pasta, pasta, cake....dinner tonight at al di la was purrfecto, tortelli with corn, summer truffle, and chanterelle's followed by tortelli of fava bean with chesse and mint followed by chocolate/pear torte...ROCKING

anyone know about these mutants?

While looking for info about Bruegel in Vienna, I found this Emory University collection of poetry inspired by paintings. You can have Bruegel by Auden or William Carlos Williams, or others. Not to mention O'Hara on Larry Rivers. Lots of fun stuff.

alex grey exhibit at tibet house

I booked the Austria trip on Expedia, and accepted a blind flight, based on the Wheel's sage advice. Here's a take on online travel from the Voice's tech column.

The Voice discovers Locanda Vini & Olii.

You're a real gem.

Flexcar's fleet of rent by the hour vehicles includes Toyota's gas-electric hybrid Prius. I rented one ($6.50 per hour, flexible rates) for a test spin. Cute, comfortable, quiet, clean and peppy off the line.
.

They're heeeere......er..almost..

Re-zoning?

Some interesting 9/11 fallout, so to speak. I heard from a Parsons classmate I hadn't been in touch with since back in the day. She spent the anniversary reading accounts on the web, and in the course of searching for old acquaintances found our site by looking up Steve DiBenedetto (as a relatively unusual name). First such contact I've had here. I guess she got something out of it, and she'd had the same memory of Larry Rivers and the pope that I recounted. I suggested that this was the sort of connectivity the internet was supposed to foster, and a positive thing to bring out of the remembrance of an awful event.
Meanwhile, in the Park, I met a woman who said she's only recently begun to really get over the whole thing, and it seems bird-watching is helping her. Trying to be helpful, I proceeded to find a rare Connecticut Warbler, which thrilled her no end.
Sometimes I think I talk it better than I walk it, so it was nice to feel like my insular activities might actually be of some use to others.

Reality TV is finally getting interesting. The point is not individuals and their "realness", but polling, which abstracts them. Polling has transformed politics in the last century, and now Argentina is going to choose a presidential candidate through a TV contest. This may start out as a species of joke, but who knows where it could lead?
(NY Post story in comments)

Duh!

Treehomeless

spirited away

face dances from takahiro kimura

Here, I will attempt to relate to you the realities of homelessness. But there is certainly more to a homeless person than being homeless, and this may be the best thing this blog could accomplish - a greater awareness about the whole-ness of homeless people. Not every post will be about homelessness, but they will all be about a homeless person, me. For some people it will be their first experience with the "me" identity within a homeless person. Welcome to My world, a subsidiary of Our world.

finishing some unloading in the neighborhood, i took 3 virgins to the 24th/9th GSI...and while i don't have any real new news, i somehow feel obliged to report that it's Still Delicious. chicken auzhou, whole fish with scallion (god was that luscious), soup dumplings, red pork, wonton with red oil etc etc etc...after overindulging until my stomach cried out in pain last night i was nonetheless ready to go back for breakfast this morning

last nights meal at aKa was yummy we thought, the soups, slider rocked, squid was a real meal deal....

strange wind on 9-11 , hope it cleanzed nyc....

I thought it was an ecstatic measurement but it turns out

The Rapture Index has two functions: one is to factor together a number of related end time components into a cohesive indicator, and the other is to standardize those components to eliminate the wide variance that currently exists with prophecy reporting.

"But the tradition continues. When Mr. Snyder was growing up, the cousins all worked at the store each summer. And last week, his cousin Ellen Smith seemed perfectly content to drop her fruit knife and wait on customers as Mr. Snyder sat and talked at the front of his store at 95 Orchard Street, between Delancey and Broome Streets. Despite his dedication to New York, his personal energy is mellow enough to qualify as Californian. The most worked up he got all day was over how many skins should go into the Black Grape Sorbet."

I'm an advocate of mourning, but I can't say I've really mourned. Well, maybe a bit, at the beginning. The anniversary brings it back; I did feel something, but I hate to say, a year later, that the overriding experience has been that of alienation. It's worse than the early Reagan years. I define alienation as the inability to achieve ecstasy via accepted cultural modes. Tears are the ecstasy of grief, and I don't think I ever cried over it. But I did share in a deep sorrow for the people who died, and for the wound made in our city. Beyond that I find little focus, and now the ecstasy of grief channels into the ecstasy of war-making, and I am sickened. Circumstance has granted the countering voice but little force, and the ecstasy of peace seems far away. This species often displays together its best and its most terrible faces. But these are just expressions, alternating on the same face. Prayers are not to ease the past, but to work eternity into a shape that may explain what is done to us, and what we do to ourselves. If we are finished now with mourning, let us pray for the living.
Pray for peace.
Then work for it.

Ash Wednesday