out the window

out the window
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

i really like my new camera, especially in combination with the contrast slide in iphoto. everything turns these wonderful hues, and the widescreen cropping just gives the image a lot of story. this one was taken out my window of the sidewalk below, just in front of the new blockbuster that opened up there last week. you can see the face of my building reflected in the windshield, very pretty

snowy blue street (very 8 mile)

bluestreet
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

in my newly found tradition of fresh pictures from the gritty streets of chelsea, the next photos will be more arty i promise.

seventies bike in the sunday snow

bikesnow
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

black white street

blackwhitestreet
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

more snow, more images

empty streets ouside

snowcrossing
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

another look out my window

snowburger
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

a lonely cyclist braves the storm

snowbike
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

picturesque winter scenes on eight avenue

snowgeneral
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

just to show off my new camera again. it's been snowing the entire day now, cnn is going into a frenzy as usual. the streets are very quiet, new yorkers really go into their shell on these kinds of days (and if you notice that all these pictures were taken out of my window, you'll know i am more than happy to join them).

liner notes for ny resolutions november 2004

Crackling, a phone rings, a distant friend finally calls back, in the background faraway snatches of ballroom dancing, borrowed crooning. It all dissolves into the earthy sound of an acoustic guitar, grubbily strummed, accompanied by an Australian voice. And that’s how it begins, finally all the pieces flow together, all I need now is a title.
Since January 2001 I have been making monthly, or bi-monthly, sometimes seasonal mixes for my friends. The series is called Resolutions, for the holiday tradition of optimistically filling our plate with more than we could ever chew. I do this because I sometimes am not that good a friend; I don’t often reply to missed calls, text messages, emails, or pretty handwritten letters. The reasons for my bad behavior in this area of human contact remain obscure to me, although they probably include occasional feelings of insignificance, apathy, and general inadequacy. Do not take this to mean that I am not glad when friends call, or entertaining when they throw parties, just that my detailed knowledge of social mores does not necessarily implies that I will act on these guidelines, do as I promised, deliver on time.
As you might have guessed, I deal with pressure very badly, and expectations are even worse; I freeze, completely and shamefully unable to pick up a phone and get to work. The last mix I sent out to my friends was compiled through spring, distributed in June, and then, all through the summer holidays, my move to New York, registration, midterms: radio silence. Sure, I sent my change of address, replied to some of their kind emails, remembered some birthdays. But I forgot more. Marked emails unread to make myself reply, building an enormous backlog of unanswered guilt. It’s the reason why my university education took seven years instead of four. When a postcard makes you nervous, imagine what happens when you get a deadline, a second one, another incomplete. Procrastination is not the word; paralysis comes close.
The CD’s seem to help, when I am satisfied with them, that is (for every successful disc there are stillborns, misguided attempts at conceptual epics). So far this one sounds good. The third song is short, a choppy remix of a pianoforte piece leading into a staple of my ‘resolutions’, Christina Aguilera, albeit layered onto pretentious French shoegazer (exactly what it sounds like - music played by bored art students who look at their toes while noodling on their instruments). Then continue with dopplering independent hip-hop by Subtle, before Azure Ray clocks in with a crispy version of New Resolution, a song emblematic of my ‘struggle’, constantly remixing resolutions, making excuses, buying envelopes. It must be said though, that it’s not all bad; the constant searh for new music, my addiction, makes it bearable, new music fed intravenously into my laptop daily, literally thousands of songs fragmenting my hard drive, each one a possible deal breaker, the song that makes you smile walking down the streets looking up at the raindrops falling parallel to the glistening skyscrapers.
Yet there’s a disturbing amount of Scandinavia here: Norwegian Annie with her somehow mournfully glacial love song to the dancefloor (Heartbeat), East Village idiot Dungen with his carnivalesque freak out (Ta Det Lugnt, which my Swedish roommate, somewhat disappointingly translates as ‘Take it easy’) and The Concretes with an overhauled version of their Chico which sounds like a retired doo-wop troupe kidnapped by a band of dazed au-pairs in Montmartre. Then there are the classics: Funkadelic, the Left Banke, and Moby Grape, all semi-obscure songs from the records I left at home. A spoken interlude, where the eighties popstar leaves a message to his wife about his recent return from space, “It would be lovely to see you again, I imagine the kids are quite grown up by now, I suppose. Still, that’s progress for you.”
I compile the songs, painstakingly mix them together, re-edit and title, then send them in the mail, or get on trains to deliver them personally. I am now working on #29, and this mix is supposed to tell my friends back home about my new life in New York City. The songs should be about new beginnings, navigating the grid of the city, the tangerine glow of the Empire State Building outside my window as the sun sets earlier, the artistic frenzy leading up to the election (the embarrassed quiet after), the night when friends of new friends led me right past the long queues into an exclusive club where I saw that celebrity heiress who had so much plastic surgery she looks like a feline VISA-addict. The artists should be local, but not exclusively so, and I would need at least a single representative from the Low Countries (to let my ‘old’ friends know they haven’t been forgotten or, God forbid, replaced). There are rules to the mixtape, John Cusack explains this in High Fidelity, an inviting opener, no more than one song per artist, and my personal additive: relative obscurity. I want the songs to be fresh, and if they are not, they should sound crisp in the bright winter glaze.
As another actor, portraying another sad male obsessionist, once conjectured, most human activities can be divided in thirty-minute sections, the middle is the hardest, forty minutes have passed and the listener will have finished their day-old dishes, laundry or make-up ritual. There should be a marked change in mood and a drop in volume helps. Mine comes in the form of a piano ballad with a voice-over by the original space cadet, Captain Kirk himself. He reads a letter from an estranged father trying to reconnect with his daughters. He says the wrong things, does not apologize, and meanwhile Aimee Mann and Ben Folds sing the chorus: “Above the quiet, there’s a buzz. That’s. Me. Trying.” Me being ironic more like; self-mockery the ever-available modus operandi for the self-conscious.
The sequencing is the best part: the songs are all there, I just have to look for the hidden flow, the funny juxtapositions, the one song that feels out of place, too much. This phase is extremely micro-managing, burning dub-plates, hearing how it feels walking through the dairy aisle in my supermarket, in the park by the rollerblade disco, on empty escalators, Saturday night at 4 a.m. in bed with the window open and the Chelsea crowd fading out. It should feel true, but just a little more optimistic. (I don’t want people to think I’m depressed just because of my penchant for troubled acoustic boys with badly tuned guitars.) Each new track should make you forget the last song, seconds into the next. Turn a pencil into a drumstick, get your hips itching and sparingly twitch the tear ducts.
This is a mix that makes most sense piped into your ears, finger on the volume trigger, keeping step even when circumventing city roadworks. It ends seventy-eight minutes later with that same crackling it started out with, a Swedish accent sings the story of a wronged song, left at the department of forgotten songs by her A-side sister. I feel glad, can’t wait to get out there, test the waves of traffic with this new soundtrack, I’ll send the finished copies off after I finish my next paper (a comparison of irrational characters of the literature of modernity), then I’ll buy those pretty rainbow CD cases, padded envelopes, compare shipping prices, start burning.
I guess I have my title, NY Resolutions, or even better in lowercase: ny resolutions #1, the local abbreviation doubling for the universally Scandinavian word for ‘new’, a promise I know I can’t keep.

cab

cab
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

pigeon

nypigeon
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

new camera and t-shirt

tshirt
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

hi everybody, just got back to new york. i am slowly getting used to new temeratures and timezones. my new camera sure helps, i'll take it out on the streets soon, for now i'll just post this picture of a t-shirt i bought from the lovely and funny kimya dawson, who i saw perform at 'happy ending' a very fancy new york bar hidden behind a hot pink awning that says health club in chinese and english. she played my favorite song ('being cool') and was adorably shy. as i've said before, more later, with pictures...

take a look at my other view

desktopscan
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

the fun thing about getting a scanner (my very new, very sexy hp all-in-one psc 1350), is that you can create desktop images out of things that are actually on your desk, a picture of edie sedgewick of warhol's factory from pittsburgh's warhol museum, the always magnificent self-adhesive name badge, assorted coins and real gold, the occasional tea bag of art, and my shiny though largely empty compostion notebook.

different angle on my marvelous view

rncroadblock
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

another picture taken during the early days, the roadblock clearly visible. as the cops were the same ones everyday, i could see them getting to know the passersby, the drivers of the cars they kept stopping and checking, after a few days there were hugs and a lot of political conversations, the police were in the midst of renegotiating their contracts with the city. now the same street has been taken over with the usual suspects, men with their dogs, grandmas with ingenious shopping contraptions and a lot more bicycles than this arrogant little dutch boy was expecting.

finally online!

empireview1
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

now that i finally have internet access in my room, i can show everybody what my view looks like from this tiny airconditioned eleatorsized room of mine. this picture was taken on one of my first days here, the convention was still in full swing and the sun was still in summer mode (when i step outside today i'll notice that fall is closing in, the breeze and sudden rainstorms). the streets are a bit busier now, although never in full-on midtown gridlock mode, i finished my proust for the day and am looking forward to checking out some of the loftier thrift stores i've been passing on my way to 'school' (since it is called the new school i think i'll cal it that). i have two classes today, another one tomorrow, and then the reading/writing will begin again.

one of the pictures i took on my road trip: blue ridge parkway

one of the pictures i took on my road trip: blue ridge parkway
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

another interesting thing about these first days is the way i adapt. i
start mimcing gestures and americanised adjectives (Nice!), what's
especiaaly disturbing is the fact that, because i've been hanging out
with british and india residents, my previously flawless
neutro-american aacent is more and more drifting into a decidedly
cockney way of speech. i suddenly find myself ordering a bagel in
british, or switch accents at random within a sentence, very
disturbing.
my phone service is almost working, so i'll be able to call some
people soon (if only to say call me back..). in the meantime my days
pass quite languidly, hardly any planning in advance, which means that
i sudenly find myself in washington square park as night is falling,
watching the freshmen and their equally wide-eyed parents and siblings
crossing the square, probably looking out for their first sight of the
elusive olsen twins, all the while this band of musicians is
practicising behind me, invite members of the public to sing along to
songs of their choosing ('summertime', and finally a mass singalong to
the magnificent 'tiny dancer').
in the morning i was out to the salvation army store across the street
where bought some mugs, a bowl, a shirt and suit-jacket for that
strokesy new york 'harry potter in converses' look that went out of
fashion two years ago, still no sign of my laptop yet so i'm still
writing these missives from the severyly cold computerlab at school.
hope all of you are well and enjoying the occasional late night
park-walk, love en kus f.

second week, new friends and the final bureaucratic steps towards my renewed existence as a student

the past days of orientation have, as well as relieving a completely new sense of anxiety and a weird internal turmoil, fulfilled most of the ideals one can have of such events, my fellow students were very interesting and interested, mostly foreign but not acutely exotic (belgium, norway, england, canada), very fulbrighty (at least four of us in a group of 24) and the days have managed to fill themselves by the comfortable natural logic that seems to set in when you completely give yourself up to kafkaesque bureaucratic processes. i have now registered for classes, all very similar to the ones i took in maastricht (war and modernism, but i also got into a class about cultural criticism), my professor was really nice and talk of classes soon gave way to planning the first liberal studies party (we discussed music and assorted cocktails).
these are still the days were you answer the same basic questions more than twenty times a day (liberal studies at the graduate faculty, dutch, i learned it from tv) in the elevator, on the steps in front of the building, walking home after buying multi-coloured clotheshangers. you are constantly forgetting everybody's names or pronouncing them wrong, going out to dinner with a few people, others tag along, you meet people on the way, and end up getting home really late, because you were discussing the particular soothing qualities of certain hollywood blockbusters (or the inherent absurdities of the american political system versus the divine nature of holland and its so-called liberal tendencies).
I've also been walking around, trying to get my internal compass in order (east west, streets, avenues, blocks, subway lines, that nice bookstore and the cheap supermarket), realizing you are closer to home (not yet home to me now, more like bunk, or place) because the skyscrapers before you, are the same as the ones outside your window. embarassingly enough, i still haven't seen central park, and i missed the big march because i was moving all my stuff (and because i was stuck in chaotic demonstration traffic waiting for a cab to take my new tv/mind control device back up eight avenue).
i saw my first celebrity last week when i was at toys-r-us where fellow fulbrighter mark was buying a bike, it must have been a sign of hope because i saw the lead singer of the polyphonic spree, a particularly overhappy and megajoyous crew of about 27 bandmembers. i guess i'm doing fine (just got another email, saying that i have to re-inform big brother of my change of address, oh the joys of beingdependent on forms and signatures) and i hope you all are too, love en kus,
f.

first post (from the very quiet, except for the insistant hum of the ac, computerlab of new school university)

hi everybody, just a few days now before i move into manhattan for real, it has been quite a wild (at least for my meagre standards) ride up to now, 2600 miles through the us, seeing enormous amounts of trees, plus the added wild animal (bear, deer, raccoon, bobcat, squirrel, and all kinds of birds), in addition to the miraculous duplication of motels, chainstores and fast food restaurants. new york has been very kind to me, as i've seen some nice films (the ever wonderful donnie darko now in its dc, the charming garden state, and today i hope to follow these up mean creek).
tomorrow will feature my first concert, albeit a classical one (oh the merry bonuses of being a 'fulbrighter'), on a barge by brooklyn bridge oevrlooking the, for me, still magical skyline of ny. my fulltime occupation of wideeyed newcomer has so far prevented me from enjoying more than a little of the other cultural life available here: i've bought but not quite finished the new daniel clowes comic about a smoking superhero, and am still reading the same very thin vonnegut i started by a manmade lake/golfing resort in georgia last week. i hope to show you a couple of shots of my new room soon, but that will have to wait until things have settled down, as next week will bring the republican convention, just a few blocks from my new place of residence, as well as orientation, registration, an english test, and the other crazy activities one normally would associate with the first weeks of class, love en kus,
f.