boo

 happy halloween, faraway friends. i'm skipping conversational russian tonight (sadly) in favor of the West Hollywood halloween parade (bagel and i are going to bike there from hollywood), so here's a little book learning to try to make up for denying myself education:

oreo in chocolate chip cookie

I ate these little abominations at katya's last night and lived to tell the tale. seriously, they were amazing delicious and i'm not even a big fan of oreos

bad stine painting

Well it's nice to see that both my technical skill and patience for watercolor have not improved since the fourth grade. It's been a lifelong battle between me and the runny, bleeding medium

the country is worrying about how to make more jobs. why not actually enforce the previous ruling that interns can't be used as free labor and that people need to be hired and paid to carry out slave tasks

beets not bits

holodez

this week we discussed traditional russian foods, which was a topic close to the heart of every russian-speaking person in the room. (again, i'm still not sure why everyone in this class already speaks russian.) there's something called сельдь под шубой, which google tells me looks like a pink cake. it's actually made of fish and beets and in english it's called herring under a fur coat. yuriy (solemn ukrainian man with steve buscemi eyes. wears black from head to toe every week, carries a black briefcase) spent a full ten minutes very methodically explaining how to properly make холодец, which is basically meat jello. his slow and quiet voice made it too easy to imagine that he was describing the process of boiling people meat, an informant sent off to the big sleep, rather than pig's feet meat. during a heated disagreement about what exactly goes into salad olivier, firecracker nelly erupted with, "Я русский человек! кто видел салат оливье без мясо!! КТО ВИДЕЛ!!" - I am russian! who has seen salad olivier without meat!! WHO HAS SEEN IT!!

a particularly creative herring under a fur coat

fancy rat wiki

It was not uncommon in upper circles of Victorian England to see a lady with her pet rat on a short monkey leash, sitting on her lap, grandly festooned with ribbons.

dungeness

yesterday at the boiling crab in koreatown i ate an entire dungeness crab. he came belly up, claws drawn in like spider rigor mortis in a bag of lemon pepper and garlic butter ocean and he was whole. 1.75 pounds and i ate his entire body. i broke off his legs and crushed them and i ripped open his belly with my hands and drank his insides like his body was a bowl. i licked my fingers and afterwards was imbued with crab spirit and i thirsted like the crab

my feet are hot

In my newly woken delirium this morning I thought the pillow next to me was a sea lion. This may be because my mother recently called me one. Two sea lions, one brown with brown hair and one blue with plaid, waking, one lolling restlessly and one fat and stationary, in a low tide of kicked sheets to a cell phone going are are arr

этот...как его

bitch vs. beach, penis vs. pennies

stern-looking armenian girl in my shot

last night the topic of class discussion was Los Angeles - what are good things about los angeles, and what are the bad? we went over the importance of not pronouncing beach as bitch and repeated them out loud together to practice. perhaps a little too excited for an exercise i could actually do, i think i was saying beach and bitch a lot more assertively than anyone else in the class. our teacher asked the US-born students if a man can also be called a bitch. we said yes. 

one of my favorite people in the class is Nelly, a Russian woman with startling blue eyes, extremely expressive face, and playful girlish demeanor. she's always whispering to me and trying to teach me phrases that i might not know. Nelly's favorite thing about Los Angeles is Hollywood Men, a male strip club. Nelly says these голливудские мужчины don't just take off their clothes, they really put on a show. when her sister visited from moscow, they didn't go to disneyland - they went to Hollywood Men. this got the other women in the class excited and they needed to know where it is, if there's a cover, etc. Nelly kept exclaiming, "Очень очень рекомендую!" (I really really recommend it!)

my people

i don't think these before-and-afters ever get old

tuna for thought

The strangest thing about the world of work is the widespread expectation that our work should make us happy. For thousands of years, work was viewed as something to be done with as rapidly as possible and escaped in the imagination through alcohol or religion.

de botton

i've just started reading the pleasures and sorrows of work. take a moment to be reminded of how far removed we are from the sources of our food and belongings.


For hours we wander the sea without hope. Then shortly after eleven in the morning - dawn in the warehouse in the middle of England - a school of yellowfin tuna approach from the east, swimming in a V-shape, the older, more confident fish on the outside, the younger ones inside. They are moving at fifty kilometres an hour, on their way to Somalia from Indonesia. Because they lack a swim-bladder, the cursed creatures have no option but to advance relentlessly; they cannot pause and rest on the current, like the sedate grouper, or they would fall to the bottom of the ocean and die, only growing more attractive to man by their continual exertions, for it is through the life-long flexing of their tails that their flesh grows muscular and hence uniquely flavoursome. A cry goes up on deck. One of the school, by all indications a heavier, older specimen, a veteran of five years of unmolested navigation, has taken a bite at a bait of mackerel. Fifteen minutes later, he announces himself on the starboard side, panicked and enraged, his tail hammering against the boat. Fifty kilos in weight, he is attempting to prise himself free of the cable tearing apart his palate, but he does not count on two men, above him at either end, reaching into the water with steel hooks and flipping him onto the deck with a victorious cry. Panemonium follows. 
The tuna has never been this far out of the water, has never seen light this bright, but he knows instinctively that he will drown in so much air. The fishermen need him to stop flooding his arteries with blood in panic, or he will darken, and therefore ruin, the appearance of his flesh against a dinner plate. So the captain's brother swiftly wrestles him between his rubber boots and raises aloft a large, blunt mallet, resembling the archetypal club of a prehistoric man, carved from the trunk of a coconut tree. He brings it down heavily. The tuna's eyes jerk out of their sockets. His tail convulses. His jaw opens and closes, as ours might do, but no scream emerges. The mallet strikes again. 
There is a dull sound, that of densely packed brain and experience, shattering inside a tight bony cage, triggering the thought that we too are never more than one hard slam away from a definitive end to our carefully arranged ideas and copious involvement with ourselves... 
Rich red blood explodes from the creature's brain and sprays across the boat. Two of the younger crewman rush forward and slit open his mouth, pulling out his gills and ventilation system. Next their turn their knives to his stomach, releasing the undigested bodies of smaller fish - fusiliers, cardinal fish, sprats - on which he breakfasted at the start of this infernal day. The deck becomes slippery with organs. As the killing spree goes on, I find myself thinking obsessively of my elder son, four years old and about the same length as some of the larger fish. It is no longer implausible that, as many religions maintain, we are all, in the end, from moth to president, members of the same large, irrevocably fraticidal family...One wonders what the atmosphere will be like in the school, 60 metres below, as the survivors pursue their way to Somalia; whether there will be a memory of the absent members and, in the pitch-black waters, a terrible fear.
de botton

beautiful godzilla visits ciclavia

yesterday for cicLAvia ten miles of major los angeles streets were closed to cars for the public's enjoyment of bicycles and rollerblades and amateur dj sets. bagel and i set out from central and 18th and joined the busy route for a Sunday afternoon of biking at a glacial pace past the piñata district, through downtown and over the 4th street bridge, stopping at hollenbeck park to absorb the beautiful bright october weather. we ate lomo saltado from a japanese-peruvian food truck called Lomo Arigato and watched people dance to bongos and then turned around.

my bagel

food trucks of LA

map

 i really should be more ashamed of my new STAR-BUCKS GOLD LEVEL CARD

rill rill

this is objectively a sort of bad live performance but i still really like it because i'm a sucker for pretty girls. and autotuned mixed mastered digitized or no, this song always gives me the feckin chills

bernard stade

 

Bernard Stade needs scratchings behind the ears, a snack before bedtime, and Xanax for thunderstorms.

Bernard and his brother Cam are beneath the table.

catharsis 2011

i might be depressed, which only occurred to me after i spent the day crying from reading about old widows finding love again online and an animal psychic talking to people's dead dogs and watching videos about someone who was shot. i've been utterly unable to do anything except consume media and get emotional. 

coconut rum and triple sec

do they go together okay? according to yahoo answers, yes.

more pep talk

real talk from my mother this morning about the job search -

ma: it's like war. you can either march forward and fight, or you can choose to withdraw and not fight, or, as a last resort...you can kill yourself. so in your case, you can either keep applying to jobs and try to land one, or you can decide to go to graduate school for the next two years, or else...i guess you can get married.

normann copenhagen

it was ages before i realized last night that the music i was listening to wasn't anything of mine but actually the website music for Normann Copenhagen. and after i realized this, i didn't mind and i listened to it for the rest of the night. it reminds me of the stuff they'd play in some bars in dk.

memory chair by ole jensen

please, for christmas?

borscht party

i'm going to have a borscht party and you are invited

i will make the borscht

verses, composed on a night of insomnia

We're reciting poems for class tonight, and here's what I'm committing to memory, written by Pushkin in 1830:

Стихи, сочиненные ночью
во время бессонницы...

Мне не спится, нет огня;
Всюду мрак и сон докучный.
Ход часов лишь однозвучный
Раздается близ меня,
Парки бабье лепетанье,
Спящей ночи трепетанье,
Жизни мышья беготня...
Что тревожишь ты меня?
Что ты значишь, скучный шепот?
Укоризна, или ропот
Мной утраченного дня?
От меня чего ты хочешь?
Ты зовешь или пророчишь?
Я понять тебя хочу,
Смысла я в тебе ищу...
---

Verses, composed during a night of insomnia...

I can't sleep, the light is out;
Chasing senseless dreams in gloom.
Clocks at once, inside my room,
Somewhere next to me, resound.
Parcae's soft and mild chatter,
Sleeping twilight's noisy flutter,
Life's commotion -- so insane..
Why am I to feel this pain?
What's your meaning, boring mumble?
Disapproving, do you grumble
Of the day I spent in vain?
What has made you so compelling?
Are you calling or foretelling?
I just want to understand,
Thus I'm seeking your intent...
---

Last week, bubbly Kazakh woman told me during break that Russian is really an extremely easy language and that Kazakh is the difficult one to learn. Very inspirational pep talk.

There's a great article in the most recent issue of Newsweek about Anna Netrebko, a delightful opera singer with whom I am only familiar because of the 'tube. I liked this:

As I order a drink, she grabs my hand and whispers: "Be careful what you order. Last night I come to have some drinks, relax. I order schnapps. They bring this tiny thing. Tiny! I tell them, 'That's not a drink! Bring me a double!' They bring me a double. Tiny! I say, 'Bring me a triple.' Finally: a normal drink. Then they bring me the bill: 150 euro! For a schnapps! It's just vodka!"

Netrebko's speech pushes against the limits of punctuation, cadences of "!!!," "?!," "???!!!!," the full range of Facebook emotions. An elegant little Austrian girl comes to ask for an autograph. Netrebko is delighted: "Fuck me," she says giggling, "I'm famous!"
pomerantsev 54

Anna's O Mio Babbino Caro - 

- the sublimity of which is the reason why I am appalled when my mother makes me listen to this and the rest of the Jackie Evancho/Dream With Me cd in the car - 

bagel and i just got back from vacation

living room touch pool

a week ago, bagel and i watched this year's cycling world championship, which took place in copenhagen, at a friend of a friend's house in santa monica. the cycling, for me, wasn't the most captivating thing i've experienced in recent days, especially since we placed bets on who would win and i lost my dollar. the house hosting the viewing party was home to a pair of newlyweds and the roost was fully stocked with assorted leftover wedding alcohols. new wife was a marine biology grad student, and in her living room she had a large saltwater tank populated with creatures she'd personally caught on her dives doing research off of Catalina Island. so cool. She had small fish, medium fish, ocean snails, sea urchins, and an anemone. after the race she told people about the different animals and stuck her entire arm into the tank and snapped off one of the spines on an urchin so everyone could feel how it felt like velcro.