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do you love it or do you hate it?
you'd have to put the book down and confront life
sometimes you don't know which is worse: the search strings that appear in your referrer logs, or that your site appeared in those search results.
simmons: "the notion is if you're going to welcome me with open arms you also have to welcome me with open legs."posted August 28, 2002 in speech
gross: "that's a really obnoxious thing to say."
simmons: "no, it's not. why should i say something behind your back that i can't tell you to your face?"
at one point, gross asked simmons about his "studded codpiece."
simmons: "it holds my manhood, otherwise it would be too much for you to take. you'd have to put the book down and confront life."- gene simmons on fresh air with teri gross, courtesy of danieltaub.com (to put in my two cents, i don't think teri gross is boring, but that photo! get thee to a stylist!)
avenue c
i started this entry on the 27th, but now it's the 28th and i don't remember anything important happening to me yesterday (today). the closest record store to the office was sam goody in the skanky manhattan mall, so i made a special trip there to get the just-released coldplay album. remember when albums came out and you hadn't already heard every track in mp3s? it was still exciting, though, and the sequence gets it right, with "amsterdam"'s long buildup and huge payoff perfectly ending the album. after work i rode the ole stationary bike and then indulged a rare craving for steak. the waitress started off frosty and ended sweet and bubbly, even giving us free chardonnay and cote du rhone glasses. and then a walk around a few blocks, scoping out apartment buildings, discussing the pros and cons of avenue c.
posted August 27, 2002 in delivery, musicliminalish
sometimes you have no desire to leave the house until 1:30am and then you're glad you live in a happening neighborhood where you can roll out and into dancing bacchanalia in five minutes flat. and then run into two good friends—one ivy league lit prof just back from alaska at the door and one college buddy dancing and romancing in the back. we shook it in front of the dj sharee booth for a few minutes (hopefully looking nothing like uma thurman post-screwdriver in hysterical blindness tonight) and a clubkid gave us passes to opaline around the corner. we went and stood around puzzled. i think i said, i don't know what's going on here; it was all liminalish and neither here nor there and some straights and some gays and some busted drag queens and then i realized what it was really like was the club in queer as folk that every schlocky episode ends in, and then i knew i had to get out of there, fast.
my whole body ached in the morning—what is it about staying up late that makes your body hurt the morning after? lately only the gym makes me feel better, which is a good thing i guess. oh, and buying things. happiness is a vintage purple lacoste for a few bucks that i don't have to wait to arrive via ebay.
posted August 25, 2002 in deliveryfucking foosball tables
i woke up this morning at 8 with a guy scaling the tree outside my window. covered myself up quickly and then the buzzsawing sounds started. went to the farmer's market and i always get too much stuff there, so that my arms are worn out by the time i get home, but hopefully it builds up my puny forearms just a little bit more. now the neighborhood is woken up and it looks like half of nyu has arrived to their dorms in the east village with their parents and don't forget, their fucking foosball tables. someone's moving into my building but i don't see them, just the moving guys and hear something crash in the hallway. the tree trimmers are still doing their thing—looks like they're taking old branches off. i make free-range brown eggs scrambled with scallions and this awesome smoked cheddar from the market, puree a ripe, sweet smelling cantaloupe into a glass, brew some coffee, and slice a yellow heirloom. mmm mmm good. surf a little bit: nytimes, isthatso?, moviefone. it's 11:50. can i make it to the noon showing of xxx? yes, but i missed some of the opening, but i also missed all the preview and commercials which almost makes it worth it. last week after seeing blue crush i wanted to be a slacker surfer boy, now i wanna be a secret agent. i still feel losery/illusory seeing a movie by myself on a weekend night, but when you go during the day, everyone is seeing them by themselves, and none of them laugh at the wrong time or applaud after the good guy wins the fight, which is all good.
and then
i find
just the right thing
but then when i get home, i discover that they chopped the whole damn tree down. i fully missed my goddamn the virgin suicides moment where i could've run outside in a white nightgown and embraced the trunk until the chopper guys went away.
posted August 24, 2002 in deliverythere's so many things i could say
it's technically the 23rd, but at 3am
"there's so many things i could say, but i just can't get them together."
- dj shadow, "letter from home," the private press
in camera lucida, his classic work on photography, roland barthes discusses an element he calls the "punctum," the detail that pierces the frozen surface of the photograph to provoke an unexpected emotional response ... the punctum itself can never be the subject of the photograph—by definition, it's superfluous, excessive, supplementary. the punctum sees barthes at his most maddeningly abstruse; it's not a concept you can necessarily use as part of an efficient interpretive strategy. as an arrow for your theoretical quiver, it seems bound to go wide of the mark every time.and yet. something about the concept seems particularly apt when discussing music—especially sampled music, which is so rich with layers, connotations, and untimely debris.
it carries a surprising emotional weight; in leaving unsaid more than it makes clear, the woman's tale conveys a powerful suggestion of mystery. the sense of history is strong: the woman's voice identifies her as, most likely, african american, and her skeletal tale of family and migration speaks quietly to the history of african americans in the bay area during the post-war years—a vital and under-explored pre-history to hip-hop. but the punctum that rends it all—and this is what i like to believe shadow heard as well—is the weird twinge to the woman's voice, caught somewhere between joy and grief. when she says, "there's so many things i could say, but i just can't get them together," you can hear her voice breaking with an overwhelming love.
- philip sherburne, music review, neumu
new obsession: neumu.net/.
afterwards i go to wonderbar and nurse a red stripe all by myself. i go to sit on the end of the long red couch but then decide i'm gonna hog the whole fuckin thing and splay myself in the middle, legs stretched out in front of me, arm stretched out along the top of the couch. it feels nice to sit there and soak in the d.j. and stare at the votives and watch the guys in the bar without looking at them. i feel some of them looking at me and trying to get me to register, but i have a sweet buzz on and wanna slouch there with my eyes at half mast and my biceps slightly flexed like i am.
posted August 23, 2002 in delivery, music, performance, print, sexcheerleader
when you're pedaling for twenty minutes and don't want to gawk at the guys beside you, you need something good to read. i was rifling through the stacks of maxim and creatinemuscle & fitnessanabolics, and the manager saw, so he offered me a spanking fresh issue of american cheerleader. i thanked him and switched it for martha stewart living while he wasn't looking. let 'em wonder.
kayaking
as a work offsite, i went kayaking on the open sea, er, hudson river, today (the right job can give you a semblance of a energetic, interesting life to onlookers). the instructors assured us that the water was safe, but we saw a totally obliviated pigeon and several latex gloves that made us cynical new york bastards think otherwise. the kayaking was fun, though—beautiful, sunny but not too hot weather (that gave me a healthy glow that's rapidly becoming sunburn), and if you didn't focus on it too much the water felt great. now i'm sitting in my landlocked third-floor apartment and it feels like it's swaying—or is that because i'm hearing the wavy ending of in limbo?
posted August 20, 2002 in deliveryzombie
i procrastinated on a presentation all last week, and so today i ended up at the office at 7:30am to finish it. i don't remember anything about the trip this morning—usually i at least remember something i saw on the walk out of the subway stairs or on the platform, but not today. that cranberries song would've been playing in the movie version.
three (strong) coffees and urinal excursions apiece later, i was, naturally, smashing. and then my boss's boss comped me a free day for working hard, which was cool.
after four hours of meetings and then a regular day at the cubicle, i should know that two coronas is too many. but two coronas i nursed, with my buddy emerson (back from the ole conservatoire dayz) at barracuda. we caught up on jobs, apartment hunting, recent breakups (both of us), grad school musings, and all that. it was nice, and the bar cooperated for once by being not too crowded and not too smoky. then i staggered into a cab and now i'm going to sleep sleep sleep.
posted August 19, 2002 in deliveryscaling
you need a sense of ease being inverted ... when you're inverted, you look at the world differently; you respond differently; you have a heightened awareness.
- wendy perron, "way up high, soaring, floating, diving, dancing," the new york times 18/08/2002
posted August 18, 2002 in art, performance, print, speechcrema
right before i woke up i was dreaming, for an hour or so, that i was standing in front of a sundae bar, and i tried a spoonful of one flavor, went to get a cup, and when i came back that flavor had disappeared. i think it was gelato, because i remember hunching over the labels and seeing "crema" be one of the flavors.
another waking thought i had was, what if i made a record and made this the album cover?
STUPID PEOPLE shouldn't BREED
mr. rivers had come to art almost by accident. as a young saxophonist in a band playing the resort circuit in maine in 1945, he was shown a book about modern art one day by the band's pianist, jack freilicher.walking up avenue b after twenty minutes with the economist and the stairmaster at the gym, there's a young woman walking her dog. she's got brown hair in a bun and glasses and a t-shirt with STUPID PEOPLE shouldn't BREED handwritten on the back. posted August 15, 2002 in art, delivery, music, print"i wanted to say, 'what's cubism?'" mr. rivers recalled in his autobiography, "what did i do?" "but suddenly i knew what cubism was. cubism told a young man from the bronx he didn't know very much. cubism didn't know about him or his nights walking all over greenwich village with his big horn slung over his shoulder looking for a joint where he could sit and blow with a lot of other desperados. cubism certainly didn't smoke pot or get high, cubism was history in which he played no part. where could i catch up?"
- michael kimmelman, "larry rivers, who shook up american art, is dead at 78," the new york times 15/08/2002
antsy
i finished things fall apart this weekend after miraculously getting through a commie pinko third world lit major in school without ever having it on a reading list. perhaps because of that, i feel guilty that i didn't like it. i've read a decent number of african authors and like the non-linear storytelling style that they sometimes exude, but with this one i felt like i read a book and missed some chapters—interesting stories within stories never got finished, characters reached some point of change or threat and then disappeared from the book altogether. i'm not hatin', i'm just saying i wanted more. have anything to say about the book, mr. achebe, or otherwise?
just to keep on my toes, i'm gonna give ulysses a shot. two reasons: my high school english teacher said that it was the one book he couldn't get through, and it's #1 on the modern library 100 best novels of the 20th century (fall was on st. mark's bookshop's additional one hundred). also, because one of the fencers on avenue a was selling a vintage hardback edition for $5.
i'm dying to see blue crush. what's up with that? but i really have wanted to learn to surf for a while now—if i'm gonna admit that moms' side of the family is from hawaii, i oughta at least try to keep it real.
one of the pleasures of the east village is discovering a restaurant that's been sitting across the backyard from your place after all this time, eating an amazing (if pricey) dinner there and being able to see into your third-floor window and wonder what the other patrons have seen over the years.
the n.e.r.d. (i'd bootlegged their mp3s but finally got the album, and the tracks are all different and there's all these little hidden beats or backup vocals or samples going on in them), jack johnson (one of the most beautiful album covers, kinda reminds me of matthew sweet's girlfriend cover), and soon-to-be-released coldplay (any brit band where the new york times refers to their use of ostinatos is a winner in my book) albums all freaking blow me away. hearing them when i get ready for work in the morning and then again when i settle into my tune-out-all-marketing-chicks-and-write-and-design-and-code interior narrative almost make the workweek alright. and for a month/summer/year like this, that's saying a lot.
posted August 14, 2002 in crap, delivery, film, music, print, sexit'll be black because i did it
i would love for some little black kid to look at me and be like, "if she's doing it then i can do it and still be black," white said. black people limit ourselves. we're like, "oh, if you do that you're not black." but i'm black and i'm going to do anything i want to do. then it'll be black because i did it.
- santi white interviewed by touré, "the hip-hop generation grabs a guitar," the new york times 11/08/2002
posted August 11, 2002 in music, print, speechblogtree
always the last to find out about these things ... just out of curiosity, did dante woo inspire you to blog or write or whatevah? that rhymed.
posted August 09, 2002 in deliverytattoo consultation
finally spoke to a guy at anil's studio about a consultation appointment. i faxed him some of my stuff from grid and he was into it. he said anil is probably the only one that can do it, since long, straight lines are difficult on non-straight parts of the body (like my shoulder). finally i know that i want this.
that passage below i read on the f train either uptown or down—i like it because a friend recently said "you are who you are" when i was listing things i'd screwed up on recently. and because the singular devotion the mountain or mouse or child is asking for is hard.
posted August 07, 2002 in deliveryi am as i am.
how did you become what you visibly are? asks the painter. i am as i am. i'm waiting, replies the mountain or the mouse or the child. what for? for you, if you abandon everything else. for how long? for as long as it takes. there are other things in life. find them and be more normal. and if i don't? i'll give you what i've given nobody else, but it's worthless, it's simply the answer to your useless question. useless? i am as i am. no promise more than that? none. i can wait for ever. i'd like a normal life. live it and don't count on me. and if i do count on you? forget everything and in me you'll find—me! the collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: more usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. the modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is a creator. rather he is a receiver. what seems like creation is the act of giving form to what he has received.posted August 06, 2002 in art, print- john berger, "steps towards a small theory of the visible (for yves)," the shape of a pocket
writing i didn't expect on yahoo weather
