multiple personality ken

multiple personality ken
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

Bubbles floated outside her building like computer generated schools of fish. A wall of mirrors bounced window-shaped beams into elegant angles of mote and light. Park closed her eyes again. Sunday morning in SoHo was bright. Her hermit corner apartment had been a dance studio before she moved in, several months ago, almost a year. The tired floor still bore the scuffed signs of the many overweight hopefuls who had dreamt their way to the city years before her. She had kept most of the furnishings intact, bringing only her bed and electronics, adding a small stove and fridge to the changing room, nothing to the showers. Her groceries came delivered and everything else could be done on her laptop. During her rehabilitation the empty days filled up easily, much easier than one would expect. Sleeping, waking, walking. She had practiced her walk in front of the silver expanse of mirrors, the cloaked piano always mute. That had been the hardest, not the voice or the gestures, but that hipless shuffle, that heelless trot so effortlessly and universally internalized at the onset of basso voce and fuzzy tummies. She sometimes wondered if, when she finally did dare to leave the building, the doorman would think she was someone else, a boyfriend, or a brother.

clockwork sparkly

clockwork sparkly
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

Shards of sunlight napalmed her eyelids and her long arm drew the heavy white sheet over her still pillowed head. It was too early for her to stop dreaming these memories. She could only see it through the camera’s eye now. It was to be the first take of her big goodbye scene, the speech at the prom, a scandalized teacher at the local high school, the real killer was caught, but still she would leave, even though her few loyal pupils had all sparked tears on their close-up shiny faces. She shook her head in lazy eights to clear her mind of all the cluttering distractions. A thin sound ripped from the spotlights and the sky fell. It left her with a line that ran from where the lighting rig had hit her first, high on her temple, all along her skinny violin back, to halfway down her leg, when momentum and gravity had stalled the destructive process of the pointed steel edge on her freshly powdered skin.
In the hospital, after the accident, the vision, her future, had come to her as she woke, paralyzed, focused beyond the wrapped white tulips, on the screen lowered from the speckled ceiling. The remote was in the bandaged hands of her tufted blond neighbor. The woman had poured water on a burning frying pan. Of all things, it was a fishing marathon her finger had frozen on, eyes closed shut while her cheeks glazed over with salty water.

spongebob prism

spongebob prism
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

Peeling from her sleeping skin, Park tunneled through the pixilated glass, finding herself somehow more substantiated as she walked down a hallway, one hand heavier than the other. A pink metallic suitcase. Her suitcase. But those were not her shoes. This looked like the day she left Seoul; off to Los Angeles to bilingually act in a small movie of immigration, family and the American dream. She was discovered at Christmas, just five years old, in the pulsating toy section of a giant department store quietly calling for her mother in English. She had wanted to do this every year since her mother disappeared. Somehow she believed her mother would be more likely to find her in an Americanized space like that, instead of the street market or the store around the corner. Her mother had been an actress too, on location in Korea when she had fallen for her driver. The man who had raised Park alone, after.
He did not come with her to America that day, offering her without question into the custody of the American studio as if he had always expected to lose her too. Her father sat next to her in the taxi, the suitcase between them. Big signs and star-less skies filled the windows until the car stopped. He steered her head through the doors of Incheon airport. Where were her braids? Her eyes searched the lofty space for a reflection. There between the pillars something stirred in the air conditioning vents. It could not be, but there it was, a little white flake wavering down on the hurried shoulders of the cramped businessmen in line ahead of her. This was just the first. Her father did not notice the shiny bustling space was slowly turning into a frosted postcard wonderland. Just behind the metal detector hid a big fat tree, a shivering squirrel between her crunchy feet. Park was struck silent, unable to articulate to her father or the mannered stewardess what had happened to the weather. He crouched down and looked into her eyes. She did not hear what he said then, but now she saw his eyes were frosted over, kind but white. Walking towards the exit, he half-waved as she passed through the detectors, dwarfed by the white tree.

navy blue on bed

navy blue on bed
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

She remembered the waiting at the gate, but not this next part. As she approached the windexed glass overlooking the ever-whiter tarmac, Park realized what had felt so strange before, her hair was a boy’s length, her dress now trousers, walking down the snowy lane hedged with huddled travelers snowed in like sleeping big city bums. Yet she felt good, better with every step closer to the edge. The tiny squirrel was now holding on to her suitcase, mumbling, could he be smiling at her? Park could tell in her mirror image stare, she certainly was. As she gazed out at the slowly waltzing planes she felt a presence at her side. A boy like her, but white, like the falling snow. Their invisible bubbles met and he returned her gaze with the deepest wells of summery moss. A tiny twist of muscle memory in her bandaged chest the only reminder this projection was not real, at least not then and there. Just as his hand moved closer to hers, just as that space between them filled with that cruel warmth, a twinkly sound grabbed the boy’s attention. She followed his eyes up and screamed a breathless scream as an absolutely tiny sharp flake embedded itself in his spotless eye. His surprised hand retracted, redirected to his face. His eyes like a fast-forward of some Icelandic lake in winter. As he faded, first crestfallen, then numb, she was drawn back between the waiting benches, into her body. The quiet noise of the tulips, the television, and the tears suddenly sounded somehow more alone now than ever before.
Then, in that hospital tomb next to the weeping woman, her scar still throbbing, Park had realized that that was to be that. There would be no more very-special-guesting on daytime dramas. No more sexy doctor Chen, mysterious model Yang, long lost sister Lee. No, from now on she would be a man with a mission. She would find this boy, take his hand, and press it to his frozen heart.

fun with prismatron

fun with prismatron
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

He had found the VCR on the street too. Brown found almost everything on the street. The mismatched furniture in his back alley apartment played musical chairs with the disgraced items he saw seductively posed on gaudy lit circles of pavement. The dusty books he took home just needed a wipe with a wet cloth before he put them on little Aztec piles beside his mattress. The occasional roach refugee he blasted with his trusty Raid, but still… Garbage here seemed cleaner - less brown sludge, less dull and gross - than he remembered from his few visits to grand old Kiev. Supposing he remembers them at all. Here he tried to wipe his old world memories, flooding his mind with new narratives. This was after he fled his mother. Left her in that macrobiotic commune in Oregon. She bought it with the money they made back home in the Ukraine. Apparently the favorable mention of an obscure grain in a popular no-carb diet bible had sparked so much interest in the meager harvests of their ancestral land that his father had been able to simply buy their way into America, the perplexing country Brown was now attempting to understand, on film, in magazines, on the street.
This city, he often thought, recycles itself; one person’s clutter becoming another’s until everyone is connected in a nostalgic downward spiral of ironic lampshades, dorky pastel record covers, and faux-leather bowling bags from drowsy upstate suburbs. The lady walking just ahead of him, the sad one who looks like she had a very slow day in high-end publishing, she just stopped and hunched, peering between some stale Staples boxes. This constant spying, downcast eyes roving between the base metal of parking meters, for Brown too had become second nature. After the Delicious Dumpling restaurant closed, the other Chinese would be here, their shopping carts parked just behind them, crouching, gently grazing the almost body sized black bags, collecting the drinking containers tossed out after SoHo’s more adventurous shoppers had drunk their last canned sip of too sweet moccachino here, in the no man’s land he now called home.

cacti in the sun

cacti in the sun
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

Brown had had no idea about America. He grew up in the Soviet Union, or what was left of it, in a family where TV was banned, and bedtime stories came from his parents’ lips. His parents had run from the city as soon as they could, leaving their college educations to till the land of their great-grandparents. Not for the glory of communism, but out of fear, he believed. They genuinely feared the progress of technology, as if it were only a matter of time before they would become robots, locked in patterns until their batteries dried out. At the airport that day, after they said goodbye to Andrej, his father, after the pile of precarious luggage had been secured to the crippled cart that surely stemmed from Khrushchev’s days, his mother had ceremoniously blinked her last look at her native land, or at least the asphalted web of roads that was its current stand-in, and closed her eyes at the first sight of a turnstile. He guided her through check-in as if she was blind, up the Aeroflot’s powder blue aisle, down Frankfurt’s almost liquid marbled hallways, over the oddly office-like texture of the carpeted floors in JFK, all the way to the rental car place in Portland, where the flowery woman behind the counter had looked at her with pity and smiled at his accent. Here in the city nobody minded, but there his halting words had encouraged questions. Always the same. “What was it like?” Then, when he asked what what was like, they rephrased, starting with their traditional assumption of telepathy. “You know. When the wall fell.” How could Brown explain they only found out much later, when the first junk mail overflowed their small mailbox and painted the overgrown gravel of the driveway with garish rainbowy promises. Without TV or news, time used to pass slowly, flowing through their house at the speed of fallen leaves. Brown thought the city would change time’s pace, yet here he often felt in a stationary state of flux, as if he was in the eye of the storm, as if the sheer number of factoids and news reports whirling around him somehow added up to zero; the blurry hum wrapped the citizens in an ergonomic blanket of noise, without really drawing them out of their metropolitan bell jar, sleepwalking them through their daily landscape. Uptown, downtown, elsewhere.

tablecloth bonanza

tablecloth bonanza
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

At the video store, Brown had had a slow night, sat through most of a Godfather without the door’s annoying little bell alerting him not to slouch. There were the usual customers. The lady who came in early once a month, still wearing her drone outfit, always rented Schindler’s list, and returned it puffy-eyed just before he closed up shop. The myopic stunted kid, who took ages sneaking peeks at the store’s more risqué content. The optimistic Midwestern guy who was working his way through the foreign section, film by film, now at G, for Ginger E Fred, reminded him of himself when he visited his first video store in Oregon, pacing starry-eyed and dithering before the wall of same-size boxes plastered with frozen faces. He found a box that seemed unthreatening, a love story he thought, in timid black and white, the title incomprehensible but somehow familiar. Seated in the rental’s sunken rec room, right on the soft receptive fur, he did not understand a word the unseen nervous man was saying. Mesmerized by the wide scenes on the television’s bulging screen, he never saw the rest of the film, rewinding again to that first part. The bridge, the park, the snow, the music, this city, this was cinema, this was America; not the yellowish earth of Oregon, nor his mother’s morning porridge or the singing wires above their square home in the woods.

misty mountain hop

misty mountain hop
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

He only took one film home these days, Brown watched and rewound, taking great care to take a walk outside before pressing play again. He sincerely intended to explore other neighborhoods, but never really succeeded, his feet always turning the extra right that led straight back home. On one of these walks by Seward Park, it must have been late November, Brown spotted Jackson. The dark gaunt man was standing on the corner, impatiently waiting for the lights to change. He hardly seemed to stray from the four blocks Brown roamed home from work. Throughout the day he sat on stoops and benches with a kind of daring backwards slump, staring through the fabric of reality, into his, a world where all the nighttime shop windows were his personal fish tanks and the shiny things within could be reeled in with a well-aimed throw of his illusory fishing rod.
The lights changed to the blaring white they substituted here for green. Brown looked down as if to tell his sneakers to find their own way home when his eyes found the crate at the very tip of the street corner. The afternoon crowds vined around him; too busy holding nose-obsessed children’s hands to spot the red milk crate’s contents. Videos, labels ripped off, it must have been twenty tapes or so, as heavy as two shopping bags. When he came home, he sat at his table and carefully wiped off the tapes with a paper towel, choosing the cleanest. At first the film seemed just like any other, but soon irregularities appeared, speech seemed clipped, the story made no sense: the weepy pregnant teen wandering into a main street shootout, spaceship hallways morphing into hospital corridors, the fat kid looking for treasure, finding only dust. Brown started to take notes. He would catalogue these films. Find their sources, trace connections, meet their maker. Brown had found his calling.

the daughters of little italy float

the daughters of little italy float
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

le figlie di san gennaro floating down mulberry street the day after the third annual cannoli eating contest

red awning and eyes piercing

red awning and eyes piercing
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

watching the nuns

the nuns of little italy float

the nuns of little italy float
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

these ladies walk around the fair and accept donations

mulberry street athrong

mulberry street athrong
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

the crowds below,

me

me
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

a full moon above

a, e, & l

a, e, & l
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

reception is best at the very edge of the roof

nice fannypack

nice fannypack
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

unidentified guest

nifty stripy hat

nifty stripy hat
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

e & p

stripy brits

stripy brits
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

the theme was stripes, very photogenic.

me and the bowie, eyes closed

me and the bowie, eyes closed
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

very cool and shiny t-shirt as a tribute to my 'neighbor' and the musical highlight of the arcde fire show in central park.

newsflash: have just been pulled from soccerbook to examine a very secure unprintable pdf of the third part of a very succesful if trashy series of action films starring sweet fangora. this one has a western feel to it, taking our heroine and her trusty dog to a vegas buried in desert dunes where she battles skeletal undead and bloodthirsty crows before facing off with an evil genius.
update: this of course is extremely sensitive material. apparently only the director, star, and producer have read this. i got to pitch it to my boss and i am under nu circumstance whatsoever to relate the above to anyone, ever. because i'm worth it.

84th post

i realize i have not been as constant and reliable a blogger as i wanted to be, so what follows will be an attempt at channeling the random biographical maelstrom of words into more of a trickle than the occasional burst.
right, so what i am supposed to be doing is writing a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of this non-fiction soccer book 'we' are adapting into a feature film, instead i have been writing lovely posts on s. stevens and emailing short gossips across the states. not as productive, but surely anything is more fun than soccer (especially since i'll be working on this for the next two weeks i'm sure).
for my lunch break i walked up broadway some 9 blocks and got stuck in the labyrinthine strand bookstore, where i was only intending to buy the new bret ellis book (since i'll be going to a book signing of his tomorrow) but where i also scored dan rhodes, sam lipsyte, dennis cooper, and a paris review collection of 'people with problems' that with an introduction by magnetic field stephin merritt and a piece by 'm, y, a.e.w.k.'s miranda july (download this unsettlingly funny mp3 for instantaneous membership to the july fanclub) demanded immediate absorption into my overflowing library.

come on feel the illinoise

sufjanstevens_boweryballroom02
Originally uploaded by the modern age.

at the urging of my friend k. in amsterdam, i joined a web-service a few months ago that documents my itunes use. apart from displaying what i'm currently listening to, it also, more disturbingly, creates weekly and monthly charts of the songs i've listened to most. one perverse look at my current charts shows my sufjan stevens obsession has quite possibly reached its pinnacle after yesterday's lovely show at the bowery ballroom (also note my equal play appreciation for the jubilant work of julie delpy, journey, and elton john).
stevens and his illinoise makers had been celebrating spirit week for the previous three nights and after celebrating fake injury and pirates night, yesterday evening brought us fake tattoo and facial hair on each of the, i think, nine performers. all the big no-no's in indie rock performance were there: pom-poms, cheers, costume changes (one involving a one-piece tracksuit made out of an american flag), balloons, as well as numerous mentions of the unmentionable capitalized lord.
the show was nothing short of amazing (horns, lovely girl sing-a-longs, and the amazingly cute 50 states song) and i can only feel sad when tonight, while watching this summer's indie hit 'me, you, and everyone we know' with glorious g. at the ifc, i'll realize the ballroom is hosting the culmination of sufjan's spirit week, the illinoise homecoming dance.
ps. i did not take this picture, found it on flickr, but was standing right behind its photographer right in front of the stage. oh, the joys of being in a city so dense with digital cameras.

woodstocky pic of central park m.i.a. show

summerstage
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

my first real weekend in new york has been as magical as one would expect. after finishing my paper, i went for a free swim and sunbathing session at a brooklyn pool, then to ps.1 for crappy techno and art, afterwards to queens when confusion necessitated i co-pilot my friends car as she drove and i manned the ipod clickwheel for an hour and a half while our friends saved us a seat at the ginormous astoria beer garden. add to this a particularly good review of my writing, interesting plans for my next semester and following thesis, as well as succesfull administrative activities and all of this makes me a particularly satisfied boy.

then manhattan bridge at the magic hour

mebridge
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

so this appears to be a summer of firsts, or at leasts activities that are out of my usual character. i have been running, much to the chagrin of my legs, the bridges of lower manhattan. first the manhattan, then the brooklyn bridge.
aided by the inevitable ipod, playing dance punk, new old favorite robyn, ladytron and of course perennial fitness favorite peaches, i have come to sort of enjoy this activity. sporty yes, competitive no. when performed at an unholy early hour it is also extremely pretty: boats, rising sun, reflecting windows, skyscape, the expected and the beautiful.

sample time again, my apologies to all concerned

sticker
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

more skull

me1
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

"(venice did not supply me with potter so i had to wait until sunday and read inbetween an open air showing of hepburn's hilarious charade, walking through lovely before sunrise vienna, and uncompromising sleep, so i finished it monday morning)
today brough much, much shoppings
have somehow decided to reinvent myself as a tight jeans, colorful, big shoes, thin stripy tshirt wearing person with a canvassy skatebackpack that has more dangling loose straps than lindsay on a bad night.
hmm, guess you'll have to wait for that particular sight
tomorrow brings visa prep, possibly new camera buying (my antiquated lomo analog died after procuring some lovely venetian images, so it will go to lomo doctor and be temporarily but artfully replaced with a lovely new fisheyecam), and dutch art at museum/modern belgian dance"

biennale/wales

biennale/wales
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

"(my sis also sends word that living in venice for a while, and with this i wholeheartedly concur, and traveling by boat constantly, treating it as the subway to combat the steadily building homesickness for ny, gives you the feeling of being forever semi-floating, coasting along some internal tidal chart, your stomach and brain and toes all occupying different planes at different times)"

mirror/sis

mirror
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

"i still have to write some 23 postcards, ahh too many friends so little time. i still have three days in venice and then i will prepare for my old school journey through the alps, throughout which i will pretend to be on the orient express (which actually ended here) and capture a few criminals, save the damsel, while i finish the halfblood prince in record time (although i have a middle seat, oh, the many sufferings of european railway travel, but i guess the ipod will block out the sounds of other smelly tourists with no trouble at all)"

at la fenice, where i saw pina bausch from a cramped and tiny private booth

fenice
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

"a short missive from the utter tendrils of the venice underworld (or whatever they are calling these hellish internet cafes these days) i trust your fourth of july was spent blissfully cavorting, mine was spent gloriously ignorant of any u.s. holiday or somesuch, probably, i cannot really remember, you know holidays always, and ideally i might add, sort of intermingle, art exhibits, vegetable market, laundry, sun, waves, boat (you get the picture) just five and a half more days in this glorious sinking city, then onwards and upwards through the alps to motherly vienna"

bloodred bits of saints in golden containers

bloed
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

"a short typing salvo from this sinking ship of churches i like to call venice weather has been lovely: rain, sun, sunburned left clavicle, using much after sun lotion, smell very strange, esp. combined with anti-mosquito stuff

my books are reading away very fast, every one i started in ny has been finished so i can leave them on this continent. i'm still hoping to run out of the apt on sat morning and buy the new hp, but boats and mail don't really promise a quick delivery at the only bookstore in town to order them in time, suitably located behind the bridge of sighs
have taken a great deal of charmingly amateurish and arty pictures of art and ruin, a great combination that makes up for most of the attraction this city holds for me"

venice, aahh, venice

venice
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

"me, im skipping a few minutes from wandering the streets, hopping on and off of boats, sauntering and staring my way through modern as well as more liturgically styled exhibits, to write these words from an eerily empty (i guess the tourist buses must have left already) and only slightly scary internet cafe, located in a side room of a cavernous gaming arcade, actually located under and old arcade on the busy route between san marco and rialto, tonight will bring a new novel to start (have shamefully almost exhausted the supply of ten books i brought)"

wet rat on slovenian pavilion's doorstep, tiny, but very scary to italians

ratje
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

"i am, at present, in wonderful sinking venice where i spend my days looking gorgeous at stunningly beautiful but also dull or old or conceptually empty works of art, before reading through my pile of books way too fast (has it really been five since saturday, am i counting scripts?) and cooking very tasty but slightly overdosed risotto (risotto croquets anyone?) the days are sunny, with miraculous showers of rain and i will be here for more than another week so id better keep that murakami in check (what do you think 150 pages a day, 200?) i probably should write all those corny postcards i bought"

my hometown before 1.2 million visitors in four days

nijmegen
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

"just got back from a rather exhausting but fun day of amsterdam (public transport was on strike, so no trams or subways and only bikes in the streets) i sequentially met three of my friends, all happy, successfull and beautiful like they should be, visited my sister's work and found some time to nip into a record store.... (i bought just a few, one was martha and the muffins, the one i don't have yet, their best one) then took a train, got picked by my dad in utrecht and we drove home, listening to the muffins during a gigantic thunderstorm that is still pitterpatting as i type. this email is just a cheap excuse to relapse into my english, my dutch has suffered horribly, i keep saying english phrases directly and subconsciously translated into my supposedly native lingo, uugh. i also saw my first dutch celeb of the week since we landed smack in the middle of the netherlandish premiere of the tom cruise summer movie (ironically after watching an honestly quite wonderful acting performance of miss kate holmes in batman)"

stranded again

and so it appears i have become stranded. this was supposed to be the last leg of my monthlong tour of europe but my arrival in the nyc has been postponed with one day so i can have the pleasure of flying what klm likes to call world business class and still arrive a mere 24 hours later. these are now being spent in an amazingly dull hotel in the charmingly named town of badhoevedorp (which babelfish lovingly dutch-french-english-translates as: the bath closes village) where i cherish my powerbooks powercable and the joy it brings me in the sound of cute new mp3s (much sexsmith and jose gonzales, though also a lot of lady sovereign, whose concert i dearly missed two weeks ago, and the new deus album, thanks to dearest m & r) old movie i had not watched yet (and now understand why i hadn't to begin with) and browsing the web for things to do when i get back.
i am immensely happy about being able to go see bret easton ellis speak in person (and slightly pissed off that i did not bring my heavy first edition glamorama...) as well as concerts by 13+god, patti smith and m.i.a. (both for free in the park, sadly not spitting rhymes over pissing in the river and pull up the poor), scout niblett (if i can find anyone depressed enough to come with), possibly colleen, joy zipper (headlining above the juicily named the 1 2 3 4) and much much more like juliana hatfield clap your hands say yeah, the inevitable four tet, and of course sufjan stevens, for which i just bought tickets to his fourth show at the bowery ballroom, his other three shows were already sold out...
movies to watch on plane (between three course meal and glasses of free alcohol, dehydration time...): constantine, assault on precinct 13, the incredible ice princess, but also quality fare as p.s., comme un image, as well as a bollywood film loosely based on oliver stone's u-turn (!!!) called musafir. sadly the india times had rogorously slammed this work as wannabe-cool and much more cruelly depitcs the lead jennifer lopez-a-like as someone "who sports stretch marks on her waist, an ugly under-arm stubble and sweat patches, love handles that some might find 'cute', a less-than-flat tummy that sneaks over the waist band of her jeans in dance sequences and thighs that can be mistaken to be instruments of physical harm." now i really have to see this...

?

?
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

where i usually post my long serial photo blog entries in the opposite chronological order, so the reader, casual browser does not have to sc roll down then up to read about my mundane cosmopolitan adventures, this morning sees me too jetlagged and floaty to even attempt a-chronological actions, let alone thoughts. so scrolldown to the first picture in the sequence and all will be explained. today will take me to amsterdam where public transportation is on strike and i will be hanging with my dutch metropolitan friends, all of whom will receive 'i heart ny' shirts, and seeing 'batman and katie' with sis and her boyf.

my first mac and cheese

my first mac and cheese
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

fannypack with tofu

fannypack with tofu
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

flash close-up

flash close-up
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

our guests mostly wore suitable attire: big hair, tattoos, fake pregnancy bellies, short skirts, platform shoes, handlebar moustache, leggings, huge loopy earrings, fannypacks, more visors and 'the world's greatest bingo player' caps, yet no one stared at them in the subway or when they walked down the street...

white trash roof party

white trash roof dinner
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

the food table had all things trashy, pringles, cheetos, cupcakes, hotdogs, beans and park, cupcakes, macaroni and cheese, cheap vodka, plastic forks (no knives or spoons), more cheese snacks, spray cheese on crackers (truly hideous), canned tomato soup, marshmallows, etc.

vertigo staircase

vertigo staircase
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

so when you throw a housewarming/going-away-for-a-month-to-europe party an dyou think it would be cool to hold it on your roof, when you decide to give it a theme, you know, everybody gets dressed up, brings appropriate food and drinks, when you think, especially inspired by a great junior senior concert, as well as the legions of badly dressed tourists streaming through our street, it would be a great idea to have white trash be that theme and you go to kmart, two subway stops, buy crazy visors, put back that overpriced willie nelson shirt, that too small, really, yes, guns and roses girly wifebeater, get every cheesy snack there plus crazy timewarp drinks in electric colors and plastic containers, when you take 6 shopping bags full of this crap home, then you realize that not only will you have to lug all this beer and those snacks eight flights up to the roof, but, due to the abscence of doorbell and buzzer, you will have run down -slightly intoxicated and in costume: visor, jack-and-coke stained wifebeater, huge five-dollar white sneakers, boxers not merely peeking but comfortable staring from above my new plaid pyjama pants, one leg half rolled up gangsta style, headphone cord tangling around every turn on the stairs - to let everybody in...

sliced clock

sliced clock
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

the famed blinds semi-obscure the clock i have a hard time reading (i prefer the 24-hour digital kind)

room

room + roommate
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

the southwest quadrant of my room, with added 'four tet' balloon, sliced sunset, found bookcase, gold woodpaneling, lomography on the wall, plus reading roommate.

cool notes from new york

when i went to kmart yesterday, it was my day off, the apartment was stifling and suddenly filled with the newly returned k's possessions, i arrived at the checkout with my new transparent vinyl covered clothing rack only to find i was without my trusty american atm card. panicking only slightly i thought back to the last time i used it, a shopping spree at h&m, pants, socks, shirts? sticky tape to finally attach the japanese tautou to her designated position and to try and fix some of the amazing records i bought at the street fair on saturday (music of the alps, loungy compilations called, sunrise, temptation, or featuring bored housewives with cocktails and fake picket fences) to the gold and white wood paneling, or was it at the dynasty supermarket just above canal street, where i am always the only caucasian shopper, trying to find cheerios among the many different chicken feet and dried sea urchins.
i returned from kmart, huge martha stewart box in tow, to find that the apartment was thrust in an even deeper, but decidedly cooler chaos, since k's too kind fireman brother had sprung for a remote controllable air conditioning unit, which now obscures part of the, according to him, extremely fire hazardous fire escape. i was just about to call the bank and have my card canceled when k suggested i go back to the store and ask if i had left my card there. the jaded city dweller i have become was immensely shocked at the show that unfolded at the supermarket. i spoke to the manager who was extremely helpful and talked to all the checkout girls in turn, one of whom remembered me and in rapid fire chinese directed her boss to my card.
faith in humanity restored, i spent the following hours blissfully unclammy, camped out on the couch correcting a paper on gender mainstreaming for my mom, interrupted by a groovy night out with the archi-pals at the new, and undiscovered hipster hotspot, palais royal complete with the ramones on flatscreen, lingerie drying outside, hidden on the other side of our block among the exterminators and herbal medicine stores of mott street. i returned, pleasantly buzzed on vodka limes, that perennial of summer drinks, strangely unfamiliar to americans. the electronic hum of the airco put me in a buddhist state sedate enough to help sleep the night through without escaped to the kitchen to down huge glasses of icy filtered water or to the cutesy bathroom to dunk my head under the new york tap. i am now just about to finish my recommendations on coupland's eleanor rigby and look forward to the rest of the week, which will bring more visitors, more humidity, a concert by the lcd soundsystem, and more, much more nights of non sweaty, remote controlled sleep. x. f.

kismet, dawson, nuclear bombs

after finishing my coverage on the quite rollicking film adaptation of dangerous parking by peter howitt, who wrote and directed sliding doors, i was put to work on an assessment of douglas coupland's latest, eleanor rigby. kismet, since i had read the entire book on the same flight on which i saw howitt's cinematic work of dull boredom the laws of attraction. another very happy coincidence is the fact that one of my due papers is on coupland's use of storytelling as religion. for this heady project i've reread the charming and still mysterious generation x and my former favorite book ever, the now sadly overbearing girlfriend in a coma to mine them for quotes and meaningful notions of faith and hope. coupland's work is hard to get a grip on because it so unabashedly borders on sentimental or, much much worse, inspirational.
still, i'm ever glad to be able to examine my own fascination with his work, just as a did with my other half-explained crushes buffy and dawson's creek, which, thankfully but not unexpectedly, has tumbled a lot of rungs down my ladder of esteem; mainly because of the horrible main characters, never as captivating as the vampire slayer or coupland's lonely storytellers.
having written this, i should probably still admit that i am now rewatching the third season and am just about to head into the final episodes where the show's major twist starts to hit hard. the irritating dawson loses the neurotic joey to his talky best friend, and ultimately preferable teen, pacey and the show died a slow death with only jen, michelle williams, who i just saw in the very odd lobotomy drama a hole in one, to tide the viewers over to the very last and very fine episodes which finally end pacey and joey's arc as they finally hook up at jen's funeral. tears all around and i'll be ready to start my latest netflix obsession, before this one i did bette davis' melodramas and now i'm gearing up for coupland-inspired nuclear war dramas: on the beach, testament, but also my perennial tearjerking favorite, deep impact.
ps my boss just asked me for my thoughts on a hiroshima movie. hmm, kismet, strange but sweet.

strange things i've won

an electric raser when i was eleven
shiny rollerblades i wore only once
a pair of promotional tighty-whities for the movie nowhere
tickets to the gala premiere of the beach that i got a week too late
a new eames chair

summer's here, and it's noisy

my schedule is back to normal and over. had three days of internship this week, just to make up for the stuff i didn't do over their break. quite tiring, weather was very silly and rainy. in this ghastly weather. i was out and about in chinatown one morning, arranging to get back a deposit from a notoriously absentminded real estate agent who we decided not to sign with. struggling with k's wondrous rainbowy umbrella i borrowed for the day, i towered over all the other pedestrians, quite a sight. but nothing compared to what has been going on with my friends in the home country, buying houses, having babies!nothing of that scale happened here; i bought some more domesticities: whisk, bowls, a groovy orange diner tray with matching yellow mustard squeezer, and some of those wooden/bamboo steamers that i've been filling with assorted dumplings and veggies (my favorite so far, the sheherd's veggie one, has frustratingly sold out, so now i'm forced to wander the aisles in search of a worthy succesor to the mighty dumpling crown). a japanese poster has also been procured from the workplaced: sadly not the shiny one with brittany murphy and jason schwartzmann for 'spun' (made by the company i work for) but a 'dirt pretty things one' of a very demure and mysterious apres-amelie audrey tautou who keeps falling from her designated piece of wall opposite the fridge-window. a drawing of a dirty car on the side of the fridge made by a hugely talented 2-and-a-half-year-old import has also been added to the mix. in other mulby news, the exterminator came one morning, apparently he comes every month, and he was happy to see no trace of buggythingies, yay for swiffer!
friday everything suddenly turned summer: glorious, sunny, and very busy as the saint anthony festival is in full swing on la mulberry. a shooting range with human target, overpriced daiquiris, and fairly badly aged drumbands. with this background, i read some more wildly anticipated scripts (the prestigious, if slightly dull new darren aronofsky, the new paul auster and 'black book' by paul verhoeven! yay for the low countries) these afternoons have been lovely, wandering around the neighborhood with canadian girls, always a pleasure. i followed that on saturday with some odd and obscure cinema by michael powell of 'the red shoes' fame (the boy who turned yellow, anyone? nobody?) and a night of 8-bit gameboy music and videogame art in dumbo, brooklyn. i will be spending memorial day doing some work and enjoying a barbecue in shiny park slope. the rest of this week will bring two of my idols to the city as both chuck palahniuk and david sedaris are reading and signing at the local b&n. more inspired postings are sure to follow. x f.

four pictures

taxi to jfk
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

i took this photo when i rushed to jfk to pick up my sister. the others are vague leftovers i found in the drainpipe of iphoto, mood setting but hardly narrative.

manhattan from a cab
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

shiny passing subway
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

misty view
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

more sample madness

one long day: by the end of it i will have writen more than i have in the past week. has it really been just seven days since many of my friend here left? like i've tried to explain before my sense of time is seriously kaufman-esque at this stage of my life. much or little happens but i cannot seem to accurately quantify its duration in newtonian terms. einsteinian would probably work better if my mind would be able to process relativist physics and since i have trouble getting simple blinds to lower i think that would be too much of a crazy endeavor.
nothing much happened: more sandbox, paperwork for visa, fixed blinds for good (they now raise AND lower), fixed that blinking light on my phone, did dishes, went to laundromat, tried to book tickets all over europe (holland-venice, venice-vienna,
by train, ahh the good life and on the day harry potter comes out too!, vienna-holland, holland-new york), and watched a ton of movies (rosemary's baby, the lady eve, the searchers, house of flying daggers, etc.) now at work, didn't do any of my coverages over 'break', oops, so am now forced to stare at a huge pile of great great scripts while i finish my old ones, grrr, anyway, bruce willis ends up in jail, but happy, while my current subject features classic moments such as: "At home in London, Alex surprises his too glamorous American housekeeper, JACK, as she is practicing her sushi-slicing skills." i'm so there.
today has once again reminded me of the immense joy i have at this job. so silly, so fast, so good. the taunting pile contains the new robert altman, with lindsay lohan!, a new paul auster script, as well as film versions of some of my friends' favorite novels: the night listener and veronika decides to die. much to look forward too then...

these days, lazily sampled from email

thursday: "yesterday brought me through central park where me and the kid fauxfished, looked at the weird little copcars, and he did the thing where he runs up a hill, stops, giggles, falls over, and rolls down. never a dull moment, when you're twoandahalf and high on summer and half an apple.
i had many a moment of fluky mindlessness on my way to return sexy but too small blinds to kmart (forgot measurements, returned home, left them down the stairs while i ran up, came back down, they were gone, ran outside, just caught the landlord trashing them, got hem back, went to kmart, didn't have my wallet, they didn't have my size, grrr, i'm off to home depot.)
i then discovered that netflix are sending my movies to nr 18 instead of 19, so i explained in my suckiest spanish (posta? envelopa? roja?) and got my first disc so now i can have odd memories and dawson for breakfast"
after a very gloomy friday (not only was it sort of wishy washy rainy, but i also finished gilmore girls season three, fire!, jess!, pregnacy! and disc one of my ultimate sick and guilty pleasure dawson's creek, the season where joey en pacey hook up, jen gets chased by michael pitt and dawson and andie chew up valuable screen time with unexpressive foreheads and incredibly lame teen depresssion.)
today, saturday: "got up, watched some rosemary's baby (it's been taking me days now, it just won't end, or get really scary, although the concept of being in a half-furnished new york apartment with weird noises (this morning 7:30 the opening sequence of lotr, i've had worse) feels familiar, mia farrow is cool though, the original gwyneth) then braved subway chaos to get to home depot, 2 stops downtown local, several uptown express, then 9 blocks walking to return the too short blinds i bought yesterday, also found out i'd need a drill. now you might think a drill moi? exactly. never used one, but i still got on that local subway downtown, suddenly running all the way, and started drilling. the effect: a set of very shiny horizontal blinds, a very good moment to quote the dutch translation luxaflex, much cooler than blinds, huh?
did some cereal shopping, got a slightly larger size of my heart tshirt from the young designer's market up the street (i bought it with caroline, off white with an anatomical drawing of a heart over mine and a red bloody stripe through it that looks very funny when worn under a jacket) and proceeded to clean my house in it, floor wetswiffed, one window scrubbed and windexed. i could suddenly see the weather outside. it was lovely, sunny and touristy all day, but around half past five a summer storm strook up and the entire city was bathed in yellow light, the kind you find in belgian tunnels at night. you might be thinking he extrapolates, exagerrates, but really full on wong kar wai yellow (who i'm going to see with c. at the new york premiere of 2046!) gorgeous, especially on the red buildings on my street, the yellow cabs and the white face of the police station's clock, now sandwiched and sliced by my shiny blinds."

post from work

although i am smack in the middle of my coverage on a quite dull quasi remake of 'the river wild' starring morgan freeman as kevin bacon and the usually ever enjoyable, but here just paying his bills, john cusack as meryl streep, i just though i'd present more random snatches of new york life. i went home for lunch today, just 15 minutes away now, and cleaned some more of the furniture i picked off the street after me, g, and k. and his merry gang of architects had the sudden use of a pickup truck (very out of place in the city) and packed and moved k's stuff in a few hours late last night. i am now the proud owner of this random set of found furniture: a huge antique traveling chest (also usable as coffee table or extension of my windowsill), a previously bug-infested bookcase able to hold all of my cd's and books, plus two chairs, one baby size serving as a makeshift bedside (although i don't have a bed yet) table and one fifties style chair to go with k's card table. strange, one day there was no furniture and now the place is starting to look more habitable by the day. back to the movie...

oddly european view from my bedroom/fire escape

my view
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

the neo-classical tower has once been the home of cher and is now occupied by none other than sofia coppola. i'd like to think that when i stretch in the mornings, dear sofia watches benevolently. i also has a clock that lights up at night so that i know what time it is. the glare of the many-coloured party bulbs of all the italian restaurants prevents me from knowing whether it it is morning already or just the onset of twilight.
celebrated the new place yesterday with our first piece of new york street furniture, a soho filing cabinet marked paid bills. good sign, i thought. afterwards there were "big" wontons at chinatown's wonderfully achromal "wonton garden" and then my initiation in what is most commonly known as karaoke. i remember whitney, bon jovi, the carpenters (superstar, ahhh), a rousing version of "how is the weather?" by the turtles and finally that song made famous by tiffany. very silly, and weird to think this kind of crucial asian-americana is mere blocks away.
back to the atheist children's trilogy presentation now, will post more pics and stories of tomorrow's amazing quadruple bill of four tet, manitoba/caribou, junior boys, and the russian futurists. also mere blocks away from the place i artfully decorated with pictures of mexican films and sites of celebrity deaths and now dare to start calling home. as ever, f.

untitled roof access

DSCF0788
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

it's the war of the limos and extended hummers every weekend night on mulberry street

the war of the limos
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

the still empty, empty hallway that ends in my bedroom

empty hallway
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

a peephole to apt. 18

peephole
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

water towers? tanks? reservoirs? anyway, essential view material.

DSCF0792
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

and a kitchen with a view

P4220199
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

all rooms (2 bedrooms, one kitchen, bathroom and one enchanting multifarious dining/entrance chamber) have windows towering over the smaller lodgings all around. the biggest windows look out over our fire escape over the roofs into the opulent former police station, now long since converted into condos for people such as madonna and cindy crawford. quite a change from being ben stiller's neighbour, as i am now, or so i learned today.

my new house...

P4230209
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

just found out today that after two weeks of intense searching, one very wise mulberry street landlord accepted me and my brandnew roommate k. to be the new tenants of this very cute building in the heart of little italy. starting next sunday, i will sometimes appear behind the windows on the upper right hand side and wave at the silly tourists paying way too much for their petty pizzas.