day three hundred and nineteen

two quick updates today. last night i hauled up to northgate to see maddox's boyfriend's band, below blackstar, play. the first band, banzai surf, was superfun (their name sort of says it all - they closed with a "flight of the bumblebee"/"hava nagila" mash-up, surf style). the second act was just awful, really. but then finally below blackstar closed the night right. admittedly it's not my kind of music, but i appreciated what the crew poured into the performance nonetheless. i remembered last minute that i should probably get a picture to chronicle the list event, so maddox snapped this with her phone right quick:

her phone's flash was surprisingly bright, and i responded accordingly. that's christopher in the background.
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aaaaaand i'm replacing another unread book on my list. i'm starting to realize that perhaps there's a reason these books have been collecting dust on my shelves, permanently dog-eared somewhere around page twelve. the most recent elimination: spinning straw into gold: what fairy tales reveal about the transformations in a woman's life. now stick with me - i thought this could be really interesting. i'm always on the lookout for feminist-/anti-feministings, especially in well-established, seemingly familiar territory. and fairy tales, all full of damsels in distress and old crones tryin' to cramp their style, seem ripe with material; unfortunately, in this case, the author took that a little too far for me. my eyes were already tired from all the rolling long before i reached page thirty-four, but it's this line on that last page that elicited an actual "ughck" kind of noise from me (in a public place, no less):

"...[the Queen] returns to the dwarfs' cottage bearing a basketful of apples, holding a particularly pretty sample, with one cheek red as sexuality and the other white as barrenness, cradling the black seeds of fertility and death at its core."

so, yeah... ughck. in an attempt to preserve the feminist nature of the original text, i've chosen america and the pill: a history of promise, peril, and liberation to replace it. i decided to buy it after reading bitch's book review, where they recommended it "for anyone who's ever watched a yaz commercial and wondered, how did we get here?"
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