Do It Yourself

We were standing in the West corridor of the second floor of Bancroft Hall*. Jess D___, the tall, friendly girl from Portland, Oregon (who had gotten me stoned for the first time from a little wooden pipe with a nug she'd smuggled on the the plane from home) was saying, "I want a haircut. An indie haircut. I want a bob, but like longer in the front than the back, or like with short bangs and then dyed black." Jess did get that "indie haircut," the bob with long strands in front. She listened to "indie music," Modest Mouse and Cat Power and Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes. She drank "indie coffee," wore "indie, vintage clothes," and "indie, vintage glasses." She had a Dandy Warhols poster on her door. Essentially, Jess was a wealthy girl from the suburbs of a place where "indie" was premium, king, cool, central. She was enamored of the twenty-somethings that she spied at record stores and on the street. So she mimicked them and then talked about it in a starry-eyed, uncool sort of way, peppering sentence after sentence with that (now and then odious) word,"indie."

Personally, I used no slang for it. For the 1970s soccer jerseys as dresses and cowboy boots of 2001. For the two white leather roses, 1940s "shoe clips" that I affixed to dresses and headbands and canvas totes in 2002. For the ripping and dyeing and ribboning and pinning and silkscreening of each item I bought in 2003, whether from Macy's Juniors or Goodwill or Barney's. For the messiness of my hair. For the big, plastic and gold and paste 80s jewelery and red and black nails. I made these choices with ease, with youth-y cockiness, and with a craftsy, cobbled air that ranged from a little twee (in 2002-3) to a little twee meets Less Than Zero (2003-4) to a little death to twee/heavy metal groupie/junkie (2004-7).

Last week, a friend used the term "D.I.Y." to describe his band. He said their sound was too "D.I.Y." for Memphis audiences. I understand that this term is being used to describe some kind of punk music that the kids like? I think? And maybe it's taking on the vicious generality of the late 90s/early aughts's "indie" or (lord save us) the elusive "hipster." Like, "indie" (and unlike "hipster") it's descriptive, a reference to some very naive, very natural (and American?) striking out. It immediately puts me in mind of the little recyclings and adjustments that I compulsively made to each object or item of clothing I came into as a teenager. It immediately puts me in mind of getting older (a common topic on this here blog--apologies). These days, I am less comfortable making my funny mark on things, or wearing holes and stains and tatters. I feel the need for fine things, for things I absolutely cannot make myself, for things I must seek out and consume.

But it's nice when you think about it, this descriptive mot. It's a wonderful thing about the youth that they want to do it for themselves, do it for free or cheap, do it to look wrong (not "right"). I suppose I was "D.I.Y." and so was Jess and so were plenty of people before us and so they are now and so they will continue to be. I'll settle into this luxe-er phase of life quite happily (when I make some money?), but I'll have nothing but love for the self-imprinted rags of old. Sigh.


*Able's prep school dormitory

Love In This Club: Johnny Weir

So I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to post something truly relevant about Johnny Weir lately. His new film, Pop Star On Ice, is hitting a million Pride festivals this month, and, y'know, somehow figure skating is always topical, but it dawned on me mid-evening that when all's said/done, I've quit smoking, I don't drink that much anymore, I'm the only one left in the Memphis offices of A&P, and Johnny Weir is just about the dreamiest thing I've seen in quite a while. That's it. Please go see his movie if it's coming near you.

Here's him skating, to help with legitimacy. The Nina Simone shit is gold.

Chinese Democracy

Middle School Dance Music Committee

Soulja Boy Tell 'Em's "Kiss Me Thru the Phone" is a serious jam, not only because it's a really good song, but because I hear it at least 5 times a day either wafting through my window from the street or while out and about in the 'hood. I finally downloaded it today, and when I saw that Sammie sings the hook I almost fell out of my chair. You may or may not remember Sammie from his summer 1999 takeover of The Box with his own cell phone-centric love song "The Crazy Things I Do". Call you on my cell phone baby, even on peak time!

A Bridge Too Far

Topical Post headline for June 11 is actually too much.

Funny Page for Wednesday

This is one of my all-time favorite strips of Watterson's probably because it's the best example of his literal outside the box approach to comic strips. Nobody's packed a strip with as much action and emotion since.

For Shame

I too have recently commented on a Gawker, Inc. site...Gawker proper. And, as you'll see (on the second page...using the [ahem] alias, SarahGrace), I was met with some seriously chipped and cold shoulders. I have long found there to be an irrational double standard when it comes to discussions of class in this country. Less-wealthy folk can heap insults at the wealthier folk, who would never conceive of saying such silly, cruel, narrow things to/about them. It's cheap to call this sort of uninformed financial/cultural angst journalism.

For Shame

The question on my mind this morning is: why is it okay for people to make fun of my ethnicity? And also, how are the editors at Jezebel so clueless? Yesterday, Dodai gave us a post entitled "The WASPiest Items in 'Vineyard Vines'". Now, I'll be the first to say I'm not a fan of Vineyard Vines. I find it to be a rip-off of more respectable and long-standing labels. But within the post I found suggestions of racism, classism, and downright stupidity. Seriously, Jezebel?--website founded on principles of "playing nice" and "equality for all"?

But thanks, Dodai!--I've learned a few fun things about myself. Apparently, white people of northwestern European descent who come from successful families only find it acceptable to wear ties with watermelons on them because black people are more into grape soda now. We like to wear white because we sympathize with the Ku Klux Klan. We won't even wear clothes that look like they're from discount stores because we're afraid of looking "LMC" ("lower middle class", catchy lingo!).

Honestly, I'm constantly disappointed by Jezebel, and I really have no idea why I keep reading it everyday. Maybe I'm holding out hope, because it makes me sad that such an interesting concept has turned out so whack. I thought the site was about helping women be proud of who they are are; no matter what their weight, height, education level, family background, profession, religion, hair color, skin color, or ethnic origin. So why are they constantly making me feel bad? I'm constantly ignoring posts that kind of make me want to cry (especially this one), but I can't ignore this fuckery. What are you DOING, Jezebel? Do you guys even realize how insane and racist (yes, I said it) this post is? I'm so angry, I even signed up for a commenter account. FOR SHAME!

What About Style?--1998-9

Cher's "Believe" video, which I assume I caught on The Box a time or two, is essential 1998-9. Have you watched it lately? I mean, the featured mass of clurrb-urchins was/(is?) pretty hep. And Cher--a golden lion at center, all headdress and injections! Transcendental.

Animated Gifmas

Best Thing Going (For Monday)

I have long pretended that F. Scott Fitzgerald and self were a number in a past life. Whatever the reason, I feel sort of heavy-hearted and spiritual about him (and his letters and the Princeton campus). Here is an absolutely lovely L.A. Times profile of his last secretary, Frances Kroll Ring. Images of Scottie's last months are so vividly conjured that I can't help but get misty...

Chinese Democracy

"They are men. They have desires. They have testosterone. If they make a mistake, I'm not going to hate them. I don’t think they are above or below being seduced. I would be foolish if I thought that. They are tested and tested, like every one of us. I pray for them." —
Denise Jonas on the celibacy of her three boys [Good Housekeeping]

Some People Started Singing It Not Knowing What It Was (III)

Summer Jam for Wednesday

Probably the only song ever inspired by a Warner Brothers talking bird.

Worst Thing Going (For Tuesday)

Right after the election we saw a small upsurge in anti-abortion activity. But since the inauguration, things have gotten measurably worse. There's been an increase in picketing by students from Franciscan University in Ohio. On Saturdays there are 60-plus protesters and there's been an increase in screaming and aggression. We don't have a parking lot so people park on the street. The antis have surrounded cars, trapping the women inside, and in several cases the antis jumped into vehicles and touched or grabbed at them. The police were called but so far they don't seem to be responding appropriately.

--This is an excerpt from an important (and disheartening) Cristina Page post...Can you even imagine being confronted by one of these maniacs?! Sickness.

View of a Room

"Baroque" Marzipan Room, Tallinn, Estonia, 2008

Tuesday?

Best Thing Going (For Tuesday)

My hat goes off to the genius at Movieline.com who decided oh so subtley to give Phyllis Diller exactly what's been coming to her.

Some People Started Singing It Not Knowing What It Was (II)

For Mama

It's occurred to me of late that, though I mention Papa Able a great deal in this forum, I have yet to type out the words "Mama Able" in a post, which is funny, as I talk to Mama daily (if not twice daily). I suppose it's got something to do with the character of our intellects; Papa is a culture man, like myself, taking the most pleasure in consuming and discoursing earthly delights, music, folks. Mama is high-minded, a scientist, a Philosophe, a greater thinker than each of the clan combined. I glaze over at the very thought of the Heidegger on her bedside table. However, Mama has a major vested interest in two less rarefied, more earthly things: politics and baseball. Now, baseball leaves me cold like Heidegger. But politics bear keeping up with, and there is no better way to do so than phoning my mother (anytime, day or night).

I recall Oli North's hearings. I was about two and a half at the time (1987). But, toddlerhood aside, they had an impact. They marked the first time I witnessed (cogently) my mother's righteous anger against Republicans. Ronald Reagan was enemy number one at Castle Able well into the 90s (after which there were: Newt, Ken Starr, and, well you know, le Deluge...). Cowpoke actor cum Governor cum Commander Reagan had incited an idiotic and tired culture war--hippies versus soldiers--that my Ma took quite personally. He had dismantled unions, American industry; sent Right-to-Choice into a difficult position of defense; reinstated a Cold War culture of fear; and, among so many other crimes I shall not bother to list here, widened the divide between rich and poor with wild, cronyistic deregulation and a generally faulty, over-theoretical economic policy (that had something to do with that previously mentioned death of Industry).

Because it's high time we laid a whole mess of blame and shame at the feet of multiple generations of Republican extremists (those tacky, far-cries from their good ole', balancing fiscal conservative ancestors), and because I love to give Mama Able credit for knowing best, I was quite pleased by this simple and direct op-ed. Krugman, with his eye toward economic actuality (as opposed to soupier emotional politics--my stock in trade), reminds us that this current crisis is a direct result of 25-year-old Reagan policy. The brewing of this storm is my agemate. I have come up entirely in an era of limitless credit (and unlimited banks), and it becomes clearer to me everyday that it has had a damning effect, has poisoned myself and others with unprecedented (even in this bourgeois promised land) levels of materialism and imprudence that will take much time to abate and understand. So, thank Reagan for your crippling debt, or for each time you feel cold and out-of-place at the thought of not being able to afford the goods and services you once breezily counted on. And thank Mama Able (unironically) for decades of astute, impassioned watchdogging--at least someone still had a conscience (and a memory) after Vietnam.

Redemption

Just when I get so fed up with The Post (see below) that I think I'm gonna quit it...I find these gifts within (and without--that cover):
1) Heidi Montag posed as some sort of hostage.
2)Free (zzz)diamonds.
3)And this (or, more specifically, this).

Love in this Club

Representative Charles B. Rangel--just try not to seethe at this idiotic Post and Bloomie smear!

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.