Ashley Wood’s WWR themed stop motion animation featuring a whole range of practical and after effects — two man job — estimated completion is in six months.
You do this shit for reel.
After effects training and infographics galore.
I’m drinking weird natural french rose.
Appropriately enough for a personal anecdote, there is no real issue here — just a series of events which effected a improper response — and in fact I have thought about it after I finally crawled home and realized that not only was I being just shy as hell, I was being a total goddamn jerk and have no real way of reconciling it.
There’s an excellent coffee shop on Greenwich Ave. between Murray and Warren called Kaffe 1668. It’s a weird hipster & black sheep themed cafe where the lights are always too low, the staff looks suspiciously out of place in suit-n-tie tribeca, Coffee is spot on, and the pastries while pricy are wonderfully indulgent. I’ve been going there first bi-weekly, then twice a day, then finally I had just come in the afternoon because one of the baristas was adorable in that nerdy way and always smiled when I came in and it made me feel better.
It’s not uncommon for smiles to make people comfortable, and this did not designate any interest, this was for all intensive purposes a little ‘crush’. She asked me my name last week and she began to get my coffee ready whenever I opened the door.
The problem begins here: I do not really like being noticed. I try to live under the illusion that I move through this big pond without making so much as a ripple, the great thing about being background noise is that nobody really cares how you look or what you’re doing, the entire city can pass you by. As I’ve worked in Tribeca, I frequent places, eventually the employees have been friendly — I know the guys over at the jewish deli like family, the burnt-out-latin french cook (questionable construction there), the chicken guy over at Cornerstones, or the psychotic mob fellows at Amore across the street — but these are all places I frequent less because I don’t really want to have to do more than order my food, say thank you, and run back to the office. I need coffee though, and 1668 is the only good ticket in town.
So I’ve been dealing with her inquiries and service cautiously: I say thank you (look in her eyes, smile briefly, cement the fact that I actually am ‘thankful’), sometimes throw out a quick witticism so I don’t seem like a robot. But she began to buy me drinks last week that I didn’t want to accept, I didn’t wish to partake in a social contract which could ever disrupt this we-smile-at-each-other-but-that’s-it situation. I did. I’ve accepted four drinks in the last week.
Is there a social responsibility if someone buys you a drink? I can barely talk to strangers let alone interpret their subtle social cues, and I am lost. Every trip there has been a carefully evaluated series of events which I contemplate with my coffee’s requisite cigarette on the way back to Chambers Street.
Okay, I’m getting a little tipsy so I’ll wrap this up: She’s started coming in the store and I run away. I don’t literally throw my limbs in the air and dash out of sight. I acknowledge her, and I see her smile and raise her eyebrows, and I turn and start working towards the basement. I sat in the cellar for fifteen minutes although she apparently (according to sales staff) leaves pretty soon after I make my exit.
How dare you, I thought.
Then I realized that that’s a risk on her part too, I’m such a jerk. And there’s nothing I hate more than being a jerk, and I’m way too shy and there’s not even any resemblance to a human relationship to save past a professional obligation to serve me big cups of delicious coffee. We could have been buddies, and shit, seriously, you should see how bad I am with young women I’m interested in — it’s fucking awful.
Cooking freely is a rare treat, when there are moments you can cook without pretension or worry. The rare moment only seems to arise at random for me, when I’m sitting alone and worried, when I have little else to do but worry, the moments come with the desire for catharsis, structure, an escape.
I’ve spent today like I’ve spent many days, laboring over cover letters and and a hot laptop, expressing what I can only hope are interpreted as honest thoughts, although I’d rather do my own thing. I am obsessed with perfection, finding structure, expression in it’s pure form, food concurrently art and pleasure, technique with tradition. I don’t know exactly what I am capable of doing, my budget is so small that even the most basic of my kitchen expectations cannot be purchased. I still have only a chefs knife, a cutting board, some flour, cornmeal, eggs, and a few random things I’ve acquired in my month in New York.
Whatever-you-like, Okonomiyaki, is in it’s pure sense a flour based pancake — cooked with an assortment of ingredients, but the japanese original concerns me only slightly. It’s flatbreads, due to the lack of leavening, require something outside of the batter or dough to prop them up. Simplicity becomes the obsession, scallion and pork, poached egg, and a light salad. It’s all an unrelated mess in my head, I can’t quite figure it out.
But maybe I want a hot meal that doesn’t feel rushed, something I can perfect, show, then retire. Through our limitations are the only way we’re ever able to truly be creative.
American rights, or what does that mean — when the framers say that we’ve got ‘unalienable human rights’ does that implicate non-citizens as being non-humans? To what extent do unalienable human rights extend to the totality of the human population. Does this mean that we believe that all humans, of all nationalities deserve a certain basic level of human rights, or does this extend only to Americans and those who have gained american human rights by the path to citizenship?
Does this mean that Americans only deserve their rights within the boarders of the United States? I don’t believe that anyone would say ‘of course’, even if they’re attempting to respect the sovereignty of nations. As American’s it is part of our cultural DNA to assume that we’ve the right to express ourselves, live free, be allowed due process of law, ect. We wouldn’t dream of even attempting to deny any American citizen these rights (not even touching the whole idea of non-citizen yet), because well we’ve been guaranteed this by our constitution — it’s explicitly stated, we’ve got ambassadors and embassies to ensure that we’re treated fairly, and they’ll handle all that messy gray area work involved with trying to find overlap between the laws and perhaps lobbying kindly for some sort of special treatment since we’re american and our government demands certain types of treatment from it’s citizens.
But I believe that this sort of wrangling is due to the fact that countries we may deal with, friendly and even-non-friendly countries that accept our tourists and business folk, have different laws — different legal philosophies that can be appropriately foreign and lost-in-translation to Americans. Even if we were citizens of their country and American there’s a possibility that somehow through all the complex inter-workings of history, culture, government, local issues, and other interacting vectors could not fully understand. We’ve got our embassies to deal with the differences in American ideas of justice and foreign ideas of justice. But our national ideas on justice should be relatively understood by most Americans, we expect them to be upheld for all court cases, and denying someone due process of the law ends up being difficult and weird and brings up all these contradictions and questions about the central core philosophy of the American justice system. But that’s not to say that any of these legal systems are in fact universally invalid or immoral, because they’ve developed them (hopefully), to be moral and fair given their own ideas of morality, fairness, and namely justice. Whatever the hell that is.
Our legal system is built on an understanding of human justice, even when it fails, it does so because we believe that all humans have a certain degree of right to defend themselves in court with proper legal recourse, that you can’t be arrested on the street for your appearance (like the Nazi’s, or those illicit europeans). It seems like it’s only natural that we treat non-citizens like citizens, or more simply we do not qualify who gets to take part in our legal system because we believe that everyone does.
Now it all makes sense, but before this morning I was full of my own illusions about (*blank*) — illusions that even brought me to the gap to buy blacks & a nice shirt. I walked in a little late after a brief spat with the cab driver, apologized, and was taken up to the second level through the kitchen to the office to fill out a non-disclosure agreement, certifying that I in fact would not blog about my experiences. So I won’t blog about my experiences, or what I saw, or what I found disappointing.
(*blank*) I’m so disappointed in you.
Virage is somewhere around 3rd & 7th, standing on the corner with an open patio, the Spanish summer awning, hangs above 3rd over 12 outdoor seats — I’m aware there are around 36 seats on the interior, but i doubt I’ll see any of them until pretty late into the fall.
What’s been really nice about my visits to NY, is coming here in the afternoon to have my brunch — which usually consists of Eggs Benedict, potatoes, some fruit, bread, a cappuccino & a Bloody Mary. It’s an exceptional Bloody Mary too, well balanced spiciness, alcohol, & sweetness. The whole meal is well executed, hearty, and full of traditional happiness you’d associate with a special breakfast with your parents. If you’re so inclined there’s excellent sangria available for the pricey $60 a pitcher, but the bloody Mary with coffee is fine for most mornings.
The 3rd ave. pedestrian crowd resembles the Flinstones travel scenes, a background of recurrent characters whom without even the slightest eye contact or gesture will come up to your table and ask you for 80 cents, a cigarette, or directions; the same requests being given every day of the week. Although I’ve not been here during the week, I can only imagine that the pattern repeats itself without change. It’s people watching, liqour, coffee, and a copy of the NYT — it’s the morning in NY.
The greens are just vibrant as all hell today, big boughs of leaves and thin trees swaying, hot pollenated air; vast swaths of sediment covered open spaces surrounding the house, every inch of which I’m sure is home to a colony of devious ticks ready to feast upon my tasty blood. Lunch was ugly, the gringo-tainted hispanic whole wheat tortilla filled with more health food than taste — there’s no taste in all of this let’s-be-svelte-haute-in-tank-tops quasi-dietary food mangling. But I digress, the day has yet to be planned, the activities have not yet shown themselves. I need to buy dumplings, but the basil white bean ‘hummus’ tasted like the horrible nightmare I expected, I’m just sitting at my computer beside myself drinking huge glasses of water hoping to wash out a surprisingly floral aftertaste. I don’t expect floral basil from factory food. Just saying.
Running at around two weeks or less for the big move to NYC, job prospects are good — but they’ve managed to honestly keep me up for hours biting my fingernails into dull misshapen nubs. I’ve spent so many years developing my tone, my style, admittedly through reading convoluted essays and admiring the greats (e.g., Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace) and either typing away into the dark night or scribbling notes in one of two Moleskines®™, twelve Mead™ notebooks, two Great Earth™ recycled pads, ripped pages, napkins, hot-press watercolor paper, ect., that my linguistic chops have been honed without editorial guidance — it’s a mangy wild, eek, sigh, head scratching garden of nonsense. Which is great.
But, snazzy editor #1, who has been more than slightly helpful in the past few weeks, notices that because I encourage myself to fractalize my prose, I have developed a style so verbose and size consuming that I fail to get at the point. I can concede this, it’s totally true, I don’t take size restrictions into account and just write — hoping that during the editing and rewrite phases I can carve enough medium out to slide in under the restriction (add: I remark that I took a bit of inspiration from film, expecting 2/3 of my writing to be cut at my end, but allowing myself to capture all the ideas that come to bear; it is impressively annoying that each publication has widely varying submission guidelines, about 700 words difference between the half dozen of them, so this method seems to work well on two accounts). He’s told me, “tighten it up, focus it, drop the vocabulary & jargon”.
Anyways, that’s the real work hopefully, but outside of day-job work and whatever there’s always the stuff you do for yourself, the real deal. The New Yorker has magically nullified about twenty hours of work, which notably, I sit on for a few weeks before really pushing to a final edit. I’m tired after work, and family can sometimes exaust me to the point that I don’t want to burn my eyelids forcing meticulous endless revisits of the same frustrating topics. The nullification comes from their magic ability to write about exactly what I want to write about, and given that my New Yorkers are second hand, they’re beating me to the punch at least two weeks before I finish my piece.
Although I was angry last night, as I was running through a draft watching Journey to the Center of the EEERRRPPPHHHH (sp?) concurrently reading through my two last NYer Subscriptions, this morning I realize that although it in effect nullifies the work that I’ve been doing, it also validates my efforts — I seem to gravitate toward topics that better established, more experienced writers are gravitating towards. Although a firmly worded letter to the editor has not been produced as of yet to discuss my disagreements with their versions of our article, perhaps, you never know what may/may-not come of such a thing. Also they take unsolicited manuscripts, I hope they’ve got a talented mail clerk.
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The best.
MI6 attacks al-Qaeda in ‘Operation Cupcake’
British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaeda online magazine and replaced bomb-making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes....
