glowing is this piece? Hysterically so:

One imagines that the scuffle Lévy describes between art and philosophy over the centuries is taking place in some tiny way in the making of the films. Here is Bernard-Henri Lévy in all of his magnificence coming into studios and handing artists texts to read that he thinks are relevant to their work. Do they agree? Do they have their own ideas of what they want to read? Does this bother Lévy, who is, for a writer or intellectual, used to a fairly high level of power in the outside world? He says it does not bother him at all. He says the collaboration is part of the “Borgesian fiction” of the experience. He also says, “Sometimes there is quite the discussion.”

Who is Bernard-Henri Levi, in all his magnificence? Well conveniently that very same Hacks of 2011 article by Pareen also includes Levi:

As if being pompous, self-serious, self-important and lazy weren’t enough, he’s also the public face of not one but two campaigns dedicated to defending powerful men against rape accusations. He organized a petition decrying Roman Polanski’s extradition to the United States to face prison for jumping bail after being convicted of raping a child years ago. Polanski didn’t deserve to go to jail, according to BHL, because he is a very good filmmaker. 

Then BHL’s dear friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for raping a hotel maid, and BHL wrote a truly astounding column defending his friend by attacking the victim and decrying the American justice system for not providing adequate special treatment to a man as rarefied and well-respected as Strauss-Kahn. 

“What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs,” BHL said of the totally standard treatment of Strauss-Kahn following his arrest for rape. 

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
After the charges against Strauss-Kahn were dropped due to unknown inconsistencies in the accuser’s story, BHL declared victory and claimed that Strauss-Kahn was the victim of “torture” due to his class, and his being French. 

I must state, to be clear, that I don’t think it has much to do with this worldwide religion and delirium that is anti-Semitism. But what I do believe is that this is the appearance of a new variation on Maurice Barrès’s phrase that has become, “That X—in this case Dominique Strauss-Kahn—is guilty, I deduce not from his race, but from his class.” 

Hm, yes, Americans, always throwing rich powerful white men in jail. Our rich white male prison population is truly our national disgrace.

So of course it's only natural that two such egregious hacks should find common cause in publicizing the magnificence of Bernard-Henri Levi. I guess rape deniers need to band together for moral support.

The skeptics he-man feminist haters club

While reading up on the bizarre shenanigans of CFI CEO Ron Lindsay I saw references to somebody at the Women and Secularism conference who was apparently considered a nuisance, at best, but nobody named any names or provided a link. But today via Skepchick I found Greta Christina's posts on the issue and she writes:

And all of this unfolded while one of the primary anti-feminist harassers was sitting there in the audience. All of this unfolded while a person who has been invading and disrupting the Twitter feeds of conferences he thinks are too feminist, a person who has defended the misogynistic online harassment and the use of hate speech against feminist women in the atheist movement, a person who has written for, and done a recent interview with, a misogynist, rape apologist website that’s being monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center (the organization that monitors hate groups), a person who has said, “I fail to see how refusing to believe in God leads to the ‘logical conclusion’ of abandoning the belief that women exist to serve men,” a person who dealt with a dispute by posting someone’s home address on the Internet, was sitting in the room. The fact that Justin Vacula was attending this conference had many people on edge: nobody knew if he was planning in-person confrontations, or continued online harassment, or what. Many of the people Vacula has personally targeted with harassment were in that room with him. For Lindsay to give that particular opening talk in that loaded environment — and for him to then make a point of going up to Vacula and personally welcoming him to the conference — showed a level of contempt for the speakers and attendees of that conference that is shocking… and that is entirely unacceptable.

When I initially wrote about this controversy, I theorized that Ron Lindsay was trying to impress Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer. But it looks like I may have over-estimated Lindsay. It appears that Ron Lindsay was trying to impress Justin Vacula.

I had heard the name before - it's hard to forget since it looks like the name rhymes with Dracula, although I don't know how it's pronounced. But I had never really paid much attention to Vacula's activities. He and Lindsay appear to be cut from the same lying bullshit cloth though:

The goal of both Lindsay and Vacula is to try to misrepresent what Watson is saying. 

I didn't realize it when I first wrote about the Lindsay controversy, but he and Watson had clashed prior to the Women in Secularism conference. In Watson's excellent article in Slate about sexism in secularism she called Ron Lindsay out - although not by name but with a link:

But still, there are leaders in the skepticism community who refuse to accept that there is a problem, and those who play the “both sides are wrong” game, insinuating that “misogynist” is just as bad an insult as “cunt.”

She linked to Ron Lindsay's article "Divisiveness in the Secular Movement" in which he says:

But it’s not that simple. It’s not that simple because while everyone agrees that telling a woman you want to kill her after you rape her is intolerable and in and of itself marks you as someone who has no place in the movement, the label “misogynist”  is sometimes thrown about carelessly. For example, Russell Blackford, the Australian philosopher (and Free Inquiry columnist) has been called a misogynist shitbag. Yet, as far as I know, Blackford has never made any hateful comments or threats to women; indeed, he has condemned them. He has expressed doubts about the wisdom of harassment policies adopted by some organizations and, if I recall correctly, he has taken exception to some of the criticism directed against TAM (the JREF’s annual meeting). But although Blackford’s views on these issues may be misguided, that hardly qualifies him as a misogynist. 

I don’t mean to suggest that the stigmatizing and slurs flow only in one direction. Obviously not. Those calling attention to the problems of harassment within the movement have been dismissed as attention whores, feminazis, or man-haters. Again, even if the incidence of harassment within the movement and its seriousness were overstated (the reality is we don’t have reliable statistics, so anecdotal evidence is all anyone can point to), this would not imply that those emphasizing the problem are engaging in unacceptable conduct. They can be mistaken without being self-centered fanatics.

Now consider Lindsay's comparison:

While everyone agrees that telling a woman you want to kill her after you rape her is intolerable and in and of itself marks you as someone who has no place in the movement, the label “misogynist”  is sometimes thrown about carelessly.

He describes something that has happened, in many variations to Rebecca Watson. Watson has helpfully documented the hatred aimed at her on her  Page O' Hate. Here is one example:

And he compares that to Russell Blackford being called a misogynist shitbag. Once.

And it's unlikely that anybody is so obsessed with hating Russell Blackford that they create and maintain a web site just for that purpose.

And then Lindsay reassures his readers that in spite of this one insult to Russell Blackford, 

"I don’t mean to suggest that the stigmatizing and slurs flow only in one direction. Obviously not."

So you see? He isn't saying that it's ONLY feminists who are responsible for slurs. The other side is just as bad. 

And in any case, after reading Russell Blackford whining about a code of behavior I do think he's an idiot. But notice that my thinking he's an idiot doesn't mean that I want to threaten him with bodily harm. That's what the anti-feminist side does.

And that's why both sides are not equally to blame. 

Oh and as we know, Ron Lindsay is a pal of Justin Vacula. Here is Vacula giving an interview to his other good buddy, Paul Elam. Here is what Elam said of Watson:

But after all, Elam just called Watson a whore, he didn't threaten to rape and kill her. So obviously Justin Vacula and his good buddy Paul Elam have a place in the movement. 

Although thanks to the elevatorgate blog, I see that Russell Blackford is an even bigger idiot than I initially thought:

Poor Blackford - "bullied" by Rebecca Watson. I wonder how many rape threats or even just threats of having coffee thrown in his face that Blackford has received. All these old men, being repressed by women having contrary opinions!

As for Vacula, whatever else you can say about him he definitely appears to be a puerile moron:

Don't satirize feminists but happily draw Mohammed?

What he considers "satire" appears to be him taking a photo of what is purportedly feminist skeptics and replacing the message that they were originally spelling out with "We (heart) Justin."

Now if you are familiar with the English language you will understand that by no definition is this in any way "satire." 

And because a feminist complained about his wankery, he attempts to present secular feminists as hypocrites because they support the right to graphically portray Mohammed without the threat of death.

And that is the hero of the anti-feminist movement within skepticism. That's Ron Lindsay's buddy. Jesus fucking Christ.

Greta Christina urges people to contact CFI instead of just blogging about this issue. I did contact CFI back on May 19, saying that while I support Lindsay's right to be an asshole, having him as their leader is a drag on their organization.

Still fighting the Civil War

It turns out that one of my co-workers buys into the bullshit fantasy in which the Civil War was fought over "states rights" instead of slavery. And apparently he's not alone. According to a Pew Research Center study, 38% of Americans say the Civil War was fought over slavery, and 48% it was fought over "states rights."

Of course I've felt it my duty to throw facts at him. I pointed out to him the impact that southern states have had on textbooks, which is confirmed by this article in Salon:

As the UDC (United Daughters of the Confederacy) gained in political clout, its members lobbied legislatures in Texas, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Florida to ban the purchase of textbooks that portrayed the South in anything less than heroic terms, or that contradicted any of the lost cause’s basic assertions. Its reach extended not just to public schools but to tenured academia—a little-known chapter of its propaganda effort is detailed by James Cobb in his 2005 book “Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.” Cobb recounts how in 1911, for instance, University of Florida history professor Enoch Banks wrote an essay for the New York Independent suggesting that slavery was the cause of secession; Banks was forced by the ensuing public outcry to resign. Perhaps Banks should have seen that coming: seven years earlier, William E. Dodd, a history professor at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College, had complained that to merely suggest the confederacy might not have been a noble enterprise led by lofty-minded statesmen “is to invite not only criticism but enforced resignation.” Dodd himself would later migrate to the University of Chicago, where he established a Northern outpost for Southerners who were interested in a serious examination of Southern history. Such scholarship was not encouraged back home: the first postwar society of Southern historians was created in 1869 for the explicit purpose of vindicating the confederate cause. 

The fear of losing one’s job worked to keep most dissenters in line, but if that failed, self-appointed censors in the community were always on the lookout. In 1913, for instance, the sons of confederate Veterans succeeded in banning from the University of Texas history curriculum a book that they felt offered an excessively New England slant on recent history. The UDC industriously compiled lists of textbooks used in schools across the South, sorting them into one of three categories: texts written by Northerners and blatantly unfair to the South; texts that were “apparently fair” but were still suspect because they were written by Northerners; and works by Southern writers. Outside academia, the New South creed, popularized by Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady in an effort to spur economic development, also reinforced this new orthodoxy. A big part of Grady’s canny public relations was to pay extravagant homage to the imagined splendor of the antebellum South, and to portray the New South as a revival of that genius instead of what it really was: the rise of a whole new class of plutocrats.

The UDC did lots of damage although according to the Salon article it no longer has much clout - but it still has a web site. But if you want a more active group of racist traitors you can check out the Southern Nationalist Network. I found that web site thanks to the Dixie Cinema web site - although they had reviews of neither the recent Lincoln nor Birth of a Nation. Although you can pretty much guess what they'll say if they ever do.

To see Southern revisionist bullshit in action check out the Dixie Outfitters web site wherein they claim:

Since the Southerners had escaped the tax by withdrawing from the Union, the only way the North could collect this oppressive tax was to invade the Confederate States and force them at gunpoint back into the Union. 

It was to collect this import tax to satisfy his Northern industrialist supporters that Abraham Lincoln invaded our South. Slavery was not the issue. Lincoln's war cost the lives of 600,000 Americans. 

The truth about the Confederate Flag is that it has nothing to do with racism or hate. The Civil War was not fought over slavery or racism.

We at Dixie Outfitters are trying to tell the real truth via our art and products in regards to the Confederate Flag. We hope to educate people about the Confederate Flag and stop the divisiveness caused by ignorance and emotion.

They go one step further than most lying Southern Revisionists - they don't simply avoid mentioning slavery - they actively claim that the Civil War was not about slavery.

These lying scumbags also have a Facebook page.

And now for some fresh air - I bought this movie when it was first released, but you can watch the entire thing for free on Youtube - it's C.S.A. - which presents the horrible dystopia that might have resulted if the South had won the Civil War.

Back to the Future day countdown

Every now and then some Facebook friend of a friend believes that TODAY is the day that Marty McFly arrives in the future from 1985. And you have to tell them no, they fell for a hoax.

From now on I'm just going to send them to the Back to the Future Countdown page.

Although really they should know better because it's going to be a much bigger deal when October 21, 2015 does roll around than just somebody will mention it on Facebook.

We still don't have hoverboards (well, except for a useless prototype) or flying cars, but Back to the Future II did get somethings right.

Fux Capacitor

We began looking at counterpoint in my music course. It turns out there are five different "species" of counterpoint first classified by Johann Joseph Fux in his Gradus ad Parnassum, which is available for free on the IMSLP web site. Unfortunately nobody thought to translate it from the original Latin into English yet. There are English translations but not free ones. All the bigs used Gradus ad Parnassum - Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Bach.

Somebody needs to write a five-species-enabled counterpoint generator and call it the Fux Capacitor. Because hey why not?

(Although technically Fux is pronounced "fooks" not "fucks" which kind of ruins the gag, but only if you pronounce it like a German. And if you ain't German... )

So while reviewing the rules of counterpoint it occurred to me that there must be a computer-based counterpoint generator out there. And there are - but not free ones. That I've found. Yet. (I did find one for $5)

Automated music has been around for a long time. According to this paper:

...the computer to aid a composer or even generate an original score. The idea of automatic music generation is not new, and one of the earliest “automatic composition” methods is due to Mozart. In his Musikalisches Wurfelspiel (Musical Dice Game), a number of small musical fragments are combined by chance to generate a Minuet.

But according to Wikipedia Musikalisches Würfelspiel :

The earliest example is Johann Philipp Kirnberger's Der allezeit fertige Menuetten- und Polonaisencomponist (German for "The Ever-Ready Minuet and Polonaise Composer") 1757...

Mozart was born in 1756. Not even he was prodigy enough to be fairly described as responsible for "one of the earliest" and in fact Wiki points out that although a version of Musikalisches Wurfelspiel was attributed to Mozart there's no direct evidence.

But counterpoint lends itself directly to computer programming because of the series of explicit rules developed for it:

1. Begin and end on either the unison, octave, or fifth, unless the added part is underneath, in which case begin and end only on unison or octave.
2. Use no unisons except at the beginning or end.
3. Avoid parallel fifths or octaves between any two parts; and avoid "hidden" parallel fifths or octaves: that is, movement by similar motion to a perfect fifth or octave, unless one part (sometimes restricted to the higher of the parts) moves by step.
4. Avoid moving in parallel fourths. (In practice Palestrina and others frequently allowed themselves such progressions, especially if they do not involve the lowest of the parts.)
5. Avoid moving in parallel thirds or sixths for very long.
6. Attempt to keep any two adjacent parts within a tenth of each other, unless an exceptionally pleasing line can be written by moving outside of that range.
7. Avoid having any two parts move in the same direction by skip.
8. Attempt to have as much contrary motion as possible.
9. Avoid dissonant intervals between any two parts: major or minor 2nd, major or minor 7th, any augmented or diminished interval, and perfect fourth (in many contexts).

Ayn Rand Fun Facts!

I realize it looks like I'm stalling on reading Atlas Shrugged... but hey, check out these Ayn Rand Fun Facts! Wow was she a nasty person!

Here are some of the funnest facts. The first one provides an explanation for what my Ayn Rand-loving Libertarian former co-worker told me (and our entire department via company email) - that Farrah Fawcett was considered for the role of Dagny Taggart in an early planned version of "Atlas Shrugged."



Ayn Rand Fun Fact # 20

One of Rand’s favorite television shows was Charlie’s Angels. She said it was a  ”triumph of concept and casting.” Rand described Angels as “uniquely American,” but said it differed from all other shows because it depicted true “romanticism” (as defined by Aristotle as “not…things as they are, but…things as they might be and ought to be”). Farrah was Rand’s favorite Angel; she wanted her to play Dagny if Atlas Shrugged were ever made into a movie. The fondness was mutual. Shortly before her death, Farrah called Ayn Rand a “literary genius.”


Ayn Rand Fun Fact # 37

Rand really didn’t get jokes. An example:

An acquaintance, to Rand: “Two fellows were sitting down at the end of [a] bar. And one said, ‘My God, you see those two women coming across the street? One’s my wife and the other is my mistress.’ The other guy said, ‘You took the words right out of my mouth!’”

Rand: “What an extraordinary coincidence.”

Ayn Rand Fun Fact # 41

When two of Rand’s Objectivist followers in the “Collective” got married, they included in the ceremony vows pledging their “joint devotion and fealty to Ayn Rand.” Also part of what had to be the worst wedding ever, they read to one another from the “sacred text” Atlas Shrugged.

Ayn Rand Fun Fact # 48

When Gentry International wanted to make a movie of Atlas Shrugged, Rand agreed on the condition that they get Rod Serling to write the screenplay. Gentry brought the proposition to Serling, and “Serling simply laughed—his laugh getting louder and longer the more he pondered it.”


NOTE: The fun facts blog also includes tidbits of Rand's sex life, but I was too skeeved out to repost them here. Go there at your own risk.

Mac Wellman wanna-be

The most recent NYCPlaywrghts Play of the Month is the wackiest play we've done yet. I don't know if the author meant to emulate the work of Mac Wellman but if you put this play up under Wellman's name I'd wager that nobody would ever suspect it wasn't him. It has all the hallmarks of Wellman's work: referencing socio-political issues without ever saying anything coherent or incisive about society or politics; lots of repetition - the "hearts beating" phrase comes up a lot in this play; little or no emotional connection between characters, and excessive verbiage.

I originally was going to say that this play indicates that the author has the same problem that so many other writers of 10-minute plays have - he couldn't be bothered to go back and re-work the draft. This is probably the first draft of the play - maybe with a few tweaks here and there. One of my edits in the video recording helped tighten things up - and all I did was leave out the first two sentences.

Why was the edit so helpful? Because the "Dirty Beauty" character starts off talking about how she saw "one of them little buggers." And yet Joseph's first line is: "looks like a bad case of moles to me." Well if she already saw one of them, what's the point of saying that line? Other than it's always better to leave nothing unsaid, and the order in which things are said doesn't really matter.

Cause and effect mean nothing in the universe of postmodernism, which is why it leads to such extremely unsatisfying drama.

An excerpt from the first page of the script:

Thanks. Life's full of surprises. Isn't it. The front lawn's a big surprise. Oh Geez. The neighbors are going to talk about this one, aren't they? I'm sure. My front lawn looks like it has a bad case of acne. It just makes me so sick. It looks like somebody's face. Full of pus. Pus filled chicken poxes. I'm trapped. I don't know what to do, it's like I feel like I'm paralyzed.

Now I happen to like the "bad case of acne metaphor." And the goofy "chicken poxes." And I think it would be better if the passage pretty much stuck to that metaphor instead of throwing in the neighbors and feeling "like I'm paralyzed."

I was originally going to say that the author has a "problem" with not going back and tightening the script, but is it really a problem? Mac Wellman has made a very nice career out of flabby and incoherent and non-dramatic work. Why couldn't this guy?

Although I did discover one reason why Wellman has been able to devote his life to work that most people outside of Academe are not interested in - the New York Public Library inventory of Mac Wellman papers 1959-1999 includes a biographic note that says: The Wellman family already included several inventors, and Mac grew into an inventor and innovator of language.

I'm guessing that, like so many people in theater, Wellman can do whatever he wants because he has a trust fund. And what he wants to do is not actually theater, although he is allowed to call it that:

Here's the second scene from his play CLEVELAND.

Scene 2
(The kitchen. MOTHER is trying to unclog the sink with a  plunger. The sink makes strange noises. JOAN is trying to do her homework at the kitchen table. More nice music.)
JOAN. Mother, how can I concentrate on my homework with you making that noise?
MOTHER. I'm sorry dear. It doesn't drain. Mr. Barfly the plumber was supposed to come fix it, but he never did.
JOAN. But I'm trying to do my homework.
MOTHER. Joanie, there's nothing I can do.
(Pause.)
JOAN. Mother, what's the largest moon in the solar system?
NARRATOR. Why, Triton, dear. A moon of Neptune. Not a very hospitable place. My this sink is hopeless. Miranda's much prettier.
JOAN. Thanks. Mr. Delaplane's science class is really hard.
(Loud crash outside.)
What's that noise?
MOTHER. (Going to look:) Just some commotion in the street.
JOAN. Who is Pope Joan? Bet you don't know.
MOTHER. Haven't the faintest, dear.
(Phone rings.)
JOAN. Oh, God, what if it's Panda Hands asking me to the prom.
(Rings.)
MOTHER. I thought we weren't fashionable enough to be invited.
(Rings.)
JOAN. Well, I still want to go. It depends. You get it.
MOTHER. Silly girl.
(She gets the phone:)
Hello? No, he's dead. That's right. Dead. No, we don't need any. Thank you. Good bye.
(Hangs up. Pause.)
Well, it wasn't Panda Hands.
(Knock at the door.)
Who could that be?
JOAN. If it's Panda Hands I'm not here.
MOTHER. (At door:) Yes? Can I help you?
(A MAN enters.)
MAN. Lady. Your front porch. It ah. Fell into the street. Somebody's underneath. In a car. One of those imports. Squashed flat.
MOTHER. Oh, how terrible. Well, come in.
MAN. Thanks. All you can see is the hubcap.
MOTHER. The phone's right there.
JOAN. Mother?
MOTHER. It's all right, Joanie. The front porch fell into the street and it seems there's a car underneath.
MAN. What's the police number?
MOTHER. Haven't the faintest.
(He reads it off the phone and dials.)
JOAN. Mother, what if Jimmy asks me and not Panda Hands?
MOTHER. Then I expect you should go. Even if we're not fashionable.
MAN. No one answers at the police. Strange. (Hangs up.)
MOTHER. That is strange.
JOAN. Very strange. Hey, can I go look?
MOTHER. If you're careful.
(JOAN skips out.)
MAN. I'll call the wrecking company. You got a Yellow Pages?
MOTHER. Sure, right here.
(Shows him. She goes to the sink and plunger.)
You know, I think I want to go back to school. Learn a skill. I'm tired of being a drudge. And since my husband died. It's rough being alone.
MAN. You're young to be a widow.
MOTHER. He was a Trotskyist.
MAN. (On phone:) Acme Wrecking? Yeah, part of a house's fallen across River Road near Willougby. Traffic's already backed up pretty far. And I think there's someone trapped underneath. Yeah, in a car.
(Hangs up.)
MOTHER. He was a Trostkyist.
MAN. So am I. Thanks, lady.
(He goes out. She goes back to the sink. JOAN enters.)
JOAN. Oh, you should see it. Everything's all smashed. It's real neat. Say, do you suppose someone's dead under all that pile of rubble?
MOTHER. Could be, darling. Could be. Wash up, it's dinner time.
JOAN. If Jimmy calls I'm here. If Johnny calls I'm not. If Panda Hands calls I'm dead.
MOTHER. Yes, dear.
(Pause.)
MOTHER. You know, Joanie. I think I want to go back to school.
JOAN. You'd be a great student. And I'll do the grocery shopping. We'll trade.
(They giggle.)
MOTHER. So. What's the biggest moon in the solar system?
JOAN. Miranda.
MOTHER. Miranda's the prettiest. Triton's the biggest.
JOAN. Darn. Well you tell me who is Pope Joan.
MOTHER. Never heard of her.
(They giggle.)
JOAN. I want to be like Pope Joan. Only I want to be a Trotskyist.
MOTHER. This sink is disgusting.
(The MAN enters again.)
MAN. Lady, can I use the phone again.
MOTHER. Sure.
(He dials. Pause.)
JOAN. If he's on the phone all the time how's Jimmy going to call me?
MOTHER. Ever think it might be Panda Hands?
(They giggle.)
(Blackout.)

Absolutely typical Wellman. It's like a dream - bizarre things happen like a front porch suddenly flies off and lands on top of a person in a car. Except that unlike most people's dreams, there is no emotional resonance from an act of violence. The characters can barely summon up enough interest in an injured or dying person to stop talking about Panda Hands for two minutes. So it's a dream dreamt by a sociopath.

You know how you love to hear some random stranger tell you about his dream, in which implausible violent things happened and nobody cared and they just kept making inane small talk?

Exactly.

Now you may say: "but Nancy, you moron, of course Wellman did this on purpose. He's making A Statement About the Way Things Are in These United States Today. Don't be such a sucker for "Sentimental Melodrama*!"

But the problem is that just presenting humans - in virtually every play he writes - as if a bunch of unfeeling robots isn't enough - there has to be something more. And there never is. What a great job Wellman has though - just throw random sociopathic bullshit on the stage and people - smart people from the university - will invent meaning for it.

And of course being a "Trotskyist" means absolutely nothing in socio-political terms in CLEVELAND. Wellman just name-drops Trotsky, probably because the people who come to see his work will congratulate themselves that they have a vague idea of who Trotsky was - he was the guy who had an ice pick buried in his head by a Bolshevik. They saw that in a short play by David Ives.

And when Wellman attempts actual political satire, well this is what happens:

...A satire about the hypocrisy inherent in right wing American politics, "7 Blowjobs" was written in the early 1990s as a response to senator Jesse Helms’s attack against the National Endowment for the Arts, when he accused the NEA of funding artists whose work he deemed obscene. With so many homophobic and anti-sex politicians scandalized in recent months, it’s no surprise that Theatre on Fire’s artistic director Darren Evans decided to revive the show. What’s surprising is that he imagined Boston audiences would find Wellman’s facile portrait of social conservatives entertaining. 

There are no actual blowjobs in this play, but when a package containing a series of ambiguous x-rated photographs is delivered to Red State senator Bob’s office, his staff of conservative aides is thrown into a sex panic. Their collective sex jitters as they spend most of the play trying to decode the political and sexual meaning of the salacious photos might have been funnier, if the verbal jabs of Wellman’s insipid stereotypes were able to rise above the level of playground polemics. Unfortunately, his dialogue merely sounds like a string of childish partisan text comments posted on You Tube. 

The premise that there’s a pack of horny Chihuahuas humping underneath the rhetoric of anti-sex campaigns is tempting if hackneyed, but the jokes are so bad you’ll end up feeling cheated and embarrassed for the cast, as I did. In the words of two insightful Edge readers I had the pleasure of sitting next to during the show: "This show is an utter waste of time... we were not amused."

Clearly the critic and the reader quoted above don't understand the Wellman play drill - you are not to expect the author to provide insight into the political scenario - just the fact that he used the word "blowjobs" in his title is supposed to be enough to impress you by what a daring maverick Wellman is. You are supposed to provide the political meaning yourself.

I'll let theater impresario Martin Denton demonstrate how it's done:

This is, in effect, all that happens in 7 Blowjobs. Senator Bob seeks advice from a television evangelist named Reverend Tom, whose reaction is pretty similar to Bruce's but whose broader experience in such matters enables him to provide the senator with some valuable strategic/tactical assistance—namely, to pin this and other conspiracies against decency on "fags." Bob, Jr., who one suspects may indeed be a bona fide member of that last-named group, is also interrogated, but to no avail.

The point of all of this non-sequitur lunacy is obvious: playwright Mac Wellman wrote 7 Blowjobs in 1991 in response to the flap on government funding supposedly obscene art by the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, and he dedicated it to Senator Jesse Helms. Hypocrisy in government not having gone away in the past decade, the play resonates resoundingly; the spectacle of seeing self-appointed guardians of the moral order salivate and drool over dirty pictures feels great and registers as hilarious, scoring points off its lascivious targets all the while.

The play's brilliance is mostly attributable to Wellman's astonishing language, which simply soars with glee as it dances around actually naming whatever it is that might be depicted in those seven pictures. Wellman delights in imprecision here: Reverend Tom declares them "photos of unnatural acts, capable of rendering a full-grown man happy," and that's really as much as we actually know about their content: how much apt commentary on the current state of morality and censorship in America is packed into that?

It should be mentioned that Denton's ecstatic response to Wellman is far more typical of critics than the negative response of the Boston critic I quoted.

So why, exactly, did NYCPlaywrights choose to do a video recording of a reading of a Wellman-esque play? Well first off, you should have seen the competition. And I would have picked the play that had the blow-up doll in it over this one, but I took a vote on the semi-finalists among the people who participated in the script-reading and majority ruled.

But most of all, because it is only ten minutes long. Postmodern plays are bearable in small doses, especially if there are some humorous bits. But as far as I know, Mac Wellman doesn't write ten-minute plays: all his plays are long enough to be considered an entire evening of theater. An entire, mind-bogglingly pointless, undramatic, postmodern evening of theater.

----------

*Mac Wellman in a 2012 edition of the Dramatist Guild's magazine. He's talking to Annie Baker:

Theatre criticism is a remarkable one note only interested in what I call Sentimental Melodrama. They miss any intellectual sharpness, visual or physical acuity. They are only interested in what I call Face Value theatre. What you see is what you get, no time for reflection (incidentally they miss the sharp edges of your work.)

Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall

Published before television was invented, obviously.

Before the Bikini: Rare Vintage Beach Photos

My favorite photo of Marilyn Monroe - from 1959

Although the Weather Channel's slide show is called "Before the Bikini: Rare Vintage Beach Photos" in fact the photos go all the way up to 1977, while the "modern" bikini appeared in 1946. Most of the photos are anonymous folks but there are a few celebrity shots - in addition to Monroe there's one of Elizabeth Taylor, a Jimmy Durante and several others - including this one of George Harrison and then-wife Patti Boyd from 1966.

Ron Lindsay's non-apology apology over his non-welcome welcome

It's my theory that Ronald A. Lindsay wanted to make the big important atheist men of the skeptical movement who have been criticized by feminists - especially Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins - know whose side he's on when he delivered his opening speech for the Women in Secularism conference sponsored by the Center for Scientific Inquiry - Lindsay is the current CEO.

Here is his speech. Now remember, this is the opening speech - typically opening speeches at conferences are given to welcome attendees.

Here's how Ron Lindsay welcomes women in secularism:

One thing you may have noticed already is that I did not give you a formal welcome to Women in Secularism 2. Of course you are welcome here. We're very happy to have you with us, but this is something you know already, and, although I don’t want to appear ungracious, why take up time to state the obvious, because the reality is we have much work to do, and presumably you came here for substance not rhetoric.

What a weird thing to say. He takes a whole paragraph to explain why he isn't giving the conference attendees a formal welcome, when all he had to say was: "welcome to Women in Secularism 2" like every other opening address to conference attendees that has ever been delivered.

Instead he says "Of course you are welcome here."

Because there was some doubt? Ron Lindsay's organization was sponsoring this thing.

I'd say that what comes next is a pretty big clue to Ron Lindsay's true state of mind in delivering a non-welcome welcome. It's about having someone like Rebecca Watson, one of the invited speakers at the conference, in his territory.

First he introduces a nameless, unidentifiable entity:

I’ve had some conversations in which the claim has been made there is no significant division among true feminists.

Presumably these conversations took place with human beings outside of Ron Lindsay's head, but other than that we know nothing about the source of these conversations. He then takes two paragraphs to argue with the mystery opponent(s) before moving on to what he's really after: the concept of privilege. He acknowledges that of course women have been dominated by men through millennia but then he says:

But it’s the second misapplication of the concept of privilege that troubles me most. I’m talking about the situation where the concept of privilege is used to try to silence others, as a justification for saying, “shut up and listen.” Shut up, because you’re a man and you cannot possibly know what it’s like to experience x, y, and z, and anything you say is bound to be mistaken in some way, but, of course, you’re too blinded by your privilege even to realize that.

So the main point of Ron Lindsay's opening statement on women in secularism is that the concept of privilege is being misused by women in secularism to silence men.

Now there is plenty of disagreement among feminists about the proper uses of the concept of privilege. And a discussion of the issue would have been a useful session in the conference. But Lindsay made this point, in the opening statement of a Women in Secularism conference right after he gave the group a non-welcome welcome.

It must be remembered that Rebecca Watson's response to Dawkins' infamous Muslima attack was a blog posted entitled The Privilege Delusion.

I think that Lindsay wanted to signal to Shermer and Dawkins that regardless of the CFI capitulation to these hysterical bitches, he, Ron Lindsay, was certainly not pussy-whipped. And like Dawkins two years ago, Lindsay responds to mild criticism of his inappropriate "welcome" by making things much worse. And by making things much worse I mean showing his true colors.

Watson responded to this non-welcome welcome with a tweet:

And instead of arguing in good faith, Ron Lindsay proceeded to deliberately misrepresent what Watson said by leaving out the second half of the tweet on the CFI web site:

But in her defense, perhaps Watson was too busy tweeting about how “strange” it was to have a “white man” open the conference to pay attention to what I was actually saying.  (I’m just glad Watson didn’t notify security: “white man loose on stage, white man loose on stage!”)

Please note the sub-text - as CEO of CFI, the stage of the CFI-sponsored event is indisputably Ron Lindsay's territory. Lindsay jokes about a scenario in which Watson attempts to push Ron Lindsay out of his own territory. 

Lindsay is not arguing in good faith because what this is all about is not an honest disagreement - Lindsay's response attacking Watson by name on the CFI web site is his trophy to put on display for Dawkins and Shermer and their legions of vicious anti-feminist fanboys.

And as Watson rightly points out, it is strange - not only that Lindsay opens a conference on women in skepticism by complaining about the way that somebody, somewhere has misused the concept of privilege - with the underlying message that men are being silenced by women in skepticism - but also his complete failure to address the actual very real silencing of women in skepticism through a relentless barrage of terroristic threats:

...In his talk, Lindsay didn’t give any examples of men who have been silenced, though he has promised to provide some. In the meanwhile, the audience is forced to examine the only example provided: Lindsay himself, a white male who is CEO of one of the largest skeptic organizations in the world and who delivered the 30-minute introductory lecture at a women’s conference. There doesn’t seem to be much danger of his voice being silenced, though of course I may not be aware of some behind-the-scenes campaign to drive him into obscurity. 

Meanwhile, nowhere in Lindsay’s speech did he mention feminists like Jen McCreight, who has been so bullied and harassed that she did in fact quit attending conferences and she quit blogging and being active on social media in the hopes the anti-feminists would finally leave her alone. They didn’t. That is silencing. Nowhere did Lindsay mention that every day I and other feminists get slurs, rape jokes, and death threats from fellow skeptics and secularists. That is an attempt at silencing, though it is an attempt that will not work until the day one person follows through on the threat.

And it must be noted that Richard Dawkins has never spoken out against his rabid fans who took his Muslima attack as a signal to turn vicious against Watson and anybody else who dared to speak up against Dawkins.

This controversy reminds me of the shitstorm that ensued after Larry Summers suggested at a conference on Women and Science that women's lesser careers in math and science were due, foremost, to women's innate inferior abilities compared to men. Like Summers, Lindsay gave lip service to discrimination and social conditions - but what they really think is made clear - the real problem is women themselves.

The most important similarity is that Summers and Lindsay delivered these statements in an address to assemblies that were dedicated to promoting women, and they delivered their statements in their capacity as representatives of the organization that was sponsoring the assembly.

Their speeches would have been controversial anyway, but could have been seen as one person's opinion. Instead they gave their opinion while serving as the organization head.

And like Summers' case, anti-feminists - in their disguise as champions of free speech and foes of political correctness - hailed Ron Lindsay as a hero. And like Summers' fans, they are in for a disappointment. Because both Summers and Lindsay like the perks of being the head of an organization, even if CEO of CFI isn't quite as prestigious as being the president of Harvard University. And so Summers and Lindsay did what any politician does when caught saying something that offends their constituents - they apologized.

Although Lindsay, predictably, offered a non-apology apology:

...In my blog post of May 18, I complained about Ms. Rebecca Watson’s characterization of my May 17 talk. In doing so, I expressed my points in intemperate language, e.g., the comparison of her blog post to a press communication from North Korea, and for that I unqualifiedly apologize. This apology has been conveyed to Ms. Watson. 

To be clear, I still firmly believe Ms. Watson’s blog post mischaracterizes my talk, specifically by characterizing my abbreviated discussion of the phrase “shut up and listen” as the “crux” of my talk. 

As to my May 17 talk, I have nothing to say. The CFI board will decide whether my talk was contemptuous of women, as some have alleged, misrepresented CFI’s commitment to women’s rights, or in some way committed CFI to a course of action inconsistent with CFI’s mission.

As I've demonstrated here, if anybody was guilty of mis-characterization it was Ron Lindsay.

I'm guessing the CFI board is going to make him issue a proper apology, and he'll do it rather than lose the prestige of being CEO.

Now will all his fanboys who considered him a hero start calling him a "mangina?" We shall see.

Much funnier than the winners

Unlike the winning entries in the New Yorker cartoon caption contest, I actually LOL'd at some of these Shitty New Yorker Cartoon Captions.

What about Ayn Rand?

Laugh at this illustration of
Atlas and Fudgy the Whale
while you can, parasites. *

Well I still haven't had time to read the rest of Atlas Shrugged. I'm currently teetering on the edge of chapter 4. But soon... I'll have to renew it again if the library will let me. Hah hah, the American public library, subverting capitalism since 1790. Thank you Ben Franklin.

In the meantime let's enjoy this review of Atlas Shrugged from the New York Times on October 13, 1957. Here's the opening:

This Gargantuan book comes among us as a demonstrative act rather than as a literary work. Its size seems an expression of the author's determination to crush the enemies of truth - her truth, of course - as a battering ram demolishes the walls of a hostile city. Not in any literary sense a serious novel, it is an earnest one, belligerent and unremitting in its earnestness. It howls in the reader's ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention, and then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds...

And even more amusing is Alan Greenspan's letter to the NYTimes from November 3, 1957, concerning the book, back when he was a mere stretch:

To the Editor: 

"Atlas Shrugged" is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. Mr. Hicks suspiciously wonders "about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,168 pages and some fourteen years of work." This reader wonders about a person who finds unrelenting justice personally disturbing. 

ALAN GREENSPAN 

New York.

Oh yeah - you just know some of this is going into my play. I'll probably have the spectre of Ayn Rand quote it back at him after Greenspan's repentance.

And here is the Ayn Rand Novels web site offering the Atlas Shrugged Summer Reading program, complete with a $10K prize for a winning essay. But you have to be in school to enter. Dammit, this might have really incentivized me into getting this thing over and done with.

*Illustration from the Mother Jones article about the private equity firm Roark Capitol Group, which owns Carvel.

IMSLP - Petrucci Music Library

My music teacher turned us on to this excellent web site, which not only lists composers alphabetically but also by nationality (who knew there was an Icelandic composer Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson? ) and music by instrument and even entire books - I downloaded Chinese Music by J. A. Van Aalst in the hopes of finding the origins of the music featured in my CD Splendid Jubilant New Year - The Collection of Chinese Festival Music. I'd love to transcribe Splendor Night Vision (which is awesome for the title alone) into piano form - how handy if somebody already put together the sheet music.

Deconstructed Goat Cheese Tart

As I mentioned on this blog last week, I absolutely adore the Goat Cheese Tart at the Black Mountain Winery in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn. The really great thing about it is that although it is mind-blowingly delicious it's also incredibly freaking healthy too. It's not actually a tart in the traditional sense of a small pie with a crust. I guess since potatoes are a starch maybe that's considered close enough to stand in for the usual pastry used in tarts. But whatever - the sandwich made from potato and roasted beet with a thin layer of goat cheese in the middle is just right - plus the balsamic and the greens with a dash of dressing and you have yourself a perfect food. I went back to Black Mountain Winery for the second week in a row, just to eat it again. But this time I examined it well enough I was able to deconstruct it. I think my illustration above is very close to accurate. Although who knows what magical things they do to make it work together in the amazing synergistic way it does?

Here's what it looked like after I ate about 20%. And of course I paired it was a sauvignon blanc. I'm sitting by the fireplace - it was chilly last Tuesday so they had a roaring fire going. Just a perfect dining experience.

 

Here's the place from the outside.