yesterday, i slept until three. but i didn't know whether to believe the clock at first, but it was right. it was a good day to wake up at three. grey out, and i needed the sleep, and a nice long shower.

i did the crossword in a timesmag that was lying around; ben and i read up to act ii, scene iii in richard iii, with voices (clarence, for instance, got a daffy-style lithp); then we did some piano jamming, me doing my best ruben gonzalez impression over his steady tumbao grooves.

the power was out all afternoon, but it came back on the instant ben's mother walked in the door. dinner was great coldish takeouts from some gourmet place; bean salad, grilled veggies and stuffed cabbage.

from nonexistent plans, we crafted a fabulous evening out - trained in and met rae and rachel at grand central, then perused timeout to find a likely spot. we ended up at zinc bar, a nicely outfitted joint that gave us no problem about getting in ($5 cover), but did impose a fairly serious minimum (two drinks per person per set.)

we stuck with the specialty cocktails as advertised on a sign on the table - a round of cuban mojitos (rum, mint and limes - very tasty and not too strong, sort like an alcoholic version of ceviche. except without the seafood) and then two brazilian caipirinhas, which we shared, and were less impressive, though also good. what we didn't know was that the drinks were a preposterous $9 each. it's good that we stopped when did.

the experience was worth it though, i think. the entertainment was a truly fantastic cuban salsa band, frank bambara y sus salseros - guitar, bass, two violins, congas (the conguero also played clave on a woodblock with his foot) and a guiro player. they started with a tune i recognized (it was "dame un cachaito pahuele," which is on the second cubanos postizos record), and they also played "guantanamera" and probably some other things that lurk in the buena vista catalog.

the space wasn't really right for it, but rae and i got up to dance; of course, it turned out to be just as the set was ending. we tried again, half a caipirinha each later. yay! a dance with each rachel.

so - drinks, music, dancing. and the company was excellent. i guess we were a somewhat diverse-looking bunch: me all prepped out in ben's clothes (red turtleneck sweater; baby-blue ribbed tee, silk-lined grey slacks, skate sneaters); ben in an excellent black blazer and lavender button-down (the outfit which prompted some punks on the train to accost him: "you don't like us!"); rae inimitable, and rachel just off work in a green pleated skirt, shoulder-bag and sweatshirt with ska patches. there was a small chance it could have been awkward, but everyone was perfectly friendly. and, more than friendly.

rae left, and the remaining three (after we posed for a picture outside the club) went of in search of centro-fly, lack of time, funds, and ids notwithstanding. i don't mind, i just love walking around in the city, following my companions blindly (when and if i live here, i'm sure i'll learn the geography too, but for now i just trust and marvel), with all the ads and sight gags and the rain and the snatches of mtv hoopla. and with a lovely gal on my arm.

i got a much better sense of her than in vt, of course, more in line with her e-mail persona. showbiz dayjob, love of sondheim, scene-smarts and mad cab-hailing skillz, fingerquotes and simple declaratives - a nyc chick, not chic but burgeoning hip. i guess she has what you would call a button nose. cute in all senses. rae and ben ("too bad she's not older," he said, though i don't know why - i wouldn't want that myself) agreed/approved (and she of them), and i was just enjoying myself.

return to [grand] central (look! there's jon norris. there's avril lavigne! who are they?), for the last metronorth lines. a chaste kiss goodnight and then we went to our respective platforms. ben and i had funny talks on the way back, interspersed with a bit of velvet underground, one earbud apiece - his excellent leading questions: "do you like theater?" "do you have psychological insights into rae?"

he offered two of his gender theories: that while men (like us) often take a long time to formulate answers, requiring preliminary "deep" thought, women who do the same are seen as flaky or annoying (and thus are rarer); and, that women laugh at things that they wouldn't normally find funny, and without realizing that they wouldn't otherwise find them funny, when they are said by attractive men. i find the first plausible but overgeneralizing (i often find men who do that annoying - like joel - and can think of several women who do), and the second uncharacteristically controversial and probably not all that gender-specific (i certainly laugh at plenty of things that aren't funny, with and without knowing it) - although undeniable in plenty of cases (even as rachel would cling to me more tightly with each silly quip.)

back to the house with more of aijung's tape, for frozen pizza and sleep. today has been slow too - web stuff (by the way, i really like tasha's livejournal), gefilte fish, missy, greeley yearbooks, and old tapes of ben's blues band. i think i'll read a bit now.

sonny wanders beyond his interior walls

some other things about the last few days, but not in order:

jesse and friends and i came upon a stack of discarded vinyl on the sidewalk. my karmic reward for having hold off on purchasing at kims?; i flipped through and picked out bobby womack and miriam makeba lps and a whodini single. i promise that if they aren't interesting on the first listen they will be promptly ejected from my collection.

as i made my progress through penn station, a symphonic fanfare blasts from the speakers throughout the terminal, including the famous bathrooms. excellent soundtrack-to-life value

since i keep referencing it in conversation, the vietnamese restaurant i ate at my last night in town must have made an impression. "le lemon grass" is such a hilariously in-character enterprise title for the neighborhood entrepeneur/contractor/tangential friend of the family Huey. This new venture is right at the end of our block, and features, among other things, William Nazar as waiter/busboy, Stickley rip-off chairs handmade by Huey himself based on a model he bought and then returned to Stickley, and genuinely tasty vietnamese food. Also of interest: the smooth-jazz station dinner music included a cover of "Stir it up," but the singer actually sang it "steer it up," like Marley does. that's just not right, if you ask me. Also: a huge fish tank (8 feet long?) absolutely devoid of decor (not even rocks or anything), and holding only two fish: a black sucker that spent most of the time wedged uncomfortably behind the three pipes at one end of the tank, and a resplendent silver arajuana which will apparently grow to be the size of the tank, supposing someone doesn't plunk down $150 to order it first.

there's prolly more, but not for now. i'll write about yesterday soon. first let's go see if ben's up.

infidels shiver in the stench of belief

two intense and intensive days. a lot to catch up on. no longer have i the luxury of ensuring my posts read the "correct" date. i'm writing this Wednesday night.

i slept only two but productive hours on Monday night, after my last update. i was able to function pretty well when i got up, although i did do the stupid characteristic thing of searching the entire house, including bedrooms in use, for my wallet which ended up being in my backpack. dad and i left at six o'clock according to schedule. it was still dark, and i wanted to listen to the massive attack/mad professor dub as we drove through the sunset, but we listened to morcheeba instead. dad asked why fragments of freedom is maligned and considered so different, which is a fair question. i thought about trying to sleep in the car, but it didn't seem worth the effort. and i didn't really read either, just a bit of pullum.

we had nice tunes - sfa, ylt, when i was cruel and dig yr own hole, because dad had never heard the chems. we stopped just over the penna border for probably the worst diner breakfast i've ever had. i took the wheel for two hour-or-so segments. it was like a road trip with yr dad, early in the morning. okay. (not oaky, as i just mistyped.)

this was the type of day which was intense but not possible to write too much about, which is good for this site. we got to swat at 1, unloaded the car, checked mccabe-mail, parrish-mail (a freshwoman from ventura had to help me open my box,) and got 1st week seminar reading in refurbished beardsley. we moved my bed from the barn (in four pieces), along with shelves and so forth. we took my powerbook to a cute little mac place in upper darby to have the sound repaired (hopefully i'll be able to reclaim it mid-next-week.) we moved the rest of my stuff from the barn and from the basement of the banana house, which was a ton of stuff. then i was very tired and sweaty.

my dad left, with the drums, at about five. thanks to him. through all of this, of course, there were people: maybe most excitingly sarah wood, smoking on the barn porch; mark and seannius, who helped me move my stuff; sweet helpful blond ras; t-ball players and old-timers (samarrah? schwieigert? corey?). and matt, with whom i had much-needed dinner at an appropriate restaurant, it being tuesday and he being ruby. good place, surprisingly: good food and cheap, definitely classier than similar chains. i had a "key west" sandwich with tilapia and veggies. half of it, that i was too tired or something to finish, is still in rubin's car, oops. over meal, we gushed: school, music, girls, rockband. mm.

after securing a place to sleep in 3s, nevermind that i had just removed my bed, i accompanied rubin to the danawell ice cream social. that selfsame event at which we met, two long years ago. i don't feel like a junior. but i have to keep telling people i am, just the same. here's the problem: it's easier to like people that are older than you than people that are younger. i was tired, like i said, so i only part of the time had energy to be chatty with the freshfolk. mostly the low-key ones sitting by themselves or with their roommates. of other people: blair, and olivia. andrew stout and sarah c. yeah.

ben says i'm writing a lot. these are long paragraphs, yeah? well, the type looks small on this computer. i was tired, like i said, so i made my way (gerrit! claudia! cat!) to the barn. but 3s was locked (i gave the key away that afternoon, after it had come in handy twice that day.) in a sort of stupor i tried the fire escape backway, then i lay down on the couch on the porch. for half an hour, or more, while people walked in and out, a little bit asleep. in the end, i slept in 1s, because there wasn't a bed in 3s anyway. thanks to sarah edelstein. a bare mattress for nine hours is a hell of a lot better than not.

gee, this is taking long. today: $2.50 breakfast at the co-op (muffin, oj, two bananas), ed and his leaving lady-love, njt to nyp, then subway to grand central to meet ben ben. we went to the lighting district on the bowery but had no luck finding him a replacement glass bowl for his lamp. we went to kim's video, but i didn't buy any cds (aren't you proud?) he had to go to his lsat class, so i went to an nyu dorm to see if jesse was in. he wasn't but a bit later he was, and i went to indian food with him and three of his friends. i like going to food. i love indian food. and i was really hungry.

my feet hurt (past and present tense), after moving heavy objects wearing flip-flops all day, and then i was wearing shoes in ny (also have a raincoat because i checked the forecast) but they are my adidas, not the best for long city walking, so that's dumba me. we walked a lot in the village, after dinner, trying to find this or that and failing. i met ben and we came here. we're at his mom's house now. the end.

harness your hopes
to the [something]
with the liquor
with the ropes
red red ropes
periscopes

i get a momentary queasiness each time i sit down at this computer, for unknown reasons. i write single lines like that in advance of posting so that i can get the date right.

i've been going through old e-mail and deleting it, but i like just looking at the names sometimes - imagining if all the people from whom i've kept e-mails in march were somehow in a room together: kari swingle, denise ostling, edith presler, scott tutton, marcantonio barone, carla naumburg, jenny yim, and "ross c. hoffman iv" (which i think is rob cox under a peculiar alias.)

i've seen several movies lately: last night, the good girl at the little and then a.i.. i preferred the latter, contrary to popular opinion. good girl was okay, but pretty low-key and not terribly engaging. there were some very funny moments though (and there's a bit character named "floberta," which one of the best things about the movie.) tim blake nelson is great, and he gets some excellent lines. a.i., granted, was a little long and restless, but it has some substance to it, i think. the pinocchio parallel is heavy-handed, and the ending is just weird (but kind of cool) - and it suggests that earth exists in the star wars galaxy as camina (i think that's what its called) in episode 2, whose denizens are reminiscent of the creatures at the end.

tonight i saw donnie darko, in martha's room because she brought the tv up to watch while she pretended to clean. i have to say i agree with jonah and chris dahlen (who liked it), rather than ben, who (in the middle of an laughy phone conversation that also included discovering some secret websites) thought it wasn't very good. it's definitely an original film, and worth watching, and i think worth watching again on dvd so that i can check out the explanatory (i hope) bonus materials. martha kept seeing e.t. parallels (drew notwithstanding.) it's set in 1988, gently but firmly, and manages to excellently reference (i won't say spoof or even satire) a handful of genres while also working within them to create something that transcends them. nothing spectacular, just a well-written, well-acted, well-thought-out and interesting movie, something which should be more common.

it's 3:30 now, and i'm theoretically leaving at 6:00 to head to swat. this trip has required more preparatory e-mails than i can comprehend, and i think that most of them have been answered, at least in some fashion. plans are still somewhat loose, but i'll be dropping my stuff off, moving stuff around and no doubt creating utter clutter in my new room, then heading for new york to goof around with ben, rae, jesse, and whomever else i can dig up. i'll be back again on saturday, just in time for dip of the month. oh how time flies through crystal clear eyes.

the question isn't "if"
the question is "marry me"

i haven't been all that unproductive. since i've been home, well i've done some reading - finished empire of signs, which got beyond me by the end, and started t. coraghessan boyle's the road to wellville, which is very enjoyable so far and is about a part of history that particularly interests me. i've been listening to many new things, and i'm halfway through a tape for aijung. aijung came over the other day and we shared some music. i burned a cd of inflight rock band live; twelve tunes, it doesn't all sound great, but it's nice to have something. i've arranged for a handful of promo cds to write about (hope the phoenix don't mind.) i'm inching towards a plan for the impending transition. new york people, philly people, where y'all at?

there was a dinner party here tonight - mike and kate, subagh and subagh, bernie and arlene, jessie (briefly) and sarah and simran and simran's friend. and emiko too, for a little while. helping to prepare for that gave me something to do - i peeled and sliced peaches for a scrumptious pie, made marinades and so forth. during the dinner (which was out on the patio, and involved grilled veggies, salmon, corn, and margaritas like apparently every good summer meal) we listened to rae's "red-blooded americans" tape for rebecca (and me), which was terrific, and then tnt and my "mingle and squeal" tape that i discovered in my boombox - the original version, which is wholly different from the cd reconstruction (that mix is actually supposed to be called "an exaltation," i think.)

some phrases that i'm collecting in my head, for tape titles or something:
stick-to-it-iveness
nimble and chalky
polygamy
sunday pants

i won't, probably, accomplish everything i want(ed) to while home - hopefully i can finish writing a song or two, and maybe buy some sandals or something - but that's okay. last night i watched most of a map of the world with my parents, and i still have two videos to watch: ai and donnie darko. dad and i just played scrabble (on his unexpected suggestion), while listening to the turtles and some other things. my best plays were SODDiNG (on the triple, my second bingo) and JINGU (on double, with J on the triple.) i don't particularly like reporting on my scrabble games.

there are heavy things to think about in this world, and i don't know if i can do it right now.

cancer for the cure my baby
buckle-up and endure now sweet thing

there's something horrid about the ends of summers, don't you think? not just the imminence of fall activities (i, at least, am nothing but superexcited to be going back-to-school) or the nostalgia of regret and unfulfilled opportunity (that's always there, and not worth it). i think it has more to do with a contradictory activity/inactivity, this sort of inertia where there are many things to be accomplished before the next season, but none of them seem particularly pressing or appealing. so i just hang around the house doing little; summer acquaintanceships fizzle; books get finished and started; i call no more than one or two friends a day even if only to find out that they've already left for school. most likely this condition (malaise is too strong a word, as are langor and funk) is tied to the nasty things my house does to me physically (i'm always sick here - the cathair makes me course through kleenex, and i don't get enough sunlight. also, my muscles sometimes intermittently, mildy ache - my neck is stiff and sore, which i can only attribute to that banana-boating spill i took the other morning.)

(this from an e-mail to rachel, before i got less high-falutin - maybe it captures something but a bit too strongly)

well the rain falls down without my help, i'm afraid

who's that standing over there by the record machine
looking like a model on the cover of a magazine?

apparently (according to martha, later) she inquired about me on saturday night, which must have been very shortly after i made my first appearance at basin harbor, arriving late for dinner in my light striped jacket (dubbed 'mafia'). maybe she noticed my dancing (that's how i get all the girls, pretty much.)

coincidentally or not, we spoke for the first time the next afternoon (it wasn't clear who initiated the exchange - she said "hello," but i paused first): she was getting off her bike, and i thought that she was wearing a blackalicious t-shirt. no, it said "the blackouts," which sounded vaguely familiar, but i couldn't place it. they're from rochester, she said, which explained that. so am i. she's from croton-on-hudson. we exchanged names. ("r names," rachel comments.)

"i heard you talked to rachel," said martha, was i guess the next thing. (insignificant, right? i noticed that she was at the cookout that night, and even, briefly, at the red mill before the dancing started, but i don't think we made eye contact.) yes, that was before this:

at lunch the following day, a waitress came up to our table to announce: "the lady in red would like to buy you a soda." man, that was classic. of course, in the family reunion context, such things can't but provoke ribbing and curiousity - while peter talked about past experiences with drinks ordered across the room, josh and carla conducted a recon mission to scope out the post-obscured lady in question (her friend catches them out, dryly: "nice walk-by.")

on the return kayak, i toodled by the trampoline (the lady in red was now the lady in strappy olive-green two-piece) to thank her for the ginger ale. carla daniela and i jumped in and swam out to bounce ("the water tramp is good times," "the townies slashed it a few weeks ago") and chat (after they left she started clutching for conversational straws, painfully - "what breakfast cereal would you be?") at dinner, she popped up between ordering and appetizers to ask me to dance, brazen and irrepressible. that was the happiest moment - managing a half-decent jitterbug, and finding things to talk about other than cereal (skavoovie, philly, basin harbor.)

apart from unprompted intelligence reports from martha ("she's about my age" "she broke up with her boyfriend two weeks ago"), all i mostly had to go on was appearances. so: she really was/is adorable, and not just in a demeaning way. okay, i'm not going to describe what she looks like. young. from conversation (she'll be a senior in high school, her birthday was four days ago, she's a BHC regular, having spent eleven summers there since her first at age six) i establish that she's seventeen. and other things (after eleven years, of course, besides seemingly knowing every kid in the place, she's friends with the staff, including sarah, the curly blond daughter of the owners and waitress who brought my soda - knowing which makes the lunchroom scene all the more comical.)

i thought about how the age seventeen is idealized in all of those songs - well she was just seventeen, if you know what i mean, "what a nice way to turn seventeen," and of course the classic (the line that follows my opening couplet above): she's too cute to be a minute over seventeen. (those songs were written, of course, by boys around my age.) i thought about the brilliant earnest wholesomeness of it all - waning august and the full-mooned nights, i miss the innocence i've known and what could be more classic-american-summer than a frivolous fling.

there was a hypnotist show that night (which she told me about, but i didn't see her there) - if this were a movie, rachel would somehow arrange to have me hypnotised into love with her. wouldn't that be perfect. (but to make it really work, the hypnosis would eventually have to somehow lose its effect so that we could see a genuine love underlying it.) feel like writing a teensploitation screenplay?

needless to say, all of this unexpected attention was terrifically flattering, not to mention brave and impressive (to the point of second-guessing it.) but come now. all her pluck and determination (and appeal) couldn't stanch the factors working against her, chief among them the family reunion setting, my limited time, and inevitably age divide.

that's a really big difference, high-school-senior to college-junior. not to say that it's unthinkable, because i don't believe age need necessarily be an important factor if experience and personality and circumstance make up for it. ("are you going to make out with her anyway, just for fun?" speed-said impish josh, smirking self-satisfiedly - carla cut him off before i could respond) but rachel, as it turned out, really was too young for me. it did not feel right, and that's that.

worse, her milieu was the frenzied-yet-mundane world of childhood summer, the club-sponsored activities, bikes and bonfires, peopled with kids and staffers whose roles she bridged, whom she could introduce me to more of in a minute than i could even begin to distinguish. she invited me to a party (a send-off for cornell-bound sarah) and i realized it was really impossible.

she disappeared for about 24 hours after we danced, and our last interactions just grew more awkward: i apologized for not going to the party (charades and late-night pounce in cocktail room), martha for some reason invited her to go tubing with us (but we weren't in the boat for the same shift), she biked over to say goodbye. and i saw again more while waiting to depart (she fends off oak and bean - "not a dog person - i rock the cats"), and perhaps against better judgment gave her my e-mail (my typical inability to say no.) i half expected to find a message from her when i arrived last night. no, but true to form, there's one in my inbox now.

so. i'll either have to think about this more or not. right now i'm going to attend to another rachel, in the form of an ornately-papered shoe-size-box that was in the post yesterday, with a completely unnecessary return address in astoria. as if i couldn't recognize the aesthetic sense responsible for those patches of color, texture, and map. and it smells like her as well, unmistakably.

cheer up
honey i hope you can
i think there is something wrong with you

home again home again jiggety jig

i'll sprinkle this one with lyrics. except i don't know if that one counts. is it a song? i'm back after four days and nights of fun in the sun at basin harbor (link in the entry below), vergennes, vermont. back with a new t-shirt (a reunion tradition, this time green on white with an innovative grandparent-centric geneogram on the back), some serious color (stark contrast between white on my upper thigh and red on my lower, plus face, arms, etc. - warm but not really painful), a stiff neck (result of tubing accident this morning??), a phone number (keep reading), and all the stuff i've been carting around with me all summer.

i'll cover this topically, rather than chronologically, and see how much writing my current energy level will allow for. these were full days:

plenty of water activity - swimming in the luxuriously temperate lake Champlain; partaking of the relatively new floating inflatable trampoline, which is almost as much fun to make jokes about (i.e. "jumping on the tramp" - of relevance later) as it is to jump or hang out on; a kayak down the shore with carla, josh, and daniela; canoeing across the lake with zoe and then martha to access a short but fulfilling hike through the woods on the ny side; and this morning an early ride on an inflated banana-thingy which ended abruptly and decisively when it flipped over going near 30 mph and plopped michelle, lawrence and me into the water.

plenty of games - i didn't participate in either of those hallmarks of white/collar sport (tennis and golf, respectively) despite a mild hankering, but there were handsful of cards, including several rounds of oh hell, two of russian banks (i triumphed against the formidable carla and betsy), and of course the family staple pounce.

for those who've never been to a cantor-naumburg-heming family gathering, pounce is perhaps the most intense card game in existence; each player has a deck and simultaneously strives to rifle through his cards and play up as much as possible in order to be the first to eliminate his 13-card talon ("pounce pile," whose russian banks analogue is the "misery pile") and yell "Pounce!", bringing the round to a close. Martha emerged, even more prominently than before, as a sick master of the game (in a five-player game i wasn't in, but taking place at the same time as was, she racked up more than 250 points with her nearest competitor eons behind with 120-something; meanwhile across the room i finished two points behind the eventual winner.)

the back-to-back games nights, which took place in my parents' cottage, also featured, on successive nights, scrabble (a 3-way game that lasted until I bingoed out to win with sANDIEr, after a frustratingly closed board threatened to render my two blanks worthless) and charades (the other family staple; memorable moments include Mike's rendition of "In the Ghetto," miming bearded, big-nosed jew; Martha's brilliant take on Tuck Everlasting, of which her team had inexcusably never heard; my three-minutes-plus Ward Ethics ["eh?," "thick, thick, thick"] which was a book on the shelf nobody knew; to contrast with my fifteen seconds to get the Ani song "pick-see," and Josh spinning around in crab-walk for Cancer, Schmancer.)

reading, in places - i finished the scrabble book on the drive up, and spotted my way through some Pullum and Barthes.

i went running twice - once with dad, and this cooler morning on the same route (3.5 miles or so), but markedly faster (we sprinted the last segment) with Alex - which felt terrific. as did jumping in the lake afterward. good to have my shoe back.

a tremendous evening Sunday night when over twenty of us invaded the bar/tavern which is oddly miscalled "Red Barn" as often as it is correctly called "Red Mill," pushed the furniture aside, I took over the CD player, and we had ourselves a little dance party into the wee hours. a similar family solidarity moment - at least demonstrative of what can happen when you get 38-ish of us together - a half-hour post-family-photos yoga session led by my pops. (3-year old Lily led some yoga classes of her own immediately following, demonstrating godlike flexibility and innovative technique involving prancing around with silly arm positions.)

meals are always a major part of the basin harbor experience, and dressing for those in the main dining room (jacket and tie required) is one of my favorite parts. unfortunately, only two of my four nights there were MDR nights (that TLA thanks to a girl i'll get to later), the other two we had worse food and nicer views at cookout/picnics on the waterfront. I didn't remember to get dessert on every lunchtime visit to the Ranger Room, but I tried to make up for it the other times.

so that should give you a sense of the carefree family reunion days. the gentrified country-club atmosphere can get a bit much (a particularly discordant moment one night when two of the Jamaican staff members stood needlessly holding screen door open for us) - it's no surprise my folks always leave several days earlier than the crowd in general - but it really is a beautiful place, and it's awfully nice to have no decisions more difficult than whether to swim, boat, hike, play a game, or do nothing, and what to select from the appetizer menu.

plus it's always nice to see family. they don't get on my nerves as much as they seem to on each others, sometimes. no major disputes (at least not until this afternoon, where there was some drama about whether Martha would be able to ride home on Peter's bus in order to stay on a few days.) i spent time most with carla and josh, martha and mom, brenda and her sons; less than i'd like with bob, alex, dan, and some others, but ok.

however. i've left out, so far, the most blogworthy portion of the whole experience. as alluded to above. i'll get to that in a little bit, but i have to go look at something first.

looking for someone to save you
looking for someone to rave about you
to rave about you

today was of art and beck. tomorrow early i leave, and will probably not be able to post for a while. i'll be reunioning it up at the basin harbor club (for my activities check the basin harbor breeze - "blows most anytime."

i might write entries up there offline, since i'll have this with me (i didn't end up sending it in to have the audio repaired, not yet). so more detail there, but a few choice moments from today:

art:
a side-looking wyeth crone shot her eyes at me from the corner (interrupting cute rivera baby playing with blocks) and i was struck down.

rauschenberg's new stuff is less obtrusive but doesn't speak to me as much, still he shows he's hip by including a pineapple.

17th-century dutch painting (can you tell van ruisdael from van ruysdael? i bet kaori can) involves impossibly fine brushwork, amusing figural scenes, sickly-pale peaches, and peacock pies.

i got lost in the asian wing trying to make a detour.

barb strangely nauseous, kept scoping out bathrooms, lying under the (thierry) table.

the broads have fun taste, tons of money, make their preferences obvious: johns, lichtenstein, warhol, koons, and most enjoyably sherman, whose photo work i like a lot more than her sculpture (which was not represented.)

beck:
spanish "jackass"

best part of the show was a hauntingly gorgeous "nobody's fault but my own" with simple harmonium accompaniment.

wurlitzer jam turned into parts of "where it's at" - the groove, the opening lines, and then the chorus done in a mocking "spyro gyra"/free-jazz style with adlibbed lyrics about boston and spyro gyra.

beck ate dinner on stage, while smokey played bossa dinner music. they chatted about the service, scene, etc. "what's for dessert?" "um, warm chocolate truffle" "how warm is that? i drool a lot; will it scald my thighs?"

a capella "sleeping bag" on request (in seconds), and "asshole" by request too, after a few tunes.

the new songs are hit-and-miss. "lonely tears" was the only tune he did at the upright, which was our only blind spot. it was actually lovely to hear that in the darkened room, without being visually aware of the source of the music.

the theatre is absolutely gorgeous, and is also used to teach economics and psych, etc., as beck joked about (he came out in an academic gown.)

"something's heavy in here. i think it's the statues"

i tried to ask him about the bagel, but he didn't hear me. didn't take my request for "o maria" either.

"tropicalia" worked well as an encore, sung from seated position on the pedestal of big stone statue of some college founder, fondling his legs.

misery waits in vague hotels
to be evicted (i always thought it was "be a victim")

the way a phrase like this rolls of rufus' tongue is unfathomable:

drunk and wearing flip-flops on fifth avenue

my days, indeed my hours (not much more than thirty, if all goes according to plan) in boston are numbered. and much remains to be done. bad enough that i'm behind in real life; blogside things are looking dire indeed. so many happenings to be recounted. well, i'll see how far i can get. as i write, on a stickie, in the living room, i'm making a tape for someone who i'm sure is reading so i won't mention his name. it's about 2:30 and, well into the first side, i've decided to start over again on a different tape deck.

listen: i took the bus into town on tuesday and walked myself over to the fogg art gallery (sorry, no hyperlinks right now, i'm unconnected). at first, the novelty of the experience struck me, and i realized i hadn't had a serious interaction with art in rather a while (oberlin's fine gallery notwithstanding.) so the pertinent question was: "do i even like art anymore?"

after a couple of rubens failed to storm my psyche, i wasn't so sure, but i think my final answer was probably affirmative. item: the featured exhibit of articles from Ur, including a lot of the really famous stuff (the ram in the thicket, which is actually a goat, and the huge bull-headed lyre; i thought i saw the freakin' standard there in the corner, and bade my time getting around to it, but it turned out to be a replica, of course. don't remember if i saw that in the British museum, but it's pretty cool.) what i was most impressed by was how modern much of it looked, particularly the jewelry. one could easily wear any of those necklaces out to a fancy dress ball, or even a funky restaurant, circa 2002.

like the best college collections (which this is), it was a perfect survey of everything - fantastic room of imps and post-imps, but limit one or two per notable (picasso got a handful, and nice ones too but then he's special.) so, all the old favorites. another temp. exhibit was of a artist i didn't know whose massive works combined silverplate photography with sculpted sheets of lead to remarkable effect. that was in the modern-er busch-reisen-something gallery, which also had a hammershøi (my latest favorite.)

that was really fun. i would have liked to check out the third museum in the complex, with non-western stuff, but instead i went down mass. ave. and did this other thing i like to do. oh, record shopping. oh dear. this was to be this summer's of equivalent of my splurge at amoeba last year, but as it happened my penchant this time was for old lps rather than new-ish cds. used in both cases.

i spent, not a stupid amount of money (no, rather a respectable amount of money - something like $2 a disc on average), but on a stupid number of albums. stupid because it's fun to use the word like that, but because a) i don't have a phonograph yet b) i have to carry the suckers, and this added nearly if not double the weight to my collection. yes, i must remember not to double the size of my collection in one day again, unless that's the day my folks get rid of their turntable.

it wasn't the most visceral pleasure i've gotten out of record shopping, but it was a satisfying time because i finally followed the reason i decided to start collecting vinyl in the first place: most of my purchases were jazz or blues records; a couple world and one country. for the most part stuff i really don't know much about.

an issue: if i'm not necessarily a huge blues or jazz fan, and don't want to build a huge collection, do i focus on just the essential classics, or do i just take a sample of whatever i come across that's easy and cheap, since it's not worth shelling out for the (inevitably more expensive) selections that a purist might select. i think some of both. i know what to look for in jazz, but beyond a few names i'm pretty lost in the blues. but learning. particularly, i don't have a sense of what i would like.

i need to find a good place to look for funk and soul records. i bet philly has something to offer there. these two places were great. stereo jacks is manned by your typical record nerds. i was there for an hour or so, and got to hear them have it out with numerous customers, would-be-sellers (over the phone) and oddballs off the street. they were pretty nice to me (i asked about a freddie hubbard record and a caetano veloso record) but still a smidgen smarmy.

record hog was in marked contrast to the orderliness of that business: stacks of lps all over the place, maybe a third of them haphazardly labelled. their posted hours were "noon-ish to seven-ish," but the retiring proprieter announced "we close at six," which was only minutes after arrived. she let me and one fellow customer poke around until 6:20 as she tended to the three or four cats and put towels over the used cd racks. then refused to give me a bargain on a used daedalus cd i noticed without a pricetag, and tried to interest me in a vanguard folksinger compilation.

mandy and ruth stopped in while i was there. we reconvened at the flat a little while later and shortly left to meet miriam for dinner at the west end lounge. that was excellent; more fun than i anticipated even. nice to have a conversation (long-form, as ben said) conducted in that intellectual style that has been lacking this summer; it's an enjoyable mode, even if i don't know how closely i associate with it.

we talked about art. we talked about word games. we deconstructed and reconstructed the myth of the jane:miriam/rebecca:ester analogy. there are some parellels, certainly (that order is the right one), but i'm not fully convinced. we listened to some compilation of awfully unoriginal beatles covers and ate food:

i ordered appetizers, which came all at once and first - seafood ravioli, mesclun salad, and gazpacho (intriguingly, "with cilantro-infused ice cubes," which turned out to be round and not cold enough) - they got fish entrees. the chef, who reminded me of a combination of julia walsh, miss piggy, but prettier and butcher, came out ostensibly to hear our opinions but also it seemed to boast of her menu-assembling prowess.

it was already a bit late, so ruth and i only played one game of anagrams. we tried using a scrabble set, including the blanks, which i think i like better. (using a blank, for instance, allowed FART>dRAFT>RAFTeD>RATIFiED>FIlTRATED.) i don't even remember who won. i think it was me. yes, it was me.

blah di dah. wednesday, nick came over and we set up some mikes to record me playing drums and he playing digeridoo. it took so long to get things sorted out that we only played for an hour or so. i haven't played all summer, which is ridiculous considering how many drums are in this house, and i felt impossibly rusty.

later endeavors: trying to clean up the inflight recordings, i get frustrated but take another stab and get somewhere, maybe.

when you sleep late you wake late, duh, and today lunch had ended before the day had barely begun - dan sez let's go meet jim and autumn in the apple store. cambridge galleria, mac store, where there's a huge display counting down to the release of OS X.2 (jaguar!) i have to say, i dig some parts of the mac aesthetic, but some (most of the white and clear hardware, but especially the borders on the huge flat screens) don't do it for me. a coupla rounds at the genius bar, lunch at the cheesecake factory (faux-egyptian decor, of course, and a "navajo sandwich": avocado, tom, let, chik, mayo, etc. on fry bread, actually quite tasty) with discussion of alternatives to bass (specifically, to jesse, who i saw on the street with ruth.) lop.

a stop-off at another big computah store, where we both got suckered in by a wicked good deal on no-name no-graphic cd-rs. (50-pak for 1.99 w/ mail-in rebate. hyaa!) now, what to do with 100 blank cds?

scarcely a break for the actual day - financial awareness discussion, internet ketchup, call home - before off again to buy beck tickets (yep, that's right. money money, but at $50, i think a respectable bargain), and pick up Sali Oyugi on the way to the gig.

she's a transplanted Kenyan singer whose drum parts Dan knows well enough. upbeat african groovy stuff. dance music, with some incongruous earnest moralizing in between tunes ("it's okay to make a mistake, because you'll be learning from it.") Sali called me up on stage to dance, so i tried to do a mostly stationary version of umfundalai, with my little square footage. umf.

in the green room, chilled with the infectious-esque headliner (iii kings - know 'em?) and had some post-set ribs + mashed sweet + turnip greens. this was at the house of blues, by the way.

and now here i am doing this, and it's after five already. after i post this, finish the mix (or not), go to bed and wake up, i'm going to the mfa, among other things. and on saturday, vermont. which means i have to pack.

ruth showed up in the morning a little later than expected, which allowed us time for a scrabble game and some goofy bugging with mason. dawdle dawdle and we went to Duck Pond, a marvelous little watering hole, cristal clear. mason and i raced down to the water (i won.) becca and i swam across and played with our fingers. mason caught pollywogs. i read my book. mmm.

we went to a clamshack. fried clamstrips and cornonthecob and chowdah. and ice cream. froggyshirt. mason and i raced on the beach (he was disqualified for running in the wrong direction, or maybe i was.)

back to the house (we were staying at someone else's friend's place): anagrams and lou rawls hilariously in and out of speed on the wobbly poor-powered turntable. unhappiness. and sleep.

next day (which was friday, like now), i remember butterfly catching with mason. i remember another brief beach, with much bigger waves and a kite. back to p-town, for dinner with jane at esthers.

i think i told you about the rest of it. time to post. it's getting light. i like this mix, but i'm a little afraid of it. i wonder if it's too wide-ranging for its own good.

check 'em out y'all
check checkin' 'em out

listening to the first(?) six tracks of the forthcoming, still-apparently-untitled beck album (and so can you), and noting the setlists from his current tour, make me reconsider how much i would spend to go to his concert on friday. i've bargained with a guy up to $50 apiece for two tickets (haven't heard his response yet; he originally wanted $150 for the pair) (face value is $30, but the show's been sold out since a few days after it went on sale.) i know that beck is a great performer regardless, but these so far i'm not that impressed by these tunes. they're reminiscent of mutations, but not as interesting melodically or lyrically, and they all have the same sort of texture. and it seems like he has barely been playing anything from his two best

several attempts scrabble games i played last night ended in my connection screwing up and me being booted out. i tried my hand at tanglewords, playsite's version of boggle, and discovered i thouroughly suck at it, watching my rating drop each round even as my point yield increased. so tonight's game, with a garrulous purple-level from pa named "babes4" ('babe is a nickname and i have four children,' she explained in response to a question that she thought was about "title" when i actually said "tile") - we used chat far more than i have in previous games. i opened with sMELTED, traded in my next rack of all consonants, keeping the j for JAR, which enabled me to make AJAR and ZEAL through a triple next turn. then QUITE on a triple-letter. and another bingo, MATINGS, forming ANODE over her NODE. my final score was 439, an online best, and maybe personal best overall. it helped that she left several triples open for me, but more that i was just drawing like crazy (although i did trade in twice.) and once again, i was stuck with a bingo (SAVINGS) at endgame and nowhere to play it. whooo.

as promised: briefly: sunday morning's hannukat bayit (mezuzzah-hanging ceremony), on less sleep than usual, had me sneezing and tired. but a lovely chance to see their lovely apartment, and meet josh's amusing family, and the fantastic Goose.

the crew, plus Barb and Ben, went to jamba juice and ordered five mango agogos, and then went to staples and met a man named turtle (first and last name.) oh yeah - a hilarious conversation in the car on the way over, in response to a report from abby that coffee stimulate's production of the "death hormone." Barb was indignant: "SHE'S the death hormone." aah, ha ha ha.

i fell asleep when we got home. more stuff happened, i'm sure, but i can't remember it.

yesterday (monday) afternoon, we had a recording session for [L], a sabar player from Dakar. sabar is a senegalese drum, virtually unknown in the states, which is played with one hand and one stick. this guy was a freaking incredible player. we had him overdub tracks over his own playing so that by the end it sounded like 7 or 8 drummers going, a complex but funky 12-8 rhythm which is apparently exclusively used as entrance music for this particular senegalese wrestler. the plan is for this drumming to be the intro to the album, overlaid with an 808 beat and snatches from the rappers. cool.

[L] stayed for thai takeout, from tantawan (awesome, probably the best thai i've ever had,) and an illuminating discussion of the local world music scene and the perplexing absence of sabar in america.

benny left last night, after a prolonged discussion of URL choices (they have secured africanrecords.com) and packaging ideas.

more stuff to talk about - a final romp through cambridge today - but it's late, once again. you know.

i'm not who you think i am
i'm the king of siam
i've got a shaved head
my name is yul brynner
and i am a famous movie star

i just had a crazy intense dream. it was like a Borgesian sci-fi ghost story, or maybe something from a more stylish m. night shyamalan film. of course it doesn't make a lot of linear sense now, even in that nifty metaphysical narrative-twists way it seemed to, but when it became lucid, it seemed like it was going to be a complete postmodern supernatural short story.

i wasn't the main character, but sometimes i occupied his mind. the protagonist and his wife board a massive ship, and wander through all the rooms (furnished as everything from parlors to coffeeshops to record stores, but all with a glamourous '40s feeling, and lots of records lying around, in boxes) until they find their own bedroom suite. in the night, his wife begins to wail annoyingly, and he murders her. then he goes off to another room to pore through some boxes of lps, wondering whether they are free for anyone to take, and feeling doubly guilty when he takes a pile. the dream didn't show me the murder, but later he sits in a room with access to the water (the room is open to the ocean - like those rooms in fallingwater that access the river), next to the corpse but confusingly not disposing of it in the water, and worried that he will be discovered if anyone else in the ship needs to wash his hands in the night. he hears footsteps.

in the morning, the wife wakes up, in the same room, and we find her in conversation with a curly-haired child, and the childs parents and the protagonist. it becomes apparent that the child is dead as well - i/the husband killed him to prevent him from discovering the wife's body. she and the child are ghosts, on this ghost ship.

a later sequence, the tone has shifted somehow, and it is the aftermath of something horrible, with a sense of impending finality as though the ship will soon dock and become inaccessible. "i" am running through the rooms of the ship, searching for the same bedroom and its adjoining record-store room to retrieve that stack of lps. but i keep running, through the walls and shelves and supermarket display cases of plum jelly, unable to find it. i ask directions several times and someone reminds me to think of the governor. a hint. i keep this in my mind and some bureaucrat appears as i pass by, identifiable by "…vernor" written on his side. it seems that i am arriving at the room, but all the records are not records but flimsy transparent plastic sleeves in racks, so i keep running: i can only reach my destination by focusing mind and memory on it, and meanwhile everything else is illusory and i phase right through it.

this all doesn't make much sense now, i see, but it was totally deep and supernatural as it happened. after the inconclusive ending to the story, i discovered (as by reading the appendix or watching the bonus featurette, or, as it seemed, looking at "readme" files contained in the same folder as the story) the "rules": the explanation of how all the strange phenomena in the dream made consistent sense. a lot of it had to do with the backstory of the character's father, and explained some things about phasing and memory. it wasn't too helpful, but i wanted it to make sense, since the dream was pretty lucid by this point.

well, i tried to capture that, not sure how well it worked. anyway, to pick up where i left the story (jason falkner lyric that's been in my head this morning), after i became one of those people that vaguely irk me, walking around in harvard square carrying bright yellow tower records baggies,

i bussed home, round midnight, and departed shortly after again. i rode with benny and the scientist on the stereo, while dan and mami followed behind us on a wicked goose chase that took us through newton, allston, brighton, cambridge, quincy, dorchester, and more (i don't remember the order, but it wasn't a logical one) to pick up ans and abby, some gas, abby's bowling ball, and another skavoover, euphonium joe. by the time we arrived at the 24-hour bowling alley, it was well past one.

but the place was packed! nearly full parking lot, four security guards on duty, who let us in after checking id (at a bowling alley? fortunately it was 18+) and they were still serving food - surprisingly tasty chewy-crust pizza, which i much needed. i bowled with focused intent but less consistency. only managed two spares in each of two games, but i felt like i was improving even though my scores were dropping off. i should bowl more. it's always a good time. we got home much after three.

coming up: sunday and monday and today and the rest of cod. but first i have to go do some things.

Brazil...
where hearts were entertaining June
we stood beneath an amber moon
and softly murmured someday soon
we kissed
and clung together
then
tomorrow was another day
the morning found me miles away
with still a million things to say
now
when twilight dims the skies above
recalling thrills of our love
there's one thing I'm certain of
return
i will
to old
Brazil

weekend was indeed tiring, as expected. maybe combination of the heat and lack of sleep, but it took a lot out of me, and i crashed a few times yesterday. a short sneezing spell that hopefully is clearing up now.

we had another barbeque saturday, which was attended by at least twice as many people as the other one; at least half of them japanese. carla and her beau's-soeur rachel were the first to arrive, as i finished up a fruit salad and listened to the copy of brainfreeze that i finally managed to get onto cd.

mami, working on a japanese eggplant dish, managed to burn the oil that she was heating, which filled the kitchen and then the whole downstairs with stinky smoke that forced us all outside for twenty minutes or so, after setting fans to blow as much of it as possible out windows. but it was good to be outside. we took turns with the hula hoop and set up a 4' inflatable t-rex that mami brought home from work. actually, once we returned inside it took us too long to get out: guests started showing up, and everyone crammed into the kitchen, trying to help out with food prep, making it difficult to move around.

but things settled down. i chatted a bit with anthony kuhn, a fairly distant cousin of mine who lives in beijing and reports for npr and the l.a. times, and also with ans, the singer from skavoovie (currently author of comics such as zombre, an animal-loving zombie), and his girlfriend abby, who told me about weekly saturday afternoon $5 hardcore shows at abc no rio in new york (ben - interested?)

good barbecue - mini hamburgers (meat cookies) and superb grilled pork loin pieces, watermelon and ibc. around 3, we got the speakers set up outside, to rock when i was born for the 7th time, rei momo, and rings around the world. man, i had to skedaddle!

thanks to a friend of mami's named kant (after immanuel, with a cool einstein t and a nervous laugh) who dropped me off at harv sq., despite the long trip from red to green to kenmore, i was at axis shortly after 7, the scheduled start time for the rather early show (or so i thought at the time, although it now occurs to me that 7 isn't a completely ridiculous start time for a saturday rock show, even if 9 or even 11 is more typical.) and i got in with no problem, and almost to the front.

opening for Cornelius, and clearly very happy about it, were south ("we've been south," they said at the end of their set), whom i may have peripherally heard of. they're good. interesting guitar britrock, somewhere between the super furry animals and oasis, with a little radiohead as well. they did a lot of instrument swapping (the front guy was mostly bassist, but also played guitar, drums and bottleneck at times) which always makes me smile. the couple next to me had never heard of cornelius - they were there to see south, so there you go.

man, Cornelius. the process of playing point for dan to convince him to go to the show (he really wanted to, but decided to host a barbecue instead) got me even more psyched about the album and curious about how he/they were going to pull it off live. i was satisfied:

the set started out with a blank white sheet covering the whole stage. dripping noises and stage left/stage right guitar plucks (recreating the immaculate panning effects on the record) gradually revealed a groove, when the drums kicked in a light revealed cornelius' silhouette in the center of the screen. with the beat, he pointed his finger at a word which then as if magically appeared on the screen where he pointed: "at…here…now…cornelius…from…nakameguro…to…everywhere…hello……"

the sheet fell and they kicked into "point of view point," the lovely video clip for it, as projected in the background, only marred by the shortness of the venue, which meant that the bottom portion of the projection was soaked up by the band members heads. the band members: four japanese in short sleeve white buttondowns and skinny black ties; cornelius on guitar and other things, another guitarist, bassist/guitarist/keyboardist, and (female!) drummer/flautist. they all sang and played occasional whistles and bells, making a valiant effort to capture the kaliedoscope of noises on the album.

also, another guy on stage ran the visuals (these rival shadow and the beta band for the best video work i've seen at a rock concert - especially cool was one of a pair of fingers walking as legs past, through, and into an amusing array of household items.) and there was another guy, a fat white guy with a red beard and t-shirt, who i guess was triggering samples or something, but mostly seemed to be dancing around excitedly.

with minimal banter, they played down the first six or seven tunes from the new record. someone in the crowd said, matter-of-factly, "that was awesome." then, fun surprises from Fantasma, which i may have written off too soon (it's not a bad record, certainly, but i always find it impossibly disjointed): time-signature anthem "count 5 or six", which had us all jumpin' and thrashin', noisy tribute "clash," the glockenspiel sample polka "magoo opening," "star fruits surf rider" and some others that i vaguely recognized.

and some i didn't, including a theoretically hula-tinged number with background visuals taken from "blue hawaii" (elvis presley surrounded by hula girls.) in the middle of this, cornelius pulled a guy out of the audience, held on to his wrist, and moved his hand to play "love me tender" on theremin. note-perfect. absolutely amazing. and then he gave him a lei. that was awesome.

they got back around to point material, including the out-of-place "i hate hate" (sounds like the fucking champs destroyed by squarepusher or something), which was further opportunity for the band to show off their tightness (in order to pull of this music, you have to be ridiculously tight, and these guys did it - the drummer was really remarkable for her ability to hit all those crazy cues and odd hits and still groove.) and my late fave track, "brazil," which they took pretty faced and traded whistle solo for kazoo.

two of the more extraneous (that is, unspontaneous) encores i've seen followed (each only one song long, and in between them i saw corny telling the light guy not to turn the lights up, they were coming back.) oddly, given the flow of the set thus far, they didn't play the last two point tracks, but instead two from the previous album: "free fall" and that acoustic, beach-boys-y pop tune (in the middle of which they paused, in classic japanese fashion, to take a picture.)

yeah. so, awesome concert. i wanted to buy some merch but it was way overpriced ($15 for "do it again and again and again…" shirt, $15 for the lp, $10 for the 12"s.)

so i just t'd back to h.sq. found myself digging in the tower records used bin, which in addition to tons of copies of the same records (surprising, like 10+ copies of albums by jeb loy nichols and catherine wheel, and less surprising, like 30+ copies of the last stone temple pilots album) there are some surprising good deals, most the results of mispricing no doubt. i walked away with four discs, totalling $7, including two by someone called mocean worker, and a beck single import for $1.50. cool.

stay tuned for: late-nite bowling madness w/ ex-ska musicians. and! a sunday morning hannukat bayit several hours later.

adopmadimado

my nearly two hour long conversation with benjamin this evening cut mightily into my blogging time, which is dangerously becoming a late-nite ritual these days. so did reading a few more chapters of my book. but that's cool. i really won't write long this time, because i have a busy weekend ahead of me.

of note today: we rigged up, rather comically, a mic to the speaker phone (requiring three xlr cables to run downstairs to the office) in order to record a phoned-in verse by shiffai, as well as (unbeknownst to shif) a good fifteen minutes worth of conversation between him and benny, in wolof and english, some of which will hopefully make it onto the album as skits.

not a whole lot of other work got done (except dan mowed the lawn and i cleaned up doggy doo after him.) the lerock brothers made some long term plans, including brainstorming urls (jamrec, jaamrec, jaamrekk, africanhiphop, africanrap, senegalhiphop, senerap - some of them are taken, some aren't, and i guess you'll just have to find out for yourself.)

i didn't eat all day until around 9:30, after a series of only semi-comical snafus involving automobiles, when we finally got to a place, celebrity pizza (clam roll, terrifically light onion rings, and a mint chip frappe emblifying the not-particularly-healthy turn my diet has taken for parts of this summer), en route to shopping for the bbq and back home in plenty of time for me to sew up the ebay auction i'd been lurking and intended to make a last minute pounce on.

i lie on the couch reading my book, and occasionally glance over at the cd player spinning out the x-press 2 album, slightly miffed and surprised to see that there isn't a wild raving house party going on over there, it's just the living room.

apropos of that (the reading part), here are:

some things about my trip to cape cod (but not a lot, because i'm going to bed soon):

what was i reading? well, i finished the borges. that's right, the entire corpus of his ficciones, two summer's worth of work and wonder (i feel like i've already written this, but i guess that's jlb for you.) my next major fiction undertaking was to be John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (which would be my fourth novel of his in near-chronological sequence.) i started it, but after 100 pages decided it was stupid. perhaps another time.

for much of the trip i paced leisurely through another barth(es), roland, whose charming and idiosyncratic Empire of Signs was an excellent holiday gift from Alyssa a few months back. I actually started it in new york, and i'm not quite down yet. but it's a good book to read in little increments. it's a good book to read in general, being on the one hand beautifully written and eloquent and on the other hand quite ridiculous in the quaint way that semiotics is. it makes me want to go back and read mythologies again sometime.

another book, the one i was referring to earlier, is Word Freak. i'm reading it. i'm not going to write about it now because i've been telling a lot of people about it already. it's ruth's copy, and i started it on the cape after becca finished with it.

okay, let's get through day two of the trip: we got up late, went to a different beach, swim and sun and sand blah blah blah yay! we had dinner with jane and cousin julia and her nearly-five-year old rapscallion/sweetfaced/entymologicrazy impossibly adorable little feller of a son, mason. more about him later. i got the most expensive dinner, despite trying not to, since we all paid for ourselves. then, taffy and seashells and drive to wellfleet. i read a book to mason on the way.

these three cubic feet
of bone and blood and meat
are all i love and know

today marks the first anniversary of this blogsite. hooray for me. i'd like to thank everyone who has been a part of it. the archives (which are now in duplicate, at least much of the time, because i don't trust them and i feel better with a backup) are ready and willing to lead you on a wild and wonderful tour of reminced's one-year history. all the way back to my first post, which is still perhaps my shortest ever.

in the scrabble game i'm playing now: i've been holding on to the blank for five or six turns now, and i finally just laid down what i was sure was a valid bingo, FLATLINe* through an n. my opponent, "ow3n," who i'm almost positive is consulting a dictionary (so far he's laid down "phage," "agon," and "otic," which seem a bit suspicious to me), challenged, and it turned out to be a phony in scrabble-ese, even though it's an incontestable word in english (anyone disagree here?) right after that, i realized i could have played F(e)LLATI(o), given either a free o or a free e. wouldn't you know it, ow3n lays down an annoying useless bingo, FlOORING, which blocks my access to a beautiful open e. rrgh. with my luck, "fellatio" was probably removed from the ospd anyway, to make it more "family-friendly."

speaking of fellatio (which isn't as much fun), last night i downloaded (no, not that) (prompted by a recent comment to my post about the cornershop concert back in may by a member of one of the opening bands, who corrected me on the number of his band's name, which i came across while looking for indications as to the progression of my emotions regarding my boyfriendship to facilitate matters in an email exchange with my exgirlfriend) an mp3 of "the chelsea hotel oral sex song," performed by jeff lewis, which i heard that night. the recording of it is just simple guitar and voice. i'm thinking about doing a remix of it (in the way that lately i'm thinking of doing remixes of things.) i think it would work well as a trance tune; jeff's scratchy sing-song talking blues voice would be a refreshing change from the indistinguishable diva vocals that usually sit atop trance tracks.

today was mostly bizness as usual (br-lunch at demo's, cranking in the studio all afternoon and evening - i should mention that the track we're currently working on, which is by slam revolution, shif's group, is probably my favorite thus far, a very bumping tune - -that's what danny and ben are working on; i mostly do other things on my computer, such as automate the threshold of a de-esser plug-in on a protools file of inflight opening for the displan - and thrown together dinner - in this case, teriyaki faux-chicken strips with rice, peas, and dumplings.) two rather amusing episodes though:

in the morning, two young fellows (at least one of them fresh out of high school) in matching light blue dress shirts, jeans, and ties, with cornrows, huge rings, gold teeth, and thick accents (one from queens, one southern), showed up at our door. they were selling magazine subscriptions. one of them (who was from memphis) had a pet iguana, a little bugger about six inches long, on a leash. he claimed it was a leash, but it looked more like a lanyard sort of jerry-rigged to function poorly as a leash. the lizard escaped two or three times while we sat on the porch talking to them, slipped out of his harness and had to be recaptured. so dan brought out a cat leash, made of blue nylon ribbing, and fashioned it into a tiny harness. of course, when we slipped it on the iguana, it was so tight that he couldn't move his front legs. well anyway. we bought some magazines (vibe and wired) and chatted with them and gave them some coke. so hopefully they didn't scam us.

dan e-mailed me about a club d'elph show happening this evening. club d'elph is a band which sometimes (as tonight) includes john medeski, as well as a bunch of guys dan knows - especially brahim, who played on the two morrocan projects he recorded. so we went to go see them, but the show turned out to be sold out. we went in to talk to the bouncers and they said they weren't letting anyone else in. five minutes later we were inside, up in the front with all the dancin' hippie girls.

what happened was: we talked to some people who were leaving the club. they didn't have ticket stubs, but they gave us their orange "non-reusable" wristbands. we went over to talk to benny, who was at a dance club down the street. we wanted to change our appearance, since the guys at the door had just seen us. so dan traded his red t-shirt and blue shades for benny's hilarious testament t-shirt and kangol hat. i turned my 'srn shirt around and messed up my hair. we put on the wristbands (which took a bit of doing) and walked right in. cool. that's only like my tenth free show of the summer.

good companions, when it's this stupid late (don't let me fool y'all, it's 3:49 am now):
medeski martin and wood's second album
steve reich, "music for 18 musicians"
the new deal.

look down, i'm gonna write some more.

dah-dat-dat-dat-dah-yah-dah-dah-dah
call the police

(that's the nat cole sample i made and have been playing around with today.)

ferry, we took a ferry from the world trade center (the other one), we being rebecca, petar, and i, after as i remember some confusion because i wasn't able to reach her all day the day or two prior to confirm we were actually going. we went, obviously. from the wtc to a pier in provincetown, whose relationship to the other pier enabled us, with the help of a pitiful map they gave us on the boat, to determine which open area was ocean and which land.

simply lovely boat ride, with grapes and sunblock and honey wheat pretzel sticks to boot. those last two, especially the second, were prominently featured on this trip. someone suggested that we had consumed thirty linear yards of the pretzel sticks.

yuppie, as i pointed out to ester, is not the first adjective that springs to mind when i encountered provincetown. neither is provincial. "town" is accurate, but that's not an adjective. it was unclear whether the town (and particularly its bustling and only thoroughfare, the aptly named commercial street) contains more portuguese flags, rainbow pride flags, or star-spangled banners. it did become quite clear (to me at least), that the american flag and the gay pride flag don't look very good together. nevertheless, they seem to be hung together on a majority of provincetown houses. actually, the pride flag doesn't really look good with anything. it's kind of like my sunday pants, which i wore this past sunday with my pink shirt - literally the only short-sleeve button down i can wear with them, since at least it's a solid-color.

[editor's note: i'm digging itunes. i love the little segues it makes between tracks, sliding one smoothly over the other so you don't mind even if one mp3 is cut off abruptly. and the cheesy "music video" graphic thingy (i guess it's called a "skin") is simply entrancing. just finished: "shaft in africa" by johnny pate. now up: "a little soul (lafayette velvet remix)" by pulp. soundjam? what was i thinking? while i'm on the subject of realtime, i just played another scrabble game; finally bingoed with "variate" after being unable to place a number of earlier 7-letter words. just like stephan fatsis, i play too many phonies. worse, they often make it through. cool word file: zooidal.]

where was i? oh, not very far at all, just down commercial street and left onto pearl (walking trips, especially, always seem much longer the first time, before you're familiar with the route) to jane's. that's rebecca's not-but-nearly-aunt. i can't remember if she's supposed to be jane or ester is, and i don't really see her as either (but maybe closer to becca's temperament.) jane is undislikable, completely no-nonsense despite being somewhat nonsensical, with broad tastes and limited interests (or maybe vice versa.)

but we didn't see jane yet, not until after plunking ourselves down at her house, i at least somewhat zonked, sat looking at her ceiling-high shelves of books books books - over half of the collection being art books (full half-shelves on the work of artists whom i have heard of, perhaps, in passing once or twice, or seen a slide for two seconds in ap art) and most of the rest literature, but oddly centered on a relatively small number of authors (hence, hemingway, faulkner, colette, had at least half a shelf each; woolf had over two full shelves.) alphabetical and chronological within author. duh. neat record collection too, including several lps of dirty dirty blues records. the best was a five-lp "copulation compilation," which i can't find online, but had a lot of the same tunes as this one.

pick it up pick it up, yes, we ate or something and walked down to the bookstore (jane has a bookstore.) dawdled at marine specialty, a huge army/navy store (as becca described it), where i purchased a pair of flip-flops made from recycled tires and other materials ($5, and quite comfy) and two $1 lps, a woody herman compilation and a 2-record set called "classic hustle" with disco-ized versions of chopin, offenbach, tchaikovsky, and so on.

next to the beach at race point, a truly fabulous beach (and i don't love beaches) with nice big sand granules that i threw myself down and delved into. water, too. and a perfect sunset, pretty enough to make us wait around for it.

at least one other thing is worth reporting about this day, which by the way was tuesday: after we wandered nearly the length of comm. st. looking for cheap eats, and settled on mojo's, i ate a sandwich called dixie chicken. on its styrofoam box someone had drawn a little chicken with the text "hi, my name is dixie." the sandwich was chicken fingers, guacamole, and cole slaw on a roll. cool and unusual. i would recommend heavier on the guac and slaw next time.

so. i'll stop for a bit.

mercy

(that's a roy orbison quote)

watching it makes me think of the time that, like the girl in this video, i was nearly alone in a room with this band, standing and watching them play. so cool.

here's the playlist section i mentioned last night. that cornelius blur mix is so gorgeous.

Sexy Boy (Some degrace mix) 4:39 Air
Put A Little Love In Your Hear 3:48 Al Green and Annie Lennox
Never Had No One Ever 3:35 Billy Bragg
Satisfaction 3:05 Cat Power genre
College Girls are Easy 4:19 Eazy E Rap
I.R.M. 5:04 Indian Ropeman misc
Dedicated Follower of Fashion 3:04 Kinks Other
Lost Myself 5:04 Longpigs
Ray Of Light (Calderone Club m 9:29 Madonna
How Can You Keep Moving 2:28 Ry Cooder misc
Urban Clearway 3:56 Saint Etienne
I'm a Man 2:53 Spencer Davis Group Rock
Mysterious Ways (Massive Attac 4:49 U2
Be Thankful For What You've Got 3:26 William DeVaughn R&B
I Saw Her Standing There 2:55 Beatles
Mixed Bizness (Nu Wave Dreamix by Les Rythmes Digitales) 4:19 Beck LRD Mix
Tender (Cornelius Remix) 5:22 Blur Rock
Build Me Up Buttercup 3:01 Foundations misc
Jacques Your Body [Make Me Sweat] '99 Mix - Cassius Remix Edit 5:53 Les Rythmes Digitales misc
Unchained Melody 3:38 Righteous Brothers Oldies
Puzzlin' Evidence 5:23 Talking Heads Rock
Freedom Rider 5:29 Traffic Rock

(hm. looking at this now, i realize that the list is partially alphabetical by artist. but strangely, and weird that there isn't any repetition of artists.) it's a good portrait of my (non-album-based) musical milieu as of spring 2001 (which is about when i stopped getting mp3s.)

there was a time when i could make you laugh at will
and i can do it still

this post-time i've concluded a game of playsite scrabble, three players (why?), wherein i bingoed twice, once with a phony (CUISINAL*) on a triple. also, listening to my old mp3s, which have just got up and running again. the seemingly random section of the library that i listened to during the game was fantastically good and varied. i may have to lift it straight to a cd.

this day i woke at 7:30 in order to meet Dan's neighbor Brian and spend a day with him at his studio, where he does post-production work for film, television, and radio. we dropped off 14-week-old Ethan for daycare and arrived at the blank-looking brick office building with labyrinthine corridors, at the one of the longer ends of which dexter media is located. first thing i noticed about the studio: he has a juno-60 (says he doesn't use it much though.)

the main project for the day was continued tweaking of the audio for a documentary about young women (in this case, young means between 20 and 40) with breast cancer, hosted by melissa joan hart, to be aired on the lifetime network. the title (although nobody mentioned this) is "fighting for the future." you can imagine, i'm sure. brian gave me explanatory running commentary as he loaded in the protools session and made his way slowly through the program, automating levels of dialogue, fading music in and out, processing soundbites occasionally to reduce noise.

this was interrupted by a minor client, a teenage dance troupe-member who needed some simple edits of janet jackson and cassette tracks of cobbled-together hip-hop cuts. i felt like he was being ever-so-slightly demeaning to her; and i empathized especially because i particularly enjoyed the lo-tech method of tape-editing that someone had clearly gone through to produce the music for the dance pieces. a minute of jay-z here, forty seconds of clubhouse spliced in.

in the late morning and afternoon, the (director?) of the documentary was in, observing the process and making numerous requests for specific amendations to the audio that towards the end seemed more and more nitpicky, considering the eventual destination of the piece (tv broadcast). but whatever. the working method revealed the documentary to me much more slowly than watching it straight through would have, which made a kind of suspense. we'd cycle a line of dialogue tens of times, over music, and the words would seem to fall in. very neat control of the video, which allowed him to hit a key on the computer keyboard to set the video in motion.

for the most part i just sat and watched. i helped in what little ways i could. takeout mu shi for lunch. at the end of the day (long - we were in the studio until seven), Brian dropped me off at CompUSA as dan requested, and i was driven to barbs for dinner.

dinner was Turkey Terrific sandwiches - turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry jelly, and mayonaise in between two slices of bread. that makes a surprisingly good sandwich. good family times.

benny back in town again, and upstairs it is senerap central once again. just like old times. yesterday and today have seen substantial developments in the contents of my hard disk. i now have more or less working versions of reason, recycle, rebirth, and a full suite of waves plugins, among other things. some of which i've been using to make bunches of samples: of duke ellington, marc ribot, the nat king cole record i bought the other day. dan is looking for interesting little samples, small enough to be unidentifiable, and preferably old enough for it not to matter. a horn hit, a scatted vocal, weird ribot high-pitched guitar plucks that i rearranged and cut together into a sort of groove.

the macnerding is slow, and my computer is still having lots of problems. hopefully we'll do a lot of troubleshooting tomorrow as i sally forward and get myself psyched up for all kinds of fun things i can do later on when i have the liberty to work on my own projects.

i'll write about cape cod hopefully tomorrow. i'm behind on a number of things, including e-mail and sleep. man, it's 3:30 now. 'night.

you are a star
and you are a hospital
you play great keyboards

the days take care of everything. there goes another - long and, and hot and productive or not, depending. hot and long, surely.

to give you context, i'm in the studio, listening to stars, first time in a while. a new song is forming in my head. air conditioning is, in this case, a blessing. my sentences are getting to be much too much. better cut to narrative.

i woke up on the couch, let the phone ring two times, and picked up after the machine because it was dan, as i suspected. i left the apartment to sleeping becca, walked down already hot mass ave. to be picked up by dan in front of the lizard lounge. the plan: to go to china pearl for dim sum.

what we didn't know was that there was a huge festival in chinatown, though nobody knew quite what for. throungs of people, stalls, and dragons. it took us forever to park, mired in the traffic mess. and nearly an hour to get a table at the dim sum place. that was okay though, we took the time to wander through the streets, get some bubble (here they call it pearl) juice/tea, etc.

this was me, dan, mami, and her cantonese/scottish friend janet, who was quite amusing. she knew best what to pick off the carts for us. tasty (though she declared it average), but it was hot and it didn't take much to sate me. towards the end, someone called my name.

guess who it was. skelly? nope. alyssa? no. elvis? no. okay, i'll tell you. it was brigid. we talked for a minute and then she had to leave. painfully characteristic interaction. ah me. also, heather sternshein. funny, that. she's going to sienna.

looks like my paragraphs are shrinking down to two rather than (the nice, haiku-ish, to my mind) three. i must really have nothing to say.

we went to herrels for ice cream. to me, it was hot enough, but too heavy. i found a good solution: one scoop lemon sorbet and one scoop lime mousse ice cream. close to indistinguishable, and just right.

it felt like forever before i was finally home. rec'd: x-press 2 disc from half and a box from alyssa containing letter, shoe, and check for $50. not entirely sure about that last. good letter. good just to get a letter, from anyone. here's a salient, if unexpected, excerpt:

…it turns out that his desire to create it came "almost directly" from christy, who apparently reads/at the time read your blog avidly. Sproul derived the impression that there were all these people "out there," who didn't really know you but who, like Christy, closely followed your journal. So, it seems to me that his parody is aimed at this perceived response to your journal as much if not more than it's aimed at the journal itself…

so there's that. the main business of the day (partly delayed once more by a trip to the watertown municipal pool, which was not a highlight in this summer of great swims, but was a nice contrast to the beaches of the cape, and served its purpose well) was burning a bunch of cds for becca, on this eve of her departure.

got 8 discs done (all the faves) in six hours, with gaps, for dinner (in front of "sex and the city," which was cute.) and then.

talked to ester (about everything - she got right down to it.) the bus missed me, so mami drove me to harv. sq. for one final goodbye to miss becca. we got unsatisfying harrels (it felt like so long since i'd been there) and sat on a bench and talked. about everything. you know. i won't write it here - call me and we can talk about it too.

the bus took a long time, but i got to read a chapter of word freak. i got off too early and wandered around watertown in my bad-for-walking flip-flops before i found home again. i'm fading. i write too much.

a million
a billion
a trillion stars
blinded by lovedust
we are

posted by K. Ross Hoffman at 1:51 AM 0 comments