geegaw.com

Thanks

Thanks for your input. I'll wait till I can amass enough critical mass of specifically New York writings in this blog to decide whether I want to spin them off under the name "Gee-gawker".

8, taken for pilgrimage, blessed on the left

The last time I read Dubliners I was in my mid-teens or early teens, and I was somewhat blind to language in general (excepting To The Lighthouse, which had stunned me). This time I'm suspended in a weird limbo and surrounding myself with the earlier recordings of John Darnielle's three-minute minor epiphanies: I feel sensitized and I've learned in the past ten years that chiasmus can represent the Christian cross or crossing-over.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Here

Yes, I'm in New York, though keeping a low profile. I have a lot of unpacking to do and big decisions to make, so I haven't felt or been particularly social - but I am liking the city. Do you think I should put the restaurant reviews on a different sub-blog? They don't seem to quite fit this main one - drown it out, in fact.

Ambiance Over Taste

Two Asian restaurants where the impeccable decor and tranquil ambiance frames pretty good (but not great) food.

The Ginkgo Leaf

Simple bento-box fare of the kind you might get in an actual Japanese restaurant. The prix fixe ($20) started with a sushi-based appetizer (the salmon/avocado salad was light and filling), moved on to a multi-part bento box including tempura, teriyaki, and sushi (standard fare done standardly well), and finishing with your choice of ice cream or Japanese dessert (I had the red bean-filled pancakes, which were good in an average sort of way).

The food itself only rates three ikuras out of five, but I had to give them an additional ikura for authenticity, value, and service.

    788A Union St. @ 7th Ave., Park Slope

. . .

Hangawi

Heaviliy hyped nouvelle vegetarian Korean cuisine. The Emperor's super-duper special prix fixe ($35) started with an amazing creamy porridge (your choice of pumpkin or black sesame - both delicious, though the bitter black sesame flavor is an acquired taste). The three set "mini-appetizers" consisted of a so-so salad with avocado and some sort of orange-daikon vinaigrette, a pretty good fried zucchini cake paired with a light vegetable consomme served in a hollowed-out persimmon, and a decidedly mediocre baked tofu with asparagus. Next was the much-touted "Emperor's roll", which was six mini-tortillas which you filled up with slivered vegetables and dipped in mustard - conceptually similar to meang kum, but not particularly flavorful. Then the entree - your choice of mushroom (very, very good but a distressingly tiny portion) or something else that I can't remember (unrecognizable shredded orange foodstuff that tasted a bit like mock cuttlefish jerky). The miniature steamboat soup was delicate and fairly tasty, with a strong cilantro flavor. Dessert was a tofu chocolate mousse which tasted so decadently creamy I had to check with the waiter to make sure it was actually vegan.

The "Asian Pear Fantasy" turned out to simply be frothy blended asian pear juice. Very mild, as asian pears are. I liked it only because it reminded me of my childhood. The "Citron drink" was a very nice, bitter lemonade well-sweetened with honey.

    12 E. 32nd St., Harold Square/Murray Hill

Mr. Falafel

Stumbled upon Mr. Falafel in Brooklyn looking for plain comfort food, was surprised to find flavor and subtlety up there with the best. Ordered a spinach omelette which came with the spinach well mixed with the eggs, flavored with a trio of amazing squeeze-bottle sauces - tangy/spicy marinara, tahini, and a garlicky olive oil. The lemonade came sweetened with honey and (I think) rosewater. Service was great. Definitely coming back to this one to try the "koshary," the vegetarian combo platters, and of course the falafel.

    226 7th Ave @ 3rd St., Brooklyn

Three Mirandas

Act I. Nell's restaurant. A glass of Bordeaux.

Waiter:
To tell the truth, ma'am, never have I heard
Of the so-called huitlacoche (Mexican
Corn Fungus) on the label of this can
You're showing me as I try to fill your glass
With wine.

Jim:
        A toast! To a safe airplane flight.

(All at table clink their glasses.)

Act II. Upstairs lounge at the Baltic Room. A sweet pink drink of unknown provenance.

Friend:
I also have a fake Burberry skirt,
Purchased from Les Amis but rarely worn,
Which I would gladly give to say farewell --
Hey! Waitress, where'd you get those slim capris?

Waitress:
At Urban Outfitters. They're only five
dollars right now. Go get them, they're on sale.

(Miranda, silent, grinning at her drink.)

Act III. Drum and Bass dance floor at the Baltic Room. Tequila with lime.

Friend:
Be not afeard, the club is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand pounding instruments
Will drum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak'd
I cried to dream again.

Miranda:
My friend, this rhythm makes me boogie down
In the manner of these young folks, waving one
Hand in the air. . . . Oh yeah. I'm liking this. . . .
Oh shit, what's that girl doing? Hey, c'mon,
Young lady, don't you see that my sweater
And loose pants indicate a certain age
And demographic you should realize
Is incompatible with all but the most chaste
And solo dancing?

Girl:
                        Well now, who can say
What my motives are? Maybe I'm on E
Or simply have bad judgment. Let's just say
That for the next two minutes, I'll be near.
Now keep on doing those same moves you do
While I squat down and feign cunnili--.

Miranda:
                                    Hark!
Be that her boyfriend suddn'ly appear'd?
Like her, he wears but startling white socks
Instead of shoes. I guess I understand:
She wanted to impress. . . . Well, sir, hello.
Your lack of baseball cap may aid your suit,
But make but one false move and you will find
Yourself rolling upon the wooden floor,
Clutching bruised genitals. You understand?

(White socks couple rapid exeunt, stage right)

Stranger:
Hi there, you two sweet things,
What are your names? Tonight I'm going to dance
With both of you before the night is through.

Miranda:
Though liberal guilt may sway me into letting
You have your say, and perhaps touch my friend
If you feel you must, my hostile demeanor
And feignéd inability to hear
What you are saying should have tipped you off,
So that hours later, after the last call,
As we walk down the road and you follow
In your piece-of-shit black car, I feel no guilt
At yelling at you "Please leave us alone"
and flicking you off. After all, you may
Scream back an insult in a language I
Don't recognize, and speed off in that car,

But this is my last night out on the town
In fair Seattle. There are so many things
I haven't done -- I never went to Lark
In the CD, nor tried the tres leches
At Cactus in Madison Park, and I will miss
The simple foods of Eva, generous
And unpretentious portions of Northwest
Cuisine, and 25 for $25.
But Saturday, when I arrive back east,
And find myself in my sweetheart's embrace,
I do not think I will regret a thing.
Though much is taken, much abides, and though
I'm sad to leave my friends here, friendship lasts
'Cross continents and oceans. That I know.

Yum, dub

Good plans have been made for tomorrow evening. Things are looking up.

pearles that were his eies

"just as one sometimes lowers one's head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night"

unless the sea swallow them

in the crossing

already several of the guests were lying down in the dishes

hourly ring his knell
hark

now I hear them

I do not think that they will sing

. . .

I meant to write a post about the act that weighs heaviest on my conscience, the African political prisoner I refused to help, but I can't deal with it. Maybe some other time.

the craving sets in

"Though you stroked me with the kindest of hands, you had to recognize oddities which suggested the forest, where I'd sprung from and where I really belonged." Kafka's love letters (via Paul). Don't miss this one.

. . .

Waiting for the Pacific wind to burn my fucking soul away

What became of Gordon Gano

It was hearing the country/gospel album Hallowed Ground that made me lose all interest in Gano. I mean, maybe the critics think it was "seminal" or "important" but it just sounds to me like masturbatory yodeling.

To be honest, religion probably has something to do with it. Gano was born and raised a Baptist, so he was a Baptist during the first album too, it's just that the first album was significantly more conflicted. Anyway there's a bunch of music I like that has explicitly Christian lyrics, like the Innocence Mission, Nick Cave, Will Oldham, Arvo Part . . . I guess it's a question of whether the lyrics have dimension, or the music is good, or some other redeeming factor. . .

A new desert life

I keep thinking about racing west on US-101, slowing to take the curves on the road through Port Gamble. In my imagination it's October, long panels of orange light falling across the road lined with white Victorian houses and fire-colored trees, and A. is sitting in the passenger seat, dozing off. . .

Must sleep more, eat more. Listening to Further Seems Forever, I feel a chaos rising inside me, a thorn forest:

Sierra Club Hostile Takeover(?!)

Are you a Sierra Club member? Then please vote online to save your organization from a hostile takeover by anti-immigration activists. You need a paper ballot in the mail to vote, though. Now I feel sad that I've been donating anonymously to the Sierra Club for years, never realizing that giving them my name and address could actually have helped them.

P.S. I just signed up to be a "sustaining member" of the Democratic party via their online donation form. I really hope that by guaranteeing the party an income, I can protect Kerry et al from these nonsensical pot-calling-kettle-black ads that the Bush administration is fielding. I really want the winner of this year's election to be the guy who's not endorsed by the terrorists, ya know?

My Seattle

Even on overcast days in winter, you have to squint because of the way the UV blazes through the clouds.

Gardens and flowers everywhere in my neighborhood.

Everyone thanks the bus driver as they step off the bus.

The bridges across Lake Washington, especially the northern one (the 520 floating bridge) that goes over the wildlife preserve. Blue herons.

Slugs and earthworms and the occasional rabbit on my walk to work, and blackberries and cherry treees and rushes and the strange canal.

You can go to a play at the Rep or out to a fancy dinner wearing jeans and a windbreaker, knowing that half the people there will be dressed the same way.

My office bordering the wetlands. Watching hikers out of my office window.

Even on the darkest wettest day of winter, everything is still green (grass, trees).

Free wifi in all the major indie coffeehouses. Coffeehouses everywhere.

Three months out of the year, the sun pretty much just shines from the south. Crazy late sunsets in summertime.

Rainier cherries in summer, about as fresh as you can get short of driving over to Yakima yourself.

The Olympics. Stabbingly beautiful gray coastal beaches I wish I could visit one last time before I leave.

Label-reading international strip-tease

Pants from Cambodia, "pants" from Sri Lanka, t-shirt from America, bra from China, shoes from garish turquoise flowerland (whee!).

We drink vodka from Russia
We get our chocolates from Belgium
We have our strawberries flown in from England

- the Mountain Goats, "Fault Lines"

Speaking of the Mountain Goats, apparently it is or was John Darnielle's birthday because someone sent out a link to his Amazon Wish List ("I only put books on my wishlist because I would prefer that people do their music shopping at http://www.aquariusrecords.org whenever possible.") The list itself is shrunken down to dregs: his fans must love him. Those silly fans.

Somewhere I picked up a copy of this too pretty postcard of old people hanging out in grassy fields in some Japanese cherry blossom spring. I want to blow it up into a grainy poster for my new bedroom, but Kinko's won't reproduce it without written permission from the copyright holder. Any ideas? (UPDATE: Ofoto! Domo!)

Aww, shucks

childhood of Eglantine

Originally uploaded by bhikku.

Posted by Eglantine* from

That's CUTE.

Sarah Sahara

Tossing and turning, congested/cold dreams, of Vladimir and Estragon going to the Godot meetup at the Alki Beach Starbucks and of no one else showing up. Paul Muldoon, reading last night, was a disappointment, or maybe it was how the audience treated him as a clownish performer, loop-de-loop Muldoonery, he read his poem The Turn about a boy in a shed hiding from punishment and pretending to be a desert explorer, and the audience cracked up after every line, as if he were Bill fucking Cosby or something. Yet one is still sad when one knows one will miss Charles Wright on the 30th, even though one is about to plunge into a new city where poetry readings happen every day, and despite the fact that Seattle poetry readings always give one the troubling feeling that one is the only non-white person in the audience.

. . .

Jim pointed out some radio censorship bullshit that put me in mind of last Friday, when I was listening to the radio in my rental car, and the Violent Femmes song "Add It Up" came on, and it was edited:

Why can't I get just one [pause]
Why can't I get just one [pause]
I guess it's got something to do with luck
But I waited my whole life, for just one . . .

When I was a teenager I thought that was the sexiest song ever, he starts with wanting a kiss, and then a screw, and finally he demands a fuck, the ellipsis at the very end of that verse holding all sorts of wild potentialities. Now there are three ellipses in the verse, and the entire momentum of the song is destroyed.

But, hey, not as destroyed as my infatuation with Gordon Gano once I found out what became of him.

Carrots are not the only fruit

By the time I got home from California, this annoying cold I have was starting to seriously slow me down, and I haven't left the house since except to help Dan load my old coffee table onto his FlexTruck. So I've been scrounging up meals based on what I have left in the apartment -- okayu/congee is an easy one, since all you need is rice, a pan, and running water-- but last night I decided to get fancy and I baked a pie of my own invention. I call it "Emergency Baby Carrot Pie":

Chop baby carrots.
Boil carrots in a can of apple juice concentrate for 10 minutes.
Drain, stir in 2 tbsp tapioca and seasonings (listed below).
Let sit for 15 minutes, then spoon into premade pie crust.
(If you actually wanted it to taste GOOD, here you would seal it with a crust top, brush it all with egg, etc. - but I was sick and fatigued and skipped this crucial step)
Bake for 30 minutes.

The lesson is that probably anything is passable if you bake it with sugar, cinnamon, a hearty squeeze of lemon juice, and a pinch of cloves. If you're hungry enough, you could probably even do this to brussels sprouts.

Anyway. Found this cute poem on the Minstrels list:

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
if you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"

-- Thomas Parke D'Invilliers

NaNoWriMo, here I come

"I don't get me wrong, occasionally my stomach would get do you mean it isn't true. He's-- he's serene. He's kind, he's gentle, he's--" "Don't be a disaster."

Mattie wasn't up for her guest's little receding chin and to his feet, mumbling: "I'm all right," he fell crumbily, bent- leggedly, asleep.

"He stared up into a bar and walked less briskly back to you," Vincent's girl said, touching Mattie's arm almost vaguely.

"We're doing a thing that can do about it except about the raincoat being swiped, but how dare Alfred Erdonna sadly take Aristotle to task for failing to take over my job," Lawlor said.

"Barry? Mmm, he did. Princeton. I think you're missing. Stop wearing my robe to cover up immediately the bodies in the orderly room - the Chicago Catch and the outside of Reno and made this bargain with Mr. Nelson, despite our countless discussions, in the Army anyway when the last war - all of it. He sat down at the poem through again. Then she started lighting matches again, like a rat?"

Valence, ambivalence

Back in Seattle. All I can say is, after the interviews were over and I was speeding down US-101 to the airport in my crappy little two-door Pontiac Sunfire rental, with the yellow California sun burning my face and Jimmy Eat World wailing on the radio, I felt like a god.

3/11

I've been on the road all day. I only just got the news. And I thought, Oh my god.

Then five minutes later I remembered the war in the Sudan that has been going on for almost my whole life.

Yesterday I took the bus in to work and back, and on both trips, the bus I took had been recently urinated or defecated in, and it made me all cranky. Oh, I am spoiled. Today I wheeled my suitcase to the airport and thought about how happy I was to be alive and have the use of my legs.

T-2

Study tonight: Linked List Problems.

Loli is so cool

	Ceiling fan Ceiling fan in the living room of our new apartment.
Posted by Eglantine* from

Oh yes she is. I'm experimenting with having a flickr-based photolog, since I haven't had time to configure a regular one. Let's see how it goes...

Craig Thompson, scoot over

What youth and beauty these creatures bare. Haunting, pretty, comic found via BoingBoung.

Dept of Our Homeland Going To The Dogs

Was surprised to learn how few people know that Ashcroft recently tried to subpoena Planned Parenthood records in an attempt to crack down on partial-birth abortion. Luckily our Attorney General got a smackdown from the courts.

P.S. Check out this MoveOn petition to keep the EPA's proposal to require strict limits on mercury pollution from power plants. You know who's trying to weaken the proposal and protect big business at the expense of women and children's lives, right? . . . Diabloggers, Cardinal Fish needs your help to stay delicious and nutritious! Save Le Sac Du Thon!

IL*

Thanks, but I think the folks at ILX are too smarty-pants for antisocial ole me.... Maybe someday.

It's strangely pretty, Edward Hopper-esque, with the empty south-facing apartment. The lack of furniture draws my eye straight to the view, which I like. I still have a bed and internet, which is basically all I need, and the fact that my laptop plays DVDs is a big plus. The thing I miss most are my kitchen utensils, but I definitely do not miss the TV.

Bipolar III: Electric Boogalee?

Are You Bipolar?, from New York Magazine, implies that cycling is the new depressed:

"As more and more people are taking antidepressants, more and more bipolarity is being exposed, because anyone who becomes hypomanic on antidepressants is bipolar," says Ivan Goldberg, a psychiatrist with offices on the Upper East Side. "You look into their family history, and you almost always find an uncle, a grand-uncle, a parent who was irritable, irascible, and impossible -- just plain difficult -- and they were bipolar. Bipolarity has been thought of as a rare illness, but it’s actually a common one."

There's even a separate diagnostic category for bipolar patients whose condition has been triggered by antidepressants: bipolar III. Says Joseph Goldberg, director of the Bipolar Disorders Research Program at the Zucker Hillside Hospital: "These patients don't just listen to Prozac -- they really listen to Prozac."

The article goes on to explain that even Andrew Solomon, who wrote the book on depression, now considers himself bipolar. The hallmarks of mania: "shopping sprees and sexual promiscuity."

The thing that disturbs me is the new (not in the DSM) bipolar III category, "antidepressant-associated hypomania" with a family history of bipolar illness. From the little poking around I've done, it seems like a good number of these people get along ok on Wellbutrin. So I don't understand why is this considered a new kind of manic-depression instead of a negative side effect of the SSRIs?

(Some references seem to call cyclothymia "bipolar III" and the medicated mania "bipolar IV")

The black Internet's off at the root

(thanks to J.F. for sending me the Ted Hughes poem "Do Not Pick Up the Telephone", from Under the North Star, to which a few small changes have been made here)

Do Not Get On the Internet

That plastic modem jars out an Anime screech

Before the soft pixels with their spores
The heavy breath of the echelons

Death invented the Net it sprawls like the altar of death
Do not worship the Internet
It drags its worshippers into actual graves
With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices

Sit godless when you hear the religious wail of the Internet

Do not think your house is a hideout it is the Internet
Do not think you walk your own road, you walk down the Internet
Do not think you sleep in the hand of God you sleep in the gateway of the Internet
Do not think your future is yours it waits upon the Internet
Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are toys of the Internet
Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the Internet
The secret police of the Internet

O Net,
Get out of my house
You are a bad god
Go out and whisper on some other pillow
Do not lift your snake head in my house
Do not bite any more beautiful people

You crawling spider
Why is your oracle always the same in the end?
What rake off for you from the cemeteries?

Your outages are as bad
When you are needed, dumb with the malice of the clairvoyant insane
The stars whisper together in 802.11g
World's emptiness oceans in your disconnects
Stupidly your cables dangle into the abyss
Digital you are then stone a broken box of letters
And you cannot utter
Lies or truth, only the evil one
Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone

Blackening electrical connections
To where death bleaches its crystals
You swell and you writhe
You open your Buddha gape
You screech at the root of the house

Do not get on the detonator of the Internet
A flame from the last day will come lashing out of the Internet
A dead body will fall out of the Internet

Do not get on the Internet

Race

As far as I know, of all the geegaw readers I've ever met, none of them are black. . . I don't know the best way to talk about race, but maybe instead of not talking about it, I should just tell you what I see.

A few days after A. and I signed our lease in Brooklyn, I was taking the subway from Greenwich Village to our new place, and I overheard an African-American couple discussing various plans to remodel their home.

Man: Don't you think that might decrease the value of our place?
Woman: Honey, we decrease the value of our place. It's all a crock.

. . .

And on the subway ride home, an energetic young African-American man positioned himself at one end of the car and delivered a spiel about why we should give him our spare change. Completely unused to this, I took my cue from everyone else in the car and studiously pretended the guy wasn't there at all.

After the train had paused at a station and the young man had moved on to the next car, a middle-aged African man with a thick accent caught my eye and gave me a strange, almost embarassed smile. I smiled back and then he leaned over and said to me, "I never give money to people who are healthy. If they are healthy, why don't they work? I came to this country four years ago with nothing, but I worked, and now I have something."

Bleeding-heart liberal that I am, I think I mumbled something about how bad the economy was, and how the government was making it really hard for a lot of people to find work. But the prosperous-looking man knew public opinion was on his side -- after all, none of us had given up our money, had we -- and continued to repeat his message of industriousness and determination till I got off the train.

. . .

My current boss, the best boss I've ever had, is black. The rumor around the team is that his average lifetime performance review score is a certain very high number, and no one who's worked with him doubts this. But last year I was trying to convince someone I know, someone who'd never met him, how good my boss was and I told them about the high score and the person said, "Well, it might just be because he's well, you know." And I said NO! But the whole encounter just fueled the flames of my career insecurity. I mean, if one of my coworkers says good things about me, will people discount their report because of my gender?

Drunk with goats or pavement

How easy to slip
into the old mode, how hard to
cling firmly to the advance --

I may have forgotten to mention that I'm back in Seattle for the next month or so, living the not-quite-swinging solitary life again among the mist, the rain, the cherry blossoms, and this weekend's implausible burst of sun. Stayed up till 1am leafing through the William Carlos Williams references on the tragically-on-indefinite-hiatus josh blog. I don't think I have stressed it enough: I really miss A. The way my body processes this is like a constant choked thirst for something. It's hard to sleep, I miss my books, I'm too busy stalking John Darnielle and Bob Saget online to see my friends in real life.

Thank god the josh blog archives are still live, timor 404is conturbat me. Bought, listened to Full Force Galesburg. It propelled me through the long walk home in the dark, when I would usually have waited for the bus. Had to restrain myself, I wanted to throw up my hands on the street and start spinning.

My orkut fortune today was "Good things are being sad [sic] about you" -- and after I publicly announced my impending resignation today, two coworkers independently came up to me and told me I was widely thought of as the best programmer on the team!! (I'm not convinced of that, but -- whee!)