I was walking with my wife to our car after dinner. I walked over to her door and hit the unlock button on the remote control. Chivalry? She got in the car and I walked over to my door. It just seems different. The idea of walking over to her door is protective and self-sacrificing, unselfish and thoughtful. And to be honest, the only reason I walked her to her door was because we had just gone out to dinner. I never walk over to her door to hit the unlock button when we go to Wegman's or Hollywood video. I hit that button yards away from the car until it opens and then B-line for the driver's side. I don't know. I suppose I should make an effort to manually unlock her door from now on, if for nothing more than a return to the old. So this is my Kierkegaardian post, using technology to complain about technology and it's pacifying and massifying effects.
Elections were being held in Indonesia last week and although I haven't been following it's political happenings of late I should be looking up who won the election and what implications their election will have on that country. What a mess we've made there.
I've been buying the weekend edition of the NYTimes lately. It takes me most of the week to get through, but I've been enjoying it thoroughly. I bet it would drive Mr. Bush mad knowing that going to church and buying the NYTimes is part of my Sunday routine. I come home from church, laboriously move our television from our bedroom to our living room questioning throughout the entire process if this trouble will really really be worth it, fuddling with those tiny cable wires that were made for Edward Ratchet Hands, the popular films stars less idealistic but more pragmatic brother, ice my now bleeding swollen hands on a little snow cone of my own which has at points of my life resembled a can of Bud, turn on the football game that comes in, (which by the way, Dear NFL, real effing cool giving the Buffalo Bills and the NY Jets bye weeks on the same week. That's the one chance I get all season to catch a Jets game you stopuidt jocks!) and read the NYTimes. This sentence was written in an experimental style I'm trying out. I really wanted you to feel the hardships of moving my television from one room to another asking all the while whether reading the rest of that long sentence would be worth it.
I love the word waxing. Waxing nostalgic, waxing sentimental, waxing Kafkaesque, it's all just grand. It makes me glad, which is another word I'd like to use more often.
In the weekend edition of the NYTimes you get a NYTimes magazine. This Sunday's cover features Ana Marie Cox of
Wonkette. The article features Josh Marshall, Atrios, The Daily Kos and Ana as well as a couple other bloggers. Ana dropped out of a PHD program at Berkeley and another, I don't remember which has a PHD from Brown University in History. (I think it was Josh but I don't want to read back through and try to find out.) He can make up to $10,000 dollars a month from the ads he has posted on his sight. Not bad. Noticeably absent from the article was our own Cap'n Pete of antistrophe.com. Rumors are flying throughout the blogosphere that Cap'n Pete refused the interview. His traffic is at an all time high, threatening to break the already work-laden blogger. It's an interesting article which I recommend reading.
I'm listening to Te Deum by Arvo Part, which is hitting a certain spot, but it's got nothing over Gavin Bryar's Sinking of the Titanic, which can bring one to tears.
Speaking of "Titnc" which was written on Jean Michel's Basquait's shoes in the movie Basquait, the MOMA will be showing a retrospective of his work coming this fall. The Whitney will be showing a crap load of Cy Twombly paintings as well so it looks as though a trip to NYC is in order in a couple of months.
After dinner, but before the chivalry Chautauqua (au au ua), we walked past a coffee bar. It was about 10:30 at night, so you'd expect to see the usual artsy locals sketching swirly Giger drawings in the in-house art book or under age poets scratching song lyrics onto recycled earth friendly nature colored napkins because they aren't old enough or inventive enough to write poems on bar napkins, which I strictly prohibited while I was bartending on grounds of its unintentional kitsch-ness and it's defamation to poetry in general. This was also grounds for dismissal if you were wearing any type of goatie or Newsy hat. But nothing of the like was to be seen here. The coffee shop was packed with people Latin dancing. It's so rare to see people dancing. These folks were young and attractive. They weren't at a wedding drunkenly following the DJ"S instructions for the Electric Slide. They were knowledgeable. They were sweating and smiling, clapping, writing a more worthy poetry with their feet. I watched from the window for a couple of minutes, but I eventually had to go in. I had to hear the music and, and see the colors. It must have been nearing a hundred degrees in this place and because I was not dancing, I was the only one to notice. It seemed surreal to see something so natural and healthy taking place in real time, in real life. It looked like a movie set the same way a bird sounds like a cell phone. Simulacra applies its white face paint and resembles instead, a cloud from a Gonzalez Torres poster. The women spun and twisted and the men held their hands and took small quick steps. No one seemed to be rehearsing or counting in his or her minds. No one seemed out of place, including myself because whenever people are dancing to Latin music, there should be someone there to admire them. It was a treat which left me for the rest of the night, waxing nostalgic.
