hair, awesome stuff, links

I got new hair again and even though this blog is mostly for "writerly" things (ostensibly) it's still MY BLOG and I can show you my hair if I want! It's going to help me with my writing, to have my head be a little bit colder than it was before, so that is also relevant. See left for sweet hair photo.

For the haircut, I went to a peculiar but awfully nice guy on the Lower East Side. He specializes in cutting only girls' hair into short haircuts (seriously, the nomenclature is "girls", I'm not just trying to pretend to not be 26 Geri Halliwell style). I guess I look enough like a girl to pass. I really like it, and think it's kinda Annie Lennox.

That's my "office" visible in the background. As you can see, it doubles as my "music room" as well as the guest room, the living room, etc etc. Multipurposing and -tasking is what I'm gonna concentrate on, from now forward.

Just so this isn't a me-only post (me-ow), I'm going to link to two nice things on the internet:

• "Spirits of the Humid Cloud" by Gillian Cummings (Wicked Alice 2009). I'm not sure if Gillian would remember me, but we had a class together at Sarah Lawrence, and though we never really spoke I was always a great fan of her work. This poem does not fail to please me. It reminds me of Larissa Szporluk's in the way that the images follow relentlessly one after the other. Gillian's work is much prettier though. You should know what I mean by prettier in this context.
• "Artists fleeing the city," a Crains article I read the other day and linked all over town. It's about how young artists are opting to skip the "New York experience" altogether and move straight to cheaper cities with burgeoning scenes. Is New York over? I don't know, but it is expensive. What do you think?

how much I love food (& watching it)

At Nikolai's suggestion, yesterday I saw FRESH: The Movie, Ana Sofia Joanes' self-distributed food production documentary. It screened at Congregation Habonim on the Upper West Side in conjunction with an CSA info session. Quoting the conversation N and I had a bit later, one of the foci for the people of this film is to bring the consumption of food from routine to ritual.

There are two sides to films (and all media, really) about food and conscious consumption: the first is the horror of the food industry (a la Food Inc and all its predecessors going back to Upton Sinclair's meat industry-exposing tome The Jungle); the second is the uplifting, people-oriented, we-can-do-it message. Both are effective in their own ways (who wants to eat something that was terrorized to death?) but the latter, for me, is the more emotional. It isn't that I don't feel terrible watching caged chicks and pigs, pale and unable to move and in horrifying conditions. I do. The aversion reaction is strong, but so is the disconnect. But it actually makes me a little misty to watch communities of people getting together, eating well, and learning about food.

Why does this happen? I'm trying to figure out what causes this reaction in me. It's not as if the film was sentimental -- it wasn't, really. I think it was about the transfer of information a.) between equal parties, and b.) about something benevolent. Teaching is usually a transfer of information between power dynamics in exchange for currency - so a student-teacher relationship is by definition unequal. But although there is a fiscal exchange between the farmer and the consumer based on product and value, in the information exchange there is no such monetary transfer. There are only happy, excited people, putting their hands into compost, getting dirty and becoming reacquainted with the things they eat.

In short, if you have a chance to watch FRESH, please do.