Album cover art - seeing double

My companion, Keith, runs an online music station.  Includes jpgs of album cover art with every cut.  Today two songs played back-to-back - amazing similarities between the two images.

Supermodel

My sister shows me the book she's reading - a cheesy celebrity bio on "supermodel" Janice Dickinson.

We get out of the car, put some money in the meter and walk about a half a block.  There's Janice Dickinson window shopping on Montana Avenue.

On the level

I'm helping Tama hang her "Alice" show, and she doesn't have a level with her.  I ask a passing security guard if he might know if anyone around the gallery might have a level, and he doesn't.  Tama says she pretty much isn't interested in obtaining a level, when I see a man walking with a baby in a carrier and something in his other hand that I can't quite make out.  I call out, "Pardon me, is that a level?"

It is.

He even let us use it.

And his baby is adorable (which isn't part of the coincidence but significant merely because of the cuteness factor).

Been there

I'm looking through a stack of greeting cards I've accumulated over the years to send to my friend elin, who's living in France for the year.  I come upon a set of cards with a photograph of a Shaker meeting house in Maine.  I originally found them in the old radio station at UNC when they were shutting it down, and Keith said it would be okay for me to take them.  None of the cards in my stack seem right for elin, until I come across this one, so I send it.

I hear back from elin a few days later.  Not only does she know about that Shaker meeting house, but she's been there.  It was 45 minutes away from the town where she grew up.

Curiouser and curiouser

I'm fairly stressed out, meeting a professor I very much admire, given that I had already put in my application to the university where she teaches.  Traffic is a nightmare on my way to the Mad Hatter Cafe in Durham, North Carolina.  I'd planned on being early but I'm just barely on time.  I first look around for her and when I don't see her I decide to get some coffee.  The coffee is self-serve - and when I go to get mine all the offered variations of flavor and options of caffeination are cold.  I explain to the young woman behind the counter that I prefer hot coffee.  She is really sweet about it, says she'll make a fresh pot.  I then notice the professor I was supposed to meet is already there, seated behind a partition, so I sit down with her and began our visit.  A few moments later, the young woman gently comes over to our table to let me know that my coffee is fresh made, hot, ready.  I'm comforted by her kindness and my meeting goes well. 

The next morning I'm at my friend Tama's house to talk with her about her newest series of photographs - a series based on Alice in Wonderland.  We're chatting and I mention that I'd been at the Mad Hatter Cafe in Durham the day before for my meeting.  She tells me her son's girlfriend Emily works there.  "Hmm," I say, "Was she by chance working there yesterday afternoon?"  And Tama says yes.  "You know I think I met her,  yesterday.  I think she was this super nice young woman who helped me out."  And I tell Tama about my stress and how much this kind young woman managed to comfort me, the way sometimes strangers can in the least likely moments.

Turns out Emily had slept over at Tama's house that night.  Shortly thereafter, sure enough, we hear some stirring and the padding of stocking feet up the stairs, and there's Emily in the doorway in her pajamas.  She looks at me with some surprise:  "I made you coffee yesterday." 

And I tell her what a comfort she'd been to me. 

Aside from the surprising confluence of Alice in Wonderland photographs and the Mad Hatter Cafe, the other piece of this coincidence is that I've only been to the Mad Hatter two times in the eight years I've lived in this area.  And I rarely meet Tama at her home...

That soundtrack is following me...

My friend Noah and I go to see Takeshi Kitano's Hana-Bi (Fireworks), a very stylized film with an equally atmospheric and ethereal soundtrack.

The sun was setting as we walk back to Noah's little blue convertible, parked in the open air on the top tier of the West LA parking deck.

Noah turns on the radio.

They're playing the soundtrack to Hana-bi.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHpV5-pRwHU

What was that guy's name...?

My sister and I at one point shared a room.  I think I may have been home visiting from college, we were both in our late teens.  We'd been in the habit of going out to this classic LA disco called the Odyssey, and one night we're trying to remember the name of this guy we'd met there.  We go through every name we can think of.  It begins to make us crazy.  We go through lists of names, "Peter, Joe, Johnny, Mark, Paul, James, Frank..."

We just can't lock in this guy's name.

One night, about three days later, in the middle of the night, after we'd fallen asleep, we both suddenly sit up in bed at the exact same time, and, each knowing the other has hit upon the name we each blurted out, as fast as we can, simultaneously:

"RANDY!!!"

Book Title/Blog Title

I discovered Michael Taussig's My Cocaine Museum

After creating this blog called Coincidence Museum

I live for coincidences

And this blog will compile the coincidence stories of my own and others.