thoughts on "astral weeks"

A moment stands out amongst my memories: I was driving down windy Mulholland Drive on an early June afternoon. I was in the home stretch of my senior year of high school; classes were already over, exams were winding down. For the majority of my life, my weekdays were accounted for, but suddenly, for the first time, I had no obligatory place to be. I maneuvered the curves of the road with ease and pleasure, probably driving too fast, with the music too loud, and the windows down, too. I pulled over at one of the many lookouts over the hills, this one facing North over the San Fernando Valley. I got out of my car--left the engine running and the music blaring, and watched the houses sloping down the hillside below. In a few days I would be graduating high school, and days after that I would be leaving home on a daredevil 2-month trip across Europe with an adventurous friend. Everything was ending (or so it seemed.) And, better yet, something was beginning. I stood atop the city and I precisely remember asking myself whether my life was about to begin. I stood there, weightless, the wind from both sides of the hills pushing and passing through me, and I still couldn't fathom that my life had begun long before I knew it. How sweet I was: so full of feeling and so stubbornly blind to it. Maybe not so sweet. Naive, yes, but "sweet"--I don't think so. At this momentous peak in my life, not only did I find myself perched above the city I grew up in, but from the open doors of my car I could hear the inspired incantations of Van Morrison on "Astral Weeks". How charmingly felicitous.


words from people who say it better than i could:

+_+_+_+__+_+_+_+_
&^(*&)(*&)(**()
@#$#$@#@
!!!!!!!!

the kind of things i like

When I Grow Up from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

ebay baby

so, i've managed to sell 75% of my ebay materials already, so i'm slowly adding more.

check this


and that

van morrison & f. garcia lorca

photo from flickr

If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again

- Van Morrison

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.

- Federico Garcia Lorca

*found in lester bangs' article on the seminal album, astral weeks

wale - chillin'

melissa scherrer

photo by melissa scherrer
via tornados in brooklyn

my love for you is like

silly funny videos

i love the internet. mainly because younger kids in the generation below me who have grown up with technology, are constantly experimenting with computers and their devices, primarily built-in video cameras. even better, these videos always end up surfacing on funny websites. i am replaying this video over and over again, and enjoying every minute of it.

(found on billy's site)

all day to ebay

now selling some items on ebay. trying to, at least.

check them out, woo!

and maybe there's more to come...

electric feathers

an exciting purchase:




by electric feathers. can't wait to wear it.

rodarte

kitties on kitties

via yellowadina

laughing out loud

edelweiss

photo from flickr

just taught myself to play "edelweiss" on the guitar.

here is a beautiful version by the honey trees.

circling 6's

scary.

remix in the morning

nothing wrong with a little diplo remix of jt's my love to get your heart pumping in the morning.

i'm ready for bathing suits

♥♥♥♥♥doughnuts♥♥♥♥♥

if i could eat one kind of food excessively and never see the consequences, doughnuts would win. i love doughnuts with all my heart. and, look: valentine's doughtnuts (with rose petals!)

after doughnuts would come pasta, bacon, whipped cream. i have to stop listing now, i've caught myself salivating.

wolford dress

i finally found the perfect dress today in the window of the wolford shop. and it was only like, $1300 or so.

that's what happens when you browse for dresses during work on the upper east side.

birthday gifting

i put together a crafty gift box yesterday for my best friend's president's day birthday. included were goodies from bedford cheese--a hunk of manchego and another of humboldt fog (that's cool for goat cheese), homemade wild blueberry jam from sidehill farm, rosemary crackers, and a little dollop of nutella. i also got a nifty cowgirl card from catbird, a pair of ranunculas from sprout, and there's a miranda july book tucked away at the bottom called learning to love you more, found at spoonbill & sugartown.

my idea for the box came from a recent trip to marlow & daughters, where they had put together "valentine's day packs" on slabs of cardboard that included an assortment of items from their shop that would provide for a nice, simple dinner for two.

what i ended up buying there looked like this (after i marinated it):



i mistakenly bought 1 1/5 pounds of faux rib-eye, as we called it, for 2 people. half of it is now resting gloriously in my freezer. but more on that later.

clo-burg

happy birthday, mija... te amo.

a song to wake up to

photo by dan boardman

what a beautiful song to wake up to: robin of the fleet foxes covering the old folk song false night on the road.

van gogh

"I know nothing with certainty but the sight of the stars makes me dream."

- van gogh

still dreaming this morning

i'm dreaming of this photo found on miss manonneke this morning.

terrariums for sale!

terrariums are my new found love. and, according to an apple a day, they are now for sale at a little shop by me on bedford ave. ahhhhhh!! gimme some money!!

la dolce video

Mr. Kim, proprietor of the Kim's Video chain

Found this article on the cover of the "City" section yesterday. It expands on the end of Kim's Video and explains why Mr. Kim's unique collection of 50,000 films is being transferred to a small town in Sicily.

If you've ever lived in the East Village or have found yourself in love with hard-to-find films, foreign or old, this article is a sweet, sad good-bye to hours spent roaming around Kim's.

saturday blossoms

new cacti/flowers that i purchased this morning at nearby sprout home.





i got these special tulips at the usq greenmarket last saturday and they've blissfully lasted all week.

extreme frugality

back when the economic meltdown first hit in october, i felt a bit removed from all the chaos. i read the paper and asked my dad questions, so that i could keep abreast of all that was happening, but i didn't go into crisis mode. the gravity of the situation didn't actually hit me until this past january, where one week without work sent me spiraling into a panic attack. i began applying for unemployment benefits, food stamps, whatever government support i was eligible for and never cared to think about before. in the past month, i've watched my savings reach its ultimate low, and in the past week, i find myself supplementing my home-cooked meals with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because i'm too thrifty to go to the ridiculously expensive market that's nearest to me. it doesn't seem like its getting better, either. last night, i found out that one of my friends managed to squeak by the massive lay-offs that occurred at her place of employment last week, and another friend's dad and sister had both been laid off. i'm rambling on about this because i just read w. hodding carter's new article on gourmet.com: extreme frugality:

A few months back, just before Iceland alerted the world to our global economic woes, I took a hard look at my Social Security Statement—that unflinching “newsletter” stating not only your expected Social Security pay-out but also your yearly income since that very first tax return. In the past, I’d always loved S.S.S.D. (Social Security Statement Day) because I would immediately glance back to 1996, my earning heyday where I raked in a massive $76,000, and let myself believe I was making that much every year. Well, for some uncontrollable reason, this time I happened to look at my income for the ten or so years since then, and I immediately spit out my $3.75 Odwalla Mango Mama. And not because it had suddenly turned sour. I ran to the study, knocking one of my four kids out of the way en route, and ripped open my wife Lisa’s statement. “Oh, my God!” I screamed. “She’s right!”

For years, Lisa had been telling me we were living beyond our means. “Please, please, Hodding, don’t buy that hand-carved black walnut countertop!” she’d implore. In fact, once she even kicked me out of the house for nine months in hopes that I’d wake up. But like that alcoholic who downs yet another Two-Buck-Chuck, I wasn’t ready. I knew that my next book was going to be an international bestseller and I felt entitled to live as did my father (although he was 25 years older than I) and all those successful, happy people in ads and on TV. Here I was, though, finally seeing the raw truth. Our average combined income—drum roll, please—for the past decade had been … $41,000. Thanks to those heady days of refinancing, deft shuffling of credit-card debt, deceased grandparents, and a lucrative house sale, however, we had lived, year after year, as if we were making $120,000. Like 70 percent of our fellow Americans, we were living off our VISA cards with no means of paying them off any time soon. As a result, we had $75,000 in credit-card debt and owed $245,000 on a $289,000 house. What had I been thinking?

Never mind. I’ll sort out the “why” on my therapist’s couch. Right now, it’s time to do the unthinkable. It’s time for us to be more like our grandparents and less like our neighbors. (Ninety percent of us buy something we don’t need every month, and Americans in all walks of life—except the very rich—carry $961 billion of credit-card debt at any given moment, paying $1.22 for every $1 they spend.) For the first time ever, my family is going to do the unthinkable. We’re going to live within our means. No matter what we actually make, we’re only going to spend $41,000 for the entire year. In other words, after paying our mortgage, taxes, insurance, and the $500 to service our credit-card debt, our family of six is going to live on $550 a month.

How hard can that be? It’s 150 percent above the federal poverty level for a six-person family. Yet, for the last few months we’ve been getting ourselves prepared. Although we live in coastal Maine, we turned off our oil furnace and installed an unused wood stove of my dad’s. Lisa, an attorney, bartered legal work for firewood. We bought 25-day-old chicks so we can have free eggs and our four children can sell the eggs for spending money—after paying us back for the chickens’ food. We’ve stopped eating out—period. And we’ve started shopping at a liquidation grocery store and making many items we used to buy. This is not going to be a quiet ride made up of baby steps toward a more thrifty life, but instead a take-no-prisoners battle loaded with measures of extreme frugality that will change our lives forever.

So, follow along and see how we do it. Take part in our ups and downs and maybe learn a thing or two along the way—like never, ever turn off the upstairs heat off before checking to see if you might have an uninsulated six-foot section of copper pipe exposed to below-freezing conditions.

Luckily, I have a great manual on how to sweat a pipe.

winter sadness mix

i don't remember where i found the link to download this winter sadness mix, but i am loving it! be warned: if you're not sad already, this mix is sure to take you there. not kidding, had to hold back tears during the first song.

tracklist:

Bill Withers - Hope She’ll Be Happier
The Ordells - Sippin’ a Cup of Coffee
William Bell - Everybody Loves A Winner
Sam Cooke - Trouble Blues
Sleepy Brown - Curse On You
Demarco - Fallen Soldier (DJ Eleven remix)
Ann Peebles - Trouble Heartaches & Sadness
Ying Yang Twins - Wind
The Notorious BIG - Suicidal Thoughts
Tom Jones - Motherless Child
The Clash - Straight To Hell
Lost Boyz - Renee
Marvin Gaye - I Wish It Would Rain
Mayer Hawthorne - Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out
J-Boogie’s Dubtronic Science feat. Zumbi - For Your Love
Bobby Womack - Nobody Wants You When You’re Down And Out (Nobody’s Safe Chump)
Bill Withers - Better Off Dead
The Smiths - Death Of A Disco Dancer
Kanye West - Coldest Winter
Al Green - Strong As Death (Sweet As Love)
Isley Brothers - Ain’t I Been Good to You Pt. 2
UGK - One Day

...and a happy little flower in the summertime.

if i could, i would huff, and i would puff, and i would blow this winter away.

i am an icy queen in the winter...

pouts all around.

craigslist

sometimes, if i'm momentarily out of reading material, i look to craigslist. that site is ridden with gems.

God's Gift to Songwriting Needs a Manager

I am Jimmy Lloyd. I am the greatest songwriter of my generation. I wrote the song and am the brains behind "Cop Bar" to begin with. (Google it). I am multi-faceted and know things about the human condition others can only dream about.

Go to to jimmylloyd.com and listen to the songs there to hear for yourself. I am seeking a manager who can take me to where I need and deserve to be. If you are a hater, wannabe, or pissed off blogger, don't respond to this post cause no one cares. But if you are a serious promoter or manager, get in touch with me and let's see what you can do.

I warn you now, I am mobbed up, lawyered up and thug deep so if you are thinking about taking this post and saying something negative about it on your blog that only you and your social networking, video-game playing, online porn dwelling friends look at... don't do it. This is a serious inquiry and there may be reprecussions.

Go to jimmylloyd.com or email jimmylloyd.music@gmail.com for more info.

------

Casting for Photo Shoot

Seeking Female of Middle Eastern descent for photoshoot of East Meets West. Will be shooting throughout various landmarks in NYC showing the contrast between East and West and the merging of two cultures.

Please submit Headshot and Bodyshot.

This is for tears ONLY, not paid.

------
LET'S START A FASHION REVOLUTION!


Well I don’t know about revolution....I’m a lover not a hater:)
I wanted to get your attention:)

If you want to be part of a super fun project it’s your day it’s your moment!
I’m filming a fashion show pilot THIS saturday
I am in need of:
camera people
lighting people
fashion people
make up artists
hair stylists
If you want to meet some interesting people and want to be part of a fun project.
This is the opportunity for u!
Pre reqs:
-available THIS Saturday or Sunday
-be talented
-a have cool quirky cutting edge look

so please tell me a little about yourself.
What inspires you... what’s in your ipod...your favorite artists designers
Please send me a myspace/faecebook profile or some pics

compensation:
it’s not paid but there can be a deal worked out so it would benefit both of us!

good luck!

Cheers,
elena

yeahhh

I can't help it. I love a potty mouth.

Lil Wayne - Yeahhh

antique prague

this dress has been sitting in the back of my closet since i got it nearly two years ago at a beautiful antique treasure trove in prague. what do i/can i do with it??

facebook for oldies

today, this guy requested my friendship on facebook:


my grandpa. a 78-year-old man who is perpetually parked at his computer in israel and i guess is looking to make friends on the internet? i thought it was funky when he started sending me daily emails contained powerpoint presentations (seriously) filled with different images, sometimes titled "Living in a Picture" or "Nature's Best Photography."

but, this is too much. i decided to check out his profile to see what he'd been up to. well, he is a pretty private guy from the looks of it, not giving out too much personal information or anything. i will tell you that he changed his profile picture at 1:48pm and that his birthday is september 17, 1930.

the un-ladylike dinner

i invited some girls over for an impromptu dinner on saturday night, it being cold out and our plans for the evening looking bleak. what was supposed to be a lady-like evening (as you can see by my delicate attempt at arranging the table) turned out to be a dinner consumed over potty-mouth conversation. all talk aside, the food turned out great.

i bought some pristine white tulips and arranged them in my brand new 75%-off pitcher from fish's eddy.



i put together a small meat and cheese plate with salami, a firm sheep's milk cheese called petit basque, fig spread, and chili-rubbed greek olives.


In my new roasting pan, I made a Pan-Roasted Chicken adapted from this recipe (I skipped the pearl onions and added a bit of rosemary and sage to the mushrooms as well), using free-range chicken legs purchased at the USQ greenmarket. I served the chicken with a multi-colored assortment of fingerling potatoes (a bag cost $5 at the USQ market), which I blanched in boiling water for 2 minutes, then roasted for 30-40 minutes after tossing them with salt, olive oil, and rosemary.



i also made balsamic-glazed onions simply by sauteeing halved red onions in oil, and then adding a cup of balsamic vinegar, a cup of water, a bit of sugar, and some chopped rosemary, and letting the mixture boil down until it reduced into a demi-glaze.


i will also point out that miro and ally made a boston lettuce salad with tomatoes, snap peas, shaved parmesan cheese, and a balsamic-garlic viniagrette that isn't picture.

here are the potty-mouthed ladybirds: