"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.

Quero ser o dente e a faca

It's truly not neglect, I just have little of interest to report.

This Week:
(over and over) Tom Zé, Leonard Cohen, One particular song by Chico Buarque

(recent positive developments) V., Crimson Gold, when Zadie Smith writes, "These days, given the choice between a week in the Caribbean and a week reading A High Wind in Jamaica, I would probably still choose the book and the sofa."

(recent, actual, anticipated geography) Providence, NY, LA

(The golden age. And all the girls.) Antropofagia because, as it proclaims via manifesto, "Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays."

Birthday present of the week. Via Low Culture.

Você fala minha linkagem?

I have commenced linking seriously. How? Why? Adam (Int'l Man of Leisure), Nathalie (Cup of Chicha), Emily (The Little Helper) and Josh (Dirty Peaches) are my friends. I was a receptionist where Jason Kottke was a web designer back during the bubbled euphoria of a Minnesota summer, year 2000. He had the first web log I ever met (and he went on to design Gawker and get profiled in the New Yorker. Pretty fancy business.) El resto are just el resto, they link me, or I read them, or they offer Freudian analysis in Portuguese.

hypounpalatable

The first thirty minutes of my day are dominated by an acute awareness of temperature disparities between under the covers and the rest of the world. I bask in the sleepy mindstate of clock radio dispatches, vaguely absorbing reports on the latest round of exploding vehicles and the occasional interview with notable citizen of the day.

This morning I learned of a new disease, "hypografia" documented in this interview with neurologist Alice Flaherty, author of the book The Midnight Disease. Apparently this marvelous affliction bestows one with a compulsive and insatiable need to write as much as possible. My first reaction was one of jealousy (and a hankering for some dex) until she continued to elaborate a period of time in her life when, overcoming personal tragedy, she would wake up in the middle of the night and cover the walls with mini post-it notes of incoherent ideas, unable to sleep until she had written everything out. I immediately thought of a drawer full of crumpled paper, including a fair amount of mini post-its, in my bedroom. And a personally embarrassing habit I have of writing terribly emotional and lengthy e-mails in the middle of the night, and even worse, text messages. And then I thought, even worse, of weblogging... how perhaps this whole project is proof that I am a diseased hypografic.

I will report back after reading the book. I tend to avoid scientific analyses of creative motivation. I've always found studies that cite higher instances of depression amongst writers (such as the one Flaherty mentions) to be underhandedly self-congratulatory in some way. As an aspiring writer I took issue with a perception that being depressed was a prerequisite to the task, with anti-depressants serving as some sort of badge of authenticity. Then of course I had to go on them, and I dutifully eat shit. However, my opinion continues to be that depression does nothing for creativity -- unless hating yourself and everyone else and anything you might possibly produce while weeping incessantly can be counted as "motivation." Sylvia Plath, bipolar postergirl, is quoted in the interview as saying "When you're ill that's all you are," and I agree.

But all of this is an interesting consideration, the physiology of motivation. If Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde on a six day cocaine binge and everyone from Jack Kerouac to Sartre to your creative writing workshop uses amphetamines, hypografia is indeed sought after. I can't express exactly how much I love writing when there is a lot of brain chaos, and it is the hope of obtaining that state of mind that motivates the endeavor in the first place. It just seems odd that a *thing* has been made out of it (to use a word other than disorder or disease) that this state of mind is one that could be coalesced into an entity, and one considered "treatable" at that.

At least now I'll have time to read the book. Now that I'm jobless. Again.

I'm so relieved!

"Do you feel there is something missing in your life? Something not quite right? I bet you're not a virgin. How do I know? Because I used to be just like you. I'm living proof that regaining your virginity can be the road to a newer and fuller life. Thousands of people have come to us and they all say the same thing -- "Something's missing from my life and I don't know what to do about it!" They say "It's over," we say "It's just the beginning!" They come to me, the president of The Society for the Recapture of Virginity, and by using the VRS 3000TM I find their virginity and give them the world."

I've been looking at this on Friendster for so long. If only I had learned earlier.

Oscars

The nominations aren't quite as offensive as usual. I mean, forgiving the obvious. There are so many for City of God... Does the Best Director nomination have any sympathy for Katia Lund, co-director and Brown grad? Will the Best Adapted Screenplay nomination consider that author Paulo Lins told me I had a big nose? And if we're shocked and awed by favelados and nominating Cidade de Deus for Best Editing why why why wasn't the editing of archival footage in Bus 174 given a nod with a Best Documentary nomination? Particularly in lieu of nominating The Weather Underground, which looked and sounded like garbage. That's the worst, and that not a single actor from Lord of the Rings was nominated but Naomi Watts was for 21 Grams. I also wish Elephant and Raising Victor Vargas had been given some minor afterthought...

Yesterday I watched a polarfleece bedecked sensitive man hit on a girl by saying, in a deep and serious tone, that 21 Grams was "masterful" and, I kid you not, "history in the making." She was all like, "I'm waiting for my boyfriend..." I choked on my coffee.

An army of succubi have descended upon the city. I have been applying emollient to their thirsty tentacles but as the battle rages the blog falters. Falter not O blog! I shall restore thee to your throne of greatness! A future of dougnuts and turnip cakes awaits us. Ask not of milk and honey nor of Aloe Vera for thine paper cuts. Patience, patience.

If instead of pod people we were simply iPods...

Saramago you kill me. I thought I was going to have nightmares about dogs chewing on fetid corpses on a street filled with excrement, instead I stayed up all night to finish the book (in English I'm afraid.) From the generosity of friends who lend sprang coincidence, because I read Blindness immediately after reading Chromophobia.

Batchelor writes of 'minimalist' interiors as places of empty white space, as "a model of what the body should be like from within. Not a place of fluids, organs, muscles, tendons and bones all in a constant, precarious and living tension with each other, but a vacant hollow, whited chamber, scraped clean, cleared of any evidence of the grotesque embarassments of an actual life." It is precisely the epidemic of white blindness in Saramago's novel that creates a world where death, waste, sex and violence can no longer be sanitized -- it is when the interior becomes a true vacant whiteness that civilization topples.

And during both all I could think of was The Tale of the Body Thief, when Lestat is so disgusted that leaving his vampire body means returning to the world of head colds and shitting. Funny how whatever you read when you were thirteen stays with you forever.