Archive for
May 2007
31May
2007
maura @ 6:25 pm
You may be wondering, how was the popfest? It was great! I wish I’d been able to make it to more than 2 shows, but honestly just going to those wiped me out. A huge incredible amount of work went into pulling the whole thing off, the organizers are amazing superpeople!
I’d only heard Bunnygrunt and Pipas before going to the shows, so it was fun to catch some new (to me) bands. The Saturday show was HOT but fantastic: indiepop + Astroland + hot dogs + vaguely confused people walking by = fun. Yay Scary Monster! And seeing Bunnygrunt at Coney Island was utterly perfect.
Sunday night’s show was also great, if a little more tiring. Seven bands, who knew I could stay up that late? Of course Pipas were swoon-worthy, totally worth the late night.
But my biggest surprise of the popfest was Best Fwends — where have I been all their lives?! When you say their name out loud it kind of makes you want to punch them. They’re 2 spazzy kids from Texas who plugged in their electropunkpop ipod and instantly had everyone bouncing around, flirting with heatstroke. They also attracted the most random passersby of any band, including a semi-toothless grandpa-age guy dancing and throwing the devil horns. It was AWESOME.
Gus liked them too! I think he was spellbound by the realization that actual grown-ups can dance crazily and sing loudly in public. Imagine when he grasps that sometimes those grown-ups can even make money that way!
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25May
2007
maura @ 6:38 pm
The popfest is here! I’m going to two shows. Tomorrow is Bunnygrunt at Coney Island. Jonathan and Gus are coming too! Though they will likely spend more time on the rides than rocking out. Whatever am I going to wear? I am fretting like a high school prom date, it is silly. It doesn’t help that it’s going to be 8 zillion degrees and the show is outside. Will my floppy old lady hat look stupid? Has it been so long since I’ve been to Williamsburg that I’ll need to study the subway map to get to the Pipas show on Sunday night? Probably the better question for Sunday is will I be able to stay awake til 11pm (when the show ends and the young folk head off to an aftershow party and I head home to sleep)?
Music and concerts have been swirling around my head lots recently. In 2 of my internships I’ve been making podcasts of library tutorials, which has activated an advanced case of college radio DJ nostalgia. It was so much fun to be a DJ, even if I usually had the 3-5am shift. There is no good way to sleep if you have to do something from 3-5am. If you try to sleep beforehand you will feel like a big pile of crap when you wake up. And then if you try to sleep afterwards it’s all light out soon and everyone else starting their days wakes you up.
The record library was unreal, it seemed like every record in the world was there (and could be borrowed!). And sometimes there was good swag, like comps to shows. I am pretty sure that Jonathan was the only person that ever listened to the show, though occasionally a call would come in. I have some tapes of the show that I made for posterity but I’ve been too embarrassed to listen to them. I’d been pretty shy in high school: it was oddly liberating to sit in a small room talking to no one at all yet potentially everyone.
When we came to New York for grad school I tried to get a radio show, but that university has a real communications department and thus filled their station with actual aspiring DJs rather than (academic) nerds who happened to be (music) geeks + old South Side blues and jazz guys. Probably just as well — I couldn’t have continued the early morning shifts for long after college without disintegrating into a krabby patty.
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23May
2007
maura @ 10:52 pm
I am tired. Bone tired. Then why am I browsing Adidas on Zappos? I don’t even (really) need new sneakers, though my old ones are probably about 2 or 3 yrs old, but they are still perfectly fine, really!
If I *did* for some reason decide to buy new sneakers, I’d get these for summer:
and these for winter:
How old am I, anyway, 12? Can an about-to-definitively-be-in-her-late-30s-parent (ooh, so uncool) really wear those and get away with it?
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22May
2007
maura @ 6:57 pm
Here’s a list, in no real order and for no real reason:
1. What my iPod taught me this morning: Colourbox - “Manic” segues nicely into the Pixies - “Debaser”, ditto with Even in Blackouts - “Knowledge” and Spice Girls - “Love Thing”
2. Shoes I wore today: red Adidas Samba sneakers
3. What I’ve been thinking a lot about recently that will have to wait for another post: competition and grading, my college radio show, method shower spray.
4. My favorite of the books Gus has been into lately: The Monster in the Backpack by Lisa Moser
5. Last thing I ate: a spoonful of toasted coconut (yum) from the coconut cream pie that Jonathan and Gus made (eew, bad texture for me).
6. My favorite deprecated HTML tag: , of course!
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19May
2007
maura @ 10:23 pm
Oops, it’s the end of the week and I’ve been a blocker again. It’s not entirely my fault: I had a stealth busy week. Summer classes started and I’d forgotten (from last summer) how intense they are — 3 1/2 hrs long (!) twice weekly. And I had a PTA-ish meeting at Gus’ school one day, and a Food Coop meeting another evening. And yesterday I got my library on at the LACUNY* conference. I presented in a session with some of the folks I’ve been interning for, see if you can find me (goofy photo and all).
* Library Association of the City University of NY, in case you were wondering
Now it’s the weekend and apparently I still have nothing to say.
I feel like I saw Gus for about 2 minutes last week, but that doesn’t seem to have bothered him much. Today he and Jonathan combined Spongebob and fine artisanal craftsmanship by making paper. Recently Gus has been moved to fits of hilarity by the part in Krabs vs. Plankton where Spongebob shreds a dollar bill in a blender and Mr. Krabs freaks out. He wanted to shred a real dollar, but we didn’t let him. So he got a bunch of paper and a green marker and drew 20 one dollar bills. Of course, then he wanted to shred them in the blender. When Jonathan mentioned they’d need to add some water, Gus immediately said “let’s make paper like I did in school!” So they did. Damn school, always making our weekends so messy with their creative learning projects. It’s drying now, we’ll see how it turns out in a day or so.
P.S. (mostly for Anne but also for other interested parties!) Read this article about Paul Reubens right now! He is a comic genius.
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15May
2007
maura @ 10:17 pm
I’m too tired for a proper post tonight, so I’ll just report with pride that this week’s newspaper score (so far) is:
Me: 2
Times: 0
In your face, paper!
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12May
2007
maura @ 9:12 pm
Yesterday Gus came home from school with a Mother’s Day card he’d made for me. It’s really pretty: on the front he drew a picture of a flower with pastels, then he watercolored over and around it. On the inside he wrote the following (case sensitivity preserved here):
MOM
GRESE
SiNOMiN
BACiN
FLAWR
Let me translate for you as Gus did for me: “Mommy, this is what you feel like (greasy), this is what you smell like (cinnamon), this is what you taste like (bacon), and this is what you look like (flower).”
His teacher has told us that Gus is a fearless writer, that he dives right in and writes it down without asking or worrying about spelling. Which is exactly how I want him to feel about learning: dude, just jump in, you can fix any mistakes later.
I can’t possibly explain how funny and wonderful and amazing and incredible my kid is, but I think I’ve come close.
To all the mamas out there, happy mother’s day! I hope someone tells you that you smell like cinnamon, too.
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10May
2007
maura @ 9:48 pm
It’s been a little quiet around this here blag lately. Why? I’m not exactly sure. I’m on my one-week break between the spring + summer semesters, though I’ve packed it with internship stuff and Gus’ school stuff, so I’m not just lying around the house eating bonbons. I think I was a little down last weekend, maybe a bit of the end of semester blues. And the job search is looming, so that’s a tad stressful, too.
On the other hand, I’ve done some fun stuff as well. Yesterday I went on a field trip with Gus’ class to the Whitney Museum. I really needed a coffee after herding 21 kindergarteners (!) on 3 different subways (!!) during rush hour (!!!) to get from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side, but sadly there were no walk-through espresso bars on the way into the museum. I wanted to see the Gordon Matta-Clark exhibit, but the kids were scheduled to see Calder’s Circus and I thought it would be bad form to ditch them. The Whitney’s educators were fantastic and the kids had a really fun time making sculpture with colored wires and volunteering incredible information: e.g. that a moving sculpture was like a see-saw which, by the way, is a lever. Little smarties.
And another fun thing is coming up this weekend: our building’s annual stoop sale! Huzzah! This year we mostly have lots and lots of old toys to sell, having convinced the little prince that it was time for many of the “baby” things to hit the road. Everything is piled up in our study and ready to go, and anything that doesn’t sell is going to charity the very instant the sale is over. Ahhh, nothing makes the OCD-ridden happier than getting rid of stuff. Good times!
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4May
2007
maura @ 8:57 am
Yesterday on the way home Gus spontaneously told me about what he learned in school “from a book”:
1. Sea snails have shells to protect them from fish that want to eat them.
2. Sea slugs do not have shells to protect them. So when a fish tries to eat it, a sea slug throws up into the mouth of the fish, and the throw-up is poisonous and the fish goes away. And also there are some pieces of tentacle in the throw-up.
3. The only way to kill a giant squid is to get a long spear and put poison on it and stick it all the way through the giant squid. It has to have poison, a regular spear will not work.
(n.b., for all you librarians in the house, none of this has been fact-checked!)
So that’s the news from kindergarten this week. The ocean is a dangerous place, chock full of poison and vomit! Be careful at the beach, kiddies!
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