Dan Savage was on The Colbert Report last week (only catching up to episodes now) to talk about marriage for same-sex couples, marriage’s history as a conveyance of property, and monogamy. It was a good platform. His Savage Love podcast makes for great weekly listening (funny, righteous political anger, incisive wit), and the book he has been evangelizing, Sex at Dawn, is an eye-opener on how we as a society should be more pragmatic about human nature and happiness and less hypocritical in public (and especially, to my mind, the media). Still smarting that Anthony Weiner, who touched no one that we know of, felt forced to resign when known prostitute (legalize it!) clients were still on the floor of Congress unperturbed.
The guy sitting behind Colbert is his longtime comedy buddy Paul Dinello playing “my Building Manager Tad” a Heterosexual Accountability Buddy, making fun of the Bachmans’ gay reparative therapy horrorshow. Any-hoo, an amusing, fast-moving comedy bit:
The heart is a potato. Carried with you, talisman against famine in your breast pocket, pants pocket, skirt pocket, hip pocket, purse. Next to your body, always warm, as warm as you. Rough skin against your smooth skin. Pocked. Divots. Stems. Sprouts to be snapped. You forget it’s there. Starchy. Filling. You forget. Takes heat beneath the sun. Gathers heat inside the oven door. Its rind crackles, it shudders about to burst. Cut lightly on the rind and it blossoms and steams out to meet you. Bready and sweet. Plastic butter knife in your hand you ask do you want to share? Cold pat of butter watch it lather and bubble and soak in. Both are smiling, both of you glad. Dive in! With a fork, never a spoon. Minutes, hours, weeks, years done. Cool it down. Cram the fluff back into the casing. Only you now. Tenderly pack with patience the settling starch. Barely tug at its skin, pull the lip over the spuddy envelope. Lick your thumb and run it along the gash’s edge. Press it shut. Does the seal hold? Back into your pocket. Run your thumb along the seam when you want. And you want.
Watched the Captain EO Tribute: Presented in 3-D today at Disneyland. Even when I saw in in the late-ish 80s (’86? ’87?) it was slapdash, disjointed, nonsensical, and dorky on at least three different levels. Weak-ass songs, shoddy choreography mimicking more inspired videos by MJ, here performed by people in pajamas. Theater was only 1/3 full, but even at the Kremlin there were slow days of visiting the waxen corpse in Lenin’s Tomb.
But, hoo-boy.
George Lucas directed, Francis Ford Coppola produced (or was it the other way around?) and the signs were all there that the Star Wars prequels were going to suck 13 years ahead of time. Incoherent script. Things like “Hey, here’s X, doing that thing X does all the time.” [X does that thing]. Everyone: “Oh, X…”
Accountants cackling at the thoughts of how much merchandise with X people will have to buy because it’s 3-D! Michael Jackson! George Lucas! That guy who did The Godfather! We put some outerspace stuff in there with peew-peew-peew laser beams ‘n’ shit! And it’s got elements of Aliens and Tron but with mediocre-Broadway musical design, airbrush makeup, & songs! Something for everyone! And Michael Jackson can shoot blue and orange bolts easier than making a fart, just by feeling!
Mercifully, some people in the audience laughed when the Borg-ish bad guys were converted by the power of Michael Jackson b-sides to become highly-moussed pop-lock dancers. Many (me fo’ sho’) recalled when pop-lock/break dancers were dropped into entertainments, and it was exciting – because OMFG some spinning on the ground and walking like robots was ABOUT TO GET DONE! Remember that guy at the end of Footloose? Many of us were parsing his moves and imitating him in school hallways back in the day. Then talked defensively about how we were so much better.
Then the movie was over, some applauded. Not presumably because the movie was any good, maybe out of politeness, as if a member of the Jackson family was in the theater. I didn’t applaud. It was around Captain EO and Bad that Michael Jackson lost his way. Mimicking the heat and energy that once moved him, enough to fool many he was still digging it, though his flame was dimming.
I’d rather have spent the whole 10 minutes or whatever looking at Anjelica Huston in that electric blue dress billowing in the dawn. Pleasing, camp, stirring all at once. A vision all too brief. Alas.
Caught this video, thought “Who’s the brunette? She’s kind of cute.” Saw the in the opening title it was Shakira. Thought “Still kind of cute, I mourn that magnificent mane she whips around.”
It is unlikely I will buy a Shakira record. Many years ago I complained her songs regularly mashed 3-7 genres, which induced disorientation and groove whiplash.
BUT(T)…
From the start I have admired her self-possession. In her videos she seems aware and in control at all times. That is hot.
About five years ago at a then-annual “Man’s Weekend” with high school friends, my buddy J, knowing I prattled on and on imitating Shakira’s hiccupy songs and dissecting them, rented a Shakira concert video. We watched it while playing some game (or maybe porn on an adjacent tv?) but I kept looking at the Shakira concert video in preference over whatever we were collectively doing.
“Look at that!” I would marvel. Shakira working the crowd, hard, and they were LOVING it. She was strong. We may have even had the sound off.
A confident woman directing the music, the crowd, the staging, deploying every wiggle and look into the audience knowing their effects. That was wicked hot. My buddy J, an accomplished drummer and showman, also marveled at her showmanship. So very different than the current gaggle of ditzes who walk as if they are in shoes for the first time ever.
And, oh lord, those hips.
Then shortly into this video, Shakira’s dirty blonde mane was revealed still in tact. And all was right again.
BTW, I’ve seen her in her presumably natural brunette hair. When long, it still totally works.
Une anecdote de Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte
Skritch skritch go my Keen sandals on the wooden floor. Painting hung from the ceiling to thigh level. If I were levitated the painting would still exceed me in both height and width. Disappointing it does not rest on the floor. We are meant to regard then walk into it. Now it would take a lean over the sill and a slide on the belly or a scissors kick to get within. Like spotting a pie in a window, then noting more pies worth sampling indoors.
I took this photo.
Except for the glass pane. Disappointing, careful textured work now pressed behind it (or is it suspended above the paint?). Fear of a maniac somewhere, a testimony to the power of art by violating it with a slash and a chant or prayer for glory to be known as the maniac who…
To be honest, I’m not incapable of that, if ever riled. Double negative. A continental affectation. I am capable. A SERIOUSLY crabby mood, though. Until then, I shake my head at such people. Alas, ye erratic apes.
Shuffle my feet up to the calf-level stanchion wire.
Now for the inevitable tension between me and the museum docents/staff – how close will they let me get? Shall I squint and feign nearsightedness? No staff in the room. Security monitors scrutinized now, or do the cameras record for future review after the alleged deed? How close could I get before security is summoned, or would an amplified voice intervene first? “Sir! Back from the painting, please!” Me? Sir? The room turns and throws darts of disdain.
Light is diffuse enough to minimize the glare, yet. Damn it. I want to near my eyes and nose and mouth to see if the little dots taste like candy. Pointilistic dapples of tinted sugar, right?
How if I take off my sandals, and in my socks hop atop the wire with an initial wobble then with yoga breathing attain balance. Would those little metal posts groan toward my poised but 191 pounds of heft as I scan around and then peer deeper, hips jutting backward to balance?
Sod it, I’ll only be here once. The wire is a guideline. I shuffle my feet so my toes transgress the imaginary forcefield. Such daring, may be only the 12th or 50th asshole to congratulate himself for such courage today. Or in the last hour. It’s a museum. The artistic mind, even manqué minds, tend toward criminal pathologies. And as anyone who has had a phone or wallet or bike stolen or home broken into, most criminals like aesthetes are pedestrian.
Closer in. My sense of people standing behind me waiting for their chance at unmolested regard, or to take their ironic/irreverent/”Oh, YOU!” photo trying to pose within Seurat’s work, wanes. Foiling those who would extend the sight to a tableau vivante may be why the painting is raised. Eyes go out of focus then pull into sharpness By the man’s hand. As he was. As he wanted people generations later to see, my turn to obey his orders.
Feet standing upon the ooze of the grass on that day. Not closely cut, but the impression of cropped solidity by piling the blips of accumulated colors just so. Point your toes in, your feet drawn into the muck up to your ankles.
Nods to things in motion, but this painting is not alive. It is not a snapshot of a moment. It is a series of comments. Frozen impressions. Not drawn in to walk around each object. Frolicsome dog, garbage curious dog, distant frolicsome dog, playful child, tense arced back monkey all inserted to connote motion but Georges knew better, knew it was a dodge. We know better. Each point carefully applied. To bring in motion as crass and clumsy as a diorama of posed, pinned butterflies.
Dots of pods and seeds, beside flecks of dashed chaff, over golden grains. There is a sound of rustling waves of grass. Not totally inert here.
Micro splotches of milky pastel candies stacked on each other like leaves fallen sideways adhering to the canvas. Can hear the water. Smell the water. Was the grass freshly cut? Septic problems making the coloacal and mictural necessities more prevalent. Air fresher on the island shore? A sound behind in the room draws me back away and in the whoosh a whiff of paint a century past pushes by then is gone.
Bearded Mandy Patinkin in a white smock stands on a ladder painting on the other side of the scrim, harrumphnifting at something ripe delicate Bernadette Peters said to him. But now the work is done, I am not looking through the gauze of staged canvas to watch him, but standing to regard what he did, the complete object, from where he did it, the true Seurat absent and instead selectively dramatized as he wanted here.
I took this photo, too.
“What do you think…?” there is no one beside me. Only me. Uttered nothing.
Où est Georges?
Bet he was going to remain out, then overcame his reserve (in defiance of…?) to ultimately add his avatar. Seeing to the future, clearest detail, solo, drawing on his pipe. Sunlight warming his legs and pants and his feet obscured. Staring to the water knowing he would portray the world behind him. Not accurately, not needing to retain each element as it was. Who was truly behind and beside and before him at that time? Did not matter to him, as it does not to us now. The moment would be his, as he wanted it, and that would be what lasted.
“Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat. Photo borrowed from the internet.
Saw this hipster setup walking around today (6 miles before work!). A plastic Virgin Mary rests on the leopardskin backseat of a Ford Galaxie 500. Mr. Springsteen, assuming you see this photo and write a song, put your contact info in the comments so my agent can contact you about the royalty check.
‘Cloud Gate’ by Anish Kapoor (also known as The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium ParkOn a plane headed home. Four and a half hours to kill. Groggy. I typically have trouble sleeping the night before traveling. Not with worry, but wondering if I should dash out and do one more thing in a famous place I may never see again. Flush away the minor concerns of sleeping and packing and proper sleep. Grab the supply of the wines of experience to fill my brain and have it swirl around in the hope that between my eyes and the cheat of a camera it will stain the walls or its residue will settle at the base of memory to give an aroma when scratched.
I packed in stages. Made up one last jaunt. Came back to the room and packed some more, then split the difference: stayed in the room and selected photos with their subdued colors (Chicago was overcast, but mild, the whole time) and lack of depth and sound and smell and motion and will and posted them to share. Wrote terse captions while my sense of geography and paths were fresh. Fell asleep after 2:00 a.m.
Woke up at 5:30. Push-ups. Shower. Wimbledon on television. Reviewed the comments on the posted photos and videos. Enjoyed the attention but also the reward of delivering the boon of new visions or evoking memories for some people who are dear, others I’ve not seen in decades, still others I’ve never met or have spoken with for scant seconds or minutes. An exhaling gust at my deeds and my people. I turn on my heel and remove the shaman robes and set them on the rack, or hand them to someone else to don. Can’t recall if the robes are in a closet or another’s possession. I had to pack, and only know the robes did not drop to the floor.
I get to airports at least two hours early. It’s prudent, but also to get through security and take strolls up and down concourses to get some exercise into a day of being launched across states and time zones, but while sitting on my ass.
An actor from a cult t.v. show (Michael Horse – Tommy “Hawk” on ‘Twin Peaks’) popular 20 years past walked by, slightly hunched, into the Men’s Room. Wiry white hair to his shoulders. Blue denim jacket with a patch of a white hand making the peace sign, words “American Indian Activist” over that logo. He looked well, and not visibly anxious about being in public. I let him go pee instead of saying “Hey!”
On the plane as it ably performs its aeronautical miracle of transport, but the cabin air is hot and muggy. The air nodules in the console above offer no cooling, allowing minimal airflow like pointing a body-temperature, sustained, stink-free dilated fart lasting several hours.
Big gourmet headphones (not Bose!) clamped over my head, I am surrounded by rectangles. This journal. Book of poetry on my lap but under the seat tray. When Music player wedged between my legs piping about an hour of The Western Canon audiobook (a chapter about Marcel Proust) before I switch to Québécoise chanteuse Martha Wainwright trills and torches Piaf songs ably and with a full voice she does not commit to her own songs. One bar of organic fair trade chocolate in my belly, another bar of another kind in my bag at my feet. Laptop in that bag. Portfolio holding notes and outlines of a writing project. Kindle. Powered-down smartphone in my bag (pssst… you don’t truly have to shut it down, the crew only needs that for your attention during the tender take off and landing phases – so says science and airline pilot columnists). Girl two seats down jumping from movie to movie on her parents’ laptop. Rows of monitors mounted above us play the CGI cartoon film Rango and I wonder if someone in an airline meeting room raised a hand and suggested they routinely calibrated their monitors. Am guessing that person was shut down by a bean counter or a philistine boss who sees no problem with wildly different hues, washed out or blown out colors that look nothing like what artists and other billion dollar companies intended. The same kind of philistine who thinks the wide screen HD televisions with murky non-HD programs look just fine so long as the stretched image fits the whole screen even with people looking like squat blotchy toads. Usually within minutes in a hotel room I’m trying to circumvent the pokey Fisher Price remote and leaning behind the t.v. searching for buttons or knobs to make the window to the world or to fantasy look normal.
I have a fever. Wish they would hook up the apertured fart vents above us to a frost giant. Can I roll down the window? Frost along the edges show it’s nice and cool outside.
Was in Chicago the last four days. Each day was occupied from morning to early evening. At night, time was my own.
I’ve never been to New York City. I’ve been to Los(t) Angeles multiple times but vague on what “Los Angeles” is. I was thrilled to be in Chicago for the first time. Daunting history both known and unknowable. Tall, dense architecture. Great weather. Walked around about 25 miles in three days. Weather was cloudy, colors in photos subdued, but the air was mild and ideal for strolling.
Took an L train line to the projects in South Side. Foolish to wear an expensive(ish) camera slung around my neck? Blocks of concrete grounds and grass overgrown in the cracks. Citgo gas stations with people hanging out all around the grounds. Sitting and leaning against their cars, some on their car hoods. Loud music. Conversations and boasts and teasing and conferral about errands and later plans. Growing up in Oregon, it is just about impossible to find any city block without white people. For about a mile from the Garfield station to the University of Chicago no other white people, no Latinos, either. I trotted across streets, but kept a normal pace otherwise. Didn’t have time to go through Hyde Park or Washington Park (it was 8:00 p.m. when I got there) but wished I could.
I wanted to museum the brains out of Chicago real, real hard. Museums closed at 5 p.m. Closest I got was walking into the Chicago Cultural Center where I snapped the above photo (and about 80 more). Small galleries, beautiful domed roofs.
It’s fun to spend that much time in completely new geography, open to whim, deep in your own self-reliant mind but also distracted from drawing too inward by the excitement of the sounds and sights.
But, to be honest, I missed having someone else to turn to and get their thoughts and cast light from different angles on all of these new things. It would have meant traveling more slowly, touring decisions by committee, but the conversations, moments of standing in place and taking things in would have been deeper, more informed, richer.
It was a mad and gloomy walk, though less than Abraham and Isaac’s.
I had to get back to that patch of dirt, now mud, in the thunderstorm.
Crackling random nearness of the lightning bolts. Warm, demanding, saturating rain.
In cars growing up I would ride with a friend and we would chase down thunderstorms, what a cool way to die, we’d laugh, but we meant it.
Had a lightning bolt struck the car, BARROOMMMED next to us, us teens, we’d have been as blissed as panicked. Up hillsides we’d be close to eye level with the storms and sidle up to the churning forces. Hey.
Harrumphing now, as a man, in my mad and gloomy walk through the deluge I knew I would prevail on the way there, I would get there like a salmon to its ground unless nature escalated. I reached the patch of mud, once dirt, and knew it would be dirt again. I stood on my place. Mine. I would likely never return to it after looking around this last time. Over my shoulder, with a nod bequeathing it to all others in existence by my grace. The gusts and the light and the drama and bursts of rattling noise and the blanketing rain and the ripe damp saturation of everything made my mind quiet. Nothing left to keep dry. My thoughts and wants and memories and wishes no longer had to crackle and rumble and whisper and whoosh – the world was that all around me. Thoughts were a stone on the surface of the water, above the ripples.
Clothes including the boastful, now hubristic waterproof Gore-Tex jacket were soaked and so pointless the only thing keeping them on was modesty.
I still like walking in inclement weather. Boastworthy in a “How’s the weather?” chitchat the day of the walk. But mostly a leaning forward into hard circumstance. Make things wild and harsh, dear Nature (within endurable measure), and grant an interval of peace within.
