Cognitive Dissonance

[substitute]

In the waiting room at a psychiatrists' office. Usually the other patients are the entertainment. Today they have both a television and a radio going. The TV shows ocean nature scenes and the radio plays classical music. The results so far:

Elephant seals bask and tussle to Mahler

Slow, ominous cellos surround a zoom shot of the ocean under a cliff. Is there a body, dead, wrapped in plastic?

More Mahler: French horns heroically sound as otters clean themselves in a kelp bed.

The choice of Mahler is great. He was quite mad, and scored a part in his unfinished 10th symphony for a flute to be made of his dead wife's thigh bone.

Comments

wireless?

[mrhinelander.livejournal.com]

Your waiting room has 802.1? Nice.

Re: wireless?

[substitute.livejournal.com]

No, the sidekick/hiptop has GPRS and I posted by email :)

Re: wireless?

[mrhinelander.livejournal.com]

Crazy, I have so much to learn about being a wireless user. I got a wireless router at home (the wireless part I mostly leave deactivated), and now the cabled connection to my linux machine has this nice irritating 20 second latency while it does a namesearch or something, for every new outgoing, web, ssh, whatever. wtf? Not there on the windows box. I need to really collect the info and post about it.

I like wires, you can see them. If there's someone attacking your wire, you can see them (except for the internet gnomes, of course, I'm always overlooking them, lousy gnomes. That's the only reason they wear them dumb pointy hats, you know; people in SUV's keep backing over them. Stinking gnomes.)

Re: wireless?

[substitute.livejournal.com]

Your problem is interesting. I bet there's an easy solution, though.

My home wireless is about as locked down as I can get it. It's WPA2 encrypted; you have to be on a hardware address list to access it; and you have to know the network name to connect. It would be possible to snoop its existence, break by some means the encryption, find out which MAC addresses are accepted, and spoof one, but it would also be a huge fucking pain in the ass. My security level is appropriate to my importance as a target, which is nil.

[thesadtomato.livejournal.com]

Alma? The woman who was married to Franz Werfel AND Walter Gropius as well as Mahler? Her thigh?

[substitute.livejournal.com]

Apparently the context is more complex than the simple version my dad told me. Mahler was in the process of being dumped by Alma for Gropius and had found out because the letter inviting her to dump him was somehow addressed to him (!). The Adagio to the 10th contains a story in which a minstrel finds a bone and makes a flute out of it, and is hired at a wedding. At the wedding the minstrel plays the flute and the bone's previous owner speaks out in his fluting, condemning the king for murdering him and causing the wedding to end poorly. There was apparently some indication in the marginal notes that this was Alma's thigh bone to him, or some other muddled thing.

He was special.

[substitute.livejournal.com]

And her boyfriends and/or husbands also included Kokoschka, Klimt... wow. Plus romantic/terrifying escape from Nazis, life in Hollywood, and grand dame of the arts in New York. What a life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Mahler

[halfjack.livejournal.com]

I think she survived him, so he must have simply been anticipating her passing. Maybe that's why he didn't finish number 10!

[godforesaken.livejournal.com]

This is kind of like a Ron Padgett poem.

[godforesaken.livejournal.com]

--Not one that exists, but one that could.

[changeng.livejournal.com]

"The choice of Mahler is great. He was quite mad, and scored a part in his unfinished 10th symphony for a flute to be made of his dead wife's thigh bone."

pure inspiration. yes. YES.