Tired and cranky

I meant to write more this week but I am tired and cranky, and now I'm going on vacation for a week. Daddy promises to bring you something back from the Duty Free.

That's hott!

When he's not busy writing, oh, hundreds of songs, Tony also writes very funny things, like this here.

In with the good hate, out with the bad hate

In my ongoing grousing about disappearing breeder coworkers, my friend and I had this conversation:

B: In my many many years of in-house work, I watched countless mothers-to-be leave with presents and a promise to return to work, and not a single
one of them ever came back. if I'd been on my toes when I quit to go freelance I would have pretended I was just taking a leave to have a baby, then I could have at least gotten some loot out of it.

Me: We've had four leave this past year alone after promising to return. Seriously, stop fucking lying to yourself, bitches.

B: That'd make a great t-shirt: Seriously, stop lying to yourself.

Me: Hmm, I like the premise, but does it sound a little too "Landmark Forum"?

B: I'll amend it to read Seriously, stop fucking lying to me.

Me: Coming soon to Cafe Press.

The only dancing elephants I ever get to see are pink

The Great Leader has sent me a charming little video of last night's danse des elephants, which I missed, due to laziness.

We are tired of your abuse

Hey, you know what's going on tonight? The Walk of the Elephants through the Midtown Tunnel, which is either a charming visitation of more innocent times or a horrifying example of animal abuse. (I can't decide what it is, but as soon as that goddamned baby is out of here I will be better able to focus.)

Living in LIC, I could watch it from the Pulaski Bridge. We'll see how embittered I feel by midnight tonight.

You are special.

Hey, haven't seen you in a while! Wow, the baby sure got big! Li'l slugger!

Yeah, so how's it going? You enjoying being a stay-at-home? Yeah, gosh...I think the last time I saw you was when the office threw you that baby shower. Wow, you got a lot of stuff! And then...what happened?

Ah. Right. You never came back to work. Even though you said you would.

I'm glad you don't feel...y'know...embarassed or anything.

Taking everyone's presents and good will and giving us sweet fuck-all in return.

And, y'know, showing up here, clearly to garner more undeserving praise for pushing out that ugly little ball of drool and DNA.

Oh, isn't he precious.

Me v. Peeps

OK, so what's to stop me from eating an entire box of marshmallow Peeps rather than going to the gym?

Nothing, that's what.

[Edited to add: Terrible, terrible mistake, that.]

Seize Him!

This cracked me right the fuck up:

William Lee, 48, died after witnesses say he became belligerent and shoved an attendant during an evening American Airlines flight from Los Angeles and was physically restrained by seven men, possibly members of a rugby team from Australia or New Zealand.

Scene 1: Gym
Me: He's been on that eliptical machine for 45 minutes now. The limit is 30 minutes per machine.
Rugby players: [Charging.] RAAAAAAAAAAAA!
[Eliptical hog attempts to run away from the rugby players, trips over barbells that no one bothers to re-rack, falls to floor, is set upon by rugby players. Emits noise like deflating balloon.]

Scene 2: Crowded subway train
Me: Why she gotta be all pushing her gym bag into my kidneys LIKE THAT.
Rugby players: Unh? Grrrrr.
Me: Get her!
Gym bag wench: [muffled] Ack! Wheeze!

Scene 3: Bar
Me: This is ridiculous. I've been waiting here for ten minutes and the bartender is ignoring me.
Bartender: You've had two beers and a vodka drink and you're behaving in a belligerent manner. I'm not serving you any more alcohol.
Me: Crush him!
Rugby players: [Thud thud pound pound thud.]

Did McLellan ever show you his cigar, Jeff?

You mean like "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar''? That wasn't Einstein. That was Freud.

You can call your momma long distance/tell her they sent your body home

Ever since the state started enforcing its draconian tax collection for online cigarette purchases last month, I have become wary of purchasing from out-of-state purveyors. I know of two people who've already received tax bills. I'm waiting for mine.

Because of this prohibition, I've chosen the only path more humbling than actually quitting smoking: Rolling my own.

Take it from someone who hadn't done this since her skint freshman year in college: It's just like riding a bike. You never forget. (I observed this the other night on the occasion of my first foray into handrolling in 11 years, and N replied: This was back when you didn't shave your legs, wasn't it?)

I bought Drum, because although there are a couple other brands, I vaguely remembered a dislike for American Spirits brand--too dry--and couldn't recall the name of the other blue-and-red packaged brand. And although I really like the design of the Bugler package, I remember my friend Julie in high school showing me the remnants of her Bugler tin: there, nestled in the scraps of leftover tobacco, were a number of beetles. "Cool, huh?" she said. I concurred, but then again, I also thought clove cigarettes were cool, and everyone knows that those are made from rolled-up dog turds and rat hair and put holes in your lungs.

Julie was the one who gave me my first cigarette. We had just taken the math Regents exam and she and I drove back to her aunt's house blaring Ministry from the enormous boom box she kept in the back seat of her 1976 Dodge Aspen (which was also, I might add, the first car I ever drove). We'd had a bit of a close call with a cherry picker barreling down one of the myriad backroads of our town and were in the throes of a heady adrenaline-and-Ministry-induced high. Back at her house, feeling my first trickle of teenage nihilism, I bummed one of her cigarettes and sat on a log in her backyard. After I inhaled, the headrush kicked in, and the moment seemed crystalline and perfect, and in retrospect, not unlike my first line of coke, a few years later.

Sweet, sweet addiction.

Luck O' The Irish

Hey, who has two thumbs and a meeting at 42nd St. and 5th Ave. this morning...during the St. Patrick's Day Parade?

This guy.

Getting to the building was not difficult. Coming out, however, I was nearly run down by the throngs of people I'd never like to be close to again, which today included a passel of retarded folks in full shiny green mylar-and-felt regalia (oddly reminiscent of the Antigeist's xmas experience) who, though sober, were probably hopped up on green candy and the unmeasurable Sturm und Drang brought on by bagpipe bands. I got engulfed by their group and sort of tripped over one in a wheelchair (I'm so, so sorry about that). They smiled.*

*This, folks, also works as a metaphor for St. Patrick's Day in general, see also, Who Wants Cake?

Oooh oooh oooh!

Right now, the House Judicary Committee is meeting to discuss the following bill:

H.Res. 136, Directing the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to transmit to the House of Representatives not later than 14 days after the date of the adoption of this resolution documents in the possession of those officials relating to the security investigations and background checks relating to granting access to the White House of James D. Guckert (also known as Jeff Gannon).

[Edited to add: They're covering this AFTER lunch, apparently.]
Big thanks to Tizzie on this one.

ASBO-fucking-lutely.

The little fascist in me* was delighted to hear about this thing in the UK known as ASBO, which stands for Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Apparently you can get smacked with a penalty for being a prick. If, for example, you are a gas huffing nuisance or you can't control your straying pigs, you can be jailed for up to five years. I think that this is a capital idea and would like to be in charge of imposing ASBOs in my building. First off, the next-door neighbors would receive no fewer than five ASBOs. Then I will address the person or persons who keep leaving a yellow carpet in the foyer of the building. Listen, either you want it or you don't. But stop abandoning it in the public area. It is offensive. And whoever is discarding empty Swedish Fish bags and Colt 45 cans in the hallway, I'm looking in your direction. Finally, to the upstairs neighbor, the one who listens to the same Dave Matthews Band album every night: Sod the fucking ASBO, I am going to stab you in the neck with a screwdriver.

*Do you have a little fascist in you? Do you want some?

"Greater New York?" More like "Greater Continuing Ed National Masters Degree Salon Thesis Show"*

According to protesters outside of PS1 on Sunday, only 33% of the Greater New York artists were women. To me, a lot of the more memorable art was genderqueer, although there was some interesting Sculpture Jock** stuff...the mechanized drum-beating-record-scratching installation that I couldn't get close enough to read the accompanying placard and Matthew Day Jackson's "Sepulcher."

Anyhow, today's featured scribbling from my notes: The sinister imagery and the POV of Anna Conway's oils remind me a bit of early 19th-century folk art paintings of courageous firemen. I would go back to PS1 just to see her two paintings.

*Spoken with true bitterness by my talented artiste friend who's wintering in SoCal. Come back to the five and dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean!

**Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Fuck you, clown

Yesterday was the opening of PS1's enormous Greater New York show, which we attended in an eleventh-hour dispute settlement on the admission line, scissors ("see the show") trumping paper ("get drunk instead").

[Ed note: Turns out they were serving beer inside. Score!]

A lot could be said about this show: Its enormousness, its diversity of media (if not subject matter), its ambition. I will say this: It was fucking crowded.

I saw only a fraction of the galleries. Took some notes while I was there, which I'll try and translate as I have time.

On Robert Melee's installation: Clown Torture, John Waters.

His work took up an entire room, which was brightly lit and psychedically-painted, with plaster curtains and wood paneling. An entertainment center sat in the middle, laden with several TVs and photographs, which featured Melee's video and photography work. Anyhow.

Many of the videos featured a scary Karen-Black-looking woman in her 50s wearing clown make-up and little else. In one video, a hand paints her naked body. In another, she drinks a Miller High Life 40-oz. Naked.

I wasn't familiar with Melee until I looked him up this morning, and it turns out the woman in all his videos is his mom, which, of course, cranks the creep-factor into the stratosphere. Is narcissism driving her participation in his work, or is it something more malevolent? It was upsetting but oddly fun to watch, feeling that unpleasant back-of-my-bellybutton twinge the entire time.

Jesus Hates Subarus

You know, back when I drove an '83 Ford T-Bird, I couldn't do nothing wrong. That hulking monstrosity was like Ali, floating like a 1-ton butterfly through the streets of NYC. The few dust-ups I had left it, and me, completely unscathed. Why'd I get rid of it?

Since then, I've owned two Subarus. The first died a tragic death on the day of my 28th birthday. The second suffered a few indignities, some at my hands, and some at others', but last night man, last night...well, it isn't totaled. I broadsided a taxi who ran through a stop sign. (Oh, and hey, if the insurance company calls you, I told them we were coming from a fundraiser for thalidomide babies.)

I don't think anyone was hurt, thank goodness. But the front end of the car is all smushed inand creaky and making scrapey sounds when I drive. It limped home.

Things could be much worse. Thank you to N, Reeves, and my friend P for being such cool (and not to mention unhurt) friends.

Girls are getting into abstract analysis

My local coffee shop is staffed mainly by women, which is something I hadn't consciously noticed until the other morning when the shop's two male employees happened to be staffing the place alone, absent XX chromosomes.

As I swung open the front door, I was greeted with ...I was cut from her belly with a Stanley knife, my daddy did a jig with the drunk midwife...

In the morning, it's usually Cat Power or something similarly feminine, like Donovan.

But Nick Cave at 8:15 in the morning? That's all boy. I was surprised that the two of them weren't wearing their underwear on their head and taking turns as knife-throwing targets.

Speaking of the neighborhood, I've been following the story of the impending development of the Schwartz Chemical Building with considerable interest:

Schwimmer said he plans to spend "roughly $100 million" to turn the property from a ruins to a jewel....The borough president is glad that there is a development plan for that very unique building," said Dan Andrews, a spokesman for Borough President Helen Marshall. "We are always in the market for new housing..."It will be interesting to see what they intend to do with the smokestacks."

Whatever. It's going to cost so much to clean the site up--lead, asbestos, unidentified leaking drums of sundry chemicals--that I have a hard time believing there's enough money in the western world to finance this project. But let these fuckers sink their money into it. Let it be their Hindenburg.

*This weather is getting to me.

Career Opportunities

I wonder if enough videos are realeased each month to make this a lucrative freelance gig.

I'm disinclined to reply to ads of this nature on CL because the folks who post them are at best flakes and at worst purulent, malfeasant micropenis'd losers.
I emailed this guy, for example, whose ad proclaimed that he'd pay me to appear in wrestling fetish videos. Why not? I rationalized that it would be easier than a lot of the other things people have paid me to do, and besides, he said I didn't have to be naked. But as soon as I told him that I wouldn't work on a closed set and that I wouldn't appear topless, he stopped emailing me back.

Out of curiosity I googled his email address--he'd been vague about what his last name was, what sort of credentials he had, or where he was located--and discovered that in addition to filming fetish videos in his garage in Westchester he's a family portrait photographer "specializing in Bat and Bar Mitvahs!"

The other things I've done for money are things that you'll have to pay me to tell you about.

Reason # 317 I need a cameraphone

A couple weeks ago on AskMetafilter someone posed the question: Hey, how come no one's tried to deface the NYC2012 ad campaign posters? I thought it odd, because it's rare to see a subway ad that's NOT been scrawled on.*

Anyhow, it turns out that these posters have, in fact, been graffitoed rather cleverly.

Sadly, I don't have photos of the two most recent examples of subway-ad graffiti that impressed me, because I don't have a cameraphone and I never carry my camera because I'm an idiot. But humor me as I attempt to describe them. The first I saw in the Greenpoint Ave. G station: It's for the highly esteemed Interboro Institute and, as part of their inspirational new campaign, this one features an African American man leaping into the air accompanied by copy in which he pledges not to let 2005 pass him by. After the printed copy, someone appended No more tap-dancing for The Man.**

The second ad appeared in my local Jackson Ave 7 stop, and it's for the new Bolla Chianti. Superimposed on a picturesque Tuscan landscape are the words "Meet the new Italian in town." Underneath, someone scrawled, Soon he'll be shtupping your wife.

*Which reminds me of an essay I read in the Times many years ago by a guy whose visage appeared in subway ads. He noted one must summon a particular type of fortitude when passing a poster on which someone has drawn a penis hanging out of your ear.

**Hey, speaking of Greenpoint, my cousin the plant manager got quoted in the NY Times today. Good on him! The last time anyone in my family appeared in the paper was during that rather unfortunate double-homicide back in the 70s. Distant cousin.

The Beauty! The Beauty!

Moorish Girl posts two readers' reports on the Junot Diaz reading last night. One of the attendees mentioned that his neverending-work-in-progress bore a similarity to his short story, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which is one of the only stories I've ever read that made me weep openly.*

Anyhow, I'm not the only one anxiously awaiting Mr. Diaz's second book. And this reading is the first indication that we haven't been carrying the torch for naught. (I couldn't bear another heartbreak like the one I endured over Ellen Miller's failure to thrive.**)

*The other one being Pat Conroy's Beach Music, and I do wish I were kidding, but I'm not.

**Though she appears to be doing better lately, what with her excellent story in Brooklyn Noir.

Donde Estan Mis Pantalones?

I declare today a national day of mourning.

I smell Pulitzer!

Jesus, ya THINK?