shut up and make stuff, part II

Everyone needs to immediately run out and find this essay, graphic essay, whatever you want to call it by Lynda Barry. Why? Because she captures here in the most essential straightforward way the ridiculous cycle of fear and judgement most artists find themselves in, or maybe I'm projecting. One particular part of this work resinates for me, when a little figment of her imagination is leaning over her shoulder watching her draw and it says, "oooh that's good ... uh, you wrecked it." That is my biggest fear, I make something that is almost good, almost done, almost an expression of my true potential but I stop short, terrified that in adding to it I will wreck it. And so I have spent many years being "promising" but not achieving. So what do you do? How does Ms. Barry suggest I, all of us, escape this horrible trap? Shut up and make stuff. Enjoy the god damn process, stop thinking about it needing to become anything.  Stop thinking about results and instead think about experience. Ram Dass isn't dicking around when he says BE HERE NOW. 

So world of the interwebs, and my mom, I have officially finished my novel. I have managed to finish something I have been terrified to finish, because I haven't wanted to frog it up. But it is done and my mantra through out was "no judgment, not expectation." Did I live up to that? Hardly, but I had moments that were clear-eyed and true, moments that were just me and my characters in a room staring at each other saying, so enjoying the weather? And now I have the terrifying, exciting task of 1. selling the thing (not so process oriented) and 2. making something new. And here is where I get to embrace the moment. Not think of my next book, or my first one, but just write, just make work, generate pages and see what comes out. The joy of starting fresh is there are no limits to where I can take a story, no problems that need to be solved, no characters that need another level, it's just whatever it is. FUN! So I assume in the next week or two the writer's block will descend. Or I'll have to do more revising of the frogging book. Is anything every really finished? (another post all together)

night out

It wasn’t so much that I was old or that I was no longer willing to stay up past midnight. I stopped going out, specifically going dancing, because I was no longer a slave to my addiction. While I was a drinker, from the drinkenest town, I was what you would describe as a problem drinker. Some of my problems involved fidelity, unopened mail, honesty, the City of Boston Impound, and keeping food down. But my addiction was something else. When I escaped Boston and all the freshly tapped kegs of Pabst therein, I stopped. I stopped drinking the way you stop at a busy intersection. I no longer wanted to cross the street against the light. I wanted friends and a life and a job. I gave up my addiction to Nights Out. Liquor I could turn off, like it was a bad song on the radio, but the Night Out was harder. So full of potential, the Night Out held all the promise of every John Hughes movie that had made my twelve year old heart sing. The Night Out was not just dancing, though that was usually the most promising, it could be the local dive bar, or the house party of a friend of a friend. I had to know some people, but never everyone, there had to be an element of surprise, of, most crucially, possibility. This was my true addiction. Like a coke head searches for the cleanest high, I searched for the ultimate good time. The ultimate good time was a cliché, the party where I was the sparkling, brilliant, mysterious girl flowing through hallways and up stairwells, leaning in close to hear breathless confessions and sticky sweet gossip, on a mad search for cigarettes with a girl I’d never meet, listening to a boy cry about his lost love and mixing him the most outrageous drink I could create from pinapple juice, marachino cherries and stout, all to end or, actually, to never end with some blue-eyed mop-top in jeans that would be too small for me. Not casual, but destined, not fumbling but frenetic. And driving fast down roads where familiarity sufficed for sobriety, winding up on a roof top in the winter looking over the river, in a park on a bench snow coming down on a the half gone whisky bottle, in a loft above the paint store smoking a joint, a new party a new group, a new boy. But usually it was four beers, furious dancing or furious talking with the eternal wing girl, and then a swerving drive back, asleep by three up by noon. This addiction plagued me. Sent me to a local bar thinking that drinking would somehow bring about the perfect Night Out. But those nights never existed. A few came close, but ended in parking tickets or my car keys thrown on a roof, perilously close to being swept into the gutter with the leaves. The perfect high was far beyond the simplicity of white powder and green cocktails. It was a ghost that told me I was beautiful and unique and out there was a man that would read my mind and play my pussy like a flute and bring down the sky and heaven with the sweetness of his words and I would be fulfilled in everyway. I would be cool. I would be unafraid. I would be understood. The reality was a man that stalked me until I discovered I was too lonely to get a restraining order and too far away from my perfect Night Out to be alone with the tv and the bong.

            My Perfect Night Out now is very different, because it isn’t perfect or out or even at night most of the time. Usually it is afternoon in the park, watching the dogs swim at their muddy little beach. Or it is morning in bed in the sun with a man that gave me nothing but space until I couldn’t take it anymore. Or it is on a train heading home to my new city, the one that never sleeps, where ironically, I go to bed early.

you can do it (or shut up and make stuff)

Deborah Ellis, her work feels like home

Here is the question of the day, or at least a question that has been coming up a lot with various friends: are you an artist if you aren't actively making work? This then opens up the larger question of how do we define the term artist? (when I use the word I mean anyone who has a creative pursuit, musician, writer, visual artist, director, actor, dancer etc.) To the first question my immediate response is: Of Course You Are. To the second question my response is: The homeless guy camped in the tunnel between the 42nd street F and 7 stops, who sells drawings of alien invasions done in marker on cardboard. That is frogging commitment, plus he is GOOD.

I've been lucky enough to know a few artists in my life. My maternal grandmother painted portraits, my mother was a sculptor for decades before switching to writing, a cousin of sorts is a particularly accomplished painter (see above),  a close friend is the most productive committed artist I've ever known, when choosing between food and paint he always chose paint, well paint and cigarettes. I grew up watching my mother patina steel and bronze sculptures on our back porch. I consistently had slivers of paper glued to my socks because of her constant collage work and use of spray glue. We had a thirty pound block of clay, a kiln and oxy-gas torch tanks in our basement. My sister and I made clay sculptures (a guinea pig, a buddha, a mermaid, a spinx) and painted pictures. My sister posed for a portrait, slept under a quilt she sewed, stirred the fire with a poker she smithed. I learned how to use our guillotine of a paper cutter, painted watercolors, made a paper mache penguin. My mother matted and frame her collages, drilled holes in granite boulders to mount sculptures. I worked the guest book at her art openings. I began writing at age nine, including but not limited to, a serial I wrote in the second grade about a team of astronaut dogs (which may have been heavily "inspired" by Pigs in Space). I wrote a murder mystery at age twelve, my older sister read the first three pages and knew who dunnit. Creating was just a part of my life. Though that never made it easy. I wanted my drawings to be photorealistic and, in elementary school, felt completely defeated that I couldn't make it happen.  I wanted my writing to be original and complex, my predictable murder mystery was the first of many perceived failures. I grew up on art the way most kids grew up on video games and sports scores. But that doesn't mean that it has been easy for me to say, out loud, I am a writer.

a few of my mom's pieces in my childhood home, I always thought this room was magic

I now know that I'm an artist. I had believed that quietly in my own heart for a long time, but found it very difficult to admit it to other people. It was particularly hard when I finished school. After I graduated from college I didn't write anything, some manic journalling maybe, but nothing else. I wrote nothing for two years. I spent those two years working in publishing, filling out contract templates, numbering manuscript pages, staring at an unread slush pile, explaining production schedules to some of the greatest writers I've ever read. It is a unique type of torture to be a blocked artist working with other more prolific and successful artists. Ultimately it was inspiring, or at least having a conversation between myself and an author appear in a climatic scene of their bestselling novel was motivating. The next thing I wrote was a story for my grad school applications.

To those friends of mine I say this: if you haven't made work recently you are still an artist, you just aren't growing as an artist. You are an artist if you consistently make work over a long period of time, even if that period is broken by long stretches of blocked, dead, unproductive spells (aka depression, drunken blackouts, or sobering terror). You are an artist if you are passionate about your work, whether the work is manifested or just some dark and impenetrable cloud in your head.  Call yourself an artist if you have an artistic soul. And maybe that soul is tortured by having never made art (though this would put you in a subcategory of the thwarted, unrealized, or terrified artist). Maybe by calling yourself an artist you will find the space to actually make the art. Sylvia Plath said, "the worst enemy to creativity is self doubt." So get on that toad. Paint those pictures, take those photos, film that sketch, paste that collage, pop that lock, knit those arm warmers, write those god damn poems and stories and novels and plays and jokes and songs and scripts and journals and, god help us all, blogs.

 (or just listen to this song, 'cause we can't take this toad too seriously)

a meager post after a shamefully long absence

Summer: A list

A teenage boy riding a bike with a towel over his shoulder.
Tan little girls wearing skirted bathing suits in line at the local ice cream shack, once called Dick and June's.
Sticky picnic tables at Woodmans.
Eating sandwiches at the kitchen table while wearing a wet bathing suit and a towel.
When the wind shifts and I can smell the ocean.
The drum of moths against the screen.
Time for the morning newspaper and donuts.
Riding bikes in the driveway.
Outdoor showers.
Naps (this is all year, but particularly satisfying in the summer)
Listening to my cousin play the cello, and between songs, listening to the rain.
My daughter learning the words "sand castle."
Tan lines.
Brushing sand out of my bed at night.
The quiet rumble and lull of the distant train whistle. My favorite sound in the universe.
The twenty three bug bites that prove I spent two weeks in the country.

I have been her kind

Rayanne Graff, a character on My So Called Life has been getting alot of chatter online lately. Maybe because MSCL is streaming on Netflix, maybe because of (gulp) ninties nostalgia (god I'm old), or maybe because we as a culture are more willing to look at previously marginalized characters. Whatever the reason I've also had Rayanne on the mind lately. Rayanne is both the corruptor and educator of the main character on the show, Angela Chase, who is that wonderful breed of innocent, with the lines of Eartha Kitt's "I Want to Be Evil" running through her head, "what ever I've got I'm eager to lose." Their sweet, obsessive friendship is archetypal, a phenomenon all women are familiar with (described far better than I could here by Emma Straub).

I've had many Rayannes in my life, wild girls who I worshiped, whose friendships I sought and cherished and lost. I have also been the Rayanne, I've been the slut and the betrayer, the bad influence, and the friend that brings voice to unspoken desires (or cosigns bullshit). But there was one girl, one woman, who was my true Rayanne, the first one, the one by which all others were measured. She gave me license to be someone I was petrified of being, to even consider it. She saw some force in me that I wasn't sure of myself. I was seventeen. I was afraid. But she helped me see that I was also strong and strange and full of fire. Her name was Clare Amory.

Clare, at eighteen, smoked Marlboro Reds. She read Anne Sexton and sang Roberta Flack. She was a dancer, a poet. She listened to Huggy Bear at eight in the morning at a volume that shook the clapboards of our dorm, audible from outside the building. She wanted nothing but heat, tank tops and swimming, and kept her dorm room sweltering, the radiators hissing and spitting, while she ran three seperate fans and had the window open. She made her two bunk beds into one double bed so that her room felt somehow more like a studio apartment. We would lie on that double bed leaning on elbows and discuss road trips, mix tapes, poetry, all boys, particular boys, including a boy she was stalking, physically stalking. Together we hid in bushes by the playing fields, loitered by his car in the parking lot. This was before cell phones and the internet, when someone's whereabouts were a mystery to be solved over the course of a day. We were gumshoes without the trench coats, we were partners in crime.

We smoked cigarettes together; we walked down Lansdowne street, got turned away from clubs; we slouched through shows at the Middle East; we drank wine; we took hot baths together, our legs tangled, our hair wet; we drove the dark roads of Massachusetts around reservoirs and through office parks. At night we would park in a lot frindged by woods and dance in the headlights to an 80's compilation she bought off the tv. The music would blare from the open car doors and we were demons pounding the asphalt with our hooves, we were selkies too far from the sea, hemmed in by our skin. We were in love with each other the way girls are, when they are young, when they want desperately to be sisters, when they are both strong and lost. Or at least I loved her, worshipped her. She was larger than life. She was the Hollywood sign and I was a starving actress fresh off the plane. We had art in our blood, and farms and Maine and oceans. And dead dogs and broken fathers.

I helped her dye her hair. She showed me how to steal a bra from a department store. We bought prom dresses together. She wore a short silver slip, it was petalled, winged. She was shimmering, lanky, her blond hair down her back. She was a nymph, a sprite, an etheral insect. But with mary jane clogs she spraypainted silver to match. She danced and danced and danced.

She needed me then. She needed a home. And while, the summer after she graduated she lived in my mother's house, I was never there. Always with the boyfriend, always turning away from her. I didn't even realize it, too much the self-involved teenager. Then one day she replaced me as, I'm sure now, she needed to. Maybe with her own Rayanne, though maybe she retained that role. We did not keep in touch, but I kept tabs on her over the years. She became a dancer, a rock star. She found a man to love who loved her back. I always assumed I would see her. I wanted to see her. We knew the same people, lived in the same city. I constantly mistook people for her, someone on the street, a long haired blond in my yoga class, a tall thin woman at the rail of the North Haven ferry.  This past winter Clare passed away. Cancer. She was thirtyfive years old. It had been seventeen years since I had seen her. I cried for days. For her, for her family, for never knowing the powerful, magical person she became.

Hemingway's Province

My hands smell of lavender, 

of verbena.

Hidden beneath the tufts of silk, the fur of a mouse,

a collapsed web, 

I found a kernel bound small and tight.

In it were things that I had been thinking for months,

for years.

In it, parched and withered, undernourished

looking for courage, waiting for harvest. 

How many miles runs the road south?

An invitation burned on palm leaves.

Palms burn, an invitation. 

Take my hand and I will no longer be a fern.

Not cold and bowed in the shade, 

but crisp, singed at the edges.

la la love you

The decor is very 60's LA, to me anyway

In honor of my beloved neighbors who are about to move to Los Angeles I've decided to spend this summer changing my attitude. At least towards LA. This is going to be my California Summer, at least in terms of media consumption. I want to find a way to short circuit my knee-jerk east coast aversion to LA. I have been to the City of Angles once and had a wonderful time, but I still find it completely bizarre that people live there permanently. Even more strange, people are from there, born there. Shocking. Now I have typical objections to the place: the hideous car culture, all the evils of suburbia but with crime and heavy traffic; the image-twisting, confidence-sucking, competative to the point of mania-inducing machine that is Hollywood; flip flops; the birthplace of the plastic surgery epidemic; the obscene pressure to be thin; use of the phrases "Hella" and "it's all good"; fanatic California vegans; strip malls instead of main streets. But then I have a New Englander's objection too, the puritian values encoded in my DNA that make me think living somewhere that is continuously warm and beautiful is weak; it is not real life. Living through winter each year shows one's resiliance and resourcefulness. Like I said, this is deep instinctual stuff. Not pretty, not rational, certainly not kind. So I want to do some deprogramming. I'm ready for a mental journey west. I want to find a bi-coastal state of mind. Like Joan Dideon or the Beastie Boys. I think part of my prejudice stems from Hollywood's perpetuation of LA as the vapid and artificial Bimbo of world class cities. Of course there are far more positive images of LA in the collective consciousness. I want to figure out what they are and replace the ones that don't resonate with me with ones that do. I need to overwrite the images of stilletos on the hollywood stars, of a gloomy, disgruntled looking dude in a Barney suit, carrying his head as he walks through a CVS parking lot, or anything I've ever seen on The Hills. 

When in LA two years and 9 months ago, I ate some of the best meals of my life, saw amazing art (Martin Kippenberger is my hero!), I saw some spectacular light (at Venice Beach, on the highway coming back from Venice beach). I hung out in a beautiful garden and ate grapes, I walked a dog in the hollywood hills, I even saw someone sorta famous. And all in the company of two of my favorite people on the planet. It was a good trip. But it seemed like a lonely place. Despite that feeling, I do now hold LA dear to my heart. During that trip, in the ladies room at Zankou Chicken, I found out I was pregnant. My daughter is about to turn two and someday I very much want to take her to LA. So in the mean time, I want to find a way to fall in love with it a little. What am I missing? I'm going to hunt out that magic in the following places. Many of these I've seen or read or heard before, but I think viewing them in succession might make the difference, help me draw parallels.

500 days of summer

 The Weetzie Bat books

Dogtown and the Z-Boys

Lords of Dogtown

Rebel without a Cause

Best Coast

The Endless Summer (for surfer culture if not LA)

The Kids are Alright

A few episoides of the L word

The Big Sleep

Swingers

The Slums of Beverly Hills

The White Album (the book, not the album)

This is the LA in my head

Tony Alva

There are a few different LA's in the mind of popular culture. There is of course classic Hollywood. 1960's mod hey day. Surfer. Richies, Malibu, Hollywood sharks. South Central. When embracing the the strangeness of life on the left coast, this is what I see:

The Interieor

Domino doing it right

Since the demise of Domino Magazine I have been mourning the loss of an accessible, unstuffy, but modern, tasteful and interesting design magazine. Domino showcased a world of interior design that was young, cool, occasionally humorous, livable and somewhat affordable. It was not the designer-dominated world of the classic six and the country house, but instead a world where designers lived, where regular people of discerning taste attempted to make their homes a conscious expression of their own creativity. Not to say there weren't plenty of Richies profiled in the pages of Domino, people who wrote some big checks to some Important designers. Domino was unlike the overstuffed, chinoiserie, miles of drapery and tasseled ottomans of the living spaces in Elle Decor or the sharp lines and overly architecturalized (yeah that's my word, disseminate at will) interiors of Interior Design Magazine, which do little to show the true use of the spaces. That is to say, those other publications seem to put the house before the home. And maybe the colorful, vintage-inspired, mixed era approach of Domino is closer to my own fashion aesthetic. I like a visit to the country club as much as the next WASP, but I don't want to live there.

So what is a design-oriented girl to do when she is disappointed by the market's available media outlets? Why, turn to the interwebs, of course! Back when I had cable TV and sliced bread and brand name conditioner, or maybe it was just during a work-out at the Y, I came across a final episode of Design Star. I immediately loved the cutie blond with the great clothes and great taste, but, like all great things one discovers while flicking, I never came across it again. Many moons later I discovered that said blond, one Emily Henderson, won the reality show and ended up with her own show, Secrets From a Stylist. Through my now complete devotion to Ms. Henderson and her show, available here, I have found a new replacement for Domino. Or at least a handy online stopgap.

(a photo of e. henderson, see when I say cute I mean it)

Rue Magazine is full of mod influences, vintage collections a'la Joseph Cornell, juxtoposing eras, and a good dose of whimsy. The magazine is run by a bevy of incredibly stylish ladies, and, as always, I like me's a girl-driven venture. It can occasionally get a bit too shiny and polished for my taste, but that is interior design, they aren't going to photograph the house with cat hair on the drapes and stacks of folded laundry on the back of the couch. Maybe some day I'll start that magazine. I'll call it Real Life.

Rue's debut issue from this past fall has an article by Ms. Henderson on entertaining, or I should say playing host while an online magazine throws a party in her house. If you need more then Rue to satisfy your vicarious shopping needs there is also Lonny, also online, started by the former editor of Domino. This one doesn't feel quite as fresh as Rue, but maybe that is because it is too close to Domino and Lucky in its layout.

Now while I've been obsessing over all things design I've had a chance to put some of that energy into my own living room. We are shopping for a new couch because our totally awesome vintage, rolled arm number is "impossible to sit on" says PBT. I'm sad to part ways with it after finding it in Allston, Mass. for $100 and having it for the last ten years (it will merit its postmortem blog post, don't worry). We've also acquired a new chair (the orange dream below) which unfortunately has to be recovered due to a persistent oder that was starting to give me headaches and make me irrationally angry.  So I've included below my inspiration board for our interior, the peaceful, verdant landscape at the heart of our little country (cats implied).

keywords, man (Geheimwort, bursche)

When checking out my stats recently for the lovely little homestead we call Porch Light, (though I'm debating if I want to officially change the name in my head to Porch Light Street Light, or leave the later as just a subtitle...anyway) I came across the traffic source page and the keyword search that lead some thoughtful readers to our door. Those precious jewels that paved the way were the following:

"porch light on in the day time is drugs being sold there"


Now, I don't want to discourage readers, but I feel I should make a small correction for that the German exchange student seeking Blue Devils or Slappers or French Baking Powder who used his best english to type that search into google. Hugold, you will not find any of these things at the house with the porch light on during the day. You will find a) no one home or b) one terrifyingly cranky american house wife who will be twice your size, have some kind of sauce spread on her neck and one ear, be standing in the open door but turned back toward the house screaming something like, "Are you supposed to be doing that? No," or "Spit it out. Now,"and she will already be on much better drugs than you hope to find. Back away from the door slowly, begin speaking German, do not engage using English or you will find out why it is totally unacceptable to ring someone's doorbell in the middle of the day on a Tuesday unless you see blood or smell gas.

Go USA! Party Goodtimes Friday Weekend!

the other book in the two-book contract

The short story is a great form in which to write. It let's you focus on a moment, small or large, in a character's life that is either monumental, a turning point after which nothing is the same, or something small that is emblematic of who they are and how they have struggled/coped/failed in their lives. It is a portrait capturing a character at a particular time in their lives, an instant that should be unique to them but universal in the emotion it elicits from the reader. The form forces the writer to use every word, every sentence to further the story and develop the characters, there can be no wasted space, no exposition, no sidetrack.

As a writer I love the idea of short story collections, a perfectly curated ensemble of delectable treats, like something you'd find in a Jacques Torres box, compact, beautiful little packages with layered, complex, surprising flavors (Earl Grey ganache, who knew?). Stories are something to be savored, far closer to poems then novels in their economy and their independence. Like poems, the point of the short story, what the author hopes the reader takes away, can be just a flavor, one emotion, an image the encapsulates that emotion, an eire vibration that buzzes in the knuckles, in the arches of the feet. Maybe it has to do with what isn't said, with a world of possibility and potential, like a missed connection on a subway, some perfect exchange, some magic of synchronous auras that dims the surrounding commuters leaving nothing but two people. That moment and the memory of that moment is pregnant, poignant, urgent, wistful. And it doesn't need to be more than that (despite what craigslist, hollywood and publishers might have you believe). Novels tend to wring ever drop of possibility from a story. They are the magical meeting on the train, the subsequent five year relationship, the unwanted child, the affair, the revenge affair, the child's subsequent career in prostitution, the very long back story of her pimp who was a high school football hero until he wrecked his knee and had to move in with his grandma because his parents had turned his room into a nursery for their surprise baby who maybe would be the one to go to college since he had blown his shot, the prostitute's parents' search for her, their brief reconciliation in a bad motel room, their ultimate divorce after they find her driving semis, turned onto the new career path by one of her regulars, and her desire never to talk to them again, oh and the pimp dies by the hands of an unsatisfied client who had seen the pimp play his greatest game. Touch down. 

As a reader, I realize that I don't want to savor. Of course, I will stop to underline and sigh at a particularly beautiful line, but I'm more of a glutton. I don't want chocolates I want a Thanksgiving feast. I want to tuck in and not come up for air for weeks. Now you can get lost in a short story, of course, and that is the mark of a good one. But, when the story ends and you are brought abruptly back to your own couch with the shredded arms and the living room that needs to be vacuumed,  you become annoyingly aware of the writer, of the editor, of the entire publishing process. In that blank space between stories, where one set of characters seems to die and another born, the book becomes, not a portal into another's mind (you can imaging Catherine Keener dressed in white as she rolls her eyes, takes your ten dollars and hands you a book), but a commodity, a product, a jumping off point for the inevitable forthcoming novel.  Maybe what it is, what I struggle with, is this: in that space I stop being a reader and become a writer again, seeing too much of the scaffolding beneath the structure of a collection, seeing a magical forest demoted to set pieces, a potted palm lit from beneath by a can light, leaves strewn across a marley floor, a sad moon hanging from a wire. If I try to avoid this place of realism, rush past the void and on to the next story, I end up confusing them, waiting for previous characters to re-emerge.

I want to read these collections though. I want to understand how to make great stories, long or short. I want to see how writers I like solves the same problems I face in my own work. Plus, short stories are powerful, Julie Orringer's "Pilgrims" has been haunting me for months.

Or Jennifer Egan's Safari, which breaks all kinds of "rules" and is better for it. I'm currently reading Other People We Married by Emma Straub, which is flawed, but a really enjoyable read.

Her ability to create believable, unique characters is impressive. Her stories occasionally suffer from a lack of purpose, ending abruptly, but even then they are astute renderings of a moment. Her stories feel real, authentic and so, not always life changing, just life. I can't wait to read something longer from her (see I'm feeding the novel machine, but I can't help it). My issues with Straub's stories may be too influenced by my issue with all story collections in general. Here is my simple solution: the novella. All the continuity you want, without the bloated extra three hundred pages. I just finished Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley, which is so sweet, a light feel good book about a woman on a book-selling road trip at the turn of the century. I have a tidy stack of little books waiting to be devoured. Plus, I have to say the novella has a great weight, just feels good in the hand. Pick one up in the store and you will want to keep it with you. There is something reminiscent in the size and shape of a childhood diary, making it seem a more precious and personal form.

And yes, I'm writing a novel. Shut up.

the Caymans are grand

So let's say you are burnt out. Let's say that after the snowiest winter on record where you were trapped inside with your baby who took eighteen months to learn to walk, which means no cute walks in the snowy wonderland because the stroller can't fit through the snowbanks and the kid weighs over twenty-five pounds so you aren't going to wear her while scaling the soot tinged Everests at every crosswalk. (Those Everests, by the way, were built on the bones of weeks worth of frozen garbage and the caracases of christmas trees.) This means that you have been home in your small apartment which faces North, with one baby and too many animals, for months. Your doctor is mystified by your constant vitamin D deficency, a void no supplement can seem to fill.  Your derealict house guest has moved back to Indonesia so you don't even have her around to talk to (read: make her cry and question her life goals). What can be done, you ask? First you call your dad and get yourself invited on his insurance conference trip to the Cayman Islands. Your sister, who is worse off then you because she is going through everything that you are, except she has two kids and more snow(being in upstate New York), has already beaten you to the punch and booked tickets. You rendezvous with her at the Owen Roberts International Airport, you do not check luggage because you are traveling without your husband and child. You pack three bathing suits and two dresses and three bottles of sunscreen and one book that you've been trying to read for the last year and a half. When you step off the plane, directly onto the tarmac because that is how they do it in the tropics, you are welcomed by live calypso music and a brief rain shower, which feels so good because it is not frozen. After a twenty minute van ride you find yourself here:

This is the view from your balcony at Villas of the Galleon. You immediately slather yourself in SPF 70, put on one of the nine swim suits that you have brought, and hit Seven Mile Beach like it's 1995 and you've never heard of analgesic spray or Colace or Music Together or Dr. Ferber or Overnights or Miralax or Sophie the giraffe or Bugaboo or Mum Mums or mirroring. You simply lie on your beach chair until you can't take the ridiculous heat and then get in to that ocean which is just a hair colder than you expect and then you bob around like the fattest old lady because the salt content is so high you don't even have to bother doing strokes.  So this is what is looks like on your little patch of beach.















You must focus on this, on the quiet and on the fact that you're actually reading hundreds of pages of ficiton, like a regular grown up would. You must try to ignore the other side of the beach, the front yard of the Ritz, which looks like this:

Then in the evenings you put on one of your two dresses and actual mascara and lip stain, not just your glasses and lip balm, and you go to a cocktail party populated almost exclusively by bald men in glasses wearing pink or yellow ties with pineapples on them. Head directly for the bar, ask for anything Cayman, Cayman sunset, Cayman Lemonade, Cayman Punch. Try not to leave your sister stranded with a woman who talks incessantly about her King Charles Spaniels' intestinal issues. If you can avoid it, don't let the waitstaff watch you spit a slimy mushroom stuffed with cream cheese into the garbage. Proceed to get almost drunk. This is fine, you are on vacation. Then move on to dinner, a different restaurant each night, yes, also populated by the bald insurance men. Notice that the best thing on the menu at all of these restaurants are the cocktails. The Grand Old House is part of the five percent of  buildings not wiped off the face of the island in 2004. Order the pina colada, it is light and frothy and tastes of real pineapple and coconut, it may be the best rendition of the drink on the planet. Next, go to Pappagallo, the very best restaurant in the middle of a swamp that you've every been to. Stand up wind of the tiki torches. Order the berry mojito, like a fruit salad with ice and mint and rum. Notice the giant tortoise shell on the wall by the ladies room, wonder if you had fewer mojitos you might find it more disturbing. Say goodnight to the disaffected parrot mascot, before riding in a bus through the more authentic parts of the island--kids on rope swings, chickens in front yards, satalite dishes next to decaying boats--back to the tourist center that is Seven Mile Beach. Wish you could see more of that other part of the island. The next day eat lunch on the beach at Calico Jack's with your sister and Dad, while he has a break from presentations in overly air-conditioned conference rooms. Meet Calico Jack himself, who is feasting on platter after platter of sliced melon with a few other boisterous gentlemen. You'll know it's him by the mustache, the kind that connects to the side burns.

Watch some young girl attempt to walk on water while inside a clear plastic inflatable ball, it doesn't look at all fun. It looks hot and anxiety-producing, though she spends most of the time lying in it watching the fish. (when you get home you will discover that those things are considered horribly dangerous because of the risk of suffocation and drowning). You wonder why people bother with glass bottom boats and inflatable balls when the water is so clear you can see down a hundred feet while you are swimming. No mask required. And there are no sharks in the Cayman Islands. So you can float on your back in the ocean with no Jaws flashbacks. You can just be. You can find some strange hidden pocket within yourself where you are unchanged by the tiny universe that you fostered in your womb, by its sole resident who was the goddess of that world and now is a helpless seedling at your feet as she says things like, "airplane, clouds." Meaning she heard an airplane go by but it was hidden by the clouds. And that secret place, where you are still the you from before, is availible to you any time. Any time you can get on a plane yourself, fly over the clouds, leave your husband to watch your daughter, ride on the coattails of your ever-generous and hardworking father, lean on the far stronger and more patient shoulder of your sister, and hide in a crowd of insurance dudes. Spring 2012 baby, start the count down. 

fortropolis

To journey to the kingdom of Fortropolis is to sail beneath the sea and tunnel through cloud and drift on an underground river as if lost. It is a kingdom that lies beyond the blood and heart and fire of the world. And while you may have heard the legend, that it is populated by wooden trolls come to life, it is in fact the most welcoming of citadels, if you can find it. The trolls are actually pixies, diminutive spirits that emerged from the woods to build their own royal court, throne and spire, keep and wall. While free and wild, they wanted straight lines to accent their circuitous flights, they wanted stones and moats to be the solid ground above which their tiny feet floated like blossoms on a stream, like downy seeds lufting in the exhaling of the trees. But even in the blissful dusk we see their sun setting, their great pleasure dome recedes, before the first keystone has grown moss, back into the arms of the forest. It is not another lost kingdom, slipping below waves, hidden behind mountains. It has not been abandoned. Its steps have become the roots of a great tree, the banyan and the sequoia are flowers in its shadow. The pixie denizens curl soft on their beds of dried leaves, sleep sound beneath the red streamers that still fly at their castle's peaks. To some the residents and keepers of Fortropolis will be seen as peaceful magical creatures, to others, to the misguided traveler, whose campsite is turned upside down by their dancing feet, whose stead is turned loose, whose shoes are hidden in the underbrush, they will be seen as little trolls.

 

the other pink mafia

The princess-industrial complex

Is there a way to help our daughters identify and embrace their gender without forcing them to take on society's prescribed gender roles, without having to equate their value with their looks and their sexuality? We can start by not showing them frogging princess movies, by closely monitoring all of their media consumption, and by constantly encouraging them to embrace not only gender neutral toys, colors, and activities, but to participate in traditionally masculine past times, playing with cars and trains, wearing blue, or, as my own mother did, using a .22 to pick off vermin trespassing in the vegetable patch (poor Peter Rabbit).  We need to do this while still celebrating their identity as girls, which is the tricky part, because without sugar, spice, pink tulle and strappy sparkle shoes what is that identity? Whatever she, my daughter or yours, wants it to be. Right now, for my 19 month old, that means literally cheering every time she points to her vagina. Considering what my vagina went through 19 months ago, what the organ is capable of, I think cheering is appropriate.

While I hope to empower my daughter as my mother empowered me, there is no way to shield her completely from the toad load of gender stereotyping out there. She will go to a slumber party, she will watch Sleeping Beauty, she will spend the subsequent vacation upstate wandering around the woods trying to sing to squirrels. She will internalize The Message that girls must conform to specific characteristics to be considered successful as women, ie feminine, sexy but also pure. These princesses glorify, in the most psychologically manipulative way so that little girls' imaginations latch onto them, a way of life, not just a way of being.  These movies promote the idea that the only way to be happy, let me say that again, the only way to be happy is to find love (aka a man). So a woman must have a man, not just to be complete as a woman, but to feel complete. Many of these girls, sitting quietly in darkened theaters thinking, someone has made a movie just for me and Now I Understand, are children of divorced parents. These girls may decided that married life is happier and easier than single life. This message will then be reenforced by every John Hughes movie they will ever see. "It will all make sense once you have love, it will all get easier once you have love." It is this mantra that can lead them down knotted sheets out their bedroom windows, into borrowed cars and to all night chapels that also sell glowsticks and malt liquor.

This is not new information. I have no illusions about that. I want to some day, when I let her watch media, show my daughter movies that feature smart, strong women achieving goals that have nothing to do with romantic love. Though it is okay if they sing to animals.

This is my kind of princess:

It was this book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, that got my tiara in a twist.

The Courtesy Phone

When I first moved to New York in 2002 I did not have a cell phone and I, and maybe that big creepy fat guy that spends all day at the deli, were the only two people in the city who used pay phones. Of course, the blackout of 2003 happened, and there were lines ten people deep at the few free-standing phones left in the city. Many of those same structures have gone the way of the Walkman, the beeper, the giving of directions, and the memorizing of telephone numbers (we can talk about that tragedy another time). But there are a few gleaming bastions of civilized society left in this town, small little squares of real estate where one can stop, close a door and have a (gasp, hand to the heart or throat) private conversation. I have noticed these temples of decorum seem to remain in institutions of higher moral regard, or perhaps they are a sign of those same institutions' pure refusal to move everything along with the times. You can take my card catalog but you can't take my telephone booths. Yes, the local library preserves our stores of knowledge (unless the magnetic poles shift and Jake Gyllenhaal shows up), but also the pay phone, like those found on the ground level of the main branch of the New York Public Library (and on the first floor too, see below).

by Erik S. Lieber

from www.infrastructurist.com

 

But what of those precious oases on the street? The phone booth has traditionally been a place of refuge, both a literal one from the elements, but also a place of safety, a life line, a last hope. This image and the idea it represents has become iconic in our culture. Like Brenda stranded in the Chicago bus station waiting desperately in a phone booth for Elisabeth Shue, or poor Tippi taking shelter from the gulls, or Griffin Dunne emptying his pockets looking for money to make a call, Christian Slater (before he became his Own Worst Enemy, in more ways than one) and Patricia Arquette sanctifying their union, even Clark Kent's alter ego sheltered behind those squeaky accordion doors. (And yes, the phone booth can also be a depository for bodily fluids, graffiti and chewing gum, but lots of great things in this world, like children or your favorite jeans, may at one time be covered in pee, graffiti or spent gum)








Of course our city and state governments have a responsibility to provide public phones, for safety if nothing else, for those moments when cell phones die or networks are overwhelmed. Can you list all the public phones within a few blocks of your house, can you list any? When they are present they are invisible to us, like parking meters to pedestrians, like boyfriends to players ("what's your pay phone got to do with me?"). What we notice is the absence. So, that is my argument for the fully fledged telephone booth, an icon preserved, a civic responsibility fulfilled, and lastly a large and easily identifiable port in a storm. Here is my most recent find at the Brooklyn Public Library.

natalie get your gun

Over the last decade there has been an increasingly popular trend among celebrities: the shot gun wedding.  Now as a disclaimer, let me say there is nothing wrong with an unplanned pregnancy. There is also nothing wrong with having children out of wedlock. Here is what I don't get: I do not understand being six months into a relationship, getting pregnant and then, as if it is a logical next step, getting engaged. There are dozens of celebrities that have taken this path, the most well know couple is probably Katie Holms and Tom Cruise, the most recent is Natalie Portman and her Black Swan costar. To this I say, Et Tu, Natalie? Now her Harvard education doesn't preclude her from making some stupid choices. A Harvard degree, contrary to what the institution would have you believe, does not guarantee intelligence (or sanity, just ask the Unabomber). 

This strange trend raises a few questions. Do movie stars lack decent education on birth control? Do they see parenthood as a way to create drama (not knowing that the second the kid is born they are no longer the stars of their own lives)? Have they been brainwashed by the romantic comedies they preform, believing that having a baby is romantic and the ultimate symbol of commitment? It is the ultimate commitment, but it is not a symbol. It is not a shiny ring that you can put into a draw when you start developing a rash on your finger. Having a baby with someone is the ultimate adventure that two people can have, the kind of adventure that tests your love for one another, and yes, it certainly brings you closer. Fighting in a war with someone brings you closer. 

I don't mean to sound cynical; there are so many moments of peace and sublime sweetness between parents and children. My focus here is on the pressure that having a baby can put on your relationship. Even the strongest unions struggle under the weight of a newborn, why would someone want to take that challenge on with a person they hardly know. PBT believes that you shouldn't marry someone you've known for less then ten years. I'm a bit more flexible than that. Maybe three years? But why are these stars choosing to marry so quickly? Is the stigma around an unmarried couple with children still so powerful? Why not just live together and see how it goes, why make it . . . not official, you have a kid, that's frogging official, why make it legally binding? If you want a kid so badly why not just follow Padma Lakshmi's example, get pregnant and do it on your own terms. Or pull a Brad and Angelina and create a new definition of family that works for you. Maybe the prospect of doing it alone is just too scary. Maybe the prospect of being that vulnerable with someone with no legal safety net in place is terrifying. 

Maybe as a culture we can't get away from our 1950's image of what a family is supposed to look like. Messing with accepted and anticipated order of events may be as subversive an act as we can manage right now. I supposed that is better than blindly accepting the status quo, but it doesn't feel like enough. It feels like smart girls getting knock up and relinquishing their power, sacrificing it on the alter of some stupid image of their future that was manufactured by Disney to sell plastic sparkle wands and pink sequined princess shoes. Of course, it's easy for me to say all this when my gender identity is exactly where Miss Manners would want it, I'm a stay at home mom with a husband who works full time to support his two ladies. My glass house is very sparkly. 

the genetics of style

Tangerine nails. Something new I'm trying. When asked to join a group of people at the local Russian baths I decided I needed shocking nails, something to take the attention off of my ill-fitting bathing suit (fyi: you can lose all the baby weight, but you can't put things back where they used to be). And some way of accessorizing when jewelry will get hot enough to burn you and makeup will melt off your face. Did I mention that the Russian Baths are basically a bar that everyone goes to in their bathing suits? Normally, I'm not one to care about these things, (when I say "makeup" I mean lip tint and mascara) but even I, a secure and fit (enough) person has her limits. Anyway, I've never really liked painting my nails, in fact it was always just another thing to pick or peel. But lately I've been wanting to look more pulled together, or if not that, than at least like I tried in some capacity. So nails. That is what I can muster. I can't wear my schoolmarm witch shoes by Chie Mihara, bad weather and bad feet. I have no occasion to wear my Vena Cava dress or my Lauren Moffatt jacket. And if I did, I barely have the energy for that kind of dressing. My energy level is at nails, and occasionally hats.

Hats are particularly nice because they distract from, or add to, an otherwise lackluster outfit. I like how my very inspiring friend Miss E described fashion, adornment as creative expression. Some might say that fashion is frivolous, and it is. But one: I'm really talking about style and art in the form of design, you can debate if that is what you call "fashion." And two: couldn't we all use a little frivolity in our lives, some light-hearted fun?

My grandmother was a woman with great style, she wore long brocade sheaths with matching coats, she wore gloves and carried tiny bejeweled purses (when appropriate, of course). She was a statuesque woman, striking, and I imagine, fearless. She wore Pucci. Her hats were from Bonwitt Teller. She had dresses handmade during her travels, in India, Jamaica, Hong Kong. And they always had lace over the hemstitching and stays for bra straps. Her clothes reflected her attention to detail, her demand for good quality, her exhaustingly high standards, and her love of beautiful things. While I was seventeen when she died, her brain, her self, died when I was nine years old. I was never able to know her, to ask her if keeping up that level of appearances was worth it. Was it ever fun, did she ever feel it was a choice? I feel lucky that I don't have to jump through all of those cultural, societal, and wearable hoops. I don't have to wear stockings, ever. I don't have to wear heels, or hats or gloves, and so choosing to wear them is an act of creative expression. It is a tribute I pay to my grandmother, and one I pay to a by-gone time when quality and beauty were synonymous. My grandmother would be scandalized to see what I wear outside of my house (though I am my mother's daughter and spend most of my time in jeans in wool sweaters, so maybe it wouldn't surprise her that much). She would be dismayed by my habit of applying liptint while riding the subway. But, I like to think that she would be happy that as a tired and spread-thin artist I still don some lovely bit of tulle and wire, before I head into Manhattan, where she study art herself in the twenties. Maybe she wore the same hat and walked down the same street. I wish I could ask her. But I know she would hate the tangerine nails. Here is a sampling of my own hat collection, the first two and the black belonged to my grandmother.

for fancy dress events

Mary Poppin's easter hat

the old stand-by

found in Savannah in 1999, there was a veil, but it didn't survive

This one is waiting patiently for spring