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Intellectual House o' Pancakes Webdiary

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2005-05-15 - 11:03 a.m.

Aside from the excellent, raucous Circus Guy show on Friday, on the godforsaken Upper East Side, my weekend has been quiet to the point of introversion...if my weekend were to take a personality test, it would be judged as an introverted/feeling type weekend with no job prospects except maybe as 19th century poet.

I did get out to see the new, improved MoMA and it's lookin' fine! It feels brighter, expanded, cleaner somehow.

My favorite room is called The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Gallery, because Blanchette Hooker is the most unlikely name ever for a society matron.

My reading material for the weekend was the creepy, fascinating Small Mediums at Large, a memoir by a psychic about herself and her psychic siblings. If you can tolerate the concepts of precognition and clairvoyance, you will enjoy this gritty autobiography that is as much about the drug-filled, swingin' downtown NYC in the 60s and 70s as it is about psychic phenomena.

And while we're thinking about downtown, I also watched Downtown 81, starring Jean-Michel Basquiat.

It's a terrible movie, but integral to the ridiculous story is timeless footage of Arto Lindsay, DNA, Kid Creole & the Coconuts, Fab Five Freddy, the Plastics, James White & the Blacks, and scene after scene of East Village icons and landmarks and clubs.

The EV depicted here is desolate--even Astor Place (home now to a Barnes& Noble, two Starbucks and a KMart) looks like Kosovo.

Watching this film makes my heart hurt with nostalgia for a time and place I didn't even partake of, except from afar, slightly after the fact, through magazines and books and vinyl albums purchased through mail order.

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