Ana Kras’s Lamps

Kras’s creations vary from coffee tables, chairs, and this exquisitely simple garment rack that takes the edge off the usual industrial wire monstrosities that most people defer to:

Ana Kras’s “Ksilofon”

Ana Kras hails from Serbia, and is 26 years young. She is also a photographer– you can take a look at her photography work here.

S Magazine also features an awesome article covering Kras and her partner, musician Devendra Banhart.

http://www.anakras.com

Cup holders and armrests should really be upheld as an American standard.

How’s that for a revolutionary idea?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

G-Pain

1717171717171717171717171717171

But since numbers are relatively meaningless (what is 171 days? Four months. What is four months? Half a pregnancy; a quarter of the year; a minute in my life), I’m not sure where I’m supposed to be. I’m ‘supposed’ to have a job, I’m supposed to know what will happen a week from now (because if I had a job, I would be 99% sure I would be glued to a computer screen at work).

But numbers in the bank account, those are more tangible: for every X  hundred dollars, another month of rent; X/6 and that’s weekly groceries at the rate of 2 meals per day, a first dinner and a second dinner. Cutting corners means no dessert.

The days whirl by, blurred with subway trains running in and out of dreams, disoriented trips in the early morning to the slow groans of the L as it wearily crosses the East River in the dregs of the night. Where does the day go? I blink, and I’m at Union Square, but I can’t decide if I’m coming or going. Where am I going? Where have I come from?

It used to be love and loneliness; it used to be an identity crisis, or when I listened to Democracy Now for too many long mornings in a row and felt like Afghanistan was falling about my tired, sorry American shoulders.

Did I vote? No, I didn’t. I missed the absentee ballot deadline.

But I’d hate to regurgitate this self-misery (can you see it dribbling down my shirt), because there’s dancing to be had, and people to meet, and one more out of two of those meals I’ve yet to consume. And who knows, maybe someone will donate dessert.

This is well worth your time.

LOTR erotica

That was snide of me, I think. I sip my coffee.

Sometime vibrates on the table. Everyone reaches for their phone.

He finally introduces himself; her name is Molly. He is Joe. He promotes his band. She puts on his headphones. He starts getting excited as he’s describing his new music video. His hands are everywhere. If I were her I would be bored, but he’s really a very nice guy.

There’s this rite of passage, where you realize that your parents are mortal, actual clumsy bodies clumsily carrying confused minds, navigating the chaos of the world. As a heterosexual woman, there is also a rite of passage where you realize that the division of ‘men’ and ‘boys’ is thin, flimsy; that most men are XL boys lumbering about in suits or Carhartts or carrying heavy things that they couldn’t carry in their earnest, eager prepubescence. Poor boys; they have so much provincial pressure to live up to, and supposedly less emotional range to cope. Supposedly.

If you believe in any sort of fate, what if you were fate-fully conceived the moment your father shows his future wife his band’s new music video? Is this more or less romantic?

Joe’s slowly packing up. Painstakingly slowly. She quietly asks if he’s leaving.

I need to read more erotic fan fiction, I think. There is so much humor, creativity, and inspiration in erotic fan fiction. Why aren’t there clubs? I should start one.

“That was fantastic. You should let me know when you’re… performing,” she murmurs.

Her name is Molly Superfine. She says she’s not joking. Her Spanish accent doesn’t hurt.

I drink the rest of my dirty chai. I feel wide awake and anxious for Joe to ask for Molly’s number when he inevitably leaves.

Joe sings softly as he shares his favorite songs with Molly. He’s singing Pink Floyd.

Okay, so I’m some twenty something no one who’s moved to New York to feel like someone.

Yes, I’ve heard and felt all those cliches: “I’m in New York. I’m tough” (as I wake up at 11 AM and sluggishly sweat my way to the nearest cafe with weak, wiggly wi fi  to weakly look for jobs that earn the rent money and pay for my Trader Joe’s dinners for one); “YOLO: IMMA BE someBODY.”

I’ve settled in east Bushwick (like, not yet gentrified Bushwick– like, the Bushwick with a gazillion gritty, grimy bodegas harboring mutant street cats and laundromats that are always unapproachably surrounded by loud, raunchy Puerto Rican grandpas gambling and cat calling and swagging as street bachelors… I haven’t done my laundry, my towels *smell*), only two long blocks from the nicely air conditioned L train. I used to live in Bellevue, Washington– have you seen Clueless? It’s sort of like that, except somehow, less diverse. Whites and white-washed asians. White n yellow white n yellow– with Coach and Louis V all over.

So Bushwick is a little different. For one, people actually greet you in the street, which was a welcome surprise. People are lounging on their stoops, people watching people watching you. Moffat is a nicely residential block– lined with treets and townhouses painted different colors, stairs turquoise_green_red_orange, cute little gates with sort of cute but mostly terrifying pitbulls… screen doors squealing open and shut. I was walking to that nicely air conditioned L  train (“Laaaaadies and gentlemen, the *pause* EL train is currently arriving on the *pause*–”) when a momma tells a boy “Well, you don’t HAVE to be afraid of the dark!”–

And it struck me like lightening struck the courthouse clock tower; that FEAR is a CHOICE.

A few days before moving in I was all over crimewatch.com– bad idea. A shooting and stabbing on our corner, really? “At least it was a month ago,” I tell my roommate. She cowers. I cringe in mutual response in order to concrete our relationship. Yes, we will be going through this together. And it’ll be okay. The worst that could happen is death, and if I’m dead I won’t care.

This is an optimistic conclusion.

On my nervousness for ‘survival’ in New York: well, there’s not much I can do to worry about securing a job. It is how much I’d like to put into it. That, and chance. I’ve been on the other side of admissions and the hiring process, so I know how much of it *is* chance.

Which means, I don’t have to be afraid of the dark. After all, how productive can fearful worrying be?

It’s beyond Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show Great Job. This is another realm of hilarity and confusion, tinged with shame, repulsion, and disgust. I would say the most accurate description of the experience has been published by Youtube user “Kampfwurst01″ as “This movie is WTF to the max”.

Enjoy!

I came home from dinner last night to find a flimsy man trying to stuff an old lady and her wheelchair into the cramped confines of our small elevator. His comb-over was haphazardly half-plastered, half-swaying with physical exertion. I held the elevator door, and managed to avert my eyes from the old lady’s unblinking, dead little gaze.

Is that a cruel way to describe it? But it was as such; she didn’t blink. Her eyelid tattoos were faded, bluish and gleaming because she didn’t have any eyelashes. Her eyebrows, sparse– but I could tell they were furrowed; at me or in thought it didn’t matter much, because she clearly didn’t give a fuck. While this poor whip-thin stick of a man pushed and pulled and yanked at a loose board (our elevator is under maintenance) that had gotten caught on the wheel, she sat perfectly still, her physiology limp and flaccid, except for hard, shiny eyes which never left my face.

Even as he bowed a thanks as the door closed, even as the door was parted an inch and somehow this strange inch of sight gave us a weirdly private moment where if she were to suddenly smile, I would be the only witness– her beetle black stare continued. I imagined it burning holes through our building as I watched the elevator beep up to the 8th floor, and come back down again.

I surmised that her glare had less to do with me than it had to do with thoughts about herself. After all, when one walks down the street and sees children of a certain age, you come to relate only through your own experience as a toddler, or a pre-teen, or especially as a teenager. There is nothing to truly and deeply critique about a stranger; why, what could you possibly assume? Very less could inspire such judgement, at that age where you are confined to a wheelchair and a man half your size has to stuff you through your doorway– she must have been thinking about herself, her life, her past.

There had to be a time when she cared enough about smiling. Or at least, not raking other’s faces with that deadly expression. Perhaps when she got those eyelid tattoos done, when there exists that fleeting, brilliant light of confident, youthful vanity. Perhaps it is my own vanity reflected in the cruelness of my description; but that is allowed. Anyone who has any conviction in conveying experiences in aging has to have a minimum quota of vanity.

What I also realized about this mindset– because we tend to relate to others as we compare them to ourselves, and vice versa (see Lacan’s Mirror theory)– is how I must guard myself against mental atrophy. There is a sure and subtle horror of only relating to the youth through our own stories and realities. Parents fighting against raising their children in a digital age, for example. The world will only change exponentially, and this has always been the case at any point in time. Progress carries momentum. Aging must feel like that; and those who turn into themselves and refuse to relate the world they grew up in with the world they have aged in will find a desperate disparity that will drive them into a stagnant bitterness; a terrific terror of disappointment and melancholy that will bring them closer to a most unsatisfying end. Instead of allowing ourselves jealousy or close mindedness take the best of us when we meet the youth that are better at the internet, or quicker and cooler– we must be patient with ourselves and the ever evolving world, and learn from it.

Many prominent pieces of literature having to do with aging seems bound to those over thirty– or women in menopause, ‘aging gracefully’ despite the comical and horrifying experience of hot flashes or the literal atrophy of one’s reproductive organs– but appreciating one’s own vanity and youth, I feel, is the key to extenuating the illusion of immortality and invulnerable innocence. Beauty and youth as a crutch for the burdens of responsibility (if you keep thinking about the future, you’ll never have the present), albeit a temporary one, is dangerous only when one mistakes their crutch for a real leg. I suppose my first mistake is anchoring beauty with youth at all; or rather, all of our mistakes; we’ve already set ourselves up for severe disappointment, our own gruesome set of dead little eyes perched atop a body in a wheelchair.

Where would we be without uncensored glory?

When I read Nabokov or Keruoac or Baudelaire or Fitzgerald, the reality they portray is entirely anchored in the objective reality we feel in the norm. The Normal, the Un-Other, the less-than-extraordinary is conveyed to us as a story of extraordinary events. Sequences of narratives, emotions, etc. (flying across the forsaken lands between the east and west coasts, falling in love with the freedom of unrequited love, the filth of living and our visceral existences climaxing then rotting) are journeys in which the reader may watch through sentences unscrambled with meaning… they remain distant tales, Disney characters who we will never make love to, or could barely feel anything for but customary twinges of sympathy (even then, these spasms cease at the ring of a dinner bell).

Yet when I read Murakami, I find an altogether astonishing surreal truth of existence.
Within the very mundane is the magic of hypersensitive detail… The fabric of how I feel in my very environment is stretched and ripped. The bowels of what normal reality I once felt as a numb being are spilled out, pulsing, gleaming, semi functioning but slowly, surely, twitching in the death of the chaos I have recently found myself in. What consistent reality I once trusted has committed a delicious seppuku. I feel a crippling childlike uncertainty, the suspension in any belief hanging my conviction by tenterhooks wound up on a high, cold ceiling in an cavernous warehouse.

These are melodramatic observations, perhaps encouraged by the sheer volume of pages I have voraciously consumed these past two weeks. But I feel the same threads of fate in my life this year that Murakami has so eloquently and keenly committed to his millions of copies of books… The eerie swells of conflicting selves. Of dreams birthing dangerous premonitions that have spilled into my waking reality, even going so far as to affect my relationships in subtle but significant ways.

I’ve always been wary of the vivid nature of my dreams, careful not to trust each whimsical event as evidence for viable desires, wishes, or fears. But emotions are emotions, whether or not your eyes are awake to differentiate the reality in sunlight or the dark night. I have always experienced a heavy, affective residue after my vivid dreams. I cannot ignore them because the grow stronger.

This last one had the power of returning me to life before I met you, when things were emptier, lighter, more free. When I awoke in the morning, I felt less for you. But I also felt less of myself. The retrospectively serious nature of what happened in my dream may directly lend significance to these feelings, but I remember a strange, shallow joy in the experience.

Ironically (? Depending at how you look at it) this makes it easier.