Oh, also...

Check this out.

http://www3.nfb.ca/webextension/rip-a-remix-manifesto/

Happy Saturday!

Some days, when you drank a lot of vodka the night before and still have to get up to go work 4 hours of completely useless overtime on a Saturday morning and your head hurts and when you walked up out of the subway you almost stepped in a really horrendous pile of vomit on the stairs... You just need to put on some makeup, turn on the tape deck, and pull the wig down from the shelf...

Back to the city

Well, I'm back in the city after five glorious days of laying around with friends, chasing Libby's children around, drinking, eating, and generally loving having more than a foot of space on every side of me NOT filled with some smelly person or garbage. It was glorious.

I got back to the city on Tuesday night and immediately felt the full weight of the next few weeks settling on my frail, frail, sore-from-boogey-boarding shoulders. I realized while in North Carolina (ie, the South) that I have way too much going on in my life. Too many social engagements, projects, plans, etc, and that I really really need to work on just slowing down, taking things day by day, and making sure I have some time off every now and then to decompress. But when I looked at my planner I realized that I have maybe three days in the next month that aren't already booked. And, well, that was not good. Cause I have a lot of things I want to do in my own time, for myself, by myself, that just can't happen when I'm so busy, even if I'm busy doing fun things with friends.

So, on Wednesday night I had a little bit of a meltdown. And by little bit I mean, of course, giant calamitous fit of neurosis. I accomplished nothing and started crying at the mere idea of folding laundry. It was bad.

But, the next day, on my way home, I walked by the H&M on the corner of 59th and Lexington, and out of the corner of my eye I recognized my friend Tom Napak from college staring at me in black and white from the store window. "Whaaaat?" I said, and whirled around. Yup, there he was, in all his uber-sexy glory with band-mate Tom Furey (the two of them make up Dangerous Muse), advertising their super-awesome Fashion Against AIDS shirts!! I flipped out, took a bunch of pictures on my phone, and immediately texted Tom to say congratulations.

I just got back from the H&M on 5th and 52nd, where Dangerous Muse is in the window as well. They're so sexy that their picture is hanging in more windows than Dita Von Teese, Cindi Lauper, and Katy Perry, just to name a few. Yeah. THAT sexy. Anyway, I bought a shirt - SO cute! The girl shirts are yellow and have a purple design of male and female condoms shaped into a heart! When you purchase a shirt, 25% of the retail price ($16.90 for girls, $14.90 for boys shirts) goes to HIV/AIDS awareness projects. And you get to look super awesome and chic and support the awesomeness that is Tom. Check it out. http://www.hm.com/us/#/faa2009/

So, I'm feeling better. Hell, if Tom can be in the window of H&M, I can damn well get some writing done and have time to paint, too. I'll figure it out. But I may have to lock down the old schedule for a while and say no to al ot of invites in order to get my sanity back.

Ta!

Something else the world doesn't need...

I'm not sure how to feel about this:

"Bacterial Orchestra (2006) is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism. The installation consists of several audio cells. Every cell listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds, trying to play together in a musical way. The musical material comes from the background noise, people talking or sounds played by other cells.

Every cell has a unique DNA. Only the ones that are musical fit enough survives. If
the surroundings doesn’t meet up to its conditions - too noisy, too quiet or no distinct
pulse - the cell dies and is reborn with a new, hopefully better, set of DNA.

The result is a musical organism adapting to and changing its environment, growing and evolving with other cells and spectators.

Every cell is simple, but together they create a complex whole. Every cell makes a sound, but together they create music."


On the one hand, the idea of a bunch of iPhones, or any other small, popular device communicating with others in such an easily recognizable way is really cool. And it brings up all kinds of interesting questions about what makes music music in the first place. The article says that the cells only use "musical" sounds to play in a "musical way," but they don't explain exactly what that means. It could be a distinct sound, a rhythmic sound, a beat-like thump, a short burst of melody, a chord, an anything. And the video on the page shows several kinds of sounds being used, so obviously it's not an easy definition to pin down - I just wish they'd put a better definition on it in the article.

And the idea of one sound branching out, feeding on itself ad infinitum is really astoundingly interesting. One note becomes two, becomes however many more, branching out and out and out into an orchestra of noise that is supposedly musical... how fascinating. BUT - only fascinating because machines are doing it.

Because, if you think about it, that's how music has already been done for thousands of years, organically, by people. Sounds inspiring other sounds, coming from many different sources to create an organic whole - jamming.

So once again, with Terminator: Salvation on its second day of mainstream release, I must ask: what is it about machines doing something we already can do, and quite well, and in a far superior fashion, that is so incredible to us? Is it simply our ability to recreate artificially the things we are almost all capable of creating organically? The fact that we have to apply our minds and our technology to achieve it, rather than just ourselves?

I don't like that idea. Why artificially recreate a good thing just because we can? Why not take a step back, smell the roses, realize they smell better than factory-made perfume, and appreciate human life and its ability to create art in itself? Why make machines do it for us? Or is that a higher order of art in itself?

Somebody help me out here - I can't quite figure this one out.


And, PLEASE, DO comment people! I need to know people are actually reading this and I'm not just doing it for myself! But, also, please don't expect an immediate response. I'm going to the beach and I'm turning off my phone and I'm keeping away from computers! Be back next Wednesday!

...every time a rug is micturated upon in this fair city...

Holy crap people! Well, holy urine, I guess. NASA has successfully purified human urine into drinkable water. They're celebrating by drinking pee on the Space Station and at NASA. There's a little blurb on it in the New York Times.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this a gigantic long-jump style leap toward solving drinking water problesm here on our home planet? I mean, great that the astronauts (and one cosmonaut) are swallowing their own swill and all, but shouldn't this be a huge story for places like Africa and overpopulated regions of... well... everywhere? Isn't the freshwater crisis like a humongous gigantic bomb of a story? Shouldn't we be dancing in the streets now that we can all drink our pee and not worry so much?

...Oh, wait. I forgot. No, the freshwater crisis ISN'T a big story, even though it's made huge headlines and is a horrible fucking calamity that people need to be made aware of and forced to act upon immediately so save us all from horrible parched deaths. Because people don't want to hear about it. And drinking pee? Well by George, that's just gross, folks. Way too disgusting to be real, much less a viable solution to a worldwide problem! Heck, it's even worse than that whoosiewhatsit liberal hippie notion of using methane as a renewable energy source! Hogwash! That's just disgusting.

Well, dammit, people, I'M excited! Let's go dance in the streets anyway. Start a trend. And drink our own pee.

Spring in the city!

It's just lovely out today, which is welcome after a few days of unseasonably cool weather, and everyone is out in their favorite spring dresses and shorts and flip-flops and such. This morning, getting on a crowded 5 train in the Bronx, I was stuck behind a very tall, large (big-boned, shall we say) woman who seemed excessively awkward while stepping into the car. She was in flip-flops and a light brown cotton sun dress, and I vaguely resented her for probably having her day planned around lounging in the park and going shopping while I had to sit inside the gallery and not even see the sunlight. I was annoyed and thought some vaguely mean thought about this woman, then forgot all about her once I got in and got a spot. However, at the the next stop I managed to nab a seat and found myself sitting facing her from across the car while she stood in the doorway.

I noticed her feet - they were huge. Which made sense, I supposed, given her height and breadth. But they were nicely pedicured. Whatever.

I turned to my book and read for a few minutes before the strangest voice broke through my reverie - it was like a Monty Python member dressed up as a granny kind of voice, but minus the British accent.

I looked up again and realized the tall awkward girl was in fact a very tall man in a strawberry blonde wig that did not in any way compliment his complexion. But I immediately liked her more than I had - you go, girl!

2 days till I leave for a short vacation on the beach! Wahooooooo!

Fun on the internets!

Ah, Mondays in the city. People are either angry that it's Monday, discussing their crazy weekends with friends, or sleeping off hangovers. And the internets are abuzz with things I am just now seeing after not reading much last week because I was writing DVD reviews like mad. So, here are a few tidbits to make you laugh:


During my lunch hour today:

1) As I was walking down 55th Street after buying some coffee in Dunkin Donuts (an adventure in itself, after I'd gotten into a kind of confused staring contest with a homeless man outside who said something in gibberish to me and then refused to repeat himself, but instead just smiled at me while I blinked at him), some really loud young men decided that they should walk DIRECTLY behind me and talk very loudly. This is what they said:
Dude #1: Yeah, I'm talking about my SCROTUM.
Dude #2: Yeah, just to be clear.
Dude #1: My nutsack.
(Pause...)
Dude #1: Man, I've got to go back to that strip club.

2) Later on, as I was walking down 5th Ave, I heard two men discussing homeless people when we walked by an old babushka looking panhandler (who I later saw stuff her bills into her pocket to make it look as if she wasn't making any money... sneaky...):
Man #1: Homeless people are interesting...
Man #2: They can make a good bit of money doing that.
Man #1: I'd imagine.
Man #2: No, I mean it! There used to be this man who would ride on the 2 train with me every day. He had a skateboard and he would push himself up and down the cars on it, as if he had no legs. And people would give him a LOT of money, cause he had no legs. But then, he would get off the train every day at South Street Seaport, and STAND UP -
Man #1: Stand up?
Man #2: Yeah, he'd stand up on his LEGS and walk to his car and go home.

3) And later on still, on 56th Street as I was heading back to work, I passed a gay looking thug-type man who was saying to the girl he was with:
"That fucking ignorant fuck! That illiterate fucking fuck!
I was impressed by his use of expletives.



Meanwhile, over the weekend and in some cases last week, these things were happening on the internet:

1) David Bowie meets Tim Burton meets Colonel Sanders - in chicken form!

2) Take a good look at all three of these photos, people:
-
-
-
Now, imagine little old me at a Man Man show, getting all riled up by the music and finally getting up the gumption to jump into the moshpit nearby. And immediately getting SLAMMED to the floor by a huge, sweaty, almost-naked body...
Turned out, that "most pit" wasn't a mosh pit at all. It was just that guy flinging himself around in nothing but a headband and underpants. And he flattened me.
Good times.

3) If you click on this photo:

...there's more where that came from. Jesus is WITH YOU ALWAYS and don't you forget that next time you're looking at porn online, people.

Almost forgot...

I can't believe I forgot to post this the other day! In my list of things I'd seen by 11:30 am, I didn't put:

The guy leaning up against the wall of Bergdorf Goodman Men's, who, as I walked by, said to his friend, "Fuggedaboudit."

Seriously, he said it! And he was serious, because he was talking before it and kept talking after it, and neither of them laughed.

I was so happy to hear a New Yorker say the quintessential New York phrase that I almost skipped to work. It's interesting, because as a non-natve New Yorker who has lived her entire time in the city in neighborhoods where she "doesn't belong," I try to remind myself every day that New York is, above all, a place of constant change. As America's primary gateway, it always has been a city in flux, with demographics flowing from younger to older and back, populations of foreigners rising and falling, hot neighborhoods changing almost weekly. Harlem used to be a farm, then rapidly changed hands from a mostly Jewish to a Polish to an Irish to an African American area, and now is slowly shifting to a Hispanic and young white professional neighborhood. That's how I told myself it was ok to live there, and deal with the mean stares I sometimes got, and how I now deal with living in the South Bronx.

But what scares me about this ever-changing face of the city is... well, ok, it's two things:

1) that the real New Yorker, the "fuggedaboudit" guy, will be pushed out by the new money moving in. When 9/11 happend (and I hate to bring up the specter of it, but...) the city fell silent except for those guys, the firefighters and cops and rescue workers who had grown up here and love this city like nothing else. Those are the guys who make it New York, and I see fewer and fewer of them with every passing year. So seeing this guy at Bergdorf's made me feel great.

2) that I have to then accept the Hipster as a legitimate presence in the city. And I just hate Hipsters.

So far today...

It is 11:30 am. I have been at work for an hour and a half. And already today, I have seen:

1) the biggest German Shepherd I have EVER seen in my life, on a leash held by a similarly large police officer;
2) a man on a fine spring morning wearing a crushed purple velvet blazer;
3) a chihuahua so fat its legs looked like they were only about an inch and a half long;
4) two homeless people with a shopping cart just as decked out as their bodies were in hand-crocheted... everything. Multi-colored. Multi-yarned. Multi-crocheted.
5) And this article about Cheerios being a drug.

Hm.

The midnight train going anywhere...

Ah, the subway. The rich vein of scum that is the lifeblood of the city. The poor man's answer to transportation and the rich man's answer to "too drunk to drive home." Where one can hone one's ability to ignore the other 200 people packed into the same car despite their raised voices, gigantic feet that stomp on yours, and general stench. Where one can learn how to avoid eye contact with 400 eyes at once and fade into a crowd when a panhandler walks by. It's a city unto itself, possessed of its own social castes, snack vendors, and a code of conduct far stricter than one finds in most elevators, encompassing etiquette for food consumption, music playing and listening, conversational faux pas, drunken weaving... you name it, there's a different way of dealing with it on the subway.

The subway irritates me. I get very peevish very easily on long underground trips, particularly on weekends, when some small voice in my head is always saying 'Don't we do this enough on weekdays? Can't we just take a cab?' while the other small voice is saying 'No we can't take a cab, you idiot, we'd be bankrupt in no time if we took cabs everywhere!' The two voices usually get into knock-down, drag-out fistfights with each other, which makes me slightly more irritable. And when this is going on in my head at 3:00 am on a Saturday night local 2 train that I'm doomed to be on for 150 blocks, I get really antsy.

And when I'm that antsy and am suddenly confronted by obnoxious people on the train... well... I get VERY irritable.

So, at 3:00 am on Saturday, when Connor and I had finished a late-night sushi binge on MacDougal (which involved a whole lot of obnoxious drunk people in the restaurant), we clambered tiredly onto the 2 train and I braced myself for the coming grouchiness. So did Connor - he gets a lot of flack when I'm grouchy.

We got on the train and were immediately subjected to Obnoxious Columbia Students. There were four of them - 2 men who were very gay and 2 women who were way too tan, and all in very expensive looking clothing. They weren't doing anything particularly annoying, per se, but they were talking REALLY LOUDLY about the most inane details of their oh-so-completely-uninteresting Columbia undergrad lives. I was able to block most of it out and focus mainly on digesting the huge amount of spicy tuna, salmon, and yellowtail in my stomach, and wondering who the aging rock-star we'd seen in the restaurant was. Until I heard the girl next to me announce: "You should totally have picked up your phone, because if you had, I was totally, honestly ready to walk down 122nd Street, the WHOLE WAY to the D train, BY MYSELF, at like midnight. I was READY. I know it wouldn't have been very safe or a good idea, but I was READY. I would have DONE it."

Oh, for Christ's sake! 122nd Street at midnight? If you LIVE near Columbia and are on a train filled with other people who live near Columbia and are really dumb enough to think that 122nd St is THAT bad... 2 choices for you. Either A) keep it to yourself because everyone will think you are a MORON or will try to mug you now that they know you're easy pickings, or B) take a stroll through Bed-Stuy or Jamaica or the 155th Projects or even near Fordham - then see how scary 122nd St. is at midnight.
Twit.

Finally these upstanding young citizens got off the train and left us in relative peace. I was content for a few seconds to contemplate the fish in my tummy.

But not for long! Oh no, on this ever-changing, evolving, developing, degenerating world of Subway Travel, the worst is never the worst. Something far fouler is always around the bend.

Two young guys - Dominican, if the one guy's shirt can be believed - sat down across from us. They were having a lively conversation in rapid Spanish, seemed nice enough, weren't bothering anyone overtly. Except the one guy was... how do I put this? He was a big guy to begin with, probably 6'1" or 6'2", so he was having some difficulty fitting himself comfortably onto the narrow train seat. Makes perfect sense. But he was one of those big guys who: A) appears to have very recently become fat and doesn't quite know what to do with his extra skin, and B) feels the need not to just sit, but to LOUNGE, in order to be comfortable. Well, with his stature and the smallness of the train, there was no way he could get comfortable, but instead of just dealing with that fact, he instead chose to twitch and twist and gallumph about, crossing and uncrossing his legs, trying to fling his arms over the back of the seat - even though there IS no back to those seats on the train - lean back, lean forward, wrap himself around the pole nearby... and continuously lift up his T-shirt to... I don't know... reposition his gut? Air it out? Show as many people as possible a sneak shot of his gross belly? I got several peeks at it before turning away, now contemplating that the fish in my belly wanted to escape.

But, alas! When I turned away, my eyes were met with a far LESS appealing sight! Yes, it existed! There was a woman sitting further down the bench seat, picking at her eye makeup in a small mirror. She was shaped like a Hershey Kiss. As if she had been sitting for her entire life and her body had just taken up the least gravity-resistant shape it could. She had no discernable breasts - if there were any beneath her bright pink shirt, they were masked by the stretches of that shirt as it endeavored to envelope a bulging, flabby stomach that burgeoned out from the waistband of a pair of black ripped leggings. NOT PANTS - leggings. I could see a large portion of her thigh through a rip in the leggings. It was as unattractive as the rest of her. She was very unpleasant to look at. But it was pretty much stare at her, or the guy across from me, or risk falling asleep on the train - a fate worse than death. (The rats might eat you if you fall asleep!) So I continued to watch her placidly pick at her eye makeup. After a while she put her mirror away and started to... oh my god... she was like... PETTING her distended belly. Rubbing it, as if she were pregnant, but she was NOT pregnant. Make no mistake. I know a round, firm pregnant belly when I see one, and this one was neither round nor firm - it was gelatinous... oh my god was she tucking her hand up UNDER her roll? Yes she was! I almost vomited up my sushi. She was petting and LIFTING her belly now.

I had to look away. It was horrendous. But when I turned, there was the gigantic fat man again, pulling up his T-shirt and breathing heavily! I saw his stomach. The yellowtail in my own stomach made a leap for the esophagus. Dear god, where could I turn?

I turned back toward the gross lady, thinking I'd just look past her and further down the car, but I was distracted because she appeared to be REMOVING her almost-flattened-by-gravity breast from her shirt. It was morbidly fascinating, watching her try to resurrect her almost-dead, deflated piece of femininity and display it to the world. Horror-stricken, I watched as she pulled it upward from the depths of her pink shirt, before plopping it back down - mostly still covered, thank goodness - into her bra, now in some semblance of cleavage.

I managed not to hurl for the last few minutes it took us to get to our stop, but just barely, and I had to keep my eyes closed. But I've never smelled sweeter air than the rancid bouquet of the 3rd Avenue-149th stop's fetid track water when I got out of that car.