December 25th, 2011
My holidays, in few words and many pictures
Among the many amazing gifts I received, a book of edgy short stories!
A very good houseguest showed up with this:
. . . which helped with a Christmas eve game night with some clever friends
Then we woke up for Piglet’s first Christmas
and there was a Hanukkah kidnapping too (please note the Bert and Cookie Monster yarmulke)!
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December 13th, 2011
Since You Asked
Here’s a selection of my year in books, in no particular order. Actually that’s not true: I organized by picture size.
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November 26th, 2011
If Edward Gorey were a flapper. . .
He would be the salon-runner / early Modernist painter Florine Stettheimer. (More here)
You see what I’m saying, right?
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November 21st, 2011
Chelsea Burns
The Neo Rauch show at David Zwirner is not to be missed. Think David Cronenberg by way of Norman Rockwell, with a heavy top note of elderflower liquor. (Isn’t it a lucky thing I’m not an art critic?)
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October 27th, 2011
What Thick-Haired Authors Think About
I checked my watch. I was exactly on time. We looked at one another.
“You’ve lost your hair,” she said.
“It happens. At least it shows I’m not an alcoholic.”
“Why do people think you’re an alcoholic?”
“They don’t.”
“Then why did you bring it up?”
“I didn’t bring it up. You said I’d lost my hair. And it happens to be a fact that if you’re a very heavy drinker, something in the booze stops your hair falling out.”
“Is that true?”
“Well can you think of a bald alcoholic?”
“I’ve got better things to do with my time.”
–”The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes
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October 19th, 2011
Wedding Cake, 365 Days On
It looked better when it was fresh, but in many ways I prefer the defrosted one-year-later version.
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September 20th, 2011
Ameica’s Next Top Camporama
I like this book’s Valley of the Dollsish cover. And the Amazon reviews are fun to read too.
Moving on. . .
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September 15th, 2011
Calling all Millionaires who Love Witches, Twits, and Giant Peaches
Roald Dahl’s famous writing hut is in peril of falling apart and his family is searching for contributions to restore it.
It might not be much to look at, but magic isn’t always immediately apparent. Dahl on his hideaway:
You become a different person, you are no longer an ordinary fellow who walks around and looks after his children and eats meals and does silly things, you go into a completely different world. I personally draw all the curtains in the room, so that I don’t see out the window and put on a little light which shines on my board. Everything else in your life disappears and you look at your bit of paper and get completely lost in what you’re doing. You do become another person for a moment. Time disappears completely. You may start at nine in the morning and the next time you look at your watch, when you’re getting hungry, it can be lunchtime. And you’ve absolutely no idea that three or fours hours have gone by.
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September 3rd, 2011
The New School
Being cooped up in your apartment and the ten block radius surrounding it for months can be rather illuminating. After all those hasty robotic exchanges, you strike up an actual conversation with the woman who runs your regular coffee shop. You finally sort of justify your monthly Netflix bill and get around to watching an under-popular and under-praised television show, starting from the very, pre-Meadow Soprano’s-nosejob, beginning and adore it. You like this show so much you are excited about the fact that there are still 77 episodes to see and you concede that its few (okay, few gazillion) fans were on to something when they said it was the best show ever. And now that you’re not constantly whirling around town on the subway, rushing to doctor’s appointments and meetings in office buildings and drinks at “small plate” restaurants that manage to send you home feeling both greasy and hungry, you might even find yourself doing a little more reflecting.
Recently I’ve had reason to jog through the things that made me happy when I was a young ‘un. There’s something very weird about discovering previously ungleaned things about your childhood joys. Such as that the Marlo Thomas album Free to Be You and Me that you played ad nauseum on your beige and tangerine Fisher Price record player was a somewhat ham-fisted work of Ms. magazine propaganda.
That Raffi has sent out an open call to the kids who grew up listening to his music in the 70s and 80s–if you respond, you too can join the world-restoring academy of “Beluga Grads.” Definitely looks more fun than law school.
And you might see that the author of The Giving Tree and countless plucky poems Shel Silverstein looked exactly like an oversexed hipster waiter at a “small plates” restaurant located somewhere off the G subway line.
I sort of cringe at the thought of what I’ll learn about my current hobbies in 2039.
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