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

Mommy Dearest, Nanny Darling

There are many things I have discovered as a result of having a baby like I would rather sleep than do just about anything (that's a lie, I knew that before the kid); that by the age of one a child can understand all the simple words and phrases used in every day life even if she can't say them herself; that the worst parenting critics are sweet little old ladies who accost you in the grocery store because you forgot to bring a sweater for your kid even though it is 90 degrees outside (to be fair it is horribly cold in super markets, and the kid ended up wearing PBT's extra shirt toga style); that most children's books are engineered to make you cry ( i.e. Lama Lama Red Pajama); that after becoming a parent any mention of sad, missing, hurt, or otherwise unhappy children (even if they are grown up and the sadness is all in flashback) in any media form will make you blubber like an idiot and cling to your spouse saying things like "we will never let our baby more then twenty feet from us and during which time we will use some sort of unbreakable tether. She can easily attend college courses wearing it. And we should immediately adopt all unhappy babies. And tether those babies to us;" and that your mother is probably the world's greatest person because she did everything you are doing but with less help and more children (thanks mom).

There is another thing that preoccupies me about parenting. Childcare. As a member of an online moms' group I've been privy to many conversations about childcare between mothers, both working and at home. What has surprised me the most is the way that so many parents devalue this service, asking questions like "why can't we pay the nanny less for babysitting at night when the kid is asleep?" This line of questioning, the one that treats the job like something other than a job, is bizarre to me. People often want to pay less for childcare than they would for housecleaning. Too often parents don't value their nanny's time. They must be paid the same rate whether the kid is sleeping or awake because the parents are paying for the nanny's time not for her level of on-the-job activity. A cashier doesn't get paid less when there are fewer customers. Her time is not less valuable just because the kid is sleeping. Not to mention the fact that the kid could wake up or there could be an emergency.

I feel lucky because I have found two babysitters (sitters, not professional nannies) who are wonderful with my girl, but who also have helped me to see how to best treat someone who is in my home taking care of my kid. It also helps that I was a babysitter up until I got pregnant (it is the perfect job for supplementary income). My two sitters ask to be given car fare home if it is after 10 pm. I also always provide a meal for them. They are, after all, captive in my house. Sure, they could go out and buy something, or bring something from home, but I feel it is important that I have food for them. If I don't, I provide the cash for ordering delivery (particularly at night, when they can't go out themselves). Of course, they may just end up with fish sticks and hummus on toast, but I try to have something more adult-oriented on hand. When I worked in restaurants I was always provided a meal, this is the same principle. The nanny cooks for your kid, so there needs to be food for the nanny to eat too.

It is so easy to forget that hanging out in your house with your fabulous kid is hard work. Though I'm not sure that is the crux of the issue. I'm home all day with my girl and there are plenty of minutes or hours that feel like frogging work. So maybe it's not that some parents forget how much work it is, but just that they are reluctant to face the reality of the expense: the extra food, the cars home, the paid vacation time, the living wage. Maybe when faced with the hundreds or thousands of dollars a month expended on childcare parents need to cut corners any way they can. I just worry about it. I worry when I go to the Y with my girl and pass the long row of women finding a warm dry play space, finding a way to break up their long day caring for someone else's baby. I worry that those women aren't getting what they deserve. Many of those same women bring a wonderful diversity to our too homogenous neighborhood, but it is tragic that diversity is not extended to class distinction. Where are all the white nannies anyway, where are the affluent Caribbean women going off to law firms and brokerage houses while their blond wisp of a nanny changes the butt bombs? But I guess that is another post all together.

In other news, I now have a spiffy new computer that has things like a fully functioning space bar and more than one GB of available memory, so look out.

Buffalo gals

We have entered one of my favorite times of year. Chrixmouse time. As a kid this time of year was typified by the continuous airing of "It's a Wonderful Life." Now I was a devotee of the Movie Loft and the Creature Double Feature, but few things captured my attention like "IAWL," that and the annual springtime airing of "The Wizard of Oz." While I have yet to have my yearly viewing of holiday classic, I have basically the entire film committed to memory. I have recently seen "The Wizard of Oz" and noticed a parallel between the two, I'll call it the Backyard Phenomenon. George Bailey wants travel the world, he is a member of the then newly founded National Geographic Society. He feels that the three most exciting sounds in the world are "anchor chains, plane motors and train whistles." But he ultimately realizes, like Dorothy, that when looking for his "heart's desire" he need never look "further than [his] own backyard." These films were made seven years apart, bookending the Second World War, so was this the fantasy of the men in uniform, or was this our culture's mindset at the time, a way to remind us of what we were fighting for? Or was this a way to discourage people from looking beyond their own small worlds, past distant horizons, to a life that was broader, larger, and therefore unamerican? Or a way to make those people who were home feel like they were contributing something valuable, like George running scrap drives and air raid drills. Maybe keeping a light in the window, the yellow ribbon around the old oak tree (which is where the yellow ribbon as a symbol of support for our troops comes from), the home hearths blazing, has a value and a courageousness that at that time needed to be recognized. If hope dies at home it will not survive on the battlefield. But the reactionary, revolutionary, liberal in me can't help but look for some agenda, some kind neutering of open dialog and questioning of authority inherent in the idea that those at home should just keep the candles lit and dinners warm. At this point in time it was the reverse of what it is now, the public wanted answers for why our nation was unwilling to join the fight. Now we seem to always be fighting. To my few and lovely readers  my christmas wish for us all is peace on earth and a brief moment of feeling what George Bailey discovered. Merry Christmas you wonderful old building and loan.

Illuminated Manuscripts, the next generation

This article about Jonathan Sarfran Foer's new book got me thinking. Normally I'm not really a fan of the writer, but I found the ideas he raised here interesting. His new book is essentially an art object. An already published novel that he has cut up to make a sort of a literary Mad Libs/Lift-the-flap novel. As a novel, I'm not willing to give it my time, but to me it holds far more credibility as  as an artist's book. This feels both snobby and elitist of me, and a bit close minded too. But I'm old school. A book is a book. And I'm not interested in it being diluted with anything. All I want is words, and all on one page, in regular sentences. I can't get through Breakfast of Champions because of the rudimentary line drawing of an asshole. Not only is this perspective close minded of me, but it also reveals my own myopic vision of the future. A vision that I'm trying hard to improve with this blog.  "Foer counters that only in writing do such incursions from other art forms draw much attention." And he's right, if text can appear in visual art, why do images somehow devalue literature? Maybe because to us old school types, images don't seem to add anything, they instead feel like a crutch. Your words should be able to create the visual you want to add. And yet here I am, incorporating images, using them to further my ideas, to help me reach beyond my own limited range as an artist. I began this blog with the dim understanding that, as Foer points out, "It’s not enough. . . for authors to tell stories in the same old ways, even as publishing transforms." Maybe I'm the worst kind writer, standing on the sinking ship, lightening striking the rocks ahead, saying, "the weather's fine, this is just a shower."  All while I'm frantically strapping on my life vest. 


When I spent a month at the Vermont Studio Center (a shamefully long time ago), one of the great lessons that stayed with me was that writers often think too literally about their craft. That as a group we get stuck thinking that being productive and committing to our creative process has to mean sitting in front of our computer for hours everyday (frog you, Stephen King). The painters and sculptors I met in Vermont showed me that your process can be anything that fuels your desire to make work. One painter said, "today my process will be sitting in the river all afternoon." Maybe some of being walled off in our writer's world has to do with the way people experience our art. Reading is a private experience. It does not have the benefit of being able to be enjoyed immediately, en masse, like visual art. (Don't even talk to me about going to readings, that can only give you a suggestion of what someone's work is truly like) We are a bunch of antisocial nerds, writing for a bunch of antisocial nerds and we don't want anyone questioning our perfect, bitter isolation. So we have built a wall around our genre, hanging a hand scrawled sign, "No visual artists allowed, keep out, this means you."  I may not be ready to take down that sign when it comes to my fiction. But at least here, in this completely topsy turvy world of the interwebs, I am able to chisel out a brick in that ridiculous fortification. 


That said, here are some artists' books to help inspire the inevitable crossover. Like Euraka and Warehouse 13. 

lastly, an image from Max Ernst's graphic novel

laugh it up fuzz ball

There are lots of funny people, movies, bits, jokes, gags, comics and even routines in this world, but it takes a certain kind of stupidity to make me laugh out loud. Some of that is because I live with a ridiculously funny, smart man with impulse control problems, who continually says and does outrageous things. Things that will one day inspire the wrath of god, I'm sure. Because of him I have become desensitized me to most shocking, inappropriate or intelligent humor. Or maybe it is because my father subsists on bad puns. Or because my friends, (Mr. Mannis, Mr. Fogg) with their humor or just their general carriage, have made me squirt all manner of beverages out of my nose.

Sometimes I feel like I've lost my sense of humor completely. Someone will show me a video, or tell me a joke, to which the general reaction is total hilarity, but my reaction is usually just a smile or nod and "yeah, that's funny."No actual laughter. My man (who will now be known as PBT, until I come up with something better, plus it makes him sound like a sandwich, and I think he will like that), PBT thinks that makes me the ultimate straight man (I've encouraged him to write a humor book entitled, Married to a Straight Man). I'm afraid this lack of laughter makes me boring.

I am left to find my chuckles where I can. There isn't enough room in the post for the amount of Bill Murray I want to include, so I'll just give you my favorite quote, "you can't leave, all the plants are gonna die."

 Here is what works for me (at varying levels of quality):
(the first two and a half minutes)




Or this, which didn't have a stupid embedding code.

Or this, which also didn't have an embedding code. Is it me?

so you want to take a vacation from your problems...

There is a saying in my house, a phrase we use when someone is trying to escape their lives, their reality, through avoidance. Usually commercial grade, illicit avoidance. Any practicing or relapsing addicted can be described as "taking a vacation from his/her problems." I think it is safe to say that I am an expert in such vacationers. I could even call them travelers, riding the snake or dragon or any other reptile, men and women who walk a dark road, one that often doubles back on itself, full of menacing pot holes and lined with houses of ill repute. Whether a traveler is collecting poppies or dusting snow caps or wearing vibrating beads, he or she is actually not traveling at all but sitting at the bottom of a forgotten, dry well wondering when someone will send down the bucket. 

I have been in such a well, and I too thought I was on a vacation. I was still riding the wave of my emo nineties cred (yeah, I know, I'm old). I was out six nights a week. Searching searching searching. I went back stage at shows, and skipped the line at clubs, and had all manner of doormen call me "sweetie." Being young and being cute and being able to hold my liquor was the trifecta. At least that was how it felt at the time.  I'll dub this time period in my life as "college." I did go to class, but I did not live in a dorm, or have the typical experience which that word usually reflects.

(this is me back then, obviously about to tell the photographer to frog off)

While I was in "college" I met hundreds of people and made no friends (Miss j the exception that proved the rule). For someone who valued her life, I spent far too much time lingering in 24 hour fast food spots, throwing up into their parking lot bushes. Glamorous, I know. I went to magical places like the city impound lot at 3 am, the rooftop of the Johnson Paint Company (though I can't remember how I got there) and the Micky D's on the McGrath O'Brien highway. Maybe I wasn't technically an addict, or maybe I was. I often embarrassed myself, told lies, put myself and others in danger, did things I couldn't remember and generally made poor decisions. 

Amazingly, one day it stopped being fun. One day I woke up at the bottom of a well and thought, this is not as nice as I thought it would be. When I was 18 and first started traveling, I realized that drugs (including alcohol) just made doing nothing fun, and I promised myself that I wouldn't let them take over my life. I saw too many friends go down that road. Some scratched and kicked their way into rehab, some turned blue on the hardwood floor of my apartment and had to be kept awake and breathing for hours, some disappeared in the middle of the night, some went to jail, some were burned up, some buried alive under all their wasted potential. Many years later I remembered that realization. It took a whole year to find a way out of that well. But when I did, I was all done. I turned it off. One day I just didn't want to drink any more. One day I just didn't want to be miserable any more. I think that is what leads all addicts to recovery, not the hope of happiness, but the rejection of misery. Maybe I'm not really an addict or maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones in recovery. I still have a drink or occasionally two (after two I am a mess). And if I have two I often want a third, and I feel that old twinge, the old rubber neck of the addict in me looking for the next party, not wanting the night to end, searching for some like-mined soul to join me in my dank little well. But I never do have that third drink. 

this isn't a poem, it's just a thing I wrote... with line breaks

Sometimes I want to walk by the river, hold stones,

watch the water rise with distant rains,

and drink from foreign hands.

I want you across from me, my hand on your ankle.

I want to find a place when we aren’t always saying goodbye,

a place between yours and mine.

A chair in the sun,

a slim view,

where wind is welcome.

Long pages, long hours.