Aural Triptych for Thursday

Fresco for Wednesday

Giotto, The Raising of Lazarus from the Arena Chapel, Padua, 1306.

I'm OK. You're OK.

Andrew Jackson, comic brute.

I forgot to read the news today, but I got to the bottom (ooof, no pun intended, really!) of James Buchanan's supposed gayness....

No More Dramas (Addendum)

Yesterday's come-down was inevitable, but brief. In fact, I've found that there's a quite easy answer to the problem of "what to do at 24 in order to be a happy grown-up"--look good. As warm and wholesome and earthy as the Zizney Reunion (see below) was, we are left with an overwhelming urge to simplify, to focus on the surfaces of things, people (us), our bodies. Drinking more water (and less booze), sleeping proper amounts, eating vitamins, brushing our hair, working out, applying masques and eye serums and sunscreen, wearing lipstick and (gasp) heels and perfume. These are the keys to our future happiness. The rest (work and school and SUCCESS) will follow suit. I'm sure of it. Yup.

So it's only fitting that I'm ready to deal with Lady GaGa, who I've been holding at arms length for months now. Pillow nodded to The Fame last year. And, though she always leads me to the finest pops (Hello Blackout!), I couldn't get into GaGa. She put me in mind of all of the bottle-serviced douchebags I used to know. And then I saw her in interviews. Such an idiot, putting on a weak, Anglo-y accent and spouting stuff about Bohemianism and New York and the Scene and drugs and garrets in not-so-proper or clever English.

I've recently become enamored of a few of the tracks. They sound quite good. They stick. But ain't she a mess? The record is all pure, unadulterated vapidity (except for the dead-on "Like It Rough"). If she was winkingly posing as the gnarliest coked-out party girl in NYC, binging in the face of the Recession and the "Death of Downtown," then she would be a total genius. Instead, she's putting on this pseudo-intellectual show (like any defensive, self-conscious loser from Sacred Heart would) and saying she's from the future? What? Lady GaGa's pitch is like one of those poster-boards scrawled with confused, tinny adjectives that gay fay-shun show producers place backstage to motivate the models, to instruct them in the seasonal inspiration/angle they're meant to describe by, you know, walking.

So, I'll take the songs, exactly the soundtrack I need for my new drive toward brainlessness and sheen, and ignore the hype. I've embedded a non-music video YouTube of "Paparazzi" that S-P-E-L-L-S out the silliness and incoherence of her lyrics and one of "Like It Rough," my fave. Enjoi. And take care of yourself.

Mayor Warbucks, Are You Going to Adopt Us?

Yesterday was all kinds of heavy symbolism for Auntie P and I'm losing my mind today just a tad, coming off yesterday's 10 hour workday and today which is going to find me on my feet long into the night thanks to the dreaded FiFi awards. I spent the last two nights tossing and turning and fretting about a future-determining meeting that I have no control over and at around 4 AM this morning I gave up on sleep and crept downstairs to borrow my neighbors hard copy of the Times and opened it up to this long anticipated and poorly written and miserably defeating Op-Ed.

I'm not quite sure how the onus of opposing our impossible-to-beat billionaire Mayor Munchkin fell on the shoulders of a SUNY educated member of the House who represents a solidly middle class district that stretches across Brooklyn and Queens but it's all over for Weiner now (who, by the by, evokes his plucky borough-kid roots much less eloquently than another prominent New Yorker did yesterday--but more on her later.) The point is, it's not just over for Weiner, it's over for all of us and most of all it's over for Bloomberg who is going to sail into his third term on a ship made out of silicon and trans-fat free pastries while flanked by iron clad battleships and submarines filled with gold bars. Giuliani, who is to blame for Bloomberg's entire existence in this city from back in his America's Mayor® days, has been suspiciously quiet as to his proteges ability to achieve a level of totalitarian power in this city that he only dreamed of and dreamed of often.

But this week also brought joy in Mudville, as yesterday we saw the President choose to nominate Sandra Sotomayor, decidedly one of the most deserving and experienced judges to be named to the highest court in the land in decades. Sotomayor is a symphony, she's lived a life out of a Dickens novel; as the New York Times put it yesterday in a fleeting moment of eloquence, "she is walking through a door she pushed open for herself."

Conservatives are letting a lot of shit fly in anticipation of her confirmation hearings, cause that's their job. Barring the inevitable inquiries into her taxes, her divorce, her childlessness, my personal favorite barb thus far is the uproar about a statement she once made that (I'm paraphrasing here) Latina women, with their richness of experience would more often make better decisions than white men, which is, like, duh. I mean starting with the leggings department obviously but has anyone who thinks that ever MET a Puerto Rican lady? My Puerto Rican roommate (who has never once been mistaken for Puerto Rican) shed a single tear yesterday at the news mostly, he confessed, because the idea of someone who thinks like his mother making important decisions overwhelmed him with confidence for the future of America.

So anyway, here's what I was thinking. I know Bloomy's been beating on a white chick these days (who consequently is the head of the NY State Banking authority, the conflicts of interest never end) but I think it's time he stopped dating women he could easily abuse and looked up, say, Rosie Perez. A little bit of empathy, and maybe the next four years won't be so bad.

Zac Efron, will you still be famous when we're married?

Memorial Day Long Weekend. We (Pillow has arrived en La Nueva--our cable reality-inspiring [see: Crackpoint, the series] codependency has resumed!) moved apartments, saw 17 Again, and ate mushrooms in a perfect, man-made sycamore and cedar grove (that we now call Zizney/The Zizney/The Zizney Reunion/The Zizney Family Reunion) on the East side of Central Park.

First, Zac Efron is stunning. Stunning. When, at the romantic climax of 17 Again (an all around sort of perfect movie), our boy morphs back into a pilly, saggy, age-appropriate Matthew Perry one's heart sinks, one cries out in anguish, "where did he go, this beating heart of the film, this beating heart of my heart?!" And it's really endless isn't it?--our appetite for new and young and next and almost. It's pure thrills to see a breakout happening in realish time, and evidently, at 24, I'm just as susceptible to that combination of beauty, charisma, and publicity as I was at 4 or 9 or 15. For a brief moment, Pillow and I fought over the grown Disney prince. But, upon further consideration, I realized that he (a Jew) may not be so interested in dating Jewish. And it follows (from all I know of my generation of male Heebs) that after his fling with a fetishized/objectified Asian chick, he'll be ready to put a ring on a worshipped/feared blonde WASP chick (...and none better than our very own!). Semantics. Anyway, the air buzzed with Zac Efron as we strolled and trained from 3rd and 9th to our new nook in Flatbush.

It was still buzzing when we took our drug and cream cheese bagel sammiches to the Park around noon on Memorial proper. The grove (the third location we scouted for our triparoo) was a shifting patchwork of shade and sun, cool and warm velvet grass with a view of some incredibly beautiful and flat/picture-planey evergreens. Pillow noted a "Disney mist" that lay just above the clearing floor. I, having picked up a habit of attaching "z's" to things from our Petrova, called it a "Zizney mist." We laughed for about five minutes and were off. The synthesis of Disney and phychedelia has been central to my work on Britney Spears--Pillow expressed my own same thoughts at random, as usual. And there we were, full of Zac's pervasive/suasive image and mushrooms and sun and birds and our nice outfits and a high-keyed mist and so many families. We felt so kindly and courtly. We sat/lay beneath the largest sycamore flanked by a large local/French-speaking (?) Jewish clan, an extended, hearty, sporting Austrian family, and a pair of fancy-looking Brit twins, one of whom had a retired model wife and a new newborn in tow. Precious. Warm. International grandparents! A gem of a Zizney Family Reunion. Such good feelings, such feelings about the FUTURE (and the poetics of landscape design). The Zizney may well have been our conjoined lawns in Tuxedo years hence (where we'll smell and dig in the rich, dewy ground with our children). It was simply, where we belong.

But, of course, despite all of the bliss of yesterday, today has been a little tricky. We hallucinated a view of our cozy thirties and forties, et cetera, but not a way, not a path, not an answer for the here and now, the crisis-y quarter-life. HOW and WHEN will we arrive at this "Brigadoon" called Zizney? And will Zac Efron still be famous when we get there? Ugh.

Verses

"Take On Me"
a-ha (with ed. punctuation)
1985 (and 2009)

We're talking away.
I don't know what I'm to say.
I'll say it anyway.
Today's another day to find you shying away.
I'll be coming for your love, OK?

Take on me.
Take me on.
I'll be gone,
In a day or two.

So needless to say,
I'm odds and ends.
But that's me--stumbling away,
Slowly learning that life is OK.
Say after me:
It's no better to be safe than sorry.

Take on me.
Take me on.
I'll be gone,
In a day or two.

Oh the things that you say:
"Is it life or just a play-my-worries-away?"

You're all the things I've got to remember.
You're shying away.
I'll be coming for you anyway.

Take on me.
Take me on
I'll be gone,
In a day or two.