Absence

December 9, 2009

I’ve been away!  I’m so sorry, my little nothings!  My absence can be explained in the following blurb from New York magazine:

The [Ten] Greatest Excesses of Art Basel 2009

1. David LaChapelle’s Art Deco “Happy New Year 1932.” As the party began, synchronized swimmers in flowered bathing caps and glittering maillots dove into the Raleigh pool and performed “Putting on the Ritz.” Commissioned to do a photo series by the German luxury automaker Maybach ($500,000 per car), LaChappelle hung a nifty giant photo above the bar, showing the car running over someone at a wedding party gone mad. “When we come to care about things too much — art, cars, anything — that’s decadence,” the artist said, waxing philosophic. By the end, the event looked like the birthday party scene from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, except with hundreds of black and silver balloons and less clothing. Anthony Haden-Giuest ended up mostly naked, wearing little other than a party hat.

I was there, though clothed, but not entirely dry the whole time.  Oh, and I got in by crawling beneath some bushes and a table.  God bless the Raleigh.

I once read this Times article about blogging and the fact that it’s an often-abandoned hobby.  I have a complex now, because of that and my favorite Simone Weill quote.

One of my favorite artists this year was Peter Liversidge.  He retroactively stole my proposal ideas!  That didn’t make any sense, but I had the idea before I saw his stuff, which is great.

A proposal by Peter Liversidge

Advertisements in Harper’s Magazine

December 3, 2009

Iceland (Tourism.  Duh.)

The Balvenie –– the Hand Crafted Single Malt

Books, including but not limited to: Reading Jesus by Mary Gordon, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literary and the Triumph of the Spectacle by Chris Hedges, New York Revisited by Henry James, You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America by John R. MacArthur, Euonoia by Christian Bok (see below,) Asylum: Inside the Closed World of the State Mental Hospitals by Christopher Payne (with an essay by Oliver Sacks), Why We Cooperate by Michael Tomasello (synopsis: Understanding cooperation as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior. (my analysis: yawn!))

LOTS of clean energy stuff

A biographical documentary about Joan Baez (biodoc?  Is that a genre?), as seen on PBS

StoneSoup, the literary magazine by children.  (Ms. calls it: “The New Yorker of the 8-13 set.”)

Diva-licious, a compilation of songs by female jazz artists like Diana Krall, released by NPR

David Morgan Purveyors, whose catalog includes, “Northwest Coast and Celtic jewelry, Akura pure fur felt hats, Filson outdoor clothing and much more.

Pajama-grams, which are pretty much exactly what they sound like

The Kindle!

$14 European berets

Delta

Rosetta Stone

Small text ads in the back:

“Form a real relationship with someone in extreme poverty.  Transformation through friendship, understanding and help.”

“Without doubt, the finest domino sets you can buy.  Great gift, with engravable [sic?] brass plate.”

“Philosophy of Heterosexuality –– Politically-incorrect ideas of a cigar-smoking old man.  http://www.philosophyofheterosexuality.com”

“REDEFINING RECOVERY.  Navigating the downslope of Peak Everything.”

“WHAT CORPORATE AMERICA IS REALLY  ABOUT: Read my true account at celinem@aol.com”

a nudist colony

a ghostwriter

A dating service exclusively for “graduates, students, and faculty of the Ivies, Seven Sisters, Stanford, U of Chicago, and others.”  (Others?!  Any others?  DeVry?)

Upton Tea Imports –– Purveyor of the World’s Finest Tea

“Unorthodox Erotica” Catalog for $2

“The Ultimate in Spanking Erotica:

‘Spanking Girl’s Backdoor Man’ starring Madison Young, Tom Byron, and beautiful Snow, includes every sex and spanking thrill.  $48 minutes.  VHS or DVD.  $24.95.  Color spanking brochure collection $5.”

My First Book Cover Photo

December 3, 2009

Haha, you can't see me!

Hm.

December 3, 2009

So I mentioned in one of my earliest posts the book written entirely without the letter “e”…there is also a French book that is over 500 pages long –– but only one sentence.  Now I’ve come across an ad in Harper’s Magazine for Eunoia, a new book by Christian Bok that, as the tagline implies (?), has five chapters, and only uses one vowel per chapter.

“Seven years in the making.  Five chapters.  One vowel.

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman.  A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal.)  A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh –– a handstamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that charts a phrasal anagram.)  A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabaharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat.  A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.”

What do we think, children?  Mockumentary?

I’m on the Left

November 28, 2009

Am I Sick?!

November 28, 2009

Okay, so I know everyone’s panties are in a wad because of these aspiring reality show stars crashing the state dinner, but I think it’s a) hilarious, according to my sick side and b) sort of a good thing, according to my practical one.  (These two overlap somewhere masochistic and fun, like piercing your own ears.)  Allow me to elaborate:

So first of all, I suppose it’s necessary that I mention to you that I don’t follow politics.  I actively do not participate, which, if you ask me, is better than passively participating, which seems to me what everyone else appears to do.  I was raised by a libertarian father and a politically apathetic mother, so I was educated in the school of All Politics Is Bullshit, and the older I get, the more I believe it, genuinely.  Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, I see all politics (and sometimes life as a whole, though not nearly on such a depressing, nihilistic level, thanks to therapy) as this kind of cannibalistic meta-theater performance.  Congressmen get together and chatter chatter chatter and nothing happens.  Everyone gets dressed to the nines and bows to the Japanese president and we (the audience) cheer our approval or hiss our disapproval regardless of any real consequence, simply because we need to release our own emotions on to the symbolic vehicles, aka politicians.  And this charade continues forever and ever, and those who want to follow the laws, will do so, and those who don’t, won’t, and this is a system to which we’re all ascribing unless we simply choose not to.  AKA turn off CNN and opt to finger paint instead.

How appropriate, then, that two reality show wannabes crashed the state dinner…aren’t they really just calling attention to the farce upon which the system is based?  It’s a wonder a camera crew doesn’t follow around members of the Obama administration already, take them inside closets for “confessionals.”

“I gotta tell you guys, Malia is really acting out these days…plus with all the flack I’m getting for health care stuff, man, I’m stressed.  Spark it up.”

And again, sorry to get all pacifist on everyone’s ass, but it seems to me that the biggest statement of trust a political figure/body could make would be to lessen security?  Gandhi went to live in the areas in northern India where the violence between the Hindus and Muslims were the worst because he knew his power as a symbol.  I fail to see how American politicians expect us to let them into our homes when they can’t let us into theirs?

Then again, I’m not afraid of death, especially by assassination.  Fastest way to iconic status.  Obama’s misgivings and faults (human, understandable…there was absolutely NO WAY he could have lived up to the expectations we all had from him, even if he had succeeded in turning deficit into surplus with a wave of his hand and a prayer) would be immediately erased if he were to perish in a fusillade of bullets.  If you really want to unite a nation, tragedy is the way to do it.

Enough of the nauseating theory shit, though…let’s talk about practicality.  CNN (which I catch bits of every once in a while, as my boss is addicted) had a number of INCENSED broadcasters and political officials on, freaking out about how a) these people could have been TERRORISTS and b) now we’re talking about the Salahis, for God’s sake, instead of IMPORTANT things like ABORTION and AFGHANISTAN.  Well to that I say:

1. They are kind of terrorists…what’s more terrifying than a reality TV star?  Have any of you fucks SEEN Breaking Bonaduce?

2. They did everyone a favor, really, if we are concerned about the president’s safety.  Now we know security is too lax, and no one had to suffer as a result.  In fact, I think this ought to be a pretty regular procedure, on airplanes, at state dinners, UN meetings.  Send in someone with a vial of air, a crude drawing of a grenade to keep the security peeps on their toes.  It’s an exercise of sorts.

3. With regard to b), then stop talking about it.

To conclude, crashing parties=always awesome.  It’s just math.  Some weird seventeen year old boys crashed my twenty-fifth birthday party and spent a lot of time looking at themselves in the mirror flexing until my friend told them we were exercising “face control” (look it up) and they had to leave.  But I treasure their memory.  It wouldn’t have been the same without them.

The answer to the titular question is obviously yes.

END SCENE.

Make-up!  I need touch-ups!

Exhibit A: Why Thanksgiving Sucks

November 28, 2009

Exhibits B-… coming soon.

 

A

 

AC: so how was your tgiving

me: oh fiiiiine

i didn’t do anything really
AC: i went off roading in the woods with my 80 year old gma in my uncle bens ford f350 and almost got shot by hunters
BUT
i didnt cry this yera
so all in all, counting it as a victory

Cleaning Out My Computer

November 25, 2009

Work it, Diane Lane!

This Is A Re-Post, Not A Joke!

November 25, 2009

I’m being serious.

A Brilliant Idea Whilst Packing

By itinerantdaughter

I’m on the move again…

I think I’m going to gather together all the single earrings, socks, and shoes (yes, I have two,) dump them in a box, title it “Loss” and try to sell it to the Guggenheim Museum for a million dollars.

UPDATE:


M: i just lost a glove today:(
ID: oh the worst
you should give the remaining one to me for my art project
“loss”
M: i know!
that’s why i told you!
Everyone with one sock/earring/glove/mitten/shoe/uh, anything else?, please contact me so that I can provide with an address to send the remainder to, and also your name, age, and hometown so that you can be credited on the project. Feel free to put on your resume as “collaborator.”
UPDATE #2:
Becca says…I have several single shoes. Probably about 7. I have kept all of them through my last several moves in hopes that one day the other will show up. Will you be keeping an archive so that long lost souls of the shoes (pun!) can still find one another?
Great idea! Please comment here requesting the paperwork and I will send it to you ASAP. You can send the complete forms and the single item to Itinerant Daughter, c/o the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10128.

Monday, Monday

November 24, 2009

“The problem with all the scientific manipulators is that somehow they don’t take life seriously enough; in this sense, all science is ‘bourgeois,’ an affair of the bureaucrats.  I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything.  Otherwise it is false.  Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow.  How do we know –– with Rilke –– that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?  Manipulative, utopian science, by deadening human sensitivity, would also deprive men of the heroic in their urge to victory.  And we know that in some very important way this falsifies our struggle by emptying us, by preventing us from incorporating the maximum of experience.  It means the end of hte distinctively human –– or even, we must say, the distinctively organismic.”