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You know how certain songs or albums or songs of certain artists will make you think of certain things? I just downloaded a few of my favorite Daniel Powter songs (Bad Day, Free Loop, Love You Lately, Song 6, Next Plane Home), and listening to them is all nostalgia. All from LA, and living in LA – the good stuff, not the trafficky stuff. Sometimes the trafficky stuff. Driving down PCH to 3rd Ave to walk around and people-watch. Going to the Grove for a free Jewel concert. Walking around at night listening to all the street musicians. All the good ones (cuz you have to get permits and audition if you want to play at the Promenade). Concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. Getting Wetzel’s Pretzel dog and trying to figure out how to get ketchup and mustard on it without making a mess on yourself.

It’s taken me way to long to write this blog, and now I can’t remember why I wrote it. Oh well, here it is anyway.

I went to see the Best Narrative Feature winner at the Tribeca Film Festival today – About Elly. It’s an Iranian(!) film about, well, about a family dealing with a situation in which they find themselves. Completely in Farsi (I think), with a fairly large cast of characters that makes it confusing in the beginning a bit. We stood outside in the rain for the better part of a hour for rush tickets. SO WORTH IT. Don’t want to spoil it, but I can definitely say it’s one of the best films I’ve seen in a while. Good films make you feel, make you relate to the characters, make you put yourself in their shoes. The movie itself was pretty long – a little over two hours, I think. It didn’t feel that way at all.

Hope it gets distributed widely in the US (though that will probably not happen, for reasons I won’t put here, since my bed is calling my name – perhaps it will end up on What Good Is My Brain?) so I can get the DVD. 🙂 Ok, you KNOW it’s a good film if I’m looking forward to the DVD even before the film is released in theatres.

…I’m now contributing to a blog called What Good Is My Brain…something Al and I came up with this afternoon when we were rather deliriously high on elitism/anti-elitism/irony and academia.

There’s nothing substantial on it yet, but hopefully will have substance soon.

In other news, I just got the A Mighty Wind album. Joy and happiness! Did you know they discontinued it? I had to get it used!

Loco Man…

How many episodes of 24 are left? It’s getting so ridiculous that I actually want it to end.

Why do all these shows (24, Lost, BSG) take themselves so seriously? We need more shows like Firefly.

Why are my friends so good to me? (ok that one was sappy, but I’m just about to dig into this awesome banana bread/chocolate cupcake/cookie sandwich dessert thingy that Tanya made and brought me last night, when we went to see the opening night of “Desire Under the Elms” because Ray gave us comp tickets)

I need someone to sublet my apartment. My nice, very CLEAN apartment.

If NYU had a metal shop like Dartmouth does, I’d be in trouble. I’d be in there every weekend working on something. Maybe I should take up something where I work with my hands building and making stuff. I seem to really enjoy that. Not just building words (or, in most cases, making them up).

I have a one-way ticket to Paris in June and none other in my airline tickets queue.

I’m hungry. Grace, where ARE you?

I think Juliana’s inspired me to make a post about food. She just started a blog about finding fine dining during the recession. Check it out here.

My blog will be very different. I’m going to write about food that has been particularly memorable, that I’ve had only once, and that I don’t think you can get anywhere else. Plus, I’m not quite as eloquent as many of my foodie friends about food… I mean, seriously, I think they have a love affair with it. And I’m sure many of them wouldn’t disagree with that statement.

I think I’m going backward in time here…

The first on the list is the BBQ Pulled Soy Chicken Sandwich at the Spotted Dog in Carrboro, NC. The sandwich comes on toasted buns, with a side of crinkled chips. The toasted buns are just right, and the BBQ inside is soft and warm and brings happiness to your palate. At least, it did to mine. But here’s the thing – I loved that meal so much that after I got back from NC, I dreamt I had gone back, and ordered the BBQ Sandwich…and was just about to take a huge bite of it when I WOKE UP. If anything, I will go back to NC soon just for that.

Napa Valley has one huge, well-known restaurant called Farm. Attached is a little cafe, managed by the same company (I think) called Boonfly Cafe. I was at Boonfly cafe a couple years ago on my way down from Sacramento en route to San Francisco when I met up with Lauren there, took some pictures, walked around (I think that was the first time I talked to Alexei too – albeit, it was on thep hone), and had a really nice breakfast. This year, I was there again, but Sanmei had taken up a managerial position at Farm, so she joined us at Boonfly for breakfast again. I can’t remember what I got for the actual meal, but per her urging, we ordered mini donuts. These mini donuts are AMAZING. They’re basically small pieces of heavily dense dough, FRIED, and sprinkled with powdered sugar. So so amazing. And I think we dipped them in chocolate or something. That part I can’t remember well. I could eat those for a meal. Really really.

The third food item I will talk about is the Mahi Mahi sandwich at Duke’s in Malibu. I was there a couple years ago with Liz – we sat in the back, on the barefoot patio. Because it’s right next to the water, during high tide, the patio gets wet. I can’t remember the sandwich itself at all, other than it was really good. But, as we ate, Anne Hathaway walked in with her entourage and sat at the table next to us. She’s beautiful in person. Lucky Adam. Yes, OUR Adam Shulman (from Twixter) is the Adam Shulman currenty dating Anne Hathaway. I didn’t believe it and thought it was another Adam Shulman until I saw his picture with Anne Hathaway in some trashy tabloid magazine…

The last food experience I’ll talk about tonight happened in Guangxi in 2001. We were at a banquet (the nth one of a medical mission trip I went on). By that time, we were pretty afraid of banquets and were begging for them to just give us rice and veggies. I think this meal was pretty tame compared to some of the other ones we had. There are two things I remember most about it. One was the sweet potato cakes – patties made out of dough and sweet potato, and lightly fried. The second was the rice wine. Sweet rice wine – you could drink a gallon of it and not feel a thing. And then it hit you like a truck about 20 minutes later. But it was delicious. I wanted to take some of the sweet potato cakes to go, but was warned that that there were monkeys where we were going, and they would find and steal my sweet potato cakes.

Ok, time to do some actual serious writing…

I’ve been adopted by Tanya’s parents for Easter weekend. Had a spectacular 6-hour dinner tonight with lots of delicious Arabic food, and smoked hookah for the first time. I’m still not sure of the purpose of smoking hookah…other than a social thing, and exchanging saliva, but it was fun, and tasted good. And the desserts….

Then, a 24 mini-marathon. Mini because we only got through two episodes, and I was only able to make it through the second one because I fell asleep during the first one (I had already seen it before). So exhausted. I need more sleep. And, I was so distracted and tired during the second episode that apparently something rather pivotal happened at the end of it, but I had to ask Ryan about it. Now we’re watching something about breeding rabbits. And why they breed so fast… Oh, and apparently they increase in the Fibonacci sequence. What?

There’s this barn/ranch near Tanya’s house, where they make homemade ice cream. We stopped by after picking Trina up from the dog groomers. Mmmm maple walnut ice cream… It’s been an ice-cream-ish couple days. Ray took me to Central Park yesterday, bought me strawberry shortcake ice cream, showed me the Enchanted fountain (where they shot the huge dance sequence), and got me back to the subway in time for me to run to class.

I’m so going to pass out. There’s a geocache half a mile away…I think we’re going to find it tomorrow. And…I’m starting to get a little hungry again.

I’m not 100% sure WHY I’m blogging this, but I suppose it feels weird to have to go to bed this early, and I wanted to write SOMETHING. These are tiny, random observations that happened a couple days ago.

The day in question is Tuesday. The first setting of the first odd/notable-enough-to-blog-about event was at the Richard Stallman talk in the early evening. Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation (to protect YOUR freedom!) and the GNU OS. He also wrote the GPL (General Public License) to go along with the GNU – a bit of copyleft, or a “fuck you” to the idea of copyright. Basically a copyright license saying that you can’t distribute GNU without also providing the source code for people to modify, copy, and distribute as they please, or else you’re in copyright violation.

Because Stallman is such a legend, the event was packed. I arrived early enough to get a seat, and listened with rapt attention as Stallman basically gave an apt summary to, conveniently, the book we were assigned this week – Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture”. About how copyright extension is bad and puts restrictions and barriers to creativity, etc. I won’t go into it – there’s plenty of literature out there about the idea of free software, democracy, free culture, and copyright laws. Halfway through the talk, however, I noticed this guy two seats away from me – rather large, with facial hair, glasses, your stereotypical computer geek (thank you, mass media). Anyway, he had his right index finger up his nose…and was picking it, and picking it, and picking it…. and then, to my morbid fascination, horror, and inappropriate amusement, removed the finger from his nose, and transferred it to his mouth! And then proceeded to do it repeatedly for the next 10 minutes or so. *sigh* I suppose when you gotta clear your nose, you gotta clear your nose, and there’s no better way to get rid of it than ingesting what came from inside you anyway when there’s nothing else to wipe it on…?

Stallman auctioned off a stuffed gnu at the end of his talk for $100. Then I had to run.

Incident the Second happened after a very entertaining discussion at Radio City Music Hall moderated by Anderson Cooper, featuring Ariana Huffington, Mike Huckabee, and DL Hughley (I got free tickets – and went with Elsa – saw Grace and Doug there). The discussion itself was basically evaluating how Obama is doing 70 days into his presidency with various issues (just check the link). Lively, and very funny. Mike Huckabee actually has some very good points. In any case, after the show, as we were all pouring out, Grace, Elsa, Doug, Doug’s friends, and I were standing on the sidewalk deciding where to go when I suddenly lost my balance and almost fell. Turns out, this very large woman with a cane (what’s with this day and large people?!) apparently thought we were taking too much space (space that she apparently needed) and literally bowled us down. I almost got knocked off my feet. Come on, now, I don’t take up THAT much space, do I?! So rude. Welcome to New York. I wanted to follow her and give her the evil eye, but didn’t think it would be worth it.

The third incident left me smiling. Late at night, I was sitting in my apartment reading or watching Angel or whatever, when I hear the doorbell ring. No one rings my doorbell. So, being the naive new New Yorker I am, I remove the bolt from my door and open it to a young man and his father (thank god they weren’t serial ax murderers or psychotic weirdos or anything). They explained their situation – they had forgotten their keys, and were knocking on all the “G” apartments in the building. They needed to get to their apartment (on the 4th floor – I’m on the 2nd) via the fire escape! I invited him (his name is Ryan) in, showed him my new painting, accepted his compliment on my “cute apartment”, and opened the window while he climbed out (his dad took the stairs) onto the very rusty and very dubious fire escape. Such a random incident though.

Don’t know why this old story popped into my head today in the shower…

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized Everybody wouldn’t do it. So Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

In my grad program, the huge themes we deal with are structures of power and epistemology (ie: how we get information, and how we internalize that information subconsciously). Ok, at least, that’s what I’M interested in. One of the books we read was Howard Becker‘s Art Worlds, which discusses conventions that we use, usually without thinking about it, to create art. For instance, when I write a song, I use a 12-tone scale, 4/4 or 3/4 time usually (or some derivative of), and a guitar. All of which follow certain conventions that have been set through the years – the guitar is of a certain proportion and audio range, made up of certain types of woods and shapes, with standards for the length and width of the string, the neck, the body, etc etc. And, the guitar plays a 12-tone scale. Not a 4-tone or a 33-tone – both of which would probably require the invention of new instruments.

It just makes me wonder, the songs I write, the songs I like, the songs that inspire me – am I just a copycat? Is there anything truly original in what I do, or am I just a faded carbon copy of the thoughts, feelings, words, and sounds of those who came before me? Could I even break these conventions if I wanted? The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is, I would get little to no distribution, because people are familiar with conventions, and that is what they want. The longest answer would be to look at how we are encoded (in the Stuart Hall-ian sense) with certain signals that make us feel certain ways, that evoke the feeling of like or dislike (think of those HSBC ads that are all incredibly post-modern), and why these conventions are in place, and what art means, and who has the power in the art world, and then how these power structures play a huge role in how we view society and how we internalize certain codes we receive from visual arts, TV, movies, journalism, the Internet, etc.

Why do I write the songs I do in the way I do? Because it’s what I like, it’s what speaks to me. Why do I like it, and why does it speak to me? Because it’s all been DONE BEFORE. Because I play into these conventions that have been embedded into our art worlds and internalized in our subconscious as the “right” way to do things, the “likeable” way to write music. Not all of us can be Harry Partch.

My brain sometimes feels like it’s about to explode. I’m gonna go quell it with some music.

At Emily’s watching an SVU marathon. But I think the marathon is over. We both want to watch more. What the heck is this NCIS thing?!

I’m hungry.