strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Sep 29 04: YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE.
Dear unknown ‘lite jazz’ musician who was playing in the background at the dentist’s this morning:
I don’t care who you are. I don’t care that you gave it a vaguely funky percussion line.
You have recorded “Take Five” in 4/4 time. The penalty is death. Please report to the nearest Chamber of Release immediately.
time
VP is now less than a week away. Rather than natter on about how I’m convinced that people are going to see right through my little charade and throw vegetables at me—tomatoes, probably, maybe an avocado that’s been allowed to go well beyond its due date—I’m going to talk about the clock.
Dad gave me the old Seth Thomas mantel clock. We drove it up from his new house in Virginia swaddled in bubble plastic and brown-paper shopping bags. Inside the door on the clock’s back there are yellowed jewelers’ stickers: one dated 1921 from a shop in Turlock, a newer one from San Mateo. I think the clock has been in Willett hands for a long while. The casing has this classical austerity, a simple semicircular arch supported by two clean pillars, all done in this rich dark wood that I figure is probably mahogany. You have to wind it with a heavy brass key. The mainspring winds through the hole next to the 4, the bell through the hole next to the 8. When you wind it you can hear the works racheting over with this really macho sort of resonance.
Starting when I was about twelve I had a long run of night terrors. I would become convinced that somewhere in the room there was an unseen and malevolent presence, watching me, waiting for…something. I would lie awake in the middle of the night, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, and listen to the clock tick in the next room. Some of the brass teeth on its internal workings were wearing down even then, and for a few seconds of each minute, time’s steady march would slide into a waltz, toc toc toc toc toc-toc, toc-toc, toc-toc, toc-toc, toc toc toc…. The bell sounds an E-natural above middle C at once reassuring and stern, a sea captain’s voice. I would listen to the bell call out hour and half-hour until the Black Thing went away and let me sleep.
Now it’s on the mantel in the living room. We’re still learning its habits, and once or twice we’ve been caught off-guard and come home from work to find it wound down completely. The uneven teeth are still there, and it picks up a minute or two a day no matter how much we tweak its tiny faster/slower switch. It may need a tune-up from the Russian ladies down on Greenwich Avenue, which I assume would add a third sticker to its door. I was surprised by how muted its voice is. The sound of its ticking doesn’t carry through the apartment, and I was sure it would. Still, as I drift off to sleep at night I can hear it chime, keeping watch over the darkness. I’ve been sleeping well.
Sep 20 04: rant
Okay, I’ve had it. I can’t take it anymore.
Perhaps it’s not my company’s fault—perhaps the blame lies with the building managers—but still. I work for a Seriously Major Educational Publisher, and yet the schmancy brushed-brass sign on the door to the gents’ says:
MENS
Its effect upon morale is subtle, yet corrosive.
Sep 19 04: discovery
Man alive, what a beautiful day. Paul and I just got back from a walk ‘round downtown. The San Gennaro Festival is in full swing, which we’d forgotten about, but it just served to force us off the more familiar streets and onto the ones we’ve never before explored. Which is fine, really, because as a result we discovered Dumpling House, at 118A Eldridge Street.
Get thee to the Dumpling House. Right now.
It’s one of those teeny tiny little storefronts that’s maybe six feet across and twenty feet deep. There’s seating for maybe four people. Everybody else is standing at the counter or piled up on the sidewalk, ordering through the window. And why? Because their food is incredibly cheap and delicious. Fried dumplings that will just blow you away, piping hot and savory and gingery and everything you could want in a potsticker, five for a buck. The cooks—five people crammed behind a tiny counter, maybe six, it was hard to tell—were cranking out dumplings as fast as they could, because the minute they came off the stove somebody bought them. We knew that we had to wait a moment or we’d burn our tongues, but the smell coming out of the little styrofoam clamshell made it hard. Eventually, we had to succumb to our appetites and risk getting scorched. I nibbled on one of Paul’s while I waited for my own order to come up. Heaven.
But if the dumpling was heaven, then superlatives fail to describe the beauty of my own lunch. A ‘sesame pancake with beef,’ they called it: it started with a pizza-sized round of soft dough, white and chewy and dusted with sesame seeds and then fried like a dumpling. The dough was cut into sectors (again, think pizza here), and then split through the middle, so the top could be peeled back from the bottom. Into the middle they layered handfuls of fresh grated carrot, fresh chopped cilantro, and cold roast beef flavored gently with anise. Over that, they squirted a peppery-vinegary red sauce. Then they close the thing back up, slip it into a pale wax-paper envelope, and there you are. For a dollar freakin’ fifty.
That was maybe three hours ago, and my taste buds are still all twinkly. We walked from Chinatown to Chelsea and I had a big goofy smile on my face the whole time. And, and I just bought tickets to go see Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence tonight with the boys!
What an excellent day.
For another look at Dumpling House, see cityrag. Or you could just take my word for it and go: here’s a map.
EDITED: although its dumplings are indeed excellent, the name of the place is just “Dumpling House.” The “Excellent Dumpling House,” on the other hand, is that place on Lafayette (which is good, sure, but frankly not as good as the just-plain-Dumpling-House).
Arrrrrrr. Klahoma!
Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Go ye forth and shiver some timbers. Unless: if you’re faced with subway preachers—and boy, do they make me glad that I can walk to work—stop talking like a pirate. Sing show tunes. (Koaloha is my new hero, and Montrealais gets my undying gratitude and a basket of International Love Points for bringing the story to my attention.)
Okay, it’s too beautiful a day to remain in front of the computer. Signing off now.
Sep 15 04: dinnsdale?
There is some sort of invisible hedgehog hiding underneath the upper eyelid of my right eye. It has been there since shortly before bedtime last night.
I am beginning to lose my composure.
Sep 12 04: souterrain, revisité
Remember that Underground Mystery Cinema they found in Paris a few days back? The Perforating Mexicans have granted an interview. Go read.
where you’re at
We took a car service home from John’s birthday fête in Brooklyn this evening. They’ve lit the two ‘ghost towers’ again: two bright columns of light, shining upwards from Ground Zero into the clouds. The two beams twinkled with the bodies of birds and bats and bugs. From our vantage point, it seemed like every night-flying creature in the tri-state area was there, a whirlwind of small lives. I guess there’s no way to explain to them what’s going on.
Maybe that’s fitting, now that I think about it.
Sep 11 04: come ‘round again
It has been three years now. On the radio they’re reading the names again, more than three thousand of them. I didn’t want to listen, but having turned it on I find it hard to turn away. The families have reached the letter G.
From an email I once sent to a dear friend:
One year ago right now the second tower had already fallen, a cloud that smelled like burning tinfoil was spreading through the city, and our friends were beginning to converge upon our apartment. The cloud was full of cement dust and scorched memoranda and the ashes of the dead.
I will never forget that day, which should have been so unremarkable for its beauty. Whoever you are, wherever you are, I wish you peace.
Sep 8 04: souterrain
I love the idea of the secret city: the maze of allegedly disused tunnels beneath the metropolis that houses a bustling community; the phantom bar that can only be found if you know where it is; the infrastructure that everybody has forgotten about.
So imagine my joy over the Underground Cinema of Paris! Oh, the coolness. Please join me in raising a glass to the Perforating Mexicans, who keep the world turning by charging it with mystery and wonder.
EDITED: Ooh, and another article about the tunnels under Moscow! About the same vintage as the first one, but still.
volunteer
There’s a flower I don’t recognize growing cheerfully in amongst the rosemary on the fire escape. Pretty. Anybody know what it is?
Sep 3 04: primate behavior
Gosh. I hadn’t been planning on picking up Doom 3 when it finally comes out for OS X—‘cause it will require, like, a whole new computer to run it—but the reactions of these gentlemen here make me think that maybe I should.
Sep 2 04: better
Okay, the whole ‘angry about the deplorable state of the Union’ thing? Still there. But right now, I ain’t feeling it. It has been shellacked safely away behind a glittering wall of Brahms.
We had our first rehearsal of the year this evening. We’re preparing the Brahms Ein Deutsches Requiem for a January 22 performance at Carnegie Hall.
Damn, but that’s some beautiful music. That fabulous soaring A in the tenor line at the end of the 4th movement? It makes everything seem okay.
Tomorrow, more angry, probably. But for now: good.
Sep 1 04: angry
The city is awash in Republicans and their detractors. Crossing Times Square yesterday en route to the office, I had to wade through a knot of middle-aged white women sporting red power suits (gold W pins on their lapels) and big bouffant hairdos. I’m doing everything I can not to pay any attention to the convention, on the grounds that all it will do is amplify the ambient feelings of constant, simmering outrage. The city buzzes with indignation. Instead, I edit science textbooks at my desk on the seventeenth floor and watch long black limousines pull up in front of Fox News (next door) and CNN (three blocks north of us). Clouds of policemen whizz up the Avenue of the Americas on bicycles, in vans, on motorcycles.
I am tired of being angry about the state of our government. I am tired of reading about how its political leaders smear private citizens who oppose them, outrageously and with impunity. I am tired of allegations that my existence somehow undermines the society of “good” and “normal” people. I am tired of demagoguery. I am tired of trying to shake the persistent worry that those in power have rigged the system so thoroughly at this point that we’ll never be able to rid ourselves of them. I want this man and his handlers to go away now.
With that in mind, let’s try to spread the word on a piece of news, okay? An election-technology watchdog group is trying to publicize the rather terrifying results of a study they’ve done:
Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator — 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.
By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.
This program is not “stupidity” or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.
When we started hearing about the possibility of using Diebold machines to steal elections, I thought it sounded far-fetched. Now…well, now I still want to believe that this country doesn’t engage in such behavior. But maybe this isn’t really my country anymore. That I find myself thinking this makes me angrier still.
Thanks to BoingBoing for pointing this one out.
happy
I turned 34 last week.
I have a fabulous boyfriend, a loving family, superlative friends, and a delicious niece. I have a Manhattan apartment with a kitchen that you can actually cook in and enough space to swing a decent-sized cat in. I have a decently-paying job. I have a body that, certain minor structural issues notwithstanding, is not in imminent danger of expiring on me. I’m going to Viable Paradise in just a few weeks. I sing with a kick-ass chorus.
Not so bad a life, really. I think I’ll keep it.