this weekend's events

It's 3:38 in the morning on Sunday. I'm up because it was my good friend Wade's birthday tonight (well, last night if you're gonna get technical) and we had a little festive party in Chelsea at our friend's place. It's always a good time with that group, like Wade's new boy said, we're like a family we're so close and comfortable with one another. It's nice to have that.
Today George and I went down 47th street and looked for wedding rings, it was good. We got some good ideas so we can make a decision. Afterwards I went to NY Cakes and Baking, a great bakers resource in chelsea, and bought some tools and such for Wade's cake. I actually dashed home to bake it in time for the party, cutting it a little close and barely having time to eat before rushing back out with cakebox in hand. I think I pushed it with not eating much and then drinking a few glasses of chardonnay. I just made scrambled eggs for my late-night snack. My blood sugar gets really low if I don't regulate it well, and tonight I wasn't really on top of it. Then, with all the sugar I put into my body, well, it's just a little to extreme for me to take and I crash. I'll be good soon, I think I needed protein. I usually trust those instincts of what foods I'm craving, it's almost always accurate. I probably need sleep too, I just knew that if I didn't eat I'd be worse off.
Tommorrow George and I will be meeting Sky, Cris, Hanna, and maybe Charlotte to go see a play about Joseph Pilates that a couple special ladies are participating in: Marie, who directed, and Marta, who's playing some bass. It's been a festive weekend, what with our show on Friday night...my band El Jezel played Crash Mansion, and it was a success. We sold some CDs and even sold tee shirts this time...we hand-drew on them with fabric markers, and I think they turned out pretty cool if I do say so myself. ;)
Ok, I must sleep now. Good night.

cake and cd's

so in a couple days i'm going to be 28, and i feel good about that. it seems like a nice age to me, i'm doing ok with myself, getting married soon, and still fell young. today i'm getting cake, so that's always a good thing, celebrating my birthday with d, doing some karaoke. fun times. tomorrow, sunday, el jezel is going into serious biz-ness to (hopefully) finish up our mixing, but knowing george, we'll probably wind up doing some more overdubs and have to schedule a new day. i'm not complaining, he's the ideas man. and then we can hopefully get our cd out to the masses by october!

Skating and crashing

I just finished a nice game of skateboarding Simpson's style with George (I was Bart and whipped little Lisa's butt), after playing a bit of Rampage and Marble Madness. It's been a while since I've played video games, and it was quite a treat, sitting there like a couple of kids getting amped up on ice cream and ginger ale. Seriously, it was Ben and Jerry's new flavor, Marsha Marsha Marshmallow. Mmm. We were planning on going to Coney Island for the Siren Music Festival, but we needed some down time and I was especially not feeling the trip since I have a bad chest virus. So we opted for getting out late in the day and seeing Wedding Crashers in Union Square. Funny movie! Not especially innovative or too original, but Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are hilarious. There were some good cameos in it as well (Christopher Walken, Will Farrell, etc.). What else? Tomorrow is an extension of Bastille Day, and since I missed the races outside of Les Halles this year (kids, adults, cooks, and waiters each have their own race down the main strip by the restaurant with the street closed to traffic for a few hours), I want to go to the street fair tomorrow. I celebrated all the French holidays in High School, when I took the class. Madame Read was so good about really submerging us in the culture, having us make the food and experience something more than just learning verbs. She took a small group of us to France, too, over the summer after I graduated. What a learning experience for me, it was an amazing two weeks. I loved the cute garcons and the currant glaces et vins and the boutique des parfums and the leches vitrine....one day I'll go back. Until then I can just try chatting with Clement, the French boy in my class, and hope that I remember half as much as I used to know.

AHHHH!!!! And we're painting our bathroom

I just needed to let that out. I'm not exactly sure why, but sometimes you just need to yell a little bit. This is the color that George and I are going to paint our bathroom this weekend. Like it? It used to be this color on the walls with this color on the ceiling, but we had this big crack above our bathtub for the longest time and our super Stanley finally patched it up and covered the walls in primer. We thought, why not try another color now that we have the chance? Stanley always gives us a hard time about our bathroom, saying in his heavily Russian-accented broken English, "I paint it white, yes? Why you like this blue color?", only to find out that HIS bathroom is in black and red. He brought it up when he was painting the primer: " I can't even see myself in my bathroom, it's dark. (pause) I paint this white, yes?"

I have the day off today, besides rehearsal later on, and haven't even showered yet. George would tell me, 'good for you', I just know it. But days off I get all tired and lazy, and I don't eat normal so I get headaches. I also had to deal with a bunch of scheduling crap for the summer, so maybe that's why I felt like screaming. That and the fact that I'm on the job search again, which can get very mentally tiring. I better get out of this storm cloud fast or else I'll be no fun in rehearsal. So did you hear that the Mets are doing their thing? Go Mets! Speaking of storms, did anyone get caught in that torrential rainstorm that lasted like 2 minutes yesterday, on Wednesday, at around 4ish? I did, but it was kinda fun, actually. I had an umbrella but it did no help, the rain was coming down hard in all directions. I've told this to some before, but I honestly can say that an overcast day and some rain lifts my spirits considerably. A bright sunny day just pisses me off.

Alright, time to shower now. I'll finish off this email in green....green things make me happy, too. And chocolate. Chocolate makes me happy. Mmmm.....

The Interlock~ part deux

My friend Cris noticed the other day that I always wear these black jelly bracelets. I do, I haven't taken them off since February 2000, when my old ones snapped and I was forced to remove them from my wrist.
When I first moved back to the east coast from California, I was living in Jersey City Heights and working at the Coach House Diner, in North Bergen. I moved a lot during my last year in CA and during one of my moves I found some old jelly bracelets that I wore in the 80's in one of my boxes. I began wearing them again, sort of as a connection to that time in my life when I was just getting into music and being excited about it. I also wanted to be Madonna (when I was 8, people). I thought it would be cool to keep them on at all times and see how long they'd last. Well, fast forward to my time in Jersey, and one day one of them just snapped, then another. They must've been 15 years old and I probably got them in a gumball machine, so I'd say that's pretty good. At the time I befriended a goth chick and her best friend/boss who would come in and sit at my diner counter that I manned to get some egg sandwiches and coffee before work. He owned Tony's Auto Shop, just a couple blocks from the diner, and she was his receptionist. I found her especially cool because she had an arm-full of black bracelets and wore ass-kicking boots that went up to her knees. We were talking about our bracelets one day when I asked her where she got hers....they didn't look like the standard skinny jelly bracelet, but thicker, and larger. 'Oh these? They're not bracelets. They're seals for air filters in a car...O-rings. I just steal 'em when Tony's not looking! Want me to get you some?' So the next day she brought me 4 of them and I realized how superior they were to my old, falling apart ones.

Fast forward to my time at Don Giovanni in midtown....this great old lady, a regular for us who is a former ballerina named Bella is ordering her usual lemon chicken with a mediterranean salad to-go when she notices my bracelets (the O-rings). 'Those are beautiful!' she says. You could sell those!' I didn't want to break it to her that I didn't design them myself, and their 'intricate', interlocked design is very easy to achieve, so I just thanked her. And later I was thinking about them and how I rarely even notice they're even there at all, they feel like an extension of my body of something. I don't take them off, I don't need to because they don't feel like anything and I can shower with them. I would compare them to a tattoo.

I was getting a massage once at my favorite Qi Gong Tui Na Chinese massage parlor, and the girl asked me to take off my jewelry, but I forgot about the bracelets. It didn't matter, they just moved up my hand when she was working on my forearm, and slid back down when she massaged my hand. I was relieved, because when I realized I almost panicked a bit, wondering if she'd make me take them off. Not that anything would happen if I did. I'm not trying to break a world record or anything, but it's just become a part of me.

So, as I wrote the last post, 'The Interlock", I felt it made perfect sense to include my fancy bracelets in with the idea. With marriage on the brain since George and I will be wed next spring, I've been thinking about what I'm going to do about my bracelets. Do I keep them on, even though they don't go with my antique styles of my dress and accessories and hair? I'm being girly now, I know. But I think about those things.
Maybe I'll make a new bracelet, in sparkly ivory beads, that can be interlocked in the same way that these ones do. That way they'll still be there, in a sense, just in a different, more elegant way.

I guess you could say they represent my love for what I call 'the interlock', in music, in dance, in relationships even, if you get all deep about it.

The Interlock

Let me take you back to my college years at California Institute of the Arts. I was a dance student, given a schedule of strictly dance-school classes without much room for any other art medium to dabble in, but my second year I convinced my mentor Lawrence (the biggest snooty ballet queen ever) to let me take a couple dance classes in the music school: African Dance and Balinese Dance. I was feeling claustrophobic from all the abstract modern dance that lacked music all together, except for the occasional ear-splitting abstract piece or spoken word crap (ok, I'm being harsh, but I couldn't for the life of me believe that my teachers didn't accept any of my choices of music to dance to, the reason for me to be inspired to dance in the first place, dammit). What a world away those classes were, literally and figuratively.

With African, I got a major workout while challenging my ear and dancing freely....the style of dance I learned was from Ghana, and the beat isn't standard 4/4 like it is in western music. I played a gourd shaker and performed for graduations, it was fabulous.
Balinese dance became my true love, though. With its intricate stylings and subtle gestures with the eyes, fingers, and angled body, I found it such an art form. The music is incredible, coming from an orchestra made up of many different sized xylophone-type instruments that are played on the floor with mallets, a gong, a time-keeper, and various other percussion instruments. The music itself is chimy and ringing and rhytmic, with many players playing the exact melody while others play the up-beat, so the result is a mesh of interlocked rhythms when played in sync. The costumes are elaborate and regal and you dance barefoot. No shoes makes Jessica a happy camper. I danced with both groups for a couple years and then my Balinese teacher asked me if I'd like to learn to play the music...I had no formal training besides the gourd (hee hee), but I accepted and learned quickly. I started on the Jegog, the deepest bass instrument played with a heavy mallet, then moved up to Calung, the higher bass with a wooden mallet, and tried out the gong as well. I became a part of the orchestra and toured around Southern Ca. to various schools and functions to play and dance with the group. It was really incredible and I miss it. I found a teacher at BMCC that was taught by MY teacher, he has a set that came from CalArts and he teaches beginner Gamelan. I dance for his performances and play a bit, but hopefully I'll find a group one of these days in the city to play with.

missing: 1 friend, slightly worn

I was setting up my account on eBlogger, getting ready to create a new post on soft communication (check it out! a bunch of musical fiends get together and share), when I accidently created my own blog spot. Hmm...what to do? I guess I've been supressing a secret desire to have my own diary online, so what better time than now? The title of my post was 'the mystery of jacob e., dedicated to my missing friend that I never met in person, but now that I think about it, I kinda like the sound of it. So from here on in, this will be the place for me to talk about whatever I damn well please.