performance art

It's Performance Week at Meat Market Gallery, and strangely, two friends from Hampshire are performing together - Megan Palaima and Liz Rosenfeld doing who knows what from 6-7p on Friday and at the closing party on Saturday. I'll be there Friday, wanna go?
Other friends Breck Brunson and the Yay! Team will be performing throughout the week, too, but as I'll be slinging pizza, i'll miss those. If you're liz or megan, and have a crafty google alert for your own name, hi! long time no see! wanna get a drink while you're in DC?
I asked a friend to invite her newish potentially uptight date to the performance with us, but she declined. Is inviting a new friend to see performance art an unfair test of character?

Mirah + Spectratone International

Saw a great show last night with jen and a few other friends.
Mirah, a whispery, sultry, sometimes girly and silly-voiced soprano with her backing band Spectratone International. They said their openers canceled so they played their own warmup- a short set of covers, mostly - a stirring pirate shanty, Nico's "Fairest of the Seasons" and an older Mirah song. After the break, they sang mostly from their newest, Share This Place, which i don't have (yet), and seems to be mostly about bugs, longing and dangerous loves. One medieval-sounding song about a grain-sorting princess took from Led Zeppelin's mystical lyric style.

Spectratone International is a fab fourtet of cello, percussion, accordion and oud, a Middle Eastern mandolin like instrument.

The music was accompanied, in the second act, by unusual stop-motion animation by Britta Johnson, which was created for the performance. You can see on of the shorts and hear the band here. Johnson's creatures and shadows made from household castoffs are beautiful and kind of gross, alluring but not overwhelming to the performance. With the band playing to build tension with the video, it was a great combination. yay art!

The crowd was almost as intriguing as the show, a mottled and attractive selection of 20s and 30s, silently rapt with the
performance. who are these people and why dont I see them more often?

flora nuevo

I inherited some new plants this week, and, as recoup from working 30+ hours this weekend, went on a potting spree yesterday. They seem to be happy in our dappled light apartment, so hopefully they'll survive!

This Aloe is a fledgling from a good friend's massive plant. I've never had an aloe before, so I'm glad to finally have this beneficial plant in the kitchen. aloe has a wide and shallow root system, so it should thrive in this terracotta bowl from Jen's house.

This is, I think, a tree philodendron, one of the smallest specimens I could find in my friend's house to take from Richmond with me. It's been repotted and put out of reach of Zira. It's poisonous; she ate some and had a not very good Saturday.

Found this leggy rubber tree in with the trash in front of my neighbors house. it's got lots of new growth on it, so I'm rescuing it. it need lots of light, and I'm not quite sure where to put it. Hopefully it's happy in the living room. It's poisonous, too, so stay away, Zira! it did not get repotted, rubber plants like to be rootbound.

Philla and Rubbert took a shower together, to clean months of dust off their tender leaves, and they seem happier together.

So, I've got nearly a dozen plants in the apartment now, and I don't think we bought any of them. I'm trying to encourage my Kaleidoscope Orchid to reflower, but, really, I'm just asking it to. I don't know any other way! The money tree is still humongous and leggy (Suffering from months of drought, per Jeremy), and the grass-like plant has been split three times and is still huge. It's a lot easier to take care of plants when there are so many asking for water!

hi

check my rad new bike! A charming red Follis, a 70s french mixte road bike with a bell. i think i'm in love. she rides smoothly thanks to a new derailleur from mr. smooth. i think i'll save up for a brooks saddle (with springs!), but not till after I have a job that pays money! speaking of, off to work!

oops - here's the ideal brooks saddle. only $240!

(short) film news in 'park city'

Some great news for the Hampshire College film program coming out of Park City lately - two films (at least) made by alums are showing at Sundance and Slamdance. Sundance, one of the top film festivals in the US, and Slamdance, playing simultaneously in the same area, might be the queen of the ultraindie fests. If you're lucky enough to head there, here are some films to add to your screening list:

At Slamdance:
COVERED TRACKS: "an experimental documentary exploring the Freedom Tunnel, a fifty-block long train tunnel underneath Manhattan's Upper West Side." Directed by Nate Kensinger, Produced by Kensinger and Meghan O'Hara. this is playing some other fests, too, including SFindie (pic at left). meghan, nate and I are experienced media services librarians.

PANELS FOR THE WALLS OF HELL: " William, a pretentious, disaffected projectionist at a film festival, has high notions of cinema." Directed by Blake Myers and Takuro Masuda. Blake and Takuro aren't HC folks, but another of their documentary projects was in the IFP Doc Lab. Blake also makes bloody horror flicks in Atlanta. maybe this is one of them?

others i'm excited about
NEW YEAR PARADE: Divorce and the mummers parade in Philly. Dir: Tom Quinn - an IFP Narrative Lab alum
WESLEY WILLIS'S JOYRIDES - you know, Wesley Willis.
FRONTRUNNER - an IFP Market project, with music supervision by our friend Brian Liu, who has his finger in everything it seems

and, at Sundance:
THE DRIFT: "A 1960s space mission goes awry, resulting in a strange disappearance and cosmic transmissions. The fall-out of this journey forever changes life back on Earth and launches a counter-culture revolution." Director: Kelly Sears
You can see Sundance's entire '08 shorts program on Netflix, iTunes or XBox.com starting Jan 18. brilliant!

others at Sundance:
KICKING IT - homeless world cup soccer!
George A. Romero's DIARY OF THE DEAD. film students cleverly documenting the world of flesheating monsters around them.
Michel Gondry's latest: BE KIND REWIND. Jack Black is magnetized and he and Mos Def remake all the great movies - Ghostbusters, Robocop, Driving Miss Daisy.

That's my line-up. Hope I get to see some of these flicks, soon!

how to occupy time when marginally employed

1. make salsa.
now, i do love burritos, but from the amount of postings i have here about salsa, you would think that I have some kind of obsession. however, this is really just because we grew tomatillos in our community garden plot this year, and they exploded! i know of nothing else to do with these green paper-covered citrusy fruits but salsa. so with jen's goading and the feeling like we shouldn't let such bounty go to waste, I turned to tomatillo-roasted jalapeno salsa.

it was mostly home-grown, though not entirely by us. some jerk pulled an entire jalapeno plant, full of fruit, out of the ground, and left it, and all the peppers, in the compost pile. I greedily stripped the peppers off the plant, swearing about wasteful americans and trying to imagine what i would do with two pounds of jalapenos.
So, into the oven they went, (400F for 20min) until roasty and skins black, sneezing in the house because of the capsicum in the air.

Next, spent a long time online trying to find a salsa recipe that was appropriate for me for canning (tasty, and not giving me botulism). Ultimately bought Ball's Blue Book of Preserving at trusty Frager's Hardware. I was sure they wouldn't give my friends botulism.
spent about half the day making a double-double batch of tomatillo salsa, canned with the aid of some of dave's beer brewing supplies, and a veg steamer at the bottom of the pot instead of a canning stand. by about 10pm, there were 9 pints of salsa cooling on the table. expect to get some in your stocking.

The kitchen has been busy this week. Professor Burpy is gurgling again, filled with a lambic-like prickly pear cactus wheat beer. it smells sweet and is electric pink, flavored juice of the prickly pear, picked by the side of the Beach Rd. in Southern Shores, NC, thisby the thankseating. a loaf of vegan banana-raisin bread has already been devoured, and i may make some coffee cake soon, too.

other projects include: intense planning for hot new years dance party, knitting a balaclava, scheming on some xmas crafts, mustering the courage to ask for a tarot reading, yoga, bicycle-hunting, dreaming up other projects.

do you have a job for me that requires brain power ?

128357

the odometer in my car stopped running. it could have been today but it seems unlikely that after not driving for several months, that I would have noticed the exact day it stopped turning over. so, my car will remain at 128K mi for eternity, which is good, when i finally sell it. naturally, i'll be honest about that.

in other news, i finally went to Tortilla Mexicana - Los Hermanos today - the tortilla factory at the top of the stairs at the Jefferston St. L stop that also has a kitchen in the front. it was never open, it seemed, when i actually was living here, so now that i've come to retrieve my things and get a dozen bagels, i jumped on one of their tacos vegetarianos. and can i say - amazing! delicious! fresh! the tortillas were def made this morning and the avacado was perfectly ripe. pinto beans, cilantro, lime, tomato, what else do you need?

picture-gifts

happy birthday mom! nice cake, L!

carrots from the lovejoy garden. we grew these! thanks earth! thanks dave for buying seeds!

Korean lunch at a place with a waterfall and white piano. glass noodle mushroom stirfry, tiny sides of two kinds of kimchee, spicy tofu, ambrosia salad, smoked shrimp-something yummy, fish cakes, pickled jalapenos... followed by a barbie pink 'strawberry' bubble tea. thanks amy!

awesome maker of a doclab film about origami sent me this today. anyone know what this kind of shape is called? it's 5 interlocked pyramids - a 20-point star? thanks vanessa!

celebs i have seen in my three months in new york

Parker Posey - just yesterday! skipping to the ladies room in my office.
Natalie Portman - at The Gate with friends in Park Slope
David Byrne - walking his bicycle in front of gallery openings in chelsea
Adam Goldberg - looking as thou he wants to be recognized? in front of the Antiques Garage
Keri Russell - at an IFP meeting
David Cross? - maybe smoking in front of The Cloisters

two to three lists on new york city

You have to admit that there is something about living in a city like New York that makes you think that you're some kind of loner/artist/writer/poet/ wanderer/freethinker/sociologist/ coffee/whisky-drinking / smoking/beatnik-hippie-punk that makes for endless diary writing awaiting tempura maki and hijiki salad (alone at a table for two, naturally), on the train to wherever you are going, or drinking vodka at a friends bar, there is something about cities like this that makes it happen.

althou, there isn't much of the privileged artsyness that goes with sushi and a comfortable solitude in Chinatown, where i sat writing yesterday at dusk, or in Bushwick where i type now (essentially alone, thou my roommate is plugged into whatever obsessive game hes been doing since i left the apartment on saturday).

Mostly, these places are filled with poverty, although Chinatown is also filled with seemingly endless stalls of strange dried things, questionable fish, even worse durian in yellow mesh bags, cheap vegetables (not organic & with a carbon footprint of >500mi), knock-off purses, watches, belts, dvds, &anything else that can be ripped off, and the holy home of vegetarian drumsicks (along with something called vegetarian fish ham, which, for the record, im not the slightest bit interested in eating).

in addition to trying not to open the bag of drumsticks and sort of wishing we had a deep fryer, here's a list of things i expect i will not be doing in my last four days here:

- visit the Whitney / Kara Walker solo exhibition
- visit the Met who were bold/moneyed enough to install Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living which includes an updated shark from the original display in Saatchi's BMA "Sensation" show
- visit the Guggenheim, more for the art cred of having gone. the facade is under renovation/scaffold anyway
-see a film at BAMcinematek, Film Forum, or some other ultra indie or notedly cinephelic theater. In fact, the only film i saw that is likely not available in DC was Wristcutters: A Love Story, at Times fucking Square.
-visit all 5 boroughs. Sorry Bronx and Staten.
-burlesque, strip club, peep show, or something equally old-new-york seedy
-find the international spice market or that huge greenmarket you see on TV cooking shows where tv chefs buy their groceries
-close a bar at 4am.
-walk across brooklyn, williamsburg or manhattan bridge
-find a magically beautiful and cheap bicycle to coast around brooklyn
-make it big time as a Broadway dancer (the stagehands are on strike)

9 days

left in New York (for now?) and it's finally cold enough to see my breath outside. I've been spending this week in the West Village at a swank members hotel's dark and comfy 'cinema' for the IFP Doc Lab. The filmmakers are amazing, excited and engaged and with promising projects you doc programmers should look out for. i sort of feel like i just figured out how to live here and now i'm leaving. it'll be good to be home and sleep in my own bed and have space and trees and the cat around me, but i'll miss the constantly good people watching, vast options for restaurants and walking aimlessly.
so, I'm here another week and a half, what should I do? also, No Country For Old Men is out this week, who wants to go?

more pics, i can't stop!

other party

zombie julia child is making braaaaaaiiinnns crepes. for your mother-in-law.

more pics here.

halloweekend party

gracious hosts Astronaut Jones and his bustalicious martian babe

bun-in-oven and tourist new baby-daddy.

bjorks

bjorks heart sexy chef

halloween picmails

patterson ave. pumpkin

nurse ratchett hair

puppies love you.

Night Walks

Walked around Prospect Heights with s.m. last night, there was a nearly full moon and cool air and it was great.
Came across a film shoot, all the trailers, a huge Arri truck, and knew something was happening. The permit posted said the film was 'Righteous Kill' but i'd never heard of that and was wondering if you could put pseudonyms on the permit. Everyone here is abuzz about the new Cohen brothers movie Burn After Reading with Brad Pitt and George Clooney, so we pushed our way thru - not really there wasn't much security so we just wandered in.

But no, it was Righteous Kill, stars none other than Al fucking Pacino and Robert fucking De Niro; Scorsese is rumored to be IN it, along with 50 Cent and John Leguizamo. Some hardboiled New York cop crime drama, not the metalhead horror flick we were assuming based on title. We might have seen a scene involving Shirly Brener or Trilby Glover or some other blondie standing on the stairs of a brownstone. I really wish we'd hung around a little more.

secret vegetable! (butternut squash)

Once, Dave received a 'secret vegetable' in the mail, the previously unknown butternut squash, a hard winter squash from the Hampshire College CSA share i had with Mod 80.
Unknown, as in 'What the fuck do i do with this?!' Because soup or mash w/brown sugar can only be tolerated for so long, because it is cheap as hell and in season right now, here is what you do:

Butternut Squash-Black Bean Tacos
serves 3

• find a small butternut squash in the fridge where you are housesitting, at the farmers market or grocery. if you are feeding more than three, get a big one!
• chop it in half with the biggest knife you can find. watch your fingers, these things are hard! peel the skin off - it will help to cut it into even smaller pieces. some schmancy stores sell the squash cut/peeled already, but using this method also uses more packaging, so forget it.
• cut the peeled chunks into small pieces - about 1/2" cubes.
• get out a big frying pan and heat olive oil in it over med-high heat. add the squash, try to make sure its only in one layer on the pan. Saute squash about 8 min until it's nearly fork-tender and browning.
• while squash is sauteing, mash 2 cloves garlic, chop fresh sage, and slice a red bell pepper. when squash is tender, add all to the pan.
• Continue saute about another two minutes, till peppers are soft, then add 1 can black beans, with most of the water drained off.
• season with the juice of half a lime, hearty shakes of cumin, salt, pepper, hot sauce, adobo powder, whatever else you like.
• When everything is hot and delicious eat with corn tortillas, guacamole, tomatillo lime salsa(if you're feeling like you love my recipes), cheese and on the couch in front of trashy television like Cribs, garbage pop videos, The Office or Dr. Who. or at the dinner table discussing your day, politics, art, and social constructs, like normal people.

House-sitting for a friend in Prospect Heights, and it's changing my whole attitude about New York. Of course, it helps that she has an effin YARD that includes a patio, sage & roses, a blue jay, & a Sunday morning wedge of sunshine to sit in while you eat breakfast and listen to the church bells. While she seems to have scored a good deal for a small apartment with a yard and a short walk to the subway, it's all relative, and dave and I would both have to be earning three times what we are to afford it. Sad!
But, this fake living in Prospect/Crown Heights has made me feel more excited about the potential to live in Brooklyn for longer than three months.
Went to the Farmer's Market Saturday, and made out like a bandit with local apples, yellow wax beans, garlic, red chard, red pepper, green grapes, cheese, tomato, pear cider and wheat boule. $20. The strange fall weather is putting tomatoes and fresh corn on the same table as winter squash. J & I feasted on butternut squash-black bean tacos before freely-poured wine at Patio Lounge. Tonight: something with yellow beans &/or chard.

movies on a rainy day!

wowee-wow-wow! there's a lot of cool movie news today!

1. Spike Jonze (director, Being John Malkovich, assorted music videos for bjork, rem, etc.) and Dave Eggers (writer, McSweeny's, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (which actually just might be)) have be shooting an adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are due out December this year. 'Someone' has leaked a still of it and it looks beautiful! can't wait for the trailer!

2. "Twin Peaks" gold box edition. oh god. i want it. all episodes, two pilots, effin POSTCARDS, and oodles more. Not to mention, it's full of secret-filled coconuts, checkered rooms, and dancing midgets. i heard that gum you like is coming back in style. if you're shopping for it too, amazon's got it for $65.

3. Star Trek XI: Wherein Kirk Loses His Virginity & Becomes An Intergalactic Slut. Im a nerd. i blame juliana for my thinking its ok to like this show. there's a new movie coming out, a prequel to the original set of movies, showing Kirk and the gang at Starfleet academy! oooh! honestly, i'll probably netflix it, but they've cast real trekky Simon Pegg (Sean of the Dead) as Scotty, and a teen heartthrob (and former L.Lo co-star) is Kirk. amazingly, both Leonard Nimoy and the bad guy from Heroes are playing Spock. Very illogical. Will this manage to be as full of racial stereotypes as the original? only time will tell.

4. Movies I want to see:
My Kid Could Paint That - silverdocs alum Amir Bar-Lev's doc about a young girl who might be a genius painter, or maybe her parents are fakers. you decide!

Darjeeling Limited - the latest from Wes Anderson. three brothers owen wilson, adrian brody and jason schwartzmanon, a train trip, with the always elegant angelika houston as their nun-mother, and another excellent soundtrack by Jim Dunbar.

Random aside! Dunbar is apparently also doing the soundtrack for an upcomng narrative adaptation of the Maysles' bros. cult documentary Grey Gardens starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange! omg!

Wristcutters - A Love Story - a roadtrip in purgatory? Tom Waits as some kind of sage? im intrigued!

coming soon: No Country For Old Men. the new one from the Cohen Bros. and a return to their darker days. looks scary, about a guy killing for fun, and unlike anything i would normally go see. out Nov 9!

ok, thats a lot of movies. now that the sun is out (briefly i think) im off to eat some food. another productive day at the office!

al gore, peace prize winner

You've probably heard well before reading it here that Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -

"for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Now, I agree that this is a very important issue, vital to the survival of the Earth, at least it's survival in a way that makes it still inhabitable for the rest of us. And, that Gore, and An Inconvenient Truth has been a good face for the movement, somehow giving a kind of red-carpet celebrity cred to usually dry science. But is it worthy of a Peace Prize?

Is Al Gore, made of the same kind of stuff as the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King Jr, the Quakers, the Red Cross and other non-violent leaders? Is global ecological stability the same field as peace? Some have argued that drought and the resulting population displacement are the catalyst for the war in Sudan, so if atrocity like this could be prevented by reducing greenhouse gasses i suppose that is akin to peace. but, is it the same?

...to be continued with a rant about why Dems should stop worrying about Gore as the top candidate for POTUS. get over it...