(c) m.c. g. zipprich.
Anyways, this week is going to be a mess. Let's assess: Monday is low key, sandwiches in Astoria and shopping for Things I Need For Italy. Tuesday, Jenny comes to town !!!! We hang out and do things like watch Rushmore at McCarren and eat barbecue on rooftops. Thursday morning at probably the asscrack of dawn, me, Jenny, and my mom haul ass back to Connecticut, where I have a doctor's appointment. I sit in my room and fume silently as the next two days are consumed by neverending packing. Saturday the entire fam packs up for Brooklyn where we send Jenny off to the airport on Sunday and me off on Monday.
Some days I think the universe is playing one huge celestial joke, my life.
24 August 2008
21 August 2008
soon soon soon
Home in Connecticut this next few days. Just got back from Ann Arbor. Had six cavities filled this morning. Just think, in less than two weeks, this blog will actually be written in and about Italy.
15 August 2008
puzzling:
i just gave myself a papercut on a plastic name-badge holder. what does one call such an injury?
yes i realize exactly how 1) irrelevant and 2) twitter-like this post is. yes, i feel shame.
yes i realize exactly how 1) irrelevant and 2) twitter-like this post is. yes, i feel shame.
14 August 2008
nick and nora [sic]
was i the only person who was just a little bit flabbergasted to hear bishop allen's 'middle management' as the trailer song to the new michael cera movie, nick and norah's infinite playlist? i mean, it wouldn't have been that bad except for the fact that the movie looks positively wretched. and... bishop allen was my band. my found-them-on-the-blogs-in-2004. when you ain't no picasso was still on blogger and didn't have a hideous redesign. jesus, i pre-ordered the broken string. i netflixed mutual appreciation; not the masterpiece of mumblecore. actually, that masterpiece has not yet appeared, but who's counting. and now, they are a trailer band...?!!
in other news, grills are like "really shiny, expensive retainers." will you marry me? seriously, i mean it.
12 August 2008
Olympic Balladeer's Voice Was Dubbed
oops.
but she is still way cute (below, left) whereas the girl with the voice (right) is was deemed too buck-toothed to be seen by most of the free world watching the opening ceremonies. totalitarian gay politburo mafia at work here, people.
observe:
photo: telegraph.co.uk
11 August 2008
regionalism:
I'll always be a proud midwesterner, but a New York slice beats a Chicago pie every time.
The Golden Ratio of Delicious:
Excessively Cheesy Heart Attack Disaster:
The New York slice is slim and sophisticated, much like a New Yorker.
The Chicago pie is... fat and Midwestern.
On the other hand, the Chicago dog is untouchable.
Photos: flickr
The Golden Ratio of Delicious:
Excessively Cheesy Heart Attack Disaster:
The New York slice is slim and sophisticated, much like a New Yorker.
The Chicago pie is... fat and Midwestern.
On the other hand, the Chicago dog is untouchable.
Photos: flickr
you know how to flatter a man
Okay, so I'm all for Michael Phelps, USA, rah rah rah and all that good clean patriotic fun, but these photos are too much:
Photos: New York Times
10 August 2008
on the other hand
general minutiae from this week:
the olympics started. yay, go team. pet peeve: how many people have said free tibet (thom yorke, you don't count, see below) without really knowing anything about the tibet saga. it's all bitch whine moan china and you try to make tibet a self-sustaining, international-law-defined country. can we all just get over the fact that human rights suck kind of everywhere and more importantly no way is the u.s. going to piss off a country that has absorbed some obscenely large amount of trade debt in the past five years. i suppose it's cliched to say that we live in an irreversably globalized society in which it is pure economic suicide to divest/disconnect from/generally fuck over another 'great power' but it's still mostly true. whatever.
second-to-last week of work, thankfully. fun, sort of. the people were nice. the tasks were menial and mindless, but it was nice to contribute to the end of tuberculosis, one baby step at a time. the office is decorated with 1930s-era WPA prints illustrating the deadliness of 'consumption' and my inner AP history geek smiled rejoiced. i thought about la bohéme and la traviata an awful lot.
saw radiohead last night at all points west with the lovely miss serena alexandra wales. that was a near-religious experience, duh. i never understood why anyone found thom yorke any kind of attractive until last night. the man is damned sexy. and he can dance, true fact. and and he was wearing excellent red skinny trousers. they played an obscenely long two-hour set that included famous songs (the bends, no surprises!!!!!!!!) and new things, including an absolutely adorable one called 'bangers and mash,' which included thom banging on a baby drum set. there was also a prominently placed free tibet flag onstage, but whatever. it was fucking radiohead. babyboadrum. freetibet.
i bought the new nico muhly CD and finally gave it a good listen this weekend. it is SO GOOD. he is a new contemporary composer, who's worked with phillip glass and björk. he is also the son of professor bunny harvey of wellesley college. the new yorker did an interview with him back in february and i texted my friend e.b., who had taken drawing from bunny harvey (so a full-name person) telling her her that i thought he was cute. her response: "i think he's gay." there isn't much else to that story, i suppose. anyways, the album, mothertongue, is so so good. weird as fuck, yeah, but really good and still eminently listenable, which is really my only requirement for contemporary classical music. and the last suite of songs on the CD are variations of the old folk song 'the wind and rain,' which is totally one of my faves ♥ * !
on the agenda: falafels at taïm, eating through flushing, a trip back to ann arbor,torture packing for florence, the blog actually beginning to talk about italy.
the olympics started. yay, go team. pet peeve: how many people have said free tibet (thom yorke, you don't count, see below) without really knowing anything about the tibet saga. it's all bitch whine moan china and you try to make tibet a self-sustaining, international-law-defined country. can we all just get over the fact that human rights suck kind of everywhere and more importantly no way is the u.s. going to piss off a country that has absorbed some obscenely large amount of trade debt in the past five years. i suppose it's cliched to say that we live in an irreversably globalized society in which it is pure economic suicide to divest/disconnect from/generally fuck over another 'great power' but it's still mostly true. whatever.
second-to-last week of work, thankfully. fun, sort of. the people were nice. the tasks were menial and mindless, but it was nice to contribute to the end of tuberculosis, one baby step at a time. the office is decorated with 1930s-era WPA prints illustrating the deadliness of 'consumption' and my inner AP history geek smiled rejoiced. i thought about la bohéme and la traviata an awful lot.
saw radiohead last night at all points west with the lovely miss serena alexandra wales. that was a near-religious experience, duh. i never understood why anyone found thom yorke any kind of attractive until last night. the man is damned sexy. and he can dance, true fact. and and he was wearing excellent red skinny trousers. they played an obscenely long two-hour set that included famous songs (the bends, no surprises!!!!!!!!) and new things, including an absolutely adorable one called 'bangers and mash,' which included thom banging on a baby drum set. there was also a prominently placed free tibet flag onstage, but whatever. it was fucking radiohead. babyboadrum. freetibet.
i bought the new nico muhly CD and finally gave it a good listen this weekend. it is SO GOOD. he is a new contemporary composer, who's worked with phillip glass and björk. he is also the son of professor bunny harvey of wellesley college. the new yorker did an interview with him back in february and i texted my friend e.b., who had taken drawing from bunny harvey (so a full-name person) telling her her that i thought he was cute. her response: "i think he's gay." there isn't much else to that story, i suppose. anyways, the album, mothertongue, is so so good. weird as fuck, yeah, but really good and still eminently listenable, which is really my only requirement for contemporary classical music. and the last suite of songs on the CD are variations of the old folk song 'the wind and rain,' which is totally one of my faves ♥ * !
on the agenda: falafels at taïm, eating through flushing, a trip back to ann arbor,
i won't fuck us over i'm mr. november
I own this t-shirt, thought up by the National as a little fundraising gimmick for Barack Obama himself. I love the National. I'm pretty down with Barack. But did anyone in the National or on the Obama marketing team realize that the song "Mr. November" contains the lyrics "I'm the new blue blood / I'm the great white hope" ? I mean, not to read too much into it or anything, and not that election politics are anything but reading too much into it or anything like that, but isn't it a little bit ironic...
Now is when I wish blogs could accurately convey that 'really, you really did just do that' kind of quizzical look.
Also, only middle-aged white men seem to comment on it.
Also, what the fuck, Russia.
05 August 2008
thoughts re: twilight
Is this what adults felt like when the first few Harry Potter sequels starting hitting the shelves? A juggernaut, a sort of behemouth of children's literature that reduced said adults to be both out-of-touch with anything outside of the New York Review of Books and marvelling at the possibility that their offspring could be sophisticated enough to re-discover reading in the nascent years of the Internet age. I was part of Hurricane Potter, dutifully buying each book at midnight, finishing them within the night and sleeping off the drama in the following daylight hours, much to chagrin of my Circadian-regulated parents. I've read each book at least three times, asides from The Order of the Phoenix, which I still maintain is 800-plus pages of contrived verbal vomit and misplaced teenage angst. But that's vitriol for another day, or perhaps never. I read the fanfiction religiously. Entire summers were whiled (wasted?) away in anticipation for new chapters of favorite works as high as it was for the books themselves. But gradually, as I aged, the unrequited love between Harry James Potter and Draco Lucius Malfoy diminished in my fevered brain. I moved onto 'real' books, away from the children's and YA fantasy that had fueled so much of my elementary and middle school years.
I suppose what that extended preface was trying to say is that the release of Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final volume of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books this weekend, coincided with realizing whether my utter ignorance of these books marks a tiny first step into the world of adults, away from the in-between state of teenager-dom that the first two years of college seems so conducive to cultivating. These thoughts are no doubt exacerbated by the fact that I turned twenty two weeks ago, my panic age. When you're twenty, you are no longer a teenager and no longer automatically excused from teenagers' errors. You are upbraided for lack of maturity; you are twenty, dammit, act your age. I've always tried to be on the up-and-up concerning books, which includes keeping tabs on my favorite authors from when I was younger. Thus, my reaction towards the Twilight phenomenon was originally of bewilderment - how had it gotten so popular so quickly? This was the kind of novel that I would have eaten up. (Side note, I was a devoted reader of Amelia Atwater-Rhodes back in the day-- she was the same age as me! She wrote achingly beautiful vampire novels! Of course I had a crush on Aubrey! Having recently unpacked all of my books and re-skimmed In the Forests of the Night... I was perhaps too easily impressed.)
Maybe I'm too jaded to be shocked at the devotion that Bella and Edward inspire amongst the droves of the teenage girls of America. Maybe it's because having gone through a similar level of devotion for Harry Potter, I'm hard-pressed to admit another series engendering such fervent reactions amongst its readers.
The New York Times posted an article a couple of weeks ago about how the youth of today (how is that I am no longer youth? Riddle me this!) are reading, just not books. They're reading fanfiction and blogs and there is an academic divide between those who think that all reading is good, no matter what the medium, and those who believe the only subjectively worthwhile reading is that which comes from the printed word. It presented the reality as dichotomy, providing no room for the possibility of evolution in the minds of young readers (like myself! The patent self-absorption of a personal rears its ugly head! This entire entry really just is about me!) from the days of fanfiction towards a lifelong appreciation for literature.
In defense of fanfiction, even though the characters are not original, the author is charged with sustaining the personality of the character in a wholly believable fashion. In an original work of fiction, the author at least gets the benefit of the doubt from his or her readers by virtue of characters being an organic creation with no preconceived notions held by the readers. The case of fanfiction is not unlike writing under a microscope, with the author's responsibility to and respect of the fandom on the line, he or she is charged with creating new plotlines and/or universes in which beloved characters must fit into while staying true to an original artistic vision within the plotting. Bottom line, it's hard. And fanfiction should not be automatically relegated to 'bad' when there is plenty of original fiction that is either more derivative than fanfiction or simply awful. In reading fanfiction, one can develop the same eye for picking out good characterizations, literary style, and plot as one can reading straight fiction. Appreciating both is possible and reading both can only broaden one's literary horizons and eye for 'good' writing.
Of course, because everything that is said on a personal blog will always circle back to the author and her self-obsession, the person I just described/ranted about was really only me and how I will one day read Infinite Jest but at the same I still have about a half-dozen fics that I re-read whenever I'm feeling especially hateful towards the cop-out epilogue of the last Harry Potter book.
I suppose what that extended preface was trying to say is that the release of Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final volume of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books this weekend, coincided with realizing whether my utter ignorance of these books marks a tiny first step into the world of adults, away from the in-between state of teenager-dom that the first two years of college seems so conducive to cultivating. These thoughts are no doubt exacerbated by the fact that I turned twenty two weeks ago, my panic age. When you're twenty, you are no longer a teenager and no longer automatically excused from teenagers' errors. You are upbraided for lack of maturity; you are twenty, dammit, act your age. I've always tried to be on the up-and-up concerning books, which includes keeping tabs on my favorite authors from when I was younger. Thus, my reaction towards the Twilight phenomenon was originally of bewilderment - how had it gotten so popular so quickly? This was the kind of novel that I would have eaten up. (Side note, I was a devoted reader of Amelia Atwater-Rhodes back in the day-- she was the same age as me! She wrote achingly beautiful vampire novels! Of course I had a crush on Aubrey! Having recently unpacked all of my books and re-skimmed In the Forests of the Night... I was perhaps too easily impressed.)
Maybe I'm too jaded to be shocked at the devotion that Bella and Edward inspire amongst the droves of the teenage girls of America. Maybe it's because having gone through a similar level of devotion for Harry Potter, I'm hard-pressed to admit another series engendering such fervent reactions amongst its readers.
The New York Times posted an article a couple of weeks ago about how the youth of today (how is that I am no longer youth? Riddle me this!) are reading, just not books. They're reading fanfiction and blogs and there is an academic divide between those who think that all reading is good, no matter what the medium, and those who believe the only subjectively worthwhile reading is that which comes from the printed word. It presented the reality as dichotomy, providing no room for the possibility of evolution in the minds of young readers (like myself! The patent self-absorption of a personal rears its ugly head! This entire entry really just is about me!) from the days of fanfiction towards a lifelong appreciation for literature.
In defense of fanfiction, even though the characters are not original, the author is charged with sustaining the personality of the character in a wholly believable fashion. In an original work of fiction, the author at least gets the benefit of the doubt from his or her readers by virtue of characters being an organic creation with no preconceived notions held by the readers. The case of fanfiction is not unlike writing under a microscope, with the author's responsibility to and respect of the fandom on the line, he or she is charged with creating new plotlines and/or universes in which beloved characters must fit into while staying true to an original artistic vision within the plotting. Bottom line, it's hard. And fanfiction should not be automatically relegated to 'bad' when there is plenty of original fiction that is either more derivative than fanfiction or simply awful. In reading fanfiction, one can develop the same eye for picking out good characterizations, literary style, and plot as one can reading straight fiction. Appreciating both is possible and reading both can only broaden one's literary horizons and eye for 'good' writing.
Of course, because everything that is said on a personal blog will always circle back to the author and her self-obsession, the person I just described/ranted about was really only me and how I will one day read Infinite Jest but at the same I still have about a half-dozen fics that I re-read whenever I'm feeling especially hateful towards the cop-out epilogue of the last Harry Potter book.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
