Random Reportings

Finally, Friday. Though it just means that more work looms on the horizon: moving the 300+ books my mother painstakingly dusted and moved and organized, since the new sofa is unlikely to be squeezed past the near end of it. DANG.

Painting the bathroom again in that lovely shade of sunny yellow that makes me look like I'm 37% better-looking to myself than I really am (don't want to think too much about that.)

The only music I can listen to while doing all this stuff is the Beatles and James Taylor's funkier stuff ("Honey, Don't Leave L.A.")

I didn't even mention the coolest thing, from a couple weeks ago. Was lucky enough to attend the Food & Wine magazine's 2009 Best New Chefs event at the great City Winery space. Star sightings: from Top Chef, that cute Italian guy and the bald guy who won and his gal-pal on the show. Plus Harold Dieterle from Season One and Ethan Suplee, the ... slow guy from "My Name is Earl." The food was ... there aren't words. You can read more at the Food & Wine page or New York magazine.

My life in bullet points

Oh shut up. Just be glad it's not another freaking PowerPoint, right? Okay. Going backward... tough day with Tribeca Film Festival and total, massive online rejection of any ticket-buying joy.

Current guilty-pleasure reading: The Straw Men by Michael Marshall. "Brilliantly written and scary as hell" -- Stephen King.

Easter in Harlem: wow. just wow. Riverside Church is gorgeous. But you knew that. Mom dragged me there and for me just being in an above-ground subway train in Harlem was WAY COOL. I know I sound like I'm 12. But that's what church does to you. The waaaaay long service was oddly punctuated with opportunities for people to grab your hand and that would've been jake if the lady next to me hadn't grabbed a mini -bottle of hand sanitizer right after giving me my paw back after three verses of Amazing Grace with totally made-up lyrics. No disrespect.

Maine in March...

Plus ca change....

Instead of going to the gym I'm scanning old photos. It's very.... aggravating and slow, truth be told. My scanner is my non-printing printer which is ridiculous since its such a behemoth.

Meanwhile, it's a cool, sunny Sunday and I'm in the middle of renovating my apartment. Step one: move ginormo bookcase that I found on the street (how on EARTH did I get it home alone? I'm so impressed!) out of the bedroom and into the livingroom where it looks very nice against the dusky blue wall. Next step: move all the books (around 350) and arrange in the way that makes me look the smartest.

I do not know why my mother thought it was okay to send me off to first grade in a dress that short. I guess that explains why I was so popular. I remember that pencil-box with such fondness. The shoes? Not so much. Yikes.

Birdland

So, yeah, I've not posted in a while because I went to Maine and wanted to post photos but couldn't find my camera so bought two cheapy throw-aways and took great pics but haven't gotten them processed. "Processed." Can you imagine.

I'll highlight the highlights from my most recent Maine trip. I spotted a mink. No, in the wild! In the front yard! Well, more like "over yonder" and I didn't really know it was a mink at the time. I thought fox, first, then otter. It sinewed blackly on the white expanse of snow about 200 yards from me, went down to the pond but not in, and then silkily scurried back up the hill and away. P. informed me, after my description of the creature, that it was a mink, though it might have been a fisher (the woodland animal that ate some of our cats in my childhood. We think.) I

I thought I had another moment of nature's miracleness when I watched a wood pecker in the tree I used to climb (it got so tall! I got so old!!) and then observed a bunch of chickadees also pecking, at the lilac bush in front of the house. J. informed me that that's normal, they're just also pecking for wood bugs. Like there's not a totally full bird-feeder right there on the terrace. Hello? Greedy little bastards.

Okay, I'll Make This Quick

An exercise in brevity. Highlights of the last week included getting a new person to read to at the Lighthouse (one time thing) who truly inspired and even got me out of the house. We'll call him Dr. R.S., a highly-respected world music expert. He's (I'm guessing) 70, completely blind and is writing a book. He hung out with Fela Kuti (!!!) back in the day and because of him I ended up at SOB's last night to hear Jamaican reggae/hip hop star Sean Paul. Who knew? Star sighting: the young guy from tv's Criminal Minds on Sixth Avenue with his posse. I actually recognized his voice before I saw his face. I bought a couch (ouch) from Room and Board. The color scheme for my apartment is gonna be dusky blue, flannel gray accented with chartreuse. La di da. The only way to watch the Oscars is afterward, same night, DVR'd and fast-forwarded. Makes for a late night but totally worth it.

Quantum Convulsions

The sloth of my writing life is apparently cyclical, corresponding to the arrival in my perpetually unlocked mailbox of Harpers and Atlantic Monthly magazines. They tend to arrive together in an overwhelming embarrassment of reading riches. And they never fail to inspire me. Not every article, no, but usually at least one that has me rapt and joyous (the dryly hilarious "Findings"* in Harpers or depressed (the amazing writing power of Edward Hoagland, in his current essay, "Curtain Calls*) in a good way -- the way that the colorful universe of books in Barnes & Noble makes me want to write, too, and also stops me dead in my literary tracks. *

From "Findings" this month: Australian researchers were trying to solve the problem of humans outliving their eyes; scientists found that brownsnout spookfish grow mirrors to reflect light into the retinas. Gu Gu, a panda in China, bit his third human... Physicists looking for gravitational waves may have discovered instead the noise of space-time breaking down into individuals grains; these quantum convulsions, said one physicist, would confirm the theory that the universe is a blurry holographic projection of a distand two-dimensional plane. .. Coca-Cola is not an efective spermicide."

 And Hoagland's essay made me envision my own inevitable "twilight years" and death in a strangely comforting pastoral and amoral (in the best sense) way. His writing is alive with metaphor and simile: "Believing in life, I believe in death as well, and at seventy-six look forward to my immersion in the other plane of the see-saw also."

He has little patience for regret: "Memories, thank goodness -- not omissions -- make me wistful... As for the graph of my behavior zigzagging behind me through my places of residence like a snail's faintly luminescent trail, arrogant, dunderheaded embarrassments do prickle some of my memories, but no indelibly shameful acts." _________________________________________________

 In other news, my brother the professor joined Facebook. And a Friday night with A. drinking wine at Cercle Rouge and later Oscar included the horror of a sloppy-drunk possibly retarded and dubiously groomed stranger fingering my iPhone at the bar. Note to self: carry anti-bacterial wipes in purse at all times.

Backyard Snow

Mohawks and Lemon Drops

Wow, it's been a while. No wonder I have exactly zero members of the Kitlab Club even though it sounds fun and porny (see left sidebar. Please.) Highlights of this weekend included going to a party (gulp) in Queens (gulp). Yes, I'm very proud to have again gotten not only out of my house but out of the borough. Typically, that involves effort and lots of money and a plane ride. This, however, was relatively easy. Jumped on the R train with E. and got off in Forest Hills (I think), walked for what seemed like forever to finally arrive at the wonderful Chinese New Year party of kooky R. and J. (that's them, pictured)

It involved lots of amazing and occasionally scary real Chinese food, a guy with an actual spiky FOOT-HIGH mohawk, a hookah (that happened after we left), some Rock Star game via video (way beyond me) and shots of tequila (how that's appropriate I don't know but it was fun). I do lament the last lemon drop we downed at the club we dropped by just because we couldn't get enough of Queens. At the Lighthouse this week I read aloud for two hours about Java and parallelism and object-oriented programming. Fun! And JUST the cure for a tequila-lemon drop hangover.

All this tech reading is going to my head and making me a bigger (and more annoying) nerd than I was. I'm not a geek (I'm just not that adept at the tech stuff or too lazy to really learn/apply), just a nerd. I love reading about technology, understand at least 5.3% of what I read, can use pretty much NONE of it except for cocktail party chatter or this blog... I even read tech blogs, but not even the cool ones that would stand me in good stead with my geeky friends and colleagues but the more obscure ones (today it was Life in the Startup Lane, stumbled upon through the vagaries of Web wandering). I like that the fellow is from my original hometown of Boulder. Oh, it's all so random. Goodbye, John Updike.

Happy MLK Day

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Hey, and I live on King Street! How cool is that? Okay, kinda cool, once a year. Allow me to enjoy it.

I'm growing weary of winter. In my head, I'm in a sun-dappled garden planting peonies. It's 75 degrees and I can hear bees. In reality, I'm boiling eggs and preparing to tackle paperwork. Last week, I performed Step 1 in my new cleaning regimen: put all paper (everything) in a paper bag. Put the bag under the desk and leave it. Step 2 (which took a full week to get to) is actually going through all the paper in the bag. Brilliant. Painless. So far.

Redux

Okay, that last post was titled "Liquidity" because I had meant to mention the weirdness that was the occasion of me going into old standby National Wholesaler Liquidators on lower Broadway because I needed some cheap hand towels (cat-related; don't ask). That's right, folks, NWL is... liquidating. What do you do when your liquidator... liquidates?

Well, you buy a whole lot of things you really REALLY don't need (I'm talking questionable surge protectors and old lipstick) for really cheap. Note: sorry I had to link to consumeraffairs.com but I couldn't locate a better link. And it's funny, if you have time. Especially the guy who feels the need to use a portion of his obviously precious time to post:

unfornately it was night time so i could talk to any body so i had to impatiiently wait for dawn to broke so at 9;15am i called and explained to the manager who told me i must come to the store with the receipt unfortunately for my i had misplaced the receipt and 2ndly i had a very busy week-end so i had to take the entire saturday and sunday to look for the receipt and finally i found inside my trash can.

I have to go now. I succumbed to a nasty cold/flu/wtf that has me feverish and dizzy and achy and the only respite is bed. I hate this. I do have to say that the outpouring of offers from outer borough friends to bring me soup and stuff warmed my heart. Which I needed (at least during the cold, shivery phase of my ailment). Winter sucks, no? But friends make it all worthwhile.

Liquidity

Anticipating a morning of reading aloud at Lighthouse Int'l. from a third edition textbook on Java, I was apprehensive. However, even reading about an object oriented programming language can provide some poetry and some needed connecting of some of my lazier components of my own neural network. Java (from Sun Microsystems). From Wikipedia (since I can't exactly ask to take the textbook home):

Java uses an automatic garbage collector to manage memory in the object lifecycle. The programmer determines when objects are created, and the Java runtime is responsible for recovering the memory once objects are no longer in use. Once no references to an object remain, the unreachable becomes eligible to be freed automatically by the garbage collector. Something similar to a memory leak may still occur if a programmer's code holds a reference to an object that is no longer needed, typically when objects that are no longer needed are stored in containers that are still in use....

Now that's very nice for a computer program. But I'd like to see it applied non-theoretically to one's brain (or the brain of any aging relative). It just sounds cool ... and effective. The photo? My 74 year old dad shoveling snow of the roof of the little house he built for my grandmother. Wow. Just... wow.

In other news, I'm still recoving from a wonderful night in Brooklyn, celebrating A.'s birthday at Union Hall. Great to see old friends and just hang out. Naturally, since I was with S., we continued the convivery (is that a word? If not, it should be) at Oscar on MacDougal Street, where I met the owner, a wonderful, brilliant man who is going to hook me up with the architect I need to build my treehouse. Well, we'll see about that but hey. Good times...

Note: D. Leshem. Where ARE you?

Paisley

That's right, paisley. There simply doesn't seem to be enough of it around these days. Wow, since I was bored and needed some... paisley, I googled it and landed on the End Times Deliverance Ministry, a site that seems to be run by crazy people who think paisley is the devil's work. Yes! And I quote:

"Paisley print is something you see on ties, shirts, blouses, dresses, curtains, rugs, furniture, etc. If you wear it or have it, you may be carrying around and attracting some demons, which could be the cause of some of your "problems".

Okaaay. Useful information, that. Anyway, Christmas in Maine was nice and low-key this year. No singing poinsettias, alas (mom had given it to B., J's father-in-law, who took it to the cape and then put it back in J.'s car, if I have the story straight.) I learned that if your dear, dear relatives ask you what you want for Christmas and you say socks, you WILL GET SOCKS. Which rocks, since I needed them.

I flew Delta this time -- and for the last time. It began with the too-loud bad holiday music blaring into the tiny cramped plane owned and operated by Freedom Air (whatev) who apparently "Support our troops in the Middle East." Um, okay. Does that really need to be on the side of your plane? I mean, I support each individual troop and wish them all well, but don't exactly support them being there. Okay, so then the radio/tape player whatever goes kerflooey with static and skipping and I actually have to ask the stewardess to turn it OFF. I'm also not enamored of the JFK Delta terminal at ALL, with its nine miles walk to the gate. On the way back, our checked-in luggage awaits us... at an entirely different terminal! JetBlue, I'm back, I'll never leave you again.

That said, I hope every one I know and love had a wonderful holiday. Happy New Year... and not a moment too soon.

Thin Ice

We had our first major snowstorm here today and people are just as wimpy as always in New York City. The newscasters wax hysteric, everything closes early, etc. No biggie. But I hate being one of the casualties. In the rain and muck and snow and sleet and darkness I decided to run about 20 errands after work. Glutton for punishment, I know. UPS came through with 1 out of 2 packages I need (yay), the item in the store I'd been eyeing for X was still there (yay) and THEN I fell down.

Trying to magically run through a puddle in the dark crossing 6th Avenue at Spring Street. It looked to be 2" deep, then soon proved to be more like 4" with a nice little layer of ice on the bottom. Down I went with a muddy splash and unrepentant and really loud "Shit!" Sopping gloves, bruised knee, I carried on.

Homebound at last, I amused myself with the TV weather reports and how racist they can be. "There's a lot of black guys covering the Henry Hudson, dangerous black guys." They were saying "black ice" but I kept hearing it wrong. "Slippery black guys is the cause of more than 50 accidents so far on the LIE..." "Black guys, as always, is a danger in the city and on the highways tonight."

Bangor, Maine to the New York Island

Cool beans! The state of Maine represents on the cool WORLD HUM "Travel Dispatches from a Shrinking Planet" site, which in a recent feature maps songs to cities around the world. Maine gets Roger Miller's 1965 classic "King of the Road" (#14 on the site's top travel songs)..... “Third boxcar, midnight train, Destination, Bangor, Maine.”

New York gets an moldy-oldy but a goodie: Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" (# 8)...... “This land is your land, this land is my land.. From California, to the New York Island.”

And a shout-out to Buffalo from... The Grateful Dead! You should be able to figure that one out..

Other personal faves include Ireland (Irish Rover, by the Clancy Bros) and Istanbul (Istanbul by They Might Be Giants). Okay, maybe the songs aren't exactly cutting edge but... then there's "When I Paint My Masterpiece, Bob Dylan: “Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble, Ancient footprints are everywhere.You can almost think that you're seein' double, On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs.” Don't know the song but love the lyrics. Thanks, Bob.

More cool things from the site: Ry Cooder's "El Mirage and Los Angeles"... via the NY Times, with a neat slideshow... "When Ry Cooder and I got to El Mirage Dry Lake, it was 110 degrees and heading to 117, hot enough to cook your head inside your hat. The Mojave Desert in daylight will cut the gizzard right out of you, Tom Joad once said, which is why the Okies crossed it at night."