Tag: weather

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If I’m going to have sugar, make it sugar like Air’s Ce Matin-La off of the Moon Safari album. French horn, tremulous strings and a wah-wah pedal late in the game. iTunes has just played it followed by some Yma Sumac.

It’s beautiful outside, but I haven’t been outside in it. After last week’s excursions, I’ve taken the opportunity for anti-sociality. Solitude that is. What do I do with my days?

Through the window I see the leaves coming onto the trees. Just barely in the case of those trees on my block, but through their branches I see one that is fully flowered, and I realize that it’s a tree on the next block over that I pass every day when I walk Lehigh.

New York is responding to the increasing warmth by dumping more people out on to the streets. SO while feel like going for a walk, I feel a little iffy about encountering the crowds. Still it’s important to get out and see some things. And Lehigh could probably do with some more outdoor time.

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Drippy outside, but this time it feels like spring. Yesterday I read Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, which is a lovely fantasy about how people become writers. There are some good jokes Had a full vegetarian day and am in the middle of another.

Not a lot of organizing happened yesterday after all. The desk still has a bunch of issues. I have made some headway on email, however.

And now I’m excited about summer plans. And they’ve started running that crazy-ass Optimum triple play reggaeton commercial again, which I love.

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It’s cold and foggy here. It doesn’t feel like spring, but rather the downward creep of fall. I’ve been playing catch up with some responsibilities, and reliving some of the high points of IMsL through other people’s recaps.

I’ve been looking for my copy of “Watchmen” around my house for months and have been unable to find it. So I bought another one in the SF airport to read on the way home. Getting through it made me even less interested in seeing the movie. For one thing, it’s not at all an action story: violent things happen, but the guts of it all is reflection, memory and discussion. The narrative moves forward very slightly compared to how much it moves backwards or sideways and it’s not propelled by people doing superhero type things. When I try to think of the directors who could do it justice I think of Tarkovsky or maybe War Wong Kai. If Fassbinder wasn’t dead he could do a great version, with everyone sitting around some broken down warehouse some where.

In other pop culture news, last night’s South Park was one of their tortured analogy episodes, where a goofy incident is made to stand in for a social issue. I laughed harder at a picture of a jar in The Onion with the caption “Heroic Pickles Holding Lid Shut From Inside”.

Speaking of beloved book adaptations, on Tuesday night TCM showed “The Phantom TollBooth”, Chuck Jones’ take on one of my favorite books from my childhood. I’ve seen it before but really forgotten how dreary it was. The backgrounds are mainly recycled from “What’s Opera Doc” and the character design is shabby. Jules Pfeiffer did a great job illustrating the book, but Jones utterly jettisoned his line and balance for the movie. The songs are lackluster and forgettable, and the end is a rushed knockoff of the “All Too Much” sequence from “Yellow Submarine”.

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All errands accomplished today. Score one for our side. But damn, this cold is not playing around. The sort of weather that just makes me want to huddle indoors nonstop. Where’s the service bottom with my toddy?

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Today has had just the kind of weather I hate, the kind that results in two foot wide puddles of soupy slush at every New York corner, the kind that makes all forward motion on the street a series of twists and flinches to avoid the chill wind, the kind that makes you feel ungracious about any and all things between yourself and the next sheltering doorway, including all your fellow pedestrians.

I got into work feeling dazed and generally unhealthy. Something is paining me in my shoulder, my nose and throat have been packed with phlegm, I’ve got low level aches and acid reflux. (Note to my body: OK, I get it: next week you begin your 49th year on the planet. Is there something you want to tell me about my warranty?) Alka-Seltzer, my secret lover banished some of my symptoms, so that I could go and be a curmudgeon in class, mushroom-barley soup helped with some of the others. It also helped that I made contact with some of the organizations I’ve owed contact to and straightened out some financial matters.

My interest in poetry podcasts has led me to sampling a bunch of other podcasts on iTunes. They’ve been giving me some ideas for what to do with the WordPress version of this blog, namely to make it more bloglike: more linking, more informational in general. We’ll see how that plays out.

There is a crazy-making aspect to WordPress though: because so few people comment, it’s a little hard to be a comment-whore in the way one can be on LJ; instead, there is the ultratantalizing “blog stats” page which provides you with a running tally of how many people are looking at your blog, and lays those figures out on a day to day graph that looks like your own little popularity roller coaster. It’s really hard not to just hit the refresh button one more time to check out if any more people have come by. Utterly addictive evil.

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It’s chilly here now. Time to return to the rituals of temperature regulation in the shower: my landlord’s aged water heater and whimsical pipes mean that the water goes from tepid (25 seconds) to steam (1 minute, 16 seconds) to frigid (6 minutes). any attempts to even out the temp means dexterity like a safe cracker’s applied to the funky taps. As an added pleasure, there is a 4 second delay between the tap adjustment and any result. So imgine the intricate ballet that occurs in the morning as I attemt to manipulate the taps, lather, rinse, soap, adjust etc., etc. Is it any wonder I stink perhaps more than I should?
On a lighter note I woke myself up in the wee hours with a series of ideas for piieces, got out my notebook, recorded them actactually got back to sleep! Will any of them turn into actual pieces? I dunno, but I’m attracted to this idea that involves fifty video monitors and a lot of slapping.
Yesterday my collaborator sent me pictures of our pieces installed in the show at Yerba Buena in San Franciso. Everything looks a little creepy, and a little sad. I wonder if it’s chilly there.