Mike Daisey on carrying a chopstick around

Just read an interview with Mike Daisey in this week's New York Magazine; this part was my favorite:

He dabs his sweaty forehead, just like onstage, and pulls out what I at first take to be a pencil. But it turns out to be, upon inspection, a lacquered chopstick. He looks embarrassed when I ask him about it. "Man, I'm supposed to leave it in my pocket during interviews," he says. "I actually have a little jar of them. When I was a kid, I would play with a pencil all the time. Then this will sound really weird. I transitioned from pencils to chopsticks, because when I would have a pencil, I would like to use unsharpened pencils, because I would stab myself in the hand with them, and they don't balance right. After I wrote my first book, people would come up to me and would be like, 'So, you're a writer. You aren't going to write very much with that unsharpened pencil.' This doesn't sound like a joke a lot of people would make. Crazy numbers of people would make this joke. Every fucking day. I literally trained myself to switch to chopsticks from pencils because it's weirder. No one says fucking anything, or they don't notice it. They're like, 'Is that a baton? What the hell is going on over there?'"

On Oliver Sacks

If you have ever been a fan of Oliver Sacks, give this New York Magazine article from November a read. It's a short and sweet look into him as a person, featuring stories from his childhood, personality, passions, focus, and life. It's full of little snippets that I loved, including the phrase neurological marbles. Here are two more:

"The great moment of his genius was not giving those people the drugs; it was walking into that home for the incurable, that warehouse, and having the moral audacity to imagine that some of those patients were different from the other ones and that they were in fact alive."

We may be our brains, he wanted to say, but we also shape them as we backpack through the world with all our trinket-y neuroses.

For your introspective Saturday night.

All Hallow's Madness

Last night Satish and I went to Judson Church for a NYxNY event (put on by NY Magazine) called All Hallow's Madness. As they put it:

New York by New York is an experiment in six parts. We're collaborating with some of our favorite bands, D.J.'s, vegan chefs, comedians, and underqualified art auctioneers on an event a month (six in all) through the beginning of the new year. We're not sure how they'll turn out.

There was a photo scavenger hunt that people with tickets had the opportunity to participate in all day. Upon arriving, one could hand in their memory card, and the winner would be announced right before the main performance of the night. Buying a ticket also got you an open bar and year's worth of New York Magazine. People were really creative with costumes; I saw Calvin & Hobbes, Wayne & Garth and a very politically incorrect Sharon Tate, among others.


Kudu, Dan Deacon and Chromeo performed; Satish and I mostly went for Chromeo. I saw my friend Tristan there, whom I actually met in the summer right after I put photos of his circuit bending performance on Flickr.








This was one of the best shows I have ever been to. For their encore, they came out with switched clothes (which was hilarious since Dave 1 is itty bitty and P-Thugg is a little larger). At the end, they pulled everybody up on stage to dance with them.

I shot a tiny bit of video and will upload them tomorrow. You can mostly hear Satish screaming along to the songs in all of them, which was great.

[photos by me and Satish]