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.