in an utterly unabashed play for continuity, i'm on my umpteenth visit to the bar down the street. i regret, for the bar's sake, that i'll be moving again next week: their movie nights are decent, the bartender now lets me bring my own music, and the patio vibe vaguely recalls my beloved gypsy den.
wrote and lost two posts in my notebooks, in duffel bags, in the weird attic space in the third sublet. i hate to differentiate them by saying they were uneventful, but they were in fact even more uneventful than the norm. gist: more homesickness on the flight back to new york, we've moved again, lots of weird san francisco reminders about.
met joe's friend katy when her band played on the lower east side sunday. i knew, thanks to a CD, that she had a gorgeous voice, but i wasn't expecting her to rock out so capably on her guitar. wish we'd caught her punky show in brooklyn on saturday. i may be cheapening whatever value my praise would have by heaping it on most of the shows i've seen in the last few months, but we've been very lucky, and luckier still to know such talented people. dear nora will be coming to a town near you - check them out.
oh, amusing starfucking notes, and what a combination: cornel west helped me sort my luggage situation at the sacramento airport. then the deer-in-the-headlights girls who turned up for katy's opening act were claire danes and michelle williams (?) of dawson's creek fame. no katie holmes, but i expect jacob to be proud of me anyway.
via ebay, we are now the owners of a dark green velvet duvet. we'll complement this with an acid green bedroom wall and my debbie harry pillow, assuming i can keep this needlepoint thing going. still going with an arms race theme for the kitchen, though i despair of finding suitably mismatched dishes at thrift stores. the call there could be heavily affected by whether or not we have a dishwasher. as i am the manual dishwasher and i have butterfingers, wimping out and getting nice new stuff could be a bad, bad plan.
and for the living room - hang on, i'll be done soon - we found supercheap camel-colored club chairs and a mahogany sideboard, reasonable because a monkey refinished it. but the hardware is original! this clashes horribly with joe's monolithic stereo equipment, but he has made me see that fine sounds are their own excuses. finally, my wonderful mum is framing an anti-nuke poster i plucked from a fence in london eight years ago. i am deeply, thoroughly, lamentably excited about nesting in our eventual apartment.
thirteen: a little more conventional than the excellent welcome to the dollhouse, but earnest in a the-co-star-helped-write-the-thing-when-she-was-that-age sort of way. red balls, the store where the girls shoplift and try to look like scary hookers, is known to my friends and sisters as That One Place On Melrose That Lauren Likes, That Gave Me A Headache. i was never popular and lithe like the girls, but i did shop there in attempts to be so. not sure if there was supposed to be odd teen movie resonance in the fact that the lead's mom (holly hunter)'s boyfriend also played the slimy alpha male high school boy in clueless, but if so - and why not - it was an inspired casting choice. worlds better than one's average pubescent dystopia film.
after the quake: a collection of six stories grouped loosely around the 1995 kobe disaster. though it wasn't so closely linked to that theme, i prefer "honey pie," a tale of ambiguous affection, the idea that early middle age is frightening and wrong, and the frustrations of a short story writer. the protagonist in this case is, in my memory, the first murakami character who really suffers for his inability to get things on paper. creative frustrations have certainly happened before, but this guy needs closure in life and otherwise - everyone else settles things without going back to the page. no handy, magical realism closure here.
the other five stories are fine, and certainly worthwhile if one is simply looking for a murakami fix until something else is translated into english, but vintage paperbacks are awfully expensive. i'd say hang on and borrow mine.
work began again today. The Corporation reinitiated me with meaty assignments, at twice the rate at which they appeared last month. this is good, as i spent the last part of july trying to extend the meaty parts and pretending that the busy work wasn't happening. now i will have partial use of an intern, whee, which is roughly as important as having one poor soul get behind me at the end of a gargantuan line. it's nominal and silly, but let's be honest, it's slightly comforting.
told my supervisor about the eventual apartment location. she noted that i'd be even closer to the offices when they revert to their original location (in 2-3 years). flattering and horrifying that i could be here when that happens.
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