August 28, 2007 (0) Comments

It's in full force, now, in my window, letting out its scent, low-key lilac with an undertone of velvet. It only blooms after dusk, unassuming little pronged flowers, but its understatement and fragrance subsume physical beauty, because physical beauty is not everything. Sometimes it's the subtext. I have some triumphs, but the fate of my plants has been sadder than last year. Cinnamon basil: dead, Cuban oregano: barely hanging on; little geranium: overtaken by polkadotted plant; lavender: hasn't grown past six inches since it was born. The polka dotted plant, it's pretty, don't get me wrong - pink and green spots, it flourishes even when I forget to water it every day. But the night blooming jasmine smells like beauty. They use it to treat epilepsy in Mexico, I read, but that might be wrong. Was a 19th century Louisiana funeral flower, I read, too, but that's too goth to flaunt without back-up, and too deep to drop flagrantly, too. I 'll check in with you later.

Inland Empire, despite being Lynchian in the late-Lynch way, might be his most human movie yet, in the late-Lynch way. It's about a woman, and empathy.
maybe they all are, but he just makes you cut through a lot of bullshit to get there. Also: more, later.

today in politics: republicans, you and your antics. you are the frat party that never ends.

August 22, 2007 (4) Comments

Watched Syriana again - what a feat, in acting, in screenwriting - and, spurred by Chris's dirty-global-dealings brainfont, not to mention my concurrent reading of the behemoth anthology of brit journalist Robert Fisk's reportage from the middle east - I am newly obsessed with Robert Baer, the former CIA agent on whose experiences that movie, Syriana, was based. The most recent interview w/dude I can find is this one in Mother Jones, conducted upon the dual release of his documentary on suicide bombers, and his novel "imagining" additional perpetrators in the 9/11 attacks. It's essential reading, especially if you are, like me, just at the very edge of understanding what the H is going on with Iran - he provides some non-partisan insidery background and perspective on the current situation. (Memo to presidential candidates.)

MJ.com: So if we were go back in time a few years, do you think the country we should have paid attention to was Iran, not Iraq?

RB: We should have dealt with Iran. I’m not saying attack it; I’m saying we should have taken it seriously. The Iranian connection to 9/11 is much stronger than the Iraqi one ever was. That was the big lie: That Saddam had something to do with 9/11—not the WMD—the connection between Saddam and bin Laden. We were spun on that and we were spun on the famous Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence, which was a complete lie. Both the CIA and the FBI came out and said that never happened.

If you have read Baer's novel Blow the House Down, pls tell me what you did think? I'd run to the library and get it right now if I weren't busy coughing up my right lung from my sickbed.
Now I'm gonna watch Half Baked.

August 20, 2007 (0) Comments

In the shortlived but brilliant HBO fake-reality show The Comeback, Lisa Kudrow is cast as an aging '80s soap star who gets a new job as a jogging-suit mom on a teen sex comedy. In one scene, she spends like 20 minutes rehearsing her sole speaking line - "I didn't need to SEE that!" - to be recited after walking in on some hot Cali teens dry humping. So she's in her kitchen, cloaked in white bathrobe, refrigerator door open, drinking milk from the carton, camera's shooting from above. For ten minutes, in method acting style, she chews on the line, stretches it out to find the right emphasis: "I didn't need to see THAT!" "I didn't NEED to see that!" For a whole summer after The Comeback came out on DVD Mo walked around rehashing the sentiment - "I didn't need to SEE that!" - applicable to all that was seeable, unseeable, unforeseeable or just plain naz-tay. Lately the phrase has been resurrected and, accordingly, I've seen a lot of things I really, really did not need to.

THINGS I DIDN'T NEED TO SEE:
- Nelly Furtado's directorial debut, if it involves Nelly Furtado dancing
- The flesh of Lindsay Lohan's index finger being sizzled off by nitrogen in I Know Who Killed Me
- A close-up on the anus of the (otherwise magnificent) Dumbo Octopus on the Discovery Channel's "Blue Planet: The Deep" (BONUS: IT'S AN OUTIE)
- Any and all full-force Louis Vuitton babies (toddlers included)
- Is it me or is there something slightly off about a dude wearing a Big Black "Songs About Fucking" t-shirt to a cardio pilates class?
I'm sure there are more. I'm sick (physically) and, unrelated, popping los drogas to fix mi cabeza, and today Jon tole me I seemed "muted" - which, to me, means I have spent three consecutive work days without running around the office yelling about the fucked nature of new media, and / or bitching that there's a new fucking Freeway album in existence and I haven't heard it yet, despite practically writing bol into my will, and/or offering up my firstborn, my womb, any consecutive egg /stem cell donations and my roommate's cats (not really, Mo), not to mention my extensive collection of overpriced Japanese incense meant to evoke the scent of cosmopolitan cities (i.e. "Paris Cafe" - there is no Philly smell). But really, I mean what the fuck.

Pack it in,
Love,
Dr. and Mrs. Serenity Prayer

p.s. Have I told you how much I hate escalators? I despise escalators. Especially long, steep escalators, unless they are taking you to the tippy-top of a roller coaster.

August 19, 2007 (0) Comments

As a fan of both Marcel Duchamp and Miuccia Prada, I am newly in love with the Virtual Shoe Museum: an art gallery where footwear is functional and conceptual, and broken up into categories for use: Birth, Death, Marriage, Prop. I am particularly fond of the Stereo Stilettos, - already got the beat in my feet, why not make it literal. (And whoever made the pumps that become flats with a flick has almost certainly ridden the NYC subway. God bless 'em.) The guy who sculpts furniture as nude heeled women is interesting - literalizing the "fuck-me pump" and, perhaps, making some feminist commentary about the nature of the stiletto (or not - sexyfurniture.nl?! really? lacks subtlety, but I guess it's direct). Though as a functional table this flawed - who would want a wooden vag staring at them while they're having toast? (Don't answer that.)

Long Michelle Obama feature in the September issue of Vogue - I read half of it and accidentally left it at a picnic in Prospect Park (we took it out my bag to marvel at its size and I believe I left it somewhere between a cucumber finger sandwich and a red plastic cup with cigarette butts and chicken wing bones in it). Yes, back to Michelle Obama - halfway through, I haven't figured out what's up with the writer, Rebecca Johnson, who alerted up my "fool meter" by the fourth graff with the precocious/condescending /fake objective language that is the hallmark of certain Vogue regulars - but Michelle Obama is the shit, carried Maureen Dowd like what, and wouldn't let the Vogue hair guy give her bed-head for the photo shoot, cause like, duh.
I will say something more insightful when I re-purchase the new Vogue, which by the way weighs approx. 800 lbs. and should come with wheels and a strap.

August 13, 2007 (4) Comments

DON'T ISSUE HIM ANY TICKETS TO BRAZIL.

So how does this impact / not impact his chances of being subpoena'd in the Gonzales hellfire?

August 13, 2007 (0) Comments

We bridged the night and the dawn light with the sounds of our voices. "Working through some things." Smoking the occasional ill-advised Camel to move the process along from an itty bitty hustle into a dull roar. Like a crash. We worked through everything - work, death, sex, love, family, drugs, writing, rap - all the big ideas, everything that matters. The mechanicals and the abstracts. Also, predictions for our whereabouts, and those of our friends, at the moment of the Mayan apocalypse (2012, two years after Lost ends). It felt like we were beating something. Being real and winning at it. I read Woody Allen's Bergman obit in the Times and I think this fits:

I’ve said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn’t save you...

I have joked about art being the intellectual’s Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public is to live on in one’s apartment, is how I put it.

I am fortunate to spend my alive-time in my apartment with people who are so terrific.

August 9, 2007 (0) Comments

August 8, 2007 (2) Comments

The Block Party, annual of course but more fun than years past, didn't really pop off until Mister Frazier, mayor of said block and my super to boot, tucked in his shirt to reveal an LCD beltbuckle which read: MISTER FRAZIER... MAYOR... (718) 555-2938...

"It's so nobody will forget who I am," he grinned, and handed me a Heineken. The neighborhood kids were still lined up to bounce inside the inflatable castle he rented, so I doubted they would and said so. S. and L., housesitting yoga zone half down the way, showed up on a fluke to play volleyball with spry under-three-footers, all game and hustle. Corliss and Jane came, too, Coronitas in tow. But both just barely missed the Aunt Jackie dance contest, much protested among participant 14-year-olds, 'cause "that's a Harlem dance" - though curiously no one was against the "Chicken Noodle Soup." Guess MTV2 play neuters your regional appeal - and soon, if not now, Aunt Jackie will finally get her passport into Brooklyn. Or at least my neighborhood, fierce and loyal. Biggie lots, still - get money - that perennial summer bbq love. New dancehall I didn't know. The babies splashed in the plastic pool. A team of teen girls brought their best moves, choreographed, and all wore a different color neon "I Heart NY" shirt - that's that old-new, now new-new - slapping each other high fives between handclaps. I think they spent all summer getting their collective swag down for "Get Me Bodied." Even your girl was impressed.

You missed a good block party. Corliss and Jane and I sat on the stoop into dusk, lighting smokes for our new boyfriends from four doors down, cringing when any baby on a bike took a spill, making new friends, waving to nice grandmoms who set up lawn chairs on the sidewalk across the street. Waving up to the nice grandmom who couldn't leave her apartment but still leaned out the window as far as she could to bounce to the boom of the Transformer-sized speakerbox on the end of the block. Bodega had a sale, by the way, and still made a killing. We were drunk off Chik-o-stix and neighborhood love. Please summer don't ever change.

-- House music: '90s house music - and '90s house dance moves. They're everywhere I go. I found a dance teacher who only teaches em, for one - my "Percolator" is not there yet but it's close. For two, the other night, at the benefit for our girl Kumari's nonprofit Dance for Peace (more on that in a bit) - I was BEDAZZLED by one dude, clearly an old-old-old NY house head, 7 feet tall and sweaty in his bad white tee, voguing/popping so hard every prominently defined mini-muscle in his neck was isolated with a little twitch - he was the most fabulous house mover I have ever seen, even better than any movies. Even better than "Party Girl." And he was surrounded by a whole crew of house-dancing chicas. I was up there with them, I do declare. Privately doing my thing. Also, crazy breaks w/homeboys from Rock STeady Crew and a surprise non-dancing appearance by "Hot Abs" (aka dewbee jammin from days yore - oh my I'm so tired so more and better on that Dance for PEace non-profit - your favorite non-profit - soon. I'm just now catching you up from two weekends ago.

August 7, 2007 (0) Comments

This New York Times Real Estate Magalog piece on town-level immigration politics is dying for a theatrical treatment. For the purpose of this exercise, I have reinterpreted one of the article's more important monologues in song form:

ACT ONE
Arrangement: tuba, bass drum, tenor soloist, three back-up singers: baritone, tenor, bass
Enter: conservative anglo Tom Roeser, a good old boy - a longtime denizen of the small town of Carpenterville, IL, who roots for Newt Gingrich which makes him an unlikely ally to the town's immigrant Latinos - or maybe not so unlikely when you discover he owns a factory! The following aria is Roeser's explanation of the "immigrant conundrum" that has sent Carpenterville teetering on social strife - the "immigrant conundrum" that will, ultimately, transform the small community... for better... or for worse.

Tuba solo, bass drum in simple oompa loompa rhythm
Hispanics!
they are more social! [tuba bleat]
They’re more in... your... face... [in ya face!]
If you live next door to a Hispanic, they probably [probably]
have more levels of family [faaaaam-i-lyyyy]
living there.
I’ll call it overcrowding. [tuba solo, chorus: wah wah wahhhhhh]

ok i'm bored with typing all the italics tags. here's the rest of the actual quote:
They may live in a low- income house, so they have only one bathroom, and the men go outside and urinate on the tree. You live next door to this family, and you don’t like that the man urinated outside, and you don’t like the fourth car in the front yard. And you don’t like the loud music and the picnicking, and so what you say is they must be a bunch of damn illegals. But once they’re all legal, you still have the same problem. You need to assimilate them.”

SO MANY BABIES! SO MANY CARS! SO MUCH PISSING ON A TREE! SO MUCH LOUD MUSIC and worst of all so much socializing!

VIVA LA RAZA!

August 7, 2007 (0) Comments

the man who plays the "smash" in real life: so smart, a net-nerdy writer-actor obama-supporter: CAN U REALLY FEEL HIM.
(Friday Night LIGHTS!!! SEASON TWO starts in OCTOBER)

August 6, 2007 (2) Comments

Pandora's Box, in the true Greek sense: Michael Jackson in a car, backseat-freaking Brett Ratner to R Kelly. Bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce.

August 1, 2007 (0) Comments

It's 3 am, and I woke up in a half-lucid terror-dream, with the idea that by web 2.1, every music website will have transformed to some ugly variation of InTouch Weekly plus Myspace, and I will be working the pole for bucks over at Scandal's, after changing my name to Sparkleshine. I guess, having long become accustomed to the possibilities of nuclear meltdown/detonation, global climate disaster and everyday minor city-street dangers, that's my idea of a realistic apocalypse. A new thing to wake me up in the night in a cold sweat. Dope.

Then I read this Oh Word post and, reminded of my privilege and also amused and rejuvenated by two forever smart and political writers, I feel a little better.

Going back to bed.