Ode to a Fountain

How I know I am a red-blooded American:

Nothing makes me happier than the fountain shows at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Nothing. Is that so wrong? I mean, honest, they practically bring a tear to my eye. I watched three separate performances this weekend, just couldn't get enough. The first was in the afternoon, some Sinatra tune I didn't recognize. Then, after dinner, Mary and I each bought a 60-ounce strawberry frozen margarita in a souvenir plastic Eiffel Tower container from the stand in front of Paris, and watched over to catch a fountain show done to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." Good enough, but luckily, we waited another 15 minutes for the next show. Wait for it...

"Time to Say Goodbye" by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli.

I swear to god, there is nothing better than strawberry margarita, dancing fountains, and Italy's blindest best. If late capitalism can bring us the Bellagio fountains, then sign me up for late capitalism.

And I am not alone. My friend Kelsey pointed me towards this amazing article in the Guardian on the guilty pleasures of famous academics. Homi Bhaba loves Project Runway. Anthony Giddens loves pro wrestling. Stanley Fish loves country music. Slavoj Zizek likes violent computer games. And although I won't name names, I have had conversations about the Bellagio fountains with many other academics. And many of these other academics admit to secretly loving the fountains, even to being quite moved by them.

I wonder why. A lot of pleasure comes from the simple conjunction of music with moving image. "Mickey mousing," as film music types call it, especially in a live situation, is always a good time. It's similar to a fireworks show, with escalating climaxes in music and image.

Also, there is the medium. How often do you get to see water dancing around? And man, those jets shoot high up into the air! But more than that, I think one of the greatest thrills is the resemblence of water to human bodies. It's most evident when the center circle of fountains does this move that looks like dancers leaning backwards. (This picture kind of shows it.) And obviously the choreography of the fountains is based largely on basic ballet choreography, with lots of synchronization. Like ballet, the synchronization is both mechanical and imperfect; the coordination is impressive, but the use of water means that it is not entirely controlled. Drops and mist fly around in the wind, and the changing light plays off the lake differently every time. It's not like watching a screensaver. At the same time, the fountains obviously are more than human. They are mechanical, and they exceed human limits. One of the common fountain moves is for the fountains to jet off in a line across the thousand foot installation, culminating in an explosion of the tall center jets. You see that kind of move in human dancing all the time--think the Rockettes kicking their legs--but it's something else to see it happen on such a gigantic scale.

You can see some videos here.

Ode to the Hot Tub

What did I do this evening? Let me tell you. It's going to be fascinating.

My parents' new house has a hot tub. Although they are not necessarily the sort of people you would expect to have a hot tub, they have had actually had two, out of the five houses they have owned. When I was born, they lived in a little cottage in Mill Valley, Marin, down the street from a redwood grove. My mother commuted to work in the City via the Sausalito ferry. Side note: Apparently there was a pretty swinging singles scene on the Sausalito ferry back in the day. The boat had a bar, and the Friday evening commute could get pretty raucous. Rumor has it that my uncle, who lived on a houseboat at the time, used to ride back and forth several times in one evening. But that's completely unsubstantiated.

Anyways, I think it was basically a zoning requirement that little cottages in Marin in the seventies had to have a hot tub. So my parents had the redwood barrel pictured below. As you can see, I enjoyed hot tubs from an early age.

I still love hot tubs. I know, who doesn't? But I really like hot tubs. I think partly it is because I am rather tall, and so there are few bathtubs out there in which I comfortably fit. Denied the everyday pleasure of immersion in hot water, it becomes a rare treat when I find a body of water small enough to heat up, but large enough to fit me. I could spend hours in a hot tub, staring into space, letting my brain cells slowly leech away into the water.

Unfortunately, my parents moved out of this house when I was very young, and I was without hot tub for many years. These were rough years in the hot tub-less wilderness. When my parents moved to Oregon a few years ago, however, the new house they bought, otherwise fairly staid, came with a large and luxurious hot tub installed in the back yard. I wasn't there when they moved in, but apparently my sister, who shares my love of the hot tub, got it up and running within minutes of arrival.

It's very cold in southern Oregon right now, with highs barely breaking 32 degrees. We've been trying to get the hot tub working all week, but it appeared to be too cold for the cranky propane heater to turn on. Yesterday, though, my dad finally got it running, and by this evening it had finally worked its way up to an appropriate temperature. So tonight, when my parents were taking the puppy to his weekly puppy class, I finally made it out for my annual soak. As I said, it's quite cold, about 29 degrees when I ventured outside. So I scampered out in a bathrobe, propped the cover up against a bush for a makeshift privacy screen--to wear a swim suit is not exactly in keeping with the hot tub spirit--and started the process of lowering myself into the scalding water. Despite my love of hot tubs, I am not very good about immersing myself in water of extreme temperature, either hot or cold. So it was a tenuous few minutes where I was perched on the side of the tub, my lower half in 100 degree water, my upper half in below freezing air.

But I eventually made it all the way in. And it felt wonderful. I think I might be ready to get back to writing my dissertation now.

Ode to the Crab Tower

Tomorrow, we return to Los Angeles. It'll be very nice to be back. I just was flipping through this year's calendar, and did a bit of counting: I spent 78 days living out of a suitcase this year. If you're doing the math, that's a little more than 20% of the year. It does make me appreciate the little things that come with being at home, like having all my clothes available to me, not just the five shirts I've been wearing since early August. And an ironing board. And Tivo. (Memo to Violet Vixen: by any chance, did you Tivo Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? Both times I tried to watch it this week, I missed the first twenty minutes.)

But I digress. I started this post because there is one thing that is always missing from my life when I am away from Washington, DC. It is a ten dollar creation of pure goodness, available at Clyde's of Georgetown, called the Crab Tower. The menu description just doesn't do it justice:

jumbo lump crab salad, seaweed salad, tobiko, coconut-curry rice cake and wasabi-sweet chili mayonnaise

I just can't tell you how delicious it is. The combination of crab, seawood, and rice cake is the most absurdly tasty thing you will ever taste. Back when Anne was a server at Clyde's and we were there a lot, I used to eat that thing three or four times a week. Now that Anne has moved to Mexico, my Crab Tower consumption has gone down a bit, but I still cherish the occasions. I'm considering the possibility of ordering a dozen, freezing them, and shipping them back home.

That is all.