Three Beautiful Things 01/27/15: Backlit, Tofu and Broccoli, Stop Making Sense

1.  With the wind chill, it was probably in the high 20s today on Greenbelt Lake and I enjoyed a bracing walk with my Canon S95 and combined exercise with getting back into the swing of photographing my favorite spot, so far, in the Greenbelt area.  When I came back around to the north bank of the lake, the partly cloudy weather conditions afforded me the opportunity to take backlit pictures, looking south onto the lake:

2.  Ah!  Back in the kitchen and back to meatless dinners, so much better for my kidneys.  Tonight I had fun baking some tofu and combining it with steamed broccoli and a sauce made up of soy sauce, fish sauce, peanut butter, hot sauce, red pepper flakes, rice vinegar, red wine vinegar, my homemade vegetable broth, and sesame oil.  We had some leftover brown rice.  I mixed it all up, kept it warm in the electric fry pan and the Deke and I had a very satisfying dinner together.

3.  Dan and I were hired together to teach full time at Lane Community College and our contracts began in January, 1991.  We became great friends, eventually having our offices next door to each other, and, before we retired, grabbed many opportunities to stand in one another's doorframes and have great discussions, most often movies.  Now these discussions are continuing by email.  I had recommended that Dan see "Stop Making Sense", the Talking Heads concert movie.  He did.  Now we are having one of our spirited conversations, both expressing our great admiration for this movie, for its vitality and for its joyous exploration of dystopia and absence of identity.  For both of us, the movie is a work of dada, creating disjunction between the joy the band expresses in performance while singing songs of delusion, alienation, paranoia, and the world's absurdity. The song and performance in the movie that epitomizes this disjunction is, in my view, "Life During Wartime". Deep irony is what got me hooked on studying literature back in the 70s, the kind of disjunction that moved me to love Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, many of Richard Thompson's lyrics, and the Tao de Ching and so much more -- darkness in light and light in darkness, mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage.   Stop making sense. Indeed.