i’m back in new york for a month. all sorts of kind of interesting personal stuff is going on with your favorite protagonist, but since this is not a livejournal from when i was sixteen, or, you know, this blog three years ago, i’ll omit all of it in favor of telling you that i ate chicken kiev on the brighton beach boardwalk. culinary adventures! you can’t shake a stick in new york without tripping over a culinary adventure, or something along those lines.
also, if i did standup somewhere, like some really depressing open mic somewhere in seattle, would anyone go see me? joyce carol oates says that writers should go running to generate ideas, and me, when i go running, i think of standup material. some of it seems funny when i think of it a couple hours later.
third (this evening, my thoughts are in even less order than usual): let’s talk about jay-z.
this song is amazing. even beyond my obvious bias. this isn’t the official video, i’m pretty sure, but i love it. all of that said, jay-z is a little bit of a dick. just a little. now, my family and i are nets fans, despite the fact that they are in a miserable state of affairs these days and their pending stadium in brooklyn, while sentimentally gratifying, would be a terrible thing to happen to brooklyn and bruce ratner is darth vader and all that. but dude: your “bringing the nets” does NOT make you the black branch rickey. sorry. branch rickey, along with jackie, broke the color barrier in baseball, at great risk to his career, a courageous display of civil rights in action. you are a very rich man moving a basketball team to a nearby city at great risk to no one, a kind of cute display of brooklyn pride and people spending a lot of money. chill out.
this song by the avett brothers also concerns brooklyn, and is wonderful:
speaking of music videos, last week i was in montreal, city of beauty and dreams and happiness, and their modern art museum has this room in the basement where they just screen cool (more artful than normal, maybe) music videos, which i found surprisingly soothing and addictive, despite my early exposure to music videos when i was grade school age and would stumble upon mtv while waiting for full house to come on and find them insufferably boring and confusing. my, how i’ve grown. here are my two favorites, by city and colour and wild beasts, respectively:
lastly, i have this long short story/novella i wrote that’s my baby, that i love, and i’m thinking of posting it in installments. we’ll see (that’s a reminder to myself to do it, if i decide to).
ciao bella.
