Boiled in Sewage, The Blind One Goes Nocturnal: Been cranking away on Portuguese medical translation and various business development projects lately, and of course posting frenetically to the Eyeball and Jot Book, down for the moment waiting for Ben Trott to fix up the mess we made of the upgrade to Movable Type 2.2. The heat, but most of all the 1000% swampland humidity, has had me really beat of late, so this evening the AC goes up and on and damn the Con-Game Edison cost. I receive a very nice hat from the folks at Copy Desk Inc. today, and hope I will have a chance to work with them. Freaking Aquent stiffed me by $2 an hour on the stated rate for my gig at PwC, which I will have to write a huffy e-mail about. I've been shuttling back and forth to the Kinky Minky's in the Village, having given her a generous proofreader's slice of the pie on this translation project to ensure I deliver top quality to a potential steady client. We're going to practice our picque-nique tecnic in the parque du Prospect tomorrow, we think, the Mink and Ari the Philosopher-King and others. Of a mind to work on some back-burner writing projects, but mentally deflected by the panic of not having the next freelance gig lined up yet. Thinking of taking a certification course in Arabic translation. Certifications would help biz a lot, I think. Joining the ATA and ALTA while I'm at it, and wanting to get the Hilst project going with the notion of making a book proposal on that basis down the road. The point is to keep moving forward, despite the sense of being boiled in soapy diarrhea that one has at the height of a New York City summer. Funny, I had complicated dreams about smog, Los Angeles, and Philip K. Dick during my afternoon nap today, the Mink having lent me her copy of "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said." Dick, who was actually my late father, and I were riding in a dirigible and he was pointing out to me how the government lied about smog ... I hate it when the new Trillian lies to me in that weird airport lobby anouncement voice that there is an "incoming message." Iggy lies comatose and panting in the cooler shadows, poor hairy dude and objective correlative of my subhuman subcortex. Over and out.

On Top of It. Getting on top of my shit affairs, finally. Phew. That was some grungy haul, working weird hours, stumbling out into the street at 5:00 AM in my Hush Puppy slippers to buy a couple of mangos at the all-night deli —the mangos are very fine right now, they taste like buttered peaches made of sex and surrealism, little red-green hand grenades of joy— meeting up with this peculiar man who seemed to be incarcerated between his front door and the security gate, asking me to please buy him a "pint" of Bud. His manner bespoke gentility, I thought him maybe Hindu-Caribbean, but his appearance bespoke a terminal romance with the crack pipe. Unheimlich. I treated him to a forty. Celebrated by meeting up with Kinko last night at the Hotel Roger Smith, this really funky joint on 47th and Lexington with an adjoining art gallery and Henry Moores, or facsimiles thereof, under the awning and framing the doors. It seems to serve as an elegant flop for travelling musical acts. There was a bored hip-hop ensemble there and a tour manager yelling on the payphone about where the goshdang limos were at.

The event was a fundraiser for a documentary film about women who choose to live in women's residential centers in Manhattan, such as the YWCA. The filmmaker, a friend of the Kinky Minky, is a former talent agent turned talent-creative herself. There was a four-minute trailer, all shot in digital video, I kind of missed the cinematicity and the questions were pretty much softballs: the filmmaker was depicting her own domestic existence. Three hundred bucks a month, three hots and a cot and a waiting list stretching all the way uptown and down the decades into the age of spiritual machines. And she was working at a hotshot agency? Independent film crowd: a television newsman turned standup comedian, sweet gay boys in leather, guys in bands with CBGB T-shirts, a smattering of the black bohebourgeoiserie, hip-hopsters who looked like Jimmy Cliff with a better shave.

Afterwards, a swing on the E down to Johnny's Bar in the Village to hook up with Brooke, the actor back from his Midwest tour, and Riyaz, a gay Pakistani techie entrepreneur and irrepressible wag. Wound up at Ipanema slurping some really excellent batidas (the caipiras not so good, since apparently Lupe is the only one with the touch and verve to execute these marvels of pre-modern mixology up to spec) until 3 in the morning. Bartender at Johnny's friendly because I recognized Santo Expedito hanging over the cash register. Santo Expedito is being better to me now. Perhaps I neglected his whiskey offering too long.

Home at four [thank Santo Expedito for actually getting picked up by a grumpy Chinese cab driver IN BROOKLYN who ACTUALLY KNEW WHERE HE WAS GOING, grousing all the way] but bouncing up at 8, not even so very hung over, really, and translating para-hidroximetilbenzoato into para-hydroxymethylbenzoate all day, quite the alchemical feat. Off to see the Eskimo movie again with Maximum Minnie, caught up with partly after some months and soon to jetset off to France, where the men go bare cause they chew ... And that is that for now. There's an e-mail from Hilda Hilst in the Mail Washer, which gives me a little rush in my stomach. Think I will let it sit for a while.

Lost in Translation: The Enigmatic Oi Oi Oi and mother of wisdom points out the overuse of the foregoing as a humorous headline on trans-related stories. In this case, it fits. I'm getting to the point where I can almost count on translating to make a living: long-term relationships with several agencies, a steady Arabic gig in the works [$40/hour]and a couple of meaty jobs on my desk. Solstice and general stress-factors have me a bit freaked at the moment, as I mentioned, but I have my desk ordered and routines set and figure I will be able to ride this shit out. "Writing blogs / like raising donkeys / every day the shit to be cleared / fresh straw laid," to quote the famous Persian qasida poet Abu 'Annan-i-Moose. Well, once a week, anyway. Having the feeling maybe the Blind Tangerine will be folded into the Hairy Eyeball eventually, the public-private distinction breaking down, though maybe not. It is a fun and consuming hobby. Would that all the Movable Type form elements worked in Mozilla, which otherwise is a blogger's browser deluxe-delight. Darkbloom and I: an official history. Will ideological revisionists pore over the archives like the FBI over Monica's hard-drive? Not on this side of the Atlantic. You should see our beard of three days: double Wolfman Jack-slash-Bride of Frankenstein-slah-Osama white stripe, if we cared to let it gestate to viability. In the muggy New York summertime? As if! And now, back to work.

Hickory Smoked Ribs: Best thing that happened all day, the guy from the Five Spot looked just like Snoop Dogg, 6' 5" and all , and brought wonderful food. I am on a day for night schedule now, practically, having my usual summertime circadian arrhythmia. No biggie: I work when I am up for it. Translation practice is building nicely, some unsolicited inquiries today from several agencies. Now if I could just get my freaking fax working ... A check from Abraxas arrives just in time to save me from going hungry today. As to the rent, hmm ... We now proceed to nap from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., after a desert of fresh mango from the Heaven bodega.

Saturnine Day on the old Homestead: Copious sleep, and lots of it. So good! Now eating lentils and hunkering down for a late night of medical translation. Who would have guessed that "acûfeno" meant "tinnitus"? We're in the position of that old song: "My last old dollar is gone / My last old dollar is gone / My whiskey bill is due and my rent bill too / Oh, darling, what shall I do?" Here's Zip on the AIM, whaddaya know. He has never heard of City Lights Books, we discover gabbing about his day in SF Chinatown. Lucky bastard, a day of leisure. I'm sure it was hard-won. Got to meet Emma Bovay of the SE Pacific tomorrow to go to her brother's play. Now the Kinky Minky phones up and starts twitting me, then launches into her personal drama. It's a tale of sordinary pain. "I gave you steak and you gave me clams," says the jiltee. The jilted-for, if that is what he was, never calls. Shit! The poor dear thinks I am wise. I speak of karmic balance and stuff like that when called upon to speak. I am a sympathetic ear. Going up the bodega now. All I can manage. Sufficient unto the day and all that.

Pool of goo: Troubled sleep last night had me wide awake at 5 this morning, which pretty much queered my chances of being superproductive today. Crazy dreams, and the observing dream self at one remove constantly saying, "Wow, I have seen this exact same dream before, precisely the same in every detail! at every turn." I'm living in this huge house and have to entertain guests, this group of three women, reluctantly showing them around the place when I'd rather be sleeping. We have to cross Yankee Stadium while the game's on to get to the market, people throw stuff at us, but we are really hungry ...

There's just no natural stopping point at the moment, what with the bank account in the shape that it's in. Enjoyed lunch with Sim City Sam and Nick Denton, a kind of towering, shambling, amiably broad-faced Brit who reminds me a bit of my dear old Prof. Monroe, the Anglo-Argentine whom the Egyptians called "the Eiffel Tower" — the man's 6'7" but incongruously meek [especially when it came to playing the politics necessary to put food on the table of the vassals who followed you into your obscure, not very lucrative or sexy academic subspecialty.]

Nick's not meek, of course: he's got a bit of that rough-and-tumble bad-ass polemical streak that makes the House of Commons fun to watch on CSPAN, more in writing than in person. [Hates the Saudis and can't believe we don't have sense enough to emulate. Got a point there.] When I twitted him about a piece he wrote for Management Today on the U.S.-E.U. relationship 3 "Isn't it presumptuous of you to speak of 'we Europeans' when the folks across the channel despise you and your deregulated utilities and pissing and moaning about the euro?" and he's all riposting, "Isn't it presumptuous of Americans to tell us what's presumptuous?" Which you felt you had to admit to yourself he had some kind of point, or at least rhetorical symmetry and conviction, all piss, vinegar, ethos, and wit all of a sudden, so, recovering victim of toxic pomo indoctrination that I am, I just ducked my head and grinned shyly into my lobster bisque, a really nice free feed from Sam at Punch in SoHo, appropriate to the jester theme: That "in-house blog journalist as corporate jester" bit was pretty good, too. I'm afraid I blurted some in the course of conversation, so freaking tired, but we'll see what I can recall cogently after a good collapse for real tonight.

Translating a chapter of the Russian's Arabic book [the Russian is fucking annoying and crazy: first he don't need no contract, then he's quoting me back my e-mails to me chapter and verse as if they had the binding force of Hegelian historical inevitability driving the Bolshevik permanent revolution] on the qawwali and zajal, strophic song-forms and themes that have come down uninterrupted in the oral tradition from our Middle Ages [which are in the middle of what, exactly? I always say, thinking of Janet Abu Lughod]. Beautiful, funny, but making the translation job even harder, of course. Fuck it, paying customers come first. $ talks, etc. Viv D-bloom out of town in D.C. Me going to see a play by Emma's brother Sunday? He writes in his bathroom, she says. Got to try that, drag the laptop in. JAFCJR has already analogized all this bloggage to the clenching and unclenching of a dog's ... never mind, an innocent free association. Where's PUIFWAP these days, anyway? Dook, who blew me off for quite some time, now trying to network me with an old classmate from the Ethics and Morals seminar at dear old founded-on-the-Oxford-model Pomona ["goddess of fruits and nuts"]. It was so long ago, but I seem to remember her paper on univeralizability in Phillipa Foot, mine on notions of virtue in Aquinas fed into by reading Joyce around the same time, all of which led, of course, to Marshall McLuhan ...So I actually do hear from Sharon. Kewl! And where's the Kinky Minky?

Back to the 6th Avenue towering sepulchre Monday, with the Lake Success gig negotations not concluded by my new agents in Chicago. Apparently the VP-EinC over at Forbes SIP-CBC really wowed them, though. We shall see. Marketing communications people at manufacturers can be real twits, dolts, and analphabetic, larcenous cube-dwelling vermin. This company's PR and marketing seems pretty high-concept, though. Taking things slow until then. Chunks of fax from Italy arriving for the medical translation, eating into my margins, got to either hit the mail or figure out fax-to-e-mail over DSL. Nice medleys of North African, Cuban, and MPB, with some wacky klezmer thrown in, on the Virgin streamcast tonight.

Then Shahrazad saw the break of day, and ceased from her permitted say.

Gargh. Tired, fucking yuppie neighbors enjoying their frickin veranda at freaking midnite on a goldang work nite, and boy did we work our carpals to the bone today. Felt pretty good, actually. Me and Jason, to whom I introduced the long, tall Fleur Obscure yesterday over margaritas at the Grand Central Zócalo, having lunch with Nick Denton of Moreover tomorrow. Monkey Grrrl dropped by and we went to see this remarkable movie by and about Eskimos called Atanarjuat, about which more in the Hairball jot book, I guess. Hate to admit that I feel asleep awhile ago in a comparable film, nearly as good, about Himalayan yak herders. This really is a remarkable film, gripping and elemental; me and MonkWo feasted on soft-shell crab rolls from the funky Japanese jernt around the cwanah during. You just had the feeling that the subtitle translation was pulling the wool over your eyes, though. Why would an Inuit call the call of the loon "creepy," like as if she was-were some San Fernando Valley mall rat? Very interesting to listen to the language. The running scenes are just incredible. Will know tomorrow about my possible jaunts to Lake Success over the next two weeks to six months to do marketing communications. As always, playing numerous side bets and hedging like a mad Enron market-maker. Got to keep fresh blubber in the fire, keep your walrus tusk harpoon scraped sharp with flint, or suchlike. I now hereby collapse into the sack.

J.J. Johnson, Trombone: Soloing on Monk's Misterioso as we get ready to hit the sack. One of those muggy days, muggy nights, the air's a foetor you swim through, pale shaved legs and freshly painted toenails everywhere. Me and SCS, though, holed up in the windowless 2523 and abstracted content for extranets as part of ongoing Content Editorial Operations. The man is a CEO: congrats! Says he likes having me around to grouse to. It's interesting to check out the negotiation of workflow among the semiautonomous fiefdoms anxious to put the proper spin on their repurposed content, and hear about the IT guys saying that our jobs will be made redundant by "business rules" soon [generically known, note this, EM-ME, as "'XML Rule Interlingua for Agent Communication, based on Courteous/Ordinary Logic Programs"—also note the Virtual Hyperglossary project, among a gazillion other mushrooming XML specs — looks dead, though, no posts for the last two years ... ]. Maybe so, but they have to model their logic and behavior on human experts, right? Otherwise it's GIGO.

So we download noodles from Ollie's, a much-filmed Times Square Chinese joint, and sidle uneasily by the Naked Cowboy outside the MTV studios with our pan-fried noodles [me] and Lunch Special No. 1 [Simsam]. The deal pretty much clinched with CopyDesk's client, I think. Got to set up my computer to get faxes, since it looks the PT medical job got lost somewhere over the Atlantic.

Coincidence: My old Latin tutee, remember? turns up a client of Maximum Minnie. Wonder what PUIFWAP is doing? Lurking ... What else? Just settling into the pleasantly numbing routine of a working week before going back to the patchwork of odd projects next week. Banished to 2517-1 tomorrow.

Out and About: Good to get out and play the working slob today with Sim City Sam over to the joint where he works. I had forgotten what it is about the corporate existence that makes you want to play Doom and Half-Life all day: We spent all morning maze-hopping [the building's floors are all identical, I got off and wandered 24 for a good 15 minutes before realizing I should be on 25] collecting magnetic passkeys, logins, passwords, Lotus Notes [does angebot mean the same thing as kaput?] apocrypha, and network pushes that did not push. Fun! We are writing content abstracts in this bizarre German browser-based content management system that misbehaves like a sentient three-year-old with polar bears and mayhem on her mind. Day falls now, sharp young hip-hop shave-beard strip guy in a jazz-funked up Nissan booming flamenco-rai-triphop gets stopped mid-block by an old man pushing a pushcart of helados [Mexican sno-cones] who seems to be following a vanished geography of rolling hills rather than the current gum-and-hot-tar-spattered traffic-signal-regulated grid. I am taking my laptop to bed to work until sleep. Lined up six weeks of 3-days-a-week editorial work in Lake Success on Lone Guyland through a Chicago-based agency: decent money, and fairly handy, since I live right near the LIRR [off at Great Neck]. Having fun with the eyeball. Categories with image maps by end-week! Baroque opera from Alabama streaming over the infernal machinery, the Divina Commedia, Circle 9 ... and Longfellow's sonnet on translating it as a refuge from toil [though we find translation to be pretty dusty, thirsty work that calls for a cooling helado at end of day] :

Oft have I seen at some cathedral-door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his pater-noster o'er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster-gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.

Leisure, pff, it's for the leisure class.

Blog Tired: The Monkey Womyn chides me for not blogging enough, while Maximum Minnie once characterized this little hobby of mine as "one big wank." Viv feels the same way, I'm sure, but what's an old agoraphobic like me to do? Go out? Well, maybe up to Tillie's to work on the Arabic stuff, anyhow. It is a fine day filled with trite birdsong. MW wants to know how to build her vocabulary. I tell her to buy a big old dictionary and actually look up words she doesn't know. Rudimentary advice, you would think, but you'd be surprised how many people don't. On the IMer, Moqui claims to be shagging the concierge at her 75-story apartment near Times Square, then calls "Psyche!" Looks like I fumbled in the red zone in my bid to become a fan of the Crimson Tide after cancelling that New York meet-up with the managing editor: dead silence ever since. Sigh. Applying to jobs, sending off a couple of samples to Digital City for a freelance listings editor gig. Alicubi blogged me back, I am so proud. Since I am working this week for Aquent [new Flash Web site, nice; check my personal self-promotion spiel], I may actually finally get my cable turned back on to watch the NBA Finals and the World Cup. More leisure, less swinking and swyving, says Darkbloom. It's a thought. Okay, off to Tillie's.

The Week in Review by the Guys Who Hang out by the Gas Station on the Corner Drinking Forties: "Fuck all that shit, may-un, crack me another forty" [overheard on the way to the Heaven]. Warm summer evening, the grubby streets Winding down, breaking into my six pack of Rolling Rock, sweeping stuff off my desk into the dustbin of history with a stylish, sweeping backhanded motion. What's done is done, for as Aristotle said, the only power denied the gods is the power to change the past. A last-minute Gorilla FUBAR and I miss meeting up with Viv as planned. I am, surprisingly, a sucker for the call of duty. Learning more about anaesthesia than I really want to know from my Italian translation job and waiting for the express mail with the rest of it to arrive. Working on the Arabic book, drawing outrage from Viv, but the fact is that the simulacrum of gainful employment is nearly as good as the real thing. When my granddaddy the Colonel was forced into retirement, he would spend days at his desk poring over the football statistics of the University of Missouri Tigers and composing long letters in his illegible farm-boy handwriting to the coach on how to beat those bastards from Nebraska. His invariable greeting: "Hey there, Tiger, how you getting along with your work?" Now Viv is on the line and I am educating her about Shaq's cinematic career and the amazing New Jersey Nets! And with that, my brain collapses. Say good night, Gracie.

Muggy to Thunder: Some day. Got the FedEx off to Southern Progress, locked in the Monday thing at PwC, finished off the Gorilla files, translated a shitload of medical Portuguese, and so now what to do with the brain cells not consumed in the process? Drink beer and eat pizza, I think. The end of the world forestalled yet again by sweat of brow. Thundering like a house afire tonight after the day's muggy haze. Viv has given up trying to chase down Nancy Sinatra and gone on to hound aging photographers for unpublished shots of the great Muhammad Ali, this for some verkakte German magazine or other. We're gonna meet up tomorrow for a day in the park, though I may bring my laptop. The Merm reports the beginning of an excruciatingly annoying period in the lifecycle of the Merchild: "Por que tem unha?" ["Why do you have fingernails?"]. Yes, it's the "why" phase, a word that never wears out. The fishgirl is beaming with pride, of course, and ordering encyclopedias.

Under the Weather: I have been a bit under the weather lately, alarming poor Darkbloom and generally throwing things into disarray. I think I will be OK again soon, but it forced me to miss my appointment with the editor from Southern Progress. Repair work underway. At least the lines of communication are open again; I was beginning to feel like a caveman without my DSL, and stumping to the corner payphone with my spare change like a crackhead. Guess I will be starting at PwC shortly. They are preparing my cube as we speak. Hey, the Kinky Minky is having a piece on some kind of crazy artist aired by NPR's Studio 360 this weekend. Tune in, turn on, drop by. I am waiting for the courier service to bring my package from Italy, from the translation agency. PwC, by the way, says people like me will soon enjoy full employment again.

Despite the combined "triple whammy" of spillover from dot-com failures, a global economic/advertising market downturn, and the impacts of the 9/11 tragedy, global entertainment and media (E&M) industry spending grew in 2001 — rising by 1.5 percent and exceeding the $1 trillion mark. Forecasting continued growth, PricewaterhouseCoopers anticipates that global E&M spending will reach $1.4 trillion in 2006, for a 5.2 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years. These predictions were published today in the latest edition of the annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Entertainment And Media Outlook: 2002-2006 the only global five-year industry forecast.

On a global basis, notwithstanding the entertainment and media industry's resilience in 2001, weak economic conditions will continue to dampen spending in 2002 and 2003, but faster growth will resume in 2004-2006. Digital distribution, piracy and a rebounding global advertising market will be three main factors impacting the industry's growth over the next five years.