First fireflies of the year, and something smells dead

First yesterday morning in the back yard one flew drunkenly into a flowerpot.  Then last evening, a couple sparking under the shad bush out front.  Meanwhile, there's the smell of something dead in the front of the house.  First, a couple of days ago, from behind the radiator or under the floorboards as you walked into the house.  Now, this morning, closer to the wall by the entry way, between the door and the living room.  I can smell it while sitting in the big chair we've promised to the silver fox.

Realizing that posts with long titles and little content are like Twitter

So, what's the problem?

Waking up to things that everyone else already seems to know

The Books are my personal musical, Oh, hello!, so far this year.

The Bottom Line presents New York On My Mind

Next Wednesday. River to River.  Friends will be there. Like a high school reunion if you went to school with Rosanne Cash, Marshall Crenshaw, The GrooveBarbers, Garland Jeffreys, Willie Nile, Martin Rivas, Suzzy and Lucy Wainwright Roche, Catherine Russell, Vin Scelsa, Loudon Wainwright III, Dar Williams,  John Leventhal, Mojo Mancini, Meg Griffin and a bunch of other people.  And, of course, Alan Pepper, the dude in the Ray Bans.

Freedom Riders

Tonight is Hal Willner's Freedom Riders project at Celebrate Brooklyn.

Jaume Plensa’s Echo

A few weeks ago we hit the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park.  I hadn't been around the park for months, so hadn't seen Jaume Plensa’s Echo.  Wow.  There are many pictures of it on the web, but few give a real sense of how luminous and hovering and present it is.  The pic below is by Noel Y. C.

 

Happy Worst Day Ever!

Terry Moore has just made my life better

Except Obama, except Obama, help us Jesus!

Her name, I believe, was Sally Ann James, and as Representative Pallone read “no person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President,” Ms. James stood and shouted, “Except Obama, except Obama, help us Jesus!” Then the Speaker directed the Sargent to remove her from the chamber. Rodriguez and I each took one of her elbows and led her away.

Some news reports said she had a placard, but I did not see that. “Help us Jesus,” however, I heard her say that in the Chambers, and she said it quite a few more times as we led her away and through the tunnel that connects the Chambers to The Pen, and then over and over as we turned from the tunnel and passed through the gray metal door that leads to the Room, “Help us Jesus!”.

In the Room we beat her, not too much, but about the face because most people find that very upsetting, and then generally. We broke a few bones but did not do anything crazy. We did not sexually abuse her, and we have not sexually abused any female hecklers since early in the Pelosi tenure. Every speaker imposes his or her own limitations or additions on the actions of the Sargent’s arms, and that was Pelosi’s. This far and no further. This far the Lord has helped us. What will Weeper Boehner want? Nothing kinky, I hope.

Then I broke her neck, Ms. James. Rodriguez laid her body down and in a single stroke severed her head with the large, heavy blade we keep in the Room just for that purpose. We put the head in a plastic carrying case, like an old style gym bag, really, and I walked with it out to the garage, where I got into one of the idling Federal cruisers.

We drove to the White House. Someone had already fetched a stepstool and put it along the fence on the Pennsylvania Avenue side. I climbed up, opened the bag - I hate this part because my balance isn’t great and I can’t hold on to the fence to steady myself - grabbed Ms. James’ head by the hair and ears with both my hands, let the bag drop, raised her head up above my own and brought it down hard so one of the spikes of the fence jammed up her neck and into her the skull. Properly impaled, right there next to the others, some of which were in very poor shape, while the crows flapped up and waited.   If she had had a placard, I would have hung it below her.

Alexander McQueen

The Names

Back in the last week of March I grabbed an old paperback copy of DeLillo's The Names from a shelf in our living room.  It was printed in '83, and we figure we read it in 85.  It's a touchstone book for us, it was very wound up in ideas we were thinking and projects we were planning.  This copy was yellow and brittle, the covers falling off.  I taped it as best I could and put a paper cover over it, but it was still in such poor shape that if I tried to hold it with one hand on the subway, with my thumb jammed into the binding to keep it open enough to read, it cracked.  I told Lori about what bad shape the book is in, and she remembered that we bought a hardcopy some time later.  We looked for it, voila, and that's the copy I finished.

About that hardcopy: it's a first edition (1982).  And, judging from the mark on the bottom of the pages, it had been remaindered.  A first edition of our favorite book by one of our country's great living writers, about themes that completely dominate our times (oilwarterrorismcomplicity anybody?) remaindered.  Not available, by the by, as an ebook.

Owsley Stanley dies, one week before world ends in nuclear stewmelt

NYT obit.

Photo: Rosie McGee, via Reuters

Even unicorns!

Pasted to the bottom of the 9th Street F station, at 10th & 4th.  Pretty sure that's from taylorthornebutler.com.

Revenge!

Decemberists.  The Mariner's Revenge Song.

Clutch my pearls

“I’m not afraid of the real truth. There is nothing you can tell me about yourself that is going to make me clutch my pearls.”

Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, interviewed by the NYTimes.
I am going to try to work the phrase "clutch my pearls" into conversation at least once a week.

Also in the article:

“This is a health-food restaurant, in a way,” she said. “People feel well here. In the sense that there’s no guilt, there’s no denial, there’s no self-deprivation.”

Hurdy Gurdy Man - I could not resist

This was posted on Rhizome as a comment to Brian Khek's Venus With Drop Shadow.  (Sounds like a random generator sentence, no?)  I couldn't resist posting it here.

The last time I went to London for work was quite a while ago now.  Five years?  I put up in a too big too fancy place not far from my office, and the fire alarms kept sounding through the night.  At some point I was very cranky, very jet lagged, and I worked out Hurdy Gurdy Man (and then Atlantis) on my uke.   Of course, if I'd been carrying a computer instead of my uke, I could have just gone to donochords.  And hummed.

I'm no a dead yet. (I think)

Our friend, Zahra Partovi, has invited us to a screening of her new film,  REM:

Rapid

trEe        

       Movement

Our old, old, old friend, Lewis Klahr (begorah, we're old) was just in town showing films at Millenium, and sad to say, we weren't able to get together.

Our friend, Giuseppe, took us to a raucous birthday celebration for himself at Enoteca Maria in St. George, the county of Richmond, and I had flashbacks to looney times of 30 years ago.  Yowza!

A crisis has struck the family, and we siblings have pulled together as though not a day has passed since we lived under one roof.  It's sad and beautiful.  And we're no a dead yet.

Our Valentines Day dinner in the borough of Love

Well, I'm wiping the cobwebs from my eyes.  I see I have a couple of unanswered emails from JalaPeno.  It's a call to post.  Bruddah, I'll answer.  Meanwhile:

we had buckwheat galettes in which we wrapped leftover duck confit, plum butter, and shallots (because I forgot to buy scallions).  The batter for the galettes is from David Tanis, and the confit is leftover from last night's dinner, still making it in the way Ruhlman outlines, and it was sitting there in the fridge for most of the last month, slumbered under it's pool of rendered and then congealed fat until we crisped it last night.  Magic duck fat.  And we had it with stir fried book choy and daikon.  We cooked it together,a la Valentine, Lota at the hot hot cast iron for the galettes and me at the wok.  Happy Valentines, y'all.   Food is love.

The table, my seat...

So, here's something I've noticed.  The table we eat our meals at, I call "the table".  I don't really have very warm feelings for it.  I'm not sure why.  It's perfectly good, and other people seem to like it.  I must have liked it pretty well when we first bought it, I guess about 14 or 15 years ago. 

There's a seat at the table I think of as Lori's seat, and a seat at the table I think of as "my seat", and they are opposite each other.  I sit in my seat at dinner time, when Lori sits in her seat.  When we have lunch at home, Lori sits in her seat, and I sit in the seat at the end of the table to her left, which seems closer to her than my seat does, and that seems right for lunch.  When Lori's not home for dinner and I sit at the table, I sit either in her seat or in the seat I sit in at lunch, but not in my seat. 

I just about never sit at the seat at the other end of the table, and I don't really know why.  It just seems like that would be wrong.  That's the seat I most often drape a coat or sweater over, if I'm going to do that sort of thing.  Lori often will drape a coat over her seat: I'll always move the coat from her seat to the seat at the far end of the table, when she's not in the room.

I thought about this a few mornings ago.  I woke at 4 and decided to stay up and read, and my mind wandered.  I think it was the morning I finished reading The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, which is very beautiful and simple and sad and has an improbably happy ending, improbable but you feel it's somehow deserved and you just go with it.  I dozed off again at 5:30 or so, and woke again at 6 and thought that there was something I was thinking about that I wanted to jot down, but I couldn't remember what it was.  I remembered that I thought it wasn't really the type of thing I usually write about in my journal, so maybe I would post it, but that's all I could remember.  Then last night or this morning I remembered what it was I was thinking, then I forgot again.  Then I remembered, and it's not that I think now I should post it, but I just made the new image with the third eyes for the Dante banner, and I need some text to separate the banner from the image I posted the other day - almost the same image, minus Dante.  So.

My hat...