July 22, 2008
Every time you sign into Flickr, it greets you in a different language. Tonight when I signed in, this:
As if I didn’t already know how to do that. Thanks for doing your research, FLICKR.
July 21, 2008
I love the hot magic hours of summer twilight, the fireflies’ happy hour, with their exuberant, pointless light flashes, only to die out a few hours later when the cooler air ushers them back into hiding. My parents left me for ten glorious days of vacation, a $100 bill for groceries and a list of which plants to water carefully placed where I’d find them. I went outside this evening to prune the raspberry bush which has been overflowing this year, shooting out fruits so fast that they’re literally going bad in the refrigerator before we can make use of them. Raspberries are among the best parts of my summer memories, first in the thicket at my grandmother’s house, back when the rural route on which she lived carried no cars and you couldn’t hear yourself think over the crickets and cicadas in the hot, still air. And now it’s in my own backyard, a well-maintained bush under my mother’s scrutiny. Like many former city dwellers, I discover often how much I missed nature without even realizing it. I don’t seek out countrysides and literally every plant I’ve ever owned has died within a few weeks, but I went outside this evening to pick raspberries per my mother’s orders, and I spent an hour crouched among the brambles.
I got my MCAT scores back on June 30, and I’ve started the long, strange medical school application process. When I found out how much just the application fees would amount to, I shed a few tears and then resolutely squared my shoulders and put my digital SLR up for sale. I found a buyer almost immediately, and he was incredibly enthusiastic until he backed out of the sale. I grumbled about it for two weeks, and then I tossed and turned in my sleep the other night, my consciousness emerging into the dawn with the decision that not only will I not sell it, but I will learn to use it again. I bought it two years ago and was reasonably prolific for a while. Then I moved home, started school, got the idea that Connecticut wasn’t worth photographing.
I moved home on May 31, 2007, and proceeded to mourn the loss of New York for the next 12 months. My brain was engaged by the present, the grueling hours of hard science; but my imagination lived somewhere in a nebulous, placeless future, while my heart stayed in my old city, in an apartment on East Third street in Manhattan, in the vivid memories of hot and hazy Greenpoint streets. I escaped there whenever my class schedule or bank account could afford it. I allowed myself to breathe in New York, in a way I never did here at home. No pictures hang on my walls; my books are still in the giant plastic containers they traveled from New York in last year. I keep my bath towels in my bedroom and not hanging in the bathoom, like I’m a college freshman who knows not to get too comfortable. I know the train schedules almost by heart, I can make a round trip by car avoiding all the toll roads. I could be ready to move out in about 2 hours, and don’t get me wrong, babe, I’m think I’m doing just fine; just when it’s summer in the city and you’re so long gone from the city…
May 31, 2008 was the day I took my MCAT, representing the culmination of my long, hard push through the pre-medical requirements. That day was also the anniversary of my move back to Connecticut, and a peculiar, unique milestone in its own right: it was the first day since 2000 when I would not be moving after one year had passed. Since I left home the first time to go to college, I’ve moved every year like clockwork. Four different residences in college (two dorms, two apartments); a move every year in New York City; but now, here, this place that I’ve staunchly, stubbornly refused to settle into, has quietly, unassumingly settled into me, claimed a title in my whole life that no other place has, ever. I know that I won’t stay here forever, not even close. But for the first time, I think, it’s okay that I’m here for now.
On my hands and knees this evening I thought, “This would be fun to photograph.” So I scrambled out of the thick tangle of thorns and berries, retrieved the camera, and humbly began to acknowledge this moment, right now.
July 16, 2008
I’m sort of obsessed with finding bad grammar everywhere: on signs, in books, in your emails. A particular brand of bad grammar of which I’m a superfan is the ambiguous punctuation.
This is a sign near the clinic at which I work:
Each time I pass it (3 times a week) I read it quickly in my head, and it also comes out “This means you, kids.” Which I, of course, love because it makes me think some crotchety old guy put it up. I think I’m supposed to infer that the end of a line means a break in punctuation, but then, the last two lines don’t follow that rule. So instead, I’m forced to insert my own punctuation, multiple times:
Scooby Doo Villain Sign
This guy hates those crazy kids in their fast cars. He also hates people. And excitedly points out all moving violations.
Kids Against Things
In this case, the neighborhood kids hate everything.
Drunk guy wants to haze you
Drink! All of you! Words! WORDS!!!!!
This guy LOVES parking SO much.
Who’s to say we’re not supposed to assume the two signs are connected? What are you, the Messiah of the DMV?
July 15, 2008
This past weekend, Ryan and I spent a little bit of time in a terrible Lower East Side club where the bouncers were dickbags, the cover was unwarranted given how few people were actually inside, the drinks were Dixie Cup-sized and expensive, and my friend who was having her birthday party there was already so drunk that there was really no conceivable way I would catch up to her.
So, as is our custom, Ryan and I spent a little bit of time sitting at the bar and making fun of people in this douchey club. One girl in particular came to our attention: she was wearing some sort of sequined outfit, had her hair pulled back in a half-ponytail, and was wearing a pair of ridiculous glasses, complete with what appeared to be a beaded chain. You know, the kind that goes around your neck so you don’t lose track of your glasses when you’re sixty. This girl was young and attractive, but these weird old lady glasses were incredibly distracting. Ryan commented that she had taken the whole “sexy librarian” thing too far, and in saying so touched on a phenomenon I’d not yet experienced: the uncanny valley of librarians.
Some background: the uncanny valley is a term that I learned from the nugget of genius that is “30 Rock,” and it refers to the gap between robotic (or android or other non-human) representation of humans and actual humans, the valley being the spectrum where robots/corpses/sex toys look too much like humans and it causes revulsion in human observers. We quickly applied this concept to the librarian simulacrum. Everyone likes a sexy girl in glasses:
Sexy Girl in Glasses
And most everyone has similar reactions to the stereotypical librarian:
Ew, librarians are old!
I, myself, try to stay on the attractive side of the valley (as opposed to the librarian side):
I can't even hear you! It's just noise coming out of an ugly scientist.
W, like the magazine
vs.
W, like Whoops, I'm a clown
July 14, 2008
What a life I lead in the summer
What a life I lead in the spring
What a life I lead in the winded breeze
What a life I lead in the spring
What a life I lead when the sun breaks free
As a giant torn from the clouds
What a life indeed when that ancient seed
Is a berry watered and plowed.
These are the opening lines of “Sun Giant” by Fleet Foxes, and the opening lines to their show that I saw on Thursday night at Union Hall in Brooklyn. There have been only a few shows in my life that really shook me to the core — Weezer at Lupo’s in Providence, August 2000; Nickel Creek with Fiona Apple last year at The Theatre in the Round in Long Island; Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins at Town Hall two years ago (and that was only because I’d never heard her before that night). I don’t actually like live shows all that often because I want the songs to either sound as awesome as they do on the album, meaning that I want a live performance of a song to replicate my favorite nuances, notes, stylistic accidents that were captured in the recording process. Obviously, this never happens, and in that case, I want the live rendering of a song to completely blow me away. Which also rarely happens: two good examples are The Shins and The New Pornographers, both of whom I have seen two or three times live and both of whom have sucked exactly all of those times.
Fleet Foxes on Thursday perfectly demonstrated what happens when you set your expectations from reasonable to low. I don’t mean this in a negative way, actually — I really love the album and the EP, I love them for their heart and their harmonies, and their gently innovative take on the folk song. I like that on the album their harmony is a little wobbly at times, that notes slide into one another before they assume their proper identities. I came to the show expecting to be charmed and warmed.
What happened instead was I exploded in all directions with sheer ecstasy at the incredible power of their performance. They opened with these lines in golden, resonant, radiant harmony, a blend of voices that shut everyone in the crowd up, left me and my companions (nearly all former college a cappella singers) awestruck, gaping, silent, clutching at each other’s hands and shoulders. The room was the size of a spacious suburban living room, but the ceilings were low so the sound had nowhere to go but in the spaces between bodies, mingling, surrounding us. The show went on for an hour after that, but I could have stood and watched for two more. It was one of the most beautiful musical experiences in recent memory, to be sure.
But I think I’m enjoying the memory of it now even more than the actual show because that chorus, these lyrics, followed me through the rest of my long weekend. I should specify that I was in NYC for four days that were unusually full of activity. I saw the same group of people numerous times over these days, which is a rare joy for me. On my bike between the Lower East Side and the outer boroughs — I crossed the Manhattan Bridge four times and the Williamsburg Bridge twice — this lick echoed, turned over and over in my mind. Because my friends are totally awesome and totally gay, by Friday afternoon someone had transcribed the three-part harmony, and so Saturday afternoon I found myself, belly full of mid-afternoon brunch, slightly delirious from cold white wine in the sunshine, singing the tenor part with two college friends, breathing and bopping like I learned to all those years ago. This exercise evolved into a mini-1990s jam session, where people wandered into the living room and picked up various instruments that were strewn about, while I sang such hits as “Zombie” and that Silverchair song where there’s no bathroom and there is no sink. We saw each other later that night at a sweaty party in an oddly-shaped apartment, where we gathered near the only open window and sang the refrain again, this time from memory, less successfully. And then, and then, again at a Bastille Day party the following evening, our voices a little more ragged than 72 hours previously when it all began.
It’s a fitting song for this weekend. The music, of course, is gorgeous and the pleasure that came from listening to it, participating in the musical event, was palpable. But the words fit this weekend, too. I floated this weekend, meandering lazily from one glass of sangria to the next, never thinking too far into the future (another rare joy for me), carried by the echo of a familiar song. It’s summertime. It’s my favorite, favorite time of the year, hands down, no question. I am not a turning of the seasons person, I don’t like every season the best just as it’s about to dawn. I await summer from the first tease of an unseasonably warm day in early March, and I dig my nails into Indian Summer in late September, gritting my teeth against the turning leaves and cooler breezes. What a life I lead in the summer! The most remarkable thing about this weekend was despite its sheer crowdedness, I never felt stressed until now, back at home, back in life. Instead, every moment was a celebration, a comfortable cliche of carefree summer, inhabiting sunny moments and breezy respites from the perfect heat. I was taken by surprise this weekend in many ways, but especially by how often I got to shrug off my habitual loneliness and join my voice with others’ — and how much I’d been needing that without even realizing it.
P.S. Here is a performance of the song from two days later in Redmond, WA. I couldn’t find a video of the show I saw and this was the best of the ones I could find from this tour. The song starts at around 1:00; sorry for the weird feedback that some weirdo didn’t feel the need to edit out.
July 7, 2008
In response to the quote: “We could start a factory / and make misery”
b: I like that misery isn’t even a personal craft anymore, but a late-capitalist glamorization of alienated, Fordized production
June 26, 2008
One of the first people to take a picture with Birthday Girl took a second picture with her, after restoring some of her line work. Three cheers for Anneliis!!!!!
(last post on Birthday Girl, I swear. I’ll start using my brain again.)
June 23, 2008
Yeah, well, I guess it was inevitable.
I have to say, I’m surprised at how premeditated the destruction was. Ry and I both knew that the thing would get a mustache drawn on her, or a cock and balls, or other graffiti… in fact, we expected that and were surprised when it didn’t happen. This thing, though, required the person to print out their little “Stay in Connecticut” sign, bring white paint or spray or whatever, and paste, and spend some time sending their message. What message, though? Clearly not a protest against street art/vandalism, depending upon how you look at it, since this person had to drag their stuff over to Birthday Girl in the wee hours to do this themselves. And also, they very conspicuously didn’t take her down, meaning that they wanted to co-opt Ryan’s art space for their own, which is the weirdest, meanest part in a way. You can argue that Birthday Girl was an eyesore, or a cry for attention, or taking up space, blocking traffic (all of these have been made as claims in the Gawker comments, which are full of petty one-liners about this subject); but in reality, this defacer turned an actual art project — loving and creative to some, lame and annoying to others — into actual trash. The destruction of art and sentiment.
Birthday Girl was the best present because she allowed everyone who wanted to participate to feel good about the project for a moment or two. Ry loved making her and was proud to install his work on the street. I loved that she existed and the thought that went into such a loving present. And everyone who participated (a lot of people!) got to be part of something fun, get their picture on flickr, and genuinely make me smile for almost no effort at all. The worst part about this defacement is that it turned a thing that inspired a lot of different reactions in people into a thing that only radiates contempt and meanness. They could just as easily have put up the “Stay in Connecticut” sign over her face without whiting her out. That would have conveyed a similar sentiment. But instead, this wasn’t primarily about the destruction of an art project; it was about a battle for attention, which is so petty, immature, and mean.
People have been asking me if I’m upset. I’m upset that more people, including a lot of my actual friends, didn’t get the chance to take their pictures with her. And I’m a little upset that something Ryan spent months on was callously destroyed in this way. But other than that, I’m actually really happy that she stayed up as long as she did (we went out to see her again the day after we’d put her up, half-expecting that she’d already been taken down and gone). She was a piece of illegal street art, and I can’t be too mad that something happened to her eventually. I’ve got pictures with perfect strangers, I’ve got pictures with myself and Ryan, and, heh, I guess I’ve got a little legacy of my own. I’m sorry to the owner of the building that she’s parked outside, because now he really does have a gross eyesore instead of a colorful thing of whimsy. In fact, I hope the board actually gets taken down now.
And if you’re reading this and you were one of the people who took a picture with her, THANK YOU! My birthday lasted a week longer than God intended, and that’s the ultimate present.
June 22, 2008
Check out her continued progress here!
June 19, 2008
Found this via my friend Alden’s site, which you should read anyway because that shit is smart AND funny. It’s an old Jeff Goldblum Apple commercial slowed down to half-speed so he comes off as even more drunk than he usually does.
Actually, the original commercial, the one that Apple actually unleashed on television viewers everywhere, makes him “seem” like he’s totally coked up:
Jeff Goldblum! One of our national treasures! (Sorry, Nic Cage.)
