These two videos I found give an idea, but they don't show the part that really made that night memorable for me.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
St Vincent and what feminism might look like
Sometime in 2011 or 2012 I went to see St Vincent play in Providence at Lupo's. I didn't know *that* much of her catalogue, but I knew enough to be excited. It was a good show. She is a very slight woman with curly hair and that night she was wearing black leather shorts I remember. Actually, some kind soul has posted video from that night (looks like it was May 3, 2012):
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Taking Time
I've known that stuff for years, heard student speeches about it while teaching, and suffered through three years of dissertating, which was the hardest, most straight up depressing thing I've ever done where I was buffeted constantly with self-doubt, procrastination, and discouragement. And despite all that, all that stop-multitasking stuff didn't really feel like it was relevant to me.
Friday, January 31, 2014
Digital art
Okay, so as you know, I had some bad tech luck and I'm not really sure how I'm going to afford in on top of my swingin' bi-continental skint lifestyle, but here's something kinda good:
Sort of beautiful "digital" art from my broken electronics. It kind of inspires me to try to make other beautiful things in this manner-- only preferably not with the ones I was relying on to do more than be gorgeous.
Sort of beautiful "digital" art from my broken electronics. It kind of inspires me to try to make other beautiful things in this manner-- only preferably not with the ones I was relying on to do more than be gorgeous.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Queen Mary's notable alumni
- J. G. Ballard – Author of Empire of the Sun and Crash amongst other works
- Graham Chapman – Monty Python star
- Bruce Dickinson – Lead Singer of Iron Maiden
- Romola Garai – Actress
- Julie Gardner – Television Producer responsible for Doctor Who
- Florence Mahoney – First Gambian woman to obtain a PhD
- Bill O'Reilly – American television host, author, historian, syndicated columnist and political commentator (?!?!?!)
- David Sullivan – Pornographer and owner of the Sport and Sunday Sport newspapers
- Sarah Waters – Author of Tipping The Velvet.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
day is done
Okay, so it started before today. On Tuesday while sitting innocently on a desk, projecting powerpoint for my Performance in History class, my laptop inexplicably threw itself off the table, landed on its side, and looked fine until I picked it up, when suddenly the screen went like this:
Oops. I still have AppleCare active on this 2.5 year old computer, so I didn't really panic at the time, while the whole assembled 15 or so students sat aghast around me. "Okay, let's get back to 18th century acting!" I asked them, but still silence, and the uncomfortable feeling that everyone was staring at me with shock and pity. "I can't do anything about it right now, so let's get back to class!" Finally I got them back into it, and kept on using the computer even, the projected image looking perfectly fine.
The panic happened later when I discovered that applecare will not cover what they kept calling "accidental damage." I kept thinking that this mishap feels exactly the same as when my power jack suddenly stopped working, or the hard drive instantaneously failed, but apparently not. I took it to the Apple store (a nearly impossible appointment to get, and I was checking THREE metro London stores) only to be gaily told by Giovanni that it's only £250 to replace the screen-- a real bargain, he insists. I disagree. I tell him I will be buying a £7 cable to connect the computer to the only-slightly-faulty plasma tv my friend gave me for free. That is what I do. Now my computer set up looks like this:
I have a home desktop now. "You can't carry it around town and use it then," Giovanni oh so helpfully told me in the apple store. No kidding.
I am considering my options.
Also, I am feeling that I do not have a large reserve of disposable income right now, because it is expensive and rather complicated to run even my modest finances on two continents.
And then today. I am trying to appreciate the wide world of free and cheap entertainments. I decided I should get on my bike and try to figure out the weird wasteland of green space, Olympic Park, cafes, and highways and then go by the big Tesco for the big stock up shopping trip for Wednesday's Kansas Day party.
And then, while trying to thread my way through the industrial wasteland and endless construction of the Olympic Park, the navigation device in my gloved hand slipped and hit the ground with a simultaneous thud and crack:
Again.
Four days after my laptop met a similar fate. It's so awful it's funny. And it got funnier. First the bike shop allegedly open next to the cafe I eventually found was unattended, so I was left with my very flat tires to head on to Tesco. Where I bought too much. And piling it all on my bicycle, in the front basket and back rack with bungee cords, as I headed off to walk the overloaded and underinflated bike home, I managed to flip the back bag, leaving me in limbo with the bag suspended upside down, shedding glass bottles and eggs while it started to rain. Nice people grabbed the bike and picked up groceries while I got it flipped back upright, out of the way, and rearranged everything (bottles in the basket now! it's just the bags didn't fit that way before.) Rolling basically on the rims with every bump, I try to lift it up over the shallow steps that oxymoronically lead to the incline for wheeled things to pass under the highway. I make it up one and realise that loaded that far down, there's no way I'll make it up more. I'm not the only one: there's a muddy track up the bank next to the steps where people clearly push their bikes. Up that, I make it nearly to the top before sliding in the mud, the bike and I fall over again, now trapped in the gully. I'm beyond the pitiful bike person in the rain at this point and it's too funny. Righted once more, I begin the slow trudge home in the light rain. About a third of the way, there's a spectacular bolt and a few seconds later, the thunder. At two thirds, a gale force deluge suddenly begins, which bends me double as the hail starts to fly down the street. I detour into the lee of the DLR station for a few minutes and watch sheets of rain and hail push us all eastward toward the river. When I launch out again, I pass mothers literally shielding their toddlers with their bodies and people attempting to advance down the street behind phalanxes of vibrating umbrellas.
My suede boots are uniformly soaked through, my hat, scarf, gloves, tights, and skirt are sopped as sponges.
Here is what my cornflakes look like now:
Enough of today.
Oops. I still have AppleCare active on this 2.5 year old computer, so I didn't really panic at the time, while the whole assembled 15 or so students sat aghast around me. "Okay, let's get back to 18th century acting!" I asked them, but still silence, and the uncomfortable feeling that everyone was staring at me with shock and pity. "I can't do anything about it right now, so let's get back to class!" Finally I got them back into it, and kept on using the computer even, the projected image looking perfectly fine.
The panic happened later when I discovered that applecare will not cover what they kept calling "accidental damage." I kept thinking that this mishap feels exactly the same as when my power jack suddenly stopped working, or the hard drive instantaneously failed, but apparently not. I took it to the Apple store (a nearly impossible appointment to get, and I was checking THREE metro London stores) only to be gaily told by Giovanni that it's only £250 to replace the screen-- a real bargain, he insists. I disagree. I tell him I will be buying a £7 cable to connect the computer to the only-slightly-faulty plasma tv my friend gave me for free. That is what I do. Now my computer set up looks like this:
I have a home desktop now. "You can't carry it around town and use it then," Giovanni oh so helpfully told me in the apple store. No kidding.
I am considering my options.
Also, I am feeling that I do not have a large reserve of disposable income right now, because it is expensive and rather complicated to run even my modest finances on two continents.
And then today. I am trying to appreciate the wide world of free and cheap entertainments. I decided I should get on my bike and try to figure out the weird wasteland of green space, Olympic Park, cafes, and highways and then go by the big Tesco for the big stock up shopping trip for Wednesday's Kansas Day party.
And then, while trying to thread my way through the industrial wasteland and endless construction of the Olympic Park, the navigation device in my gloved hand slipped and hit the ground with a simultaneous thud and crack:
Again.
Four days after my laptop met a similar fate. It's so awful it's funny. And it got funnier. First the bike shop allegedly open next to the cafe I eventually found was unattended, so I was left with my very flat tires to head on to Tesco. Where I bought too much. And piling it all on my bicycle, in the front basket and back rack with bungee cords, as I headed off to walk the overloaded and underinflated bike home, I managed to flip the back bag, leaving me in limbo with the bag suspended upside down, shedding glass bottles and eggs while it started to rain. Nice people grabbed the bike and picked up groceries while I got it flipped back upright, out of the way, and rearranged everything (bottles in the basket now! it's just the bags didn't fit that way before.) Rolling basically on the rims with every bump, I try to lift it up over the shallow steps that oxymoronically lead to the incline for wheeled things to pass under the highway. I make it up one and realise that loaded that far down, there's no way I'll make it up more. I'm not the only one: there's a muddy track up the bank next to the steps where people clearly push their bikes. Up that, I make it nearly to the top before sliding in the mud, the bike and I fall over again, now trapped in the gully. I'm beyond the pitiful bike person in the rain at this point and it's too funny. Righted once more, I begin the slow trudge home in the light rain. About a third of the way, there's a spectacular bolt and a few seconds later, the thunder. At two thirds, a gale force deluge suddenly begins, which bends me double as the hail starts to fly down the street. I detour into the lee of the DLR station for a few minutes and watch sheets of rain and hail push us all eastward toward the river. When I launch out again, I pass mothers literally shielding their toddlers with their bodies and people attempting to advance down the street behind phalanxes of vibrating umbrellas.
My suede boots are uniformly soaked through, my hat, scarf, gloves, tights, and skirt are sopped as sponges.
Here is what my cornflakes look like now:
Enough of today.
Friday, January 17, 2014
The stairway is a box that
There was a cryptic note yesterday in the staircase in the ArtsOne building where the Department of Drama is (one of the great perks of working in exciting theatre departments is that strange little projects have a higher probability of popping up around one).
It said something like "A stairway is
a box where you throw your takeaway coffee cups."
It was gone a few hours later (and I even discovered why it came to be there) but today I was walking up the staircase and as I reached the top where Drama is (it sounds so funny! "DRAMA is there!" "The Department of Drama" like some surreal government office.)
as I summited the stairs, I was suddenly shocked:
It's so familiar. This is my routine. This is my job, my life. I do this all the time. These stairs are familiar stairs. This blue carpet square pattern is behind the office door, it leads to the "pigeonholes" as we call the mailboxes, and the kettle and the endless Earl Grey I drink. This is familiar, this is my life.
And I missed you. I felt keenly, carved precisely out of me all the rest of you who aren't in this verse of my life. Who I sincerely hope will come back in at the chorus. There were suddenly vacuum spaces in me the shape of friends and family, close ones and not-so-close ones, all of you who've been a part of my routine, my orbit, before.
I miss you. I thought of you in Kansas, California, Abu Dhabi, Japan, Rhode Island, New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado, Germany, Poland, Finland, China, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Turkey, Malaysia, Ohio. And more. I thought of you. I thought of you specifically and I thought of You generally and I miss you.
I thought (again, as I so often have before) of how strange it is to be strung all over the world. I miss you. I hope to see you soon.
It said something like "A stairway is
a box where you throw your takeaway coffee cups."
It was gone a few hours later (and I even discovered why it came to be there) but today I was walking up the staircase and as I reached the top where Drama is (it sounds so funny! "DRAMA is there!" "The Department of Drama" like some surreal government office.)
as I summited the stairs, I was suddenly shocked:
It's so familiar. This is my routine. This is my job, my life. I do this all the time. These stairs are familiar stairs. This blue carpet square pattern is behind the office door, it leads to the "pigeonholes" as we call the mailboxes, and the kettle and the endless Earl Grey I drink. This is familiar, this is my life.
And I missed you. I felt keenly, carved precisely out of me all the rest of you who aren't in this verse of my life. Who I sincerely hope will come back in at the chorus. There were suddenly vacuum spaces in me the shape of friends and family, close ones and not-so-close ones, all of you who've been a part of my routine, my orbit, before.
I miss you. I thought of you in Kansas, California, Abu Dhabi, Japan, Rhode Island, New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado, Germany, Poland, Finland, China, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Turkey, Malaysia, Ohio. And more. I thought of you. I thought of you specifically and I thought of You generally and I miss you.
I thought (again, as I so often have before) of how strange it is to be strung all over the world. I miss you. I hope to see you soon.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Adults
A few years ago, when I turned 32, I was struck with a realization-- in that way where when an idea hits you with physical force, it seems truer than the ones that wander through or the ones that you invite through rumination. The thing that struck me was that 32 was basically like being 16 again. I felt like I was surrounded still, maybe more than ever, with teen-like angst, with adolescent drama, even from faculty "adults" as old as my parents or aunts and uncles at least. Even if 32 could barely be considered adult these days, they should surely surely be grown ups.
And so I became convinced that there is really no such thing as this mythical state we call "adulthood." We often treat adolescence and behaviors designated as such as somehow unreal--an act that people (even teenagers) need to snap out of: "Grow up," we say. "Act like an adult."
But I decided then that adulthood is the fantasy, the imaginary state we aspire to (or wish others would ascend to) while we all remain mired in the status quo reality of outsize feelings about petty drama and bratty selfishness.. just like teenagers. Even more so than teenagers, I sometimes think, because we have so much more power and we have accrued more and more relationships that we can mess with.
Some more time has passed. Any second I'll be in my "mid 30's." Maybe I already am. And so most of my friends are getting to this age, give or take 10 years, and my parents are getting older (seriously, "parent" always seemed like a static state to me, but now they talk about retirement and minor medical procedures and getting senior discounts on things. What's happening?!). Babies are raining down all over the place. And recently a number of really tragic things seem to be happening all over my facebook feed: my dear friend Jim died tragically young a year ago, another friend is fighting stage IV cancer, another friend's wife has been diagnosed in the last two weeks with "an aggressive brain tumor in an eloquent area of her brain." Other friends are losing their parents, dealing with divorces, or with chronic and life-ending illnesses amongst family members and friends. It feels like the list of tragedies and life-shattering traumas is suddenly growing much more rapidly.
And I thought, is this what it is to be an adult? Is it to encounter tragedies and actually, unbelievably, shockingly, to come through it. Not to thrive, necessarily, but to realize that you survive, that you are at some level, okay. Is attaining adulthood not necessarily to attain some mythical level of level-headedness, rationality, and competence but instead to just be broken and broken and broken and realize that you can still get up and go on. And that when you don't go on, that's also, actually, okay.
It seems like a double edged sword to me, this ability to be okay. It could entail a certain kind of jadedness, a hardness that shuts out the hurt of others and oneself, even if only as a defense against it. I don't want to be that kind of adult. But it could also be something that seems to me about the most admirable thing I can think of, which is a sort of repaired and reparable fragility: One that acknowledges that we were built to spill, but that breaks can be repaired. Not a good as new kind of repair, but a kind of patched up, scarred perfection that acknowledges every knock, every disappointment, every tragedy and yet also acknowledges that we can go on. That imperceptibly, we end up basically okay. Is growing up realizing that actually, mostly, basically, it's going to be okay?
And so I became convinced that there is really no such thing as this mythical state we call "adulthood." We often treat adolescence and behaviors designated as such as somehow unreal--an act that people (even teenagers) need to snap out of: "Grow up," we say. "Act like an adult."
But I decided then that adulthood is the fantasy, the imaginary state we aspire to (or wish others would ascend to) while we all remain mired in the status quo reality of outsize feelings about petty drama and bratty selfishness.. just like teenagers. Even more so than teenagers, I sometimes think, because we have so much more power and we have accrued more and more relationships that we can mess with.
Some more time has passed. Any second I'll be in my "mid 30's." Maybe I already am. And so most of my friends are getting to this age, give or take 10 years, and my parents are getting older (seriously, "parent" always seemed like a static state to me, but now they talk about retirement and minor medical procedures and getting senior discounts on things. What's happening?!). Babies are raining down all over the place. And recently a number of really tragic things seem to be happening all over my facebook feed: my dear friend Jim died tragically young a year ago, another friend is fighting stage IV cancer, another friend's wife has been diagnosed in the last two weeks with "an aggressive brain tumor in an eloquent area of her brain." Other friends are losing their parents, dealing with divorces, or with chronic and life-ending illnesses amongst family members and friends. It feels like the list of tragedies and life-shattering traumas is suddenly growing much more rapidly.
And I thought, is this what it is to be an adult? Is it to encounter tragedies and actually, unbelievably, shockingly, to come through it. Not to thrive, necessarily, but to realize that you survive, that you are at some level, okay. Is attaining adulthood not necessarily to attain some mythical level of level-headedness, rationality, and competence but instead to just be broken and broken and broken and realize that you can still get up and go on. And that when you don't go on, that's also, actually, okay.
It seems like a double edged sword to me, this ability to be okay. It could entail a certain kind of jadedness, a hardness that shuts out the hurt of others and oneself, even if only as a defense against it. I don't want to be that kind of adult. But it could also be something that seems to me about the most admirable thing I can think of, which is a sort of repaired and reparable fragility: One that acknowledges that we were built to spill, but that breaks can be repaired. Not a good as new kind of repair, but a kind of patched up, scarred perfection that acknowledges every knock, every disappointment, every tragedy and yet also acknowledges that we can go on. That imperceptibly, we end up basically okay. Is growing up realizing that actually, mostly, basically, it's going to be okay?
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