Basket Case

In 1992, professional basketball players were allowed to compete in the Olympics for the first time. The players who were part of the team the US sent to Barcelona were superstars from the golden age of the NBA – everybody’s heard of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Charles Barkley, right? I remember watching the games on the wood-panelled TV in my grandmother’s living room (“Bohdan, go play outside, the weather’s too nice to stay indoors”), and being completely, utterly, irredeemably hypnotised. Those guys were just out of this world, and they were having so much FUN. I wanted to be just like them, of course, and this new-found ambition fuelled long years filled with hard training and scotch-taping broken pairs of glasses together. I did make it on my school’s high-school team, and then I could have my own brand of fun, watching most games from the bench as I wondered why the coach hated my guts so much. But I digress. I meant to show you this:

Yes, I fulfilled my childhood dream – I went to see the Washington Wizards' first game of the season (they were once called the Washington Bullets, but as DC used to have the dubious honour for being the US murder capital for many years, they changed the name; it seems to have helped, although the new logo is enough to make you want to kill someone). The game was a bit of letdown (most of the Wizards’ best players are currently injured), but the whole shebang was just perfect – the overpriced hotdogs, the lightshow, the cheesy announcer, the cheerleaders, the burrito toss, the kiss cam… You get a lot of metaphorical bang for your quite literal buck, even if you are stuck way, way up near the ceiling because you bought the cheapest tickets on offer. Here's the kiss cam, which I think synergises very well with the Sprite ads:

There was only one worrying thing, seeing as election day is just around the corner:

Adam said it was probably fake, and they were trying to get the people to text more in order to take their money. Or phone numbers. Or both. I’d rather believe that, too.

All In A Day's Work

Here’s the thing about living in the US: you feel like you’re in a movie. I’ve seen so many films and TV shows set in the home of the brave that in my mind, Macy’s and 7/11 are not real stores, just sets in sitcoms and action films; pick-up trucks are props, not actual modes of transportation; the FBI is a fictional organisation of superheroes (or villains, it depends), not the guys who occasionally to take a different route to get to the Library. Honestly, the impression is so strong, whenever people speak, I look down, waiting for the subtitles to appear.

And so I can't shake off the vague suspicion that this whole thing is somehow less than real. It doesn’t help if the screen of your computer occasionally spontaneously displays messages like these:



Aw, c’mon. At least tell us what the substance was!

Where Have All the Heroes Gone

They looked up and yelled:
It's a bird! It's a plane! No..
Wait... Yeah, it's a plane.

Over The Anvil We Stretch

I took the metro all the way to the University of Maryland . The station is way up there on the northern end of the green line:



I made the trip to see the Junkyard Ghost Revival, the touring spoken word supergroup consisting of Anis Mojgani, Buddy Wakefield, Derrick Brown, and a fourth poet who changes every few weeks (it was Cristin O'Keefe that evening). If you don't know their stuff, google it, sit back and enjoy - those guys are the epitome of amazing. They are the bee's knees, the dog's bollocks and the cat's pajamas. Also, Buddy remembered me from Oxford, which was a nice surprise, and hanging out with Anis for the first time since Paris was awesome. Plus, the two of them made me go on stage a read a poem, so now I have officially shared a stage with people who opened for the Rolling Stones and toured with freakin' Sage Francis.

Also met a bunch of great people from the Maryland Uni's poetry circles, took part in a semi-choreographed dance routine to this song blaring from their tour van's speakers, had calzone pizza at a strip mall, and lost a game of pool against Derrick in a dive bar with a wonky jukebox. My American experience is getting more and more genuine.

Pictured - Buddy and Anis at the D.P. Dough pizza place, awaiting nourishment:

Target Market

So I went down to Pentagon City metro the other day to do some shopping, and noticed the billboards were different than at other stations. I took a closer look, and saw that while one or two were touting pension plans for federal employees - fair enough - most were ads for the acronymically named JAGM, by Boeing and Raytheon. Can someone please explain to me the logic behind a billboard campaign advertising air-to-ground missiles? Is the average commuter going to go "Gosh darn, I'm so annoyed having to remember whether my F-16 uses stingers or hellfires, I always get the wrong ones at the mall - the JAGM thing looks like it could save me some headaches?" I'm perplexed.

On a (vaguely) related note, the sequel to my all-time favourite computer game is coming out, and despite all the controversy, I can't help but feel excited - especially since I recently ofund out most of it is going to take place in a post-apocalyptic DC. So I will be able to do the tourists sights in real life, then revisit them after a nuclear explosion and a mutant invasion. And while this could seem slightly disquieting, this sign I saw at the Library's staff entrance today makes me feel nice and safe and warm:

Reassuring

Near the postboxes in the corridor that leads out of my house here, a crumpled, laminated sheet of yellowing paper is stuck to the wall.
For one reason or another, I stopped to read it today, and I would like to share it with you all:


Now if that's not reassuring, I don't know what is.

Wrap Up the Case

So the other day, the National Portrait Gallery had a free showing of the Maltese Falcon. We went to see it with A., and boy, the movie is all kinds of awesome. Look here:

What with me being in the middle of a noir phase after The Yiddish Policemen's Union, this really hit the spot. Repeatedly. With the butt of a pistol.

And while we're wrapping up, it's time to call an end to the Shuffle & Baffle thingy - 18 out of 25 is astounding, considering the fact that some of the lines I would never have guessed myself. I'm very proud of everyone (with the exception of Paul, who really should have guessed the Smashing Pumpkins song; I mean come on). Anyway, here are the solutions:

1. King Crimson, Frame by Frame
2. Erykah Badu, Cleva
3. Bjork, Joga
4. Sun Kil Moon, Glenn Tipton
5. Buddy Wakefield, My Town
6. Roots Manuva, Colossal Insight
7. Sufjan Stevens, Seven Swans
8. The Decemberists, Eli the Barrow Boy
9. Aoi Teshima, Teru no Uta (Tales of Earthsea Soundtrack)
10. Noir Desir, L'enfant roi
11. Madredeus, O Mar
12. Jeff Buckley, Corpus Christi Carol
13. RHCP, Emit Remmus
14. Iva Bittova, V cerném
15. Sage Francis, Crack Pipes
16. Regina Spektor, The Consequence of Sounds
17. Smashing Pumpkins, Rocket
18. Non-prophets, New Word Order
19. Saul Williams, List of Demands
20. System of a Down, Toxicity
21. Atmosphere, Aspiring Sociopath
22. Tom Waits, Little Rain (for Clyde)
23. Sufjan Stevens, Flint (for the unemployed and the underpaid)
24. Buck 65, Heather Nights
25. Atmosphere, Guns & Cigarettes

Oh, and if you haven't had enough, Daan's just posted his version.

Shuffle & Baffle

Stole this from a friend:

• Put your music player on random.
  
• Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
  
• Let everyone guess what song and artist the lines come from.
  
• Bold the songs when someone guesses correctly.
• Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!

So. Here's mine:

1. Frame by frame, if by drowning, in your arms, in your arms, analysis.
2. This is how I look without make-up
3. All these accidents that happen follow the dot, coincidence makes sense only with you.
4. Cassius Clay was hated more than Sonny Liston, some like KK Downing more than Glenn Tipton
5. The first time my town saw the sky, it sucker-punched us in the throat
6. Collosal insight (collosal, man) invites the soul (inviting of the soapbox), sturdy after good food (more sturdy)
7. We didn't sleep too late, there was a fire in the yard
8. Eli the barrow boy of the old town sells coal and marigolds, and he cries out all down the day
9. Yuuyami semaru kumo no ue, itsumo ichiwa de tonde iru
10. Je ne sais qu'une chose, tu tiens ma joie ma peine entre tes mains
11. No nenhum poema, o que vos vou dizer, nem sei se vale a pena tentar-vos descrever
12. He bear her off, he bear her down, he bear her into an orchard ground
    
13. The California animal is a bear
14. Pred dvermi opráším sníh z vlasu, sníh z paží, z rukávu, sníh z ras.
15. I'd give a 21 gun shot salute with the toy rifle that you gave me, but it won't shoot
16. My rhyme ain't good just yet, my brain and tongue just met
17. Bleed in your own light, dream of your own life
18. You ain't got no style, you ain't got no style, you ain't got no style, you ain't got no style
19. I want my money back, I'm down here drowning in your fat, you got me on my knees praying for everything you lack.
20. Conversion, software version 7.0
21. 7:30 AM, alerted to life by a song on the radio
22. The Ice Man's mule is parked outside the bar where a man with missing fingers plays a strange guitar
23. It's the same outside, driving to the riverside
24. Sleepy town, Saturday, seen a man drown
25. Rappers stepping to me, they wanna get some, but most of them should go and boost their monthly income

Good luck!

Built From Nothing but High Hopes and Thin Air

I learned a few things yesterday.

1. The Eastern Market is the best place to go for second-hand bikes.



2. The National Gallery of Art is good for buying prints and posters as well as crashing parties.



3. The Sylvan Amphitheatre is right next to the Lincoln Memorial, and the Christian McBride Quartet makes for an amazing soundtrack for Kavalier & Clay (which is a great book, and you should go read it now).


4. Nick Cave is a glamorous demon on stage, and his electric mandolin player is Rasputin crossed with a crane.

You guys in Europe live in the future

Walking around in a daze today. I still have not gotten over the overwhelming feeling this whole thing is fake and/or is happening to someone else entirely. The feeling is compounded by the fact I have spent the last month or so checking out DC on google maps, and I keep wanting to zoom in on my surroundings and scroll them.

The Library is humongous and it's a freaking maze:



Seriously. I only got out today, after registering and meeting the rest of the cubicle warriors, because I thoughfully dropped breadcrumbs on my way from the entrance. Not sure I'll find my way back to my desk tomorrow; the minotaur has probably eaten them all by now.

The cubicle warriors seem cool. We crashed a formal reception at the National Gallery of Art today, and conferred on subjects such as MAs in Life Studies and mysterious shiny pseudo-Spanish foodstuffs.

Also, on my way back from the NGA, I saw these guys, enjoying a special kind of guided tour of the city:


Made my day.