chaos is love, and they say love is blind

ask not where confusion lies
earlier this week, pitchfork reviewed this track [read here] by spencer krug [aka sunset rubdown - his solo project] of wolf parade. "winged/wicked things" is not included on the recent sunset rubdown full-length shut up i am dreaming, but it's a total gem. it's a radion session courtsey of daytrotter. perhaps i've fallen victim to the pitchfork effect, but i don't think so! like "i'll believe in anything" off the recent wolf parade album, this song is on constant, heart-tugging repeat. there might be something detrimental even about so many repetitions of a song like this. eh, whatever. TRUST me on this one.

sunset rubdown ----->> winged/wicked things
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
other music-y-ness:

bound stems playing mac's in lansing with the plastic constellations on sunday. have you heard? no? hear here:

--->>>>>crimes and follies
--->>>>>wake up, ma and pa are gone
--->>>>>my kingdom for a trundle bed

elated

with seam and three mile pilot announced today for the touch & go 25th anniversary block party september 8-10 at the hideout in chicago, i can't stop my face from contorting. thumbing through mental reactions, visible facially. glee, worry, fear, hope, excitement. while s and k were promising the gods of chicago and the gods of music [reunited music, that is] AND the gods of chicago music [entirely separate gods] their descent on the town upon announcement of scratch acid, my feet stood firmly planted in detroit soil. fuck that! let's take a hot air balloon to fucking chicago in early september. you think that's possible?

this is where you read all about it ------------> ohhhhh, touch & go

true words: "new york city is the best place on earth."

really, i think it is. okay, let me put an asterisk on that. "new york city is the best place on earth."* the parks, dogs, people-watching, outdoor markets, the accessibility, the everything. we walked so much on saturday [in black roxy slip-ons, not good] that my calves/ankles are still in pain. we ate much amazing food, especially desserts of course [as my sister is in school for baking and pasty arts]. we even went to a fancy dessert bar called room 4 dessert. big yums [except for the BEER sorbet or whatever. yep. ugh.]. another thing about dessert is that i've now had cupcakes from billy's bakery, magnolia and sweet sugar sunshine, and truthfully, none of them are really THAT good. they ARE cute though, i'll give them that. good icing on all of them, too. magnolia's cake part of the cupcake is probably the best. i vote for sweet sugar sunshine probably. probably. i think i'm weighing location too. blah. we saw susan sarandon at abc carpet and home yesterday. it was basically my first celebrity spotting EVER. i got pretty excited about it!

terry's plane is a couple hours late. i have a visible frown on my face. whaaaaaaaaa. good thing i looked, right? who ever looks at that stuff? i guess it's the international thing, no cell phone, etc. i'm actually going to park at the airport. it's a nice thing to do sometimes.


*when the weather is nice.

"distance has a way of making love understandable"

HPV CARWASHso i'm here at the cia, and it's like bizarroworld or something. well, at least yesterday was kind strange. or funny, or something. i took the plane to la guardia, then the bus to the train station, then the commuter train north to poughkeepsie, ny, then a cab to the cia in hyde park. big day of transportation. i met up with steph's roommate and went in the dorm while steph was still in class. hungry, i made my way over to the "pub" in the rec center about a half a mile away until my walk was cut short by ambulances, fire trucks, police cars and dozens of people standing around gawking. on the road through campus there is a very small man-made lake, which is much more like a pond, and the road runs right along it, separated from it by only a 2-ft. wooden guardrail and about a 30-ft. drop into the water. sometime around 4:30 pm a red camaro, driven by a drunk cia stduent and filled with three other drunk ones, swerved off the road, smashed through the wooden guardrail, plummetted into the water and submerged completely. nuts! i guess everyone here is just drunk all the time, ha. then, on my way back from the "pub" [which looks more like a pub from the set of the old degrassi junior high], there were some students having a car wash in a parking lot. they had a sign and had made t-shirts that read "HPV CAR WASH." alright. bizarroworld.

UMAMI, GOOD MOUTHFEELafter class she met me at a demonstration from a couple who had compiled a cookbook on umami, "the fifth taste." umami is considered to be a taste sensation quite like salt, sweet, sour and bitter and has something to do glutamates in food. some very umami foods are parmesan cheese, vine-ripened tomatoes, mushrooms, asparagus, asian fish sauce, soy sauce, ketchup. [note: i think umami explains why i want to eat thai food every day.] you can read more about it here ---> more on UMAMI. in the night, i taught steph how to crochet a bit, we saw a mouse, i slept in the bed, and she slept on the floor. i worried about the mouse nibbling on her face in the night, but luckily she awoke, face fully intact.

PICKLED EGGS AND DEVIL FISHthis morning she gave me a tour of the kitchens and storage room/refrigerators, which was totally cool because you could see all the way-fresh food that supplies the kitchen classrooms. i snuck a plate of food at lunch. i had the salad nicoise, and it was delicious. the tuna was seared on the outside and raw [yummy] on the inside. the egg was pickled, and the red onions were marinated. i ate the tuna in spite of my allergy or whatever to it, and i must admit i don't feel amazing now, even two hours later. i wish the allergy wasn't an allergy but more of a tolerance issue, but i'm quite sure that's not the case. meh. i can't imagine being able to eat gourmet meals [even way better than salad nicoise, of course] every day. i'm looking forward to dinner where there are even more options from multiple kitchens like middle eastern, asian, etc.

every occasion of a one billion day funeral.

today i'm going to new york to visit my sister at the culinary institute of america. !!!

we're going to new york city for saturday and sunday, staying in a hotel in chelsea that's very homosexual-friendly. under "amenities" on their website it says: "Guests are always attracted to lounge on the Hotel's rooftop. Clothing is optional." that statement never fails to make me laugh out loud. we're going to have bbq from big apple bbq. i want pommes frites. and dosas. big-time. a dosa with cheese and asparagus. mmmmmmM. we're going to some bakeries too, naturally. i'm going to eat lots of cupcakes. i'm going to blow up like violet beauregarde.

home sunday night. my boy comes home from germany monday. i can barely wait.

listen to the band of horses hit. it will surely bring you down.

band of horses -----------> funeral

if you're not for ART, then you're for EVIL

if you read my blog with any frequency, you probably hate me by now because i have been updating so infrequently. i think it's perhaps too late to think about redeeming myself. i apologize. big-time. i'm fed up with the writing side of myself too, you're not alone.

so i have this thing about boycotting stores, corporations, labels, whatever, etc. i don't boycott much though. i don't buy dasani [coke] water because it has sodium in it; so it's like the oxymoron of hydration. but now coke owns odwalla, and odwalla, frankly, is pretty good [and so are odwalla bars i found out yesterday], so i don't really hate odwalla. or coke. i actually prefer coke over pepsi when feel like drinking cola. and it pairs up perfectly with whiskey, so you really couldn't ask for much more from a beverage, especially one that's brown. so no dasani, dasani bad. dasani isn't really a brand even, it's just some concoction we should call coke water. dasani's just a name. coke is the brand. the coporation. the mongul. mongul? the monster.

so. the only real, true, steadfast boycott i've sustained is against diesel. five or so years ago diesel had an ad campaign that went like "________ is now sponsored by diesel." the "_________" got filled in with various nouns, so the ads ended up having these bright, colorful pictures of people wearing diesel clothes and smiling with the slogan "freedom is now sponsored by diesel." or, "happiness is now sponsored by diesel." "pleasure is now sponsored by diesel." these slogans made me ranging wildbeast mad. wildebeest mad. like rabid. totally, totally rabid. [yes, i do admit i was reading adbusters religiously at the time, too.] i don't think i even really need to elucidate how terrible and ridiculous and reprehensible it is for a brand of clothing to act like it can/will/should facilitate capital-"X" [ok, kinda--see plato's theory of forms] aspects of the human experience like Happiness, Freedom, &tc. but! clothes and consumerism and all that shit does bring people lots of happiness [myself certainly not excluded], so who am i to criticize? PLUS, it's marketing. marketing doing EXACTLY what it's meant to do. look -- it's YEARS later, and i gave up 15 minutes of my life and about 100 words just to rant about it on my fucking BLOG. the bottom line is i never have bought diesel anything, and i never will. i'm not quite the steadfast wildebeest [how much do you love that that word is spelled with two e's?] i was in my younger days, but now it's become a habit of mine to not consider diesel as a viable option for clothing myself. EVER.

so i lied. big-time. i've never been to wal-mart ever ever in my life, and the last several years have been out of boycott and not out of happenstance. wal-mart blows, and if you haven't realized this or why wal-mart blows by now, here is some reading ---> here. so i've never stepped into a wal-mart, ever, and i swore to never do so BUT! but...there's a problem. about a month or so ago i started knitting cotton waRshcloths from the new mason-dixon knitting book [check out the fantastic knit-a-long blog ---> here], and the cotton yarn they use [peaches and creme, if anyone's actually paying atttention] is ONLY available in stores around here at...wal-mart. [i just found that someone wrote this on the that blog: "Many folks seem to find Peaches at Wal-Mart, but I don't shop there on principle."] yep. ok. sure, there are other cotton yarns, and i have been using them. i have! it's just that...i know that this yarn at wal-mart is better, i've seen it written about. and i know for SURE that there are better colors and more selection than the yarn i've been working with. but! to step into wal-mart?! well, not only step in the store, but actually PURCHASE [read: support EVIL] from wal-mart? this is a difficult quandary. so it is washcloths or wal-mart? ART or EVIL? am i willing to forgoe my principles for the sake of art [yes, this knitting is ART]? am i lame if i do? how lame? who's counting? just me? isn't there an all-knowing boycott higher power up in the sky keeping tabs on who is supporting what corporations and who is voraciously NOT?

are you a train chaser?

georgie james is the new jam. it's the pairing of the drummer from q and not u and sologirl laura burhenn. kinda folky, kinda campy, kinda 70s lite FM, big harmonies, big-time infectious. quite fitting for summer. they're spread all over july, touring it up with camera obscura. these two tracks are from their demos, and they'll be recording at the end of june with brendan canty. woo. check them out on myspace, which serves as their comprehensive corner of the web at the moment.

jams:
---------------------->need your needs
---------------------->long week

movie-related, i watched the station agent last night, and it was really great. you should watch it. it's one of the least slow and boring of the great slow and boring movies, which comprise my favorite hack-genre.

you got used to the upswing, the feeling of a winning streak

dear dov,

thank you for designing the best tank top ever. you win.

love in peacetime and usual/unusual wartimes,
margaret