South Philadelphia is a place everyone should have to experience on a post-rain sunday at thirty seconds to noon. Coming up the orange steps from the subway all i could hear was a cacophony of bing-bongs as all of the churches on all of the corners rang out their different tell-tale noon-rings at once, and i twisted them round and round in my head pulling forward sets to duet in perfect harmony and listening in one ear to others sounding like dueling blacksmiths.
After the perpetual rain all day yesterday the humidity is gone and Philadelphia just feels clean. I’m sure we’ll manage to muss that up tomorrow, but right now i want to go lie in my tiny rowhome backyard and smell that unmistakably city-smell of rain evaporating out of concrete sidewalks and watch the odd little weed with tiny blue flowers try to prove itself a rosebush through the cracks in the cement. Creeping up past the tiny china-cracks into the very bottom of a blue sky.
There are worse Sundays spent worse ways than this.
Year 01
I think it’s a good thing to have so many idols, because i don’t make them unreal. Garrison Starr is still very much a person to me, and not some sort of god. When i met Shirley Manson she talked to me about writing personal songs and i talked about going to college. But, i feel like having so many people i honestly admire as artists and as people somehow is helping me triangulate to who i want to be and why. One of the people who has just as much influence as any rock star he’s ever written about is Glenn McDonald, and Rabi just pointed out a rare look at him outside of the context of his page where he talks about criticism as an art and profession. Also, there’s apparently a MetaFilter thread somehow related to all of this, but i haven’t quite found my way over to MeFi yet today. But, anyway, it’s all worth a read, to be sure.
I don’t really even need to be a rock star, and, you have to understand that a rock star in my book is much nearer to Ani DiFranco or Tori Amos than it is to Aerosmith or even Dave Matthews. Last night i saw Garrison Starr play to less than 200 people, and despite the fact that the majority of the audience seemed to be there more to drink and chatter than to listen to her play she made a point of being worthy of attention. That… standing up there under randomly shifting spotlights sweating to death and pounding away at her guitar… that is something i want to do. Hilary seems to think performance is all about being an applause junky, but you get something better than applause when you perform something the way it was meant to be heard.
Just to prove that my co-workers are about as dysfunctional as my family, i just overheard this approximate conversation from three of our admissions councilers filing out of a birthday party:
Gina: Let’s play “either/or.”
Ian: What’s that?
G: I’ll ask you an either/or question, and you have to answer. Like, would you rather be stranded on a desert island with Bob Dole or The Rock?
Eric: You didn’t use “either” in that question.
G: Be quiet, Eric.
Ian: Well, that’s not much of a choice. I’d say neither.
G: There is no “neither!” You have to pick one.
E: Well, they both refer to themselves in the third person, which would get annoying, but The Rock could lift boulders and stuff.
I: Yeah, but Bob Dole would die first.
G: Alright, good job. So, here’s another one. Would you rather have an sexual experience with a guy of your choosing every day for an entire year…
E & I: [insert typical “Touching another man’s pee-pee is a fate worse than death” commentary here]
G: Or, have Cameron Diaz come to your house every day…
E: Would she clean?
G: Let me finish! Have Cameron Diaz come to your house every day to shove a beer bottle up your ass.
You could hear crickets chirping in Russia at that point, i swear.
G: With the cap still on it. [because, obviously they needed clarification]
E: But, would she clean afterwards?
I: Um… when you mentioned a “sexual experience,” could we just watch some porn together?
College Admissions. Very glamorous work.
The rain started pounding down so hard that i couldn’t even make out the light that was on in the window across the street, and it was in that exact moment i decided i needed to be sitting on my windowsill with my legs dangling out of the window enjoying the storm. After futzing hopeless with the endless leak that is my air conditioner i finally just threw some towels down on the window sill, threw the screen open, and leaned out into the rain. So, here i am in my nearly unlit apartment with colors splayed on my ceiling from my omnipresent bubbly floor-lamp and Diana Ross and the Supremes telling me all i ever needed to learn about love via my stereo.
If anyone feels like going out to dance in the rain, just let me know…