There are some days when everything is beautiful.

She just doesn't give a shit...



















I might have done that...













I am sick. Why don't people stay at home when they're sick so as not to infect the vulnerable and whiny? Blech. I've been trying to distract myself with sweet thing like this explodingdog.com Sam Brown illustration...and with funny things like this crazy dude. (see link below). I am going to crawl into bed with soup and Nyquil and watch X-Files. I'm glad I'm not a parent, at least to a child, imagine having to take care of someone else when you're feeling selfish and only want someone to pet your head and feed you tea? Sarah fucking sucks as a caregiver.

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/05/051606.html

Every sitcom, hackneyed movie, and David Sedaris was right. Holidays can only be tolerated with large quantities of alcohol.

the fluke hates easter too.

The madness has to stop! I'm watching X-Files 24 hrs a day. I just finished season 1 and now I'm on season 2 (and in panic that the X-Files marathon of hermiting could end in the near future, I've already ordered season 3). It's worse than that, I ordered sushi for lunch and falafel for dinner last night, I'm really hibernating.

I'm trying to extricate myself from the tentacles of Mulder and Scully's big love and my renewed belief that the government is engineering viral bees for our destruction by going to Easter dinner today. Ugh, hate the holidays, and I was only able to eat one Cadbury easter creme egg this season. I know, bad for the diet, but those eggs are like sweet crack. And you can't find them anywhere in the city!! I bet hipsters use them in their installation art. Bad mood brought to you by Christian holidays, here I come!

What to say about Matthew Barney? Drawing Restraint 9 was visually and acoustically stunning (though the operatic howling almost drove me mad, Bjork's soundtrack almost overshadowed the movie), and everything else was inexplicable. The narrative was curiously and comfortingly linear, with Bjork and Barney arriving onboard separately and being bathed, clothed, adorned and shaved for an elaborate wedding ritual below-deck on the Nisshin Maru, while the whaling ship operates 'normally' above. Normal meaning that the whalers create a huge Vaseline sculpture on the deck by pouring liquid jelly into a mold. Everything is going well, below and above-deck, and then a storm hits the ship. The sculpture melts and fills the lower deck and the Occidental Tourists unite in love, hacking each other's lower bodies to pieces. Their lower bodies turn into whale tails (fins?) and they end by feeding each other delicate pieces of their own flesh. There were also rocky spines, mermaid-like oyster divers, children singing, priests and shrimp in cement...


I found everything to be ornate and shockingly beautiful, and much more delicate (if vats of petroleum jelly and floating bits of human flesh can be delicate) than the Cremaster visuals. I think the ideas of life and death, creation and destruction were not meant to be subtle, but there was a stark quietness to everything in the movie that lent Drawing Restraint a sense of deep sensitivity and tranquility. Could have used a few more floating testicles, phallic imagery and bees, though.

I just took an "Are you normal?" quiz. Apparently I'm 47% normal:


Wonderful eccentric: You've earned the title of wonderful eccentric, and while you're not a wild, gun slinging maverick, you certainly like to follow your own way. Of course, you probably don't think of yourself as eccentric. As Einstein might say, "It's all relative."

Lame. Of course, I did just buy this hat.

http://www.chatterbean.com/cb/runormal/?INKLE_AB=1

How much do you love the end of Reality Bites? Winona is not a good actress, but Ethan Hawke was luminous. His mojo lasted until 1999. Singles is on right now, vs. my bed.

p.s. My font is brown in Eddie Vedder's honour.

I went to the Bring Em Home concert for peace last night, and the music was pretty great. Though when Rufus sang Hallelujah, I wished it was Jeff Buckley instead, like every time I hear that song. P.S. What do serious neoliberal kids have against dancing? Fischerspooner and Peaches were wasted on that crowd, they would have loved 3 hours of Bright Eyes. Annoying.

before coming undone


Two guys on the train sang 'She's Come Undone' tonight, complete with acoustic guitar and portable drum set; one of the guys came and sat down beside me while singing. They actually started singing 'Smoke on the Water', then stopped and serenaded me with The Guess Who. Have you ever listened to the lyrics of that song? (useful horn section version of the song with lyrics below)

http://users.cis.net/sammy/undone.htm

I'm pretty sure it's about suicide. Thanks, guys.

Since today is Obvious yet Irrelevant Day, as well as well as look-like-the-Cryptkeeper-or-Eddie-from-Iron-Maiden-day (see previous post):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-clooney/
i-am-a-liberal-there-i-_b_17119.html


God, who cares.

I drank coffee too late last night and couldn't/can't sleep. And now it's 4:26am and I'm in the danger zone (remember from when you would stay up all night studying? Past 4am means that no alarm in the world is going to wake you up the next morning). So far, I've read two chapters, realized it was antisocial sleepover (with myself) behaviour, and started uncontrollably watching the following movies:

1. Sense and Sensibility. My favourite movie, not likely to help me sleep.
2. The Shaft. A horribly campy movie about a possessed elevator shaft in the Millenium Building, an analog of the Empire State Building, but then it turned out that the elevator was being experimented on by a rogue Army Intelligence dude who was working on AI and built a computer chip melded with human tissue. Naomi Watts was in it, inexplicably, not a high point for her.
3. Stigmata (on now). Hoorah! I love the cheesy soundtrack to this movie, billy corgan did it...

Oh irony of ironies, Lindsay Wagner and her Sleep Number bed commercial is on tv. I think my sleep number is 48. There are a lot of life insurance, don't leave your family with your funeral bills commercials on this late at night, I feel bad for the old people they're targeting, it seems cold-blooded to take advantage of the fact that they don't sleep much.

This has been super fun, sleepover, but tomorrow I'll be moping around the office, cranky and overcaffeinated. I kind of miss all-nighters, I haven't had one or stayed up this late (and been home) since I left school. No regrets, because I don't want to be reading Plato. Right now, Gabriel Bryne is a dashingly haunted priest, and that's as complicated as it's going to get at 4:36am.

"We believe we are the first to record neural activity from a monkey doing a somersault"

So says a scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Apparently when a monkey is free to tumble, sets of neurons controlling opposing muscle groups are both active throughout many movements. Understanding this may be vital in creating a muscle-stimulating prosthesis to restore movement to a limb paralysed by nerve damage.
How can we use this technology to suck billions of dollars away from domestic matters and social programs and make it a crucial aspect of the war on terror? Remote-controlled 'stealth' sharks, of course (always a good idea to 'train' one-ton killing machines for advanced counterintelligence)

Engineers funded by the U.S. military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark's brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal's movements. For spy purposes. This is a fact (newscientist.com), and needs little tweaking to make this into the premise of a blockbuster Michael Bay movie (I don't know how they'll top the genius of Deep Blue Sea, though). In the film, the implant must degrade/go haywire. Either...

1. the sharks become sentient, as the implant degrading causes irregular growth (not cancer, but increased intelligence) in brain matter. They will turn against us.
2. the malfunctioning implant will reverse the direction of the mind-control beam (?), allowing them to control us. We will be forced to raise the sea level to flood our low-lying areas. They will eat us. The people in high elevations will survive, the rest of the movie will be like an Appalachian Mad Max.
3. half the spy sharks go over to the other side and sell Pentagon secrets to Iraqi insurgents, and the other half develops a conscience and realize that the war against terrorism must be fought by all patriotic Americans, humans and sharks alike. Even if it means fighting your brothers. The rest of the movie will be like North and South.


Rise up against the man, shark-brethren!

Why watch the Oscars?

There's a Law & Order Marathon on all night. Jon Stewart should be entertaining, even though he's bloated with self-love. Even though it will be cringe-worthy to see Jack Nicholson stumble onto the stage to give another one of his doddering friends an honorary award for longevity, I do love the clench-jawed clapping of the losers, and the cameras always pan to them when they're names are not called. I would like to see Ang Lee win an Oscar, though I thought the Brokeback sheep were criminally overlooked in the best supporting actor (not gender or species specific) category. Animals are often part of the landscape of a movie, and provide a foil for the characters, e.g. Would Ennis have been as endearing if he hadn't carried a baby lamb on his shoulders across the river? Even though he did leave them to be attacked by wolves, it was to have hot sex (wow) with Jack. Understandable. Arianna Huffington called George Clooney the Karl Rove of the 2006 Oscars, but he's so pretty and suave. He should win the Channeling Cary Grant award/Best recovery after extreme weight gain award. Jordan Catalano could learn something from him. Well, have a beer and a bowl of chili, our Superbowl is about to start...

I'm finally going to see them in Sayreville, NJ. Where is that? Don't know, but maybe there won't be as many NY music snobs there.

I'm watching The Aristocrats, which is hilarious and horrifying. So far, the mime, Bob Saget and Carrie Fisher have told the joke the best. And the Smothers brothers.

Sing, goddess of the wrath of...'The Iliad' by Michael Kors.

I haven't decided whether this is the best or the worst classical allusion I've ever seen.

Why the Iliad?
Maybe it's the epic lines? (Paeans will be sung to these shoes)
The timeless hero legend? (We catch up with one brave woman, in media res, as she spends one full day in these shoes: a morning commute, work (with no kicking off of shoes under her desk) out at night to play and down the rabbit hole, home to Brooklyn, on the train)
The clash of egos? (see above woman vs. Michael Kors, now that I've seen him on Project Runway, I have no doubt I can take him)


It's a beautiful poem, and a beautiful shoe. That's all we need to say.

Happy weekend!

Listening to: The sound of my stomach rumbling (forgot lunch in storm of thrift shopping) and The National. V. good.
Doing this weekend: The Met, again. Dinners and sedateness as opposed to last weekend's hungover haze with my sister.

and this...

(cw from top. Venus and Cupid (Lorenzo Lotto), Ariadne (de Chirico) and Mother and Child (Calatrava)


The Met was beautiful today, and today was a perfect day for it. We cruised (walked) down from the Met to 42nd street (where all good intentions and goodwill goes to die) on beautiful, sunny Fifth Ave. I bought an I love Paris (the city) calendar from the gift shop for a dollar, I figured Atget's photos will remind me that I have to go, and you can't beat spending 2 dollars (one for admission) for a full day of art. Ooh, not to be gross and celebrity stalkerish, but we saw Paul Rudd waiting at the front of the line at the Neue Gallerie (we wanted to get sachertorte, but the lineup was too long. I would have drank coffee though, sachertorte sound gross), and he was way cuter in person, with a Harry Potter scarf and taller. I saw him and said, "Hey, that looks like..." and my friend did a "Wow, that's Paul Rudd". I think he heard and was scared that we were going to rush him. If I didn't crawl into Alan Cummings' lap (spotted Thursday night at Orchid Lounge) I was not going to embarrass myself for Paul Rudd. Like that's true. This was VERY stalkerish, apologies. Back to highbrow. Here are a few of my favourite things from today.

BCE place, Toronto

Magical day off tomorrow, going to see the Calatrava exhibit at the Met. Hoorah for George Washington's birthday.

Baby three-toed sloth smiles for the camera


My first blog written in my pyjamas. To commemorate a day of sushi, The Cutting Edge and my roommate from Japan taking a picture of me with bedhead and an NYPD sweatshirt so she'll remember new york forever....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVPVtUWm0NE

listening to: sufjan stevens illinoise, courtesy of my sister.

For better or worse, I joined a bookclub. Not a joiner, I know, but our first book is The Namesake. What does it matter what a bunch of overeducated women think about this book when A Million Little Pieces of Shame is still #9 on Amazon? But, I did really like this book a lot: I stayed up all night to finish it when I read it for the first time about two years ago. A little contrived (father's love for Russian literature saved him from a train wreck) and a little cliched (protagonist succumbs and marries a Bengali girl, who leaves him for a French scholar. Who wouldn't leave whoever for a French scholar?) but descriptions of cooking for big family parties, sneaking booze and cigarettes, the gulf of misunderstanding separating Indian parent and 'desi' child which only highlights the love and tenderness in their relationship made this book a worthwhile read.

It's been a long time since I posted, I guess contented=more blogging, cranky=less. That doesn't really translate for the great writers of the world, though. Usually when there's more angst, there's more and better writing (and more bad writing, but I digress...) At any rate, rereading Jhumpa (not her good name, btw, but her pet name. I should publish under 'mole') made me miss my mother and father and then not, and miss good food, but the whole book is written with a sense of nostalgia, of moments melding into each other into the blur that is Gogol's 32-year old memory. I can't help but think of Marquez and the vivid prose of a nonagenarian (though Melancholy Whores was not his finest work) and how he treats memory and nostalgia and I think Lahiri has more to grow as a writer. Which is unfair, but whatever. She's gorgeous and young and a Pulitzer Prize winner, I can be jealous...