February 23, 2009

my living room in Beijing

Ten things I'm liking at the moment:

1. Milk. Silliman went on about it, but I didn't know about the union support for Milk and vice versa. I mean, I was 8 when he was killed, so this film was something of an education on the gay rights movement for me. I wish it had come out sooner in California to sway the Prop 8 vote.
2. John Berryman's The Dream Songs. A lot of folks really don't like this work, but I think they are completely misreading it. In light of his snoozy contemporaries --Lowell, Ginsberg after Kaddish . . .
3. That my apartment comes with a washing machine. Few apartments have dryers in China, as they recognize the waste of energy drying clothes truly is. Hence, the delicates by the window in the photo above.
4. Single fare subways. Beijing is like New York. You pay the same amount to travel by subway if you are going one stop (in which case you should walk) or 10. BART could learn something from this.
5. Sanjay, my coworker, used to do something TV/film related in England before winding up in China. He knows a fair bit about other forms of writing and wants to talk about it. This is an unexpected development.
6. Exercise. 5 days a week: I listen to mostly Sabbath, the Stooges & the White Stripes on my shuffle as I slowly run 5K on the treadmill at the grotty gym 3 blocks from my place. I dropped from being boarderline high-blood pressure to perfectly healthy in about a month.
7. My job makes me wear slacks and a tie. I'm almost 40 and have never had to wear a tie at a job in my life. At this point, it seems much more like performance. I am literally suiting up for my job. I have been buying the most hideous ties to go with the loud dress shirts I am having made. I am honestly enjoying this part of the theater of it. I am dressing a part, and the students are receiving the part well enough to get on with their own role of language learning. There's a movie's worth of material in this dynamic.
8. Tailored shirts for 100 kuai ($15).
9. I have been busy cooking up new projects.
10. That 21 Grand offered me a show which can't pan out. I pitched a show idea to Darren sometime last year, and he recently got back me. Unfortunately, I'm not in the Bay Area and 21 Grand is --and should be -- all about the Bay folk. It's akin to my losing out on the Bay Area Poetics anthology. But that's what I get for moving so much.