Thank you Hammacher Schlemmer, for fighting the good fight, and making alcoholism that much more socially acceptable.

Made in Taiwan

As the Deer Panteth After the Water Brooks...

It's the human condition to search for meaning in life, a higher power, God, etc. Well, last year the Lifetime network gave me religion with the first season of Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead. When it came to a close, I didn't know if I would ever see her and her beautiful head of hair again. But hold onto your Saturday afternoon zinfandel and strap yourself in, because SHE'S BACK!!!!!! Lisa Williams: Voices from the Other Side will premiere Monday, October 27th at 11:00 A.M. Eastern, 10:00 Central.

Please see the extra special clip below, featuring Lisa and one of my favorite hysterical white women.

i call. . . bullshit

The Olsen twins sort of had me there for a second. I always like what they wear; they seemed to actually be unsoliciting of our attention and a bit smart and MK was a newly minted hippie, free from her narcotic doldrums. I think that a book of interviews sounds like a fine project, but THE COVER.
I mean really.

are you smoking yet?

I've been thinking quite honestly about quitting smoking. Anyone new to this blog (most, as this blog is currently in its inception), and thus, those submitting to it, may not understand the totality of this statement. After typing that first sentence, I freaked the fuck out because I had an unlit cigarette in my mouth and couldn't find my "Adorable Satan lighter" (I have a friend who makes ghetto customized lighters . . . yup), nor could I find the complimentary pack of matches I took from a rather unseemly bar just to keep my oven lit during the Holidays, when I make cookies for people . . . I found the matches. Fuck you if you want to experience my pumpkin spice cookies . . .

I love the idea of a cigarette. I love the meditation, the relief, the drama, the something/anything it gives me to do. Cigarettes are reflective and meaningful and a whole lot better than talking after sexing/drugging/drinking/fighting. It's the punctuation you need after that perfect sentence. The screen to hide behind.

And then reality sets in--you start to think about how horrible smoking is. How you might get the lung cancer, the emphysema, cardiovascular disease, cataracts and possibly Alzheimer's (according to angry non-smokers on Wikipedia). If I quit now (from what the "info" tells me), my lungs could be like a newborn's within five years. According to ex-lovers, who were also quite conveniently ex-smokers, quitting is the cheapest way to acheive what advertisers call "male enhancement." Not that I need to worry about that in the least, but still, who isn't irrationally greedy in that department . . .

The problem remains: what is moose-humping cooler than smoking??? Damn the cough, the smell, the extra $45.00 on my insurance. Smoking is badass when you're feeling insecure. It's instant devil-may-care. It's danse macabre. It's the rebel and the good-kid-gone-wrong, and everything you need to be when the chips are down. It's celebration, victory and accomplishment.

It's also sometimes an empty pack and having to go to the market in your jammies...

to be continued, as it seems...

Self-Medication, the True International Language

Maybe it's my extremely American private education, or some kind of xenophobia that I am afraid to confront, or even a more altruistic form of patriotism or genetic memory, but I've always been more attached to American and English poets than those of any other extraction. My countrymen gave me the kind of controlled misery that appealed to my WASP-iness

But recently, in the midst of a particularly dark time, I stumbled upon a collection of Chinese poems from the Great Dynasties. These translations were surprisingly sympathetic to my current cause. I'm suddenly guilty for not taking to heart Michael and Lionel's insistence that "We are the world" (one depressed, heartbroken, functionally alcoholic world).

All of us receive
am empty body
All of us
take
the universe's breath
We die
and still
must live again
come back to earth
all recollection lost
Ai! No more than this?
Think hard about it
All things turn
stale and flat on the tongue
It comforts people? No
Better
now and again
to get blind drunk on the floor
alone

(Wang Fan-Chin, T'ang dynasty)

Here we are forced to confront the many faces of death. In the first lines, is the poet speaking literally? Is he referring to an actual physical death followed by a spiritual reincarnation into a new physical body? Or, is he lamenting the constant reincarnations we are forced to experience in THIS life, due to various emotional deaths? Either way, no matter what life (or lives) we are handed, it seems that we can all agree that booze is a definite necessity.

Next Week, on "My Big Redneck Wedding"

Love in this Club

Lewis Thornton Powell (Lewis Payne or Paine), twenty-one year old Confederate soldier from Alabama, executed in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate the President--

Verses

Waiting on Elvis, 1956

Joyce Carol Oates

This place up in Charlotte called Chuck’s where I used to waitress and who came in one night but Elvis and some of his friends before his concert at the Arena, I was twenty-six married but still waiting tables and we got to joking around like you do, and he was fingering the lace edge of my slip where it showed below my hemline and I hadn’t even seen it and I slapped at him a little saying, You sure are the one aren’t you feeling my face burn but he was the kind of boy even meanness turned sweet in his mouth. Smiled at me and said, Yeah honey I guess I sure am.

Ghost Whisperer

I was at a dinner honoring somebody or other in a big hall at a big private club. The gentleman next to me asked me abruptly, in the midst of general, smallish conversation, what my favorite restaurants were (specifically here in New York). I'd had a bit to drink, so maybe the world looked extra hostile, but I sensed that this was not an inquiry so much as a challenge. His eyes looked dark; he wanted me to falter. I squirmed. I said something about my love of Koreatown, especially the places with interior waterfalls and white pianos and stellar, steely lunch-lady servers who mind your barbecue coals. I mentioned a few places by name.

 

I knew, once and for all, that this exchange had been a bit hateful, when I found myself responding to his question the next morning, to myself, while brushing my teeth (I only do this with late responses to semi-bullying). I had completely forgotten to mention my most favorite kind of New York restaurant---THE EUROTRASH LUNCH SPOT! Principal among these are Bice in midtown and Da Silvano/Bar Pitti (though clearly there are so many that I've yet to find). The food and wine are unfalteringly good, spot-on, thorough Italian menus (Da Silvano and Bar Pitti are remarkably good and Bice a little less so). In both cases, the waiters are flawless; the interiors nice and also pretty frumpy. The crowd is unmatched, orange-skinned, Dior-decked. The whole---kind of bliss-making (once, tipsy and full of bolognese, I saw a massive body guard standing outside of the bathroom at Da Silvano, timing Allegra Versace with a stop watch---for truth!).

Painting for Friday

Martin Johnson Heade
Sunset: A Scene in Brazil, 1864-5

Am enamored of Heade, a painter of the Hudson River School, who made nouveau Dutch flower paintings--sweet, perfectly rendered, auction-ready, utterly sick-making. He also "went Native," first producing these sort of resort paintings in Florida, and then these wild, flourescent odes on colonialism? planting? pink? palms? theater? in Brazil and Nicaragua. First, this canvas put me in mind of a coloring book I had as a child all about a Victorian family staying in a seaside hotel with many potted plants and hammocks (a touch off the mark, I know. . . it was a first impression). Second, rather dimly again, the weather, the promise of viscous, smelly, absolute heat (the sort beyond the best efforts of my angry, spitting radiator, which makes a heat I like to call, Boarding School Corridor). Third, the basest, I imagined buying it with someone else's money and hanging it on a coffered wood wall.

And then--Guy Thwaite. Romantic hero of Wharton's unfinished The Buccaneers (1937), the tale of American beauties, the daughters of Wall Street titans, making perfectly miserable marriages to emotionally limited and/or gay Brits during the Gilded Age. Guy is meant to inherit a very old house (15th century) and a very old peerage (correct usage?) and his dissipated father's expectations of a political career. He is, of course, in need of that tricky substance, cash. Guy must go engineering in South America, removing him from his great, creepy house in order to keep it in the family, and, of course, spoiling his chance at marrying young American Anabelle (you see, he alone is the Brit with an open mind and heart, the one who can love her hot and whole). In the course of the narrative, he comes home from the West to find his lady unhappily married to a mean, sexually conflicted Duke. Guy rescues Anabelle! They run off together, forever alienating their respective and combined worlds, losing his inheritance to a bitter father, etc. There is much in that, Wharton's most favorite trope: good, young people scorned for making honest choices, refusing to be trapped or conventional. But what I'm after is the object of an exotic destination when it is met by a person who has the ancient, heavy promise of a home elsewhere. In the novel, Guy loses his country seat, his rightful still point on the moving Earth. Yet, imagine that this is not his fate, that his inheritance is as fixed as it ought to be. How is it? How is it to move through the world with certainty at your back? What do the tropics look like? Is everything one or the other, home or not-home? Is this a great luxury, as I imagine it to be? Or is it, instead, a tremendous burden? Both I suppose.