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Frontier Dreaming
What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one.... It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one -- which is really the realm of the artist.
-- Frederico Fellini
Sunday, December 14, 1997
Yesterday I met with G---, a new acquaintance. This was by way of being a blind date. I had a great time, and I should have! When I wrote the personal ad I was talking about a few days ago, I mentioned some things that I would do on a typical fun afternoon, including playing pinball at Goldie's, a tavern on 45th. It turns out that Goldie's is one of G---'s old hangouts, so he was interested in meeting there. We actually did all the things that I had named: husky burger (take a good-size cheeseburger, then add a grilled smoky link sausage!), then movie, then pinball. I really don't think G--- knew what he was getting into with the movie, but he was a good sport about it.
It was The Wings of the Dove, based on the Henry James novel and starring Helena Bonham Carter. You never do get the happy endings with James, do you? I liked the movie; Bonham Carter is always intense. The costumes and sets were magnificent! And the adaptation makes clear the dilemma the protagonist (I wouldn't call her a heroine) faces, back when jobs for women were harder to come by. If she is disinherited for pursuing a romance with a young reporter, she's not the only one that will suffer; her drug-addict father will also be cut off from his source of funds. Since the term "co-dependent" was unknown in the early 1900s, it's not surprising that it didn't occur to her that her father had had forty years to mess up his life before she was born, and it wasn't her sole responsibility to ensure an income for him.
I knew the general outline of the movie, though I haven't read the book. But G--- was surprised by some of the dark twists of the plot.
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We had a Cacophony event scheduled for Saturday evening, but no one signed on to go with me, and call me crazy, but I didn't want to go down to Seattle Center in a strange costume all by myself! So instead I unzipped Frontier 5, which I had downloaded earlier in the day. I worked my way through some of the tutorials. What an elegant, powerful tool! I'm going to be using it to manage an organization website that I have taken over maintenance on, and maybe extend it later to this site.
I stayed up too late, taking a break to watch some very silly soft-core porn on Showtime. I really should cancel all premium cable channels since I don't watch enough, but instead when they moved the Disney Channel to basic expanded cable, I allowed them to substitute Showtime as a second premium channel. The movie I watched part of was notable for starring George Hamilton!
I woke up this morning, not from a sexy dream, but from a programming dream. "Tables...templates...prefs..." I was mumbling. I dug through Frontier all day, taking a quick break to pay a tech support call to my sister's house. Conflicting versions of Quicktime installed with a kids' CD-ROM had messed my old machine up (they have it now), but I turned down hardware accelleration and reinstalled the program and all seems well.
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