Ceci n’est pas un blog

Doing very well with my resolutions so far:

Resolve to stay in bed till noon more often and not feel guilty about it. (Useful to have the support of a partner who seems to have resolved to bring me breakfast in bed more often)

Resolve to eat fruit every day. (Sent partner back downstairs for grapefruit.)

Resolve to have no more than one basket of clean laundry at foot of bed. (Folded and put away both, for good measure).

Resolve to start a net outflow of paper from bedroom floor to recyclying bin. (But still have to look through those old mags - otherwise would have missed David Quammen’s excellent story in the April Harpers on contagious cancer in Tasmanian devils. (here, but you might need a subscription.)

Resolve not to keep partner waiting so often due to computer based activities. (oops gotta run.)

We do love being tourists in NYC after Christmas. After escaping our roots and pretending to be Jewish* with a lovely Dec. 25th** dinner of salty-spicy shrimp, yu-shiang eggplant and whole fish in black bean sauce at East Ocean City here in Boston, we jumped on the train to NYC Saturday morning. Went straight to the TKTS booth at South St. Seaport and got reduced price tix to August: Osage County. Deeply satisfying dysfunctional family drama. Our seats in the front row stage left put us about 5 feet from the actors for some of the scenes, which was intense. Scenes in the attic were pretty hard to see but it didn’t matter. 3.5 hours of melodrama flew by.

Now want to find more plays by this Tracy Letts person. It’s so hard to keep up, especially when people younger than I am run around winning Pulitzer prizes. I suppose I should get used to that.

Image: Anti-Christmas card from Apoplectic Press.

* The boyfriend not pretending exactly - while mother’s family Christian (Scientist), so not Jewish to the Jews, he is, as he reminds his daughters occasionally they are too, Jewish enough for Hitler.

** Jews at least have Chinese food and movies. We poor atheists don’t even have that tradition. I despise Christmas. 2 years ago, I tried escaping to Buddhist Bangkok, only to find that they play Western Christmas carols on the streets there. Horrifying. Someday will start successful travel agency  offering special tours to someplace with no Christmas of any kind, but where??

Victoria Thierrée Chaplin and her daughter Aurélia Thierrée are amazing. If you are in the Boston area, go see Aurelia’s Oratorio at the American Repertory theater before it closes Jan 3. Such a pleasure. Funny, beautiful, sad. Also excellent for children, older people (we had grandma in tow, she loved it), and foreign guests because no words that matter, it’s all physical theater. Boyfriend sat down in foul mood from snow, forgetting something, worry that his senile mother would ask questions loudly throughout performance, etc. Within less than a minute after the lights went off and Aurélia began, he was ecstatic.

It reminded me of how much I cherish real performances by talented people. It’s so important. And it makes me so sad that audiences at Amrep are always mostly rich old white people (like us) Who else can afford it?

And now I’ve just learned by Twitter that Harold Pinter has died. Sad.

“One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.” Harold Pinter

Image: from Amrep.org

Some folks I know just produced a nifty new book on how to get around attempts to keep you from going where you want on the Internet - you can download it for free, or buy a copy!

tbilisi_face_painting,
originally uploaded by fonchik.

Tbilisi, Georgia is a gorgeous city which was celebrating itself today. Tbilisoba, the day of the city, is going on all weekend. Everyone was out on the streets, the weather was warm autumn perfection. Tomorrow they’ll be crushing grapes, or “crashing grapes” as the English version of the Tbilisi city website announces.

Spent the day walking, sitting and talking to old friends, snacking on salad, bread, khachapuri and of course red wine. Now off to dinner. Yum.

On Sharden, a pedestrian street in Old Town, the two main attractions were face-painting (the Georgian flag was the most popular) and taking pictures of living statues draped with artificial fruit. Real fruit - persimmons, pears, beautiful tiny grapes - is everywhere I go. Every few steps there is someone selling produce on the sidewalk or from a tiny storefront. The tomatoes in the salad were the deepest red imaginable. The whole city is one big farmers’ market.

First Tomatillo!!!1111!!!!,
originally uploaded by urtica.

As part of our CSA share from Red Fire Farm, we got some tomatillos. The farm’s website had a recipe for salsa,  which I finally got around to making on Sunday. It was GREAT.

I skipped the maple syrup, roasted the tomatillos, garlic and jalapenos in a skillet. Avoided the jalapeno seeds to keep the salsa on the mild side. All 3 girls loved it, we ate the entire batch in one sitting.

What a newspaper article could look like online

Below I’ve taken some snippets from an article and in a non-profit transformative use of them, used Apture to add things I would have liked Boston.com to help me find. I’m not shilling for Apture, by the way, just testing it for fun.

A different spin
Mashing audio and video, trio plans to remix tonight’s presidential debate

By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff September 26, 2008

Tonight - if the plans stick - tens of millions of voters will be on their sofas staring at the television as Barack Obama and John McCain duke it out in the first debate of the presidential campaign. Here in Boston, several hundred will take in quite a different view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, where the three-man audiovisual performance group Sosolimited will present what they’re calling a “live remix” of the presidential debate.

Don’t be misled by the remix tag. “ReConstitution 2008″ isn’t a dance-floor version of the McCain-Obama conversation, although John Rothenberg, Eric Gunther, and Justin Manor confess with horror that some folks assume they’ll be spinning techno music during the point-counterpoint….

At Sosolimited’s headquarters - a.k.a. Small Design Firm, the Cambridge interactive design group where all three have day jobs…

Sosolimited will stage live remixes of the second and third presidential debates, as well - Oct. 7 at the Art Directors Club in New York and Oct. 15 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Asked about the threat of copyright infringement, Manor bemoans the fact that CNN is releasing the broadcast under a Creative Commons license, which allows the footage to be modified or redistributed.

“We’d love a cease-and-desist letter,” Manor says. “We’d love the free publicity.”

This is for the good of journalistkind,  honest. I’m testing the thing I saw at ONA 2008 which was the coolest looking demo ever. Apture. Despite its deceptive simplicity it actually took me a few tries to realize that I can’t edit within WP editing window, have to publish the post and then use Apture to add stuff. I’m doing this at my personal blog which my pals in Oakland host for me because my other blog is on a WP installation managed by the good geeks at Berkman who insist on doing some kind of due diligence before adding new plugins to their installation. Imagine.

It’s tempting to do a kind of mad lib of stuff it’d be fun to link to, remembering my trips to Samarkand and Petra, wondering whatever happened to Peter Sellars, and wondering which picture of my friend the supertalented Robert Mealy will turn up.

snowy newstand,
originally uploaded by dragonflyajt.

testing how flickr sends this.

Best evening entertainment in a long time - fireworks on Revere Beach this past Saturday in honor of the sand sculpture contest. I had to work a little to get Tony, Lizzie and Vicky to think it was worth going out into the heat for. It was. There were many components to the perfection:

Weather - It was a hellishly hot day, but by the time we got to the beach at 7 it was 10 degrees cooler there than in the city. Also getting there that late, we enjoyed the best parts of the beach (per me, that is) — walking on sand, smelling salt air, looking at the water, without my less-favorite parts - wearing bathing suits, getting wet, sunburn.

People - Lots of folks, but still plenty of room to spread out on our bedspread. Also, because Revere is an urban beach, accessible by mass transit and across the street from rows of apartment buildings, the crowd was as diverse in age, race, nationality and dress as any I’ve ever been in. Many families, lots of local teens, many languages (including ASL!), wonderful. For the first, somewhat sheltered, 20-some years of my life I experienced beaches exclusively as places that people drove a long way to, having packed up for a day at the beach. The only people who walked or biked to the beach were either very wealthy or on vacation or both. And nearly everyone was white until we got sunburned red. The urban beach, where ordinary working people go for an after-dinner walk, fully dressed elderly people sit on benches and chat, where homeless people and skateboarding teens and people of color all share space, was a pleasant shock the first time (Venice Beach) and still amazes me.

Food - Nostalgic smells of fried dough and other fried foods, but we had our own yummier, healthier picnic of grilled swordfish and potato salad and no standing in lines.

Culture - We looked at the sand sculptures, technique is impressive, a couple were intriguing, generally not my aesthetic, but hey it was free and Lizzie enjoyed taking pictures. She also entertained us and many of the surrounding beachgoers with her impressive hula-hooping skills, using her new dad-made hoop. 

Weather, again - Showers were predicted and for an entire hour before the fireworks started, rainclouds lurked on the horizon spiked by a couple spectacular bolts of lightning. But the rain went out to sea and we and the fireworks stayed dry.

Fireworks - When they finally started at 9, I was already so happy because of everything listed above that it was hard to improve on, but of course fireworks always make me happier. We were only a few hundred feet from the launching pad of the fireworks themselves, so I could feel the explosions of the louder ones in my ribcage and smell the sulfur and the smoke. The booms bouncing off the tall buildings across the boulevard added to the pleasure. Lying flat on the bedspread on the sand the pinwheels opened not over there in the sky but right over our heads, the way they did in my childhood when we would watch from the baseball field where they were launched on July 4th. The brighter ones, especially the red ones, illuminate people around us with a wonderful glow.

Every time I see fireworks brings back a fragment of every other time I have seen them: with my family in Connecticut, from the riverbank in Boston, in suburban fields outside Tokyo, where in summer they seemed to have them nearly every weekend somewhere, from rooftops in New York and balconies in Moscow, which is so big that they set them off in several locations around the city. But these were my first fireworks on a real beach.

The Revere show was astonishingly luscious - it went on for a deeply satisfying half hour, a lifetime in fireworks. There were at least 3 pseudo-finales before the real one, which, like all good finales, was so frenetic and excessive that we worried something had gone wrong with the timed fuses and set off all the remaining fireworks at once. Ridiculous excess is good in fireworks. And not fattening. 

Triumph over the odds, nostalgia, exceeding my own and others’ expectations – all in all, a perfect evening.

Photos by Lizzie