Yes Us Can

On October 30th, 2008, I got dropped off at my parking lot gate at around 12:30 in the morning.  As I fiddled with my keys, I could hear shouts and whoops whizzing through the air.  I put my keys back in my purse and took myself for a walk. 

South Street was abuzz with activity–not the aggressive, wanton debauchery of its Friday and Saturday nights, but a joyful, flushed-face conviviality truly proving the city to be worthy of its Brotherly Love epithet.  Walking west to Broad Street, I high-fived nearly every person walking the other way.  Their red baseball caps were bathed in a warm amber glow from the streetlights.  A girl smilingly offered me a beer from her jacket pocket.  Their attitudes were infectious, and I felt a huge grin spread across my face. 

The evening chill kissed my skin as I thought about how, in hard times, we find heroes in the most unlikely of figures–unlikely, because although they are undeniably talented, their acts of “heroism” didn’t exactly save anyone: Babe Ruth.  Lucky Lindy.  Shirley Temple.  Philadelphia, a city sodden with the downtrodden, had found its heroes in a group of athletes. 

I had felt a similar electricity in the air a few weeks earlier, when I’d attended an Obama rally in North Philly.  And because the atmosphere between the two events was so similar, and because the election was less than a week away, I mused to myself that when I would look back on this night they would be inextricably linked in my mind.  At that moment, there was no doubt in my mind that change was going to come.  With that amount of goodwill in the air, how could it not?

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Tags: SouthStreet, Philadelphia, Barack Obama, Phillies

didn’t like data entry as a summer office temp, and I don’t like it now as a teacher!

Infinite Jest

was always one of those books I meant to read, and now I probably should, given the recent death of David Foster Wallace. What the hell is it about? Wikipedia is no help.

Looking Backwards

I asked Stoph how his move to New York went.  “It’s fine,” he responded.  “I mean, I always knew I would eventually end up here, so it doesn’t feel weird.”

I do not have the same kind of focused direction, but I understand the feeling,  I think I’ve always known I would end up in a city, and here I am.  I think when I look back on my twenties, I won’t remember the floundering feelings of being lost and aimless, but rather the nights out: tripping down the asphalt, our laughs and shouts bouncing off the dark, silent rowhomes and storefronts; my face smeared with makeup and sweat; my nostrils and wilted hair laced with smoke; the silk of my top stained with cocktail spills; the sickly sweet aftertaste of fermented grain in my mouth and my feet blistered raw from dancing; my ears throbbing from hip hop and electro and my eyes dry and tired. 

But what I will remember most are the cab rides home.  Sometimes I’m with friends and we’re talking much too loudly and being far too obnoxious.  Sometimes I’m with a boy and we’re being obnoxious in a different way.  But the best times are when I’m alone, with the windows open and the swift cool wind sweeping back my hair as I rest my tired head against the sticky vinyl sea. 

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Tags: twenties, nights out, nostalgia, Stoph, city

A G-Chat Conversation #12: And Now I Feel Stupid

Me: you watchin exiled!!

SD Sewell: no i was watching michelle obama

A G-Chat Conversation #11

me: yo yo

tell

me

5:14 PM how BADLY do you want to see sisterhood of the traveling pants 2

The Redheaded Jewess: um

so much more than dark knight

A G-Chat Conversation #10

Son of Sartorialist: OMG this next month of tv is amazing

12:00 PM me: what else is on

12:01 PM Son of Sartorialist: olympics

mad men

conventions

me: oh the olympics, yeah i think i’ve heard of that

Son of Sartorialist: its in china

me: where’s that

Son of Sartorialist: your home duh

I Love the ’00s

A few years ago in Chicago, 92.7 was a radio station called Energy and it was dedicated entirely to dance music. It was awesome. It was the perfect driving soundtrack about 90% of the time–going out with your girlfriends, running errands on Saturday, going to school in the morning, driving home from the movie extra late at night, road-tripping…it was just upbeat, high BPM, synthesized goodness. Also they used to have these promo spots where listeners who had called in would read lines like, “Hi, my name is Kimberly and I’m a cheerleader from Naperville and I. am. ENERGY!!!!!” Great, right? Yeah, well some people didn’t think so, and I remember coming home for winter break my freshman year of college and flipping to 92.7 and it was no more! Sob. No more “Two Times” or “Heaven” remixes or “I’ll Fly With You.” WHATEVER WOULD I DO?!
Anyway, it was easy to get over the death of Energy, because it was such a niche station and it wasn’t like I was going to hear Basement Jaxx on mainstream radio, so it was forgotten pretty quickly. But lately I’ve been hearing a bunch of singles on the radio that would have fit in perfectly with Energy’s format:

• Chris Brown, “Forever”
• David Guetta, “Love Is Gone”
• September, “Cry For You”
• Rihanna, “Disturbia”
• That one Latin song by the chick who died

I’m really not sure what it all means; I just saw a photo of one of the Olsens wearing Docs, cutoffs, and a flannel, which means the 90s are coming back. But Energy didn’t really pop up until, like, 2000 before fizzling out a mere year later. It was like a candle in the wind, if you will. I guess what I am trying to say is that there is obviously a market for this music, so can I have my Energy back please! CLEAR CHANNEL, ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?!

On Poetry, and Gerard Manley Hopkins

I don’t really like poetry. Shock! And this coming from someone who majored in creative writing and in English literature. But there you have it. I find it really awkward, for the most part, both in reading and in writing, and I feel like I have the authority to say that as someone who

1. wrote a lot of really bad, maudlin poetry as an angsty adolescent,
2. has received a lot of squirm-inducing poetry from boyfriends throughout the years, and
3. once endured an impromptu private recital of Lord Byron’s “She walks in Beauty”, courtesy of a “boyfriend” who was probably as enamored with the sound of his own voice as he most likely was with his own good looks, and who had probably been researching Byron’s poetry as part of a role anyway.

With that said, I make some exceptions. I will always be obsessed with anything Pre-Raphaelite and so the Rossettis make my list. In more recent years, I’ve explored Neruda and Rilke. And out of a sort of nostalgia for high school English and college survey courses, and the jealous way they cling to canonical texts, I’m also partial to Whitman’s wide-eyed wisdom, the drug-addled portents of Poe and Coleridge, Shakespeare’s sly wordplay and Dickinson’s idiosyncratic, world-weary innocence. I really don’t have the patience for someone like T.S. Eliot, but I love “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Finally, I can’t really leave John Keats off this list, not after hearing my Australian Brit Lit professor read stanzas of “Eve of St. Agnes” aloud in a darkened lecture hall. (The words “silken Samarkand” are burned indelibly into my mind.)

Anyway, a poem I have always loved is “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It first came to me under rather unspectacular circumstances–a reading assignment in English 100, in college–but at the time, 9/11 had just happened, so it held a different kind of significance for me, I guess. Judging from the date (1918), I would guess that Hopkins wrote it in response to WWI and its aftermath, but I think it has a timeless appeal, and the imagery kind of reminds me of the Mussorgsky/Ave Maria suite in Fantasia:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

LCD Soundsystem

I love when this song comes on when I’m out.

************************

That’s how it starts
We go back to your house
We check the charts
And start to figure it out

And if it’s crowded, all the better
Because we know we’re gonna be up late
But if you’re worried about the weather
Then you picked the wrong place to stay
That’s how it starts

And so it starts
You switch the engine on
We set controls for the heart of the sun
one of the ways we show our age

And if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up
And I still don’t wanna stagger home
Then it’s the memory of our betters
That are keeping us on our feet

You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan
And the next five years trying to be with your friends again

You’re talking 45 turns just as fast as you can
Teah, I know it gets tired, but it’s better when we pretend

It comes apart
The way it does in bad films
Except in parts
When the moral kicks in

Though when we’re running out of the drugs
And the conversation’s winding away
I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision
For another five years of lies

You drop the first ten years just as fast as you can
And the next ten people who are trying to be polite
When you’re blowing eighty-five days in the middle of France
Yeah, I know it gets tired only where are your friends tonight?

And to tell the truth
Oh, this could be the last time
So here we go
Like a sales force into the night

And if I made a fool, if I made a fool, if I made a fool
on the road, there’s always this
And if I’m sewn into submission
I can still come home to this

And with a face like a dad and a laughable stand
You can sleep on the plane or review what you said
When you’re drunk and the kids leave impossible tasks
You think over and over, “hey, I’m finally dead.”

Oh, if the trip and the plan come apart in your hand
Tou look contorted on yourself your ridiculous prop
You forgot what you meant when you read what you said
And you always knew you were tired, but then
Where are your friends tonight?

Where are your friends tonight?
Where are your friends tonight?

If I could see all my friends tonight
If I could see all my friends tonight
If I could see all my friends tonight
If I could see all my friends tonight