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Hello, I'm Rachel.
I am 25 and I live in NYC, but I grew up chasing tumbleweeds and hornytoads in New Mexico. I write things for a living, for now. I like the arts, photographs, old movies, the web, and the city, and tend to wonder how each influences the other. I thought this might be a good place to collect a few of the million images, sounds and ideas I get distracted by every day--sentimental though they may be. Welcome to my corner.
And if you just want to say hi, please do. I write back.
Jul 17
Desmond Richardson, aka one fine specimen, aka choreographer and director of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, which comes to the Joyce in November and will sell out. I’m already scoping out tickets. He is one of those dancers I feel lucky to be watching, even in the ruddy frame of YouTube short. Is there anything more beautiful than this?
UPDATE: Desmond choreographed this, which aired last night.
» Kay Ryan
It’s official, today Kay Ryan was just named the new poet laureate:
[“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”…For a woman who once shrank from exposing herself, this new position will put her in the public eye more than ever. But at this point Ms. Ryan is philosophical: “I realized that whatever we do or don’t do, we’re utterly exposed.”]
Truth!
Also, a favorite Ryan poem for good measure:
Bad Day
Not every day
is a good day
for the elfin tailor.
Some days
the stolen cloth
reveals what it
was made for:
a handsome weskit
or the jerkin
of an elfin sailor.
Other days
the tailor
sees a jacket
in his mind
and sets about
to find the fabric.
But some days
neither the idea
nor the material
presents itself;
and these are
the hard days
for the tailor elf.
happy to me, camilla parker bowles, phyllis diller, and david hasselhoff…this cheeseburger’s for you.
also thank you to someecards, for making it possible for my friends to show me they remembered my birthday in another and only slightly more time-intensive way than a facebook message.
Rudolph Nureyev on the Muppet Show. One of the more absurdist things to come out of children’s television—I like Feist’s latest Hensonizing, but this one takes the cake for me.
Jul 16
25, off to a good start.
[If there is a philosophy implicit in these pages, it is that great pleasure in food is there for the taking. Food is not a metaphor for life. It is life, and eating is an art. Now, more than ever, in this era of obsessive self-denial, obsessive overindulgence and obsessive moderation, it is deeply satisfying to be reminded that, as Fisher writes, “often the place and time help make a food what it becomes, even more than the food itself.”]-Kate Christensen on NPR.
Last night I had dinner with my boys at Juliette, an early birthday indulgence, and we sat on the roofdeck, eating sugared dates, savory summer crab, buttery mussels with bay leaves, and rare, peppery steak. Three bottles of oaky white, a full tumbler of earthy tequila with sea salt. Sometimes eating well perfectly compliments the moment—which last night, was one of felicity and amusement and a pollyanna excitement for the next year—and a meal does become much more than the food itself. I am really so lucky to have the fantastic ones around me (and even luckier to realize that fact when it is easier to overlook it). They make it so much less difficult to get older.
Jul 15
Make up artist Bud Westmore with stars Ann Blyth and William Powell on the set of Mr. Peabody and The Mermaid, 1948 (via).
So many wrong and right things going on here.
in which we discuss language
- A: i had no idea she was that funny and/or witty
- R: i plan to use banana split as a way to describe people
- A: "that chick is a banana split" et al
- R: people really don't talk like that anymore...is it because no one wants to objectify women in such creative ways?
- A: ha
- R: it's always bitch, whore, slut
- R: never, she is a curdled milkshake and send it back please
