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.