I just found out the translation of ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle‘, one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors(Haruki Murakami) was cut down by 25,000 words due to a contract stipulation at Knopf.
Damnit. I want to know what we missed!
Stoopid publishers.
Hurray, a new author to devour! I loved this book. Ben Okri writes beautifully, telling the story of a tender-hearted artist maturing in a Nigerian ghetto compound. His writing plunges you into the horrors endured(or perpetrated) by his characters in a similar way to another of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami. It’s an intense and magical portrayal.
I should warn you though, it’s potent medicine. Read it only if you have the fortitude to be shaken and stirred by the passion, brutality and confusion of life.
is a tremendous book. It was recommended to me on Goodreads, by the Murakami fan club.
Really looking forward to the rest of his books!
Sam’s favorite feature of Rita and Ben’s house is the ginormous trampoline in the backyard. Usually he can persuade Rita to sproing about with him for hours, but neither of us were feeling very bouncy after so much partying and parade-wading, so we spectated as he put on a Boingplop show. Boing!
Plop. Down he’d come, with lots of cool ninja moments inbetween.
We got some wacky pics(flickr’d of course).
Master of strange faces vs. teh trampoline.
I think the trampoline won.
So, the morning after Rita’s party(see below), we crawled out of bed-er, well, more like out of couch, or floor to the joy of Ben’s delicious pancakes. Happily stuffed, we waddled down to the fair and waded through massive herds of determined fairgoers.. And waded, and waded and…
…finally found a spot to sit at near the very end of the parade route. And waited and waited and waited.. A sporadic mostly naked biker popped by now and then, but by the time the parade came our way, Ben and Dawn had given up and deserted. Sam and Rita and I stuck it out, but the floats were so sparsely spread out by the time they got to us that about two thirds of the way through we thought it was over and our whole tail end of sweaty, slightly irate humanity started heading back down the route only to get shouted at when we met the rest of the parade rounding the bend. Eep!
Oh well. Our patterned butts were glad to get a short respite from the pebbly concrete and we jammed ourselves into an edge of crowd to enjoy the rest of the show.
It wasn’t as spectacular as some years, but I rather liked Ol’ Spaghettihead and the Pirates.
This is my favorite picture though-not because of the cockpole guy and his lovely muscles, but for the three lookyloos with the cameras in the background gawking at the nekkid chicks. Priceless.
More Solstice parade heah.
My dear friend Rita had an awesome birthday bash on friday. Ben’s deluxe homemade sourdough pizza, tons of other delicious foody goodness, great conversations, high-flying trampoline madness, musical mayhem, repeated attempts to get Ben’s pants off, spanking lessons, much massage goodness(including lessons on nape-biting, one of my favorite non-professional techniques), and snuggle puddle heaven ensued.
Ah, birthday delights.
We partied into the wee hours and then many of us crashed overnight with intentions to attend the Fremont Solstice Parade in the morning sans the madness of fair-goer traffic congestion and parking.
I will give the parade it’s own separate post, but this
was on our walk home to Rita and Ben’s house. There’s a very steep Monetesque(huh, -esquing doesn’t work as well with those silly french silent consonants) sidewalk that Sam likes to march up, so they stalked me all the way up.
The madfunny stalking progression here.
Long walk on the longest day of the year, ending in a sunset picnic meditation.
Who knew?
It’s perverted, it’s sexy, it’s nasty, it’s gruesome, GREEN PORN!!!!
Link via Travis. Thanks Rach, for putting him on chat entertainment detail.
I made this heart for Svadesh, my friend and meditation/massage teacher. He had a heart attack last friday. He’s recovering well, but I figured he could use a little heart strengthening energy. The yellow irises striped it sweetly with their lovely shadows.
It’s been a strange week, Sam’s summer vacation started this week, but he came home from his dad’s sick.. Then my mom’s message about Svadesh(I hooked her up with his extraordinary massages a while back and they’ve become good friends) and today, a kitty emergency-Kaya, my mom’s kitty who used to be ours, had to be rushed to the kitty critical care.
Apparently she’d tried to eat a barbed seedpod and the darn thing bit her back!-it was working it’s way up into her nasal cavity-yikes!
Anyway, man and cat survived and Sam is sniffly but on the road to recovery, making strange origami things on the bed whilst I blog…
So, on we go with this precious, messy, fragile, silly thing called life.
Rita(one of my favorite bodypainting models) and I are always hearing how alike we look, so we decided to play switcheroo at the last Gold show.
She dressed up in my painter gear and I dressed down(to the bare essentials) as her model, did our hair in identical pigtails and she painted me! It was too fun and so interesting to be the painted one, for a change. And, goddamn, she looks hawt in my painty gear!
Not bad for her first time, huh?