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February 28, 2001
Bonsai Kittens.
Bonsai Kittens. Don't try it at home. Just don't.
Posted by me at 12:13 AM | Comments (4)
February 26, 2001
Aquaframe, I was wrong, it's an ordinary day...
I am now the proud owner of an Aquaframe. An Aquaframe is one of an increasingly diverse line of products which feature little plastic fish which, as if by magic, swim around in a plastic tank. Apparently it has something to do with magnets, although I have seen huge freestanding tube ones which are bubble-powered. I already have a nice model my friend Tinh gave to me a few years ago which has a Captain-Picard's-quarters globe front. However, when I was offered the latest one I couldn't resist.
First of all, it comes with eight pieces of gravel, nowhere near enough to cover the bottom of the tank. Each of the little fakey rocks is a different Day-Glo color.
Second, this tank doubles as a picture frame, which makes for more fun by powers of hundreds than my other one, which has a blue sculpted plastic "coral reef" background. The original owner suggested putting in a picture of the desert; I also considered a picture of my dad's flotilla of pink plastic flamingos, or my favorite picture of my old pal Robert, the one where he's standing in the air freshener aisle at the local supermarket and holding the six-pack of eggs we bought to christen the microwave we gave Tinh at her wedding shower, smiling through his neat little goatee like a salesman or a maniac. Ultimately, though, I decided to slide the back cover of the liner notes from David Byrne's album Feelings, the one where he has had his head digitally manipulated so it looks like he's a molded-plastic Ken-doll, into the photo slot. The fish go round and round jerking their tails awkwardly in front of David Byrne's smile, and it feels appropriate. Witness:
The kicker, though, is that it's from the Sharper Image. The company even saw fit to emblazon its logo across the lower right hand corner of the frame. Next time you covet the status symbol of an electric shoe buffer or your own personal Shiatsu massage chair, just remember the Aquaframe and laugh.
I'll still take a free-standing tube tank, though, if anyone wants to give one up. My quest for kitsch knows no bounds. While I'm at it I should reiterate my call for animatronic kitsch: If you have a spare Big Mouth Billy Bass, Rappin' Catfish, dancing Coke can, Furby, pot of animatronic daisies, old Teddy Ruxpin, or anything else that has some kind of electronic circuits which make it talk or move, and you're willing to sacrifice it, send it to me. I'm trying to develop electrical repair and hacking skills, and I'm eager to culture-jam using the most revolting capitalist by-products possible. I'll post the results, of course.
Posted by me at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)
Today on the Subway
I've got a new blog up called Today On The Subway. I'm hoping to find other people who are interested in observing subway life to contribute. There have just been too many weird and beautiful things happening on the subway not to comment. The other day there were these two snaggle-toothed guys who were quite openly popping each other's zits. Right there on the 7 train. Then last night there was a huge pile of grey fluff on the train floor. Hence, the blog.
Posted by me at 12:06 AM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2001
Internet-Correspondance Repair
With the long-distance help of my dad, I am fixing a lamp which was a New York street find. This follows in a peculiar tradition of long-distance repair between the two of us, the most notable moment being the time when my dad accurately diagnosed the ominous scraping sound coming from the wheel wells of Evan's two-door Honda when all we could find to fix the car on a rainy holiday-weekend night in outback Massachusetts was two drunken guys who may or may not have been employees of the closed Citgo station where we stopped. Dad says he is going to be digitally recording progress of rebuilding his 30s-era Cord soon, too. I envision a network of illustrated Click and Clack-like help for anyone fixing something, be it a computer, a toaster, or an elderly jalopy... would have been useful the other day as we were trying to figure out how to hack together an Appletalk-to-ethernet cable down at the IMC. (We're still looking for illustrated instructions, if anyone has 'em.)
Posted by me at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
Bush movements
Somehow I expected that Bush would be cutting corporate welfare, but I'm still a little startled... Why did I guess this? Well, Clinton did all sorts of things to betray his party in being so middle-of-the-road... doesn't it stand to reason that Bush would have to do some of the same to follow up on his promises of "compassionate conservativism?"
but I know sh!t about politics. if you wonder why I don't write for Indymedia, that's why.
Posted by me at 8:46 PM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2001
Si Fulano...
Listening to Paul Simon's album You're The One — specifically the title track, and only the title track, which has caught my attention in the sick I-will-listen-to-nothing-else-for-a-week, then-I-won't-be-able-to-stand-it-for-a-year way.
So, when did Paul Simon and David Byrne switch personalities without my noticing? Yeah, they're both middle-aged white ex-rocksters with a tendency to "borrow" (I'll let you hash that judgement out) music from Africa and South America, so I suppose it was inevitable they cross each other's paths. But "You're The One" is a little less wistful than most Paul Simon songs. It's a little sharper at the edges.
The song opens with a benediction, "May twelve angels guard you while you sleep," and then admits uncharacteristic self-doubt — "maybe that's a waste of angels, I dunno." No "days of miracles and wonder;" this is Paul Simon after taking a drubbing for the Capeman incident, maybe, a little less confident of his prophecies.
As a certain ex-boyfriend pointed out in a long embittered letter, my ear is for sh!t (and if you wished to imbibe the rest of that poison, you'd learn it's not my worst feature). I think, though, that I hear Simon exploring scales more here — top of his range, bottom of his range — and using minor chords more for irony than melancholy. The guitar is tic-y, obsessive, an echo of the Talking Heads circa I Wish You Wouldn't Say That. Vocals range from ethereal to percussive. You half expect Simon to leap out of his melted-by-the-Central-Park-summer-heat murmur and deliver a screed against the parking lots of the Bible Belt.
The song plays with big symbols, which has traditionally been more Byrne's preserve than Simon's. Here there are no Fullbrights, wandering Jews, marital contracts, boys in bubbles or babies with baboon hearts; no Graceland. Just love and anti-love, regarded from all sides for symmetry's sake:
You're the one who broke my heart,
who made me cry...
but when I hear it from the other side,
it's a completely different song
and I'm the one that made you cry
and I'm the one who's wrong.
Tight as nursery rhymes, or a kid's taunt. This stanza really kicks me in the head:
Nature gives us shapeless shapes,
clouds and wings and flame,
but human expectation,
is that love remains the same;
and when it doesn't,
we point our fingers
and blame, blame, blame.
You can see the sticks moving the puppets here; not the clothing of daily negotiations and love songs, but the drives beneath. As he ages, Paul Simon makes us mortal.
Posted by me at 2:48 AM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2001
The Temporary Home Of The John "Chauncy Berry" Seabury Fan Klub
Hey look, gang! My cousin was nominated for a Grammy! Way to go, John! Gee, I wish someone had told me EARLIER (ahem); I would have cast my precious Recording Academy vote for him, but you know, Billboard was all on about Madonna's packaging, I mean her PACKAGING, because if you noticed the whole damn ceremony was about women and their PACKAGING... or LACK of it... except in Joni Mitchell's case for some reason... and so I voted for... you know, the eventual winner, and I, well... the whole affair is a fscking crock. fsck the man and give me back my fscking free Napster.
Pynoman is one of John's projects. I don't know if he has anything else up online, but he's a keen artist (though not for the faint of heart mind you), and we all get Christmas cards from him (SOME of us, ahem) and you don't. John's an accomplished musician, too, as is his brother Dave. If you are in Oakland/Berkeley, go check out the Kensington Circus. Ask for the Feztones. And if you're still on the remains of Napster, search for the two Napster users-- count 'em two-- who have a copy of the Psyco Pyno song "I Want Her So Bad." (Actually, there appears to be a song or two on MP3.com as well.) It sounds just like tha art!
Posted by me at 9:53 PM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2001
59th St., N Train
There is a poem by Jack Agüeros I like:
59th St., N Train
10 o'clock.
She rides east.
I ride west.
I ask God to do things for me
And when he does, I don't notice.
He made me a gift of her love
And another now of her friendship.
But I cannot quell my greed,
It's her love I want:
Riding, on the same train
In any direction.
(thanks, Martín, as usual.)
Posted by me at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)
All Your Base Are Belong To Us
It's sublime. Finally a winner in the ongoing worst-possible-translations contest. Also in the category of portentous incongruous juxtaposition. Makes the little hairs on my back stand up straight. Sub Lime.
Posted by me at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2001
Pat Boone and Eminem
Pat Boone and Eminem, sittin' in a tree...
Posted by me at 1:01 AM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2001
Found Documents: California Calendar Journal
I discovered that I'd written the following down in the back pages of an old wallet calendar. Sometimes in college a situation or discussion seemed so important I decided I must write it down right then and there for a later assignment or personal project. It bothers me no end that I have no idea what this was about now, or even when it was that I wrote it down... OK, so checking out the clues it appears this was when Mom drove me up to Redwood City for my internship at Sunset... but what in god's name was I going to do with it?
tide box
end of the world
"That's it dude. 3 squid."
plastic bag in mouth
no cares
they're not kids anymore
I don't think I'm a man/ woman/ etc.
I think I am a... well, I don't think I'm a man until I sleep with 15...
discussion of 90210
huevos viejos
social area
No Woman No Cry
the unadulterated dust of the equestrian centers... the road monsters and how once they were all I saw [ed. note: I used to call the power line supports road monsters. I drew them as we drove from Maine to California on my first big move.]... the map is crazed with meaning, my life, laid out over a state, denser in places... Morro Bay + the mud...
Is it that everything has been bleached + so it seems like a canvas + there is so much you can paint but it's depressing because it's so hot
Mom narrates the drive. "Ventura is where most of our produce comes from... celery, as well as strawberries, but that's not as well known."
"Last time I checked Ventura had only one tall building... Up around the mountain there is Rancho del Cielo, that's Ronald Reagan's place... (I tune out, and when I come back in, she says) This is where we mine the animals that died and have been decomposing in the sun for years... (I don't respond) And then we burn them and let out the sun again. Someday we'll run out, and we'll have to find some other way to let the sunlight out. (pause) Something else to burn."
She turns on the radio, because I'm not talking. I turn channels and find something we start dancing to before we know what it is. (It's Sublime.)
a mixed bank of CA poppies
Icelandic ponies in the blond hills
broadleaf fields w/herds of ppl bent + scattered... port-a-potties and stacks of plastic crates between rows... then coming over a hill, a pink, red, orange, yellow, white field
Most hills subtle variations on yellow -- beautiful, + then you get up close and see what ugly scrapple it is
Madonna Inn [a pink-painted hotel at the edge of San Luis Obispo]
Your Beauty Is Your Smile in big Disney letters
... "He was just a man with excruciatingly disgusting taste -- real American taste" + into neckties. "He had more neckties for sale than you would ever wanna see"...
gilt mirrors
huge goblets
just outside of [San Luis Obispo] a few shadowed hillsides of live oak
trunks recently burned black
taller trees among them that didn't grow back -- hardy oaks
* * * *
Number one on the list of things to absolutely never do if you want to accomplish something on a given day: Pick up an old yearbook. Yours or anyone else's.
Posted by me at 5:49 PM | Comments (0)
And I don't like anybody very much.
They're rioting in Africa.
They're starving in Spain.
There's hurricanes in Florida,
And Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering
With unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans
The Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like anybody very much.
In far away Siberia
They freeze by the score
An avalanche in Switzerland
Just got fifteen more.
But we can be tranquil
And thankful and proud
For man's been endowed
With a mushroom shaped cloud.
And we know for certain
That some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off
And we will all be blown away.
They're rioting in Africa.
There's strife in Iran.
What nature doesn't do to us
Will be done by our fellow man.
--Sheldon Harnick
The other day at work I was speaking with a very intelligent social worker about the earthquake in El Salvador; she had been there at the time. Meanwhile she'd missed the little two-pointer we had in New York, and probably missed the news about India. It's a sign, she thought, all these earthquakes at once. Can't possibly be another explanation except God. She seemed unconvinced when I told her what I know about plates shifting.
At the IMC, yet another person asks me what my sign is and continues in dead earnest to argue that since there are matters beyond the ken of science, a case could be made for the influence of constellations on our lives.
Bush has picked up where Clinton left off in belligerence towards Iraq. I wonder how all the people we interviewed in DC at the Inauguration who were so happy about Bush being elected will think about this. Most people seem about ready to accept any line they're handed. They kept cooing about how wonderful it was to have a man who loves the Lord in office. I startled a religious friend of mine the other day when I explained to him that, as someone who grew up in a family with more faith in science than religion, I felt unsafe in this climate of decreased distinction between church and state. Some Christians decry Jews and Muslims and followers of other religions, sure, but what I hear more often is an acceptance of anyone with any kind of spirituality. Meanwhile, atheists are rejected based on this unseeing belief that people with no god also have no morals, and therefore can't be legitimate players in public life.
America is becoming an uncomfortable place to live if you want to think critically.
Posted by me at 1:35 AM | Comments (2)
February 15, 2001
Bronx hair? Anime hair?
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Posted by me at 1:36 AM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2001
Bhangra On the Eve Of Napster's Demise (draft)
In my last year of high school a heartthrobby brown-eyed boy named Nil took the stage at the student-run after-hours talent show -- a notoriously tough venue -- and performed a dance routine which had won him the Mr. India California title that year. The moves looked like exaggerated hip hop about eight years out of date -- lots of big footwork and I'm-so-smooth, look-at-my-hair gestures -- but Nil pulled it all off with energy and a rascal look meant to seduce the whole audience, so by the end even the hyaenas of popularity were cheering. I later saw Nil's dance echoed in Fire, an lesbian Indian film produced in Canada. At the time I had no idea what it was called, or even that it was part of a larger phenomenon. Bhangra, as I recently learned the style involved is called, is a traditional Punjabi form of music which, through the more pleasant vagaries of globalization, has become fused with rap, hip hop, and Caribbean forms like soca and reggae.
Two weekends ago I went to a bhangra dance in Chelsea put on by the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association. Bhangra was spun with various of its fellow travellers -- standard dance music, hip hop, and Bollywood tunes, music from Indian movies. The room was crowded, seeded with gluey pairs of gay men, plowed here and there with queens in brilliant saris, heavy eye makeup, bindi jewels. I was looking for my friend Eileen, who had invited me. I scoped a few crewcuts and eventually made my way to the one that was hers.
A rotund queen with a bare midriff took the stage, pulling strands of a wig out of her face. In round subcontinental vowels she introduced a dancer in magenta. The tablas began. (I have only come to like tablas recently, despite my parents' copy of the Concert for Bangladesh; I think it took more exposure to salsa polyrhythms to make me appreciate the unique loopiness of Indian drums' tones.)
Behind some tall gentlemen I could only see the dancer's hands and face, and when I bounced on my toes, some belly ripples. It briefly irritated me that a man was co-opting belly dancing (which I am told was developed to help women strengthen birthing muscles), until I thought that it probably wasn't my place to be offended on behalf of women from the other side of the globe. And here -- Eileen, craning her neck to see past the tall men as the dancer pulled off some stop-motion grinding, was telling me that there is a thriving bhangra competition culture at a number of American universities.
The dancer's hands were all flirtation -- coquette around heer ears, startled freezes. My impression is that old American dramatic conventions for heroines were adopted by the Indian cinema and added to the stylized gestures of traditional Indian dance (but then my exposure to the latter mostly consists of the one dance my friend Pia brought back from India when we were eight). The result is fascinating to watch, especially when juxtaposed with the squarer, more macho moves of the men's dances -- which it soon was in this case, as a number of men took turns dancing with the magenta queen.
The stage filled with queens and men in tight shirts as the number ended. I turned my attention to Eileen and a group of her friends we had joined. In a room full of gyrators, Eileen maintained a vertical, Elvis Costello-esque groove. I tried out the hands and the hip isolations I saw onstage. (I think I'll take some lessons in Indian dance; it occurred to me that the stylized gestures, shoulder isolations, and dramatic pauses would give me a repertoire for parts of my body I'm uncomfortable with. Plus the cross-pollination of styles would be wicked cool.) A tall thin man grinned at me, mirrored me, drew me into the range of his skeleton. We danced a few measures, and he returned to his partner.
The music slid through some hip hop and suddenly got more rhythmically complex. I recognized a salsa riff. Salsa in bhangra! I nearly jumped through the ceiling in my excitement. Why? The revelation: It is possible to completely sidestep American popular music. Rock is unnecessary. It doesn't have to be the common meeting ground.
I worry a lot that American mainstream monoculture is seeping into cultures around the world through the pipes of the increasingly amalgamated media corporations. I have hardly travelled at all, so I am a poor authority on how other cultures end up taking it in, but it still worries me. I don't want all music to be in thrall to N'Sync, or even to draw on the traditions of Bob Dylan.
Later that night, still sweaty from the crowded floor, I ran back to a video production studio in Gramercy where a producer from the IMC was editing our video from the DC protests. The boy is from Los Angeles, model-cheeked and slim, blue hooded sweatshirt -- so popular right now -- and fashionably ugly pants. Smokes and smokes. A few days before I had asked him if he knew how to swing dance, because I still have the urge to go. He gave me a silent, appraising look. I knew the answer was yes.
But not yes, I will not go dance with you. Swing is dead, he says. Pulls at his Cosmo Kramer hair. I had the whole thing going in college, the swinger pad, the martinis, he says. But it got kind of tiring. It's an old fad.
I want to hide bhangra under a big pile of American flags so it does not get "discovered," enfaddened, and chucked the way of the Lindy Hop revival. Makes for less dancers.
You listen to the same kind of music all the time, you start hallucinating that you're hearing a variety. I swear, I have no idea what kind of glue some of my friends are using on their ears. They know I like some outer-reaches-of-popularity band like the Squirrel Nut Zippers and try to make recommendations for other things I should listen to, usually on the order of, "Hey, there's this band that sounds just like them..." And I listen to the selected band... RUNH RUNH RUNH RUNH runh runh runh runh. You couldn't point out a single similarity between my band and the suggested group, except that they tend to avoid the ranges of pitch more easily heard by bloodhounds and bottlenose dolphins.
Until my dance floor epiphany, I wondered what was wrong with me that I didn't find anything striking or appealing in the bands my friends seemed to like, even my smart fringes-of-society friends. I was consistently disappointed by American rock of all persuasions. I would rattle through the racks of CDs at the flea market and the albums would always look promising. Musicians choose names full of all sorts of intriguing connotations -- Belle and Sebastian, Heavy Vegetable, the Breeders, Camper Van Beethoven, Meat Puppets, Better Than Ezra -- and then somehow they all end up sounding the same. RUNH RUNH RUNH RUNH runh runh runh runh. Distorted major or minor chords played with no finesse. Pop is even more boring, but it's punctuated by flash-in-the-pan fads, at least. (Hey! Macarena!)
I'm not alone. David Byrne says rock in America is dead too, so there. ok, maybe that was Sting I'm thinking of, and Byrne just said Ozomatli was the future of American music, which essentially means the same thing. We can't go on living like this, with disposable genres and creeping monoculture. I don't know about you, but I'm'a shed that dead skin and move on.
(Need I even mention that Napster has, like, something to do with this?)
Posted by me at 1:25 AM | Comments (1)
February 12, 2001
Found Documents: Trivial Pursuit Award
Found in a Trivial Pursuit box at a place where I'm housesitting. Small notepad sheets tied in one corner with dark blue yarn.
To whom it may concern:
Mazel tov!
Congrats on a mind boggling victory. Take pride in your mastery of this insignificantly paltry frivolously frothy inconsequentially immaterial trifling molehill, this flimsy shallow mediocre petty puerile piddling inanely ludicrous farcically picayune somewhat unessential scruffy cheap wretched futile fiddle deefee of a game.
You are the unparalelled king of all that is worthless, unproductive, fallow unprofitable superfluous dispensable fruitless and of no earthly use to man or dog. You reign supreme in the realm of the pinprick, the fleabite, the gimcrack, the gewgaw, the mist, you rule the empire of bagatelles of trinkets and baubles and bubbles and cobwebs and fairydust and froth, of rubbish and trumpery and stuff and smoke and small potatoes. Your brain is a finely woven net into which all matters of importance are poured and only the most worthless items of bunk are retained. The medulla oblongata that is yours (ie - the winning medulla oblongata) is surely crammed to bursting with every splinter, morsel, crumb, snicksnack, thimbleful, scraplet, granule, iota, fragment, particle, ion, speck dot jot fraction grain minim sip dab droplet dripule dash and tidbit of orphan information from here to wawa.
You have clutched this lonesome lore to your bosom and given it a home in your snug skull. As a reward for this selfless act of bravura and god knows we need more people like you we crown you Trivial Turkey of the Week.
--Gzy Gzint
wait -- suddenly it occurs to me that this was not written for the owners of the game. I don't remember seeing it when we got the game out. that's fscking eerie. it might not be an incongruity after all. maybe it's meant for me.
Posted by me at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)
February 8, 2001
Detritus peripatetica
Coming home at night I smell dinner being cooked all over Sunnyside. People are making better food than I do. I think this is because they are not making it for themselves alone.
I feel like I haven't said what I needed to say to put this election to rest for me. Then, I don't think I can. Every time I think how farcical and debased it was I am utterly floored. Hunter S. Thompson needs to come out of retirement. The whole process warranted a frame of giant iguanas and Samoan lawyers threatening people with guns and periods of utter debauchery with cigarette boats and smack. It's just as awful as anything that happened in the Sixties, if not worse because nobody can stop it and so many people think they don't need to. What's worse than iguanas? I'm sending Godzilla into my landscape. damn, why he have to mess up his head like that. If the man wasn't completely wrecked from the horror of the Nixon era we might have someone fit to hold up a mirror to it all.
Posted by me at 2:04 AM | Comments (0)
February 5, 2001
Look at these babbies!
Look at these babbies! Aren't they dear! They remind me of my gang. Oh, I wish Xephreniaq had had a blog in high school. I wish we had a blog now (AHEM.) Salutations, kindred spirits and fellow travellers!
Posted by me at 1:06 AM | Comments (2)
More Dirty Socks
I've added one more picture to the Death Valley series :)
Posted by me at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)
February 1, 2001
The Museum of Weird Consumer Culture
I need to look for more things like the Museum of Weird Consumer Culture, with its Consumer Kachina, online.
Posted by me at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)
Never sent
You see, this is probably one of the most jarring revelations of your path towards sensibility: people on the right have a deep faith in the essential goodness of their fellow man. I'll let you fill in the comparison for the left.
We have a deep faith in the essential corruption of everyone. And a deep conviction that a well-informed perspective is more valuable than faith.
--from an email exchange with Izaac Falken (of "Off The Hook" fame.)
(Not to mention the fact that I have about 5 minutes of tape from the DC protest in which a Bush supporter explains that corruption, lying, and theft are inevitable in government but God wants us to uphold the government He has put in place anyway.)
Posted by me at 2:34 AM | Comments (0)