07.27.12

the real triumph could be that i didn't drop a chunk of sparkler between my toes this time. (photo by george)

07.26.12

07.24.12

multigenerational text messages {sweet tooth edition}

LMO: licorice in a cart otherwise full of vegetables. why did you curse me?
dad: Curse? It is a gift, and if you are around for the end of the wor
dad: ld or anything else comparably important, I guarantee you it will
dad: come in handy -- could even save a civilization or two. Just be s
dad: ure to check back with me when that happens, and I will share a fe
dad: w more secrets with you.

07.20.12

when i was nineteen i wrote a sonnet about this guy i met.

remember your hands
for an unlikely advisor

'I picked you out,' he says, 'from over there -
You're beautiful! You look like me.' Presents
a flower made of napkins. 'Lady fair,
in that much black you must be fucking tense.'

'I'll fix those hands,' he says, 'let's see your wrists -
These muscles, girl! You write too hard.' And he
is pulling verses from my arms. 'A fist
can't make you anything, you wait and see.'

'I know your type,' he says, 'all metaphor,
all misery. You're young, you're strong. Forget
the drama; it'll only make you sore.
Your romance, honey, hasn't happened yet.'

I sag in my chair; he grins as he stands.
'Write something gentle. Remember your hands.'

07.13.12ii

conversations at the art supply store {II}

LMO: could you help me with some spray paint?
guy: sure! what color do you need?
LMO: black.
guy: that's easy!
guy: so...i got beat up last night.
LMO: god, i'm sorry!
guy: thanks.
LMO: what happened?
guy: this guy freaked out because some other guy drank his soda.
LMO: that's terrible. are you okay?
guy: yeah, i just got hit a couple of times here. [gestures at ribs] i'm pretty sore, though.
LMO: maybe you should get yourself checked out, to make sure your internal organs are okay.
guy: man, internal organs! well, it happened last night, so -
LMO: if you're still hurting in a couple of days, you should go see somebody. is this the black paint?
guy: no, it should be next to the white. here it is!
LMO: seriously, you don't mess around with that stuff.
LMO: and probably you shouldn't hang out with that guy any more.
guy: i'm the type of person that, when i see injustice, i have to speak up about it.
guy: and i think people appreciate that.

07.13.12

[The stories] were all about men, mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, mostly with an aspiration that they'd given up because of a marriage or a dead relative or a fear about not being good enough: the singer-songwriter who performs as a cowboy-clown at children's birthday parties and finds himself doing a gig at the house of his high school girlfriend; the minor-league baseball player forced to decide between new love and an unexpected ascension to the majors. There was a sweetness and earnestness to the stories that Juliet had at first found winning. The men were smart and self-effacing, the details about domestic routines spot-on, the characters' neuroses believable and exaggerated ever so slightly for comic effect. But Juliet also noticed in that third read that the women of the book were all blandly noble and long-suffering, and while the man-child narrator worked through his feelings of inadequacy, making such frequent comment about his failings that you couldn't help but think extremely well of him, to believe him enlightened, his girl stood by, full of spunky good sense and patience, never angry, never granted the luxury to be small or selfish. The clown story, "On the Redemption of Roy Rogers," ended with the narrator, still in grease paint, giving his high school girlfriend a long, tender kiss while her husband and the children at the party are outside taking pony rides (and of course there had already been a comically gloomy contemplation of the pony's being a gelding). "I kissed her," the last line went, "reclaimed her, while outside her husband and the pony walked a slow and never-ending circle, no sunset in sight."

[...]

"You want to tell me something about my book, I suppose. Well, enlighten me, Miss New York Press."
"That's Mrs. New York Press," Juliet said. "To you."
"Mrs., then. Enlighten me."
"If they were to make movies out of your stories, John Cusack would play the lead in every one of them."

(holly goddard jones, "the right way to end a story,"* tin house #52)

tin house's summer reading issue also boasts "annie duels the sun," a boss angie wang cover (wang's work frequently features heroic gals; "despite being stalked, bombed, or forced into submission, these young women persevere. if they're not already in escape mode or recovery, they are ready to unleash their power"), and an impressively plausible celebration of cooking with friends, a middlebrow, tv-themed collection of recipes developed on the down-low by jack bishop (who helped launch cook's illustrated and set the tasting protocols for america's test kitchen). i just ordered it as a bonus gift for the wedding we're attending next weekend.

*(that excerpt is not the end of the story.)

07.12.12

101 in 1001 {III}: 022 see at least 6 more of shakespeare's plays for the first time [ongoing]

i have grown weary of the discounts and local happenings which parade through my inbox each morning - the sample sales and i should spend some time apart, i think, and by and large i'm happiest when i'm loafing - but daily candy's weekend-preview email did me a solid last week:

SEE
Alan Cumming’s One-Man Macbeth
What: The quirky Scottish actor takes to the stage for a solo rendition of the Shakespeare classic set in a psychiatric ward.
Why: You worked up a sweat chasing Lady Macbeth in Sleep No More. Chill out for this one.
When: Today-July 14.
Where: Rose Theater, Broadway, at 60th St. (212-875-5766). Tickets ($50-$100) at lincolncenterfestival.org.

i did work up a sweat chasing lady macbeth in sleep no more (an immersive, interactive, macbeth-adjacent hipster theatre experience) back in december, and i wondered, therefore, if i could still count macbeth as shakespeare i had yet to see. i've developed a fondness for alan cumming's saucy introductions to masterpiece mystery! programs, and i found an empty seat in the center of the front row for fifty bucks, so i went for it.

bearing in mind that it's nearly impossible to stage shakespeare i can't enjoy in some way (congratulations again, perpetrators of a midsummer night's dream on the north shore of lake tahoe in the summer of 1999), this was some shakespeare, team. i know macbeth nearly as well as i know hamlet, so the fact that the play had been trimmed down to an hour and forty five minutes and nearly all surviving characters and lines fell to one underclothed, androgynous scotsman wasn't problematic for me. in fact, the very element that seemed to bother reviewers - that is, that cumming never develops the momentum of macbeth's traditionally terrible, carnivorous majesty at the end of the play - pleased me. i need king lear to be full-throated and tragic, which is why derek jacobi's infantilized version so disappointed me last year; he can't squeal and coo! macbeth, on the other hand, is a piñata just waiting to be smacked. as staged by the national theatre of scotland, he's one of a dozen characters to erupt from AC, who is escorted to the stage (a cavernous, filthy-tiled psychiatric ward with a few rickety beds at one end, an iron staircase at the other, and a large, clinical viewing window high on the rear wall) by a silent man and woman in hospital uniforms. he's gently stripped of his suit, swabbed for evidence (there are three deep scratches on his chest, and there's something beneath his fingernails), given a white tee and trousers, and abandoned as he pronounces the first line of the play, a witch's line - "when shall we three meet again?" it segues beautifully to his first scene as the witches; his face is tripled in screens at the top of the stage, and his body contorts bestially (a la his x-men 2 character, nightcrawler). otherness suits him, and his scenes as the witches and as lady macbeth were some of my favorites. his turn as both macbeths in act I, scene V (lady m's "cowboy up" speech) should be ridiculous - who can plausibly seduce himself? - but the flipflop physicality totally works, and the scene is impressive rather than gimmicky. when cumming does settle in as macbeth, particularly in several long, wordless scenes in which he's both failing to turn into the thundering thane his wife urged him to be and going to pieces as a psychiatric patient (there's a particularly chilling sequence in which the same screens that showed cumming as the three witches appear to be showing a live feed of him alone and asleep on one of the hospital beds - until a dark, furtive figure materializes at his shoulder, visible on the monitors and nowhere on the stage) - he's riveting, whoever he is. contemporary staging and phrasing aren't usually my thing, but when they work, they work.

yeah, yeah, but who is he? "[this staging] might be some people's first time ever seeing shakespeare and this play, so we don't want to mess around," said co-director john tiffany (whose broadway version of once just picked up eight tonys, if you're into that sort of thing). "what we've done is try to honor the story by setting it in a context that an audience has a different way in." like a first-time sleep no more participant, a neophyte here would wander and even stumble a bit - but here, he or she would be sure to meet macbeth.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 if you've seen sleep no more, do you consider it a staging of macbeth?
02 if you've seen cory arcangel's clouds, have you seen super mario brothers?
03 you've been asked to introduce a masterpiece mystery! show. what shall you wear? shall you affect an accent?
04 i bought a nonrefundable ticket for last sunday's show before realizing sunday was joe's birthday. am i the worst wife ever?
05 i need you to stage some one-man shakespeare. which play do you choose? why?

07.11.12

On his first free day since he was born Samuel sat with a loose girl in a locked bathroom over a teashop, the dirty curtains were drawn, and his hand lay on her thighs. He did not feel any emotion at all. O God, he thought, make me feel something, make me feel as I ought to, here is something happening and I'm cool and dull as a man in a bus. Make me remember all the stories. I caught her in my arms, my heart beat against hers, her body was trembling, her mouth opened like a flower. The lotus of Osiris was opening in the sun.
"Listen to the old birds," she said, and he saw that the hot water was running over the rim of the washbasin.
I must be impotent, he thought.
"Why did he cut his throat like that, Polly? Was it love? I think if I was crossed in love I'd drink brandy and whisky and creme de menthe and that stuff that's made with eggs."
"It wasn't love with Mr. Shaw. I don't know why he did it. Mrs. Bentley said there was blood everywhere, everywhere, and all over the clock. He left a little note in the letter rack and all it said was that he'd been meaning to do it ever since October. Look, the water'll drip right through into the kitchen."
He turned it off. The birds stopped singing.
"Perhaps it was love, really. Perhaps he loved you, Polly, but he wouldn't say so. From a distance."
"Go on, he had a limp," she said. "Old Dot and Carry. How old are you?"
"Twenty."
"No, you're not."
"Well, nearly."
"No, you're not."

(dylan thomas, from adventures in the skin trade)

the dylan thomas collection i found at mast books a few months ago - with a photo of a man with his little finger lodged in a bottle of bass on the cover, and a child's blue ball-point scribbles on the last few pages - could be the first thing i've read in a decade that makes me want to be a novelist. not any novelist, mind you, but the novelist to finish that novel (thomas stopped writing it after four chapters).

This unique fragment, half fictional though it is, carries the unmistakable stamp of [DT's] personality. It is real now because it was once real to him, and because it holds the key to a certain attitude to the world and to a situation which was peculiarly his own. This attitude, which may be defined as a rooted opposition to material progress, he continued to hold long after he had abandoned work on the novel. Its anarchic fantasy appealed to him, and it is one more example of the poet's indifference to reputation, of his refusal to follow the advance guard of his fame.

(vernon watkins, in his introduction to adventures in the skin trade)

sam never gets free of the bottle, not even when the wicked polly convinces him to remove all of his clothes, get into someone else's cold, dirty bath, and drink a full glass of eau de cologne ("'Christ!' he said in a clear, ordinary voice. 'Christ!'"). it's a damn shame.

06.20.12

joe and his new iphone are a cavalier and his horse: they gallop through battle as one and then find the best pizza nearby, or something. i, on the other hand, have downloaded but a single app and have managed to coat my device with a thin film of absinthe-scented beeswax (one must wash one's hands after applying lip balm and prior to setting one's alarm clock, it seems). that said, i will grudgingly admit that it's now super-easy to take photos of garbage (and i dearly love taking photos of garbage). i will give you that and only that, robot overlords.

06.18.12

101 in 1001 {III}: 006 bake pumpernickel bread from scratch [completed 06.15.12]



summer fridays! they're referenced on twitter, and one hears of them in passing on saturdays and sundays, but never were they mine until last monday, when it was announced that my office would be closed at the end of the week, motherfuckers. with baking time on my hands, i found myself a recipe, hit the whole foods at columbus circle like an eastern army with a continent-sized campaign on its map, and settled down to make some pumpernickel.

the tricky part of bringing this bread into being was, oddly, the shopping (o, how the russians fetishize shopping): deb of smitten kitchen's russian black bread calls for seventeen ingredients, including a fresh shallot, unsweetened chocolate, three kinds of flour, a decommissioned tank, and four severed alliances. the combination of those things resulted in the peculiar cat-food smell that is the signature of good pumpernickel, though, so i figured i was on the right track.



as my go-to bread procedure has always been jim lahey's no-knead recipe, spending quality time with a dough was new and a little frightening. how much abuse did it want? what does springy feel like, anyway? was i supposed to fold and punch, to stretch and wheedle, to fling and exclaim? i spoke a little russian to the gluten as it developed ("i am studying international relations at stanford university, i am not a spy! what time is it? meat salad!").





the bread, to make a long story short, was quite horrorshow; i think i would be a bit more liberal with the caraway seeds, toss in a bit of sauteed onion, and perhaps tinker with the flour ratios a bit next time (for the pumpernickel flavor was just a bit subdued), but on the whole i was exceedingly pleased. my two loaves rose dutifully, and they were right tasty sliced and toasted with scrambled eggs and cracked pepper.

summer fridays are not merely for making bread, o my brothers; i have also been addressing the 101 in 1001 list with new-to-me shakespeare (as you like it in central park on thursday night) and kubrick (full metal jacket as i pumpernickeled). as you like it was one of the better comedies i've seen in recent years; lily rabe's rosalind was sharp and charming, a katharine hepburn for arden, and the bluegrass steve martin composed for the show paired well with the cast's high spirits. i teared up as i do every year; it is so fine, this city of mine with its plush june air and whirling moths and poetry all over the place. full metal jacket, in turn, was...passable? i liked the head-shaving opening sequence very much (can you really shave a head that quickly?), and vincent d'onofrio was as scary as he always is, but the pacing was weird, and joker's final voice-over was disappointing. i have higher hopes for barry lyndon and dr. strangelove.


imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 what would you do with a suddenly-spare friday?
02 are you a baker of bread? have you any kneading secrets?
03 how many of shakespeare's plays have you seen (live)?
04 do you ever cry at plays?
05 am i the only one who didn't know 2 live crew sampled full metal jacket?
06 have you seen prometheus? was that first scene on earth?

06.13.12

i do try to avoid photographing and talking about things here - though the fact that i'm an inveterate, indiscriminate hoarder is obvious and kind of unavoidable, you don't need to hear all about the dominos and plastic animals and moist towelettes and bits of icelandic licorice i carry around the city - but naurnie got me all worked up when she posted about her day-to-day jewelry. mine is very meaningful to me as well, you see, and it would be a great shame if, say, a crocodile ate one or both of my hands and you never saw it (i saw romancing the stone several dozen times in the eighties, so that was my primary concern when we bought my engagement ring, easily the fanciest thing i've ever owned: what if a crocodile makes off with my hand?). and so.

the silver cuff ring at top is from a tibetan shop on union street in san francisco; i bought it to replace a similar ring from a kiosk in the garage in harvard square. the script is a six-syllable mantra associated with the bodhisattva of compassion. it's particularly handy as a hook for the rest of my daily pieces, all of which are removed and set aside on a regular basis (some people sleep in their engagement and wedding rings; i remove mine when i eat chips).

the white gold band perpendicular to the cuff is my wedding ring, part of the late, amazing tobias wong's diamond project; it came in a little plastic bubble from a grocery-store toy machine. i also have one of tobi's diamond-embedded dimes, but i can only wear it once every week or so; i'm allergic to the nickel-copper blend (if we are ever in a superhero battle royale, you can defeat me with costume jewelry).

the platinum solitaire framed in the tobi wong ring is my engagement ring, by henrich & denzel (compliant with UN resolutions 1171, 1173, 1306, and 1343). the modern bezel setting suits me and my interest in playing with cats without putting their eyes out, and the jeweler is really understanding when joe and i come back in to have our rings polished up after feats of strength or especially nasty manual labor.

06.11.12

THUNDERTOME II: ROUND 10
SURVIVOR: the long ships (frans g. bengtsson)*
CHALLENGER: the ask (sam lipsyte)

i was, i will admit, a bit worried that the many months between the one in which i finished the ask (october, maybe?) and this one had somehow distorted the way i feel about sam lipsyte's writing. then, as if assigned by the universe's own deputy fairness editor, lipsyte's short story "the republic of empathy" appeared in the new yorker's science fiction double feature and became my subway reading last week. a refresher! what luck! a snippet:

I took Philip for a walk. He tired easily, but his gait was significant. He tended to clutch his hands behind his back, like the vexed ruler of something about to disintegrate.
"How about a brother or sister?" I asked.
"How about I just pooped," Philip said.
"Thanks for your input."
Peg always said I shouldn't model sarcasm for the boy, but who will? Everybody's so earnest around children. Besides, I've always wanted to model. To strut down the runway under all that strobe and glitter, while the fashion aristocrats cheer on my sarcasm.

if you relish the prospect of a book-length version of this - a verbally-confident narrator who does little donuts in his word-jalopy, a creepy child, paragraphs in which returns diminish - the ask is for you. but i'm getting ahead of myself; let's begin again.

it has been argued that it's incredibly difficult to write long-form satire. i agree; i vaguely recall liking the harvard lampoon's bored of the rings, but that probably says as much about my surplus of affection for j.r.r. tolkien as it does about the caliber of the poonies' vietnam jokes (and either way, i was exceedingly tired of the name "dildo bugger" by the time i put that book down). moving higher up the brow, it's no accident that "a modest proposal" is, well, swift, or that the new yorker's "shouts and murmurs" humor pages top out at two pages of ha-ha, max. being funny at length is no mean feat, and being funny at length while telling a meaningful story is, i would imagine, very nearly impossible. unsuccessful book-length satire, moreover, is bad like a cobra: i hated david lodge's nice work (a self-satisfied rumpity-bumpity novel about university politics and corporate shenanigans and crap) so much when forced to read it in college that i re-read elizabeth gaskell's north and south (the earnest, industrialism-can-grow-a-heart! 1855 novel which gave rise to lodge's book, sort of) so that i could write a twice-as-long-as-required essay in which i did my best to beat the former to death with the latter. david lodge makes richard whitely look like lenny bruce.**

deep, slow breaths. in, out. at the other end of the spectrum, i think gary shteyngart (the russian debutante's handbook, absurdistan) marries satire and sentiment pretty well, though he sometimes takes awhile to get there (i'll talk about that if i ever manage to THUNDERTOME super sad true love story, speaking of taking awhile to get places). if lydia millet in the times book review is to be believed, sam lipsyte does, too:

What makes “The Ask” work so well is the way it dovetails its characters’ self-loathing with their self-consciousness. For instead of making its characters blind — a strategy upon which much farcical writing since “Don Quixote” has depended — it gives them 20-20 vision but endows them with perfect impotence. Milo and Don and Maura and their colleagues have more depth than many of the celebrated satirical characters of the past, and Lipsyte’s great accomplishment is to pull this trick off without trumpeting it. His characters are intelligent, even hyper­intelligent — they’re nobody’s fools, clearly — but finally their weakness is near-infinite.

[...]

It’s as if publishing is afraid to be both literary and funny anymore — as though, in hedging its bets against the competitive advantage of other media, publishing fears the literary comedy and even more the literary satire. And we’re a weaker intellectual culture because of it: other forms simply don’t do the same work that great satirical literature does. It takes fiction, with its subtlety and interiority and sentence rhythms and essential made-upness, to marry the individually uproarious to the systemically tragic in a way that can be laughed at without, finally, also being laughed off.

she could be right about publishing. she's totally wrong about lipsyte. impotent characters are fine with me when they're instrumental; i don't necessarily need them to teach me things about how the world works, as, say, kafka's do, but i need them to move me, or at the very least to make me laugh. lipsyte's milo, an overeducated and -fed toddler-father living with his wife in queens and leering his way through throwaway jobs in higher education, does none of those things.

Back in high school, I remembered, a soothing way to fall asleep after picturing tremendous breasts in burgundy bras (yes, the image pre-dated Vargina) had been to conjure the crimson blossom of bullet-ripped concert tees, the hot suck and pour of flamethrower flame over pep rally bleachers. Typical teen shooter fluff, though I was worried I'd inherited my grandmother's nutcake gene. I was fairly popular. Why did I slaver for slaughter?
The visions had stopped in college. Some huge and dainty hand peeled them off my skull walls.
I became a painter, at least at parties. I was happy for a time.
But now, riding the trains, or else home sitting with the bills, the old terrible feeling returned. Whenever I checked my bank balance the terrible feeling welled up in me. The goddamn asks, I'd sweep them with a Maxim gun or some other wipeout device whose history I learned of late at night on the war channels, a glass of Old Overholt rye on my knee. I was not bad off compared to most of the world. Why didn't anybody do anything? We could get a few billion of us together, rush the bastards. Sure, a good many of us would die, but unless the asks popped off some nukes, eventually they'd get overrun.
What was the holdup?

passages like these make me feel like the house centipedes that blunder out of the drain in our bathroom once every six months or so. they try so hard to scramble up the sides of the drinking glasses with which i catch and release them to the balcony; as those legs and legs and legs catch on nothing and nothing and nothing, i imagine their little mugs look like i did as i reread the first four chapters of the ask on the way to columbus circle this morning. where am i expected to get with this? why am i so angry?

in a breathless review for the guardian, the novelist geoff dyer points to "strong traces of...Don DeLillo" in lipsyte's writing. "Characters are recruited and scenes contrived solely for the pleasures of setting up a two- or three-person groove, to riff on and report back from the leading edge of language." never mind the interchangeable voices, the particle-board personalities, the ditties that never really begin or end; the riff's the thing!

forgive me for referring you once again, dear readers, to infinite jest, the big boss battle waiting for all post-modern writers who fancy themselves masters of humor and structure - but you see, one doesn't need to flip back through it to remember what madame psychosis sounds like, to be reminded of what happened to don gately, to know whether or not the jokes buried in the endless footnotes were funny, to get the point. it's been years since i last read it all the way through (i'm overdue for a reread, actually), and i'm still dead certain the chapter headings alone could take the ask in THUNDERTOME. am i saying sam lipsyte doesn't do it for me because he's not david foster wallace? yeah, i guess i am; i need satire with a big old bleeding heart, a punch line with actual punch. not characters with character - i can handle the fact that milo is a schmuck - but a reason to stick around for three hundred pages. there isn't one here.

VICTOR: the long ships; the ask should be abandoned in shark-infested waters.


imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 how many times have you heard the trolley song? could you stand to hear it again?
02 when was the last time a book made you hulk-mad? what was it?
03 have you ever had to deal with a house centipede?
04 have you read the ask, or lipsyte's recent piece in the new yorker? do you think he's funny?
05 is it fair to expect chewy emotional nougat at the center of satire?
06 is it fair to expect pomo writers to be better than david foster wallace?
07 how do you feel about jazz?

*previous battle here.

**the only other time i got that angry in the middle of an assignment was when i filled the last two pages of my film class's final blue book with vitriol about judy garland's stupid eyebrows after having to watch "the trolley song" from meet me in st. louis ten times in a row. i got a gentleman's B.