Goddammnit. I hate this. At 7:47, as I distinctly remember, the alarm went off, and I touched the snooze button. And then it didn't go off again. I would have heard it. I'm trying to figure this out. Next thing I saw was the time 10:06. I have three classes in a row this morning, and I always forget that they're on a different schedule, so I thought, okay, well I missed French and Philo, but I can easily make it on time to Syntax at 10:30. Except of course it's not until 11:20, whereas I could have been fairly reasonably late to 9:55 French. But I didn't realize that until I had made the long trek around to DuPont and saw another class going on not led by the hopefully returned Kari. And I didn't even have the little book, Un Papillon dans La Cite that I borrowed from Camilla because the bookstore is out of it, although they said they'd reorder, that I tried to read last night but gave up on after a few pages because the only thing in it I could understand was the few words for which someone had written translations above. So it didn't make sense to go to class at that point. This stuff is so annoying because it's not really due to any fault of my own, or at least certainly not a conscious fault, but I feel so guilty. Especially on the fourth day of class. And what a way to ruin an otherwise lovely morning; drizzly and grey and muted, not cold but enveloping, the kind of morning that makes reality seem lubricated. Funny thing, when I start writing here, all of that starts to slip away, as though this is free of time, set off from the reality of annoyances and pleasures, where the only responsibility is to recount them.

It's not like I didn't get enough sleep; I was in bed at 1 and fell asleep soon after, and while six and a half hours may not be optimal, it's not terrible. Granted, it was for dumb reasons that I was up that late in the first place. [lovely piano lesson where I sightread three Mozart sonatas, plan to work on sinfonien and allegro barbaro; bookstore and beardsley; sort-of tea and speed-scrabble with Joel and Alyssa did something; african and african (the basics); dinner at Tarble of all places, a grilled chicken and swiss while talking to Ben and Alyssa about record stores; laughy visit to the triple; talk about the Beach Boys on the shuttle back.] When I got home, Joel asked if I wanted to play scrabble, and I agreed rather than just trying some reading and going to bed. Rebecca eventually came to join us, and while Nori switched the couches, we had our first real time of four-way roommate bantering, deliriously loud and declarative and good-humored conversation. Taboo topics come up: screw, the family metaphor. But it's nice. I think it will work. We're respectful. The couch is good even. Oh, that couch. Frost. Air.

take a ride on the west coast highway

"Talk Talk" by the Music Machine
"Rebel Rebel" by David Bowie
"Wonderful Wonderful" by Sebadoh
"Corrina Corrina" by a number of people
"Wonder Wonder" by Edith Frost

more?

I don't know why I'm stayin' with you
If everything they're sayin' is true
I heard about you lying to your mama, baby
and I wonder wonder what I should do
I wonder wonder what I should do
I don't know what to do about you

Yesterday ('yes today' 'did you say yesterday' 'yes, today') was, as I think I might mentioned, just ridiculous warm and summery. Sixty-four degrees or something. Ben Schak said "I never thought I'd be complaining about lack of air conditioning in January," and first-year sub David Harrison led the seven syntax-junkies outside, or rather Ben and I led us to the cherry trees ouside Martin, which was noisy, but suitable enough for our purposes of attempting to discover a phonology-syntax interface (class, can you say "Mark showed to John the letter"? How about "Mark showed to John the letter from Paris"?) (David is a phonologist, I take it). I squinted in the sun. As I've said, burst outward and touch down behind Sharples, with some outside folks - Zac, Christine (sorry, I'd rather not spend six Sundays and spring break learning how to be outside, which I've done my whole life), and Morgan, newly bespectacled. Her frames are extremely similar to mine in appearance, except for color, and our prescriptions are practically identical, as I realized when I tried hers on; I handed her mine back, and she didn't realize we had switched until about twenty minutes later when I described my glasses as brown, and she noticed that the ones I had on were green. We had a remarkably bouyant chat, about poison oak, among other things, and Dima Schelenkov stopped to kneel by us for a little while. I went over to talk to Alison and Amy for a while too (they're in Jewish Mysticism together). When I went inside to deliver my tray, I discovered Alyssa and Alison Adelman, and Dima joined us there too, nodded gravely. And Brigid.

Beardsley: overheard Cothren's seminar, regarded Rachel Block's photo show (tattooed man with big mac, mall scenes, tiny fish on leaves, Catherine Gaffney's torso with excellent fabric/skin textures), read blogs. Parrish: no business at the registrars, no mail. Barn: sat outside on the couch reading (Cloudsplitter), then she split to deal with some cleats. I made most of a mixtape, recording over the one intended for Joel, that I think is going to turn into a 180-minute, two-cassette mix. (I just finished the first cassette), all the great stuff I've been listening to lately, and since the last time I made a tape that I have a copy of (creds.) Perhaps I'll make the other side in a few days. I'm listening to it now. Cool intro, lead into "Get Out of My Head" by Firewater (best rock song of 2001?). Oh I'll do the Amazon list thing. It'll be there in a day or so I guess. In the interstices, went into Joel's room to glorify with him in Pet Sounds, that he's been playing nonstop since I lent it to him. Nori asked me to teach her about music, so I gave her a fifteen minute rundown about the Beach Boys, even found an amusing visual of Brian Wilson in the aisle of his health food store from the Rolling Stone images book. Joel made a lovely stirfry dinner (with Maria joining us) (is someone keeping track here - have we really had a dinner guest every night we've had dinner like it seems we have?) Also Nori's scrumptchy banana cream pie. I have yet to make a full dinner for the whole flat this semester; the other three just keep signing up to do it before I really have a chance to start thinking about it. It's okay - I don't mind being perpetually dishwasher, but sooner or later I'd like to make a meal. Perhaps when my invitees come: tops on the list are flat 2S and Pedro Schmidt. Cothren has also been invited.

I convinced Nori to come with me to a lecture Schuldenfrei had recommended on "Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Origin of Philosophy." I was able to follow the first fifteen minutes or so, but it was just so incredibly hot in the Scheuer room that I couldn't concentrate at all after that. Too bad, it seemed fairly interesting. To Parrish 5th to drop off WSRN form (I looked at some of the other applications, ours was predictably the best, without question), 4th to see if I could get my Beach Boys CDs back, then 2nd to see what was up. Elizabeth and Stefanie and I played a few rounds of speed scrabble, which is a really neat variation (everyone works simultaneously on an individual board, drawing two letter whenever anyone has encorporated all of theirs; rearranging is always allowed). The second time we played the sexual innuendo version (I ended up with Pretty, Tiger, Oral, Plush, Boob, Snog, and Bunnysuit.) Then the room was overrun with QSA types gathered there to watch a movie. About 20 of them. I ran into Ben and Brigid in the hallway; the first insisted that we sing a round, the second wanted to show off her cribbage board. I walked over to Worth with Ben, talking about summer plans, which need to be ascertained at some time soon. Rather than accompanying him to the barn, I decided to go to Tango. I was a little late for the start of the advanced class, but okay. I feel like I have very little sense of how to put many of the movements we work on together, since we just do one or two per class, and don't work on combining them or constructing entire dances. Most of the time we're just working with a partner to try to figure out the last thing he had shown us. Joanne and Lindsey titter, Jessica maddens. I said I wouldn't go over, but the shuttle took me to ML anyway. We admired Jesse's elaborate link-super-saturated procrastination entry, and such, and slept. A funny night - little bed, Dali poster fell on me, fire alarm that I tried to ignore, bizarre dream about auto-castration (it had seemed like a good idea at the time), but I slept well enough. Bagels and Science Times (how dolphins keep cool) in the breakfast room. Long walk to class on time. Don't have the book. Here to finish tape and write this. Now meet with advisor. Piano lesson. Tea. Change clothes at some point.

my social life's a dud
my name is really mud

I didn't finish my entry yesterday, but I guess since several people have read it that I'll just start a new one. I was going to mention two especial cuases for the wonderfulness of the world yesterday. First, I have figured out a solution to my scheduling quandary for the semester. I had wanted to take the Schuldintphil 8:30, but since I had already a full slate of 1+1+1.5+.5 academic credits, and I'm not that much of a fool for learnin' my ambition was to audit it. Mr. Schuldenfrei (whose name Nori translates to free of debt or guilt) takes a principled stand against audition, and shot me down like a high school sophomore clarinetist auditioning in a challenge for the stand of principal. Mr. Bruce Grant (one of two professor Bruces to say nice things to me yesterday) sez, though, that's fine. So there's the compromise: audit HistCultConc, take the bitter phil. This has decided advantageousnesses, such as a much (much) lighter workload for the course where it will technically count, and the ability for me to test just how much I really do want to read all this theory schtuff, even though I'm determined to read as much as possible. The only downside is that I'll be graded on my ability to lug myself off to Papazian twice weekly in the early morn. But so far so good. I got there this morning fine, and the added pressure of three straight 75-min classes (philfrenchling, philfrenchling) made the burst out into the abso-freakin-lutely beautiful afternoon all the more dramatic; this schedule promises many jubilant Tuesday and Thursday afternoons once real spring comes (assuming it bears nearly as much resemblance to spring as this bears to summer.)

Number two is that good things have arrived in the mail. A couple Anth textbooks from Half, pleasantly enough, but much much enjoyably a cubical box from my folks packed full of goodies: a postcard from Rae from England; a roll of fun Sager photos from last year that actually belong to Rebecca, which I guess had been left with me and developed sometime when I was unawares; four boxes of LST (that is, two licorice spice and two lapsang souchong); Joel's iMic; a lemon zester (which I christened Miss Zester. Oh, I miss Ester); and two cheap CDs, by Edith Frost and Rebecca Gates (both of whom were all over Spinner this summer), and will figure nicely in the next installment of "Chicks." (Does Ester, I wonder, play tapes or CDs?) Hoo-rah for material possessions.

Sunday evening, after struggling with Fabian for a while, and then triumphing with that pleasant moment of intellectual connection, besides which realizing that the problem was much more with the poor writing than with the complexity of the idas, I came back home to find dinner ready, even a dinner guest - alum Chris Fanjul, who shared fencing stories along with Rebecca. Read Tylor (which has amusingly quaint certainty that it isn't actually racist) and so forth, and then went downstairs to visit buddy Rae. Her room (at least twice as purple as Nori's) is if possible even messier than before. She's gotten to the point where she's ready to something concrete about it, I think, so I gave her some suggestions, and offered to spend an afternoon helping her pick up/straighten up/clean up (it needs the first two most), provided that she was committed to going through with the full thing. Perhaps in conjunction with an "Eban and Charley" listening party. (Martin Hall?) She's practically abandoned Swat once again; half her classes are at Bryn Mawr. I guess the plan is to design a library. She's also talking about changing her name to "Rae". I suggested "rae." or perhaps "RAE". Miho Hatori may be the funniest rapper ever. Listened to "Insignificance" on loop for about three hours. It really is that good.

i'm miho hatori, straight out of purgatori
ai ai allright, i'm passing on your right

Today I love the world. Everyone is attractive and smart and sexy and worth talking to. The weather can do no wrong. Everything falls neatly into place. I woke up early (an hour before alarm) and wrote about "my love affair with house music" as an intro for a Jaxx comp review. These reviews are getting too long - I'm only going to squeeze in two this week, sez Carla, and if they're running alternatingly, one a week is too slow a rate for how they'll hopefully be coming in again. A lovely stroll to French and back, and then time for a reuben, more writing, and chatting with Nori before Culture Concept. Everyone who was there when I arrived had sat along the edges of the room, but I staked out a spot at a table in the middle. When nobody ventured to join me and I was all alone in the center "ahm, like you're on exhibit," Bruce suggested I move to a corner. The class ran pleasantly and smoothly, even though the first two hours of discussion were led almost completely by two student facilitators. Bruce stepped in with some helpful definitions ("nomonology", "axiologic") and occasionally to provide examples or summaries. The most troublesome part was of course dealing with the Fabian reading, from a book titled "Time and the Other," the first chapter of which took me nearly three hours and a page and a half of notes yesterday afternoon as the sun set gorgeously outside the second floor of McCabe, and which is far, far more wordy than necessary, including much more than a fair share of purely invented jargon (including spatialized, naturalized, physical, mundane, typological, and intersubjective Time). After that, a nice first chat with Renee on the porch, tea-time with Nori and Alyssa, and filling-out WSRN app with the latter. Show title: "reality is lubricated." What do you think? Rae said it was "raunchy."

And then there was African. Man! Three hours (half drumming, half dancing) goes by like nothing. I mean, not even the most enjoyable seminar imaginable could pass anywhere near so quickly. I feel like my drumming has improved even since last week. My thigh-drum grip is more comfortable, and my technique and even stamina seem quite a lot better. I improvised some fun gradual embellishments on a rhythm that we played for quite a while, held down the tricky slap/tone upbeats (+a +a +a +a) on a Rumba, and basically prevented the patakato from falling apart when Charles went over to help one of the others. If I had ever imagined that drumming might occasionally get boring, I don't think so anymore. Even if it did, the dancers (and there are a lot of them) are infinitely pleasurable to watch. And then it was my turn. Class was if anything more intense than on Thursday, with great hungawe turning extension, kenanga alternating off-the-ground full-turn contractions, pelvic goodness across the floor. And plus the mirror was visible, which I rather liked because I was very much enjoying how I looked in my green shins tee, dark blue scrubs. Durn I'm skinny. I was so sweaty afterwards that I endured a thorough and chilly shower before heading off to SAC meeting. The meeting was thankfully efficient, and we kept nicely under budget for the week (doling out only $730 of nearly $1600 requested.) Back here I made myself a late supper of scrambled egg-lettuce-gado gado-cinnamon heart-cheese sandwich (it was good I tell you! tasted like Chinese food) and started to watch "The Blue Angel" with Nori. It took us a while to figure out whether there were subtitles, because the first scene takes place in an English classroom. The rest of the dialogue switches between English and German, but the recording is so poor that none of it is very comprehensible. Marlene Dietrich's sexuality is even sillier than Marilyn's. Alyssa is sleeping next to me now; I'll have to wake her up before I go to sleep, and rotate her 90°. Now I'm going to read the Meno with Nori, who's being awfly obliging.

cover me with spots
black and red dots
until i'm filling up your visual field

Jim O'Rourke - Insignificance The phrase "experimental pop" doesn't make a whole lot of intuitive sense. I mean, pop music is supposed to be normal and familiar and immediately likable. In fact, I know plenty of folks who will turn their noses up at anything labelled "pop" for just those reasons: they apparently want to be forced to work or at least wait a while before they like something (or maybe they're afraid of other people inadvertently liking it too.) Incontrovertibly though, the genre (if it can be called that) has changed quite a bit over the last few decades, which means that someone must have been experimenting somewhere along the way. And indeed, most of my favorite artists - Elvis Costello, Beck, Stevie Wonder, even the Beatles - could be neatly described as pop experimenters. Jim O'Rourke's new record kicks off with a bright snare rat-tat-tat and a cheery rip of chiming guitar, leading into the rollicking "All Downhill From Here," which (despite its bitter lyrics) suggests nothing so much as the simplistic joyful abandon of the days when rock and rollers had no fear of pop. And yet a glance at a daunting list of projects that the veteran musician and producer has been involved in - with indie luminaries like Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Superchunk, Faust, and Tortoise - confirms that he's had his hand in more than a handful of experiments in his time, in the process earning a name for himself as experimenter non pareil, especially among Chicago's cutting-edge cognoscenti. What makes Insignificance so surprising, atypical, and ultimately beautiful (and no, I won't stoop to punning on the title) is the subtle way in which that experimental edge comes through on an album of what are essentially pop songs. If one of the trademark deficiencies of pop music is its lack of variety (and even if "experimental music" is often similarly derided for being monolithically same-sounding in the face of its inaccessability), O'Rourke neatly avoids that problem. The seven songs here veer widely from the lilting vibes-and-piano waltz of the title track (which strongly recalls another of O'Rourke's collaborators, the High Llamas) to the stomping, chunky guitar rock of "Therefore, I Am." And then there's the ingenious closer, "Life Goes Off," whose lyrics politely detail the accoutrements of some rather questionable goings-on ("You used to be quite content with your shower cap/I guess know I now you feel more at home/with a case of handi-wrap" "I'd think that you would try to find something to do/with my old school tie/that doesn't turn my skin blue") and pause to muse: "If I were to die with these things on, you might want to try another size." If you weren't listening closely though, the gorgeous acoustic guitar work and the catchy, gently unusual chorus melody might make you mistake it for just another old pretty love ballad. And a final curve-ball comes the last two minutes, as drum-rolls and high-pitched hums subsume the song and lurch ahead into a strutting, epic crescendo of joyful noise. A top-notch group of players, including members of Wilco and Essex Green and saxist Ken Vandemark, wonderfully execute O'Rourke's arrangements, which, though they start simply enough, contain enough layers of complexity to ensure that the album is always a pleasure to listen to. It's worth noting that though this album is only a scant seven tunes long, it reaches a fairly respectable 38 minutes, meaning that the songs average about five and a half minutes. Which is saying something considering that most of them call to mind tunes I could imagine someone disparaging as "three-minute pop songs." Jim and crew take those extra two and a half minutes to create something truly meaningful - perhaps the highest compliment I could pay them would be to say that these songs are all "fully realized." To be honest, I can't quite say what it is - clever arranging, tasteful musicianship, or just plain songcraft - that makes listening to this album such an enjoyable, rewarding experience. What O'Rourke seems to be after here is gently nudging the pop song in new directions, while allowing all of its best qualities to shine in their full glory. So I guess that's it.

A Sunday truly deserving of that name. After a stunning performance yesterday evening (the colors changed more than once even in the span of a short phone call with Ben), everyone's second favorite celestial body has been doing spectacular work today, streaming down through scant two tents (maybe one and a half) of cirrus and making it positively balmy. And I didn't even realize until this afternoon, when (after a productive first four hours - a good start on culture concept reading, scrambledeggstomatocheesesmartbaconpoppyseedbagel sandwich, helping Nori transform my old room into lavender, and the below review) I strolled over to campus, wearing just a painty t-shirt under the jacket that I soon took off. Matt was lying on his bed looking to be in some amount of pain; he has been recovering from a hangover all day, and didn't respond to either of my voice-mail messages which tried to subtly hint that we were supposed to play this morning, remember? (blasts of Les Savy Fav and Les Flaming Lips) So much for rock and roll. A few people were sitting in Willets courtyard - Elena and Nicole reading Aristotle, and Kate and somebody practicing Spanish - which was quite picturesque. Now I'm in the library, where my plan is to procure somehow some of the readings for HCC (the printers are out of order, so I'll have to go to Beardsley to print the e-res, and Jocelyn is still working on Fabian's "Time and the Other," which she says is "crazy") and take them outside and just dare the sun to distract me.

Last night saw yet another populous barn dinner (we've been having so many more people over lately), with Alyssa, Joe, and Ben. The only people on the scene missing were the Natural History, openers at Olde Club with whom Joel has something of a working relationship. The didn't respond to our invitation, so they lost out on a lovely quasi-Indian meal of dal, grill-pan-grilled eggplant, sauce for it, and round ethnic breadstuffs. Actually Ben didn't eat, he just slept on Rebecca's bed and grunted and rolled over when we came in to watch "L.A. Story" after cleaning up a bit. He and Alyssa and Joel had never seen it before, and Rebecca acquiesced to our choice of it over "Strictly Ballroom," which I would still like to see. It may or may not be one of my favorite movies, but it surely is fun, and the first two-thirds especially have so many great jokes and gags that laughter really is pretty continual. I even noticed some new jokes this time, mostly one-liners in background conversations that are quite easy to miss except on repeated viewings. And they range from stupid and punny to incredibly clever bits of dialogue and humorous inflection, as well as subtle/hyperbolic parodies of pretension, like the kitty blinking under the Shakespeare quote. A lot of the Shakespeare jokes don't work too well, actually, some are just embarrasingly bad, it's hard to tell why they insisted on so many of them. Also the movie doesn't work so well towards the end when it turns into full-on romance; or maybe that's just not my genre. It's kind of a funny shift. It's sort of hard to tell how seriously it takes itself in some of those parts.

The movie took until 10:30, so we missed all of the Natural History's set (except half of their last song), which was a shame, because it sounds like they were pretty good. Rachel said "like the Strokes but even better." The basement was full of hip-looking non-Swarthies, not all of whom were band-members and girlfriends, and some of whom were in the corner reading the Times and a math textbook(?), better food than I've seen at an Olde Club show in a while (Tropical Typhoon Mike and Ikes are good, and what's with this white cranberry-peach stuff? It tastes like candy juice -mmm), some actual furniture (perhaps some of it from the barn basement), and also some old indyfriends - shaggy anti-pop Caroline Bermudez, Priti Batta (who's forsaken wsrn for mkat), christy smallwood (note self-consciously cute use of lower case) who introduced me to people who have had Bobby Conn sleep in their bed, Jenny and Nate and so forth, even Henry the drummer from Scarsdale. Matt Pond PA featured, as promised, "violins and stuff" (actually cellos), and were so sedate that four of their six members were sitting down (okay, i can forgive the cellists and drummer, but Mr. Pond himself?), although the lanky drummer (in requisite glasses and dingy old mayoral campaign tee) was holding it down with complex beats and stick tricks and a shaker. Their melodies were nice and the arrangements were nicer, and his voice, though entirely uninteresting, has some passion at least. Afterwards the drummer asked me where to find some alcohol, and the best I could do was point him toward the Russian club party, but he declined and went to sit on the lap of a striped-sweater photo girl that Ben had been chatting with. Les Savy Fay ("you say it lay-sah-vee-fav," the bassist informed a group of us after the show as he passed out stickers) were a nicely stark contrast, the opposite of sedate. Ringleader Tim Harrigan (?) sweated and bugged his eyes like the crazyman(iac) with a hulking red shaggy beard that he is, and acted very much the performer of opportunities - he used what he had to work with, throwing the mic back and forth between his hands, standing on whatever amps and monitors were available, blowing excitedly on a pinwheel that someone in the audience held up, eating a plastic lizard, rattling the metal gate in front of the soundmachine room and then attempting to climb on it up to the balcony, disappearing into the room for a few minutes while still singing and then returning with a blanket draped over his shoulders, which he then threw on top of me, trying to climb under the stage, etc. For the first time about thirty seconds into the opening number, and every few songs thereafter, he lunged out into the audience and cut a swath into the center of the crowd - or to the far corner, or to the middle of the floor - and shouting at/thrusting the mic towards/throwing his arms around/licking the glasses of various audience members. He leered at me and then headed for me and gave me a big hug, or something. Then he climbed out the window and came back in through another, standing on the radiator to rip half of a gel off one of the lights and then move it back and forth over the crowd. All this time, of course, an extremely inadvisedly drunk Matt Rubin hollered excitedly and raised the sign of the goat towards the Man (David Berger was also ridiculously goat-signing for the whole time, as his Obie girlfriend swiveled bobbed up and down). Oh, right the music - they fall I'd say somewhere between At the Drive-In and the Dismemberment Plan for a visceral wedding of punk guitar throttle and Talking Heads-ish pfunk (apparently these guys are from RISD too), with some of the bizzareness of Need New Body, and slightly more melodicism and texture-experimenting than any of those groups. An unmissable live show, for sure, but I was enough sold on it (chiefly from lovely little melodic bits that got fairly crushed under the noise and frenzy, coming from ooh-wah backup vocals, funky basslines, cheesy sampler-synths) that I plunked down two fivers for the album, which after all has been gettin critical praise from all over. I stood around for a little while with Ali, Brigid, Stef, Wirzbicki, Sid Beveridge, Mike Camilleri, Heather Sternshein (who was mostly there to ogle the drummers, I guess: "I have no taste in music, I like anything that has vibrations" Sidney:"Then you should listen to double-yewess-awren, everything we broadcast has vibrations" "even the static" "I like static if it's artistic" "this isn't really artistic, it's more pragmatic. pragmatic static") and then walked up to Parrish circle with Ali and Mike and caught the shuttle (Kath Voll was in there - i look at her now and wonder why exactly i was thinking back then) back to the bran. Somewhat surprisingly, nobody was back yet. So I put in "Go Forth" (which has really frustrating artwork) and did some dishes. At first I was disappointed, but then I pushed the track button back and listened to some of the songs again, and they had already begun to grow on me. So we'll see. Might not have been such a dumb impulsive purchase after all.

first one name's sweet anne-marie and she's my heart's delight
second one is prison baby the sherrif's on my trail

her space holiday - manic expressive The first sound on "manic expressive" by her space holiday (note self-deprecating use of lower case) is a computerized voice "welcoming" you to the album, rather similar to the one on the first Add N to [X] record (note self-conscious use of mathematical symbols). Rather than whirrs and burbles and the sound of accelerating concrete, however, this rather tired trick is followed here by the comparably innovative sounds of an orchestra tuning up, interrupted by a few taps of the conductor's baton (a device that may have been lying fallow since R.E.M.'s "Nightswimming.") A solo violin launches into a lovely little melody, soon joined by the rest of the orchestra in a lush, politely brooding instrumental that sets the middling tone for the rest of album; emotional but reserved, sophisticated but tawdry. This soon subsides into an atmospheric hum, which leads into the album's first proper song, a mournful ballad which sets up some of the album's lyrical themes, self-doubt and the sadder aspects of love affairs, set against loping IDM beats and glitches. The marriage of symphonic textures with slowed-down Aphex Twin-style blip-hop and pseudo-jungle, which is essentially her space holdiay's m.o. here, recalls some of the more sophisticated mid-90s trip-hop releases, such as Mono's "Formica Blues" and Everything But The Girl's "Walking Wounded." But this is plainly singer/songwriter territory, albeit fancily got-up, and would never be mistaken for 'techno' (as those albums were). And instead of a bleary-eyed European chanteuse, these tunes are crooned with an appropriate mix of pathos and heartfelt disinterest by hsh's central (only?) member Mark Bianchi, and occasionally doubled by his girlfriend Keely. If this barrage of comparisons and references seems excessive (I've mentioned five other artists so far, and I've only touched on the album's first two tracks), it's frankly because not much that Bianchi does here is strikingly original. At its high points, such as "the ringing in my ears" (the catchiest track here, which features an uplifting string ostinato à la "Bittersweet Symphony") "manic expressive" is truly enjoyable, but elsewhere, in the inexplicable interview track "spectator sport" and the wallowing "perfect on paper" ("I don't hate myself/just the things I do"), which plays like a despondent, pessimistic cousin to the Flaming Lips' "The Spark That Bled," it just seems self-indulgent. I just have one more comparison to make, and in order to be perfectly banal I'll make it as clichéd as possible: her space holiday's most immediate touchstone seems to be Radiohead. Not that this sounds particularly like Radiohead, any more than anything released in the last five years, although the funky, electric-piano driven "keystroke" wouldn't have sounded out of place on their last two discs. But it's hard to imagine a record like this in a pre-"Kid A" universe, from its cover art (created by Shynola, who also did the art for "Kid A" and "Amnesiac") to the mechanical/emotional confluence that informs the music and some of the lyrics. As much as it tries to create something original, and despite the not insignificant pleasures it has to offer, "manic expressive" serves mostly as a reminder that it's not the only one or the best of its kind. And there's nothing wrong with that. Cheer up, Mark. (6/10)

I've spent most of today writing a long two-part post chronicling my reflections on the Joel and Alana situation - the conversations with him and then with Alyssa on the night of the break-up (for want of a better word), the parallels I see with my own life and philosophies, and the talk I had with Joel yesterday afternoon which led him to credit me as his saviour. In the meantime, Alyssa's been here reading JONKOJ and wearing a skirt that keeps getting twisted and there's been all kinds of rockin' going on (Hummer, Big Head Todd, Afghan Whigs, Smiths) and not a whole lot else has happened.

I was mostly here yesterday too, missing dinner because nobody cooked it (we thought Nori was but then she went to Gabe's), instead Joel and I played abbreviated Trivial Pursuit while we waited for Alyssa, with each square good for a pie piece. Even though I had a full pie and was gunning for the center when he only had two, I was going back and forth across the middle for so long that he ended up winning. I put on Hello Nasty to get the party started right, and eventually Claire and Alyssa showed up, cold rockin' it in jaguar print and lacy/pink, respectively. I put on my newest tie (gold and blue one from Mike) with the olive green shirt and light striped jacket - Rebecca called the ensemble David Byrne - but we still had to wait for her to do stuff and get dressed, and Joel looking up Lithuanian first names on the 'net ("They should cancel the internet and just keep this site") But eventually we got there, shuttled over. There being Blair's 21st birthday party in the WRC. Alyssa's skirt matched a lot of things - the Royal Tennenbaum's soundtrack and parts of the butt of the Beanie Mandrill ("Cheeks - he's named for…can you guess?") that Blair had recieved as presents, the leftover decorations from the Lambda Latke Pi party ("No Hazing" sign), individually wrapped Jelly Bellys, some of the frosted drinks that waistcoated, tattooed Marvin Barron was serving up (from an amazingly extensive bar including sour apple liqueur with which I mixed myself an "appletini"), Blair's cheeks, etc. Downstairs I talked with Lindsey Newbold, Emily Clough, Chris Keary, Peter Wirzbicki (who had apparently just sort of wandered in from somewhere), Liane Rice, and later Adrian Daub; eventually the party shifted upstairs (some people even went to the third floor for drinking games sundry and sordid) where Blair was trying to get people to dance, but having mixed luck due to a somewhat haphazard selection on her mix CD - P-Funk, Run-DMC, Salt'n'Pepa interspersed with the Nields, Pete Yorn, the Replacements, Joe Jackson, and the George of the Jungle soundtrack? Her friend from Oberlin was happy to dance to most of it though. And eventually she put in the fast hits disc from the Luaka Bop anniversary comp. In the mean time I was enjoying the sociably drunk company of Laura Hirschfeld (whom I had never met before, but who was pleased to welcome me into her onion - the metaphor we were expanding on for most of the evening), her jersey-wearing Temple boyfriend John, Emily and Peter. It was really extremely silly. A little later on I came to that group attending to Kellam Conover, as he expounded on gay sex, hilariously making Peter a little uncomfortable by using him in his examples, and telling really confusing stories. It got late really fast. I had been expecting my roommates to be watching "L.A. Story" by the time I got home, but they weren't even back until quarter to three.

Well the sun has gone now (in the most spectacular fashion I've witnessed in quite a while) and its probably nearing dinner time. A little while ago Nori came in and fetched me to join she and Rebecca practicing and teaching Joel how to do pelvic isolations in the kitchen, with Stankonia accompaniment. An extremely, extremely amusing sight.

i pray so much about it, need some knee pads

The longest, best conversation I've ever had with Alana took place over Fall Break last year, on the return trip from Shenandoah, when she told me about, among other things, the story of Alana and Joel. They have had, as Joel described it last night, a storybook romance, involving a series of semi-coincidental meetings over a period of six or seven years, interspersed with long separations and intense correspondences. I feel somewhat honored to have had what small glimpses I have had into their relationship, because it seems that it has always been quite a private matter. It's doubtful that more than a handful of folks at this school know about it even after a year and a half. Despite this, I've always found them remarkably adept at balancing an obviously close and loving relationship with large amounts of space, so that they have largely different friend groups, and it wouldn't be unusual for them to pass as much as a week without seeing one another. I certainly wouldn't characterize their relationship as dependent.

That's partly why it came as such a shock the other night when Joel walked into the kitchen and said that Alana thought they should spend some time apart for fear of being too dependent. His attitude at that point was largely one of disbelief, understandably, and even humor, just not knowing how to respond, but also clarity. "It was genius" he said, of the way she brought it up - reiterating how good they are to each other and how much they love each other, and then desoningcribing her anxieties of how their relationship might play out. The sort of thinking similar to what I was exploring last semester, in a few conversations with Ester, the idea that you might end up with someone your whole life, not having taken 'sufficient' opportunity to experiment with other types of relationships. Although I'm not sure how absolutely true it is that one ought to have those kinds of opportunities, it's certainly an understandable idea and one that makes a lot of sense. And I can hear the concern that its better for this sort of 'temporary experimental separation' to occur in college and not, say, when they've moved into an apartment together. As I thought about it, I was quite impressed at how Alana had taken it upon herself to act on these anxieties, however arbitrary and rash it might seem. I think it's extremely important to make a clean breast and act decisively when these kinds of tricky emotional concerns come up; my complete failure to be clear-headed and upfront like that with Meredith when it really mattered is probably the biggest mistake I've ever made. Still, it doesn't seem like the fairest or certainly most considerate way to have gone about it, especially since her crisis seems to have come from intellectual problems more than emotion ones. Maybe necessary; who knows.

In any case, Joel was coping okay for a while. Nori, Rebecca, Sean, Alyssa, and I (most of us in bathrobes) convened in the kitchen to comfort him as best we could. We rejected beer, but I gave him some ice cream. And hugs, and advice, break-up stories and platitudes. For a long time he lay down on my bed while most of the others clustered in the doorway, and fondly recounted the story of their relationship. I found all kinds of parallels in it to my various relationships: summer camp (of course), extended long-distance separations, intense intellectual and quasi-emotional correspondence, staying outside all night, and forbidden, necessarily secret love. His outlook at this point seemed extremely uplooking and hopeful, resolved to enjoy his unexpected singlehood for what it was, and though he thought he was unlikely getting to sleep, he retained a cool head. Michelle came over and we mocked David paintings and sang Magnetic Fields ("I don't want to get over you.")

My strongest reaction (besides compulsive mix-tape compiling in my head) was to try to sort out where Alana had been coming from in all of this. As I explained it to Alyssa, I imagined her line of thinking followed some of the discussions we had had last semester about free love (Kollontai, etc.) and lack of dependence, which were rather intellectualized and somehow seemed contradictory to normal human emotions. Certainly its an idea that appeals to the two of us intellectually, and I actually felt quite comfortable with it in practice, although there were emotional quandaries that came up; while Alyssa has said that she wished she were more comfortable with it as an emotional reality. I'm not sure this is making sense. So I was trying to sort out for myself how much of Alana's decision had come from intellectual reasoning and how much was more genuinely felt. It seems the former to some extent, but she also seems to have greatly underestimated how much she would be emotionally affected by its consequences (although they were both in tears by the end of the discussion, she had apparently been much further gone in sobs.)

Although it felt like something completely out of the blue, there were precursors to this juncture, such as (intellectually) her discomfort/moral rejection of the term "girlfriend" (which makes this "break-up" somewhat contradictory), and (in a more tangible sense) a crush she had on some guy last semester. It sounds like she is quite keen on the idea that Joel should go and have relationships with other people (she being his first and only), which is a little hard to interpret. After thinking it through a while, I found myself less of a parallel to Alana (in terms of my thinking about my relationship) than I had at first thought - although it seems possible that I might at some point succumb to these 'intellectual' anxieties about unexplored possibilities despite an ideal and existing relationship, I'm sure my approach would be less drastic and more considered - in a sense, more intellectualized - perhaps to the point of uselessness. Alyssa and I also wondered if Alana would retain her rational "emotionless" stance for long enough to effectively enact this "noble experiment," or whether the drama of that night's conversation and its immediate emotional repercussions would be enough to make reconsider - realize that she wanted something less drastic-feeling. It's hard to know. The underlying premise in something like this has to be that there is always the possibility of getting back together. I tend to feel that as long as a comfortable, balanced, and caring relationship has existed once between two people, the possibilty of its being regained is always there, assuming th relationship was based on something more stable than pure and intense passion. And Alana and Joel have certainly demonstrated that; surviving unscatched and even strengthened after several long separations. At some point though, contends Alyssa, it's possible for one party to hurt the other emotionally to the extent that a reunion is no longer possible; this (along with the chance that a reunion just might not happen for logistical reasons) is the danger. And though of course it is impossible to predict these things, there must be ways to minimize them. In my opinion, as usual, frankness and honesty is the way to go. We talked about our break-up experiences and the relationships that had proceeded them; Nori, Meredith, high school, cynicism, and slept happy.

~

We thought we had heard some sobbing coming from the next room as we fell asleep, but I was rather surprised to learn the next afternoon (Friday; yesterday) that Alana had called late at night and they had spoken for quite a while. She (I think) called again and they talked for another hour or so, at the end of which he agreed to go over to see her at Woolman. But first Joel came and talked to me. It sounded like the phone conversations had mostly been circular, rehashing essentially the same things they had said the previous night, and that the way things were going they would both end up spending a lot more time than necessary being miserable. "Neither of us have really had a break-up before" he said, "so it's like we're just acting out our idea of what a break-up is supposed to be like." Since their relationship had not been a convential one (even in its nomenclature), this seemed like a particularly silly way to proceed. I told him a lot of what I had been thinking, and encouraged him to do something decisive about the situation. Since it seemed clear they shouldn't and wouldn't just get back together immediately and forget about it all, there was nothing for it but that they spend some time apart, as Alana had suggested, for better or for worse. Although I would certainly suggest that he look at it for the better (explore the situation and take advantage of its positive opportunities), it was most important, I thought, that the two of them acknowledge those things that they can be sure of - that they love each other, that neither really wants to hurt the other, and that they can exercise control over their circumstances insofar as they can remain open and honest about their own feelings - things that they had been letting go of to some extent. The logistics of the arrangement (complete avoidance for a set period, "friend-dates," leaving it up to chance, whatever) are less important than that they just make some temporary decision, as I saw it. Some part of what I said inspired Joel, and he decided he would go over and "be mature about it." Which was the best thing I'd heard yet. And it's early to tell yet, but it sounds like it went well. He's sad still, but I think he feels good about the conversation they had and the prospects for the future. His next project: finding other fish.

a dreaded sunny day
so I'll meet you at the cemetary gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
but you lose
because Wilde is on mine

I started to make a catharsis mix tape for my roommate, but it turned into me just listening to the Smiths and reading [zabby's] amusing website, which I had previously had difficulty accessing. The story from today's entry cracked me up. My plans to write last night were interrupted by an unexplected explosion, which I'll get to later, depending.

To pick up from where I left off, what happened Wednesday afternoon was I went and signed out a pair of binoculars from Janet McI. Williams (who is an extremely sweet lady as well as having the best middle initial ever), along with a "purse" for them, and went to model them for the triplet. Brigid (whose online shorthand nickname "brig" is to my knowledge rarely used in spoken conversation) found them useful for reading her astro textbook from across the room. Very much in keeping with the logic of that room, she has moved her mattress out of the large room and turned her bedframe on its side to serve as a partition/barricade to prevent Zabby's mess from infiltrating her desk area. We didn't talk, because, you know, we never have conversations.

I'm sure I got something accomplished back here before tea-time with Nori and Laurel (which we want to make a pre-African ritual) and leaving for African. I drummed for an hour and a half and then danced as long again, and each part caused me some amount of physical pain. Not a lot. From drumming only when I was doing a steady 1e+ 2e+ rhythm on agogo with my left hand at a funny angle, against a clave on the drum. It was tricky too, since I'm more used to doing that with the hands switched. Charles gave me a few exercises to work on. He had some questions too - he wanted to know how I would play a seven on traps, and the name of the William Tell overture. Dancing (in African II, which was at least as crowded as the biggest African I class last semester, if not bigger) was extremely intense, from its pacing as much as anything else. He gave me a few corrections that I had some difficulty encorporating. Rebecca says that my dancing has a markedly different aesthetic from what he's looking for ("not that it's bad"), maybe just because of my body type. If class maintains this pitch, I'm sure I'll be improving quickly, and that's exciting.

The next morning, Nori and I made it on time to philosophy, but after enough other people that the only seats left were in the back. I guess he couldn't see my hand that far away, so he didn't call on me to participate in talking about Plato's Gorgias (which Nori and I had read in dialogue the previous night) which is intriguingly ambiguous in its applicability to contemporary modes of thought. Plato is clearly operating under assumptions that I'm not necessarily sure I agree with, and it's not always obvious why he's getting at what he is. Is it helpful just to expose a contradiction if it doesn't really explain anything new? Nori talked to him after class about auditing, and it sounds like he's stubbornly and emphatically against it, which is a real shame, for my sake anyway. French was fine (Ben Wharton and I picked out an atelier in the cinqiéme arrondisement) and Syntax was slightly more productive, (Donna Jo subbed admirably, even though she had lost her mother just the night before. "I guess it seems like tragedy striking the ling dept." she said, and warned that she might have to stop in the middle of the lesson. Her teaching style, or I guess just her demeanor, makes such a contrast to Kari's easy understatement.)

Nori and I made the trip to Genuardi's, which seems much closer on the way there than on the way back, burdened with a full frame pack of groceries, but it works, although now there are lentils all over the inside of it. Before that I had finished part two of Cloudsplitter (that's page 300; intermittent progress but progress nonetheless) and Brigid was here to discuss it not long afterwards. It's a fascinating book that raises a lot of questions - many of which would require some historical research to answer, although we did consult mapquest for one of them. We might have to take some field trips too. Alyssa and Sean made seven for dinner, which was tasty veggie kugel and an inspired but only somewhat successful edamame-peas-shallots side.

Most of we sophomores ran off to the "chocolates and choosing" meeting, wherein most of our class gathered in upper tarble to listen to inadequately miced Dean Charlton (who always reminds me of the frazzled, well-intentioned teacher in "Clueless") explain about major requirements, some of which was new information to me (but how many people really course double major in the same subject as their honors minor?) The packet they alphabetically distributed (Holman next to Hoffman; Brett-Esborn near Blecher) was not as helpful as I had anticipated (ie. it didn't contain tentative course offering lists for the next two years), but it was nice to see the whole class in one place like that (as Stefanie mocked me for saying). I took a rose, did the Language Lab thing, came back here to Alyssa and Stocking. While we were reading, Rae came by to chat, which made for a sort of awkward moment (was it awkward? I thought it was). Then I went into the kitchen to do some dishes, and that's when it hit. Joel walked in after having been somewhat conspicuously absent for a few hours, and said: I was just dumped. It's real fun.

I think I'll write about that, and the conversations that took place in the next several hours, before and after we went to bed, a little later on. For now, here's today: It was absolutely gorgeous today, a stark contrast to the persistent drizzle and gray of yesterday; clear blue sky from the moment I looked up. That is, cloud cover of zero-tenths, or as I misheard Janet "call me Janet" McI, zero tents. I like the idea of tents as a scale for cloud cover, it makes a good deal of sense. We stood in a circle behind Martin and described sounds and their direction, spotted some mourning doves (columbiformes) on the river birches and conifers, and a scurry of passenteries at the feeders: titmice, chickadees, sparrows, juncos, finches, faster than she could talk about them. As became even more abundantly clear a few hours later in the indoor portion of the class (after French lab and sitting in parlors with Claire while Jonathan Schneider and whatsisname, Gavril, were ridiculously conversing about vectors and dot-products and Australia and a refreshingly normal conversation with Rachel Block about art - she has a show up in Beardsley - and interrupting Alyssa's Sharples date with Melissa Min, who has either changed a lot or else I my sense of her from last year was incomplete; she was being far more earnest and talkative than I would have guessed), the group is split between abject beginners like me and Abram ("birds are pretty") and seriously experienced folks like two who have spent summers banding birds and one who has incurred the jealousy of Ms. Williams by having travelled to South America with "only one of the most important living ornithologists" (Janet's words). Debates about the pronunciation of "Appalachian" have already started. The class should be really interesting and different; it's nice that Joe and Ali are taking it too. I might go on a field trip with them Sunday. After class she took most of us to look at the Swarthmore College Bird Collection, which is three large cabinets in a back room of Martin whose drawers contain hundreds and hundreds of stuffed birds, including owls, eagles, hummingbirds, parrots, and a pelican. Many people kept commenting on how beautiful they are, or adorable even, and they certainly are, in a way, but it just struck me as a funny response. I guess if you're used to these things.

she told me she would meet me 'bout a quarter to nine
and believe it or not she was right on time

I felt strangely warm and as they say fuzzy yesterday morning, as I gave up on trying to shower in the cold water, walked briskly to campus with Nori and found myself in a delightful wooded room complete with fireplace and empty built-in bookshelves (and an elaborate ceiling pattern cut in half with a crude plastic hallway partition.) Mr. Schuldenfrei (as he put it on the syllabus) seems like a terrific fellow indeed: relaxed, amiable, slightly sarcastic without seeming bitter at all, truly philosophical, I guess. I didn't speak up a whole lot, but I enjoyed the conversation ("what is the purpose of college"; "why do we say 'social change' when we mean 'radical liberalism'"), and the dichotomy of bright-eyed freshmen (tee-hee) and PDC-bagging juniors (Nori and Emily Clough). It's a very tempting class, and seems especially well-suited to auditing, since the meat is in reading and discussion, and the papers are somewhat extraneous. There are certainly problems with auditing 8:30 classes, but there are advantages as well (at least to auditing them over taking them).

Next up was French, my first class with Micheline Rice-Maximin, who is spunky and speaks quickly, but seems nice enough (she spent a few minutes after class digging up an extra schedule for me). Then to DuPont (around the back the long way, since I was just following my nose) for Intermediate Syntax. I was quite confused to find a somewhat flustered, soft-spoken clean-cut young man leading a low-key discussion of interfaces between linguistic modules, but eventually I figured out that Kari was away (her father has apparently just died.) She wouldn't be in Semantics either, of course, so instead of that I went with Alyssa (whom I had encountered at lunch, over curly fries and an articulated discussion of Turkey with Adrienne) to her Cognitive Science class, for which ironically I was enrolled and not she. This was in the same lovely room (Papazian 324) as the philosophy class, and had the same sort of eager freshfolk, including Jonathan "but happy" Schneider (but not J. Bronstein), Joy Mills, funky haired robotic clown Ed (who had been in French as well), and Elena C. Unfortunately this prof wasn't nearly as compelling, mostly content to stand silently and let people "respond directly" to one another. Alyssa and I refrained from entering the debate, despite our complementary mind definitions, but it was quite amusing regardless, as folks argued for the sentience of sunflowers, the impossibility of new ideas, the idiocy of moths, the temporality of the mind. "Actually, I don't know what's in a quiche." I had never really had the intention of taking it, but I kind of enjoy first class meetings. I talked Alyssa into going to another one with me, my fifth in a row, and in Sproul of all places: Historical and Comparative. That seems like quite a far-out class, touching on everything from Old Icelandic structures to computer programming to Iron Age cuisine to Tolkein Worship. Shame but I don't think it's for me, at least this semester. Sean Crist is endearing though, as much as a professor as as a square-dance caller and a muller of wine (my only previous experience with him.)

And with that (and a trip to the bookstore for pens and, perhaps ill-advisedly, Hindu goddess books) we headed off for ml, past running Schmidt, to Alyssa's room, where I "whacked and unwrapped" a "raspberry," ordered half of my anthropology books for literally half what it would have cost me at the bookstore, and read what Schmidt had to say about my paper. Blair came by to see about Sharples, but I only walked with her partway, and then headed home. Dinner here was already underway, even though nobody had answered my call fifteen minutes earlier, and soon enough Laurel and Jenny and Sean arrived to partake. It was Joel's old favorite dofoo curry with coconut milk with a new and excited audience (had he thought we were criticizing the peanuts rather than the repetition?) Joel and Rebecca left partway through the meal, and the juniors got to intense majors-requirements-PDCs talk, spurred by Nori's recent ambition to become a CS major. When the dust cleared, she seemed set on CS and Ling double-minor with a music major, while Jenny toyed with various "special" combinations. I re-read the requirements, shifted my thinking to Arth major Ling minor rather than vice versa (but no rush to choose, so that's nice.) I read some and went to tango, which was as I should have known flushed with new folk and a lesson on the basics once again. After about fifteen minutes I noticed there was gender balance without me, so I slid back out again. Took the chance to visit some Lodgers, primarily Matt, who played me his three new tunes (including the expanded "save the homosexuals") and the Jay-Z unplugged disc, and Kate Minear, who has a fabulous new haircut and is applying to go to Madrid (her roomies were out involved in theatre and cinema). Back here and wrote this.

Today's classes were startlingly normal: French drill with good old Bénèdicte and Camilla in orange, and Goddesses, which both piqued my interest in the subject further and made it seem like the subject matter might end up being the most worthwhile thing about the class. Alyssa met me in the foyer as promised, we lunched here. I took care of some matters (called home and Tony) and here I am, so that's up to date. I'm going to go get binoculars soon.

i saw her leave the luau with the one who parks the cars
and the fat one from the swimming pool - they were swaying arm in arm
now i can hear their ukeleles playing down by the sea
she's gone with the hula hula boys, and she don't care about me

they're singing:
haina 'ia mahiana ka puana
haina 'ia mahiana ka puana
haina 'ia mahiana ka puana
haina 'ia mahiana ka puana

I have been to eight (academic) classes in the last two days. In declining order of my desire to take them (considering all relevant factors):

History of the Culture Concept (Anthropology)
French 2B
Intro to Philosophy
Intermediate Syntax and Semantics
Goddesses (and Gods) of India
Comparative and Historical Linguistics
Patterns of Asian Religions
Intro to Cognitive Science

My schedule is still somewhat unsettled, but I'm essentially certain that I'll take those first two. Also Spring Ornithology, which has yet to meet, and one of two ling classes; Semantics or the "intermediary." As usual, I'm tempted to audit, the most likely candidates being Phil and Goddesses (less likely). Here's what it's been like:

Sunday was relaxing for the most part (the entire Björk ouevre to date, a visit from Ben, a chapter each in Pinker and Banks) although I had an attack of funk (mostly roommate/loneliness/lethargy related). That improved after I decided to be more active, and cleaned out my closet a bit, setting it up to prompt Rebecca to dub it a "boudoir," and strung up SAC funded blue lights around my window and eyesore pipe thingy. I opted out of the first day of French, but sat through two straight religion classes, both with Katharine Ulrich, an enthusiastic visiting prof from UChicago (doctoral candidate for "Images of Dismemberment"; she's also teaching a seminar on "Sacrifice: Theory and Practice"). Patterns was packed and seemed like it would be frustratingly broad and shallow, although well-thought out, but Goddesses (which I hadn't realized was emphatically Goddesses and Gods) held some interest, despite my lack of allegedly prerequisite knowledge of Hindu. There were only six other students, including an ecstatic Mike Smith and at least one practicing Hindu. Met Nori back home for a bagel with cream cheese, hot mango chutney, and Florence pear preserves, and then found myself late to History of the Culture Concept (that class is annoyingly unabbreviatable). I was the last one in the room in fact, which meant that I joined two others on the hard cold windowsill, looking at the hairs on the back of Jocelyn's sweater. I think it's a good sign that she's in the class, and it certainly has the mixture of hard-core theoreticalness and stylishly self-aware humor that marked my last class with her, Everyday Things. I'm not exactly sure why I signed up for it, other than that Bryn Rosenfeld raved about it so extensively, given that I have never professed an interest in anthropology, and have perhaps only slightly higher than average (for Swarthmore) tolerance for theory. But I'm pretty psyched for it. It promises to be challenging and fun (quite an imposing reading list that I'm sure will range from sublime and inspiring to frustrating and just boring, and just an overall aura of intensity and focus that engages my simultaneous hankering for hard-core academia and substantial skepticism toward it) and certainly worthwhile. Bruce Grant, the young, wiry, clenched-mouthed, Canadian prof (and self-described "me centered person") is a trip, as they say. He read us all of the course evaluations by students from the last iteration of the class, praised "Dude, Where's My Car" (and called Alicia Silverstone "fat"), offered an entertaining if inevitably self-parodying combination of candor, patronizingness (?), and scholarly enthusiasm. Anyway, that's good.

We got out early, although I didn't realize it, so I waited briefly for Alyssa in Kohlberg; then spent the hour or so disparity in our class-endings (at least for day one) going to the bookstore with Jocelyn and deploying Ester-hugs to Stefanie, Sorelle, Zabby, Addie, etc. A and I met up again for an unnecessarily rushed Sharples dinner before drumming for African (Charles just comes up to me with a big hug and a huge grin, has me up on the big drum with the agogo after ten minutes of playing). I took a brief and bizarre interlude at jazz band (thinking they would still be in need of drummers; as it turned out I was one of three, along with Andrew Steele), which was similarly a re-entry into a world in which I am quite at home, unlike some of my earlier experiences of the day, and then headed back for African II. Most of the drummers had danced the previous session, so it was an appropriate role-reversal. But we didn't actually hold class because of a gospel concert that Kemal wanted to attend. From there back here, where we had a second dinner of gado-gado and Brigid joined us (Nori and Alyssa) to spell "barn" and play scrabble. (Yes I won; sometime I'll have to write some of my thoughts about why I like that game so much and that I ought to find someone who will beat me at it.) We went to bed on the early side, since I had decided to accompany Nori to Schuldenfhilosipheightthirty the next day.

Rae has wandered up here in her silk bathrobe to seek out some bass tones that have been foiling her attempts to sleep (Nori was the offender, not I); she reminds me that I should be getting to sleep as well, at least after perhaps skimming through the last fifteen pages of Hindu Goddess stuff for this class I'm not really sure why I'll be attending tomorrow, since I am almost certainly not going to take it. But that's how it goes. So I'll write about today tomorrow, when I really will have some honest-to-goodness time.

it's better than even money

Today is Björk Day. I've decided to listen to all of the seven of her releases that I have, starting with "Gling-Glo" (but not the Sugarcubes) and concluding with "Vespertine," which will be my first time listening to it. In the meantime: eating, determining a shopping schedule, reading, transporting clothes and other objects, eventually record reviews. Perhaps Scrabble tonight? (what do you think?) I'm thinking to balance out yesterday's relative lack of inactivity.

Or, I'll start with Friday. Sunshine streams into this room in an intense way, so there will definitely be some blind action in the near future. To campus to mail a check, deposit another, order 150 more, recieve "El Producto" and a Humuhumunukunukuapua postcard (how's that for a new coinage), then back here. Sheets laundered, books shelved across the hall, clothes hung, refrigerator cleaned, long-dead-leftovers turned into a cornupopic moldfest in the sink, bed made, Alyssa arrived. Soon enough, so did Laurel and Amelia, for tofu-and-stuff (with black-bean-and-garlic condiment) and discussion of feminist magazines. It was just like being back at school, or maybe just like hanging out with some people. Tortoise and dishes and after they left I helped Rebecca paint her room Lipstick red, an impulse choice that looks spectacular, and makes the room decidedly hers. Nice light-switch plate too. And Alyssa was back to paint some too, while Georgy Harrison crooned "I dig love, I dig love……I love dig, I love dig."

The next morning we woke to a flurry of e-mails and …snow! In appreciable quantities, already having put a coat on the opposing rooftop by our rather late awakening, and enlivening the walk ville-wards. So did Nori's ambush, which pushed Alyssa clear off the sidewalk. Joel had warned us that she might be prowling the area. I successfully obtained eggs, cream, marzipan, green, tartar, a ladle, and a second can of lipstick. Bûche start time was about 2:30, and although it was a glitch-ridden process (the uneven oven rack/oven temperature rendered one corner of the roll burnt and the rest somewhat unsettlingly patchily colored; the first batch of meringue was a flop) the end result satisfied my goal of having it either look good or taste good. People apparently thought it did both. It was rather smaller than usual, due to burnt corner and cookie-sheet substituting for larger jelly roll pan, but appropriate since the only tray I could find was a rather small handled one from 2N (all other cutting boards having been lent to the souplords). I substituted Sunday pants for dishtowel. Nori came in to help with the mushrooms, but other than that I was mostly reclused in the kitchen all day only emerging at the end with the final product, replete with cinnamon holly-berries, lots of marzipan leaves and sprigs (which just happened to match my fingers) and what Allen McBride later praised as fungality, an hour later than the dinner was supposed to start. They (the new flatmate line-up plus sick Allison) were placated by it I think, and so we headed off for the craziness.

It was really quite a charming scene; one long table lined with rice-embedded candles, people like Claire, Roban, Benj, Gabe, Sarah Fritsch, Amanda Cravens, Alana, Jenny, Olivia, Abram, Emily Clough, and so on. Three soups, of which I sampled too (minestrone and poor: the conceptual soup), terrifically chewy zero-sum cookies by log-junkie Amelia (actually, I want your recipe), salad with green dressing, one wine glass which Claire clinked for short-winded toasters. Happiness, more or less. I ladled some soup into tupperware, and then we headed down the block for Christy's birthday party, which turned out to be a full-out Yale House soireé, with all the usual suspects plus some folks I hadn't seen in a while (Adrienne Fowler, Dave Auerbach, Abby Kluchan) and some that I'd never met: Ben Tiven, John Shainin, Matt Schwartz, and Mark Lotto, who along with the ineffable Patrick Conolly form a legendary cohort of like-hairstyled, prep-sweatered, somewhat condescending alleged hipsters, newly involved in a newspaper enterprise. They distributed their first issue (the oversize "Philadelphia Independant") and took control of the stereo (New Pornographers, White Stripes). I engaged Matt (with whom Alyssa apparently has some rocky history) over a bit of the leftover log, and met Mr. Tiven. Elsewhere, I repaid jaguar-pantsed Daniel Sproul, agreed to play accordion, or perhaps even audition, for Tiffany Lennon, and generally chatted about with relative ease.

Sooner or later, I made the trudge back here, with the remaining half-slice of bûche. Cleaned up the evidence of its creation, and even swept. Jackson, Merrit, Simon on the Juno; Alyssa back and unwinding in the kitchen, fitful sleep and journalling. It's drippy now. I haven't figured out how I want to position myself with respect to these worlds of people. For brief stretches yesterday I was feeling in want of an ally. Stuff is going to start. Tomorrow, eh?

we could nick a boat
and sneak off too this island
i could bring my little jhettoblaster

I'm looking at this page in Netscape for the first time in a while, and it looks kind of wack. I wonder why.

The transition took about five seconds, as usual. I got here and, well, I'm here. The hallway was dark, the perpetual flourescence having mostly dwindled I guess. There was a note on the locked door - Rebecca had been there a few hours earlier and her key hadn't worked, so she and the bunny went off elsewhere for a while. I think my key is in the flat someplace, or at least I didn't have it handy, but luckily I had read my e-mail this morning and knew that Ester had left hers in Rebecca's shoe. It still took a bit of fiddling, but I made it into the interior hallway. I didn't notice it at the time, but some bastard had disturbed Nelly's remains. Lugged my lugs in, picked through cds that had arrived (Firewater, new Lambchop and Cornelius promos, Vespertine, no Dis Plan?) and detritus (sorry, detrus.) Not really knowing where to start with the other stuff, I began the process of transferring cds from carrying case to jewel cases (it's really amazing how much space that thing saves; the jewels took up a mighty large box) and filing them all away. Good thing the shelves were all set up. I popped Blur's "Modern Life is Rubbish" into Rebecca's musical alarm clock, an album that I've had an inexplicable craving for lately. I remember that that was the first thing I listened to after I arrived at HCSMF&I the last time, when I was just sitting alone in my room after having unpacked. I pressed the forward button 67 times to get to "When the Cows Come Home," which is a 'hidden track' that follows scores of pesky three-second tracks of silence. Ba-ba-ba-bum go the trombones. Then "Psychopharmacology" which is very rocking and very very dark and depressed.

I was thinking about maybe pulling out the laptop (for the third time today) and writing something like that, but Blondie and Hairy (as I greeted them) appeared before I got to it. We talked on Ester's bed for a bit and visited next door, where there was all kinds of commotion, and eventually got down to dinner - your basic pasta and sauce. Except that the pasta was pretty funny looking. I wasn't all that hungry, having had a hearty lunch, as I suppose I'll write about below. We forewent Scrabble, set about accomplishing the necessary rearrangements. I transported stereo equipment into my new room, where they are currently in a somewhat makeshift but actually fairly satisfactory arrangement (pragmatic if not particularly esthetic) and rewired the kitchen speakers, only removing a minimal amount of hall paint in the process. Christened the new setup with "Hello Nasty." In the middle of that Miss Ester called. Miss Ester? Yes I do. We said what needed to be said, mostly, and gave each other vague assignments. Anyone who feels they deserve a hug from Ester, I will serve as a medium. Thinking about going to Danemarch to visit her, perhaps especially if I have a second travelling companion so as not to infringe on her bunny-time. Ben. I'm looking forward to see Ben. He really loves her so much, it must be so nice. And so frustrating too. Good old Ben. Poor thing.

Took a break from packing last night to read Andre Dubus' short story "Killings," on which "In the Bedroom" is based. I remember hearing somewhere that the short story is the ideal source for a feature length film. This makes a strong case for that; the movie fleshes out a lot of the action that's merely implied in the twenty-page story, but it doesn't add a whole lot except where appropriate. And the dialogue in the story is used pretty much verbatim in the book. I'd like to read some of his other stuff. I had a guilty late-night moo shi veggie in tortilla (Mings makes great hoisin sauce) and packed other things together. Slept for maybe more than four hours, then finished the job, nodded at my mother's blandishments, drove to the airport. We had snow, for the first time since I'd been home there was a substantial amount of whiteness on the ground. Homegrown too. The zealous Rochester security officials put Cleveland's to shame; the latter didn't even want to wand me down, much less x-ray my shoes (I'd been thinking they were in need of an x-ray anyway.) Kind of hard not to laugh. I intermittently slept and read a chapter of Cloudsplitter, about moving up to the North Elba, in my kind of country (I love that Marcy was still called Tahawus back then.) In the baggage claim area I was called to attention by Brigid in a Waldo-striped sweater, holding a hardcover copy of same. We didn't talk about it much.

But about most other things, yes: names and their variants, snow, Papa M, movies, album titles (she doesn't like them), roommates, math, Rushdie, break trips, finding her someone. Meanwhile, she took me in an eggplant colored auto to Sokolowski's University Inn, a cafeteria-style establishment serving up generous portions of hearty Polish fare, replete with plastic Tiffany-style hanging lampshades, communal-sized tables, Indians paraphernalia, beer ad mirrors, and racially and age diverse lunch-hour clientele. We both went for the sizable pierogies and lemonade, and I took sides of kraut-n-noodles and gravy mashed potatoes. I wonder if Nori has learned anything about Eastern European cooking; it's hard to imagine eating something like that here at the Barn. With ample time to kill, I had a whirlwind tour of the West Side, including Jacob's field and the adjacent peanut mural, a funky bridge with colossal figures holding up little modes of transportation, and the terrific public market building. Then a massive thrift store, where pink, green, and yellow items were on sale. We quizzed each other with Trivial Pursuit Baby Boomer cards. And then she deposited me back at the departure area. I would say "what a sweet gal" except you know it's been said before. The rest of the trip, as they say, uneventful. Another chapter of Banks, more sleep. Hauled my bags across the street to get a taxi, and guided the driver back here without too much difficulty. Memories. Then all that other stuff happened.

So here's what:
This semester portends fairly well I think. Rebecca declared at dinner that it's a year for unconventional couplings. For my part I would like to hope that this will be a somewhat less eventful one relationship-wise, not that last wasn't plenty interesting. Stability will be nice for a change; I'm quite excited for it actually. Somewhat more undetermined is what the dynamic will be like 'round here. No question that Nori's additions to the mix will be markedly different from Ester's. N isn't concerned: she has apparently told Ester that she since she doesn't know us very well, she doesn't foresee arguing with us. Yes, well we'll see how long that lasts. Seriously, I am looking forward to this living situation, and I am sure we'll all get along swimmingly. I have no apprehensions. We have also declared that this is to be a semester for nudity. No doubt Nori will be of more help in that department than her predecessor. To kick things off, Rebecca has unveiled a poster of cartoonish Puerto Rican pornographic magazine covers. It matches the peach of the common room nicely. Beyond that? I don't really have a strong sense of what this semester will bring. Oh, rock music, classical music, literature hopefully, the broadening of my academic scope perhaps, and certainly more than a few surprises along the way. Flowers. Good things, exclusively, of course. As I mentioned to Ester earlier, I don't really have bad experiences.

So. Kristin Hersh and the Kings of Convenience have been nicely lulling me, and it's probably high time to make some sense of the pillows and tangle on this bed. The sheets are quite dusty and linty at the moment, from having things placed on them and subsequently removed. But I shall wash them tomorrow. Tomorrow: more rearrangement of household items; Alyssa; perhaps some time for reading, or a jelly-roll pan.

hey all you prestidigitators
why don't you disappear for good

More Songs About Movies And Books:

"In The Mood For Love," which I watched last night after noodles at Ming's, was highly recommended by Ben and Ester, who saw it in Philly last spring, and dismissed as pointless and ridiculous by Scott and Jesse, who saw it at the Cinema sometime. I say it's definitely worthwhile and good, but it certainly has a touch of the pointless and ridiculous. Like the last five minutes, which are unpopulated camera sweeps of ancient temples in Cambodia, when the rest of the movie takes place in Hong Kong (except for a brief section in Singapore towards the end, whose point I also didn't quite catch.) It's obviously a director's movie, and it seems that those are in lately. That's not a bad thing, and actually I think I like Wong Kar-Wai as a director (I wish I could write his name in Chinese characters like in the white-on-red low-budget title sequences). He uses the Mike Nichols (in "The Graduate") thing of repeating the same piece of music many many many times in a row - mostly filmish/Chinese string pieces, with a couple bizarre but gorgeous Nat King Cole renditions of Latin standards ("Aquellos Ojos Verdes" and "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas") - and having them underscore sections without dialogue (in Kar-Wai's case though there's usually not much action going on either.) It really is a beautiful film - the costumes especially. The characterization and story take a back seat to style, but they're charming enough in their vaguely romantic simplicity. I do like the idea of an all-night marathon Mah Jongg game though, anyone up for trying that at school?

The Language Instinct reads quickly (I'm on chapter five now) for something so dense with ideas. It's a funny mix of stuff I already know and stuff I didn't really have a handle on. The last twenty pages I read were basically a gloss of my syntax class, with some background information that Kari didn't touch on (mostly relevant to the focus of the book.) He sort of surreptitiously introduces the concept of an IP, but he puts auxilliaries (actually only modals) as heads of IPs, classifying them separately from verbs. I assume that's just a simplification measure, but it seems odd that he didn't even mention that about it. He sort of discourages you from actually reading Chomsky, but I think I might tackle it anyway. The examples are always fun (he's at least as big a Twain fan as
I am, and he included a terrific paragraph from "Double-Barreled Detective Story" with a "solitary esophagus.") He also refers to some research (later discredited) by "linguist and now Swarthmore College president Alfred Bloom," which was an amusing surprise.

Cloudsplitter continues to be big and meaty and enjoyable. Brigid is curious (as am I) about how close it follows historical record. The impression I got from hearing Banks speak is that he researched quite deeply in preparing to write it, so I assume it's at least as accurate as, say, Mason & Dixon, although that's kind of a dangerous comparison. One of the blurbs on the back says something about some of the characters being "wholly invented" however. I really like Owen as the narrator, although I don't much care for the framing device of having him write letters to a historian's assistant. Presumably he left some writings behind which Banks makes use of? Anyway, it's especially interesting reading this in the wake of two other (pseudo)-historical literary epics, M&D and Sotweed.

"Following," which I've been meaning to see for a while, is good. At least as good as "Memento" is my impression on first viewing. We decided afterwards that Following is more confusing as you watch it (partly because it lets you in on some of the secret, but not enough to really explain it), but Memento leaves more questions unanswered at the end. I liked the way it was shot - gritty and black and white - and the pacing. He (Nolan) has got his thing pretty pat; undeniably entertaining but also intellectually engaging, if more in the sense of a puzzle than anything deeper than that. Plus it's short (70 minutes) which is refreshing in this time of three hour epics. Yeah. Good movie. Funny thing - it starts out seeming like it's going to be unusual and quirky, and then fairly quickly starts to get a bit more normal, so you think it's going to be a more standard experience/discovery/self-realization/crime thing rather than an engaging psychological portrait (he starts by explaining about the "following," but that doesn't become the focus). Then, towards the end, it pulls a couple fast twists. Huh.

What else is new? Well, Danny Loss of all people e-mailed to confess his readership and ask if he could link to this. (Hi Danny. Sorry to sound so surprised, but you know how it is.) I'm been packing; I think I've decided to go with a second checked bag rather than packing a box to mail home. That means heavy, but it's better I guess. Back to school tomorrow. Rebecca and Brigid and (if I'm lucky) Ester(?) and the barn. And the day after that, well hell, all kinds of folks.

stop acting like a bitch already
be a visionary
and maybe you'll see your name in the column of obituaries.......

I finished the Rushdie yesterday, and got glasses, somewhat frustrated driving, and I (re)-read the entirety of The Crying of Lot 49. What a terrific little (in size) book. It has some very obvious similarities to those other big books of his I read, mostly in terms of his themes and interests (Maxwell's demon, conspiracies in general), but the experience of reading it is completely different, and most of the time it was hard to remember they were written by the same person. In GR "paranoids" is a verb, in this it's just a rock band. And I listened to Nuggets 2 and 3 while I read it, which seemed very appropriate, especially with the cover on my (1967) edition. For a while my parents were in the room too, working on their new laptop or looking through glossy car promo materials, and remembering or not remembering the songs from Nuggets. It was fun.

Then I stayed up until about four, finishing the book, playing a little Super Mario Bros. on Martha's brand-new original version Nintendo (Danny bought it for her for Christmas for about fifteen bucks), reading pitchfork reviews (much more entertaining than they have a right to be), and e's journal (for the first time in months), and reading my entries here from November 4th-10th (what a glorious, heady week. hooray for mini-crushes), and then tackling chapter two of Cloudsplitter; all fifty pages of it. I put on "and then nothing turned itself inside-out," brewed up some licorice tea, and cuddled up to it. Thankfully he got to the narrative right away. It reminded me a lot of East of Eden; besides being big and epic, it has a similar wholesome, American, family-oriented, male-driven storytelling tone and focus. I think I like that. Let's see if he can sustain its interest for the next 700 or so pages.

Lots of e-mail: Rebecca and Nori about hangers, blinds, jelly-roll pans (they're like shiny cookie sheets with sides, i use one for making my bûche); Nori and Brigid about Yo La Tengo; Brigid and Alyssa about Salinger and Wes Anderson (and their similarities), etc. Today I baked springerle while listening to "Dig Your Own Hole" (great cooking album), we barely had any sugar, and at first I mistook instant hummus mix for brown sugar, and then just ended up substituting powdered. They look like they'll come out well. The mail came late, bringing two more big books; "Giles Goat-Boy" (funny non-parallel blurb on the back says Barth is like Mephistopheles, or Batman) and "The Language Instinct" (read the first chapter, fun and intriguing if a bit preachy, should be a nice counterpoint to all my epic fiction.) I'm making good use of my remaining time, largely by not doing anything of much importance with it. They keep predicting snow and almost none of it arrives (nothing on the ground anyway.) I've been playing scales and arpeggios, which are better than I might have hoped, although I can't remember all the fingerings for the latter. Trying not to think too much. Just feeling.

who is this doing this emphatic type of alphabetapsychedelicfuckin'[?]
(well, what do you think he's saying?)

Check out two very entertaining Yo La Tengo videos.

I wake up feeling kind of sick every morning, although I usually feel better as the day goes on, after taking my daily zyrtec. My eyes especially have been feeling kind of crummy, but hopefully that will improve when I don't have to wear my contacts all the time. My glasses are ready, so I'll go and pick them up today. This is getting ridiculous. Somebody has to make me stop buying CDs. Just take half offline for a while or something. I'm getting back into the swing of promo copies though; Stephin Merrit and Cornelius promos should be forthcoming.

I watched our new video of "What Women Want" the other night, which is fun but too long. Five minutes from the end my parents came back in with the Tebors and Callery/Nazars, back from a fiasco of a dinner out (incompetent waitress, the kitchen out of everything they ordered, then closed, then they asked them to leave several times before they had gotten the check back, etc.) with desserts and built a fire and we sat around in the living room talking about tv and npr personalities and the dinner. Yesterday I did some productive things, like finish writing my resume and practice driving. I drove on the highway for the first time. Also I read all but the last twenty pages of Midnight's Children. It's good. As I said in my annoying sextuplicated reblogger comment, I am enjoying it, it just hasn't knocked me off my feet like a lot of what I've been reading. It's kind of too clever for its own good, but the writing is captivating enough. A funny take on mannipean satire. Well, I'll finish that today, and then its Banks and/or Pinker. I fell asleep on the couch reading it. I went to the movies again, the Little with my parents, to see "In The Bedroom." I find it hard to say that it was "good" or that it "enjoyed" it, but it was certainly stunning and incredible. Terrific acting (especially from Tom Wilkinson, have I seen him before?) and an intriguing story, but especially well paced and directed - tasteful use of sound (minimal) and camera work (beautiful). It's set in small-harbor-town-Maine, and the opening shots (lovers in a grassy field) made me think of Wyeth. Sissy Spacechick reads a book about Wyeth in the bedroom. Sad and artful that way. For some reason the phrase "artful, volatile" stuck in my head. Was that in a review or something? Anyway, moving, powerful film, I recommend it. Not light.

Counting down the days. I'll be heading back to school on Thursday; because of a bizarre blind discount deal from Travelocity I'm flying through Cleveland, with a three-and-a-half hour layover there. Perhaps I will meet Brigid for lunch. When I get to school, I'm looking forward very much to moving stuff and setting up my room, baking a log for Laurel, picking classes, etc. I'm listening to spinner's "Best of Dance '01" for a break from the indirok stuff. Not compelled. La dee dah. The New Pornographers are in my head lately, I can't decide if they're annoying or sublime.

the body says no
no no no!

I seem destined to gradually go about acquiring my own copies of the songs that other people put on mixtapes for me. I ordered an early kd lang album after hearing some tracks from it on an NPR folk-show "twangy" segment the other week, thinking it would be a creative way to bolster my country collection, and because half had it for something like $1.50. And it has this song "Full Moon Full of Love" that Nicole Lancy put on a tape for me years ago ("Audio Cartoons.") And of course Nuggets, which I'm listening to right now, has the Knickerbockers' "Lies," that's on "Pynched/Promised."

Got out of bed before noon today for once, and talked with cousin Carla. She (and my mother) saw/heard on national news about them trucking in snow from Buffalo for a winter festival here in Rochester. It has only snowed here once since I've been home (for a season total of 12"), which is kind of depressing. There is no snow visible anywhere except in a few isolated clusters. But it was a beautiful sunny day, so I guess that's something. I went running this morning, for no real good reason except the idea occurred to me. I was running for a full 45 minutes (side one of the dishes that alyssa left here), not counting a stop into record archive to try to find that used copy of "Cassidy" again (I couldn't, and I resisted buying the Divine Comedy and Nadine as well), and a moment of terror when I thought my mom's walkman had fallen out of my pocket (well, it had, but I went back and was able to find it.) I met up with my dad at the intersection of Culver and Monroe. Thinking about all this music that I wanted to listen to (Ted Leo, Apples, Nuggets, her space holiday). All kinds of stuff keeps coming, most of it great: Four Tet, New Pornographers, Dump "that skinny motherfucker with the high voice?" I think I'll make my amazon best of 2001 listmania list, music that made me glad to be alive in 2001.

Last night I went to see "Gosford Park" with the folks. It was opening night (my second in a row), at least in backwards Rochester, and the Little was crammed. We ended up in the third row, next to Ed and Pat. The movie is really enjoyable, not least because of the genre all-star cast (especially Maggie Smith, Richard Grant, Stephen Fry, and my favorite Emily Watson). It's pretty unusual in the way it combines an "Upstairs-Downstairs"-type twilight of the Empire British mannered country weekend shooting party film with a murder mystery. Because of the staid style, the murder mystery part isn't dramatic or suspenseful at all, it just sort of happens like anything else, it might just as easily not have happened, and it almost gets lost in the shuffle of subplots and characters. There is so much going on that it's really impossible to figure everything out after one viewing, especially due to many scenes (in the parlor, in the servants areas, etc.) where multiple conversations overlap, realistically and frustratingly. Definitely one I'd like to see again, to enjoy it for its delicious detail as much as for the overall effect. Afterwards we went to Hogans, where though I wasn't very hungry I enjoyed a third of a caesar and a bowl of seafood chowder, and some tasty bread. The Harrens were there. We talked about cars; whether they should get a new one, whether they should fix the van. The difficulty is that there are apparently no vans with standard anymore. The new eurovan looks pretty nice though, although the microbus is not exactly. Hmm, how about some breakfast.

from a splinter in the hand to a thorn in the heart to a shotgun to the head
you've got no choice but to learn to glean solace from pain
or you'll end up cynical or dead

Mmmm...molasses cookie. Went to the airport with Alyssa and mumbled along with the Shins, and finished up the night in my own bed. I think I'll read all day. I'm about at page 200 of MC, which still hasn't really grabbed me, it seems about as self-indulgent as "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" and not as fun. He only just got to the point in the last chapter, and showed us what's so special about the character that he's been talking about for 200 pages. Still, I think I'll finish it, since I made the effort of starting it again. It's not bad, it's just not spectacular. Brigid says she 150 pages into Cloudsplitter; I didn't even know we were supposed to be reading it.

Alyssa and I read up until the end of October break the other night; far enough to get past all the real drama, although I wonder what she'll think about some of what comes later. We had a nice talk afterwards, the sort where you feel like you can say anything. Not that we usually hold back, it was just more to the point. She read several selections from her journal. It's funny, even though this is a publicly-accessible journal, I still feel like I'm sharing something somewhat private when we're sitting here reading this together. It comes out differently if you read it all at once rather than in daily chunks, I think. My little twinges of embarassment were just as likely in my transgressions against spelling and grammar as against moral decency though. I'll maybe read the rest of it today, or at least over the next few days. It's fun for me, at least.

Yesterday at 1:30 Julian called and asked if we wanted to do something at 2:30. By 3:30, he and Morgan and we were at a converted factory on Blossom that now houses the METAL museum (that stands for Museum of the Elizabeth Collection of Twentieth Century American Laborers) which is the private collection of this presumably somewhat eccentric art patron. I'd never heard of it before, and the others were all very bemused by the fact that it was here in Rochester. We went in through the frame shop, which had paintings all over the place. Then we passed through a few stairwells with art all over the place, and through the guy's apartment, which has art all over the place, and a few more stairwells. And then we entered the museum proper. At this point (the plans and space for expansion seem quite extensive) it consists of one humongous two-story room and a series of corriders adjoining it, one of which is set up to look like a "Parisian boulevard." The walls, floor, and ceiling house everything from countless paintings (Feldmans, Santiagos, some Dali prints) to a series of gigantic wooden renditions of old-fashioned implements (a stapler, a telephone) to colorfully metalwrought benches, a couple of the paraded horses, an architect's model of the Strasenburgh planetarium, an intricate three-dimensional and musical representation of the internet, and the amusing Christ Portraits. It was basically sensory overload, especially with the soundtrack, which was mostly some classical thing but mixed with fragments of Little Richard, piano jazz, and dialogue from a movie someone was watching upstairs. Definitely cool, though, as promised.

"I'm hungry," said Morgan so we drove over, Zep II cassette blasting, to the Village Gate for a visit to Crock Rock sub shop, Morgans once and occasional place of employment ("I'm on call" she explained.) A lot of the shops have closed or moved, although a few seem to be doing well: the Bop Shop added an additional room and Ricky's Deco Plus moved to a much larger location downstairs. We spent a while browsing the always entertaining funky antique clothes there, and then in a new vintage shop across the way called Velouria, which has almost entirely seventies stuff. No Beatles-fan thick cat-eye glasses frames though.

Back home, we watched "Blood Simple," which moves slowly enough that I could follow it even falling asleep periodically. It's very obviously a Coen brothers movie, and not just because it features an amazingly young Frances McDormand. One great moment has a tense conversation interrupted by what sounds like a gunshot - actually it's just a newspaper striking a glass pane in the door. There's some trademark Coen gore too. Ordered too much food from Great Northern (leftovers for today, tomorrow, next week!) and listened to "Hello Nasty" to clean up. Over Russian Banks we decided Jesse into coming to see Amelie with us. It was almost as good the second time, a little less because I wasn't in quite the right mood I think. Still the best film I've seen in a while. And I've seen ten in the past week or so.

I'm the king of Boggle there is no higher
I get eleven points from the word "quagmire"