Walls looking a little bare? The MoMA Online Store is having a poster sale. A Cezanne for $3.95? No, its not as good as real art. But its more famous and less expensive to insure.
"Riffing on the idea of junk e-mail as a lowly commercial life form, Mr. Jarnow along with the other curators, Daniel Greenfeld and Mike Rosenthal, tried to depict how an archaeologist 450 million years in the future might present current culture, based only on relics of spam...
Light-up dioramas, for example, show pictures of the actual deposed African leaders who are frequently the purported authors of e-mail proposing deals that typically involve wire transfers of many thousands of dollars. 'It is not known whether or not their appeals were received by willing accomplices or not,' the exhibit commentary says. 'If they were, most likely, those who responded were simply drawn into the deep unrest from which the requests sprang.'"
The dalliance with reality television is over. Glitter put a stop to the appearance at Style Court when the show asked for pictures of her closet at home. Everyone has their breaking point. On the other hand, she has been wearing non-workout clothes to the office so the desired effect was achieved. It's for the best really--I'd hate to be the gay sidekick to the fashionable straight gal. Sure, having one is trendy now, but next season I'm donated to the Salvation Army.
Mail.app is not being a good application lately. Last week the program suddenly quit when I designated a message that had escaped through the filter as Junk. Then it quit again and again. On the advice from the Apple boards, I deleted the MessageSorting.plist. That solved the quitting issue, but all my Rules had to be remade. Fine and back to normal until Friday: not only is Mail.app quitting when designated Junk again, it's now added suddenly quitting for no reason at all to its tricks. To isolate the problem, I have taken out HTTP Mail Plugin and reset the Junk filter. So far the past ten minutes have been issue-free. People I expect to let me down... from my electronic friends I expect more.
Obviously another spam message, but I do appreciate the care that went into this one. On first glance it looks like some medieval manuscript. But the text praises the lords of home loans and mortgages instead of the heavens above.
Franz Ferdinand are the band for 2004, or at least the last two weeks of January 2004, longer if they are lucky. If the Raveonettes are the new Jesus and Mary Chain, and Interpol the new Joy Division, then apparently Franz Ferdinand is the new Orange Juice or Josef K. And before you ask the question, yes, we do need one of those and much more than anyone needed the other two.
My favorite line is from "Michael": "...you're the boy with all the leather hips, sticky hair, sticky hips, stubble on my sticky lips".
Earlier this week I took a short road trip: north on the Garden State Parkway, across the Tappen Zee, and, later, back across the George Washington Bridge and south on the Turnpike. Obviously, all of New Jersey's greatest hits. Those landmarks, using the term loosely, comprise probably the most of the state that most people ever see of it. Urban wasteland as its own rewards as a creature of horrible beauty. But perhaps its better with the blur at 70 miles per hour.
At an interview at the destination of this road trip, one question threw me for a loop. How would I like to be remembered after I have left the building? My first inclination is to answer in a Zen riddle about not wanting to be remembered, but that did not seem the time or place for philosophy or poesy. I stammered something out about being capable. Which in all fairness is a quality that goes unrespected.
A year or so ago, Molly and I were sitting at work and trying to decide what to do with our lives. She had her eyes set on a make-up course. My decision was to go back to school. After a year of tutorials, prep tests, applications, fees, and worrying, I have been accepted to a school. Truth be told, I'm quite pleased with the accomplishment. Molly has yet to sign up for the make-up course.
Sunday activities: make coffee, back to bed to read, go out for milk, avoid ice, make more coffee, paint, pick up groceries, take nap, make soup, make tea... Apparently I only accomplished a narrow range of tasks today.
I picture Henry James reading this essay: his right hand shaking and spilling tea on the lace doiley at the hotel. No, he thinks to himself, I will not have the venison tonight afterall.
Life is obviously full of choices. Some are of relatively little concern, like the decision of what to eat for lunch. Even if it is a really bad lunch, at least you can choose something else the next day. Other choices are just harder. These are the ones that don't really have a clear cut GOOD or BAD outcome. Oblique Strategies is a little program to help with these choices. Recently I was having a hard time with an issue and received this advice:
It didn't really apply to my situation, but at least I thought about something else for a while.
Thank you to SecretSantaJames dropping by my chimney with Joss Whedon's future Slayer Fray collection. Gifts in January are a nice way to wean one's self out of the exuberance of the holidays. Alternately, gifts are the only thing one can cling to for comfort with months of winter ahead. I'll support both theories...
Tintin recently turned seventy-five though he barely looks a day over manchild. Actually, he did grow up once in Frederic Tuten's novel Tintin In The New World, but that was more a post-modern fantasy riff. He's really better off in Marlinspike with Snowy.
In the height of sticky humid summertime, cold comfort is finding the shade of a tree. After the first autumn chill in September, everyone unleashes the winter wardrobe though its likely to be 80 again the next day. The temperature as I type this is 6 degrees. And that's Fahrenheit, baby. Celsius friends, please use -14. That's fine though since all necessary weekend provisions are stocked up: milk, coffee, tea, unread novels, take-out menus.
Over the weekend I read Adam Haslett's short story collection You Are Not A Stranger Here. Haslett tends to write the same gay man on the verge of a nervous breakdown character, but in about half the stories he does it to good effect. The other half reminded me of David Leavitt's awful While England Sleeps. That novel bothers me because the writing is so unimagintive and the narrative can't even cover it up. The characters are English so they all have "tea" and "ride the tube" like Leavitt had an English cultural checklist. "Brolly," check. And the thing still receives good reviews. After I finished it in disgust, I went back to Amazon.com to click that each positive review was definitely not helpful.
Back to Haslett though, he's a better writer than Leavitt. The quote below comes from the story "War's End":
Despite all the explanations, he's never been able to rid himself of the conviction that his experience has a meaning... That it is there to be seen if one has the eyes. He's been told that this is a romantic notion, a dangerous thing to cling to, bad advice for the mentally ill. Perhaps it is. Though the opposite has always seemed more frightening to him, lonelier--the idea that so much of him was a pure and blinded waste.
Besides the worthwhile stories, the book is also worth picking up for the back cover picture of Haslett bundled in a tweed coat and scarf.
New Year's Day has a sad tinge. In elementary school, the day meant the end of the Christmas vacation and the imminent return to school. Mind you, now the day means the imminent return to work. Look at all the things past, gone, unfinished, and done: four funerals, two weddings, two day long exams, one week in Cape Cod, one weekend in Vermont... there's more. My mind takes about two years to process information.
Brian and I headed out for lunch after a shaky morning. The cafe was closed--we headed back to the apartment. In the evening we watched After The Thin Man. Jimmy Stewart looked old even when he was young. His hair was grey, but the movie was shot in black and white.
Resolutions, yes:
* Remember to ask for help
* Mind my own business
* Try happiness
By day eight of vacation, the hours began to run together in that sloppy way. Carefully set plans for home organization or other projects were pushed aside for naps and wandering with the thought that there's always later. (Naps and wandering are fine on their way, mind you). Walked over to the mall, lured by thoughts of sales and good deals. The place was ransacked. My only purchases were a pine-scented candle, to keep Christmas spirit if not in the heart then in the nostrils all year round, and some scented glycerin soaps. There's a cat urine scent in the apartment that I am constantly in battle with (maybe--I might be imagining it).
Will and his fiance Katie came over for dinner later in the evening to celebrate the New Year. He disappeared to the wilds of northern New Jersey back in June with barely a good-bye, only leaving a television set as a remembrance. Katie is now teaching English literature to sophomores at a Catholic high school--she needed suggestions for some books for her students to read. My recommendations had some reservations. A Taste of Honey is a play and a novel was needed. High school students need to know where Morrissey took all his good lines. None of three novels by Denton Welch were quite right either, especially with the back cover pull quote about "reeking with homosexuality". Absolute Beginners has an awful movie to its credit so the students wouldn't be able to watch that instead of reading the book. However, my final choice was Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner because everyone loves an Angry Young Man novel. Holden Caulfield would be an absolute beast to have to deal with in real life, but in print he and his ilk are manageable and even charming.
While finishing up the dishes around 2.30 am, one of Brian's glasses from his Temporama collection slipped from my hand and shattered in the sink. 2004 begins with broken glass and a bloody finger.
This journaling exercise of a post for each day of my holiday is getting tiresome for me so I can only begin to imagine what any readers might think. Oh, you can just close the window and move on. I always wanted my writing to be more like the Little Minx than news links and forced wittiness. Ta. My consolation is that I say I use the blog as a writing exercise anyway. For that Great American Novel that I hope to cough up one day. Looking at the bestseller lists, I'm sure that most novels are coughed up anyway.
The bulk of the day was set aside for painting. A few years ago I decided to be an Abstract Expressionist (because one has to do something); unfortunately, representation kept sneaking in and not very good ones at that. The artistic talent allotment in my family went nearly entirely to my father and my older brother. My brother's reputation preceded me in high school, and the art teachers always seemed to judge anything I did in comparison. The first class I had in college was oil painting. The instructor was a local artist who seemed content for the class to "express" ourselves. The canvas was huge and blank. She gave everyone in the class top marks regardless of talent or work. The day's painting came out well enough for only an afternoon of work.
Today I was a suburban housewife. My mother usually watches nephew HappyWill during the day, but she requested help since she was suffering from a cold. How can one say to their only mother, just a few days after Christmas, that he can not help out with the kid, especially considering that he is off from work anyway? If there is a way to do that, I would like to know. Manhattan was still misty and the skyscrapers apparently constructed from vapor when I caught the train in Hoboken to points west that morning.
HappyWill and I took went to the supermarket. He insisted on using a shopping cart that has the front of a car on it. This cart did not fit too well in the aisles, or the door for that matter. I steered it into the door and a bang. HappyWill commented, "You crash". He has been trained to munch a donut while in the store to keep him occupied. I could barely see him at all in the car-cart contraption. While waiting to check out, HappyWill handed me the rest of donut back. In the parking lot as he was getting back in his carseat, he suddenly had a Peppermint Patty. Well I didn't buy him that! We left the parking lot in a hurry to avoid suspicion.
The playground population consisted of other mothers and their children. Occasionally a father with his kids would drag his kids in and wait impatiently. I pushed HappyWill on the swing, which is, as he is smart enough to know, the best part of the playground. One girl was blocking the entrance to the slide. I asked her to move a bit--her father glared at me. What is playground etiquette for adults? Are we required to chat about the kids? I ignored them. Some of the other parents looked rather young--perhaps they are my classmates from high school. Perhaps they were aunts or cousins shoved off with the kids. A year or so ago when HappyWIll and I were waiting in line at the post office, a lady was chatting with me about the kid, his age, whatever. She asked how old he was. I just shrugged and gave an estimate--she look horrified that I didn't know exactly. After I explained that he is my nephew, she told me that she was wondering why I had such a young child. She admitted that she had been constructing some elaborate back-story about the kid being some high school love-child.
I broke the cardinal rule of babysitting. Since the kid was acting fine and had just recovered from a cold, I finished his donut and shared a glass of water with him. Naturally, in the afternoon he suddenly has a 101 temperature. I am waiting for my virus to manifest. All children are bags of germs.
The New York Times Home & Garden section discusses botanical theories with Richard Hell. No, that's not right, but Mr Hell was paid $50,000 for his personal collection of memorabilia. He says, "...in a strange way you only really exist in the works you do. If you don't keep them, then you don't exist."
The day after Christmas is the sirens' song of sales and discounts. My mother invited me to join her at Talbots when the store opened at 8 am. I agreed in the hope that she would get sidetracked and drive me back to my apartment (she didn't). The shop is in a relatively new strip mall on the state highway that runs through my parents' town. Since the place opened during the summer, my parents have been urging me to stop by the stores because they are "very nice". The chain stores are actually just mall stores in a... strip (hence, strip mall). Granted, nearly all those shops (Gap, Banana Republic, Pier One, Starbucks, etc.) are within a five block radius of my office in Manhattan, but at least there I have the benefit of walking and sidewalks. Suburban sprawl is a pet peeve of mine. So anyway, Talbots, at 8 am. Apparently the theme of this Christmas really is "waspy chic".
Back at my apartment, a box from my brother was waiting for me. The packing materials he used were old wedding invitations, a (clean?) diaper, among other random items. At least nothing in the box was alive or formerly alive. The rest of the afternoon was spent comforting the cats after two days of being alone, reading, napping, and continuing the peanut brittle diet. Eat all you want--consequences be damned! Keep off the post-Christmas blues with sugar!
The days of the two week vacation begin to run together. Was that Tuesday or Wednesday? Friday? We still have those? Saturday and Sunday do not count as holiday days as they are merely weekend days.
