08.08.05

readers, i have failed. i sprinted out of work on friday, hoping to put together a wee photo essay on the general lee's appearance at the 56th street hooters, but rain was dissolving the group shot by the time i was within range. i got a picture of jumpsuited dukes of hazzard promo guys and an accidental two-second movie of a hooters girl with fat arms (ha!) running for cover, both nixed with a slip of the thumb on friday evening; sincerest apologies. in lieu of boobies, my favorite snippets from pauline kael's new yorker film reviews (june 1983 - july 1985):

(on footloose)
Footloose is what they're not.

(on risky business)
There's a stale cuteness in the idea; it's like a George Bernard Shaw play rewritten for a cast of ducks and geese.

(on al pacino's tony in scarface)
He's a pig rooting around in money and cocaine, and, as things go wrong, he snorts more and more. (This could be a summary of how some movies are made now.)

(on against all odds)
God, how I have come to hate car chases.

(on prince in purple rain)
He's a cutie when he dances.

08.04.05

as evidenced by my weekend of ovary smut, i have no problem with girlie trash. i find it nice, as a matter of fact - as long as it doesn't think it's something else. lauren weisberger's everyone worth knowing, for example, tries to pass itself off as a defense of the romance novel; no. jane austen stumped for the novel-novel (a "work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language") quite pleasantly in northanger abbey ; weisberger, on the other hand, sends her heroine to a weekly meeting of harlequin junkies who must be on to something good because, in all other respects, they're so damn hip. honey, no. we're also expected to believe in Big Romance because bette's final affair resembles one - but weisberger is too lazy to flesh out her analogies ("it was, i had to admit, a sex scene straight out of a harlequin"), and the 'real' courtship is too skimpy to serve her purpose. then there's the issue of satire, the reason i decided to read the thing in the first place; weisberger leads the reader to believe she's gonna nail the PR/events industry. there's no denying that she knows the scene; i met most of the types she describes, minus the coke binges and bungalow 8 fixations, in my year as a press-schmoozer. that said, bette never really realizes that publicists are Evil; she simply objects to real work, evil or otherwise. worst of all, the book just isn't funny. i hate you, lauren weisberger.

the encyclopedia of exes, on the other hand, is a pleasant surprise; i expected vapid short stories to match the gimmicky premise (26 male writers riff on breakups - alphabetically!) and got a reasonably tight anthology. lethem's "five" (originally "five fucks" in wall of the sky, wall of the eye) is a solid highbrow excuse for picking the book up in the first place, and panio "never heard of him" gianopoulos wins my heart with "murmur," a piece whose love affair ends with the narrator petting a cat that has a serious spinal injury. the bad news? we're reviewing everyone worth knowing, and the encyclopedia of exes got tossed and forgotten on the free table. the good news? i picked it up, so you can borrow it and get happy. i love you, injured cat.

08.03.05

thanatette (6:00:04 PM): what will you name your wine fridge? and do you plan to drink enough white wine to justify it?
thanatette (6:00:21 PM): most importantly, can we have a stevie nicks dress-up night?
Unideli (6:00:47 PM): 1. i will name her claire.
Unideli (6:00:52 PM): 2. it's for red wine, you dolt.
Unideli (6:00:55 PM): 3. yes.

08.02.05

i stitched up another beanie koi. mmm, beanie koi.

08.01.05

i will spare you most of the details of my intensely girlie weekend; food photos are over at flickr, and i'll dry heave over lauren "devil wears prada" weisberger's latest tragedy at a later date. let us summarize with movie cinquains.

wimbledon:

tennis
is not the stuff
of high romance, but i
wouldn't kick paul bettany out
of bed.

the wedding planner:

treacly
and utterly
satisfying. i cried
when yicky j-lo got her man.
help me.

mean girls:

better
by far than what
i've come to expect from
SNL alums. only two
fart jokes!

ms. gaw asked for a list of my favorite ten poems. sadistic girl! that's harder than choosing a favorite child, and i'm a baby-hating dink. here's an attempt, though i would note that i excluded all pieces i've already excerpted or otherwise pimped. in no particular order,

quarantine, eavan boland
the dover bitch, anthony hecht
the taste of rain, jack kerouac
a supermarket in california, allen ginsberg
with mercy for the greedy, anne sexton
do not go gentle into that good night, dylan thomas
a cloud in trousers, vladimir mayakovsky
song, seamus heaney
you're, sylvia plath
this, osip mandelstam

most of those are brief and/or maudlin and/or abrasive, which shouldn't surprise anyone who suffered through poetry 92 with me. go team go!

07.28.05

work is crazy. joe's in arizona. i'm sewing wee creatures again.



koi are fun to stitch, so lemme know if you need, um, beanie fish.

07.26.05

i never get tired of noting that my cats are goddamn adorable.

07.21.05

all hail the fantabulous summer friday that'll enable me to spruce up the apartment for weekenders! jen and valya are coming in from chicago and san jose, respectively, and this will be the first college roommate reunion since val's wedding two years ago. mari and i haven't finalized crafty local tour guide plans, but i feel reasonably confident that we can forestall muggings and bad hair. as i'm sure you all worry about my hair, more on that: i caught myself looking like a monk in an h&m dressing room mirror last week, so i went at my head with some sewing scissors and ended up with aggressively glam bangs that both our beauty and fashion editors (yay!) have admired. i have no pipe dreams about a salon career, but i do feel thrifty for having avoided professional cuts since the end of last year. this is arguably an accomplishment.

on accomplishments, i finally got off my ass and pitched a story to the senior health editor. won't know if it's a go until she gets feedback from the rest of the team, but in the best of all possible worlds, i could have a byline in the next few months. as usual, i share this so that if it doesn't happen, i can attribute the disappointment to jinxing myself by talking about it. call it web-based existentialism.

from the "month of softies" flickr pool, the world's largest sock monkey? crafty girls, you are the queens of my world.

07.18.05

joined jacob and david for a brief and fragrant trip to the met on sunday afternoon – brief because jake was on his way back to penn state, and fragrant because 1) new york has been a sweltering pit for the past week and a half and 2) everyone who stopped by the chanel exhibit either emptied a bottle of no. 5 over their heads or, being french, came as god perfumed them (i refer you again to the weather). the exhibit itself reminded me that even the very best tweed suits have a dowdy vibe, and that swap meet chanel and please hammer, don't hurt 'em are both karl lagerfeld's fault. the met's swanky new duccio, in turn, reminded me that i can't handle religious art for more than five minutes without dissolving into giggles. i mean no disrespect, but the babies get me every time.

07.13.05

was so very bored yesterday that i finally accepted a pamphlet from the dude who sings unintelligible yet operatic hymns and patriotic songs in front of the office. if you remove bible quotes and the phrase "go to hell," it's found poetry:

Man does not seek after God, but in His love, God seeks man, so that he will not
While His Spirit works in your heart, please do not
You cannot go to heaven by church membership or good works, but only through the blood of Jesus, so please do not
Here God says again, if you go to heaven, you must go through His Son Jesus Christ. There is no reason for you to
Once you see yourself as a sinner in God's sight and realize that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven, the Holy Spirit says, "Please do not
We cast things away when we no longer need them, but God will never cast you out when you come to him. He begs you not to
After you hear the Word of God, please accept Him, because after death it will be too late. Please do not
Regardless of what man may say, God's Word is true; therefore, please do not
Repentance is seeing yourself as God does, turning from your sins, coming to Jesus Christ, and trusting Him for our salvation. If you do not repent, but reject Jesus Christ as your Saviour, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Please do not
If you will accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour, please pray with all your heart:

on the subject of casting things away, the proprietress of there is no away has undertaken a fascinating project:

I publicly agree to take responsibility, for one month, for all the packaging that comes into my life. While I will continue to mulch, burn, and compost those items that I normally deal with in those ways, I will catalog all the (plastic) garbage that I would traditionally toss in the trash or send off to recycling, and make something useful out of every bit of it. For one month.

cigarette butts would unmake me in a situation like that, though chow yun fat fans would argue that they plug up gunshot wounds pretty well. me, i thought they turned into baby pigeons until i heard cheeping and saw a nest above our building's awning last week. there goes that theory.

on the subject of joe's brain, here is a picture of joe's brain.

07.11.05

my mom now has an artist page at the brigham galleries in nantucket. admire her, o internet! give her oodles of money for her kick-ass sculpture! i, in turn, have continuted to construct things with humble felt; for joe's recent birthday i put together an anthropomorphic cannoli.

have decided to return to a metered film review system; the paragraph format doesn't suit my attention span. the movie cinquains liveth in the summer of '05:

war of the worlds:

bitchin'
disaster scenes;
a pointless tim robbins;
tom cruise clearly wanted to smooch
his son.

the getaway:

ali
mcgraw is a
visual sedative.
sally struthers is a daft ho.
discuss.

white heat:

gangster
flick with sound bites
galore. plausible psychopath,
that james cagney. his moll looks like
my boss(!).

07.06.05

debauched twentysomething that i am, i spent the holiday weekend sewing and prowling around junk stores. mari popped over on friday, so i got to present her with a housewarming trinket at last; since joe and i saw our first-ever fireflies on the way to her place last week, she requested a stuffed bug. ta-da! i like green butts and i cannot lie. i also had a crack at july’s “month of softies” project (theme: a world of sock monkeys). here’s my zombie version, complete with exposed brain and an ‘optic nerve’ that came wrapped around joe’s cupcakes from the bakery. my future is clearly in handmade wedding favors.