shitcakes

seven days left.

I’m so satisfied, i’ve done so much this year and pretty damn happy with my last months in new york.  things left to do:

1. beach picnic (actually, I’ve had 3-4 of these already this summer)

2. get my gyno on / get tested (yaay monday)

3. go full blown dancing (yay saturday night)

4. get a massage? (though I’ve already been to spa castle twice this year)

5. bbq it up (yaay saturday morning)

6. watch old movie in bed alllll day

7. make a real full dinner for friends

super simple stuff. and i want presents! folks give me parting gifts!

WAMP-WAMP.  There’s a song by The Lonely Forest called (I Don’t Want To) “Live There” that I’m not going to post because it’s just too damn relevant. Haha.  I’m not sad! .. but I saw myself in the mirror of a coffee shop at Emory and I completely fit in. Wanted to vomit a little.  I hate the smugness of students and this false sense of empowerment.  I’m not intimidated of school at all and the city is absolutely pleasant.  It’s just that I’ll be spending my 25th and 26th years there.  It’s really too early, I’m not ready for it personally.  I wish I could put in one more solid year of working before I went back to school. 

& of course there’s never enough time to spend with friends and family.  My family for example is going to Calcutta this summer, and I won’t be joining them.  They’ll be eating bhetki and feeling all these metaphysical highs walking through what for them is this mythical-literary landscape. I really wish I could be there with them.  &I love so many good people in New York City, with their kiddy pools, bad haircuts and rooftop pow-wows.  My life here could easily be a music video.  Made a mediocre dinner at Kate’s house last week while Mos Def was playing (live) directly outside her window.  Good friends with whole lives, and they’ll keep rolling on and I will have to as well. 

Basically, I’m making a playlist called “Songs to Pack Up A Life To”.  WAMP WAMP.

It’s Okay.

 
 

Mm, I think I’m going to make this today.

So … moving to Atlanta soon.  The crazier the nights I have in NYC, the better I feel about the move.   I feel like I’ve been going pretty hard these days/at least for me. Hemorrhaging money. I haven’t bought into the graduate school bullshit, but having a place of my own, a job, and reading again will be pretty great.  Really good for me.  Ready to grow out my hair and invite the challenges.  But I’m pretty sure I’ll be saying fuck-off to a whole lot of folks. Probably in particular to most of the emerging “development professionals” I’m about to join.  Oh dear gawd.

Berlusconi -> bunga bunga -> brown-face ->

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12325796 

I hadn’t heard about virginia woolf’s foray into racial theater, but you know, that’s not surprising at all.  I’m so obsessed with Rubygate to the point where I’m watching vintage RAI programming!

My route in red today ^

Someone keep tabs on me because this can spiral into something really unhealthy.  I am completely hooked on the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway.  Literally stumbled upon it this month by accident while doing the trails at Alley Pond Park.  One minute its bullfrogs and tulip trees, the next it’s a 40 mile bike and pedestrian lane connecting Brooklyn and Queens!  AHHH! My mind has been blown. 

I’ve been back twice in 1 week.  Look at the map damnit! It starts in Bayside Queens and ends in Coney Island Brooklyn (origin and endpoint defined entirely thanks to my bias).  It cuts a dozen parks, residential areas (it’s pretty bizarre window-shopping real estate and checking out people’s private backyard POOLS in Jamaica Estates), over highways, waterfronts and Jesus, I took a pit-stop at my house because it’s about 10 blocks from the path.  YOU WOULD NEVER KNOW IT, but there is this whole parallel world called the BK-QNS GREENWAY running through your hood.  I was hallucinating bits and pieces of tuck everlasting, bridge to terrabithia, the hobbit, and a mashup of suburban horror movies. 

Best thing to do is find an entrance near a neighborhood you’re familiar with, follow it, and WATCH IT BLOW YOUR MIND as it takes you under fire-engine red bridges and past the backwoods of a suburbia you’ve never seen.

Okay.  Well today we started in Flushing and ate a giant plate of french fries and club sandwich plate.  Ran around the Qns Botanic Garden  ——> Flushing Meadows Park ——> suburban Kew Gardens ——>  stopped at my house for fuel ——-> took bus 20 blocks up to Alley Pond Park ——> merged with Cunningham Park. 

We easily treked 10-15 miles, partly out of complete curiosity and partly because of an all-you-can-eat-sushi/munchies incident earlier in the week.

This is a long winded way of saying I FOUND THE ULTIMATE JOGGING ROUTE SUCKAS!

I went to the Coney Island Aquarium yesterday.  I don’t know if you’ve visited our resident aquatic inmates recently, but it can easily be one of the most disorienting places in NYC.  It was nice going as two aimless folks floating in and out of the halls.  Yeah, all in all it’s a pretty meditative place if you avoid the kiddos.

I think the photos I took perfectly convey how I felt today:

I saw Bengal Tiger At Baghdad Zoo recently and was somewhat disappointed at this scathing review of it in the April edition of the New Yorker. The play was first written as a ten minute 2 act with only the tiger and the 2 U.S. marines as characters.  The full length version evolves into this disjointed collision of dialogues between the living and dead.. between everyone from Uday Hussein and the decapitated head of his brother, leper women and amputated soldiers, calls to prayer and artillery fire, and of course the ghost of a belligerent and philosophical tiger.  The 2 most significant characters (I thought) were Robin Williams as the tiger and Ariyan Moyaed as Musa, this charismatic Iraqi translator in crisis. They become sort of the nexus of it all and loosely tie these disparate characters and their feuds together.  I think the reviewer suggested that had Bengal Tiger stayed in its earlier version, in the metaphorical realm of a talking displaced tiger and his U.S. marine counterparts at a zoo, and not concerned itself with the busy, noisy, murkiness of U.S. occupation and politics the play would have been …more of play?

Boooo.
 
The play was a nightmare, and it used this discordant humor thanks to the super Robin Williams to take it to such shrill heights of discomfort and reflection. None of the characters offer resolution, none of the characters (besides maybe the demonic Uday) offer any absolutes or reassurance in ideology and vision.  The reviewer did talk about agency though, and how the characters are really at the beck and call of the writer Rajiv Joseph’s whims. So they’re more functional and “characters in a play” rather than having life and agency of their own.  The play IS constructed deliberately to act out this horror.  Sure.  But the reviewer didn’t dwell on the brilliance of that horror, and how generative it is.

I mentioned that I’ve had some vivid nightmares perk up in my subconscious ever since the tsunami.  It stings when folks isolate horrors, i.e. as if “environmentalism” isn’t anything BUT race class and gender, food shortages and uprisings, mudslides, cancer, perfunctory resource wars, gendered labour, heart disease…  plays like Bengal Tiger capture the ethos of today’s shitty world. 

I really liked the play in other words.

I’m not saying ooh golly, it was this brilliant piece of theater that articulates something new, but I thought Bengal Tiger did achieve this rarely sustained cacophonous space.  I’m saying, I think a lot of us live in that cacophony.

my kind of dancing

Certainly not the best post for International Women’s Day, but here is Grace Chang singing from Carmen. What are you thinking when you watch this?

so-treu:

elonjames:

It’s like my opinion made it self solid and drew itself…

IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE.

“In China, you know, the emperor is a Chinese, and all those about him are Chinamen also.” 

The begining of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Nightingale. Ok, off to see the aquatic puppet opera version of the nightingale at BAM tonight.  I’m utterly thrilled to see Lepage’s sets and direction, and also to understand what to do and how to feel in an world of ultra chinoiserie and fetish.  I’m thinking both of PT Barnum sideshows with Chinese women in bound feet and flying trapeze acts and man-made lagoons.  Reflections to come!

Waaaaa! Tilt Shift photography blows my mind every time!! Aaaah!

done! tmrw for breakfast. but eggs in turkey cup.

http://thenoshery.com/2009/03/29/a-two-bite-breakfast/