Friday, August 31, 2007

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

My big outting on this stay-at-home vacation was to Canal Street yesterday to buy supplies at Pearl Paint.

Canal Street, Wikipedia tells me, is named for an actual canal dug in the 1800s to drain a toxic, disease-ridden pond into the Hudson River. I have to say it still smells. Of rotting fruit and car exhaust. Mmm.

Canal Street generally gives me the willies. Every third person seems shifty and this time every street vendor (incense and buddha sellers, baseball caps, etc.) mumbled at me in the manner of the Washington Square Park weed purveyors. I couldn't tell what they were saying but it sounded sinister in the bright sunlight.

Pearl Paint was a welcome respite but also a chore. Up the stairs for paper, down the stairs for brushes, up the stairs (2 flights) for acrylic paint, down for oil paint crayons. First floor for Elmer's Glue, back up for fancy paper. I intend to create something for J., for her birthday, and also for my sad walls. I've been sketching all week and have some cool and completely impossible ideas...

On the walk home, I encountered a domestic kerfuffle. On the corner of W. Broadway and Spring St. a couple was screaming and fighting and then were in their car, still smacking each other around, while passersby knocked on the window to ask if the woman was ok. It was at once disturbing and heartening.

Discovered Vico C at Ideya.

Read: Indecision by Benjamin Kinkel (mildly funny); On the Couch, by Lorraine Bracco (sister-loaned, this book will alter your already ambivalent opinion of Harvey Keitel); and Ann Patchett's wonderful The Magician's Assistant from ten years ago (oops).

Went to Barnes & Noble on lower Sixth Avenue and AGAIN bought a book I'd already read. Ack.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

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