Spurious, randomness
March, 2007
San Francisco.
The weather has been almost unbearably mild and sunny this week. Last year at this time? 30-something days of rain. Any time you get sun in San Francisco you rejoice - because folks? It really ain't all that sunny here. And in stormy, unpredictable March?
We're a population of human sunflowers.
I got this leather jacket last month? It's almost too warm to wear (but I do, because damn, it looks good on me). Out west in the Inner Richmond, where the wind kicks up in the late afternoon and you can feel the breath of the fog long before you actually see it, I find myself morphing more and more into a native. Last Monday, with the temperature still comfortably in the 70's, I showed up for a rare appearance at the 540 wearing my leather coat, t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. This kind of look in Seattle would get me outed as a California transplant - here I was just another person doing their own thing.
I'm reading Martin Amis again, after a lengthy MA hiatus. (He tells a story of watching his father, the great English author Kingsley Amis, trying to read one of his books - "fifty pages in, and he'd send it cartwheeling across the living room" - only to pick up a spy thriller by Le Carre or Graham Greene. I sort of get that frustration myself). A little of him goes a long way, sort of like Tom Robbins, but with the Superman sized talent. His newest book, House Of Meetings is (as usual) shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and is so full of Amis' idiosyncratic, pyrotechically brilliant prose, I can barely pick it up before putting down, feeling at once both stimulated and exhausted:
So, to encapsulate: Zoya, unlike "all the others," I saw as indivisible. Being indivisible was her prime constituent. Each action involved the whole of her. When she walked, everything swayed. When she laughed, everything shook. When she sneezed - you felt that absolutely anything might happen. And when she talked, when she argued and opposed, across a tabletop, she leaned into it and performed a sedentary belly dance of rebuttal. And naturally I wondered what else she did like that, with the whole of her body.
This is the POV of a man obsessed - and it describes exactly the kind of woman I hope to find someday.
Watched Supernatural and Grey's Anatomy last night. Tricia Helfer was on, but damn if I didn't see the gag straight off because in the tease, when they showed her car plowed up against the tree, I thought "Oh, lookit - they're poor, driving a 1990 something-or-other rather than a new car, which is weird because on television they're always driving new cars and talking on new cellphones - UNLESS THIS IS 1992 or SOMETHING AND TRICIA HELFER IS LIKE BRUCE WILLIS IN THE SIXTH SENSE" - I swear to God my mind does this to me all the time, taking little details and spoiling the damn show. I like how makeup people like to turn Tricia into Bombshell Tricia and then Normal Tricia and back again, all the while she just does what she does, which is act lights out. Honestly, I didn't like her at first - but I've really been impressed with her development as an actor.
Over on Grey's, they did the wonderful denounment, where all of the main characters end up one bed over from their usual sleeping arrangement, with Meredith skootching in beside Christina (would that it were so) and Izzy rolls over to find George and the empty bottle of Knob Creek they knocked off. She notes her nakedness and finally - FINALLY - she can move on from Denny D.
I'm starting to wake up. In the day, in my life.
San Francisco.
The weather has been almost unbearably mild and sunny this week. Last year at this time? 30-something days of rain. Any time you get sun in San Francisco you rejoice - because folks? It really ain't all that sunny here. And in stormy, unpredictable March?
We're a population of human sunflowers.
I got this leather jacket last month? It's almost too warm to wear (but I do, because damn, it looks good on me). Out west in the Inner Richmond, where the wind kicks up in the late afternoon and you can feel the breath of the fog long before you actually see it, I find myself morphing more and more into a native. Last Monday, with the temperature still comfortably in the 70's, I showed up for a rare appearance at the 540 wearing my leather coat, t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. This kind of look in Seattle would get me outed as a California transplant - here I was just another person doing their own thing.
I'm reading Martin Amis again, after a lengthy MA hiatus. (He tells a story of watching his father, the great English author Kingsley Amis, trying to read one of his books - "fifty pages in, and he'd send it cartwheeling across the living room" - only to pick up a spy thriller by Le Carre or Graham Greene. I sort of get that frustration myself). A little of him goes a long way, sort of like Tom Robbins, but with the Superman sized talent. His newest book, House Of Meetings is (as usual) shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and is so full of Amis' idiosyncratic, pyrotechically brilliant prose, I can barely pick it up before putting down, feeling at once both stimulated and exhausted:
So, to encapsulate: Zoya, unlike "all the others," I saw as indivisible. Being indivisible was her prime constituent. Each action involved the whole of her. When she walked, everything swayed. When she laughed, everything shook. When she sneezed - you felt that absolutely anything might happen. And when she talked, when she argued and opposed, across a tabletop, she leaned into it and performed a sedentary belly dance of rebuttal. And naturally I wondered what else she did like that, with the whole of her body.
This is the POV of a man obsessed - and it describes exactly the kind of woman I hope to find someday.
Watched Supernatural and Grey's Anatomy last night. Tricia Helfer was on, but damn if I didn't see the gag straight off because in the tease, when they showed her car plowed up against the tree, I thought "Oh, lookit - they're poor, driving a 1990 something-or-other rather than a new car, which is weird because on television they're always driving new cars and talking on new cellphones - UNLESS THIS IS 1992 or SOMETHING AND TRICIA HELFER IS LIKE BRUCE WILLIS IN THE SIXTH SENSE" - I swear to God my mind does this to me all the time, taking little details and spoiling the damn show. I like how makeup people like to turn Tricia into Bombshell Tricia and then Normal Tricia and back again, all the while she just does what she does, which is act lights out. Honestly, I didn't like her at first - but I've really been impressed with her development as an actor.
Over on Grey's, they did the wonderful denounment, where all of the main characters end up one bed over from their usual sleeping arrangement, with Meredith skootching in beside Christina (would that it were so) and Izzy rolls over to find George and the empty bottle of Knob Creek they knocked off. She notes her nakedness and finally - FINALLY - she can move on from Denny D.
I'm starting to wake up. In the day, in my life.