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

more today than yesterday; not half as much as tomorrow

2007-02-27T18:07:00.000-05:00

update: just so we're clear, misery soup (which has decided to be curry) actually tastes pretty okay. eat it up for breakfast lunch and dinner! sup sup! make em say yum yum!

a contemporary dilemna (so says matthew):
i want to be a myspace friend to the books. (because they love me.) but they do not have a myspage. instead, should i befriend (enfriend?) i am not the books, a guy/page/entity which/who is not the books, or i can't find the books, who is also not the books? or both? the former has more friends than the latter, does that mean it's more authentic?

(psst: i think they're in la jolla.)

these hearts came from denmark, towards miley cyrus, misdirected to the cure (who is not my girlfriend) for bedbugs. now they are for you:

in case you were wondering, i did ~~achieve~~ acquire those hot ipod-luvin' buds. guess what....they don't sound as good as these. oh well. got supaglue to fix them, same walk around the block as i got hot pink sharpie and rubber-cement and a return to toothpaste (foiled by flouride) and a disco LP and a radical and spontaneous pair of on-sale sneaks -----> like these but olive green like my backpack and my sox and my pants. (it's weird when your shoes socks and pants all match.)

but what color laces should i get? yellow may indeed be the only option.

(also the same day as i went to the post office to collect four copies of the same celine dion cd. which according to allmusic is a bad celine dion cd. apparently it has less value than an empty jewel case, or at least a potentially uncracked one. there was another funny part but i forgot. oh yeah, something about the postal clerk said i had a nice name.)

i'll make the music making stop making music, soon as i figger out how. but first, hooking up a hot new joint called marriage is hot, and so are you.

put your sweet lips
a little closer
to the phone

we'll all have to move to california. or at least west philly.

2007-02-26T22:46:00.001-05:00

grrrr. two and a half years now that i've lived in this city. still having trouble feeling like i'm much more sense of [being part of a] community than i was back when...

eh...don't even have the energy to 'plain about that now.

even, my roommate disappeared again - to maui for ten days. wish he wouldn't do that. so i'm all alone again. nobody to cook to or play music at besides myself.

haven't burned down the apartment yet, but not for lack of trying - i did manage to fill it with smoke by burning some ghee this evening. lesson learned, woks heat supafast, don't turn your back. opened all the windows and flapped the doors, but still had to go out for a walk and call alyssa and my mom and buy some tofu. (that was nice at least.)

dinner take two was less dramatic but more depressing. by the end it was so miserable it couldn't decide if it wanted to be curry or soup. tastes like misery. blech. and loneliness.

at least i don't have to worry about cleaning up the dishes/kitchen for anybody else but me.

(ultimately though, seems, whenever matthew goes away, the apartment gets even cleaner.)

the policy that i'm basically not required to accomplish anything else during my (three-day) work-week gettin' necessary.

oscar report: leo wins - leo gets a ridiculous amount of love. 2nd place: abigail breslin. saw keith urban for a split-second, sitting next to his wifey. dntel in car ad. aberfeldy in coke ad. ("summer's gone") makes me think that dr. pepper totally missed out on being ahead of the indie-rock soda-commercial curve when they turned dow amanset's custom jingle. not to mention "warm panda cola."

who puts me in the magic position?

<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3

2007-02-15T14:23:00.000-05:00

it's a sin and it's a crime and it's a goddamn shame
that you're the cause and you're the cure of all my pain

sugar we're snowing down

2007-02-13T22:29:00.000-05:00

i snow sugar; it snows snow!

[no, dummy, actually right then it was snowing sleet, or hailing something nasty that is not nice for stinging the cheeks of the boy on the bike/fox in the snow on his way home from yoga, thinking, i really should be suspended from class if i don't know my elbow from my ass, and simon didn't say.]

(snow days are indie-pop days, doncha know. that's why they have so many of them in scandonavia.)

[just ordered me up some swedish twee. tweedish? no, that'd oughtta be scots. sweeee!]

so i was thinking, actually it's not that i wouldn't want to work more, it's that i wouldn't want to do other things less. which must mean that i like the work okay. and come to think of it, if the day before valentine's day in a pastry kitchen is relatively low-key, non-stressful, and even rather mirthful, it probably almost never if ever turns into a high-stress environment.

(although nobody there seems to like valentines day very much. seems like "elitism" means being against things and "populism" is being for them.)

[someday i'll tell you about the songs that get stuck in my head just by the fact of being there, once i figure out what they are.]

(and as i worked, i could look over and see that it was still coming down. though sometimes it was hard to tell. couldn't see how much accizumulation there was though.)

[seems to have stopped for now. widget still says sun today; snow for the rest of the week]

i ask you, what kind of a message is it sending the [brotherly] lovers that the philly skyline lights are yellow (as they have been all month)? will they turn red or pink for tomorrow at least? (i will. and i betcha some coworkers will scoff.)

today marks three months exactly since my accident. even though i'm basically functional at this point, i do still have a ways to heal. well three months isn't that long i suppose. i feel like progress has been slowing in the last month or so, which is a bit worrisome. so i think it's time to get it checked out again, and see what i can see. it cricks to bend my right knee with weight, and i still don't have full range of extension on my ankle (can't really do trikonasana or virasana without prop modifications...)

say, it's almost not tuesday anymore, and still no sign of the prodigal roommate... (doesn't he love me?)

so, what kind of a fool would make fresh peach and mint ice cream on a day like today?

[i promise that i did not even remotely think of this.]

well, a fool such as i.

life gives you the runaround
you say
you wanna know how much dues must you pay?

the fake weekend is real again

2007-02-11T16:22:00.000-05:00

see, ben likes it when i'm ridiculous.

odd thing, i blothered with rebecca and later, helpfully, counseled with millie on monday about, partly, not doing things, you might say, spontaneously and radically (more the latter i guess.) but hey look! yesterday, as you can see ,i spontaneously and radically got new glasses. really so. until the moment i set foot in the store, i had absolutely no premonition that i was going to get glasses that day. i did spend a while trying to pick out frames - my goal was to get something bold and remarkable that would be different from my other pair, but i ended up getting some that are extremely similar to my old glasses (which were broken in the accident), just slightly more uniform in their thickness and emphatically stripey in their tortoise (which is the only aspect i don't really like.) tried to go for some color (green or red, blue's no good) but i couldn't do it and/or they didn't have what i would have needed.

wait, let's count - that's one. 2. also radically and spontaneously changed my order to sesame and lemon mock chicken at cherry st. veg - that was a bad choice, but then i wasn't the one who decided to eat there. (jason ordered "feathered knishes," which is not something i would have ever thought to think of in conjunction with veg chinese, if at all.)

2.5) also radically and spontaneously happened to see martha when i was at laura and caitlin and dave's yesterday. that made twice in as many days after friday, when we watched high school musical instead of dreamgirls. i'm gonna have a hard time feeling like that was a wrong decision, because hsm is wow great good, even better than the part of me that was expecting to love it expected. still a little confused about how a made-for-even-disney-tv movie became teh phenomenon, but ok. i'm gonna say not b/c talent will out.

for real 3) all thursday tara and i radically and fairly spontaneously began not so much just restructuring my apartment as transmogrifying it. a process that involves furniture and cleanliness. and, like all good things in life, lots and lots of cds in piles all over the place. it's getting less spontaneous as it lulls (no, just waits patiently whilst i run about town in the bikebreaking cold), but no less radical, no sir. oh man, it is so radical. and it's not finished yet!

it might be truer than i even think that i've managed to 4) spontaneously, certainly, and radically cut back on my internet abusage since two weeks or so ago when i verbalized, seriously albeit jokingly, that it had become something like addiction. still suffer some blog guilt, but that's going too. on the other hand, worklife, apartmentlife and other things have also helped by forcibly intervening.

so now, what do i do instead of (just) compulsively internetting (and for the nonce cleaning/straightening) when i get home? after work for instance. well, for one thing, i lie on the floor, when i get home from work, especially now that i am just getting readjusted to the strain and drain of it. but for the most part, after baking all day at work, i find myself playing around in the kitchen. which makes me think that i must really like doing things with food.

[eta: but! i'm not gearing up for a career in food service, but rather for being a stay-at-home and making dinner for my future spouse(s).]

hmm, i just now spontaneously and fairly radically made a cheese sauce to put on asparagus and rice. hey, cheese sauce is really easy, and tastes good. asparagus was 99¢ and tastes like it, but okay.

that's five, but i must say that it's been less satisfying than it should/could be this week to make food experiments and to transmogrify the apartment. that's because my new-minted roommate has indeed evidently very spontaneously and radically - and uncharacteristically - disappeared, without advance or subsequent notice - i haven't seen him since last sunday night, and it wasn't until tuesday that he cryptically texted me, or thursday morning that i got his e-mail saying he'd be back this tuesday, but still not explaining where he was or why... this after all of two nights actually staying together in the apartment.

so that's been a little mystery. (i dreamed he came back and had been on a fishing trip.) i guess i'll let you know what happens.

by the way, i wrote about the akron/family and jonathan richman and david byrne concerts i went to this weekend and last here, so dig that.

there's a lot i want to write about on mincetapes these days - jazz (and electronica), reggae (and soul), soul (and the ny times), keith urban (and being a teenage girl) - and i may or may not catch with all of it before the flurry of valentimes posts that i just realized i ought to do as well. that may or may not depend on whether i try to go to the lily allen concert tomorrow night, which will be somewhat spontaneous and radical if i do it. (do you think this is an annoying structuring device? i do!)

i feel nice about valentimes being this week - even though i didn't get to make crafty cards with rebecca yesterday (neither did she), and even if this party isn't happening again this year, which it looks like it may not, which would be a shame. it was some memorable fun last time. look, you can tell me by my shoes (tho even better is the one with me and the paper bags):

[eta: since i am now an avatar of elemental love, i'm not responsible for actually propagating love in the puny form of valentines cards, or for having an actual valentine. feel the ross of love and the love of ross.]

emptiness in computers bothers me

return to cooky mountain

2007-02-02T12:36:00.001-05:00

deep breaths.

making cookys is easy, as i was telling ben the other night. the most important part is creaming the butter and sugar(s) a lot (you can't really overdo it.) creaming is also something you do in sports, and in your jeans. i baked (should be bade?) chocolate cookys (with chocolate chips too, whoa!) to use in making sandwiches with the ginger-lime-coconut ice cream - pretty good, v. intense flavor (and slightly underhomogenous) but slightly icy b/c the lime juice broke the cream, we think (though why is that in the recipe then?)

[on the other hand, we made this one last night, excellent delicate flavor (and i even upped the star anise quanitity), but didn't solidify very well at all during conversion, not sure why - using 2% and half & half instead whole and heavy shouldn't have affected that, even if might have screwed up the custard (right? it wasn't deliberate anyway) so maybe the batter was insufficiently chilled. dunno. more smoothie fodder tho!]

it occured to me that yoga classes are like big games of "simon says" for grown-ups that everybody is constantly losing.

[speaking of yoga - which is getting mad good btw - i liked the part where russ asked if it was right that my cd (rainbow-styling) was "hip-hop disco." pretty much, yeah. i gave him a copy after he was bopping to arthur russell on my 'phones.]

this is probably inevitably going to be a long entry; there's so much going on in my life!! so sorry but i guess i'll use bullet points in honor of tara's muchadoed resumé. oh gawd, tara.

• didn't make it to new york this morning. that's okay. i was going to meet my grandfolks for jazz at noon (which i swear used to have its own website) as per decades tradition. originally wanted to take a 9 bus but getting up at 7 didn't seem feasible; the 10 bus would have got me there in fine style but the greyhound tix machines were down and the lines were way long and static. so instead it amounted to a there-and-back walk to chinatown, but it gave me the chance to listen to pixel revolt, which is an wholeheartedly lovely john vanderslice album, like all of them in danger of being overlooked given the sheer number of albums he puts out, but probably his loveliest. his words are so wordy, in a way that doesn't always square with that vibe, but appealing despite.

really just as well (the backtracking) because i was wearing my new shoes for the first time and instead of being remarkably comfortable as i had previously thought it turns out they bite sharply into the backs of my heels, and also the padded soles are sort of hard (or maybe my feet are just worn out.) not only does that suck, i wasn't carrying any others, so i would have ended up having to buy a new pair in the city probably (or really thick socks.) also i'd neglected to bring the just-boughten dvds that i wanted to watch with you all day tomorrow (true stories and gn,&gl.) or extra socks. so just as well.

• i was already tired last night, which i guess ended up somewhere in between out on the town and chill with friends, but was amped up with leftover chaos and the underway upheaval of this apartment - yesterday was the day, i guess, when gabe moved out and matthew moved in, so i lost a whole roommate and gained a whole other one, which is not as big a deal as moving up a floor, but almost. so there's boxes and furniture around about, but more to the point we is getting things whip-cracked into shape - you wouldn't believe how much better this place is starting to become already. i cleaned out the fridge+freezer yesterday, and we're starting to tackle or at least confer on a dozen or more improvement schemes of various kinds (like a radically switching the silverware and utensil drawers!)

anyway, i was talking about last night. i guess i should start from the night before, when i was early to bed so as to rise at five for my worky, and t-bundle showed up in my room at around 3am (actually she broke into my room, flipping up the latch) and announced that she had to sleep in my bed, for reasons which are still pretty unclear (particularly considering that there was at least one unoccupied bed in the flat.) well anyway. i didn't really lose that much sleep, the bundle is just ridiculous. she was still here when i got back home oh eleven ours later, wearing my sweater and still not actually working on her resumé and still apparently more or less drunk. well we whatever, the moving and cleaning and listening and eventually the kooking (the a-quiescent qustard, plus skittle stirfry and bosc slaad) to dancetrak of el (gh!!) and etta (tell mama, which is, like, RRRFG!!) (she even covers the groundhog day anthem)

and kate the great and nate her date were late (later than eight) but then we ate, and ended up not going the MGC cabaret (because of time, but mostly b/c they balked at the cover), which i only later realized was sort of disappointing in particular because i had wanted k and r to meet each other. and of course we went to paradise, which was fun dancing, intermittently, but also made me kind of sad and jealous and wisty; more than (just) being tired....i just really don't like hanging out with drunk people sometimes. it can be incredibly alienating and perplexing. (especially when that's what always seems to happen.) yeah... well i perked myself up for little minutes, mostly by singing overtop the italo, like "the flashing lights come from everywhere/something something something stop and stare/she's got me lovestoned and i swear that she knows/i think that she knows"

you know, the interesting part about that lyric/conceit (apart from it being adorably idiotic - or, as we like to say, "sub-genius") is that it flips the conventional love/drug metaphor of jonesing or needing a fix, where the act of love (or at least requitedness) is the payoff, so that in this case JT is stoned off of just seeing/thinking about/lusting after her - he's not even sure that she knows (though, more than likely, in his altered state, his "i think that she knows" - which in the song's heavenward "interlude" becomes a sweet, hymnlike mantra - probably understates his relatively inkling of something blindly obvious to the impartial observer.)

• work? no, i'll hold off a while more. yesterday was day 3 - no question it's work but i think i can get into it. i do want to get a move on to new york in a little minute. chinatown by bike, not greyhound by foot, will be the resort.

what's really exciting? my new olive drab canvas australian-style rucksack that i got from i. goldberg's on wednesday. geez, weds was a crazy active day too: besides i.'s (where i also replaced my famous pink nalgene that i lost at pitch4k), i also went to america's best (where they no longer carries the frames that got destroyed in the accident, but at least they have my soon-to-"expire"[?] prescription on file), ritz camera (where they would in fact try to fix my powershot(s), but would rather and more cheaply sell me a new one with almost four times the combined model number, assuming a constant A), pastrami and things (where gabe and i, on his last lunch-break in philadelphia, opted for the former, as per plan, which though it turned not to be especially monumental, as anticipated, was still quite tasty) and nodding head (where we washed it down with BPA from the 'beer engine' - more monumental, similarly tasty), repo (south street survivor - where the GBQ and lily albums are befuddingly inexpensive) and long in the tooth (who seem to be doing well, which makes me happy), the electronic servicenter (whom i still begrudgingly kind of love even though they broke the rules and ended up charging me way more money than i feel good about for not, in fact, actually fixing my cd deck completely - which in this means i intend to get some of that money back!), and finally to my boy dave q's for some freeform rc. yah. i talked to him about money.

better not get started on anything else.

but, see, how SO MUCH is happening and fluxing under this full groundhoggy moon?? new job, new roommate, new apartment (practically), new backpack, and i didn't even mention how i'm just spontaneously and radically restructing my cd collection, moving almost everything around to new shelves - i'm kind of scared about it actually, because i don't really know how it's going to turn out. inspired i guess by finally putting my dj cds away, and realizing the soul and pop sections are swelling beyond their capacity, plus i've just gotten another whole ton of new cds (january started out slow, but rapidly picked up thanks mostly to BMG, peter guralnick, and my jazzbo buddy who is not my neighbor but still might be soon.)

still feeling pretty kind of centered though.

you bring me so much joy
and then you bring me more joy

there's no "i can't" in cROiSSant

2007-01-26T14:57:00.000-05:00

eh?

or how about: can anybody figure out the joke that can be made using the hitherto unnoticed correspondance between "Pecos Bill" and "PECO bills"?

i was going to post the li'l podcasty mix i made today here to make up for having written a lot lately over at mincetapes and not anything here lately. then i decided that was silly because it's precisely what mincetapes is all about. but i just decided to put it here too, because i know some of you don't like to go over there, and i sort of made it with you guys in mind. (instead of those elitist, too-hip-for-their-own-good readers of the other blog.)

here it is:

i'll let you press the play button yourself (it's under the middle screw if you can't find it.) but you'll have to go there to see the track list. it's all 1960s pop songs about winter, except for the songs that aren't. a little under 25 minutes.

in other non-music, non-winter-related news, i had an absolutely lovely time driving to swathmore through an intense, unanticipated snowstorm last night with matthew, gabe, tara, and heidi, watching/listening to the phenomal and adorable camera obscura (and sultry la laque) and having a snowball fight afterwards.

ever since rebecca said something about the light in television and especially computer screens making it hard to get to sleep after staring at them because it's so bright it keeps your mind awake for a long while afterwards, i've had this subtle paranoia about them, like that some sinister force inside the screen is covertly sucking away my life-force. which, you know, they sort of do metaphorically too. (and they keep sucking me in.)

however i don't think that's really why i had such a hard time getting to sleep the other night, considering i went to bed at 8 and started watchin sweet and lowdown and fell asleep half an hour in. but i woke up again at ten-something and then was unable to get back to sleep again until maybe two hours before i finally got up at 4:30, to go to work. (!) i think my favorite part was walking (half-crutching) the 1.4 mi to the bakery that early in the morning. not to say the rest was not good - i think i'll wait and talk about that later - but i did really like that part.

still with the sun destroyers words:

nation of mine, nation of mine
you are so big and powerful, but it's just a matter of time

oodelally oodelally golly

2007-01-19T05:55:00.000-05:00

what a day. it started 21 hours ago now, so i really am gonna do this quickly, but i do wanna do it.

my diligent readers and update-checkers may have noticed that i've been slowly but assuredly accomplishing things, from my list of things to accomplish. or at least crossing them off. they may have noticed that "blog" wasn't on that list, so look at me here going above and beyond the call of sleep-deprivation.

anyway this morning (er, last morning, whatever - when anyway i had not stayed up nearly this late) i was awakened by a phone call that i don't actually remember answering (because i was still asleep then), from a very prominent philadelphia bakery, asking whether i was ross who had e-mailed them and whether i'd like to set up a job interview. it was something like this:

kr: yeah, that's me...and yes, i'd love to have an interview!

mb: great. well, i'm here every day except sunday; what's a good time for you?

kr (suddenly having misplaced the ability to think): ummmmm...

mb: er, did i just wake you up?

kr (not having been fully cognizant of this): um...oh yeah...actually you did!

mb: oh, i'm sorry! would you like me to call you back later?

kr (still impressively out of it, vaguely looking around the room in hopes that the right answer might manifest itself): um...er, yes. yeah, that would be good. uh, thanks!

upon which point i thought about how nice it was to be up so bright and early (this was shortly after 9:00 am), and how i should get up and savor it, and then about how i should instead lie in bed and read and savor it, which somehow got translated into going back to sleep only to wake up with my alarm at 10:30, in just enough time to lie there for twenty more minutes, feeling considerably less happy about being awake this time, before getting up and dressed in order to meet the fellow who was supposed to be coming to look at the apartment downstairs.

except he didn't end up coming, and i didn't get his texto, so i ended up sitting and vaguely waiting (and reading about music online, if that's a fair reconstruction of events.) but then i did accomplish a number of things, even some which were not on the lissst. most of which involved getting things ready to put in the mail.

the day didn't really get cookin' until jasmine and i went to the art gallery. i decided, somewhat spontaneously, to get a museum membership. the big exhibitions don't look quite as cool this year, but oh well. we basically just looked at the modern wing, which has changed somewhat since i've been there. some gorgeous industrial design stuff that i don't remember having seen before, and a really striking gaugin that i'm almost positive is new. a carnival evening is back home, so yay for that. weird video piece about a money-changing scam perpetrated on (romanian?) tourists; the subtitles were very poorly translated, and i started to wonder if that was the point, since nothing else seemed to be. also, there was this messy installation, which we didn't have the time (and it would take a while) to really explore.

there's a small ellsworth kelly feature on, which i really enjoyed. best part very likely was the score to john cage's "seven haiku for solo piano," borderline inscrutable and in places almost certainly unplayable (as far as standard notation goes - it wasn't clear what everything meant), but perfectly gorgeous to look at. (apparently there because cage's use of chance was an influence on EK. ok, whatever, but i'm glad i got to see it.) also, we looked at the newly famous gross clinic. which is indeed gross (sorry.) i mean, which is indeed impressive, much more so in person than on the little postcard. i liked the eakins boxing painting they had too.

after that i trolleyed out to westphalia to meet hannah for abyssinia (mmm, way too much food) and the other green line. it's (as always) great to see her, and i hope she gets better and better adjusted to grad-school life (as i have no doubt she will.) (almost said post-collegiate life, but then it's not, is it?) from there a nice walk - through a couple of slightly snowy patches even (!!) down to woodland (not larchwood, as i'd misthought), to sarah's house (oh yeah - i had gone to the museum w/o my crutches - and w/o incident - but i did bring them for this part of the trip.) for counselling. we counselled. it was good. she has the most amazingly beautiful cat (kitten really) i've seen in memory. wow. friskyfriendly, too. zuela, is her name. nice house - too bad i can't socialize with her, but i can with her roommates, now can't i. i've now officially met them first.

thennnn, thanks to the second trolley, which decided to actually stop for me since i was waiting at its stop, back to nolibs where i ducked into the abbaye for quizzo thinking i might find matthew, and finding instead (well, who else)...the same people that are always there for quizzo. so i played quizzo with them. i was the only person in the bar, it seems, who knew what OMFUG stands for. but none of us knew the state flower of delaware. or that michelle williams played the 12-year-old version of the main character in species (ummm.)

and then. came home. chatted with matthew. that was about it. i guess i can go to bed now.

when i was waiting for the trolley, i called (back) home, and my mom said: "you sound good!" i guess yeah i am good!

here are some things that made me start getting excited about djing next weekend:
1. hearing fantasia's "hood boy" on the radio twice on the brief drive to the PMA and back. 2. listening to the uncredibly awesome jamaica to toronto comp i just got, while on the trolley, and thinking about funk music. 3. listening to and thinking about the chemical brothers. 4. downloading the talib/madlib album (man, they should have done something more overt with the title wordplay!), even though i haven't listened to it yet. 5. hearing alonso talk about sally shapiro. 6. thinking about "i'm the baddest bitch" by norma jean bell (i think?)

also, i made ice cream the other day. woot! (cookies'n'cream! it's good!)

you've had enough to think, now you need a wife

too due

2007-01-09T11:35:00.000-05:00

{task-oriented}
• ~~get to work~~ on finding a neighbor
• check in with geico adjuster re: claims
• ~~at least look at some job listings (well ok); maybe work on a resumé (hey, i have a job interview now...almost)~~
• ~~it's not hard not far to reach/i can hitch a ride to delray beach~~ ~~[+rsvp]~~

{disciplined}
• ~~conceptualize/publicize last-fridays dance/party series ("flux capacitor") with liza;~~ ditto t's bdp
• ~~commence~~/~~continue~~/~~complete "year-end mincetacular" before it gets really embarrassingly overdue~~
• redesign mincetapes layout (~~with hopefully helpfully googletools~~) [eh, the googletools are kinda sucky. oh well.]
• dupe ¡OhSiX! &/or r-s to give to AJW [@ driz horse?] ~~and others [more to mail?]~~ (anybody else want? raise yr hands say yeah)

{regimented}
• ~~grocery shop~~
• ~~start making scones [ingredients, recipe, delivery]~~ next: pricing, business plan?
• ~~also: talk to michael about co-baking~~
• ~~laundry~~

{effectual}
• ~~return CSN to a.k.a.;~~ ~~adopt alternate strategy for tardy santaness~~
• to acquire: ~~hat~~ (i just lost another one, i'm so awesome!), ~~backpack~~ (found one in my closet!), sneakers, glasses, cell phone, earphones, ~~stylus(?)~~
• ~~get CDN36 repaired, again~~
• look into camera repair

{fruitful}
• write some soul songs, about those great things that soul songs are about
• plan ~~time to plan~~ musical project time with danny
• ~~complete, title, artify~~, blog ~~silver-starry mix for my gal~~
• ~~start EMP paper research? (i.e. read guaralnick)~~ (NA, sadly, but i'm reading it anyway)

{self-gratifying}
• ~~get back into AtD; you know you wanna~~ (now my official before-sleep activity, since i finished 6FU season 2)
• ~~children of men~~, volver
• ~~get tix 4 girl talk [DAMMIIIT!]~~; ~~pig-iron cab~~; om? ylt?
• vote in my dad's weirdo presidential tourney, again. sorry, bet, not vote.

[resolution settings adjustable]
let's see if i can't accomplish some of the things that fall into these categories. and what was that other things again?

we need a resolution
we have so much confusion

o, my philadelphia,

2007-01-07T11:39:00.000-05:00

someday i shall have dominion over thee once more. i will navigate you, in your wholesome wholeness, commandingly, not as a sequence of dissected intersections, contiguously conceived, but discretely achieved. i will hold you in my grasp again, not just in my memory as the vague uniting principle of pinnable points: 13th and pine, 40th and walnut, juniper between locust and spruce, no, walnut and locust - and their immediately adjacent pizza places, shoe stores, and subway stops.

i may never again have the chance to let the postponed mummer's parade pass me by on a scarily summery epiphany, while i picnic cross-town, on quinoa and spaghetti-squash, until my bff and her bf go off with god and leave me to watch the foam-swordsmen charge and recharge and sit in liza clark park before attempting (alternating armpits and ankle) the 1.03 miles (says the gmaps pedometer), clearance-shopping these shoes and this along the sunny saturday way, back to the blue line. but at least i'll be able to accomplish some errands.

someday soon my rapscallion roommate will leave you, and leave me too, cilantro-resale schemes unrealized, serial cigar rants un-video-blogged, millenia of European history unfathomed. and i'll have a new one, a wide-eyed westerner, who may not be on the cover of time, but will make me cups of tea and watch russian ark with me and eat what i cook and come to paradise on thursdays and we'll find ways to take advantage of one another - my company, his car - but it will be good.

and we'll gaze upon you, in the mornings when you glisten in the winter sun, in the evenings when the pink sinks to purple and the purple holds and holds, until robot comcast tower lays down its puny crane arms and surrenders to you too, soon.

sooner than that, i'll leave you too. i'll return to the scene of the crime, the pearline goldmine of rock city wankers and their bleeding poesy, diamonds and glass, sapphire and zinc. but i'll always come back. yoga on tuesdays and movies on wednesdays. paradise on thursdays. you will still love me tomorrow.

stirred, not shaken

2007-01-04T16:29:00.000-05:00

happy happy. 2007 sure sounds like a funny name for a year, but i guess we got used to 2006 too.

the weekend at wanakena was - as i told the party krew - as wonderful as ever, and possibly more so. hard to reckon that - i re-read my entry from two years ago, after what i tend to think of as the 'first' wanakena new years weekend (even though there were a sizable group for 03-04) - and it's confusing to compare this time to that time. i'm definitely not having the kind of incomprehensibly overwhelming reaction i described then, though there have been a few tearful moments (driving home with rebecca tuesday night, and again yesterday evening on the phone with my dad.)

not sure if the difference is because i'm in a more emotionally stable place now - i am; although my life is in many ways just as uncertain as it was two years ago (more so than a year ago, when, for instance, i had a happy job, and i could count to 8 with things to do) - or else just a more emotionally (as we say) inured one (and past accustomed to the restorative/palliative potency of retreat and friend-time) - or because there really was something magically momentous about that one time. like, very possibly, that it was the first time: it was an adventure then; we were feeling our way through possibilities that have since developed the comfortable durability but also the mellowing mundanity of the weight of tradition.

but if this year felt convivial and familiar rather than inexpressibly blissful, it's also hard to remember or even imagine that it was ever otherwise - as hard now to recapture what that other version of the experience even felt like as it would be to recreate it. so the comparison is probably meaningless. (that other version seems mystical and ephemeral now, in a way it couldn't have been at the time - still it's good to be reminded of that sense of it.)

i wonder how others encounter this developing tradition - my closest friends in the world, who have been there several times and might notice changing aspects of it, but even more so the newcomers who, perhaps, had the opportunity to experience it more freshly, closer to the way i did two years ago. on the other hand, perhaps not, because it might have been something unique to me, being the central nexus among all of these people and this place - as i noted in that entry two years ago, "for me it may have been something else entirely."

i think i felt less central this year, which i mean in the best way - of course i was the de facto host, but i really felt like it was an event created in common by everyone there. even in terms of preliminary organizing, reb and sarah co did as much if not more of the inviting and recruiting and logistical legwork. several of us shopped and cooked - yes, it was reb and me for the most part, but regardless it never felt like delegation or default, just people doing what we wanted to do. my main contribution was baking: improvised baklava (with raisins and oj), petit 4 banana cookies, apple pie, and the ninth-annual booche , definitely the smoothest production to date, thanks to the multi-attachment smartstick and my new buttercup yellow joy-toy - even that was communal (leaves and stems by jonah and dan, turtle by jonah.)

there's a sense in which everything that happens seems either to be part of tradition already - all those things i baked, for instance, and the morning exercises - or to immediately become part of it. new additions to the activities were few - face painting, moongazing, a couple of games (khet, blokus, telephone-pictionary) - and thanks in part to what reb calls nachshon's "insta-ritual proclivities," even the most extreme silliness could take on ceremonial aspect, complete with worship-hymn-cum-drinking-song. (the best line that ester didn't quote was about fifi "giving us gas for 2007.") i also really liked the ritual that nach created for the sweat, which happened on the early evening of the 31st and became about (or more explicitly about) cleansing ourselves of the old year.

but that's not to say that the proceedings were ponderous - the mood was even more mellow and relaxed than years previous, which is saying something. i really liked the group of people there this year. it was the most swattie-heavy year so far, but there were broad similarities in other ways too (the groop was overwhelmingly jewish, for one thing.) still, i did notice a lack of - not levity, exactly, but giddiness (as ester put it - also giggliness), or not to put too fine a point on it party-hearty-ness (the proverbial hard-core get-down action.) we rise in the morning and go to bed at dishonorably reasonable hours, and despite a decent amount of drinking i didn't notice anyone noticeably near drunk (it was a challenge to polish off four of the five bottles of champagne by the time we left - less than two had been downed by the end of the 'eve.) even the after-dinner dance party (now-standard, and of coure meti-ti-ticulously scripted, though the record states it was once "spontaneous") was a strain to sustain even through the first hour of the new year, with hobble-footed me to lead the way.

i suppose one goes to the country for new years eve to avoid riotous revelry and heavy drinking, but i still feel like we're not behaving properly for a bunch of kids in our mid-20s. don't tell me we're getting old this fast. i guess this is why i don't really think of wanakena as a party, even though i sometimes call it that.

ester asked me, on gchat today, why it has such emotional heft for me; why it matters to me on such a personal level (even if some of that now seems more symbolic in contrast to the visceral effect of 04-05.) apart from the simple fact of bringing together the people and place i love the most. i told her: it's the transitory realization of an ideal. communally created and shared pure contentment and enjoyment; as a natural state rather than something to be earned or justified. pleasure, if you must, not self-indulgent but self-sustaining. "socially-responsible low-level hedonism" she suggested - "nobody's working, but everyone pitches in." i'm not sure that's quite it, but something like that. i do think all work can and should be, as she says, "communal living work." anyway, it's the juxtaposition of ideality and transitoriness that has the power to make it so wrenching and bittersweet.

still, it's not necessarily as transitory as all that. i guess it should be a reminder of the real possibility of attaining that ideal; if a few people can do it for a few days, why can't more do it for longer. big dreams, is what we talked about on the drive home, the need for them. i have a disheartening tendency to forget and deny to myself that there are things going on in my life, in my present, that i have accomplished some things, small and slow as they might seem, upon which i can build. certainly, a week and a half revisiting my past in the form of the people and places of my childhood isn't the best way to remind myself of that (no time now to reflect on my recent time with family and friends in scarsdale and rochester, people and places just-perceptibly aging, maturing, changing.) but i'll try to keep remembering it, and think to the future in ways that don't make me crumple into a weepy heap. no time for laundry for the strong, forward-looking woman.

there's already a lot going on in 2007: at least three of my best friends are getting married, my sister's graduating (and producing a large-scale show), my grandmother's throwing an 85th birthday party in lieu of the long-running bi-pentennial family-reunion tradition. i might dj a monthly dance party in philadelphia, and i might write and present a paper at a conference in seattle, and i might work on a musical project with my uncle in boston, and i might stay with and work for my cousin in maine. somehow in all of that i hope i can find a way to have a job or several, travel to visit friends on the west coast, and maybe live for a period in another place, perhaps another country, somehow engaged in a new and different way - although i'm not ready to give philadelphia up yet, i don't think.

i have some inklings of little, irresolute resolutions for what i want to do in 2007. i want to play guitar and sing, to return to being a music-maker as well as a music-taker, even if it's just for myself in my room. i want to bake and cook with continuing increasing confidence, and learn and think more about the broader implications of food. i want to be more personally and intellectually engaged with social and political ideas, which doesn't necessarily mean i want to follow current events. as important as it is to read about music on the internet, i want to have better things to do with most of my time. i want to continue with and expand upon my yoga practice, and maybe explore other possibilities for physical activity once i get my full mobility back (hopefully a month or so.) i want to continue to cultivate and enjoy the existing relationships i have with friends and family members, and find ways to broaden other relationships and develop new ones. i want to feel that i am an active and engaged member of a community, or communities, in any of several senses. it would also be nice if i got a driver's license.

it's okay if i don't do all of these things, or even most of them. most of all i want to be happy. and all things considered i still think i do okay at that.

perhaps it's the unfair prejudicing of chronology, but i thought the nicest part of wanakena this year was monday (the third of the three complete days - out of five total): after two relatively chaotic and exhilarating days with thirteen people in the house, culminating in sunday night's festivities - and i must admit that mark's unanticipated early-evening arrival, as NYE preparations were in full swing, grinning and bearing bourbon, constitutes a close second - half of the participants took off on monday morning, leaving seven of us to a day of pure and unadulterated hanging-out. there were enough leftovers that we didn't even cook. the biggest enterprise for the day was trying (and failing) to launch a boat in the nearly-but-not-quite unmelted pond. for the most part we just sat around having swattie-style conversations, about religion, class, academia, and most memorably the experiential vs. objective quality of emotions - that one inspired by alyssa's frustrated frustration at losing a lengthy game of monopoly.

i dunno, that was just a really nice day.

baby you're a prize
and i'm a catch
and we're a perfect match

crutchy rides again

2006-12-28T21:16:00.000-05:00

yo yo yo yo yo. got my cast off today. can't quite pirouette on the right side yet, but... have been walking without my crutches maybe a third of the time. will improve, especially since i have a shocking green bit of rubber to do ankle exercises with. productive day otherwise too: showered (freestanding!), mailed off many copies of my ¡MiX!, talked to insurance peeps, purchased a coat, gloves, slippers, jeans, and an immersion blender (gift for wanakena), though no shoes.

oh mannn. cannn't stay up late doing this, i've gotta get up and go to the adx tomorrow. but let me say - there have been some lovely times of late. my last week in philly (pre-holidays) was invigorating - specifically, i want to say, last thursday, when things just felt so good. would it be ridiculous to say that the most joyous moment of my last week(ish) was watching a movie? by myself, in a theatre.

not sure, but bobby surprised the hell out of me [well, given its mediocre reception by the snuffy critics - i was rooting for it all along] by being absolutely, giddily thrilling. i can't remember a time a movie has moved me to grin so big, tear up, dance in my seat, with its generosity and warmth. (and its music and style and humor and pathos and relevance) i cried (and i really never cry at films) for the same reasons i got weepy at the u.s. v. john lennon, but several more beside despite the sprawling cast, with 20 or so characters all getting roughly equal screen time, i was fully caught up with and in each of them; a testament to many great performances and equally adept writing.

the movie's easiest flaws to point to are in the somewhat overdone montage sequences with voiceover clips from RFK's speeches - there are a few too many of them towards the end - but i feel (subjectively) like the film actually earned those moments, and i was perfectly content to go along and feel with them even as i had to wink at myself. weirdly, the speech he gave that night is actually not included, and instead is drowned out by "the sound of silence" (the acoustic version. which was sort of a cool choice.) otherwise, the movie is almost subtle in its handling of the inescapable, bittersweet dramatic irony that pervades the whole thing, never overplaying the connections between the storylines, but simply allowing their shared time and place, in history and in the world of the movie, be enough to unite them in an unspecific but meaningful way.

i especially liked freddy rodriguez' character, having just seen him in a somewhat similar role in 6 ft. under. also memorable were the acid trip set to "initials" from hair and the scene, set to "tracks of my tears" (!) that revolves around a discussion of anne bancroft's nudity in the the graduate (the scene opens with the camera on mary e. winstead's chest while an offscreen character says "her boobs".)

was it a great film? it's hard for me to say - except that i'm not sure how it could be otherwise - i think it got me personal way that goes beyond easy analysis of its merits, and there's not much better you can say about a movie than that. anyway. i highly recommend you go and enjoy it, and i just want to tell everybody because i'm afraid people won't realize how good it is.

is that really all i wanted to say, after a week-plus of blog silence? probably not, but it's what was on my mind at the moment, and now i think i better be off. catch ya in the noo year.

eva,
i'm sorry but you will never have me. to me you're just some faggy girl, and i need a lover with soul power.
and you ain't got no soul power.
no you ain't got no soul power.
no you ain't got not so-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh...

heads high, my young allies

2006-12-19T23:55:00.000-05:00

taking a brake from megamishamashmix oh-sicks (u herd it hear furst fowx!)... well, we'll see if it doesn't fin(n)ish me first. currently live [demo] and garageband are in cahoots to befudddle my mind by screwing around with my work and generally being insubordinate. what's that you say, it's working?

mebbs. also been living in lala-list-land, only thank goodness p4k just laid theirs all out in one go, none of this gradual-revelation suspense. unit 3 and i went through the whole darn business last night; sty and p that is, singles and "tracks." molto youtubage. gah. one thing's for sure: it was a 2006 in/of music. not too much to say except the lists seem more and more arbitrary all the time, but i still like 'em. loving the knife love and enjoying the defiant self-righteousness of nobody else recognizing my personal #1 or #2 (aside from my clique-buddies dave and frank, hi guyse.) that's whatever. soon enough you'l get to see what sort of mess i can make of it.

been going out every night. standing on the corner of 6th and spring garden at around 6:30, waiting for a hailable cab (only once did i have to give up and call) is becoming a regular thing, though i don't feel like i'm getting better at it. today for y(ay for y)oga. yesternight for unsilent, which was a bit of an ordeal;

originally was giving up on going, then becca convinced me to cab, as my parents have instructed me to make myself do (to not feel helpless and unempowered, though it is also a timehassle.) 'cept it took 2 cabs - the first one was going to pick up his takeout food first, but before we even got there he kicked me out b/c he's meter wasn't working (!?) second one got me to rittenhouse, but i had to crutch a few blocks from there to meet up with the ambient procession. still, was with it for the last fifteen-twenty-ish minutes/five-ish blocks, although hot-footing it to compensate for walking debility is not the best way to bask in the chimey envelopmental glowth. no-prob; forgot about the food'n'coffee'n'more(live)music'n'raffle after-function, upstairs @ the ethical soc. so that was good. weird was there's (besides rebecca) dave from counselling and (as in with) alice from school/moveon/canasta. so that was confusing. also woman from lizo's dance thing. so it's like i live in filadelfia or sth. somebody won this and it looks kool. (that's a palindrome.) (like rebecca and her ko-workers, officially.) anyway we also sat in the non-colored-light-ball-having r. square until even the penguin on my toes got cold.

oh yeah, remember him? erikka (that's the dominifinn i didn't mention earlier) and i had to take him/it to the movies with us on was it wednesday, b/c we went to see happy feet!! - which i recommend as long as the basic premise appeals. that review does a good job of explaining why the film is interesting, bringing up a lot of the strange (not espeically subtle) political content, although i don't know if i'd go quite so far in terms of it being weird (or great.) then i ran into james at the white dog, and we also played canasta.

but wait, i'm supposed to be working backwards. um um. right, rc sunday. rebecca on thursday. emp proposal friday.

saturday was lovely because of notonebut two visits (basically not my instigation either) from friendlings: been-a-while bedbugs and lauduling for afternoon lunch and the challenge of playing music that would force laura to take it seriously. then, not long later, tara and eventually hop-a-long k8 the l8 and gr8. those gulls and i wined and dined, accordion-caroled, dissected dora and diego, danced around dance parties. no wonder i made three pies in three days! first apple got gobbled by a steady stream of visitors thurs-sat; with the second half of the crust i made 1 quiche (tomato-spinach-scallion) and 1 more apple (jumbly "crumb" topping), plus my famous three-orange-root-vegetable potage. (so i've got plenty orts to eat, should last me til i leave.)

problem with a flurry is it leaves me, sunday, feeling all the more alonely. afterwards alone and lifelong lonely, and in this case puzzlin' too to my lonesome about rltnshp gurgles and whirbles, and somehow i just burst into heaving dry sobs over my soup, discharging by myself for myself (nobody to be on the receiving end, just clienting freehand.) that's the problem, ain't it, it's not a problem when someone's there to tell about it, it's the after and before they're there, that you can't quite summon up xactly at that accompanied remove. so it's fine, because it is, and really it is, you know, because those aren't most of the times, it's just that there are those too. well a will a well.

at least i have amy. aw amy. still me, still now, like millie says, "i'm still here." gotta believe, when there's a thirteen year-old there to assure you, "it can only get better," that's consolation. and it is. sweetly. she's preposterously, precociously concerned with making sure you feel okay: "life's what you make it" "that's life" "no regrets" "don't lose any sleep" "don't cry your heart out", except that's not accurate, it's a very common misrecognition of the discharge as the hurt/distress pattern itself; in fact you should cry your heart out. okay? it's okay, go ahead. don't hold it against her, she's only thirteen. "diamonds are forever," she also says, and it does indeed seem that she's poised to start taking over the world, starting with me and my dad and the fifty-year-old curmudgeon-critics and the kids my grandma knows in barbados.

and you?

you won't be sad or broken tonight
you won't be squealed on, ripped on tonight
you won't be back-stabbed,
double-crossed,
face down,
teeth knocked out
lying in a gutter somewhere

the way i roll

2006-12-13T10:48:00.000-05:00

yo. joe inspired me to try actually wheeling myself around in my chair, instead of playing passive helpless, well hey hey, well-timed too, since my good leg's a bit put out from yesterday's exertions - in the name of consumerism! - and even hop-crutching around the living room is a mite dicey...so i'm wheeling around it instead, like a calibrated robot madman. scientist. rugger. easier for putting cds away too. can't get into the kitchen though (computer in the way.)

something...was gonna write, or watch fanny and alexander, sunday night was it, but somehow the simple whipping-together of my year-end single list took hrs, and i had to succumb to reason; then i dreamed this...

late up then up late again monday, mostly working on my response to the EMP CFP - if you care, it's effectively pt. 5. of this post, which i mostly link to show off the amusing new photo(s) i put on the top of it, and plus it's a nice bit, which you would be interested in, and not just because i'm trying to see how many times i can link to mincetapes. comments and discussion welcomed - i'll probably try to polish of the rest of proposal (amazing how long 250 words can take if you let them) tomorrow day.

no werk yesterday either, but - good. i had lunch with becca at pura vida, then taxied to meet with iyengar russ in the loft, encouraging me to work my foot within the cast, gave me a nice sequence that i'm eager to go do. i think a major stumbling block to my home practice is just not having a good idea of how to construct a full sequence. he gave me a chair too, which will allow for some intense headrushing backbends.

unit 3 (=matthew) picked me up from there and we went to investigate the tower rekkids bankruptcy craziness. at this point (10 days left), everything's at least 60% off, dance 70%, rock/pop 60%+20%, hip-hop cds $1.50 each (didn't see anything i'd even heard of though). which means however you slice it you're not going to avoid getting some pretty great deals. 16 discs (some of them gifts) for under $80 is score enough, but factor in that at least four were imports originally (preposterously!) priced at $25-30 a pop (dude, no wonder they're out of business!), now available for $7-8...and that's including tax, shipping and handling. lots left there too - a week from now, they'll probably be begging you to take anything you can stomach at a dollar or less (cassettes are 25 cents now, which seems like highway robbery.) anyway. a listener's work is never done. (and i didn't even get to look at the dvd section.)

after that binge we were too hungry to proceed to tjs as planned, especially when i remembered it was two-dollar tuesday. so that. then home for frenzied listening. (the figurines sound like modest mouse! built to spill sound like themselves! kieren hebden is a lunatic!) somehow gabe and i started playing tool and the who for each other. jasmine arrived for reading week. matthew returned, in a "belgian state," and explained how the strokes have rock and roll bleeding out of their eyeballs and wolf parade sound like their vomiting out the rest of your vomity heart (or something?) which is a good thing. dunno how jay-z figgers he's from the murder capital (unless it's not per capita, in which case not very impressive. camden's rate is almost as high as baltimore's.) "exact" and "precise", we decided, mean the same thing, we think.

em-oh-em-oh-ar-em-oh-ar-em-eye-en-gee

flakes are in the air

2006-12-07T22:20:00.000-05:00

i was going to attempt to write about how remarkably unreliable people in general (or, less generally, my friends) are about honoring commitments, returning phone calls, following through on plans, and so forth, whilst making it clear that i was not actually (in these instances) frustrated or upset about this phenomenon, nor even complaining. just, i find it quite striking, and even after experiencing it all my life.

but seeing as how a sizable bunch (6-2+1) of my friends, one way or another, albeit severally by dint of flakery and delays, ended up here at my place last night in a lovely sort of semi-impromptu gathering, i would feel a little ungracious writing about that. so i guess i'll write about that instead.

tara was here first, and we threw some cookbooks around, then she took off on my bike (with my helmet even!) to do some shopping for me at reading terminal. that ended up taking over an hour and a half, maybe because she was shopping for herself as well. rebecca came in the meantime and started working on the lentils. i roasted squash seeds, which ended up in the rice. when tara returned, it took her six avocados to start to balance out the half a habanero in the guacamole. nachshon brought sprouted lentils and bandaids for me, angela brought orfee, which we got through maybe half an hour of later, mostly falling asleep (well, what did we expect from subtitles in the dark after dinner and several cups of wine, under bedroom blankets?), before erika arrived and jojo brought us back to life. katie and brady had brought copies of the new (not out yet) shins album. tara stayed last, listening to that and nellie, and trying out the cabernet chocolate sauce over coconut sorbet.

was that boring? today i did less than ever, it felt like. it was possibly the first time since my accident that i started to get bored. though folks have been asking me, am i bored out of my gourd? gored out of my board? chugging plugging through against the day now, and it's nice to know (if obvious) that gr and ps (unmistakeable, isn't it?) are reading along with me. you otter too - "his most accessible novel, page by page", schmidt says some folks say, and i would agree. it's not like you don't have the time, right? (OtherGabe HorribleWits is reading it too, but also the sound and the fury simultaneously, so slowly.) i ran out of 6' under first season episodes to watch, so i'll start on some movies.

i have been listening the day away to wincing the night away (bad title), which is easy 'cuz, like they like, it's v. short. (also funeral and crane wife and bring me the workhorse and the eraser, for indie solidarity.) it's good! it feels like a blend between the first two albums, sonically/energywise, but heavier on the synths. the first track is an unmissable arcade fire deadringer (hence...) with nice plinky arpeggios; the best track so far is the one that opens with an "and then he kissed me" nod and then he talks about being "fond of why-oh-you." yah i'm yakking muso here, so what. it's the shins! [btw, they're née flakemusic, get it?]

this evening erika and pete took me out (second time in philly; second time ever in the wheelchair) a few blocks roll to a holiday (i guess) party at latte lounge. featuring plenty o' food, eggnog, erika's rendition of rich/katie's vegan chocolate cake, fudgier than ever, and some funny little cranberry cream tarts made by a lady who goes by "stevens" (?) and makes hats and "love[s] car crash stories!" also featured live jazzzz - saxophone, casio keyboard, djembe, vocals. i dug their groovy stuff ("the creator has a master plan," some spiritual about adam and eve and 'writing a glee'[?]) more than their "blue in green" and "song for my father", but the obvious highpoint was the talented-enough vocalist's mad-skillz tapdancing to "my favorite things" (6/8 = the best time signature for tapping!) moofer take note: she teaches too.

wait, even better highpoint: glanced out the window and noticed that it was snowing!, just holiday-party-perfect, and it kept it up too, healthily, as we walked/rode home and gloriated. not that i've been thinking so much about the weather, but i have had this vague idea that winter might not actually get around to happening. well maybe it will.

trees break the sidewalk
and the sidewalk skins my knees

i feel old and foolish now

2006-12-01T01:05:00.000-05:00

yesterday i went and got four teeth removed. they took all four, it turned out.

today i got a lot of hair removed. possibly about equal to the teeth, if measured by weight.

yesterday i ate nothing, until the evening, and that's only if you count a smoothie (yogurt-pineapple-orange) and a bowl of ice cream.

today i ate at least four meals:
1) oatmeal
2) mashed potatoes; baba ghannouj; leftover saag paneer and malai kofta; sweet potatoes
3) pesto pasta; cherry tomato (singular); yellow peppers; more baba, with pita this time; a clementine
4) crab cake w/ mustard remoulade; pumpkin ravioli w/ walnut-sage cream sauce (ohmygodgood); no dessert

hmmmmmaybei'llhavesomeicecream.

tomorrow i return to phillydelphia with my dad ("on his way" to d.c.) i think i will not eat quite so well there. but hopefully i will do okay.

thanks to my parents for taking such gooood care of me, doing my laundry and letting me usurp their hairstylist appointments. also thanks scott for getting us comps to see real time tonight (um...that description is a bit hypberbolic but...cute show). and thanks to joh. seb. for writing zweistimmige inventionen, 9/15 of which i can apparently stumble through reasonably respectably.

[you might have gathered - i'm feeling alright. naturally my mouth feels a bit funny, and eating is not the easiest thing in the world. but, yknow. the note from the oral and maxillofacial surgeon sez they think ibuprofen is stronger than vicodin, and i'm inclined to believe that.]

wanna update mincetapes but i am just too overcome by SWEDEN and what it has wrought (and scandinavia generally) that i am rendered speechless. i'll get over that soon and then try to write something about it. meanwhile the pet shop boys' "flamboyant" is ruling my brain.

now i will try to read most of the last 100 pages of life of pi in hopes that i can leave it behind when i depart tomorrow morning (i give that <40% chance of happening.)

and the question is:
"was i more alive then than i am now?"

you get the ankles and i'll get the wrists

2006-11-28T00:07:00.000-05:00

djaknow that song samples toots + the maytals too, in addition to howlin' wolf and the andrews sisters? (and is that raymond scott again?) i didn't.

was in a grumpy mood today after the first thing i did being back to the orthopedist two hours for them to take another x-ray ("no change - that's a good thing") and replace my basically fine cast with another definitely inferior cast - not neat and smooth and elegant but lumpy uneven gritty in parts of the exterior and still i think the wrong kind of space around my foot - that's cuz booker the butcher didn't do it, he's moving to orlando on thursday and was just half-supervising the new guy. grr. oh well. (got purple again; too yellow to go for the pink.) comes off in a month or less.

well, i didn't say much about thanksgiving, so i wanted to. my brother dubbed me "the hobbler who made the cobbler" (no mention of the gobbler though.) and i did make the cobbler (apple-cranberry, with oatmeal-streusel topping and biscuit dough bottom crust, not rolled out very well and hence uneven but still pretty good i think, i'll have the last piece tomorrow.) dad made the pumpkin pie and collard greens, dan made cranberry relish/salsa in various variations and tended to the jelly, martha had something to do with mashed potatoes and made as promised green bean casserole with fried shallots on top. mom did turkey stuffing gravy and etc. and i mostly just chopped things as needed and put cds on shuffle (sweet potatoes, salad, biscuits, and pecan pie were provided by the mcdee-esses.) and it was so good we ate it aaaaaaaaall up. except for the leftovers.

(last night we actually made the weirdly snarky thai coconut turkey soup recipe from this this allmusic feature, which turned out to be quite tasty.)

after a nice heartful round of "thankful-fors" (in which i talked a lot but somehow forgot to mention my friends), the conversation centered various internet phenomena. which provided the inspiration for after-dinner activities, as martha and hannah immediately set up a second life account on my macbook and proceeded to terrorize orientation island (as "forkmannah minghuang") with simultaneous purple spiky hair and black pigtails, except when the curious collected company comandeered the computer to look at youtube videos (surprise, everybody loves okgo.)

cooler, though it didn't happen until the next night, was when danny used my built-in camera to do video ichat with mami and lena in japan. other weekend highlights included a family expedition to shop for speakers and be underwhelmed by borat, and the much-anticipated wheelchair (st)roll around the reservoir. yuh.

friday night i went out, with martha and scott (and sarah), and met emiko and morgan and jeremy, and eventually nick and most of his family (oh man people's drunk parents!) and various others at the second bar after we left the old toad. i kind of liked how it ended up as a series of small, mostly one-on-one, conversations, instead of a big communal one, whether that was because of bar noise and spatial arrangements or it's just how it happened. striking how differently our life paths have led us thus far, from nick hating 3rd year med (but he'll pull through) and scott working ridiculous hours but hey he's doing theatre to morgan "feeling old" because her knees are giving out (seriously limiting future hiking and running possibilities, which sucks a lot if you're morgan) and she's got a house with her boyfriend, and emiko just back from 7 months of leading tours in the southwest and leaving again tomorrow for 5 or so more on a boat in baja. basically, everyone seems really good.

and then there's me, doing nothing. okay, well healing. forced to take some time off from not doing much in particular to forcibly do less. sigh, we won't go into it. it was refreshing to talk to those guys about some of that stuff though, not having seen them in long times, to fall quite naturally into relatively big talk about happiness and relationships and community and school and life trajectories.

anyway i'm out of that little funk (mostly yr basic post-holiday mood correction anyway) having decided to (try to?) come back to philly on friday, having talked to rebecca and convinced myself that it will be both workable and the better thing to do. not too worried that my friends (the ones i forgot to mention how thankful i am for) won't be able to help me shop and cook and basically function and more importantly perhaps come visit and keep me company so i don't go lonely or bored...the main issue now is whether i'll be capable of travelling (sitting in the passenger seat, six hours tops) two days after i get my wisdom teeth extracted on wednesday. which i realize is a significant gamble (sounds like recovery times do vary, very widely), but i don't see many better options than to take it, and if i lose i guess just find some other way to do the trip. (hm - moving my stuff will be the problem though, i just thought of that.) so that'll be the big we'll see, and in the meantime whatever will be will be.

to finish my story about today, i talked to a couple people whilst sitting on the side porch swing (it continues to be mercifully mild here, which is atypical weather for its sheer consistency), and finally made it to the end of penelope and the novel, good golly molly what a great book, and watched taxi driver and played some bach and beethoven and ate dinner and did yoga and watched my parents' tv show with them (studio 60) and now it's now and i guess i'll read a little bit of life of pi, as per my aunt jane's prescription, before i fall asleep.

and how the muscle bone and sinews tangled

cultural learnings

2006-11-26T01:32:00.000-05:00

(really really wanted to set up a reader participation web poll thingy for this question to see what kind of aggregate consensus would emerge, but i couldn't find a way to ask it in the correct format (as a ranking of items rather than a simple selecting of radio-button options) so i guess just contribute in the comments if you want, in any case the question i woke up with in my head on thursday morning is:

rank the decades of the 20th century in order, from best to worst. using any criteria you deem relevant. my tentative ranking is as follows:

1960s
1990s
1950s
1920s/1970s (tie?)
1900s
1940s
1980s
1930s
1910s

anyway....................)

....................

i dreamed about going to see borat on thursday night. the people i was going with didn't make it, but later my cousin (bobby) and uncle (dan) were there, the latter very excited that the concessions stand had given him free drinks and free nacho cheese. later in the dream we also saw miles davis perform live and he was very friendly to us.

anyway, the movie was great - the opening section was set in a high school, featuring a character that was not borat (maybe like a cross with andy milonakis, whom dan just introduced me to?), but similarly an outsider and vaguely ethnic, creating uncomfortable situations and the expected sexist/misogynist jokes but mostly jokes about disability and cripples, which i was made the butt of, though i took it well. then a weird transition (involving a capgun fired at the audience?) to the main portion of the film, set in the north african desert (egypt i think), mostly consisting of very visually innovative animations of crayon-scribbled triangles and other abstract shapes, and also pomp with figures in star wars style paramilitary uniforms, also we were able to walk around the theatre, go behind the screen and see the characters there (not cooperative.)

[triangles are a four-year-old development stage said my mom when we were speaker shopping yesterday; circles are five-year-old]

well, we actually went to see the real borat movie last night and all (the whole family) found it disappointing. indeed i had initially not thought i would enjoy it much, mostly because of the style of humor. the deafening buzz made me think it would be worth seeing anyway, and reports from friends had me expecting it would be pretty funny.

um, it's really not that funny. sure, i laughed a decent amount at some scenes (and it was hard to resist affecting his pidgin for a few hours afterwards), but there were long stretches that were strained and awkward, poorly conceived, based on moronic and unfunny jokes, or just generally fell flat. and it's not that provocative either. neither the satire/political stuff nor the scatological/shock-value stuff (which takes up a lot more of the film than the former) seemed particularly offensive to me. i can definitely see how the premise could be create smart and provocative commentary, as well as great comedy (as i've been told it does much more effectively in the tv show) - but this was not that. it's certainly not a complete failure, and i'm sure less hype would have helped me enjoy it more. but i really just can't understand how the material as presented in this movie is earning striking universal acclaim from critics, no matter how many of them are lefty pinko baron-cohen apologists who are just rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of inflicting this on unsuspecting peorians.

whatever. just had to say, if you're wondering whether to see it. my 2¢ is: not funny, not worthy of the controversy it doesn't actually seem to have generated; don't bother.

on the other hand, saw the similarly lauded departed tonight, and that is totally worth it (thank you, carla.) great cast, obviously, all those big boys doing their thang - matt damon smug as ever but somehow not annoying for it; jack almost underused but untouchable, especially his hysterical rat-face-making and his ability to casually distill pure evil; though i think i liked leo's performance even more - and that's just the leads. even better filmmaking - chock-full of almost breathtakingly economical scenes. it's not exactly my genre (the toll of killings, especially towards the end, left me unsettled and on edge well out of the theatre and even after getting home) but even so, more pure cinematic pleasure there than anything i've seen in a while, maybe since (the generally overlooked) kiss kiss bang bang.

somehow, i don't think i've ever seen a scorsese film before, except for no direction home and, oh yeah, the last waltz (which clearly don't count.) (oh yeah, i did watch most of boxcar bertha too.) maybe i'll try to work on that over the next few weeks, and catch up on some altman too.

......

thought i was gonna talk about some sorta serious stuff, lifethinkings in the wake of meeting up with some high school buddies at a bar last night, and general post-holiday-hubbub comedown back-to-the-life pontifications [sputter] but for now i think i'll slink off to bed and return tomorrow after/unless my sister decides to hang out with me.

dream at night, girl with the cobra tattoo

gettin' bionic

2006-11-22T15:01:00.000-05:00

just did a bunch of restorative yoga, so that should help to restore, i suppose, my humanity, or my sanity, or not my vanity, along with my phone charger (true story.) however (don't tell donna harraway), i'm growing a little more cybernetic day by day. (cyborthotic?)

the two screws in my foot i told you about, but i didn't realize long they are until i saw the x-ray yesterday (should have guessed? i thought they'd just be little guys. two inches maybe.) they stay in until/unless they get uncomfortable rubbing against my shoes (in a year.) also have purple stitches where they cut me, but those will dissolve in a month or so. (they look like scraggly pen marks.) then they gave me a fiberglass cast, also purple (not so good for signing, sez lillie, but maybe somebody will paint on it.) and an elbow brace, padded strapped to my arm in four places with a mechanical rotary joint, allowing full extension and no lateral motion. the brace is kind of bulky and annoying to don or doff clothes over, but it's nice to have more motion and it's not painful. the cast is more comfortable and secure and a little lighter than the splint. so that's all good.

went to the dentist today too (first time in 3+ years?), and looks like i need wisdom teeth out, so will do that next week as long as i'm home and laid up anyway. the plan is to ride back to philly on friday 1 dec with dad on his way to d.c. which gives me 24 hours before the party that's allegedly still happening: mascher cooperative (dance) space, saturday night, to follow some dance presentations, featuring ross of love, live and gimpy. if yr in philly plz do come, show love. that's assuming somebody can lend us an amp. b.y.o.b.

unca danny's here now, so the txgiving onslaught is on in earnest, and i'm supposed to go bake an apple-cranberry dessert (pie/cobbler/tart? probably some unholy combination) soon. moofer will arrive tonight. but joanna and nellie are here now!

[dan just showed me this video for one of his recent senerap productions - check it out - the white guy is my cousin benny.]

mostly i'm excited about against the day. although this online guide being up and massive already is just a little wikidiculous. (dude, wardenclyffe!)

i keep thinking i should write about my dreams here, but i'm probably wrong - i feel like the vicodin makes them take strange, abstract forms (like with me not even in them): i told you about the blog-comments one, but there was one in the form of a family guy episode, and one in lengthy question-answer dialogue format like ithaca. night before last i dreamed, among other things, a new stephin merritt song (entitled "sides") that was so perfectly poppy and detailed in my memory (if only i could recall the melody!) that i was seriously tempted to write about it at mincetapes. but that would just be silly.

last night (no pills) there was some kind of hip/hippie theater collective that had recently moved into a house down the street (maybe inspired by heather graham's character in six degrees, which i watched right before sleeping), having an open house/party/presentation of the early shakespeare comedy (familiarly known as?) "locusts," performed in the round or maybe en promenade in the courtyard. i tried to play music for the hanging-out afterward by making an itunes playlist, but it took so frustratingly long to search for and add each song that i could never finish and go join the rest of the people. stupid pcs.

i got hit by a mink car
driven by a guitar
woke up in a beautiful dream alone

nostos

2006-11-19T17:26:00.000-05:00

guess which pants i'm wearing on my swollen, vaguely discolored, scabbing, bandaged, woozy, puffy, achy breaky legs today? (hint: it's sunday!) i've been home in rochester for a few days now, so time for an update.

i had surgery on friday night - they put two screws in my ankle to help it heal back into the correct position. sort of like an internal body piercing. the surgery was done by 7:30 or 8 but apparently i was in pretty rough shape, in a lot of pain and vomiting a lot (i only remember a little bit of pain and vomiting, which is fine with me), so they kept me at the hospital overnight. i didn't get to leave until almost noon, even though i was awake and perfectly comfortable at 6 am, waiting for one thing after another but mostly a physical therapist to come and watch me walk with my crutches.

now i have a walker (complete with fancy brakes and a padded platform for my fratured-elbow arm) and a wheelchair in addition to the crutches (which i still need to use the stairs), though it remains to be seen when i will use the latter. hospitalizings aside, the most activity i've seen so far was on thursday, when i flew across the state and then went out to the movies, to catch the science of sleep at the cinema before it closed.

the pain is very mild and manageable (i have lots of vicodin left), and i haven't gotten too bored yet either. i'm pretty uninspired by my parents dvd collection. (i would welcome suggestions of movies to have them rent for me.) worse, however, is their cache of take-out menus. (they went out for a fancy 20-person cook-it-yourself dinner thing at this new culinary center last night, and i was stuck with 3rd-rate chinese.) um, i beat four-decks spider today. anyway, thanks to folks who have been writing and calling.

i think this entry is really lame and sappy so i'm going to stop. in case you haven't gotten the e-mail yet (which probably means i don't have your address): wanakena new years is on!

(in related news, archival betamax news footage was recently rediscovered of ross and martha, c. 1994, giving a guided tour of the partially-completed house, sporting the latest in tween hyperactive eyesore fashion, with additional reportage by hastily invented aliases about clown tight-rope accidents and redwood deforestation, as well as "music video" renditions of "cheese grater", "toddler hiway" and "baa baa black sheep" on the boathouse dock.)

p.s. it snowed here today (!)

take yr close 'n' play

the meteorite is the source of the light*

2006-11-15T12:18:00.000-05:00

hello. hello everything. hello, and okay. so, in addition to the lovely folks over at blabberbook (not sure about that title, but nice li'l piece), the accident has been written up in practically ever nyc news outlet from the post to the times, which mentions me directly (as "a man"), tho it got the hospital info wrong. the washington square news piece is probably the best (especially that last quote, which i don't think is about me), and gothamist has links to several others. so you can read there all about the incident itself, the scene on the sidewalk, and speculations about the causes, none of which i am not very qualified to report on, having been extremely confused and disoriented at the time.

i can, however, tell my own story, as i have done well upwards of forty times so far - in person (mostly to various hospital personnel), on the phone, in e-mails and via g-chat (though not txt) - and i think again find something new in it, rather than simply rehearsing the raw specifics once more. first though, importantly: don't worry: i am okay.

and i will only get better from here. look, here i am typing! and here i am smiling:

[there are lots of photos from this adventure - ben was documenting the whole time in the hospital, and kate took pictures of the sidewalk scene - but all i have access to now is alyssa's mirror-flipping computer camera. here's a few more; first flickrpix from me in over a year]

~
(story begins without explosion...) i woke up, on monday the 13th, alone, on the couch in angela, robert, and robin's charming (and hopefully somewhat more charmed - 2nd time's the charm?) astoria apartment, as ang was leaving for work. i watched the opening minutes of koyanisqatsi, to get the flavor, and the entirety of black narcissus (which was enjoyable and gorgeous to look at, but underwhelming - i was hoping for something closer to the emotional intensity of the convent.) i ate some leftovers from the previous night's lovingly prepared meal - spaghetti with sauce and meatballs from the randisi family recipe (robin is vegetarian except for those meatballs, and with good reason), and the preposterously rich cheesecake-oreo ice cream (a.k.a. cookies and cream cheese) that angela and i made. i listened to a litle of the punch the clock bonus disc, took a shower and dried off under the heat lamps, and headed out into the agreeably warm astoria noontime.

on the way to the NW, made vague plans with josie and rachel c., and slightly firmer ones with kate [flutter], before returning to my just-burnt pre-copy of ys. but first i had an appointment to keep at academy. results of the visit visible on the left - okay-but-not-great haul, with some pretty good 99¢ grabs. immediately afterward, i ran into audrey chan on the street, with her bf, rockin' a fresh new look (specs; 'do?) - this is mostly remarkable because she lives in l.a. (!) (where i was tentatively planning to be at some point this week or next.)

then met kate and her friend avi on the inside outside southside westside of union sq., and headed north towards great buttons, which more than lives up to its name. while k8 browsed buttons and then, down the street, ring blanks upon which to mount them, i contacted ben about what i thought were our well-established dinner plans. it turned out those plans were called off because benster were to have a special fancy dinner to celebrate their engagement. that was understandably confounding, but all was explained eventually (i got both rather detailed sides of the story later that night from the side of my hospital bed.)

it was now some time after five. the evening was only just beginning. kate picked up some sandwiches from pret. tara called from philly. it started to rain. we walked down 7th ave to 23rd street, discussing popstars and shoe shopping. stopped into a mexican/pizza hole-in-the-wall and had just finished ordering a torta de la casa when ben called again to say his and ester's dinner plans "had fallen through" (not sure how that works with two people, but okay) and would i come meet them. and so i cancelled the order and we walked on, pausing in a david z's, overshooting by a block south on university place and turning back north from 11th and broadway. coming up on six o'clock. we crossed on the south side of 12th, and then again, north across 12th, to the strand. introduced kate and benster on the NW corner, just outside the bookstore. b+e crossed W; kate and i lingered to say our goodbyes. she turned and walked S; i waited for the light, then moved to rejoin benster, to have a quick meal (vietnamese?) before the reading and the concert and

~
a few steps into the crosswalk, i noticed the car coming. a smallish black car, in the outermost lane, going south on broadway. i remember thinking it was surely going to stop - it had a red light, after all - even though it was going pretty fast. but i wouldn't have thought that if i wasn't confused. because then i realized that it was going too fast to stop in time, and that it might actually hit me - and then that i couldn't get out of the way, and it would definitely hit me. i half remember thinking: i have no idea what it will be like to be hit by a car. there was still time - it could only have been a fraction of a second - for me to think: i have to at least try to get out of the way. but - in that instant - i couldn't decide which direction to try, and i couldn't move either way -

and then i was being pushed. it was a little like being on an insane, dizzying roller coaster, hurtling completely out of control into a violently unstable phantasmagoria of sounds and colors - simultaneously thrilling and terrifying, but either way a complete surrender - happening way too fast to process, let alone respond to - i had the sensation of being upright as i was being propelled. at least initially. but i can't say for sure what was really happening, just that, scant moments later, i had stopped, and i was sitting on the sidewalk.

then i was confused. from the moment i first landed - on the sidewalk - i was immediately aware of commotion - people shouting and screaming and milling about frantically - a generalized sense of chaos around me, even though my attention was focused inward. i knew that i had just been hit, and i was reeling. but i felt...okay...i thought...i was in pain, and dizzy, or disoriented, but i thought i could stand up, and so i tried - and i did! - but then i decided it was a bad idea, and i sat down again. at first it was impossible to isolate the specifics of what i was feeling - it was all i could do to respond to one thing at a time - and people were continually shouting things at me, asking if i was okay, and i just kept saying "i'm okay...but...it's kind of hard to see..." - my glasses had fallen off, but i could tell that my vision was getting darker and blurry, and i was just trying to focus on something, to assert some kind of consciousness or control over what i was experiencing. which was - above all - very visceral pain, especially in my right leg.

my phone rang and i answered - it must have been in my pocket - and it was ester. she asked (apparently - i don't quite remember this) whether i could cross the street. and i said "no." that must have been a little earlier, because they were there, as my vision was going dark, i could still make out ester and ben arriving at my side. and kate was there too, behind me, propping me up, cradling me and telling me to sing ashlee simpson along with her. i remember saying - but probably not loud enough for anyone to hear - that it looked really cool - and it did: the darker it got the bright light-points that i could still see got swirlier and diffused throughout the space, sort of like those psychedelic fractal images but also like a vision of dissipating electricity, or nebulas. i remember seeing ester in silhouette, just visible against that still-darkening backdrop before everything grew too obscure to make out. and i felt faint, increasingly woozy, and at the same time it started to get a little hard to breathe - just for a moment - as i was still talking and trying to tell everyone that i was mostly okay...and then it swung back, i could start to see again, i grew less lightheaded, even as the hubbub around me only increased.

~
not much later the ambulance was there and they were having me lie down and rock myself onto the stretcher. it couldn't have been more than ten minutes from the time i was hit to the arrival of the ambulance, or at least that's what it seemed like. though i remember being conscious and fairly talkative the whole time, it's harder to remember, or even reconstruct, the latter part of that brief timespan.

those few, fast moments before i was hit, and my lightning-chain of thought then - although i have recounted them numerous times in the last few days (which has a tendency to abstract felt memories from known memories) - remain completely present and real to me. it's not that i felt time slow down or anything like that, but i was extremely lucid and attentive to my own thoughts in those moments. and it was an analytical thought process - certainly i was scared, on some level, when i realized what was happening, but there wasn't time, perhaps, for the fear to fully manifest, and there was just too much else going on.

i've had much more trouble figuring out what happened when i was hit - understandably so - and i'm still not very sure about how the physics of it worked; where i was on the car (hood? windshield?) or even which way i was facing (forward? my backpack suffered some damage and might have helped me by softening the blow - but the contents of it, electronics and such, were unaffected - and why would i have been facing directly away from the car as it hit me?) i'm most sore in my left upper outer calf - which would mean i was facing back east (in my final moment of equivocation?) if that came from the car, which makes sense (it's at more or less the right height) - and my coccyx, which would again indicate facing south. but it does seem that the bulk of my injuries - my two fractures and most or all of my scrapes came from the impact with the sidewalk, not the car, so at least the latter soreness could be from that. as for my upper chest tenderness...just general shock? i don't think i was face down at any point, though maybe i rolled off the car that way - i'm pretty sure i landed butt-down, with my right inner ankle and left inner elbow (the locations of my fractures) evidently the points of strongest (initial?) impact.

well. i had forgotten about the phone call until ester reminded me yesterday morning (although i did remember it happening when she mentioned it) - and i can't help laughing every time i tell about it - that i actually picked up at that moment. actually, i'm confused about what happened to my phone. the front and rear metal casing pieces are missing (just decorative/protective, so it's still functional) - but if it was in my pocket after the collision for me to answer, when did those pieces come off and get lost? my glasses were also broken: the right temple (i think?) broke off and is gone. those were my thicker plastic ones - fortunately i had my other pair in my bag, and they were unharmed (impressive, since i had just stuck them in at the last minute and they were not in a case - my biggest packing error for this trip turned into a crucial boon.)

i should also note - though i was not aware of it at the time - that avi, kate's friend, arrived on the scene shortly before i took off. she had initially been led to the ambulance of the guy who went through the window and was complete bloody mess (and she thought it was me! i think k8 said it gave her nightmares.) but she was the one who found my hat in the street and rescued it - hurrah! (i had only gotten it saturday.) i don't think i knew that then, but i did hear her and shout 'hello' from the ambulance.

~
so. ben and ester rode with me in the ambulance, along with liane, a friendly EMT. as ester reported, she warned me about the scissor-happy ER folks that would take malicious pleasure in destroying the sweater my mom made for me. and we had a funny exchange about whether or not she should give me an IV drip. in retrospect it probably would have been a good idea, but i was confused about it at the time, and the best reason she could give me was "it's protocol." i was definitely not aware of the extent of the damage to my body yet - well, nobody was, but i was typically optimistic. (though i was not being modest when i gave my pain level as 7/10, nor when i revised it down to 6 - even then i could easily envision much worse.)

i don't want to dwell too much on my hospital stay. ester, again, covered it succinctly (something we all know i'm incapable of), and i don't have much to add. the worst part was definitely the nausea that i suffered both times i tried to get up to see if i could stand or walk (this didn't happen until after i was twice splinted and thrice x-rayed, which took five hours or more though it didn't seem that long to me.) i assume the nausea was caused primarily by the morphine they gave me probably too soon before the two affable orthopedic residents - carefully, methodically, slowly, wincingly - injected fluid into my elbow joint. that was to make sure it wasn't "communicating with" the nearby bullet-like wound ("an open hole" a nurse said, then laughed at her redundant phrase.) it wasn't - good sign, but that meant pressure buildup and more sharp - ow! ow! but, like i was saying, nausea is the worst - because it's so generalized and overwhelming, you know; sharp discrete pain is much easier to compartmentalize (and i was def. working my yogic relaxation powers with every injection, or trying to.)

ben and ester were saints (and storytellers, smilers, wincers, documentarians) by my bedside until after 1:00. (but i lost the palloncino they brought me - hope ben has a picture - and i never ate the sandwich.) then st. alyssa took over, staying with me for my fourth trip to radiology (my chest and left leg x-rayed by a jamaican ex-pat who complained that it was unneccesary and "they take too many x-rays in this country") and my second bout of nausea and - when they finally left me alone and i got a bit of much-needed rest - helping to fend off periodic interruptions from random new doctors who wanted to give me CT scans or tried to suggest i should leave the hospital and a guy who, unexpectedly, brought paperwork for me to be admitted, which later turned out to be a mistake. i had been lobbying for that, but, after sleeping a bit it turned out i could survive being upright and even walk around the ward a bit, and it was clear that it was time to go.

and so my emergecy room experience ended after almost 13 hours. leaving the hospital was surprisingly simple (wheelchair helped of course), and our cab zipped up the east side highway home here to aly + julie's lovely ft. washington apt., where i hobbled my way up the elevator and into bed for an uninterrupted morning's rest.

~
and here i am still. in the past 36 hours i have moved from bed to chair, to bathroom and back, to the other bed in the room, to the bathroom once more (brushed my teeth that time!) and back to the chair.

it's getting better: today's bathroom trip was easier than yesterday's. otherwise, i've been sleeping, internetting, eating (bagel, bananas, brownies), listening to things, and most of all talking to lots of people on the phone. mark and jesse came by last night and we had some indian food and wine. today i listened to a lot of the hubert sumlin b-day tribute on wkcr, thanks to ben's rec.

i had a tough time sleeping last night: i kept adjusting my position little by little to find something more comfortable, and i eventually took a pain pill (which i hadn't yet felt the need to do since leaving the hospital.) i don't think it helped much - i continued shifting periodically and stayed half-awake, half in a strange semi-dream that took the form of blog comments, up to 109 of them and more forming a many-sided conversation about my situation. i must have slept some before 5:30 or so, but i was awake again then, and gave up trying for a while, deciding instead to do some yoga. well, modified of course. ("invalid yoga" ester insists on calling it, though i insist the stress not be on the second syllable.) some seated forward bending, some seated twists, suptha padangusthasana and further movement exploration with my left leg, some restorative things and whatever else i made up in my limited state. (later, this evening, i did viparita karani and some plow-ish extensions.) i have to go slow, but it feels good, and i'm feeling stronger, even if it's hard to perceive much change yet.

as i keep telling people (and i don't mean that as i complaint: i am more than happy to keep telling the same basic things over and over to the people who love me), i am in very little pain. walking is tough, and pretty much any movement requires ginger and involves some little twinges, but once i get myself positioned decently i feel very much alright. my bandages and various minor wounds are in somewhat ragged state, but i'll wait and tend to them tomorrow after i get home. i've booked an early afternoon flight back to rochester, so just a little taxi to the airport, frontdoor to the taxi, courtesy wheelchair action, and i'll be back in the bosom of my home and family, where my mom also happens to know a thing or two about the local medical community. so things are looking good for convalescence phase two...stay tuned.

~
beyond all of this - i've saved it for last because it's hard to know what to say exactly, and fully reflecting is going to involve more time than the simple physical healing process (?my whole life, ultimately) (physical healing, by the by, should hopefully happen within 6-8 weeks, with maybe a few more to be back in top form) - is the sentiment i've been expressing over and over, to nearly everyone i've interacted with, my new mantra, that i'm so incredibly glad, and so inexpressibly grateful, and i feel so unbelievably lucky, that i am not worse off than i am. it could so easily have been much, much worse.

i have to keep saying it - not because it isn't true, or because i don't feel it strongly, deeply, overwhelmingly, but because i don't know how to articulate it, even inwardly, except so simply and bluntly it almost becomes a platitudinous afterthought. but it's a powerful thing. the biggest emotional reaction i've had - certainly not the only one, as i've had a whole heap of confusion, frustration, irrational self-recrimination, gratitude for my beautiful friends and family, amazement at and tremendous pride for my body and mental strength, and a profound compassionate empathy for the other victims, and for the driver (somebody asked if i was angry at her - but i can't even fathom that; she was clearly unimaginably freaked out, and must now be suffering unbelievable remorse) - is that subtle, but emphatic joy - de vivre, i suppose - and appreciation for life. "living is so expensive", somebody (jesse?) said last night, in a discussion of new york apartment-hunting. in my armchair halfway across the room, set apart from the conversation by several pieces of furniture and several degrees of desire for self-expression, i could only think "life is so precious...life is so dear."

and at the risk of getting precious myself, i'll cut off there. even with little to do with my time at the moment besides think about it, this is obviously going to take a while to really come to terms with - in some ways i'm now just roughly sketching what i project my emotional response will develop into. just as my body is just beginning to grow into its future former self, as i'm barely starting to get a grip on how i'll be able to and have to conduct myself for the next two months or so, as i occasionally find myself feeling disgusted at my laziness or selfish for my reliance on the assistance of alyssa and julie for all manner of little things, and have to continually remember: wait a minute, i was just hit by a car the other day!

i was hit by a car. and i'm okay. and it's all pretty goddamn crazy. on the other hand, here i am again now, at the end of another long, daunting, possibly precariously wrought blog post about the minute details of my daily life. things haven't changed all that much.

~
(and if i can't honestly say it was the worst part, missing joanna was at least the added insult that maybe only some solid time spent with ys during my recovery will be able to redress)

*rabi (or whoever): aren't you glad no indie kid will ever get that confused again?

this is unlike the story it was written to be

somebody to make a mixtape for (i wish i had)

2006-11-10T00:35:00.002-05:00

because then i'd have something to do with the song in my heart.

what a day, the sky thursday unbearably unwearably blue, like my bike and my helmet and the ties of the partisan pundits on election night cnn. i lay down on my back in the liberty lands grass and looked up at it and thought: "maybe i should be less goal-oriented."

(two happy babies approached each other across the park in strollers, met, and continued on.)

all day i ate discretely: 1 banana, 2 an apple (macintosh, local, from iovine's yesterday), 3 a cookie (double-chocolate peanut-butter-chip, from brown betty where they won't hire me now, too bad because i like it there, delicious), 4 a spinach knish from kaplan's (the woman behind the counter is going to stay single for as long as she can) that i ate in the park. later on, a 5 quick slice of marbled rye toast with fontina and granny smith, both from almanac (the ginger in dark chocolate bars are as overpriced as everything else, but look worth it; kristallnacht and also the day the berlin wall fell, the sandwichboard says on the sidewalk.) and - eventually - (6, 7) - leftovers from the junkfood mecca that was the just-dismantled philly moveon office, and a half-price on thursdays burger at sugar mom's nextdoor.

so the story that tells is i was tootling around northern liberties this unseasonable afternoon in just a t-shirt. i was feeling the development. in the positive way - beyond the intellectual fact of it, and not so much that i like the aesthetic or the dvpmt itself, but the establishments are good and it seems like a good place to be. liberties walk they fixed my bike (at trophy, "pop shop [?] for the urban cyclist") and there's a restaurant i want to check out (hm, disappointed pw review, but at least it's cheapy.) (make that two with franz har har ferdinand.)

on that note, matthew (my inferior neighbor) and i went (back) to north bowl on monday, basically to check out/support my new deejay acquaintance mr. bilwa (we shared turntable responsibilities, and turntables, at lava on saturday) and his partner travis the 'head'. but ended up digging the joint too, more than expected. not sure i'm all the way down with that plastic retro (seems to be the now vibe of nolibs) but i can contingently embrace it. helps when i can feel okay paying for only a single game after shoe rental (and just starting to remember a bit about the sport towards the end of ten frames), and the tomato bisque 'n' grilled cheese "bites" plate isn't too skimpy for the money neither. you could say the place is lacking a dancefloor, but i'd prefer to imagine the whole expanse of the dozen or so glistening lanes as a huge shiny potential dancing space that they'll never have the party big enough to fill (just imagine it though!) besides, y'always gotta do yr little dance after you release yr ball.

it seemed preposterous that i would read all of circe (read: the 150-pp. hallicinatory stageplay episode 15 in ulysses) and make a two-day marathon of moveon calls and go bowling. but i guess not since i did it all in fine style, and by wednesday noon i'd successfully finished the chapter for class and "delivered" (or how you wanna say) a democrat(ic?) congress for the country. (okay, i had some help from the electorate and whatnot.) i did skip my yoga class though. wasn't gonna, either, but as i explained to tara-not-that-tara (that one was in delahellaware, being bored and not voting), i was just having so much fun, calling last-minute didja-voters in NJ-OH-PA-NY-MT-WA. i think reb and i were the last ones still calling, dialing in our data to the hotline as we watched the results come in and the party started. low-key party. pizza and beer in this guy's apartment (on the 26th floor, with a harp and a cat) and many many happy returns (!), which we cheered, but tamely.

but it's been a celebratory couple of days since then anyway. beautiful all-rain wednesday (fitting prelude to today), made the shocks of color of campus foliage all the more vivid (those peach-green mottled conifers along the lpac walk.) my favorite thing about the election, as i keep saying, is how smoothly it seemed to go - in contrast to the inconclusive, corrupted, shady muddle it was so easy to fear. see, this turning-of-the-tide is all about the triumph of hope over fear. hurrah to hope! i'll presumably return to my regularly-scheduled political indifference in a few days or weeks, but really this seems like a bad time to be indifferent, so maybe we'll see. if you ever catch me actually blogging about politix, you'll know something's up.

so that's that (at least that part of that is) and after that to-do the idea is to do some other stuff so here's more

to do:
•visit erika at latte lounge and talk to the owner about making scones for her.
•buy (ebay) a (kitchen) mixer and headphones (my supposedly birthday presents).
•label or somehow decorate (or not) the dj demo cd, if that is going to be my dj demo cd, and figure out where to shop it around, and do so.
•get with liza on planning mascher party (saturday 2 dec - we need a name!)
•work on electrosoulpopwhatever pt. 1, and/or late nineties mix.
•find something to do about the way more pop and soul cds than will fit on my shelves
•eumaeus, ithaca, penelope, of course.
•marie, borat, old joy
•get $ from joe; get futureheads from harris. (also: cherry peel from erika.)
•visit the pma, the edgar allen poe house, the beautiful world syndicate.
•get my cd player fixed, sometime when i'm out of town.
•make a resumé? (download open-office; set up printer)
•get a job, right?
•think about emp proposal

[conspicuously absent from list: uphold three-year pattern/tradition of starting a new romantic relationship in the month of november.]

potential issue: bobby got offered a job on the tom vilsack presidential campaign, which means he might be relocating to des moines in the very near future, in which case i very much want to visit him in san francisco before that happens. which will be easy in one way at least (free round-trip ticket voucher!) but difficult scheduling-wise, what with thanksgiving in rochester, mascher party moved up to the following weekend, and wanting to stay in philly next weekend (ang's birthday for one thing, and kate whom i miss.) will have to figure that out. (and hopefully a trip could also include joining msr on the air and sidetripping to la for aud+rae.) and if that happens, plus what with txg in roch, etc., how am i supposed to think about getting a job for the immediate present?

(maybe i should be less goal-oriented.)

oh, before i forget: you can see me in my hallowe'en costume (and hear me talk about it) in this video of critical mass. i have since trimmed my beard and moustache.

[i had wanted to do some kind of pre-halloween post using the title "toussaint l'overture." but i didn't get to it. so hopefully i'll still remember that joke by next year and you wont.]

i bet you think that's pretty clever
don't you boy

24/7

2006-10-27T23:19:00.000-04:00

never stops or slows down of course. like this evening, critical mas(s)querade, which was cold and rainy and hence injurious (but not fatal!) to my newspaper suit, but still rollicking and triumphant (and featured at least three wes anderson-based costumes, including the entire team zissou, plus several pippi longstockingses, one of whom said i was her favorite.) this afternoon, emi meek and i drove and then walked along the wispy wissahickon, before it started to rain, and this morning i made another mix. last night was a bit of an adventure, starting with surprise free death cab for for cutie tickets (well that's what they said) from a friend of a friend of a friend. after a long lovely concert (ted leo too!), gabe and tara and i shouted/sang in the backseat to the whole first strokes album the whole way back from the tower theater; then we got a flat tire zipping through center city alley. etc. (previous night: revenge of the killer slits(!))

a long time ago though i wanted to jot down here some things, so this is a quotidian by which i mean workaday or should i say day-to-day record, a little deposit in the memory bank, starting from my natal day.

24+0. errands - acquisitions: two books, the information, 40+oz of hershey's milk chocolate, a scoop, a knife, a scraper. waited around for dave, we went to get orchestra tickets and ate thai at 22nd+south (most memorable: tomato/cod/coconut cream soup). concert (with tara): shostakovich! piano concerto! no. 2! and 1 - still a galoomphus of a piece, though it's a little hard to know how to experience a sort of workmanlike performance (sub-pianist didn't help) of music i know so intimately. the tchaik (6) was maybe more enjoyable (pathetiq indeed!), and a bonus shosta quartet possibly even better. so, good. from there to the gilded/cupred gryphon for a collins and "miami sky" and lots of people wanting to feel my (mom's) sweater. we gave up on 700 club dancing after ten minutes of devo and less inspired rock, and ended up watching stop making sense in my room, which on balance might have been the best part of the day. hooray for tina, especially.

24+1. party-day. lovely if smaller than last year (no problems from the macanarmas though.) the cooking was the point. first shopping, laying out a rainbow cornucopia on the table to be gradually depleted by several waves of guests/helpers as the action shifted from the kitchen to the living and back around. roasted-orange-things potage (supposedly soup, but this theory was rejected by people that insisted on eating it from a plate with a fork) and cornbread (thx hannah+tyler) and peanutty collards (thx martha+kchamb.) and pie and petit 4 banana cookies (a quarter recipe, still a ton of course, just got finished yesterday. but that was some nostalgia. this too.) when the women:gabe ratio got down to 8:1, it was time to go dancing.

24+2. sundaypants day (was it? no, other plaid, but felt like that.) criss-crossings all 'cross town: alyssa left me here to meet laurel at honey's, where they saw tara and kate and roberta, who i joined shortly thereafter; later laurel ran into morgan and joe at kingdom, and then i ran into morgan and joe at rebecca's house. meanwhile erika and mali were looking at the same studios all morning without meeting, but later tk+i met erika on her bike and mali at the studios. arted-out, we chased the dwindling sun up to my roof and read lydia davis and the nyt watch supplement. shapes on the floor of my room. then to wph for swatties, pictures, pumpkin pie. talk about compassion. and gabe was on the couch the whole time.

24+3. woke up in west philly and a baby came to visit. 4+ hours @ the marvelous, pricing and putting out used cds, listening to r. wyatt, the boxtops, m'boom, and deep city soul, talking about "truth" as an achievable artistic goal (q.v. bresson.)

24+4. comedown, sorta depressed w/ myself. (can't remember what happened except i must have worked on my mixy. didn't write any e-mail, apparently.) better after yoga and talking to my parents (of course) about god and/or small things.

24+5. kickstart out of the hump with visits from rebka (more god, also friendliness, and plough-person style lunching) and liza (party planning) and probably more/better mixing. best though was we went to see shortbus, which is perfectly lovely, from the neato faux-claymation(?) city-panning sequences to the well-deployed soundtrack (hidden cameras, natch, and tons of animal collective, but also the ark and apparently yo la tengo though i somehow didn't notice) to the many jokes, which were very funny, to the subsersive(ly gentle) positivity of the whole thing. the individual stories weren't as great or cohesive as the whole, but that's ok. rah, go sex. (sort of odd to see it when i'm not having sex, but whatever.)

24+6. hm. saw the john lennon movie. that was good too, and kind of inspiring, actually rather moving in a funny generalized (but unanticipated way), just telling the story of american popular/political culture/history in '68-'75 or so, kent state, watergate, beatles playing "revolution", fear and anger and confusion (and mistrust) all sort of made me tear up a bit inside about the sadness that has come upon my country. (i'm really enjoying the introductory essay to this book, which i read, a bit at a time, as i eat my bread and cheese and what, which talks about evolving reassessments of the '60s "revolution" by each successive generation, and i feel myself so so squarely in the late '80s/early '90s revivalist/nostalgia camp - pragmatism + idealism (?) what fails, what persists, where is the legacy/fate of the revolution now? it's an open question, but worth cracking.)

oh, i remember now that this was also the first night i went phone banking for moveon, and met erikka and karla and those folks (old buds now, of course) and started talking about PVs and TWs and just electoral politics, again. and then i went dancing (optimo! at paradise! at key west!) - not as xciting or nearly so genreclashy as the mix but nice enough. good munchies too.

24+7. now then. what? oh. my roommate told me i was ridiculously lazy. to which i responded by taking out the trash (eventually) and walking around the hood with him in search of dirt (score) and a recycling bin (no dice), and then by going out to save the world, one PV x 100 LPUVICCD at a time (likely-progressive/unlikely-voter-in-contested-congressional-district?) not any worse than DIDIPP - later on gabe and i spouted at length about first impressions (and had little to say about the intervening help! tracks) (tara's john kick > anti-paulism [um yeah, recent news isn't helping] > i try to defend him, but somebody's probably just being contraray.) that was at my house, via dumplings. (david's mai lai wah fresh ginger dipping sauce = god.)

24+8. so i'm past the initial quota, but can i keep going a bit? we're back at the weekend. for the second saturday in a row, i did morning yoga (yay - 2x/wk is >2x better) and then went to reading terminal, this time to buy lovely cheese from cheesy kate (the italian silver goat is yummy, the spanish valdeón blue is exceptional) and some rustique pain and pears to eat withal. then i spent the better part of the afternoon making a suit jacket, tape-on tie, and hat (sailory natch) out of newspaper, specifically the independent, specifically the phindies that have been in my bathroom for over a year. came out rather good. (walking through center city, several people stopped me and asked if they could take my picture.) had dinner with k8ie and br8y, then rode out to swat for gabe's martini hallowini. not much to report. scattergories, pool, mali as slutty pumpkin (awesome crepe paper dress), rafa as jumpsuited exterminator.

24+9. slept over and rode in in the morning for brunch at the tap (mm avocado bacon sammy) and paused home, but really why i've kept going is i wanted to mention the intro rc workshop/session i went to with rebecca and zoe in west philly. which was lovely and exciting. you should read about rc (re-evaluation co-counseling, though people don't seem to use all of the syllables) at that website. i'm curious about counseling in the context of its particular community/organizational structure vs. as a tool/method to use in the wider world/life in general - points both ways, i guess. anyway it's certainly fun and (i guess, one must insist, more to the point) useful, although use is a funny word, and it would be interesting to explore it more (people i told about it at corey's bbq, immediately afterward, were quite keen as well.) well then i came home and mali and i made a spicy tofu-green bean curry (yellow curry i guess? it was yellow) and played blokus.

otherwise...phonebanking...dancing...biking...yogaing...wearing winter clothes...am i supposed to get a job yet?

i carry my heart like a soldier with a hand grenade

(p.s. i'm on myspace [music] now.

october is interminable

2006-10-23T16:06:00.000-04:00

every year i sing, along with paul simon:

yesterday it was my birthday
hung one more year on the line
i should be depressed; my life's a mess
but i'm having a good time

that was a week ago now, of course, and actually i sang it the day before my birthday. but anyway the day after paul's birthday is the same as the day after mine - we were born only exactly 41 years apart. by which logic i guess i'll be releasing my first album collaboration with brian eno in 2045.

he sang about our birthday again on his last album that i paid attention to, which was not the last one but the one before that. (i feel that i ought to purchase and own and listen to surprise, out of loyalty if nothing else, but it hasn't happened yet.) you're the one was the first record of his that i didn't take as a consummate display of his brilliance - in fact i think it's sort of dull - but this part's cute:

first time i smoked, guess what? - paranoid
first time i heard "satisfaction" i was young and unemployed
down the decades every year, summer leaves and my birthday's here
and all my friends stand up and cheer and say "man, you're old"

well, summer's gone, for sure, and i'm young and unemployed (but not paranoid - what's our equivalent of "satisfaction" again?) and my life's not a mess but i sometimes still feel like i should be depressed, but anyway i'm pretty much having a good time. i guess i'm a little more down with the paul of '75 than '05, but they both beat '65, even if i was 21 years when i wrote this song/i'm 22 now but i won't be for long is one of the perfect opening couplets in songwriting.

last year my mantra (and sdtrk) was october is eternal, and i stretched my birthday out for a good week+ of traipsing and multi-partite festivation. this year was rather tamer, and that warm fuzzy feeling didn't last much beyond the weekend, if that.

[interminable recount of the last week+ events goes here, but i'm not done writing it yet, so i'll hold off and just do this now. ok]

change your mind tonite...
you belong on the radio

happy birthday to meeeeeeeeeeee!!!

2006-10-13T10:04:00.000-04:00

now i think i'll clean my house!

daze of my nites

2006-10-09T01:50:00.000-04:00

my roommate goes out of town for the weekend (to visit his baltimore gal) and as if it wasn't bad enough when he's just away at work my tendency to just be around the apartment all day doing some appreciable quantity of negligible spirals inversional to the absent empathetic putter of responsibility. today i've been non-methodically cleaning in fits and sputters, which in this case means the living room looks more cluttered than when i began, though the degree of underlying orderliness is respectably increased and my lp-crate and turntable setup is rearranged, and though the kitchen is certainly shinier than it had been, the process has been nullified and then reversed at least twice today. meanwhile i've been djing on and off continuously, crushing in particular on sam and dave's "i thank you" and a certain roni size>*nsync transition that i'm mostly convinced is beautiful even though i'm not always sure it will fly - i've set up garageband to record the audio stream, and have tinkered a tad with the possibilities of editing down the road (ohh-kay; i'm not sure this is really the program i want to use for this, but i'll probably stumble through with it for a couple of mixes before i convince myself of that) - i'll spare us further reflections on my dj practice methods for now (and for here, probably.)

i also went out today: to a.k.a. to hear bob "the dean" xgau (who read his paper that i missed at EMP, and then snapped at dave for asking him about the voice) and francis davis (who read two pieces about film, rather than jazz, but it was okay, 'specially for the pleasure of reliving the best years of our lives through his descriptions of its astoundingly many delicious scenes - i also really enjoyed watching him drink a boylan's cola, for some reason.) particularly in the q+a session, it really felt like a mini-EMP. so that was nice. (and i rummaged the $2.99 bin with dave, and i even said hi to maria.)

that's just to show that i did do a thing today. amazing (is it?) how one thing is kind of enough to make a day feel reasonably unwasted, at least without closer examination. on the other hand it's a rare day that i don't do something identifiable or worth reporting, and yet on balance it feels like a good two or three days a week slip by predominantly unseized. in any case, regardless of diurnal indolence, the nights have a way of turning adventuresome (well, active) without too much forethought on my part.

i think back to reconstruct events, and having written that it's almost surprising that there have been a few. like wednesday, i served tara and her angela an improvised dinner (pestofied baked tofu, winey kale, garlic baguette, bosc'n'blue salad) with almost all successful inventions, and then went to see brady's band (foosa) at the khyber. i rocked out impishly as their friends persona deconstructionist-post-punked it, my rocking not necessarily predicated on theirs; it was more i was rocking, of my own accord, alongside them, rather than being compelled, as they weren't especially. when you've got the room to move you move, (nobody's gonna have your fun for ya!) big girlfriend girl with the umbrella and elbows, who had instigated (i abetted) some flailing couples mosh whirlishes that resulted in jess' wine spilling (and not for the last time.) she wasn't upstairs later, but there was j, j, a, katie and tara to make a good fluid circle with, and i liked that - prob. socially the nicest clubbing i've had in a good bit. and we danced through the smoke and the better part of the evening with the "genre of good" folks, so thankfully (relatively) minimal on the cure/neworder overplay, got yer dfa, justin and that josh wink song. and t and i talked to andrew as "stepping out" wrapped about the confusing conflicting smoking ban story - he sez 700 is observing the ban and hence is stinky.

wait, what am i doing! shucks in that case well thursday we saw live flesh (good!) and um stuff well that night was the martha grahamcracker cabaret at l'etage: the absinthe drinkers (amusing but underwhelming) and the walking hellos, definitely a unique group albeit only myla goldberg's second greatest contribution to indie music (is that not nice?) martha herself put on quite a show, long and immensely entertaining in almost every aspect, but probably most of all for great song selection - a quartet of reworked beatles tunes ("we can work it out" reborn as gospel-soul=awesome), "one" (a bass-loop feature), "proud mary", and "natural woman" - that had me thinking on my rainy bike ride home about the true sublime greatness of golden age pop/rock songcraft.

what i really wanted to tell you about: friday night. over the course of the evening i was at three different birthday celebrations for people i'd never met. pretty good feat, i think, and obviously comp. coincidental. [although -- i'd really like some more specific statistics about this, but apparently october 5th is the most common birthday, and it's surprising how intuitively empirical that seems (despite also not seeming to make any sense.) so ah happy late birthday, probably.]

1st was michael, roommate to my non-alter-ego ken rosso, and his combo sukkot-shabbat-bday food-and-spiritual-teachings-sharing potluck-celebration-observance, which included the birthday boy's pro croissants (and my ex-pro ginger cookies) and a long lovely story from nachshon about an etrog. also a lapsitting circle in the sukka, and my discovery that you can make a farty noise by slamming your hand down on a thick rubber band on a flat surface.)

2nd was bridget, visiting from seattle, friend of tara's, with whom, and also kate and rel, we went to ray's birthday bar, which is definitely more bary than birthdayy, but they at least had kara-okay as advertised, and cheep gin'n'crans(!) so we had at it, tara w/ heart and "lola," and later kate attempting daddy yankee's "rompé" (even with several of us up there to help her, the spanish rapping proved to be too much to handle.) i sang elvis's WSFB(PLU) (it's been done i know: bill murray in lost in translation most obviously, but whatfr), the best part of which was how heather doyle(!) miraculously appeared out of nowhere (well, from the bar area) in the middle of my performance to join me in singing, which meant we could actually do harmony on the "where is the harmony" part (as on the brinsley schwartz version, which is nearly superior for that feature alone.) later on (last song of the night, in fact - dunno why they ended so early) i tried my hand at "pieces of me", that being the only ashlee in the songbook. went okay (i switched from falsetto to the lower octave one chorus in) but i was stumped by the bridge, which i didn't even remember existed, and whose melody i was totally unable to recollect. however, even having gone back and listened to it a few times, i still don't think i'd be able to sing the bridge, as it's just not very memorable.

gets better tho - 3rd was howie (ross), a friend of a friend of tara's roommate, whose party we ended up at after leaving the bar cuz it was in the hood (true south philly) and which one of the more singular parties i've seen. also a sukkot/b-day combo - their backyard sukka just used the cement walls and some dead cornstalks on wires, but it did the trick. impressive spread spread, hoppy homebrew, livingroom ishuffle playing "chill out" james brown and roots, and remarkably polite and friendly people. then went down to the basement, where a (psy?)trance dj was spinning and maybe a dozen people were dancing, and within thirty seconds (not exaggerating) was approached by three different people offering different drugs (nitrous, pot, mdma.) that was rather comical. we danced some and watched some and, back upstairs, tara tried some of their homemade absinthe (by tried i mean she attempted to drink it, and it was quite an effort. i had a sip and even masked by sprite it was oppressively bitter.) the nicest moment was dancing with kate to "strange brew" (yay cream! good pick too, and fitting) and several doors songs, and then plopping on the very ploppable couch and singing "heartbeat" a cappella before leaving, sometime after 3:00.

well well. last night was liza's birthday dinner (i do know her) and a fairly early night in. tonight it's already this morning, and this has taken a long time, and i've nearly reached the end of the mysterious itunes mix cd that i found while cleaning. (lovely kid loco remix of "a little soul")

curse you, lateness! gotta get up and meet louisa for lunch. guess no 400 coups tonight then. eh.

city life i love you
even though the skies are grey
i'll never place no place above you

2006-10-02T20:47:00.000-04:00

spent all yesterday writing about the mountain goats and sharon jones and ideas of performance and artist-audience r'ships. (well that and playing with the crazy new itunes album art flippy thing.) turned out long (natch) but pretty interesting, i think, and there are more places to go with it too.

anyway let's see if i can whip up a something here about my life more quickly, and get to bed sometime decent.

recent days have been characterized by a resurgence of Interest (translates to interestedness?) in, mostly, Things. specifically, in an intellectual vein. beginning not with ModEpic (TolsJoyCiamarquez?) last wednesday, tho that was okay, but more so immediately afterwards, having dinner with hannah and hearing about her anthro woes and doing some more theory talk, trying to remember things from the culture concept. (also, we excavated a frozen glowing wooly mammoth from the 2nd mile, and made an apple crisp by heavily doctoring a recipe from her chef this summer, at the ranch in montana.)

i stayed up late - must have been that night - re(re)ading my (undergraduate) (thesis), in prep. for the rousseau jungles exhibit, resavoring the savory salience (hey, remember this?) what i mean is i really like that paper; i loved writing it, and i think the ideas in it are swell. i note that maybe the most interesting of the things i was doing though were not so much art history as history and theory that happen to do with an artist. which is maybe the point.

though there was the night i stayed up reading about free jazz and temporarily convincing myself i ought to get a lot of alice coltrane and pharoah sanders records. or something.

can i say something coherent about thursday? i remember thinking "gee, what a lovely day this has been, and i haven't even seen the mountain goats yet..." chief of the lovelies was happening on the national portrait gallery and perusing the collection, mostly the 19th century stuff (including a whole series of matthew brady studio cartes de visite) whilst listening to bill frisell's album of american portraits, have a little faith. some moments, regarding wistfully heroic antebellum shakers and reformers - john brown, wm lloyd garrison, henry clay - and hearing the unbearably poignant titular hiatt cover, nearly induce tears, the conmingled swells of glinting admiration, all-too-human pathos, hopeful self-recognition, historic irony; nostalgic complicated patriotism.

another point: i acquired four (4) books while i was in d.c., and no cds. i bought the rousseau exh. catalog, which i'm quite curious to read the essays in. (i approved of the theoretical slant of the walltext in the exhibit itself, though there wasn't much of it; i didn't get the audioguide, though i did watch the abbreviated, kevin-kline-narrated accompanying doc. the bookstore had several other recent rousseau monographs, which either postdated my thesis or otherwise eluded me. i want to know if anybody has unwittingly duplicated my interpretive and art historical detective work or vice versa.)

later on, i picked up baker's the mezzanine and a grapes of wrath at a used book store (the latter largely because of its brilliant lime green cover), and sarah pawned off a copy of in cold blood on me. so lots to look forward to, as if i wasn't about to embark on another ulyssey - besides which i'd be corked to read some antebellum history or maybe even merleau-ponty(?) (anyway, i think the larger message is that there's no decent record shopping in d.c.)

other capital interludes (no more need be mentioned about the weekend's concertgoing) included watching the curse of the were-rabbit (and, nearly as exciting, renting it), playing srcabble with src and "hi hi cherry-o!" with ella, a pre-kol nidre walk in the woods with jedd, and sallying forth with heidi(+)rob to ye rennaissance fest. bagpipes, archery, jousting, glassblowing, a midsummer night's dream, henry viii betwixt wives, flower garland circlets and drinking horns worn at the hip, and all manner of food on sticks and/or deep-fried (not the soup though, that was in bowls made of bread.) eh, what do you want? jolly goode fun. n.b. if you're a good rock climber, you could effectively get free admission by winning $25 (-$8 to try = $17 ticket price) for climbing the castle tower (involves a considerable overhang.)

ok, lemme go get my laundry now and venture out into the world.

oh p.s. on the bus back sunday nite i listened to robyn and paris and come and get it (not called rachel but it could be) - guess what kind of mood i was in! - and thought about the lyrics rather more concertedly than i'd done, and i shall have some things to say about that at some point.

you could have found out i might have been the girl of your dreams

little mnemo

2006-09-17T21:41:00.000-04:00

got that lurchy liminal viscerality that three-plus drinks and the late night before will do you. it's been a grand day for living, long-time-no sunday pants you know, sun and a full slate of exquisite divertment: movie, confection, repast.

first -- almodovar's women on the verge of a nervous breakdown (the title is actually better in english.) the translation may be loose but the movie is, as i leaned over and told ang, ridiculous in its awesomeness. most acutely so in the cinematic giddiness of the opening 20 minutes, but almost equally the beautifully-pitched farce that makes up the tonally-distinct main body of the film. viva pedro indeed - i'm psyched for the rest of this series though i don't get why they're out of order. and the previews were almost as exciting: volver, renaissance, gondry, zhang yimou. (it's fall alright.)

then -- the franklin fountain, and the parisian flip i've been craving for a good week now (as i flip for paris: coincidence?), happily achieved, if not in precisely the ideal moment. alongside that a tripled-spooned double-scoop of coconut and licorice (again! gray, like k8's pants), and a half-game of scrabble, somewhat the faheyan free-associative "gypsy" variety, with a point of clarification from the vietnamese woman sitting nearby. also some readings from brother i-sven's psychic soviet.

and then the satisfaction of my second recent restaurantal hankering, early dinner at rangoon (whoa, the newly redesigned menu-cum-cultural-primer looks so much better than that website.) that one was even more fulfilling. and we left full-feeling, but, i think, just at that perfect level; the delicate threshold another bite would dash; food nirvana. (jungle tofu and 1000-layer bread deliver as always, but this time i think the clustery and intensively flavored tea leaf salad took the cake. gotta love a salad you can eat with a spoon.) here's the deal w/ pulses, btw. (no wiki on vatana, eek!)

the fellowship on this whole deal was, i sorta mentioned, tara and kate. (also angela and here-and-back-again guen just for the first part.) we cotton well, the loopy literarity is sprightly but felt, that inimitable tarasitan insistent connectivitization goes (even) better with a common counterpoint on this side of the wide-eyed divide. and hey that's three days to make our weekend.

the afooorementioned drinks were at last night's cabaret: redeeming three drink tickets finally exhausting the bounty of my various, more and less useful, volunteery activities, which i'd been reaping readily since the 1st. all told, as i was impressed to calculate, it made for seventeen philly fringe/live arts performances attended, only five of which i paid in money for. (and nine of them this long weekend alone.) lovely stuff, many memorable shows and just generally a fun project; i'll have more to report shortly, and perhaps i'll eventually figure out my favorite(s).

for now's purposes - the culmination of it all was the goofy concert/(very much felt like an "an evening with...") of king britt 'n' dj spooky, at the "rotunda cathedral" (uh since when?) and then the same pair on the decks at the cabaret post- megaparty. my opinion of neither is particularly improved, but in both settings i preferred britt - first his strangely engaging ambient next-to-nothing-out (the psychedelic speckles on the rotunda ceiling certainly helped), then his, at least, uninterruptedly rhythmic, if utilitarian, house and remixcore offerings at the cab, a relief after borderline jerkabout inscrutability from that wacky "subliminal kid" spooky ("satisfaction" remix wha?) better anyway after the second and third of those drink tickets, and especially after tara brought me a tuft of phlox to adorn my specs, but besides the point was company and that was all nice - finally got to fringe with lizo too. the dancing... was not nearly as good as two sundays ago, but whatevs. i was out til past 4, then up til 6 chatting with gabe. [minor bad part: was forcibly made to relinquish a bit of money on spring garden, maybe-ironically on the way back from walking ang home.]

what did i want to say anyway? things are good. the fest was the best and i'm happy too that it's over and i can get back into the rest. like reading tolstoy (got some catching up to do in the next two days if'n i'm to stay on track), feeding myself (getting into the swing on this one - nova/neufchatel/scallion omelets of late, and sandwiches; enhanced menu planning coming soon), bloglogloglin' (snerf), and, most of most, working on being a deejay yay! i guess i'll get to that some other time soon too. guess i'll watch nausicaä with gabe now. he's studying russian and just yawned.

twinkle twinkle
blah blah blah
E
T
C

in the eye

2006-09-03T16:16:00.000-04:00

guess i've been in philadelphia for a week, so far, this time. most recently i'd been to new york (again), for a long weekend.

that time i helped alyssa move into up-up-upper manhattan; saw two movies with climactic scenes in coney island (the warriors in brooklyn bridge park) and on the town at symphony space); waited on a sidewalk for four and a half hours for tickets to see meryl streep and kevin kline perform brecht in central park; savored the irony of eating a bountiful raw, vegan "live verdura feast" brunch at caravan of dreams and a 7-oz bacon cheeseburger at jackson hole, both in the same day; joined patent officer rob and his heidi for a magnolia cupcake; brainstormed many bread-related puns on new york neighborhood names, and successfully managed to transform mark's bushwick housewarming into a dance party.

if only a small portion of that sounds like productive activity, philly in the meanwhile has certainly felt less active. i'm wearing fewer clothes than appropriate, sitting around in my house as piles of records and dishes accumulate, clocking bpms and attempting harebrained genre-crossing mix transitions, aimlessly pondering allmusic and wikipedia and eventually climbing upstairs to listen to get lonely and read an essay from best music writing 2002 before getting up again to turn of the lights and then fall asleep.

actually it's not nearly so dire as that. i've been doing some yoga. i've been dancing down the street. somehow i feel like i'm maintaining respectable social life, even though it's mostly consisted of seeing angela (and often jamie) most days (we watched hero and chocolat), and sometimes saying hi to my neighbors. thursday was gabe's birthday, and we went to the standard tap, after first dismissing the new 'libs bowling alley (-cum-bar-cum-dj-etc) as not our scene.

well, and i've done some bits of volunteering for the fringe festival - hanging cables and curtains to set up the cabaret on wednesday, tending bar for a v.i.p. preview reception thursday (i wore a sombrero and made $40 in tips); tonight i'll sell tickets or usher for "eye-95 re-tarred," and hope it's more than an excuse to mock hick stereotypes.

in exchange for that i've gotten a couple of ticket vouchers, and went last night to see "every day above ground" at the wilma, by sabooge, which was about billy the kid, except actually it was merely "loosely based" on michael ondaatje's book (of poetry?) about billy the kid, which is to say it wasn't really about anything so cut-and-dried. it was a collective creation (as the post-show q+a, fittingly led by allen kuharski stressed a lot), and it definitely felt like one, which may or may not be a criticism. i enjoyed the atmospheric and stylistic elements - the costumes, the deathly makeup, the soundscape, and visual bits such as sawdust spilling out of gunshot wounds and a nightmarish burlesque shadow play - but definitely felt a lack of cohesion, although part of my problem may have been that i was still looking for narrative through-lines of some sort (not that i thought it was going to be traditionally linear) long after it should have been clear that the characters were all dead and kept dying and ruminating about death in nonspecific ways.

when a brave audience member complained in the talkback that, though the performance "seemed very professional," he basically hadn't understood anything that was going on, the company's writer responded "that's a completely valid...thing!" and offered a what felt amusingly like a vague non-explanation, although i understood what she meant. she invited and seemed to welcome constructive criticisms without specifically acknowledging them as such; i felt like to do so would be admitting that after a year and a half (?) of process, they still didn't have a strong sense of what they wanted to present. there's a funny fine line between this kind of thing being okay and not okay - where is the responsibility to the audience in a creative work that's so unabashedly about the collaborative process of creation and exploration rather than a necessarily accessible presentation of the result?

i came home, made some sweet corn and collard greens with ginger and peanutty, listened to lemon jelly and the beta band, watched dog day afternoon until three in the morning.

today i have looked at some online job listings and i just come away disgusted by the prospect. i want to dj, and i'm trying to do it, and i'm also trying to want it more. i've been working on a demo tape, but i'm kind of realizing that i ought to do it with cd instead, which presents some technical problems which i'll address in due time i'm sure. i read two essays in this is pop - titles like "lost in music: obsessive record collecting" and "unpacking our hard drives: discophilia in the age of digital reproduction" - which were really depressing and made me feel sick at the thought of being a music collector. that's yucky.

[right now i'm listening to sam cooke and currituck county.]

i'm looking at the lovely burnished golden cow's bell that ben gave me, from his trip to munich, which is hanging on the doorknob of the closet behind my computer desk. ben thinks i should sell mixtapes online and on the streets. maybe i'll work on that. it's funny to think about selling that way - i don't imagine that such an endeavor could be a way to make a significant amount of money, and as such i'd be more inclined to give mixes away to spread my name and love (like i do already, tho not to strangers so much), but money is a way of quantifying worth, establishing that the doing of it has some significance and value to people, even if the money itself is not the point.

as i wrote to mali today, i'm still happy, but i'm a little worried about that. it's hard when you have to strive not to let the things you do for pleasure (internet, music, walking, reading, lagging, cultural consumption) feel like failure or waste.

alyssa said a comforting thing, which was that maybe i should just enjoy doing nothing for a while. it feels like it's already been a while of doing nothing. (i guess a month and a half since i left the bakery - feels longer, but that's not so bad really.) but i will work on letting it be okay. besides which i really am not doing nothing. i really am not. and i have some plans. life is just so huge and vast and slow like molasses. i'm frustrated by that pace, because it's hard to view the momentary me with respect to that monumental, molassesy context. you can't move very fast, but you do have to be moving. (it feels like). motion is vital, but glacial slow motion is the only one that's available. and running (very slowly) in place takes a lot of energy.

that's all.

music
tonight i just want your music
tonight

ready to be heartbroken

2006-08-18T04:10:00.000-04:00

i stayed up pretty late last night reading about literary hoaxes on wikipedia. which i highly recommend. i started because i wanted to find out more about ossian, which/whom i learned about at the nifty girodet exhibit at the met. which i also recommend (he did a bunch of paintings on themes from ossian.) the most interesting were probably ern malley and thomas chatterton, but seriously they're all worth clicking on. (did anybody else read go ask alice and the education of little tree back in the day?)

tonight i feel like i'm staying up late mostly just to enjoy one of the nicest things about being back home, listening to music. last night it was just wowee zowee on repeat.

now i'm listening primarily to the cds i just got (girls aloud, white stripes, silver mt. zion) which, foolishly, makes me feel like i do a decent job of making sure the cds i own get listened to, even though it kind of means the opposite.

funny how i never feel any unproductivity guilt about doing non-substantial/justifiable things at night, no matter how late. well, it's still a (re-novated) novelty for me to stay up this late. days are okay - today was better than yesterday. i went to the gallery to try to buy some shoes. i didn't do that, but i did look at some shoes, and i bought what seems like yet another crummy discman because i can't seem to buy a good one. then i met bedbugs at a/k/a b/c they have a lot of good stuff right now (better than academy, anyway, shucks.) can you believe that took most of the day? i guess it wasn't quite like that.

alyssa hosted folks here for beer and pizza, and it was almost like old times (did we have those times?) but cut short because rebecca and i went to see only human, which was about equally good with time to leave which i saw the night before - in both cases, as alyssa said, called what they're called because movies have to have titles. then i went to angela's and watched the first episode of carnivale with her.

i've been trying, and it seems to be getting better, not to be bummed/annoyed about things in my life being kind of nowhere and/or on hold right now, because i've been travelling and not feeling in a position to do much. (even this - somehow was having a hard time deciding to blog while i was away, even though i was certainly on the net in rochester.)

on the last night of my canoe trip in algonquin, i heard something cry in the night (loon? wolf? don't remember) and got that warm/cold shiver of a reminder of the wildness of wildness, and the flimsiness of civilizations safeguard (is that something we go into the backcountry to remember, or to convince ourselves of?)

on the last night of my days home in rochester i finally hooked up with some high school friends and went out and stayed up listening to peter seller's (dr. strangelove voice) recitation of "she loves you" (and we even ran into our american history teacher at the movies!)

on the last night of my meander through new york i was finally sitting around a table on curry row with the lovely bunch of ben and ester and jesse and rebecca w. and angela (fleury!) and bobby robert and what do i have to do but get up and leave in the middle to catch the bus to philly.

it's like not until i'm about to leave a place do i manage to actualize the best reasons for being there - always takes a few days to connect up with people (and even figure out who's around) and i guess i'm not best poised to max up the meantimes. in each of these cases roughly four days/three nights. not that my "trip" wasn't "good," as i've said to people more times than seems appropriate; it's less like a trip than a periodic extension of the normal existence that i conduct in these places, running through the same routines to make sure they still fit right, and at worst (i'll stop complaining) always being in familiar surroundings but never precisely home.

EDIT: except (forgot to include this b4), in the past twenty-four hour span, i've separately run into three people i know from different contexts in different unrelated haunts: ex-schoolmate katie d. in whole foods, ex-neighbor ramon at the ritz, two-time ex-coworker matt in a/ka. so that makes me feel a little like i've got some connexx to philly.

so this scheduled week in philly is set up in advance to be knocked down like another stop on the "trip", a tidbit of travel that in this case isn't away from the city i live in but merely the social context, this being, in accordance, a philly party weekend, and a time of significant community acknowledgingness.

but also short, because, the idea is, i'm heading out west on wednesday. except, am i? things are confused, and the plans aren't making themselves like they're supposed to. find out i guess. and if not that means i'm stuck here and it's time to get things in motion and do some establishing of my self in place and trajectory - which is something i've been feeling itchy to get to, but at the same time not perhaps quite wanting to face yet. anyway that's where things are for now.

la la-la-la la-la
there's nothing to rely on

i fell in love again

2006-08-01T11:58:00.000-04:00

...with indie rock? with a new exciting city? with my girlfriend? well maybe vampires is a bit strong but...

anyway ang+my weekend in chicago was satisfectellawesomagnanificent. started out with us getting free plane tickets to anywhere in the u.s. ("no blackout dates!" they cried). well, that part wasn't in chicago, but it was in exchange for waiting a mere two hours longer in the philly airport, reading the sermon in moby-dick and sleeping on shoulders. then we got there with a whole afternoon to fill. i'd never been to chicago - ang had once a while ago - but my first impression was tremendously positive, which is to say they have a great public transit system: easy to figure out, cool line colors (pink! brown! purple with stripes!), and only $12 for a train/bus pass that covered our entire stay.

so we made it to our digs (off the fullerton stop, in lincoln park, or maybe lakeview - i didn't quite figure out how the neighborhoods work), took forever wrestling with the front door keys, and asked the first bozos we saw on the street for advice about where to go. they sent us downtown to navy pier...which turned out to be sorta plastic tourist trap, but at least it was nice to see the lake, and i got a decent polish at america's dog - where rochester's status as a hot-dog town is once again denied, and no the 'buffalo dog' doesn't count. i like the black-sesame-seed buns though.

from there we found our way (by bus, after pearline at the information desk acted like we were crazy for wanting to walk along the water - "where are you from?...oh, philadelphia's different.") to millenium park. (which is either part of grant park or just next to it?) as recommended by everyone, and deservedly so: they have a funky gehry(esque?) concert pavilion (bruckner and liszt playing that night, so no thanks but), two huge facing waterfall video-screen towers, a toe-dipping 'stream' beside the boardwalk, very cool gardens, 'upscale' mini-golf with an amusingly classy-looking "clubhouse", and the awesome giant mirrored steel 'bean' - fun to walk under but maybe best viewed from the patio below, from which it reflects the warped skyline. the park also prompted an interesting if slightly stressful half-argument-half-discussion about class and public spaces.

many of our activity tips came from two rapid-fire textos courtesy of sarah rose, almost all of whose suggestions we took (except for the american girl place and the "$ food") - most crucially, she reminded me about the neo-futurists, who i saw years ago in rochester. after a quick and tasty greek dinner at the athenian room, we went to their home base, the neo-futurarium, for a midnight performance of their constantly evolving, eighteen years running (!), signature piece, tmlmtbgb. you can read about it there - basically, they do thirty 'plays' in sixy minutes ("new plays every week! new audience every night!") (c)hi-lites this time: the "corkscrewing motherfucker" shadow-play (performed solely by a corkscrew as shadow-puppet); "mr. science demonstrates othello" (with desdemona as a candle, othello as an oreo, and cassio as a glass of milk), the tmbg-ish ditty "genital spotlight"; "midwest diplomacy" (an audience-participatory allegory using water-balloons); and "a child's act of contrition," a touching and unsettling story that one of the actors told, while holding up her first communion dress, about her first confession, given face to face with the under-attentive priest, of learning how to masturbate. it turns out my old buddy yuri lane was performing at the neo-futurarium when we were there - too bad i didn't figure that out earlier.

saturday morning we followed sarah's instructions to the belmont el and ann sather for cinnamon rolls - which come a generous two apiece, along with a bowl of well-chosen fresh fruit, with every egg dish (in my case, the florentine.) the food arrived in five minutes - i really don't think i'm exaggerating, and the take-home bag for our second cinnamon rolls followed close behind. we wandered up to wrigleyville (of field fame) for kicks, then back down along broadway (stopping in reckless records) to the lake, which we followed for a ways before giving up on finding the beach and climbing down to access the lake via the rocks (not swimming so much as dangling our legs and watching the ski-dooers mostly fail to do stunts.)

ignoring for now the entire reason for our trip (i'll write about the festival on mincetapes, probably in more detail than anybody could care about), i'll skip to sunday morning, which was kind of similar: we joined kate (whom we'd connected with the day before at the festival) for brunch at orange - which, randomly, erika had also mentioned to me. the pancakes and such (i got the french toast kabobs) proved a little too much for us, especially poor angela, whose cinnamon roll 'cakes were close to a foot in diameter - but the mix-and-match juices were excellent. no time for thrifting, but we did pick up some necessaries at marshall's (hey, it's a chicago landmark, if not that particular location) before festival day two.

between that and our six a.m. departure next morning, we didn't quite manage to eat any deep-dish pizza or actually swim in lake michigan (we considered doing both with kate late-late on sunday, but we couldn't find a pizza place that was open - instead, we hit up 24-hr clarke's for more generously-portioned diner-style fare - and angela probably wisely opted for sleeping over the nightswimming). so...i'll have to go back! (didn't do the art institute either, but clearly this was not the trip for that. also wouldn't mind taking an architectural boat tour next time.)

i thought chicago was pretty exciting. it definitely felt larger and more bustling than philly, and not as big as new york - even though it's hard to tell from the limited amount of it we got to see - on the other hand it's of course true. but it was a nice extension/confirmation of philly always feeling so small next to new york, even though there aren't really that many u.s. cities that are between them in size. (in fact there are only three, and after this month i'll have visited two of them for the first time.) i wonder whether if i'd stayed longer i would have picked up more on the midwest-ness of it. anyway. i look forward to spending more time there in my life. how's that. stay tuned to mincetapes for the other half of the weekend.

can't you feel the beat of my heart?
(bum-ba-bum-ba-bum-ba-bum-ba-bum-ba-bum-bum)

and so this year kicks into gear

2006-07-27T20:49:00.000-04:00

whoa, now i'm officially hyper-mega excited for the forthcoming junior boys boygirls. trax on they'respace. also, erlend+co=whitest boy alive. which shouldn't be a surprise to anywone. also i kind of half-knew about some of these, but adem and mountain goats and yo la tengo (those last two who i'm going to see like in two days!) and i think some other folks have new stufff coming? ohly wtf this year might just be the okay.

more to the pt my weird mini-philly-week (tue-wed-thur) when i couldn't seem to do anything but buy groceries was going to nicely turn into a little dinner of me cooking (shrimp+avocado+oaxaca stringcheese)adillas and goat chz apple salad and mojitos and maybe gazpacho for myself and ang and tara then angela cancelled then tara cancelled (cuz thunderstorm!!) then alyssa joined then tara is coming anyway (changed her mind) and now maybe ang and jamie will come and all of a sudden this is a party. should call laura (who we drive-by-popsicle-lick'd from the uhaul today) and make it a real total girlfriend party. so anyway i'm post-prepping now but i wanted to say this.

stuff's happening, incidentally: i quit my job, went to new york for cousin's wedding and saw lots of family and also some friends, came back here, saw angela's new place, stopped by (old) work and saw that nothing much had changed, just dwindle continuing, bought a lot of groceries, like i said, biked around in north philly further than i've ever done, including the notorious K&A (kensington and allegheny aves), which is marked with a skull and crossbones on gabe's map of philly, and today i spent all of helping alyssa move her stuff into storage in wphil. was okay.

tomorrow i'm going to chicago for the pfmfest with ang....should be awlsum!!....first time to chicago, staying with my old neighbor (from rochester)'s sister/aunt, who is preposterously accomodating (she was way-unnecessarily embarrassed not to remember my name for like ten seconds, 8+ years out of context...immediately started telling me which planter on the porch she'd leave the key under.) yaeaeah. i'll yell tou all abouy iy.

see, and see?

2006-06-23T00:31:00.001-04:00

sorry, ross. i know i'm a continual let-down on this front; communication tool or documentation strategy, things are getting pretty iffy around here, and the sideline "serious" blogproject isn't convincing anything. well the thing is, part of the thing, i've been writing less (than i think about writing, let's put it that way) not just b/c i'm busy/lazy (actually wrote 'bazy' - think i like that), but actually i am getting a lot of this stuff out in communication with actual that is specific people.

by e-mail and g-chat for some of it - in which case google has got my back, documentationwise too - switching to firefox (be)late(d)ly has opened the latter up to me, and it's pretty satisfying. the simplicity and ease of the in-inbox-window format is quite brilliant - too bad navigating absently away shuts it all off (how annoying is that dialog box that tells you that after it's happened!) - there's gotta be a fix for that. now, i'm as wary as any of the timewasting dangers of chat, but it also allows for both succinct communiques (a la texto) and substantial conversation.

how awesome is waking up at 5:00am saturday morning (having crashed out early friday night, and before going to work a little later on to make some party pies) and talking simultaneously to lillie in ak (2:00am her time, post-bar) about vintage and obscure pop, and to dave in india (4:00pm his time) about, well, vintage and obscure pop, and what it means to be "as good as the beatles". (the former convo inspired by the awesome franklin fountain. postscript: found champagne kola @ cousins that afternoon and got some for the party)

but also, more significantly, i've been seeing/talking/hanging out/etc. i like to think of it as connecting, but whatever, with crazy [amount of] nonvirtual people these days [too]. i may have alluded to some of this. tonight i made dinner with mali; yesterday strummed and hummed with ang and yahmay b4 p4 partay, tuesday had some real talk with dwjonas, and monday morning i hosted and hung with jesse and josie. last week i had lunch w/ laura; dinner and basement rock show with matt rubin (the show was in his basement, at dangerdanger); rebecca and alyssa what else is new but going back i went to new york on sunday to see audrey chan and her art (to wit: her quite compelling video 'boomerang', which falls somewhere between political documentary, found-footage collage, powerpoint journal entry, and music-vid mash-up, but gets to be an art film because...she made it in art school? no, because she _says_ so - plus it's in a gallery! so go see it! yay oddree!) and her fam (who ordered all sorts of delicious food for us in a private dining room in chinatown, as we discussed fashion and celebrity and l.a. life.)

and somewhere in there was the party (vernal!paternal!inferno!) i threw with rebecca and nachshon. actually, i did less actual socializing there than any of this other stuff, being preoccupied with the musical environment and drinks and stuff, but it was lovely nonetheless. somehow it felt wonderful just being there, even not doing anything - the weather was perfect (hot-time in the city, but not in airy mt. airy!), the good food and favorite-flavors flowed freely, and the 'feng shui mirror curtains' cast dancing light-speckles about like a deviant disco ball (as someone said), and most of all there was just this palpable mellow... (well, i hope you made it; if not hope there's a next time!)

so - basically it's looking like it's c+c days again - which is right, that's supposed to be summer, and it has without question turned summer. some community getting going on, for sure. less sure about the change aspect, at least wrt me personally, but it is occurring to me, if not quite yet occurring.

this would be the point to talk about the two major foci of my mental and emotional energy these days - angela and petit4 - but i wont get into them right yet, partly because i'm not sure this is a good forum for them, but more because i've been talking about them so much that i don't really feel like going through it all again right now (viz the rest of this post.) anyway - change is going and coming too - and ain't it always for the better?

in the meantime though - i'm off to bath (m.e.) tomorrow (i.e. today), but i'll shower first i think (haha) and get this pile on my floor into my pack, and try to get some sleep (3 hours?) before work, after which it's direct to the plane station. after maine (my uncle's 70th - lobster is heavily anticipated) i'll be in wanakena all next week, with my folks and my brother and sisinlaw and nephew (1st time!) i'll probably be back in philly the following weekend though. so you know.

and, as usual, if you care what i'll be listening to, hit me up at mincetapes.

peace loves.

every second spent with her
's a bulging wallet
overstuffed with angel's pay

[[oh, p.s. - just thought you might be interested that after acquiring no fewer than 44(!) new cds in the first half of june, (by comparison, i got 'only' 33 in all of may; 26 in april), i have successfully (so far) cut myself off for at least the rest of the month. cold turkey except for 3 leslie gore lps i ordered off ebay the day of the kaibosh. $1.50 for the lot, whatcha gon' do? the decision was made after a weekend when i spent the requisite amount of time (hour-plus) in both a.k.a. and academy, and bought nothing at either, realizing there wasn't anything i even wanted though there were things i thought i should. just prior to academy i had stumbled upon a random library-benefit sale where i scored nine random titles for about fifteen bucks total, including some hunchbought teenpop. next time 'round i'll try to update the sidebar. ok end trans.]]

put your hand on your heart

2006-05-27T18:40:00.000-04:00

and tell me it's all over
i won't believe it till you
put your hand on your heart and tell me
that we're through

you know it's one thing to say you love me
but another to mean it from the heart
and if you don't intend to see it through
why did we ever start?

i want to hear you tell me
you don't want my love

my head has been playing this song for the past two weeks or so, in two versions: at first mostly josé gonzález's spare acoustic cover, and more recently the dance pop original by kylie minogue. the song's most striking quality for me is the utter uncertainty of its lyric. the central question - is it over? - remains unresolved, and it's never explicit whether either party possesses a sure answer. it was the singer's lover who initiated this impending potential parting (i thought that we were just beginning, but now you say we're in the past), but apparently not with so much conviction as to satisfy the singer of its necessity. and if the singer is desperate, it's not for the affair to continue, but for certainty, the emotional surety that must be conveyed by a hand on the heart (or, elsewhere, a look in the eyes.) without that decisive assurance, they both - and we too, as concerned listeners - are mired in ambiguity.

must it end? the singer, albeit desperate with confusion, is not blinkered by false romance, acknowledging they like to talk about forever; most people never get the chance. unlike the majority of pop love narratives, this one seems to find both participants in nearly (if not entirely) equitable positions with respect to their situation - there's a flat, matter-of-fact quality to the lyric that suggests the singer, like the lover, could take or leave the relationship - both (well, the singer more explicitly) are waiting for a sign, an indication of emotional "truth," to cut through the confusion and speak louder than their calmly rational words.

and that's essentially where i am as well. (you might think this post belongs over at mincetapes, but it's here, on this blog about my life, for good reason.) i don't mean to suggest that there isn't plenty of tenderness to the song. both minogue and gonzález's performances are sincerely felt, and invest the song with undeniable emotion resonance, without ever overplaying it with impassioned vocal histrionics. they could almost be singing to each other, across over a decade and a considerable stylistic divide. josé's folk-like rendition may seem more conducive to earnest, heartfelt emotion, and its subdued, plaintive tenor could suggest a less romantically hopeful prognosis - next to kylie's necessarily energetic club-ready version, whose rhythm track and plangent synths tempt a defiantly optimistic reading of the ambivalent lyrics. the line i want to hear you tell me you don't want my love, in particular, is easier to take at face value from josé, even if we're meant not to believe that either singer really wants that. but the emphatic a capella choral prelude to kylie's version belies the positivity of the drum machines that kick in moments later, setting an uncharacteristically solemn tone that resonates through the track.

kylie seems to be this sort of position - finding herself with the future of a relationship thrown into doubt - fairly frequently, at least in her early work, and her response is generally one of sometimes guarded but always resolute optimism that things can work out: she's "got to be certain", and admits "je ne sais pas pourqoui", but concludes that it's "better the devil you know" (a supposedly considered but nonetheless uneasy sentiment, to be sure) - and besides, it's "never too late" ("…to change your mind.") it's a pretty striking contrast to plenty of pop - for example (first thing that comes to mind) brie larson, whose girl-power-flavored "whatever" is an intense kiss-off to a guy who let her down but now thinks he can have her back. so maybe kylie's wishy-washy forgive-and-forget philosophy and failure to assert her frustrations makes her a poor romantic role model. maybe her optimistically 'pragmatic' approach (wishful thinking?) is escapist fantasy and (worse) maybe her self-presentation as weak-willed and manipulable plays into prescribed and restrictive gender roles. still, i have to say i feel her on this one, and i admire the brazenness of her willing to give things another try, even if i'm not always convinced she's doing the right thing.

josé gonzález's cover does us the great service of stripping away the production so as to reveal more plainly the song in itself; making more transparent the emotional core that is very much there in kylie's original. of course, kylie has plenty of covers herself; one in particular that conveys a similar romantic sensibility is "give me just a little more time." ("...and our love will surely grow...") which includes the totally stunning line: "let's think of each other and hesitate." i recently acquired the original version, by chairman of the board, on a compilation of (post-motown) holland dozier holland solid gold (purchase inspired by michaelango matos' talk at emp...) so, pretty good fodder for my soul-pop interminglement mission. i listened with bated breath the first time i heard kylie's version... and yes, she absolutely does the "brrrrrrrr!" part, and it totally clinches the cover. so that one's hitting close for me these days too.

"the loco-motion" is also swell - very possibly the best dance-craze song (as opposed to 'record') ever, don't you think? (rufus thomas has several contenders, but i feel like they're not necessarily that great as songs - "the twist" is nowhere near.) too bad folks of carole king's calibre don't attempt them more often. on the other hand... her "tears on my pillow" cover is very silly and unnecessary; it doesn't change the song enough to make it make sense in an 80s pop context, and the attempts to keep the 50s feel just come off as forced; the whole thing feels like a pointless exercise and completely shatters the delicate splendor of the original. (which was on the first mix i got from angela, btw.) maybe it's because that's so meh that i actually tolerate and even enjoy her version of "celebration" (the next track on this compilation), which is certainly a more redundant cover, and is a song i've always disdained, but at least seems appropriate here. somehow this version, in its apotheosis of frivolity and disposability (in its very redundancy!?), and with the percolating synths buoying that big dumb anthemic chord hook, manages to get past all that. or maybe i'm just really going crazy.

er, i'm going to put on clem snide now.

the world goes right, the world goes round

2006-05-24T14:03:00.000-04:00

[retype of a post i lost yesterday - what's up w/ the recover function?]

i return from new york inwardly beaming, freshly vital, and full of giddy contentment. these trips always do me good - it's not so much the escape, i think, as the chance to (re)connect with people and places and experiences (familiar ones, but new ones too) outside of the day-to-day realm of my present. it reminds me about the outside and the other, about the power of the connections i already have and the limitless potential for making more. it gets me feeling fondly about the past as well as the future - both seem so emotional resonant and rich with possibility.

on the chinatown bus home yesterday, as i txted a couple of you, i got this oddly tangible sense of growing out of myself, getting a broader perspective on how it is to be comfortable and honest and unselfconscious as an approach to life. if vagueness about identity and isolation from community are some of the issues i was grappling with last year (and now to a much lesser extent, after some soulsearching and minor breakthroughs), one that seems more relevant these days is my tendency to inhibitedness. so if this weekend occasioned some unsticking in this area - it's not just the trip to new york; i'd been doing a lot of thinking recently anyway - this business of placing and experiencing myself in other contexts, remembering about other kinds of connectedness, feels helpful and healthy and happy.

it was, it was a pretty much perfect weekend of new york doings. there was only one lowlight (well, two if you count my continued failure to get a haircut - from the famous rocky the barber of bklyn heights no less), and it came right at the beginning: i lost my favorite (pretty much only) not-functional hat, the raspberry corduroy cap i got at park slope beacon's closet about this time last year. with the yellow anticon button on it. i left it on the bus, oh well - it was probably inevitable - i don't know if i'll ever learn how to not lose hats; i've been doing it my whole life. i tried to inquire about a lost+found, but that was predictably hopeless. i just hope somebody found it and is enjoying it. and that they keep the pin on.

and highlights?

• meeting matt/steve; friend of angela's, new-minted new-school grad (poetry mfa), scrappy musician and "obscuro" dj, owner of a melodica signed by the tmbg johns, and just generally very enjoyable and like-minded fellow. even if for some reason he "assumed i don't like barbeque." he took us to the [unmistakeably mcsweeney's-affiliated] superhero store.

• well, naturally: the daptone super soul revue. it did not disappoint - despite my substantially sleep-deprived state (as ester puts it, i was still dancing the entire time even if i couldn't quite dance my heart out.) birthday girl sharon, the dap-kings, et. al. were in fine form, and the mighty-young-lookin' mighty imperials ("that's very politally incorrect!" complained rebecca) offered a splendid "intermission" in the form of a change of both pace and dress code. but the most suprising and startling performance, in over 3 hours of non-stop funk'n'soul, was by naomi davis. wow. (plus her two venerable keyboard-playing mystery men.) being there with a posse (nine-strong, so no match for the as many as twenty suit-sporting funkateers on stage at any given time, but still...) made it all that much better. watching (or just being in, and loving) the crowd was often almost as enjoyable as watching the performers. mm, dinner at the korean restaurant before the show was yummy too.

• chatting about donuts with a pair of very large economists from yale, frank and laurie.

• sitting back and dropping, like a stone, to sleep, on mark's massive masterbed.

• a somewhat magical picnic in the rain, in prospect park, thanks to the generous umbrella-tree that kept us (and our brie de meaux and our cornichons) perfectly dry. even if it didn't keep us safe from an 8-year-old "cynical jackass."

• record shopping at academy, not just for several key finds of my own, but sharing the excitement of some excellent purchases made by my friends.

• getting to see my very good friend lillie, at the tail end of her fortnight furlough from anchorage, as well as (for the first time) her mother and their lovely home in mt. kisco. we talked until late, in a bar and a basement, and again in the morning - over florentine and croissant french toast w/ ice cream - about the big things. (like love and marriage and family and friendship. also about txting and music packaging and what all our friends are up to.) she always makes me think and feel.

• not in new york, but upon my return to work today: katie's new indieboy (!) made her the perfect little indieboy mixtape, with the typewritten tracklist, the (gorgeous) scratch-paper artwork, the magnetic fields song, etc. etc. she doesn't have a walkman, so he had to lend her one to listen to it (true, the smoother move would be to give her one, a page from the matt rubin playbook.) oh, and by whom are the first two songs on side A? of montreal, and okkervil river. (ross-n-angela buffs will get this one.) anyway, just about the sweetest thing, makin' my heart sing. good stuff.

i get deep i get deep i get deep i get deeper
into this thing

laundry nite blooze

2006-05-20T03:48:00.000-04:00

[original title: feels like friday, smells like rain. actually, that's what i was thinking as i rode home from work yesterday. but somehow less true today, even though it is and it is.]

the other day i made a tape then i gave it away (the making was for me, but it turned out the tape wasn't) and later on that day i found an unlabeled tape lying on the street. let's listen to it now.... oh wait, it's broken. never mind.

so, the weekend before last, which already felt like ages ago at the beginning of this week - even spending less than 24 hours in roslyn last sunday>monday almost made it feel like another travel weekend - was the first weekend i had spent in philadelphia in a while. good one for it too, what with first cinco de mayo friday (the mexican holiday traditionally celebrated by drinking a fifth of mayonaisse, plus the thing where everybody goes to old city and walks around) and, apparently, [kentucky] derby day. the first did involve art and margaritas (homemade) and tiredness, and only a smidgen of dancing; the latter i observed with the gabe and the o'connors + jamie @ north 3rd, where the waitress couldn't believe we wanted mint juleps despite their sign advertising for the derby. that night was lizo's dance studio opening performance/party/ambiguous social-artistic event. which was lovely - great space and djs, and an intriguing blurring of socialization and performance space/time, which was mostly about disorganization i guess. that's all i'm remembering right now.

at some point i accompanied martha to get her frontal helix pierced (while her friend got her tragus pierced.)

i also met and spent several occasions with nachshon, whom you probably don't know about. but he's lovely. did you know ben and ester got engaged? yay yay congrats yay omg yay yay! meanwhile heidirob are probably naming their grandkids now or something. it's like the slightly grown-up-er version of bunny season.

notable weeks at petit 4 - rich was away last week and martin is this week, and joe's been around a bit more than normal. last week, with just me marty and katie in the kitchen, was (surprisingly) a lot of fun - everyone was in good spirits in spite of doubly-short-staffedness and the mother's day crunch. (i made chocolate plaques of "mom"-heart tattoos.) we even all went out on thursday (it's the new sunday, doncha know?) on saturday i had a funny time pitching in here and there and helping joe deliver wedding cakes and cakes made to look like buildings. this week was somewhat less fun, but at least it's over for me.

the big drama this week has been how i will get my hair cut. yes, i don't believe there has been any drama more substantial than that this week. apropos of not much, katie asked me tuesday if she could cut my hair, and i threw her off by saying yes. unfortunately, hasn't happened yet, and i was probably definitely maybe going to try cutting it myself tonight, until i looked to the internet for some advice, and chickened out by the elaborate instructions (involving things like extra mirrors that i don't have.)

so that remains unaccomplished. but i did go see mccoy tyner rip it up, and i made a djmixtape and another mix cd or two, and i did laundry and wrote in my blog. and really i better go to bed now if i'm going to have any awakeability for tomorrow's birthday thingies.

today i fell asleep in a bath of hair
hair that once sprouted from my own white wet chalk follicles
i swalllow a coal
and follow my breath
and i did it with the grapefruit soap
thinking of you

bathed, oiled and shaved
your legs are like two skinny dolphins swimming
between the mattress and the layers of bedding

sun shower

2006-05-16T15:33:00.001-04:00

harry nilsson - without you (demo)
billy bragg - rule nor reason
elvis costello - just a memory
dusty springfield - i just don't know what to do with myself
jill sobule - i'm so happy
william bell - i forgot to be your lover
robyn - eclipse
jose gonzalez - hand on your heart
go-betweens - quiet heart
rachel stevens - it's all about me
veronicas - leave me alone
ashlee simpson - coming back for more
neil young - don't let it bring you down
mountain goats - sometimes i still feel the bruise
james hunter - i can't win
candi staton - it's not easy letting go
o.v. wright - you're gonna make me cry
everything but the girl - single
edith frost - loving you goodbye

these songs, i rained along with it, and put them on a tape. (still, the sun shone - this was yesterday afternoon)

paddle battle fiddle faddle

2006-05-04T18:08:00.000-04:00

well i already pulled out the obligatory jeff lewis quotable quote, for this post over at mincetapes - the new 'satellite blog' (of the, er, non-pathetic variety) - which i retroactively entitled "preEMPtive" (howdylikethat? and how much longer can i make this sentence appear in the editor than it actually is?) ...but are there any other songs that rhyme with seattle? "smells like nirvana", of course, has the immortal line "well it sure beats raising cattle." gotta be something with saddle, right, in one of those infinite c+w songs with place names in the lyrics?

anyway, there i was. i was, there. golly it's a nice place. i'm working my way through the dirty details of the conference itself in the music-discussion-sanctioned venue, so i thought i'd tell you guys about the other aspects of my trip.

sarah kelly was my enthusiastic and able host, with special bonus thanx to addie c. who i got to see for a chat and cookie before she took off to boston and left me her bed to sleep in. not that it's that different from west philly, but it was still cool to see people living in a real, life-sized (albeit purple) house, with a yard and all that (and two quite purty cats even if one of them was having some trouble on the rug.)

the first part of my seattle trip went something like - airport - bus - house in a grassy residential neighborhood - bus - conference (rooms in a building, albeit, oh look, a wacky psychotic and playful and basically ve(h)ry gehry one) - so i wasn't getting too much local character. i did see the local critical mass (massive indeed - as per request, a thorough exploration of the meanings at play in this name will be forthcoming in a future post) impressively mucking up friday evening traffic as i waited for the bus. and the strange experience of having our waiter (at coastal kitchen, celebrating "venezuela month") casually explain to us, halfway through dinner, that somebody else was going to serve us the rest of the time because "he had just been dumped." (by whom was not clear, nor if this was a euphemism for fired.)

on sunday afternoon, my only large block of non-conference time, skelly took me on a bit of a seattle snacking tour, with stops at a mexican place that got my order bizarrely wrong (fried egg instead of fish taco?), a yummy belgian frites joint, the fabled bauhaus coffeeshop (where i had a couple of sips of latte which i actually appreciated and maybe even enjoyed a little), and the bakery where she is employed as cupcake-froster. and a few thriftstores (where i failed to find shoes but did get a shirt and another "texas is for lovers" for angela, which seemed like an appropriate souvenir) and the watertower in the olmstead "capitol" hill park (where we finally glimpsed some mountain, and the emp looks confusing.)

in conclusion, i have to say that seattle seems to have better and more extensive funky-hip shopping'n'hanging out districts than philly or possibly new york (manhattan at least.) and the used record stores may not necessarily have better prices but there sure are a lot of them. i only checked out one, easy street, which is impressive, but then aka just has me spoiled. (a half-point off for not marking as such the edited version of late registration which i subsequently returned.)

so that was all great. but truly the best non-conference-related part of the trip was the opportunity to hang out with sarah for substantial period of time, and some great chats about music and cultural politics and the ever-popular post-collegiality. so yeah, thanks again sarah.

everything is effed up straight from the <3

out of whack/on the right track

2006-04-25T20:18:00.000-04:00

is how i felt this weekend. or at least the latter part of it. i barely even remember the beginning...i feel like my perspective is totally skewed right now, but somehow it seems like the weeks are compressing and weekends are spooling out endlessly - last week i slept straight through from work wednesday to work thursday. i can reconstruct some of what happened friday (gabe's friends came to town, i hung out with them and angela and matthew, mostly just sitting around the flat) and saturday (rained a lot, i watched the purple rose of cairo with alyssa), but even now they feel misty and ages ago.

what happened (this was sunday) was i decided the most productive/best thing for me to do would be to spend _all day_ in my bathrobe, sitting at my computer, (listening to and buying and) reading and writing and IMing(!) about Pop Music. really, i actually made that decision. and i don't think it was a wrong decision - but, you know, usually when i spend inordinate amounts of time doing these things, it's not my _intention_ at the outset, and i feel sort of guilty and wasteful afterwards.

long story short, i had been loudly pondering the experience music project pop conference - at first largely in the abstract, as something i thought was cool, but increasingly as a something i could potentially attend. somewhat to my surprise, almost everyone i mentioned it too was enthusiastic about the idea - notably harris ("what are the downsides? there are no downsides") and bedbug dave ("you HAVE to go to EMP if you can!") and most particularly my father. so... i'm going. right - it's in seattle, and it's this weekend (in case you didn't read the link). and... i have no idea what it's going to be like. but i'm very excited. although, even though you wouldn't think it, it has taken me a while of psyching myself up and quelling my apprehensions for me to get that way.

so that, in conjunction with the awesome book i'm reading (which is just the papers from the same conference two years ago) and my excitement about what's going on at dave's teenpop blog (i'm still not 100% convinced i'm a true teenpoptimist like mr. moore, but i've been heavily digging, in particular, the veronicas debut album and ashlee simpson's latest), along with some thinking about mixtapes and soul and, crucially, some conversations with - still my intellectual/spiritual muse and mentor and bff, tfb, aft... all of these things, as i was saying, have got me feeling primed and pumped for some kind of realization or revelation about my musicself. an idea, a project, a life path, it's not really clear. nothing is quite coalescing, and there's no particular reason for me to think it should, but... anyway, i'm thinking about things. and i won't say much more here, because i've got a new place to say these things.

yes, i know it's a little questionable considering how unsatisfied i am with how often i get to post here as it is, in my flagship blog. but i've started a music blog. it's something i've been sort of considering for a while. and, naturally, it's still getting worked out. but i figured you would want to know about it. so go look and let me know what you think: mincetapes.

two entries so far. the first i wrote sunday day, the second i wrote sunday night, after forcing myself to get outside and do _something_. the something turned out to be, not the why? or strokes concerts, but meeting rebecca at fergie's for some improv comedy, then random runnings-in at capogiro [mmmm], then some top-notch low-key hanging out with new philly peeps raghiv and emily, at monks. lovely stuff, and an excellent reminder of people/community after all day alone at the console. still, i was up until 5:30 writing that post (you'll see- it's long) and then trying to figure out why i couldn't publish it (turned out blogger was not working at all). i slept for four hours, then couldn't get back to sleep. so, all of monday, and still, to a lesser extent today (because i had trouble sleeping last night too), i've had that strange queasy lucidity that comes from sleep deprivation [and in the case, also spending all that time in the internerd disconnecto.] queasy lucidity (that's apt, so i repeat it), which seems to augment the possible in both positive and negative ways, making you (or me at least) simultaneously somewhat physically sick and oddly more alive. do you know what i mean?

so i think now i've explained both the out of whack and the on the right track parts. sorry i didn't get around to telling you about last weekend in new york (it was truly, freshly, and in fact unexpectedly marvelous.) if there's more writing in me tonight - not sure yet - going to try some yoga first, then we'll see - it's going to mincetapes. but i still love you.

i still love you.

first step is the hardest
but you've got to get yourself started

my sucking funny day... [plus! folk as puck vs. funk as polk]

2006-03-28T19:55:00.000-05:00

...was actually last tuesday. more funny than entirely sucking, but i did feel kind of funny the whole time pretty much. mentally, not physically - some of the emotional detritus of self- and world-questioning thoughts interpolated from the whole gluttony episode, which i didn't have the time to start negotiating at the end of the last post. the cyclical dose of aimlessness - was there something else? happily cut short - an excellently-timed restorative yoga class worked some wonders and got me back on track.

but wednesday was my day for bodily sickness. fine in the morning, but an hour or two into the workday i was sneezing violently and getting rapidly sore in the face. no stomach stuff (but that's still been recurring episodically in weird ways - it's back now for instance.) came home earlyish to rest, make some yummy miso and watch the gold rush (joe claims chaplin is great medicine). was going back and forth but finally decided to attend the animal collective show anyway - the sick definitely ruled out the option of going to swat for jean dielmann 23 quai de commerce..., which i had spent the previous 24 hours trying to convince myself i wouldn't actually rather attend than the concert (my last chance to see the film until who knows when?) i pretty much figured i would be mostly bored either way. probably true - at least, i only enjoyed the a.c. show about exactly as much as i had anticipated. but whatever. just a shame that we missed all but the final minutes of openers nix noltes (sp?), who seem worth watching.

well, part of the problem was that following right on the heels of a mini-crisis of faith about all this cultural-consumption excess, last week was a particularly excessive one, with almost every night involving an at least semi-actual decision. (the philly music festival, remember?) thursday went to poet in new york (and not the go! team), friday to the mates of state, not to angela's friend's video/music collective thingy at danger!danger!, saturday (this was the crusher - really the only two i cared about) to the books and not billy bragg. which is at least my third time missing billy. oh well. the books was absolutely a correct decision. easily the best show all week

(so i won't bother talking about the others, unless you care - nadir was almost certainly stonery audience dude totally botching "starman" in failed attempt to help save kori gardner's voice)....

well death vessel turns out to be a band after all, not just a girl-faced boy, and somewhat the less for it. still pretty tho. but jose gonzales, man. crikey. spellbinding. (but i'll not be bound to spell with the correct diacritics - nyah nyah.) he's from sweden, of course (what is it with these people?) (so far the record doesn't really approach the potency of the life, but "heartbeats" is pretty perfect - i never realized the lyrics were so decent.) then the books. i guess they were sold out of their the books oven mitts, and their "french elevator music" 3"s, so i didn't buy any of their murtch, although i kind of really wanted a freedom from expression t-shirt. not so much for the image (guy hunkering down in a crater hole?) as the phrase, which seems exactly right to me - except, what do you guys think? i'm curious how it understands itself to you. because i feel like i could use some freedom from expression, or at least freedom from feeling a necessity to express. don't you see that's a positive thing? well, maybe depending on your (?) response, i'll think about getting a shirt.

anyway so like, i really really like the books. as angela pointed out, that's kind of a no-brainer, because the books are also really like me. except maybe (even?) cleverer and funnier and still spiritual and emotional and thoughtful. (and they're not, for example, angry or anxious or melodramatic or redundant or closed-minded.) i should really come up with better adjectives. sigh. they do things that i would really like to be doing, or that i value a lot, using words in interesting ways, combining them with musical and other sounds to describe, but never proscribe, moods that aren't just textural but complexly humanistic, coming up with music that is simple and elemental and straightforward in its process but utterly affecting and unexpected (and unique) in product. that may not really be a reasonable bunching of words. anyway, they make beauty by the careful culling and ordering of non-extraordinary elements. (it's a kind of sublimation?) and they're just really nice! (still on the like me tip?)

i've never been a collector of sounds the way they are (although i think i appreciate sounds in similar ways), but maybe i should be. and images! seeing them live was great just to be able to focus on the music the way you only can at a concert, and also absolutely to put (two) human faces to the name and sounds (they're so nice! i would really like to have lunch with them, or spend a weekend at their house - and that's not something i would say about many famous people i don't know), but most especially, considering how much of the sound was necessarily non-live, the video component really clinched the show. found-footage collages with precisely that same books wit and humanity, and all very neatly synched to the songs, not for the most part over-overshadowing them. but if they ever put out a dvd of that video, i would buy it in a second. so they really should! maybe most effective use of video in concert i've seen?

okay, enough about the books. one other thing about that show (haha!) was that although i didn't quite realize it yet, it helped me decide/realize that i'm more interested in folk music than i thought. or maybe i think i should be. i just randomly arrived at that as i was biking home the next day after half-accidently (?) purchasing both vashti bunyan albums (the one from 1970 and the one from 2005) at two different record stores. it's all making sense - now i see why i bought that other richard and linda thompson album. for the true test, i pulled out one my old nick drake cds, and much to my chagrin discover that i sort of like it. (?) so, brit/britty folk anyway. 1968-72. produced by joe boyd. and espers. (if i go to the jack rose/fursaxa show, maybe i could finally figure a philly scene to align with? but when will the tickets be on sale?)

well, i figured, this shall can be a week of peace, and folk is peacey. the books put me at peace and so is waking up on sunday morning and well go forgive the devilicious silk ("uh, you mean sin?") city brunch-special hedons, you see also this is a week of exercise. (folk and exercise.) because, i am cacheing in my free weekly "trial" (?) membership to the phila sports club that i won in a drawing about two months after the fact. oh man i am using that thing up. sunday (1) i went and ran on the treadmill and used the nautilus equipment, last night (2) i took a "clubyoga" class and today (3) i took a "vinyasa yoga" class. maybe tomorrow i'll use the big inflatable balls. or do core body workout? well no, i'll probably run some more. the yoga was ohkay, at least yesterday was pretty good but the vinyasa teacher was the corniest you could imagine, she kep making preposterous jokes and of course she was the only one who could laugh at them anyway. but the best part of course is the sauna and the steam room. (except you want to hear something kind of weird, there was a guy masturbating in the steam room, like after this other guy and i were already in there. i thought that was pretty strange but whatever. who knows how these things work. i'm not used to being around just men like that, i suppose there is something sexy about it.) well in any case you won't see me signing up for jim membership, but i will try to make the most of this week and see what i can learn about this business. interesting because gyms are about yourself and also about other people, very much so. with any luck it will make a perfect transition week because by next week it will be so balmy outside i can just switch to doing all my exercise in plein air.

was there anything else i was supposed to tell you? oh yeah, i saw body worlds yesterday. yeah, it's really cool. really pretty amazing they could do all that. hard to keep remembering these are actual real bodies. most disturbing was "obesity exposed," where i guess they finally figured out how to preserve fat, (and make it white?) and laid out vertical cross-section slices of a 140-pound person next to a 580-pound person. most of it was not really gruesome or upsetting though (even if it sometimes made janine think of beef jerky or prosciutto.) on the spectacle/science/art rubric, it definitely scores unambiguously highest in the first and second categories (i feel like i need to go through it with somebody who really knows anatomy though - especially to figure out how much of what is really real) but there is some undeniably aesthetic jawn in there as well. most especially the vascular systems, with all the blood vessels infused with a red-dyed polymer that preserves even the tiniest branching capillaries (although there were definitely little broken-off pieces at the bottom of the cases.) some bizarre choices though, especially with some very obviously fake and added lips and nipples and bellybuttons, and also a propenderance of penises left intact. (even on specimens with just, say, the muscular and skeletal systems preserved.) so, that's all sort of going through my head as i think about my own body and doing things with my systems. but sort of not.

after the museum, i bought a book by witold rybcynzski, whose name i will learn to spell by the time i finish reading it, about the weekend and the development of the concept of leisure. which seems particularly relevant to me, and to some of the ideas and discussions/concerns i've been having lately. because i have a lot of weekend and a lot of leisure. i'll let you know how it goes.

speaking of discussions, i forgot how droolinducingly awesome this looks - the experience music project conference taking place in a month - just look through the schedule of the different panels and read the paper titles. (only slight problem is i'm not sure "shame" is something i'm all that interested in thining about vis-a-vis pop music, relatively speaking of course.)

also i discovered on rainy saturday night that my shoe has a hole in the sole. yuck. where should i buy noo shews?

well i think that's it. maybe next time will be more frequent/shorter. peace.

juliet.....
i get on my knees!

[p.s. why do i keep thinking of dire straits when i think about the clientele. they don't sound anything like them, although they do share a sort of genteel british restrained thing. it's probably mostly because of that "juliet" line. anyway i finally really like them, but maybe i'm just making myself. that "be my baby" glockenspiel rip is clutch.]