Pictures, performance, passion, pinhead

I've posted some new photos over in the flickr section. We had a neat batch of snow squalls move through town yesterday afternoon, and I had a great view from my perch in the Young Tower. The snow activity was patchy -- I'd see blue sky in my part of the city, while the south end was getting white-out conditions. Or there'd be snow near me, and blue sky across the harbour in Dartmouth. It seemed to change every five minutes or so.

Went out to a rock and roll show Saturday with my sweetheart for the first time since moving here. We took in Wide Mouth Mason at The Attic. Young-looking trio from Saskatchewan who had a coupla hits in the late 1990s during the post-grunge era. I'm not good at pegging bands by style, but I'd call this one Spin Doctors meets Colin James. Doors opened at 11 ... we showed up after 12 ... band started around 1:15 ... rocked 'til about 2:30 -- that's ayem. Good show! Kudos to Amanda for having good taste in music.

After years of no-book-readin', I've finished a second book. Woo-woo! I bought a bunch of books from Blowfish.com (possibly not a link you should be opening at work) some years ago, and decided to pull one off the shelf and take it for some bus reading. Patricia Anderson's Passion Lost: Public Sex, Private Desire in the Twentieth Century profiles North America's relationship with the culture of sex over the past hundred-or-so years. It's something of a history lesson with a philosophical thread. If you've ever wondered how our culture got from Victorian ideals, to the so-called "sexual revolution", on to the 90s environment of explicitness and compulsive confession, to wherever-we-are-now, it's a decent, well-researched item.

It gave me some insight into that urgent desire so many people have for "something more" and how, regardless of how it's manifested itself over the decades, the quest for the elusive thing called passion has been a constant. Main lesson learned: private passion has been largely hijacked by the public obsession with sex, and in order for couples to be able to enjoy and explore our own erotic lives with joy and freedom, there may need to be a restoration of the privacy afforded in times that we now look upon as more "suppressive" -- we like to think that the old-time ways were free of filth, but in reality, it was there... only people were able to carve out their own private niche of passion, because the public realm just didn't permit that kind of thing. Sort of like how it'd be hard to enjoy your own dinner in a supermarket, I guess... I dunno, still mulling over the whole thing. Analogies aren't coming to me quite yet. Anyway, good read.