[yes, I know everyone already has an orange web site]
When I think about it, it amuses me - this site can now serve both as a device for me to procrastinate other work AND as yet another thing I can put off doing, as in "you know, I really should update my site..." How pathetic. And look, now I'm meta-procrastinating. Oh wait, scanning pictures takes up a nice big chunk of time. Let's do that.
Oyster Boy Review
Fence
and Paul says that there are a disproportionate number of his readers named Judith or Juliet or something like that. Prove him wrong.
What a weekend. Came home from Toronto late Friday after lots of meetings and a few quick drinks. Slept very very late Saturday morning. Realized that the apartment had decayed well past that "it's sort of messy, but it's not actually dirty" phase. Scoured the bathroom, so now I have one really clean room, one disastrously messy room, two rooms that are just kind of unpleasant, and three closets that could probably use some attention as well. Oh, and the front hallway too. Sigh.
Afternoon coffee with Shira, followed by Wendy's "bachelorette" party. What a dumb concept, that. But what a wonderfully silly evening. We first went for salsa lessons - ten girls so all the tall girls played boys. We were mostly pathetic, especially as we were being taught without music, which both screwed up any chance at rhythm we might have had and left us wholly unprepared for actual tempo when the music came on. But after an hour and a half we'd accomplished most everything, including the turn that Stacey dubbed the "creme brulee", and we headed off to dinner. Wendy was made to wear a blindfold and a veil of tulle + daises, so we looked very silly walking through the streets of Manhattan...people yelled "good luck" and "don't do it" as we steered her through the East Village. We got to the tapas bar and had at least six pitchers of sangria with our tapas and mostly just talked about sex (the assorted locations: two churches, two ferryboats, an office floor, an office desk, a bedroom, 20 bedrooms, a park). After we'd soaked up as much sangria as humanly possible we decided to go show off our new salsa skills at a club downtown with a live band. It was great to dance with crowds of people and men who just led you as if you really did understand how your hips and knees were supposed to be moving. After a while Wendy got bored and we went across the street to Liquor Store, which is one of my favorite bars, and we stayed there for a while. I ran into my friend Noah and then had this bizarre but pleasant conversation with these two boys - an off-off-Broadway theater director and a lapsed Orthodox rabbi. I actually found the conversation so fascinating that I stayed even after Wendy and the girls went home, and finally went home myself around 2:30.
Today I had a lovely brunch in Williamsburg with Daniel (Oznot's Dish, yum) and then walked around the neighborhood for a while. All was well and good till the drive home, when he pulled the car over, pulled a ring box out of his pocket and asked me to marry him. Sometimes getting what you wanted after you no longer want it is much more difficult than never getting it at all.
time
to
scan
photos
doesn't
this
block
look
empty?
And, constantly,
Giovanni Sollima.
Blue Heidi
go see modhouse, before Patrick redesigns.
Too many meetings.
Every few months, Richard Preston writes some terrifying tale of epidemiology in the New Yorker. Not only did I start to itch just reading his smallpox stories, but I seriously wonder how the man brings himself to leave the house in the morning.
in keeping with today's theme.
Jane just called - she's back from her year in Moscow, where she worked as a rabbi. It's hard enough being a woman rabbi in this country, let alone Russia. I admire her.
Reading Jen's dispatches from her summer in Ghana reminds me of some of Jane's initial impressions of Moscow - struggles with laundry, language foibles, the difficulties of being a female American abroad.
Go see the surrealism show at the Guggenheim. Lots of Joseph Cornell stuff and some wonderful Max Ernst things, including "A Week of Kindness". I'd link to it if they ever updated their site...
Sorry to read that Todd is ill; I have a meeting tomorrow with him...although he's the second writer on this job to become physically ill. Should I be concerned?
Scanned some pictures. The Lomo is a great camera for its novelty value, but the actual pictures don't capture people all that well. Only one of five or six actually turn out somewhat interesting, so they're not much use from a documentary standpoint. Nevertheless, I'll be putting more of them up, including some of the more experimental ones.
The first day back at work in a week. The usual blah-blah. But maybe I'll go to Toronto next week, where it's bound to be at least a few degrees cooler.
That crazy camera
So I'm off to rent a movie and sit in Sarah's airconditioning. I'd hoped to actually get things accomplished today, but I simply can't. (although I did finally register this url + sign up with a host - we'll see how that turns out...) There's something very alluring about moving to San Francisco - I was actually shivering at points this week thinking it was too cold. Silly me.
[later, back home, still sweltering]
Sarah + I watched The Daytrippers, which was fun, then we lounged. I'm an exceptional lounger, if anyone had any doubts.
furniture porn
how I catalogued links before I had a page of my own:
thanks colin
in this special
all-about-colin issue:
see the rest of his site at moock.org
ok. for all the people who have been asking...here it is. I'm somewhere over Utah and have a few hours to go before reaching NYC + its unbearable weather. SF was lovely and the Web99 conference was terrific. Thanks to the fabulous Peter Merholz, I met wonderful people and had a delightful time.
Yesterday, I walked through Golden Gate Park and enjoyed the remarkable plants + flowers. While the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is gorgeous, and Prospect Park in the spring is delightful, it just wasn't the same as turning a corner into a flurry of nasturtiums and willow trees. And while the zoo at Prospect Park has capybaras, somehow the field of bison in SF seems much more...surreal. At the end of the park I reached the Pacific and walked the beach for a while, then climbed to the Cliff House where I visited the Musee Mechanique and the Camera Obscura. I've long been fascinated by the camera obscura and how Vermeer and DaVinci used it to paint. This one was remarkable and I stood there with a group of French tourists who were murmuring "bateau" and "oiseaux" and I felt completely transported, a sense of something magical. A family walked in with a little boy and after a minute he said "This must be how a cyclops sees."
Peter
Molly
Richard
Maura
Ben
Bryan
Evany
Josh
Carl
what I saw in SF
Camera Obscura
Bill Viola at SFMOMA
books + music from SF
Interpreter of Maladies
Nabokov/Wilson Letters
The Oy of Sex
Talvin Singh's OK
a copy of
The Nudist on
the Late Shift
autographed to Colleen