Apartment Update

December 2nd, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

The shower water pressure’s good but the flush strength in both toilets is feeble.

I’m told I should shut the door to the kitchenette before taking a shower, thus ensuring any natural gas from the wall-mounted water heater there will go out the window and not insidiously into the apartment. I’d lend this precaution more credence if the shower weren’t two rooms and a hallway away, and if, every time I cranked the kitchen tap to warm to wash dishes, I weren’t standing right beside said water heater, close enough to see its pilot flare blue. Am I sucking in natural gas then? Not olfactibly. All the same, that window, the apartment’s only to face north, never gets closed, even though it would seem to provide the poorest ventilation, giving as it does on a building well. Curiously enough, this window has been getting the best breezes lately, whipping wildly the blue flames beneath the wok. It’s also the only one, naturally, without a sunshade; whatever wind drives down the hollow through the screen also brings in the rain. When I moved in, soot from the poor air had settled over floor and counter in a layer where the last rain could be read in spots. Overlapping tin awnings hide what’s below; across from me, the corrugated canopy to a neighbor’s window cage gives a green cast to his perennially drying shirts.

Okko #1 Hits Stores in December

November 28th, 2006 § 1 comment § permalink

okko_cover_thumb_big.jpg

Okko is just one of three series I’m totally stoked to be working on for Archaia Studios Press, the publishers of such innovative gems as David Petersen’s Mouse Guard, Alex Sheikman’s Robotika, and co-founder Mark Smylie’s own Artesia. Release dates, description, and preview pages here.

I turned these pages in back in August, and am currently deep into the second French volume—stuff you’ll be seeing in the April 2007 issue. This is creator Humbert Chambuel’s first series—among other things, Hub was previously a designer on the Besson film The Fifth Element. » Read the rest of this entry «

Back.

November 26th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

I’ve returned safely and uneventfully to a Taiwan I dimly recognize as having lived in, ticking off, like the taxi meter and its miles, the landmarks between the airport and home: the signs to Taoyuan, the toll plaza, the freeway flanked by elevated routes, the buildings I remember being grey as warehouses hiding their grime in night and laying claim, with countless lighted windows, to the animation of newness. Be they wrecks in the day, patched with corrugated awnings and bristling with scaffolding whose ragged bamboo edges seem a frame exposed by rot or breach, by night they are freighters on a dark sea. We haven’t crossed the river yet, I bet myself, and when a few minutes later we do, the sight of Taipei 101 congratulates me. On a hill to the left, the Grand Hotel bright as the bathhouse in Spirited Away, and then we’re swerving southeast into town.

Yuánshan Dàfàndiàn by night.

Pom

November 13th, 2006 § 2 comments § permalink

The pomegranate is, in the sorry event you neglected to Google how to eat it before diving in, the crayfish of fruits: a chore for the fingers, with very little reward. Bites, small and few, paced by tiresome peeling and picking, are ritually punctuated by the spitting of seeds, which although edible, are bitter. Imagine an orange with the fibers of each slice enlarged, each made a sac to house a seed. The skin is neither thick nor difficult to remove. The pith peels easily away from the seed sacs. What little flesh there is—mostly liquid—jets out at the slightest pressure, staining clothes. Your tongue tries to press the remaining juice from the fibrous mass inside your mouth before giving up and relinquishing it to the plate.

Distinctions

October 18th, 2006 § 1 comment § permalink

The word for scallion is cong (pronounced tsoong). Scallions are the same as green or spring onions. Onions are literally White Man’s Scallions (yáng cong). Shallots are Small White Man’s Scallions (xǐao yáng cong). Chives, however, are jǐu caì, though in French the chive (ciboulette) is a diminutive of the spring onion (ciboule). The Chinese call their leeks (poireaux) Chinese Chives—not to be mistaken for the Flowering Chive, whose blossoms (jǐu caì hua), lightly stir-fried, are a popular side.

As  the Bard would have it, “Eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath.”

For Starters

February 28th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

The Oxford-Hachette Dictionary, this translator’s tool of choice, has this to say:

rentier, –ère / 1A~tje, E1 / nom masculin et féminin person of independent means

Not I. A little joke, then, on this struggling artist and serial renter. Posts in this category, or thusly tagged, will examine the rooms my life and travels have dragged me through, places I’ve lived or merely survived in. Adulthood is owning a home. In the meantime, there’s that two-month security deposit.

“…And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed–

…He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. ”

Build thee more stately mansions, indeed.

Le joli mois de mai

May 24th, 2005 § 0 comments § permalink

L’Hotel de l’Avenir At lunch I would walk along the rue de Fleurus, past the Hotel de l’Avenir, and cross the Jardins de Luxembourg on gravel paths striped unevenly with puddles reflecting a sky, only just scrubbed of clouds, whose watery light made the paths pale as a northern beach. Ahead of me would open the gardens, with the Pantheon dome rising to the right of the straight path between, on one side, the tennis courts, and on the other, saplings each in their neat wooden pickets. Beyond, the uniform benches multiplying into the distance, beneath the shaggy fringe of small plane trees bent low and shaking slightly, as though in murmur over their own shadows, seemed to extend the park infinitely into some verdant gloom.

Saplings in their pickets

4b18.jpg At night, coming home, I would emerge from the metro to the sight of the line, always three or four deep, at the brightly lit corner crêperie, turn away, and in the darkness finally fallen at eleven, walk the long block back along the boulevard encircling Paris whose segments were named for the marshals of France, past the broad storefronts of a motorcycle dealership, a carpet and parquet shop, two auto showrooms, each with its grating drawn behind the ad-splashed windows, while along expanses of white wall black-stenciled letters forbade posters as per the law of July 29, 1881. That spring a tramway was being built and the cold light from the globes of streetlamps made the interim sidewalks a pitted white whose lunar desertion at that hour was always broken by small dogs trotting at a distance from their owners. They nosed around the gray and green corrugated sections of fence, anchored by numbered blocks, whose configuration changed daily, directing pedestrians up and down side streets to cross intersections, often almost doubling the distance walked. Only my passing seemed to stir dog owners from the trance in which, it seemed, they contemplated, at the barrier’s edge, the sudden wasteland of pulverized cobblestones, ashen gravel, and exposed wiring into which their habitual promenade had been suddenly transformed, and from which saplings in their allotted squares rose incongruously undisturbed. On the other side, the fencing had reduced the Boulevard Jourdan to two lanes, strangling traffic. Rain from balconies above had, along the awningless block, pocked the concrete at some formative stage, and as I neared the corner toward my room, a few muddled bootprints were to be seen until they were shoddily topped off with asphalt that, with the copious settling of dust, soon became indistinguishable in color from the cement.

Newer Entries »