Despite my frustrating status as an errant publicist, I have been offered the privilege of joining the recently established Society of Friends of Belgium in America for a tour of the spectacular Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor exhibition at the Met. My old BAEF cohort Ben Gateño will play guitar at the reception following at the Consul General's residence. I am curious to know what a Fifth Avenue residence looks like, as well as to meet the Friends in attendance. The Society's website has an excellent introduction to Belgium.

Un Sport Combat

It has become patently clear to me that I cannot interact with people who act primarily on intuition, even if I admire them greatly. A lot makes sense now.

My long search is perhaps coming to an end -- Pierre Carles' documentary on Pierre Bourdieu, "La Sociologie est un sport de combat," will be released on DVD in December with multilingual subtitles. I hope, hope, hope some retailer will offer it. Amazon isn't planning to, so I'm a bit distressed. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to shopping for TV-type things.

I have surprised myself again by writing an extended essay without a conclusive thesis in mind (I wasn't decided between one possible thesis and its opposite) and without the mental coherence to consciously develop a big picture, and yet ending up with a relatively coherently argued paper. I suppose all those years with CyberEdit reorganizing bad essays did me some good. It was exciting to finally get to analyze an electronic musical work, to feel like I was doing something new to me that employed the skills I've spent five years developing. I hope Professor Watkins buys it.

I usually excuse myself from portrait requests and justify the lack of humans in my photography by claiming that I'm terrible at portraiture. Architectural spaces, especially large and deteriorating ones, are my forte. But this season, Zara's catalog has proven that portraiture and deteriorating industrial spaces can be dramatically combined. Wild.

Carillons and poppies aren't important only in Belgium. This article on Remembrance Sunday with carillon music in Loughborough brings back memories of Ieper (Ypres).

Oil spill in SF Bay :(

About 58,000 gallons of oil were spilled into the bay after a container ship hit a tower of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco in Wednesday morning's dense fog.

The spill, believed to be the biggest in the bay since 1988, has fouled miles of coastline, closed several beaches, canceled weekend outdoor events and threatened thousands of birds and marine animals.

"How does a ship, with that much space available, how does a ship hit the bridge?" Governor Schwarzenegger asked as he was shown a map of the bay and where the vessel struck the bridge. Everybody else is asking the same question, as well as why it took the Coast Guard until evening to announce the massive extent of the spill.

The possibility has arisen that someone has been using my resume in order to pose as me for job interviews. For the record, I am not currently seeking a job in the Bay Area or New York, or in fact anywhere at this time.

"What? What? Am I seeing things?"

In my short life so far, those are some of the few words I've uttered loudly and unabashedly to myself and myself alone. I am flipping through Kerala's The Organ as a Mirror of its Time on a whim, idly wondering if an article in it might be obliquely related to my 19th-century carillon/organ research into Bollée, Cavaillé-Coll, etc. And what should my eyes fall on when I flip to Owen's "Technology and the organ in the 19th century," but

"...in Birmingham, [Hill's] all-mechanical action was so stiff and heavy that... Cavaillé-Coll compared the Birmingham action to that of a carillon."

I feel as if I'm just awakening from a shock and a fainting spell. Was this M. Aristide's conjecture or did he try a carillon somewhere? Bollée's at the Exposition or later in Perpignan? Better yet, elsewhere??? Perhaps I ought to take Erica's advice and write to Douglass. Perhaps I also need to map out CC's travels to figure out where he might have encountered carillons. There is more to this story than meets the eye.

And to think that this piece of the puzzle came to me from Hans Davidsson.