Lightning Strikes on Kane Street

Last week we had a storm, and folks, it was a doozy. A bolt of lightning struck the historic Christ Church on Kane Street and Clinton Avenue here in my neighborhood, and the falling debris killed some guy walking past. Harsh. The scaffolding that was up is all twisted, there's a huge gaping hole in the roof, and one of the stained glass windows is thrashed, as you can (kinda) see. The trees get in the way of really good disaster pictures, and I missed my chance to take close-ups before the city put wooden walls around the whole site and blocked it off to all cars and pedestrians. The whole street is going to be blocked off by construction for the next month or so while they repair the building.

It's weird to say this now, but I'm more scared of thunder than lightning. My first big summer storm in New York, when I was still living at 187, the thunder scared me so much I moved my mattress to the floor and slept there for the rest of my stay in that house. It never occurred to me to be scared of lightning. It's just light, right? I can feel Sir Isaac Newton shaking his fat little head at me. "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter into their Composition?… The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations…" Somehow that quote relates to the development of the atomic bomb and means I should be way more scared of lightning than I actually am (probably; I don't pretend to understand Sir Isaac Newton, I just read that quote in a comic book once). Look what it did to this steeple!

Like I said. Harsh.

Birkenstocks

I got a pair of Birkenstocks. I'm at that point in my life.

Strangely enough, I got the idea from "The Devil Wears Prada," which I rented on Netflix a few weeks ago. If encouraging its viewers to go shopping was the movie's intention, it succeeded nicely, because "The Devil Wears Prada" inspired in me a deep want for clothes. Anna Hathaway just looked so pretty in her perfectly-fitted little jackets and skirts that cost thousands of dollars in real life but she got for free because she worked at a fashion magazine. But every time she was out of the office, walking around the streets of New York or Paris in those ridiculous shoes, my feet ached in sympathy. The soles were all too thin for the cobbles in her Lower East Side neighborhood, and the heels were not at all conducive to the amount of running around her boss made her do. There's studies that show the long-term damage feet and legs sustain from regular high heel-usage. I already wake up in the middle of the night from cramps in my feet and calves if I've done a lot of walking; there's no way my body could take a pair of stiletto Jimmy Choos.

But the want--the deep, gnawing WANT for new, pretty clothes! I must have STUFF! I stared at a lot of people's feet on the subway for the next couple of days, which is totally okay and not at all weird because in New York everyone looks at everyone else's shoes, and I determined that T-strap sandals are in this summer. And one of the fashion websites I joined, Rue La La, was having a sale on Birkenstocks, so there you go. T-strap Gizeh Birkenstock sandals for Big Island Rachel. They're so comfy. I regret nothing.

I know that a girl's Birkenstock phase is usually in college, when she's attending Take Back the Night rallies and only wearing clothes from No Sweat. But I grew up country. My only shoes in high school were rubber slippah and white tennis shoes all chewed up from hiking. When I went to college, I went from farmland to urban Honolulu, and my roommate was a SoCal fashionista who took me shopping every weekend. I wore heels and full makeup to class and was usually the best-dressed person at the poetry slam. Little silk scares, y'all.

Living in New York, I've almost started to regress. I never wear makeup, because the pollution makes my eyes tear up and it would dissolve into a soggy raccoon mess by lunchtime. I always wear my hair in a tight braid or a bun because I'm afraid of what's on the back of my subway seat. And I don't wear high heels. The last time I put on a pair of heels was for the Tom Sawyer ballet in Kansas City, and while I looked great and it was a lot of fun, it's just not going to happen for me in New York. I walk a mile on concrete sidewalks to get to work every morning, spend my day in an office with concrete floors, and walk another mile over concrete to get back home at night. I need a flat shoe with a thick, chunky sole that can absorb the shock of all that hard concrete. So, Birkenstocks. I just wore them for a week straight and my feet feel fantastic. Can Anne Hathaway say that?

Well, probably, because she's a movie star and can afford to have some peasant rub her feet with crushed pearls and shea butter every night. But I'm a union member and I don't believe in exploiting the working man. Birkenstocks, y'all. Birkenstocks.

Just stepped out for some smokes

And came back six months in honor of Bastille Day! Which also happens to be the day that the BF and I met back in 2007 in the Penn Station food court. We celebrate our anniversary on this day because it's easy to remember and all the French restaurants have dinner discounts. Big Island Rachel keeps it classy.

This year we went to a restaurant in my neighborhood that I've walked past every day for two years but have never actually entered. It's expensive and looks fancy, but it's always packed with people, many of them in jeans and slippers, so I always assumed that it must serve delicious and well-prepared but still user-friendly cuisine.

Instead, it turned out to be the art house movie equivalent of food: confusing and hard to swallow.  There was a goat cheese and yellow watermelon salad; hazelnuts in the fish; mint and purple wild rice in the grits; something called "Korean barbecue style brisket." I looked at the tower of food piled up on my plate like a church steeple and softly wailed, "What is this? I don't understand!"

And for all its weirdness, the food just felt, well, a bit old-fashioned. Strange combinations of disparate ingredients arranged in tower formation on huge plates--how fifteen years ago. This is Brooklyn, or nuBrooklyn as the BF likes to call it. We've got a sort of gourmet mac'n'cheese and locally sourced meat loaf thing going on right now. Dining in nuBrooklyn is all about the most basic post-war Americana cooking, just made with local, organic and artisanal everything instead of processed cheese-product and factory farmed beef.

On a related note, visit our newest sign of the end times, a store that in Prospect Heights that sells only artisanal mayonnaise. Finally.

Want to learn more about artisanal Brooklyn? Read this New York Magazine article on the Brooklyn food revolution, and pay special attention to the section at the end that talks about the Dominos Sugar Factory that's been in Brooklyn since the 1950s.

Doe Paoro on the Rodent Hour

Last night, the Rodent Hour hosted a singer named Sonia from the group Doe Paoro. I probably had about three different pronunciations of that name over the course of the evening, and none of them were correct. I shouldn't have looked at the word "Paoro" before I had the sound stuck firmly in my brain. Kept trying to roll that R.

But it was still a great show. Sonia played music from her new CD, "Slow to Love," which you can listen to in its entirety at that link and also purchase on iTunes. She ended by singing a Tibetan opera piece for us, a capella. Most of the tech stuff went off without a hitch. And the Rodent Hour's new theme song is the theme song for the anime Cowboy Bebop. I'm pretty proud of that one. I pulled the song up on my computer, and my co-host Matt agreed that it would make a great opener, so now the nerdiest possible music outside of the Star Trek theme song will play before every show.

Staying true to my roots.

Next week, our guest is Jason Cady, a lovely person and an opera composer who was also my very first roommate when I moved to New York City. The BF remembers the story like this: "You got out of the car that took you to Bedstuy from the airport and we rang the doorbell to the apartment, and I was thinking, Please be normal, Please be normal, Please be normal. And it was Jason!" You can listen to some of his music at that link.

Update: Almost forgot, Rodent Hour shows are archived on the our SoundCloud account , so if you missed our guest interviews live, you can listen and download them for one week after the show.

Also, the second hour of our show is Tunes from the Crypt, music we find on the shelves of the Pratt Radio station. Each week's play list is also available for download on the SoundCloud account (soundcloud.com/rodenthour). We update the site every week every Wednesday, the day after the latest show.

And now I'm a radio host!

For my first post of the New Year (and Happy Year of the Dragon to you all!), I'm pleased to announce my debut on college radio. I'm going to be co-hosting the Rodent Hour on Tuesdays from 8 to 10PM New York time, which means it's just in time for all the Hawaii people to get off work, crack open a brew, and listen to some tunes on Pratt Radio.

It's all online. Here's the link to the Pratt Radio website where you can listen to us live.

And here's the link to the Rodent Hour's Facebook page, so you can post comments either celebrating or disparaging our taste in music and guests. Tonight's interviewees are Drunk Bastard and Skate from the hockey punk rock or puck rock band, Two Man Advantage.

Here's now I came to be on college radio five years after I graduated from college. My coworker, Matt, did the Rodent Hour on Pratt Radio last spring. Pratt Radio has bookshelves full of promo CDs, literally hundreds of them going back 10 or 25 years, that no one has ever listened to. Matt would grab a handful of them every week and bring them into the office so we could listen to them and riff on how bad they were, ala Mystery Science Theater 3000, because most of them were AWFUL. He'd say how he wanted to have another radio show and call it Tunes from the Crypt, where we'd just play music from the shelves and talk about it, and I'd laugh and say how much fun it would be to co-host that show with him.

Now, Matt will do this thing to me, and I think it's quite cruel, where he'll start off a sentence with, "Remember when you said..." It always makes a little bud of panic bloom in my tummy, because the truth is, no. No, I don't remember what I said. Ever. If it's not a quote from the Simpsons, a feminist screed, or the history of Batman's Robins, I don't save it in my brainspace after its left my mouth. So Matt came into the office about two weeks ago with the Spring 2012 Pratt Radio Schedule, and I'm on the list to co-host Tunes from the Crypt every Tuesday. He says I agreed to it, and my mind was just a big "File Not Found," but I pretended like I knew what he was talking about and nodded vigorously to save face. Then I got to thinking to myself, "Self, you're gonna be on the radio!" Self thought that was pretty cool, and I agreed, so now here we all are, on Tuesdays from 8 to 10, co-hosting the Rodent Hour!

Tunes from the Crypt, while originally a separate show from the Rodent Hour, is just going to be the name we give to the music we find on the shelves. Simpler that way.

We're on the lookout for musicians to come on the show, play their music, and talk story with us. So far, we've scheduled Two Man Advantage for tonight, and later we've got opera composer Jason Cady (2/21/12) and hiphop artist E-Dot (2/28/12). To be a guest, you have a have 1) decent music, 2) an upcoming show/CD release to promote, and 3) a website/Facebook page. If you want to be a guest, contact the Rodent Hour Facebook page.

Our listenership runs well into the teens, so you know it's a good bet!

Literacy for Queers

I somehow landed not one, but two queer-themed literary events on my agenda last week. The first was a Queer Librarian event on Saturday night, and the second was a talk by noted queer author Samuel Delany just last night.

Queer Librarians--as my sister says, "Are there that many of them?" Judging by the size of the crowd at the Stonewall Inn on Saturday, I'd say that's a resounding Yes. Some of the people were from my company, both students and faculty from the Library Science program. There probably were some employees of the Public Library system there, but I think the majority of attendees came from the world of fringe libraries: zine curators, underground film archivists, and of course the editors, writers, artists and filmmakers that produce what the libraries curate. And I'm not going to rule out the possibility of people who were just there to fulfill a sexy librarian fetish--or a book fetish in general, why the hell not? It's the Village!

Although I like to think that Internet was invented just so I could broadcast my misguided sense of importance to the world at large, it's clear that the real beneficiaries of this great cloud of information we humans have created are people and ideas on the fringe. One of the zines I picked up at the event had a story about the writer looking up "homosexual" in the dictionary when she was six because she lacked any other source of information or research tool to discover what she was. Now any person with an Internet connection can go online and find poetry, music, academic articles, political discourse, support groups and pornography that speak directly to them and their experiences. We're unshackled from the myth of monolithic culture in a way we've never been before, and perspectives that historically haven't been aired now have their own Library of Congress classifications. The walls at the Stonewall were decorated with library call numbers for topics like "older bisexual men" and "history of transsexuals," and all the televisions were playing the original British "The Prisoner," which isn't exactly literary but fits the interests of that weird and nerdy subset of people who use library call numbers as party decorations.

Fun detail, when really butch women get dressed to the nines, they look like a cross between Buddy Holly and the 11th Doctor on Doctor Who. ("Bow Ties are cool.")

On Monday, I went to the first hour of a talk by Samuel Delany, who says he hasn't considered himself a science fiction writer since his 20s but is still mainly known as that queer experimental science fiction writer. He's a great public speaker. Some writers aren't--Alice Waters can suck it--and others are, and Delany was one of the good ones. For example, I learned that it's entirely possible to write and publish 5 novels by the time you're 22 if you're also leaving your apartment at least 3 times a day to have anonymous gay sex with half a dozen people at a time on the Lower East Side.

Speaking of different perspectives, Delany told a story about why science fiction is relevant because of its ability to describe different worlds, which aren't as far away as we think. When he was living on the Lower East Side in the 1960s and having all that delicious sex, he was also married to a woman who wore the same jeans size as him. One day she came home wet from the rain and he gave her a pair of his jeans to wear while hers dried off. She stuck her hands in the pockets and gasped. "They're so big!" Curious, he looked at her jeans and realized for the first time that pockets in women's jeans "couldn't even hold a pack of cigarettes." He could barely imagine what it must have been like to live in a world without pockets, and realized then that women lived in a completely different world than men. So he began to write stories from the perspective of women and queer characters to describe these different worlds, some of which have actual aliens but most of which just have people who feel like aliens in relation to the world they live in.

Good stuff, lots to think about. I like to cultivate life on the fringe.

Letters to the past

Dear Past Rachel:
Yes, you're seven years old and you are Catwoman. I know you're feeling awesome about it, even though the costume is a little off-model and you're vamping in a parking lot in front of the pizza parlor in broad daylight. Good for you.

Things are a little tough for you right now. You're cross-eyed and have a terrible haircut. Being Catwoman helps, but unfortunately, it's not going to get better just yet. You'll be cross-eyed for a while longer, you'll have to wear braces, and when you start getting tits, one will clearly be bigger than the other. By and large, it will suck.

But guess what? One day you grow up and you get to look like this.Now you're Catwoman and you're on your way to a party in the East Village in New York City. Hair all grown out, eyes straight, teeth straight, well-titted, got your own blog--life is pretty sweet for you. You even still have those original leather gloves from your first Catwoman outfit, but you left them at home because they have some holes between the fingers now.

Just remember, you may clean up good and know your way around a ball gown, but while you may sashay into parties thinking that you look like this----the vast majority of the time you're still sort of goofy-looking, especially when you're having a lot of fun and haven't practiced your drunk-face in front of the mirror. Observe.In fact, that maniacal grin and scrunched up nose is pretty much your default setting. You don't really need to be drinking. Observe again.
Oy. That's harsh. But your loved ones assure you it's part of your charm. Besides, you're Catwoman! And look, you won a book at the Halloween party! So all in all, we made good, little kitten. Real good.