Itinerantdaughter's Blog

Shortly to be sent to PR people at all major, fancy Miami hotels.

To Whom It May Concern:

Greetings!  We are the Well Dressed Refugees, a tribe of breathtakingly beautiful youths with biting wits, fantastic hair-dos and fierce spirits who act as a collective art cooperative devoted to upstaging the simulated “real” with the real real .  We had our debut late this past year at Miami’s Art Basel, during which our highly acclaimed piece “Untitled #76” was in the Convention Center.  Since then, we have exhibited at the Palace Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, ____ in Los Angeles, and Gallerie de Osgood in Miami, published a small ‘zine and begun plans for massive theater pieces that will span numerous countries, socio-economic milieus and spheres of consciousness.
As a hotel employee or manager, you may or may not be aware of the contemporary meta-art world and its focus, which is imbuing everything with a joyous abandon and sense of deep yet whimsical spiritual purpose.  This announcement is made completely devoid of condescension; in fact, we thought that considering you yourself are an artist, creating constantly and prolifically, it might be beneficial for you to be made aware of the glory of your own accomplishments, as well as those of your colleagues (everyone.)  As a group, the WDR has met with unparalleled success in spreading exhilaration and orgasmic confusion wherever we go, and therefore we would like to offer our services as Meta-Artists-in-Residence to you.
The marketing concept of the pretty, mischievous hotel dweller(s) is not a new one.  What would the venerable Plaza Hotel be without plucky little Eloise?  (We have an exact doppelganger, F to the YI.)  Or the Algonquin without the drunkards at the Round Table?  (Repeat last parenthetical.)  The Chelsea without Andy Warhol’s meth head starlets?  (You get the picture.)  BORING, that’s what they’d be.  There is a long tradition of the libertine-in-residence, and with us, you can get five for the price of one!  We can pour drinks, drink drinks, and play bongos.  Plus we can guarantee you some really fantastic and entertaining activities, including but not limited to spontaneous meditation sessions, organizing hotel guests for giant games of Manhunt, and, if you have a pool, synchronized swimming routines complete with flowered caps and old lady nose plugs.  We can also assure a guest appearance by none other than actor-turned-pretentious-performance-art-champion James Franco, a dear friend, and Mickey Rourke, who always bring the ladeez. No assembly required.
A small anecdote, by way of parting: during the weekend of our grand premiere, we saw a pretty though dull-looking girl lapping in the pool at a hotel to remain nameless.  She removed half her bathing suit, exposed her breasts unenthusiastically and sat beneath a small fountain of water looking rather listless and unhappy.  Later on, she confessed to one of us that the hotel “sometimes paid” her to swim around.  Our collective response is: come on, guys, you can do better than that!  Treat your guests like intelligent, post modern beings; bait them with Baudrillard, not boobs!  Not that we’re against a titty flash now and then, but we just want to be upfront about the fact that we set the bar high, and will inevitably attract people just like us: glamorous, immortal, highly cultured and, as our title indicates, blindingly fashionable.
To discuss rates, references and programs in production, please contact ID at itinerantdaughterandson@gmail.com.

Wishing you filthy dreams and a million cupcakes,

The WDR

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing in regards to the Craigslist position for a Learning Annex blogger on the subject of Self-Help and Personal Development.

I certainly “have…an enthusiasm & passion for the subject” of Self-Help/Personal Development, though admittedly most of my advice will entail staying far, far away from things like books about self-help and personal development.  As Roger Ebert so eloquently twittered, “Self-help books are bullshit.  Read a good book.  That’ll help you.”  I am a budding bibliotherapist and life-long sage and can give the soundest and funniest advice on either side of the Mississippi.  Please don’t misunderstand: I can wax existential about all the self-help luminaries from Oprah to Norman Vincent Peale and Lord knows I could write a f$*ing tome on Rhonda Byrne and the socially noxious dribble contained within The Secret; I just probably won’t point readers in those directions for any reason other than to point out what’s wrong with the world and the way we think about personal development and helping The Self.  I’m more likely to look to Kant, I suppose, or The Bible (with the occasional Van Morrison reference.)  I went to Columbia.  We had to read that stuff,* and I think it helped me personally more than a decade in therapy or any misery memoir ever did.  Not to knock therapy, though, because it was immensely didactic in many ways, and I think most of the population could use such emotional exercise, but given the recession and all, probably not a realistic idea.

I know how to be nice.  No, I promise, I do.  But I don’t like to coddle.  If this position involves quandaries I am supposed to help readers navigate their way through, I’m not likely to hold their hands.  I might pat their shoulders and then give them a really detailed, logical map, some trail mix, maybe a little bourbon to take the edge off, and then send them off.  If they’re being whiny and childish, I may get stern, but I don’t yell.  I do, however, curse often.  No catalyst for self-development like a S-T-A-U-N-C-H munchkin who swears a lot.

I could go on, I suppose, and talk a bit more about my general swath of knowledge, my occasional visits to a Hindu guru who gives fantastic advice, or certain stock life advice I like to give (“Be sure to spend time with people outside your own age group” and “Never trust anyone with two first names”) but really, what the fuck do I know?  The first rule of being wise is knowing you know absolutely nothing, and anyone who pretends otherwise is a false prophet.

To close, I leave you with the lyrics to this beautiful and oh-so-true tune from Monty Python’s film The Meaning of Life:

ARTIST: Monty Python
TITLE: The Galaxy Song
Lyrics and Chords

{Spoken, loosely}
Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving

And revolving at 900 miles an hour
That's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day

In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way

Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars
It's 100,000 light-years side-to-side
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick

But out by us it's just 3000 light-years wide
We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point
We go round every 200 million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there's bugger all down here on Earth

Thank you, and goodnight!

Sincerely,
ID
https://itinerantdaughter.wordpress.com (only about one year old)

*I am, of course, not including Van the Man when making this statement.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to Roger Ebert, http://twitter.com/ebertchicago/status/11766350431.
Also to Jivanmukta Swami Ganapati, for telling me to live my reality.