sunrise high over scotland

sunrise high over scotland
Originally uploaded by wonderwomanyank.

radio goodbyes

ciento uno punto siete!!! super estrellas!!!
on the list of everyday things that make me happy, 101.7 is somewhere in the high 30's (#1: the sunlight through my sheer curtains in london, #57: the noise my sister's flip mobile makes when you swing the hinges. open, close, open, close...giggle : )

when i grew up here, there was nothing but tejano on the hispanic stations. bad guitar ballads with accordian notes, and selina. now...i've got la ley, mana, ricardo arjona, shakira, kumbia kings, alexs syntek, even paulina rubio. my mother is going to laugh when she turns on the radio in the green machine this evening.

but it's time to go home. i'm packed, all the errands run, the cycling clothes purchased, the bank happy, chosen another 10 books to bring back as my bookshelves glacially migrate acorss the atlantic. arrive tomorrow morningish, and have the whole day to unpack, start cycling off the holiday hips, and plan out my thoughts. detachment and distance have borne their fruit, and i've several ideas up my sleeve(s).

dallas

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Originally uploaded by wonderwomanyank.

a city of cars and highways

cousins, driving

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Originally uploaded by wonderwomanyank.

oil

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Originally uploaded by wonderwomanyank.

next up, overweight americans. welcome to the land of bush.

soma’s not all that bad.

it’s been american beef for 4 meals now. the latest, a yummy mother-marinated 2inch thick choice sirloin. so tender and almost bloody.

the bondathon has been balm to my jet lagged soul. connery helps pass the early hours. as does my old university commuter bike, around the local lake.

a storm in kansas is causing wind gusts of up to 40mph in north texas tonight. imagine a blizzard in zurich causing snowflakes in london.

to see with eyes unclouded by hate

or, perhaps you might prefer 'stranger in a familiar land'.
there is intimacy and history in lifting a fork from the silverware drawer without looking, recognizing the smell of the city in the morning and relaxing in the night's warm wind as we drive, windows down. these street corners still hold memories.
detachment in my sudden arrival into a family engrossed in their own life. listening to conversations where my character plays no part. to hear familiar conversation patterns, know the jealousies and delights, but isolated now, a party trick who refuses to entertain.

can think of nothing but that life is an endless round of work, food, diversion, food, work. “the greatest freedom of man is ‘independence of thought’, said henry james. And yet we are a planet bored with thoughts, set to small mean tasks and filling the hours between wake and sleep with diversions. and so back to the thanksgiving bondathon, on channel 36.

when faced with so much excess, the luxury of all, here where house prices have not dented consumer spending or enchilada eating, my knee jerk reaction is to desire nothing, and to hide from 35 types of salsa in a book. although the current bedside reading is contributing to my general disenchantment with humanity. the kite runner, the 6th harry potter, reading lolita in tehran, even a clive cussler action hero trasher chime with the despondency of my shopping visit to a rural texas walmart at rush hour. In a town with only liquor stores and gas stations, walmart is the required option for tape, orange juice, and coffee.

ps. ‘kiss kiss bang bang’ is hilarious. go divert yourself in a pulp action with val Kilmer as a gay private eye.
pps. the soundtrack to the week? michael nyman, with a touch of U2 in the lighter moments.

somehow, it slipped my mind

no idea what i was doing 'recharging my batteries' when all i have (had) was one day of work before i'm off to dallas for a week. family time.
off to relax for a week, my time ordered and food prepared by women wiser and older than i, an old friend to search out, a brother to laugh with late into the night. both my grandmothers have just upped the speed at which they're dying, and I'm glad they'll both be there, probably the last time. sheesh i've gotten sappy. now, when i start actually missing the city, get out the shotguns.
the family will impress upon me their expectations, remind me of my own goals in life, and most importantly dallas better kick me in the ass. i hate that city, but it's a productive anger, forces me to rise up, inspires me to reach far far away, and i need that now.


The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Italo Calvino

it's mid november

i spent the weekend recharging my batteries, contemplating next steps,
or perhaps ignoring, escaping from the sunny hostile world
in zadie smith, isabelle allende, nigel coates and philippa gregory.
in brioche, selfridges lingerie, leather gloves and expensive tweed.
reading for hours on end, historical fiction, urban theory, childrens fantasy
conversing casually with jen, jumping topics from a to z and back to b.
easily
re-building a potemkin façade of fashion facts, of knowing my life’s future tree.

oh to decide on your desires, to act because you differentiate, to see over the jumbled skyline and aim for the golden sky at dusk…

_

last night i dreamed of playing rugby with Julia Roberts, of bullet-running races, and of talking to a man on the phone who was in the building, but whom I could never find.

techno-riot

The three bloggers arrested in France used Skyblog.com, a major radio station's service, popular with young people. Agence France-Presse reported that one of their blog posts urged: "Unite, Ile-de-France, and burn the cops. Go to the nearest police station and burn it." Is that an order or an opinion? If those were lyrics to an American rap song, would they bring arrest, furore, or fame?

Search and destroy

At the same time, the rioters' political and media bete noire, interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy - who was blamed for worsening the violence when he called the rioters "racille", which was first translated in the Guardian and elsewhere as "scum" and later as "rabble" - took out ads in Google to push his agenda. Business Week magazine reports that French Googlers who searched on such words as "riots," "burned cars", and "violence" saw ads sending them to a petition to support Sarkozy. In the old days, maybe two years ago, the minister would have held press conferences. Now he speaks through a search engine. (guardian:technology)

c theory...

i'm cycling home at 9, outside euston station. at the intersection, there's two men in high-vis yellow jackets fixing something in the road. all normal.
at the light, however, i've time to observe them in front of me. there's no orange cones, no trucks nearby, just two men fiddling with this latch (literally.. like a big key) in the road, and turning it with some un-tool like iron rods. and one of the guys has a suit on underneath the yellow vis jacket. road works?

i say nothing, just smile and cycle on.

wonderwoman!!!

so andrew has, besides an ipod whose software he can't understand..
THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON OF WONDERWOMAN!
what hilarious awfulness. amazons in satin in athletic tournaments, invisible planes, nazi's in smoking jackets, gorgeous american hunks...oh i love this. so low budget and gorgeously fun. and i need a pair of those boots.

on the reading list

Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (Paperback)by Osama bin Laden, Bruce Lawrence (Editor), James Howarth (Translator)

countem....6

pairs of gay men with dogs in hyde park this morning.

design approach, maccreanor lavington architects

(for your reading pleasure)
Our contextual approach is closely intertwined with a fascination for the anonymous and ordinary. Ordinary architecture is storytelling about the roots and conditions of the landscape as each landscape generates its own specific, yet special anonymity. Instead of a search for the extravagance the ideas explored try to extend the specialness of the ordinary.

Our projects are first and foremost developed around the rationality of program and site conditions, a rationality that restrains the indulgence in visual fantasies. The architecture attempts neither nostalgic repetition nor extravagant invention but moreover uses a language that talks about a shared experience, a shared memory, and ordinariness.
...
the emotive power of nostalgia lies, in these terms, not in the desire to physically re-invent something lost, but in the way idealised and fragmentary images of the past are sometimes summoned unexpectedly into the context of a very different present. Here it is the simultaneous and contradictory awareness of past and present, which is of importance. it is this second understanding of nostalgia, which interests us.

evening rant

went to a Royal Society of the Arts lecture this evening, on 'the inconvient society'. a refined discussion and debate on what started out as the problems casued by our 'convience' society and what ended in a discussion on how we must shift to a low-carbon society or climate change will ruin us. from how clever personalised marketing leads to social exclusion into how we must square the conflict between personal choice and communal reality. find a way to internalise the 'externalities' of economic growth.

as i was cycling home up regents street (it's blue lights this christmas season, with large disney elephants, and reminder-to-self: don't run red lights at the trafalgar roundabout, because you just end up going round in circles) my thoughts ran something like this: there's a need for government policy to create change (pollution limits), there's a need for a bit of bribery (if you recycle your taxes are lower), there's definitly a need to charge the REAL cost of driving and flying, but mostly -
there's a whole lotta education that's gotta go on. we are going to have to re-design our economy, our shopping play and work habits, our cities and farms, and everyone's got to start now. architects and planners need to design places that don't require cars (great for the elderly and kids!), developers need to see the riskyness of out of town shopping centres when fuel prices blast the ceiling, insurance needs to connect the dots between insuring coal plants and insuring buildings from severe weather....

i've dreamt of the day when car-based low-density suburbs lie empty, ghost towns where companies scavenge for bricks wood and good soil to re-sell into city development, where the enormous sewage and water infrastructure designed for single-family detached homes is used to irrigate the farming of what used to be front lawns.

my thoughts are dying. (home now, and i need to eat). but while tonight was an intellectually stimulating debate by learned well-dressed men and women (sitting under 17th century paintings) it was preaching to the converted. the planet - and our divided, segregated, sickly cities and societies - need larger actions now.

balance

Each of us finds a comfortable position somewhere along the continuum that ranges from complete withdrawal and self-absorption at one end to full civic engagement and reciprocity at the other. The position is never fixed. We fret, vacillate and steer our lives through the riptide of countervailing instincts that press from both ends of the continuum. The uncertainty we feel is not a curse. It is not a confusion on the road out of Eden. It is just the human condition. We are intelligent mammals, fitted by evolution – by God if you prefer – to pursue personal ends through cooperation. Edward O. Wilson

frustration, not revolution

The interior minister's forces, of which there are some 9,500 on duty around the country, are loathed. "They harass you, they hassle you, they insult you the whole time, ID checks now, scooter checks next. They call you nigger names," said Karim, 17. "I got caught the other week smoking on the train. OK, you shouldn't smoke on the train. But we get to Aulnay station, there are six cops waiting for us, three cars. They did the whole body search, they had me with my hands on the roof of the car. One said: 'Go back home, Arab. Screw your race'."

Sylla summed it up. "We burn because it's the only way to make ourselves heard, because it's solidarity with the rest of the non-citizens in this country, with this whole underclass. Because it feels good to do something with your rage," he said.

"The guys whose cars get torched, they understand. OK, sometimes they do. We have to do this. Our parents, they should understand. They did nothing, they suffered in silence. We don't have a choice. We're sinking in shit, and France is standing on our heads. One way or another we're heading for prison. It might as well be for actually doing something."
(the guardian)

Yes, these riots are rooted in economic deprivation and urban decay. But they also have an ethnic, racial dimension. And France's key problem is that it cannot face that fact.

That is a less polemical statement than it sounds. For it is a matter of bald fact that France does not officially recognise the concept of ethnic difference at all. It is literally illegal for anyone compiling an official census even to ask about someone's ethnic origins. There are no figures showing the rate of French-Algerian unemployment or school enrolment or hospital treatment. French official texts speak of integration as resting on the "refusal to distinguish citizens according to their origins and their particularities". In other words, there can be no Algerian French or French-Moroccans or any other such combination. There are only the French.

This is a defining republican value. Tim King, who writes the excellent France Profonde column for Prospect magazine, says the idea is rigidly enforced. "When an immigrant comes to France, he must drop everything he has ever learned of his previous culture; he has to leave it in his baggage."

The doctrine was doubtless perfectly well-intentioned. There shall be no categories of citizen in France, it declared. The law shall view everyone equally.

The trouble is, it is not the law that decides every aspect of daily life: people do. (more guardian)

fortune tellers

don't ask me how... it's 3am...
i'm to ignore men until '29'' at which age i'm to rediscover
men and real relationships.n as if i can evolve in a vaccuum until then.

nov sundays

12 hours of sleep, rain speckles the windosws, grey skies outside and garden state on the dvd player. rest.

smiles, sparkle and perfect lighting

i've been researching stock photos all day for work
its a bit like watching american tv, you start thinking everyone in the world is good looking, happy, with perfect white smiles. that we live in big clean rooms and that beaches are always the perfect temperature.

season's changes

the bbc said it was 10C at 7am this morning. first time this fall.
10C is my threshold - above that, and i tell myself it's not cold and i don't need any special gear to cycle in - my core's warm enough to keep the blood moving. but at 10, out come the headband to protect my ears and the full (rather than knuckle) gloves. at 8, a layer of tights over my cycle shorts and an extra pair of socks. at 6, a full sweater instead of just a vest. at 4, a warm hat under the helmet, the big over-shoe socks, proper warm gloves, and sometimes a scarf. at 2, i check for ice. ice means i stay indoors.

i want to be climbing a mountain now

untitled
Originally uploaded by wonderwomanyank.