The evening started with Ivana XL (we can add her to the category of marcia-music).  A sort of Cat Power, Emiliana Torrini-esque singer whose songs I’d like to download and listen to everyday.

The first film that was showed, Revolution of the Crabs, I’d seen two summers before while working at the Brooklyn International Film Festival, which was fantastic because I loved it then and love it now. The story of the marble rock crabs destined to travel the earth walking in only one direction, enduring 120 million years of tragedy. Its much more light hearted than it sounds.

Though I can’t embed the video here, check it on the IFC website.

My other favorites:

Composte

and Bob Log III’s Pony Dick Story (its exactly like it sounds and twice as hilarious)

Where would you go?

I’m starting to think that opportunties like this don’t happen that often in a lifetime and when they do most people are usually too complacent to take advantage of them.

• a writer and a prop stylist (meg and i combined??)
• two upright bassist
• one actor
• ten kids with unsure job titles who live in a commune
• one recently broken up guy who kept talking about his girlfriend’s stuff
• drank twice with prospective roommates
• someone registered on couch surfing dot com
• a handful of photographers and graphic designers
• and one owner of a plus sized modeling company (of the girly mag variety)

Needless to day, as it draws closer to the wire, my standards have dropped considerably. Hey Mr. Plus Sized Model Company, is that room still open? I’ve made a simple math formula to help everyone understand what the search is like: Where A is the amount of cool people and B is the coolness of the apartment and C is the weird people and D is the weird apartment.

• A+B=no chance in hell.
• A+D=some chance but not likely.
• C+B=lots of chance but do you really want to.
• C+D=an apartment offer on the spot.

In fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to understand those young women for whom New York was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, girls who bought toasters and installed new cabinets in their apartments and committed themselves to some reasonable furniture. I never bought any furniture in New York. For a year or so I lived in other people’s apartments; after that I lived in the Nineties in an apartment furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away. And when I left the apartment in the Nineties (that was when I was leaving everything, when it was all breaking up) I left everything in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento County I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me who I was, and I moved into a monastic four-room floor-through on Seventy-fifth Street. “Monastic” is perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severity; until after I was married and my husband moved some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four rooms except a cheap double mattress and box springs, ordered by telephone the day I decided to move, and two French garden chairs lent me by a friend who imported them. (It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engaged only about our most private lives.)

All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.

because, the light filters through the trees in a way that you’d forgotten, making beautiful silhouettes that you no longer take for granted.

because, we wear our beauty so proudly, most of us achieving that moment before flaunting it, leaving just enough for the imagination. New York bodies…so lithe and beautiful and bathed in sunlight. Who doesn’t live here that doesn’t love each moment that the sun shines enough to beat against their skin. Maybe its respite against the bold winters.

because, I feel like I’m seventeen again. These moments always feel like they can last forever, even when my age and my wisdom knows they can’t. I can feel beautiful and young and a part of it all. Some how this here and this now gives us this gift.

because, I drink wine in the park like I’m making love in broad daylight. Bottles everywhere. Abandonment. We just simply don’t care.

because, babies run through the parks and because we can pet random dogs in front of cafe’s on lafeyette and feel that its our rite to be as happy as they are when we greet them.

because, I can gather my friends on any given day and we have no excuse or rhyme or reason. It isn’t a holiday or a birthday, we just wanted to savor those last few moments and watch the sun dip down perfectly between the trees. Wax poetics about where the summer went and how fast it passes.

because, for hours everything can be possible and nothing forgotten.

because, these are the moments we live for. The moments we live HERE for. Breathing. Beating.

And because I could possibly ode New York summers forever. Because, it gives us a reason to keep living here through the harsh coldness and the angry pedestrians. Because, where else will we go.

You know it once you lived here, New York love is very different than any love you’ve ever experienced; from any habitat that you’ve ever lived.

New mix up on Muxtape & also available for download at Zshare.
Cover art stolen from BK’s flickr stream.

Panama | Brooklyn Zoo – Ol Dirty Bastard
Cye | Return of the Crooklyn Dodgers – Chubb Rock, OC, Jeru The Damaja
OJ | Jockin’ Jay-Z (Dope Boy Fresh) – Jay-Z
Eyejammy | We Live In Brooklyn, Baby – Roy Ayers
Ouxu | BK Anthem – Foxy Brown
Jen | Brooklyn Sky – Digable Planets
BK | Brooklyn – Mos Def
Sam | Murda, Murda - Jay-Z feat. Memphis Bleek & Geda K
Liz | Hello Brooklyn – Jay-Z feat. Lil Wayne
George | The Boogie Man Song – Mos Def
Marcia | The Stoop – Little Jackie

This week we tip our hat in honor of Boom’s big move to NYC (if she doesn’t move to Brooklyn I’ve threatened to disown her and remove this post). Our internet-friendship began a little before her trip to Paris in January and picked up a lot of steam right after mine (she’s been the first person I talked to on a daily for months now), being that I was an internet-friendship-virgin I couldn’t believe how perfectly it translated into real life.

Lets just say her couch has seen more than its fair share of me these past two weeks.

I knew this mix was going to be heavy on the hip hop tip but I hadn’t picked a song by Monday. When I played the first track on the Little Jackie album I immediately thought of how much fun its going to be when she has her very on stoop for us to play own.

Consider me the Kanye of writing.

Today I wandered over to Union Square after work. While I was sitting there amidst the hustle and bustle it struck me, everything was moving in time with the rhythm of this symphony of light. The words bore a certain cinematic quality. Sitting solitary and decelerating, while all of life seems to quicken around you, the people become blurs, the cars simply streaks of light, the lights in the buildings seemed to all come one and flicker as people sleep or leave or whatever else they might be doing in the darkness…That all flashed into my head in the instant they crossed my mind but I realized that exactly it…

It was all the people. Everyone around me seemed to be involved in some type of city dance.  They were the light, the energy the driving force. They were flickering and flashing objects. Some were bulbs nearly burnt out on life, shining like a nova before it becomes a black hole. Some were dim and weak and barely aglow, their eyes sad and safe.  Some sparkled like the christmas lights that shimmer all colorful and changing with their own rhythm. It was all there, all inside all of us. All in everyone prepared for fighting or fucking or loving or dancing or singing or stuffing our faces till we couldn’t breathe. All in everyone who had come to New York wanting more and lived in New York taking more, reaching for more, grasping for more.  All in everyone who’d been driven mad by the city and seemed to go on and off with their own accord, like haunted lights. Lights of ghost. Some unforeseen force compelling and driving them forward with unimaginable energy. (Oh, the stamina of insanity.) It was all there in the loudness and the rudeness and the loveliness and the loneliness and the beauty. All reaching out, those symphonies of light. Drawing outsiders to us with our radiance. Sirens against the angry storm that is our City. Calling as loud as we could.

When I wander about my place in the city, when I find myself at Union Square just before dusk, in those moments when the air finally cools and the sun is no longer hot against my skin. Just before the lights on all the buildings start to become lit, sitting arm to arm with strangers while the frantic energy of the city in heat swells around me…I feel alive.

But Via Tania aka Tania Bowers has been in my cd player since 2003 when turntable lab (you’re gonna wanna check them out) featured a few of her songs from Under a Different Sky. There was just something about the fragile quality of her voice, like a whisper through your head phones that was just different enough and powerful enough to capture me at the time. She released her new album Moon Sweet Moon and I was all on board. When I found out she was performing in the big apple I knew if I didn’t attend the show it would be one of those moments I regretted (see sufjan stevens…sigh). The night was perfect, even after arriving late, even after walking through the rain and being soaked through to my socks.

If you’ve got the time. If you’ve got the energy please dig”

Audio of the last song she performed and one of my personal faves:
Download audio file (true.mp3)

And howcome:

Via Tania: Howcome from shoottheplayer on Vimeo.

First off, Miss Boom came to town. We filled the past ten days with stoop sitting, brunching and lunching, a few nights on the town, getting to know new people, dressing similarly (by accident of course) and lots of vegging out (post 4th of July). It was the first time we’d actually hung out in depth and it was an absolutely amazing time. With a little bit of luck we’ll have her up here in a few months permanently.

Next, I gave Vespa driving a go, with hilarious and painful results. Needless to say, I took it down fairly quickly.

I spent a day getting to know my new neighbor Megan a little better which was one of my favorite lazy brooklyn days this summer. We traveled from bed-stuy to brooklyn heights and back. She’s the type of person that brightens any room.

Finally, the bk and blazey bbq stoop party which was all the fun you’d ever want and more. Boom and I posted up in our previous stoop spot where we spent most of the party. I got to talk to a bunch of people I’d seen around the way but never gotten to a chance to really engage. AND as an added bonus there was a little reunion with two of my oldest New York friends from college (AKA part of the “william street dorm crew). The lovely Whitney and JD (dizzal or dilla to those who know him), who I only see once every four or five months but love like a brother nonetheless (him and his adorable girlfriend, Krystal, might be hosting a little post party mh birthday bbq at their place in willy-b saturday which of course everyone is invited to).

viva la summer.

Happy summering.

the cool down muxtape.