Thick Description

2008-07-22T02:44:00.004-04:00

last summer i made a lot of mixtapes. this summer i've been taking a lot of trips. i haven't been home for more than a week since the traveling started, with a month in the middle east (14 days in israel, 10 in egypt, 6 more in israel), and so - as i wrote in a letter today (on a piece of wallpaper, to one of my livnot chevre - i've scarcely had the real opportunity to process what i've experienced (on the israel trip in particular), let alone think clearly about the future in any aspect, nor am i even very settled into the present, except as a time of transitoriness (which may or may not necessarily entail transition?) not that i feel particularly unsettled either, at least not in a distressing way. but i am very aware of being, as i so often am, on the outside of sustaining and sustainable routine.

the most recent trip away was to new york (briefly, for damon albarn's honest jons revue at lincoln center and, as it turned out, a guacamole party at sam'n'gerrit's with many swattie faces), newark for rae's wedding (i dj'd a bit- rae-appropriate dinner music from an itunes playlist, and then a few minutes of dance stuff at the end - but still had plenty of time to have fun and chat and dance to the fabulous klezmer band. it all felt short, but i guess that's a good thing) and then to wanakena for monday-friday with the extended nuclear family. including evie on her 1st birthday, 4-y.o. marcus the good-mood hiker and bugfearer (spiderwebs!), and martha before she split for some interviews in new york. and nava. also an evening in knollwood, where they have fun newish boathouse toys. good summer time, good family time, though.

letters from the middle east

2008-06-26T17:20:00.003-04:00

22 may

hello loves,

so... here i am in jerusalem, in the hotel where we'll be staying through shabbes. i'm in the lobby on a friend's laptop. we've been playing some music - loren, one of our madrichim (counselors) is a pretty serious violinist, and there is a group guitar which has a busted A-string tuning peg but otherwise is pretty nice. there's a white upright piano here but they wouldn't let us play because it's too late. there are a number of musicians - one guy brought a ukelele, and there are some drums and flutes and harmonicas. we haven't had a full-out jam yet, but there has been music playing of some sort every night so far. some on the bus as well.

the trip has been entirely enjoyable so far - i'm really liking the group, which is large (40) but laidback and "mature" (21-26, but besides that most people are just pretty thoughtful and sensitive.) at this stage we're all mostly commingling pretty indiscriminately, though specific friendships are probably starting to form. the first morning in israel (after a short first day when we took a brief walk through the old city) i joined some folks for 5:15am yoga in the grass - rie led some hatha and then alex led some kundalini. next time around i will probably throw some iyengar in the mix. we hiked up masada (short but intense heat and fairly steep) and hung out in the cistern for a while; i participated in a preposterous masada rap performance (best rhyme: josephius/facetious.) from there to the dead sea, where we had too little time (an hour) and stretched it out by going to cover ourselves in mud at the last moment. my birkenstocks, already extensively destroyed, are now just plain unreasonable.

we stayed last night at a nature reserve, ein geddi, and woke up at 3:45 this morning to start a hike right at first light - a climb up mount jesse (yishai), where we had a celebratory dance circle at the summit, fairly frequent stops for discussions of quietude and lack, an Ethiopian walking round, a stop by a 5500 year old caananite building, unbelievably well preserved (only the foundations, but still.) then ended up at an oasis, an amazing series of waterfall pools where we swam and a couple of us did some impromptu rock climbing-cum-spelunking over moss-covered rocks and cave formations alongside the waterfall. that was all before lunch...

the rest of the day has been fairly chill; we've done some preparations for shabbat, which in my case meant preparing a skit in which i will star as a naked delusional turkey/prince. more eventually... it's all been good, and i'm looking forward to further jewish discussions, which will definitely be happening more soon. (we've had a couple.)

hope you all are well!

love,

2 june

hey everybody...

i'm sitting on a front porch in a small town near netanya, eating homemade sushi, drinking beer and erek, listening to cicadas and crickets and reggae on the itunes, chilling with my friend andrew and some buddies of his from san francisco. in less than an hour i'm getting on an overnight bus to eilat, the southernmost tip of israel, where i will hopefully navigate the egyptian consulate visa situation and border crossing so as to get on a bus to cairo by tomorrow night, and from there to travel around egypt with martha. last night was the conclusion of an entirely wonderful two weeks, involving a 3+ hour candlelit concluding thoughts circle, which got kind of surreal and disorienting (i was physically very uncomfortable - cold and tired on the hard floor, and then they played a random john denver song), but gave way to an all night party of group singing, dancing to impromptu musicmaking, improvisatory songwriting out in the starry dark night of the tzfat hillside. most people left on the bus at 5:30 this morning, and andrew and i slept from 6 to noon. no time now to talk about the trip really - i've gotta leave and want to be social with these folks for a minute - but it was really something special. definitely exceeding my unclear expectations. as i said in the final circle, maybe less for me about discovering new things than about remembering and reaffirming things i already have and know - but pretty revelatory nonetheless. more eventually, i hope. postcards, maybe.

love

6 june

hi guys. slight overlap in info from the last update, but this is what i wrote to my livnot friends about what's been going on for the last fw days:

shabbat shalom. i am writing to you from my sister's amusingly posh apartment here in cairo, where we are kicking back after a day of livnot-worthy intensity, hunting pyramids from giza to saqqara to darshur (by taxi and donkeyback), downing multiple 1.5-liters of water, looking at even more stony things in the egyptian antiquities museum downtown, and then taking a rather silly bellydancing/dinner cruise on the nile with her roomate and her friends.

so, let's see... after bidding farewell to most of you at 5:30 am four mornings ago (was it only?), andrew (nimmer) and i slept in until noon. (a whole six hours!) his friends from san fran showed up a little while later, and we tooled around tzfat for another minute - one last yemenite delicacy (i still haven't had felafel in the middle east yet) - before saying goodbye to the rest of you. they took us to a brilliant "vanished" lake not far from tiberias, an aquifer that was discovered while digging a quarry, which had stunning green-blue water and excellent cliffs for climbing and jumping off - 40 feet up, maybe? then to a house, somewhere outside netanya, where we showered, played some cards, drank some beer and delicious erek/grapefruit/mint cocktails, and rolled and devoured some scrumptious sushi. it felt unbelievably nice, almost luxurious, to be in a friendly house and just relax, even for only a few hours.

which is all the time i had, because soon enough i was off on my own, on a red-eye (midnight-4:30) bus to eilat. i hadn't realized it would get in quite so early - i barely slept en route, and there wasn't anything going on when i arrived (although one of the beach bars was still blasting eminem and kylie minogue across the red sea), so i just wandered around a bit, found somewhere to sit on the beach and watch the sky colors change and the mountains slowly emerge from the darkness. i tried to follow the signs to the 'birdwatching park' but i'm not really sure whether i found it or not. i didn't end up fulfilling andrew's vision of jumping in a cab and demanding "take me to the egyptian consulate", because i was able to follow the map in my guidebook and find it myself, in an unassuming residential area. i slept a bit on the sidewalk waiting for it to open.

after securing my visa i started walking down mitzrayim road (sounds sort of foreboding, no?), thinking i might stop at a beach along the way - i did, and the water was lovely, but after that i couldn't take much more walking in the heat, so i just took a cab to the border. a few more adventures, going in on a taxi-van to cairo with some other folks, some of whom turned out to have the wrong visas, which held us up for a while, then some rigamarole about where they were actually going to drop us off. i was able to stretch out and sleep (and read!) in the back seat, and watch a lot of utterly empty desert go by - the land here is hopelessly bleak even compared to the judean desert; as impressive in a way, but definitely not as spectacular.

it's been a whirlwind in this crazy, dirty, noisy, hectic, colorful, nonsensical city of 22 million people (!!); on wednesday we started out in the coptic quarter taking in a synagogue and a greek orthodox church before coming to our senses and visiting some mosques. (if you thought israeli history was complicated - well, i didn't, really, especially since we ignored about 1800 years of it - it's nothing compared to this country, which has had so many cultures and religions and conquering nations and cross-pollinations, going back continuously for 5000 years, at least...pretty unbelievable.) i've really been enjoying cairo though, from admiring the panoramic view of the whole city (well, at least as far as the truly spectacular smog levels allow, which isn't that far) from the extensive hilltop al-azhar park to just walking around in the hectic streets and trying to battle my overdeveloped car-fearing self-preservation instincts.

but i'm also looking forward to heading on to slightly calmer, cleaner destinations. today we go to alex[andria]; tomorrow we are going to try to attend shabbat services at the synagogue there, which according to the rough guide "once served a jewish community of 70,000, tracing its ancestry back to the city's foundation. nowadays only a dozen or so, mostly elderly, jews remain." pretty sad...should be interesting though.

then on to sinai (dahab) and hopefully squeezing in luxor and/or aswan before i return to israel - my current hope is to try to make it to jerusalem for shabbat with nachshon next weekend.

...
love

10 june

salaam chevre,

more greetings again from egypt, "the land of civilization," as one tourist-poster slogan had it. another one: "been here for thousands of years."

i feel like i've been here a pretty long time myself... in the way that time starts to lose meaning; the tide ebbs and flows, the waves swell and cease, the moon waxes (half-way now), it gets hotter or windier or darker or brighter, but nothing much else seems to change.

i'm writing from a spot i've barely left in coming up on four days now: a restaurant in dahab, sinai, overlooking the aqaba gulf of the red sea towards saudi arabia (we see their lights at night - i guess it's as close as i'll get at least until my passport expires in five years), a flat thatched roof and no walls sheltering a dozen or so low-lying tables, each ringed with rows of cushions, rather sparsely populated at any given hour of the day with pockets of suntanned internationals, sitting, reclining, lying, sleeping. we have a room in the attached hostel, but it's been little more than a storage space for our stuff, since we've been sleeping in the restaurant too. (martha established a friendship with the preposterously laid-back twenty-something owner of the joint on her previous two visits, but then anyone could probably do the same in a minute or so.)

the guidebooks talk about travelers habitually being lured into extending their stay here in dahab, and it seems to be almost comically true of everyone i've met here - a group of women (two swedes and an italian) whom we've been palling with were originally here for a single night and have somehow stuck around for over a week now. in our case, we had clear plans to leave two nights ago - the evening of our second day - and travel on to luxor and aswan in the upper nile, but evidently things have turned out differently: i came down with some (mysterious but predictable) stomach/g-i bugginess on our second morning, which led me to spend the next 30 or so hours almost literally not moving from my spot in the restaurant pillows... thankfully after the first couple of hours it was relatively low-grade, but for a long time i was unable to move or eat without provoking some more discomfort. so basically i have been forced to relax, to temper my adventuresome ways and succumb to the languorous, lotophagous pace of life here...

it's hard to complain, really - it would be hard to conceive of a nicer place to convalesce, in all respects - the sea is so so blue, the wind keeps us cool, the food is decent and plentiful, and they never even ask you to pay (until they do, eventually, at which point you're expected to remember everything you've eaten in the last few days), but they certainly don't ask you to leave or move, they let me play my ipod over the speakers, there's a constant, fluid social thrum - new and old friends, martha's fellow teacher and my fellow sibling-companion, a friend of hers from high school, the girl we met in the synagogue in alexandria the other day... you know. it's pretty unimaginably sweet here. and all that.

sorta getting anxy to move on though. i'm a patient man but too much lull dulls my skull and dahab is confirming my suspicions that it would be a dangerous place. moof and i had a really great time just before this in alexandria - el-iskandriya, as they call it (made me think of aleks & rie too.) we took the train from cairo - an impressively green, pastoral trip - and spent an action-packed day and a half alternating sights [from ancient roman amphitheater, baths and catacombs to the extra-modern, extra-awesome new biblioteca alexandrina, hands down the coolest library i've ever seen (apologies to seattle/koolhaas)], shopping [i got some shirts and shoes and helped martha convince herself to buy three excellent dresses], and just wandering [around the city, which kind of feels like one gigantic shopping plaza, and a good deal more laid-back than cairo, but most memorably in the montazah pleasure gardens, a massive expanse of whimsical and manicured park complete with legoland-esque entrance tower, where we were invited to join a raucous bunch of women (mostly) of all ages having an all-out singing and dancing birthday celebration.] oh yeah, i also finally got my felafel fix - three times from the same place, but it was fantastic - and also had possibly some of the best fish i've eaten in my life.

so, from there we took the overnight bus (10 hours? maybe more?) to sharm el sheik, at the tip of sinai, and continued on to here. it has been good here - the first day we packed in snorkeling at the truly spectacular blue hole reef (slightly less so without glasses that don't fit under the goggles, but still) and a "bedouin" dinner in a somewhat remote desert area that wasn't too impressively bedouinny (chicken, veggies and rice) but anyway it was nice to hang out under the stars and climb up some rocks in the dark to sing down to the candlelit camp. then i got sick.

and last night, despite still not feeling 100%, i joined the gang hiking up mt. sinai (two days after shavuot - not bad right?); starting the climb at around 2:00 am and getting to the summit just shortly after the beginning of a truly lovely sunset. i was fine with the hiking - enjoyed it a lot - but i did have to move a lot more slowly than i ordinarily would, so most of my group went on ahead, though martha stuck with me. it was a nice hike going up under stars, though the trail was pretty crowded and there were frequent camel traffic jams,

[heya... whoops! i was in the middle of writing this e-mail while a very cute little egyptian kid came over and wanted to play with the laptop.

i took some photobooth pictures of us for a while, but then i went back to writing and he was poking at keys - i guess he hit something that sent the e-mail before it was finished. so now i will conclude...]

there were frequent camel traffic jams, but the descent - when we could actually see where we were going - was just breathtaking. i was however seriously feeling the absence of michael's insights, or something that could help give me some perspective on the significance of the place. it's pretty amazing just in terms of topography, but there's obviously a lot more going on. that's how i felt too about our little visit to st. catherine's monastery, at the foot of the mountain - a place with a lot of history, and lots of interesting things to look at, but we had no real access to understanding anything about it. egyptian tourist sites, to put it mildly, are not set up with that kind of thing in mind.

so. it turns out that i really did lose track of time, because i thought there was one more day here than there actually is. the current plan, taking that into account, is to do another desert hike tomorrow morning - canyon, oasis, bedouin village - the usual - and then head on to eilat, where i will meet up with loren; jerusalem, where i will meet up with liz (anybody else?); tel aviv; home. and don't worry, i'll get my photos up then. and so on. i'll probably do one final summing-up piece and then stop bugging y'all.

and some days it's a good day to blog

2008-02-26T02:11:00.005-05:00

or nights, as the case may be, since daytime blogging is against the new rules. even though, as nava points out, staying up late at night to blog may not be the best way to ensure daytime productivity either. well it was her idea in the first place, i'm just self-enforcing it.

you know, when i put up that 'hibernatin'' picture-post i wasn't actually intending it as the announcement of a blog hiatus, truly i wasn't. i'd just wanted to share an outtake from the macbook photo shoot i'd just done for the cover of a mixtape which i still haven't made, actually (but it's, if slowly, definitely still forthcoming - ben has even signed on as official collaborator/commentator/chaperone...now i've just got to get him the tracks as they stand, once i figure out what they are. but i did make another mix, wow ten days ago now, and here's some more from that photo shoot:

)

anyhow, i only realized after the fact how convenient and perfect that post was as the starting point for a blog-break, plus it turned out to be pretty easy to not blog for an(other) extended period. anyway, you guys haven't exactly been clamoring for my return. whatever.

these days, i've gotta say, are finally, possibly, probably my most fulfilling and filled-fullest days since my college days (when, o course, i blogged incessantly), that and there's so much internet writing i do as it is: it's my job now (!?), plus i've done a decent job of maintaining mincetapes. filled-fullest may not be exactly right; it's not exactly like i'm running all over the place doing a million things. indeed, most days i'm in my house for nearly the entire day if not all of it (i generally make a point to get outside and do something at least once a day, but it's usually only once, at least during the week.)

my life is extremely messy, as i told nava recently: my professional life is all messed up with my personal creative/artistic project life which is mixed up with my entertainment/gratification cultural consumption life, which all in turn blur into my social life and my domestic/quotidian homelife and my romantic life. there are rarely clear delineations of space, time and mental energy separating these various facets of my current existence, which i could see being somewhat dangerous and deleterious, but for now, at least, is proving to work out quite well. it doesn't necessarily feel sustainable, but it doesn't feel static either; it feels progressive and exciting and, well, alive. and fun.

today was a typical weekday of these days, so let me just tell you about that. having stayed up late watching the oscars, talking to my men in austin stango and gravity with some consternation over this sxsw wristband hoo-hah, putting yet another round of finalizing tweaks on my review of the lovely album tiger, my friend by psapp, and making minimal progress through the final chapter of david mitchell's awesome number9dream, i woke up towards the later end of acceptable: 10:40, though when i looked at my phone for some reason i first thought it was 01:40. hard to wake up too late since i never draw the blinds and the morning sun is keen here in my eastfacing thirdfloor bedrum, not to mention there's my daily alerting alarm that goes off at 7:48 every morning, after which my phone gives me the option to snooze or dismiss. it's awesome.

i worked cheerfully and efficiently at my writing-desk most of the day, posting the psapp piece and writing both a bio and an album review for the australian post-jazz group triosk, along the way developing/rediscovering/honing an active-listening review process (taking notes on individual songs as i listen once through the album, or enough of it to amass sufficient relevant material; a pretty obvious concept of course, but oddly not what i necessarily tend to do.) (all the while also constantly importing cds onto my computer via itunes and thence to drobo - it's a mammoth process i've commenced; hard to say but i may be a quarter done or even a little more. 49 days, 8 hours of music, so far.

i can only really judge my efficiency by feel and mood, since i can almost never generate as much written output as i'd think would be reasonable. but i'm learning to be okay with that. and trying to decide what to make of the recently-acquired information that i am, apparently, already one of the highest-paid freelancers at the esteemed web publication for which i write [because of 1) "the high quality of my writing" (thanks -ed!) and 2) the weak dollar (?)], and therefore i probably won't be able to get a raise anytime soon, if ever.

took a brunch break - pequa valley black cherry yogurt plus my homemade (gently burnt) granola for an appeteaser, then some home fries, kale+tomato+onion, and scrambled egg whites (plus one yolk - works much better that way) left over from when i made ice cream last week (fresh mint plus chocolate chunks - something unconventional about its mintiness, but not bad.) otherwise was pretty diligent, gchatting only briefly with martha (who'd just arrived in cairo), rebecca (in israel) and liza. still, i didn't find the time to write the handful of e-mails i'd listed as tasks for myself, save for one quickie about possibly djing for LaB tomorrow (unlikely), before showering (necessary), grabbing a muffin (carrot-apple-ginger-etc.; vegan - i made em for a potluck last week) and quickly dashing off (slightly frantically, though i wasn't actually late) to bike to my first book arts class at fleisher.

as of now, i have somewhere between two and five classes to attend each week, depending - two art classes (the aforementioned and letterpress printing at uarts), lindyblues (aka LaB aka swing, though i rarely go to the class part anymore, i just show up for the two hours of dancing, but it has, i'm somewhat sorry to say, eclipsed my loyal tuesday night loft yoga class as an underswerving weekly constant), and yoga as i see fit (ideally, loft tuesdays and saturdays - though last week i went thursday for the first time, it was all about scooping the contents of the ilia; there's also wake up west, which is sort of a nice contrast to strict iyengar, plus it's seductively much closer.) it's quite helpful - possibly crucial - to have structured evenings balancing my unstructured/self-structured daytimes. especially if i've gotten enough work done to feel satisfied, jumping on my bike and heading off (often just as my housemates arrive home) to wherever it is feels nearly as triumphantly liberating as going home from a 9-5. i guess.

anyway, first meeting of book arts was a lot of fun. we made paste papers, i.e. decorative papers with wheatpaste, to be used as covers or maybe watermarks later on in the course - our instructor described it as "basically like fingerpainting - hopefully a little more sophisticated." lots of fun toys to play around with making designs. i managed to rescue my papers from total ugliness most of the time, and theoretically cutting them down for actual binding use will complete the transition to actual beauty. something. anyway, i'm psyched for the class, seems like it'll be action-packed, somewhat unlike (strangely) my letterprinting class - i'm liking the vibe of the students more, in any event. we got out early so i looked at some of the nifty stuffin the memorial gallery, then i walked on phone as i talked home for a bit before biking back up the hills (coming home uphill means that you can at least get there fast on the way down, which is a preferable situation if you ask me.)

there was sort of a flurry of good news throughout the evening which has made me especially buoyant: first, i heard back from bubblehouse (a boba/asian-fusion joint-cum-bar/nightspot in ucity, where i'd eaten lunch and dropped off a demo disc the other day) saying that they want me to dj there. then the biggest breaking story, which is kind of too complex to fully explain, but the upshot being that matthew and i (thanks to matthew) and bobby and nava (thanks to bobby) came out on top in the random drawing and so now we all have wristbands for sxsw, which is just a really nice relief, not to have to worry any more about whether/where we'll be able to get them. now we've got a fantastic foursome, and we are set to tear austin up. finally i just got the glimmer that it might just be possible to change my plane ticket slightly to accomodate more stuff in my life better.

we'll see tomorrow maybe. and i'll write those e-mails and make those phone calls, and go to some yoga class or other, and maybe the next day i'll see there will be blood, since my dad (primarily) has finally convinced me that i should. and then i'll go to the airport to visit my brother and rebecca. and meanwhile i'll submit the review of adrian klumpes (triosk's pianist) that i've been sporadically drafting all day (i wrote and submitted a bio for him this evening), and the rest of the leaf discs i've been sitting on for a little minute, as well as the new jim white (out next week! guess i'll be in the new releases section for the first time.)

but for now (4:15 am. hmph. but that's bloggin' forya.) i'll sleep. yip!

hibernatin'

2007-12-07T02:08:00.001-05:00

december's infernal (and everybody's)

2007-11-28T13:25:00.000-05:00

but it's a warm fire that glows. rekindles not devours. y'know, s'weird filling my head with (something something, as daphne carr was saying last night) constructed/produced "knowledge about popular music" all the time, such that i get these phrases stuck there - "cold bleak heat: it's magnificent, but it isn't war" - and they tumble around all the time, evocative of something but nothing, catchier probably than whatever music they originally once attached to, which i usually have no idea what it was (apparently it's punk jazz), but there are the words. [cold bleak heat - sounds intense, sounds...wait, cold heat? whoa.]

well, among other words - another one is "i was gasping for contact," which comes from this postcard of a piece of art that's on the wall of alyssa's bedroom, right above my head as i type. i like to play with it: grasping for contacts? another is "...and now we call it gravy," which is from the italian market cookbook, but my subconscious thinks is like some universally recognized saying that i can reference and people will understand. good one for thanksgiving.

actually it's the opposite: a warm welcoming chill. i've been enjoying the cold viscerally, surprising me even, the actual tangible enjoyment, not just lack of displeasure. vitality, i guess. the joys of bundling too (downside: too many pockets.) and biking in philly (so warm), running in rochester (warming up to a full dash around the reservoir - i got some nu shooz and they are sooo ugly! but better on the road), walking in new york city (which has actually been markedly warmer so for - warm enough not to notice.)

what makes a man start fires? i made one in our living room on thxgiving (though we barely enjoyed it - we were too busy in the dining room, mesmerized by the citrus slices in the water pitcher and wondering, why do limes sink and lemons float? get this: it has to do with density! probably.) there was also this one (can you see that?) the fire's in my eyes and the flames need fanning. no...i mean, it's in our hearts. something about stars? (in our living room, after the it isn't war?) gah. make it stop.

and why am i talking about the weather again? and the time of year? i think i was just trying to paraphrase what i said to liz this morning, realizing that it's practically december and december will be like december is: fast and busy and cold and cozy and, by turns communal and alienating, for those so inclined. i'm in new york now (did i mention that?) and it's _christmas in new york_. which is all right. playing with people and subways and food, and mostly playing with words. mine or yours. (or my dad's, or l. mcmurtry's - i'm almost done with lonesome dove, i swear. finished the guralnick, finely. bought this last night after hearing half of its contributors talk about/read from their essays. "momentary." woot! maybe i'll talk about that at the other blog. it was EMP in two hours or less.)

ok, so life recap: last week (i mean, the one before thanksgiving - two weeks ago) i very literally left the house no more than a couple of times all week. once for vegan luncheonette with dave g, once for movie (no country for delicate-sensibilitied rosses) and dinner and kitten-klaw-klipping with/without dave m. otherwise i was in my house, in my jams, WRITING abt MUSIC. (spec. teen pop, mostly, not again, but for once, and it's getting interesting, and i'm having fun editorializing contextually while keeping objective contentfully...ok, i'll save it for the other place too.)

then the weekend came and i was working at the cafe, and pretending that i would get to bed early so to wake up early for it, but instead i saw romance and cigarettes (bad title, awesome movie! RFG! albeit preposterous) and saw mr. marmalade (awesome! but _dark_. i thought anyway) and 'played 1950s board games,' or something? i don't remember, and still only stayed up til like 2 or something. sunday i finally crashed, a little, except it was more like holing up in tired-boo. it's nice to be tired, somebody said.

and monday i managed to get practically all of my laundry and packing and moving (all my belongings from the third floor the first, so it could be refinished), and lunch with rebecca, and have a drink with kate before this concert (bowerbird site can has permalinkage? anyway, xprmntl improv is fine, but semi-composed ethnmsclgy take-off string hoo-hah is finer) and still be at the train station in reasonable amount of time for getting to new york unreasonably late.

and then it was thanksgiving. home. family. nephewniecelings. picture books. sweaters. bread pudding in the pumpkin shell. kim sisters. boyfriends. euchre. contradance. etc!

[lars and the real girl 7.6/10. superbad 9.4/10. she's the man. 6.2/10. missed american graffiti at the dryden, which would have made a nice h.s. triptych.]

and now i'm here, that's about it. ok now? more stuff:

"iMacs" homophonous w/ "IMAX." both rhyme with "no climax" - which one is will robinson sheff saying? works both ways?

encountered in the process of trying to research for a review of rachel stevens' album:
word, dawg.
whoa, dude.
[parents strongly cautioned: some sexual material. (as per the opening warning screen on she's the man.) but em it's for a good cause!]

two lyrics, take your pick:

i took a plane, i took a train
(ah! who cares, you always end up in the city
stranded at bleecker and broadway
looking for something to
do

. . .

i've got friends with the sweetest wives
they've got beautiful kids
they lead meaningful lives
in the suburbs just out of town
love is all around

ninety-nine and a half (will do)

2007-11-13T23:02:00.000-05:00

it was a year ago today that i was on my way to have some dinner and see a concert with some friends when i got into a little trouble with a possibly defective car and ended up spending the night in the ER, a couple days at alyssa's apartment, a couple weeks at home, and two months or so off of my right foot...

am i 99.5% recovered? or more, or less? how are you supposed to measure these things, anyway? i'll never be 100% back to normal (is anyone ever?) - it's not unreasonable to think i'll progress somewhat closer to that abstract ideal, in a matter of years - but for all intents here i am, good as i'll get and not too shabbily. a kind of key moment came a week and a half ago, when i had an evening of the most athletic, passionate, inventive social dancing i've done in ages - and i didn't once think about my ankle or feel limited by my ability to bend it. there were definitely points when i've doubted whether that would ever happen again.

i still feel it - not pain, per se, but a dull ache and a discomforting tightness that i think i'll be able to knead out and never can - i seem to notice it especially when the weather changes, or maybe it's just at certain humidity levels; anyhow more often than usual this time of year. the swing dancing i've been doing seems to exacerbate it a tad - though that may just be the opening blues lessons, always starting by shifting weight to the left foot, but usually they have a few more words to say first and you're already in the stance, so you end up holding your right calf in tension for an inordinate amount of time.

but this is quibbling. i'm better. this is of course the month to be writing my liner-note acknowledgments to the world, and so like any good rapper i better start out by thanking G-O-D!, the entity upstairs, my dawg, good lookin' out, i am so grateful you helped me get thru this thing naw but f'real, i'm feeling you, healing this annamayakosha knowhati'msayin', reeling in the prana flowin' so tight, sealing in the practice and permeating my vital air sheath, the information radiating out from my cells, sailing the sea of qi; the connectivity among all things. the internet is love.

armistice day
armistice day
that's all i really wanted to say

pajama drama

2007-11-11T17:53:00.000-05:00

so eternal october is over and now it's november. close to halfway through november, already?? [or hovember, i guess, again. he always does that, doesn't he. (yup: last five releases have had nov. drop dates.) before it just appeared, i had been entirely unaware of american gangster's existence - the record or the film - despite my best friends being in a promo video for it. kind of nice when an entire pop-cultural phenomenon (is it really?) arrives fully formed like that - it was faster than in rainbows for me. on the other hand, i've only listened to the album once so far; jury's still out.]

still feels octy enough though - maybe that's what the eternal part's about. been listening to the mix, resuscitating it actually, with a handful of iffy burns and a disturbingly finicky disc drive...i want to make copies (hopefully with new/actual art design!) for the west philly'ns that have joined/become my gang recently; i feel like it fits out here pretty perfect; we b all bout c+c. i haven't attempted anything like this since; two years now. these days the time feels right, but not just quite. i believe this is my most perfect mix tape.

why am i writing about music here? i've been writing about music here, for fun and profit, i.e. actually for real for profit, and writing about writing about music here to go alongside that; but still not saying much about how it's in my life now, which is a lot. i really oughta archive those "stuck in my head" sidebars. anyway i'll stop writing about writing, but it is what i've been doing - tho way more slowly and distractedly than i'd hope, by a lot. maybe i'll get discipline this week? have also been dancing - writing and dancing; as i said to somebody, making commentary on music with words and with movements.

pretty constant - from the tuesday swing sessions, to navigating through the silkcity halloween crowd, to probably the most phenomenal dance-club dancing in ages last saturday (@700), mostly due to a large posse of friends and strangely friendly friendy strangers. (not to mention non-lofty yoga and navel/naval radiation a.k.a. body-mind centering a.k.a. looney liza time.) even sunday night taraoke found me doing the charleston with some random barfly. so, meeting people... is easy. (what comes next, i'm not so sure.) one of my LaB partners turned out, in a kind of amazing bit of cross-town crossed-paths, to be my new co-worker (fellow new hire) at the cafe; another one turned up at a boardgame birthday yesterday (didn't say hi?)

been watching a lot of dance, too, atypically. not even counting last friday's gamelan dancers at lang (or dragonfly-winged ninja's stage antics at the go! team halloween concert), seen three kindsa modern in the past week: herebegin's "current", mostly to see the roguish return of enfantes terribles becky & alison, who did not disappoint (memorably: hexagon critique and the naked part); nicole bindler's pia mater, which was a profusion of xprmntl dance+music, featuring black & white semi-formal dress and set, a micro-absurdist talent show, a contest of bicycle feats (the fixie wins), a discordant sort of birthday party, lots of pretending to be babies and mothers and occasionally birds, live painting of bodies, and the playing of broken strings and electronics, bowed cymbals, bike wheels and balloons. those were both at mascher, which seems to swinging back into gear for the underinsulated months - the lighting is getting more serious, tho it's cute that they're still using my old receiver as the sound system.

then yesterday reb and i treated ourselves to the martha graham company at the annenberg... it was as much a history lesson as it was a dance concert - impressive and fascinating on both counts - and also a revealing illustration of how much the aesthetics of dance - and i'd guess the arts more broadly - have continued to change past this kind of high modernism, groundbreaking though it was. as obvious and dramatic as the difference was between the samples of art-dance that pre-dated graham's innovations (orientalist, "ornamental" solos from 1906 and '16) and the selections in her signature style of the '30s (best represented by the still-startling socialist fantasia "panorama," easily the most exciting thing in the concert), even her later work (like 1981's admittedly classicist, hellenistic "acts of light," choreographed when she was '86) came off in our eyes as hopelessly stylized and dated, awkward rooted in a foreign-seeming conception of essentialized beauty: basically, still bizarrely close to the conventions of classical ballet. which doesn't mean it was any less impressive as performance, or as dance (1956's "embattled garden" was particularly dynamic and virtuosic); just that the stylistic trappings - the excessive makeup, gold unitards (!), and general sense of romantic bombast - were utterly distracting and essentially negated the sense of authenticity emotion it seemed to be trying to convey, and which we're used to seeing in modern dance. well, interesting.

[oh, speaking of... we also went to see martha graham cracker at her cabaret on thursday. and speaking of the piggies, we also went to see their sliver of 365 days/plays (steps 352-358 to be exact.) fabulous, fabulous. so much performances! makes me want to get up there do something myself...i do miss performing; it's harder to do out here in the real world. hey maybe i'll do something here, on bilwa's (general-purpose, for-public-use) set, like he wants.]

well, so much for sitting still in the audience. apart from biking back and forth across the river, bundled against the mounting chill, i've been doing my fair share of sitting still in other situations too. at home, even though i sometimes feels like i'm never home for more than a moment before rushing out again. rather, i feel like it's like that whenever my housemates are around. this weekend has been better though - we've all been here together more often than in the past few weeks, even if we're usually in separate rooms. also, concrete things are happening with the house, which is exciting, though i haven't been as involved with this round of improvements. best part for me so far is that we now have a kitchen table. pretty nice one too. so i can sit there and read my dad's manuscript as i eat my whatever.

nice that the tv's set up too - there was an inaugural movie night last night, with nightwatch substituted for 28 days/weeks later (kind of good since it meant i didn't care as much about watching the whole thing), and a typically extravagant mali hostess-mode spread of cheeses, fruits, popcorns, and oh yeah, an actual dinner of ribs and self-described accoutrements. (and hopefully they ate some of my peanut-butter fudge brownies, which are rich enough that even a quarter of the size i originally cut them will do you just fine. i had just come from a board-game birthday party which featured, i'm pretty sure, at least six different kinds of brownies and brownie-like things. so i was on the verge of a brown-out.)

i skipped out on most of the feasting, though, because it was time to head off for the centerpiece event of the weekend, a plan which had gradually taken its vague shape over the preceding couple of weeks: the pajama party.

we're not in our pajamas in these pictures. we're playing dress-up, of course - the scavenged clothing items and fabulous fabulous hats are just a fraction of the many strange, wonderful, whimsical items that fill every corner of the lavish, slightly lurid, but lovingly adorned, antiquarian-aired apartment: an appropriately remarkable home, certainly, as our unwitting host is clearly a truly remarkable woman. perhaps you can get a sense from the background clutter in those hazy dream-portraits, if not from our outfits themselves. i'm pretty sure it's the best house i've been in in philadelphia. it was also pretty surreal - the house and the whole experience - which i think the pictures catch as well. we look like we're ready for some sort of drama, don't we?

i don't want to say too much about it - there was some of that sort of nebulous specialness that you want to keep a little unexamined, to keep it sacred but also on the suspicion that it might just end up sounding silly and inane if you pay it too much attention. we weren't really sure what we were doing, i think - we were just trying to satisfy the criteria for the quintessential pajama party, as best as we could figure. things started out particularly well, with the novelty of the enterprise, starting into a pot of mulled cider and a fifth of maker's mark, the excitement of exploring the apartment, donning hats and costumes, commencing an impromptu photo shoot - there are clearer, better, posed group costume shots that i don't have (yet, but i'll try to put them up here - in the mean time i finally added a halloween picture to the bottom of the last entry, so scroll down and look at that.)

after photos, and a round of desserts ordered up from the restaurant (ah yes, the restaurant) we changed into our pjs - i'd just thrifted a set of red plaid jammies that morning, which was actually one of my favorite parts of the whole affair. i also really enjoyed playing default dj, digging into my extensive supply of twinkly, somnambient lullaby tunes - what quickly got dubbed "fairy music" - including colleen's et les boîtes à musique, yokota's unfailing sakura, the lovely auburn lull, and lullatone's oh-so-appropriate plays pajama pop pour vous (oh those frenchy japaneseys.) also erlend øye's dj-kicks, marit and tracks 3-10 of in rainbows, all of which feature their own variety of twinklings. (i didn't say i was gonna stop talking about music, did i?)

it all seemed to fit with the sweet, dreamily childlike game we were playing. as far as actual activities go, well we played apples to apples - a game that's a lot less interesting than it used to seem (but still decently enjoyable, and was right-on with the adjective cards this time: i am indeed sappy, sexy, sharp, witty and weird) - and ha ha ha (i guess it's called) or 'human plaid' - we took a just-pre-closing jaunt down to the bar, partially in pjs, to catch last call - we lay on a bedspread on the livingroom floor, gazing up at the 3-, 4-, 5-, 6-pointed starry ceiling (that's a clue) and trying to think of jokes or questions - somehow there was clamor for a dance party at around 4am, so i decided to play ¡OhSiX!, which went over well, even if the dancing dissolved after a half-hour or so.

dawn came and we hadn't slept (well, save for one who'd drifted off before the dancing); we took the dogs out for a walk and to greet the day - frost in the field - though the sun had already cleared the horizon by the time we made it out. we slept some - in the pile on the floor, and eventually, after something like an unintentional approximation of a game of sardines, in a couple of the beds upstairs - but only some. four hours at best, not enough to shake that lessening that comes when you don't quite make the all-nighter. it's really better not to sleep at all than to stay up til the morning and sleep just a short while - that little bit somehow casts the disproportionate sleeplessness in a garish harrowed glare it's easier to squint out when you're just going on the wisps and fumes of the liminal hurdle, the second-wind of sunrise, the wan and achy weakened deepened wakefulness of coasting on through.

so - despite the generous, delicious orts in lieu of brunch, the concluding come-together clean-up, and especially despite the gloriously sunny morning we walked out into - there was this nagging anxiety, a tiny disquiet lingering about the whole business, that it was hard to quite apprehend until the light hit it. there was the physical futsiness of the suspended sleeplessness and torpor (i guess the whiskey didn't help, though it passed generally unnoticed the night before; the brownies neither perhaps.) this diverting but indeterminate agelessness we'd been engaging in - an imprecise précis not to act our age (our ages), but to be...school-children? high-schoolers? (like little scandinavian children on christmas morning, i said at one point - shades of fanny and alexander, natch - from the apartment too - our gay apparel courtesy of, perhaps, hannah andersson. i also felt like a 1950s norman rockwell suburban junior, with the plaid pjs and my thick specs) - and a timelessness too of just being out of ourselves, out of our lives, out of time - somebody was wishing it could go on for a whole week, but even the briefest span seemed enough to capsule it off fully, so more time would've just belabored the point, diluted the essence - these things aren't bad, per se, they were just the nature of the unreality, the oneiric otherness of it - (not, also, to haze it up in hindsight - but i haven't slept since, either, really, but at least in this state that's my lingering perception. the night, and the surroundings, and the mind, can do strange things.)

but i do regret a little that it didn't become more of a personal, communal self-sharing sort of experience - there's the opportunity with these things for surprising connections, those late-night deep talks that might end up seeming preposterous in the morning light (or they might not), but can establish and consolidate some real and lasting bonds, regardless. i can't say i really feel substantively closer to the participants now...of course, it was only one night, so that's not too surprising or upsetting. but instead, there was - maybe, the other direction from actual intimacy - this little, stupid sort of sexual tension - maybe it comes with the territory, though i'm not sure it has to - maybe a little sweet, silly, but just a little too unconscious to acknowledge or deflate. the sort of fun at the time, but, ugh, ultimately just limiting, since it's just inhibiting. even as it is itself inhibited by the pervasive, put-on, but no less inexorable, innocent wholesomeness - so that just puts things further at odds.

meh - don't want to say much, or feel like i should dwell on it. it bothered me (not specifically; generally) for much of the day, in an imprecise way. it was a shapeless day, sort of shot from the start for anything of much substance to happen - and a sunday anyway. i mostly channeled my restless, fragile energy into playing guitar and singing - songs from edith frost's it's a game and the mountain goats' get lonely - two of the finest collections of mopey, post-break-up folk formalism in recent memory; not sure why but those were what was coming to me. played keyboard too (after being asked not to use the intriguing player piano in the parlor at the party) - mostly just big churchy organ chords and gospel IV-Is. i wanted to go for a ride or maybe a hike/walk in the woods, but i couldn't find a partner for it or get up to going alone, so i just walked around the neighborhood a bit. the strains of curtis mayfield drew me towards a party in malcolm x park, with a circle of youngish breakers dancing to an afro'd laptop dj who turned out to be a penn student (freshman?), so i chatted with him for a while, and then hung out with a four-ish year old who wanted some help getting onto the jungle gym, until his mom came back. nice.

also - it was just nice to come home from the party and see my housemates at the dining/living(?)room table, doing the sunday morning. here they are:

we don't need more time
we need to use it right

. . .

time's unpredictable - just when you think
that you've learned how to save it,
you spend all day on hold
i need somebody to show me the difference between using it wisely
and just growing old

. . .

why did you grow a beard?
why did you grow a beard?
i can't leave you along for five minutes
what the christ
what the devil

the lonely crowdful west

2007-10-31T01:41:00.000-04:00

lot been goin on. i kept vowing i would write a post about my birthday, but for some reason it didn't want to come. one last stab, quick:

it was lovely. i'd written in the e-mail: if it can somehow easily and harmoniously coalesce into a full but relaxed day of enjoyable activities and friendfulness, well that would make me a happy twenty-fiver. pretty much it did and it did. birthdays, i find, are if nothing else guaranteed to make you pay a little attention to how you're spending them, which way they resonate; a way to check in with your life.

this one started with saturday morning yoga class - or, rather, with the sunny bike ride to it - then brunch at cafe lift with sara, dave, russ, and some fellow students (dave and i shared 'jen's crespelle' and spinach salad.) angela joined s d and i for a hayride around the block at rtm harvest festival (surprisingly sublime) and to give me the only present i received on my birthday (tied with the blue ribbon i wore in my hair.) here we are:

we were back down to three for a round of mini-golf at franklin square, and then i had some time to myself for playing digital pianos at 8th street music, picking bottles of sangiovese and lillet at w+s, and - on something resembling a whim - taking an eye exam and ordering contact lenses for the first time in seven or eight years. that's about when everybody called - i talked with my mom while i walked to long in the tooth to pick up the new sharon and bettye albums. then i came home - being out of plans - and chatted with mali while we peeled apples for a pie [#3] and i froze some raw milk ginger was it? these (and the wines) we brought to dinner at joanna's with ian (in town for the weekend - we got to see each other three nights running) and sarah, a lengthy leisurely meal and discussion.

this was significant: i had characteristically hoped that the day could find its way to a dancing conclusion, but despite some rounds of txt inquiries this was seeming doubtful around mid-evening. then i learned that tara and roberta, david, john, and erin, had, mostly independently (coincidentally), wound up at an opening in south philly, which had, unexpectedly, developed into a dance party. they all wanted me to come - truly, i could not have made it there in under a half hour (if that), by which point they figured the dancing would be nearly over. but if that was frustrating just then (and also that nobody was up to the ordeal of meeting to dance elsewhere - "i hate philly dance culture," i said, and still say), still it was meaningful to know that, somewhere way across town, there were was a spontaneous outburst of dancing among a randomly assembled group of my friends, and that they were thinking about me, and dancing for me, on my birthday.

as the day ended, i found myself, pretty randomly, at a party (an early halloween/birthday party) full of people whom i mostly didn't know - acquaintances at best - and i stayed for several hours, most of the time in low-key one-on-one conversations. that was almost the nicest part of the day - or rather, it seemed like such an nice, refreshingly relaxing note to end on. it was such a full day, filled with experiences and activities and interactions - with friends, strangers, and various shades between - none of which was especially monumental or noteworthy on its on, but collectively emphasizing an sense of flexibility, a network of possibilities, here in this city, my city. started off my 25th year feeling, almost suddenly, more personable and open and able to be gregarious than i've been in a while. and it was a sunny funny sunny day too.

---

since then there was also the party - autumn comes to delicious berry - which deserves some words of its own. well first there was practically a full week of planning/prepping, including a couple evenings in the penn print shop (to create the "Complimentary Notes" that nobody seemed to think were as perversely amusing as mali and me) and a field trip with to linvilla orchards with three of my fave philly fillies - tarasarareb'n'roo, together again for the first time? - to load up on pumpkins, gourds, and cider donuts. the most memorable thing about the actual party (which consumed the bulk of mali's and my attention before - well, along with felix the plucky orphan kitty and his friend gordon the gourd - and a good deal of it during) was the food. in my case, mostly hand-crafted junk food: ginger[fivespice]snaps! four different ice creams [licorice, coconut ginger, cranberry sherbet, apple sorbet]! pie [#4]! homemade terra chips [oven-baked slices of sweet potato, beet, yuca, redcoco, cuscus]! homemade candy corn! oh yeah, i made some garlic chard too. mali and delia handled most of the "real food" (including real pumpkin pie), and most of the kitty business as well. oh right - then there was the memorable moment when this weirdball showed up:

who are these bozos? what's with the haircuts? and the eyes? um. and i say, what the devil color is that behind them!? (why that's delicious berry - rather washed out though.)

- - -

and since then...i've barely left west philly. to be precise, since the subsequent sunday - when i went to libswalk for a job interview (don't ask), liblands for cake and wine with the t-ster, c-town for dim sum and boba (with above-pictured mystery traveller), and locust bar for taraoke (fun with sublime, kinks, and "road to nowhere," but i pledge next time i'm gonna try "help the aged") - i've gone across the river exactly twice. (as of tomorrow that's ten days - but i'll probably break it.)

once i almost forgot about - i took the bus (it was pouring, but still i should have taken the subway) and met liza in olde city to see into the wild, but we both missed it so we killed the intervening hours before the late showing at old standby mediocrities mexican post and cosi. the second time was this saturday, when i had my first morning of cooking brunch at the cafe (it was great!) and then rode all over town poring thrift and vintage stores hoping to augment my costume (to nearly no avail - did get a sweet star-buckled belt - though i did inevitably, almost inadvertently, augment my record collection.)

otherwise i've stayed in westy. some days i've barely left the house, it's true. (though i'm less contrite about that than you might think - a good chunk of that time i was working, or something like, and besides, our house is nice.) but i've been active too. apart from arthouse movies and, well, my job-thing, west philly seems to be staggeringly capable of fulfilling all my needs. (there's even mediocre mexican and costumarily unsatisfactory clothes stores here too - on friday i did what felt like the african-american version of that center city trawl, taking in forman mills, the endlessly fascinating 52nd street mall, and the second mile, where i at least got some swifty-neat cordy overalls.) (no critical mass[querade] over here though, which is mostly why i missed it.)

---

banking, post-office, yoga, dance, music, theater, brunch, art, houses, friends, serendipity, parties, people:

• pfcu [50th & bmore] - deposited checks for dj gigging and yoga-teacher-glasses-breaking-compensation. remembering to remove my atm card after the transaction.

• usps [50th & sansom] - rec'd: presents from dede (wallet) and my folks (huh? ok.) but more excitingly my dad's new manuscript, which i am presently 100pp. into and loving (it's like reading my own novel - 'cause my dad is like me - but better.)

• wake-up [49th & bmore] - liking the smoother thursday class more than wednesdays with glasses-crusher, though she's okay too. by no means have i abandoned the loft though - i've just been playing hooky these past two weeks (after two years plus i'm surely entitled?) so as to check out...

• take the lead [47th & pine] - my first swing at it since high school, practically. jitterbug's out in the aughts, now lindy's the thing and 'blues' is queen. so i'm new to the latter, but it's not hard to take to (slower, closer, looser: sexual.) last week reb came and we faked it; this week there were costumes, live tunes, getting the hang back. something endlessly fascinating about this kind of social dancing situation. also: (as my pop's narrator would say) coeds.

• mill creek tavern [42nd & chester] - soft people (incl. michael, mr. marvelous himself), opening for stinking lizaveta (buddies of dave's; local legend metal-jammers; must have read a different translation of bros. k than me), in extempore collaboration with (backing up?) damo suzuki (ex-can; int'l legend krautshouter; crazy old japanese dude ranting guttural gibberish.) um. i was there for st. liz - or for dave, really, so the rest was an odd surprise - less so the handful of familiars in the crowd, but like that. not so much my scene, but...hmm.

• curio theatre [28th & bmore] - death and the maiden. set (not "set") in s. africa. great production - riveting. arena staging. ending less interesting than i'd've hoped. unresolved questions, fine, but under-resolved dramatic arc unfortunate. still, right on. look forward to orton's butler.

• white dog cafe [34th & sansom] - rafa's 30th birthday! with m+r, gabe, mark, joanna. excellent company and decor (the room with 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-pointed stars on the ceiling), slightly underwhelming meal (even though the waitress emphatically assured me my unplanned order was "the best brunch option") but - sensational desserts: pumpkin ice cream sandwich (ginger cookies) and local goat-cheesecake (lime-"spiked" crust.)

• POST - more on that in a sec - but also, incidentally dg's mural [47th & bmore] - first side's done - i'm in it!

- - -

let's see here - i'll do it a bit roundabout. yes, after the brunch on sunday, j and i (with m+r, briefly) took a look at some studios (and artist homes) around westy. it was blustery and brisk, even with secret sunday-pants and super-soft sweater, but good in the sun. fall, finally? we talked about the aspirations and frustrations of meeting new people - still a project, to branch out solidly from collegiate networks, looking for something sustaining, something more, perhaps, pertinent to the present, (post?)-post-adolescent, urban, situation. she puts it straight up: wanting to meet people she might date. which is not how i tend to think about it. on the whole. but, maybe, should be? thing's tricky. we discussed. shades of those ancient freshman year analytic principles of r'ships.

we saw zarouhie's abstracted nola birdseyes at the cathedral. we saw zoe's cellular microscopy fantasias at metro. we went to jj's house - also home to kara rennert and her marvelous ceramic heads and figures - and that's where we ran into kate, who said "i figured i'd see you here." funny thing is i'd kind of figured that too. hm. she joined us and pointed us towards amy orr's house, which even more than jj's is an enviable, exquisite home-space, a charming building filled with beautiful objects, only a fraction of which were the official display pieces - although those, her found-object quilts (twist-ties, credit cards, action figures, crack vials), and falsie pillows (emblazoned with latex breasts) were utterly arresting. (amy took being called a hero in stride; she said she always needed cards and i handed her expired fmfcu visa.)

after that we swapped j for d before the culminating stop, the studioful-house where zoe was sharing her more recent and less metro-friendly drawings (e.g. the ones made with blood); james p. and jill m. also had work on display, but it was slightly overshadowed by, respectively, the former's congenial humor and hospitality and the latter's unanticipated performance on the aerial tissu (which, to my inexperienced eye at least, was absolutely spectacular. kate: "your muscle tone must be unsurpassed.") there was even a bonus demo show/tell from electronic music guy joe, of some of his favorite gadgets; then some bonhomie in the kitchen with ken and zoe and the rest. by then it had gotten chilly out again. ah! good good day of walking around looking at art and houses, meeting west philly artists, talking to folks in my neighborhood.

---

my neighborhood. these are things that happen. even after two years in northern liberties, i didn't do things in the hood this way. (unless you wanna call all of center city a 'hood, which isn't entirely implausible - it's not even all that much bigger.) there's a very simple explanation for the difference: i know people who live here. i even live with some of them (i.e. more than one.) but more imptly than that - there houses where i can, more or less, just go, without especial pretext or much advance planning (only two like that, 4834 walton and 1013 47th, but that's for now) - houses of my neighbors, houses of my friends. and i have other friends around here, in 1-brs, in collegiate housing, on scaffolding, that i can visit, even if i haven't taken so much advantage of that yet. and: my best friend lives here - i'd forgotten what it's like to for us to be that much more accessible to each other, even if the difference in the amount of time we share isn't that dramatic.

this weekend i went to three costume parties - all of them in west philly, which is telling even if that's just how it happened to happen. kate was at all three. who's kate? friend of dave's. otherwise very little overlap (dave and reb at two each; that's it.) the party friday night was at kate's house. i'd only met her once, briefly - three weeks back. but we played invitation tag and i was it, so i walked the four blocks down and half-a-block over, braving the downpour so i could bring them a pie [#5 - hands-down the best one i've made yet this season] in a milk crate, shielded with foil. i didn't know anybody else there ('til dave came), so i met some. though i probably won't remember them later sans santa/pirate/fifer/banana getup. didn't stay forever (b/c work) but had a good time.

the second one was at the walton house. i djed. plenty of folks i know, though i barely got to talk to any of them, of course. lots of fun all the same - read about it there. kate came and stood near the dj, but for a long time i didn't realize it was her - she was masked, and i was looking for her as a cowgirl (we'd matched the night before.) the third party was at ang's. two months in and they've already established a great party rep, as far as i'm concerned. i really like her roommates, and the people that show up (the majority of them tla video staffers) are good people, good party people. best costumes at this one i think - brontosaurus, madeline, pee-wee herman, coupla romans, obscure horror characters. ang was a giant squid. dave revived birdman; k8, masked again, brought crafty airplane-safety-illustration fridge magnets as a hostess gift. enjoyed talking with natasha about philadelphia, brazil, and michael jackson.

point being, perhaps, that there's three different, basically non-overlapping communities, right there, to which i am, however tangentially, connected. throw in the swingers and the brunch crowd (my housies and their circle) and the post artist contingent, and you've got three more sets. six, just within the past week; all of them to a greater or lesser extent centered around west philly; all of them groups that i am to a greater or lesser extent likely to be in contact with, more or less often, as long as i'm around here. not that i'll end up making new, true friends with many or even necessarily any of these people...or that i'll end up feeling like fully part of any of these communities. but at least they're there. it's good to know they're there. and maybe i will. maybe i'll make one of my very own.

- - -

yeah i know. i should have some pictures from the halloween parties. sorry! somebody else probably has some that i'll get eventually.

did i tell you what i've been wearing? my thought was that i should go as a texan. or even specifically an austinite, or possibly stephen austin. couldn't find anything specifically texan (no state-shaped belt-buckles, lone-star flags, or "don't mess with" t-shirts) so "texan" got conflated with "cowboy." then "cowboy" got confused with various other western archetypes (farmer, bandit, sheriff.) native ang lent me her plastic bandolier and picked me up a holster/sheriff-star set and mustache (which i never got to wear, lacking spirit gum and spirit.) i got those overalls and a farmerish red-and-white shirt, and stuck with the decently appropriate straw hat i already owned. looked all over town for some cowboy boots before realizing that mali already had some that fit me fine; she also lent me a purple bandana. oh, and i got that big star-buckle belt. lastly i wore the southwestern motif bola that my piano teacher gave me at high school graduation. the ensemble ended up pretty vague and general, but people seemed to like it anyhow.

so... am i moving to austin? when am i moving to austin? people keep asking, and i keep equivocating...yes, i'm still planning to... pretty definitely not until after the new year. a better answer, which i'm starting to revert to (the balance may have only just shifted again), is that i don't know. i really don't know what i'm gonna do.

i know that i'm not trying to make a decision at this point: i am staying in philly at least until january; to make a go of this job, to be east for the holidays, to continue enjoying the things i'm enjoying. you might have noticed that i'm pretty positive on west philly these days. (though, absolutely, it's not without its problems.)

in the meantime, i am sort of self-consciously surrounding myself with "texas culture" of various sorts: i'm reading lonesome dove. (yes, still.) i'm watching friday night lights. i'm listening to austin indie rock: okkervil river, the excellent knife in the water, er, spoon. and listening to chart country too, especially when getting into character. [one of amy orr's found-object quilts had a sticker advertising a magazine as "the how-to guide for living in the west" - perhaps that's what i need, he chuckled.]

i've gotta say i'm...not particularly feeling it at this point, even though i do still think it's a good idea. and i do still honestly think that i should give it a shot - not that i owe it to austin, or myself, but that a lot of good could come from it. but my reasons have gotten so confused at this point. goofball 'goni's surprise visit here, strangely enough, left me more conflicted about it, rather than less - which isn't a great sign, but there are some mitigating factors...

you know? we'll see. i do feel like i'm not in limbo anymore - at least, in a lot of ways i'm much less in limbo than i was. it's too easy for this life to feel like limbo, anyway. i'm trying to stay out of that.

it's 7:25 am. good night.

[eta:
okay, here's a halloween pic for you, from friday night's party. courtesy of facebook. taken by the cowgirl, who'd sashayed her way out of sharing a frame. that's me in the mid, more or less my full get-up minus the kick-ass belt i bought the next day, plus a gourd. birdman/phœnix on the left. lightswitch on the right - but you'll notice it's not wearing a costume. should've had it take the picture instead.]

did the ironing in a cowboy hat
felt as fresh as the paint in this new flat

. . .

texas only kept me awake
another interest I won't fake

. . .

it's so exciting to be sleeping here in this new room
you're my reason to get out of bed before noon

gittin giddy

2007-10-13T03:05:00.000-04:00

up past three third night in a row - 6 last night, 5 before; i'm going to sleep now (so as to wake up in...five?) starting off year XXV in freshly laundered, dryer-warm sheets. did eight out of eleven to-do items today - more or less - counting this entry as one; two of the outstanding are among the special self-actualizing errands i'll be running tomorrow instead.

the last of the big batch of used cds i binge-bought from half and amazon last week (after realizing that i'd bought nearly no - well, relatively few - albums in all of september!) arrived, and it was the one i'd been wanting for the longest, and paid the most for - it was ricardo villalobos' alcachofa, and for some reason the seller giftwrapped it, in lovely treefrog wrapping paper!

life's got that tangy tangible zing.

shake
shimmy
...shimmy
shake
shimmy
shimmy
shake
shimmy
shimmy
shake shimmy
shake
shimmy-shimmy
shake shake
shimmy-shimmy
shake
shimmy-shimmy
shake shake
shimmy-shimmy

quarter life

2007-10-11T01:31:00.000-04:00

today started with a friend needling me about not blogging (...how the time slips by between the posts, even when you're not thinking about it - though i did begin and abandon an entry in the interim, good bad not great [that's a shangri-las reference by way of the black lips, as i just found out], about how first i had been feeling mopey and then i got physically sick but was feeling better mentally and emotionally - well all this would go better if i could train myself into a more deliberately haphazard, anecdotal approach.)

she went on to 'braindump' about not knowing what to do with her life, feeling "crossroadsy and unsure." and she's the one who just got married and has a blossoming artistic undertaking and - if not a career per se, at least an agreeable day job in a sympathetic industry, which sounds more like a career to me than anything i've managed to stumble into yet. ("how much are you supposed to like your job?" she wondered - an excellent question.)

which is certainly not to suggest that she has any less right to bemoan or be apprehensive about her life situation than i do. from her perspective, sitting on the other side of the fence, i'm not so much unemployed as focusing on passions outside of the 9-to-5 grind. well fair enough - maybe so, even if i wouldn't tend to see it that way. how much are you supposed to like your passions?

another friend of mine just got broken up with in a particularly unfair and frustrating way. another one called yesterday, nearly in tears, having realized she needed to switch schools and coasts to escape from the despondency, borne of friendlessness and lack of community, that has been plaguing her now for weeks and months, maybe years. "ross, we're having quarter-life crises!" she burst out.

i'm not complaining...least not right now i'm not. you can call these things crises - some of them may be - but it seems to me life is just tough, there's a lot to sort out, and it doesn't quite dawn on us until after college when we're out in the thick of it. i've been living with low-to-mid-grade existential doubts and worries about what i'm doing with my life for long enough now that they've long since lost their urgency, which is to say much of their potency, which is not to pretend that they don't still knock me flat on my worse days. but, you know, here's my life - twenty-five years of it just about finished and accounted for - and i'm doing with it whatever i'm doing; trying to look to the future and suss out some sense, but trying just as hard to look to the present and recognize its relevance, to demand that my day-to-day existence assume a meaning and a fullness, prosaic or poetic as it might be, not to feel like there's something i'm still waiting for, to begin.

something like that - that's about what i told my friend. it goes okay. does make it a bit hard when the days don't live up to the visions i have for them as the days of a reasonable, responsible, real person - but it means i have to accept that those days are my life too, maybe a little too often these days (but only a little), and that alone has to make them a little worthwhile. right? not trying to justify the unjust, just trying not to disgust the disjust.

there's a lot i don't know - i do know exactly where i stand in terms of romantic/partnering relationships at the moment, which is nowhere. which is ok. i'm still trying to figure out where i'm going to live and when...things have flip-flopped at least once or twice since last post...but in the mean time i'm happy where i am, and getting happier. i'm starting to get a clearer sense of some things that are going on in the professional sphere - jobwise; perhaps careerwise in the sense that i can really only conceive of a career right now in similar terms to those described above. (i'll tell you about that later, once i know a little more.) i tend to think that i know what's going on on the friend scene, but sometimes i have thoughts about that too.

how does it really work out that i have all these friends spread out all over the place, most of them not especially involved in my quotidian life (my real life.) my friends in philadelphia are not well consolidated; most of them don't know each other, and they all have different schedules, which i try to keep in my head so as to develop plans around them, but it takes a long time and diligence to work it out, and for the most part i don't feel like i have much support or cooperation (like, more people who realize that i'm, presently, generally available, and more importantly game, more or less whenever - at least, more likely than not - and accordingly just call me up when they have ideas or availability.) is it that they don't remember me at those times, or do they just not have ideas or availability. i know, they don't have money or time or energy. life's tough. i do see friends and do things and fill up my social schedule, but i wish it could happen somehow less haphazardly and more fluidly, more deliberately, more in a context of community and coeval life-states, the outgrowth of a shared sense of inhabiting the same life in similar ways. crazy, i know. (again... there are a couple of folks who are not the people i'm talking about.)

what i'm really doing with my life, proper, when those things do work out, are the kinds of thing of little, self-contained, but still significant life-filling things i would be writing about here if it didn't tend to take me so long in between posts that i feel like i owe you guys (owe me?) a life status update each time, not that i have anything that especially new to report.

like this weekend there was a camping trip - a funny thing, the output of several weeks planning - close to a hundred e-mails worth of it (that i was involved with anyway), as well as chats and even some phone conversations - hard to say why it took so much exactly, though i'm sure i occasioned a chunk of it personally - through habit or necessity, not really intention, i suppose i ended up doing a lot of shepherding, which was sometimes stressful and also delectable. anyway it all came together in a pleasantly, deceptively haphazard fashion - and no question, it was all a lot of fun, unhurried and easy-going - it seemed to me curiously self-containing, that there was no more or less to it than exactly what it consisted of; each phase of the trip not so much experienced as enacted - travel, in multiple stages, each with its attendant joys and concerns; making camp; bailing on dinner - due to a thunderstorm that was well-timed but not quite well enough - and going out instead (to a china buffet); campfire; breakfast; hike; camping again [in a reduced configuration] with dinner in-camp this time; another fire; another little walk, and then the return travel.

not that these things weren't enjoyable - they absolutely were - but other than this broad, inevitable framework (much of which wasn't even discussed in advance, even with the amount of discussing that happened, it was just left to be determined, passively, by default), there's not much to say about what happened on the trip. sure, there are anecdotes that can be told (honey-mustard-pretzel taste-test on the drive up; a cappella tromboning; flummoxing the china buffet waitstaff by ordering not only á la carte but also veggie; gerrit and derrick's surprise delayed after-dark arrival and late-night grilling of hamburgs, sausages and shrimp; enthusiastic "manly" log-splitting which led to the arbitrary throwing of pieces of wood; impromptu variety show in a lean-to near "stony ledge") - and there was also some perfectly lovely scenery - but the substance of the trip was all in the group dynamics; the running jokes and banter and camaraderie and general silliness that was going on throughout.

and even that, in a way, was impersonal, if that makes any sense - so much of what was happening didn't bear much specific connection to the relationships i have with these various people - even though some of them are my very best friends - i'm definitely glad everyone in this group was there, but i feel like i could have had almost the same experience with a largely or wholly different (but similarly composed) group. i would find it strange to say that we "bonded" over the course of the weekend. thinking back, i'm not sure i really had more than one or two meaningful discussions with anybody the whole time, all on the last day when we shifted down to a five-person group (rather than ten), which of course brought an attendant change in dynamic.

i hope it doesn't sound like i'm complaining... really i'm not; the trip was absolutely a success for what it was, which was everything i would have wanted it to be. i'm trying to express something that i don't quite understand myself, and i'm not entirely sure whether other people experienced it this way at all. i'd be curious to know what you understand from what i've written. anyway.

[there was at least one absolutely memorable and special moment for me, which stands out as my favorite memory from the weekend - the singing that we did around the campfire on saturday night, which flowed from one song to the next without any discussion or even any pauses; just starting up, overlapping, sometimes several songs at once, harmonizing, adding air trombone obligato, switching before the previous one had necessarily finished, and creating collectively generated free-associative thematic and stylistic threads; i sang from "when the saints" and "swing low" to "black water" to "dixie" to "the night they drove old dixie down" to "zip a dee doo dah" to "hakuna matata" to "the bare necessities" to "the other day i met a bear" and onward - also memorable were "son of a preacher man" and "wipeout" and "smells like nirvana" and "one of us" and "99 problems"...we skipped simon & garfunkel and magnetic fields and indigo girls and gershwin and even the beatles until the following night, a more conventional folksing with mostly me and reb...even though it was late and past quiet hours; which i know created some unease too even though we were grooving too high to want to relent...anyway i'll remember that.]

better let it be now - i'm really gearing up to return to mincetapes. hopefully i'll be back here before saturday, but if not, wish me a happy quarter century?

how come i end up where i belong?

post 1000: the return to form blog magick party

2007-09-24T23:33:00.000-04:00

well if the 'boss is doing it, must be time. back back back.

in the last month and half, i too helped some friends get married; got a driver license; used it to transport my worldly possessions out of nolibs in a borrowed pick-up with an ornery stick-shift; set up comfy temporary digs on the third floor of friends' recently-purchased west philly home; continued to develop a (still coalescing) plan to move, in a month or so, to austin, tx. in the meantime i've been basking with my family around the northeast [rochester, wnkn, state college, columbia md], sharing notes, singing songs, talking about god. also i succumbed to facebookland, i biked back and forth around philly ushering for and taking in as much of the fringe festival as humanly possible, and i slew a slew of dj gigs, maybe more than i've ever had in month.

this, f'rinstance was the flyer i made for an engagement the other night; it didn't end up getting used (in favor of somebody else's design with rodney dangerfield and "schoolgirl" which i'd left tacit), but it was fun to discover how many school-related fonts are available ("chalkboard" not included). nobody came, nobody danced. nobody's really been dancing at any of my gigs lately, which is sort of a drag. booker/promoter kate hawk [at work], whose idea the whole school thing was, came as a schoolgirl, and that's about it. no matter.

it was good to talk to the other dj about traktor, which i'm currently trying to acquire. i've been monkeying around with the demo, and it seems well enough suited to most of my purposes for the time being. am slightly afraid it will make mix-making too easy and hence boring, but i'll figure a way around that i'm sure. 21st century dj zeitgeist here comes love.

also, fall started. yesterday officially, a week after i declared it to be fall and made my first autumn-colored (carrot, yam, ginger) soup. tonight i made a butternut squash and tomato curry, and apple pie, and an outrageously rich caramel-swirl ice cream. most days i'm inside too long, or else i'm out all day - that's my busybody layabout lifestyle - but one thing about fall is that (unlike summer) you can enjoy it almost as much through the windows. the trees outside mine are still green, but orange flecks are emerging.

(best windows moment in this room: a kid, probably 8 or so, whose window is less than ten feet from mine, cheering me on and giving me thumbs-up as i played some mountain goats and miracles on my rusty acoustic. then he said: "pause that, my show's on.")

i'm slowly settling into (old, new) west philly and into this (new, old) house - both of them lovely, luxuriant places to be living, especially during this most lovely and luxuriant of season shifts. (they say that autumn won't arrive in austin 'til november, so i may get to have it twice in a row!) the first two weeks here i was so (pre)occupied with the fringe festival that i was barely home. last week i shopped at mariposa, sat in clark park, watched a video with bonnie & clyde, took a class at wake up west and shared a magic bagel after with rebecca at the satellite, checked out the dock street brewpub (the new face of westward baltimore yuppification, and it looks pretty darn nice) and rearranged my gloriously sunny east-facing bedroom for enhanced yoga space.

and now i'm on a push for establishing increased livability on the first floor, all three rooms of which are (or were until recently) filled by a substantial amount of clutter. today i spent all afternoon scrubbing cleaning and organizing the recently-exterminated kitchen...really all i did all day except for baking that pie and reading about bonus failed presidential assassins on wikipedia. oh, and trying to register for the printmaking (paper lithography) class which was going to perfectly fill my remaining time in philadelphia and give me a versatile and relevant new skill and which was supposed to start tonight...only to find out it had been cancelled due to underenrollment. damn!

will attempt to think of some other worthwhile thing(s) to do with my next six weeks so as not to feel wholly unconstructive. (not proving the easiest thing to do. i've made a couple inquiries into temporary internships and such, with no luck yet.) well anyway. so today's been low-key (though the kitchen venture was a good undertaking), but it's a nice counterpoint to an excellent action-packed yesterday. i couldn't have planned a better first day of fall if i'd known that's what it was!

sara and i went dogwalking and kayaking on the schuylkill in the morning, and joined in for thirty or so (the counting was fairly inscrutable) out of 108 sun salutations in fairmount park (for me this was the culmination of a big yoga week that included three classes and some home practice - my hamstrings, triceps, and very-famous upper-mid-back are still feelin' fresh from it, and here comes another!) later on i wound up stranded in old city, so i said hi to rodney and checked out julie taymor's surprisingly non-cringe-inducing aquarian nostalgia spectacular (the visuals do not disappoint, the beatles interpolations are fun and effective, and who cares about plot anyway?), before meeting first rebecca and then mali and rafa for another couple of thoroughly enjoyable spectacles - one theatrical, one culinary.

(last week was no-restaurant week - and it really was too, at least until friday when i skipped kol nidre and met mr. heidi and mr. heideck at nodding head for a pint and a bacon-cheese-burger...and then i joined sarah mac and co. for weekly post-yoga saturday brunch at cafe lift - mmmm lemon ricotta pancakes with figs and honey.... but this is restaurant week.)

and so, forth.

i'm excited for next weekend's camping trip. i'm looking forward to deejaying a couple-few philly house parties in october. i'm hoping to visit boston before i split west. i'm glad to be writing here again even if it still takes too long to feel like a reasonable accomplishment.

i've got a birthday coming up - my 25th - i think i'd like to figure out a good way to spend it with my friends and family in the big apple, something appropriate to a dignified number like that and an undignifed number like me. any suggestions?

stay up super late tonight
picking apples
making pie

roasty toasty

2007-08-10T13:29:00.001-04:00

i knew that i wouldn't get that colorado post up before the wedding unless i finished it before going to d.c., and of course i didn't. even though i thought i might, as i wrote the bulk of it on rob and heidi's couch friday night, before the festivities began. now i'm on angela and robert's couch in astoria - another very comfortable couch i have slept on several times - and popular demand (sarah and ester) is telling me i should blog about the wedding. but it's gettin' late and i ought to get out and be in new york, as nice as it is to be in here listening to the rain outside and the free design's raindrops.

it's a magic carpet ride
every door will open wide
for happy people like you

street tar 'n summer, 'll make a horcrux of your soul

2007-08-04T01:26:00.000-04:00

finished HPVII (and poked around the ensuing discussion [spoilers!]; also consulted with my bridegroom on some of the finer points of wandlore) last night, so now i'm at liberty to attend to more important things. like, em, blogging? wasn't sure i was necessarily going to read it right away, as i normally like to lag a few years behind the times, but after reading V in time to see the movie on opening day, during ester's lunch break (better than book, we agreed) and speeding through sarahco's copy of VI, i succumbed to momentum and impulse-bought it on sale at king sooper's while marcus rode a plastic rodeo horse.

yeah. good stuff. the electrifying conclusion. a strong ramp-up to the end (unlike, say, narnia's whimper), even if i can concede some of these quibblers' qualms, after the fact. biggest letdown: not enough hot ginny action. (that's not a spoiler is it?) more luna would've been nice too.

as it happened, i got into colorado on the night book seven was released, so after matthew picked me up from the airport, we caught up with the gang post-potluck and headed down to pearl street where the teeming hordes were gathered around boulder bookstore in their rowlingian regalia, awaiting the stroke of midnight. a couple of folks at the bar we were at ducked out to pick up their pre-ordered copies and then ran around the room giddily clutching the books and gloating.

bummed around in boulder for a few days, checking out many of the assorted cafes, restaurants and bars - standouts included hapa - late night happy hour sushi and sake cocktails, with sci-fi decorating motifs and '80s radio rock dj soundtrack - and the mountain sun brewpub, where i played an excellent game of scrabble with katrina, devised domino rally diversions with erin, drank a delectable ginger-flavored draft, and listened to an accomplished jam-style band whose covers drew from ween, portishead, and i think something even more surprising that i can't remember.

we dealt with some car trouble: the alternator belt snapped on matt's newly acquired 1984 mazda RX7 - i learned more than i ever knew about auto mechanics watching his wrench-monkey brother mike poke around and fix it. also took a short hike up one of the flatirons, during which one of my hiking boots fell almost completely apart, to excellent comic effect; biked out boulder canyon a short ways; did some yoga in the grass; went to an unexpectedly jesus-centric service at the all souls church of boulder; played in backyard with pepper, the eriksons' affectionate and fluffy graying black cat; and visited the REI mecca in denver (for new boots, a tent, and guidebooks to the maroon bells/snowmass wilderness.)

after some last-minute lineup changes (from three down to two, then back up to four in a matter of hours the night before) we set out for aspen tuesday morning to embark on a two-night backpack up in the rockies. we picked up some necessary final provisions at "the miner's building," a fabulously dusty old hardware and sundries store/general purpose dry goods emporium that we discovered amidst the gucci-wearing gawkers and immaculately kept-up public walking areas. there was a shelf of jumbled and inconsistently price-tagged rain gear that mostly looked like it had been sitting there since the '70s (at least judging from the mustaches on the package models.) i got a canary-yellow slicker and pants set. at least i think they were supposed to be a set.

in any case they served me well and i was glad i had them along. we hiked, that late afternoon (making camp around dusk) and the following morning, up the conundrum valley to the hot springs (it's hard to find good pictures of the springs b/c they usually have naked people in them.) matthew and i took an additional side-hike up to triangle pass, at almost 12000 feet, and then scrambled up a little peak from there. the view - 360º vantages into close to a dozen different fourteener-flanked valleys, with shades of countless reds, greens, and purples - was made even more spectacular by the approach of some dramatically chiaroscuroed cloudmasses from the south and west...but of course those same thunderheads made us skedaddle back down the scree and through the endless wildflower meadows about as quickly as we could - pausing to refill our water-bottle at a snowpatch - so as to avoid any close calls with lightning which, as our guidebooks emphatically reiterated, can actually kill you!

as it happened we made it back to camp just as the rain started to come down, to find dave and elise cooking up some chili in the vestibule of their tent. the four of us huddled in their tent as the downpour continued, worried about the effectiveness of their rainfly and (more worryingly) the makeshift trash-bag groundcloth, gave each other footrubs, listened to a roald dahl short story, and first waited, then gave up on waiting, for the rice which was to accompany the chili. after close to two hours matt and i decided to give up on the huddled semi-misery and left the tent on the pretext of going to filter water from the stream. i tried pumping some water from the springs so that d and e could have hot-water-bottles in their sleeping bags - a mostly failed experiment but a nice idea regardless. around that time (10pm), the rain let up,
so m and i went to the hot springs, which for basically the first time since we'd arrived was empty of bathers. while we soaked, a pair of thoroughly bedraggled pair of hikers arrived on the scene - they'd just walked the eight miles from the trailhead, at least two hours of it in the steady downpour as well as darkness, and it's beyond me why they hadn't stopped to make camp at some earlier point.

anyway. those are the eight miles that we trucked out the following afternoon, after a luxuriously paced camp morning, a little too quickly and with too few water breaks, on my part, as it turned out - i'd been feeling pretty good as we hiked, but after arriving back at the cars i was hit with a bout of altitude sickness (cum-dehydration-cum-heat-exhaustion?) the most comically pitiful moment came as we drove over the spectacular independence pass, where i vomited a bellyful of clif bars and dried fruit in front of a glorious mountain vista, complete with a rainbow, and a cute, concerned-looking deer that came over to investigate me. pulled over to throw up four more times throughout the drive and otherwise i just huddled miserably in my seat. but i was more or less to rights by the next morning.

from there i went to aurora to visit my brother and sister-in-law, plus nephew marcus and baby niece evelyn (and ben the good doggy) - a low-key weekend, or at least as low key as it can be with a rambunctious three-year-old and a hungry two-week-old. we took some tricycle and wagon trips to the nearby park and playground, ate meals prepared by the MOPS (mothers of preschool children) and the eggroll king, and watched "mater and the ghost light" (a short from the cars dvd bonus features) at least twice. hooray for family. on my last day there, alex took off for a business trip to italy, and chris came down with a violent stomach bug, so i looked after marcus while her sister took her to the hospital. after one meltdown-timeout cycle, we had a relatively relaxed time, eating pb+j and watching both cars and finding nemo.

i ended up seeing three pixar films that day, as matthew and i reunited went to catch the excellent ratatouille. quickly - highlights of the rest of the trip: two visits powell's sweet shoppe on pearl street, an afternoon in grand lake with scott b. and sarah (minigolf!), and the grand finale daft punk concert at red rocks...in all quite an action-packed week and a half. i can't say i'm completely won over by the colorado lifestyle, but there is certainly some nice living to be had out there.

now back to philly where spring garden street has been torn up and is hell for biking, the humidity is making my ankle joint fussy again, i need to come up with a magical solution for what to do with my stuff and my life, and i haven't even had a yoga class in three weeks (!). but first: d.c. and the wedding. oh, it doesn't stop.

youth and beauty brigade

2007-07-16T23:14:00.000-04:00

1. the drinks i invented (and drank) on saturday night

i) "light and stormy"
• light rum
• Goya® ginger beer
• lime
• a bit of tonic water to mellow the bite of the ginger beer (!)

ii) "beteljin"*
• beet juice
• gin

iii) [untitled(?)]
• slightly melted homemade vegan mint chocolate chip soy ice cream [soy milk, soy creamer, sugar, telephone brand agar powder, free give-away local organic mint from the co-op, chocolate chips, peppermint schnapps]
• vegan chocolate soy ice cream
• soy milk
• peppermint schnapps
• creme de cacao
• bailey's irish cream
• ice cube
• garnish with mint leaf

iv) "jewish sangria"
• manischevitz concord grape juice
• raspberry vodka

2. so, this sign, or, art, is on second street, just south of spring garden:

(my favorite part is the "T")

i guess it should make me think of james blunt or something, when i go past it, but it makes me think of death cab.

well, and it makes me think: yes. indeed. hurrah. everyyou is, and can probably stand to be reminded. so thanks, thanks for risking corniness to bring us this special public service announcement, o unknown artmaker.

a little while ago i noticed that folks had started tagging, writing on, graffiti-ing, defacing, what-have-you, some of the letters. and i thought: now that is brilliant - whoever comes along, and whether they merely observe or if they choose to contribute, say, or defile, as you will, the artwork - which, after all, forms a blank slate, a large flat white expanse for whatever may come - they are perpetually affirmed in their beauty and worth, and by extension the beauty of their actions. the art, by the statement it quite literally embodies, welcomes all comers. and, beautifully, no matter how many people pile on their tags and messages and drawings, the original content=form of the piece can never be obstructed/destructed, because it is just delineated by the edges of the letters, which are simply attached to the fence.

now, i didn't suppose the artist(s) had this in mind - if they had, how terrifically cool, though if not, the serendipity is perhaps even more so. but i eagerly hoped that people would continue writing on it, and be inspired by others' examples to make their own increasingly varied contributions, thereby becoming simultaneously affirmed and themselves affirming, and creating an ever deeper and multivalent work. public art, indeed!

i biked by yesterday, on my way to pick up the tickets i'd won to see the decemberists, and i noticed that all the grafs had been painted over, in individual blotches. in a white that didn't match the white of the sign(!) it put me in mind of the subconscious art of graffiti removal (watch it if you haven't!). and there is a certain to this palimpsestuous art-upon-art-upon-art, if you want to see it that way. but i liked my idea better...oh well. you are beautiful.

she said "it's hopeless
i'm a slut for the new york times"

*didn't actually invent this on saturday, but i came up with the name then.

it depends day

2007-07-05T21:29:00.000-04:00

i quit my job yesterday; told my landlord that i'll move out at the end of august. so i'm gonna have to figure something out.

also just got notice that our internet provider is discontinuing service at the end of july.

i have a new roommate, as of sunday, who is also matthew (aka jazzclinic, fka dr. jazz phd.) he's contributed his own big bookshelf of cds that extends the wall of music to fully halfway around the living room; i think basically our only overlaps are some promos he's given me copies of. he's also the first of my three roommates here to really set up his own station in the living room, which is nice actually. we face away from each other, dormroom-style, as he says. so that's for two months.

[failure to complete/publish post in a timely fashion: -2 points]

i'm a
i'm a
i'm a
i'm a

mice pace

2007-06-10T14:29:00.000-04:00

couple things. travelling some - new york city (karaoke funeral, bbq penguins, etc.), rochester, swarthmore (yale house memorial day bash), swarthmore (commencement.) my fourth swat grad weekend - 03 04 06 07 - listening to all of those speeches always makes me both nostalgic and also feel like i didn't quite get the 'correct' swarthmore experience, as they eulogize it. because i only did/learned/absorbed some portion of the invaluable things they describe, not all of them. or maybe it really is because the swarthmore they conjure doesn't (of course) really exist for anybody. i liked jenny keith's the best, not just for how much mileage she got out of a potentially corny but actually resonant metaphor, but for recognizing that different students, like different members of the same family, each have unique experiences of the college. i always feel funny for those students, sitting at their commencements, listening to those speeches, whom i know didn't have the fuzzy and idealistic swat experiences being described, much more than me.

didn't have a great view to see martha as she walked, but she was wearing the earrings, made by yoga sara, that i gave her the night before, at brasserie perrier (right next door to my grad wknd restaurant, alma) (best thing i had was i think my roasted beet tricolor salad, though the cucumber-ginger-lemon-gin "ale" was yummy too.) she seemed to be holding it together on lack of sleep better than i did - but then she barely had the opportunity to let her emotions take over with all the running-around senior week class officer organizing and campaign management; i followed her around on her errands for an hour or two on thursday, in the zone, telling the story backwards. now she's off in amsterdam, or maybe beyond by now. europe for two months three days after moving out - barely time to regroup but maybe just as well that way.

i do wish i'd been able to interact with her more substantively between now and then, but that pretty obviously wasn't going to happen, so it's ok. as i wrote to her in a repurposed swarthmore college thank you card (originally bought for my high school grad present thankses), we're now going to be in the same life-stage for the first time since possibly elementary school. looking forward to it. i do regret that i didn't think of the beatles when i was tinkling some ivories at her and kristin's post-commencement luncheon party at the meetinghouse (best part of which was doing high school musical with cousin zoe). of course, i should have played "martha my dear"! and if i'd thought of it, i also would have played "in my life." what a song.

it's summertime, of course - that's the big news - in basically every way except actually (meteorologically, culturally, socially, institutionally.) spring is the shortest season because it's measured from the end of snow to the beginning of mugginess, which never lasts three months anywhere i've lived. fall on the other hand (by the reverse measure) is nice and leisurely. maybe that's why i've always had such a tough time putting a finger on the spring months (from a distance, march and may always seemed interchangeable), while october is eternal. on my game for once, i made my summer mix starting just at the tail end of memorial day weekend, and finished up a coupla days ago. that's where all my blog energies have gone, for that week.5 at least. you can listen to it now, at mincetapes or mincepace, and i've just manufactured the first round of mass-packaging for it, so you can get your own copy, with or without a bonus disc, depending. i'm quite happy with it, anyway - it sort of reveals me to be weird. i can't claim to understand it.

and the summer society is happening, so i'm psyched. i keep meeting these people, with their warehouse art lofts in old kensington or whatever you call, with varying shades of completion and webreality [AMMS, PIFAS, MSC], waitresses, teachers, mural artists. they admire each others work. maybe that's what i need? i'm a dj. if i had a car i could be a drummer? (i have a permit, again, as of.) or else, they have some tracks online that i should check out. walked with david guinn to his, parked over on baltimore and 47th, and said we were collecting faces - no. amassing recognitions, and if we were more efficient the whole city could be collapsed in about no time. emily told me upwards of twenty times in quick succession that she was going to write me a check, is that okay? (yes, and she already gave it to me, it's made out to "ross." i forgot her birthday present.)

and everyone's on myspace. get over it.

friday was "dangerously hot," so cory and i went inside, to the fabric workshop museum (1/2 exhibit; no fabric) and the masonic temple, and we almost got to go to the top of the city hall tower but we were a few minutes late because we got some pretzels and blueberry (frozen) yogurt at reading terminal. i did go to the pma, and looked mostly at indian animal paintings instead of japanese landscapes. walked around barefoot on the delightfully varied surfaces of the medieval/asian wing until a hesitant guard offered: "i'm not sure whether we have a policy on shoes...but i believe they're supposed to be worn. we don't want you to get a splinter, and then decide to sue the museum. i think that's it. we don't want you to get blood all over the floor. it's the blood reason."

so i sat on the steps (not on the side of the steps!) and somebody behind me said "that was a good tour" - then i figured out he meant my t-shirt, phish summer '97 (ten years!), which i wear, um, subversively? (not ironically!) oregonian multi-instrumentalist (self-described), in town (malvern) for computer training, has a band with the guy from the (tequila) champs. cool - i always feel self-conscious wearing that but i wear to force myself to try to not feel self-conscious. it's a complicated game that i don't always win. it's inspired by matt rubin.

i have my fingers in so many artistic pies, says that guy. oh -that reminds me -really, i didn't mean to make this a transition until just now, honest, i made a strawberry-rhubarb pie last week. my dad scolded me: "rhubarb pie, ross!" ok fine. i got some more 'barb, so pretty! slender and pink, at the fair food farmstand. i'll make a straight-up one - when? maybe in wanakena. waste of freshness. oh well. good fruitscrap sorbet too - straw/blueb/mango; i won't tell you the secret part, because it tastes better if you don't know.

well there you go. every day i say 'time to blog' and now i did. grandparents can stop grumbling, for a while anyway.

i think, new plan, i will see daft punk at red rocks.

this is why
this is why
this is why

travelog

2007-05-12T12:23:00.000-04:00

seattle:
got sprayed w/ blue cheese foam

new york:
karaoke funeral bbq penguins

philadelphia:
hieropornophony

artparty hookup

karaoke funeral

2007-05-11T17:50:00.000-04:00

BBQ penguins

glubbluggbugbel frrnfi wefwefoinp ccnncc gg gg gg
wwpon1 30oir sdf vnvvncs qqw

can't even.

wwffnfnfnfnfnfnfnfnrinfrinrfinrfinrfinrfinrfinrf
0v0

well,

ergponerg

ethponasierwerwerwer 23rr3

12--0n4t434tp'xg''gg'snsnsnwewerwoingpmgpimgt;t;rblblvqnqnpnpdfsonergoindfgo;in

i go to bed and i wake up
isn't that interesting?

i packed my stuff. i'm on the bus. i can't believe it's true.

2007-04-26T11:21:00.000-04:00

woke up from a sleep i didn't even realize i'd drifted off to, just as the postmarks was about to end - guess that makes it by default the rainy chinatown bus indie pop headphone nap album of the year. it took fixing idly for several minutes on the ubiquitous pseudo-profound "we are not response" sign for me to arrive at: oh! i can blog on the bus!

so i'm blogging on the bus. leaving home again - this time only two days after i'd returned. why i'm as bad as my roommate! had this sudden insight - if that's what it was - at the time of my most major recent stymied blogging impulse - how remarkably closely the physical space dichotomy of at-home/out maps onto a kind of psychological interiority/exteriority. that i feel inside of myself when i'm at home, and when i'm go somewhere else, i'm abstracted; outside of - inhabiting something other than - my life, almost. this might work out to be more limitedly true wherein by home you mean my apartment, but i think i was construing "home" somewhat more broadly as the places germane to my current daily existence, which might include much of the streets and public spaces of central philadelphia [although, like, worklife certainly feels like an abstraction. the loft - yoga - does feel homely though.]

most markedly (i feel like i've mentioned this before) i definitely enter a psychological elsewhere whenever i go on a trip, depending on the destination and my familiarity with it, this might be a wholly exterior space, or a psychotemporal past, or even a future, but it's never precisely present. if that makes sense. is this observation in any way remarkable? i can't tell. anyway, was originally gonna mention that in reference to the evacuation of two weekends ago; in between one in d.c. and one in seattle [and now i'm headed to nyc, after which i'll have spent effectively all of april outside of my city and my life - it amounts to escapism as a lived reality.]

that was the time i stayed in philly - and my parents came here to visit - but we did spend all day saturday out swarthward, starting with early brunch at the box car cafe (in glen mills - "home of scrapple fries and pancakes as big as your face"), then two plays at swat - the fishbowl (as stage-managed by rebecca) and into the woods (as produced by martha) - punctuated by dinner at heng's thai and drinks/dessert at (!?) charlie brown's steakhouse. the meals were no better or worse than those i ate in the city with my parents the night before at isla ibiza and after at farmicia - but the plays were both great. itw especially, i want to say, by virtue of being such a great great great show to begin with, and also probably the most impressive drama board production i've ever seen (as primarily evidenced by its doing justice to the show.) fishbowl (a new original; playwrighting thesis by anna belc) had me struggling a bit at first, but revealed itself marvelously, especially after several rounds of post-discussion which had me wanted to view it again. also, unquestionably the finest stage-managing i've ever witnessed.

both plays dealt centrally parental-filial relationships - as, to a slightly lesser extent, did caroline, or change, which i'd seen earlier in the week [i decided that it's not quite as phenomenal a work as itw, but it's close, and makes comparably excellent use of little-explored possibilities of the musical-theatre form] - and i might have had something ponderous and intertextual to say about those relationships in the context of my parents' visit (and parents weekend) and the universality of those themes in the plays. but i'll just mention that the final suite of songs ("no-one is alone";"children will listen") definitely brought some tears to my eyes, of the resonant-shared-humanity perfect-imperfection sort also evoked by bobby and the us v. john lennon.

this is from an e-mail: "nice dinner with my parents at fARMiCia tonight - food not amazing, but good talking, mostly about into the woods and life/career kinds of things. my mom has done so much incredible good work as a doctor and a teacher, but she feels like she is a failure as an academic - so in a sense like her career is not successful. talking about what the "obvious" things would be for me to do (after my mom had said that my dad tends to avoid doing those things in his own life - for instance not going to grad school for south asian studies at penn - cutting off his nose to spite his face) my parents at first were saying to be an academic or a cultural critic, or a composer (my dad) or a graphics person of some sort. among other things, am wary of some of those things because i'm afraid of self-promotion, or at least having to self-promote on a constant/regular basis. we'll see though. there is something [perversely?] appealing about waiting tables."

i'll stop now to keep this neat; i'm not on the bus anymore. i'd write about seattle but i'm obliged to report on the conference elsewhere, even though on balance the non-conference parts were more fulfilling than the conference.

perhaps, my post-rate will increase and i will reach my 1000th sometime before the end of the year.

now i'm gonna say something slightly off-topic:
shy represents, buy my album when i drop it

2007-04-12T15:37:00.000-04:00

if there's something Buddhist about detachment, the Chinatown bus provides a good venue for it. there was bus trouble both ways travelling between philly and dc this holiday weekend, involving expenditure of time and money i might rather have not.

actually the way there it was greyhound, who sold me a ticket and only refunded 80% when the woman in front of me in line got the last seat - still a net gain of $2 that way (even counting the $5 i allowed a bedraggled lady to scam from me), because that's how much cheaper ctown is. [lost time too, but it amounted to trading tea with heidirob for coffee with jbjonas.] you pay for it in chaos though, and often hours - trying for an early return (4pm) sunday i ended up spending over four, at 5th & H, mostly.

[i stood in the maddening crowd for a while, read my book on the sunny sidewalk, got a bubble tea and tried the undersatisfying crispy duck (by forcible recommendation) at the still appealingly dingy corner joint there - my fortune cookie said "you look pretty" - and then jedd rescued me and we chatted more over measly thai salads.]

but: i didn't mind. it's time; it's money. okay. i have these things. lamenting them, getting frustrated, is more than merely not worth the effort. it's what the world seems to expect - or what we expect from the world - and most people succumb to it, and i see it make them miserable in moments, and slowly seep in. but detachment is dubious - not-becoming-upset is not being happy, and though i can do both, most of the time, and although instituting disconnect as a sunday night stress-saver may be a useful skill, it's nothing to build a life on. i want to get Engaged.

time and money - are not a big deal - they're just things. however - life is made up of things - and life is a big deal - so there is your paradox.

yoga, by the way, does not manifest to me as being primarily about detachment - well, in a sense engagement and detachedness are two sides of the same coin: we disengage from some things in order to more fully engage with others, although that may not be a very orthodox way of understanding it. anyway, yoga absolutely engages me with my physical body, of course (ahh, my camstrings and halves!) and also with my selfy-self: it's a time and space for me to, as they say, go inward, but in a nonspecific way, without reference to my external and emotional life, devoid of content in a sense, strangely, interacting with my self in an unmediated, one-to-one way that doesn't often happen in everyday life (as in: come on, self, make your body work! okay, now you can rest. thanks, that feels good. mmmm.)

but it also engages me with other people, in a communal if not precisely social way - the other selves-being-selves in my little neighborhood class are there together, sharing the space, not interdependent on one another, but resonating. and we laugh at russ's silly sayings, and we mumble together, breaking silence hesitantly, when he asks us a question, and afterwards we talk to each other a little bit, like friendly acquaintances who don't quite verbalize their commonalities, but are aware of them nonetheless.

work, sorry to say, is more opportunity for detachment. though i am still enjoying - maybe even more actively - the actual work that i'm doing, measuring mixing transferring filling and most especially shaping - i almost feel like i could stand there rolling up croissants (esp. the plain, unfilled ones) for the whole eight hours. i'm still learning and improving, but getting up towards a wall, beyond which it's going to take some focus and determination to increase and keep up my speed and efficiency. well enough - most of the time, i'm inclined to want to find that focus - even if it has to be self-derived, since i rarely get much feedback on my work, and when i do it takes some interpretation to be constructive.

but although there's something, i'll say it, zenlike, about that self-containment and autonomous quest for focus - there's also a less pleasant, obligatory sort of cast to the detachment: i have a hard time feeling very invested in my workplace, either in terms of the work itself (i don't really get to see the finished product, and folks don't seem to have much if any sense of pride in what we're doing, which to me seems like a necessity) or in terms of the people that work there. i mostly don't talk - i stay to myself, not to get involved in the volleys of verbal abuse - well-meaning, ostensibly, but still, i asseverate, not very nice - and the outbursts of petty frustration.

and so i slough off engagement and endeavor instead to conceive of my time there as fundamentally separate from the rest of my life. it's not, precisely, that i don't want to be there: i'm usually able to engross myself in the activity of the enough to get genuine pleasure from it, if not constantly than often enough. but for the most part i don't take real breaks, i don't stop to eat a meal, i just plug on and get er done, so that i can then leave and my day can begin in earnest. it's as if - if i packed a lunch and broke to eat it there, or if i had an engaged conversation with my coworkers, or (maybe especially) if i let myself get stressed and frustrated about the way things were going there, it would be acknowledging a continuity with the rest of my existence, giving my worktime a weight and a reality that would force me to reckon with it on a more involved level, which must inevitably turn out to be unsatisfying. like orpheus looking back or persephone eating the seeds.

ahem: this cover story (what a great cover!) from last week's philly weekly is about a "positive psychologist," who studies happiness and espouses "learned optimism" as way to actively counter depression by replacing it instead of just trying to extinguish it. the article asks: what are the keys to lifelong bliss? statistically, it's not money, education, attractiveness, children, or geography (almost - from my reading, it sounds like people in the south, the midwest, and california are happier than northeasterners.) strong relationships with family and friends, unsurprisingly, are strongly correlated (which suggests that my priorities are in the right place) along with genetics (where i seem to be in good shape.) also:

Seligman divides happiness into three “lives”: the pleasant life, which involves successfully pursuing life’s pleasures, such as sex, music or vanilla ice cream; the engaged life, which involves using what he calls your “signature strengths” to pursue your passions; and the meaningful life, which involves using your strengths and virtues to serve a larger purpose.

well, i'm fairly solid on the "pleasant" front (guess which of those three things is my favorite - hint: it's not vanilla ice cream, though that's close.) the article suggests that all three are similarly important, but that name seems a little dismissive. i feel like music might cross over into the second category for me - at least, i feel "engaged" with it in a way that goes beyond "pleasant," and i think it's where i try to focus my "signature strengths" (maybe i should try to articulate what those are - i'm not really sure.) "meaning" is often evasive..."a larger purpose" can be vague...i'm not there yet. i'll think about it though.

enough of that for now. (apt as heavy musing is for somebody who's spent the last few weeks obsessing to low.)

my pleasant life continues on its pleasant way. i saw a pleasant play. naw, caroline or change is as meaningful and engaged as they come, and brilliant also - i knew all these things before, but even struggling to stay attentive for much of act one (in the evening after my underslept work-week and a nonstop city day.) really, really, it's so good. i'd happily go again friday (or sunday) if anybody wanted to join me (got $5 rush tickets last night, though it might be hard to do that again.) why why why did it flop on broadway? i'd blame it on the lack of extricable standalone song-hits, if i thought that mattered any more. (does it?) anyway - still not sure i can really sell it in a description (rebecca tried valiantly yesterday but failed, despite calling it an essential piece of american theater, or something like that.) really though.

what else? that was at the recently reopened samosa - yay! - much prettier now, very possibly tastier (with a menu now!), and as cheap as ever. then angela (yay!) met us, lugging a box of clothes (half her wardrobe she claimed) that she'd had little luck selling to buffalo exchange. i accompanied her to greene street and retrospect - still no luck.

d.c. was good: no plans weekend, cherry blossoms going going gone, but got to spend most of it with bobby, home on furlough from iowa, where he's now back to press-office work for the maybe messiah. mostly together, we lots of other people, old and new. joined sarahco for a delicious dinner of lamb and mashed turnips (made by her roommate who - you'll be glad to hear, alyssa - discussed the history of sino-american political relations while we ate) and a lovelife advising session. with jonah and(/or) jedd we walked around the tidal basin, pitied the shivering hula dancers, ate the oldest indian food in washington, watched "beavis and butthead" on dvd, and discussed the future of computing; various forms of social interaction, internet-mediated (e.g. craigslist personals by butch hippies) and otherwise; the corrections and redemption; and home cookin'.

there was also a party - my cousin's friend's ex-girlfriend's friend's birthday - and, of course, i brought another friend (jonah) who immediately saw somebody he knew there. this being d.c. people (everybody seemed to be mid-20s) were very well-dressed, and talked about politics, but the birthdaygirl-hostess was charming and a little hyperactive and agreeably at the center of her own party, and insisted that we dance (to her 80s mix, not, unfortunately, to "40 boys and 40 nights" which came on later) and of course i did. so it was a good random party. next morning was brunch with brooke, bobby's highschool ex i'd somehow never met, who is a bit of a firecracker and immensely likable. (she recently transferred from EPA to ICE, though in times of trouble she sometimes becomes a member of ICS - Instant Command System! - which involves wearing a chemical suit.) good brunch partner too.

so, people. they're alway about, aren't they, the silver and the gold and then there's the ones that got away. ghosts. people of the past still flitting about, in the memory, in the internets. i found some of them, in the nets - one of them is thirty-one now, and has a baby - one's married, another cut her hair, a third looks the same. to varying degrees, they seem more and less real, more and less inaccessible. but, there they are, living in brooklyn. funny things the internet can do with our psyches, but i guess i'm glad it's there to do it. probably i'll get in touch; we'll see.

[the past can be a little heavy sometimes, more so when it's just in your head. just hoping to avoid validating a (para)phrase that's been kicking in my head: the past prevents the future.]

i did go on a bit of a myspace rampage the other night, adding people as seemed appropriate mostly from within available ("extended"?) networks. and now i have more friends. anyway...

meanwhile some others (actual people!) are emerging - back from the coast, to visit or stay, ran-into in a bar, at a concert, while dancing, online; roundabout connections revealing - community. when i get to new york in two weeks there'll be more than i know what do with. first seattle first, philly. better get planning.

time to stop subsisting on the tortilla espagnola that made the other day (after my quiche pan exploded in the oven!?! - did i tell you about that one?), maybe make a sandwich with some of that bread i earned. gotta gonna gotsta DJ tonight, and it's about time to get ready for that. so enough.

here's a list i made (ranking somewhat subject to revision):

1. live conversation
2. gchat
3. phone conversation
4. e-mail
5. ichat (w/ video)
6. txt message
7. blog comment
8. myspace message
9. voice message
10. myspace comment
11. blog post
12. gchat status message
13. messageboard post
14. (tie) myspace friend request
myspace picture comment
16. flickr picture comment

untested:
myspace blog
photomessage
gmail paper (hypothetical)
as you pass by, hand them a fortune cookie fortune that says "you look pretty"

we celebrate our sense of each other
we a have a lot to give to each other

let your boyfriend come from the right kind of schools

2007-04-02T20:16:00.000-04:00

amelia, listen.

the hold steady did indeed play olde club. i watched from the balcony, with rob and heidi and my sister and k-cham. it was fun. craig finn seems to have mellowed out a bit since i saw them two years ago when separation sunday came out - his dancing is less spastic, and he's got a beard now, so he comes off more like a dad and less of a total geek. but his band still rocks, no question.

look, here's a movie of them playing "you can make him like you":

(for those unfamiliar, the line immediately preceding the part in the video is "you don't have to deal with the dealers, let your boyfriend deal with the ..." this is possibly my favorite song from the new album. my least favorite song is "southtown girls," except for the part where he says "take nicolette out to the vietnamese," because it makes me think of going to get vietnamese food with my friend nicolette.)

as you can see, the crowd was pretty much going crazy. i think it was the wildest, rowdiest crowd i've ever seen at olde club - and the band commented at one point that they'd never seen such a crazy audience at a college show. (unfortunately?) i'm pretty sure that the primary bunch of rowdies, the group of 8 or so people convulsing in the front row, were not actually swatties. they certainly had a lot of energy, and a possibly unhealthy amount of holdsteady love. they were passing around a handle of bourbon. i'm not sure, but i think they might have brought the confetti that ended up scattered all over the place (just like on the album cover!) they were a lot of fun to watch, but it might have been somewhat dangerous to be downstairs in the crowd adjacent to then.

so it was a good decision to be in the balcony. except that one of my earplugs somehow fell out of my ear and over the railing - after diligent searching at the end of the set, we were able to recover the custom-fit rubber part (thanks to heidi), but we couldn't find the tiny filter among all the confetti. anyway, it was a fun show, even if they didn't play "certain songs."

so what's new with you, anyway? how long are you going to be out in california? should i come visit you there? (maybe i can get that friend of ours to come too.)

hey, did i ever tell you that the flour we use at my work (metropolitan bakery) comes from grand forks? (the kind i use for my danishes and croissants is "north dakota champion.") i thought that was kind of funny.

so i gather you're into the hold steady. do you feel like they sold out by moving to brooklyn even though they still front like they're repping the midwest in their lyrics? do you wish you had been more into indie rock when you were at swat and all those indie rock bands played at olde club? who else are you listening to these days?

paradise and lunch

2007-03-26T22:13:00.000-04:00

hi!

forgot what i was going to say.

[there's been some potential cross-posting going on - if you're interested i hope you checked out my south by south west posts on mincetapes. they're about life as well as music, if not quite as much. at least there are some nice pictures to look at (more coming soon hopefully), and a story about getting giddy over a girl (have i ever devoted a paragraph to describing somebody's physical appearance before?) i just went back and finished this post about the walton house party; that might have been confusing before because it somehow got published while still in draft form. this past week, most notably, has been a veritable deluge of new music, mostly of the indie stripe...but i think i'll write about that on mincetapes as is appropriate, and maybe about the holdsteady olde club show there as well.]

the party was good. [my party, this weekend.] maybe twenty, twenty-five people came. many of them from out-of-town. nobody that hadn't said they were going to (except for the +1s and +2s, who make it interesting.) i spent the morning distractedly picking stuff up around my room, then suddenly dashing off to RTM to buy vegies vegies vegies (as the O.K. Lee receipts have it) and invite kate and katie, and then asia supermarket for many interesting things, and then palm tree and then palm tree again when i realized i'd gotten the wrong amount of chocolate. and then i made five-spice chocolate cake (flourless) and coconut milk ginger ice cream (vegan! basically that recipe but w/o the lime and half + half) and spring rolls and various dipping sauces.

didn't even start cooking until 4:00. hannah and tyler had arrived by the end of it and helped with the sauces and made lemonade, and i spent the first hour of the party assembling spring rolls. meanwhile matthew, who had seemingly spent the entire day vacuuming the apartment, inside and out, showed up at about 8:00 with a sixpack and a bag of ingredients to make asparagus goat-cheese cilantro quesadillas. i feel like i played host a reasonable amount of the time, which is to say i definitely got to enjoy the party but i didn't really talk to anybody for very long. there was a fun spontaneous djing session towards the end (headphone-free, track-selection by conversational suggestion) that was headed towards low-key dancing until tara started gettin' critical. oh bundle.

ben was our intrepid houseguest, and sunday morning we made a lovely large breakfast (eggs and toast, yogurt and fruit salad) with ray charles and ry cooder. i walked him to the bus, and spent most of the rest of the day continuing to walk in the sunshine.

i sat in the green outside christ church looking across the cobblestones. the 1907 ice cream season is open at franklin fountain! - has been for three weeks apparently - so i got a phosphate (no parisian flips this year, or "you may fire when ready" - i got the jamestown julep, which is very not sweet - also not as tasty as the stein of julep raffa made me on friday, though less debilitating) watched the black lips flop around and play demented ?psych-garagey-rock upstairs at a.k.a., which was very amusing. they seem much younger than they perhaps are (they seem young anyway.) then i met dave jonas and jb and we ate at pico de gallo. that place kind of drives me crazy - it has the most confusing menu ever (which they seem to keep printing on bigger and bigger paper without changing the bizarro text), and the food is almost always disappointing, and yet we keep going there because it's cheapish and convenient and it's the only place we can think of in that area. i want to swear off going there (which i sort of had), but it probably wont work.

anyway the reason we were there was to proceed to a reading at the gershman Y starring rebecca. unfortunately i had a really hard time staying awake, and we left after the first act. sorry, the play was pretty bad (not rebecca's fault.)

well, things are good. i didn't have any bringdown after this party, which is refreshing and atypical. maybe it's because the planning was quite uninvolved and last-minute. it's also very nice to have a clean(er) apartment. will try to keep it this way for as long as it lasts. i'm going to need a new roommate in two months - though i might have already found one (at the party.)

i'll probably stay in philly for the summer, at least - because of inertia, but also, i have to say, the prospect of physically moving is not so appealing. but i'm keeping myself open to going somewhere else, whenever the opportunity arises. no, i'll take a more active approach than that. i'd like to think more deliberately about what's keeping me here in philly - not too much: mostly just the fact that i know and like it here. not too many friends left besides rebecca and tara. (angela, author of her own disaster, is being a mystery.) waiting and see.

in the meantime: dc, seattle, nyc, upstate, california maybe (june?), bachelor event somewhere. maine in august maybe. or hokkaido. glad the sun's out in philly (tomorrow and yesterday, less so today.)

i know you've got a thing for ordinary guys
but i've heard your records and they sound a lot like mine
so you be my marrianne and i'll be your yoko
and let's bury the hatchet like the beatles,
the beatles and the stones

ostentatious!

2007-03-15T12:02:00.000-04:00

there's never going to be a better opportunity for me to use that pun (which i've carried in my head for years and years no) so you must forgive me. but here i am in ostentatious austin tejas (or texas, if you pronounce it the portuguese way), and, man...

pretty sweet down here. well, it's not too hot, i can tell you that much (philly in the sunshine has been warmer the last few days.) SXSW, our austensible reason for being here (truth be told i was almost as excited about just checking out the city and hanging out with matthew's friends), is as insane as i'd imagined. just look: here's the list of bands playing, today alone (but click on the other days for more), in the "official" conference. here's a seemingly comprehensive list of mostly free, mostly daytime, non-official shows (scroll down to this week, and just keep scrolling.) yeah, it's ridiculous.

i had promised myself that i wouldn't go crazy trying to see everything and everybody, and so far i'm feeling good about that. actually feels pretty great to be able to relax and breathe about it while people all around are milling about and fretting. matthew and i don't have wristbands (much less the allmighty badges), which means we're in the lowliest class of show-goers - i've determined that it's more or less still possible to get into most any show (paying cash, of course, but usually around $10) - you just have to line up way in advance and be serious about it. we cut it too close trying to get into the 4AD showcase (beirut, mountain goats, blonde redhead being the main draws), lining up only 15-20 minutes before doors. even so, it looked likely we'd be able to get in (the line was moving steadily but slowly), but when we were twenty feet from the door, the line of badge-holders (who get access before any of us can even think about it) started to grow and grow, and it was looking like even some of them wouldn't make it. so we wisely gave up, after a good two hours of gradually mounting expectations. i did see and say hi to john darnielle on the street (not sure whether he heard me.)

so, we breathed out and headed for a cafe to chill before somewhat fortuitously making it into a show headlined by peter björn and john (who seem to be playing three or four times a day all week, all over town.) we entered to the lovely and relaxing sounds of tunng, from the uk, who evoked the books (!), kings of convenience, and maybe a blissed-out akron/family animal collective in equal parts. very pretty, kinda ramshackle sit-down folk-plus, including a leftfield bloc party cover that was really quite magical. and then PB+J - who were just brilliant - perfectly tight and precise, rocking out more than you might think, and of course swedishly charming and adorable. peter encouraged us to join the protest against them, "stop peter bjorn and john," and had to ask his bandmates the name of that thing they wanted to put over his mouth (duct tape.) especially nice re-arrangements of "amsterdam," "young folks" and a couple others - jammed out "up against the wall" closer.

anyway. earlier in the day we went to a "party" (as they're called) at mohawk, where we saw peter and the wolf (another of the gazillion wolf bands - this is really getting out of hand - with an intriguing folk style augmented by eight-woman chorus singing affectlessly around a single mike), headlights (perfectly normal indie rock), architecture in helsinki (cute, what else?), and surprise highlight for me so far, a group from nyc called apes and androids - extremely campy glammed out queen-style dancey-dance rock, with, refreshingly, a much higher quotient of silliness than irony. they had huge inflatable dancing amorphous maw-ed alien beings. and they made me dance like mad, though for some reason most of the crowd wasn't that affected. eh, whatever.

better yet, i ran into nan wakefield there - she's recently moved to austin (as i now vaguely recalled), and is determined to get herself a musical education this week, and i daresay will get pretty far. she joined our insta-posse, consisting at this point of matthew's friends and friends-of-friends jenny, nicolette, elizabeth, and courtney. (as you can tell, it's my kind of insta-posse.) that group, in various combinations (some have wristbands and some don't, which makes coordination tricky at times) was the crew for most of the day and i'm assuming most of the rest of the week. which by the way i better get started on.

i'm angling to maybe catch the pipettes this early afternoon (that's pending my "company affiliations" in the rsvp e-mail being up to the fader/levi's snuff), and then chill out at waterloo records (what could be finer?) with sparklehorse, lily allen, busdriver, albert hammond, and of course throngs of amusingly-attired people. if that pipettes thing's a bust, i may be out of luck with them except for the pitchfork party (which i'm sure will be a zoo) - should have probably gone to la zona rosa for them and the rapture last night instead of waiting on that 4AD line. but, you know what? it's really not a big deal, and i don't care.

the one show that i do care about most (i just found out yesterday, and i'm superpsyched) is marit larsen, playing on an all-scandinavian bill at "uncle flirty's loft" friday night. i'm pretty sure there will be very little buzz and very little line for that, and as of now it's my number one priority, so hoo-rah.

i must confess that i dreamed about seeing bands last night - specifically okgo (who aren't even here, i think), the bird and the bee (and talking to greg and inara afterwards about my longtime fandom) and, somebody random (robyn hitchcock?) fronting the decemberists. it was odd. my dad was there. ohkay.

hella large on the track

2007-03-12T17:53:00.000-04:00

{whoa!}

gonna keep using that reference until somebody admits to getting it.

the lost in dance-[e?]lation party this past saturday was a mega-success. at least from where i was standing, tucked away in a neat little nook beside the stairwell, turntable to my left, mixer on the diagonal, cddex dead ahead and records behind me. i just stood there and a steady stream of folks throughout the night to make requests (almost all of which i played - le tigre, reggae, outkast, sharon jones, talking heads, pb+j), compliment my shit, ask about hiring me, give me props, and generally kowtow. even better (well...maybe only a little better), the dancefloor was packed straight through from 9:30 til well past 2:00 (old time.)

coherent sets of ragga/digital dancehall (i guess?) towards the beginning (that was sweet - need to get more stuff like that), some soul, then poppy ("fever," the mechanical amory of "robot song" and "strict machine"), and a lengthy (hour-plus) segment of sixties funk, soul, and blue-eyed pop, with brief excursions into james hunter (which got props) and jonathan richman ("you have accomplished something tonight.") they liked that.

didn't actually play much japanese music - cornelius, puffy amiyumi, yellow magic orchestra, com.a, and pizzicato five ["I" was the official kick-off for the dance-party, into cibo matto's "spoon"] only at the very beginning, mostly before anybody got there, but i didn't make it back to any of them, as planned. no "I.U.D./S.I.S." either. so i guess the most theme-appropriate thing i played was "what goes around...comes around" (cuz, yknow, it has the "asian" hook and scarlett is in the video.)

had to play that for its full 7+ minute glory. likewise, toward the end "we share our mothers' health" (trentemøller remix) and "the sunshine underground," which i was hoping would be a night-ending anthem to take the dancing to the next level, but i guess folks were spent after "mothers'" and vitalic's "no fun." wound down with junior boys, "young folks" (by request), and "black cab" (had to end - no time for camobs, or "a touch of spring" or the fairways, which would have brought it back to japan.)

anyway, great. best party i've deejayed since college? more like this, please!

daylight spendthrift

2007-03-11T18:37:00.000-04:00

daylight saving (not savings, n.b.) time came early this year...but there haint been no saving on the daylight to-day! it's been a-streamin' and i've been a-baskin' all day, and nothing much but a baskin' case, and a-ha i just now get rebex joke about robbin' well no robins yet (pardon the s.o.c.) but spring's not quite here yet, but don't we do seem to be anxious for it, tomorrow today next week this week, why with all the green and irish (poor inflated leprauchan being dragged along the spring garden street, head hidden hungover like a morning drunk; the black-clad saxophone and banjo brigade?) a week early when st. paddy's is on a saturday this year

anyway that was the traffic stilled to a crawl this mid-noon, mostly flower show congestion, presumes, more anxiety (march flowers made by february what exactly?) that i hardly thought to not miss this year, though maybe i should have.

was going to say, basking in the sunlight while the tofu basks in tamari/sake/triple sec (cuz, no mirin)/ginger and i'm not sure which role the pineapple plays, marinator or marinatee...anyway i guess it was too long and the "extra firm" tofu turned mushy so i converted the whole thing to a kind of gravy (lemon was the secret finishing touch), fine with sesame and scallions over flied snowpeas/'sparagus/pineapple/red bell. rice of course. that was my pancakes for one too many tonight...

here's me, sunlight gone, still at the window, sitting alone in my inside-out socks, new flowery pale pink sunshine shirt. more flowers - too small to call it floral, i think. little petals all around. florid more like. florid, ah.

um.

before some other segue interceded, was going to going to use this blogarithm to riposte the adventures of the past week+, before this week's adventure takes over (starting in approximately 40 hours...whooosh!) but it's already too late and i have lost because it's past my bedtime which means the week is here.

so no time to tell you about lippin' it up at the lost in dance-[e]lation jawn rast nite (wo) [d00d i should have billed myself as "loss of rove"] or about swooning over mirah and her family members (real and imagined) at the church on friday or about partying with of montreal (for real!) after as well as at their gig and mine on thursday or about also deejaying in westfully the previous saturday, or about taking delray beach fl by storm last weekend or.

maybe l8r maybe. sowsee.

the telephone just doesn't seem to do
to let you know how much it's true
that we love you
yeah we love you