You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December, 2007.
a very happy birthday to two of my lovely roommates:
liz angrisani who is sweetness and light
and the delectable Celeste Rodero.
Happy Birthday!
merry christmas everyone!
I am not musically talented in any way, but I do make incredible mix cds. Most including such classics as “Car Chase” and “Sex Tape” have themes and are pulled from a myriad of sources. Any mix I would make in the near future would basically just be a copy of M3 Volume 15, so I’ll save time and trouble and post links here.Good Weather for Airstrikes consistently has the best music and this mix is no exception. M3 16 and 17 are already out, and great as well, but this mix was really the soundtrack to my November/early December and the backdrop to a relationship that got off the ground, but was shot down in mid-air. Oh, life.
While a little on the meow meow/unrequited love side, standouts include:
08. “Gray or Blue” – Jaymay
09. “Five Years Time” – Noah & The Whale
12. “New Romantic” – Laura Marling
04. “5 Acts” – Jeremy Warmsley
07. “Canopies and Grapes” (Demo) – Emmy The Great
10. “She Knows” (Demo) – Thom Stone [EXCLUSIVE]
Um…yeah, that is half the mix. In short, it’s awesome DOWNLOAD IT!
(The direct Mega-upload link: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XPO94S3V)
Just my favorite photo from Sean Slinsky. Sean is a talented photographer living in San Francisco.
I miss you already, you wonderful, self-important, walkable, sporty, humid, pretentious, kinetic, dazzling, overpriced, over caffeinated, cobblestoned, self-conscious, self-unaware, popped-collar-sporting, popped-collar-mocking, preppy hipster college town masquerading as the political capital of the world.I was just 17 when we met. You were my first love, and you stuck with me through thick and then – the years rat-racing through college, that weird time after college when I worked in a restaurant, the overpaid paralegal job, the misguided semester of law school, and then even when I moved down to Virginia I still visited you every single weekend.
When the plane hit the Pentagon, I watched the smoke from across the river and cried. I thought the scaffolding around the Washington Monument was beautiful. I sat in Einstein’s lap. When I was flush I drank at the 18th street lounge, and when I was broke I went across the street to Lucky Bar. I could lie in my bed at night and listen to the monkeys making a racket across the street at the zoo, and wake up on a Saturday and sit in my front yard and smoke a cigar with my best friends and watch your young families and your gorgeous, gorgeous young women strolling by.
Georgetown was the neighborhood I loved to hate, and seedy Adams Morgan at 3 AM on a Saturday was the neighborhood I hated to admit I loved. Afternoons laughing out loud at the human circus in Dupont Circle, then getting my butt kicked at chess by some homeless guy. All those weekends we spent Running Against Bush. Man, that seems like such a long time ago. Hitting up Mount Pleasant for real, authentic Mexican food, or crashing with my Hill friends and waking up early to get breakfast at Eastern Market.
Running on the Mall. Playing Ultimate or soccer or rugby on the Mall. Flying kites on the Mall. Building a snow sculpture of the Capitol, on the Mall. Worshipping in the temples of Lincoln and Roosevelt and most of all, Jefferson. Taking pretty girls for walks on the Mall and ending up on the top deck of the Kennedy Center, looking out at your beautiful lights and wanting it all so badly.
All those mornings for all those years, waking up before daylight to row up and down and up and down and up and down the Potomac. Running from the cops under Key Bridge. Drag racing up Rock Creek Park in the middle of the night, and a thousand other crazy stupid things we did together that in retrospect were idiotic but at the time, just meant being young and being broke and alive and full of ideals and most of all, happy.
And now they’ve finally taken me away from you, and made me come live in this desolate little town in the middle of nowhere where the highest form of culture is the Barber shop/Tattoo parlor combo, and the nearest movie theater is 40 miles away, and the people weigh too much and talk too slowly and I can’t complain any more about strangers in bars always wanting to ask what’s your job and what’s your politics, ’cause around here, everyone’s job is the same and people don’t understand why a polite person would want to bring up politics in the first place.
I guess I never really told you how I felt, DC. They say that you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone… only, I guess in our case, you’re still there, and I’m the one who’s gone, but anyway it works out the same way in the end. But now that I’m gone, I just wanted to tell you hey, thanks for all the memories, all the good times, all the things you taught me about myself and my country and the world.
I’ll never forget you, the city of my youth. You’re beautiful to me. You’ll always be my first love.
A best-of-Craigslist originally posted on 10/10/2006 by unknown. Posted in honor of ending (postponing?) my own love affair with dc.
Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with the white hair, with a daughter and a granddaughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.
Or that’s a lie.
Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull. Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.
There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter’s wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.
I bought the audiobook of Fragile Things last night and this morning on the metro, Gaiman reading “Strange Little Girls” brought me to tears. (Yes making me THAT lady on the metro that people avert their eyes from and shuffle-walk away).
My favorite scrap from SLG is this:
“Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop.
You will never see her again. Whenever it rains you will think of her“
If you haven’t read anything of Neil Gaiman’s, do so immediately. I was filled with such a sense of loss after I finished American Gods, knowing that one of the best things I could ever read was behind me now.
I know this has segwayed into rambling, so if you have made it this far, what opened this post is one of the snippets from “Strange Little Girls”, called “raining blood“. I’ll put up the rest sometime, and maybe the audiobook file.
