6/25/02
Two months from yesterday, my vita nuova begins--we fly off to Burning Man, and immediately after we return, I start the Columbia program. So I'm trying to complete at least one significant piece of work every day between now and then, both to make some money and so that my byline won't completely disappear (I assume whatever I finish now will be scattered across the following few months). "Significant piece of work" can mean a lot of things, though.
This morning I got interviewed for a Jandek documentary by three nice folks from Mizzou--they tried to shoot the film in Gantry Park, but the park guard wasn't having it, so we ended up standing in the courtyard of the school attached to my building. They asked me at the end if I wanted to send a video message to Jandek, so I looked into the camera and told him to ignore me and everyone else who writes about him and keep doing exactly what he wants to do. Wasted most of the day, I fear, trying to write a draft of a piece about Wire that'll be bearable; I love that record a lot, and am trying to figure out how to express that interestingly. Dinner tonight at another Sietsema pick: Grameen, a Bangladeshi restaurant near 74th St. in Queens. Most Indian restaurants in Manhattan are actually staffed by Bangladeshis, apparently, but this has some more indigenous food, which is spicy and flavorful. Plus, we got to have dinner with Sigrid and Matt, who we see too rarely.
I spent a rather large chunk of Sunday at the Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art's art festival--essentially an East Coast equivalent to APE, though this was its first year. There are a lot of really lame student comics out there, but there were also some gems to be had--best of all, a paperback collection of Amy Unbounded, the best minicomic ever and the antidote to every bad sword-and-sorcery comic anybody's ever come up with. I'm also swooning over The Ganzfeld, an anthology with beautiful production and some extraordinary stuff in it.