Saw Gillian Welch the other night. Never saw her act live before, but it was pretty much what I would have expected from her albums. Good show. Old Crow Medicine Show opened, and at the end of the night they all came back on-stage for a lengthy encore with Welch (which, we were informed, they hadn’t done before).
For Dean. Hey, he’s still on the ballot, and he’s the guy I wanted to vote for. I realize the vote is symbolic, but perhaps not a completely empty symbol. Kerry’s got the nomination locked up, but at this point, every vote for someone else is a reminder to him: “Hey, there’s a constituency out here that you need to address.”
At the sign-in table, there was one Republican judge, one Democrat, and two other guys who didn’t have any party role to fill. As I walked up, one of them asked me if I was voting Democrat; another said something like “he couldn’t possibly be a Republican.” There was some more partisan joking. The lone Republican kept his tongue. This was the first time I could ever recall election judges publicly making partisan jokes, and I have to admit, it struck me as a little unseemly. But very interesting. I live in a pretty progressive neighborhood, and this seems like a sign that the general election will be extremely polarized (not that it would come as much surprise).
I’ve been a freelancer since 1989, and in that sense, I get a new job every time a new document comes down the pipe. I am still a freelancer, still doing the same thing, but I still feel like I’ve got a new job.
When I started translating as a freelancer, things were kind of thin. Gradually, my client base and workload picked up, and by 2000, I was making a pretty nice income.
Then came 2001: my income was less than half what it had been in 2000: the Japanese economy–already bad–seemed to get worse, and we all know what happened in the U.S. economy. 2002 was slightly worse; 2003 about the same.
December 2003 and January 2004 were alarmingly quiet, and I could no longer pretend that I was riding out a lean spell and things would pick up in their own time. Either I needed to get more translation work, or I had to get a “real” job (though the idea gave me hives). In the past, I had occasionally made efforts to get new work by cold-calling, but I found the process uniformly unproductive and had given up. Time to try again. I contacted a lot of translation agencies. Most of them thanked me for my resume (if that much) and that was the end of it. Some had me do translation tests. This turned into a more labor-intensive way for me to wind up buried in a rolodex somewhere. But I contacted one company that was different. They sent me a very demanding translation test–a long passage (as trials go) of very challenging material. I slacked a little on finishing it, but eventually did so. And eventually heard back that they like my work and want to add me to their stable. And that they can, it seems, completely saturate my pipeline. And they pay pretty well (especially for Americans). In short, if I choose to, I can pretty much work full-time and exclusively for them. I feel both relieved that a long and difficult period seems to be ending, and anxious that I might screw up.
Jenny and I have discussed before the danger as freelancers of turning one’s client ecology into a monoculture, but right now, it beats the hell out of a xericulture.
While I was under the impression that the Austin city budget was hit harder by the recession than most cities, apparently I was wrong. Current city roadwork projects underway in the more-or-less central part of town include:
And that doesn’t include the eternal mess at I-35/Ben White, which is a TxDOT project.
I am genuinely curious: where has the city found the money to pay for all these projects? Did we pass a bond or something? And why are they hell-bent on taking on so many major projects in a relatively small, dense area all at once?
Expecting to see Shorty Long last night doing their usual thing at Flipnotics, we wound up seeing the Boxcar Preachers, the lead singer of which is a co-worker of Gwen’s. Old-timey songs about heroin addicts and Randy Weaver. They’re good. Check ’em out.
An article in today’s NY Times does a good job of putting the debate on gay marriage into more productive terms, and comes to the same conclusions I do, but gets there by different means.
The writer, Nathaniel Frank, helpfully clarifies that the “for” and “against” sides are talking past each other–the against side pitches its argument in terms of marriage’s social role, the for side in terms of individual rights–and he points out that both aspects are relevant.
My main disagreement with Frank is brought into sharpest relief by this paragraph:
The argument is not so much that individual straight couples are threatened by gay marriage, but that the collective rules that define marriage are being undermined. Instead of feeling part of a greater social project that demands respect, people will feel that breaking their vows offends only their spouse, not the whole community. Knowing that their friends and neighbors no longer hold marriage sacred can make it easier for people to wander.
The problem with Frank’s argument here is that he fails to acknowledge that this dread is ultimately rooted in bigotry: if the “greater social project” is somehow debased by gay marriage, it is because some feel that homosexuality is icky, and do not want to be forced to acknowledge the legitimacy of a gay relationship.
For a long time, I was ambivalent about gay marriage: on the one hand, I was inclined to be tolerant, on the other, the idea inspired cognitive dissonance–it didn’t fit my notion of marriage. Then, about ten years ago, the Economist published a cover story (as they are doing again this week) making the case for gay marriage–“Let them wed” the headline read. And I realized that my objections were hollow.
Another Bernado Bertolucci movie that tries to document a pivotal moment in history and tell a story of psychosexual drama, I just don’t quite get the Dreamers. The historical setting is Paris in 1968, during student uprisings, and the characters are an American exchange student who hooks up with a brother-sister who seem joined at the hip.
Perhaps it’s because I don’t know enough about Paris in 1968 that the historical angle leaves me cold–a bunch of students marching in the streets and venerating Mao, clashes with police, etc–it’s not clear what they really thought they would achieve, if anything, or if they were just being rebellious and blowing off steam. The movie sort of muddles along for the first three quarters, occasionally punctuated by significant moments, and in the last quarter has several momentous but completely ambiguous moments that leave the audience wondering not only what is happening but why the characters did what they did. The cinematography is quite good, but the content could be condensed down to less than an hour.
Saw the Triplets of Belleville along with Destino at the Dobie.
Destino is an animated short that finishes off an unfinished collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali; it has all the melting clocks and visual imagination you’d expect from a duo like that. Here in town, it’s only playing at the Dobie, but it’s worth it. Apparently the original project didn’t get beyond conceptual sketches–what we saw was all computer-generated.
The Triplets of Belleville is another animated movie, and it’s wonderful. It has no dialogue, very much like Mr Hulot’s Holiday, and in fact, it made a couple of explicit references to that. The characters are (pardon the pun) two-dimensional, but there’s so much visual and auditory inventiveness I just didn’t care. The movie rewards careful viewing, and demands a pretty good visual vocabulary to get much out of it. It also, I have to point out, was made by someone who loves bikes and bike racing, and he gets right a lot of little details that only another bike person would notice.
A pirate posting of a recent Vanity Fair profile of John Ashcroft makes for an interesting read (it’s long but worth reading–you might want to print it out). It doesn’t have a lot of profound insights, but it does have numerous alarming anecdotes from people who have worked closely with the man.
One point in particular jumped off the page at me, though:
He has supported an additional 10 amendments to the Constitution (including one to make it easier to amend).
Here’s the thing: America is an unusual country in that at its root, it is founded on a document, the Constitution. Older countries–France or Japan, for example–are at root basically big tribes: they are countries because there are more-or-less cohesive ethnic/linguistic groups within their borders. France and Japan have been through any number of different forms of government–monarchy, military dictatorship, republic, etc–but nobody would ever dispute that each was the same country throughout. Many newer countries, for better or worse, are artifacts of colonialism or European tussles, with artificially drawn borders that artificially group together nationalities that probably wouldn’t choose to share citizenship with each other. We saw that with Yugoslavia before, and we’re seeing this in Iraq right now.
The idea behind the USA is that people are made American by their choice to accept a certain set of rules for what it means to be American, and that set of rules is expressed in the Constitution. Change the Constitution and you change the country. Right now there are 7 articles and 27 amendments to the Constitution and Ashcroft would add 10 more? Clearly, he is not happy with this country as it is constituted and wants it to be something very different. Rather than radically change the country to suit his tastes, he’d be better off finding a country that’s closer to his liking and moving there. The rest of us would be better off, too.
I’m somewhat amazed at myself for having sat through this movie twice now, but last night I saw Alamo’s foleyvision production of Turkish Star Wars (op cit). The key difference this time being the English voiceovers. “Now I’ll know what that movie was actually about” I thought when I bought my ticket.
Two hours later, I was sadder, poorer, but wiser. The movie is so profoundly nonsensical that it defies comprehension in any language. This is not to criticize the translation, and I must say, the entire audience–a packed house–cheered when the translator’s name scrolled up in the Alamo’s homemade credits, which made my heart swell.
The foleyvision crew did a fine job, and took well-earned poetic license on occasion. Kudos.