| when I was 23... it was not a very good year |
[07 Jan 2008|08:59am] |
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Frank Sinatra -- It Was A Very Good Year |
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Go Shorty,
it's your birthday!
Gonna party,
like it's your birthday!
--card written by my mom
I've always done resolutions based on my year of age rather than the year of calendar, as my birthday and New Year's are so close together and usually a week after New Year's I'm thinking, "Maybe I should have made some resolutions or something."
So the best specific resolution I can come up with for 24 is to shut this thing down. I've had it for what, six years now? Jesus.
Thing is, something I wrote here a long time ago was a factor in my not getting a job that I really wanted. They told me this, I'm not making it up. I haven't felt like writing since. And really, it's a completely stupid move to keep a personal blog if you're attempting to work in the new-media-obsessed media. So I'm officially going back to the old skool paper journal I used to have.
When I was in junior high, I kept a journal in one of those black marble composition notebooks; when I went home for Christmas, I found five or six of them in a drawer in my room. I'd carry these around with me everywhere, recording minuscule details about what I did in each period, what I was wearing, who said something funny, whatever.
These journals were the most helpful on shitty days, as when I got a few really shit things in a row written down, I would perversely start hoping for more bad things to happen so I could record them, too; the thought that maybe today would be the Worst Day Ever was exciting. In fact, most of my "bad day" entries in those old notebooks are two to three times the length of "good day" entries, as when I thought I might have a potential Worst Day Ever, I started recording every single thing that went wrong that day, from being called the Gimp in gym class to dropping my pencil and having it roll away.
23 was kind of amazing in that same sense of Worst Year Ever. In my mind, this whole year was capitalized as The Year of Nadir. It was the year of fleas, the year of retail, the year of unpaid internships, the year of near-nervous breakdowns from working seven days a week, the year of barely scraping rent together, the year of identity theft, the year of dry sockets, the year of horrible cat, the year of christ it's been a long time since I had a real boyfriend, the year of gas station coffee, the year of professional despair. I will probably think it's funny how hopeless everything seemed when I was 23.
But I want to end this on a happy note, because I am pretty happy now.
After a lot of stress, the Christmas Eve service went swimmingly. Working with this choir has made me feel good about myself as a musician for the first time since I went to Oberlin, and that's really nice. Next: organ lessons and only one or two songs to prep per service, thank jesus. I'm currently picking out things to do for Lent and Easter that don't have too much sin/guilt/gore; it's difficult.
Anthropologie is working out well. The first of my copy is up on the website, and it's fun to see my writing alongside the often-ridiculous price tag (they only put the wholesale price on the sheet I see).
I'm turning in my first piece for a national magazine (Strings Magazine, yeah, but whatever) at the end of the month.
I just got another job doing copy and photo editing at the Philadelphia Daily News. And apparently writing the gossip column on Saturdays? This is very exciting; the two big dailies in Philly are both owned by one company, which has had lots of financial troubles recently and hasn't hired any entry-level people since before I moved here. Finally having a job that is in the field I want to be in is gonna be awesome, I think, although the hours blow. I start one week from today, ending my unemployment vacation.
With these jobs combined, I am Captain Planet. Or at least I am Captain Living Above the Poverty Line.
Last night was spent sitting around the house with people. I made jerk chicken and mashed sweet potatoes (which turned out OK, even though it felt like a lot of effort and dishes for mediocrity), and we watched the premiere of AMERICAN GLADIATORS, which was amazing. I popped open a mini bottle of champagne at midnight. Rajiv got me a bottle of Mountain Dew and test tubes of hydrogen peroxide and baking soda, items which have been on the never-updated grocery list in the kitchen since I saw the video below several months ago. I love Philadelphia, and having a solid crew of friends is something I resolve to take less for granted. I am no longer hopelessly unemployed/underemployed. I put a down payment on a (digital, but balls-expensive) piano to be delivered later this week. Things are generally looking up.
I leave you with the eternally relevant question: if you were an American Gladiator, what would your name be?
OK, bye!
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| I'm a shaaaaaaaark |
[09 Dec 2007|09:35am] |
I did my first paid copy blocks for Anthropologie on Friday. It was pretty fun, and they didn't have too many edits, and they're paying me, and I named items obliquely after both Farah and Ghostface Killah. All my freelance work up until now has been done by contract-ish, or at least I don't have to send an invoice. But now I get to make myself an invoice form. Ooh, maybe I'll make myself a business card!
However, I'm putting a brief cap on spending anything because the power company thinks that I owe them $738, just in case I can't get them to realize that they are incorrect. This is probably going to take up most of my Monday.
I have been watching Planet Earth. It's kind of the shit. Look, it's a shark the size of a bus jumping completely out of the water to catch a seal.
Enough to make me not want to go in the ocean ever again. Except how I really, really want to fuck off to Hawaii and see the pretty fish. It's been snowing for the last few days here in Philly and I am not in support.
What the hell am I doing up so early in the morning? I lead the most decadent lifestyle I have ever had. I don't have to go to work, and if this Anthropologie thing works out plus my church job I might not even have to go to work ever again. I could sleep until noon every day if I wanted, but for some reason I've been waking up at 8 or 9 every morning. This is all well and good when you're alone, I kind of like being awake at weird times, but at the moment I am typing very quietly.
EDIT: Shortly after I posted this, Rajiv sat bolt upright in bed, startling the shit out of me, and said "I dreamed I was playing with Slayer. It was awesome." in a kind of disappointed-sounding way.
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| 100 days, 100 nights |
[28 Nov 2007|11:41pm] |
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Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - 100 Days, 100 Nights |
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Wandering around Center City the past few days, I keep running into a guy selling bootleg t-shirts. The t-shirt has a disgruntled Calvin on it, and a slogan which the guy yells for hours in this particular way:
The EA-gles
are PLAY-ing
like SHIT!
PASS me a-NOTH-er BEER.
Life's going pretty well. I got another job that should keep me in rent and food; I'm starting freelance copywriting for Anthropologie on Monday. It's basically like this: they send me a bunch of pdfs with pictures and information about products. I name the product, which is fun, and then write a sentence or two along these lines (which I did not write):
Star Grass Dress
Embroidered yellow buds line the rippling hem of this sleeveless voile vision by Lithe. Its delicate pintucks and pleats never cease to charm.
* Side zip
* Cotton, silk; lining
* Dry clean
* 40.25"L
* Imported
style #73619 $158.00
It's hard to get into the right state of mind to write this floridly.
I also have an interview at the copy desk of the Philadelphia Daily News tomorrow, which I am kind of stressing out about. I've been reading the AP Style Guide and Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words for like a week and a half straight and I am seriously about to lose it. I'm thinking about the proper use of words all the time. What is the exact difference between jail and prison? Between disinterested and uninterested? Is it sneaked or snuck? Dived or dove? Why the hell is it spelled kindergartner (although spellcheck appears to disagree) when it's a kindergarten? I caught myself using the word whom in casual conversation yesterday, ugh.
What is wrong with the following sentences?
"There now seems some hope that these divergent views can be reconciled."
"David English, whose career seemed to be reaching a crescendo this month when he took over the editorship of Mail on Sunday..."
"It was her customary habit to eat at the New Deal Diner on Sundays."
"With this new development, Northern Liberties is becoming an even more unique place to live."
"One of the best panaceas for baldness is Rogaine."
So my dilemma (defined as a situation where one has two seemingly equal courses of action, rather than just a general problem where you don't know what to do) here is this. The copywriting job will pay very well, and they're looking for someone to take a full-time position in a couple months. However, I will be writing about skirts for a living. They are skirts I can get behind, but they are still skirts.
The copy editing job will pay all right and it's a start in the industry I really want to be in, but copy editors at big dailies usually work, from what I've gathered on the internets, 4 to midnight. I'd never get to go to shows or the opera, and I'd be a pretty shit girlfriend. I'd probably have to stop freelancing for PW, and there's no assurance I'd be able to write to the Daily News.
Thoughts?
I should go to bed. I should also probably worry about getting the copy editing job before I worry about which job to take too much. However, I am going to look mad good at my interview; I got this sweet-ass navy jacket that fits really well and I got my hair cut today and they flat-ironed it so it'll probably still be all shiny and straight tomorrow. Hell yeah. OK Bedtime. At least after today I can stop reading about words, Jesus.
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| I won't run far |
[12 Nov 2007|01:07pm] |
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The Other Side of Mt Heart Attack - Liars |
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A man in a black SUV just drove up 16th St leaning on his horn for no reason that I could figure out. I just got out of the shower, so when I heard him coming, I went to the window wearing a towel to see what was up. I didn't expect him to be able to see me, because even though my window is on the first floor looking out onto the street, the air conditioning unit blocks all but the tallest people from being able to see in. But the guy leaning on his horn waved in my direction.
In other news, I got a church gig. I am the choir director, pianist and organist for the most adorable, gay-marrying Unitarian church in Fishtown. Hooray! They pay me far too much; it's basically enough that, if I supplement it with writing, I'm pretty sure I won't have to get a day job. It's two hours a week. Hooray again! Who'd have ever thought that piano was in fact going to ever make me the dollars?
Also, I am quitting sudoku. It is sucking my soul away, although with the amount that I've done in the past month I've probably bought myself an extra two years of lucidity at the end of my life.
OK time to go to the bodega.
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[06 Nov 2007|09:52am] |
Hey, Post WWII-era American GIs!
What’s your favorite kind of hip-hop?
Utterly ripped off from the invincible super-blog, that is the archetype of one of those things that for some reason I find funny enough to giggle about just remembering it weeks later but others are kind of like, "Yeah, well, I guess that's kind of funny." My sense of humor is so stupid.
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[20 Oct 2007|02:42pm] |
Rajiv's landlady hates me, I think.
I used to occasionally smoke cigarettes on his front porch and flick them into the street. I must have landed a couple on the front sidewalk, though, because Rajiv received a typed note asking him please not to let his friends leave butts on the property. So of course when I heard this I stopped.
Then I would occasionally smoke cigarettes on the front porch and walk to the street to get rid of them. Rajiv received a typed note asking him not to let his friends smoke on the property at all and mentioning something creepy about their having people who watch the property when they can't, which makes me think there's a hidden camera somewhere.
I locked my bike to the front railing the first time I slept over and the next morning I ran into the landlady (who treats being a landlady like a 9-5 and is constantly puttering around the place) and got a 15-minute lecture on how someone could tear up the fence to get to my bike and how I really shouldn't lock it there anymore. This apparently happened to them like ten years ago when 44th and Locust was in the middle of a really bad neighborhood, but come on. It's full of joggers and college kids and the Penn Yellow Jackets now, it's pretty obvious that while it is still in the city, nobody is going to destroy a wrought-iron fence located right under a streetlight to get my cheap bike. But whatever, I was very apologetic and promised never to lock it there again.
So the next time I locked my bike inside the house in the main hallway. The next day, Rajiv got a typed note saying there's only one bike per rent-payer allowed in the hallway. I can see that, that makes sense, traffic flow and all. I started carrying my bike up the stairs and putting it in Rajiv's actual apartment.
About a week ago, I was leaving the house to return Rajiv's keys, as he had to go to class and left them with me so I could sleep in. When I was on my way out, I noticed that the doors were unlocked and then saw the crazy landlady puttering around on the front porch. Fuck. So I walked out and said "Good morning, would you like me to leave the door unlocked for you?" No response. I asked again, no response. So I left the door unlocked, smiled, wished her a nice day and carried my bike down the stairs.
So Rajiv just got a letter he had to sign for saying that I caused a danger leaving the door unlocked, that I can't leave my bike in his room overnight due to wear and tear on the property, and alluding to the no-guests-for-more-than-five-consecutive-days clause in the lease like I'm some sort of vagrant.
I dunno, any advice? My current thought is pacify, pacify, pacify, but it doesn't seem to be doing any good. I really don't want to get Rajiv evicted, because even though I'm positive that it wouldn't be defensible in court, it would be such a pain in the ass to go to court. The landlady loved Rajiv before this, too. She's a 60-year-old woman with a thick accent from Bosnia; my original assumption was that she didn't like me because I was white and Rajiv is not, but her husband is white so I'm back to thinking that maybe she just had a little crush on him? Most of the other people who live in the building have similar stories.
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| ow! |
[09 Oct 2007|02:33am] |
I've been a bit under the weather. I got my wisdom teeth out last Thursday, then developed a complication involving a nerve in my jaw called "dry socket" which, unpleasant as it already sounds, should really be called "small but persistent bees stinging the entire left side of your face from the inside 24 hours a day." It's a mouthful, but "dry socket" is just not fucking adequate. Jeez.
Thankfully, after a weekend of popping far more painkillers than I probably should have, I walked over to the place I got my teeth out this morning and said, "There's something wrong. I will sit here until someone can see me." So: still hurts, but I know what it is and what to do about it and that I'm not just being a big pussy. Also they gave me a new bottle of vicodin, which is kind of key given that I actually couldn't sleep for a couple days there.
So I've been in a bit of a a daze these past five days. In this time, scenes from my friend Matt's movie were filmed in my house, I watched a million videos and ate two gallons of sherbet, and I reupholstered the chair that I am sitting in right now using an old skirt and Liquid Nails. I did this today, and my housemates seem to be relieved that I am back to pointless DIY shit rather than lying on the couch half-assedly watching the Prisoner with an icepack pressed to my face.
Speaking of DIY stuff, my house has continued to improve. A tour:
reupholstery project #1
I painted the living room "Orange Smoothie" and cut up Carol's old fitted sheet to make curtains
and installed these bookshelvey things I made out of old drawers cuz my bookshelves are getting overcrowded
and did a chandelier stencil above the tv
and made these silhouette thingies to go over Nick's chair
and painted birch trees in the front hall
with birds stenciled on them
I framed it's motherfucking booze time
maybe the records will work this time, I've been considering learning to frame the prettiest ones
There is a moth the size and speed of a hummingbird frantically swooping around my living room right now. I can't seem to make myself do anything about it. Maybe if I just go to sleep, it will be gone when I wake up.
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| on the dole |
[25 Sep 2007|02:13pm] |
As you may or may have not heard, I got fired from the Apple store on Friday. It went like this:
The store owner left for the day. The manager I work with the most often called me into the back room at about 5:45 on Friday, and looked really sheepish as he told me they had to let me go. There was no particular thing he could point to that was a reason for my being fired, I was just not happy in my job (true) and it showed (debatable). I was right for the company, but not for the job (false, they're hiring for a position I've expressed interest in). I was of course completely welcome to still come bowling on Thursday, as per previous plans (oh, definitely).
My first question was "...Really?" Yeah. My second question was "How long will I stay on health insurance?" Until the end of October, which is good cuz I'm getting my wisdom teeth out on the 4th. I didn't really have any questions; it was kind of obvious to me at least why I got fired, even though there isn't really a reason. They'd just kind of used me up with all those long periods of working both receptionist positions by myself. It was really stressful and made me hate working there even though I got really efficient at the position, so they brought in someone who didn't hate working there yet, had me train her, then dropped my tired ass.
So I walked around saying goodbye, and I was at least a little vindicated when every single person I said goodbye to was like, "That's fucked up, man." This job has made me feel like I'm taking crazy pills from the very beginning, walking this weird line between what I'm supposed to do and what is possible, what I'm told to do by four different managers, trying to balance contradictory rules. At least everyone was as surprised as me; makes me feel a little more like the crazy comes from the environment and not me.
HOWEVER this story has been very sad, but... I worked at the Apple store for a little over a year, which means...
UNEMPLOYMENT!
Oh yes. I am on the dole. There's a waiting week, so I'm not on the dole quite yet, but I don't have to go to work, and I'm apparently (from what I've been told) going to get 60% of my wages from the government for the next 26 weeks.
Can I just repeat that? I'm going to get MONEY to SIT AROUND and DO NOTHING.
So of course I'm not going to do nothing, but I'm not in a rush to find a job. I've done all kinds of fixing-up projects around the house in my first day of unemployment that I've been meaning to do for weeks. I'm going to primarily use this time to get freelancing off the ground, hopefully, and maybe at the end of my 26 weeks I won't have to get a job. Right. Well, that's the best-case scenario. Second-best-case scenario is I get a job that doesn't utterly blow. And maybe pays above the poverty line.
So I've decided to keep an unemployment diary and keep track of the things I do on unemployment so I don't sit around the house all day. I'm gonna do a fair amount of netflixing, no lies, but I'm gonna do productive things too.
DAY 1: MONDAY 9/24
Painted floating bookshelves glossy brown
Painted trim in room glossy brown, as I had leftover paint
Arranged books by color
Hung penguin painting and several record covers in entrance hall
Decoupaged large board
Made Korean barbeque
Rescued drawers from side of the road to make shelving in living room
Finished cutting out chandelier stencil
Painted most of chandelier stencil above TV, stopped 3/4 of the way through because of hand cramps
Put rack on the back of bike
Stole crate for back of bike
Got groceries
DAY 2: TUESDAY 9/25
Installed toilet paper holder in bathroom (tricky because of drywall, but NICK OWNS A DRILL OMG)
Started fucking around with rescued drawers
Watched Sopranos
Changed sheets
Did laundry
And now I'm gonna go bike around. Because I can. BITCHES.
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| it's tool time! |
[11 Sep 2007|12:11pm] |
So what with the new housemates and new lease and not being one paycheck away from financial ruin for once in my life, I've been on a manic home-renovation kick for the last month. RESULTS:
Fishy hallway
Yellow (NOT URINE COLORED GODDAMMIT) bird-themed bathroom
Things in this picture from my bedroom: Vonnegut stack bookend, comic bookshelf, sunglasses organization system, bunny bank, handy birth-control holder, Mountain Goats tickets!
Painting for living room I did last night, ripped off from Takeshi Kitano.
I also made curtains for the living room, repainted all the white walls, made a neat little framed collection of silhouettes on the wall, put a few more shelves on my walls, got myself a bedframe (with a headboard and footboard and everything, although now because of the footbaord Rajiv can't lie down unless he does it hypotenuse-style which I find to be entirely unreasonable), and putting the following image in a nice frame and hanging it above the stove, which makes me giggle every time I go through the kitchen:
FUTURE PROJECTS:
learn reupholstery, reupholster couch
fins appropriate fabric, make curtains for bedroom
purchase Roomba, use gluegun and fake fur to make Roomba monster
install shelves in living room
finish off birch trees and canaries mural in entryway
figure out what to do with the living room besides hang up enormous yellow painting
chandelier stencil
Also received my first Gardasil shot this morning, was a total pussy about it.
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| A time to gain, a time to lose |
[29 Aug 2007|10:03am] |
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The Byrds - Turn, Turn, Turn |
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It's been a while.
In any event, I've recently passed the year-since-I-moved-to-Philadelphia mark, and it feels very cyclical. The weather's the same, the smell is the same as when I first moved here.
I'm at the same jobs, I live in the same apartment.
 I'm seeing the City Year kids, all fresh-faced and hopeful in their red City Year jackets, all over the place, just like last year when I'd just moved here. Alli and I used to meet and eat our sandwiches on our lunch breaks in Rittenhouse Square every once in a while, and the City Year people would be doing jumping jacks and vaguely tai chi moves under the instruction of a muscley man with glasses and flowing blond hair who looked like he'd be more at home in Camelot.
I helped one extremely grateful City Year girl fill her bike tires at the gas station across the street from my work yesterday.
I've been at Springboard for one year and four days, the same length of time as the air hockey table in the basement. The air hockey table stopped being novel after a couple of months, especially after the service department got a Wii, and now it's used mostly as a regular table to put computer parts and stacks of papers.
I haven't felt like writing so much lately because I've been pretty down about my situation not having significantly changed over the last year. I'm still working a bitch job where I say "debit or credit?" thirty times a day. I've failed to get a "real" salaried job in a field I'm interested in. I've failed to get a job that uses/justifies my Oberlin education/student loans. I haven't written any new fiction. I haven't worked on my comics. I've failed to really get going on freelancing in any significant way. And I tell you what, I've been pretty fucking down about all of that for the past month or so.
It didn't help that the apartment (through catsitting) somehow got fleas, which remained and drove us to the brink of insanity weeks after the cat had gone back to her owners. Because life frustration + very little sleep + little fucking unkillable demon bugs everywhere + housemates pissed about unkillable demon bugs = utter misery. But we finally got rid of them, through a very expensive exterminator.
This weekend I was the glorious combination of sick, hopeless, cranky because Rajiv's in California visiting his family and premenstrual, so I decided to spare everyone the emotions/mucus and stayed in. I spent the whole time painting, cleaning and repairing things, which I generally find soothing when I'm frustrated about something.
My apartment now looks pretty decent. I painted the long, narrow hallway that leads to the living room bright blue, and cut stencils and spraypainted silver and black fish on it so it looks like you're walking through an aquarium. I also painted the bathroom this odd shade of yellow which some insist is green. It is YELLOW.
I resigned my lease last night with Andreas and Nick. My landlady Ella (a sweet Polish grandmother who dyes her hair an unnatural shade of red) and her husband came over and we signed in the living room, and they liked the home improvements I've been working on. They really liked the fish.
So we're sitting in my living room, going over the lease. It's the same exact lease as Lekha and Carol and I signed a year ago, so I'm not paying that much attention. We get to the bit about our cosigners, which I hadn't thought about. Ella says she'll make copies for us to send to our parents, and I say, Hey, I've been paying my own rent this whole year, should I still have my parents cosign? Do you want to run a credit check on me?
Ella tilted her head and looked at me for a couple seconds, then said no, I'd been very reliable all year, I didn't need to have my parents cosign.
And the malaise (as Rajiv's been calling it) broke like a fever.
I've been paying my own rent, cleaning my own house, cooking my own food, doing my own dishes for a whole year. I'm not late for things anymore. I don't forget as much. I've been such a flake for my entire life, and now I pay all my bills on time and make deadlines. I paid off my credit card that's been dogging me since that one awful/awesome summer of 2005. I got a boyfriend who I like a lot. I know basic bike repair. I've made a lot of new friends, and my old ones are present and excellent. I've started practicing piano again. And I have a really sweet mural.
I spent my four years at Oberlin learning how to write, how to play music, how to operate under extreme stress, how to think and read and speak. I've spent this last year learning how to function as an adult and slowly coming to the sad but necessary realization that sometimes, even if you try your ass off, things aren't going to turn out the way you hoped. I feel OK about writing that off as a year well-spent.
I'm feeling better. Now it's time to get back on the horse.
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| On Vox: the story of the Civil War Drinking Game |
[06 Aug 2007|10:49am] |
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The Civil War Drinking Game is one of the most
practically educational drinking games you can play. This game, as far
as I know, was played for the first time in an Oberlin dorm in the dead
of winter term 2003. The rules are very simple, but this is nonetheless
one of the most grueling (but educational!) drinking games most people
will ever attempt.
THE RULES:
1. Procure a copy of The
Civil War by Ken Burns, a nine-episode, 11-hour documentary
miniseries. Also procure at least... well, I'm trying to come up with
an average beers per person, but I really just can't. So get as much
beer as you can get your hands on.
2. Split into two teams, Union and Confederacy, based on state of origin.
3. Start up the Civil War. Each team drinks when their side incurs
casualties or loses a city. The heaviness of the drinking should match
the heaviness of the casualties.
Veteran players agree: the Civil War Drinking Games gives you a better,
more visceral understanding of the history of the Civil War than any
textbook ever could. You remember McClellan's incompetence a whole lot
better when his fuckups are constantly causing you to have to drink
even more cheap beer. The Confederacy gets the early exultation of
kicking the Union around at Bull Run and Shiloh for a couple hours, the
turning point at Gettysburg and later, the utter brutality of Sherman's
march to the sea. Everyone gets pretty fucked up on Antietam. And it all seems so much more weighty when you're sort of participating.
Now, it's very difficult doing this all in one sitting; as far as I
know, it's never been done. But even split up over a few nights, it's a
worthwhile undertaking.
Originally posted on loveforthreeoranges.vox.com
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[19 Jul 2007|11:18am] |
 So last night I saw Lang Lang with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He did not have the silly hair that has been in most of his recent press photos, which I found slightly disappointing. Because if there's anything I want to see, it's a dude one year older than I am with hair that is four inches tall playing the piano like a crazy man.
Overture to The Marriage of Figaro
Mozart Piano Concerto no. 17
intermission
China Air Suite
Yellow River Piano Concerto
A lot of people don't like Lang Lang, because his playing can be kind of... well, depending on your point of view, either "dramatic" or "douchey." See video for demonstration of said playing on Liszt's Réminiscences de Don Juan, and click through to the youtube page for 11 pages of "Lang Lang is a douchebag!" "No, YOU'RE a douchebag!" commentary.
Selected excerpts from youtube Lang Lang debate:
I don't care how well he can play lol - his gestures and movements are annoying !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AARGAAHRG! Lol
(p.s he is an amazing pianist)
i like this version but @ one min and thirty sec. h looks like heez havin u kno wut...lol, this song was meant to be dramatic so heez rite for this song
A most pathetic performance of the highest order. He devotes 10^100 more effort into his body acting (maybe he should just become an actor...) than the soul of the music. What he needs to do next is actually STUDY Mozart's opera first before he puts this up.
No wonder Earl Wild calls Lang Lang "the J. Lo of the piano." Spare me.
He's great! His left hand shape can sometimes make me cringe with horror, but other than that, It's a great performance, even though he does sometimes look like an absolute fool.
THAT IS RIGHT LANG LANG, WAGGLE YOUR HEAD AT EVERY NOTE! You FILTHY WHORE, YOU HAD BETTER CLOSE YOUR EYES AND IMITATE ORGASMS IN YOUR FRIVOLOUS PINK SHIRT WHILE PLAYING OBNOXIOUS DYNAMICS THAT DO NOT BELONG, AND YOU MUSN'T FORGET TO WRITHE AND BOB UP AND DOWN LIKE A BLEEDING KANGAROO
No one seems to consider that perhaps the genius of his playing is borne from the fact that he brings his body into the music, letting it absorb his entire being. Perhaps the exaggerated expressions are what allows him to bring himself so deeply into the music and have it come out bearing every emotion he wants it to.
What I want to know is... who the hell are these commenters? Who on earth wrote that line about his "FRIVOLOUS PINK SHIRT?" I can't decide whether I would want to have a beer with that chick or not.
Well. I walked into the Mann mostly just thankful that I had once again fallen into free orchestra tickets, of which I've gotten a really bizarre amount lately.
Figaro was of course like that old comforable pair of pajamas made audial, and then Lang Lang came out to do the piano concerto.
I always forget how much I like seeing Mozart performed live, especially piano stuff. And despite Lang Lang's rep as a showoff/firecracker, my favorite bits of the concert were in the slow movement of the Mozart concerto. He does the quiet stuff much better than the Bang Bang stuff that causes so many debates between nerds on youtube. It was just delicate and tasteful and lovely; as Mozart is.
The second half of the program was kind of meh. I wasn't a big fan of the two Chinese pieces; according to the program notes, there were a lot of pieces written in the '30s that tried to merge Eastern and Western classical music, but these were among the first written by actual Asian composers.
I guess that's interesting enough; but it sounded like the composers (whoever they were, there was a big Communist-style rewrite during the Cultural Revolution and the piece is billed as being written by MULTIPLE) fetishized Romantic Western music as much as, say, the Mikado fetishized Eastern. Just... yeah. Based on traditional Chinese tunes, but Romantic to the nth degree. ARPEGGIOS! DRAMATIC CRESCENDOS! They even had a fucking suspended cymbal, the ultimate emotion-faker, which made me feel like I was 16 and back in district band.
An interesting bit of information on program notes. Someone did a study on the effect of background information on musical appreciation. She separated undergrad students without much experience with classical music into three groups who then listened to four piceces of music. Beforehand, one group got a little talk about the musical structure of the pieces they were going to hear. One group got historical background of what was going on when the piece was written and biographical information about the composer. And one group just heard the pieces without any additional information.
Turns out that the group who got the historical talk appreciated the music more than either of the other two groups. I find that pretty interesting.
For example, knowing that the Chinese pieces had been written and rewritten by lots of anonymous people during the Cultural Revolution made me a lot more tolerant and understanding of what I thought, overall, was some overly glitzy music. But only because it gave me something else to think about.
But anyway. Tickets to see Midori and the Tchaikovsky violin concerto tonight, and then to Andre Watts playing Rachmaninoff tomorrow, which should be hott. It's supposed to rain like a beast tonight, I gotta remember to pick up an umbrella on lunch.
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| one of these things is not like the other things |
[16 Jul 2007|08:42pm] |
Back around Christmas, my boss at the Apple store gave me a little bag of these really low-grade gray plastic animals to throw in packages we were shipping to fancy people. Why he thought that fancy people would particularly appreciate low-grade gray plastic animals remains a mystery, but I ended up keeping a bunch of them for the purposes of instantly gaining the love of small children and setting up little Serengeti tableaux around my desk when I got bored.
The inventory guy and I had a pretty awesome scene going on for a while, with about eight or ten lions clustered around a giraffe lying on its side, the lions positioned so that they were looking up as if they'd been disturbed, glaring over in the direction of the customers as if to say "You're next, fatass."
Not many people even noticed that it was there, although the few who commented on it thought it was pretty funny. My boss felt that it was unprofessional looking, though, so the inventory guy took the giraffe and lions to his shady basement lair, where they will remain unprofessionally arranged on a shelf forever.
 I kept five of the little guys around, though, and arranged them on top of a little box behind my computer. What's neat, though, is that when they're not in an obviously formal arrangement (such as "lion kill"), the customers like to put them in different positions while I'm not looking.
At least this is my assumption, because the other option, that they are moving around by themselves, is not possible. I'll come around the other side of the desk and the fox will be making out with the lioness, or they'll all be stacked on one another, or they'll all be upside down, or they'll all be walking around the perimeter in single file... it's very strange.
The inventory guy got back from a safari a couple of weeks ago and brought me back the little zebra, which I love. It's actually from Africa and made of wood, but has a certain crappy work ethic about it that I feel makes it fit in perfectly with my shitty plastic menagerie. I find that the arrangements that random customers put my toys into often involve segregating the wooden zebra from the plastic animals.
On a related note, I feel like that Sesame Street "One of these things is not like the other things" skit, while well-intentioned, has caused an entire generation to grow up humming that song in their head when they're sitting around three other people, noticing different traits about themselves that signify they just don't belong.
Maybe I'm projecting. But they changed it! At some point, the lyrics changed from what I remember as kid:
One of these things is not like the other things
One of these things doesn't belong
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
Before I finish this song?
to
One of these things is not like the others
Which one is different, do you know?
Tell me, which thing here is not like the others
And I'll tell you if it is so!
I knew it!
Speaking of Sesame Street, I distinctly remember the weird-assed animations, such as this one here with the rainbow circles, from when I was little. But shit! I don't remember it being something you're obviously supposed to watch while on hallucinogens.
I guess being really little is vaguely like being on hallucinogens. I definitely remember making up and then after a while strongly believing impossible things when I was young enough to be watching Sesame Street, including that there was a ghost cat in our neighborhood. I actually remember both making it up and later seeing it. Both seem equally real as memories.
But seriously, somebody plays with my crappy plastic toys at least three times every single day. I think we underestimate our human need to play with toys as adults, or we try to replace the urge with sex or drugs or Warcraft, which are similar but not the same. "Adults." Whatever.
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| everything is illuminated |
[13 Jul 2007|12:20am] |
Just got home from the ballet, and am that bizarre combination of wired/tired that generally either ends in one of two things. To paraphrase Roddy Piper in They Live, I have come here to do Sudoku and blog. And I'm out of all but the really easy Sudoku in the front of the book.
I went to see the Royal Ballet do Swan Lake with some other people from work tonight. We're doing business with a dance school in South Philly, and they had some extra tickets, so we got them somehow.
The audience seemed to be composed of 60% standard concert-goers and 40% dancers. There were tall, waifish people of all ages and genders all over the place, although most of them were tall, waifish high school girls. I don't think I've ever seen that much collarbone in one place in my life.
So I don't really go to the ballet. I go when I get sweet-ass free tickets from my boss, but 99% of my experience with snotty cultural stuff where you're likely to overhear someone exclaim "Extraordinary!" during intermission is with music, not dance.
 So my completely uneducated take on the ballet: Swan Lake was pretty and fun to watch, but if there's an theater form even less natural than opera, it's definitely ballet. I'm sitting there in the audience, the orchestra plays the overture, the red velvet curtain goes up, and instead of people singing, there's preternaturally graceful people dancing. No talking. No singing. Only dancing, and a little miming. It felt weird.
In opera, at least they half-assedly try to make the plot seem like it's not just an excuse to sing showy arias. In ballet, there is absolutely no such pretense. "Not I," says the plot of Swan Lake, giving everyone a big shit-eating grin. "I am an excuse to have women dress like birds and move their arms gracefully. You're just going to have to accept that."
What was even more disconcerting for me was how the dancers broke the fourth wall and took (preternaturally graceful) bows after every. Single. Number. Which was about every three to five minutes. I've never seen so much preternaturally gracious acknowledgement of applause in my life.
And speaking of bows. I didn't think that it was even possible for an artistic subset to be more vain and masturbatory about curtain calls than singers, but I was wrong. Dancers are way, way worse. The Royal Ballet bows lasted, literally, almost as long as a fifth act would have been. They seemed to really want to hit every possible permutation, and they may have.
First it was the whole company.
Then again.
Then again, with the solo groups taking separate bows.
Then again, with the roles taking separate bows.
Then again, with a guy in a tux dragged out on stage.
Then for the orchestra.
Then the roles all together.
Then all the roles again, separately in front of the closed curtain.
Then Siegfried and Odette.
Then just Siegfried.
Then just Odette.
Then just Odile, who actually did warrant her own call; Tamara Rojo, who is the one in the picture above dancing Odette, injured herself during the second act (the "white act," as the announcer called it) and her double danced the third ("black") act with about ten minutes' notice.
Then Siegfried AND Odette AND Odile.
Then the guy in the tux again.
Then... you get the idea.
It took a good five minutes for my palms to stop tingling.
Also speaking of bows: I don't know how or why this happens, but at rock concerts I always end up standing directly behind That Seven Foot Tall Guy. And at classical concerts I always end up sitting very near That Guy Who Shouts BRAVA!
I understand showing appreciation. I appreciate showing appreciation. But That Guy Who Shouts BRAVA! is always the one who was also whispering pedantically at his (usually female) companion throughout the entire performance, and is also usually the one exclaiming "Extraordinary!" at intermission. At least That Seven Foot Tall Guy can't help his genes.
On a really, really excellent note, I came home tonight to find a brand-new air conditioning unit in my bedroom illuminated by the new brand-new fluorescent light bulbs in my drop ceiling. My ceiling is twelve feet off the floor, and since we don't have an appropriately-sized ladder, I've been unable to do anything but look on helplessly as my light bulbs died one by one until the last one went about a month ago. I'd been working with my desk lamp, but it exacerbated the horrifying Philadelphia heat. But now, oh now, my problems are solved.
Well, my immediate "Choose between tripping on stuff after 9pm or waking up drenched in sweat" problems are solved. My "Jesus Christ, what am I even doing, here" problems continue, but I can now think about them in a much more comfortable environment.
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| You wake up in the morning, you hear the work bell ring |
[12 Jul 2007|12:05pm] |
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music |
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CCR - Midnight Special |
] |
 Wow, I am intensely sick of all the selfish douchebags that call my job all the time. I can't even conceive of the sort of life that leads someone to demand special treatment and then scream at the 23-year-old, $12/hour girl whose job it is to tell you no.
I guess I was sick of them before, but it's reaching critical mass.
Ha, we've been listening to the '60s XM station at work lately, and there was this awful cover of Light My Fire on that somehow involved jazz flute. And afterwards, the DJ came on and actually said, "Light my fire, light my fire, light my fire, light my fire, light my fire, lick my dick..." and Amanda and I, who had just been discussing how much the cover blew, just kind of looked up with identical Oh No He Didn't faces.
Also, I think that the fact that Amanda and I have been doing things in our spare receptioning time like cleaning dozens of disgusting, grungy old cords and mice and keyboards over the last couple of days is contributing to the whole critical mass thing.
And speaking of douchebags, Hot Chicks with Douchebags is my new favorite website.
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| strictly for the weather, women and the weed |
[07 Jul 2007|10:59am] |
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music |
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Notorious BIG - Going Back to Cali |
] |
Last night I had the most odd meeting with a new potential landlord ever.
So Brandt is going going back back to Cali Cali or something. In any event he's not going to stay in Philly after the lease is up, so yeah. I may have two people to hold the lease on my current apartment, but I may have to strike out on my own, which isn't such a bad thing although I have gotten very attached to the Fortress of Solitude.
 In any event, I went looking around on Craigslist for places looking for housemates, and I found this beautiful place in Bella Vista (for non-Philly residents, this is a really nice neighborhood that is about the same distance south of Center City as my current place is north of it) that has a big extra room, washer/dryer, garbage disposal and (most key!) a baby grand piano. It's within my price range, so I emailed the guy and he actually set up a date the very same day.
So I go to meet Potential Landlord at a coffeeshop near the house, and when he arrives it's clear that he knows everyone who works there. I go introduce myself, he seems pretty cool, and we sit there and chat with the extremely pretty barista for a bit and I try to show off what an awesome conversationalist I am.
Things are going pretty well when the barista interjects something like, "Well, you know he's got a brain tumor, right?" Oberlin has not treated me well in the respect that when anyone says anything like this out of the blue, I assume that they are fucking with me. So I say something like, "Man, this is feeling a lot like college, where I was never sure when people were fucking with me."
But Potential Landlord actually does have brain cancer. I couldn't see it at the time because I'm so short, but he has a big, obvious scar on his bald head where they operated. I turn kind of red, but limp on conversationally and we're getting along well. I get the idea that Potential Landlord likes to drop shocking news on people to see how they'll react.
We walk back to his house, and the neighborhood is so beautiful, goddamn. The house is likewise pretty amazing: the room is, as advertised, really big, there's two floors and a roof above the guy's green realty office, the baby grand is present if a little out of tune, and the roof has this glorious view of the city skyline that just cannot be priced. Potential Landlord's girlfriend is cool and a dance teacher, the girlfriend's cat is nice, and Potential Landlord himself is someone I get along with.
 So we're up on the roof, and he's telling me all his plans for solar panels and a garden up there and it all sounds very cool... he asks what my living habits are, if I'm seeing anybody, that sort of thing, and I mention that I'm sorta dating Rajiv, who's a neuroscience Ph.D. student of some sort (I never really understand what the hell he's talking about when he describes what he does; at this point when I ask what he did at work, I get things like "I sat in a dark humming box and took pictures of glowy shit").
Potential Landlord says he could have used a neuroscience person a couple weeks ago. He apparently went in for a post-surgery MRI and on his way out the hospital door, they handed him a DVD with the MRI scans on it. He asked if he could, uh, talk to a neurologist or something about what they meant, and was told no. So he was just sitting at his laptop that night, looking at his brain and what he thought probably was the tumor and trying to figure out what it all meant.
"It was really weird," he says, and then gives me this kind of bizarrely naughty look. "Wanna see?"
 So that is how I ended up sitting in my potential landlord's living room with his girlfriend and cat and baby grand piano, looking at pictures of his brain. It looked basically like this, and you could scroll through different strata of the brain in three dimensions. The place where the tumor used to be was this large, empty-looking black triangle, whereas what was left of the tumor was white.
I don't know whether the guy just likes to fuck with people or what, but I think my reactions were acceptable enough that the room is mine if I want it.
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| you got a mouth, got a wonderful mouth |
[02 Jul 2007|11:28pm] |
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music |
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McLusky -- Collagen Rock |
] |
It's very disconcerting the way everyone just sets off fireworks randomly as Philadelphia gets closer to the Fourth of July. I know what a firework sounds like, and I know what a gun sounds like, and I can tell the difference, but... yeah. There have been 648 shootings in Philly so far in 2007, with over 200 homicides involving a shooting. I can't help but jump whenever something goes bang outside my window.
 So on Tuesday, my boss gave Amanda and me his tickets to go see the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Mann Center, their outdoor summer venue, because his new wife was too tired to go.
I love going to classical music things with Amanda because... I dunno, a lot of the time people assume that you have to already know a ton about music to have any valid insights about it, and it's just not true. For example: I gave Amanda one of my comp tickets to The Picture of Dorian Gray opera. It was her first opera ever. It was written in 1996. I was a little worried she was going to be really bored or put off. But she came out at intermission and was pretty dead on, if a little tentative, in her critiques. The lead tenor didn't have the pipes for the role. Grand opera gestures made for a big stage looked really ridiculous in a small theater like Perelman. Damn, Lord Henry can sing.
 It's all about the Duchamp readymades, right? Put a frame around anything and put it in a museum, and it is Art. We get filled with self-doubt about our inability to appreciate the Art and will then overlook obvious flaws and blame ourselves for not enjoying them, because clearly we are philistines.
Same thing with the orchestra. It was Itzhak Perlman playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, and he kind of phoned it in (I can't say I blame him, he's old and it was SO HUMID). He and the conductor also seemed to have drastically different ideas of how the piece was going to go, and it just sounded so tense between them that it was actually unpleasant. And Amanda again seemed a bit hesitant to voice her critique (we got an effusive speech from our boss upon receipt of the tickets about how Itzhak Perlman is, like, totally amazing and the best violinist EVAR), but again, when asked what she honestly thought, said that it seemed like the orchestra and the violin were fighting.
It had been deadly hot for the first half, with people fanning themselves all over the audience to the point where we sounded vaguely like a plague of locusts. The night had already been a strange congruence of the music and the ambient noise. During bits of the concerto that had a lot of woodwindy, birdlike stuff going on, the family of swallows nesting in the eaves started making noise. The lightning bugs invaded the audience, they'd suddenly flash right by my face and both the flashes and the crickets actually seemed to be lining up with the music at times.
 Then it started to thunder. The lawn seats emptied out pretty quickly, along with a good deal of the audience with seats under the roof. But Amanda and I decided to stick it out, goddammit. Which we did, and got to listen to the thunder interacting with the music in some pretty awesome ways. It's only a matter of time until humans are going to be able to tinker with the weather, and after that it's only a matter of time until people start writing concerti for thunderstorm and orchestra. That will be the most awesome day of my life.
So right after the lights come up, the sky just opens up. It's the kind of rain where it feels like someone's just throwing buckets of water on your head. It's the kind of rain where you just gotta accept the fact that no matter what you do, no matter how fast you run, you and everything you're wearing are going to be completely soaked. So we accepted it, but still ran sans umbrellas, laughing and screeching, toward the bus, which was all the way around the other side of the theater.
We of course got so wet it was impossible to get any wetter, and then spent the whole bus ride home giggling to ourselves and unwittingly creating small puddles of water on the ground at our feet.
I love outdoor concerts.
 It's been a long-running joke that on my last day of work at the Apple store, I'm going to show up wearing gold lame hotpants.
I think it may be time to invest in gold lame hotpants. You can read that as a metaphor or not.
The problem: I hate American Apparel, but where the hell else am I going to find gold lame hotpants? And how many times can I say gold lame hotpants in the course of three paragraphs? Riddle me THAT, motherfuckers. I'm going to bed.
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| breast of peacock/apple pie/I love marriage/so do I |
[27 Jun 2007|12:50am] |
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music |
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Candide - Oh Happy We |
] |
So today was another work event, which the Apple store does as a monthly bonding ritual. We all do some sort of sport or fun thing, then the boss takes us all out to eat and drink a lot on his tab. It's usually pretty fun.
Today, I had completely forgotten that it was a work event day, specifically Ultimate Frisbee. I myself have not broken into a run in mayyyyybe eight months--
I interrupt this broadcast with an important message: Ah, oh no, it's my first time hearing my boyfriend-girlfriend housemates have sex.
--and, I realized at work while wearing a dress and completely inappropriate-for-frisbee shoes, I don't actually own a pair of athletic shorts. So I stopped by H&M kind of in a rush on the way home and grabbed the first pair of cheap shorts in my size I could find, got my sneakers and changed into clothes more appropriate for running around.
I realized as soon as I put them on that I had made a grave mistake in not trying on the shorts, which were less shorts than hotpants. I guess, really, that "less shorts" pretty much summed it up. But I had nothing else. And hell if I was wearing pants to run around in the 90 degree heat and 800% humidity.
So that is how I scored the winning goal in Ultimate Frisbee while wearing this outfit:
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| I just want to kill you... |
[26 Jun 2007|07:03am] |
| [ |
music |
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Julio Iglesias -- Hero |
] |
So last night I went to Movie Monday at the Troc for MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE.
They had an MC in a Skeletor costume who did some truly inspired versions of karaoke songs with an evil twist, such as "Hero" by Julio Iglesias with the lyrics "I will take your breath away/with my magic powers/and you'll die."
His shtick (aside from karaoke) was pretending to be the embodiment of the cartoon version of Skeletor; he kept complaining that Frank Langella was making him look like an incompetent, ugly douchebag.
 I discovered another nuance of my cell phone's texting features last night. My seven-year-old cell phone does the thing where it takes the numbers you push and translates them into the most common word that could be made from the letters on the keys (4-6-4-6-4=going, for example). You have to manually spell out weird words like "Hoegaarden" and curse words such as "fucking cunts." I discovered last night that my phone will auto-spell the word "Skeletor" but not the word "karaoke."
I was SSSSSSSSSHed by Alli when I tried to drunkenly scream "IT'S B-FLAT, F, E, C, D, B-FLAT, MUSIC THEORY MAJORS SAVE THE UNIVERSE WHUT?!" over that scene where they're trying to puzzle out what notes are going to unlock the Cosmic Key and send them back to Castle Grayskull. Which I think was not warranted. I mean, people were screaming shit out Rocky Horror-style all over the theater.
Like, in the climactic scene where Skeletor has He-Man all tied up and is having him whipped, someone screamed "DON'T FORGET YOUR SAFEWORD!" to great amusement; also, after He-Man struck a particularly pec-rippling pose and the audience burst into cheers, someone (I think it may actually have been Skeletor) yelled "ALL YOU GUYS SCREAMING FOR HE-MAN ARE FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGS!"
If I had wanted to REALLY embarrass Alli, I could have just screamed "LYDIAN MODE! DO SOL FA RE MI DO! SOLFEGE MOTHERFUCKERS!"
I somehow ended up standing right next to Skeletor at the bar afterwards, where he stayed in character and kept yelling "Skeletor needs a beer!" until the bartender finally brought him a can of Pabst with a straw so he could drink it through his mask. I asked Skeletor if he would like some of my Skittles, and he politely said no, he couldn't eat them, and anyway he wasn't really into tasting the rainbow.
What kind of awesome definition is this:
A freelancer or freelance worker is a person who pursues a profession without a long-term commitment to any one employer. The term was first coined by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) in his well-known historical romance Ivanhoe to describe a "medieval mercenary warrior."
I am a ronin, motherfuckers.
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| The Magic Garden |
[24 Jun 2007|08:26pm] |
| [ |
music |
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The Magnetic Fields -- Parades |
] |
The Magic Garden, this crazy, enormous habitat with every possible surface covered in mosaic. I walked around a while ago and took a whole lot of pictures.
( The Magic Garden )
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