Love in This Club

schmaltz and crackers

Dyspepsia.

Sunday evening, after some serious thrills at the new-ish American Wing (goodness), the sale of my childhood home and two hours spent watching Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew left me sour and achey—ill still—no joke. I'm pretty delicate.

So I've been tending my condition with flat cola and saltines and...soap:

—Billy Baldwin Decorates—a painting hung on a mirrored panel and then this sort of line:

"I think an unpleasant atmosphere results from the entry into the obviously 'rich' room—the kind that makes you feel like you're caught right in the middle between the devil of a museum and the deep sea of embarras de richesse. And a thing you can say for Southern women—they're far less guilty on this score than Northerners." (Yes and no...sure. I'm thinking about houses is Memphis and those ways of entertaining [possessing enough natural oldness and eccentricity to be easy about keeping some "regular," even low-low things, foods, habits], but also favorite, accidentally cluttered or accidentally barren New York apartments and what a good time I've had at/with The Met lately.)

—two songs: Rihanna's "Russian Roulette" (I've been critical of the album art [for no particular reason] and last week's Diane Sawyer interview left a bad taste in my mouth, but this track is great, I find...plotting, plodding, as heavy and Eastern as the title suggests, totally transSIBERIAN!) and then also Mary J. "I'm Going Down," yes (musical theater).

—David Hare's screenplay for Michael Cunningham's "The Hours."

—this ad (I mean, yipeee).

—this program too, watched on and off after meeting that confederate spur(er of a new-future collection) in Louisville (featured below)...the interviews are wonderful.

spur!

ender

generally not a great fan of year-end (or now, decade-end) lists. but the format of this guy from the economist's vanity mag intelligent life (wow) is quite good....a group of number-less, free-form entries from professional aesthetes about the way the aughts (or, as the brit's have it, 'the noughties') looked. there is some cultural dissonance (sienna miller [not half so important as m.k. olsen]....jade jagger?, combat fatigues?), but also some winning stuff: the bits about iPods, bags, celebrity, and vomit....

Bad Gurl 4 Lyfe: Cassie "Manuella Santos" Steele.

Um, apparently Cassie Steele is an even crazier bitch in real life. I don't know who Mr. Colson is (I like to think he's Degrassi's middle-aged on-set tutor), but I fear for him. The same way I fear for every man I've ever loved. Please to enjoy her Canadian Top 40 Hit....?

Nail Color for the Weekend

OPI Holiday Glow, but no holiday today, just grateful that I'm able to spend a large chunk of today's work hours getting my nails did and killing time in a Park Slope coffee shop. The good news is that they play a lot of Kelly Clarkson here but the downside is that she's not drowning out the conversational English lessons on either side of me. They could also be blind dates but how would you ever know the difference?

napoleon's hair is in there!

lookit.

11-11

View of a Room

Bedroom from the Sagredo Palace, Venice (ca.1718), held by our Metropolitan Museum since 1907.

Early Photograph for Sunday

Burning Mills at Oswego

George N. Barnard

(Painted) Daguerreotype

1853

Verses

From-a-babe, I've felt a spiritual affiliation with WWI dead and mourning (likely past life residue). So this morning (nostalgic?), I returned to my collected Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon has never impacted me like Wilfred Owen, never appeared to be as fine and musical a poet (or as tragic a figure). But he was certainly more prolific and . . . journal*istic? The war poems are best taken whole; severed from the pack, they are sort of naive, the satirical diary entries of a well-educated boy encountering misfortune for the first time, reactionary and freshly political. When read one after another, they impress with honesty, render one incapable of cynicism for their earnestness and for the trauma through which they were penned. That said, here are two, set aside, both on the subject of rough amusements, a persistent grotesque (I hope they haven't been criminally airlifted from context . . . they're definitely Brit-priggish):

"When I'm among a Blaze of Lights"

8 January, 1917

When I'm among a blaze of lights

With tawdry music and cigars

And women dawdling through delights,

And officers in cocktail bars,

Sometimes I think of garden nights

And elm trees nodding at the stars.

I dream of a small firelit room

With yellow candles burning straight,

And glowing pictures in the gloom,

And kindly books that hold me late.

Of things like these I choose to think

When I can never be alone:

Then someone says, 'Another drink?'

And turns my living heart to stone.

"Blighters"

4 February, 1917

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin

And cackle at The Show, while prancing ranks

Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;

'We're sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!'

I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to ragtime tunes, or 'Home sweet Home,'

And there'd be no jokes in Music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Baupaume.

hot flag

good morn-ting

praise jesus

hot teeth

Um, Other Stuff Happened Today

YES YES YES!

Extremely Belated Love in this Club

THE Jam For 2010 Pending....

Able, you're just gonna have to deal with the Gaga for a second.

singles

"Sweet Dreams"
Beyoncé

Last week, my co-worker was playing a video linked from FB, some throaty, grey shoegazer with a haircut covering "Single Ladies." It was 'ick. He said, "Why is everybody raving about this?" I said, "...because they're racist." And then I watched the for-real "Single Ladies" video a few times--still good, still a call to arms not a snooze, not even a little bit. Occasionally I wonder if, we spectators get lazy about newness and give the establishment too much credit/obeisance (that "...to be pleased means to say yes" business). Sure. But Be is never not working. She works to make our lives easy, to provide us with half-familiar/half-fresh treats, soundtrackings, jams--21st Century POP MUSIC, red-blooded, healthy post-Modernism. This guy, "Sweet Dreams," the most recent single drawn from I am...Sasha Fierce (the 6th or 7th off the record since last autumn?), is Be's Gothic number, as Industrial as our bright Aughts R&B gets (cousin to Rihanna's "Disturbia") and with lyrics like, "Tattoo your name across my heart so it will remain/Not even death can make us part/What kind of dream is this?" and "Clouds filled with stars cover the skies/And I hope it rains/You're the perfect lullaby." I really dig her invocation of dreamstates. Dreams are--as soon as we become aware of them, waking--histories, passages, memories, inaccessible. This angle lends the song a deal of regret, glances backward. She opens with a loosely cast phrase, "turn the lights on," that is applied as a portion of the driving beat throughout the song. In the track's present tense, Be is no longer falling into soupy, dark love, but attempting to reconstruct and measure it 'in the light'...after.

"Sally"
Sam Sparro

I picked up this dude's album because...um...a gay teen played it for me at an American Apparel, saying, "You wouldn't believe how he looks: cute white boy with a side bang, wearing our shit." Whatever. Ain't no shame. This and the U.K. hit, "Black and Gold," are supreme and smart dance songs, despite their hipster cheese (Sparro is an Aussie living in El Lay....so....). And "Sally." I mapped out something like five music videos (starring me?) for it as I rode the train into Manhattan this morning. My favorite was a tour of the Financial District, dead at night with Christmas decorations on the lamposts, dancing in and out of empty dives and office tower porticoes in a 91/2 Weeks, off the shoulder, creamy Irish cable knit sweater and nothing else (shoes?). The lyrical take on stripper dadsums-issues is a touch ham-handed. But Sam's throwback politics are in the right place (I loathe the fourth-wave approach to sex industry-as-empowerment).

Pure redux--tragic heroines/social issues+gay soul singing+slap-happy synths, a track to get riled up to, to dance yr emotions to. Bless our hearts. Disco isn't ever gonna die again!

On Being Post-Revolutionary Aristocrat

"...There's more. Blue is also the color of the wall paint, the velvet mantle-cover she leans against, its fringe and a tassel, the Sèvres and other porcelains on the mantle, assorted flowers, the pouch for her fan, the bell-rope to call servants, the paisley-like pattern on the gold and red cashmere shawl draped over a chair, gemstones in her jewelry, Louise's limpid eyes, even the pale shadows beneath her eyes and along the hand she holds at her chin."--The L.A. Times' Christopher Knight (?) writes the Frick's first loan of Louise de'Haussonville to a SoCal museum

On Being Woman

The painting...confronts the viewer with the disturbing and contradictory visual experience of gazing at Kahlo's nude torso, attractive and available, while standing witness to horrifying pain and inexplicable physical abuse.

- Margaret A. Lindauer, on Frida Kahlo's The Broken Column of 1944.

"kiss me thru the phone"

oh young aj (map of arkansas written across yr face). please don't go and suffer on our account. we love you, and we really love how you twice refuse to blame joe g. for yr poor performance when pressed. what a yankee.

Pillow!

Verses

What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life? In my case, there was a fixed sum of experiences...to or from which I could not yet add or subtract, but which I was skilled at coming to grief over, crucially, in broad daylight.

--excerpt from Gary Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (1996)

Nail Color For November 2, 2009

Essie, Aruba Blue. Back in Los 90's, metallic sapphire was a favorite, the trailer-trashiest of those non-red/pink spectrum shades. And, aside from dull, Inland-Cali long, square and French white, trashy digits always sing.

Yankee-celebratory nails, from title to sheen to shade. Woop woop.

bam bam

This Postseason has been a consistent thread of comfort en nuestra familia. The Yankees face a near-certain (knock wood) World Series win. I'm prepared for a loss tonight that lets us take the title back in the Bronx, a stadium inauguration (plus Pillow's got es-chool tonight). Of course, I'd also be pleased to make short work of it inside the Lion's Den. Oh the terrible bhoyos and girls of 'illadelphia. I was certain a fight would break out last night, between cracked cracker drunkards in the packed decks or even ballplayers (A. Rod hit 3 times?!). These Keystoners are worse than Massholes, all chipped shoulders and 'helicopter towels' (though I must admit that bell-toll is stylish). If you were only listening last night, catch a clip of Damon stealing third like lightning.

Love.

PARADE.

This track, excavated from our padded memories on Saturday afternoon, has little/nothing to do with La Nueva, but it suits.