phenakistoscope

Forgot to post this to LJ when I put it online last week. :) Had so much fun with these guys...

Awesome!

Love love love Tulay Karaca!!!!!!!!

It's the FISH DANCE!!! I LOVE IT!

*drool*

He showed up at Artie's camp last year. Gah. The clarinet playing is so hot.

Asharah, what with your background, I thought you might enjoy this...

blar phlarg gloop ding donut glicko morsgae phwap socko schomorglo asdevc onself noinwg ptffffffff~ lorgh smoasho dorgdol ding donut* oooblek nord.

Today on the metro there was a guy two seats down from me who fell on the floor and didn't move. Two ladies beside me noticed him first, I was reading. By the time all three of us got up to walk over, he started moving up and down, like he had fallen over because he was asleep. But we called a guard anyway to come check it out. When she pulled him to his feet it was obvious, to me at least, that he had OD'd on something. She started asking him questions, but his eyes were rolled back in his head, he was shaking, and he just kept groaning and trying to lie down on the floor again. She didn't seem to get the fact that he was on something and not just being ornery. As she pulled him off the train to the security booth he leaned against my window, drooling, hands spread, stumbling. Sometimes I wish I could turn into a doctor.

So yesterday the water in my house stopped working in the morning, and I decided a DC New Years was not for me. Around noon, I went up to the cesspool (Baltimore) and found yippy/vDer, tammy, and josiah busy baking and reading the ENTIRE harry potter series in tandem. V, J, and I went off to eat lots and lots of tofu and decided to head to the rotunda for "the producers." second time for me. but we found ourselves in the middle of the rotunda shopping center with nothing to do for 45 min. before the next showing so we all did yoga in the middle of the hall near a pizza parlor. i apparently like the producers more than anyone else. upon return to tammy/ali/yippy's, we were faced with an impossible new year's decision. tammy went to the inner harbor to watch fireworks, josiah went to a charity event...Vder and i called paco about the dresden dolls brigade party, and rob about some sort of music/talking head??? party, but vetoed everything at the last minute when I discovered to my great astonishment that "oh my god, meg and rose are out of oberlin and in DC!!!!!" after calling and batting phone eyes to establish invite, vder (Oberlin: 2001) and i (Oberlin: 2003/4) headed back to DC around 9:30 PM. i love oberlin, and the students/alums it contains! after V fell asleep on a couch in the middle of the party for an hour, i decided I was sober enough to go home. plus lots of people i didn't think i'd hear from called/emailed/established non-abduction by aliens.

returned V to baltimore today, navigated to paco's. he had a bit more "fun" on new years, note the myspace picture where he was apparently "coerced" into belly dancing:
http://www.myspace.com/pacofish

err...paco's house: peach pie. nudity buffer. british sitcoms. the clash. cafe zen. paco found crutches at a thrift store so our plan to dress like animals and busk at the zoo is in high gear. we haven't started much with the master plans, and need to make sure others are still in. paco, if you're reading this, busking may be montana now, but it will be oatmeal soon. helena, baby. helena.

i now have a borrowed copy of shawn of the dead.

I decorated my room. I love it. Best collage of art and nudity I've managed so far. Excellence.

If you're in DC, you have to come see.

Goddamn! I am allergic to EVERYTHING! Maybe I'm allergic to DC. Since I've gotten here I've had five allergic reactions - three mild, two severe. I'm even allergic to my blue jeans. Apparently. Or fabric softener. Or something.

on an additional gross note, I keep forgetting to carry kleenex with me. i've been quite inventive, often using debit card receipts instead. although lately i've run out of those. i thought about asking someone on the metro. as in: I say sir, may I have a section of your newspaper?

random person: which one?
me: oh, no one reads the stock section. how about that one? or how about lifestyles?
RP: why?
me: I've always wanted to snot on a film star.
random person: (looks disgusted)

me = idiot at night.

On the metro I notice all these people reading classical novels. Like Dosteyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, or Hugo’s Les Miserables…the woman reading that looked engrossed, like she’d read all the pages before and they were falling apart because of some emotional state of her fingers like love or hate.

Reading Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist. Excellent – lyrical, beautiful, haunting, pick an adjective. Which is odd because I could barely finish White Noise last year. This is my favorite passage::

It is the thing no one understands. But it makes and shapes you. And in these nights since he’d left she sometimes sat with a book in her lap, eyes closed, and felt him living somewhere in the dark, and it is colder where he is, it is wintrier there, and she wanted to take him in, try to know him in the spaces where his chaos lurks, in all the soft-cornered rooms and unraveling verbs, the parts of speech where he is meant to locate his existence, and in the material place where Ray lives in him, alive again, word for word, touch for touch, and she opened and closed her eyes and thought in a blink the world had changed.
He violates the limits of the human.

***

In a job interview this past summer, I think for MUSE maybe?, one of the editors asked me how I knew when I’d written something well. And I told her (and this is so bizarre) that I recognize good writing because of what it evokes within me, even the simplest passages or journalism pieces do this if well constructed. The best way I can describe the sensation is to say it’s a kind of mental image that doesn’t quite come into being, like a sunset, where all you can see is blurred color and no delineation. Not to get off subject too much of course, but that’s what I see when I read Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist. The editor laughed at me. She called it “looking for sunsets.”