Tag Archives: Rand

Rhythm is a Dancer

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Another day, another night, another opening, another show. Last night was quiet. Juan was running late and decided to take a raincheck on stopping by which was fine by me. I spent sometime with Julio & Stine and Superboy.

Hung out, Julio burned some DVD’s for me so I might send them to the left coast as a Christmas present though I was told no Christmas presents, this costs mere pennies so that means I won’t hear ‘Oh you spent too much money, you shouldn’t have’ from Annemarie. This year it’s going to be a cheap holiday gift giving season.

So it was a quiet night and I wasn’t in bed by 11:30, but more like 11:45 which isn’t that big of a deal. Slept really well. Once again my pillows have gone bad and I’ve been waking up with an achy neck.

Since Bill is in Stuyvesant Town I decided to add one of his pillows to mine and voila! It worked and I slept really well. Still some difficulty getting out of bed when the alarm goes off but it wasn’t that bad and I was up and mobile at 6:30 and out at 7:15.

No Casey bus today, but progress is being made. It’s more than likely that when I eventually do catch the bus that I used to see Casey on, he won’t be there. Nothing on him, just the way the cosmic joke is on me, rather than being included on the cosmic joke.

Work was busy, the new subtenants were annoying. There was a new guy and so their discussions around the trading desk were political and had a tinge of anti-Obama feeling to it.

The other day as they were watching CNBC, there was an article on the TV about how investors are sweeping in on India and taking advantage of the chaos following the attacks in Mumbai.

This is the disaster capitalism that Naomi Klein writes about. Something happens, the people are in shock. Public companies are privatized, unions dismantled and occasionally brutalities occur.

Scratch that ‘occasionally’, brutalities happen quite often. Murder, displacement, rampant unemployment, government crackdowns in democratic societies, people going ‘missing’ all in the name of free trade.

That is The Shock Doctrine, as put forth by Milton Friedman and his gang from the University of Chicago. I mentioned it as the news was reported and got a few strange looks as I spoke. I guess a tirade against unregulated capitalism doesn’t go down that well when you’re dealing with traders in a financial institution.

I’ve been reading this book for months now, I read it usually on my way home since it’s generally so upsetting and it angers up my blood. I have less than a third to read and Naomi Klein writes about what happened and continues to happen in Iraq.

I guess I should have paid more attention to the misdeeds of Paul Bremer and his ilk, but I hope that I am making up for lost time and my ignorance.

Like yesterday, I got really tired after lunch, a salad. Sort of crashing. Maybe it’s because of the drop in temperature as the day goes on, it could also be the errands that I have been doing usually in the morning. If I could take a midday nap I would but I can’t so I ate a banana, which helped.

This evening I went to Steven’s Institute of Technology to attend a lecture by Dr. Oliver Sacks, whom I have written about before. The gist of the lecture concerned music and it’s relation to the brain.

I heard about it through Rand and once again I am in his debt. Dr. Sacks is personable and mentioned a few times that the paperback has some rewrites as well as additional case stories which made me regret purchasing the hardcover when it came out. Won’t do that again.

I was hoping to get a chance to talk about my brother Frank and his aphasia. His aphasia seems to go away when he’s talking about music and he’s just as passionate about music as I am. But the opportunity never arose and I was hungry.

I did thank Rand for telling me about the lecture and now here I am mere moments later writing about it. Still tired and a bit hungry now so that’s it.

I have photos from last week to today, but since I’m on Bill’s Mac I can’t figure out how to upload them.

Sunday’s Best

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Argh, Sunday night. After four days off there is a feeling of dread in going back tomorrow. And there’s no need for it, since I enjoy this job. I’m sure it would be different if Bill was here, but he’s not on this cold rainy evening.
I wish he were here, but I must carry on. Didn’t do much today due to the weather. Yesterday would have been the day to do something but I stayed local. No trip to Manhattan, just a walk to the post office.

I did find the scarves I’ve been looking for, and of course I found them after buying a scarf on Thanksgiving morning in the city while waiting for Bill and his mother outside of Grand Central Station.

Last night I watched Tropic Thunder, which was very good, very witty. Turns out I didn’t have Hancock, the Will Smith movie. That’s next in the Netflix queue. Tropic Thunder was basically a movie about a making a movie, which I thought was along the lines of The Stunt Man, a movie from the early 1980’s starring Peter O’Toole, Barbara Hershey and Steve Railsback. Similar concept, different plots, or plotz.

I watched the director’s cut last night, the commentary with Ben Stiller, Jack Black and the great Robert Downey Jr., who is certainly one of the best actors around today, playing a blond haired blue eyed Australian who undergoes a darkening of his pigmentation so he can play a role written for a black man.

It did sag in bits, but then again it was the director’s cut, not the theatrical release which had most of the fat trimmed off. But as Downey’s character says in the movie that he doesn’t step out of character until the DVD commentary, he does his commentary in character, to the amusement of Stiller and Black.

After that I watched bit’s and pieces of Saturday Night Live as well as Escape from the Planet of the Apes which I used to love, now I was surprised that I was able to sit through it then because there was an awful lot of dialogue and really cheap sets.

Then again, I wasn’t able to see it in the theater since I was too young so I had to wait for it to be shown on broadcast TV. I think the only one I saw in a theater was the fourth Ape movie, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.

They never showed the Apes movies nearby, it seemed they only showed them in Passaic, which was too far and too rowdy for me to go alone let alone ask someone else to go and get their parents to drive us. Paramus was closer and within walking distance and had a few theaters.

This afternoon I finally got around to watching Wall-E which was as charming and cute as I had been told. Harpy likened it to old school cartoons from the 1920’s, not much dialogue- you need to follow the plot by watching the action and figuring out various bleeps and whirrs.

But it’s not all bleeps and whirrs and watching it on DVD affords the luxury of reading subtitles. It’s funny, when I sat don a few minutes ago I was saying to myself I don’t want to write, but here I am twenty minutes later and basically finished with tonight’s entry.

And I just got a call from Rand who is going to be dropping off my computer in a few minutes. Oh how torn I am, using Bill’s Mac and finally getting the right commands down to going back to Ol’ Dusty.

Which is sort of like Bill’s Mac being EVE and Ol’ Dusty being Wall-E.

Yeah- that makes sense.