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Archive for August, 2012

An Earlier Storm

A video today. Taken earlier this summer, when a set of storms was coming in. I looked up and above the house was a riptide of clouds churning, right over our heads. The smell of everything got thick and heavy, and the air felt so viscous that my eyes turned half-closed and sleepy.

I was scared, of course, but the clouds were stunning to look at. So I shot them with my iPod touch and hoped for the best. There was no way of outrunning anything this time.

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This entry is part of the August Break, organized by the lovely Susannah Conway. A pic a day, words optional. Just life and pictures in the final gasp of summer before fall’s purposefulness sets in. To see all the August Break entries so far, click here.

Summer Salads

I made a really delicious corn, edamame and quinoa salad. It’s based a bit on a recipe from the New York Times — I used more lemon instead of lime, swapped out the chili pepper for red pepper flakes, and added avocado, because everything is better with avocado. It is soooooo yummy! I really recommend it. I always go back to this other New York Times food feature by Mark Bittman on summer salads…I could eat my way through these with no problem. Nom, nom, nom…

I loooooooove quinoa, too…it’s a fabulous grain, so versatile and easy to prepare. I like to make a boatload of it and use it throughout a week to base meals off of. Coming soon: ripe, juicy tomatofest, including a tomato, mint, feta and watermelon salad I want to try. I may not be fond of summer as a sartorial season, but coming from a culinary perspective, it’s delicious!

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This entry is part of the August Break, organized by the lovely Susannah Conway. A pic a day, words optional. Just life and pictures in the final gasp of summer before fall’s purposefulness sets in. To see all the August Break entries so far, click here.

I Follow Rivers

I used to live in a city by the ocean, and my sense of time and experience in that place was very much oceanic: vast, somewhat overwhelming, great loops of time and energy that seemed to have no beginning or end. To this day, I can’t remember anything quite linearly from my time there; my memories refracted, shards of colors, temperatures, smell, the weight of something on your skin.

But I grew up in a small town with a river, and perhaps, as beautiful as the ocean is, it is with rivers my allegiance and destiny ultimately lies. A river goes places, it connects and separates, it pulls you in and then gently moves you along and out. Some rivers are epic and vast in their own way as the ocean: I imagine the Nile to be such a river like this, or the Amazon, and I know the Chao Phraya river felt like this to me, a conduit to great swaths of my ancestry. My first true sense of having ancestors came from crossing the Chao Phraya in a narrow, rickety boat, gliding past the ancient temples and the glittering royal palaces. I had that feeling that my ancestors probably crossed the Chao Phraya before; they had seen these temples and palaces, too. To be tracing their past paths, however obliquely, made me understand how far back in the past my kinfolk extends.

These days I walk next to a much more humble, smaller river. I’m told you can’t eat the fish you catch in it because the levels of toxins are too high. Canadian geese have made their home next to it, and the pedestrian paths alongside the river are strewn with their shit. But I like walking next to the river anyway, talking amiably, conversation meandering — just two voices murmuring like water as the sun fades and the buildings and trees turn into shadows in the dusk.

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This entry is part of the August Break, organized by the lovely Susannah Conway. A pic a day, words optional. Just life and pictures in the final gasp of summer before fall’s purposefulness sets in. To see all the August Break entries so far, click here.

Happy Madonna Day

Madonna was my childhood idol; I was lucky enough to grow up with her during her saucy, cheeky pre-“Like A Virgin” phase, when she looked like an East Village urchin. Of course, I didn’t know what the East Village was at the time, but it’s probably because of Madonna that I eventually did.

She was a gateway for a curiosity about a certain type of experience, and she always seemed fun. Maybe it’s lame, because I became curious about modern art at a young age because of Madonna, and queer culture, and feminism, and so much more else.

Nowadays I have a more complicated relationship to Madonna as a pop culture entity — and, let’s get real, MDNA is my least-favorite Madonna record so far — but loyal to the end, I still love her and her Pussy Riot-supporting self. In an age where pop stars are “brands” and have “platforms” and “followings,” there’s something about Madonna that seems beyond all that, as business-savvy as she is — a kind of intransigence and stubbornness. Sometimes it manifests itself oddly, as I get older myself, I appreciate her resilience, longevity and willingness to troop forward.

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This entry is part of the August Break, organized by the lovely Susannah Conway. A pic a day, words optional. Just life and pictures in the final gasp of summer before fall’s purposefulness sets in. To see all the August Break entries so far, click here.

I’m gearing up to put out my next newsletter; it’s kind of a scribble-scrabble letter about what’s been going on for me in August, and some thoughts on strength and vulnerability. If you’re interested, make sure to subscribe!