stairs and life

This is an article that was recently printed in Diario Vasco. It immediately felt like a footnote in the book "My Attempt to Figure Out Life". I like the emphasis on gaining perspective in this metaphorical outlook...it's definitely not about the despair found in Plath's fig tree. This is my translation from the Spanish. So, a look at another metaphor in hopes it may give us a grasp on the real thing.


"Those that have arrived to the seventh floor tell us that, although their feet are heavy, the view was worth the journey. If you peer out and look below the ground goes blurry but if you search along the horizon you see a beautiful and calm landscape.
We learn to climb stairs before we learn to walk. We advance with insecure steps, propelled by innocence, until the first floor, and upon arriving and looking backwards, we discover that the stairway has been erased, that the only way out is up. Each floor is painted a different color, each landing is a different meeting place. Between the first and second floor there is, thrown on the ground, a white album. You go on completing it with the experiences you run into on the stairwell. At first we have so much curiosity that we would climb the huge steps two by two but, after the second floor, we aren't in as much of a hurry to arrive. From the third the stairs seem taller. It's a stretch in which it is easy to trip up because each step implies a decision. On the fourth floor there is a wooden bench. You sit and confirm that your soles have begun to wear out. Then you discover that, any day, one of these doors can be opened. You jump up and for the first time you help yourself up with the banister to be able to continue.
Of all the floors of this building I don't know which is the best. We are all only concerned with reaching the top floor, but a neighbor told me that once you arrive on the seventh floor, the only thing that you regret is not having enjoyed more each step."

*guille viglione, translated from the Spanish article in the Diario Vasco

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marcovaldo by italo calvino

Finished yet another book that made me give thanks for my ability to read...this time the award goes to Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo, or The seasons in the city.

It's a must read. A collection of twenty short stories, each is set in a consecutive season in a small town of northern Italy. They follow a poor laborer named Marcovaldo who has an eye for the fantastic and a disdain for his surroundings. There are fantastical touches, like a plane bound for India accidentally boarded, a breath that clears a yard of snow, a plant with an astounding rate of growth...but this book doesn't ask you to confirm it as factual, but merely to enjoy it.

The book is divided by a decade or so down the middle, and the first half is set in the poorer yet more innocent Italy of the 50s while the second deals with the illusions of prosperity in the 60s. Of course, it's not nearly as didactic as it sounds...these exterior facts are not explicitly stated, but merely offer a bit more explanation as to what the characters go through.

Furthermore, the book is divided into self-contained chapters, each bearing a title and a label of either Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter. In a reflection of the interconnectedness of life and the way days and years often unfold, Calvino weaves shadows of the previous season into the most recent. In the first tale, Marcovaldo finds mushrooms sprouting up in the cracks of the city. Although he tries to hoard them for himself, everyone finds out and gathers them up....and the whole town ends up in the hospital. Three stories later, next Spring finds Marcovaldo treating his fellow citizens for rheumatism using wasp stings, which goes awry with a huge wasp attack. The following Spring's story opens with a doctor prescribing a some good air as treatment for Marcovaldo's children, and they end up in the countryside on the grounds of a sanitorium. These little threads he weaves attaching each story make a cohesive unit of the collection.

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figs and life

I saw Curiouser, a play from Skin Horse theater, at the New Orleans Fringe Festival last weekend. It was a lovely side-by-side of two lives that were not as disparate as they initially seem: Lewis Carroll and Sylvia Plath. A quote from The Bell Jar was used in the play, and I think it impacted all the twentysomethings in the group, including myself. So, a look at a metaphor in hopes it may give us a grasp on the real thing.

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

*sylvia plath, the bell jar

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how to spot true genius, part II

"However, one trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the pleasure we take in admiring skilled performances. Human beings have a permanent, innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts."

Okay, so I'm still struggling with this question, and today I'm thinking about it in terms of art. Art art. Fine art. It's such a loaded question...what makes good art, and who decides on good art, is a question laden with assumptions, prejudice, and snobbery.

One viewpoint suggests there are two schools in which you must separate art to be able to judge its merit: skill and concept.

A recent editorial in the Times pointed out that perhaps we are wired to emotionally respond to skilled works of beauty. What if all this discussion and all this controversy deferred to what people actually felt? I mean, really felt when they looked at a picture/sculpture/objet? Maybe the question would become moot. But I don't think it's possible to expect the many people who analyze for a living to be able to step down from their pedestal. And good art has come from the sanctioned 'movements' of art that have been ordained by the Deciders. It just may not last when the constructs of its value pass into history and all that's left is a skull made of waaaay too many diamonds.

This excerpt from the editorial says it best:



We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship.....

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.-Denis Dutton,The New York Times, October 15, 2009


For me, this begs the question of where is the happy medium? Are enough artists making things of beauty that are still original? Yet another impressionist rendering of a sunset on a small village is just as bad as the Hirst pieces Dutton rails against. Perhaps the measure of a true work of art must take into account originality, skill, and beauty, and acknowledge that the three must be linked.

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my special bookshelf

A pause to confirm the excellence of Orhan Pamuk's latest book. It has now been placed on my special bookshelf, whose unofficial title could be 'shelf for the best books I've read and own'. It sits, collecting its first precious dust particles, next to if on a winter's night a traveler (italo calvino), a moveable feast (hemingway), 2666 (roberto bolaño), history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters (julian barnes), confederacy of dunces (john kennedy o'toole), and the bell jar (sylvia plath) among others....not bad company.

So what's the fuss, what enables the 532-page novel to claim such exclusive company? In Museum of Innocence Pamuk continues weaving his interconnect Istanbul world, this time through the eyes of the obsessed Kemal. Kemal's two-month affair with his distant, distant relative stops his current life dead in its tracks and sustains him for almost a decade until happiness flits by him once again. Kemal runs in wealthy socialite circles, and Pamuk explores this world in his ever-luscious detail, with words piling up on each other in sentence after sentence. The eyes of a German model on a soda billboard follow Kemal around for ten years, reminding us of his Gatsby-esque upbringing and potential fate. This book is far-reaching in its plumbing of cultural mores and pieces of Istanbuli history, collecting them as avidly as Kemal collects every particle of his existence with Fusun. If the museum conceit was a bit strained in the more action-packed middle of the novel, it proved its worth as the end approached. The tragic end.

It was every bit as good as those bookkeepers promised me. Perhaps I will thank them as I am returning this weekend to New Orleans...

please read this!

Oh, and quickly I feel I must say Maureen Freely (translator) is amazing at what she does.

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how to spot true genius, part I

This past week, a topic that I think circles around appeared twice in the Times, prompting me to come back to it once again. It's the eternal battle in the field of the arts: that of raw skill versus intellectuality, as seen through the lens of the question of what makes a truly great work of art.

Whether talking about a movie or a dish, the question of value is often dependent on which of these lenses you use to view the work. To make matters more complex, the motive of the creator and the reaction of the participant are both criteria for judging, inextricably intertwined, and yet totally separate.

Take cinema, for example. Deciding where to place a movie on the spectrum of greatness can be tough...go to any summer cinema, and chances are you will find it easy to see a completely entertaining yet wholly unoriginal and forgettable piece of fluff. So was it good? Well, it wasn't bad....and maybe it was kind of good, like Titanic, perhaps. But you don't even care, because you enjoyed it.

Then there's the movies that pretend to greatness, that relish the opportunity to be classified as festival, or art house, films. We all know them. They're beautiful and paced slowly to give you time to enjoy that beauty (so vain!). They work hard at representing certain cinematic ideals or fashions. They touch on "deep" topics, and often focus on dialogue or landscape. You can't not see these types of films sitting in the halls of any film festival. A few modern day examples? One I saw at Zinemaldia was 10 to 11. Beautiful, artistic, but kind of opaque and boring. A few other art for the sake of art and NOT for your sake- Tuvalu. Brokeback Mountain. Margot at the Wedding. Don't believe me? A google search for 'boring art house films' returns over five million web pages.

Then there are movies like Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction, Synechdoche New York, to name a few, that manage to combine the entertainment and immediate likeability of a blockbuster with the originality, quality, and stamp of its maker that typify art house cinema.

So that leaves us still with the question of what makes a truly great movie. Our reaction to a film, our visceral response, is important! But it is far from all. And some of those art house movies carry import, whether it be due to their place in the evolution of cinema or another factor. It's all so relative it makes your head spin trying to take in the opposing sides. I like this quote as a point in the debate because it makes concrete the arguing factions, those would-be determiners of greatness: profit, art criticism, popularity.

"Many studio executives argue that films can't objectively be categorized as "good" or "bad": either they appeal to a given demographic--and make the studio at least a ten-per-cent profit--or they don't. 'most critics are not the target audience for most of the films being made today, so they're not going to respond to them," sony screen Gems' Clint Clupepper says. "How a fifty-six-year-old man feels about a movie aimed at teen-age girls is irrelevant." -The New Yorker, January 19, 2009

I feel motivated enough to wrestle with this question a bit more, and in writing, so I will be approaching it with regards to food, art, and music over the next few posts. Trying to make a little bit of sense out of it all.

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museum of innocence day, 2009

"It was the happiest moment of my life, but I didn't know it."






Today marks the release of Orhan Pamuk's latest English translation, The Museum of Innocence. Touted by some as his greatest achievement, this novel is a tale of lifelong, obsessive love.

Having spoken with the estimable bookkeepers on Pirate's Alley, I can say with full confidence that it's a work of literary art. So get yourself to the bookstore, roast some chickpeas, and curl up with this latest gem.

I'm so excited.

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it's complicated

How can this one moment make me feel so many emotions?
First, and most pure, happiness.
Second, guilt. A part of my mind actually belittling that first, most pure part of my mind for feeling that tiny spark. That first part of my mind feeling like it shouldn't have felt that about some dumb mug with some dumb tea on some dumb rainy day.
Third, confusion. I just wanted some tea. And I became happy. And now I feel confused.
Fourth, introspection. And here's where I try to figure out what brought me to this point. Why did my brain take this tiny act to such a level? Does it have a greater application to my life? What does the fact that I am even thinking these thoughts say about me? It's amazing, because I feel like for each thought I grasp, I lose nine because my consciousness moves so quickly.

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itsasaro

I like untranslatable words.
Take itsasaro.
It's Basque. And it's translation is 'a condition of the ocean ideal for going out to sea.'
Good. I'm glad someone has a word for this.

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excerpt....guess where?

Snow coming hard from the sky, long enough to render the mountain path impassable. With cold seeping through his garments the priest grumbled silently. Always the one old man, rain, shine, torment or snow, always waiting. The same cold inside, a dark body huddled beneath fur, waiting for the same words, the same motions. Read. Grasp the chalice. Raise it into the frigid air. Recite words of prayer. Wait. Repeat, and always the same but then a drop of blood on the cloth. And the bread no longer bread, but soft and firm like human flesh. His heart beating so fast, the old main raising his clasped hands to heaven. All on this darkest and coldest of nights. The wind screamed through cracks in the slate walls.

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US Open derailed!

A semifinal with an unexpected result in today's US Open...Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina dominated Rafael Nadal of Spain, 6-2, 6-2, 6-2.
The announcers had basically been looking past him to a Federer-Nadal final. Now it's possible that we may even have a Del Potro-Djokovic final.
How cute was little del Potro in his post-match interview?

About beating Rafa, he said, "I"m sorry."
And, not content to beat Rafa in tennis, he started a humility contest as well: "I'm not strong, but I do my best." Yeah. Yeah you do.

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The Art of Living in the Moment

Breathe.
We are living in a world that is distraction and fragmentation.
The only way to drown it out is to channel all your mind's energy to the present.
The pace and the hurry and the way things are never enough disappear when you actively focus on each passing moment.
Forget the future.
Forget the past.
You are where you are and comparisons only take away from that.
Luxuriate in and savor your passing seconds.
Look at the world with a beginner's mind.
You don't know what's around you, no matter how many times you've seen it. Trust me.
It's not about rewards. There is no end product.
Just being mindful.
Breathe.

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kings of leon genealogy

i found this letter walking the streets of nashville. it was folded up in a little square, with hearts and arrows all over it in a purple ballpoint. pretty crazy!


dear stevey,

thank you for everything you have done for me and my career.
i love your voice and i spend much of my time emulating its edgy and screechy nature.
and so far, it's working quite well.
i can only hope to age as gracefully as you have.

love,
caleb

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roddick and verdasco at the rogers cup

The Rogers Masters is happening now in Montreal, and today's match between Verdasco and Roddick was pretty heated. A two hour and 36 minute match, it finished 7-6 R 4-6 Verdasco and in a tiebreaker with Roddick taking it 7-5.
Verdasco was leading at 5-5 in the third set, but he gave up three points with two really unforced errors. You could see the defeat and exasperation in his body language, and I can't tell if that's something I hate or love to see as an audience member. On one hand, it makes me almost embarrased for the player. But that actually kind of draws me in to feeling for that player.

At 40-40 in the third set, Roddick's 6 games to Verdasco's 5, Roddick unwrapped a new racquet. He then proceeded to volley safely with Verdasco for several minutes until Verdasco hit a killer cross court shot as Roddick lunged toward the net. Roddick missed the AD serve and Verdasco returned his second with a furious deep court shot.
During the tiebreak game, Verdasco hit forehand after glorious forehand, at one point forcing Roddick to throw his newly unwrapped racquet in the air. Moon shot by Roddick. A bounce off the tape by Verdasco. 3-3. A solid serve and aggresive back court hit by Roddick. Net by Roddick. 4-4. Beautiful line shot by Verdasco. Ugly long shot by Verdasco. 5-5. Poor return by Verdasco. 6-5 matchpoint Roddick. Fault followed by a long volley until Verdasco hits it OUT. Roddick wins. Lifts his shirt to show off a relatively undefined paunch. Maybe Andy needs to lay off the prosciutto a little bit.

Watching players like Roddick and Verdasco, who are ranked 5 and 10 respectively, really makes you respect the top players in the world: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and the Williams sisters. Their game is substantially more graceful and error-free than even their fellow top tenners. It's the difference between any merely great talent and a true genius, born with physical and mental advantages that coincide so rarely with a nurturing environment.

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another magic aspect of Birmingham

Normally, I'm not stuck on Birmingham stuff for the blog, but I've been pondering it quite a bit lately. I guess it could be part of a subconscious effort to reconcile myself with living here...or maybe have the opposite effect.
I've been talking a lot lately to people about downtown real estate, and there seems to be a common misconception that a building downtown, say, on 20th street, costs a normal amount of money. Well, that's just not true. For whatever reason, the beautiful, tree-lined artery of downtown Birmingham plays host to some really cheap buildings. Some friends with a new business downtown told me their building was on the market for $150,000. That's a three-story building, on 20th street. In need of a new roof, sure, but I think that would be pretty affordable considering the purchase price.

What's more, part of the main drag is in a mistical, magical no-man's land where zoning is a foreign concept. I recently had the privilege of touring an old storefront on the north side of 20th that was being renovated as a residence. The facade had been redone in a gorgeous dark wood, and the interior was open, airy and modern. To top it off, a rooftop balcony offered views of the entire skyline. Tax assesor's value? $74,000.

And I'm sure some of you heard about the City Federal auction at the beginning of the summer. In a prime example of executive arrogance, the Atlanta-based firm Synergy decided to hold an absolute auction on their lovely new condos. A great way to make some quick cash, right? Sort of. They sold 11 condos in 29 minutes. The only problem is, they were supposed to sell 20, but decided to close the auction after one of the half-million dollar residences sold for $80,000. Aaah! So, the conclusion: Birmingham Real Estate is too good to be true. Magic.

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now i know why it's called the magic city.

Because you can host an entire music festival and not pay anyone.
Excepting artists who had the foresight (or suspicious business practices) of demanding cash in advance of playing (like Young Jeezy), and the smaller acts who have no manager/middleman, checks were bouncing left and right in the weeks following Birmingham's "premier" music festival.
I'm not really sure where anyone expected the money to come from. You can't advertise REO Speedwagon and Styx as your headlining acts and expect to make ANY money. It seems like bad decision (holding it in June instead of, say, October) was piled upon bad decision (settling on mediocre bands booked by people who don't even live here), until the ominous end that no one ever really thought would come sent it all crashing down.
I know a few bands who got their money, but they were the smaller acts that cashed their checks the Monday after. Bands with the thousand-dollar checks were left hanging. And Bottletree, caterer of the event, got stiffed for about half the bill, leaving them unable to pay staff and recoup costs from virtually closing down the bar that weekend. So where do we go from here? Everyone's got ideas. One of the Bottletree folks airs his rant here. His, however, seems a bit narrow in focus. Yes, Bottletree has rejuvenated Birmingham's music scene. Yes, we deserve a more relevant festival lineup. But you have to live in a pretty insulated world to believe that most people in Birmingham give a flip about bands "like Wilco, Drive By Truckers, Mos Def, Broken Social Scene, Cat Power, The Roots, Vampire Weekend, Beastie Boys, MGMT, Crystal Castles, TV on the Radio, Andrew Bird, Neko Case, Grizzly Bear, Of Montreal, Sharon Jones, Nick Cave, Mastodon, Band of Horses, Les Savy Fav, Phoenix, Bat for Lashes, Lucero, Dan Deacon, Dr. Dog, Explosions in the Sky, Wolf Parade, Animal Collective". I mean, I am young, white, middle-class, and into music, and about half those bands' music I have never heard, and of the other half about 50% of those might induce me to buy a ticket. But not a $30 one.
So, everyone's got a favorite solution. What almost nobody's got is the stamina/blindness to keep a dead festival breathing for 20 years. And their check from playing City Stages.


Type rest of the post here

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megachurch or christian corporation?

Megachurches: huge groups of people that gather in a stadium-like setting to listen to a preacher who typically has some sort of celebrity status and typically delivers crowd-pleasing sermons.
Peter Drucker calls megachurches “the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last 30 years.”
Don't ask me if megachurches are good or evil. All I know is the first megachurch, a rented drive-in where Robert Schuller preached to hundreds sitting in their parked cars, looks a lot like entertainment. And not a lot like community. But I'm no expert: ask the folks at triple canopy, who put together an essay and slideshow detailing the parallel evolution of the megachurch and the corporation.
Perhaps the most patent aspect of all this is how deeply megachurches are rooted in a passing trend. The current business model they emulate is just that-current. And destined to be outdated by the end of the decade. Will megachurches prove to be a passing fad? Probably.

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language vs. globalization

Sometimes globalization feels like an unstoppable force. But maybe something is actually fighting against it. Maybe language is the saving grace of different cultures and peoples. Sometimes I feel so powerless to stop the merging of cultures, the erasure of differences and histories in favor of a common narrative. There is an increasing sense of reality as instantaneous, and therefore ephemeral .

But maybe people like me have a fellow fighter in this quixotic battle. As long as different cultures speak different languages, there will be a line separating them, acting as a ‘do not cross’ strip of paint around a museum exhibit.

Think about it: if you are searching for some good South American music, the internet seems like a perfect solution. A search in English, however, will reveal only a desultory and incomplete list. But if you have just a bit of Spanish, a few key searches (mi cantante favorito, lo mejor musica argentina) will yield exponentially higher success rates. Simple, but insurmountable without language.
Think about the war on terror. American soldiers on the ground can be rendered completely useless without translators if civilians refuse to cooperate. A man could be standing in front of them, saying, “I can take you to Bin Laden”, but they wouldn’t have a clue. It’s vitally simple

So, while these frustrations are countless, they have a higher purpose. Preservation. Survival. As long as language separates people, cultures will remain distinct. Even in this increasingly connected (and English-speaking) world, nuances and shades of meaning remain in the shadows.

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looking back fondly on the 16th amendment...

Some Constitutional amendments are glamorous, recognizable by a mere number...the 19th (women's suffrage), the 13th (abolished slavery), etc.

Others will never, ever have their moment in the sun, partly because they refuse to reveal their meaning even under a microscope (25: Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.) BLECH.

And some that seem innocuous, like the 16th, or income tax, amendment, actually become the Great Walls of American history, creating a complete and vast separation of the past and future. We don't even give income tax a second thought nowadays, but imagine what it was like before it existed. Individuals were allowed to pursue their personal financial goals without the knowledge of the government.

Your wage and earnings, legal or not, were yours alone. The government had no need to pursue involvement in a person's business or private affairs. A huge inheritance, left to two children, was just that...no estate tax, no paperwork. So that's why all those heroines in old novels are so romantically taken care of.

It almost makes one want to be Republican. But, then again, it's too late for such drastic measures.

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dreaming of travel...

...and picking up some great ideas from www.gonomad.com...russia here i come!

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savoring slowly

I'm loving this book so, so much.
It's my second Pamuk novel. First I read Snow, which was just awesome. Istanbul seems so close when I'm reading his books...I can smell the coffee wafting out of dingy neighborhood bars and see the Bosphorus shining in the moonlight.
I don't ever want it to end...fortunately Pamuk's oeuvre is rather extensive, consisting of several masterpieces: Snow, The Black Book, The White Castle, Istanbul:Memories of A City , just to name a few. Then there's, as a friend put it, his B-sides for the hungry fan.
It seems nice to be the voice for an entire city, to know that what you are framing in words will mark for posterity the character of a place you love.
Not sure what I'd write about...Wildwood? Driving around? Drunk people outside of BellBottoms?

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old people make me cry

old people make me cry.
does anyone else have that problem?
yesterday i saw an old man with blood gushing down his face lying on the ground outside of Whole Foods. he probably fell; who knows what happened. all i know is the sight of him prone, so helpless in his faded blazer and khakis, just caused sadness to completely overtake me. what happened? did he trip on the curb? does he have anyone to take care of him? what are those people sitting over there eating their lunch thinking? why can't there be more people around to care? why do we have to live in a place where nobody ever interacts with anyone, where our circles of comfort need never be penetrated? why do i feel embarrassed and deeply sad right now? Is this a guilt stemming from my personal life, or is this society's guilt manifesting itself in me?
Why don't people just care more about the elderly?
all these thoughts happened in the span of a couple seconds. all of these questions, so important, will probably go unanswered, especially by those who desperately need to confront them.

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my fashion icon

Mix and match is how I roll. I don't buy outfits. I don't even really buy clothes, unless I'm in another country. Here in the United States I prefer to find them in the trash pile.
Maybe that's why I feel such an affinity for the crazy Edie Beale. She lived such a boring life. She scares me, because in a way she reveals a part many of us keep hidden. She sucked all the life from every moment. She was a contradiction. But in her you can see a glimpse of what happens when a product of society detaches from that society.
If you don't know who the heck I'm talking about, here's an morbid summation. If you don't care to know who I'm talking about, I just have a couple words for you: fishnets over shorts under a skirt that's been tucked up and under the waistband on one side. Yes! Or sweater, pulled only partially over head with sleeves tied at the crown of head, like a fabric ponytail. YES! And please, don't forget your ostentatious broach.
Edie captures the imagination, which I suppose is what fashion is all about. For me, though, she is the epitome of craftiness and bravery, which, when I do consider fashion, are the things I value most.

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le chose du jour

I've always admired the fun that Europeans manage to inject into their graphic design sensibility. They don't shy away from the silly, the lower-case, the cartoon, even when dealing with serious subjects.
Imagine my delight when I stumbled across these two little gems.



The first is Los Bajos de la Alta Cocina (loose translation: "the lows of high cuisine", which comes to us from Chef Aduriz at the amazing Mugaritz, outside of San Sebastian. The second is a fuego negro: pintxos y viñetas(loose translation: "a fuego negro: small plates and cartoons"), from the young chefs at one of my favorite places in the world, A Fuego Negro, in San Sebastian.
Leave it to the most innovative chefs to fuse cooking with art in a whole new way. These books bring the graphic novel into the kitchen. The Mugaritz book is hilarious, featuring the misadventures that come with a michelin-starred restaurant. A Fuego Negro's book is a bit more of a history, and includes a very nice selection of recipes. I'm seriously salivating over both, at a level comparable to the last time I was in their dining rooms.

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tele-life

I was thinking recently about how those who grew up in the 50s have the uniquely privileged position of belonging to both pre-TV and post-TV society. These people know a world I never will--one without television. They know what it is to have a lazy afternoon stretch infinitely before them, permeated by a quiet that no longer exists. They know a silence and a loneliness that cannot be replicated. We can turn off or even choose not to own televisions, but still their secondhand white noise exerts a kind of influence on us, clamoring

for a position in our brains.
Please stop to imagine life before TV. If you want, stretch out before radio. There was no such thing as immediate communication. Letters were about the quickest you got. It really takes mental acrobatics to imagine this kind of life. And it makes me want to shed a little tear when I think about how it is absolutely irretrievable. I can write the letters (only to get texts in return!), get rid of the tv, keep the radio off, but still technology and webs of communication shape my life.
That's not even thinking about the Internet, although maybe we should. My generation may very well someday be the subject of a rant like this one. I remember my first experiences with the Internet-sitting in a study in my friends house, on Instant Messenger, in 1994. I was ten. The Internet stayed out of the spotlight for several years after that--it was only in high school that it began to truly be an essential part of life for the majority of the population. Perhaps I too occupy an enviable position for having experienced life without the urgency of the Internet. Only time will tell.

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of time and the city

This cine-poem is a jewel, as much for viewers with no attachment to Liverpool as for lovers of the city. Terrence Davies' voice plays over the images in his latest film, Of Time and the City, some of which are pulled from history (my favorites) and others that are filmed a la PBS (not quite so inspirational). His words had me scrambling for a pencil and paper: "that is the land of lost content/i see it shining plain/ those happy highways where we went/and will not come again." Okay, so that's A.E. Housman. But still. A lovely documentary.

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