I am pre-sorry for posting this, but someone sent me a picture of Demi Moore’s vagina in 1981, and it is beguiling. [NSFW photo and discussion to follow]
Nobel
I won’t defend his receiving the award, but I will say that today’s furor points to a problem we have: the punditry and right wing dismiss Obama by saying that he got elected on a cloud of rhetoric, but I say that we don’t believe enough that theories and ideas matter. Ideas help expand our imagination for how our lives can be lived. Before the marches and sit-ins, people needed MLK to tell them: We can do this, it’s worth doing, let’s do it now. Further, a bunch of English people didn’t get on a boat and land in America at random; someone crafted a story about the lives that were possible if they got up and did it, then they internalized that story, and only after the story sunk in did they actually get up and do it.
So, yeah. I agree that talk without acts is pointless (“When you unwrap the utopia, batteries aren’t included”). And occasionally I wish that Obama were more audacious in the narrative he’s trying to create for us. But I think that creating a story that makes room for people to think differently about both their personal and collective lives is a rare, difficult action; it’s a necessary step in the journey toward peace; and it is an action worth celebrating.
I am reading Female Chauvinist Pigs, which is briskly written and sharply argued, but every few pages I find myself compelled to look again at the author photo on the back flap, and now, on page 55, I must admit that this woman—there is a lot there in her gaze, isn’t there? Also her name is Ariel Levy, which is dreamy beyond compare—could beckon me into a career of organic farming or terrorism or pretzel sales or anything she demanded.
Is there an edition of this book sans author photo?
Does anybody know a drug dealer who is hiring?
So I’ve been watching “The Wire” and cannot avoid that there is something in this career path for me. Being a police seems horrible though, with the red tape and authoritarian meatheads and having to abet your partner’s cheating on his/her spouse. Drug traffickers, on the other hand, appear to reward initiative and critical thinking, and they would likely appreciate my no-drama style. Also we have similar taste in cars and clothing (that’s right, Avon—I noticed you wore seersucker the night you were released from prison!).
Prayer in public schools
Dear Lord,
Please do not let me be served eggplant parmesan ever.
Amen.
Love advice from Smog's "Strayed"
Don’t love in haste
Don’t love thinking only of the cost
Don’t ask someone to kiss something you would not kiss
Don’t leave someone waiting in the car
Leonard Cohen won't clean up the mess you made
This morning in the car, “So Long, Marianne” came up on shuffle. It reminded me of a story, which I started telling:
Years ago during my “first love” phase, this girl and I started breaking up and getting back together. During one break she had sex with a bunch of people—whoops!—and I found out—whoops x2—and I was very hurt. She mailed me a thick love/apology letter, and on the back of the envelope, she wrote in her brittle little handwriting a line from the chorus of this song:
“It’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”
That is a fine enough thing to write on the back of an envelope, maybe even charming for its political use of optimism, but I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom looking at that envelope and thinking, “No, you having sex with some dude from FRIENDSTER who looks like BRIGHT EYES is not a funny story I will laugh about again.”
Now (let’s get meta), it is funny to think about how dumb you were when you were 20, and the story feels so far-off that it may as well have happened to a fictional character in a book I read in high school, so I was laughing as I told it in the car. Brooke pointed out that I was indeed laughing about it, so the message on the back of the envelope turned out to be meaningful, though its timing was way off.
This phenomenon—that the timing of the reading interacts with the meaning of the text—is kin to something David Berman wrote:
If the fable of “The grasshopper and the ants” was amended so that the world ended before the turn of winter, then the grasshopper would have been wiser and the moral would have vindicated him. In a story, the location of the ending is very deliberate.
Anyway, Arianne, you are a Canadian prophet.
“I will always <3 u”
- Whitney Houston [via Dolly Parton]
Examples of confusion
Sometimes I’ll be in a bar, and I’ll get to talking so fast, boring into some argument, that in the back of my mind this thought bubbles up:
You are about to have an aneurysm or start bleeding anally, and that’s how this episode of “House” begins.
Today a lifelong dream was realized: I find myself in Bowling Green, KY, one of the few cities in the world in which one can arrange a WHITE CASTLE VS. KRYSTAL TASTE TEST! Both serve onion-riddled sliders, and though normally they are parted like brothers fighting for opposite sides in the Civil War, in Bowling Green they are but two blocks away from each other! Notes follow.
Image: White Castle buildings look like a putt-putt version of a castle, which gives them a leg up; Krystal buildings look like a 50s chrome diner crossed with a greenhouse. WC’s slider box is lame—it should look more castley, with more fringe at the top.
Price: WC’s cheese slider is 85 cents, K’s is 93. These prices are high when you consider that McDonald’s double cheeseburger is about $1.
White Castle cheeseburger: The bun was mushy and slimy inside. The top was crunchy, so maybe it was stale. Biting into it, all I could taste were the onions—which seemed to be diced onions mixed with some weird onion puree. I could barely tell the meat was there.
Pictured: Krystal on left, White Castle on right
Cheese Krystal: You can see how fluffy the steamed bun is; it’s soft and tasty, not mushy. There was a lot of mustard on the Krystal, which gave it a strong tartness. The burger tasted like real meat, making it more than a mere onion-holder. There are a lot of onions here, too, but none of the nasty onion puree. A bite of the Krystal was a bit saltier.
THE WINNER??!?!? Krystal, by far. The White Castle burger looked and tasted like a shit smear. The Cheese Krystal had too much mustard on it, but that’s my only complaint. Mark it down—another gross thing the South does better.
Apartment Therapy
Today in four hours I did the cleaning that previously, in January, took five full days. Obviously there was a psychological component to my January cleaning that I wish I had taken care of through some simpler, quicker method, such as a ritual burning.
Why is it important that our living spaces be clean when someone visits? Is it a gesture, as if to say, “You mean enough to me that I’d pile my shit in closets and vacuum”? Is it because we want people to think that we always live this tidily? For me there is that small degree of deception—I don’t want you to know that I live like an 11-year-old who divorced his parents—but mostly I feel like there is more room for people to happen in an uncluttered space.
Internet inventory
I am taking inventory of my Internet presences. Facebook, for instance, feels like one of the things that normal people are expected to have, such as their own apartment (as opposed to their parents’ basement). “Respectable” things carry out a function but are kind of boring, like Toyotas and Bob Dylan.
I stop shy of deleting my MySpace account because of one girl I’ve kept ‘favorited’ since undergrad. Her pictures—she has posted hundreds of thousands—all look as though they were taken through a smoky haze. She has the heavy eyelids of a lifetime stoner. She is maybe the Southern female equivalent of Josh Hartnett in The Virgin Suicides, and this is why MySpace is worth keeping open as opposed to Facebook: it preserves the opportunity for luridness. It is similar to how the kid in Adventureland was captured by the slouched, dead-eyed stoner girl: you figure she will get you into trouble, and you want her to.
N.B. I do not smoke or log into MySpace.
Let's talk about Carly Simon
Was listening to my personal greatest hits of Carly Simon’s Greatest Hits and realized that this woman is a mess.
In “Jesse” her ex comes back to town. She steels herself to avoid him, asks her friends to remind her what a shithole he is, but she gets pulled into Jesse’s undertow anyway:
Jesse, let’s open the wine
And drink to the heart which has a will of its own.
My friends, let’s comfort them—
They’re feeling bad, they think I’ve sunk so low.
Ha-ha-ha, now I can laugh at my stupid friends, since I won’t be needing them anymore, now that Jesse is in town, and things will surely work out with him this time, forever!
Truthfully I always want to stick up for Jesse. If he makes her feel excited enough to cut fresh flowers and wait by the phone, could he really be that bad? Maybe Carly should trust her gut and tell her friends to fuck off.
Signaled by use of a proper noun, “Jesse” feels more like a constructed fiction and less personal than her other popular songs. The music comes easy and light and doesn’t veer into the maudlin as readily.
—unlike some of the others, which carry the vagueness that comes with public confessional writing. In “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” she strings together a bunch of Lifetime-movie-ready images of marital dischord, decides marriage is an unwinnable trap, then accepts a proposal anyway because she doesn’t have the energy to say no.
“You Belong to Me” is a deliriously insane compound of despotic control and desperate neediness. (However I really like the line, “You don’t have to prove to me that you’re beautiful to strangers”—that’s an uncommonly sharp observation.) When she trills, “Tell her, tell her that I love you! Tell her I know you from a long time ago! Tell her she don’t even know you!”—she sounds brokedown. She sounds like she’s singing in an open bathrobe, and crying, in a train station.
Could this many portrayals of insane women in doomed relationships come from someone who experiences healthy relationships in real life? I am skeptical. If you think about how many love songs contain unhealthy views or plain terrible advice, you start to wonder how these people get hired as rock stars anyway.
“Nobody Does It Better,” her James Bond theme, is pretty awesome though and sounds only minimally like James Bond. Its one mention of a spy is sexily allegorical: “The spy who loved me is keeping all my secrets safe tonight.” She still seems unlevel here, but charm can make up for a lot.
Dear J. Frederick Berg Jr.,
I guessed that you are a lawyer and of course I am right, but then the names on these plaques always sound like lawyer names.
Please accept my sincere thanks for funding one of these library study closets. I love them so much that I skulk between the shelves until one opens up. I think I’d get a lot of work done in them if wi-fi was not available.
Tonight, the previous occupant left behind a half-full bottle of water and a half-empty bag of Snickers Minis. While I intend to touch neither, it is better than what people usually leave in these rooms: stains and smells.
And now a tip for you, Berg. I know you are a fancy lawyer, but no one puts the comma before “Jr.” anymore. Chicago style stopped it in the early 90s.
Anyway, thanks again, and if you ever want a tour of the library, or if you need an in-house ethicist for your firm (let’s face it, you probably do), I’m your man.
- J. Edward Turner
Today's role playing
Wearing a Bluetooth earpiece, pretending to negotiate a business deal
You work at the Apple Genius Bar; I’m a 17-year-old who spilled vodka on my iPhone because I’m sooooo wasted
You’re waiting in an economic depression bread line and have to convince me to give you the final loaf
Doctor/nurse jargon in 140 or fewer characters
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