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Back to NYC, maybe both literally and figuratively, blogging without the wine haze. Back from babyville and the threat of sudden suburban domestication.

Maybe it was all the recent life changes that made me as impressionable as an adolescent school girl (all the more reason to not fraternize with people under the age of four), but I’m looking forward to not waking up to feed children and change diapers (thought it was nice and nice to give the broheim a break.)

I’m thinking now about the realistic future. At least the future as realistic as after the New Year and resolution making. I’ve got one concrete so far and it entails not making the same mistakes I’ve made in the past. Looking forward instead of constantly looking back, a seemingly difficult feat for someone who loves ruminating and being introspective as much as I. There are some ruts that are a little more difficult to spot than others.

I’m still a bit discombobulated from the flight and the commute home. So all of my other 2009 thoughts will have to wait, but I have to say, I love this time of year, if only because a lot of people are all trying to figure out ways to make this year better than the one before. And even if they don’t succeed that collective feeling of go-to-do-betterness is fairly fantastic in and of itself.

so this is christmas

In Uncategorized on 25 December 2008 with 1,196 comments

I’m home, which has been strangely wonderful. Strange because my mother is missing from the picture… and I feel for better or worse, it’s OUR (my brothet and i) Christmas. We made a whole big dinner, two pies, a cake, and chocolate chip, oatmeal and raisin cookies. There are presents under the tree, despite our current economic status -and I feel, despite the way that Texas usually makes me feel 17 again, older. We’ve sat around drinking on Christmas Eve, the way I remember my mother and brothers did and I write this with too much red wine in my stomach.

The children, especially though, are the big difference. I have a neice, with my eyes, my head and my name. I have a nephew, the literal replica of my brother. It makes the upcoming Christmas morning so special.

I’ve been through out my life, ridiculously anti-children. I say ridiculously because it’s a stance I’ve held as long as I can remember in my young life, and of course is one of those things that everyone knows (or hopes) will eventually change with age. So hello 25. I still feel like it’s much to early to have these thoughts, but suddenly…

I was sitting on the bed, Ann crawling and cooing across me, my nephew at my feet watching PBS, and suddenly I thought… I could do this…soon. It seemed a rather errant and irresponsible thought. Of course, I can’t. Not now.

These moods, this biological thing, sometimes you realize how deeply it’s engraned. Deeper than logical thought, it lodges itself into your brain. Maybe it means everything. Maybe it means nothing. Maybe it just means the most at Christmas time, when children rule the day, when their greatest gift is simply showing up, their tiny faces a glow, the day only once again loaded with meaning (and let’s not forget Santa.)

I’m rambling here.

What I mean is Merry Christmas. Slowly back away from your neices and nephews.

Get back to your single city life, quick like.

winter memories

In Uncategorized on 18 December 2008 with 15 comments

Maybe because I’ve wriiten so much about summer or maybe it just stems from trying to conjur up a few things to love about New York winters, which I always find a bit difficult and trying. I started thinking back to my first winter here and by association, my first holiday season, not so much nostalgically but a feeling akin to leafing through an old journal and being transported back in time to a person you no longer are, with beliefs you no longer hold. The memories are like a dream both vivid and skewed. The colors still bright but some of the faces are missing. There are, slightly obscured from view, peripheal things dancing on the outer edges. Feelings that are, while maybe important then, lost in the shuffle of growing up. While maybe you recall feeling a certain way, it conjures no particular emotion other than the pleasure or pain caused from remembering a time not so long ago, when you were younger.

The first thing that my mind called to the forefront was the ice rink in Central Park. I can’t remember the ride to the park or renting the skates. Only that we were standing in the center of the rink, Brian and I, and it was just before Christmas. Maybe it was snowing. Maybe tiny snowflakes were drifting around us (it snowed more in New York not-so-long-ago). And he had, in his hands a small crudely wrapped, duct taped and glued package.

We had broken up a little over a month beforehand and were both dating other people, which we talked fairly openly about, but I’d gotten him a gift anyway. I remember he smiled so hard I thought the edges of his cheeks would grow extra dimples and crevices in them. I remember that he looked at me in a way I can only recall having seen once or twice since, like someone falling in love and he kissed me hard before opening it. What I can’t recall is how I felt exactly at that moment: excited about the watch which had cost me eighty dollars, a severe price on a student budget and excited about the moment which felt at the time so perfectly story book that we were both swept away in it. I skated small circles around him, helping him pull away the tape, nearly half a ridiculous roll, both of us giggling. We pulled and pulled and laughed, and maybe there was snow in our hair, maybe not, till finally he had to cut the box with a pocket knife I’d smuggled onto the ice. He pulled the watch out and turned it over in his hands, both of us still half laughing. And we kissed and our friends gave a small clap and it was one of those moments.

Times like these are as cherished as your first adolescent love letters. Tucked in a keepsake box.

what life does.

In quote on 4 December 2008 with 936 comments

(ah. Yes. I know a lot of my post lately have consisted of reblogs from whiskey river, but some things are too good not to share)

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.
- Eleanor Lerman

the pumpkin guy

In Uncategorized on 16 November 2008 with 2 comments

He sits in a small musty room behind the exhibit that smells like sweat and despiration. We talk for five minutes and I feel held hostage, despite the fact that he’s very nice. The right side of his face is slightly limp, like that of a stroke victim and his watermelon carving of frida kahlo (dedicated to her final painting of a watermelon) is particularly inspired.

I wonder what it must be like to create work that most people think of as compleletly ornamental.

Maybe it’s the same for all art.

“the books we love…

In People, quote on 12 November 2008 with 108 comments

…love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them– not to pretend we’re better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agitprop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff infotainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget our cynical opportunism for an angle, spin or a take, instead of consulting compass points on principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of slicks. We are reading for lives, not performing like seals for some fish.”

John Leonard

o-ba-ma

In personal, rant on 12 November 2008 with 3 comments

What I recall thinking, as I stood with the crowds in the gathered around the large tv in the neighborhood bar, having abandoned the home tv for just a minute to experience everyone else’s joy and laughter, to see what all the noise and honking and drinking in the streets was like, was that this was not only a historical change, but it was also the first time our generation had really got to witness something not only history making but in a positive way. Most of us were too young to really recall the Berlin Wall coming down in great depth, I simply remember the images and my mother’s tears, who had spent three years there.

What I do remember was watching from a class room window as the second plane hit the twin towers. I remember crying in front of the television as the Iraq war began. I remember the slow sinking feeling I’d come to expect with the making of “history.” I guess, without realizing it, I’d begun to lose faith in our country in so many ways. I was definitely one of the masses that was afraid to hope.

I didn’t cry when Obama won. I smiled. I smiled till my cheeks ached and all I could follow it up with was occasional outburst of laughter and “I can’t believe we did it.” I ordered two Johnny Walker Blacks and I smiled in front of the tv and at the people standing next to me at everything in nothing in general.

I think our generation needed to see something like this, needed the type of hope it would provide. Needed to believe. Insert cheesy proud to be an american quote.

(I know I’m a bit late on the whole thing, I’ve been internet free for daaaays, but it was nice to finally say my piece)

ifc/rooftop films (animated shorts)

In Music, film, neuva york on 12 November 2008 with 298 comments

I stopped over to check out the IFC/Rooftop Films Short Annimated Film Showcase at the Chelsea Market on Monday, and while I lament missing the summer series (rooftops+free beer=life can’t be much sweeter) I’m glad I finally got turned on to the event.

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)

america again

In poetry on 5 November 2008 with 2 comments

I haven’t really had time, between yesterday and today to sit and articulate my feelings. (Plus I’m internet-less at the moment so thats proved to be a bit of a hinderance). But I found this Langston Hughes poem on Language Hat this morning and thought it was a perfect stand in.

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!

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