I haven't a photo, but last night I saw the Campanile looking more beautiful than I'd ever seen it before. It glowed white against a marbled sky of unusually curlicued cirrus clouds, and the bright stars of Orion peeked out from behind it, framing it with points of light. I was glad to have taken the longer route through the grove.

farmer's market

My mouth is full of so-sweet-it-melts-in-your-mouth Warren pear and the olive aftertaste of my favorite bread, Phoenix Pastificio's rustic olive bread. Golden rays of sun hang in the warm air, and a slight cool breeze ruffles my hair. To my left, a young woman at the Ici farmer's market stand is laughingly telling two little girls that she doesn't have free ice cream today. A girl is singing folk down the street to her guitar, and two little blonde girls, elfin-faced sisters, are dancing in circles next to me. They're straight out of a Marc Jacobs advertisement for Lola perfume, except that they are actually little girls and are actually wearing no makeup. Whether their rustic clothing is actually rustic is kind of a stretch, but as I walk home past clean cans of freshly emptied recycling and a smiling boy carrying organic groceries from some other Berkeley place, I wonder at how idyllic Berkeley is. Not the kind of place you'd want to be if you wanted to actually make the world better, perhaps. Berkeley doesn't need too much bettering.

As I study for oral exams, I'm realizing that I really enjoy listening to Cowell's piano music. It's basically like listening to particular kinds of carillon repertoire. Muscular, masculine music, played mostly with fists (i.e. clusters), eliciting a riot of overtones from the instrument. Ha.

SoCal

Yesterday I drove the whole two blocks to In-N-Out to order a grilled cheese sandwich and fries. Today I drove from Claremont to Pasadena to catch up with a friend, and then went to the McDonald's drive-in right in front of my hotel just to order fries. Did I mention that I never get fast food, and that this fast food was within walking distance? It's just too amusing to pretend to embrace the car lifestyle here. And you can't help but be amused by the sign for the Shamrock Shake still sticking out of the Astroturf as you idle.

novelty never ends

Afraid I was running out of new streets to jog, I took to busy Sacramento to the strains of Béla Fleck's Throw Down Your Heart on my iPod. To my wonder, the front gardens were lush and the houses were warm, inviting, and charming in the pale pink evening light. White wooden accents turned warm shades of peach, and boarded-up driveways beckoned like doorways into other worlds. I continued to the historic plaque marking the Ohlone Trail, read up a bit on my local history, and turned back to discover a house near North Berkeley BART with great rustic fences built using the redwoods in its front yard as pillars. Strings of multicolored Christmas lights extended fancifully into one of the tree's upper reaches, and outside a hatchback van sported a life-sized wooden grizzly bear sticking out of the trunk.

I continued past Phoenix Pastifico (note to self: eat there) to find myself on the strangely otherworldly Bonar Street. Under an undifferentiated darkening blue dome, the quiet world of one-story houses seemed in the middle of nowhere, a gentler, differentiated version of D.J. Waldie's Holy Land. Knowing that the out-of-sight skyscrapers of San Francisco rose just a dozen miles away made the street miraculous; a similarly charming neighborhood actually in the middle of nowhere (I thought of Waverly, PA with a shudder) would have seemed desolate. Past warmly lit living rooms of charmingly narrow Second Empire homes and a California Mission bell marker replica I'd never noticed in the entryway of a house at McGee and Parker, and I was home.

Powdery snow blows in a steady stream off the tops of buildings, creating layers of mist that separate groupings of buildings at different distances like the misty mountains of Chinese landscape paintings.

I checked into Snowpocalypse 2010 on foursquare and was unexpectedly awarded what I presume to be a fairly rare badge: Super Duper Swarm. It's hard to imagine how over 500 foursquare users could check into a single location unless that location is defined as a ginormous weather system (or a foursquare mob). Having just earned the Mile High badge a few days ago for checking in from the plane, I seem to be doing well for just having an iPod touch 1G!

underwater

In the blizzard, Times Square looks as if it's underwater. Besides the whoa-I'm-in-Bladerunner feeling the place usually gives me, its air now glows dozens of stories into the air, asserting its palpability as it whooshes past radiant billboards. The limned currents sweeping around buildings are more visible than the currents of any river, seeming more rational for their visibility and more chaotic for their wildness.

On the walk home from the subway in LIC, every vicious needle of snow seems to pierce my skin. Cars whirr futilely on every corner, and I want to volunteer to push, but doubt that my 105 pounds of force would help. From the upper floors of my parents' apartment building, the blizzard looks like a pestilence of locusts, swarming and dissipating randomly, dimming the streetlights almost to darkness as thick clouds rush horizontally across the ground. The windows, not fully sealed against the outside, emit high-pitched whines. I wonder if snow is blasting horizontally past our window up some two dozen floors; there are no street lights to catch it in the act, but I see it billowing past another high rise some stories below.

Just for fun, I imagine that I'm in the great ancient city of Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, beset by an epochal sandstorm. But it's hard to believe it when the corners of the buildings haven't been worn down into curves by the slow but sure grinding wheel of flying sand. I have an easier time imagining the panorama of flickering streetlights as the flickering of celluloid. I'm glad to be a spectator inside, listening to the occasional creaking of the walls as air -- just thin air, but so powerful -- rages past.

I didn't leave the apartment at all today. Instead, I spent Christmas day lofted high into the Long Island City air over a squat, curlicued red sign that beamed "Drink Coca-Cola" brightly at the multitude of Manhattan skyscraper windows and passing cars along the East River. My parents, a smiling beanbag dolphin, and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age kept me company.

When I recall Derek recommending the book to me in 2004 as A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, I feel the ironic urgency of my ever-increasing leisure reading list. Near the front door, the massive black first part of Taruskin's twentieth-century music history looms, ready as a brick to be wielded against intruders or to knock me out of my daydreams, should I for a moment think I can afford more than this one indulgence.

nostalgia

And it hit. Like clockwork. My yearly nostalgia for Europe... today in the form of Christmas in Antwerp (which ironically never even happened -- I was trapped in my room with a broken femur for the holidays). I'm longing to wander snow-covered, winding cobblestone streets and to drink genever in arcaded, candlelit underground brick cellars... Maybe Christmas in NYC and New Year's in DC will at least take care of the ill-advised snow craving.

To feel nostalgia today is particularly odd. This morning I was thinking about nostalgia quite clinically (or at least psychoanalytically) as I pondered Richard Pine's introduction to Creativity, Madness and Civilisation (2007). He points out that unheimlich really translates to "unhomely," relating it rather obliquely but intriguingly to nostalgia (Greek: nostos, the homeward journey; algos, pain). And here I am, feeling a nostalgia for an invented home, constructed in my own mind as a false memory, yet vivid enough to gravitate me towards a place that has no bearing on where I grew up. And I keep trying to critique the American carillon as nostalgic sonic mark of an invented European heritage. Maybe I'd do better if I could first sort myself out.

the reenchantment of the world

I was all dressed to jog when I looked out my window and saw needles of rain slanting past. Exasperated, I undressed and watched the rest of When In Rome, feeling guiltily entertained and unproductive. Romantic comedies have never been my thing (they make me feel too girly), but what's a guilty pleasure if it isn't unpleasant and dislikeable in some way?

After the movie, golden sunlight made the slick world glow outside, and I bounded back into my workout clothes and out the door. Everyone was putting out free stuff, and just as I nearly fell over myself noticing a narrow, asymmetrical two-story boat-shaped house on McGee, I stumbled upon a curbside box with all the colors of thread I'd been wanting for months, and a seal keychain and tennis balls and poster tape. I couldn't believe how useful it all was and stashed some into my back pocket, resolving to take the rest on the way home. As usual, I deliberately chose random streets I hadn't seen before and eventually wound my way through a charming Victorian-lined lane to the Ohlone Trail, where I discovered that there were two halves to the community garden, one of which I had never noticed. I turned around at Gilman, but not before wandering into a plant nursery and realizing I could buy all the garden things I'd been wanting here and wondering at the beautiful flowering kale and dreaming of having my own garden, built from scratch, a clean doorstep, and time to cook dinner every night. Fat chance, you tenure-dreaming academic, you.

Normally I avoid wide car-dominated streets like Sacramento, but on the way back I was drawn to an outdoor tent on the sidewalk that seemed to be exploding with wooden wares I couldn't quite identify from a distance. To my amazement, it was the birdhouse tent I've often driven past. The artist Michael introduced himself and invited me into the backyard. I picked my way through his garage, which was clearly a basement performing arts venue with an elaborate upright piano and bar, and up a steep flight of stairs where I found myself beneath the shade of trees in a bewildering maze of birdhouses, each so different from the rest. It was another world, right off that busy commuter thoroughfare--a world of debris-turned-magic. Amongst the rows was the birdhouse of my dreams: a chapel with a little belltower. Save that one for me, Michael (how you remind me of Paul and his loft-turned-performing-arts-center), until I have a chance to break open the piggybank and return for the Friday music!

As if this wasn't enough, after picking up the rest of the loot on McGee and doing another double-take at the nautical house I must have passed multiple times and never noted, I stumbled upon Helly Welly's lighting store. I was walking now to cool down and the storefront, past which I had driven so many times, issued a challenge to the greying sky with golden light and musical instrument lamps. Helly led me through a wonderland of clarinet lamps and chandeliers made with transparencies she'd created in 1970s performance art events.

I made the final leg home in twilight, when all the world holds its breath in anticipation of the night. Time comes to a standstill at twilight, and it seems that time could stay stopped forever, and yet twilight is the most fleeting and rapidly changing part of the day, yielding to dusk and then to darkness. I can't love it enough. I was regretting missing Berkeley Artisans Holiday Open Studios this weekend, but the open studios found me, as they often find wanderers.