James McCourt, Queer Street
BEWARE GIRLS: the call is coming from inside the house!
(via macartney)
Ding ding ding!
Travel makes you innocent again, someone supposedly once said; couch surfing makes you a twitchy, unsettled mess and a bit bonkers, I am here to tell you. It is the disconcerting feeling of being a nomad in the city you supposedly call home. Plus. There is the thing of having more keys than a high school janitor. Learning on the fly the particular quirks of each new apartment (every New York apartment is squirrely in its own way), the shower that runs too hot, how many times you have to jiggle the handle on the toilet. Really, the nightmare that is other people’s toilets. These are the ones you never want to overflow. The best place to safely exit in case a fire breaks out in the middle of the night. Remembering who said to only lock the bottom lock and be sure to open the curtain so the plant gets light. Feeling the urge to leave the house in the morning and not return until the end of the day, even if you have nothing to do apart from look for a more permanent living situation, because its slightly weird to lounge around while your friend-cum-host is busily dressing for work at 6 AM. That minor tug of guilt—and feeling of fecklessness—at having to rely on the kindness of close friends, like a first draft Tennessee Williams heroine. (You’re grateful for the lucky breaks where someone is out of town and let’s you crash at their place, in exchange for keeping a pet or plant alive.)
I can now find these tribulations amusing since I’m currently ensconced in a new place in upper Manhattan. A door to shut and the indulgent vanity of (semi-) privacy. A sense of autonomy restored. Though, the sublet is up in a half a year, give or take. Anyone have a couch free around then?
Ah, fantastic, new Ann Magnuson. (Well, old Ann but new to me.) From her Facebook:
Just discovered someone posted a very rare recording I did with John Cale (yup, from the Velvet Underground) - a spoken word piece done in the style of John Cage for a tribute record done in 1993. Wacky how everything comes back to bite your bottom! And if the bottoms are as glamorous as the ones on these Helmut Newton models, why the heck not!?
Last night I was talking about Willa Cather’s short story “Paul’s Case,” which, depending on the lens through which you want to interpret the story, could be subtitled It Doesn’t Get Better. Well, there is a made-for-TV adaptation from 1980 which you can watch on Netflix I believe or you can pay YouTube 3.99 for the pleasure of viewing it there. The first part moves at the speed of molasses through cheesecloth. But never you mind, because you can also watch it through the lens of young Eric Roberts sure was a doll.
Babs/Judes — Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again
Berlin never rests, and this is glorious. Each dawning day brings with it a new, agreeably disagreeable attack on complacency, and this does the general sense of indolence good. An artist possesses, much like a child, an inborn propensity for beautiful, noble sluggardizing. Well, this slug-a-beddishness, this kingdom, is constantly being buffeted by fresh storm-winds of inspiration. The refined, silent creature is suddenly blustered full of something coarse, loud, and unrefined. There is an incessant blurring together of various things, and this is good, this is Berlin, and Berlin is outstanding. —“Berlin and the Artist.”
I’m not even quite halfway through Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, translated by Susan Bernofsky, and it is all I can do to stop myself from blogging nearly ever single sentence. First, “noble sluggardizing”! Then, throughout the “prose pieces,” as they are designated, there are phrases like “that blue-eyed marvel, the early morning” and “magnificent restlessness” and “where poesy can be felt, poetic flights are superfluous.”
The book is one of my favorite types, the musings of a flâneur and metropolitan chronicler who observes the whirling city from its bars stools and park benches, its opera boxes and streetcars. It is the kind of book that affords the reader the eerie delight of life explicated just as it is. It is poetic and deeply felt even in its flippancy.
Even though Walser was writing about Berlin in the early 1900s, it is hard not to draw parallels to New York, for a certain type of person who has moved to the city to live a certain type of life, no matter the decade or century in which they arrive. That is, for me, both a help and a hindrance as I am trying, after a five month absence, to fall in love with this city again.
But! This post is mostly in service of encouraging you to pick up the slim volume, if you are certain type of person who is drawn to a certain metropolitan life; if you ponder, like Walser, “what plays will be put on this winter,” if you enjoy long, contemplative walks smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and if you find the thrum of urban life to be a source of endless fascination.
When picking up the keys yesterday I was informed that the bird I’m meant to be sitting may in fact be dying. So. It has now become a bird hospice situation, possibly. Further updates as warranted.
ourmaningraz: Hauptplatz
A thoroughly incomplete list of things I will and will not miss:
I will miss the euro but not euro coins. I will miss legally drinking on the street but not the teenagers drinking on the buses. I will miss the nachtwurststandl and the kebap place that’s open on Sunday when everything else is shuttered. I will miss learning German but not being asked if I’ve conned the grammatical complexities of the language in only five months. I will miss sitting and smoking in cafes undisturbed for hours. I will not miss the 24 hour clock. I will miss tipping by merely rounding up to the next whole number. I will not miss people treating their public displays of affection like an extreme sport. I will miss living in the 8020, aka the wrong side of the river. I will not miss people’s inability to queue at the post office, the movies, or the bank, really anywhere one should know how to stand in line. Nor will not miss people’s refusal to utilize all available space on buses and trams. I will miss paying five euros for a prescription. I will miss kürbiskernöl. I will miss my bike, die Frau. I will miss the Hobbit bar and cheap beer. I will not miss terribly made cocktails. What I will miss most I’m sure will be what I’ve thought least of while I was here.
