Sept 27 00woo! I'm going to be doing a web broadcast at 2pm, London time. which is 9am EST. here, the show is called fusem. DJ Lani is usually on, but today it will be me! it will be archived afterwards, so you can download it at your leisure.

like nadyalec, I have been nostalgic in the rain. a quick walk to the corner store under my roommate's umbrella in the night, and the smell of wet pavement and trees nearly broke me out. First i smelt Cambridgeport, where I lived for four delicious years, then Berlin at night, in my runaround phase, then back and forth, remembering all the times I walked quiet and alone, to or from crowds of friends, in the quiet shine on the streets and the cars' hiss.

September 26 00 Well. Paris. It was a good time. I didn't bring much reading material, so I wrote a bit in a little journal to pass the time. My friend whom I stayed with was really busy the whole time, unprepared for my last-minute phone call requesting a couch to crash on. Gave me a spare set o keys though, and a few hints as to promising directions. I walked and walked and walked, took the metro a bit. Didn't quite manage the buses. here are extracts from the trip:
Sept 20 00, des vosges square. a place with grass and fountains, lined with trees pruned so that their leaves form an unbroken squared border. Surrounding them is the iron fence (with gates at the midpoints of each side of the square. Then the streets, and across, all around, pink-stone buildings with narrow-high stripes of windows and tall slanted roofs. The sun is shining and there are select sections of grass which we are allowed to sit or lie on, while others have warning signs which everyone obeys. Children scream and wallow in sun, young parents spread blankets and fairly elegant folk recline on their coats. the effect of the square-of-connected-pink-building around the square-of-street around the square-of-fence around the square-of-(squared)treetops, around the square-of-grass with trees studded at regular intervals, cross-sectioned by paths. Not quite sterile, although regimented. the symmetry is pleasing, but conservative.
I'm finding parisians quite conservative on the whole. People in posh shops eye me, security guards in Sephora follow back and forth and back and forth again across the shop (I hide behind a corner and pop out, eventually I time one as he strolls across for the third time to my side of the shop, and laugh at him when he sees me checking my watch). But unlike londoners, who would die rather than be caught noticing a large tattoo, people here are fine with walking up to me as I wait for the metro, standing 2 feet away and examining my arm until satisfied, then going away again. Craning necks and turned heads and open staring are par for the course. funny.
Sept 21 00 Today began by heading north to Arrondissement 18, first to the African and Turkish areas. Lots of ladies wrapped in brightpatterned fabrics. It's mostly residential-feeling in the side streets, although the wide main streets are all shopping oriented, lineed iwth bargain clothing shops with bins outside full of shirts for 5 francs, sweaters (all hideous) for 10. in the side streets about every other corner has cafe-bars full of men. and now and then small shops crammed with cloth and spices and phone cards and ads for money-wiring-services. fruit stands. Wandered north and east, found myself going uphill, got the feeling that something was ahead, that i should continue. up, up, then hit a little crossroads with a cobbled street slanting steeply down on one side, and cafes on every corner, and a fenced park sloping down and left. In front was a flight of 100 steps, wide with a railing in the middle. up, up, at the top of the steps was tourist land. Sacre Coeur church, on the top of the huge hill, which turned out to be montmartre, with a fabulous view of the city. church itself was a bit sterile, with all the carvings and paintings several stories up, and very little human-sized action. Tons of toursits, french, US, New Zealand, Japan. Sun was bright and the sky huge over the view. tried to find windy (both kinds) steep narrow streets with funky shops while heading down and south towards my afternoon destination, the Louvre. half-succeeded. it's a hip but posh area, lovely to look at but a touch too islington-feeling. hip but pricey shops and cafes and bars. finally lost the most hardcore tourists. found an internet cafe and wrote a note to mom. walked and walked. down out of the most picturesque montmartre area, to a street lined with peepshow theaters. One was all art-nouveau on the outside, with the door edged in a giant yonic-treelike-art-nouveau frame, and another around the window which had a stained-glass (also artnouveau) picture of a woman. seedily sensual.

more extracts later.

September 18 00 I'm going to Paris tomorrow, back on Sunday. so no updates for a few days.

September 16 00 yesterday I handed in my master's thesis. it's ok i think. could use another week. or six. these things are never really done. and, crisis-fueled, i made all kinds of last-minute revisions. found some interesting books in the last 3 weeks that I just HAD to incorporate, and reread an old article and found it suddenly relevant. so it's done. my year in london, my impetus for being here.
but i still want to stay. don't want to go back to the US, especially if gwb wins the elections. i like being somewhere where nobody argues about the death penalty, or socialised medicine, where some things are accepted as natural, like if you have a government, it doesn't try to kill you either on purpose or through neglect, just because you're poor. And except for the yardies, the gun thing is pretty chill here, and few need to argue about it either. of course i live on the edge of serious yardie land, but the music is better, and i'm not involved in the conflicts. And I like the fact that interracial couples are not hassled as much, and in general the racial issue is not as live. also less race-baiting by black intellectuals here. and then there's the idea of a phD or another master's at Goldsmiths, land of cultural studies. hmmmm..

September 11 00 you know, my feet never smelled, not for years, not for all those years that i wore nothing but boots -docs, combats, motorcycle boots, all summer long. Not until i broke down and got a pair of sneakers. And even then, it didn't really take off until a few years ago, when i got those great fornarina sneakers with the velcro and the open bits at the sides. love them to death but they gave me feetstink. hope those that love me find it familiar and endearing. no one gonna love me after these damn x-dreeem all vinyl marinators I've been wearing all summer. actually they are horribly stonkin, even with odor-eaters. I need some industrial-strength chemical shoe nuke madness now.

i'm all riled up cuz i just watched a documentary on Nixon. grrrr.. and I'm sick of seeing interviews with Kissingerwhere i see him and he's still alive and not yet burning in some kind of hell, andhe has a nobel peace prize and is really rich. dammit.

today was warm and sunny. packed up the crucial 11 pages and biked to a sunny cafe, where i might dj in a week or two. on brick lane (not the one on brick lane that i already played at. another one. more laidback.) wore the zebra dress, biked i think it's about 3 miles, was beloved of all truckers on the way there and back. braless girls 'ave more fun. sometimes.

inna good mood. the weather i think. and leftover from last night when I had a little dinner party. my friends (DJ Lani) and Mr New York and Lani's friend (The Photographer Going To St. Petersburg Russia The Next Day and I'm Jealous as Hell). good simple food: roasted eggplant slices, baked butternut squash, sliced organic tomatoes that had been drizzled with balsamic and left to sit for an hour. Hummus with added lemon and roasted garlic. grilled bread. and for dessert, fresh strawberries, cut in half, sprinkled with a little sugar, and drizzled with more balsamic vinegar (it makes'em all tangy and amazing).

after the cafe, came home and sat at the laptop in my room with the windows open and the beatles-live at the bbc album playing. a great album. truly. sang along and everything. followed by the " 'bam bam' to 'cherry-oh-baby'" compilation of Jamaica festival-winning tunes. meanwhile writing about the significance of the bam bam riddim's longevity and importance as a common cultural resource for the industry, and the inadequacy of copyright law to deal with that. whee!

September 8 00 And tonight, someone found my site through the search for "puppet sex". puppet sex? what were you thinking? unless you saw Jan Svankmajer's "Faust" and were just, um, inspired. And the williams sisters fetishist is getting more creative: "venus and serena williams dolls." sad, people.
saw "ring", this supposedly terrifying japanese movie the other night. ehhh. had some good creepy visuals, but it tried too hard, especially with the music. I mean, if you have a shot of a room, and the music makes this big "KaCHINGG..CHING CHING CHING Ba-BUMMMMMMM", i guess it's scary. but a good cinematographer could make it scary without the music beating you over the head. or a good actor. the music was annoying, because it dominated otherwise not-so-convincing scenes. I think the film was edited badly as well. a nice little ghost story plot, but there were all these loose ends that were called attention to and then dropped. it doesn't have to be totally wrapped-up for it to work, but it needs to have a flow of its own, based on the narrative, or the rythm or something. there were some scary moments, but they went by too fast. meh. was looking forward to supercreepy atnosphere. left kinda disappointed.

September 5 00 haw. somebody found this page by searching "does venus williams have a boyfriend". good luck, guy.

Did this weird market research thingy today. but I got paid 30 pounds to chat with five other people in a room about "youth tribes". although nobody told us officially, I heard it was for MTV and Cocacola and such. I kept being weirded out by the idea that my thoughts were going to be marketing tools for these huge systems, it actually made me a little uncomfortable when I opened my mouth. Dodn't want to explain how people could cash in faster on youth culture. they cash in fast enough as it is...
Spent a third of the proceeds with two of the folks there at a sushi place nearby, having a much more interesting chat. Going to try to have a little dinner party later this week I hope, and connect some of my friends together.

September 3 00 today was the Brick Lane Festival, which wasn't as lively as I had heard, but fun neverless. Sat with my new New Yorker musician friend (who gets an acronym soon), talked and watched the crowds, soaking up the infrequent sunblasts and catching a shiver in the shade. got bothered by sketchy cockney guys who had obviously come just to run some scams on the festival-visitors. They wouldn't shut up, especially this one dud (not dude, but dud) who kept asking me stupid things about my tattoo and ended that by saying "a pretty girl like you just does not need that on her arm" or some such bullshit. thanks for sharing, asshole. finished the iced-soy-mocha (i'm high-maintenance like that) and strolled through the scene to spitalfields and bought a couple records, came back to Brick Lane, and ran into five or six folks I know, so got to catch up on some backstories.

starting to think hard about where I'll be after this thesis is over. have the feeling if I wanted to hustle, I could do new-media stuff in London. not sure if I want to burn that energy. I may just try to write a ton of grants... any suggestions? mail me if you know folks who want to fund research on Jamaican music, intellectual property and music, subcultures and property rights, and a few other ideas I could pitch...