file under: a nominee

i love the endlessly vertiginous length of this photo.

awesome.

whether you're someone who does things like vote for blogs or not, you might want to consider this site.

file under: signal drop

i have recently lost the ability to reply to people's e-mail within a reasonable amount of time. i don't know what my problem is, but it's just not happening.

i go through this from time to time, and it's never anything personal; i just can't make myself tackle my inbox, no matter how ridiculous it gets.

so if you're one of the many that hasn't heard from me in a while, please forgive me - i must've already used up all of my monthly e-mail points for january.

i will write soon.

file under: of love and funeral pyres

it was funny to see that a photo of the fire station i used to live across from when i first moved to seattle was in the local "news" today.

when N and i were walking around the old neighborhood in october, she was amazed at how crackhouse-like my old building was: chain link fence, not a lot of windows, grey stucco everywhere. it was like a little piece of south-central l.a. had relocated to more overcast climes.

walking around with her brought such memories back, though! like fire trucks blaring their sirens at all hours of the night, for instance. i know it nearly drove me crazy at times, but the dog living right next to the fire station had it infinitely worse.

and i had forgotten all about the plaid pantry (a convenience store located to the left of the station - you can see it in the photo!). it was open 24 hours, and it was there that i received a very unexpected welcome from my newly adoptive city - in the form of a walrus-mustachioed guy in a little pickup truck offering to blow me at his house (conveniently located right around the corner). i demurred, despite his "it'll be cool; you know, real casual" sales pitch.

what can i say? something about the guy and his truck said hunting knife to me.

file under: whoknows whatpop (pt. iii)

hopefully by now, the exercise looks familiar to those interested in playing along at home. i know it's juvenile, but whenever it's brought up with friends, their answers always surprise me. i therefore want to pose further questions. have i no shame?

the impossible topic this time around is favorite albums. define that last term however you want - i'll accept whatever constraints you lay out there. greatest hits packages? box sets? homemade mixtape? 's all good, cuzzo.

some of my own choices actually surprised me a little bit this time. in order to verify those unexpected answers, i re-listened to and re-evaluated some older favorites and found them slipping down the list (some completely out of the top 10 for the very first time ever!).

i've also noticed that nostalgia has begun to play a huge role for me in this ongoing game. have my boundaries been set? have my tastes calcified? have my plates really fused, so to speak? it was inevitable, i guess.

so without further ado, the 10 albums i think of as my favorites at this early morning hour (in rough but definitely not absolute order):

01) sonic youth - goo
02) the stooges - fun house
03) horace andy - skylarking
04) guided by voices - bee thousand
05) king tubby - essential dub

06) the clash - combat rock
07) mf doom - operation: doomsday!
08) run-d.m.c. - run-d.m.c.
09) yo la tengo - i can hear the heart beating as one
10) erase errata - other animals

what are yours?

[next week: food-related!]

file under: in the neighborhood

after a very good vegetarian dinner at JS and VF's house (the texture of that fake chicken was seriously amazing), we all walked to queen street in order to catch our various forms of transpo for the night's further activities - N going home (work tomorrow! hahaha); JS and VF going to a birthday party for a friend's cat; and me heading off to my night shift (as usual).

on the way, JS was telling me about his times living a few blocks away from the hospital where i work, about how a prostitute jumped into the passenger seat of the van his dad was driving on the day JS moved in. the neighborhood he and VF live in now has its share of addicts and crime as well, but he was telling me it has a sense of community that the area around the hospital simply doesn't have.

as if to prove that point somehow, i was only two steps through the front door when i walked into an unfolding mise en scene in the hospital lobby: 3 security guards standing in front of a homeless man who was so inebriated he could hardly keep his head upright. he had apparently plopped down in one of the wheelchairs in the lobby and was trying to leave with it. security had explained to him that he couldn't just take a wheelchair with him, so he kept yelling "BUT I CAN'T WALK!!!"

i could hear him yelling from the other end of the long hallway, on my way up the stairs and around the corner, to my desk behind electronic swipe doors.

BUT I CAN'T WALK!!!

BUT I CAN'T WALK!!!

BUT I CAN'T WALK!!!

file under: life in a day

when was the last time i worked 7 days straight?

really, it's not that much of an accomplishment; and yet, finishing everything up and taking that one glorious day off before starting all over again seems so major right now.

[anyone else remember that song, by the way? it reminds me of the new wave girls i lost sleep over back in those pre-historic jr. highschool days.]

file under: whose eyes will it have?

earlier tonight, we stopped mid-channelsurf to catch a part of the O.C. featuring seth cohen walking through a pseudo-dreamscape, his voice echoed out to spacy effect. apparently, he was in some kind of altered state of consciousness in search of his spirit animal.

we moved on once the show resumed its characteristic and customary direction, but not before N commented that it was as if our brains had just made babies in tv-hood for a moment there (to the extent that i like druggy things and she, you know, likes california.

not to mention adam brody).

file under: hypnotised by the tiniest part of the day

going up the subway station's escalator on the way home, i look down just in time to see (stuck in the crevice between escalator plate and topmost stair) one dirty green grape, uncrushed but quite grimy.

as the upcoming steps pass out of sight and into the escalator's inner workings, the edge of each stair gently brushes past the grape, touching it just enough to rotate it along its axis.

i therefore see, as i pass this grape while de-escalating, that it is rolling rolling rolling in place, endlessly, to the sound of the elevator's monotonous rumble.

file under: whoknows whatpop (pt. ii)

as mentioned earlier, thinking and talking about favorite things amongst friends has produced some surprising (and, at times, revealing) answers.

what's odd is that i'm finding it a bit of an awkward subject to broach as often as i'd like to. i mean, i wouldn't mind knowing everyone's favorite movie, or song, or album, or book. but in reality, i've only asked one co-worker about such things, and i was so painfully conscious of my forced off-handedness that i decided to avoid the topic with other people. not everyone cottons to the nerdy stuff, after all.

but still, it's hard not to engage in such list-making activities, once the seed has been planted.

and it is with that admission in mind that i bring up favorite books.

now, i'm not as well-read as some, but i've spent many a day curled up on the sofa with a book tented over my face (often snoring my brains out). but at some point, the pleasure derived from reading a good book started to wane, and in its place came the vague sensation of being emotionally manipulated. i therefore started reading more non-fiction than fiction about 10 years ago. that transition will most likely turn up in the second half of my top ten, which might go something like this (in a very rough but not absolute order):

1) gravity's rainbow, by thomas pynchon
2) on the road, by jack kerouac
3) nine stories, by j.d. salinger
4) alice's adventures in wonderland and through the looking glass, by lewis carroll
5) city of glass, by paul auster

6) leaves of grass, by walt whitman
7) introduction to zen buddhism, by d.t. suzuki
8) the golden bough, by james frazer
9) bend sinister, by vladimir nabokov
10) cometbus #45, by aaron cometbus

so what are yours?

[next week: albums!]

file under: whew

after holding our breath over the last 24 hours or so, i can gladly report that we're now a two-income household. congrats to N on the good news!

maybe i can continue to avoid extradition to debtor's prison, after all....

file under: concerning the spiritual eternal

alice coltrane passed away on friday. hearing about it somehow helped explain why the city felt just a little bit colder upon my return home from a too-short visit with RP and BB.

file under: daytrip to exurbia

we are off to see city friends, and from there we are off to see yet more friends in the outer rings of the in-between city.

file under: (market) penetration in the centerfold

while flipping past jeopardy earlier tonight, we were shocked to slowly realize that every category on the screen was named after a rock band (plus one category possibly just named "bands", although we didn't see it clearly enough to verify that). i guess that's better than seeing "bruce willis" as a category, which i did see on a previous occassion....

the contestants were a bald man in military uniform, a female "foreign affairs officer" stationed in canberra, and a rather bland looking (by way of over-martha stewartization) tv news producer.

their categories?

"the replacements"
"big star"
"the fall"
"husker do" [sic]
"the english beat"

holy shit. are we that old now? has the world turned so much that bands we once had to slowly discover from hanging out in record stores and reading rockist specialty rags are now fodder for throwaway "general knowledge" gameshow punchlines? and all for the benefit of dinnertime tv audiences everywhere, no less?

what exactly is that, anyway? a co-optation of bygone heroes? would "commodification" be more accurate, or more inflammatory? how about "collaboration"? it all sounds so juvenile, so lacking in nuance.

this must be the way our youth will be encoded into the 21st century, registering as not much more than an opportunity for nostalgic parents to revel in tv's backgrounded bon mots, all to the embarrassment of their disinterested teenage children.

file under: epiphaneal glandulation

i first heard about the spirit molecule from SH. he told me something about that "other dimension" most participants swore they went to, and he also told me it was happening right in our own backyard for free (if you were lucky enough to get in on the trials).

so it's kinda funny to me that i'd find ABQ in the "news" again (or at least one link removed, via metafilter) not many days after having SH on the brain. maybe he was, in fact, on my pineal gland, known to produce trace amounts of DMT in the body (and reportedly releasing it in dreams).

and while we're getting mildly brainulationary, i'll throw in the additional weirdness of finding out about robert anton wilson's secession a week or so after noting a holiday for a group i first heard about through the illuminatus trilogy.

crazy!

file under: who knows what pop culture lurks in the hearts of men?

a recent little compilation project i've been working on (inspired entirely by an annual compilation project N has been conducting for an impressive 6 years now) has me thinking about favorites.

no matter how well you might know somebody, the songs or books or films they hold closest to their hearts can still be, when revealed, quite surprising. some of that clearly has to do with the ridiculousness of picking a favorite of anything - for most of us, there are just too many factors involved (that don't necessarily lend themselves to easy comparison, of course) to really come up with a satisfying answer.

but still: we can't help but build our lists. it's actually, factually an indicator of obsessive-compulsive disorder! yikes.

after thinking about all this on the subway ride home from work, i abruptly asked N what her favorite movie was. her answer surprised us both (i had guessed lolita, but was wrong - i'm betting that it's a contender for favorite book instead). that kind of surprise seems to go hand-in-hand with such questions; it definitely accompanied the majority of answers to my query about people's favorite song of all time.

a little later, i even went so far as to badger a well-respected culture worker (who happened to be on the phone with N at the time) with the same question. what is his favorite movie? hopefully, he'll get back to us on that.

while drifting off to sleep at about 10am, i started to formalize a top 5 (or at least a first approximation thereof), although a top 10 might be needed to get all of the crucial ones in there. does it matter what those movies are? why am i even bothering to jot them down?

fucking lists.

as of this moment, arguments could be made for:

01) my own private idaho
02) the big lebowski
03) fitzcarraldo
04) rockers
05) beat street

while the second 5 might come down to:

06) cry baby
07) american movie
08) orfeu negro
09) river's edge
10) mulholland drive

so what are yours?

[maybe we'll do one for books next week.]

file under: today's headlines

on january 9th:

in 475 AD, unpopular byzantine emperor zeno is forced to flee his capital (then known as constantinople).

874 years after that (1349), the jewish population of basel, switzerland, is rounded up and incinerated, believed by residents to be the cause of the ongoing bubonic plague.

82 years after that (1431), judges' investigations for the trial of joan of arc begin in rouen, france, the seat of the english occupation government.

337 years after that (1768), philip astley stages the first modern circus (in london).

25 years after that (1793), jean-pierre blanchard becomes the first to fly in a balloon in the united states.

54 years after that (1822), portuguese prince pedro I of brazil decides to stay in brazil against the orders of the portuguese king joão VI, starting the brazilian independence process.

17 years after that (1839), the french academy of sciences announces the daguerreotype photography process.

19 years after that (1858), anson jones, the final president of the republic of texas, commits suicide.

3 years after that (1861), the "star of the west" incident occurs near charleston, south carolina. it is considered by some historians to be the "first shots of the american civil war."

21 years after that (1882), oscar wilde gives his first lecture on "the english renaissance of art" in new york.

23 years after that (1905), russian workers stage a march on the winter palace that ends in the massacre by czarist troops known as "bloody sunday", setting off the russian revolution of 1905.

11 years after that (1916), the ottoman empire prevails in the battle of gallipoli, as the last british troops are evacuated.

13 years after that (1929), the seeing eye is established in nashville, tennessee, with the mission to train dogs for assisting the blind.

22 years after that (1951), united nations headquarters officially opens in new york city.

21 years after that (1972), the rms queen elizabeth is destroyed by fire in victoria harbour, hong kong (a photo of which amazes and creeps me out at the same time, of course).

[fun fact! the wreck was featured in the 1974 james bond movie the man with the golden gun, and was portrayed in the film as a covert base of operations for the british secret service.]

14 years after that (1986), kodak leaves the instant camera business after losing a patent battle with polaroid.

9 years after that (1995), valeri poliakov completes 366 days in space while aboard the mir space station, breaking a duration record.

12 years after that (2007), i read about all this for the first time (via wikipee).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

it might be nothing more than a hallmark of middle age, but over the last 6 or 7 years i've become much more affected by history's sweeping vistas. the happy confluence of living in nyc and meeting a gang of smart-plus-staunch marxists got that particular ball rolling, and now i'm finding more and more of the past to be incredibly involving.

[and while we're at it, bon anniversaire to les demoiselles, whose tough countenances once gave a young man pause.]

file under: shine on, you crazy diamond

there's a friend who's been more like a brother to me, and he's having a tough time these days. we talked on the phone briefly about it, but there was too much to say and i ended up feeling a bit of the old evasiveness coming through.

i'm too far away to be of much help to him, but he's in my thoughts tonight.

work on your things and get better, SH. i wish i could do something from up here to help.

file under: regarding the waiter holding forth at brunch

1) we guessed him to be 23-25.
2) he was super-skinny and sported a vaguely jarmusch-like pompadour of brown hair.
3) his rockabilly gear was understated (black button-down shirt, dark jeans, modest star-shaped belt buckle, black van hi-tops instead of boots).
4) his voice was amazingly loud. like, amazingly. that yawpbox could drown out even the heartiest of table chatter.
5) he wanted to make sure everyone could see that he knew the words to the songs he liked, which he proved by singing them loudly just ahead of the song itself.
6) he was friendly, but in an overly-familiar way.
6.5) he put sunglasses on at some point (wayfarers, i think).
7) he draped himself uncomfortably in a chair from the bar and drank water for what must have been 20 or 30 minutes. we referred to this portion of our brunch as his poseathon.
8) he never brought us our check and bicycled away when the table of local musicians left.
9) the brunch was good, regardless.

[update: N tells me his belt buckle was not a star, but rather the hammer and sickle of the fallen soviet union. that must deserve at least +3 extra snazzy detail points.]

file under: post-apocalyptic future, here we come

seriously, wtf is up with humanity these days?

i need a drink.

file under: holy day for chaos

make sure to wish the discordians in your life a happy mungday today!

file under: does any of it help?

a few weeks ago, i ran across this great summation of what's wrong with the war in iraq. it's provided food for thought ever since.

today, a small trail of links eventually led me to this article, in which a handful of high-profile neoconservatives disown their horrific gift to the world. according to them, the stupendously incompetent white house administration is to blame for the entire mess.

as contrite as they present themselves, it's clear that the temptation to dump responsibility on a lame duck president was just too convenient to pass up. with any luck, their forlorn conclusions that american neoconservatism may have suffered a fatal blow because of prez dub will prove to be true. it never made much sense in the first place and clearly doesn't fucking work. assholes.

and what does it mean when my oft-cited once-left dissenter expresses anger and shame at the execution of the man he's been resolutely committed to deposing for the last 20 years or so? what was he expecting, really? has he been paying attention to the way things have been going at all? jesus christ, man!

are there any true internationalists left these days, or has that worldview become hopelessly compromised by foreign policy designed to gouge out advantages for one's own country?

it's all pretty dispiriting today.

file under: the heart is a lonely hunter (apparently)

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

i didn't quite believe it, so i took the test again to see if the results would change. they did not.

i feel like such a friggin' dude right now.

file under: nothing changes

had i made any kind of resolution a few nights ago, it most likely would have been about being more diligent in my daily life. i therefore would have opted to do the more responsible thing today (ie, clean house, stock up on groceries and cook at home) rather than what we actually did (ie, eat brunch out, catch the early showing of pan's labyrinth in the VIP theater, buy CD's and DVD's, and eventually order spring rolls for dinner - the har gow was excellent, by the way, as was the thai spicy eggplant with tiger shrimps).

we had heard such good things about the movie, i think both N and i were a little underwhelmed. in particular, i couldn't quite figure out why the film opens by telling us the year is 1944 when the spanish civil war was over by 1939 and the spanish did not officially enter into WWII at all (technically speaking, although they allowed nazi germany certain privileges not extended to the allies).

i don't get why that year was specified at all. wouldn't an earlier year have made more sense if the background of civil resistance was so crucial? is there something about 1944 in spain that i'm not aware of, because my understanding is that any real struggle against franco was over and done with before the 40's even began....

or did i hallucinate the year everything takes place? did it really say "1934" on the opening screen? and if so, is the optimistic high note the film ends on merely a wishful "fairy tale" to ward off the persistance of the franco regime, which continued well into the 70's?

much like that other movie involving spaniards (which also, incidentally, features a newborn male child pointedly symbolizing the beginnings of a new world), the intentions of the director aren't as clear as it might initially appear.

file under: enters annum porcine

after the trainride ending the 10 days of seeing our favorite people in some of our favorite places; after accepting the fact that calvin seems to love us more now than when we left (shout out to distance + time on that one) and that speedy the plant looks pretty damn good for only being watered twice during our trips; even after waking up again for brunch at over easy (the dagwood was ridiculously good again) before doing some post-christian shopping; i think we're ready to get down to facing the year ahead of us.