I was in a cab and the driver was playing some great music. I told him this about 80 times and he gave me the tape. I did some karaoke to it at home, and the searched the address on the case and found this guy.
Anyways according to his website, Sant Shri Asaramji Bapu lived in seclusion for seven years. That sounds like grad school.
best falafel with extra tahini and pickles in New York: Oasis
fastest bicycle in New York: Cannondale Caad9
most enchanted island in New York: Roosevelt
I just found that someone uploaded the first EP by Malignus Youth - total geniuses -they got more melodic after this - tracks 2 and 5 indicate what they became
Monk seals sleep on the beach all day long
This penguin was naughty
Glass war mosaic from the punchbowl crater
The most prevalent birds were myna birds - these are northern cardinals
basically, they don't have bugs, because the birds eat them, and the birds are not eaten because snakes are illegal
I read in an Economist article that the great East German spies slept with alot of middle aged secretaries to get the secrets about their agencies. The new James Bond didn't do that, but it did refer to the Cold War, which seems much more of a daffy intellectual game than the current messy holy crusade. I thought the movie spent its multi-million budget well, usually I leave a movie wondering why it costs so much to blow up cars in LA.
When I was at Barnes and Noble, an old lady tried to pick me up while I was looking at Josh's photo on page 108 of JPEG. I told her that Josh did half the work, and the other guy did half by looking so crazy. She repiled that the tattoo artist was really the person who did all the work.
Whn I was visiting Rick a few days ago in Boston, he took me to 1369. They have the best coffee I've ever had.
I was searching for some old poem I liked as a teenager and I found this site where gentlemen pretend they're batman. It's really the best website in the world. Here's an excerpt:
"
I push Dana out of the way and take the hit to the ground. I rise to my feet.
"Stalker!" I say in my batman voice. "So you come for your trophy?"
"Yes I have Batman," The Stalker replies. He extends his pole and swats at my head. I duck quickly and flip towards Dana.
"Come on where is it?" I ask myself. I reach into my back pocket and find some gas balls. "Sorry Dana!" I whip a gas ball at her face sending her peacefully asleep to the ground.
I do a backflip and land on the roof of the new Dodge Viper GTS. (( OOC: I love cars)) "In case you haven't noticed. The Bat is not here." I playfully taunt. I bend on my knees and launch at him full speed turning a sphere into a drop kick. The Stalker bashes into a steel pole.
I take his head and bash his head against the steel pole several times. Thinking I have the advantage I take a short while to catch my breath.
The Stalker quickly counters with a roundhouse kick to my face. I am sent straight to the ground.
I carefully climb to my feet. I clumbsily reach for one of the remaining gas balls.
CNet likes the Creative Zen Micro MP3 player almost as much as the iPod. Does anyone have one of these?
After a year and a half of battery decline and trying all diagnostics, my iPod has bought the farm. I know this has happened to other people. Ocassionally, I like to spend money on things that work for more than a year and a half, despite what the gods of marketing tell me to do.
Secondarily, remember Genevieve Jones from Baton Rouge? In case you haven't noticed, she is the new "it girl" in the fashion and arts world. I have already run into pages of photos of her in the NYTimes, The New York magazine, and Vogue. Here's an example from style . The last time I saw her, she was at the Mermaid Lounge with some guy named Huckleberry.
First, let me share this Soul Shower music blog I found that is highlighting New Orleans music. Right now the host has some great Barons, Huey Piano Smith and George Porter up. I got to see George Porter twice in Louisiana over Christmas. The better show was with Vidacovich right after the Peach Bowl - those guys can really get a crowd dancing.
New Year's Eve, Anna, Kyle and Jenny formed a band in 3 days and played in K&J's 9th ward residence/ art studio. They were great, switching instruments throughout the songs. Their candlelight party featured fireworks, bike punks, bands, dance music, and MRE's at midnight. The neighborhood felt pretty calm, with no street lights, they're of the few home owner/residents in the area, so fireworks were the only noises. FEMA seemed more on the ball reimbursing homeowners for generators and tool expenditures, and paying contractors a motivating amount to put blue tarps on roofs. The Red Cross drives around all day in a hot dog truck and there are neigborhood volunteer centers giving out supplies.
The aspect of the destruction that's hard to convey is the scale. This is a ten thousandth of the damage east of Bucktown:
Tree upon house after tree upon house with ten foot water lines for miles and miles and miles. It seemed that the majority of the homeowners were residents. I was about to take a photo of a car in a tree, when I saw a sign asking that I didn't.
In New York on Sunday at the Knitting Factory there's a 30 band benefit show . It looks like the money goes to the Southern Arts Federation.
I'm back home and warm and listening to my new favorite song, Biz Markie singing over "Bennie and the Jets." My clothes are filled with ice cubes. Today was just like Ben's Birthday Bear cartoon. My final exam was snowed out. So, I headed to the stats department at 6 with both arms full of cardboard, where Elijah and Tyler had two cases of beer, string and duct tape. We made tricked out viking sleds that would have made DaVinci proud, and walked and walked and walked to the jolly white hills. Our cardboard beasts worked pretty well, until they fell apart and then we tried trays, and linoleum, and everything else, but the secret was all around us, on the kids who came up to sled - garbage bags. Nothing seems faster than luging in a plastic bag. And it's nicest when you lie on your back in a plastic bag and luge headfirst down really tall hills, looking up at the stars, until unexpecedly crashing into a snow bank and getting a mouth full of snow.
Every political protest that I've seen in a while, has a bunch of people walking like drones in a game of red rover, chanting that silly chant, "The people. united. will never be defeated." until it means nothing, which doesn't take too long. I mean, marching and saying the same thing is being united and it doesn't do anything, but make people in the protest feel included.
On the other hand, if people burned 1500 cars in one night in the US, they'd be considered national enemies - the way the Watts, Rodney King, etc. riots never accomplished much in the way of recognition or equality here.
So, then, short of martyrdom, or heroics from the press, what form of protest would actually be effective? I think a massive work strike would get attention, because the economy is everything in the US. For example, if doctors stopped working for a week to protest Cheney's beloved torture policy - that might effect legislature.
"Bizarre little marsupials [opossums] , they are said to mate through the nose (of
the female). The male presumably has a forked penis and the only
visible paired openings on the female are nostrils. The female is also
known to lick the interior of her pouch and the fur between it and the
vagina before birth. Folks say that she is then blowing the embryos out
of her nose and into the pouch. Zoologists figger that her tongue
freshens up the path that the centimeter long, blind, glorified embryos
crawl up to reach the pouch. There they will hang on to one of 13 teats
and remain tethered for 2-3 months. The forked penis, zoologists
claim, is better suited for interaction with the female's paired uteri
(from which bit they are named Didelphis (double wombed) virginiana."
well, that's kind of gross, but he's a doctor, and when you think about this biologically, it becomes interesting, first, what mental or environmental conditions would have made this an advantageous method, and second, how could it have become so advantageous a method as to become ingrained behavior. There must be something olfactory promoting this.
There are alot of skunks on UConn's campus, including one with switched colors, black stripe on white. There's a note in my dorm not to put food in the garbage public garbage cans, because the maid found a skunk in the bathroom.
My weird creatures of the day are this iron plated snail living on thermal vents, check him out: link
Music: Fiery Furnaces EP -
At first I just liked the beats and keyboard melodies and I did't go for the rest. But then, this grew on me pretty quickly, like a summer when you're a kid hanging out with siblings who your parents are friends with and they're in a weird world with their own tongue twisters and inside jokes for the first half of the week and by the second half you're making up toungue twisters with them because kids are so adaptible.
Movie: Me You and Everyone We Know -
This was pretty amazing - packed with creative ideas and very emotionaly upfront. These are usually more DIY qualities and it was nice to see them translated clearly to a mainstream format. Afterwards I was a little overwhelmed by the depictions of divorce and relationships that never happen so I went to the Waverly Diner and ordered breakfast which they brought me in a frying pan.
Book: Freakonomics
I read this on the bus back from Univeristy of Connecticut. It's pretty harsh statistics based microeconomics, but it deals with so many slices of humanity that after reading it, I stood on a street corner in Times Square for half an hour impressed by all the different types of people. The structure is this weird Flavor Flav/ Chuck D style where a journallist gives introductions to each section hyping up the economist. Dubner says that Levitt's so nice and weak that he wouldn't hurt a fly in a chapter's preface and then Levitt drops the bomb that abortion's legalization has lowered crime.
Put on your powerglove with the calculator on the wrist, have a smart drink, and rev up your CPU for this brainteaser:
If you have two pieces of rope, and a lighter
and each rope takes an hour to burn
and the two ropes are of inconsistent mass and density across their length
and they could be of different lengths and widths
How can you firgure out that 45 minutes have passed by burning the ropes?
I went to the Met to see the Diane Arbus show on Sunday. They created these cool darkrooms to display her notes and books and the things on her walls. The odd looking NYers from the 60s still look like Brooklynites today, but they don't hang out in Washington Square Park as much these days, and there's alot less cigarettes around than are in her photos. After that, we went to watch this musical, Choir Boyz, which was like something Anna, Ben and I would have put together if we were 10x better looking.
Saturday morning at 6am, I ran the Brooklyn half marathon that started in a loop on the boardwalk at Coney Island and ended in a spiral in hilly Prospect Park. I'd never ran more than 6 miles, but I ran all 13 at my target speed. People were kvetching while running around me, so I used my IPOD to keep up the PMA and felt like my knees had fallen off the next day.
I thought of Cristo when I was wrapping Xmas presents in William Morris print paper last year. The more layers of material one removes before getting to an object - ribbon, wrapping paper, shrinkwrap, the more one feels private ownership of something.
The Gates don't strike me as being one person's art piece. Alot of the piece is in hearing the reactions of people walking by - and that they're walking by is the nice thing. Because, it's so cold that I and the hundreds and thousands of others walking through the park would probably being sitting around inside on a clear day were this not happening.
I want to give props to Anna Dreesen for always doing the most fun things I can imagine and being the executive and artistic force behind alot of creative projects. Tonight I got to eat with her, Michele and Erin at Galaxy. They were wearing "Spokes" t-shirts to advertise the 8 day bike ride of the same name that they're setting up from Richmond, VA to NYC. They say they already have 50 kids signed up - every night they're going to play shows along the way. I'm thinking about joining them - it should be unreal. Check out their website .
I hear people say "online" when they mean "in line" again and again these days. Today someone told me they were going to eat a bagel online at the DMV.
Andrew and I were hanging out at this saloon on his birthday and they were playing the entire Double Nickels on the Dime - "Toadies" was Brian's favorite, "History Lesson, Pt. 2" was Jeff's favorite, " Shit from an old notebook" was my favorite.
Liam Nielson did a good job of acting as an unbearable nerd in "Kinsey" (much better than Crowe) , so much that Heather wanted to leave the movie theater. It was pretty campy when it attempted to be art - like showing owls winking in the woods.
We went to this Indian place on 1st Ave, where two guys fom two neighboring restaurants try to pull you in to their restaurant. Evan told us the one on the right was better, so we went in - my head kept pulling down the red chili lights hanging from the ceiling.
It turns out that I live two blocks West of Bloomberg - I should invite him over for some turkey.
Evan and Michele made a tremendous vegan gumbo for Thanksgiving - I gave them a higher Zagat rating than Peter Luger's. The strange thing was everyone was wearing the same outfit. I guess there was a sale:
