i can see marc jacobs from my house

last nite on our merry way to and from the map room pub in bucktown, something in the marc by marc jacobs store caught our eye. yes, that's palin there, glued onto a mannequin with this season's shearling coat:

AWESOME.

can't wait for thursday's hot mess of a VP debate. although, will i be forced to choose between it and the new episode of The Office? decisions, decisions...which reminds me of the televised OJ chase, during a sleepover and smack in the middle of a new episode of Friends. I was incensed, i had waited a full week for this new episode and it was being interrupted by some boring footage of an expressway car chase.  i was 10 and couldn't have cared less about some runaway dude in a white bronco. gimme mah telly. ah, the obsession began early.

so this is inevitable withdrawal

my peach flatmates made it very difficult to leave. 

on this rainy chicago morning, i woke up to an email from olivia, entitled 'what unemployed people do in the morning', full of goofy photos of her & julien on our couches, posing with the books that my heavy suitcases simply wouldn't allow me to bring home (i wouldn't have taken the horrific Nostromo with me anyway, but i was sad to say goodbye to the jean rhys). 

just last week this was me & julien in the late mornings, searching for jobs on our laptops while our tv blared in the background, subtitled for julien. we preferred House & Frasier, but would settle for the OC or richard & judy when nothing else was available.

feeling rather fragile now that i'm home. i'm happy to be here & with my sweet family, but my teary-eyed reaction to watching the local weather forecast this morning clued me into the fact that no, i'm not quite over you yet, london.

my heart rate rapid

transitions.

water descends and sheets me like an eel

decomP magazine is publishing a poem o' mine in its December issue! HUZZAH HUZZAH HUZZAH. what lovely news to read first thing in the morning. i like all these very much, especially the very last one by brandi wells.

the other day on the tube, whilst listening to last days (the haunting, insistent piano bit of 'mountains' especially) and reading Woolf's The Waves, tears actually sprang to my eyes, I felt overwhelmed with the beauty of it all. Try listening to this song and reading Woolf, which is such an intensely visual text, a full-on cinematic journey through the senses that you will feel as though you were dropped into a hushed movie theatre of your own. 

I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you. I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. 

If you live in New York, you absolutely must see Kate Mitchell's stage adaptation of The Waves when it comes to Broadway. I have never been more captivated by a theatre production in my entire life, they captured every sound, every image, every nuance of Woolf's masterful text with such unprecedented innovation, incorporating water, cameras and live film, photography, projection, shelves of bits and bobs to create the necessary sounds, oh, oh, it was so impressive. It's coming to Broadway soon.

airwaves + london is sunny

the moment i decide to leave london, to move back home & make some $ before moving out to LA after christmas, it decides to turn blindingly sunny and warm for 3 days straight. the universe is fucking with me. 

last nite was London Airwaves, an Icelandic music festival previewing here first. 10 venues all within a 10-minute walk of my doorstep opened its stages to live acts all night, and those with wristbands were allowed to go in and out of all these clubs & bars, picking and choosing who to see and when. It was like a mini-Coachella supplanted in London's gritty East End. There were massive queues outside each venue, yet since we got our tix earlier that day, our wristbands turned us into rockstars for the night -- none of this lining up outside bullshit, we just breezed right in. Fairly exhilarating.

Our first stop was to see my beloved Metronomy, a triumvirate of devastatingly sexy scruffy English boys who did not disappoint, plus they wore actual functional globe lights on their chest, like those on their tees in this photo:

Then we jumped over to Cargo for The Whip, a Manchester quartet. Insatiable energy and the female drummer (in top photo) was so badass we went up to her later on the patio and told her we were all in love with her. She was cool and gracious and all her friends were like HAYYYYY. I cannot stop listening to their uber-catchy Kitsune Divebomb track.  

Countless vodka tonics later, we scuttled over to rambunctious awesome Casio Kids, slugged a foster's for the walk to 93 Feet East for Digitalism live DJ set added at the last minute. Stellar, needless to say. I danced my sequins and purple blush off, frenched a frenchy, and staggered home with a stop off at the 24 Hour BAYGEL BAKE for a 3 am lox & cream cheese snack. London nights like these are going to be hard to beat. 

advise me

Sam Pink gives good advice:

Whenever you get a haircut, and someone says, "oh hey, you got a haircut" you should affect a somewhat confused look, then slowly reach your hands up to your head and feel around, and then say "oh my god, how did this happen?" and then become increasingly more terrified and start screaming and keep yelling "oh my god, fuck, how did this happen, it must've happened while i was sleeping oh god oh god oh god." That will likely keep them from stating things that are obvious.

{Ed: That makes me think of my dad, because whenever he gets a haircut, I am always forever and ever the only one that notices. He has about three hairs that he crosses over his scalp in a very unique comb-over way, plus some hair on the sides, but I always notice when he gets his hairs cut because the comb-over looks sleeker, neater, more suave. He always really appreciates when I notice that he gets a haircut, so I will not be taking Sam Pink's advice here. Sorry Sam Pink.}

The next time you are about to ejaculate into someone, put your fingers in your ears and close your eyes and say, "Three, two, one..." The other person might not laugh, but at least then you know where things stand.

~

The list includes equally useful bits of advice by other entertaining blawger/writers, including one of my favorite items by the inimitable ryan manning:

If we are chatting on AOL instant messenger and you are not typing in size 10 Arial font it will affect our relationship in a negative way.

Personally I prefer Georgia size 11.

the impossible library

British artists Onkar Kular and Noam Toran collaborate on art/film projects, including an upcoming film at the Somerset House in London. 

I find the concept for one of their past collaborations endlessly fascinating: An Impossible Library compiles what basically amounts to a morbid round-up of cinematic moments of dying in 10 categories, taken from over 150 films. Among the categories are dying singing, dying in arms, dying whilst lying down, etc. The proposal asserts their mission to catalogue every dying moment in the history of cinema, their first feature-length round-up as only the first installment in a series. I wish I could have had the doubtlessly eerie, macabre Borges-ian romp through cinematic deaths when it was first shown in a London gallery, although I imagine a full 2 hours of nothing but death might prove overwhelmingly weighty even for my depressive cinematic preferences (Lars von Trier films, Requiem for a Dream, which i have somehow subjected myself to 3 times now, French films about infidelity, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach's sweetly devastating characters).

you obviously know what i'm talking about.

joshua kogan & rolas simulis

desire despair

Marni Horwitz has captured some really lovely images, the top 2 of which are from her time living in the Czech Republic. Her artist statement on this melancholic period of living and loving among these people is interesting; she describes her experience of living there, despite having a lover and many friends and speaking fluent Czech, as feeling consistently on the outside, as getting smaller and slowly disappearing from the edges of her own existence there.

I found Prague to be a very melancholic place, too. I'm a quarter Czech, and so I was not too shocked when confronted with the dour personality of its land, the sad faces who seem to relish their unsatisfactory existence, their dissatisfaction with whatever or whoever is in front of them. My great-grandmother was a perfect example of the Czech personality, as we lay in bed side by side when I was around 8 and she around 80, as she pressed her hands and lips together in fervent prayer, admonishing me to "Pray to Jeeeeezus that he TAKES me tonight. I'm TIRED of this life now! Pray for the Good Lord to take me away tonight!"

"But...Gramma...I don't want you to die tonight! I don't want Jesus to take you! I want you to stay and sleepover the whole weekend!" I protested, tears springing to my eyes. 

"Oh, now, enough of that. I'm TIRED of this LIFE, I say. It's TIME for the baby Jesus to TAKE ME."

If that's not the epitome of a dysfunctional Czech personality, well, I don't know what is.

Anyhow, lovely photos, no?

surveillance

public meets private, by mitch epstein

free muzik

because i feel too guilt-ridden to download music for free from the internets, i pay for it all on itunes. even though i've had 3 laptops break down, and had to painfully replenish my music library as many times, because i still haven't learned the valuable, if boring, lesson of backing my shit up, i still pay for music. or take it from my friends' computers.

if you are like me, then you might appreciate this free offer from classical music site passionato.com (not, as i learned when trying to remember the site from the offer i read in the newspaper on the tube, passionata.com, which seems to be a rather classy porn site). they're currently giving away 10 free classical music downloads, among them haydn, brahms, and chopin. Free, and guilt-free. i like. if that doesn't interest you, then maybe passionata.com will, and if so, then good, i've fulfilled today's altruistic blog task of sharing information of interest.

close your eyes, and keep them closed.

Saw Blow Up at the BFI tonite. I had only seen a clip before, in my Italian cinema class I took in Rome 4 years ago, images from which have stubbornly stuck with me ever since. A cool, plodding, mod exploration of the violence in voyeurism and the problematic nature of perception. 

Anyone care to explain the significance of the mimes, though? The silent book-ends of the film, we're sure there must be something vast and important at work there but we couldn't quite grasp what it was.

six to eight black men

a rather lovely lady took me to see the always-delightful david sedaris speak tonight at the Bloomsbury Theatre. Several years ago in chicago, I waited for hours in line to meet him and have my copy of me talk pretty one day signed. I think I blurted out something seriously lame about Paris when I finally got to meet him. Holidays on Ice is probably one of the most hilarious collections of short stories of all time, and I re-read 'the santaland diaries' every christmas. it is the literary realization of all of my secret Christmas-baby fantasies of working in the north pole -- er, mall -- with santa. {hey, if i can get my uber-jew ex-boyfriend with a rabbi father to love christmas, i can get anyone to love christmas.}

In the q&a session, someone asked Sedaris what he thought about the "election thing" and he talked about how scary the undecided voters are -- that being "Undecided" in this election is akin to being on a flight and offered the choice between chicken, and human shit riddled with shards of glass, and asking "well, how is the chicken cooked...?"

oh sedaris, i love thee.

bbc

"and tonight, coming up next, a woman found mummified in her closet."

today was lovely but i can't find my camera card connector thingie so photos will have to wait.

it did include some brilliant woolf theatre, a gallery opening, the best thai calamari in the world, harvey nicks (during which we giggled with tv memories of patsy & edina falling through its revolving doors drunkenly, laden with shopping bags), Orangerie tea, and a little bit o' this, scarfed whilst crossing millennium bridge over a grey thames and under an even greyer sky.

ain't no sunshine

mum is visiting this week! theatre & cinema & markets & the best of londontown food (you'd be surprised, this city is teeming with marvelous gastronomical delights) & used book shops & high tea & scones, oh my. not a bad way to spend my last unemployed week.

sinema

last nite on the way to the organic food market, i spotted this wee space, nestled in between an off-license and a pub. I crossed the road to get a closer look, as its entrancing neon sign and warm glowing interior dotted with oil painting portraiture piqued my interest. turns out it's the coolest film shop i've ever seen, called 'today is boring'. This place is a cinematic nocturnal emission, with 2,500 independent and foreign titles. plus their website is really cool. i would have gotten a membership but they're moving to bloody dalston in 2 weeks because the rent in Shoreditch climbs 10% every year and they can't afford it anymore. The only reason we can live here is that we live above a bar and must get some sort of ease on rent from the noise. Well, that and the sound proofing is hardly the sturdiest -- I can hear my roommates turn over, and I hear julien's alarm go off before he even does. 

LA must have awesome independent video shops like this one, no? each day, each moment has become a psychological trans-Atlantic battle between los angeles & london. "well surely LA doesn't have this"; "but surely people in LA wouldn't be treated like this"; "surely the sun would come out at least ONE day a week in LA..."

what to do.

stick a fork in me

doneDONEdone with my master's as of 2pm yesterday. Not sure what i was expecting  -- trumpet fanfare, balloons, confetti, cakes with elaborate layers of buttercream frosting? -- what transpired was something slightly more anti-climactic, along the monotone lines of "just pop your paypah in the box there, yeah? i'll sort it out lay-tah." k...uh, bye!! 

Well, then off some coursemates & i went, to celebrate as the English do: by heading straight to the pub. Around 1 am a Hackney drunk with cuts around his eyes sat himself next to me at a bus stop and told me he liked my hair but and that my knees were nice but muscular. Not sure what that means. Then he pontificated about knees for awhile. 

It's kind of awkward when you're sitting on a double decker and the bus stops next to another double decker and then you're creepily close to someone in the next bus over, like 1 inch plus 2 windowpanes away. It's disorienting being that close to someone 25 feet up, I'm never sure where to look.

It's 4 pm and I'm still in pj's. What next, life? What next indeed.