Rebel Prince

I’m in the middle of reading a New Yorker article on the “Wal-Martization of the bridal business” (“You’re Getting Married,” April 21 & 28, 2003, p. 76). It notes, “The average American bride and groom together spend twenty-two thousand dollars on the day that sees them transformed into man and wife…” Let me do my Dr. Evil impression here: Twenty-two. Thousand. Dollars.

Yikes. I figured as much, but it’s just staggering to see it in print. When I was a little boy, borrowing bridal magazines from the public library, picking out china patterns and deciding which dresses were the prettiest*, the idea of planning a huge wedding was so dreamy. Now it seems outrageous. Oh, well. I’m fickle. Check back in a few years; my royal-wedding dreams could very well recur by then.

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* Stephen, once again you may rightly ask why, with admissions like that, I even have to tell people I’m gay. Heh. I believe the relevant Will & Grace quote is this, from the pilot episode:

Jack: FYI, folks, most people that meet me do not know that I am gay.
Will: Jack, blind and deaf people know you’re gay. Dead people know you’re gay.
[later]
Jack: Grace, did you know I was gay when you met me?
Grace: My dog knew.

Ba da bing.

• Some very good sartorial advice: “Men’s Fashion: Spring” (Morning News)
• Definitely something to keep an eye (and ear) on: “Gay Rappers: Too Real for Hip-Hop” (New York Times)
• I suppose this is a good thing, body image diversity and all, but apparently I didn’t get the memo: “Is the potbelly the new gay ideal?” (Guardian)
• Create and e-mail artistic scribblings, penstrokes included, with GE’s “Imagination at Work” (requires Flash). Here’s mine, all set for spring.

The alarm buzzed. The sky was bright. I went back to sleep, and next thing I knew I had only about a half hour until the next Mass at St. Matthew’s. I threw on my Sunday best, and ran out the door. The Cathedral is only a few blocks away, so it turns out I had plenty of time.

It’s been a while since I’ve gone to Church—I’m often lacking in religious motivation when on my own—so it was good to get sort of spiritually recharged and reattuned to the true spirit of Easter. In his homily, our celebrant noted that this season of resurrection and renewal calls us to love others to life, to raise them from the little deaths of life: setbacks, disappointments, and so forth.

At Communion, the choir sang one of my favorite pieces of modern “classical” sacred music, Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia” (second only to “Ave Maria,” by Franz Biebl).

Happy Easter, kids. Peace.

“To the Thawing Wind,” from A Boy’s Will (1913), by Robert Frost (1874-1963):

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do tonight,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

Books recently acquired from various sale racks and discount bins:

• The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction, edited by Edmund White
• With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer, Susannah Clapp
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, D. M. Thomas
• The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem

Next up in the Netflix queue: Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones (pictured: Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan). I am not much of a Star Wars follower. I give that disclaimer, because in judging episodic movies like this, I always feel like an outsider, unable to see it in the context of the larger, overarching story, or in comparison to its individual parts. That said, here goes.

Episode II is just okay. The story is well-laid out and the world created by the movie is complex and stunning—my makeshift home-theater system, such as it is, was having inadequacy issues handling such digital splendor—but I feel like the writing and acting could have been stronger. (I know that’s not the point of the movie, but still.) All the dialogue is simple and open, with the characters so easily declaring their motivations and emotions, there’s not much for you to do but gawk at the scenery, which itself ends up being somewhat of a scene stealer. To be fair, there are a few affecting moments, mostly provided by Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen)—like his finding of his mother, and his sudden self-awareness after slaughtering her captors—where you get some depth of character.

If I want to get really nitpicky, I should mention the music. I admire film composer-extraordinaire John Williams, but practically every scene here is underscored, and while it lends to a buoyant, unrelenting pace, it made some scenes feel heavy-handed, overwrought. Like, “cue the [insert emotion here] music!” Yeah, I know, it’s an epic, but there’s too much simultaneous spectacle for me to feel the drama.

For you Bay Area folk, Ram’s Head Theatrical Society, Stanford University’s largest student-run theater group (with which I was associated for most of my college career), closes its run of West Side Story tonight with a performance at 8 p.m. in Memorial Auditorium. Admission is $15.

Oh, man. One of our co-workers turned the big three-oh earlier this week, so last night, a bunch of us went out for after-work drinks at the always lively Rio Grande. Much fun (and many margaritas, and bottomless bowls of chips and salsa) was had by all. As perhaps the youngest in the group, at one point I declared, “I’ll never turn 30!” Uh, yeah, that got a few unsympathetic headshakes that seemed to say, “So young, so naïve.” Heh. Hours later, we finally stumbled out of the place into the brisk, light rain. “Happy hour” is an almost euphemistic misnomer, of course; I didn’t get home until past midnight. Good times.

I woke up a few hours ago, not quite hungover, but still groggy. Now that I’ve had lunch, what to do? Maybe catch up on Netflix acquisitions, or go back to sleep. Speaking of movies, as I write this, I received an e-mail from my mom. She and my dad rented Liam and Enigma. Glad to see their tastes are leaning away from the cheesy blockbusters, and towards the indie and art-house.

The past week I’ve been working behind the scenes to transfer my web hosting and registration to DreamHost, and switch over to Movable Type. The domain name servers have just been changed, which means the rebelprince.com URL will start pointing to my new space over at DreamHost, but it takes as much as a couple of days for the change to propagate… across the universe! Bwah ha ha. Or something like that. (There’s something about the word “propagate” that makes me think of viruses. Or world domination. Anyway.) So, if and when you read this on my spiffy redesigned webpage (think “indigo”), then you’re at the new space. If you can’t wait and want a sneak peek, check out the mirror server at http://rebelprince.dreamhost.com.

And so I finally know what Movable Type is, and how it differs from some of the other systems. MT is software that runs directly on your web host server. Installing it is not for the faint of heart. I had to exercise some brain cells I hadn’t used in a few years, like the ones in charge of basic UNIX commands. But surprisingly enough, it all went pretty smoothly.

One thing I like is the integration. MT has built-in comment and e-mail notification functions, which previously I had to pull from other sources. And all the code is customizable, almost so customizable that all the choices can be intimidating, but it’s like learning a new language, one where most of the words look like <$MT…$>. I’ve imported all my old Blogger entries and YACCS comments, but I’ll be publishing them on a continuing basis, since I have to do some quality control to get make sure all the formatting is okay. For example, in the imported comments, where I had typed the HTML code &mdash; to get the m-dash (—), the conversion takes it literally, and renders the ampersand too (&amp;dash;), which is icky. It’s going, slowly but surely.

Well, I hope you like all the changes. That’s one small step for Jeff, one giant leap for Rebel Prince.