07.21.11: the dirty dozen {twelve youtube comments on the original "space oddity" video}

01 I heard this song in an English class in MEXICO
02 I'm 13 years old, I'm from Canada, and I love David Bowie. I feel like I should have been born in another time era.
03 This song is #1 of the top 13 songs about space travel.
04 that's not david bowie.. this looks homemade. i detect a trololo
05 1:13-1:20 I think the camera guy insisted on more and more crotch. David handled it well with that little maneuver.
06 Ground control major thong.
07 Is it cold in space Bowie Do you want to borrow my jumper Bowie
08 ocarina schmocarina
09 the cat power version is way better
10 It's too literal and far too low budget.
11 damn it, how i want that helmet!
12 good float man

07.20.11

101 in 1001 {II}: 039 visit an acupuncturist [completed 07.05.11]

i could tell you that there's a noble ladymag tradition of covering acupuncture, that western institutions are warming to it, or that our living near chinatown has piqued my curiosity about traditional medicine* - and all of those things are true - but let's be honest: acupuncture ended up on my list because needles amuse me and it looked fun. i found a groupon, and away i went.

the studio i chose was down in the financial district; 1 world trade climbed into the sky just down the street, and i reverse-commuted against a school of suits on their way north. downtown manhattan in the early evening is an abandoned reef: buildings folded in on themselves like concrete brain coral, grotty storefronts shuttered like barnacles. i like that it's been constructed and reconstructed for so long that it feels organic again. i also like how acupuncture appointments enable super-cheesy city-as-ecosphere analogies! wall street, you smell like fish.

as the studio's website explained, treatments take place in a single large room partitioned by screens (as opposed to in individual treatment rooms) in order to keep costs down.** on one hand, that means that i got to walk past people having all sorts of exciting treatments (gal covered with seaweed! guy wrapped in foil like a big old potato!) on the way to a zero-gravity table; on the other, i was desperately afraid of falling asleep and flashing the room (i was wearing a minidress, for i have a magical ability to dress impractically at all times). though i filled out an online questionnaire about my kidney qi and other energies of interest prior to my visit, the heartbreakingly lovely acupuncturist who arrived to spirit me to my table flustered me, and i agreed to chat about my reasons for visiting*** instead of just asking her to grab the chart the office had generated for me. which is fine, i guess, though walking someone through the details of my menstrual cycle in mixed company is something i can live without doing again. surprise the first: the literal needling was not only painless but virtually imperceptible. i noticed the first few in my feet and the one she planted between my eyes, but i had to sneak looks at myself after she'd left my life forces to redistribute themselves to figure out just what had gone down. surprise the second: the waiting. i assumed the puncturing itself was the main attraction, but it seems that one must lean back, absorb inoffensive world music, and stay just on this side of wakefulness for forty-five minutes or so to truly reap the benefits of the wee needles. so i did; mare's-tail clouds drifted between the buildings outside, a fidgety girl in electric-pink underwear rose and set like a satellite on the table across from me, and i contemplated my inner aspect. i imagined how pleasant it would be to watch snow fall past the window. i must have looked disappointed when my statuesque acupuncturist came to rouse me, for she offered to let me lounge a bit more while they closed the studio for the night. no no, needle-lady; all things in moderation.

did the conditions for which i presented myself - stress, omphaloskepsis, a tendency to wake up feeling as though i've been dropped from a great height the morning after i've run a long distance - resolve themselves? not really, though none of them afflicted me while i was on the table. i did feel a bit more centered as i rode the train back up to the lower east side, though i suppose that could have been because i was virtually alone. i will be back for another round of acupuncture; i forgot to cash in my groupon, for one thing, and for another it's terribly exciting to use qi in a non-scrabble context. onward and inward, team.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 have you ever had acupuncture? why or why not?

02 if you have, did it cure what ailed you?

03 did you know coral is extremely finicky? it's true: a guy i worked with at the san francisco SPCA had a massive saltwater aquarium that thwarted almost all of his vacation attempts (as he only had one coral-sitter capable of keeping things going in his absence).

04 do you call cirrus clouds mare's tails? joe mentioned the term the other night, and that when he was little he thought it was "mayor's tail" clouds, a la rich uncle pennybags's morning coat in monopoly.

*mostly the proximity to chinatown makes me want to buy a durian; don't they look like something a lakitu would throw?

**this sounds unforgivably cheap, but i actually found it endearing; they also had a pay-what-you-wish fee structure.

***because it seemed like the mellow thing to do? laid-back health care, you disconcert me.

07.15.11: the dirty dozen {twelve things i pass on my walk to work}

01 doughnut plant
02 carnegie hall
03 the pickle guys
04 lee's art shop, home of fine plastic animals
05 great wall chinese (WATERMELON, BONELESS DUCK, LIVE LOBSTER ANY STYLE)
06 zafis luncheonette
07 abrons art center, home of the steampunk haunted house
08 church of st. mary (bingo saturday sunday 7pm)
09 pizza school
10 morning glories
11 jerry seinfeld (twice)
12 a pit bull wearing a fur coat (once, but i can't stop talking about it)

07.13.11: {cibo matto @ brooklyn bowl}



RULE 5
CONCERTS
In Bowling Alleys
1. At least sixty seconds of "Know Your Chicken" shall be recorded for beloved roommates.
2. One shall jump up and down and up and down.

{setlist, jumping here}

07.11.11



RULE 4
ILLEGAL FIREWORKS
Across State Lines
1. Sparklers shall be held as close to the face as possible.
2. Photographs of said sparklers shall be posted on Mondays for Maximum Psychological Benefit.
3. Photographers shall sing off-key for fifty minutes when returning home via public transportation.

07.05.11

101 in 1001 {II}: 038 cook with 12 ingredients I’ve never used before [completed 06.29.11]

01-03: jicama, honewort, kale
04-06: key limes, sunchokes, mochiko
07: dahlia tuber
08: cream of tartar
09: saffron
10: lavender
11: okra

12: nutritional yeast. our extremely eco-capable friend melissa (who composts, occasionally tends large boxes of worms,* and makes her own seitan) has been telling me for years that nutritional yeast plus tofu adds up to a transcendent breakfast scramble; i keep forgetting about it, which explains both my misery circa the vegan experiment of '06 and, perhaps, the fact that i've been flunking out of blood and platelet donations left and right for the past year (nutritional yeast, as the name implies, is full of b-complex vitamins and protein). what might have been!

the earnest yeast finally made it to our table when i inherited a grow your own mushroom kit; i perked up at the idea of cultivating something exotic (i can't keep, like, mint alive, but i can grow the hell out of rainforesty stuff like tillandsia and staghorn ferns), and joe made appreciative noises at the oyster mushroom pasta in pink sauce recipe (featuring nutritional yeast) that came with the fungus farm.

the shrooms, they grew and grew heartily; everyone deserves the right to save images like that for moments of peak psychological fortitude, but click away if you so choose. the first several days were, i'll not lie, kind of off-putting, but after a week or so we had some fine forest friends. and then we had super-homemade pasta.



the recipe needs a bit of tweaking, i think - not enough tomato paste, perhaps, and i had to reduce the sauce for ten minutes or so, as it was initially pretty thin - but it's quite satisfying. the yeast isn't quite a cheesy flavor (as some say), but as an almost brutally nutritious seasoning, it's pretty unimpeachable. i'd hide it in other pasta sauces and even chilis without batting an eye (and probably will, in fact, since the container i bought is kind of a monster), and melissa's mythical tofu scramble will finally make it to the plate this weekend. the sleeper hit of this mystery-ingredient round is, of course, the home-grown mushrooms; i'll be re-soaking my eco-kit and summoning a second batch of them over the next few weeks, and i might order a more exotic kit (reishi mushroom patch!**) in the fall. you guys are getting some freaky holiday gifts this year.

*i really want a box of worms, but it has been explained to me several times that we are not to invite invertebrates into the house.

**this is probably last night's acupuncture talking. more on that soon.

06.27.11

THUNDERTOME II: ROUND 4

SURVIVOR: anna karenina (leo tolstoy)*
CHALLENGER: the passage (justin cronin)



after all that talk of beach reading for our trip to iceland back in march, i packed predictably:** i ended up burning the midnight oil in reykjavik with a massive advance reader's edition of justin cronin's the passage, thanks to a friend who knows of my fondness for vampires, apocalypses, and vampire apocalypses.

cronin, an iowa writers' workshop grad and the author of an award-winning collection of interconnected stories and a novel about a fishing camp in maine, was instructed by his daughter to "write about a girl who saves the world;" less than overwhelmed, perhaps, by the revenues generated by collections of interconnected stories and novels about fishing camps in maine, he wrote about vampires. more precisely, he wrote about an unscrupulous military research project which zaps hardened criminals' thymus glands and (instead of just making them more or less immortal, makes them immortal and) turns them into vampires. for reasons which are never made especially clear, the project's final subject is not a murderer/rapist plucked from death row but amy, a keane waif from iowa whose desperate mother dumps her off with a magical nun. instead of turning her into a twelfth slightly-phosphorescent killing machine which lopes across the country unzipping hapless victims' rib cages like so many bananagrams carrying cases, amy's tweaked thymus turns her into an insufferable child messiah/vampire whisperer who's inexplicably irresistible to government employees such as her kidnapper, fbi agent brad wolgast, a good man haunted by his deeds.

still with me? now it's ninety years later, the beast is loose in the streets of bethlehem, the rats are in the corn, and nearly everyone has long since been bananagrammed. survivors have walled themselves into first colony, a fort which they defend from the "virals" with bright lights and off-putting new social conventions. children born in the fort, for example, are separated from their parents at birth and supervised by guards and caretakers who refer to them as "littles." the fortified-nursery strategy is a perfectly sound one, but "littles" - look, i have dear friends who love and have used the term often and affectionately in non-vampire-apocalypse contexts for years. i'm the daughter of an art history major, "littles" as a term for children takes me straight to the terrifying baby-men who hang with the virgin mary in medieval art, and it creeps me out. know what else was all over the place in the fourteenth century? the black death, and there's a lesson in that. i think we can differ in our feelings about various terms and remain respectful of one another, but don't come crying to me with your buboes, is what i'm saying.***

sister lacey the magical nun is approximated in the fort portions of the story by ida "auntie" jackson, the sole survivor of a convoy of children dispatched decades upon decades ago to escape the virals' assault. sympathetic readers see her cryptic nattering and mysterious tea preparation as a tip of the hat to mother abigail in stephen king's the stand; i decided cronin's a shoplifter long before i got to auntie's uncharming repartee, and i have little patience for characters like her as expository devices anyway. ditto for alicia "starbuck" donadio, a tough-as-nails (hot) maverick soldier type whose bravado endangers the colony. how can i be expected to believe cronin isn't simply exploiting sci-fi and horror fans when he populates his story with other writers' characters?

the passage is a page-turner, make no mistake; cronin delivers some fine action sequences, his highbrow petticoat peeps out regularly in his (non-vampy-death-scene) descriptions, and his plotting is tight. i had a grand old time reading about the end of the world late at night at the hotel borg. that said, i genuinely love some of the houses at which he's trick-or-treating,; going forward (like deborah harkness's a discovery of witches, the passage is the first installment in a trilogy****), i expect substantial proof that he isn't simply in the neighborhood for the sugar.

VICTOR: anna karenina; how does one say "bananagrammed" in russian?

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 how old will cronin's daughter be when she's allowed to read the passage?

02 is it even possible for military medical experiments to be a good idea?

03 who determined that suspenseful horror-novel killings should sound like someone removing a windbreaker and eating a fruit salad in the next room?

04 do medieval baby-men bother you?

05 have you read and/or seen the stand?

06 is being a page-turner an excuse for lack of originality?

07 why do you think cronin wrote the passage?

08 can you forgive me for that weird halloween conclusion? not sure what happened there.

*previous battle here.

**i read zeitoun when we were in montreal this past fall; i was better about not waking joe up and reading him the especially depressing parts this time.

***full disclosure: i call chuck our little bubo.

****per interviews, this is the road novel; the sequel will be spytastic, and the finale will be all-out war, man.

06.24.11: the dirty dozen, part III

08 from helen simpson's "night thoughts," granta 115:

3:48 a.m.

And the media is so disparaging of men over forty, he thought; the way it zooms in on our paunches and spindle shanks, our pendulous earlobes. Another real worry was, he was developing turkey wattles. Ella had noticed it too - she'd called him jowly the other day, she'd pinched an incipient fold of flab while ostensibly chucking him under the chin.

Why can't there be some positive older role models for a change? he fretted. Wherever you went, images of young men in next to nothing were in your face, making you feel bad about your body. His route to work was tyrannized by giant posters of ripped abs, honed six-packs, buff biceps.

In a pathetic attempt to fight back, he'd recently been engaging in a spot of newsagent guerrilla warfare. Now when he bought his paper he made sure to stick some of his pre-prepared Post-it notes to the naked boys on the covers of the women's magazines - notes he had felt-tipped in advance with the words: WHAT IF HE WAS YOUR SON?

09 {sub-list: twelve sorts of person-spackle which are worth what one hands over for them}

i benetint rose-tinted lip & cheek stain ($28)
ii guerlain météorites pearls ($57)
iii lush ocean salt cleanser ($35)
iv chanel rouge allure ($32)
v l'oréal paris telescopic mascara ($10)
vi deborah lippmann nail lacquer ($16-$20)
vii revlon colorstay liquid eye pen ($9)
viii lather ultra light face lotion ($16)
ix tokyomilk absinthe no. 84 lip elixir ($7)
x maybelline colorsensational lipstain ($7)
xi estée lauder double wear ($32)
xii essie nail polish ($8)

10 from eudora welty's letter to the new yorker, march 15, 1933:

As to what I might do for you - I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15 cent movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse's pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works - quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.

[...]

There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase [sic] you, but consider my other alternative: the U. of N.C. offers $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay's Congo. I congo on. I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker.

Truly yours.

06.23.11: the dirty dozen, part II

05 coming home last night. no sound required.

06 on the way to work this morning. worth a listen.

07
Birds singing
in the dark
--Rainy dawn.

(jack kerouac)

06.20.11: the dirty dozen, part I

01 on wednesday we saw measure for measure in central park; it was considerably more renaissance-glam (alexander-mcqueen-esque leather breastplates for the hos! a tech crew of gimp-devils!*) than the pared-down mobile unit version i saw last fall, though it retained carson elrod, my favorite member of the mobile company. can carson elrod be rearranged to spell i am lord voldemort?** anything can happen in repertory theatre. after the show i texted an entry to the number on a flyer in our measure for measure playbills and won tickets to all's well that ends well, so we'll be back in the park this friday. all of the shakespeare in my pockets! call me a hoarder if you like. i don't even care.

02 in digging around for information on the KGB's cold-war-era locomotive-based mobile headquarters in order to send a note on dinner plans for this thursday, i ended up on wikipedia's russian political jokes page.

- Why are the meatballs cube-shaped?
- Perestroika! (restructuring)
- Why are they undercooked?
- Uskoreniye! (acceleration)
- Why are they bitten?
- Gospriyomka! (state approval)
- Why are you telling me all this so brazenly?
- Glasnost! (openness)

there's a subsection, "geriatric intermezzo," especially for jokes about the communist party leadership's escalating decrepitude ("Why did Brezhnev go abroad, and Andropov did not? Because Brezhnev ran on batteries, but Andropov needed an outlet."). it is a fine page.

03 my current subway reading is the 115th granta, on "the f word" (feminism); today's essay is "aftermath," by novelist rachel cusk.*** she's a working mother, and writes that

I read somewhere that a space station is always slowly falling back to Earth, and that every few months or so a rocket has to be sent to push it back out again. In rather the same way, a woman is forever dragged at by an imperceptible force of biological conformism: her life is relentlessly iterative; it requires energy to keep her in orbit. Year after year she'll do it, but if one year the rocket doesn't come then down she'll go.

it's an arresting way describe one's own position; i will never be a working mother, but i know a thing or two about biological conformism, and i think every woman knows the disorienting weightlessness of another woman suddenly in or out of her own orbit, wherever it is. off she shot. here she comes. it does feel like gravity, deep in your gut.

04 my sunday-afternoon-and-nightstand reading, in turn, is david foster wallace's the pale king. an orphaned copy was actually placed in my hands, so i perched it atop my files and squinted at it as i drank my morning coffee for a week or so. i broke down and started reading it on a midnight train ride from the office late last week; i was so work-dazed and ill-rested that i greeted the dust jacket photo as though it were a person. when a sentence exploded across four pages, i flipped back to the jacket: hi. i'm a long way from finishing, and i don't yet know if i'll be interested in talking about the pale king here when i do**** - but i know already that i don't regret the read. i've lacked him.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 have you any shakespeare-related crushes?

02 gamboling gimp-devils! are you on board?

03 do you tend to win things?

04 does this whole communists-on-a-train thing ring a bell with you?

05 how do you deal with mice in the kremlin?

06 have you read any rachel cusk? does that quote make you feel funny?

07 would you be interested in talking about the pale king at some point?

08 what are you reading? is it making you happy?

*our fellow theatregoers were less fond of the gimp-devils, but they served a purpose: as director david esbjornson noted, literalizing evil on earth in his staging of the play makes isabella's refusal to sacrifice her soul for her brother's life more plausible. also they were all witchy and slick.

**in re anagrams, mind you. as far as i know he has no beef with harry potter.

***"not exactly a poster child for domesticity," as one book critic describes her.

****THUNDERTOME is not for the pale king.

06.19.11

1: what if we upholstered a chair with this big piece of denim?
2: too rustic.
1: what if we upholstered a chair with this big piece of denim and wrote FUCK! on it?
2: could work.

06.14.11



















{storm front from the train; joe in our hotel's murderous hallway; man-eating koi; the ceiling at sixth & i; that with which we oompa loompa; teeth; afterparty; lincoln's waffle shop; the national portrait gallery}

the good news is that our friends' wedding in washington was a smashing success. the bad news is that almost anyone can trick me into dancing these days.

{full photo set here.}