Role Models

Role Models
John Waters

“Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it’s the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.”
- John Waters

An apropos quote, considering I bought Waters’ latest book Role Models immediately upon seeing a signed copy at St. Marks Bookshop. Nope, never even looked at the price. I knew no matter what it was, it was worth it.

Role Models acts as a bookend, and in some ways an answer to, Waters’ first book Shock Value. Shock Value (published in 1981) was the work of a hilarious, bratty young man and a manifesto, a call to arms against snooty good taste. Role Models is the work of a still hilarious, yet more refined older man, who has seen bad taste become mainstream, the only taste left in America. Parts of it read like a mea culpa, most noticeably in the chapters about Leslie Van Houten, one of the convicted members of the Manson family, and Shelia Alberta Bowater, aka “Lady Zorro,” a lesbian stripper in one of Baltimore’s sleazier clubs from Waters’ youth. Whereas Shock Value featured an almost gleeful attitude towards the Manson family – a picture of John posing with Tex Watson probably lost him (John, not Tex) more than one movie deal – Role Models’ chapter on Ms. Van Houten is actually an impassioned plea for parole based on the belief that people can change and reform themselves in prison. It’s also a testament to Waters’ friendship with Van Houten, even if Waters’ mother comments when a letter from Leslie is delivered to their house, “Does the Manson Family have to have our address?”

The chapter on Lady Zorro is also heartbreaking because if focuses on the damage she inflicted upon her daughter who, against the odds, has managed to pull her life together and now has a bemused attitude towards her alcoholic and destructive mother. In his early films Waters collected people and ideas that were against the norm, as an enemy of his enemy (middle class manners and hypocrisy) being a friend. But as an older man, Waters seems to recognize the cost it takes to live outside the norms, both to yourself and those around you. He now seems horrified by Lady Zorro’s home life and instead respects her daughter’s quiet dignity.

It’s an attitude I can understand. When I was young, part of what attracted me to a particular group of friends was that they were not “normal.” They were funny, all a little crazy, but had neither a desire nor an ability to fit in. The sentimental inclination is to say that we all formed our own family, but that’s not quite true. It was more like these outcasts formed their own asylum, with each one taking turns being either inmate or social worker. I guess because I am fundamentally middle-class and bourgeois and normal, I assumed that they too would eventually calm down and we’d grown into funny wacky adults together. But that’s not what happened. Some of them died from drugs, some people’s craziness eventually make them impossible to be around, and some of them slipped into desperate lives that are as far from normal as you can get but still function. I remember when I realized “They’re never going to get better. This is who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives.” That sort of melancholy, that surveying of a devastated landscape behind you, came to mind reading Role Models. The lucky ones who live and endure get to remember and talk about those who didn’t.

This makes Roles Models sound like a dreary affair; it is anything but. Waters writes with his customary wit, and his insight into people and the arts still surprise like flash bombs. He’s equally adept at writing about singer Johnny Mathis, artist Cy Twombly, author Jane Bowles and gay pornographers. His article about avant-garde fashion designer Rei Kawakubo didn’t make me want to wear her clothes, but I understand why Waters does: “…I like to wear a blue coat that, if you look really closely, you realize, no, it doesn’t need to be cleaned; those coffee stains are part of the fabric. This way if a drunken fisherman spills a drink on you, you’ve turned him into a fashion designer and he’s none the wiser.”

One final word from Waters, and it’s not a bad one to live by: “I’ve always said true success is figuring our your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.”

Amen.

The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains
Nicholas Carr

Ever since I’ve lost God, or rather misplaced Him, I’ve been looking for the prime cause a little lower; within my brain, to be exact. Once I stopped thinking of “my second favorite organ” (to quote Woody Allen) as a fixed operating system but instead as an ongoing work-in-progress, one that you could effect by your actions and that, in turn, would effect you, I’ve become interested in how the cauliflower inside our heads gets anything done. Neurology has replaced psychology and, as it is still a fresh field for me to explore, I am fascinated by the ideas that grow there.

One favorite idea is that technology changes us fundamentally because technology changes our consciousness. Our ancestors of long ago, who lived their entire lives without various tools, might as well be a different species. It’s a very Marshall McLuhan idea, though I was infected with it by David Cronenberg. The way that technology changes us, that it is never a passive tool free of consequences, is the underlying thesis of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Carr moves from the anecdotal and personal (“I can’t seem to concentrate on reading anything for very long nowadays”) to trying to find the reasons why. It’s not just that concentration and deep reading are a bore or old fashioned in today’s infobyte culture. It’s because prolonged exposure to the internet and how we surf the web causes changes not just in habits or learned behavior but in the physical structure of the brain itself.

Like the internet, The Shallows contains multitudes. It is a history of books and reading and of the internet, including an overview of Google (the book grew out of the author’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”). It includes a demonstration on how technology changes consciousness. Clocks changed man’s perception of time (the first people to demand precise time measurement were monks in the middle ages who wanted to know exactly when to pray) and maps changed man’s perception of space. It is an accessible primer on the physiology of the human brain and how experience is transformed into memory and a demonstration of why human memory is nothing like computer memory. It is a warning of the consequences of individuals and cultures abandoning the concentration that comes with focusing on a text in favor of gorging on information in a short period of time.

In a digression, Carr himself admits the irony in the fact that he set out to write a book about the fact that he seems to be losing his ability to concentrate on anything for an extended period of time. To finish his book, he had to deliberately curtail his internet usage, but confesses that as the book neared completion, he found himself going online more and more.

I find myself with a slightly different problem. I’ve always been a fidgety reader, but once I get past the initial phase of looking around, looking at the cover of the book for the umpteenth time, flipping through its pages and re-reading paragraphs, then I am hooked. I can’t blame the internet for that. However, I now find it takes a great deal of effort to watch a movie. It is rare I watch a film in one sitting at home anymore. Inevitably I have to stop to make tea, check email, take a nap, or indulge in some other distraction. I suspect that this is internet related and that it is the similarity of the television screen to the computer monitor that makes me want to mentally “click” on to some other idea. This doesn’t happen when I watch television shows, probably due to the faster-paced storytelling.

Happily, I’ve become interested in reading in a way that I have not in years. An irony to add to Carr’s: I was completely hooked on his book about how books are losing their place as the prime purveyors of information, particularly to sections discussing how human brains work. Having finished The Shallows, I try to force myself to concentrate more, particularly while at my job, rather than get swept away in the tide of instant messages, emails, jumping online and indulging in all the other distractions. I can’t control the world around me, but I can try to exorcise some control over how it affects and if it changes me.

(And yes, I did look at the internet many times while writing this post).

Okay, I can't take credit for discovering these; I'm reposting them from Caustic Cover Critic, which is a great blog in its own right. I don't know what is worse: the fact that there is an Anne Frank manga or the fact that Astroboy is apparently one of the characters.

The Timechart of Revelations

If the Bible was more like USA Today, or for those who need a quick reference to the End Times, because who really will have time to read once the seas are a-boiling?

Sinners: please click on to make more legible.



Thank you to Andrea and Troy Collins.

More Paintings on the Walls of My Neighborhood

Louise Bourgeois, 1911 - 2010

I didn't love everything she made, but seeing her sculpture Maman at the Guggenheim in Bilboa was awe-inspiring. It's a work that seems to give birth to more art: I don't think it's possible to take a bad picture of the sculpture.





The other thing that comes to mind aboutf Ms. Bourgeois is the scene in The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine, a documentary about her life, in which she cries while recalling how much her father's infidelities hurt her as a child. To watch a woman in her nineties still weep over a trauma so long past is beyond heartbreaking. May she rest in peace.

I was visiting friends in Louisville this past weekend and rediscovered something I hadn't realized I'd forgotten: what it's like to sleep in complete silence. The bedroom I was in faced the back of the house and opened onto a neighborhood that is quiet at night. Even the iguana in the room was silent. (This isn't metaphoric or an attempt at surrealism. My friends' son has a pet iguana.)

The contrast to my usual sleeping arrangement was obvious my first night home. Every piece of street noise, every passersby's conversation, was enough to jolt me awake and miss the quiet of Louisville. I once saw a report on 60 Minutes about sleep deprivation and how noise, even if it doesn't wake you up, can keep you from entering deep restful slumber. No wonder New Yorkers are so cranky.

Last night, I felt sleepy around ten o'clock and thought it would be nice to get a full eight hours rest. Not long after I lay down, I heard drums playing; obviously a rhythm track from some passing car. I waited for the sound to fade as the car pulled away...but it didn't. Assuming someone was parked in the street and playing their radio loud, I looked to see if I could determine which car it was. No luck. But a moment or two later, the drums stopped. Great.

Except then they started again. This time it was obvious that it wasn't a recording but someone was playing live. Naively I kept expecting them to stop, even while waiting on hold for almost ten minutes to register a noise complaint with the police. I gave up on the noise complaint and went outside to see if I could get a sense of the situation. The drumming was coming from the erroneously name Ascenzi Square, which is in fact a triangle situated between two streets across from my apartment.

I expected the source of the noise to be some surly drunk hipster having an impromptu jam session, so imagine my surprise when I saw that the cause was in fact a drum circle made up of eight girls in their early twenties. "Uh...I'm sorry to ask, but can you guys perhaps do that somewhere else? I have to get up early tomorrow." There might have been a quiet "sorry" but none of them argued with me, so I thanked them and left.

"What do you have to get up early for?" one of them asked as I walked away.

"Work - sad, but true."

"I have to get up tomorrow at 7:00" another said.

"Well, it's not a contest, but I get up at 6:00."

After that, no more drumming (thanks ladies!) though it took another hour and an episode of Glee to make me feel drowsy enough to sleep.

A Favorite Passage

Each year, author Alan Bennett publishes selections from his diaries in the London Review of Books, and they have been included in his omnibus collections Writing Home and Untold Stories.

Below is one of my favorite passages, his memorial of Dudley Moore, who, along with Bennett, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, formed the influential comedy troupe Beyond The Fringe. What I love about this passage is how much it accomplishes seemingly effortlessly, with a natural flow of ideas one into another. It memorializes a friend, includes some gossip, challenges (not unkindly) some notions the deceased had, offers insight into how both jazz and comedy work, and ends with an illustration of the simple ways someone long ago can still influence you.

25 May
Thinking about Dudley M. since his death, I'm struck by how little was said at the time of his musical abilities. In particular his talents as a jazz pianist. This would have come as no surprise to him as his success as a comedian and subsequently as a movie star put his musical accomplishment in the shade; jazz became marginal...

...when later in life with that slightly aggrieved air with which he discussed his early career Dudley complained of being unappreciated by his colleagues in Beyond The Fringe, this was partly what it was about. He was a very funny instinctive comedian but he was not a writer and, no good at one sort of language, he found that music, the language he was good at, was largely discounted. And when on chat shows and interviews he gave his always defensive account of himself, complaining of the inferior status he had been accorded, particularly by Peter, music was at the heart of it.

Of course, words and music are not the only languages and at this time, when we were all in our twenties, what ranked him above the rest of us and indeed anyone I've ever come across since, was his sexual success. This, unlike his musical accomplishment, was the subject of constant discussion and enquiry and it was a topic on which, while not boastful, Dudley was always frank, informative and very funny.

That Dudley, given the chance, could talk illuminatingly about music was brought home to me in almost the only conversation I had with him about jazz, when he explained the difference, as he saw it, between a good and an average performance. It had to do with the musical beat, which he told me to think of not as a brief and indivisible moment but as an interval with a discernible length, and a beginning, a middle and an end. The art of playing good jazz, he explained, was to try to hit the beat as near as possible to its ending.

To musicians this may well be a truism but I had never come across the notion before, and it linked, as Dudley then linked it, with comedy timing in the theatre, where the same applies and which I did understand and practiced, though instinctively.

This conversation would have taken pace in New York sometime in 1963 in the apartment which he was then subletting on Washington Square and where he also taught me to add a spoonful of water to the mixture of the scrambled eggs we invariably had for lunch. It was there too that, possibly in order to wean me off Elgar, he played me the long sinuous romantic theme that begins Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. Though I always add the water when scrambling eggs, I have never got much further with Bruckner and the opening of the Seventh is still all I know.

Graffiti and Pictures From My Neighborhood

40 Days of Lent: Day Forty

The story goes that, late in his life, Guglielmo Marconi had an epiphany. Th godfather of radio technology decided that no sound ever dies. It just decays beyond the point that we can detect it with our ears. Any sound was forever recoverable, he believed, with the right device. His dream was to build one powerful enough to pick up Christ's Sermon on the Mount.

--from Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner

And that's it for this year's 40 Days of Lent postings. I know Lent doesn't end until Easter next Sunday, but I've hit my goal of 40 entries. Anything beyond this will be like the bonus features on a dvd.

Cheers to all who read.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Nine

Race With The Devil

I just finished watching Race With The Devil, a movie that seriously freaked me thirty five years ago when I saw it as part of a double feature with my friends Steve Gutin and Johnny Paucilo (sp? - sorry John). I suppose I was wrong when I wrote about penis surgery footage being the one thing I couldn't watch, because when I saw Race With The Devil, I was so unnerved I kept leaving the theater to sit in the lobby until the scary parts were over. It's the only film I saw as a child that had that effect.

It's not a bad little thriller. Two couples, Warren Oates and Loretta Swit and Peter Fonda and Lara Parker, set out on vacation in a Winnebago, intending to drive from San Antonio to Colorado. The first night out, the men spy on what they think is an orgy, but is in fact a Satanic ritual complete with human sacrifice. They report it to the police, but sense with growing paranoia that everyone they meet on the road is in league with the Satanists and end up on the run for their lives. Watching it now, I can see it's completely of its time. It mixes the paranoia of the early 70's with its interest in the occult and the popularity of chase movies. At the time I liked movies with chases and lots of stunts. Main characters who were doomed never bothered me. So why couldn't I be in the room with Race With The Devil?

Because they were being chased by Satanists, of course. Had it been a biker gang, bad townspeople, even aliens, it wouldn't have affected me the same way. But making them Satanists just made the threat that much worse. Not only could they kill you, they could also send your soul to hell, so reasoned my young Catholic mind. I couldn't even watch a chase scene that consisted of pick up trucks ramming into the Winnebago because the pickups were driven by those in service to Satan. I went out to sit in the lobby for what had to be the third or forth time, only to return a few minutes later and see the credits had started. Despite my embarrassment, I asked my friends how it ended. I don't think we ever talked about my inability to watch the movie. There wasn't much to discuss. I was simply scared beyond rational control.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Eight

Some Things I Thought While Waiting For My Friend Bill In The Basement Of The Whitney Museum

- As soon as I start updating my blog, he'll show up. Any second now...

- Oh, the elevators. I've been watching the stairs and forgot all about the elevators. It's only one flight down. Has Bill become a lazy man?

- David Hockney or Andy Warhol?

- She's cute.

- Hope Bill shows up before this band plays/hope this band isn't too loud.

- Hope Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon don't think I keep getting my iPhone out so I can take a picture of them. I'm just obsessed with what time it is.

- God love you, why would you chose to look like that?

- You are not going to just leave your empty coffee cup sitting there...yes, you are.

- I haven't seen Bill in a couple of years. Maybe he's here and I don't recognize him.

- She's cute too.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Seven

The Crystal World
J.G. Ballard

I was out for dinner the other night (Happy Birthday, Kenny!) when my sister and I got into a conversation about the work J. G. Ballard, British writer of science fiction (if you can call it that). She had recently re-read Concrete Island, a book of his she hated the first time she read it, but found she liked it more this time. It goes without saying I envy her finding the time to re-read stuff – even stuff she hates! – whereas I don’t have time to read everything I’m interested in.

But how to explain Ballard? He considered himself a surrealist, writing the literary equivalent of Salvador Dali or Max Ernst’s work, which explains the consistent depictions of human beings in strange landscapes. The standard expectations of fiction, such as realistic characters with recognizable psychological motivation and verisimilitude in plot, didn’t mean much to him. He thought science fiction was the best mode for writing about the changes technology had wrought on the individual psyche, but generally avoided the genre’s trappings (aliens, spaceships, robots). Even when his work is experimental in form or content, the language is always clear, accessible. The tone is reasonable; you just have to get over your “what the hell?” reaction.

It’s this contradiction that gives his work its power: the reasonable British voice describing the most irrational things. He seemed completely uninterested in morality, whether his characters were “good” or “bad.” As the environment changes unnaturally and people go mad as a result, such a man-made dichotomy seemed irrelevant.

The Crystal World is one of Ballard’s apocalyptic novels, but it’s a beautiful apocalypse. Everything within a jungle in Africa – animals, plants, people – is slowly crystallizing, turning into stunning clear jeweled objects. The contradiction is something so beautiful being so bad. There are enough descriptions of the natural world in crystal form that you wonder is Ballard is a frustrated painter, describing images he couldn’t create. In terms of literature, it’s like reading Joseph Conrad as you drift off to sleep. Its tale of squabbling Westerners moving into a mysterious jungle keeps turning into descriptions of a jungle that looks like it was made of glass.

The transformation of the world inspires some to embrace this change and deliberately allow all or part of their bodies to crystallize. The explanation for the phenomena is a quirk in how space and time relate, so that anything that crystallizes is actually frozen in time, neither alive nor dead, and eternal. It’s mysticism linked to science rather than spirituality.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Six

I Have No Idea What's Going On
Illustrations from children's books

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Five

Super Size Thou

This reads like something from The Onion, but apparently it's legit. Actually I think it's a pretty interesting idea and I'm glad someone thought of it and was able to do the research.

from The Los Angeles Times:

Last Supper helpings have grown

An unusual study looks at the food portions in artistic depictions of the Last Supper throughout history. The apostles have eaten better and better over the years, scholars say.
By Melissa Healy
March 23, 2010

The Christian faith holds several acts of "super-sizing" to be miracles accomplished by Jesus Christ -- a handful of fish and loaves of bread expanded to feed thousands; a wedding feast running low on wine suddenly awash in the stuff. Now a new study of portion expansion puts Jesus once more at the center.

In a bid to uncover the roots of super-sized American fare, a pair of sibling scholars has turned to an unusual source: 52 artists' renderings of the New Testament's Last Supper.

Their findings, published online Tuesday in the International Journal of Obesity, indicate that serving sizes have been marching heavenward for 1,000 years.

"I think people assume that increased serving sizes, or 'portion distortion,' is a recent phenomenon," said Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think." "But this research indicates that it's a general trend for at least the last millennium."

To reach their conclusion, Wansink and his brother Craig, a biblical scholar at Virginia Wesleyan College, analyzed 52 depictions of the meal the Wansinks call "history's most famous dinner party" painted between the year 1000 and the year 2000.

Using the size of the diners' heads as a basis for comparison, the Wansinks used computers to compare the sizes of the plates in front of the apostles, the food servings on those plates and the bread on the table. Assuming that heads did not increase in size during the second millennium after the birth of Christ, the researchers used this method to gauge how much serving sizes increased.

And increase they did.

Over the course of the millennium, the Wansinks found that the entrees depicted on the plates laid before Jesus' followers grew by about 70%, and the bread by 23%.

As entree portions rose, so too did the size of the plates -- by 65.6%.

The apostles depicted during the Middle Ages appear to be the ascetics they are said to have been. But by 1498, when Leonardo da Vinci completed his masterpiece, the party was more lavishly fed. Almost a century later, the Mannerist painter Jacobo Tintoretto piled the food on the apostles' plates still higher.

New York University nutrition researcher Lisa R. Young called the Wansink study fun. But as the author of "The Portion Teller," a history of portion size through the 20th century, she also pointed to the three decades that ended the millennium as a "tipping point" for humankind.

There is scant evidence that the body mass index of people in developed societies soared into unhealthy ranges for most of the 1,000 years studied, Young said. But there is little doubt, she added, that that changed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s -- coincidentally, when portion sizes began a dramatic run-up.

The Wansinks, however, suggest that portion growth may have a provenance far older than industrial farming and the economics of takeout food.

Instead, they suggest, it's a natural consequence of "dramatic socio-historic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food" over the millennium that started in the year 1000 A.D.

"The contemporary discovery of increasing food portions and availability may be little more than 1,000-year-old wine in a new bottle," the Wansinks wrote.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Four

What I Can't Watch

When I was a younger man, I prided myself on being able to watch or read most anything. Part of it was the punk ethos, part of it came from liking horror movies, part of it was perhaps my version of machismo, an Aesthete's Macho: there's nothing I can't watch.

However, when I was in my early twenties, I discovered something I just couldn't look at. It was at the Chestnut Cabaret in Philadelphia at a Butthole Surfers show. Films were projected onstage behind the band while they played. As this was during the Reagan years, it was inevitable that one of the films would be a loop of mushroom cloud footage. On stage right, however, I saw what I could not watch and was surprised by my inability to look as I was at the content.

What I couldn't bring myself to watch were medical films of penis surgery.

It was so bad that I had to lift my left hand and block that part of the stage from view. Every once in a while I would move my hand to see if the film had ended, but nope, still going on. I recall at one moment moving my hand and seeing the gloved hands peeling the skin back as if it was a banana. [Shudder]

Something about that show seemed to coincide with losing my taste for the horror genre. I don't think the two are connected, apart from the fact that one of the reasons I rarely watch horror films or read horror novels is that I feel vulnerable now in a way I didn't then. No matter how obnoxious they are, I feel bad for the victims when they are suffer.

Incidentally, this posting has nothing to do with the healthcare bill passing last night.

Forty Days of Lent: Day Thirty Three

Oh damn, it's happened again. The thin line between my real world and my fictional map of the same momentarily dissolved.

Today's post was intended to be a passage from Jim Woodring's late 1980's comic Jim. Jim was a collection of automatic writing, strange drawings and comic stories. One of my favorite pieces from the comic, a piece that exists, God as my witness, was a fake PSA warning people about praying while drunk. It was very funny and was never reprinted in any of the Jim anthologies that followed. However, i could not find the piece in question, despite going through all my old issues several times.

However, one thing I did find was a story in which Jim sees something in a book that disturbs him so much that he sets the book aside. Later, when he is compelled to look at it again, he's mystified because he can't find it...similar to what I was experiencing. "That's funny" Jim concludes "it's not here at all." No, not funny at all.

I've had this sort of experience before. Much of the worst excesses of the Bush years felt like my paranoid story ideas from years before. As I watch my worst thoughts come to pass, I began to wonder if maybe I should just not think some things for everyone's sake.

The clearest example of this phenomena occurred a number of years ago. For a while I had carried a story I called "The Flood" around in my head. One of the elements of this story is that the main character is haunted by an image of a woman sitting on a man's back that causes either catatonia or seizures each time he sees it. One Sunday afternoon, I was in the gift shop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw a postcard of the image I had been imagining. Not the exact image, but close enough to make me seriously uncomfortable. It was like assuming a role in a story I had invented. There was nothing I could do except accept it, calm myself and try not to freak out over the weird coincidence.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Two

It's amazing how quickly the anger comes on when old resentments are mentioned, especially when someone blithely gets their facts wrong. Historian Nell Irvin Painter was on The Colbert Report to discuss her book The History of White People when she stated that, for example, people were once referred to as Irish and then started subcategorizing, such as Scots-Irish.

Colbert was quick to correct her. "Scots-Irish are not Irish."

"Yes, they are."

"No they're not. Scots-Irish...there's no Irish blood in Scots-Irish people. They are Scotch Presbyterians who were given land in Ireland, they took our land, they drove my people across the river Shannon, where we forced to farm rocks by Oliver Cromwell and I will see him rot in Hell before you call Scots-Irish people 'Irish!' You wanna fight?"

It's always interesting seeing what will make Stephen break character, how passionate he gets, and how quickly he is able to switch back to entertaining once his point is made. He shifts from wishing to see Cromwell rot in hell to playfully challenging Ms. Painter to armwrestle in the space of a few seconds.

The whole interview is here. You're not really going to learn anything about the history of white people, but if you want to see Stephen's rant, it's at around 2:20.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Nell Irvin Painter
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care reform

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty One

On Wednesday, I was out with my friend Cindy, who was visiting from Los Angeles. The only guideline we had was that we wanted to avoid anyplace overrun with St. Patrick's Day Celebrants. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am very proud of my ancestors*, but loathe holidays in which everyone feels it's their duty to get drunk (see also Halloween and New Year's Eve).

We met for tapas and then went for Mexican food, only to discover that my go-to place for sloppy Mexican food, Maryanne's on Second Avenue, was closed, or rather "seized" due to non=payment of taxes. Peering through the window, Cindy said "It looks like it didn't happen that long ago. There are still napkins on the tables."

However, all I could think was "one more regular (or semi-regular) haunt is now gone." Not to be self-pitying, because I know the loss of a favored spot is nothing compared to the loss of a job suffered by those who work at such places when they close, but so many places are closing that I haven't had time to find new places yet. I've kvetched before (did you know the "k" was silent?) on this website about Telephone Bar closing. Last fall PlanEat Thai in my neighborhood closed, and that was a restaurant that I thought was going to last forever.

Is this what Alzherimer's is like? The landscape slowly changing or shifting around you, but you just react in befuddlement? I know the cliche is that "in New York, the only constant is change" but is it so much to expect a bar or restaurant to stick around for a while? It's not as profound, but is what I'm feeling a fraction of what my grandparents, social butterflies that they were, experienced when their friends began dying?

Cindy and I got food somewhere else but I was pursued by the sense that my New York was slowly shrinking. Donde est last straw? When is it no longer a city I recognize? Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. I walked past Maryanne's tonight and the restaurant was not only open but full of people. I stopped in and asked the hostess what had happened. "Oh," she laughed "that was all a big misunderstanding."



------------------------------------
* re: How The Irish Saved Civilzation: you're welcome. Is it so much to expect a "thank you" every once in a while? I still don't think we, or rather I, have received proper due for that. Sheesh.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty

The Stigmittens Are Here!



Knitted by my friend Carol for me, these fingerless gloves will always remind me of the agony our Lord suffered while they keep my hands nice and warm. Perhaps the name of this blog should be changed to The Happiest Boy In The World.




As a bonus, she also sent me this great Virgin Mary nightlight.



Thank you, Carol. Words can't express my appreciation.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Nine

Happy St. Patrick's Day From Jack Chick!

Spreading his message of strict dogma and intolerance to everyone - now in Gaelic (or "Irish" as it says on his website). I'm surprised it's not one of his anti-Catholic tracts.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Eight

Spring has come to New York. People run up the subway stairs, hurrying to get into the sun.

I ran into my landlord for the second time since having an argument with him a month ago. The first time I saw him post-argument we said hello to each other but didn't really talk much. The argument was about the fact that he lets himself in to my apartment when I'm not there, which according to NYC tenant's rights, is a big no-no. Invasion of privacy and all that. My landlord only does it when he wants to fix something in the apartment or to let the exterminator in to spray for bugs. I realize I should be happy my landlord pays an exterminator to spray every other month, and his own unannounced visits are rare and a small price to pay for an inexpensive apartment in a good neighborhood.

But my landlord is not a young man and sometimes forgets the code for the front door alarm to my apartment. He also once forgot where he put my rent check, so I had to write him another one. A few days later he found the original check: it was under his pillow. "Why did you put my check under your pillow?" "I don't know - I don't know how it got there!"

The argument wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been one of those nights when I was in a hurry. I wanted to drop my stuff off at the apartment after work, change and head back into Manhattan to meet friends for drinks. I was going to be a little late but it was worth it to change from my office-drag into jeans. As soon as I opened the front door of my building, I could hear my alarm going off. I got to my door and saw a piece of paper on the floor from my landlord that said "John - call me!" Worst yet, the top lock on my door did not work.

I called my landlord and exclaimed that I could not get into my apartment. "Oh, I was gonna tell you about the alarm. I don't know what I did!" After a few minutes of mounting panic, I figured out that when he had left my apartment, my landlord had not locked the deadbolt. I had been trying to unlock what was already unlocked, which is why my key wouldn't turn properly. Got into the apartment only to see some strange hieroglyphics on my alarm system. I entered my code and nothing happened. Alarm kept tolling, strange hieroglyphics remained. I entered the code several more times, reasoning that it hadn't worked the first time cause I hadn't done it just so, to no avail.

Somewhere in this apartment is the user's manual that came with the alarm system, but it was nowhere I looked that night. I called my friend Kate, who lived here before me, on the off chance she would still remember how to reset the alarm of an apartment she hasn't live in for over five years. No answer. After pushing various buttons, I stumbled on how to reset the alarm and the resulting silence was, well, alarming.

I called my landlord back to explain how to reset it should this ever happen again and, because of my frustration, let slip "you know, you're not even supposed to be in my apartment when I'm not here without my permission," which is true, but just because something is true doesn't mean you should say it out loud. So a quick argument ensued, ending when I apologized, done because I had to be on my way. I wondered if I'd ever get my apartment sprayed for bugs again.

So when I saw my landlord tonight, I was relieved when we began chatting. I can only hope he forgot the argument. He showed me a cell phone he bought on ebay. It was an older model but still in great condition, and he was frustrated by the company's customer service department's inability to activate the phone. It wasn't too hard to see he was talking about more than phones when he said "Just cause it's old they want to get rid of it - not everything that's new is better," especially since he followed it up with the fact that the only take people's age into account when they are on a waiting list for internal organs, and never their moral character.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Seven

I have a friend who's ill and I'm worried he's not going to get better. I have another friend who's leaving town this weekend and I suspect tonight was the last time I'll see him. But despite being a middle-aged man, when I look at these images I feel a little less sad.

Thank you, Chuck Jones.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Six

Deep In The Heart of Texas

The entire article from The Huffington Post is worth reading, but I thought I would quote the first sentence because I can't summarize it any better:

"A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade."

There is a slideshow with the article detailing some of the changes that were pushed through. It's the standard ultra-conservative party line: Reagan was The Greatest President Ever, minorities didn't play much a part in this nation's development, free enterprise is the best system every time everywhere. My favorite change, which is simultaneously the pettiest and most Orwellian: the US government will be described as a "constitutional republic" rather than "democratic." Amazing.

This reminds me of what George Carlin said about school: "They're only teaching you what they want you know."

Here come the new Dark Ages!

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Five

Closing Time
Joe Queenan

Joe Queenan’s memoir Closing Time begins with what could be the start of an amusing affectionate anecdote about the time his father got stuck on the roof of their house and had to stay there all day. But because his father was a raging alcoholic who terrorized his children, the day is remembered as less humorous than peaceful, one of the few afternoons of peace the Queenan children got to experience.

I’ve read Queenan’s work before (he’s contributed to Spy, Esquire, and The Wall Street Journal among others) and while I can appreciate his wit, I don’t like the accompanying nastiness of his writing. Queenan sees this as part of his job as a satirist and while I certainly have a mean bone or two in my body, this tone has always kept me from being an enthusiast. In addition, his satire picks on easy prey and I disagree with his politics. On the other hand, I can’t be too hard on someone whose book of celebrity interviews is entitled If You’re Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble. Full disclosure: He is also a supportive friend and mentor to one of my friends. I’ve met him a couple of times and he couldn’t have been nicer. The first time he mentioned he was working on a book about his father but it wasn’t easy. The book is Closing Time.

Queenan grew up poor in Philadelphia in the 1950s and 60s, the son of an alcoholic who could not hold a job for long and a woman who had children but didn’t have much interest in them.

…he had simply suffered through so many calamities that the only way he knew how to respond to adversity was to brutalize those closest to him. Happily, his preference for victims shorter than forty-eight inches kept my mother out of the line of fire. Like many Irish-Catholic men of his generation, he would never dream of raising his hand to his wife, not only because he feared that it would have brought down the curtain on their marriage, but because men like him had an unwholesome reverence for their spouses, viewing them as domestic stand-ins for the Virgin Mary, with the one notable difference that, unlike the Madonna, they also cooked and cleaned. My mother was not a Madonna; she was an emotionally inert woman who had injudiciously brought four children into the world with no clear idea of how henceforth to proceed. While my father was skinning us alive with his trusty old belt, she would entomb herself in her bedroom, surrounded by newspapers she never seem to learn anything from, pretending not to hear what was going on downstairs. But the walls were not thick and the sound must have carried, if not in her conscience, at least into her cochleae.

Understandably, Queenan was motivated by escape: from his father’s beatings, from his neighborhood, from his class. He doesn’t want to be rich, he simply wants to stop being poor. A combination of luck, self-determination and the influence of a few kind souls saves Queenan, but this memoir is neither self-aggrandizing nor sentimental. There is no reconciliation with the father, no forgiveness, no moment that puts all the abuse into perspective. The book is a meditation on urban entropy, poverty, class differences and how culture and education can, but not necessarily will, help. (“Marguerite, a product of the slums, knew that if you were standing in front of a Brancusi and the light hit it just right, you could briefly forget you were poor.”) It is also funny and compulsively readable. When looking for passages to include in this essay, I found myself reading pages at a time until forcing myself to stop. Queenan is a master of smart conversational prose that always pulls you forward because you want to see what the next sharp detail, funny line or larger insight will be, as in this section describing he and his sisters riding in the back of his father’s delivery truck:

If I was not careful, I could have easily tumbled out into the street and been flattened by oncoming cars. But I was careful – I was born careful – and these outings were rollicking good fun. Anyway, back in the Paleocene 1950s, when being fond of one’s children had not yet come into vogue, poor people didn’t seem to mind all that much if one of their offspring when flying out into traffic, as everyone had spares.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Four

My cousin Katie commented in response to this post:

It's driving that causes you to miss the beautiful. Wilkes-Barre is a beautiful city and you've seen it and photographed it because you've always walked it, John. When you drive, the run-down seems to stand out. When you walk (or bike-ride as my Dad loved to do) you get to see the beauty in the details. I always try to get out and walk when I'm home. It reminds me why I was so happy growing up there. And that snow storm, on that particular day, was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

Well, there's so much to respond to here. While I will always prefer walking to driving, I do love the blur of the landscape passing by when you are in motion, whether on a train, bus or in the passenger's seat. It's one of the reasons why I don't often read on buses. I prefer looking at the landscape in motion. When I walk, it's more like I'm looking at still photographs, whereas in a car or train, it's more like watching a movie. But yes, walking or biking gives you the time to appreciate the details.

The other night, in response to a friend's comment that he could see himself living in Los Angeles (a city that I profess to "hate" even though every time I'm there I enjoy myself a great deal), I instinctively said "I couldn't live in a city where you had to drive everywhere and had no public transportation." My friend pointed out that LA had fine public transportation and he in fact had friends who lived there who didn't know how to drive and got around just fine. I suppose I was thinking I could never live in a city that was not conducive to walking. A common characteristic of everywhere I've lived is that the were all pedestrian-friendly: cities that not only invited but also rewarded walking with the little surprises and treasures that Katie refers to. (Another characteristic of the places I've lived; they've all been near and partially defined by bodies of water, whether the Susquehanna, Thames or Hudson Rivers, the San Francisco Bay or the Potomac. I suppose i don't ever want to feel completely landlocked.) I've lived in Brooklyn for almost six years now and I still miss being able to walk to work.

In America, cities founded before the invention of the automobile were based on a 19th Century European model: a central downtown area with a mix of commercial and residential buildings, designed with the idea that people would walk to their destinations. I was lucky enough to grow up in such a town. However, much of this country is now based on a Los Angeles model: urban sprawl connected by roads with the assumption that people will drive everywhere, and that driving is somehow inherently better than walking. Even Wilkes-Barre, where I grew up, now seems more of a sprawl of malls, industrial parks and suburban developments than a town.

All of which is fine if you love driving or are a real estate developer, but having grown up in a town where everything you needed was within walking distance, I find it a frustrating way to live. I have friends I have not seen in years and I believe one of the reasons is because I don't like being in their house. They live in a suburban development and there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, unless you drive. I feel trapped inside their house. (Full disclosure: it's possible I haven't seen these friends in years because they grew tired of me, but I really prefer to blame their house.)

Driving is for efficiency, but this efficiency is linked to economic concerns not necessarily in the driver's best interest. A number of years ago, I imagined people whose entire lives seemed to consists of driving an endless triangle between the industrial park where they worked, the suburban development where they live and the shopping/strip malls where they shopped. If you legally declared that those could be the only three places they could go, almost anyone would protest. Yet many people do spend their lives shuttling between these destinations.

Walking brings contemplation. It's also not as goal-oriented as driving, though God knows there is much pleasure to be had in cruising around in a car or driving on a dark highway at night. But one of the things that I feel so grateful to have experienced is growing up in an area in which I could walk anywhere. This brought an early sense of autonomy and self-determination, as opposed to having to ask my parents to drive me any time I wanted to do somewhere. This probably explains why I've lived where I have and why my life has had the shape it has: because I am determined to live in cities where the element of chance that accompanies walking as opposed to driving is primary. This lack of efficiency, this importance of contemplation and belief in significant chance happenings has a great deal to explain my mindset and life.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a town that had its economic peak during the early 20th century, when people could still afford to build beautiful buildings of stone and brick. We can't afford to build such buildings now. That's another feature of shopping malls and most suburban developments: they're ugly at worst, boring at best. Even if you did walk among them, you'd be bored.

Yes, Katie. The snowstorm the day of your father's funeral was beautiful. He deserved no less. Snow makes everything beautiful but I had forgotten how ethereal and glowing it makes my, and his, hometown.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Three

Karma

The other night I was having dinner at my favorite bar and got into a conversation with Scott, the bartender. Scott's one of those bartenders who, if he recognizes you, reaches over the bar to shake your hand and tell you how good it is to see you again. He's going to be going to Europe soon, visiting London, Paris, Prague and Berlin. I told him what I remembered of London and Paris, paid my bill eventually and said goodnight.

Once outside I recalled I had a great photobook/traveler's guide to Paris that was invaluable when I was there five years ago. I had lent it to a co-worker for vacation, and she loved it too. So I turned around to go back in and ask Scott if he wanted to borrow the book when two girls who were heading in said "You know, you're going in the wrong direction. You were just in here."

"Yeah, I know" I said "but someone said something that made me mad, so I'm going back in to fight him."

"Oh, no! You have great bone structure - I'd hate to see it get ruined in a fight."

So there you go. You go to do something nice and the universe throws a nice compliment your way.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Two

What happens when it's midnight and you haven't written anything for your online journal yet and you don't have any ideas that you can finish by the self-imposed deadline and your friend Jeff's comment from yesterday has brought up all sorts of old Lampoon nostalgia not only for the individual issues themselves but for the times (early 1970's) when they were published and the times (your teen years) when you began buying them, though it should be said that Bob's suggestion that you write about the current Vatican sex scandal in which a choirista was apparently soliciting male prostitutes isn't a bad idea either:



You just post a National Lampoon cover you found online.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty One

Nazi Literature in the Americas
Roberto Bolano

Roberto's Bolano's experimental novel is a catalogue of imaginary extreme right wing literature that somehow took root in North and Latin America. In tone, it recalls Jorge Borges and Stanislaw Lem's imagined fictions along with the pieces Woody Allen wrote for The New Yorker in the early 1970's, such as "If Impressionists Were Dentists" which imagined the letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, but substituting dental procedures for art-making.

The central idea seems to be a play on the way that most people in the arts lean left or at are at least liberal. It is written in the same dry, deadpan language of most literary surveys. What if someone paid serious attention to more right-wing authors? It leads to laugh out-loud lines like these:

She took to drinking in dives and having affairs with some of the most unsavory individuals in Buenos Aires. Her well-known poem 'I Was Happy with Hitler,' misunderstood by the Right and Left alike, dates from this period.

In 1958 she fell in love again. This time the object of her affections was a twenty-five-year-old painter. He was blond, blue-eyed and disarmingly stupid.

As a young man Salcvatico advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chlieans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation...
He was a soccer player and a flutist.

He is against monopolies, especially cultural monopolies. He believes in the family, but also in a man's "natural right to have a bit of fun on the side."

It is the pacing, the mix of the straightforward with the absurd, that recalls Woody Allen's influential early work.

But there is also something else here. All of Bolano's authors end up sad failures. Part of you wants to say "thank God" as they are horrible people and their beliefs are destructive. Yet there is also a remarkable melancholy that creeps in as you read yet another case study of someone whose passions and hard work ultimately lead to nothing. It reminds me of Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, in which all the conspiracies of those in power (the Dutch East India Company, the Jesuits, the British Crown) ultimately came to nothing as those organizations passed into irrelevance. As one who lived through the Bush years, it can give you hope.

On a personal note, apropo of nothing, I have the nice surprise of realizing that the photo on the cover of Nazi Literature in the Americas, like many of Bolano's other early novels, was taken by my downstairs neighbor Allen. The cover seemed familiar without my ever realizing why. I like the idea that the book was in my apartment while the man who created the cover image was just one story down.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty

Barbie and Ken Pieta
One of kind craft/sculpture available for purchase here.






Very special thank you to my friend Carol for telling me about this.

40 Days of Lent: Day Nineteen

The Summer Book
Tove Jansson

It was the cover of NYRB’s republication of The Summer Book that initially interested me. Like all their books, it is a simple, elegant design, using a pleasing mix of colors and an image that seems perfect. It was perfect: it was a watercolor of an island silhouetted against a light sky by author Tove Jansson used for the novel’s first edition. Unlike DVD companies that forgo a film’s original iconic poster in favor of a mundane picture of its stars when designing their discs, NYRB knew better than tamper with perfection. The DVD comparison isn’t far-fetched. NYRB reminds me of the Criterion Collection in the way they republish lost classics in handsome editions, usually with insightful introductions by contemporary authors. I have a number of their books; I haven’t read them all, but they are all beautiful objects.

Admiring the cover, I thought “Tove Jansson? I know that name – how do I know that name?” The explanation was on the back. Jansson was the creator of Moomin, a delightful comic strip that began publishing in the 1950’s. Finding out she also wrote books is like discovered an unknown novel by Charles Schulz or Walt Kelly.

The Summer Book is the story of Sophia, a young girl who bonds with her grandmother while they spend the summer together on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. Despite this set-up, the book is not sentimental or even overtly emotional. Sophia behaves much like a child, alternately charming and frustrating, and the grandmother can be moody, swinging from wise and sharing to irascible in the space of a few sentences. They’re two women, one young enough that she hasn’t fully learned how to “be nice” so people will like her and one who is old enough to gratefully let go of such social pretence. On this isolated island, they’re just themselves.

They’re themselves, surrounded by a natural world of old vegetation, unexpected storms, and debris that washes up on the beach. The vignettes of the book are described in a language that’s restrained but filled with a sly humor wise to the characters’ traits. Jansson’s description of a sometimes harsh landscape and the people who chose to live there reminds me of Annie Proulx and the episodic nature of the novel recalls comic strips. It is a sensuous book, passages written to appeal to the senses as to how things smell, feel, taste as well as look and sound. A passage I particularly like:

Grandmother snorted. “We sowed our own tents,” she said, remembering what they had looked like – huge, sturdy, grayish-brown. This was a toy, a bright yellow plaything for veranda guests, and not worth having.

“Isn’t it a Scout tent?” asked Sophia anxiously.

So her grandmother said maybe it was, after all, but a very modern one, and they crawled in and lay down side by side.

“Now you’re not allowed to go to sleep,” Sophia said. “You have to tell me what it was like to be a Scout and all the things you did.”

A very long time ago, Grandmother had wanted to tell about all the things they did, but no one had bothered to ask. And now she had lost the urge.

“We had campfires,” she answered briefly, and suddenly she felt sad.

“And what else?”

“There was a log that burned for a long time. We sat around the fire. It was cold out. We ate soup.”

That’s strange, Grandmother thought. I can’t describe things any more. I can’t find the words, or maybe it’s just that I’m not trying hard enough. It was such a long time ago. No one here was even born. And unless I tell it because I want to, it’s as if it never happened; it gets closed off and then it’s lost. She sat up and said, “Some days I can’t remember very well. But sometime you ought to try and sleep in a tent all night.”

40 Days of Lent: Day Eighteen

40 Days of Lent: Day Seventeen

25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom
Alan Moore

I’m disappointed by 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom. Perhaps I should rephrase that. I was disappointed by Alan Moore’s book of that title. When I heard that writer Alan Moore was going to be writing a book about erotica and pornography, I expected a fresh perspective on these controversial topics. One thing that Moore’s work has never suffered from was a lack of ideas.

But while Abrams has done their customary exemplary job with the book’s design and production -- it is a handsome book to look through and the illustrations are well-chosen -- the essay within is a little lacking. The more sexually open a culture is, the better it is. There’s good pornography and bad pornography, aesthetically speaking, so we should strive to make good pornography. The social or political reasons people have against pornography are either repressive or disingenuous. Whether you agree with those statements or not, there’s not much here to argue with. The text is more manifesto than essay, so the reader is left with little more than what Mr. Moore thinks. Historical proof or logical arguments aren’t really part of this book. That’s a shame because I would be interested in reading a serious scholarly work that used historical precedence and logical arguments as a justification for erotica.