(no subject)

I see neither cornfedpig nor pipistrellus seem to have surfaced yet. This doesn't surprise me, as I've been laid flat by jet lag the past 24 hours, and I came back from New York by a fairly direct route. I saw them at JFK airport on Sunday night and I think they were going to fly via Reykjavik, Warsaw, Santiago, New York again and then Kyoto. Something like that.



I'm hard pressed to see how the trip could have been any better. The wedding went without a hitch, as did the reception, and even the music, for which I was responsible, went off okay, although I am never DJ-ing with iPods again, as the things that make them fine for personal use—the sensitivity of the controls, the briefness of the backlighting, etc—make them incredibly bad for use in a darkened dancing environment where people are expecting the same track to keep playing all the way through, and not suddenly change mid-song because a moth blew its nose half a fucking mile away.


EDIT: Oh, and, and, if you pause a track, after thirty seconds or so the iPod decides for itself you didn't really mean it, and starts playing anyway. This, for DJing purposes, can safely be labelled unsatisfuckingfactory.

(no subject)

I went to the Museum of Modern Art last Thursday, and, as well as getting to see some Jackson Pollocks up close for the first time (make my entendre a double, etc), I was forced into the realisation that Andy Warhol was probably a genius after all. I always thought that as far as the theory went, yes, he was on the money, and that yes, art and commerce, fifteen minutes, all that, he'd pretty much called reality's bluff; however, I was never moved by the end product. Soulless and unexciting, I thought (and still do where those awful films are concerned, no matter how much of a practical joke they were meant to be). MOMA has the soup cans on display, and you could rave to me for four hours about their wider meaning as I sank into a Martini-induced stupor, but you'd still fail to convince me that they're at all interesting. They really are, as the uninitiated remarked in bewilderment when the paintings were first unveiled, just a bunch of soup cans.

However, on two separate occasions (since MOMA has followed Tate Modern's lead and ordered things by theme and choronology, as opposed to necessarily by artist) I walked into a room and was utterly sucker-punched by a vast Warhol screenprint I'd never seen before. If you don't know them, tiny reproductions on your screen of Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times and Hammer and Sickle won't be enough to convey their visceral impact, but they persuaded me, against my will, that the old bugger might have been on to something after all.

(no subject)

Literally several people have asked me if I went to the theatre while I was in New York. The answer is no, but only because THIS hadn’t opened there yet:

Harvey Finkelstein’s Institute of Whimsical, Fantastical and Marvelous Puppet Masterage’s
SOCK PUPPET SHOWGIRLS



“We do all the essential bits, like the strip-club scenes and the goddess dance,” says the show’s creator. The highlight is the pool scene, although, he admits, “it’s close to impossible to mimic pool sex—especially with socks.”
New York Magazine

The wisdom of Bob Dylan

“We were talking about, I don’t know what, maybe Jack Kerouac, and somebody said a certain word, and he said another word, and I said, ‘Well, that doesn’t mean the same thing!’ And he said, ‘All words that rhyme mean the same thing.’ I’ve never forgotten that. I thought it showed insight. Of some sort.”

D.A. Pennebaker (director of 1967 Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back)