so much for time. [to write, and so on.] today has felt so much like a friday. i don't know why. friday means relief and a mellowing, but it's also a day of anticipation, and the endless endless possilibities of a weekend. yesterday felt like a friday too, though it was monday, because we were getting away at the end of it. today felt like friday, but it is a tuesday, and in the end i have to finish up some work for tomorrow.

the previous two days were not dominated by assassins for me, not in the way that a week and a half of last semester was. but it was a presence on campus, undeniably, woven around my accomplishments (buying plane tix for thanksgiving, contacting folks about cbs, practicing and listening.)

at sunday brunch (why does it open so sort of late?) multiple people made attempts, providing much amusement. a kill in the library. i tried the sun lab a few times for my target, on the off chance that her saying she'd be there was neither a ruse nor a set-up. i talked to some people about it on the phone, maybe being less than circumspect.

i didn't have to deal with any attempts on my rear, even after i figured out who was after me.

actually, that knowledge let me avoid involvement even further - i decide against making a move at my first and only potential opportunity thus far (except maybe breakfast), because i figured it would be too risky. turned out i was right - if i had been there, chances are good that a full string of five (s>a>e>r>z) could have collapsed to one in a fell swoop. as it was, the man i had been counting on to save my peace of mind (and piece of ass) for the even was unable to pull through.

so i tried again. i was checking the lines of communication throughout the day - before and after french (in which we seem to be doing a unit on music videos), yoga (super ham+butt stretches on the wall), and composers (a quiz that i did well despite, and some great performances i was sorry not to participate in) - but only learned of the morning's tragedy at T minus 30 for NYC. luckily class ended 15m early; I ran into rose, who told me about sam. he was working at kcb, and told me about shargie. he was out shopping when i called, but when i called again 20m later (under the pretext, and after having legitimately, called hannah who had sadly changed her mind) maria got him on the phone, and he apparently drove over to the parking lot in time but never came out of the bushes. what was he thinking?! that was my deathblow right there!

of course it was hopeless to think i could evade ester for the whole ny trip. at least, i wasn't interest in expending the mental energy it would have required. so. out again. i made it further than well over half of the players, which was my original objective for this game (actually, i wanted to last the first week too - i figured those goals would be roughly equal, but this game is going ridiculously fast.) some distinct new trends: people tended to know who their attackers were much earlier than normal; the assignments were viciously inbred among friend-circles; everyone's using armor, which i personally feel is somewhat cheap, and could perhaps be outlawed next semester to interesting effect; folks are concentrating their efforts on taking out their assailants rather than their (to use s's term) objects. some of these are related.

tueday, after class, i read about man ray. sort of - less about him than i'd expected or would have made my job easier. lunch with the gal, and it started to hail, as i mentioned in my last post. i sang "give me another chance" as i crossed the courtyard. i visited joel and we listened to the cbgbs tape. i mailed in my absentee ballot application, i pulled slides, i wrote about noise (i'll put it here soon i guess).

i was in the mood for a really good dinner, and sharples came through. despite it being cheesesteak bar, there was culinary majestry in the air - subtle and succulent catfish, broccoli stirfry, corn pudding, tomatoes provencal, salad and orange juice. mmmm. just the thing for a rainy night. i came back and read in my room, falling asleep at the end of an article. and i woke to find myself in a kiss, which is the best possible way to wake up. that's what happens when i leave my door open.

licorice tea, six parts seven, and ske are all working their magic now, and i am sooo sleepy. sooo sleepy.

you better watch out
you better not cry
you better behave
i'm telling you why:

t-rex
is coming to town
tyrannosaurus rex
is coming to town

HAIL, HAIL, ROCK AND ROLL!

(if you'll pardon me), that's what's going on.

thank you for last night. last night was incredible. such a great time. truly an historic moment, as joel said.

thirteen swatties, plus the four members of the van, drove up to new york city in a college van and several cars. we made it to the world-famous venue in little over two hours, thanks to enthusiastic driving from matt and a ben's great tape for kate (plus some nas from me in the holland tunnel.) we tried to get a picture of the "holla" tunnel, but no.

loaded our stuff in as the first band started (something about "day"), met the yale crew (bobby, jacob b, andj) and
jesse, went out for some food (while others opted for blimpy's, ben directed alyssa and ester and me to Karen's on Astor for soup and chili empanada) and walked back past the guy with speaker-backpack blasting techno-polka, to find Rae on a streetcorner, michelle and aijung inside. stone temple incubus, a.k.a. dec 84 (all the members were born that month) finished their set, we swapped in our drumkit and were ready to rock in fifteen.

i don't know what to say about the show except that i enjoyed it immensely, i was frustrated with myself for not playing some parts as well as i could have, and the audience really seemed to be big and enjoying itself. the set was identical to the dos show, including closing with "midnight class" which we weren't going to do then were then weren't because we didn't have the capo then did but the sound was funny but it was good anyway. it was good. i love music.

in some of the seventy or so e-mails that the band members have sent back and forth since last night, matt has alluded a few times to things that he's learning or coming to realize. these are such learning experiences, and i feel like approaching them all as experiments to discover what we really are as a band. joel and i had a long talk in the van home about different directions to take, and i want to do them all.

i just thought of something - maybe inflight should start a group blog, to conduct these discussions that we're having all the time anyway. we can all post our little manifestos and brainstorms, or whatever we want, and it could be a good variation of the 'diaries' that a lot of bands have on their websites. yeah.

thanks again. and again to everyone who came to see us last night. you made it! the big group of us and ours, after a bit of reloading and confusion, made it to veselka, a ukrainian sort-of diner est. 1954. a mixed plate of pierogi, which i shared with aij, were tasty but sort of strangely deep-fried; satisfying cole slaw and vanilla egg cream (one of my favorite discoveries of the summer.) and i got a chance to talk to those people i love so much. rae made me a birthday card of facepaint and fishing bobs, but it was giving difficulty.

pleasant van ride home, alyssa driving and singing to some of def pie '98 and R, ester sleeping on me, ben reading and joel talking about religion and rock. final unload and dropoff. and then it was over. i'll write about iceland (and assassins and stuff) soon, but first i have to write about noise.

what's the frequency kenneth
is your benzedrine uh-huh
i was brain-dead, locked out, numb
not up to speed

i thought i'd pegged you an idiot

ohhhh, man. time goes too quick. i'm just gonna do up these last few days fast if i can, because i've been remembering all of this stuff that i need to get done today, in order to avoid being delinquent. and nobody wants that.

thursday there was a good long band practice, and scrabble (me v. ester) and roaming with rose, and radio with hannah (see below). and i got a new id card, and went to class and stuff. i didn't clean my room so much as i intended to.

wednesday night i dreamed about organizing a big hiking trip, with all kinds of family and people from here, and also something about a naked string quartet. i dreamed about bacon thursday night, but in the morning they didn't even have those eggy croissant things. okay, well after class i helped with the last three clues of nori's crossword. and later on ben came over and we listened to music for the party he djed that night. hannah called and therefore we walked to goodwill. i tried to assemble a halloween outfit (based on audrey, the previous night, saying i should be buddy holly as we sat on the parrish steps) and got as far as a striking plaid blazer and a neat pair of brown pants. but i think i left my belt there by mistake. damn, i love that belt like a son. maybe i can go buy it back from them.

see, this is what i mean about time going too quick. when i returned it was 4:30, no time to clean my room because i decided to dash out to an artist's lecture; sana something showing slides of her cool ceramic work and telling incredible stories of travel to tiny african villages and other places where ceramics is practiced worldwide, and where here hair was a source of fascination. then i got in a load of laundry before dinner, assassin's party, and olivia's recital. activity, activity, a night of activity.

next up, after again too no time here (except to march to tarble with my technics for b-dawg and wonder what one would be like in a marching band): drag king show, which featured performances to prince, the cure, the pixies, the smiths, and of x (including my favorite, "yr phone's off the hook but yr not," done with bass and duo vocals.) otherwise, the show was frequently amateurish but frequently entertaining.

party downstairs was kicking from the beginning. ben, flying solo, had it all handily in hand. let him tell you what he played. i liked especially: "debra," "girls and boys," "are you that somebody." as several people have pointed out there were a lot of couples there, and i got to dance in some of them. partying with felicia, ester and gang, hannah when i could find her, audrey and tiffany, laura, alyssa and joel, etc. h and i left in the middle to try to see the olde club show, but it was mostly done by then, unfortunately. a funny walk home with many stops to chat meant i was too late to beckon hannah by shuttle, but that's okay.

yesterday was fun, involved a lot of walking (though we didn't go on the hike, which as it turned out was a shame because the weather was terrific after all) and not work (though i did a spot of room-cleaning.) after brunch we went to the friends meetinghouse jumble sale. no clothing for sale (they donate it), but hannah bought a bunch of books and took free natgeos, and i got a stack of records, for a nickel each. they had all the dreck you'd expect - doris day, al hirt, cheesy lounge and worse - and i bought some of that (herb alpert and the "breakfast at tiffany's" sdtrk) - but also some misplaced indie/punk, some of which had belonged to wsrn at some point - i took a couple 7"s, a Mission of Burma EP, a Superchunk LP (which i'll give back to the station), and a pristine Don Caballero 2xLP. but my best finds were an MGM Command ripoff called Spectacular Percussion, whose cover shows a neverending field of technicolor tympani, and an early John Lee Hooker album, beat-up jacket but record in fine shape, which a collector-guy named Art told me was worth $400.

we made the pressured decision to go into the city earlier than planned - the 2:27, which allowed us an hour or two to search center city's dollar stores, cheap-clothing-outlets, thrift shops, and kbtoys and k-mart, all fruitlessly, for rubber snakes, plastic hornrims, and goofy bowties. what is the world coming to? it should not be this hard to find a rubber snake.

samosa's was closed, and we found ourselves without time for proper food, just buttery popcorn as we flumped down with our tired feet to watch "punch-drunk love." um, movie? sorry, ester, i should have known better. i guess p.t. anderson is just too artsy for me. i don't think it was a bad movie, exactly, it just lacked a point. except the message that, with all of the "modern things," it's possible to do some weird stuff (everything in the film is possible, it's just unlikely.) i enjoyed adam sandler, actually; as predicted, he plays his usual role, but is more understated. cousin philip and emily watson, as gorgeous as she is, don't get nearly enough screen time to save the movie - according to the filmbill she was supposed to try some new acting techniques, but as it was i barely got a cohesive sense of her character. i did really like the abstract color images that popped up from time to time.

anyway. then we walked south and met our buddies on the corner. it took a while to find the "club" we were supposed to play. it turned out to be a room upstairs in a pizzeria uno (hence the name dos), with no outside indication of its existence. but a nice enough room, with a nice drumkit and all of our gear there. after soundchecking and pizza, we figured it was time to start, even though there weren't any more people there than the four (hannah, elena, bobby b, sarah w) who had been there all along.) when we actually began there was a small crowd of hipsters (presumably the other bands and their girlfriends) who good-naturedly clapped for us. i thought we played pretty well, though with some stupid screw-ups which we covered well enough. it sounded different in that context though. i didn't feel like my drumming had the power it does when we play in olde club. i don't know if that was the kit or the room. but it was fun to play anyway.

the band stayed to see our friends pattern is movement, i took off with the groupies so as to prepare for the ml halloween party. i ended up wearing my newish lacy white shirt with the jacket, plus my black bowtie, and gelling my hair combed back with a prominent cowlick curl affixed to my forehead, so that, in combination with my glasses, i was somewhere between bill haley and buddy holly. hannah's guitar completed the outfit, as i played "not fade away," "peggy sue," "everyday," and "like dylan in the movies" in her room while she cut out paper snakes, but she wouldn't let me take it to the party.

finally we were ready - she looked fantastic as medusa, with a green velvet dress and a headful of asian-eyed snakes. with my mind (and often my hands) on my posterior, i successfully navigated the party - no sign of my target, and no indication of an attacker. apparently a lot of players met their fate, including rabi, who by the time i saw her had lost most of her magician-ish costume. mark was cheery as ever, as a "demon-slayer" (apparently they have white hair), and well-hidden armor. i found surprisingly few friends at the party (maybe scared off by the game?), so we only stayed maybe an hour. i encouraged djs flurie and b.c., who were doing a fine job considering how flustered they were. i drank three drinks immediately in a row, and didn't feel a thing from them. costumes were less exciting this year (at least when i was there, 12:00-1:00), also it was too dark to see most of them.

i want very dearly to tell you all about my trip to iceland. that's what those empty posts with just the lyrics on them are for. but i am so laden with tasks to accomplish. we'll see, maybe i can do some of it later today. hopefully at least before they all disappear from the main page.

here's something funny: i got an e-mail from amy meek, who points out that Cex links to reminced on his site (saying "it's not difficult to get a boner for [me]", no less). not a permalink though.

love, ross.

she's just your size
she's sexy
she's beautiful

does she talk?

Super Furry Animals : The Door To This House Remains Open
Spoon : The Guestlist/The Execution (P)
Rjd2 : More Dead

Dandy Warhols : Country Leaver
Supergrass : Moving
Sleatter Kinney : One Beat (P)
Heatmiser : Cruel Reminder
Heatmiser : You Gotta Move

Randy Newman : Every Time It Rains
Blanket Music : Itchy Popcorn (P)
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers : S'Make It
Soft Boys : Lions and Tigers

Palomar : Knockout (P)
Cex : Bad Acne
Delgados : Reasons for Silence
Billy Bragg : Rumours of War
Wilco : Passenger Side

Jim White : Christmas Day
Jim Yoshii Pile-Up : Middle Harbor Road (P)
Jim O'Rourke : Get a Room
Tram : Three Years (P)

And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead : Monsoon (P)
And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead : Relative Ways (P)
Destroyer : Trembling Peacock (P)
Destroyer : Modern Painters (P)
Deerhoof : Sound the Alarm (P)
Deerhoof : This Magnificent Bird Will Rise (P)
Deerhoof : The Eyebright Bugler (P)
Bright Eyes/Britt Daniel : [tracks 1, 2, and 4 from the ep] (P)
Morphine : Cure for Pain

two, briefly:

1. apparently, a halcyon is a bird. it's a kingfisher. this makes me extremely satisfied, because it reveals the true cleverness of the people who named swarthmore's yearbook. not only does "halcyon" continue the bird theme of the cygnet, as i've always (erroneously) been irked that it didn't, but it also continues the extremely clever bird-puns theme. i always thought that the cygnet was a very clever title.

2. the unbearable lightness of being is fantastic. you already knew this. i'm reading hannah's roommate jessica's copy, since i forgot to bring the two towers with me on break to start when i finished wellville. it's so useful: almost every conversation i have (including much of seminar) seems to relate to it, sometimes so directly that i have to pull it out and quote from it.

my plan for right now: go to the bathroom, read a bit of the kundera, write a page of a french short story, go to lunch, go to bach class, come back and clean my room and blog about iceland.

i see your face
i smell your breath
i used to hold

i had to end my day by stopping by paces, after a short but acrobatic dance rehearsal with a lot of back-bruising rolls and flips, and there i ran into stefanie and rebecca weinberger, and we had a nice discussion of relationshippy stuff and queer stuff, among other things. i have been wearing a sticker i picked up at the coming-out week sticker table that says only "there's." presumably someone started writing and was interrupted. back here i can't bring myself to come to grips with french, despite a concerned e-mail from carole. so i'll at least do this, which will need to be done a lot soon.

my two days of week back at swat classes happening:

started off mad yesterday morning because my alarm didn't go off i had forgotten how to set it properly and thus i missed french for the fourth time in a row (two drill and two class) and lost out on some time for semin reading. and soon enough i went to lunch and bach class which frustratingly felt simultaneously productive and responsible and neither of those. i got postcards from rae and lillie, of all people.

but the day wasn't all bad, or even mostly. i rendezvoused at lunch with ester for an ahem talk that turned out to be mostly irrelevant but tender anyway. i got in a pinch of reading, i hurriedly wrote a soft boys review for the phoenix while not listening to the record. there was an hour of band practice and then a half hour before hannah and i actually found each other in sharples as planned. we're not very good at that. but we're good at killing time.

i went to see wilco and califone with liza and tika and alex flurie. wilco are a great rock and roll band. califone are darn good too. they had three drummers. i bought the album of theirs that i didn't have already, which has a good title. but wilco, damn. they played for two hours, and the best part of it was the (two) encores, which featured, rather than any of the measly three Yankee Hotel songs they didn't play in the main set, throwbacks: first, "Hesitating Beauty" and "Cali Stars" from the Mermaid album, and then, even better, "Casino Queen" (from the debut am, my guilty pleasure almost-favorite wilco album) > "Outtasite outtamind" > "Monday." They were really hitting their stride even as the show reached its end. Really rocked out. They're so sonically conscious, even if they play simple stuff, it really creates magic. Rock and roll, baby.

We drove back and I irresponsibly stopped by pitt, giving H all the impetus she needed to fall in with her impulses and come over. 7:15, it turned out, was a good time to wake up today. 8:15 was an even better time to wake up, having slept another hour. but again i didn't much work before french. but that was fun, playing an alibi game. yoga i had been waiting for for over a week, and it didn't disappoint.

Seminar turned out to be quite good and enjoyable, partly due to sidetracks. I played "Frontier Psychiatrist" for the class during break, for some reason. I chatted with Janine about EC (she's seeing him Friday). Olivia brought a really satisfying breaksnack - classic brie and Breton (of course) crackers, cookies and lemonade, okay it was food. i was hungry.

and discussion was interesting. we did an automatic writing exercise that i found frustrating. we talked a lot about the surrealist manifesto (#1, 1924), which I enjoyed a lot. and we talked a lot about love and desire, which are things i care about. meanwhile alyssa was talking about nothingness, which she cares about.

i was too late for ester again, but i had a nice encounter with ruby and elena outside pearson instead. and early dinner with the estercrew, that dragged on for over an hour as the table turned over until finally hannah's friends outnumbered even me. she was more silent than usual, for a sort of silly reason maybe. i don't know.

and i kept draggling myself; i can't get started quite. my e-mail is daunting, for one thing. but an hour with marcantonio is restorative no matter what; even if i hadn't played for almost two weeks. i came back then and listened to cure for pain. my life isn't falling apart, but if i close my eyes i can imagine that it might be. no, my life is just fine. dancing and chatting. i'm kind of pissed off about the phoenix article on inflight, but not too much. there's these little quirps and imperfections. there's.

mark just came in and showed me his demon hunter costume

how does it feel like
to let forever be
and how does it feel like
to spend a little lifetime sitting in the gutter

said the priest to the waitress:
"the best thing about you is your waist"
her reply echoed throughout the fortress:
"wait til you see the statues in my bathroom"

you're such a pinball
yeah you know it's true
there's always something
you go back running to
to follow the path
of no resistance

it's time that the iceland saga [for it must be a saga: iceland is the country of the saga. one of the guidebooks said that sagas are iceland's greatest contribution to western culture. i didn't stay at the radisson saga hotel, but i did stay in a "saga class" room at hotel esja] be told.

i do want to wrap up a few other things first though, the end of what happened before iceland. like for breakfast the day before we left we made pancakes and bacon for breakfast. the bacon was hannah's idea. it was really good. that's all. sometimes it's a good day to eat breakfast.

next : alarms were set for seven, we were on the road no less than an hour later than intended. only one mishap (claire got a speeding ticket going the long way around albany) marred our progress, but rush-hour traffic engulfing the metropolis forced us to revise plans for meeting the coxes. this was kind of surreal:

they've revamped the airport completely
now it looks just like a nightclub

no kidding. no idle lyric-quoting. have you been to jfk recently? terminal seven, at least, has been outfitted with reams of colored, psychedelic lights. so we (hannah, 'lyssa, claire, plus rob, sister, mum) sat beneath potted palms in the atrium of the check-in lobby, under the revolving disco lights, played word mastermind, and ate chinese takeout.

and then we (just rob and i) went to iceland. after reading the feature on the festival in the inflight magazine and eating some surprisingly good chicken curry, i slept for the remainder of the shortish flight.

we arrived early (7:00?) their time, walked through the empty, gorgeously-wooden-floored keflavík airport, changed money (i switched $60 for something like 5800 ISK, but so much of the country runs on credit that i hadn't even spent all that cash by the time i left), and took the flybus to esja.

due to construction (gearing up to become the largest hotel in iceland, at a whopping 284 rooms) our promised panoramic-view "junior suite" was unavailable, but they kindly gave us an extra room at no charge so we didn't have to share a bed. the rooms were also wood floored and wood furnished, not rustic wood but funky modernist wood, and with elaborate tv sets whose wake-up function (a bizarre beepy melody) we had mostly figured out by the end of the trip.

we slept for a few hours again, and then set off to explore the city. first stop was festival central, where i wasn't thinking on my toes fast enough to snag some promo cds for press folks (duh i'm press, why didn't i think of that in time, and then i couldn't convince them). but they did direct us to the "exclusive" "party," which turned out to be a question-and-answer session with current hypees Apparat Organ Quartet.

Apparat are depicted on their album cover and posters as colorfully attired playmobil figures, and here they were faithfully wearing that clothing: preposterously euro-chic, glasses, brightly colored corduroy suits, clever hair and neckties, the whole bit. questions were relayed through a tall fellow with pink bowtie and tan suit, round blond head and facial hair and a manic happy face. the band demonstrated the "sitting version" of their eponymous "appa-dance." then, even more excitingly, they showed us the dance ("dance" for them means hand gestures) which follows the words [see below - ed.] of their apparent hit single "stereo rock and roll." and five young red- t-shirted ballerinas came out and extrapolated on the dance.

there was a kid in the audience, who i only mention because he comes into play later on in the story, who looked exactly like jae won chung. perhaps even more exaggerated in glasses and spiky hair. purple velvet jacket. tan sweater with thin horizontal turquoise stripes.

anyway, we hung around the mingling afterwards for a bit, talking to the interviewer guy (who turned out to front one of the bands we saw that night, Trabant) and some members of Apparat, and enjoying the complimentary honey-and-vodka. then out into the cold again.

a few hours to kill in downtown reykjavík, which is essentially one street (although it changes names a couple times). a helpful sign even identifies it (in english): "the main shopping street." we found two record shops, one slightly more indie than the next, really expensive (new cds were usually about 2400 ISK, which is nearly thirty bucks, even without VAT) but enticing, with listening stations of the current local releases. I flipped through used vinyl and found a prime condition copy of Prince's Lovesexy for 400kr and a Rinocerose 12" for 300.

dinner at 22, recommended by one of the record store clerks (he also said "icelandic food is not a delicacy. it has usually been stored for six months.") we never found a menu with any hint of the purported local specialties such as rotten shark and sheeps head, just plenty of fish. good though. rob and i split most meals, and took some bread for the road.

because nights are long at the airwaves festival, and it was good to have something to munch on when they ended. we missed thursday, the first night of club shows, so friday was our first. we started at the neatly lit nasa, which seemed to have a flourescent aquatic theme, but the first-up rock band didn't move us much, so we headed over to idno (really ithno; i can make ? but not the character that means soft th that looks like a d with lines through it), billed as "alternative."

first up there was daniel agust, who wore a black shirt with ruffles down the back, strings hanging from the arms, and some sort of wings. he danced around bizarrely and sang (intensely) everything from nature poetry to "you don't need nobody else baby," to the accompaniment of a tuxedoed string quintet that vacated the stage one by one and played offstage, and a fellow with a powerbook.

we went back to nasa to catch the last three songs of singapore sling (strokes-ish hard-rocking sixties-throwbacks), but mostly we stayed at idno all night, for bang gang (two austere blond-beauty singers, plus multi-instrumentalists and a big gong, with one really really catchy drum-and-bassy-ish pop song), ske (we'd heard their record in the store; folksy mellow but weird rock with different singers on each song), and trabant (keyboards and freakout - mr. bowtie ended the set without a shirt.) we also caught a bit of serious hardcore punk by mínus over at some other club, and missed quix*o*tic. i would have stayed out to check out the house and trance and electro, which was scheduled at different clubs until three, but rob wanted to get back so we took a taxi home around midnight.

that's day one, or one and a half.

stereo
rock and roll
stereo
rock and roll
stereo
rock and roll
give me
rock and roll
in stereo

i´m in iceland!


and now i present this, from a sticky on my retrieved powerbook :

>>>>>>>>alyssa and i work on interpreting the lyrics of elliott smith's "angeles," and she quotes from her buddhism reading. hannah in a towel turban reads an iraqi ethnography and drinks from a salsa jar the oj-spritzer-triple sec-vodka concoction i made her. claire's got her powerbook out too, tapping away at her record of swat memories, hoping to bring it up to date, but currently mired in sophomore spring, which is prompting all sorts of recollections from the three of us that were around for it. and by now i've cycled through all the photos and stickies and other non-internet-reliant diversions to be had from this one, shy of music apps. so i guess it's time to proxy blog. i brought the computer thinking to maybe do some record reviews, but at least i can get this out of it.

we had two days of gorgeous, and this one has been all rain. the first one was driving up: a nice trip, starting on schedule almost even, after bagels and gas. tracking coloration in the foliage as we headed north - 10-15% at first, and shooting up to glorious 75% or so by northern penna. real fally. coldplay, rufus, red-blooded americans, everything. we met with my folks at a restaurant in watertown. they had hot drinks, we had food; i had a lot of food, like a spinach-bacon salad and an open-face reuben.

we got here by 7, and it already felt late. we all did nothing. reading, tea-drinking. hannah and i played scrabble, or rather we played most of a game. someday perhaps i'll finish a game with her. [i did have two 98-point turns in this game: ZIPS and ZONE with the Z on a double and S on a triple, and RESHORN.]

life here isn't worth writing about, it's so so immensely worth living. this is my home and hearth, my resting place and i love i love i love being here. and i want to spend it with you.

tuesday was as gorgeous as monday, and therefore we slept in and got around to going outside, for a long meandering walk. when we tired of the rangerschool trails and roads, we crossed a memorial bridge to nowhere and 'shwhacked up into a hill, dawdled inspecting leaves on antlers and bugs on logs. everything was picturesque. i sang aloud "flowers never bend" and then some shins songs, which are all about sunlight and nature. i think my companions may have had their faith shaken, but i led us back via some fortuitous paths, and we arrived home safe.

drive to the store for a couple extra ingredients for the evenings victuals. the meal we prepared, mostly adapted from the moosewood - big pot of chili, "mexican" cheesy corn bread, mashed acorn squash - was generous and autumnal. when it's all there is to do, there's nothing better than cooking. plus reading and dancing and guitar playing. all my favorite music: i'm with stupid, kiko, quality control, get lost, and more throughout the weekend.

if today is wednesday, it rained all day long. it was a cold rain, it's a hard rain, like the kind you find in songs [POLL: how many of you think this lyric is a bob dylan reference. raise your hands] it's nice to watch it through our big windows, and depending on which way the wind blows it's often hard to tell that it's still raining at all. i couldn't convince anyone to go out except hannah and i walked around the island and then through the woods to the store, where she bought film and klondike bars to sit in the gazebo eating in the rain. this rain was different from the swat rain. and nobody would go boating with me in the rain.

at some point i finished the boyle, started borrowed borrowed kundera. we had orts for dinner, plus a corn/pear/lettuce/something salad. the squash wasn't a big hit, but i liked it. carrot-squash soup was creamy good. hannah made splendidly chewy oatmeal cookies while i made a (one match, to light a candle) fire in the sweat lodge. but i left the door open, so it didn't get hot. we tried again a while later and it still didn't get too hot, but it was still nice.

it seems like elliott smith has a thing about "balancing" profanity in his songs: if he says "fuck," he's very likely to say "shit" a few lines later. some examples:

he's fucking up even the simplest lines/…i'll be the only shit that's left behind
trying to occupy space: what a fucking joke/…i always feel like shit
and feel like shit the morning after/…situations get fucked up

as some people have diligently noted, today is my birthday. it took even me a while to realize that though, i guess i'm numbed to it from a week of people wishing me happy prematurely. not that i'm not happy. oh, my druthers of a philly-dinner-movie night aren't panning out, from some combination of apathy, ambivalence, imperfect logistics, and my reluctance to assert myself. but that's okay. i guess i'll be having some food courtesy of the international club, and maybe i'll finally get to watch my sting dvd.

it's like a mellowed-out but pleasant expanse of sparsely-populated weekend. we missed the train last night because of track-construction confusion, so we joined the somewhat impromptu weinstein house dinner party instead, offering the eddie's cheesecake and leftover mojito makings as our contributions. while laurel, amelia, alyssa, tofuboy, et al. chopped veggies and stirred things for gado gado (last semester's weekly staple), i squeezed nuked limes and picked days-old mint leaves to prepare cocktails for the company - tonic water instead of club, and not much of it, but these 'jitos turned out if anything better than thursday's. once served, we settled in the living room, discussed hifi and dylan while half of the group was silent, toasted veggies, women, and men, listened to augustus pablo. very pleasant. i like houses.

after that, i got to spend a while on the phone with my folks and bobby, and then hannah and i watched the first forty minutes or so of the fountainhead, which was about as bad as we expected. kind of fun though, and to be reminded of that book which already feels so long ago to me. so we gave that up, for sam phillips, fourtet, tea, and bathrobe.

this morning we (strange to be writing in first person plural; this is not the royal or rose's presumptive we but a spacesaver by means of implication) ventured out at 9:30 to attend quaker meeting. neither of us had been before. there turned out not to be the grandiose breakfast of rumor (no other students b/c of break), instead a humble but appealing spread which provided us with tea, bread with jam, and cherry streusel bites. over breakfast we chatted with some folks about the conference that had just happened, and about school and so forth - somehow i found a way to answer a question about the subject of ester's screenplay.

meeting itself was quite pleasant. no one spoke for at least half an hour, probably longer, so the only sound was an occasional outburst from my poor throat (it's phlegmy but not really pained; i'm accruing a few symptoms, but this doesn't feel like it has the makings of a real sickness, it's just something to slow me down a tad. as opposed to what rufus has apparently got for himself). when they did talk, most of the friends' comments directly referred to quakerism, generally in a historical sense - i gather this was mostly because of the conference and not entirely typical. some of it was very moving, and i would definitely be interested in going back. i stood at the end to introduce myself, as newcomers are asked to do, but we left before the refreshments and social time in the rushmore room. i hadn't realized the friends meeting house was so expansive.

we had a second breakfast a few hours later; english muffins, toasted bread, donuts, salami, cider, and hannah-scrambled eggs with cheddar. in the palmer kitchen, in a group of five, while we listened to her scratchy burnt copy of sweetheart of the rodeo (zany frog lauren sez: "is this country? i feel like i'm in rochester new york or something… well you said it's near a lake"). tasty. i like breakfast.

ernst reading while elliott sings. playsite scrabble (intense! i ended up up, 395-392, with help from the scrabdict) and u2's pop, which i remember is a terrific album. i spent five minutes packing, which means i'm mostly done. expect, i guess, not many updates for a while, as i'll be in the wilds of the northwoods and then, and then, after years of waiting, as the lights flash before your eyes, the isle of dreams. (women and children first and children first and children…) (get off my back.) oh, well perhaps i'll post tomorrow morning before we leave too.

her eyes all swimming pool blue
dumb bells on a diving board
she's always attracted to the things she's afraid of

big girl with the sweet tooth
watches the skinny girl in the photo shoot

the rain pervaded the campus for two days, inspiring poetry, community and solitude, asserting itself as a topic of conversation with partygoers and public safety officers, resulting in the loss of at least one umbrella and the always aesthetic array of many more at the entrance to sharples, moistening but somehow never soaking me as i trodged back and forth, and manifesting that phenomenom that has always fascinated me of simultaneously muting and making more vibrant the sensory experiences of life. rain was a subject there, but in some ways this weather was a paragon dummy subject, without agency, merely continuing.

continuing into the night, but this morning (morning, i say, and yet it's 4:24 in the pm) the sky is fantastically luminous albeit still overcast, the air is wondrous clear; humid, but seemingly purified. hannah and i have made it through poses, out of our heads, and xo without accomplishing more than a few pages of the prince, the times, or this. but that's okay. it's break. and here i am writing about the weather, and paraphrasing my personal e-mail. there's recounting to do.

forever ago wednesday, i brought a cheesecake to seminar and only spoke, for the most part, after it had been almost half-eaten, but then with some frequency and some passion about potential unrealized implications of dada. stayed after to wipe up spring-form drip and chat with janine about parallels in modern music. i think she likes me. i practiced and spent too long in sharples and watched the combined african class. a deep lesson found tony contradicting himself, perhaps, on chopin interpretation, and telling me i should stick with quiet sensitive music for now (ravel perhaps?)

from there to a collapse in kcb and an absolutely preposterous dance rehearsal for terpsichore. the group was about half different from sunday. free-form warm-up exercises led into a "break" which was actually spontaneous leaping and twirling around to the t-heads' "blind." we didn't work on the dance per se; we did self-aware-ly "flaky" modern improv and composition exercises, which drew on african, kathak, capoeira the electric slide, rhythm, and so on. all with an impossibly giddy energy. i stuck around too, after pushups and such, for a briefing in breakdancing basics. i intended either to sleep or clean my room, but too much energy after dancing, so i hung out in alyssa's for an hour or two.

i roused myself in time for class thursday morning, but i couldn't bring myself to it, and forget about bach (even though the chance of actually listening to music in class was tempting) that afternoon. as for drill yesterday, i was already too far into break, it would have just felt incongruous. eh, so what. but thursday i definitely needed the spare time.

we assembled at ten: mark drove, ben purchased liquor with his superpower of being 21, while sarah and i did the genuardi's portion, doing quite well at sixty bucks or so. she was my co-conspirator/sidekick/cheesebaking expert/minion for the day, uncomplainingly following me from worth to sharples to ben west to wrc (an obviously inefficient route that i blame on the residual faultiness of my mental map of campus from living in danawell) to the weinstein's kitchen, where we were able to chat up tofu-boy, dissect and groove to midnite vultures, and get our bake on in a real kitchen. a real kitchen. lots of rummaging through cupboards to find something we knew we'd just seen. ("we, kemosabe?")

there was some difficulty in getting the wrc key (my id is still misplaced), getting sarah (henceforth to be known by the name of rose - speaking of which i hear u. eco is speaking at bryn mawr) the key, and opening the friggin' door even when we had the friggin' key. that last procedure involved standing in the rain for a good twenty minutes, chatting with number 23, and then giving up and going to sharples. i ate a sandwich as i walked back to shower and change. help too from ester on the sidelines and laurel, who i think somewhat begrudgingly drove me back to weinstein's to pick up the baked goodies.

i squeezed in the budget hours, where geoff made me some allowances but not all (will require a tiny bit more legwork). and then to the party. but there was nobody there to help, and too much to be done with a half hour left. we frosted the cake (banana with chocolate ganache on the top layer, lemon buttercream on the bottom - damn tasty cake, at least to my taste) and set out the cheeses (brie and camembert baked with apricot-pineapple preserves) and grapes and cheesecake. when people started arriving, in a lovable range of attire, we were still in frantic prep mode ("we, kemosabe?").

some things made me frustrated: we never got a satisfactory music setup, and it took forever to get the drinks going (the only appropriate vessel i could find for heating the cider was an old electric dispenser thingy which created large amounts of alternately noxious and pleasant-smelling smoke when i tried to use it). and the whole thing felt pretty disjointed - ben mentioned that it was sparsely attended for the space, but actually it was about the number i wanted/expected to attend; it was just a shame i hadn't had time to think through spatial arrangement. so, it wasn't my best party.

but, whatever. many people that i love were there, including all of the at-swat bloggers on my sidelinks except for duffy, who it now occurs to me completely slipped my mind when i was writing invitations - so sorry kate! - and zabby, who seems to be disappearing completely (i'm not going to link to them, you can get there by yourself). joel performed "birthday rós" for as far as i know the first time in public, which was precious and very well received. (i wasn't really expecting any presents, and in fact only got one - a tilebag from rose in the morning - as well as sweet cards from two-thirds of the freshman contingent.) the drinks, when we got them going, were fantastic: a bowl of minty mojito served with straws and lime wedges, and improvised hot cider (i finally gave up and just dumped a large quantity in the dispenser; it smoked less and came out tasting great) with copious spiced rum. all had a good time, i think, in the end.

we were tired and somewhat drunk, and left messes for the morning - i {rose and/and rose} went back to the wrc at 8:30 to mop and dishwash; made short work of it and made sharples breakfast like a typical friday. all that was left for me was to return the pa to soundmachine, so that accomplished (with the help of a comradely p.s. officer) i came back to my bed, to recover and deal with another mess - in the space of a few hours my floor went from almost invisible to clear and vacuumed. bed made. closet overhauled (the sweater shelf my folks sent has gone along way to systematizing closet and dresser). other surfaces still cluttered, but still it's satisfying.

i only left for sharples, and only then at dinner, after several stabs concluded a little game of birthday card monte with benjamin. i found lots of nice folks to talk with, and eventually hannah arrived. we came back here to talk for a while and play an aborted game of scrabble. then made a lovely night of it in pitt, with the natural history of the chicken, laundry retrieval and painting appreciation, and a tindersticks cd found on a bulletin board. we took turns serenading each other on her neat little martin (i sang "chicken with its head cut off" in honor of an episode in the movie.) in the morning, oatmeal with nori, a missing sock, and lavender hygiene products. and so it continues. back on campus (at noon, respectably), i finally got the iceland tickets, and i took a cheese danish from the 350 years of quakerism conference. but the library was closed, so we've come back here. we listened to lovesongs #1-23. hannah has forsaken machiavelli for kundera. we're thinking about going into the city. but no definite plans. it's break. it's break it's break. i'm excited, and, happy. am i ever not happy (answer: yesterday, briefly, but that's done now.)

i've heard many songs in the last few days, but not this one. for some reason i wanted to quote it:

i sit two stories above the street
it's awful quiet here since love fell asleep

a day of cheesecake! i can't believe it's only tuesday. i mean, that's what i said this morning; i felt then like it must have been thursday evening or something. now i'm about spent enough for two weeks. this is the crunch, no doubt, and even if my pressures aren't academic, and are essentially academic, break couldn't be better-timed. if indeed it affords a break, which is yet to be seen. the business-as-inversely-proportional-to-room-cleanliness axiom is certainly in effect now; in the last two days, my room has degraded at what would be an alarming rate if i didn't know that a solid two hours (a laughable impossibility right now) would suffice to set it right again.

if it sounds like i'm complaining, i'm not: this is me, at my best, or one of my bests. a million things to take care of, requiring considerable logistical dexterity; taking care of each task neatly in turn makes me feel (to use an analogy that probably nobody reading this will understand) like i'm playing a heated game of pounce and hitting that sweet stride, the higher realm of operating from which janet used to make a buzzing noise as she sped along and annoy the heck out of everyone else. so: despite it only being a two-day catch-up job, this entry is liable to get long and overly detailed, much like the previous one. i'm consciously not scaling it back though - the complexity and oversaturation of detail is specifically parallel to the speed of life these days. and so…

yesterday morning i waltzed through breakfast, french, and super-relax yoga with my pumpkin-walnut cake on my shoulder (albeit without the walnut oil which was to so subtly "echo and complement" the chopped walnuts), until i unloaded it in judy lord's fridge. most of the way through discussion with the crumbs, i brought it out to be served, along with cider and candy corn. david crumb ate about two-thirds of my bag of candy corn during the second half of the discussion. i tried to ask george about the problems of 'cultural appropriation' that i sort of alluded to in my last entry; he didn't have much to say about that, or about jay's question about electronics. still, it was nice to talk with him.

ester and i made close to thirty invitations with pictures cut out from national geos and new yorkers. i felt like i was being gruff and bossy with her, even as i was apologizing for it; sorry again ester. but they came out really nicely. favorites include a group of chinese toddlers playing in the balls, one with "nori" written on his butt; an italian man lifting his arms in a flurry of confetti and streamers, with "ed" tattooed on his arm; and a soviet army officer in conversation with another man, both of them sharing a thought bubble about "nicole." and the lion whose eyes complete "r" "b" "c" "x." yah.

no dinner but jazz; afterwards i popped in the new cassius that i'd just recieved from astralwerks (along with some of damon albarns new shiznit), and soon rae showed up and we spontaneously started dancing to it. that means it's a good cd. her beau nouveau (lou, whom i'd met in jazz practice) showed up eventually to go out for dinner, but everyplace was closed. so we just went to paces, for andreses and whatnot - but no guitar, as lou's had just broken; we settled for farmhouse instead. i was wearing my pink blazer, my candystriped wedding shirt, and white-pants; ready for camping. hannah met us there, as did about half of my guest list (i could have given out the invites then, but i waited to stuff them this morning.)

the sleeping bag count at this point was three: joeflo's, alyssa's, and hannah("what do you do?" "camping")'s. it was fun to break into the outsiders group space, but there turned out not to be any sleeping bags there, though we did take an excellent large tarp. after a big convergence of folks in brigster's room (estgid's?), i scrounged up three more bags from helpful danaians (jedd, audrey, sorelle; thank you thank you.) goes to show that the school's best resource is indeed its students.

by midnight-thirty, so much for an early bed, we listened to the last pixies song on srn, then headed into the woods. basically we just got into our bags and crashed. ester and ben came and joined, making it into a sort of triple date. it must have been a cute sight, three pairs of bags snuggled together on the massive tarp in the middle of crumhenge. it was cold but body and bag heat were enough that i didn't wear my sweater for most of the night. and somehow (thanks to rae i think), i got up in time to only be five minutes late for my 8:30 class. so: a successful crumsleep, but with emphasis on the sleep and unfortunately no time for other campinglike activities. in the future, we hope.

french was interesting. carole told me, after i came late and didn't have my book, that i was the model of a bad student. but i think she meant it in a nice way. we had a quiz, the grammar bits of which i think i did very well. for one of the writing bits, about a canary, i wrote a kind of parody of 1984. that was fun.

i saw nori in kcb (i'm trying to push this acronym, can you tell?) and got her key. stuffed mailboxes. went to ppr to collect n's springform pan, a tin pan for a water bath from the palmer kitchen (do you want to know how much ppr rocks? it turns out they have a spring-form pan in their dorm kitchen), and my darlin'. from the co-op, we got two lemons and a gaggle of strawberries. and now i was prepared for baking endeavour no. 2 of the week.

while h read her farha ghannam, periodically interrupted with ginger- and lemon-flavored kisses, and patsy sang of heartaches and tangled triangles despite her frightening grin on the record cover, i whipped out another in a long line of cheesecakes. chance technical innovation this go-round: i put the lemons in the microwave, which is a standard practice i have to get more juice out of them. one started squirting juice out a hole in the end. so i took it and squeezed as much as i could out of the end (i hadn't thought to procure a juicer.) that worked really well. also: the pan i borrowed from palmer was maybe the best water-bath pan i've ever found, although a tad shallow. like rose levy berenbaum, i am passionate on this subject.

we looked through some photos, and then went to bag lunch. it's nice just to walk across the beach with her. an almost entirely useless bach class (the origins of solfegge, the circle of fifths, no music whatsoever, and not even many funny marrissen moments). then i checked mail, and found another cheesecake, just on my way to take the first out of the oven. to be honest, i had predicted a cheesecake would be arriving today, the same day i was planning to make one. but hannah tells me you can't have too much cheesecake (i know from experience that this is not quite true.)

this one was an appropriately early b-day present from my folks, who also sent me a phat check (for icelandic spenses) and a box of sox and toiletries yesterday (two tubes each, double my request, of t.o.m.'s gingermint paste, my coconut-lime shave cream, and aveeno handlotion.) what swell folks my folks are. perhaps i'll see them on sunday, in the adirondacks. wouldn't that be funny.

the rest? oh, i did laundry today, and i ate various things (i have a lot of food now), and i did seminar reading (most of it, not all of it, but i think a sufficient amount, yes.) i went to a fabulous lecture on de chirico, by the curator of this coming exhibit. he showed us sides of the work that i'd certainly never seen - he (the lecturer too, but i mean the artist) certainly had a sense of humor, and a very well-developed sense of self-suffiency vis-á-vis the intellectual/art world. sounds like he was perhaps crazy as well. peter schmidt was there - i see him everywhere (ibarra, dukakis, crumb, etc.) good, good lecture. i like.

then a rush for more laundry and reading and two pieces of pizza and a shockingly good salad from tarble, before rockinar. this was a momentous rehearsal, i think, for the inflight rock band. after recomposing "composition", ripping out perhaps the rockingest "radical honesty" i've heard yet, and reworking the end of "sex digress" so much that we ended up where we started from, with an a cappella ending on a harmonized chord, we got into a discussion about our goals and intentions as a band, which has needed to happen, but hasn't exactly, for a long time. there is still a lot more to be discussed - we all disagree slightly on some issues, but are generally in the same place - and we'll hopefully have a chance to do it in a non-rehearsal setting soon - but it was good and necessary to get it started.

we spent the last hour on preparing blur covers for the halloween show. "beetlebum" came together pretty well - as with the others, it's just going to require some individual listening time - but the real breakthrough was "girls and boys." after what felt like pulling teeth all day to get them to actually try working on it, we listened through once in matt's car, and then went back in to jam out for twenty minutes on what is essentially an very simply organized song - inanely easy but great drum beat, simple guitar bits that matt got in spirit if not perfect-pitch, keyboard noodlings which joel will replace with his trademark craziness and maybe even some tonality, and an absolutely killer funky precision bassline that aaron has cold. playing that tune - and actually jamming on it, which is something we rarely get a chance for in our ultrafocused rehearsals - made my essential point better than any of my rhetoric: that playing music is supposed to be fun, and this is a great, infectious song that the audience is going to love dancing to and shouting along with, and we're going to immensely enjoy apostrophizing and apotheosizing. and so, i came home happy.

i'm excited for tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. i love my hectic, preposterous, and charmed life. but i'm also really, really tired.

you're so easy to love
you're so easy to love
you make it hard for me
to carry through
with all the little things
that I should do 'cause

you're so easy to love
you're just an angel from above
you're just the lover
that I've always dreamed of
it seems you're very easy to love

this was one of the great swarthmore weekends. i couldn't even think about going off campus this weekend. so much going on, in the various arenas of campus. it's a late start to do them all justice now; i'm tired, physically and also mentally but less to the point of exhaustion than to a place where i want to relax and speak slowly. this will be chronological and perhaps too much for some of you.

i've been seeing a lot of sarah. we did dinner, duke lecture and scrabble together thursday night, and the next morning, when her class was cancelled, we made a trip to trinity. i had already been that morning, with nicole and hannah, but i knew i needed to go back to take full opportunity. so, after a brief labo interlude - it turned out that most of the nifty clothes on offer (best i've seen in a long time) didn't quite fit me right, so i only took a fun lacy white shirt, whose combination possibilities i'm still not sure on. but i did snag a stack of lps, including the harder they come, workingman's dead, moby grape's debut (with awesome huge poster), a 3-lp gieseking ravel set, and recordings of britten, shostakovich, schönberg, and prokofiev.

the marathon of evening activities began at 7. erica cartmill called me from across sharples with an invitation to join her elite band of pterodactyl hunters. of course i accepted, and so she and i, suzanne and andrew, nick goodness and ian kysel all drew bikini tops on our trash bags, and practiced our yodel - we signed up as the swedish bikini team. we managed to rack up an astounding amount of poker chips early, and i think had enough for a p-hunting licence before almost anyone else. the 'dactyls, however, were not playing fair - they had way over the legitimate number of guards, and claimed that each of our seven or so attempts was invalid for some reason or another. it was all very confusing. and it was dark too. hey, it was great fun anyway.

and who do you think else was there but hannah? we sparred a bit with the new-improved styrofoam swords, came back here for verklärte, then spiffed up and met again at paces. speaking of new-improved. or it will be when they do have a mural, and a bar, and food. entertainment by mr. d.l.k.m., and the availables, who, it turns out, are all that and a bag of chips. i was really impressed. sure, their set was loose and rough, they're still sort of new at it, but they have unmistakeable talent - songwriting, instrumentalism (esp. joe on piano, and emiliano on cello, whose voice and songwriting reminded me very much of joe jackson), and stage presence. also impressive range, from serious popsmith ballads to spot-on hilarious anthems of hedonism and self-deprecation. cool.

the olde club party has been adequately documented (wayward zab's awesome new haircut, check! wansom illicitly djing the good-days-sound, check! hannah's friends run away from us, check!) ellipsis, too, are old hat, but tighter than in past performances. vale now has long blond hair. joel has a pink shirt. we caught the end of their set, including numerous covers, my favorite of theirs ("stowaway ophelia"), and the essential "orange blossom special." back to central, more girlz'n'guitarz (merrick and, um, brad mehldau.) and, in the morning, st. germain, which it turns out isn't easy to dance to in a dorm room.

saturday was absolutely beautiful, as were today and friday too. the only problem is that it wasn't like this when we had planned our outdoor party. o whell. the nights are a bit cool though. i read a bunch, including five articles from this book, which all of which were interesting and some extremely so. good scholarship makes me happy, or at least it can. joel and i took in some crumb at underhill. i practiced and stuff. met lsat-drained ben at sharps, and i made myself nachos the real(ish) way.

another full-on-assault evening. we skipped the bcc diaspora labels discussion and read a bit of shrew and listened to the dead. i put on a longer shirt which still had on a walters sticker from the last time i saw gary and carole. the latter's birthday celebration was at the occupied weinstein's house. it was soo nice to be in a living room again. with people. 16 or so of us, and as ben says, the conversation really was nicely laid-back and singular. it broke up of course - i talked to mr. jonas about the cooking club, and alyssa and i shared some tiny moments (bringing in the cakes and candles; keeping a 'secret' of the disturbing green things in one of them) that made me quite happy. a humbly genteel gathering. carole asked "do you guys ever do anything low-class?" there were other good quotes i won't think of now. discussion of classes-in-common, mvnch, and the martial art of breaking things.

we caught the tail end of the wrc coffeehouse; specifically the last three songs of a set by katie davenport, who has managed to assemble, completely without my knowledge, a crack blues trio with mary blair on bass and andrew steel playing the best time i've ever heard from him. they did a great trad-styled blues piece, a hilarious britney spears parody about chemical structures (which one exactly?) and an amusing early work about "the life of the mind." cool. so, apparently, there really is the makings of a swat music scene. katie has a fantastic voice and great stage presence; i'm eager to hear more of her stuff.

what's-her-face showed up shortly after, and it seemed we had a saturday-nite foursome with ben and vicki, but the former never re-emerged after we went to his room for ear-plugging cottonballs, and the latter came and went, mostly went. so it was just we two; after a rocking set by skeleton key (jumpsuits! grunge-machine-funk! kerosene tanks and fire extinguishers and chains and wrenches on a hanger!) (they drove their van right up onto the ivy beside olde club, and took about an hour to load up all their gear) we wandered with the vague thought of finding company in danawell. instead, we found $17 on the path. not much to do in that situation besides take it, as odd as that feels. we figured it would be best to spend it that night, but instead maybe we'll put it towards a nice dinner or something. clearly, it will have to be spent on something frivolousish, and together.

tanakh made us sit down and threatened to put us to sleep too, so we came back here. we shared some yogurt (peach). the music (because you know that's how it goes): point, chet baker, and workingman's dead. we danced to the second. we even talked for a while - dredlocks, communities… anyway, we agreed it was comforting that we had things to talk about.

and then it was today. i remembered in time for my nine o'clock terpsichore rehearsal, for sarah gladwin and greg holt's piece. that was great fun. fun other dancers (dale, steve, jessie, sarah wood, hannah's friend adam, and another freshman hannah), fun dance phrase, fun weightsharing and lifts and even crunches and pushups at the end. two-hours-worth took a bit out of me, after come to think of it not too much sleep. but it felt good, and was a nice headstart on the day.

i neglected sunday pants again and just stayed in the same white ribbed shirt and green dancy pants through breakfast (with k. davenport, and then with sarah and sarah), back here with hannah again to listen to george crumb's "star child" (we listened to george clinton's "star child" too, by way of contrast), and to then underhill, reading and napping in the barn porch hammock, and to acme with elena and steve. i stocked up for a week of baking and semin breaks. i even got some double-sided tape.

ben came to reclaim his shakespeare. i burned a disc of latter-day b&s singles. i read more interesting n.y. dada articles (a bit overboard with the wordplay and genderizing, but hey, it's all in good fun.) a firedrill got me out of the room, and i kept on going, to the co-op where i didn't buy a $6 bottle of walnut oil, and to dinner with the always-amusing britta and her roomfolks. swung by weinstein's again, for a mixer and spices.

and then: the concert. what a way to culminate a weekend full of music and musical discoveries, especially for hannah, who was there for all of it and must have been about overloaded. david crumb's piece, though quite a show-offer for tony, was disappointing next to the other pieces of his we listened to for class (esp. the lovely cello and orchestra variations). prelude de l'apres-midi was gorgeous of course, and the mahler was really cool too, although i couldn't help nodding off at the very end.

inflight, nori, joe, and hannah relocated to the consipicuously empty front row during intermission, so as to get the full effect of the crumb premiere. i don't know what to say, but it was awesome. bizarre, to be sure; less so for its inventive textures (yeah, yeah, chisel on the piano strings, clicking stones together, scrapy owl-sounding thingy) than for the weirdness of folk tunes, sung "in a folk style" (which of course could never be if it had to be prescribed like that) by crumb's broadway-starring daughter ann (formidable and scary facial expressions), purposely "made strange," and even though 'embraced' into the classical arena, totally destroyed and reduced to parody, inadvertently, in the process. an interesting conundrum (far more than "how can there be a ring that has no end?")

if you think it seems like i spent an awful lot of time with hannah this weekend, you'd be right. yeah… it's good. she's a good kisser. i bought her a toothbrush today. i think it's getting better as we get to know each other, and hopefully the social integration aspects will come about, gradually. she definitely feels intimidated, and with good reason. but okay. it's an unusual position for me. but i'm second-guessing myself less, and just, i'm really happy.

i convinced her that she didn't need to stick around and help me with cake and invitations if she felt like her bio needed to be done. and so i baked alone, in the frustratingly understocked worth kitchen, with the practical and pleasant sounds of the beck album streaming from the next room. pumpkin-walnut ring, only not a ring and without walnut oil. but it came out really well, i think. i guess i'm not going to ice it.

oh my. i've got a busy, if probably quite enjoyable, week ahead of me. and then another, which needs to be provisioned for. my room is getting messy again. for instance, there's a cake on my bed. but my bed is made (mysteriously, in my absence.)

you, you, and you: you're invited to my party thursday.

this is just a modern rock song
this is just a sorry lament
we're four boys in corduroys
we're not terrific but we're competent

i dreamed last night that i stumbled, with hannah, onto a meeting of a group that gathered weekly to discuss the contents of this blog. i recognized a few of the people (kellam maybe?) but most of them i didn't know. a main topic of discussion was 'this new girl' - it was proposed that i should let my readership vote periodically on love interests. she was kind of annoyed about it. there was also a part about going to a bookstore to buy the brand-new book of some bestseller author (grisham?), which was titled east of eden, and was in the same green penguin classics edition as my copy.

you know, like i felt the need to explain and apologize to hannah, before i realized i didn't need to. like the previous night, when i dreamed i found my wallet on a mantel outside my house, but in the morning i realized i still needed to look for it.

sentimentality pause
as jimmy stewart
ignores her question

who wouldn't be tempted by these msn exclusives:

•  Struck by love?
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•  Find your soul mate
•  Dessert-burning tool
•  Are you a flirt?

today had very defined good parts and bad parts.

the bad:

• [if today can be extended into the previous evening, which i think it can since it's evidently being extended into tomorrning: a few pieces of bummy news about breakplans which shave a day off the inbetween ends of two trips - wednesday iceland packages disappeared and rae couldn't get off work tuesday]

• in the theoretically good morning, i found myself locked out of my room. i could have sworn i'd left the door open, with srn flowing into the shower. i found dorothy the cleaning lady to help me out, but not before

• i managed to smash my head in between the wall and the shower door, leaving a still-tender impression on my eyebrow.

• bach class was cancelled, so i went to mccabe to start the dada reading. that's when i realized that we have well over twice as much as usual for this week. something like 700 pages, and many of them large-format, albeit with pictures. but what's up with that?

the good (which weigh-out way the other):

• scrabble. in one of three games, i scored a 526. it was ridiculous. i bingoed thrice, with dEPRAVED and DOORWAyS, though my ester my special opponent helped by agreeing not take the space i needed to play TRIDENTS. i had all the tile luck, although she squeezed out some lovely words too, including a bingo. it's only fair, she's beat me the last three times. and i had just forcibly resigned a game i was winning.

• iceland. rob and i purchased our tickets. three nights, three short but superexciting days. can't hardly wait.

• md55. dukakis is a fantastic speaker. funny, engaging, passionate, looking very good for 70, and i agreed with almost everything he said. sarah and i sat in the front house left section which was dominated by administrators (we were in a two seat radius from gross and eldridge), and it was interesting to hear their side comments (at the end: "i'm glad i voted for him," they all agreed.)

• hannah. was in kcb during (lackluster turnout, i played TONGUER against sarah c.) scrabble, trying to study for her two tests the next morning. but we got to chat and wander for a while too.

• radio. though i don't know what sort of audience i had, at least i was enjoying myself. here's the log:

drums and tuba : the mummy

no. 2 : pop in c
salako : look left
imperial teen : city song

guided by voices : they ‘re not witches
guided by voices : as we go up, we go down
frank black and the catholics : california bound
cornelius : brazil

blanket music : move (p)
blanket music : hips (p)
lispector : nobody cares (p)
sahara hotnights : fall into line (p)

cibo matto : working for vacation
solomon burke : diamond in your mind
solomon burke : the judgment
the twilight singers : king only

skeleton key : kerosene
arto lindsay : pre-feelings

“collective wsrn” id

edith frost : easy to love
the mountain goats : scotch grove
the mountain goats : horseradish road
spoon : small stakes (p)
everything but the girl : the heart remains a child

mad professor v. massive attack : eternal feedback
rufus wainwright : greek song
french kicks : down now (p)

the walkmen : we've been had (p)
freakwater : good for nothing
the jacksons : enjoy yourself (mistake)

fuck : one lb of in
the o'jays : now that we found love
the soft boys : unprotected love

brad mehldau : exit music (for a film)

in a funny moment of parallelism to the day, i left parrish into the 2am grogginess and realized that i didn't have my keys. or my wallet. or my heatmiser cd. or U. i found a kindly public safety officer, who reminded me of prof. weinberg, to let me into lpac, since i figured the keys must have fallen out of my big flabby green pockets during duke's lecture. but no good, so he radioed himself over to k3 to let me in here as well.

the cd was in my room, and i counted up my tiles to find not only U but five more AWOL; probably and hopefully they've invaded suzanne's set. and this morning (duh i'm writing this on friday) i traipsed early to the amphitheatre on that hunch, and sure enough my keys and wallet had spent the night there, a bit dewy but not the worse for it. they ought to teach you this in sex ed: if you're going to make out outside, you should check the area for your belongings afterward.

the way everybody's voice
comes out muffled when they speak
the way we take our diminishing inventories
month to month, week to week

the maria callas records
on the stereo all the time
you're gonna get yours
and i'm gonna get mine

sorry this is taking so long. the week has come and thrown its heft around and now it's mostly gone, from where i sit. and it has been, well, dense. and so, for the second year running, the last post of september (though of course it was mostly written yesterday) was the hook-up post. does that mean? these warm-up paragraphs are never no good.

my morning was fueled by wsrn - quincy jones, etta james, solomon burke (wow) and others on "the soul of swat." since then, i've mostly just been eating all day: first, breakfast, where i discussed aspects of high school with sarah and britta, and nothing with joanna and hannah (some of you will understand my difficulty in resisting the temptation to pun on 'jo hannah'). after yoga, i got the second-to-last bag lunch (i got the last one on monday), which i still haven't finished - it sustained me until seminar break, including those irresistable caramel creme things that are apparently called bulls eyes. out from that, elena roped me into a psych lecture on choice and the secret of happiness (engaging but too long; i actually think i embody the sort of happiness that he described pretty well), where they had food too. and then sharples. and i almost went to a study break to watch "dead poets society." they would have had food there too. yeah, well you have to have some way to draw the day together. and you have to have food. and radio - it's solid indirok territory now.

monday, ed and i again pulled off a respectable dialogue with inadequate preparation (the previous night we just sat in my room without volition), assuming the rôles of collignon and duffayel from the movie. in yoga, we did adhomukhasvanasana (downward dog) for the first time with sally, and also supported shoulder stands. also, i answered a question with "angles," but she thought i said "ankles"; she asked donna jo to explain the phonetic difference between the words, and then tried to create an elaborate and utterly nonsensical metaphor about yoga and linguistics ("we have to voice this pose.") we had a listening quiz in composers (these classful days are trying, i know), which was not difficult but not boring.

ester and i met in between jazz and qsa for billy bragg and scrabble. she beat me (again!). i was almost able to play out with EVEnTFUL, but she never played the T i knew she had. H was by briefly, and was quiet, but mostly because scrabble is a piss-poor medium for conversation. oh well. she went to earthlust, we went to qsa, but i left after 20 min. or so of uninspired discussion for practice and dip. it's a bit treacherous down the danawell way in the dark, so i sang some blues to keep me company. a healthy five dippers, ed and three unknown to me. it was a little cold outside but the water grew nicer the longer i stayed.

finally, yesterday i did all of the semin reading that i hadn't started until then, retrieved my passport from the usps, read a few scenes of "twelfth night" with ben, ripped up some classics in a mutually pleasurable rockinar. hannah and joanna (that's hannah's best or at least most proximal friend here, apparently she thinks i hate her, but of course i don't) stumbled upon it, and we invited them in but then mostly ignored them and worked out a new ending for "sex digress." against some amount of judgment, but with a respectable amount of reading under my reclaimed demildewed lindseygaragesalepurchased orange belt, i took the short walk from worth to pitt to visit my ladylove. we escaped to the grass a few yards away, and then talked with her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend about new york and art. and then read in the palmer lounge. that's the way it goes. people start to notice, and that's satisfying and amusing, think. no definitions yet, but who cares about that. this has been in my head all day, and it's fun to sing:

i'm a modern guy
i don't care much
for the go-go
or the retro
image i see so often