september 18

since we happen to have digital cable here, i feel obligated to take advantage of it to watch all tottenham hotspur games i can while i still have the opportunity. to that end, i woke up this morning to watch the wolverhampton game. despite more glorious play by gareth bale, we dropped a goal late in the first half, and it looked like we'd drop more points at home until alan hutton won a late penalty that rafael van der vaart put away. then, a bit later, roman pavlyuchenko put us ahead and a freak goal went in off hutton.* all in all, a terrific start to the day. i also had the feeling, for some reason, that my day would mirror the flow of the game--starting slowly and then ending epicly.


so, i went to get breakfast/lunch (or brunch) from the bakery down the street, and failed miserably. they didn't have the ciabatta roll i wanted, or the egg salad i wanted, so i had to settle for a bagel with (expensive) cream cheese. i ate it in the mcgolrick park and listened to the announcements of some sort of inter-elementary school race, but never actually went to see what was being raced. i imagine it was a soapbox derby or something similar though.


after that i went to central park to people watch until the pay what you want hours at the guggenheim started. i found an amazing bookstore on the way at st marks place. it had the largest cultural studies collection i've ever seen in a bookstore, including every work by adorno, agamben, badiou, and zizek. then, after a little while in the park, a guy walked up to me and asked if he could take some pictures of me for a photo project. he seemed like a legit enough photographer and like i could probably win in a fight if he tried to turn it into a nude photo shoot, so i agreed. turns out he's a japanese immigrant and a graduate of a photography school in the city who is now working as an assistant to some other photographer while he tries to get his own career started. he was also really friendly and thankful that i let him take the pictures. then, during the close-up facial portrait he wanted to take, he dropped this gem: "wow. you have a beautifully shaped head." which is the first time anyone has said anything about my head other than "it's huge" and "you have tiny ears." i also think it might be photographer speak for "round and generally head shaped."


after the weirdest compliment i've ever received, i went to wait in another extraordinary line for a museum so that i could pay no money to see some art. but, "pay what you wish" to the guggenheim doesn't include nothing, so i had to shell out a whole seventy cents to get in. unfortunately, around half of the museum was closed while they installed new exhibits, so it was a bit of a short tour. however, i did get the chance to see the work of julie mehretu who had these amazing drawings of cityscapes and destroyed buildings using only lines and grayscale. they were some of my favorite pieces i've seen in the city, surpassing, for me at least, all the works by picasso and matisse and diego rivera that were on display as well. they also had more depth than any two dimensional work i've ever seen before--i had to stop myself from touching them. i also, while at the guggenheim, finally asked a security guard the questions i've been wondering about for awhile: how many people try to touch the paintings? and do you ever get tired of looking at this art all day? but what i found out was that most of the security guards at big museums are actually police officers who are on the lookout for terrorists. 


then, after i left, i had the pleasure of doing my favorite kind of biking: weaving through standstill, bumper-to-bumper traffic. it just makes me feel so much more efficient than everyone else. so much so that even with all the cabbies who race past me just to cut me off and turn left right in front of me so i almost crash into them and that one dude who kept whistling and making bird-calls as the worst substitute for a horn i've ever imagined, this may have been my favorite bike ride since i've been here. of course, that may also be because i passed a 'pizza self-sufficiency center," which i imagine to be a (brilliantly named) pizza tossing school.


and finally, proving my weird intuition about the structure of my day correct, the glorious end to my night: no age. it's a punk band i saw at lollapalooza, but that was when randy randall, the guitarist with a fantastic name, had dislocated his shoulder and played in a sling, limiting all the energy. this time, things were different. the two opening bands, soft circle and small black, were a great lead in, and no age took advantage if it. they were tight enough to earn respect for their musicianship and loose enough that the show was an outright good time for the crowd. i got sucked into the center of the excited part of the crowd, the part that pogoed around and danced together in some sort of anarchic collective unity. the mosh pit, you could say. i am sweaty, tired, a little bit bloody, and oh so pleased. my left shoelaces were also somehow tied into some sort of triple knot that i still can't untie. honestly, it was the best fifteen dollars i've spent in a long time.


also, on a side note, this apartment has exactly two forks and two spoons, but eight butter knives. i actually noticed that a while ago, but i just now realized how very strange it is.




*i realize no one else cares about this. i chose to tell you anyways.