half my culture rapes the other

Beethoven would be rolling in his grave if it wasn't so hilarious. Sorry all you non-J speakers out there. There is a version with subtitles but a) it's low rez and b) it's just not as funny. If you must know what they are saying, then you must, but in any case watch this first. My mom sent it to me. Her words were, "This is really funny and you will appreciate it."

She also recently sent me black Qtips so you can see the crap that comes out of your ear clearer. Was there ever a mother who knew her daughter better...?

Enjoy:

direct objects DO serve a purpose

I saw a man handing out pamphlets of a religious nature in the subway yesterday. Obviously a believer of his message, he wore a sweatshirt that was airbrushed with his message about allowing Jesus to save your soul from eternal damnation. Of course, "Jesus: Believe in Him and he will save your soul from the fiery depths of Hell" was too long a message for a sweatshirt front, and besides, you have maybe 3 seconds with which to get your general message across to busy commuters who won't even take your leaflet and probably don't want to be saved by you or your savior's message anyway. So, editing occurred, direct objects were omitted and the meaning was obsured. I wish I had taken a picture but there was just no way to do it, plus: what if I missed my train? Yes, commuting has taken precedence over photographing weird things. This is a major difference I've noted between my life here and my life in Tokyo. ANYWAY, the shirt read:

Jesus Saves
from
HELL

Of course the words were engulfed in flames. FLAMES!! It was the most hilarious thing, and I kept thinking how metal it would have been if there had been a vengeful looking Jesus with hand curled into a claw emerging from the flames as well. Oh, hell. Photoshop is my friend. I'll just take a few moments to show you what is in my imagination. Happy Wednesday to you.

Things from the street

Here's another installment of brilliance I encountered over the weekend.
First at PS270:

Then in defaced ads in the subway (some of which I thought were great re-appropriation of materials):


Of course it all degraded into mustache drawing eventually, as everything does:
Though the last mustache barely made an impression on me simply because it was just so right.

Spring and a boner in the Upper East Side

I've recently begun some form of employment in the Upper East Side and have to say I really appreciate the blooming pear trees as well as the tulips which are finally showing some color all up and down Park Avenue. When you are contending with mostly concrete- or stone-gray, a little color and brightness really goes a long way.So on this glorious spring afternoon on my walk back to work, having shot this white-haired-tree-and-blue-sky-combo, I was looking up more than at my feet. In this city, this could prove a fatal move what with the uneven sidewalks, oblivious speed-walkers, ladies with carts or small dogs in jackets on leashes, cabs, cyclists, etc., etc., but had I not risked my life, I would have never noticed this dangling above eye-level. I must say that whenever I see something this out of the ordinary, my gut reaction is always to jump to the conclusion that it is an art piece. Once someone had left a box full of candy in the hall in front of the the gallery I worked at in SF; it sat there all day tempting me every time I passed it to steal a free Crunch bar or Snickers, but I never did because I was convinced it was under surveillance for some dumb art project and I refused to be a sap.

But really, what alternative to 'art project' is there when you see a bone security-locked to a parking sign hanging like some weird morbid phallus on East 78th and Madison? It certainly didn't get up there by accident.

This smells awful! Here, YOU smell it!

Some things, as awful as they are, need sharing. One time on Ashika's recommendation I watched a movie called The Piano Teacher and felt so ill and mentally disturbed that I literally needed to watch hours of Seinfeld or something in order to cleanse my brain and be able to function normally again. John introduced me to a subculture he stumbled upon yesterday whose youtube videos have a similar effect on me as this movie. For your own emotional safety, this "YOU smell it" comes in two parts.

Part one is to watch this stealth ninja cat video many times in a row. It is cute enough to almost barf, but seriously it will help with part two.


Part two: proceed with caution. These videos are not violent, lewd, pornographic or inappropriate in anyway, but they might as well be. They are creepy as hell. The more I've seen, the creepier they get and now it almost makes me want to vomit.





When that vomitous feeling comes, just watch the cat video again and try to forget the creepy shoe guy, though it may have already scarred you, also, for life. Why, why, why? I recently wanted to see that horror movie "A Haunting in Connecticut" but no longer have the need. I can just watch this guy's movies back to back, follow the threads to related videos and be literally unable to sleep soundly for weeks straight.

don't use this art handler

Doesn't he know that white canvas will scuff?I'll file this memory away labeled "uncommon scenes in the NY subway." A story I heard second hand that would fit in this category: A man was eating a tuna sandwich on the train, messy (I imagine similar to the guy with the everything bagel in Eric's rant), dropped a little bit of tuna on the ground, picked it up and ate it. Now, I am a strong believer in the 5 second rule, but there needs to be some statute of limitations. For example: A potato chip that fell while you were watching sports at home: Fine - even if you have cats; A lollypop that dropped out of your mouth into the sand at the playground: Okay - if you rinse it first; tuna salad that you picked up off of a train floor that literally sees the bottom of millions of shoes that walk miles through dirt, dog poo and city grime everyday: Totally unacceptable - no matter what the scenario. That's my two cents.

my counterpart

man in the dark

es hilarante. seriamente.

Lately I've seriously been reconsidering nearly all of the well-intentioned decision making I've done in my life. Granted I wouldn't be here now had the happenings in my life not transpired in the exact order that they did, but I digress.

For example, while my love of the French language hasn't waned, I now realize that it would have been infinitely more useful to have studied Spanish with the same vigor. Which brings me to this post: I recently decided that you can teach old dogs new tricks and I decided to learn some basic Spanish. Not necessarily to achieve speech but perhaps just some level of comprehension that might prove useful living in a place like Bushwick. So I went to the library and came home with "Speak Basic Spanish In No Time!" It is filled with the same lame sentences that fill all beginning foreign language books: "What time is it?" "That ball is orange." "Where is the bathroom?" etc., etc. Having taught from these types of books, I know how unimportant content usually is. You grasp the structure, you grasp the grammar, you learn vocabulary, hopefully you can put it all together yourself, the end. I have learned to gloss over the rest.

Luckily an alert reader had borrowed this book before me. Otherwise I would have missed this hilarity completely. This is probably also not as funny as I am acting, but I swear I can't stop laughing.
Enjoy:

An amazing time suck.

Medical woes

This (modified) ad for the Benjamin Button movie is gone from our subway stop now but I still think about it, probably more than I should:
Of course the part that makes it hilarious to me is the fact that it's a curious case. It's probably not as funny as I am acting, but I cannot help myself.

Post Script: continuing on my love of obscure web URLs and the like, here is my defense of this new one. Originally I thought up the tag line as the blog title, but it was too long for the URL; 'rabbit' is 'lapin' in French (LAPiN); J-P Sartre is French and thus the blog's name was born. If you couldn't follow my train of thought, welcome to my world where I am usually the only one inside on all my inside jokes. Thus things like namidotcom.org (look up nami.org or nami.com if you wanted to know where that URL originated). Sometimes I think if you opened the top of my head up, spring loaded snakes might fly out.

Or maybe I'm simply suffering from a curious (but acute) case of Jamin Butt.