KM: Why is it always the lamest looking guys that start a sex cult? How does that happen?
ID: Good point. It’s never a dreamboat. Who is the best looking sex cult leader you can think of? My vote is David Koresh.
KM: That’s what I was going to say. In regard to regular cults, I’d say David Miscavige. Great hair.
ID: He’s kind of WASPy hot in a way.
Recently I was browsing the web and I saw a news item about two women in Fort Myers, Florida, who married a ficus tree. Now, this wasn’t (probably) a case of objectophilia, as the women mostly had the wedding in order to prevent the tree from getting chopped down, which the town planned to do as its roots were encroaching on a neighboring property. Still, it has echoes of object love: an affinity for a thing, a wedding ceremony with white gowns and cakes, and even, somewhat miraculously, an acknowledgment from the public (city officials are now working to save the tree). It reminds me of how whenever these kinds of stories come up in the news, I always want to write a listicle of sorts, with the above title.
So, herewith, my favorite ladies marrying things:
Eija-Riita Berliner-Mauer: I’ve written about her before. Apparently she died in 2015. Still waiting on someone to translate her documentary for me. The only information I would like to add to my original piece on her is this quote:
“I find long, slim things with horizontal lines very sexy. The Great Wall of China’s attractive, but he’s too thick – my husband is sexier.”
And this poem, which she allegedly wrote:
I Dream About You
You beautiful Berlin Wall.
You are so very sexy, my Darling.
I will always be here for you. My love for you is
so strong as the concrete blocks which
holds you standing.
I often think of the times when you in my loneliness
has made me so happy.
My kisses will warm you, when the night comes.
My life begins and ends with you.
Finally you should all know she observes a yahrzeit of sorts on the anniversary of the fall of the wall.
Erika Eiffel: In 2007, Erika Eiffel observed a commitment ceremony with the Eiffel Tower, whose curves she admired. I’ve always thought the Eiffel Tower to be a bit cliched but I wouldn’t want to yuck someone’s yum, so get it, Erika! Eiffel says that prior to her union with the Tower, she had an affair with an F-15, with whom she was besotted she ended up becoming an expert on it and earned a $250,000 scholarship to the United States Air Force Academy.
Jodi Rose: Also in France, Jodi Rose married Le Pont du Diable, but I kind of call bullshit because she spoke (for her bridge lover!) and said that “he understands that I love other bridges––and men.”
I found a few others but there isn’t really enough information on them (a woman who fell in love with a metal processor, a woman who married a fairground ride) to make it into my Very Brief History. And thus we come to my favorite of the bunch: artist Tracey Emin marries a rock! Emin, the famous wild child of British art, decided to marry a rock in the garden of her summer home in France. She wore her father’s funeral shroud as her wedding dress. “Somewhere on a hill facing the sea, there is a very beautiful ancient stone, and it’s not going anywhere,” she told the press, which is just about the gosh darn most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. More than you can say for many partners, anyway.
A field of eligible bachelors, in Brittany
Guys.
What’s with the disembodied hand trend on the cover of cookbooks? Two of the most popular cookbooks in recent years feature them; in fact, the covers look suspiciously similar to one another in more ways than just that one. So, what exactly is happening here? Why do I find this a little bit… scary?
This eerie similarity is not enough for me to not want these cookbooks, though, just for the record.
So I started an homage to great similes elsewhere (cough cough). This one below is too long for me to incorporate there, but is still excellent, for so many reasons.
Yeshua’s kingdom apparently exists in ever-changing resemblances. He does not say what it is, only what it is like. It’s like a tiny seed. Like something inside you. Like a pearl you’d give everything to possess. Like wheat growing among weeds. Like the camel climbing through the needle’s eye. Like the way the world looks to children. Like a servant making good use of the master’s money. Like getting a day’s pay for an hour’s work. Like a crooked magistrate, who has fixed the case in your favor. Like a narrow gate, a difficult road, a lamp on a stand. Like a wedding party. Like a wedding party where all the original guests have been disinvited and replaced by random passers-by. Like yeast in dough. Like a treasure, like a harvest, like a door that opens whenever you knock. Or like a door you have to bang on for hours in the middle of the night until a grumpy neighbor wakes up and lends you a loaf. The kingdom is––whatever all those likenesses have in common. The kingdom, he seems to be saying, is something that can only be glimpsed in comparisons, because the world contains no actual example of it. And yet the world glints and winks and shines everywhere with the possibility of it.
~Francis Spufford , Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
“Rabbi Baer of Radoshitz once said to his teacher, the ‘Seer’ of Lublin: ‘Show me one general way to the service of God.’
The zaddik replied: ‘It is impossible to tell men what way they should take. For one way to serve God is through learning, another through prayer, another through fasting, and still another through eating. Everyone should carefully observe what way his heart draws him to, and then choose this way with all his strength.'”
~Martin Buber, The Way of Man
Whenever I am scrolling through Netflix and I see one of their own productions in the “trending now” or “critically acclaimed” sections, I’m like, “Ugh, bragging like that is so unseemly.”
From a Daily Beast article published in 2014:
Marni Kotak sits on a gold-painted twin bed, wearing a gold satin nightgown, with matching bedsheets covering her legs. She’s scribbling in gold ink on a cartoonishly large notepad, an expanding list of the day’s emotional fluctuations. It’s a small room, littered with gold-painted everything: chairs, desk, exercise machine, dumbbells.
It isn’t Kotak’s apartment, but the microscopic Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn, where I have come to see Mad Meds, during which the 39-year-old performance artist will document her “personal struggles with her own mind, the US medical system, and the pharmaceutical industry as she attempts to withdraw from psychiatric medicines.”
Kotak has only just begun weaning herself off a cocktail of anti-psychotic, anti-depressant, and anti-anxiety medication. She started the pill-popping regimen—a combination of Wellbutrin, Abilify, Klonopin—in February 2012 after being treated for postpartum depression. A medicine cabinet stuffed with empty pill bottles provides an informal tally of the drugs she’s consumed in the past two years. When I arrive, Kotak is surprisingly relaxed, telling me that, at the moment, she’s only suffering from “mild anxiety and achiness.”
***
This woman is a genius. The birth of the child which kicked off the postpartum was also staged as a “performance,” although that choice I find a bit less exciting. Anyway, I’m a Marniphile now.
of foodstuffs eaten in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. I skimmed back through to compose this list, so I might have missed some, as I remember there being more when I first read the book; still, I managed to catch a few gems, such as cow udder soup (how much would you have to get paid to try that?)
Coffee
White rolls
baked goose
cabbage soup
“a nice smoked eel”
Zwieback
soup made of beer, sugar and eggs
another made of rose hips and onions
another one of bread and cabbage water
another of cows’ udders flavored with nutmeg
dough mixed with beech-nut oil
pickled herring and goose with treacle sauce
hard-boiled eggs
dumplings
boiled potatoes
pickled raspberries
200 oysters
the ears snout and strips of fat from the pig’s neck boiled in peppermint schnapps
arrack
pickled goose legs
black ham
fruit liqueurs
sweet cakes
Stewed pigs’ feet
plum conserve
Ken Kesey:
As portrayed by a young Gene Hackman:
… at NYU’s Center for Experimental Humanities.
nothingness
the 1990s
underworlds
anti-colonial pedagogy
bad women
John Berger
the curatorial
insomnia
David Bowie
(Among others, I’m assuming)
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