Rory Gilmore's book club: Rory is my favorite television bookworm and here is a list of real books that the fictional character might like. Honestly, I don't know how she has the tme since she is a full time student at Yale. She once had a mini-crisis over all the books she would never get to read in her lifetime (supply vs. time), but she got over it.
Tintin travel exhibition: "Georges Remi, alias Hergé, would make thousands of illustrations for each story, using archives of photos and source materials to make his destinations as authentic as possible... While Hergé had already accumulated a large research archive... from which he copied elements of the boats, his attention to detail was such that he would later declare himself disappointed with the boat, saying 'the ship I designed would not have kept afloat.'"
"Cut up is a technique... made famous by Burroughs in his work, but it is also a tool anyone can use for whatever purposes of their own. It can provide insight into texts written by yourself and others.... With the advent of computers we have a powerful tool for breaking down the barriers that we believe exist in language. One experiment, suggested by Umberto Eco in "Foucault's Pendulum" is to take a text in a word processor and do a find and replace on key words or letters. By breaking down the forced meanings we can gain a different understanding of language and its purpose."
Apparently, a school can be judged by its baked goods and the art on its walls. Last Friday I visited the other school that accepted me, this one being in downtown New York City. The location is excellent: a few blocks from the PATH, and near all the courts (because apparently that is important). The entire event was much more formal yet much less in depth than the previous school visit. Also, it seems to be a place where people who wish they were at better NYC schools go. As for the baked goods, it was a prepackaged Pepperidge Farm deal. The school in New Hampshire had a much fresher cookie. Same ends, but a different means there. The art on the walls, on the other hand, was just bad.
So between this and and the two rejection letters received this week, all signs points north to New Hampshire.
Dear bassoon player with the "I Love Latvians" sticker:
If you knock my bag and coat off a chair to take this chair to rest your case on again, you will find rosin in places you'd rather not. Also, my double bass is bigger than your instrument so don't mess with me.
A Bush Surprise: Fright-Wing Support: "'Punk has been hijacked by an extreme left-wing element,' Mr. Rizzuto said... his goal 'is rallying conservative punks and getting people to vote.'"
Punk and politics have always been strange bedfellows, but the kids in the article are obviously missing the point. What is the point? Well, it's not what they think it is. The best way to think of punk is the politics of the personal and moving outwards from there. Fortunately, the article ran in the NY Times Sunday Styles section which is, as far as I can tell, a garbage can for ill-advised articles.
Staying out of touch: "Time travel isn't hard, you can build your own machine right there in your living room. A willing and interested partner is a nice addition as well... I will say hello to Jacques Brell, Henry Miller, Ingmar Bergman and Jack Jones for you."
Tomorrow I am attending yet another school open house; this one is in downtown New York City. Admissions sent an email this afternoon to curtail any fears about the forecast snowstorm. This is a big strike against attendance there.*
*My grammar ain't perfect, but an institution of learning beyond higher learning should be more careful of obvious errors.
First: never look a borrowed car in the mouth, so to speak. However, if this car has recently had your mother's chai latte spilled in it and suffered your father's "attempt" at cleaning it, please beware. The smell was was reminiscent rotten milk or dirty babies. Brian and I pretended the smell went away after a few minutes of being in the car, until we bought an emergency air freshener just over the border in New Hampshire.
Second: as for the rest of the trip up north, its hard not to love a state with no sales tax and where all the license plates have "live free or die" on them. The school was small, but in a more comfortable way than in a claustrophobic manner. Besides, there were at least two or three hallways that we didn't go down while on the tour. Another plus was that the professors and students all seemed technologically forward. I spied iMacs, an Airport base station, and one professor used his 12" Powerbook to show a presentation. That sort of computer competency can not be underestimated.
The box lunch during the open house included a good cookie. As Brian noted, though I fear sarcastically, its a good idea to judge the merits of an institution of higher learning by the quality of its baked goods.
Jack Slept Here: A Kerouac House Attracts Writers and Devotees: "...he and his mother lived in Orlando on and off for five years, eventually abandoning the bungalow for a ranch house in a subdivision... Though more famous than ever, he lived there in relative anonymity, enjoying air-conditioning, a reclining chair and other bourgeois amenities but also mocking his surroundings.
'Across the street big boring Americans looking for togetherness,' he wrote in a notebook unearthed by Mr. Kealing. 'But won't get it from this old seadog.'"
Cracking Up is Mike White's new project. Essentially, Jason Schwartzman plays Max Fisher from the film Rushmore as a psychology grad student living with a dysfunctional family. The first episode was nearly laugh free. The second was about forty percent funnier--that's approximately four laughs. Arrested Development uses the same concept of the sane man in the crazy family, but that show is actually funny. Too bad, since Mike White's involvement is usually a sign of a good time.
Wonderfalls (one episode only so far) is the simple story of an ambitionless 20-something sales clerk working at a Niagara Falls gift shop. Unfortunately, inanimate objects begin to talk to her and give her vague directions to do good. One of the working titles was "Touched By A Crazy Person". The deadpan and droll delivery is similar Dead Like Me, which makes more sense when you realize that Bryan Fuller created both. The concept will hopefully explore why wax lions and monkey bookends are talking to her, instead of having the main gal just do good deeds all time. Not that those are bad, but a television series has to be going somewhere instead of recycling the same plot over and over.
If I am going to give an hour of my time each week to a television series, it has to give something back.
Guardian interview with Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine: "I went to the house once with Bobby [Gillespie] and there were chinchillas, these weird little rat animals, in cages, about 20 of them, all over the room, with barbed wire everywhere. It was definitely meltdown.'"
Activists Target Paris Subway Ads: "Spinning on her heels, a mischievous glint in her soft blue eyes, she whipped a red wax crayon from her handbag and, wielding it sword-like, scrawled her fury across a billboard advertising home appliances.
"TOO MANY THINGS, NOT ENOUGH POETRY!'' she wrote.
Pow! Thus another blow was struck in a fight raging in France against advertising."
More than just a pretty interface: "Shopping for food while listening to a Bach violin concerto completely remakes the experience. It turns you from a grazing animal into something finer. In the same way listening to David Bowie's The Laughing Gnome would radically alter a dressing down from a policeman."
Leonard Cohen's novel The Favorite Game is rather slim, but he simply doesn't waste words. An admirable quality since many writers feels that just because a page is blank that it needs to be filled.
Breavman and Krantz are childhood friends who make a strict pact with each other:
They swore not to be fooled by long cars, screen love, the Red Menace, or The New Yorker magazine.
This passage was chosen though it reflects my current personal feelings towards NYC:
New York City... He was relieved that it wasn’t his city and he didn’t have to record its ugly magnificence. He walked on whatever streets he wanted and he didn’t have to put their names in stories. New York had already been sung.
Chernobyl: "I travel a lot and one of my favorite destination lead through poisoned with radiation, so called Chernobyl 'dead zone' It is 130kms from my home. Why favourite? because one can ride there for hours and not meet any single car and not to see any single soul. People left and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places, woods, lakes."
Last spring I found $100 at the ATM. Molly told me I had to return it and to think of all the good karma. The security guard at the bank probably stuffed it in his pocket as soon as I turned around, but at least my karma was assured. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for my good karma. Molly says it's not automatic thing, that it takes time. Well, I'm impatient. One night I found a seat on the subway when I really wanted one. Not sure if that was worth $100.
On the other hand, I do have some holy communion at my desk. My brother the minister sent me a traveling host (for invalids and military operations)--it looks like a coffee creamer, but with grape juice and has a little wafer on top. It isn't consecrated. My brother confirmed this: it's still just grape juice, sugar, and starch, not the blood and flesh of anyone. None of my coworkers will go near it though, especially the lapsed Catholics. I'm not sure what to do with it--throwing it out still feels very wrong. Perhaps it will come in handy one day (just in case).
