“Well, lady,” he said to her, “are you an artist too?”
“No,” said Miss Goering. “I wanted to be a religious leader when I was young and now I just reside in my house and try not to be too unhappy. I have a friend living with me, which makes it easier.”
~ Two Serious Ladies by Jane Auer Bowles
Email from _____ to me (and undisclosed recipients) at 4:26 PM, Monday, October 24th (this is the second email I’ve received from this person)
Hi Everyone,
Mimi and I are having another open gym this Sunday, OCT 30th from 1 – 3 PM. Would love for you to come and play. If you have any teammates, friends, sisters, etc. that want to come play as well they are welcome. Let me know if you can make it. See you soon!
Sincerely,
___
website
phone (Orange/San Diego County area code)
From me to ____, 6:05 PM
Please update your address book –– I am not the person you’re trying to reach. I live in New York City, I don’t have sisters and I don’t go to the gym.
So this morning on the subway I was looking over my shoulder as some lady was typing an email on her telefono intelligente (I don’t know why I felt that needed to be Spanish) and this is a pretty close approximation of the note:
Subject: Doctor O
Hi cutie,
I really think you should go see Doctor O. I’ll be happy to pay for it –– I’ll consider it an investment (I think you can get her down to $125/hr.) [Something platitudinous after this…]
So given the quotation of an hourly rate, I’m guessing this is about a psychiatrist or a mental health professional of some sort, and a Google search of Dr. O’s in NYC provides the following match:
Dr. S. O.
I’m a Clinical Psychologist who’s been in private practice for almost 15 years. My basic training is psychodynamic in nature, though I’ve worked extensively as a Dialectical Behavior Therapist (DBT), and it’s informed my practice of therapy enormously. Originally developed to treat patients with ‘Borderline Personality Disorder,’ DBT is also immensely helpful to those suffering a wide range of emotional disturbances, including depression, anxiety, anger management problems, eating disorders, difficulties with close relationships, and difficulties in the work place. It’s a treatment where the therapist is interactive and “real”, and the treatment process is de-mystified.
My working style is an integration of both of DBT, and my psychodynamic foundations. Classified as a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), DBT has a didactic component where patients are essentially taught important life skills (core mindfulness, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotion regulation). Many find this aspect of DBT extraordinarily helpful.
I integrate the helpful techniques from DBT into my primarily psychodynamic practice. A session is a collaborative process. I am not silent and distant, but actively involved. My style is warm and direct. Patients often say early on that they feel very comfortable with me, and well understood.
—-
Ah, the cutie is Borderline! That is… super unfortch.
“During her stay in Bourges, Simone also made a few attempts –– most of them disastrous –– to get in touch with the peasant classes. Once, when she was taking a walk in the country, she talked a farmer into letting her use his plow; to the man’s fury, she quickly overturned it. Some weeks later a lycee colleague introduced her to a couple, the Bellevilles, who had a small farm in the environs. They agreed to have her come for a few hours a day and do basic tasks –– dig up beetroots, prepare the cows’ fodder, pile up manure, draw water for the trough. But how many questions Simone asked them as she helped them prepare the noon meal! ‘How much do you make? How do you make ends meet? Do you consider yourself happy?’ The Bellevilles were perplexed by such queries, and never more embarrassed than when she asked them to ‘sum up their desires.’ When she asked them if she could live with them full-time, pay them rent, and ‘mingle with the peasants,’ that was the last straw. ‘Life would have become impossible for us,’ they told their daughter, pleading that Mlle Weil desist from visiting them again. Not only did she never change her clothes, they complained, but she failed to wash her hands before milking the cows, and when they offered her a fine cream cheese she pushed it away, saying that the Indochinese were too hungry. ‘The poor young girl,’ they commented. ‘Too much study has driven her out of her wits.'”
Simone Weil, Francine du Plessix Gray
My face is blurred in order to protect my identity from PETA, those crazy fuckers. The chicken's face is seen because let's face it, all hope is lost for that little guy. He was my exchange, my substitute, my expiation. This chicken went to death and I shall proceed to a good, long life and peace. SUCKER!
Last Thursday night was a very special night in the life of this little adventurer. A retelling:
First up was the inaugural meeting of the Harold Pinter Appreciation Society at a dark and cozy midtown bar, the location of which can’t be revealed because, well, then people would stalk and try to join us (whereas if they are interested, all they must do is email us at HaroldPinterGroupies@gmail.com and perform for the committee the monologue version of “The Tea Party.”) At this wildly successful event, we drank wine, read aloud from The Dumb Waiter and speculated as to what mess, exactly, Ben and Gus leave behind for whomever to clean. The next meeting was scheduled and plans for upcoming more elaborate performances (with costumes and larger casts, perhaps) were made before the meeting was adjourned.
At this point I hopped on the F train to Brooklyn for my second activity of the night: kapparot, the ancient Jewish ritual of swinging a live chicken round your head and then giving it to be slaughtered. I met my friends the Zs and after a quick costume change (we decided M’s red skirt wasn’t frum enough), we hopped into the Rabbi’s minivan, picked up another couple and headed for the exotic and far-flung neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn’s enclave for the Lubavitch Chasids. We walked into the heart of the hood and, surrounded by an army of Yiddish and Hebrew speaking schoolgirls and young boys asking for change for the Rebbe, engaged in Kapparot. The three men went and bought live chickens, held them by their wings, brought them back to us ladies (standing at the periphery) and, as we recited a prayer, twirled them around our heads three times. There were a lot of high-pitched clucking/squealing noises (babies and chickens sound very similar.) After we recited the prayers, we took the chickens ourselves, walked up to the little slaughter booth, where there were a few men who deftly snatched up the chickens, cut their throats, and tossed the carcasses on a pile behind them.
M and I were feeling a little queasy from the smell of fresh blood so we walked away from the ado and visited a nice bakery across the street, where I bought some delicious looking rugelach for my own YK observance and the Zs bought some snacks that we consumed after thoroughly soaking our hands in Purell (which I don’t even believe in but because my hands smelled like chickens, I made an exception.) After this, we walked over to the Rabbi’s house, passing the infamous 770 Eastern Parkway (spiritual center of the deceased –– perhaps? –– Menachem Mendel Schneerson) on our way, to pick up some palm fronds for our sukkah hut (lulav) and also some etrog, these bastardized hybridization of a lemon and a gourd. We had to wait for a while in line because there were a few pushy dudes who seemed BFFs with the Rab, but no matter as we got to discuss the perils of palm frond selection and admire the pious decrepitude of the abode. After we had purchased all our holiday necessities, we hopped back in the van and drove back to more gentrified pastures.
HA SIKUM!
I wish I could tell you about my upcoming adventure, but sadly, if I reveal our plans now, it may ruin the whole thing. Just wait, though, it’s damn good. One thing I can tell you is that the question of what to wear is so loaded it trumps even the one I asked myself pre-Kapparot.
My brother and stunningly genius collaborator, PS (aka Itinerant Son) and I will drag the bear from “Untitled (Lamp/Bear)” from Park Avenue down to the Gavin Brown Enterprise (620 Greenwich Avenue), dump it into “You,” douse it in lighter fluid, strike a match and dance and sing ecstatically as it burns.
I just found an excellently trashy white girl name on Heavy (the schadenfraude marathon continues… maybe A&E will sense my addiction to their shows and send me to a lovely “facility” in Malibu?)… BRITNY! What kind of a trailer-park cousin-banging roadkill-eating name is that?
I know we’re all about being nice to transgendered people these days, but let’s be real: it wasn’t Chaz Bono’s “knees” that hindered his performance in the quickstep portion of Dancing with the Stars… it was his fucking OBESITY!
Also:
Fuck you, New York Magazine.
Seriously. Fuck you.
“Insofar as ‘image flow’ isn’t going away any time soon, it certainly makes sense to try to harness the powers of YouTube for all kinds of social causes as well as for entertainment. But there are also perils. And one is that in a cultural moment defined (by some, for some) by image flow, the question of what one should look at, along with attendant inquiries into the nature and effect of the images blowing by, has a creepy way of overtaking almost all other questions. This may in fact be part of the so-called image regime’s raison d’etre, rather than a puzzling side effect. In any case, it can lead ot cul-de-sacs, red herrings, or distractions fatal to the primary issue at hand.
For example, in a director’s statement about his Abu Ghraib documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, filmmaker Errol Morris names the principal question posed by his film as, ‘Is it possible for a photograph to change the world?’ But what could the answer to this question –– be it in the negative or the affirmative — really mean? As Sontag puts it in Regarding the Pain of Others, ‘The image as shock and the image as cliche are two aspects of the same presence’ –– a notion that partially explains how the iconic image of the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib forced to hold a foreboding wire in each hand could literally sicken one’s stomach when first viewed, then move on to become a much-parodied image (e.g., on the satirical posters that appeared throughout the New York subways not long after the Abu Ghraib story broke, posters that borrowed the distinct design of Apple’s iPod campaign, but substituted the word ‘iRaq’ for ‘iPod,’ and featured the silhouette of hte hooded man in lieu of the iPod’s silhouetted dancer). It isn’t that the photograph played no role in the unfolding of human events –– clearly, it did. But after nearly 200 years of photography, it may be that we are closer than ever to understanding that an image –– be it circulated in a newspaper, on YouTube, or in an art gallery –– is an exceptionally poor platform on which to place the unending, arduous, multifaceted, and circuitous process of ‘changing the world.'”
-– Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
NO Manifesto by American dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer
No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement
of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.
Itinerantdaughter's Blog 