I'm on day five in the Northeast. Still no luggage (I had a bit of a trial getting up here), and although I had an awesome christmas in Philly and it's lovely to see all my friends, I sort of want to go home. Philly was great, but I don't belong in New York somehow, and it's not just that my clothes have started to smell. Supposedly I'm up to collect $125 and counting for my smelliness. The best things from the past couple of days have been a graphic novel called Unlikely, the ipod my brother gave me for christmas (even though it is not yet in my posession) and how much I love the friends and family that all came over for christmas dinner and aftermath in Philly. It's great to see people. I wish there was some way to reconcile how much I love the city of New York with how bad it is capable of making me feel.

Festivities.

Photos from Rebecca's visit to Arkansas. I admit I'm a little embarassed about my sweatsuit ensemble. We were hiking, OK? Also: Emily Brochin's first big ass article in the Philadelphia Weekly. She's brilliant, although the newspaper could stand to hire a proofreader. What else... I'm going to be in New York and Philadelphia next week kiddos, if anyone still reads this (according to official counts, approximately three people a day do.)

All The King's Men is being re-made with the following cast:
Sean Penn as Willie Stark (or Willie Talos, depending on which edition of the book you read.)
Jude Law as Jack Burden (I have to say I think this is an excellent choice.)
Patricia Clarkson as Sadie Burke (I really hope they make sure her hair is black and crazy.)
Anthony Hopkins as Judge Irwin (who I envisioned as tall and rather craggy, more like the guy that plays the farmer in Babe.)
Kate Winslet as Anne Stanton.

James Carville is listed as Executive Producer, so at least there's one other Southerner in the credits. It's directed by Steven Zaillian, who is not Southern, and who directed Searching for Bobby Fisher. I predict that Sean Penn's Southern accent is going to be horrific. The movie better be good though.

These days I'm sort of against animal spectatorship, particularly of elephants, which I think should not be bred in captivity and used for performative purposes because they are too smart and interesting, and can communicate with one another by sensing vibrations through their feet from up to twenty miles away. I also am tired of people like Karl Lagerfield, and wish he could take his world and move it several miles into space, and I am annoyed that he is dressing this elephant in a Chanel suit, as if she were some botoxed vampire stalking a chintz-filled living room in the Upper 80s.

I turned on to the off-ramp of I-30 today and I think it was only sort of a mistake. I meant to link this days ago, when Emily B. called at 8 a.m. to inform me that Stephen Levin was wearing a blazer in the NY Times. This recent spate of appearances by Brown kids in the Times has left me sort of dumbfounded. Rebecca tried to set me up with Manu once. Good people, these boys.

Thank god for ponchos

Nov. 21, 2004  |  SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) -- President Bush tried to mend relations in Latin America with fresh promises of immigration reform Sunday while a new security spat surfaced with Chile after an embarrassing fracas in which Bush intervened.

What was supposed to have been an elaborate state dinner with 200 people Sunday was downgraded to an official working dinner, reportedly because Chilean President Ricardo Lagos balked at Secret Service demands for guests to walk through metal detectors. The guest list for the working dinner was pared down to the leaders, their wives and top aides.

On Saturday night, Bush waded into a scuffle that erupted when Chilean authorities blocked the president's Secret Service agents from accompanying him into a dinner. As tempers flared and a shoving match ensued, Bush pushed into the commotion, grabbed his lead agent, Nick Trotta, and pulled him inside.

The incident, shown repeatedly on television worldwide, was an unlikely episode in an otherwise staid gathering of 21 Pacific Rim leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. In a moment of levity, the leaders posed in colorful, hand-woven ponchos -- following the summit tradition of wearing native garb of the host country.



I've needed to e-mail my host family for awhile, but now I'm sort of ashamed to.

Eureka

Thanks to the impeccable e-mail archives of Ted and Solon, the depressing ODB article was found. It was in Blender, not The Source. It's still depressing. Read it.

Some might call my my mother a pessimist.

The Life and Times of Big Baby Jesus

Today, on Russell "Rusty" Jones's birthday, we must sadly mourn his sudden and unexpected death last week from what appears to be heart failure. Rather than focus on his myriad gunshots/arrests/gonorrheaoutbreaks/paroles/incarcarations/baby'smommas/bulletproofvests, etc. I think the thing that stands out most in my mind was that amazing article in The Source about him in prison, which I can't find anywhere on the internet. I'm guessing it ran in 2002, before The Trials & Tribulations of Russell Jones came out, a sad commentary on a sadder man, where the writer described Ol' Dirty in a state of physical and mental decay, on suicide watch, toothless and muttering, not even knowing what material would be on The Trials & Tribulations (which was universally panned.) But I can't find it, so this, my second favorite news item, will have to do:

Ol' Dirty Bastard Saves Child

Ol' Dirty's second most noble deed came shortly after that one, at the 1998 Grammys, where he interrupted Shawn Colvin's speech to bum rush the stage and give his opinion on the fact that Puffy had just won album of the year. His speech echoed the sentiments of many:

"Please calm down. I went and bought me an outfit today that cost me a lot of money, because I figured that Wu-Tang was gonna win. I don't know how you all see it, but when it comes to the children, Wu-Tang is for the children. We teach the children. Puffy is good, but Wu-Tang is the best. I want you all to know that this is ODB, and I love you all, peace."

Sorry if you already read this on Arkansas Rockers. I can't imagine there's much overlap in readership. Two people max. is my estimate. I've been wanting to write an extensive summary of life in Little Rock, which I feel like I've barely posted about at all, but it gets muddled in my head and, like any outsider perspective, could potentially be seen by natives as a massive display of ignorance, a tourist's view. I'm a bit sensitive about that. I was thinking I could make a link to the 4-page thread on ArkansasRockers.com's message board about The Localist/Vinos conspiracy, and provide an appendix with necessary vocab words and personalities like "The Localist," "The Mansion," "T.J. Deeter," "Vinos," "Davey, " etc. but I can't imagine anybody up in the Northeast would actually go through the trouble. If one were so inclined to undertake such an anthropological study, out of sheer voyeuristic obsession with what we can all agree upon is my thrilling existence, where even such mundane facts as where one might eat pizza in Little Rock, Arkansas are small cultural gems of higher knowledge, than they should just call me and we'll work something out.

It doesn't get any scarier than this...

Congratulatory letter to President George W. Bush from Dr. Bob Jones III:

November 3, 2004

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

The media tells us that you have received the largest number of popular votes of any president in America's history. Congratulations!

In your re-election, God has graciously granted America—though she doesn't deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet. Because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of voice eagerly.

Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ. Honor the Lord, and He will honor you.

More of the same.

Today

The morning was punctuated by three events ocurring between stepping out of my car and arriving at my building:

1. Domestic dispute, where the following was overheard: "Wull Hunny, thar's a reason yew bin married three times."

2. This misplaced campaign of righteousness on a bumper sticker: "No to Mike, yes to Roy: Save Disney."

3. A dead blackbird.

Rue the day

First Avenue closed. Sad times in Minneapolis. More.

I saw The Motorcycle Diaries the other day and liked it quite a bit. It made me rather nostalgic—while in Chile they pass through Temuco, Valparaíso (where I was an exchange student for a year), the Atacama and Chuquicamata, all places I have rather intense emotional memories of.

In other news, I just realized our cat has a Friendster page. She has six testimonials. It's weird to Friendster your cat.

Obligatory Thoughts on the Re-election of GWB

"Having restored decency to the White House, President Bush now has a mandate to affect policy that will promote a more decent society, through both politics and law. His supporters want that, and have given him a mandate in their popular and electoral votes to see to it. Now is the time to begin our long, national cultural renewal ('The Great Relearning,' as novelist Tom Wolfe calls it) — no less in legislation than in federal court appointments. It is, after all, the main reason George W. Bush was reelected."

Thus writes Bill Bennett his doughy face alight in flabby celebration, presiding over a tea party of assholes at The National Review.

Here in Arkansas it was a morning of rain and hangovers, and as Kerry conceded the vote, the final death knell for pluralism in Washington D.C. for a good while, I happened to be fact checking an article on John C. Calhoun. Generally credited with spawning the Civil War, he was advocate number one for secession, putting forth nullification as a Constitutionally-granted State right. I had to wonder what would happen, for a minute, if the entire block of the North seceded this morning. Ideologically, on the Internet at least, it does not seem implausible.

"Despite living here all my life," laments Nathalie, "I'm not familiar with America." Wonkette offers us Harper's guide to expatriation. Over and over we hear of this great cultural divide between the South/Midwest and the Northeast. I feel the need, in the middle of all this, to reflect on the part of the country I just moved to. Since my parents left Minneapolis for Georgia two and a half years ago, I no longer have a home town. I have voted in four different districts since the last presidential election and I have completely lost touch with the people I grew up with. But after four years in Rhode Island it never felt like any sort of home. I love New York but I spent the majority of time there in total solitude and although anti-depressants made this experience much more pleasant than the same experience in Rhode Island, it was still never home.

So culturally, even though it's only been two months, Arkansas is my home. With the exception of Atlanta, where my parents live, I love the little I have seen of the South, I love the people here. Speaking in generalities I relate to them more than I do Northeasterners and life has just come a little bit easier since I moved here. But it makes me really fucking upset that 75% of the voters in Arkansas wanted to ban gay marriage and I may not celebrate Christmas this year in order to protest religious fundamentalist fascist ideologue assholes, even if they are in the vast majority.

HOWEVER, Kerry only lost by some 11 percentage points. We re-elected a Democratic Senator and Congressman. Maybe if a few people in the more liberal states would lose their snooty opinion, because it is snooty my friends, and maybe if they realized how much money they could save by living in, say, Oxford, Mississippi, than in New York, New York and how, particularly if you are a writer, artist-type, you can get a lot more work done and feel much better about yourself than you would surrounded by all the other douchebags trying to do the same thing in Williamsburg, maybe then we could make a political difference.

My friends. We have lost the election. We cannot lose again. The next democratic candidate will be John Edwards, and he'll be a Southerner. Will you let this dumpling of the Carolinas down again? Would you suffer his twinkly smile to falter? In the next four years we need to alter the landscape of the country:

Don't secede, don't expatriate... CARPETBAG IN 2008!

Big Time

Little Rock has now joined the likes of Memphis and Providence with the completion of its own novelty trolley. The trolley goes to North Little Rock! And the Clinton library! (Which looks, incidentally, like a large traileron stilts.) It is so heartening to see municipalities around the country taking genuine steps toward better public transportation.

I mean, at least when Minneapolis decided to build a train they made it a Light Rail that goes to useful places, like the airport, and the Mall of America.

The Robot Hall of Fame "recognizes excellence in robotics technology worldwide and honors the fictional and real robots that have inspired and made breakthrough accomplishments in robotics."

From the NYT:

Scientists Find Skeletons of Miniature People
"Once upon a time, but not so long ago, in a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons, and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.

The island of Flores is very isolated and, before modern times, was inhabited only by a select group of animals that managed to reach it. These then became subject to unusual evolutionary forces that propelled some toward giantism and downsized others.

The carnivorous lizards that reached Flores, perhaps on natural rafts, became giant-sized and still survive, though now confined mostly to the nearby island of Komodo; they are called Komodo dragons. Elephants are excellent swimmers; those that reached Flores evolved to a dwarf form the size of an ox."

Emily B. always mails me the best articles. I would l like to live on a magical island with large lizards rafting into the sunset and mini-elephants populating its forests. I have also, since moving to the South, become very adept at spearing giant rats.
More.

Hurrah for the Red Sox.

Memorial event

For Joanne. Monday, October 25, 5 pm, at the new MCM building (135 Thayer St.) in Providence.

Gorrillas in the Mist

Louis is in Rwanda and he finally has a a blog of his own. One step closer to becoming a khaki-wearing, gunshot-scarred, Graham Greene-reading mercenary of a dispatching expat. DO IT!

Moving up in the world

Last Sunday's New York Times was scattered around the house and I was going through the morning cereal ritual when I see the Sunday Styles section on the floor with a picture of Evan Rock. Or at least it looks like Evan Rock. And then I notice the caption, and it is indeed Evan Rock. Not only that, the story is by Elana Berkowitz, and she quotes Jordan Carlos too. Isn't everyone so young and fabulous? The story.

For meanings differ and defer

Perhaps in my last posting I quickly hopped over Derrida's death to complain about my undergraduate institution, but in all fairness today I feel compelled to praise one of my favorite academic personalities, who I learned about, of course, in the same room I denigrated in my last posting.

It is raining today. I wore sweatpants in solidarity with the weather, which was banging "stay in bed!" against the windowpane this morning. Unfortunately, the sweatpants have gone to my head, leaving me in a sort of sweatpants-like mindset that demanded I read every obituary about Derrida I could find on the internet instead of writing a challenging article about elephants that I assume will never be published.

As a person who writes, I know it is possible to execute a moderately successful article about a subject you don't attempt to understand by describing the controversy around it. This was the case in the majority of Derrida articles and obituaries that have been printed in the past few days, most of which devoted much more ink to the academic squabbling surrounding his various theories than the theories themselves. A number of publications brought up a New York Times interview where Derrida had refused to provide a definition to the concept of deconstruction, responding instead with the question, "Why don't you ask a physicist or a mathematician about difficulty?"

Without a small statuette in one's hand, it sounds silly to thank one person for the influence they have had on one's work, but I and many other people I know owe a debt to Derrida for teaching us about language. Rare is the day that I do not think about the concept of différance, not directly perhaps, but through the ability to articulate what exactly is wrong (or perhaps right) with the linguistic process behind a phrase like "the war on terror." It's what I wrote my first one-act play about, and he said it, there is nothing outside of text.

Having gone through a fair amount of obituaries, this one, appearing in the Guardian, was the most comprehensive:

"He argued that understanding something requires a grasp of the ways in which it relates to other things, and a capacity to recognise it on other occasions and in different contexts - which can never be exhaustively predicted. He coined the term "differance" ( différance in French, combining the meanings of difference and deferral) to characterise these aspects of understanding, and proposed that differance is the ur-phenomenon lying at the heart of language and thought, at work in all meaningful activities in a necessarily elusive and provisional way...

Derrida moved easily among French, English and German writers, and his favourites included James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan. Although his name is often coupled with the term "postmodernism" (sometimes with a suggestion of moral relativism), his allegiance was much more to the strenuous aesthetic experiments of the modernist writers. For him, the fact that moral values cannot be expressed as simple rules of conduct increased, rather than decreased, the importance of our ethical responsibilities."

Which internet did you hear that on?

I'm in Memphis with the Oxford American for a literary conference of sorts. I watched the debates last night in a little broken bar with a pool table and christmas lights just one block from where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Passing by the Hotel Lorraine on our way to dinner (decision to eat determined via gut check) made me sad. Downtown Memphis is old ornate buildings interspersed with late 1970s monoliths, it feels rather dead but ornamentally so. Like every city suffering a renaissance for its blighted downtown, there is a novelty trolley. Somehow urban wastelands looked for redemption and were presented with apparitions of novelty trolleys that have since been worshiped as false idols. We had ribs from Rendezvous, and I really wanted to Fed Ex someone a package of ribs. It's a pretty penny though.

So Jacques Derrida has died. I imagine there have been various candlelight vigils and memorial panels at Brown. Ugh. Sometimes I daydream about going to an MCM class and sitting on that big wooden table at the Malcolm S. Forbes Center and vomiting on the best-dressed student in the discussion section.

Today I also fell in love with James Ellroy. He asked me what my name was. I said Emily. He looked me in the eye and said, "Emily, history rages." Then took my copy of American Tabloid and signed it, "To Emily. History Rages! J.E." He did this for no-one else that I saw. I was pleased.

He's pretty crazy. He said something along the lines of "I always tell writers not to write from their own lives," and yet at the same time he talked at length about growing up in L.A., about how his mother was murdered in 1958 when he was ten, "an unsolved body dump sex crime," and how all his best friends are cops. This is a person whose life and experiences are totally inseprable from his fiction, to an uncanny extent. He's also a total populist, all his favorite books were released as trade paperbacks and he was very up front about only writing film scripts (none of which have ever been made, excluding adaptations of his own work) for money. He think films are a lesser art than literature. He hopes to die without any money, except enough to build an auditorium at his old junior high in L.A. (where he says he spent a few happy years). And in the James Ellroy Auditorium he would erect a statue of himself with the words "Read motherfuckers!" inscribed at the base.

He "dreams of a new language for popular American fiction.''

It's been a day surrounded by the middle-aged however, and the maroon and forest green motifs of my hotel room in the "Sleep Inn" are beginning to swim before my eyes. I must go take the novelty trolley to trays of canapes and small tarts and Edward P. Jones accepting an award.

Pleather: the body wrap of teensploitation.

Merriam Webster announces new words for 2004.

Man of the year

Crispin Glover is clearly one of the better people on the planet. I watched Charlies Angels II the other day, and was inspired, even by this shitty movie, to look further into the various manifestations of Crispin Glover on screen, in song and in writing. He uses his middle name, Hellion, when he works on his own projects because, as he told Stuff Magazine “As an interpreter of work, you’re not really the whole artist when you’re acting. So when I publish my books or my records or films, I use Hellion.” And it doesn't stop there. His father was in Diamonds Are Forever, his birthday is two days before mine (which makes him an Aries not a Taurus but still!), he collects antique gynecological equipment, he sued Steven Spielberg and won...

The projects of Crispin Hellion Glover are rather difficult to find, it seems, but all his work can be found on sale here. This includes:

His books:
Rat Catching: A study in the art of catching rats.
Oak Mot: "a tale of epic proportions involving pride and prejudice."
What it is, and how it is done: "A man's life in reverse as told in first second and third persons."

His musical debut:
The Big Problem does not equal the solution. The Solution equals Let It Be.

And, this is the most interesting, his short film:
What is it?: With a cast of actors with down syndrome and a snail, whose voice is played by Fairuza Balk.

It will be awhile before I will be able to purchase or read any of the above, given my present financial situation, but I certainly hope somebody does and that he or she reports back to us with a review. The expectations of someone with an IMDB photo like Crispin's are high. I hope he does not disappoint.

More fun facts.

More from the interview in Stuff.

STUFF: Who’s more difficult to work with: Oliver Stone or Down’s syndrome actors?
CRISPIN: Neither. Oliver Stone I liked working with very much. I played Andy Warhol [in The Doors], and it was a part that I sought out. I met Andy Warhol at Sean Penn and Madonna’s wedding. And I stood back and watched him and the way he moved, and I thought, This fellow really is an interesting person. [Stone’s] technique was almost an intimidation element of, like, “Look, a lot of people are going to see this—you’d better be good.”

Any ground rules for handling actors afflicted with Down’s syndrome?
No. All of the people with Down’s syndrome were more enthusiastic than anybody I’ve worked with. I really had zero problems working with people with Down’s syndrome.

Do you have a Hollywood nemesis?
I don’t want to call anybody in the industry my nemesis, because it’s just bad business. If something is egregiously wrong, then one must go to the legal system. But if something is minor, then it’s better just to let it go.

I don't have the internet in my house and therefore will post much more infrequently, as I feel guilty about doing so from work like I just did.

This article made me pretty sad. Lesley Thornton is a wonderful person.

Best nerd

The 2004 Ignatz Award nominees!

In the category of best online comic:

Outstanding Online Comic

American Elf, James Kochalka, americanelf.com

Apocamon, Patrick Farley, e-sheep.com

Desert Rocks, J.J. Naas, dr.ungroup.net

The Pain … When Will it End?, Timothy Kreider, thepaincomics.com

Tailipoe, Craig Boldman, craigboldman.com

Austin

Some people complained about the heat. It was so sweaty. But we all got nice suntans...

Number of stars in my eyes during their performances:
Pixies:****************************************************
Wilco:************************************************
Modest Mouse:****************************
My Morning Jacket: *****************
Cat Power:***************
Spoon:*********
Old 97s:******
Elvis Costello:****
Centro-Matic:***
Josh Rouse:**
Dashboard Confessional:--

Texas is numerically expressed by number of goatees divided by fake boobies plus cowboy hats times Whataburgers squared. The pho was delicious though.

We were trying to think up names for this, but the one chosen beats out the others indeed. Nathalie's newest blog is for Media Bistro: Galley Cat, all about books and their publishers.

And so on...

I just read Art Spiegelman's new book, In the Shadow of no Towers. I love the man, and his work, but found that he exercised a lack of restraint on this one. Naturally he was covering a difficult subject, one that caused an explosion of various emotions in everyone. But that's what this work is really, an explosion of emotion, a reflection back to us of our many reactions to September 11th. I wanted something smarter than that, a point of view that hadn't yet been taken. I don't think it is his fault, I just think that it is difficult to analyze something when you are caught in the middle of it, which he was.

Sorry I haven't been writing. I just started my new job here. It's been busy busy. I'm going to Texas for the first time in my life tonight, to go to Austin City Limits. I'm going to see the Pixies! rah rah rah

More fantasy books written for children

I bought the second Harry Potter at the grocery store and now I'm listening to the third one when I drive (it's way better on tape I think, the guy who reads it is fantastic.) I was talking to some kids here about it and they all got really excited amongst themselves, and one ran into his room and came back with three books that are another Harry Potter-like series (but better written), His Dark Materials, by Phillip Pullman. The kids in Little Rock are obsessed with them, they told me I wouldn't be able to stop reading until I'd finished all three.

They're based on Paradise Lost and the plot is essentially Kids vs. God. It's pretty dark. People die. I'm halfway through The Golden Compass, which is the first one in the series, and I can't say I'm that impressed yet, but it's full of nice animals like marmosets and basilisks who comprise people's familiars... The first one takes place in a fantasy world, the second in the real world, and the third somewhere between the two, according to the intro page. They're making a movie out of it, directed by the guy who did About a Boy.

Tarnation

Jonathan Caouette. I guess this is old news, but I just heard about this guy and his $218 movie. Dreamy.

"I think Jonathan Caouette's TARNATION is the shit," notes Van Sant. "I think I have always been waiting to see someone make something as moving as Jonathan's film with as little as he has had to make it. I knew something like this would appear, and I am glad that it finally has." This week, Gus called Jonathan about using iMovie for a possible project of his own.

Knoxious

I am in a motel room in Knoxville, Tennessee, one of a cluster of motels surrounding an exit called "Strawberry Plains" (nothing of the sort in sight). They form a bleak bouquet of square streetlights and neon signs, interlocking driveways and chain link fences, set to the ever-present soundtrack of interstate US-40.

It poured rain all day, and if I shut my eyes I can still see puddly mack trucks out of my peripheral vision spraying my windshield. Somewhere in the mountains of Virginia I saw a pick-up truck, not too far in front of me, spin out onto the grassy highway median, losing various pieces along the way. I wasn't sure whether to try and slow down and help the guy, who I don't think would have gotten injured. I didn't though, I just kept driving. There was no way I could have safely slowed down in time, but I thought I should call someone, although I was unsure what there was to say. "Hello 911? I saw a man's near-death experience and didn't slow down. What's that? Where was it? Um... there was a mountain on my right..." If I had left my last gas stop thirty seconds sooner, he would have spun out into my car at 80 mph, but I didn't and he didn't so there was nothing to do but just pass him, his car beached lopsided in the grass, hunched over his seat, doubtless breathing heavily and incredulous, as I was, that he wasn't a mangled corpse.

You start to feel like the only person in the world, even though it's only a 24-hour period between homes, but there are just things - I haven't received an e-mail for three days, I got here and I was the only person paddling around in the motel's creepy swimming pool, falling asleep in a bed that's big enough to lie horizontally or vertically in... It makes me almost want to be some sort of business-type whose life is a series of first-class cabins and hotel lobbies because the solitude is such a particular type, one that makes you think the world doesn't exist. I was tempted to book a room at a "Christianed-themed lodge" just for the experience, but it was earlier than I wanted to stop and I had visions of falling asleep under the scrutinizing gaze of a bloody icon that scared me.

I watched this movie last night, The Happiness of the Kakaturis, the weirdest movie ever and maybe not so good. It's like a Japanese claymation/musical/horror flick about these people who own a hotel that everyone keeps dying in. It has now taken on sinister (rather than totally ridiculous) undertones.

I listened to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on tape today and part of the Metaphysical Club. I gave up on the latter early in the morning, both me in the car and the progressing Civil War in the book reaching Gettysburg, PA at the same moment, I decided it was time to succumb to Harry Potter. It's no Tolkein, or even C.S. Lewis, but it was nice.

There is a spider in the shower. But no Woody Allen to call.

When I opened the paper this morning and read about a Joanne Levy who committed suicide I thought was that it was someone else, because the description said she had red hair and was 5'8. Except that obviously every other descriptive matched up: 23, second year film student, resident of Greenwich Village... Knowing Joanne to be impulsive and rather erratic, her intensity was always translated into her amazing films and this is so very tragic.

Joanne Levy was the very first person I met at Brown. I had just gotten to school and my dad dropped me off at the employment office so I could get an on-campus job (he had priorities). She was sitting at the job computer with Lili and we started up a conversation. I was always sort of bummed that they were in another unit, because I only met a couple other people I felt like I related to as much over the course of the next year. I hung out with them a lot during orientation week. I was absolutely miserable with Brown and thought I had made a huge mistake, but them, and Mike, Meghan, Albert and Lisa, who were all good friends immediately, made me think differently.

Last summer, Joanne and Lili came to the brownstone I was house-sitting in Brooklyn Heights and they stayed over a couple nights, post-juvenile slumber party style. Joanne had just gotten the list of films she had to watch over the summer before starting film school, and we watched Band of Outsiders, which is now one of my favorite movies, and something else I can't remember. She was always something of an intense presence -- on that day she had just returned from Providence, where she had accidentally set fire to her apartment and her cat had died of smoke inhalation. She had to go home early because she wasn't feeling well. (She had diabetes and didn't always take the best care of herself it seemed).

My friend Brandon, who was good friends with her and made a movie with her in intro to video (the one with the button for those who saw it) said it was always hard to know how she was actually feeling about things because she only let you get so close, and I feel the same way. Not that I was her best friend or anything (I haven't seen her since that time last summer), but I had no idea she was in such a situation. I got the sense that she was very close with her family, even if the press says she was in an argument with her father immediately before her death.

It's very sad, she was very talented, extremely hardworking and a total character, which are the three characteristics of a person I am generally drawn to. She was someone of greater potential than most, and if her death serves a purpose it should be to remind each of us of her focus, her drive and her talent, because she was someone who truly lived for her art. I was genuinely looking forward, even if our Brown-based friendship had lapsed, to see her succeed as a filmmaker.

beep beep beep beep beep

My radar is failing me. I can't distinguish the trash in my room from my clothing. The girls I may live with in Arkansas were just described to me as "Sex in the city of the Ozarks." I can't leave soon enough. Friday to Allentown, land of my birth, then my respects to Emily in Philadelphia then back to NY then away away away...

I saw Hero last night and I was a little disappointed, but also motivated to ask what could be done in a movie with such pretty colors that had a compelling story instead of what felt like various levels of streetfighter compiled into a piece of despotic propaganda. But really so pretty, and the guards in their black cloaks that scurried en masse reminded me of one of my favorite parts of Princess Mononoke, when the soldiers scurry around disguised as boars. There is something about masses of people engaged in the act of scurrying that I quite enjoy.

I feel like I haven't slept in years. It has only been days.

Fire Breathing Dragons and All

Walking past Madison Square Garden this afternoon with hundreds of thousands of protesters was like walking past a grave -- the day was full of people happily displaying their joviality and eccentricity, and then there they were: polo shirts, khakis, bulging stomachs and laminated necklaces. And the sense was not so much of hatred, even thought there were a few older people around me that just began yelling until their faces were red and their eyes were watering, like a baby screaming, but one of mourning, because even if there is a chance to put a halt to it, what is done is done. The moment after a joke told at a memorial service maybe, that makes everyone laugh and then in the silence that follows a much deeper sadness seeps in, that was the sadness in front of Madison Square Garden.

We turned the corner and waited for a friend under the Old Navy marquee on 34th Street. While waiting behind the barrier on the sidewalk, a scuffle appeared to break out to our left, people began running and the police cleared 34th Street completely and halted the march. It was strange, there was a bizarre smell, and then we saw a bunch of smoke wafting by from around the corner (in front of Madison Square Garden). There was no way to see what was happening, but all of a sudden the FOX News jumbotron across the street cut from some talking head to what was less than a block from us, the large paper mache dragon on fire. How strange that we were learning about what was going on around the corner at the same time some potato in Ohio was. Very strange, all this television business.

Later on the walk back downtown, there was some discussion from the marchers about what had happened. "I heard that a wagon was on fire," said one of the curious. "No," we said, "It was a dragon."

Indeed, the dragon we had passed only a short time before, its wings the breadth of the street, led by a fleshy product of post-punk wearing the tapestries of a sultan from the rococco and twirling a baton. Somewhere from beneath its wings London Calling was emanating. My friend Sara said that hearing the song gave her the chills - perhaps the icy hands of death were merely brushing by on their way to an inescapable grip around the neck of the monster.

It was a wonderful day, probably the only day of my life in which five strangers will ask to take my picture. And, that night, at the Downtown for Democracy event, the first person I saw upon opening the door to a bar was a sad and aged-looking Telly, from Kids. He looked so old, it was strange. Like all of that fuss, this movie depicting these delinquents and there he is, alive and well, with thinning hair. What was supposed to be so scary about that movie, if this is how we all end up anyway? Innocuous, and pale, quite ready to admit that an argyle sweater vest would complete the look - and probably make us so very happy besides.

Waiting for the subway on the way home a man came and played us a song on a trombone made entirely out of PVC piping. It was utterly charming, and the fog of drunken exhaustion and the creeping malaise that anticipates arriving home with a sigh cleared for one moment and everything was good.

He has a backbone

New jaw grown on patient's back! wow.

In case you weren't there

"And it’s not that I have a particular animus against self-help philosophy. I think it works; it’s even worked for me on a short-term basis. But no matter how much it’s spun as philanthropic, how it’s really about spreading the good vibes to everyone, self-help is a self-ish philosophy: The source of happiness or unhappiness, of health and disease, is always within, your fault rather than the product of political or cultural, forces, the flawed nature of human nature and the societies it gives rise to. Or the fault of the moral order (or lack of one) of the cosmos."

This essay, by the delightful Ron Rosenbaum, who brought us Manhattan Passions (that essential element to any well-rounded collection of 1980s literature), has now very nicely summarized a certain aspect of my play. Not so much in the quote above, but certainly in Mr. Rosenbaum's questioning the validity of an optimistic mandate. It's something that has found itself into much of my writing of late.

The following passage in particular -- I think this is perhaps a rite of passage for many of us:

"Pessimism is impermissible because it challenges the American orthodoxy that there’s always an answer, always a solution to every problem. And if there’s an answer, a solution, there’s no need to despair, because eventually we’ll find the answer and act accordingly. As if "acting accordingly" was a given. I know I grew up thinking, in a very American way, this was true. That eventually reason would prevail and all parties in any dispute, however grave, would come together on a compromise. No matter what the dispute, it could be resolved, with patience and good will. Some have called this, after a school of optimistic British historians, "Whig history," history as inexorable progress.

I don’t believe in it any more. My answer to Rodney King: Sorry, my friend, on the evidence, in fact, we can’t all get along. We’re too twisted by the irresistible push and pull of bad impulses and bad ideas. If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that. History is the nightmare we can’t escape from."

The rest of the story: Errol Morris Has A Very Blue Line: Curse Darkness

By the way, if anyone would like to *read* the play I will happily provide.

Star Crossed

I just saw Fassbinder's IN A YEAR OF THIRTEEN MOONS. Now, the introduction to the movie is the following explanation:

"Every seventh year is a lunar year. Those people whose lives are essentially dominated by their emotions suffer particularly strongly from depressions in these lunar years. The same is also true of years with thirteen new moons, although not quite so strongly. And if a lunar year also happens to be a year with thirteen new moons, the result is often a personal catastrophe."

The year 1978, when Meier (Fassbinder's lover) killed himself and Fassbinder made this film, was one of thirteen new moons that was also a "lunar" year. Supposedly. I wanted to verify. First of all, what is a lunar year? Typically it is defined as the normal, calendar year. Second, the moon does not seem to follow any sort of seven-year cycle whatsoever. 1971, moon-wise at least, does not bear much striking resemblance at all to 1978. I was trying to find some small characteristic indicative of a seven year feature and couldn't see any. 1978 was, however, a year that had 13 new moons, but that is something that happens not so infrequently, approximately once every 2.5 years.

1971 was a year of thirteen full moons.
1978 was a year of thirteen new moons.
1985 full moons.
1992 new moons.

But 2004 is a year of thirteen full moons too, although it isn't part of the alleged seven year lunar cycle. And most years will have either thirteen new or thirteen full moons (not so 2002, which had thirteen 3rd quarter moons). Anyway, I was looking for answers, and found none. I thought maybe the idea was that these years had BOTH 13 full moons and 13 new moons but that is impossible.

Silly. I liked the movie anyway, even though I thought it was Thursday instead of Wednesday and thought I was going to see Scorpio Rising and Vinyl instead of Fassbinder. It was rather Hedwig-ish, with some very poignant moments. For the past few days I've been feeling twitchy and sweaty and dizzy in a very uncomfortable way, like I am able to feel my fingernails growing and it is unpleasant. I had a hard time sitting still is what I mean. Now that I'm thinking a bit deeper about the movie though there are parts that I deeply loved.

The scene where they butcher the cows is amazing. I couldn't really read the subtitles because watching the cows get strung up and have their throats cut was such a visual spectacle. They're so nice the cows are. Pretty eyes. If anyone is in Minnesota right now make sure to catch the State Fair while the guernseys are on display because they're the prettiest. I also usually scheduled my visits around the rabbit contests, because I believe there are very few places on the planet that amass such a large collection of bizarre and extroardinary rabbits. Same goes for chickens.

People who grow up in the megalopolis are never afforded the opportunity to watch farm boys from 4-H have their projects judged. It makes you feel like life is worth living to see a smartly dressed Minnesotan child demonstrating the skills of their well-behaved sheep to a panel of judges in a small arena of green sawdust.

Anyway, if you would like to know the exact dates of every blue moon since 1700, the US Navy is only too happy to provide, right HERE.

I interviewed the director of Open Water today and was too shamefaced to admit that I hadn't seen it because it looks sort of scary. And sort of bad maybe.

I like #11

Naturist One-Act Playwrighting Competition
Suggested storylines:

Following are some suggestions for a story line. These are offered merely to help get your creative juices flowing. They should, in no way, limit or restrict your creativity. A play built from one of these ideas has no advantage over any other plot you may conceive.

1. A first experience.

2. A Naturist man or woman who introduces a reluctant spouse or girlfriend to Naturism.

3. Historical – When did we begin wearing clothes; When did we start wearing swim suits; When did it become mandatory to wear a swim suit?

4. Religious – Prophets used to strip and preach naked. What would happen if a modern prophet were to preach that way?

5.Contemporary society.

6. Hippies.

7. Being raised as a Naturist and then learning how different you are from the other kids.

8. What happens when Westerners come into contact with cultures less compulsive about dress.

9. An office staff discovers one of their co-workers is a Naturist.

10. A family accidently comes across a clothing-optional beach while on vacation.

11. SciFi – A space traveler (or time traveler) discovers another (or future) civilization which is highly advanced. Everyone there is naked.

Nota bene: I did not write this. Someone thought I did, but no, look at the website. Also look at the "Photos" section, for a pleasing visual poetry arrangement. ed.

Man in Tutu Interrupts Diving
Security has been tightened at the Athens Games after a man in a tutu jumped into the pool from the diving board during the men's synchronized springboard event.

Harumph.

Misc.

I was wondering about this. Every time I got on a subway as school was getting out it was like a teenage boy mumu-fest.

The little slide show on this is so sad. Its organs were crushed by its own weight? My head feels like that right now.

Two-armed robot top candidate for saving Hubble. More.

The most literate U.S. cities:
1. Minneapolis, Minnesota
2. Seattle, Washington
3. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
4. Madison, Wisconsin
5. Cincinnati, Ohio
6. Washington, D.C.
7. Denver, Colorado
8. Boston, Massachusetts
9. Portland, Oregon
10. San Francisco, California

Hmmmm... More.

The top 10 stingiest cities:
1. Hartford, Connecticut: 4.7 percent
2. Providence-Fall River-Warwick, Rhode Island: 5.1 percent
3. Boston-Worcester-Lawrence, Massachusetts: 5.2 percent
4. Buffalo-Niagara Falls, New York: 5.8 percent
5. (tie) New Orleans, Louisiana: 5.9 percent
5. (tie) Las Vegas, Nevada: 5.9 percent
7. Austin-San Marcos, Texas: 6.0 percent
8. (tie) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: 6.1 percent
8. (tie) Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Florida: 6.1 percent
8. (tie) Philadelphia-Wilmington, Delaware-Atlantic City, New Jersey: 6.1 percent

If I had to guess the top three I definitely would have said New England. Explains why it's such a shithole.

The top 10 most generous cities:
1. Salt Lake City-Ogden, Utah: 14.9 percent
2. Grand Rapids-Muskegon-Holland, Michigan: 10 percent
3. (tie) Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota: 8.5 percent
3. (tie) Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point, North Carolina: 8.5 percent
5. (tie) Memphis, Tennessee: 8.4 percent
5. (tie) Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas: 8.4 percent
7. Nashville, Tennessee: 8.3 percent
8. (tie) San Antonio, Texas: 8.1 percent
8. (tie) Houston-Galveston-Brazoria, Texas: 8.1 percent
10. (tie) Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: 8 percent
10. (tie) Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News, Virginia: 8 percent

More.

Takako is the very best.

So I think the woman that cut my hair the last time it was cut is the coolest ever, like even if she can't speak English really and calls it Engrish, she has the best sneakers in NYC and tonight I saw her at a sushi restaurant in Brooklyn. How crazy! She is in Brooklyn? I thought she lived some Japanese ex-pat high life. I wanted to say hi but I didn't think she would remember me. I want to be like Takako. She gives excellent hair cuts and her own hair looks like it was run through some destructive machine, all split ends and roots, and she doesn't give a fuck. Best of all, she doesn't put your hair up in sections in those stupid clippy-things, she does it all freestyle, yet it's even and perfect. And she eats at the sushi place on Flatbush, where my waitress tonight tried very hard to remember the word "quiche" to describe what Tofu Tamago was.

Maria cheia de graca, venha me soccorer. Maria cheia de graca, eu tambem quero viver. Eu quero ser malandro, para ver como e que e...

Pois malandro pra ser malandro tem que ter fe, tem que usar a cabeca e o pe, tira gimbo de quem tem, e da gimbo de quem nao tem. How fucking good is Jorge Ben? I saw Maria Full of Grace yesterday, and this song is in my head ever since, just because of the name. It was a really stressful movie. Thinking about inhaling a drug that was carried around in someone's large intestine certainly does make one rather repulsed, particularly if it had to be cut out of a cadaver. Four hundred people died en route in thirty years said that article in the Times: The director, Joshua Marston, lives in Williamsburg apparently and did his research in Queens and at JFK. I suppose that depriving America's noses would also deprive Columbia some 5% of its GDP, although recent estimates put it more at 2.3%, since the fall of Pablo and friends and the rise of Mexican cartels. And as the movie shows, if it's not cocaine, than it's flowers, which Colombia exports more of than any other country except Holland. So nothing is really resolved as to what is the problem and what is the solution, or maybe I should say reduced. In the end what it becomes is the moving story of a malcontent in a really amazing performance I thought.

Fitzgerald grew up in St. Paul Anyway

I have been unable to read anything about college lately. Who knows why This Side of Paradise makes me unbearably sad, even though it was written eighty years ago, and F.'s chum-filled experience at Princeton is so cheerfully composed? The description of Minneapolis actually, of bobbing parties on Nicollet Ave. Even though I have no idea what a bobbing party actually is. A recent traveller told me the thing about the Minnesota is that the clouds are just puffier. I always found it to be rather hypercolored in comparison to New York's sepia, but only in the summer. Like when you land at the airport the first thing you see is so much grass, and everyone looks so pretty and well-fed. Gosh I'm homesick. I wish I could go back.

The description of "The Slicker" from TSoP:
1. Clever. Sense of social values.
2. Dresses well. Pretends that dress is superficial - but knows it isn't.
3. Goes into such activites as he can shine in.
4. Gets to college and is, in a worldly way, successful.
5. Hair slicked.

"The slickers of that year had adopted tortoise-shell spectacles as badges of their slickerhood, and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory and Rahill never missed one... Amory's secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents - also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper."

How did F. Scott know his hipsters so well? All this in opposition to
"The Big Man":
1. Inclined to stupidity and unconscious of social values.
2. Thinks dress is superficial and is inclined to be careless about it.
3. Goes out for everything from a sense of duty.
4. Gets to college and has a problematical future. Feels lost without his circle and always says that school days were happiest after all.
5. Hair not slicked.

Fellow Robot Goes to War

Friend and neighbor Frank Lesser's much anticipated Danny Bot is now available online. What I gather from the song's lyrics is that robot war is like Alien vs. Predator: whoever wins, we lose. An interesting factoid is that I just wrote a profile of the site's designer, Stefan Lawrence, for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and had no idea we had Frank Lesser in common. Imagine. How very charming everything is. Watch the saga of a fellow robot, it is both mournful and poignant. I however, am a sight to be pitied and scorned, so its probably best to get out of here as fast as you can. Danny Bot

Oh my boat is empty, oh my head is empty

It was a beautiful weekend, beautiful people, beautiful weather, but I have a preoccupied head and therefore was already occupied while the beauty raged. For the past couple of weeks I was working on the play and then working out a post-play malaise, that hasn't exactly subsided but one must keep a stiff upper lip. As the title of this post indicates, I got a new Caetano Veloso album, which has made the week, musically at least, so much nicer. That and Mr. Softee. There is more than this isn't there? I saw The Manchurian Candidate, which lacked my favorite part of the old one, replacing the hydrangea convention for lots of bloody tubes and vaguely ethnic bedouin-type women with facial tattoos warbling. I actually love Denzel Washington so much though. I don't know what it is, his face I suppose, his glasses, his inability to smile, that makes looking at him interesting even if the movie is not so much. Maybe it is just Tak Fujimoto, who was DP on Badlands as well, and everyone knows how I feel about Badlands. I have a special bond with Terrence Malick, if you hadn't heard, which is why Jim Caveziel's character in The Thin Red Line is named Witt. Like me. And then Jim Caveziel went and played Jesus. Didn't he understand what a step down that was?

Hostage Situation

I am on Solon's couch. This post is against my will, only provoked by Solon's heroin induced craze from just watching trainspotting. He sneered, said "choose life" and then put a popsicle to my head. Please send help.

Post country weekend malaise

I went to New Hampshire over the weekend, where I finally learned how to spot polaris if I find myself someday lost in the woods. I also kicked ass at Scrabble. I also lost horribly at it, but I am much better at badminton than tennis I realized. I am reading a book by PJ O'Rourke, "Holidays in Hell," which has basically written up all the things I felt about Cuba, except in the context of 1980s Lebanon or Communist Poland. It is simultaneously witty and upsetting, like most things, but more on the subject on another day when I don't have to wake up in five hours. The end of Cryptonomicon was the biggest fucking disappointment on the planet. The last hundred pages were first miserable, and then absurd, but fortunately it is now done. Unfortunately, my mother happened to be reading the sequel in what is a planned trilogy, and now that I know it exists I am a quitter, 900 crappy pages notwithstanding, if I don't read Quicksilver when it comes out in paperback. Apparently it takes place in the 1600s, following the narrative of these families throughout the milennia like they were Black Adder or something. Bah.

It's Horrible, I Can't Put it Down

Now on page 623 of the nerd tome I described in an earlier posting, I am getting increasingly perplexed by the paradox of genuinely detesting some of the writing and certain plot lines while at the same time being unable to stop reading it. I realized today, reporting on a religious parade in Williamsburg, that it has even infiltrated my writing, resulting in inane commentary on the miter worn by the Bishop of Brooklyn in an otherwise sound piece of reporting.

The book has also gotten very funny at points, with the theme of paranoia extending to car alarms in the form of Range Rovers that talk, descriptions of Gen. Macarthur in a pink sateen bathrobe and aviator sunglasses and something called the Ejaculation Control Conspiracy (ECC). A poor man's Pynchon I guess, and therefore infinitely more accessible, but of lesser quality, like fake Louis Vuitton.

There is also an imaginary country called Qwghlm, which I thought at first was some special way of referring to Wales (the word "Japanese" is never used, only the much more globalized and somehow Internet-y "Nipponese"). Then I realized it was sort of a Nabokovian hoax, (I didn't get it immediately in Ada or Ardor either), and Qwghlm, much like the Sultanate of Kinuktuka, (site of the "data haven") doesn't exist. And then (after thinking I probably ate a lot of lead paint chips at some point) I start to get a little paranoid myself, that given the skewed account of history, the long and mystifying passages that graph things like one protagonist's mental productivity in relation to self-imposed versus aided ejaculation as a differential equation are all bullshit as well.

If an author is going to be a smarty-pants and put in math equations that show off how much more clever he is than the mathematically challenged, I expect the work to be flawless. My mathematically inclined sibling, who naturally was the nerd who I noticed reading this book in the first place, claims that Infinite Jest, for one, contained mathematical errors. I bought him DFW's book about infinity for Christmas, only to see him throw it against the wall in annoyance well before the New Year. It was disheartening, although it serves as a lesson for those of us who quietly defer to writers who tell us they can do math, taking their word for it. Not that it matters particularly in this case. Not that I would understand how it was wrong even if it were. But I appreciate a soundness of facts, if I think someone is smart I want to be able to trust them as such, otherwise their intelligence is nothing more than my ignorance. I'm sorry I keep writing about this book. Nothing much is going on around here.

I am a grown-up

I quit my job at the restaurant last week, for no reason that made any logical or financial sense. I hated it though. I'm glad I'm not the only hostess who took the job because she had proven herself incapable at any position requiring enthusiasm, commitment, mental presence and punctuality. And as stupid as it seems I also related to the part about how much time it takes to get ready for work. I'm not a slob, but any outfit that cannot be worn with sneakers makes me very tired, and takes a great expenditure of time and energy to devise. I take it back though, because my boss did call me a slob once, hence the stress.

However, I have become an adult. Due to a death in someone's family (not mine), I had my pick of an apartmentful of furniture, and I am pleased to announce that after a year of ascetic squalor I now own a bed, a couch, bookshelves, chairs, a lamp, pots and pans, a full set of dishware and a vacuum cleaner. The bed is the important one though, it had been almost a year on the floor.

I thought I had to leave New York, but now I think I can stay. I just have trouble commiting to objects that might offer comfort, security and a home-like atmosphere although it is actually just about being really poor and having trouble determining what the essentials are. It seems sometimes like trying to make a homey-type place for yourself is impossible if you are doing it alone, it's something of an oxymoron. I was not willing to accept solitude as the outcome of entropy, that as every reinvention in a lifetime inevitably degrades to disorder it is to this point that one arrives. Some people are very okay with that, but it feels unnatural to me. I wouldn't resort to channels of Internet voyeurism if I was happy knowing that nobody gives a fuck.

Not that it isn't self-imposed most of the time but it wasn't a maneira de ser I wanted to establish, one might say, by buying heavy domestic objects like beds and sofas. Now it is established, through furniture I seem to have chosen something I really didn't want. But it just is. Going to college and becoming really insecure just happened. I thought that it was just the nature of a stifling environment, that leaving would bring me back to a place where I used to be, where friends as good as family came easy and often. Maybe if I went back to the Midwest. But as of Saturday, in making the decision to domesticate instead of remaining uncomfortably feral, the status quo was elected and confirmed. It is no longer a happenstance that I am entitled to complain about.

Whatever. Have you bought tickets to my play yet? www.smarttix.com, in The American Living Room Festival: The Nostalgic Recollections of Raymond Boggs. I went to a rehearsal today. The actors are good, as well as good-looking.

What persistence!

I was surprised when I walked by Nathan's in Coney Island and saw that the hot dog eating contest has been won by Japanese people for six out of the past seven years. But look at this man:



He is a champion! He has one four contests in a row! He is Japanese, and broke his own world record! 53.5 hot dogs in twelve minutes? Nobody has ever eaten that many hot dogs in so little time, ever. Takeru Kobayashi I think I'm in love with you.

I am reading the nerdiest book ever written. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, contains the following nerd elements:
Fantasy gaming
Math geniuses
Code breaking
Lots of greek letters
Internet start-up companies
Introverted socially awkward men with beards
The inter-library loan office as a central locale for characters meeting each other
Classification as a "cyber-thriller"
"The Society for Creative Anachronism"
The appendix
The author photo on the back
Etc.

It has three intertwined narratives, two of which are rather compelling, set in WWII, and one which is horrible, set in the nineties, people trying to set up a "data haven". I don't know what that means. But it's okay, and in spite of being 900 pages long it moves quickly and actually is sort of dull, brainless reading, the sort you can do in a loud room as long as you're skipping the drawn out mathematical descriptions that happen every once in a while.

John Edwards as VP made me inexplicably happy this morning. I'm such a sucker for southern dumplings.

I saw Saved last night. I like Jena Malone and (obviously) McCauly, but the funny part of the movie was the first ten minutes and then it just got strange, there were blatant displays of horrible acting and it couldn't really make up it's mind. Was it a lark? Was it social criticism? What was going on? Spider Man 2 is fucking great though.

Via Cup of Chicha. This is ridiculous.

Oh to be Chris Ware...

Today my employer and I wheeled/walked to Central Park. We sat in a pagoda by the pond, its opaque surface the color of lime peels. Turtles and turtle shells frequently emerged and submerged.

HIM. Where do you see yourself in five years? (His speech slightly impeded by the presence of a cough drop.)

ME. I want to have a substantial body of published written work. (I don't fucking know.) What would you have answered when you were my age?

I visualize him physically capable of shrugging. It seemed appropriate.

HIM. I would have said the same as you.

Pause. Turtles.

HIM. But at that age my life was ruled by sexual conquest. All I was interested in was sex. And literature.

I think bitter thoughts, affairs and women weeping.

HIM. I wanted to find a woman who would change my life.

Isn't that what everyone wants. Not that he wasn't already forgiven.

ME. Did you?

HIM. Yes. When my first daughter was born.

We laugh. Then turtles sets in.

HIM. When I was 27 I married a 17 year-old.

I calculate... 1963.

ME. Did you have children?

HIM: Two daughters, one who loves me, one who doesn't.

ME: How old was your wi-

HIM: 18 the first and twenty the second. It was a horrible mistake. She was a drug addict. The girls had to take her to the emergency room more than once.

ME: Is she still alive?

HIM: Still a drug addict.

Long interlude of turtles.

HIM: Do you mind if we go back home now?

My whole day consisted of conversations like these, although it's easier to write about his skeletons and his closet than anything I shared with him. Before I went home for the afternoon, he gave me a copy of his book, dictating its inscription, "To Emily, my new friend." He asked me not to ask him questions about his memoirs. I won't.

APPENDIX
At one point he mentioned a turning point, when a one act play of his was produced for the first time.

HIM. I wish I still had a copy of it. Have you had anything produced?

ME. Right now.

Meaning that you can buy tickets online for The Nostalgic Recollections of Raymond Boggs, part of The American Living Room Festival. If you have run into me in the past couple of days then you have a brochure already, if not go to www.here.org.

Poor us. We were so close to seeing David Foster Wallace and George Saunders, and the theater filled up right as we had nearly reached the door. It's okay. Sangria and rubbery calamari provided solace. I've been working for this man, covering for a friend who is doing a play in Poland. He has MS, and I help him type and turn pages as he cannot do these things. His wheelchair is operated by mouthpiece and head button. He has many famous friends who I type e-mails to and aid in telephoning to arrange dinners with champagne and other treats. He is writing a film review of Visconti's The Leopard and with my friend is translating a play called "The Magnificent Cuckold" from French. I am very fond of him, and he has nice pets, particularly his cat Bones. I am very tired though.

I went to the Neil Young tribute in Prospect Park. It maybe wasn't quite as good as Leonard Cohen, but I was also separated from the stage by a large mass of people in constant motion. That part of it turned out to be more interesting than the concert itself, as people from MN and other remote sites of childhood development would walk by and then join in the consumption of cookies/cigarettes/blanket space. Anyway, I thought of you, if you weren't there, though chances are not so remote.

Lucky 13

The newest McSweeney's is worth the $25 investment. I haven't been able to say that for a long time.

Rebecca Works Hard and Will Be Very Successful

Thanks to the illustrious accomplishments of my roommate, I just got to go to a preview of Fahrenheit 9/11. It was good, although as usual I prefer the more abstract parts of the film to the ones where M. Moore is there to melodramatically guide your emotions. But then at one point the melodramatic part gets very spoiled and fucked up, in a bizarre triangular encounter that forms what I think is one of the film's best scenes. The bit of the film I saw five months ago (I don't want to give anything away but it is during the opening credits and the part on September 11th) remained the most eerily arresting of the whole project. I got to go with Rebecca to the wrap party at Soho House, which I'd only heard of because someone paid me to write up a movie treatment for her story idea, described as "Sex in the City Gone Bad." Needless to say, Soho House and the words "a clingy Missoni dress" shared a paragraph in her initial description, but with fois gras and a glowing rooftop swimming pool to schmooze around I'm not going to complain. It was pretty. A word of warning though: The SoHo House is not in SoHo, but rather in the Meatpacking District. ("Ringworm is neither a ring or a worm, it is a fungus," recall those who read Matt Groening as children.) I hung out with the bassist from Ween. He's only been with the band for six years but we mutually lamented the demise of songs like Poop Ship Destroyer in the mainstream vernacular of music. It was exciting.

I actually think this movie is going to be more politically influential than maybe any other American film ever. It is slated to open this weekend (according to Moore) in 800 theaters, a number unprecedented even for his own record-breaking precedents. Bowling for Columbine apparently never played more than 250 theaters at a time. It's really amazing. In a war where we have seen little televised images, the images in the movie strike really hard. Maybe it's just because I've only been reading books about war for the past two months, but it's always shocking to see the violence and the open wounds and injuries. You start to think of violence on such abstract humanitarian terms until you actually see someone's tibia exposed.

War lit is interesting... every book has a chapter on the glorification of war and the feeling the soldiers have of acting out their own movie -- it's a fantasy that is simultaneously shattered by the trauma of actually being there and perpetuated by the recording of it in the non-fiction recreation of the drama. I don't know why I like it so much. It isn't the violence -- I actually had to put Dispatches and Black Hawk Down down for a little while, because they were making me nauseous -- but rather that they can work as Saramago's Blindness did fictionally, questioning order and comfort and how very fragile the threads holding things in place are. Particularly when you are contrasting people who grew up sitting on a couch eating Fritos with people who have had violence around them their entire lives. Blindness also made me want to throw up. More than the other two even. But there's something about filling out an experience only seen from a position of comfort and then in 2-dimensions. In Homage to Catalonia when Orwell comes along and talks about how having lice in his underwear is such an undiscussed and unavoidable part of the military experience -- It's just not what you are thinking of when you watch Saving Private Ryan.

I Never Leave Brooklyn Anymore

On 5th Avenue in Park Slope there is a veterinary clinic that also serves as a boarding house for cats whose owners are on vacation. It is a very nice respite when I'm working to go watch the cats for a little bit. They are in rows and columns, each sitting or sleeping or stretching on its own towel.

I saw L'Avventura today. I finished reading Black Hawk Down. I covered an anti-arena ralley for the Brooklyn Eagle. I did laundry. I stared at the wall. I decided Great Lakes makes my list of top three bars in New York. It would be higher if they had Scrabble in addition to Trivial Pursuit and such good music. Good music makes me happier than almost anything. I started to read Godel, Escher, Bach. My brother told me that I won't understand the math. I'm hoping that it won't matter, because he's right. I only bought it because it was two dollars. I finished the 10 billionth draft of my play, which is about 9.9 billion drafts too many for something only thirty pages long. Especially because the last version was better and after the director agrees with me I'm throwing this one away. I don't know what sucks and what doesn't anymore. When I revise something that much the removed words sort of pile up in my head, in their isolation like radioactive waste, such that discarded passages like "she had a word with our sponsor, and then she stepped on it. The sponsor? No, the moth," or phrases like "a fear of double-chinned anonymity" are going to give me brain cancer maybe. They don't go away.

Sometimes I wish Saturday nights were Monday nights, when boredom is so much more publicly ordained. I feel rotten.

You studied what? Symbiotics?

"It was not only Glass who defined himself as a Brown semiotician. From its founding as a fledgling program in 1974 to its morphing into a full Department of Modern Culture and Media in 1996, Brown semiotics produced a crop of creators that, if they don't exactly dominate the cultural mainstream, certainly have grown famous sparring with it. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, Academy Award-nominated director Todd Haynes and legendary indie producer Christine Vachon, "Ice Storm" author Rick Moody, pop-science writer Steven Johnson -- all walked the slanting corridors of Adams House, a sad cottage at the fringe of Brown's Providence campus. There at the bottom of College Hill, under the aegis of an august English professor, an academic discipline sprang up that would make some parents very worried and some students very successful."

More.

The Pigeon: The Pinnacle of All That is Avian, or Mere Winged Rat?

"Meanwhile, the pigeon wars escalate, and avian battles fought in Central London cause human accidents, injuries and deaths. Everyone looks fearfully at the sky -- ''It was as if the whole of London had visited the same deranged chiropractor'' -- and antipigeon vigilantes, from whom Ken Livingstone might learn a thing or two, band together."

In Fiction...

"We're the hard-core part of the pigeon movement," said Bob, who asked that his last name not be used but who is the founder of Bird Operations Busted, an organization that has about 15 members. "Our aim is to unveil the mafia of netters," he said in hushed tones, seated in an Upper West Side cafe.

And the news...

The debate rages on.

LVT Double Header

"So let's get it over with: Dear Lars, thank you for the obstructions. They have taught me to see what I really am: a miserable human being. I try as humans do, to fool the world and myself, because I don't want to admit it.

My trick is cheap and I repeat it endlessly. I came up with it early on: If I just tell what I see and nothing else, and keep doing so, like the prisoner of war who repeats nothing but his name and number, not adding anything (emotions are far too dangerous for me) maybe the world - and I, too - will buy it. 

I call it art. But in fact I am certain that I am capable of nothing. 
And I only do it all to be able to stand myself."

The Text of Obstruction #5, written by Lars Von Trier for the voice of Jorgen Leth.

Dogwood (Sunday), The Five Obstructions (Monday) I love I love 2x

OK, so the zoo was really fun and all, there were very nice sloths with little hands, but after petting a goat at the children's zoo an unidentified insect or arachnid took a chomp on my arm that has since developed into an itchy series of small bumps. Nothing good can come without a little pain. Not even a marvelous place like the zoo.

I should be going to sleep

But instead I just activated my new g-mail account. 1000 MB! So gangsta. Speaking of G-thangs, I watched the Ali G movie for the first time tonight until I realized that birds were chirping and home was a whole borough away. It is always strange how empty the city can be in the very late night. For some reason, I always feel that 2 AM would be as busy as 6 AM, but if you've ever taken the subway at 6 AM on a weekday it is packed and in the wee hours when the birds just start chirping you can sometimes be the only person in a car. There is something rather wonderful about being able to walk down Broadway or Canal and pass maybe one person when just a few hours later you can barely move, or being able to cross the street at Columbus Circle without waiting for a walk light. For whatever reason though, the street below my window never ever calms down, to the extent where the silences created by red lights are deafening. I hear them louder than the traffic at this point. I suppose if it did grow as empty as other parts of the city walking home would be a bit more scary but I can never cross without a walk light and yesterday when I "dusted" the windowsill the paper towels came up black. One can only imagine my lungs, who sleep directly underneath. If I can manage the financial responsibility that it would entail, I may move in September. But that is a lot of financial responsibility. Carcinogens come so cheaply. And responsibility comes at such a huge price.

I am going to the zoo tomorrow! To the zoo!!

Today I saw three twelve year-olds (perhaps they were younger) get chased down Flatbush Avenue by car and handcuffed to each other, then loaded onto a van and driven away, all within the span of one piece of pizza. The cop to child ratio was app. 3:1. I don't know any other details.

Tomorrow I will see monkeys pee! The zoo! The ZOO! Zooooooo! Zebras. Gila monsters. Soft grunting animals with claws and wet noses all whiskered and velvety. The zoo!

Fleet Week: Big Boats and More

Surrounded by a gaggle of sailors, I went to see The Day After Tomorrow this afternoon. It was satisfyingly catastrophic, I will have sweet sweet dreams tonight of Jake Gyllenhall fighting bloodthirsty wolves and there were lots of opportunities to giggle. I was also pleased to see that in spite of recent history, apocalyptic movies will continue to honor the filmic tradition of at least one appearance by the Cyrillic alphabet. Then I come home and open the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly only to see a small paragraph on page 50 essentially repeating Dennis Quaid's hapless whistle-blowing speech to the thinly-veiled-as-Dick-Cheney Vice President. Except that it's an actual scientific report entitled, "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security." I couldn't find that but I did find this. It is with great joy that I anticipate the return of our friends the Saber Tooth Tiger and The Woolly Mammoth.

On a similar theme, in this month's Harper's Patrick Graham describes sorry attempts to put down the Iraqi resistance as a situation where "the production values are incredible but the script sucks," winning the award for clever metaphor of the week. He also noted, with a prescience we might call "research," that most Iraqis found Chalabi to be a scumbag: "the most pro-American -- and arguably least popular, less even than Saddam Hussein -- of Iraqi politicians." Oops.

The Precocious are Deserving of our Praise

"Over the years, homoeroticism has probably ghostwritten more rap shit than Jay-Z and Mad Skillz combined, as the logical by-product of a cultural investment in the dick that runs deeper than vaginas (see Saafir's "Worship the D"). But in mainstream hip-hop, actually being gay is relegated to life either "on the DL" or as a spectator/dick-rider. Which may be why the making-gay of DMX's musical signifiers happens on Xiu Xiu's Fabulous Muscles, enabled by a white suburbanite for whom spectatorship is existential."

Rajiv Jaswa is the future of music writing.

"Of the composers I heard, the one who seem best poised for a major career is Nico Muhly, twenty-two-year-old, spiky-haired, healthily irreverent student of Corigliano’s at Juilliard... On a recent afternoon, he enjoyed motets b William Byrd, Khia’s salacious hip-hop track “My Neck, My Back,” John Adams’s “Chin Gates,” and Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung”—the last for a school paper."

Nico Muhly is the future of music.

Mayflowers

What happened? I can't quite say. It was a dark spring... I read a lot of books about war and suicide and the bubonic plague. I had to finish a play. I dropped ambition like an old and weathered hat and took up a hostessing job at a pizza place next door to my house. March and April are always the worst time of the year for me. People put on their tank tops and I try to further stuff myself into sweaters. Both food and sleep make my stomach turn. I hide in the movie theaters on the nicest days, the only thing I craved was soft-serve ice cream from trucks, which I have almost always detested for making me rather ill. One of my roommates moved out taking all of our furniture and the TV and for two weeks there was no replacement roommate or furniture so I placed my desk in the middle of the empty living room and spent the days sitting there working on the play or thinking about terrible things. I was reprimanded at the pizza place for looking sloppy, ("Try to do something with your hair," said the owner) and then again for "acting distracted" ("Try to leave your personal problems at home please.") After nearly nine months in my apartment I am still sleeping on the floor. Simply put, I had lost the desire to share my dim existence on the computer because it was boring and full of ill-will. Sometimes the world around you forms corners and it takes a long time to figure out that you can't fit in as a round person. I was growing corners and have returned until triangles develop outside and I will seek another repreive.

Anyway I really decided to write again because of the two comments posted. And to those in question I apologize for not having attended any of your gallery openings because I wanted to but had something. I also have finished the play more or less, which will be performed August 1st and 2nd at HERE Center for the Arts, double billed with some interpretive dance about Puerto Rican identity that I have nothing to do with. I also wanted to write about Cuba, but it was so complex -- I mean I have written about it, but pages and pages too long to belong on a weblog. It was partially Cuba that threw me into a temporary madness. The best description I could give would be a recommendation to read The Sheltering Sky and Orwell's essay on Makarresh. One item of note was that I got busted by the feds, an experience that I've also written quite a bit about that will hopefully appear in some other venue some day as well, along with the account of a discotheque inside a cave, the day a man with acne scars bought me guarapo and an inquiry into the worst thing I have ever consumed, misleadingly entitled a hamburger. The only statement I could put simply is that it was the country that made me most patriotic while simultaneously landing me on airport shit lists, so that (thus far) I've been thoroughly searched every time I've flown since returning. There's something rather satisfying about being classified as a political threat in the current climate, I must admit.

I am once more acclimatized and I hope I can win back your loyalty and trust. I realized when I started changing my Friendster profile every day that it was time to do this again.

Oh do you still read this?

I'm sorry. One day it will be resurrected from the dead. Va na fe...

I'm Sorry

I haven't been writing, because I've been trying to really write a bit. And I have been reading...

Oh. And I was in Cuba for two weeks.

Since I left You:

Pattern Recognition, By William Gibson
Vernon God Little, By DBC Pierre
Bonfire of the Vanities, By Tom Wolfe
The New Journalism, By Tom Wolfe (ed.)
Darkness at Noon, By Arthur Koestler

All deserve applause.

At the lunch table our freshman year she was Aisha. Now he is Luke. But is he still a vegan?

"They soon discovered they had loads in common. They marveled that they had booked Cannes with the same travel agent. Mr. Wolfensohn was a partner in Red Ramona, a New York music studio, and Ms. Small had a cat named Ramona."

I like reading the Weddings section of the Sunday Times. Sentences like these support my delusional love life by lowering the concept of soul mate to the level of inane coincidence.

"Felix gives the most matter-of-fact and truthful answers. Asked about the situation, he answers tersely: Confusão. Confusão is a good word, a synthesis word, an everything word. In Angola it has its own specific sense and is literally untranslatable. To simplify things: Confusão means confusion, a mess, a state of anarchy and disorder. Confusão is a situation created by people, but in the course of creating it they lose control and direction, becoming victims of confusão themselves. A person wants to do something, but it all falls to pieces in his hands... Everything crosses him; even with the best will in the world, he falls over and over again into confusão. Confusão can overwhelm our thinking, and then others will say that the person has confusão in his head. It can steal into our hearts, and then our girls dump us. It can explode in a crowd and sweep through a mass of people - then there is fighting, death, arson. Sometimes confusão takes a more benign form in which it assumes the character of desultory, chaotic, but bloodless haggling... After a while confusão loses energy, weakens, vanishes. We emerge from a state of confusão exhausted, but somehow satisfied that we have managed to survive. We start gathering strength again for the next confusão."

I concentrated in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown, my course of study replicating the pattern of Portugal and its colonies (i.e. the best resources focused on Brazil), but I really can't believe I wasn't handed this book until yesterday, and then it was by my roommate and not a professor. (Thanks Aaron.)*

Another Day of Life, by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Like the collapsed civilization in Saramago's Blindess, Kapuscinski describes the European quarter in the city of Luanda after the Portuguese mass exodus -- luxury cars left gathering dust and growing rusty, houses boarded up with no one inside, the city's infrastructure almost instantly crumbling with only one person left who knows how to fly a plane and one engineer capable of maintaining Luanda's water supply intact.

Five hundred years of the Portuguese in Angola, during which time 3-4 million slaves were shipped to the Americas, the Cold War, the Brazilian economy, the Portuguese economy, the new world order and a country that is left 90% illiterate and in the middle of a civil war when it finally achieves independence. Somehow a Polish journalist wandering around Angola in 1974 manages to encapsulate all this history in a 150-page personal narrative. Finally all the acronyms (MPLA, UPA, UNITA, FNLA, PLUA, GRAE, FRA) are somewhat organized in my head. This book is so good.

*Update: To be fair, I have learned this was taught in Anani D.'s class the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Triangle, but not when I took it. [Adazinho, I would expand on what you said but there's a reason I put a thing on for comments.]

I am My Brother's Keeper

By that I mean, of course, that I am his only Friendster.

Tonight I watched the last twenty minutes of Rocky, read the screenplay to Terminator online and aided in the slow unraveling of my sweatpants by strategically tugging loose threads. In between wishing that Kyle Reese was as sexy in the movie as he sounds in the screenplay and deciding that my firstborn child must be named Sly Witt (hyphen cohenrichgoldbergstienrabinovitch) I decided I should have just gone out, at least I could be drunk and not have done any work. But then I found this picture of an alpaca.

Sylvain Chomet, director of The Triplets of Belleville, on why most animation sucks.

I'm afraid new information on this will be scarce in the following three weeks because of other writing deadlines/leaving the country.

"Tourists, with their sensible sneakers and no-neck
children, lining up like lemmings to get a glimpse of Matt
and Katie at the Rockefeller Center fishbowl, have turned
the better part of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue into the Mall
of America. With the avenue's S.U.V.-choked traffic and an
Ann Taylor and a Gap on every corner, you might as well
window-shop in Minnesota."

If you want a sweatshirt appliqued with a portrait of loons rising in flight from a lake in the North Woods surrounded by howling timberwolves in moonlight and snow, the Mall of America can't be beat. But there's a reason why I prefer this 5th Ave.
Thanks Adam.

Fun Factoid

If you are scanning many documents with columns of numbers and the occasional horizontal line, the scanned images (as they appear on your monitor) combine to form a little stop-motion animated film of moving lines that is rather amusing entertainment on a Friday afternoon.

John Edwards, Neighborhood Advocate

"Edwards insisted that he will restore the jobs President George W. Bush's administration has dissolved. Citing the 286,000 jobs lost in New York state under the current president, Edwards said, "The president only knows one street in New York City--Wall Street." He continued, listing streets like 125th Street, Flatbush Avenue, and Jamaica Avenue, areas he hinted his administration might focus on."

Hmmm. It's not every day that the street you live on gets cited as "the people's" street. Or maybe just a fine example of urban squalor. But wait! I'm unemployed...
Columbia Spectator

You are now available for comment.

Nostalgia for Nostalgia's Sake

I've been spending too much time at This web site. It's just kind of funny, and Minneapolis is such a pretty place isn't it? There are so many lakes in the middle of the city. And it's just small enough that pretty much every photo can be annexed to some childhood event.

This fine example of riot-proof architecture is where I got asked out on my first date. I declined the invitation.

This would be the view from my locker. Note comments below the photo -- the balcony, between classes, was like the worst mosh pit at the most tightly packed concert you've ever been to.

In sum, high school. Until I was a senior there weren't any windows in the building, and then they put on a third floor with a couple of windows. But the majority of the building remained windowless. Mid-winter, if you were involved in any after-school activity you would get the before sun-up and leave after sun-down and that was it -- you wouldn't see daylight for months on end. What a dump. I went to South America for a year to get out. But I was happy to come back in the end.

This was the site of my summer job, renting canoes and selling ice cream with the ex-cons who would snort coke and steal people's sailboats at night. Sometimes they would find dead bodies. This lake is inside the city, for those who have doubts.

If you take a left at the top of this ramp you come to Bryn Mawr, the neighborhood where I lived (sadly neglected in the "neighborhoods" section, which only covers South Minneapolis and not the not-quite-so-nice parts of the city.) Not that Bryn Mawr wasn't very nice. Back in the pioneer days they would graze cattle in Bryn Mawr Meadows.

Isn't it so pretty? The midwest is pretty.

And somebody makes this every winter. If you're commenting on the houses obviously lake shore property is coveted, but nobody can own shoreline, there's bike paths all around.

So that's what it looks like where I'm from.

Happy Valentine's Day

"She hates the smell of newly mown grass, the ceaseless movement of the sea, the clackety clack of computer keyboards (which sounds like "mice MASTICATING"). She hates little old ladies. She hates scientists. She hates herself, and her body's disgusting functions. In fact, she hates the whole human race, "so unprepossessingly UPRIGHT, gangly, and so BARE," without fur or feathers: "Tiny despots in a universe that may be equally despicable."

She is grossed out by American suburbs and by the fat people who live there. She is incensed that people get horrible illnesses and die hideous, random deaths. And she is in an existential fury over the stupid, horrible meaninglessness of life, the absurdity of it all.

About the only things that Dot likes are sex with her husband, John, and dreaming about pie. "

Wow. I couldn't have said it better. More.

More famous friends:

Izzy Grinspan recently acquired an i-pod, a boyfriend and "L-Train Sex appeal". And a byline in the Voice! She must be very happy.

Growl. Hiss.

From now on only shearling will keep me warm

I'm in Malibu trying to be a superstar. I thought that California was about boobs and bikinis but I was wrong. It's like Barbarella, or maybe Clan of the Cave Bear, uggs (ughs) on every man woman and child. Some with the added accessory of a swanky pelt over the shoulder. No leather loin cloths yet, but I haven't gotten out much. My friend's mom has the only pair of acceptable Uggggs in the neighborhood, hers reading "Malibu" down the back in Olde English font. I saw Sting lying on his deck in a bathrobe, Rod Stewart in a playground full of small pink ughs on swingsets, and Fred Siegal on a bench in a white v-neck cardigan, sans ugggs (as if).

I'm investigating the details of an $8 brand of peanut butter, called "Butter" with chunkE pistachios and hunny. Last night I was at a party that contained the following elements:
Checkered parquet floors
Hula-dancing lamp
Washed-up hollywood starletto, app. age 68
Cracked out fake-baker, app. age 16
Inventor of "Butter" in fur-cuffed coat (male)
900000 ft. television screen
pinball
jumbo pac of lighters
Brandon
Molly
Emily

The starletto swept me off my feet into a mangled foxtrot. Charmed, I sipped my 7&7 while he whispered unintelligible nothings in my hear. His dark suit, it was hollywood, he was washed up, I thought for a moment I was in Weetzie Bat but this was real. Marilyn Monroe was biting her lip in a portrait on the wall. The 'stang was outside with the top up.. .

I've let this project go to shit. My stats are down, no one comes here anymore and there's no one to blame but myself. I'm busy I'm busy. I'll be better. Promise. I have to say though that as I write this I am witnessing the most incredible sunset over the Pacific, palm trees sillhouetted against the pink sky, for all the world like the cover of my old Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. I heard there's a winter mix falling in NY. Winter Mix. Mix it up.