I am so easy, when it comes to dance music. Alls I need is a good mix done by someone who knows how to use a low-pass filter. It’s that easy. It can be anything: house, Warp, 80’s, norwegian black metal, Sufjan Motherfucking Stevens, I don’t care*. As long as you can avoid jarringly crashing the songs together (not easy; such cacophony is SOP for some) and you sweep the mids, you have me at hello.

Not that I’ve been dancing much (with a handful of notable exceptions; most notably the drunken CAVE danceathon depicted above, which maybe I will tell you about sometime) but dance music == work music, and the nights have been quite late here. The writing has been haphazard, but I did get an article out the door for a magazine my dear friends back in RISD architecture are doing. It’s called Public Relations, and when I know more about this publication and its whereabouts, so will you.

Anyway. Also, a few weeks ago I went and got some new pants in new york. I usually get pants from Diesel, but I wanted to mix things up a bit, so I went to the “G-Star RAW” store across from Stackhouse, despite their entirely stupid name. While the pants I got there are nice, the people who work there are retards. Furthermore, they managed to reinforce my conviction that ASSHOLES and RETARDS are the new fundamental dichotomy that defines all of humanity:

Figure 1. Assholes versus retards. As originally referenced herein.

… and so here’s why: when you go to Diesel, the people who work there are snotty, overdressed pieces of hipster trash who don’t condescend to give you the time of day (née “assholes”). When you come out of the dressing room in your putative new pants, they look you up and down and sort of snort derisively. I am not precisely sure why, but this whole routine makes them sell more pants. Like you’ve somehow earned them by dealing with their shit.

But so the “G-Star RAW” people are sycophantic douchebags (née “retards”). First off, the pants guy actively helped me find some pants. That was their first mistake. I do not want nice pants people; I want to be brutally put in my place for my naïve fashion sense and rampant consumerism. Furthermore, he tried waaay too hard to please. I came out of the dressing room in some pants, and one of his pants cohorts looked at me and immediately said “those look nice!” … I went over to the mirror and saw that he was a lying sack of shit. The pants were horrendous, and I in fact sent them back. Plus, all the “G-Star RAW” employees were not dressed in the over-the-top absurd manner I have come to expect from top pantsmen. The whole experience left me baffled, and I can’t say I’ll be doing much business with them in the future.

Anyway yeah. This whole entry was a procrastination scheme, so I’m going to call it over and do some real work. Fuck yes!

-fish

Due to my hillarious academic loop-de-loops, I have to do another “first-year review” next thursday. For the most part, this is retarded, cuz I’ve been here two years, and if they didn’t want me around I would certainly know it by now. But it’s also kind of cool, cuz I get to exhume all sorts of old work and parade around the few interesting chestnuts. Like this timeline concept map thing I made for a process book:

Click for the whole shebang. Taken from this document.

… I think I’ll post more random shit over the next few days, whilst I sift through it all. Why not?? Hey hey.

In other news, this is what we’re doing over here, cuz school hasn’t really started and we’re all a bunch of alcoholics, it would seem. Indeed. So yeah more crap soon! Yeah.

-fish

good:

• rebuilding merce cunningham’s internal database
• frying hot dogs in butter (the only worthwile thing I got from the book “dry” by augusten burroughs, you axed me)
• the similarity of mcgorlick park with washington square park, not just in design (that sort of radial french-garden plan thing) but also in the way that each lane in the park seems to self-segregate into a micro-region based on foot traffic (e.g. in washington square, southwest corner = chess players, west middle corridor = nyu students going to class, center area = tourists watching breakdancers, etc… in mcgorlick park the distinctions are a mite more subtle, like polish dog walkers vs. new moms with bugaboos, but they’re still there).
• maybe maybe maybe selling a book, knock on wood, yes yes
• interviewing people and having them blab about design and language on tape for hours
• cupcakes from billy’s
• dancing with girls, all night long
• riding a bike from greenpoint to redhook with your friend on a summer day … normally I enjoy deriding “bike people” as hillarious fanatics, but I can sort of see where they’re coming from with that. weaving in and out of the little niches between cars at high speed gives you this total man-over-machine type buzz, and plus if you’re doing this in new york, your perspectival POV of the city is very similar to how the video game Grand Theft Auto looks, which is entertaining. the whole thing is further enhanced by stopping at grimaldi’s and/or swimming in a redhook swimming pool, indeed.
• doing laundry … just now in my laundry, I unexpectedly found an almost-new deerhoof shirt that I know is not mine, but is in my laundry and is my size. this never happens, but karmatically it makes sense considering the staggering quantities of my own clothing that has disappeared without warning or explaination into washing machines and dryers throughout my 27+ years of garbed existence
• cutting video again
• shakespeare in the park

bad:

• the G train
• hangovers
• when someone you love very much is in a bad way, such that it makes them seem mean and nasty when really they’re just tired and scared, so you have to repress your emotion when interfacing with them, which is not easy because you love them and seeing someone you love in pain makes you kind of emotional
• the total wasteland of despair that is typographic control in CSS
• dumping liquid into your new laptop, destroying the keyboard
• talking before thinking
• drinking too much
• forgetting recipes
• transcribing interview tapes where both parties are hyped on coffee and talking 400wpm or thereabouts
• money
• not being able to sleep because of hideous anxiety attacks concerning life decisions and whatnot

ugly:

• old polish men peering in your window at night and catching you dancing to really stupid shit
• thinking proudly to yourself, “wow, I haven’t seen a single cockroach in my apartment all summer”, because as soon as you have thought that, you have of course irrevocably jinxed yourself and you basically see a huge one crawling up the wall as soon as you’ve finished the thought
• rats that have been smooshed by cars
• the hipsters who have formed a kickball league (replete with un-funny ironic team t-shirts) and play relentlessly in mackerren park
• the blackouts currently plaguing brooklyn and the subway in general
• leaving a cabinet open, forgetting you have done so, and then smashing your temple on it when abruptly standing up

… basically, yeah.

so let me bring you up to speed. here is the deal: I am in greenpoint. I am in apartment #3F at 67 driggs, near mcgorlick park. I am subletting this spot from a chick I met on craigslist. I spent all my spare cash on the rent here, and on the rent in my PVD spot, and on a new computer I didn’t really need but kind of wanted anyway, and so no I am closer to broke than I’d like to be, which is why right now I am drinking miller genuine draft. I have an air conditioner and an enormous turbine-sized industrial fan so I am not too absurdly hot. I am trying to work on my book and so far ofer erenfeld, david reinfurt, stephan moore, and a few other kids have agreed to give me interviews, which will give me enough material to prevent the whole project from collasping under the weight of its own hideously self-referential footnotes.

I am doing some freelance work but it won’t pay me for a while. I went, the other night, to Hiro, to see VHS or Beta spin for the Hot Chip release party, and I danced like a complete utter retard, thanks to the unique combination of compounds and music I was subsequently exposed to. I have a fire escape here where I can watch the sun set over the park. I have sort of exposed my head and neck to enough sun to begin the tanning process, but the skin there is still kind of pinkish, and the rest of me is classic computer-geek pale white, so I literally look like a red-neck, which is very sad.

I couldn’t go to a party this weekend up in troy, which is also sad. I went to a party at the new O-R-G studio the other night, where many people including my ex-girlfriend had received summonses for drinking outside, like just before I got there, and they were selling a magazine called “tourette’s”, the mere presence of which in my personal space kind of bugged me out so I spent 10 bucks to acquire the two issues of it that they had for sale, and I was handed them by stuart bailey himself, which I did not realize until after the transaction, during which (thanks to the three or so hastily consumed warm heinekens) I made several comments that (in retrospect) made me sound like some sort of douche, and I will not reproduce them here, for your benefit.

I recently went through all my old fiction writing and found, unsurprisingly, that it was all utter garbage, but amusingly there are bits of it that are so amazingly bad that they successfully transcend and become bad in a fascinating way that catches and refracts all wavelengths of light all around you when you look at them, like a prism of horror sort of. I amused myself one morning by taking the best of the worst of it and typesetting it all neatly, with small-caps numbers and flourishes on the page numbers and hillariously ornate drop caps and shit like that. I will not show you this, again for your benefit.

I get headaches like all the time but I’m out of advill. I am trying hard not to start smoking again.

I’ll let you know more when I know more. yes.

-fish