Sad news

I'm sure everyone who reads this already knows, but I wanted to at least mention the tragic passing of actor David Carradine, discovered dead in his Bangkok hotel room on June 3. Rumor has it he hung himself, and he was a guy who was known to contemplate suicide, so that seems believable. But there has not been an official investigation yet, and it WAS in Bangkok, so I guess we'll have to wait for the official report to know for sure.

Tip a glass to him when you go out tonight, folks. :(

In happier news, I had a dream last night that I was out busting ghosts with Bill Murray. We were fighting a somewhat mysterious apparition that was causing a lightning storm of sorts over a small observation tower at an airport, I believe, but unfortunately we were the only two at the scene, and instead of the Ecto-1, we were driving a somewhat beat-up white Honda with a very small trunk, into which Bill (he was Bill Murray in the dream, not Peter Venkman) had packed all of our equipment. Everything was stuck in there, and really hard to get out, and I was informing Bill that he was going to have to invest in some much lighter proton packs if he wanted me on the team because those things were way too big for me to be carrying around. Then I woke up. It was pretty sweet.

Beyond that I don't have a whole lot to report. It's a pretty disgusting rainy day here in the city, and I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of a good friend who will be crashing at my place for the weekend, so I'm gonna peace out, beyotches.

Unibrows, low-lifes, and garbage compacting...

Ah, more New York happenings. Today feels like Friday. It's not Friday, but I've asked several of my co-workers and they all agree that it feels as if it should be Friday today. I wonder what tomorrow will be like. Perhaps we'll all just sleep in and forget to come to the office... Oh, that would be delightful.

I'm a little pooped because last night I was at the gallery until 9:15, manning the front desk for a benefit party and auction for Pure Vision Arts, an advocacy/representation group for artists with developmental disabilities. While I totally support the idea, and think it's really great that there are people dedicating themselves to helping artists who might have trouble getting representation otherwise, the evening in reality was really, really, really awkward. It was me, a bunch of caterers and organizers, two other people who work for the gallery (one of whom, who lives upstate, had just contracted Lyme disease a few days ago and we were basically trying to make sure she didn't pass out the whole time), and 200 guests. About a third of the guests had developmental handicaps ranging from Downs Syndrome to autism. It was... well... awkward. But the event was catered, I got paid overtime for doing very little, AND they had Perseco. So it's all good. I'm just a little tired today.

But, nevertheless, I've seen and heard some fun things in the past two days so I thought I'd post them for your entertainment!

1) Last night, during the event, I was in the lobby of the building talking to the night front desk man, George. He's great. While we were discussing home prices in New York versus Puerto Rico, a delivery man came in with a late dinner for someone on one of the upper floors. I don't know where this guy was from - he was white, spoke very good English, but had a heavy accent of some sort I couldn't quite identify. He was mostly bald on top, with salt and pepper hair around the sides, and the most AMAZING Unibrow I have ever seen. The thing was utterly glorious. I can hardly do it justice with words, people. Now, I am not exactly a fan of the Unibrow look, but when something is done right, you have to give credit where credit's due, and let me tell you - this Unibrow was the Platonic Ideal of Unibrows. It was thick, dark, and made a perfect V on this guy's forehad right between his eyes. Perfectly symmetrical. If Spok had a Unibrow, it would look like this man's. I was in awe. I didn't say anything to him about it, because I have a feeling he hasn't cultivated it purposely and he might be offended if I said anything. But, wow, I really wanted to shake his hand.

2) On my tired, several-Perseco-ed way home, I just got on the first train to come to 59th and Lex, without looking to see if it was a 4 or a 5. Turns out it was a 4, and I ended up at Yankee Stadium, really pissed off and tired and waiting for the downtown train along with every idiotic Yankee fan ever. Usually I identify with Yankees fans and try to appreciate their zeal, but last night I was NOT in the mood. I ended up getting on a train next to this dorky older guy and his 13 year old son, who was asking kind of annoying questions to his dad, who was then mumbling the answers unintelligibly. But I did catch this little gem of conversation:

13 year old boy: Dad, how long is this train ride going to take?
Dad: Well, it's about 10:15 now, and we're at 161st street, so I'd say, depending on the low-lifes, we'll get home around 10:45.

...I can't fathom what low-lifes would have to do with the length of a train ride. Maybe he meant the MTA? But then you'd think he'd say "The low-lifes at the MTA." Certainly there were lots of low-lifes among the people leaving the stadium, but they were all already on the train and couldn't hinder it from going whatever speed it wanted. I'm stumped.

3) This morning on the 5 on the way to work, two very tall guys got on at 125th Street and stood in the doorways of my car. They were being kind of loud and annoying, almost as if drunk, but it was 9:15 in the morning. Not that I'm judging anyone who's durnk at 9:15 in the morning. But... seriously. Anyway, at some point I looked toward the one guy and noticed a giant streak of SPIT runnng down the door and onto the floor in front of him, where it was forming a big frothy puddle. DUDE! If you have to spit THAT bad while you're on the train, go OUTSIDE and spit BETWEEN the cars! Don't f-ing spit on the FLOOR! God! The subway is filthy enough with all kinds of mysterious grime and dirt - the last thing we need is somebody spitting on the door AND the floor at 9:15 in the goddamn morning! I was so angry. Sometimes I really want to just get up in people's faces and yell at them about common decency and respect for one's fellow man, but... eh... I'd probably lose the fight. This IS New York.

4) I had to run to the post office at Rockefeller Center today to drop off a package. On my walk down 6th Ave, I passed a bunch of guys who were bringing large metal grates of some sort out of a back door of a building and across the sidewalk to a truck. I just tried to get past them without getting knocked down by one of the grates, but as I went by I heard this horrible crunching, grating, squealing noise, and turned to see tha the truck they were loading was a GARBAGE truck! There were a bunch of guys around it, loading the metal grates into it one by one and watching them get crushed by the giant compactor in the back of the truck. Funnest thing ever!!


And, lastly, from our friends at OverheardInNewYork.com:

Texting teenager: Is there two "L"s in "Fordham"?
Teenager's friend: Uhh...just one, I think.

Let's see how this works...

Oh my. The internet is down at the office, and I have left my flash drive at home. So I have, at the moment, absolutely nothing to work on. I could be free-thinking about work on my book, I suppose, or composing brilliant poetry, but I thought it might be fun to freestyle on the blog instead. I’ll just write something up in Word, save it, and post it when the interwebs are back up and running.

So, fun New York adventures: it’s catch-up time!

Firstly, I haven’t actually seen a whole lot of particularly interesting bits lately in the city, and I can’t really imagine why. Perhaps I’ve just been enjoying the fine weather and listening to my fine music too much to be bothered by the craziness going on around me, or perhaps everyone else is so busy doing the same thing that they aren’t putting their usual hardcore effort into being weird. But suffice it to say, the city has been pretty darn normal lately.

I have, however, run across some fun things here and there. For example:

1) On the subway on Monday morning, which was incredibly packed and gave me no choices about where to look except at people’s shirts to avoid eye contact, I spotted a man in a white T-shirt that featured a black and white drawn picture of Chucky. Child’s Play doll, you know, who’s supposed to be wearing a cute little jumper and striped shirt combo? Well, in this picture, he was gangsta. Puerto Rican gangsta, to be specific. Headband tied in a knot, big T-shirt, bling necklace, and sagging pants. I couldn’t help but laugh. Dude, the whole reason that Chucky is scary is that he looks like a sweet innocent child but is actually evil. Chucky as a Crip… not so scary.

2) Last night I had my first run-in with a restaurant that served $6 Vietnamese rice vermicelli bowls – delish! – but also had shark fin on the menu. I wasn’t sure what to do. I can’t support shark fin. But I sure as hell support rice vermicelli! I just got the curried shrimp with coconut milk over noodles and resolved not to ever go back there. So sad.

3) On Sunday morning I got up at 6:00 am, after a rooftop party in Queens and a late-night kitty visit at Kate’s, to do a homeless model photo shoot. It was way fun. I’m going to try to post a few of the photos here via Model Mayhem but you may have to have an account to see them – let me know if they don’t work and I’ll try another route:

Oh, wait!

I know what to blog about! Check me out, I'm published TWICE this week!

Firstly, a while back I may or may not have made a big deal of having a short story accepted as part of an anthology called "Memoirs of Meanness." It's coming out THIS WEEK from Pergola Press, after much hemming and hawing over formatting and such. Dude, it's a BOOK. I don't have many details just yet but when I know more about where you can buy them and if/when/where there are any readings, I'll post up here.

Secondly, my friend Carlos and I had a talk the other day about surrealist fiction, so I sent him two of my stories. They're not relaly surrealist in the hardcore literary analysis way, but they're surreal nonetheless. So, turns out, he loved them! And he published on on his lit mag, The Whiskey Dregs! Check me out!

Stumped.

Well. I really want to blog today but I just... I'm stumped. All I can think of to do is regurgitate some news article or post some video or ramble on about my weekend, but none of those things seem to fit the theme of the blog.

I think I've got a summer fever or something. All I want to do is just go sit in the park, where it's so green I could've sworn they were enhancing the trees with some sort of fake green color until I realized I was IN it, not watching it on TV. Creepy how we assume we're looking at everything through a lens these days, isn't it? Is that how you spell lens? Wow, I'm brain dead.

I had 3,000 words to write today for a magazine, so maybe I have an excuse, but I don't feel like anything I wrote really justifies my stupidity at this point. Also I guess I didn't get nearly as much sleep as I should have over the weekend, so maybe that's part of it.

I worked on Saturday morning, after a night of much vodka, and then had a modeling session/photo shoot on Sunday morning after much beer and three hours of sleep. The modeling was actually fun this time - partly because I really like the photographer and partly because I haven't done any modeling for so long. I really only ENJOY it when it's a concept I'm behind, and this one was hilarious: I cut up a wife beater and wore a pair of really beat up jeans, got myself all grungy looking (mascara for dirt under my fingernails and streaked on my skin, with some green eyeshadow as grass stains on my feet), made a little cardboard sign that said "Starving Model: Please Help" on one side and "Will Pose for Food" on the other, and went and posed enar this vacant lot in my neighborhood. It was hilarious. It was only 7:00 am so the streets were mostly empty, but a few lonely souls wandered by and gave us the weirdest looks. I'll put up some pictures when I get them, I suppose.

I've also had this idea that I can't decide if I want to model in/make happen photographically, or draw. But the other day on the train back from JFK (a loooong train ride, and I was verrrry tired, so my brain was doing interesting things), I thought how cool it would be to have a series of images of a woman climbing around and using the poles in the subway car as props. Like standing on seats and leaning out, holding onto the overhead bar, wrapping on leg around the middle bar and reaching out to the side bar with her hand, just kind of writhing and wriggling all around a totally empty car like that. Or, better yet, a full car, but that complicates the whole thing. And in my head she's like this creepy kind of heroin-chic fairy lady in a small, clingy dress - or if I draw her, totally nude - that looks like she's somehow a ghost or a spirit totally out of place on the subway... I think I might see if I can get a photographer on board and try it out, at like 3:00 am on a Tuesday or something... Input?

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.