Cool!
Every time I've traveled in Europe -- which is, er, well, twice I guess, but still -- I've run into at least one person I knew. Weird. One thing to run into a high school classmate at Lake Nokomis, quite another to run into him along the banks of the Serpentine...
Sozobe wrote:
what made me smile today was sozlet coming out of her classroom in full warpaint -- her entire face was covered, lurid pinks and yellows and blues.
It is only going to get better, or perhaps worse. In 15 or so years, the sozlet will go to some prestigious university but on a sunny fall afternoon she will come into a store like mine with some of her sorority sisters with names, now, like Britney or Missey. Draped around them will be frat boys Bret or Drew. God knows what they will be named 15 years from now.
They will buy, as they do now, body paint that they can smear all over themselves. Perhaps, perhaps, they will get their five seconds of fame on tv on the football game tonight.
TV? they're not body painting for TV.
I smiled when I went for a walk despite the rain. It's been rainy here for more than a week, I've been feeling cooped up. I finally decided enough was enough. I went the buddhist center for lunch and wandered off to my favorite bookstore. On my way home I was rewarded by an Ivan siting. The large soft-orange tabby who climbs a fat virginia creeper vine to a second story cat-door-in-a-window. I'd never seen him climb it, up or down, but today he clambered, slipping and twisting, down to see me.
I can just see it.
Someone called "sozlet"on idols.
heheh.
good luck, mom! <winks>
the look on the nurse practioners face this morning when i pulled out my camera to take a pic of my thumb after she removed the dressing, littlek requested one so if you want to see there's a link at the grimace and grit thread
look at your own risk
Getting a pm from someone I haven't talked to in four years made me smile.
Sorry I can't answer it. Not active enough, apparently. <s> But life is fine.
Well, the above response made me smile a lot.
quick question, though - while I'm on the subject - can I turn off pm's? myself, I mean, so I stop getting messages I can't reply to?
walter, your signature made me smile and nod knowingly. <s>
shewolfs post in her mother in law thread
that's stupid, if you're not able to reply.
<shrugs>
realizing that small things still become important, that I am still the same sensitive neurotic, and that that's ok here ... made me smile just now.
but I really AM going to bed. I'm only here because my emotional state says I need to be. but she doesn't know what she's talking about. <winks>
c'mon, r.g. <s>
Another sensitive neurotic checking in. Using this thread as a substitute for the Dear Diary thread, as always.
I had a lovely weekend, that is, it started off lovely. Friday night, Saturday.
Friday I first went to have dinner with a friend, chat, cool. Then we went to that event, and it turned out to indeed be the place to be. It was fun.
Sonic Tags, it was called, and Radio Territories. Upstairs there were performances, first by a poet whom I hated until he started doing some sound poems, then by a man who made music with his hands; by moving his hands eliciting sounds from a machine. None of the computer-steered sound fields that had wowed me before, but, apparently, a machine that was developed by some Russian modernist in the 1910s. Interesting.
Meanwhile, spread around the floor, different artists were broadcasting their own audio-artfile. You were fitted out with a small radio and headphones - no podcasting or anything, simply AM and FM, and you used the FM - and walking around the room you could pick up one or the other's cast. Or, of course, a random Budapest radio station, and who was to say which was which? Found some stuff on the regular radio that was pretty cool too, anyway ;-).
The Slovenian girl was there, and was broadcasting sound recordings from the Chinese market. She also started doing that juggling-dancing that that Chinese girl had done at the Durgas concert in Szimpla Kis Kert in August (which I raved about here), except admittedly not as good, and with glowsticks instead of fire.
Downstairs' just a big drinking place. I'd gone with Esther and a friend of hers, and apart from Slovenian girl and her Italian friend, we met another friend of hers, as well as my friend from Tilos Radio who had helped organise it, and the guitarist from the Durgas, and homegirl from the Internetcafe (not the one who'd also told me about this thing but the one I had a brief crush on earlier, until I realised she was way too young. Esther nicknamed her "doe eyes", and she was very, very drunk.)
Budapest is surprisingly like a village, you meet the same people everywhere.
The next place turned out to be Angyal, the shrill gay place down the street. Which was predictably awful - karaoke on the ground floor, Whitney Houston and Modern Talking in the basement disco - but fun, anyway. In a high-school disco kind of way. Even including the drama within the group that belongs to that (tho thankfully not involving me).
Saturday I was up at about five, and by the time I got out I realised I'd already have to make my way downtown to meet friends at the new park theyve created by finally tearing down the long row of Kadar-era shops that had been boarded up, right on the downtown boulevard, for many years, the city hall's backyard closed up behind it. Now, all a park. And for tonight, a series of concerts, and a lightshow. No moving stroboscopes or anything, but what they call "raypainting".
But on my way I got stuck at what turned out to be a neighbourhood fest by the church around the corner. Hearing Balkan-sounding music, I turned the corner towards the stage, saw a big man in military fatigues, and a pope, complete with black robe, beard and funny black hat. Oh my God the Serbs have taken over! Except it turned out to be Greeks. The band playing on stage and the folk dancers in front were the Association of the Terezvaros Neighbourhood's Greek Minority. And lots of people linked in and folkdanced along, too. While row after row of 60- and 70-somethings on plastic chairs clapped along (they're not put away into OAP homes here), one big woman with big glasses clapping exuberantly with her hands above her head. Go Greek minority!
Children danced, dogs ran, and all around little stands, with woodcarvings of the Virgin Mary, toys, an all-wooden merry-go-round with reed baskets to put your baby in, hot wine, kalacs and langos. (Tejfolos-sajtos langos, fried dough with cheese and cream, for breakfast is not a good idea.) After the Greeks, a concert by the Pal Utcai Fiuk, according to Esther's friend one of the best Hungarian bands, charming in this 1980s guitar-plus-occasional-brass way. Very Berlin, all, somehow.
Further on downtown, when finally getting there, the raypainting was brilliant. Its these extremely powerful projectors that turn the entire environment into a brilliantly colourful canvas. The same they had on the Erzsebet Bridge on Museum Night, turning the white bridge as well as the whole neighbouring Gellert Hill into a colour-thick aboriginal art painting. Now, all the blind walls of the surrounding buildings, a circle around of hundreds of meters, were covered with a continuing abstract painting-type thing, ranging from stark B/W towerblock-shapes at one end to picturesque warm yellows/oranges at the other, in erratic patterns and transitions. And everybody walking round and admiring.
Meanwhile, on the stage Hungarian reggea from Szolnok. That I happen to like ("Mit isztok??!!"), tho admittedly the two kids turned out to look strikingly like those Brit-Indian rasta kid characters in Goodness Gracious Me ("no man, I'm talking bout the motherland, Jamaica!!").
Going home from there, spending some time at Sark, Susannah working (still, for now). A nice evening.
Gee, NIMH, that sounds just like Stoneham last Saturday.
...but what did happen Saturday was that the Lovely Bride and I met
another couple for dinner at "Not Your Average Joe's" in Lexington.
Just after we'd ordered, the manager came over and asked us whether
we'd do him a big favor and move from our table to another one in a
different part of the restaurant. (I wasn't acting up - honest. Our table
for four was between two other tables for four that were just vacated and
a party of twelve had arrived.)
In return, our meals would be on the house -- except for the booze.
We said yes, of course. Heck, they could have gotten me for free coffee.
Good meal by the way. Spatan beer in honor of Octoberfest. Prosit!
Sweet deal. george. Try it again next weekend.
I have mentioned A2K to some of my employees. They realize, perhaps, how much it means to me. I printed out Nimh's "lovely weekend" post just so they could read some of the writing that yall do.
One employee was raised in Belgium, another graduated in theatre, and another is in a band that will be returning to Europe for a second tour.
