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lapsedmodernistI realized that I never wrote about my Christmas trip to the US, so here are the highlights, along with photos.
I left home in exhausted chaos of end-of-semester crap and missing passport awfulness, and made my way to Amsterdam where I paid my tax on my own stupidity, and picked up my new passport with a photo that is far less flattering than the wide-eyed photo of my 23-year old self taken in a mobile "photo studio," which was basically a sketchy van outside the American consulate in Guatemala City. I had dinner with Niki and Alana, and slept over at Alana's, waking up at some ungodly hour for my flight to Boston, where I arrived, exhausted, and made my way to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
redheadedmuse's house, where I decompressed for 24 hours, caught up and gossiped with her and thoroughbass, ate delicious homemade yoghurt, participated in a photo extravaganza downstairs at mzrowan's house, and took some other random photos, of which I like this one the best:
The next day I made my way to New York City, after some confusion with busses (Bolt Bus or Megabus, can't remember which, had relocated their pick=up location from South Station to Back Bay since the last time I had availed myself of their services, trying to figure out who had tickets for what time was confusing, finally I went with my old buddy Lucky Star, lured by their promises of new exciting on-board wifi, of which there was no evidence in reality, but it did get me to NYC in a reasonable amount of time).
For the next almost-a-week I proceeded to camp out onapropos' air mattress (with one night's exception--more about that in a second) in La Casa de apropos and missmimesis and also the former official/current de facto casa de msmsgirl, basking in the glow of nightly Hannukah candles, and the shimmering of the Christmas Ideology Tree (thusly named because the top decoration on the tree looked to us like a Deleuzean rhizome).
aprpose, with tree in the background
The Menorah
We ate Thai food and sushi, spent hours at a retro-ish Morningside Heights diner withapropos' friend Gorgeous whom I had finally met, played in the snow, went to a party. Also in the midst of all of this I went to see the movie adaptation of "Youth In Revolt" with totalvirility, who had screen passes. Anyone who knows me knows that this has been one of my favorite books since my senior year of high school, back when it was still totally a cult favorite. It had been TotalV's favorite since freshman year of college, when I lent it to him. We were both appalled by the adaptation, but I guess it was inevitable. It is impossible to make that book into a Hollywood movie, even an "edgy" Hollywood movie.As I was explaining to theophile today, basically the characters in that book are completely sociopathic, which makes the over-the-top, absurd, sociopathic behavior that they engage in towards each other and the world in general, funny. It's like a morality equivalent of suspension of disbelief. You cannot be bothered by all of the totally sociopathic actions, because they are doing it to other totally sociopathic people. But in the movie, they "humanized" the main characters, Nick and Sheeni, they made him this kind of crazy romantic guy, and her basically a desperately bored romantic precocious teen, stifled in her uber-Christian family, while toning down the sociopathy enough that it no longer has the madcap absurd sheen that makes the book stand apart, but retaining enough of it that with the newly humanized characters, the matter-of-fact way in which they dole it out and accept it seems confusing and inappropriate. Basically, read the book, it's hilarious, the movie sucks.
ANYway. here aremissmimesis and msmsgirl
on the fire escape
and with a switcheroo in the focus
missmimesis again
My second or third day in NYC I went to see my beautiful singer friendakozorez (who gifted me with the most amazing, warmest, most beautiful hand-made Victorian-ish, steampunk-ish neck warmer) in the village, where outside of Yaffa we discovered the following message, which I suspected the Universe was sending her way:
here she is contemplating it
our kitschy fairyland, Yaffa
In the winter there are all kinds of fairlyland windows all over the East Village.
here is one
I went to the Strand
and bought the following books: Revenge by Mary Morris who is kind of hit or miss for me, but I keep reading everything she writes, although so far she hasn't written anything better than Night Sky, but it's the sort of slow psychological suspense study that I like, with my favorite themes of memory and obsession, then China Mieville's The Scar which I finally finished, and liked a lot, but not as much as Perdido Street Station, and The Glister which I got because I had read it mentioned onjactitation's year-end meme, the synopsis sounded interesting, but unfortunately it went AWOL in theophile's parents' house and so I haven't read it. I almost bought The Year of the Flood but it was pricy and heavy, and in the end I didn't.
Oh--so the one night I did not spent in Morningside Heights, I spent, improbably, at the W hotel in midtown, where my college friend who is now a Fancy Lawyer got a room for the night, as she drove in from Philadelphia to see me. It was so wonderful to see her and catch up. But oh my god the hotel! obviously, because of my lifestyle choices it is not often that I end up immersed in total American Psycho Corporate Hell, so it was sort of an ethnographically interesting experience, but also so over the top that it wasn't just my usual finely attuned Matrix geiger counter that was beeping, that place was like this parody of a place.
Please picture this: the only color schemes used in the entire hotel are gray and black. Primarily gray. The carpet is gray, the paint is gray with some black, the bed sheets are gray and black. The soap is gray. The jelly beans are gray. The CONDOMS, packaged together with a "gynocological napkin" (that's what it was called) were also gray. The gray jelly beans and the gray condoms, by the way, were stationed together with sad-looking cashews and some gray (I kid you not) candy with a sign that said "this surface is equipped with electronic sensors; as soon as you move any of the packages, your credit card will be charged." The towels were gray. The menu was gray and had insane euphemistic options, where it was impossible to understand what food was actually being offered. To top it all off, the hotel was undergoing some kind of "facelift" (sic) which meant that as a part of the facade construction there was a (gray) rope swinging melancholically outside our window, back and forth, back and forth, casting a giant gray shadow of a swinging rope across the gray wall. Just in case you weren't already thinking of killing yourself.
As a counter-part to the gray hotel I spent some time in my erstwhile workplace, The Peace Pentagon, a.k.a. the War Resisters' League building on Lafayette, where the Deep Dish TV (and Paper Tiger TV) offices are located, up the stairs decorated with signs that date back to the Vietnam anti-war movement. I saw Maoist Boss, who is awesome as ever, and his amazing stepdaughter, who is more awesome than ever, whom I last saw as she was heading off to Stanford. She is now finishing Stanford, and is this brilliant, effervescent young woman, who was telling us about a reproductive/sexual health research project she did in Kenya, with a sophistication that led Babs and me to tell her that she should consider becoming a medical anthropologist, but she really wants to go to medical school and be a doctor so that she can perform abortions for women who have a hard time accessing those services. She is really a wonder. More like her, please.
Oh, and related to Maoist Boss but also to EVERYTHING ELSE, pnts moved to New York!!! At first it looked like we would miss each other by like a day but then it turned out that she got there at the same time I got there, and we were reunited! I finally met her husband, and we squealed and beeped at each other and acted in our usual delighted-goofy seeing each other way. And she wore my new rainbow hat at a brunch place in Williamsburg:
And we went for drinks to some crossover NYU/dive bar on Spring (I think) with her andapropos and after that for DELICIOUS PIEROGIES at Odessa.
I also had all too brief but wonderful time seeinglabrujah and klingrap (and scared the crap out of the latter, I think, by having an allergic reaction to "milk tea" at St. Alf's Teahouse on 13th street, and really, Teahouse Staff, if your customer asks you what was in the tea because her throat is closing up saying "oh, I don't know, it's some kind of non-dairy mixture in a big vat so I can't look up the ingredients for you" is not the correct response), went to Beacon's Closet, missed some people I hope to see next time, saw erstwhile Chair and sadly missed cyberanya who decamped for Germany on the very day I arrived, and Ms. Palindrome who I had thought was away, but apparently was not. Alas.
After NYC I made my way back to Boston on a bus that took like eleventy billion hours to get back to Boston, spent a truncated night in Newburyport before getting up at 3.30 AM to catch the airport shuttle to Logan again, with Fionn, to visit my parents in Chicago, where Fionn had his first Christmas tree experience. That was great, despite a fiasco with a promised train set (somehow instead of the approved Brio wooden train set a made-in-China Thomas the Engine crapola was purchased, from the same line that was recalled in 2007 for lead in the paint). Fionn also kept putting on ALL OF MY MOTHER' S JEWELRY AT ONCE which I photodocumented:
After five days there we came back to Boston, rather late in the evening, and headed tobeginnersmind's house, where Fionn was reunited with his first ever real playmate from their wee days, Maiya, who was born mere days after him in the same birth center, in the same room.
beginnersmind and Maiya
Maiya and Fionn, in the background
Maiya had these awesome helium balloons that Fionn was entranced with:
Then I dropped Fionn off withtheophile, went to see my chiropractor, Dr. Marty, in Wellesley, saw, in a whirlwind, a bunch of other friends and nears and dears, and, gloriously, was escorted to the airport by the lovely legitimatelove and her little ones, and I am so happy I got to catch up with her, even if it was too rushed/hectic/not enough time.
But with friends, and loved ones, and loved cities, it is always not enough time.
And then the next day I was in Berlin for new year's, and I was jet-lagged and sick for much of the time I was there, basically after the first night/day my hosts and I were all sick and just chilled out and took group baths in Neukolln (which is why I didn't get in touch with the two of you I meant to see--heresiarch and shaherezada), and then my rideshare to Dusseldorf took so long because of the snow on the roads that I missed the last train home and spent the night in the Dusseldorf train station, which, as I discovered, pretty much occupies the same demographic/existential zip code as the American Greyhound stations at night. As I was telling my friend/coworker pH about the neo-nazi dude tweaking on meth who kept approaching me and standing in front of me, but I wouldn't raise my eyes from my book to look at him, so basically it was like his crotch kept sailing into my field of vision, and then moving away, and the two Turkish dudes blowing up condoms and popping them (all this accompanied by running racist commentary from two appalled middle-aged Russian women who kept talking to, presumably, their families on a cell phone and saying things like "it's like a zoo, every race of monkeys is represented"), he asked, in all seriousness, if I wasn't scared, because Dusseldorf train station at night is such a scary place.
This is funny not only because out of all the sketchy places I've been in my life, Dusseldorf train station isn't even on the map, but also (and mostly) because in two weeks he is leaving his sheltered bougie apartment and his cello and going to Kinshasa to visit his fiancee for two months. When I told her about his totally serious scared-for-me query about the train station, she joked that it would be funny to leave him in the Kinshasa airport for a couple of hours after arrival.
He is a sweetie, though. I hope he fares well in the DRC!
I left home in exhausted chaos of end-of-semester crap and missing passport awfulness, and made my way to Amsterdam where I paid my tax on my own stupidity, and picked up my new passport with a photo that is far less flattering than the wide-eyed photo of my 23-year old self taken in a mobile "photo studio," which was basically a sketchy van outside the American consulate in Guatemala City. I had dinner with Niki and Alana, and slept over at Alana's, waking up at some ungodly hour for my flight to Boston, where I arrived, exhausted, and made my way to
redheadedmuse's house, where I decompressed for 24 hours, caught up and gossiped with her and thoroughbass, ate delicious homemade yoghurt, participated in a photo extravaganza downstairs at mzrowan's house, and took some other random photos, of which I like this one the best:The next day I made my way to New York City, after some confusion with busses (Bolt Bus or Megabus, can't remember which, had relocated their pick=up location from South Station to Back Bay since the last time I had availed myself of their services, trying to figure out who had tickets for what time was confusing, finally I went with my old buddy Lucky Star, lured by their promises of new exciting on-board wifi, of which there was no evidence in reality, but it did get me to NYC in a reasonable amount of time).
For the next almost-a-week I proceeded to camp out on
apropos' air mattress (with one night's exception--more about that in a second) in La Casa de apropos and missmimesis and also the former official/current de facto casa de msmsgirl, basking in the glow of nightly Hannukah candles, and the shimmering of the aprpose, with tree in the backgroundThe Menorah
We ate Thai food and sushi, spent hours at a retro-ish Morningside Heights diner with
apropos' friend Gorgeous whom I had finally met, played in the snow, went to a party. Also in the midst of all of this I went to see the movie adaptation of "Youth In Revolt" with totalvirility, who had screen passes. Anyone who knows me knows that this has been one of my favorite books since my senior year of high school, back when it was still totally a cult favorite. It had been TotalV's favorite since freshman year of college, when I lent it to him. We were both appalled by the adaptation, but I guess it was inevitable. It is impossible to make that book into a Hollywood movie, even an "edgy" Hollywood movie.As I was explaining to theophile today, basically the characters in that book are completely sociopathic, which makes the over-the-top, absurd, sociopathic behavior that they engage in towards each other and the world in general, funny. It's like a morality equivalent of suspension of disbelief. You cannot be bothered by all of the totally sociopathic actions, because they are doing it to other totally sociopathic people. But in the movie, they "humanized" the main characters, Nick and Sheeni, they made him this kind of crazy romantic guy, and her basically a desperately bored romantic precocious teen, stifled in her uber-Christian family, while toning down the sociopathy enough that it no longer has the madcap absurd sheen that makes the book stand apart, but retaining enough of it that with the newly humanized characters, the matter-of-fact way in which they dole it out and accept it seems confusing and inappropriate. Basically, read the book, it's hilarious, the movie sucks.ANYway. here are
missmimesis and msmsgirlon the fire escape
and with a switcheroo in the focus
missmimesis againMy second or third day in NYC I went to see my beautiful singer friend
akozorez (who gifted me with the most amazing, warmest, most beautiful hand-made Victorian-ish, steampunk-ish neck warmer) in the village, where outside of Yaffa we discovered the following message, which I suspected the Universe was sending her way:here she is contemplating it
our kitschy fairyland, Yaffa
In the winter there are all kinds of fairlyland windows all over the East Village.
here is one
I went to the Strand
and bought the following books: Revenge by Mary Morris who is kind of hit or miss for me, but I keep reading everything she writes, although so far she hasn't written anything better than Night Sky, but it's the sort of slow psychological suspense study that I like, with my favorite themes of memory and obsession, then China Mieville's The Scar which I finally finished, and liked a lot, but not as much as Perdido Street Station, and The Glister which I got because I had read it mentioned on
jactitation's year-end meme, the synopsis sounded interesting, but unfortunately it went AWOL in theophile's parents' house and so I haven't read it. I almost bought The Year of the Flood but it was pricy and heavy, and in the end I didn't.Oh--so the one night I did not spent in Morningside Heights, I spent, improbably, at the W hotel in midtown, where my college friend who is now a Fancy Lawyer got a room for the night, as she drove in from Philadelphia to see me. It was so wonderful to see her and catch up. But oh my god the hotel! obviously, because of my lifestyle choices it is not often that I end up immersed in total American Psycho Corporate Hell, so it was sort of an ethnographically interesting experience, but also so over the top that it wasn't just my usual finely attuned Matrix geiger counter that was beeping, that place was like this parody of a place.
Please picture this: the only color schemes used in the entire hotel are gray and black. Primarily gray. The carpet is gray, the paint is gray with some black, the bed sheets are gray and black. The soap is gray. The jelly beans are gray. The CONDOMS, packaged together with a "gynocological napkin" (that's what it was called) were also gray. The gray jelly beans and the gray condoms, by the way, were stationed together with sad-looking cashews and some gray (I kid you not) candy with a sign that said "this surface is equipped with electronic sensors; as soon as you move any of the packages, your credit card will be charged." The towels were gray. The menu was gray and had insane euphemistic options, where it was impossible to understand what food was actually being offered. To top it all off, the hotel was undergoing some kind of "facelift" (sic) which meant that as a part of the facade construction there was a (gray) rope swinging melancholically outside our window, back and forth, back and forth, casting a giant gray shadow of a swinging rope across the gray wall. Just in case you weren't already thinking of killing yourself.
As a counter-part to the gray hotel I spent some time in my erstwhile workplace, The Peace Pentagon, a.k.a. the War Resisters' League building on Lafayette, where the Deep Dish TV (and Paper Tiger TV) offices are located, up the stairs decorated with signs that date back to the Vietnam anti-war movement. I saw Maoist Boss, who is awesome as ever, and his amazing stepdaughter, who is more awesome than ever, whom I last saw as she was heading off to Stanford. She is now finishing Stanford, and is this brilliant, effervescent young woman, who was telling us about a reproductive/sexual health research project she did in Kenya, with a sophistication that led Babs and me to tell her that she should consider becoming a medical anthropologist, but she really wants to go to medical school and be a doctor so that she can perform abortions for women who have a hard time accessing those services. She is really a wonder. More like her, please.
Oh, and related to Maoist Boss but also to EVERYTHING ELSE, pnts moved to New York!!! At first it looked like we would miss each other by like a day but then it turned out that she got there at the same time I got there, and we were reunited! I finally met her husband, and we squealed and beeped at each other and acted in our usual delighted-goofy seeing each other way. And she wore my new rainbow hat at a brunch place in Williamsburg:
And we went for drinks to some crossover NYU/dive bar on Spring (I think) with her and
apropos and after that for DELICIOUS PIEROGIES at Odessa.I also had all too brief but wonderful time seeing
labrujah and klingrap (and scared the crap out of the latter, I think, by having an allergic reaction to "milk tea" at St. Alf's Teahouse on 13th street, and really, Teahouse Staff, if your customer asks you what was in the tea because her throat is closing up saying "oh, I don't know, it's some kind of non-dairy mixture in a big vat so I can't look up the ingredients for you" is not the correct response), went to Beacon's Closet, missed some people I hope to see next time, saw erstwhile Chair and sadly missed cyberanya who decamped for Germany on the very day I arrived, and Ms. Palindrome who I had thought was away, but apparently was not. Alas.After NYC I made my way back to Boston on a bus that took like eleventy billion hours to get back to Boston, spent a truncated night in Newburyport before getting up at 3.30 AM to catch the airport shuttle to Logan again, with Fionn, to visit my parents in Chicago, where Fionn had his first Christmas tree experience. That was great, despite a fiasco with a promised train set (somehow instead of the approved Brio wooden train set a made-in-China Thomas the Engine crapola was purchased, from the same line that was recalled in 2007 for lead in the paint). Fionn also kept putting on ALL OF MY MOTHER' S JEWELRY AT ONCE which I photodocumented:
After five days there we came back to Boston, rather late in the evening, and headed to
beginnersmind's house, where Fionn was reunited with his first ever real playmate from their wee days, Maiya, who was born mere days after him in the same birth center, in the same room.beginnersmind and MaiyaMaiya and Fionn, in the background
Maiya had these awesome helium balloons that Fionn was entranced with:
Then I dropped Fionn off with
theophile, went to see my chiropractor, Dr. Marty, in Wellesley, saw, in a whirlwind, a bunch of other friends and nears and dears, and, gloriously, was escorted to the airport by the lovely legitimatelove and her little ones, and I am so happy I got to catch up with her, even if it was too rushed/hectic/not enough time.But with friends, and loved ones, and loved cities, it is always not enough time.
And then the next day I was in Berlin for new year's, and I was jet-lagged and sick for much of the time I was there, basically after the first night/day my hosts and I were all sick and just chilled out and took group baths in Neukolln (which is why I didn't get in touch with the two of you I meant to see--
heresiarch and shaherezada), and then my rideshare to Dusseldorf took so long because of the snow on the roads that I missed the last train home and spent the night in the Dusseldorf train station, which, as I discovered, pretty much occupies the same demographic/existential zip code as the American Greyhound stations at night. As I was telling my friend/coworker pH about the neo-nazi dude tweaking on meth who kept approaching me and standing in front of me, but I wouldn't raise my eyes from my book to look at him, so basically it was like his crotch kept sailing into my field of vision, and then moving away, and the two Turkish dudes blowing up condoms and popping them (all this accompanied by running racist commentary from two appalled middle-aged Russian women who kept talking to, presumably, their families on a cell phone and saying things like "it's like a zoo, every race of monkeys is represented"), he asked, in all seriousness, if I wasn't scared, because Dusseldorf train station at night is such a scary place.This is funny not only because out of all the sketchy places I've been in my life, Dusseldorf train station isn't even on the map, but also (and mostly) because in two weeks he is leaving his sheltered bougie apartment and his cello and going to Kinshasa to visit his fiancee for two months. When I told her about his totally serious scared-for-me query about the train station, she joked that it would be funny to leave him in the Kinshasa airport for a couple of hours after arrival.
He is a sweetie, though. I hope he fares well in the DRC!
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 11:19 pm (UTC)That second picture of fionn with all the jewelry on -- man, that kid is already a total rock star. what a great camera presence.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-20 11:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 12:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 04:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 04:58 pm (UTC)almost crossed paths?
Date: 2010-01-21 04:50 am (UTC)Lovely pics of Mr. Fionn, too :)
Re: almost crossed paths?
Date: 2010-01-21 05:00 pm (UTC)Small New York. Wish I had seen you!
no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-01 07:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-01 07:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 09:39 pm (UTC)I will be in New York the first couplea weeks of Feb. I've not been there in cold weather since I was like 10; what do you recommend for activities? :)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-01 07:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-21 09:54 pm (UTC)anyhow, sorry to have missed you, but i hope we can make it up some other time!
no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 12:42 am (UTC)