It's cold and stinks of pork

This year, Hanukkah and Thanksgiving fall on the same day. It's weird how we can extrapolate holidays to infinity--I could find out the date of Hanukkah for the next 200 years with a nanosecond Google search--but every year there's some temporal coincidence like this and we all have to read lifestyle columns about how to plan an appropriate theme party. Maybe I've watched too much Doctor Who at this point in my life, but do we need to coo and marvel over this sort of thing as if it were genuinely unexpected?

With that cynical attitude, I clearly haven't watched enough Doctor Who. Happy 50th Anniversary, fellow Whovians!

Happy Thanksgivukkah, anyway. No reason we shouldn't take pleasure in the simple things. I'm just a little grumpy because I cooked hot sausage for stuffed mushrooms, and now I have to leave the windows open to let the grease smoke out. I already took the smoke detector off the wall (and this time, I'm going to remember to put it back on, because that is how the Great Bra Fire of 2012 escalated so quickly). It's 30 degrees out and windy as fuck, so my apartment is freezing cold and stinking of pork to boot. Days I'll have to live in this pork-stink. DAYS!

Yes, it's that time of year again, when I make my one fancy dish: stuffed mushrooms. Like that guitar player in the park who only knows "Hotel California," I've got one good thing to offer the world and by god, I'm gonna do it!

One time, for the department Christmas party, I tried to make Spanish rice, and no one ate any of it--rightly so, because it was super-bland haole food that even I didn't want to eat. I'll never embarrass myself like that again. Everyone loves my stuffed mushrooms, and why wouldn't they? You can't go wrong with full-fat cream cheese and spicy sausage. I can already tell I'm going to have some of the stuffing mixture left over, and I'm looking forward to having some on a microwaved potato for dinner tonight. I'll shut the windows, crank the space heater, and stuff my gullet with delicious pork while I anticipate the office Thanksgivukkah party.

UPDATE: I ate too much cream cheese and sausage and now my belly hurts and everything is cold and stinks of pork. I'm going to watch more Doctor Who.

Urban Foraging

Uh-oh. Almost everyone who wished me a happy birthday last week said something about my blog. I think I have to start posting again.

My latest adventure in urban foraging is the best one yet. I've found apples, seashells, vacuum cleaners, dishes, and books on the stoops of Brooklyn, but a couple of weeks ago, my stubborn refusal to make eye contact with other pedestrians paid off big when I found an iPod on the ground.

I never wanted an iPod. On the other hand, I never particularly wanted a tablet, and then I got one for Christmas a while back and now I can't imagine what I'd do without it. How else would I be able to watch cartoons AND scroll through my tumblr feed at the same time? Same for my smart phone: what would I do if I couldn't take upside-down videos of  interesting birds I encounter? (Is there a way to flip videos like you flip regular pictures? Because my phone never warns me that I'm shooting upside down, I just have to find out later when I upload the footage to my computer.)

I got an iPod connector from the dollar store across the street from work, spent two hours downloading iTunes onto my rickety old laptop (and uninstalling all the useless toolbars and crap that came with it), hit "restore factory settings," and "Pete's iPod" became "Rachel's iPod."

Poor Pete--hanging out in Brooklyn, having a good time, and just like that, his brand new iPod pops out of his pocket and into the hands of a stranger who replaces his collection of carefully curated 80s dance music with 13 hours of "Star Talk" with Neil DeGrass Tyson.

But enough about Pete! Rachel's iPod also features every episode of "Welcome to Night Vale," and several hours of local music from Brooklyn's hottest up-and-comers. Two years into hosting a radio show and I've finally gotten around to listening to all of those CDs our guest bands leave in the station. And they're SUPER good! They must be amazing live!

Also, I've discovered this new thing, where you stick your headphones in and listen to music instead of paying attention to other people or traffic on the way to work. Have other people thought of this? It's pretty amazing. I haven't been hit by a single bike yet, either. Let THEM get out of MY way.

I've gone too far. This may be too much power for me.

The Mistress and Her Stable

This is a Polaroid picture.

Weird to see one, right? They don't even make Polaroid film anymore, what with the advent of high resolution cameras on our pocket phones. Photography students have all the good shit.

Last night was the last show of the summer season on the Rodent Hour. Our guests were Von Shakes, who are really too good to be on our little dog-and-pony show (they're playing on the Fox morning show next week), but they came anyway and we had a great time.

We didn't plan the photo this way--I was just put in front because I'm the shortest and ended up absorbing the light from the flash like a sheet of white paper. What I like best about this picture is that it looks like Mistress Rachel is showing off her stable of man-slaves for your pain and pleasure.

It reminds me of one of my high school graduation pictures. There was nothing overtly sexual about that picture either, I was just dressed all in white and smiling big at the camera, but Mom and I took one look at it and agreed I looked like a stripper. Sometimes, through no thought or intention, pictures of me are just kind of--dirty.

Or maybe I've just got a dirty mind.

More Summer So Far

Crap, summer's almost over, isn't it? I'm going to resist the urge to open my work email on my home computer. I've already slept in late, watched excessive amounts of cartoons, and sat about the apartment in my own filth like an aged cat--I'm not about to start being responsible just yet.

Maybe I could read more Game of Thrones for an hour or four...

I did make it back down to New Jersey to pick berries, but there were no berries to be found. I did see an excessive amount of little wild rabbits, though. Appropriate, since I re-read "Watership Down" this summer.

Oh, and R sent me the pictures of our July hike in Wawayanda State Park!

I'm never going to wear the band shirts I own to an actual performance, so here I am wearing one out in the wilderness where no one can see me buy the bears. And bears are into dubstep anyway, so who cares what they think?

The BF and I had some time off together, so we took Metronorth up to New Haven, Connecticut. Metronorth is pretty fun. You get to leave from Grand Central Station, not Penn Station, and if you don't know what that means, let's just say there's a reason the evil aliens in "The Avengers" trashed the beautiful, elegant edifice of Grand Central instead of the dank, dystopian tunnels of Penn Station.

Aliens: "We're destroying this!" Everyone else: "Good."

Yale University is in New Haven. The campus and its immediate surroundings are quite nice, a bit like Cobble Hill with the little restaurants and bookstores and outrageously priced fair trade clothing and accessories. The rest of New Haven is like Spokane but with slightly better-dressed pedestrians.

I don't have pictures of them. The BF was camera-master that day and he took over 100 pictures of buildings, but nary a one of unfashionable townies.

Yes, so much more interesting than that guy with the top hat and the feather vest.

So that is the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which the BF would have me tell you was designed by Gordon Bunshaft and completed in 1963. I would make a crude joke about the architect's last name, and was thinking up a pretty good one, but then we went inside and--

Guh...

Beinecke Library is this hollow white cube. In the center of the cube is a smaller glass cube full of books. 

Spu...

The building is make of these slabs of marble that are thin enough for sunlight to leak through, but there are no windows or skylights. 
 

It's a little like being underwater.

The rare and ancient tomes, which include a complete and intact Gutenberg Bible, are protected from excessive light, heat and humidity in their glittering glass tower. 

nuh...!

There are these cool Mad Men-era seating areas with low leather chairs and marble tables, where you can sit at the foot of the tower and just stare up at the books resting behind the glass, like the jewelry box of some enormous, nerdy Titan.

I'm spent.

I don't want to read them. I don't even want to touch them. I just want to sit there forever in their presence.

Mostly because they're classics, so they'll be really slow and boring and have those "s" letters that look like "f" letters, which give me a headache. And that right there is why I'll never be a classics scholar. What else is going on in New Haven?

Smash cut!

The BF took this picture from across the street. As soon as he lowered the camera, I disappeared inside without even waiting for him to join me. When he finally made it across and came inside, I was already handing my money over and ready to leave. I found a Catwoman book. It made me happy.

Speaking of cats, the BF and I went to the Brooklyn Museum at MY request (gasp!) to see the Divine Feline exhibit in the Egyptian wing. It's a small exhibit in a side gallery, featuring cats and lions from their permanent collection.

awww...

The BF liked the bronze mother cat with kittens the best.

AWWW...

 You can't see it in this picture, but that little one looking into Mom's face has an open mouth. He's meowing at her! It's so cute, I can't stand it!

I went to the dentist yesterday and got my teeth spackled. Then I went to the farmer's market in Grand Army Plaza, because I'd hate to have a summer where I didn't go at least once to the biggest farmer's market in Brooklyn. But I had to make the trip into Manhattan to the Union Square farmer's market, because nobody in Grand Army Plaza was selling purple potatoes.

I got to Union Square just as the vendors were starting to load up their trucks and take down tents. But most were still open and about three booths in, I spotted a laminated sign with some authentic frontier gibberish name for what we in Hawaii call Okinawan sweet potatoes. A heavily bearded man with a waxed gray mustache took my money and said, "You're looking happy." I replied, "It's because I found my purple potatoes!"

I cooked some last night with fancy purple and yellow carrots in a curry paste I bought at Pearl River. The curry paste kind of covered up the flavor of the funny-colored roots, but I have lots more of each and will make many delicious dishes with them.

And when I go back to work tomorrow, I will sit on the lawn in the rose garden and eat cold purple potatoes and purple carrots from my pink Hello Kitty lunchbox. Like a proper grown-up.

Bruising your bits on the Rodent Hour

Tuesday nights are for Rachel pretending to be cool.

You are listening to the Rodent Hour on Pratt Radio!

I know my life  may look like a glamorous whirlwind of wild hedonism and vice, but it's all a clever ruse, because the truth is I'm the kind of person who uses words like "ruse" and gets her microphone cut off when she goes on too long about X-Men. (In my defense if you listen to the broadcast on the Rodent Hour's soundcloud account, you'll hear the guitarist raising the topic. I just ran with it.)

So this is my side project, co-hosting a live music show on college radio. Which would be a LOT cooler if I didn't, in fact, graduate from college half a decade ago, and also if I actually went out to clubs and concerts to see the bands who play for us every week.

After Slim Wray played their set and my co-host Matt thwarted me and guitarist Hauser from talking about X-Men, we all gathered in the green room for the team photo. As you can see, I'm doing all right so far. At least I'm not trying to wear that sea foam green guitar with the avocado trim. I know my limits.

Here's what happened right after that picture was taken.

I offered to take the picture of the band and our sound techs with L's professional camera, which weights about seven pounds and is the size of a puppy. He put the strap around my neck and gently tried to guide my stubby fingers to the big "take picture" button. The enormous camera slips out of my creepy little child hands and falls.

My first thought was, Shit, my student's camera is going to shatter into a million expensive pieces on the floor! My second thought was, No, it'll be fine, the strap is around my neck.

I didn't have a third thought because at that point, the strap went taut and the camera swung right into my vagina.

I crumpled to my knees. Yelling "Fuck I bruised my pussy!" seemed inappropriate, so instead I squeaked, "If I was a guy, I'd be throwing up right now."

Had there been even one other woman in that room, I would have had a cold bottle of water on my vag and an arm to help me to the couch before you could say "why is that camera so fucking big?!"

But alas, there were only men. So immediately someone yelled, "Take her picture now!"

As you can see by the lack of a picture of Rachel crouching on the floor with her hands on her crotch, I ran away before that could happen.

There are many fun ways you can bruise your lady-bits at a rock show. I wouldn't recommend this one.

Monkey!

Last Sunday, I went to Lincoln Center to see "Monkey: Journey to the West," a mixed-media stage show blending animation and music with live action. It's an adaptation of the classic Chinese novel "Journey to the West" by Wu Cheng'en, which is the epic tale of the Monkey King and his friends traveling to India to find  the true teachings of Buddha and bring them back to China.

Road trip!

This show is a collaboration between Chinese and English artists. Chen Shi-Zheng wrote the text and directed, Damon Albarn composed the music, and Jamie Hewlett did the animation and the costumes. I became interested in the show because I saw some of Hewlett's concept art for "Monkey" on one of my comic book websites. He drew the indie comic "Tank Girl" back in the 90s, so he pops up on my nerdy radar every now and again. 

There's a movie, but don't watch it. You still have so much to live for.

However, watching "Monkey," I wasn't reminded of "Tank Girl," or even Hewlett and Albarn's other famous collaboration, the band Gorillaz. This show tripped some unexpected memory triggers from way back in my small-kid time that had nothing to do with indie comics or animated musical collectives.

Fun fact: Albarn and Hewlett were both born in the Year of the Monkey.

One movie that had a great impact on me as a child was "Farewell My Concubine." It's the story of two Peking opera stars who meet as children in an opera school, rise to stardom together, and come crashing back down under the rising tide of the Cultural Revolution. There's some gay stuff, too, but that's a little too complicated to get into right now. 

In Peking opera, all parts are played by males, even the female roles, and an actor who specializes in the female roles is called a dan, and the dan in this story is in love with the jing actor, who specializes in playing generals and kings, but the jing doesn't love the dan because he's straight and instead marries a prostitute who--fuck it, just watch the movie.

I've only seen it once in my life, but certain scenes remain vivid and arresting in my imagination: a mother cutting off her little boy's finger in a snowy alley; two aging actors burning their costumes in a public square while the Red Guard of Chairman Mao jeer at them; a young man in a silk gown throwing a pair of slippers at the feet of a prostitute. 

I couldn't possibly have understood this movie as a child, considering it's subject matter. For a long time it was one of those movies whose name and plot I couldn't remember, and sometimes I wondered if I made it up. It was this mysterious childhood artifact that I carried around in my mind, like a one of those ancient tables covered in writing that historians can't decipher. 

And then came the Internet. All I had to do was Google "Chinese movie little boy finger cut off" and boom! "Farewell My Concubine."

I'm not a technophobe and I don't long for a time when I couldn't spend six hours on my couch watching cartoons on my laptop while I cruise my tumblr feed on my tablet. But sometimes I am nostalgic for a time when there were still mysteries that couldn't be solved in nanoseconds by our boxes of light that hold all the information in the universe. 

Anyway, I discovered that "Farewell My Concubine" was adapted from a novel of the same name by Lilian Lee. I read it for the first time in the summer of 2007 during my first trip to New York. I bought a copy of "Farewell" during my touristy visit to the famous Strand bookstore, along with a novel by Maxine Hong Kingston called "Tripmaster Monkey," which was about a theater troupe in 1960s San Francisco putting on a performance of--wait for it--"Journey to the West." 

Monkey!

I've long lost both of those books. They were probably abandoned at some point in my journeying, as I am wont to pick up books on the road and then leave them by the wayside because books are fucking heavy to lug around in a rolly-suitcase. 

BUT--watching "Monkey: Journey to the West" reminded me very strongly of all these works and clarified a lot that was unclear or confusing about them, especially the opera scenes in "Farewell My Concubine." There's only so much words can do to convey the feeling of watching a stage show, and the movie focused more on the lives of the performers than the performances, so I was always a little fuzzy on what Peking opera was like and how it differed from Western styles of musical theater. As soon as Monkey stepped out onto the stage, stamped his feet and sang "I am Monkey!", I got it. There's so much meaning and character development conveyed in how the performers move and speak, and you can tell what type of character they are--trickster, drunken lout, aging general, goddess, demon--by these rather minimalist markers. I suppose the word to use is "stylized," because the characters are archetypes that are revealed through their styles of speech and movement. 

Guess which one is the trickster Monkey King who stole the peaches of Heaven and pissed on the Buddha's palm.

Now I've been jazzed up for a while about going to see "Monkey: Journey to the West" because of the aforementioned Jamie Hewlett connection (and also because acrobats!). I told everyone at work I was going, since I tend to get excited about things and then not shut up about them because I am apparently a four-year-old. Anyway, my Tall Boss mentioned that his wife, who is a Beijing native, hated this show. I don't know if she saw it during of its first runs or if she just heard about it and disliked it on principal, but it didn't lessen my enjoyment of it. In fact, I can see why she might hate it. If you grew up knowing a bit about Peking opera, a show like this might seem like a gaudy, tasteless spectacle designed for a dumbed-down, Westernized audience without patience or appreciation for the purer traditional form. 

And that's fine. It's a valid opinion to have. I don't like hula 'auana. I think it's haolified and lacks the underlying power and majesty of hula kahiko, so I understand traditionalist objections to a work like "Monkey: Journey to the West." I wouldn't agree with them in this case, because I enjoyed myself immensely at "Monkey", but on the other hand, I know nothing about Peking opera except that I think they allow women on the stage these days. 

I bring this up because both "Farewell My Concubine" and "Tripmaster Monkey" dealt with the preservation of traditional performance styles, and traditional values, in the face of sweeping societal upheavals. Do you change the show when your audience changes in order to remain relevant in a modern world? Or do you preserve the show as it was in the past, even at the risk of losing your audience, so the audience doesn't lose or forget something about themselves? 

Of course there's no right answer. Or rather, the right answer is somewhere in between. The tricky part is that you can't tell whether the answer was right nor not until several generations down the road, when your descendants look at your decisions and either praise or curse you for the history you made for them. 

You just have to leap, and hope for the best. 

Summer so far

It's an on-time post! A rare occurrence this summer, which is weird because I'm actually doing a lot of activities. I just get to post day and think, "No one wants to read about that." Somehow I think my life is actually less interesting when I'm being social.

For example, so far this summer I've been to three dinners with the BF's family--once for the Fourth of July, once for some English cousins moving to the city in the fall--and just last Friday, a dinner with cousins that live in the city but we literally never see except at Passover. New York is weird that way. Your relatives can live 20 minutes away on the subway and you'll see them maybe three times a year. Is it like this other places?

Also this summer, the BF and I went to see a South African stand-up comedian at The Culture Project on Bleeker Street. I love stand-up, and this guy was great. His name is Trevor Noah. You should follow him on twitter or facebook or whatever platform you use to avoid reality (I prefer tumblr).

A couple weekends back, R and I went hiking in Wawayanda State Park in New Jersey, and she still hasn't sent me any pictures of that hike except for this one. Hopefully that will change in the near future.

It's a turtle.

And on Bastille Day, the BF and I celebrated our 6 year anniversary. We each got to pick an activity, and I don't mean to brag, but my activity pick was amazing. We took the free ferry to Governor's Island to ride on 19th century carnival equipment.

I am killing summer.

That is a bicycle carousel. You turn it by pedaling (the BF says there's a motor in the center, too, but I prefer to think that it turns by the power of imagination and joy!), and it goes both backward and forward. BF says it's much easier to pedal backward than it is to pedal forward, oddly enough. I wouldn't know, because I sat in one of the red velvet seats and put my feet up like a princess while he sat on one of the dinky bike seats and did all the hard work.

I just hotted up the place.

I love Governor's Island. It's a car-free national park, and the free ferry leaves every half-hour from the park by my apartment. They moved the ferry docking this year; it used to be right across the East River from me, and the Battery Tunnel vent shaft, but now it's about a quarter of a mile down stream. The ride there is longer, so there's time to admire the scenery and watch the containers getting unloaded on the docks in front of of my building (which I can juuuust see over the big pile of salt).

The city has been doing a lot of refurbishment on the island the last couple of years, turning the old army base buildings into gift shops and pop-up art galleries and museum. There's art installations on the lawns, tree houses, playgrounds, bike paths and barnyards.

Barnyards designed by Rene Magritte.

The BF's activity turned out to be a walking tour of Jewish heritage sites on the Lower East Side that lasted for three hours in the 95 degree heat. But y'know--heritage, and I got to meet a kitty in an old synagogue that's been turned into an art space.

Highlight of the day for me.

Also we got to eat the most amazing pickles at the end of the tour, and the BF got me bubble tea as a reward for not whining once.

Later that evening, we went out for Ethiopian food and ate spiced pastes with our hands. A good time was had by all!

And have you been listening to my radio show? We're having a short summer season. Last night, my co-host was away on vacation, so I brought in my friend J to work the soundboard (and she thought I was joking when I told her I couldn't turn on my own microphone). J hooked her computer up to the studio speakers so we got to watch the first 20 minutes of "Captain America" with the audio blaring out on the brand spanking new equipment like we were in Martin Scorsese's living room. The band Hurrah! A Bolt of Light played an amazing set and we all ate cornbread. You can listen to the whole broadcast here if you missed.