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Breaking the Matrix
My breaking the matrix… well it’s a lot of things, but right now the challenge seems to take its example in salsa and performance. It scares me silly, and I push myself, but shy away more. I retreat at the thought of watchful expectation, but also hold high expectations.
It’s good to know though that this matrix exists and you have to transcend it. I’m chugging along, even though I seek an immediate transcendental moment. And I’m brave enough to tackle the salsa congress with just, what? 6 months under my salsa spandex belt?
What’s your breaking the matrix?
Dante’s Inferno, 8th Circle, Bolgia 9: Broken MTA announcement systems
“Sowers of discord” are placed in this circle of Dante’s Inferno, and who’s going to argue that those shrieking gargles we often hear on the subway or the platform do not perform such a function? In with air-conditioning you go, broken MTA announcement systems, and here’s why: when you’re broken, and broken real good as you often are, every minute or so we have to hear horrible scratchy blaring screams from subway speakers that are supposed to be in English, but are actually a high frequency form of alien language that must be meant to make your ears bleed. We’re already pissed we have to go to work, the caffeine has already got us jittery. We need to also listen to a cacophony worthy of the late X-Man Banshee?
how dumb we’ve become
Link to brandsalsa.com for an article on this name change, no relation to salsa dancing that I know of.
My normally relaxing, utterly transporting experience of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation was interuppted by an abomination on my TV set. The Sci-Fi channel has changed it’s name and logo to Syfy. How dumb have we become that we take a channel devoted to smart, cool things with a cool planet symbol and correct spelling to a dumbed down, bubble gum font brand? I can’t see this logo without cringing. It’s Sci Fi, I liked to be remind of the SCIENCE and the FICTION, not a cutesy name. The F doesn’t even get a capital letter. The linked article tells you the reality behind this, but right now it doesn’t sit well with me.
By the way, if you’re sensitive to caffeine, don’t drink a frappé after 5pm. I think I’ll be blogging for awhile. Darn foodies turned me into a caffeine freak.
Et en Arcadia
The most memorable moment of our recent Sicilian odyssey did not happen in a city, but between cities. We were on one of those two hour car drives, this time our destination was ceramics from Caltagirone and chocolate from the city of Modica. We were winding our way through the Sicilian countryside. Our cars followed a well paved highway. We were surrounded by fields of golden wheat, distant hills with olive trees, and flattened sun-dried grass with bundled haystacks that looked like round suitcases left long ago by the Cyclopean race. The highway served as an unlikely wormhole through an Arcadian landscape; we passed through it encased in our vehicles. For a long while the only reminder of human contact with the land was passing trucks. They swayed with heavy loads of agricultural bounties I imagined harvested from these golden fields. I was entranced by paradise. Et en Arcadia – continue reading …
That would be July…
Someone must have forgotten to tell someone that it’s July 4th and not June 4th when we have full fledged fireworks. Because at 9:45pm on June 4th in Inwood, a full blown mini Macy’s fireworks display was blasting in the sky. My guess is it came from Dyckman (everyone blames Dyckman. Best block!). Another theory is that the ghosts from La Marina set them off (when is our hang out going to open again?). Last theory is someone on their yacht on the Hudson set them off over champagne. Still, they were no joke. Dazzlers, teasers, rainbow sprinkles, halfies- you name it. Anyone else see it?
Pass me a molotov
If any of you have ever lived in or visited Greece, or perhaps have watched television in the last year, you know that riots, protests and strikes are fairly common and normal. My paranoid self would travel no where on the planet where the US government issued a warning for its citizens not to visit, but I’ve made Greece an exception, and traveled there in the middle of the Kosovo war.
Love and its doppelgänger lust often make you the invincible warrior. I can’t really recall what brought me back there at such a time, but I do know I felt secure enough to go. I was on an errand and needed to collect some paper work from someone’s office so hopped on the bus and got off 2o minutes later at my stop. I stepped off, the doors closed. I felt a tad bit strange. I shrugged my shoulders, got on with my chore, and exited the office about 10 minutes later. I had just missed the bus- there it was chugging along one of the busiest streets in Athens, except there weren’t any other cars with it. Just as there weren’t any pedestrians in the street. Suddenly I realized that I was very, very alone in a place that should normally be packed with shoppers, trolley cars, mopeds, and Roma kids (gypsies) selling tissues and water. It was like walking out onto Times Square mid day and finding it’s empty. Pass me a molotov – continue reading …
Loaded like a Freight Train….
GNR fans will appreciate this story. I was coming home from one of those miserable days at work, when a cloud follows you from the office, to the stairwell, to the revolving door of your work building, creeps down the subway stairs like a horror-movie mist and stands beside you in the smelly underground world of the subway. (People, wise up-it is not a coincidence that you go underground like a troll every day to be barfed up an hour later onto the surface to enter a slave-master’s domain. Think you’re any different because your job is “helping the world”? Its slavery nevertheless and will stay that way until our world and its masters start respecting the holistic individual). I was waiting for the A train, when a middle aged man with dirty-blonde (in every sense) long hair clad in jeans (pants, jacket and shirt) started to stumble towards the benches where I was standing. The man was drunk; he was clutching his forty-ounce in a crumbled brown paper bag that reminded me of life at the corner bodega before plastic bags. He suddenly burst out in chorus, air guitar and all, to the lyrics of Nightrain, except he changed it to match the train he was waiting for. So goes his song: Loaded like a Freight Train…. – continue reading …
The Dyckman Revolution: the Free Man’s Last Stand
The weather is warming up in the Inwood Heights. Besides the midriffs and sidewalk bastions for dominoes that blossom like May flowers, one thing to look forward to are the Saturday night wild west automobile parties at the abandoned Marina on Dyckman street. C-mixto & I have unwittingly strolled into these before, during hot summer nights when we’re looking for a breeze on the pier overlooking Englewood Cliffs, the distant GW bridge, and the Hudson curving up into that vast distant territory called upstate. We know what’s up. We’re not playing the innocent. We hear the thumping base of reggaetón, the snarls of exhaust-less motorcycles. Walking into Dyckman Marina past dusk requires a comfort that you are one with your neighborhood and that you’re actually there to be a part of the party. The Dyckman Revolution: the Free Man’s Last Stand – continue reading …
