4 posts tagged “da captial”
I was at artDC all day on Saturday in the booth for the DCAC and had one of those golly-it's-a-small-world moments. A man came up to the booth and was looking at each of the pieces and I thought, wow.... he really looks like Jay Wee. Now, I haven't seen Jay Wee in like.. fourteen years? I think the last time I saw him was 1993. I knew him back in the day when I was living in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where he was one a large group of artists living in the neighborhood. I remember him being a painter... and maybe doing some sculpture... I think he was living in a huge studio space that was really an empty garage or warehouse or factory or something. I associate the space with Mr. Cheung, an older painter from Korea who, I vaguely remember being told, sold his work like hotcakes back in Seoul. I remember parties there... and that I lost one of a pair of earrings my mother had given me for my birthday in a couch in that place where I'd gone to sleep in the not so wee hours of the morning at the dwindling of one of those parties.
The last time I remember seeing him was when we were making scallion pancakes at Tabitha's wedding, which took place in an abandoned warehouse in Williamsburg. Strangely, I thought of him recently when I found a few rolls of pictures I made in the early ninties of a Brooklyn-based band I knew. He was friends with a few of the people in the band and there was a picture of him I made at a practice session at a studio in Alphabet City. I posted it in the music set on my website.
In any case, I was looking at him and thinking, damn, that really looks like Jay Wee... then he turned towards me and stopped, and said... you look really familiar... you're Julee's friend. Turns out he recently moved to Maryland from Brooklyn. And it was the artDC event, after all, and he's an artist, so it made sense.... but it was an odd weekend of overlapping worlds-- a continual stream of people that I ran into at artDC or across the street at the Warehouse that I knew in other contexts (from work, from AOM, from back in the day in another city). By Saturday night I literally ran into three people I knew I knew but I couldn't place because they were in the wrong context and everything had gotten mashed together (I figured each of them out eventually). And then met new people who I knew of from different contexts and got confused all over again.
Eventually I realized what I really needed was sleep...
Three random things.
1) I was riding the metro home the other day and a woman got on with her toddler. It was rush hour, the metro was packed. The woman looked to be in her late forties, the child was about three. At first I thought she was the grandmother, but then she admonished the girl to quit struggling to slide out of the stroller and sit in mommy's lap. I'm all about mom being able to sit on the metro, and (unusually) several people got up to let her sit down, but then she took up all three seats that we proffered, sitting in one and blocking the others with herself and the stroller, which at rush hour seemed clueless at best. The woman sitting next to me, across from the woman and her daughter, was counting through a small rosary. The little girl was staring. She held them up for her to see and the girl was fascinated. "You see the pretty beads?" the mother said as the girl stared at the crucifix swinging back and forth. We pulled into the Pentagon stop and the woman handed the rosary to the little girl, who grabbed it and started waving it. The doors opened and the woman got up to get off. "Oh, your rosary!" the mother said, but the woman smiled at her and said, "Oh, it's okay, I have others," and stepped off, immediately engulfed by the sea of military uniforms.
2) There is a man with a dog. A young dog; a puppy. He comes every day-- at least he has for the last month or so-- and stands under my office window, encouraging his dog to poop in the yard of the building. I don't know where he comes from, or goes to, but the dog is hyperactive (being a puppy) and jumps up and down a lot, periodically chomping on the man's pants and shirt, yanking and pulling, his head going back and forth as he tries to shake the life out of the garments. He yips and yelps and gurgles right under my window. The whole time the man utters a long low grumble of curses and admonishments at the dog. When the dog loses interest he teases him until he grabs on to his shirt tales again.
3) On the corner across from my office are the sad remnants of a yellow scooter. It looks like it was in an accident and got some damage, was then chained to a lamppost (while the driver was taken to the hospital? Which makes me sad) and has since sustained more damage and lost some things (tires, seat, etc.). It is rather sad and dejected looking. This morning as I neared the corner I could see a homeless man pulling a blanket out of the clothing donation box next to the scooter. (Well, hey, it was for him more or less to begin with, right?), which he worked hard to wrap around his head. I reached him just as he finished. He then semi-squatted and stared intensely at the scooter, saying, "MoooooooooooOOOOOOOOOoooohhhhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhh!" He repeated that a couple of times.
On Thursday nights I have been taking a class. It's a photography class-- the first one I've taken in years and years and years-- as they were having a sale on tuition and I've been wanting to get back to the lab for ages. I signed up for it and about three days later everything with the moving went into action, and then soon after Artomatic went into full swing.... so what seemed like a good idea at the time (hey, it's cheap enough that I can afford it! And what else am I doing of a Thursday night?) turned out to be poorly timed (argh! I have to miss three classes while moving and cleaning and I can't go in on weekends to use the lab because I'm unpacking and gawd I've got three artomatic meetings this week and all I want to do is go HOME not go to South Capitol....). But hey, it is what it is (and when it is), so I'm trying to take as full advantage of it as I can.
Last night was the first time I've developed my own film in well over a decade. I managed to mis-spool (sadly, if not surprisingly). Fortunately, neither roll was anything I was totally in love with, and I didn't lose all frames, but there was some film on film action with pinkish sworls and such. *sigh* practice practice practice.
On the way home I had one of those horribly disconcerting city experiences. I've had a few similar ones before, luckily not on the receiving end but always on the observing end. I was walking to the Eastern Market metro stop from the class a bit after nine, and old, white haired gentleman in a Mackintosh in front of me (it was raining). On the corner of that little... park sorta thing?... where the metro stop is a car was parked. Okay, lots of cars were parked. But this one-- an American car, like a Taurus, was on the corner. All the windows were steamed up. As the old fellow and I neared the corner (diagonally across the street), the back passenger door opened, there was movement, then a booming man's voice.
You ain't going no place! You gonna sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up!
Then his beige puffy coated arm reached out into the night, grabbed the inner door handle, and slammed the door shut. The old man, who'd watched the whole thing, turned away and hurried on. I kept looking at the car where through the steamed glass I could see the puffy coated arm pumping repeatedly towards something that was below it. He was clearly punching someone, over and over and over, in quick succession, and very hard. The car was rocking back and forth.
The old man was already up by Pennsylvannia. I looked around, hoping for a cop, and spotted a Transit Police van parked maybe a hundred feet away. I walked up to the passenger window and knocked. There was a cop in the van on the driver's side. He rolled down the window.
Uhhh... I know it isn't in the transit system, but, uhm, there seems to be someone really beating the hell out of someone in a car over there.
He asked where, and I directed him to it. He said okay, he'd checked it out, and started to get out of the van while I went down into the metro station. I had to wait on the platform for about ten minutes for my train. Five minutes into waiting I could hear sirens for a cop car and an ambulance on the street above. They stopped when they got close to the metro entrance.
Missing the bus is not a good way to start the day. As I came around the corner of my street to where it meets Calvert I watched my bus pull up to my bus stop-- across the street, with no way to make it over there without getting hit by oncoming traffic-- sighed and thought, well, shit. When I got the light I crossed over and spent (wasted) a few minutes reading the bus schedule, realized that it would be another eight minutes before another one came, contemplated started to walk to work, hemmed and hawed... and then realized that the traffic was backed up at the light and that I might be able to make it to the next stop before the bus took off. I started walking quickly around the curve in the road and just beyond a line of shops I saw the bus, sitting at the next corner, waiting for the light to change. I broke into a run, bolted down the block and across the street, but the bus started across before I did, and for once there wasn't a crazy person screaming at themselves and physically incapacitated and wheelchair bound, necessitating the bus to "kneel," and thus slowing it down. It pulled out just as I was reaching the back of the bus.... and there it went.... down the street..... sigh....
When I got on the next bus I realized I'd left my pencil at home and had brought with me only reading material that required marking up.Which then left me free to contemplate the messages being sent my way by the woman who plunked down practically in my lap-- someone I have encountered on this bus before. Her message to everyone else that got on the bus was "I love you baby! I love you!" But sitting so close to me I got a little more of the, shall we say, inner turmoil than most other people on the bus. Let's just say she's a little angry. You know, deep down.
I also had to go to the post office this morning-- I sold a bunch of stuff on Amazon and had to send it all out. Upon arrival I was told that the cost of sending stuff media mail has gone up since I last sent stuff media mail (admittedly, it's been a while), screwing up all my calculations on whether or not it was worth selling the stuff to begin with. Too. Late. Now. Then, I was told that I would need to readdress everything, as it is not acceptable to put your return address on the back. The woman at the window insisted it had been like this from time imemorial; I recall it being fine to do so, like, for my entire life. Not to mention that if she were to watch any classic film she would encounter a scene with a closeup to a letter in which the protagonist holds it far too long in his hand right side up to show that it is (or isn't) addressed to him, and then flips it over to see from whom it has been sent. The readdressing took for-bloody-ever.
On the upside, it meant I was in post office for so long that I got to hear this exchange happen:
Guy in his mid-twenties asks window clerk how long various services will take. He holds up a priority envelope, "How long will this take?"
Clerk says, "Two to three days."
Guy: "Naaah, that's too long, yo." Walks off, comes back with express mail envelope. "What about this one?"
Clerk, "That's next day air."
Guy looks at envelope. "So it will be there tomorrow?"
Clerk: "Yes, tomorrow." Guy walks off, starting writing something.
Guy arrives at window with envelope. "This is next day express, that's what you want?"
Guy: "Oh yeah. I'm trying to get my phone back by Friday, you know?"
All three clerks look up. "Get your phone back?"
Guy: "Yeah, you know... it gets stolen, and you gots to send all this stuff to the INsurance comp'ny to get the phone back. It's so stupit. I mean, I gots insurance for like five years... buy you gots to do all this stuff...."
My clerk: "That must be some high-tech phone you got there, some high-tech piece of electronic equipment."
Guy: "Nahhh.... it ain't all that.... it only costed, like.....forty hundred and seventy dollars." (He was trying to sound all casual about it, like $470 was no big thing, but it was clear it was a big thing, and that he wanted everyone to know.)
Clerks: "whooooooo.... that's some seriously high-tech equipment... four hundred and seventy dollars.... pssshhh..."
Guy (smiling, satisfied): "Yeah, it's crazy.... they make you do all this stuff, you know what I'm saying? Even had to get a after david signed and notorized an' everything."
That's right, slick. An After David.
