Category Archives: More Bullshit

Uphill NYC

August 3, 2009 10:49 am , 2 Comments ,

She enters the city going the wrong way down a one-way street. Rush hour in the rain, driving past the Empire State Building in a 14-foot U-Haul, herds of black umbrellas bobbing across the road. Nature seems upside down. The real world is overhead where the buildings crest. She walks a trench at the bottom of a concrete ocean. In New York City human beings seem to navigate ditches. She feels the ground somewhere above her; she’ll have to take an elevator to find it. The scale of herself is completely off. When had she shrunk to the size of a bug? She’ll never look at bugs the same way again. She’ll stop grinding them into a paste and spreading them on toast. When had the range of skyscrapers replaced the Blue Ridge Mountains? What if Donald Trump got attacked by a bear?

Her feet hurt. She’s going to take a carriage ride around Central Park. The horse merges into the right lane and picks up speed. The city must seem even taller and weirder to horses because they all have to live on the ground floor. Their hooves are engraved with four-digit numbers. She recognizes the park from scenes in monster movies. Something’s going to eat her. The buggy driver points out the bridge from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. She feels a sudden kinship with Macaulay Culkin and regrets not reviewing his movie before moving to Manhattan. When Macaulay was lost in New York, did he also have BO? Her map says there’s a train station around the corner. Riding the subway elevator is a bad idea: It’s an airtight enclosure full of someone else’s pee. If it was her own pee it would be okay, but probably not for everybody else.

Home is a fourth-floor walk-up next to Our Lady of Sorrows church on a Lower East Side block that one hundred years ago supported a busy brothel and saloon. Home is quiet, rejuvenating, full of vodka. It’s fun to spy on the senior citizens who live in the housing project across the street. Not fun, but sad.

Routines have been established. Dumplings have been found. Drug dealers have been identified. Life is getting good and comfortable again. They call it the Big Apple because you want to pick up everything from the ground and put it in your mouth, but real New Yorkers frown on that behavior. It’s better to just load the stuff in your shopping cart and take it home with you.

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Alaska travelogue. Don’t read if you don’t like travelogues. I just have to get these feelings out.

June 19, 2009 6:47 pm , Leave a Comment ,

It occurs to me that my last post was sort of doom and gloom and that you may be wondering if I made it to Alaska and back. I did! Thanks a lot for asking. I also fell in love with the place, much like my taxi driver to the Juneau “International” Airport (they have service to Canada) who cashed in the return portion of a round trip ticket 25 years ago and never looked back. It must have been June when he did it, because the Alaskan summer has both snow-covered vistas and 80-degree days. You’re hiking up a mountain in a t-shirt while a glacier holds firm in the rocks below you, thinking “My armpit alone could melt down that glacier.” It’s actually really weird. I can’t explain it in terms of weather, temperature, global warming, chemistry, pop culture, anything. Maybe the ice is so full of bald eagle shit that it’s preserved year-round.

And I can speak about bald eagle shit from experience now. I feel like a true American. I took my cousin’s two young kids on a tram to the top of a mountain overlooking Juneau (these awesome kids were my free ticket to Alaska, god bless them) where we stomped around in the snow and then visited one of the state’s majestic bald eagles where it lived in a cage the size of a utility closet. The keeper said the bird was captive because she had been shot blind years ago, which I think is what the keeper says to tourists to make them feel better about seeing an animal suffer in captivity. But as I watched the creature and the kids gripped my arm (bald eagles are actually really big – and also intimidating when they rip into frozen salmon – and also scary when the babysitter is saying stuff like “Look out! The bird is going to eat you!”), the thing turned around, hiked its butt in the air, and tried to squirt me with white hot poop. Which of course made me cackle, but only because the bird missed. I’m pretty sure its brain is smaller than mine.

Other animals we saw included humpback whales (wedding whale sighting booze cruise!), sea lions (the one bloated male keeps a rookerie of 50 females at the ready in case he wants to play Bingo), ravens (they’re everywhere. Locals have to retrieve their mail as soon as it’s delivered, otherwise the ravens will open their mailboxes and cash their checks. They’re that smart. My cousin’s husband also pointed out that you shouldn’t look up when you walk through downtown Juneau because if you do you’ll see a dozen ravens staring at you and get freaked out), deer, squirrels, and dogs. I just remembered a joke my grandfather told during this Alaska wedding weekend: “Someone should make a toupee for bald eagles.” He has better delivery than I do. He has some comedic competition in Alaska though. A Juneau playhouse was putting on a show called “Salmon Chanted Evening.”

I don’t know if all Alaskan coastal towns are like this, but every day in the summer about five 3,000-person capacity, 10-story cruise ships dock in the Juneau harbor so their occupants can roam around buying gold nuggets and fur bikinis. There are more people in one of these cruise ships than in all of Alaska (I’m making up demographics, but this one sounds accurate). So each summer the town caters to these tourists by transforming itself into a quaint outdoor shopping mall where one can buy Eskimo-themed knickknacks and temporary orca tattoos. Meanwhile you get the feeling that in the winter it’s every man for himself and people walk around with either shotguns or fly fishing rods, out for blood.  And this is why I was baffled that Alaska is home to Sarah Palin. Everything I’ve ever seen of that woman on TV suggests that she’s not fit for the Alaskan wilderness. Pantsuits? Blow-outs? Come on. The state is as laid-back as it gets. I wore long johns under my dress to the wedding and I still felt like royalty.

One fabulous thing about Alaska is its daylight hours. It seems like an excellent place for an alcoholic to pay taxes (oh wait – we pay taxes to Alaskans) because it’s sunny until like 10pm and you not only get a second wind but a third and a fourth when you’re drinking. Is it time to stop? Slow down? No, the sun is shining. There’s a reason the bride and groom both did ice luge vodka shots at the wedding: The climate builds liver stamina.

Was the plane ride awful? Yes, but I had modern medication on my side. I feel sorry for the people of the 17th century who had to fly in commuter jets without these helpful chemicals. Their helicopter pilots must have been nervous enough to wet their pantaloons.

Oh shit, Jeopardy’s on.

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In which my husband solves the newspaper publishing crisis

May 18, 2009 8:25 pm , 3 Comments ,

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the future of journalism residing in “hyperlocal” news. Hyperlocal news steps in where the doomsday scenario leaves off: Newspapers fire experienced writers, writers have no place to go, newspapers die out, the end is nigh. Yet we still crave news that is streamlined and directly relevant to our lives. So instead of scavenging a national paper on its deathbed, we might read a blog written by an out-of-work reporter who lives down the street, a meaningful voice that in turn aggregates other meaningful voices.

This is where Darren Hoyt comes in. He and Ben Gillbanks, an English colleague, just launched Dispatch, a WordPress blog theme for writers and journalists. An add-on to the Mimbo Pro WP theme, Dispatch gives any journalist with $20* an online platform that looks and feels like a professional newspaper or magazine website. So with minimal effort and financial commitment, you can launch a respectable blog for posting pictures and stories of your tour in Afghanistan or your cat or whatever. God, my husband is on the cutting edge.

Tech Dirt tells us why hyperlocal news makes sense, and, by extension, why you should be interested in Dispatch:

The technological and economic constraints of newsprint meant that the whole process had to be done by full-time employees and carefully coordinated by a single, monolithic organization. But the Internet makes possible a much more decentralized model, in which lots of different people, most of them volunteers, participate in the process of gathering and filtering the news. Rather than a handful of professional reporters writing stories and an even smaller number of professional editors deciding which ones get printed, we’re moving toward a world that Clay Shirky calls publish, then filter: anyone can write any story they want, and the stories that get the most attention are determined after publication by decentralized, community-driven processes like Digg, del.icio.us, and the blogosphere.

Other tech people weigh in on hyperlocal news here and here and here.

In my own hyperlocal news, I want to punch that word “blogosphere” in the gut. And then make sweet love to it.

Here’s a “for instance”: Your wife needs a new website ASAP so she can compete with the New York literati! You just created an awesome website! What’s your next move?

Screenshot of Dispatch WordPress theme

Screenshot of Dispatch WordPress theme

*Keep in mind that Dispatch is an add-on to Mimbo Pro, which costs $79. Still, that totals $100 for a website with amazing functionality and versatility that you might otherwise pay a designer thousands of dollars to develop for you. I feel like I am one step away from an infomercial right now.

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Sickness. Couch. Links. Confusion.

March 6, 2009 5:03 pm , 6 Comments ,

I am a creature of routine occupying a body of convention living a life of habit. So when I got exciting news this week that seems to portend my world changing drastically this summer (holy crap I was admitted to an MFA program!), I immediately got the flu. It was my body’s way of saying, “Don’t go changing on me.” And not only am I receiving conflicting signals from my ambitious brain and my curmudgeonly immune system, I am further confused by the rejection letters slowly piling up from other MFA programs. Maybe I got into the one program that didn’t read my application. Oh well – sucks for them. I’m still going. A green light is a green light even when you can see a collision on the horizon. Thank you, dear benefactors!

In other news:

I give you the Halloween costume of the future! (The future being 2009.)

Tom Perotta talks Tracy Flick: “Especially with Palin, I don’t feel as if Tracy Flick was the best comparison. I just think people are made uncomfortable by ambitious women.”

Romantic comedies might be as harmful to the developing psyche as violent video games and cheese from a can.

Are poets held to lower standards today?

What war on drugs? I don’t remember fighting a war on drugs.

I’m the last person to be wrapped up in the WTF Blanket.

A new book asks why women get short shrift when it comes to writing the next Great American Novel. (Thanks to DD for the link.)

[Elaine Showalter] has insisted that themes central to women’s lives — marriage, motherhood, the tension between family and individual aspirations — constitute subject matter as “serious” and significant as traditionally masculine motifs like war and travel. Yet she rejects the preference of many feminist literary scholars for emphasizing “culture importance rather than aesthetic distinction” . . .

This website is to sociologists what PhotoshopDisasters is to designers.

Judith Warner writes about the pitfalls of mindfulness and Anna Fricke writes about not getting the baby drunk (both from NY Times blogs).

My alma mater is looking for a new mascot. Remember that artichokes, banana slugs, and “The Fighting Quaker” have already been done.

Jonathan Ames is taking on TV and James Franco is taking on books. And I live on the moon and moon rocks live on my couch!

I’m waiting for a quiet, sad moment to read this New Yorker piece about David Foster Wallace and his unfinished novel.

[Wallace’s] goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.”

Garrison Keillor learns a lesson from an unread writer.

And thanks to Edward Upward, I have decided not to take a sabbatical after all. You go off to the woods for a year and it puts you under terrible pressure to write “Moby Dick” or something worthy of having had an entire year in which to write, and the longer you work at this masterpiece the shabbier it looks, the whale turns into a guppy, and at the end of the year you have torn up almost everything you wrote and you are filled with self-loathing and bitter regret.

I’m just happy more good looking people seem to be choosing the literary profession over acting, modeling, or working at Hooters. Makes readings feel more like the talent portion of a beauty contest. Vive les letters!

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Brooklyn hipster imitation is the highest form of flattery

October 30, 2008 2:34 pm , 24 Comments ,

I wanted to be supportive. I really did. The poster’s kind of cool, even if the women depicted look too scrawny and too bangly and too fashionable to compete with the likes of us. They’re also in the Break Arm Position.

Hipster arm wrestling poster

But then I visited the Classy Ladies Arm Wrestling Society (CLAWS) Myspace page and the more I examined it, the more icky I felt. CLAWS was founded by three 21-year-old Brooklyn artists and DJs who are into 1) bike ridin’, 2) whiskey drinkin’, and 3) taking publicity photos of themselves in cute outfits. Okay, we’re into all that same stuff, but at least we’re not writing excruciating copy and questionnaires like this:

Have you ever found yourself clearing off a barroom table, staring down your best friend, hands locked, nail polish chipped … a frenzy of dudes gathering around you…when the jukebox and everything you’ve ever accomplished (graduate school, solo art show, your band’s European tour) is drowned out by the sheer necessity of this moment…of your moment…when it all just comes down to arm wrestling?

Calling all classy ladies with a penchant for arm wrestling and whiskey drinking…Fill out this survey and send it in. [. . .]

Questionnaire
1. Name
2. Nickname
3. Age
3. Locale
4. Birthplace
5. Which female celebrity would you most want to arm wrestle?
6. Which fictional character?
7. What’s your favorite ‘would you rather’ question?
8. Theme song in movie of your life at two moments, (both while walking down crowded nyc street)…1. you’re exalted, in LOVE, it’s a scorching summer day 2. you’re exalted, in LOVE, but it’s a grey winter day
9. Last but not least, why do you love to arm wrestle?

I wonder if I could make it onto the CLAWS roster with a few white lies. I dream of wrestling the fictional Madeleine, as played by Chantal Goya in Jean Luc Godard’s 1966 Nouvelle Vague film Masculin, feminin, while surrounded by a frenzy of dudes in bands who are still boozy from the night before. I dream of walking down Flatbush Avenue on a scorching summer day with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a fistful of MIA’s ass in the other to the tune of “Under My Thumb” by the Stones. And I would rather contrive to arm wrestle away my existential hangover than admit that I am ripping off the nice girls of Central Virginia.

This has all been an antagonistic preface to the following challenge: Brooklyn hipsters, we will rip your skinny arms off! We will shatter your bangles! We will mock your DJ careers! And then we will declare ourselves the original Lady Arm Wrestlers!

But all in fun, of course. There’s room for every patient in the wrestling fever ward.

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Review of “Doubt: A Parable” from One Star Watt’s resident theater expert

September 30, 2008 12:18 pm , 3 Comments ,

This week’s C-Ville features my review of Doubt: A Parable, a play by John Patrick Shanley showing at Live Arts through October 11. The editors had difficulty reining me in so I did not focus my review on either the guava/vodka cocktails being served at the Live Arts concession stand or on the historical fact that Shanley also wrote the screenplay to Joe Versus the Volcano. If I had my way, the review would have been 20% Joe Versus the Volcano, 30% guava/vodka cocktails, 10% how good the play was, and 40% my byline. So way to go, editors.

From an earlier draft, my ode to opening night at Live Arts:

“What does it mean that Live Arts “forges community and theater”? For this reviewer attending the opening night of Doubt: A Parable by playwright John Patrick Shanley, it means that Live Arts’ artistic director [the dashing John Gibson!] personally reminds the audience to turn off its cell phones before curtain. It means that as the lights dim, people in the front row whisper about who they know in the production. It means that members of the lead actor’s Crozet Presbyterian congregation bought their tickets in order to get a better sense of their pastor’s extracurricular activities. And it means that after the play the whole crowd stays on to enjoy champagne [a nice complement to the guava/vodka cocktails] and pastries [yes, okay, yes] courtesy of Albemarle Baking Company and a couple local arts patrons. So that’s the community part of the forging. The theater part is first-class entertainment.”

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Trying to recreate the turtle/toad/spider meme magic

September 4, 2008 4:00 pm , 8 Comments ,

Thanks to cVillain’s recent link, my blog has seen a 500% spike in traffic. It’s clear that I need to capitalize on this unforeseen fame by following up the turtle/toad/spider picture with something equally awesome. I don’t want to alienate my new fans who enjoyed the cute-tower-of-baby-creatures formula. That formula kicks ass. Why fix something that’s not broken? Therefore I give you the sequels to my triumphant turtle/toad/spider photograph (click on the thumbnails for the larger images):

Pig on Frog on Big Boy

 Pig on Frog on Big Boy

I actually saved these losers from drowning in a bubble bath.

 

 Pig on Monkey on Chick

Pig on Monkey* on Chick

These doofuses were riding on a skateboard about to go over a cliff, so I rescued them.

*The monkey has not yet mounted the chick, but he is planning to after I wind him up. 

 

Finally, my chef d’oeuvre:

 Baby on Shark on Creche

Baby on Shark on Nativity Scene

These guys were actually about to perish in a chemical explosion, but I pulled them to safety just in time. The shark has PTSD but is otherwise okay.

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Something cute I fished out of the pool filter today

August 30, 2008 6:19 pm , 19 Comments ,

I opened my parents’ pool filter today and there was this turtle, just barely afloat, with two resourceful friends riding the crown of her back. In the chlorine around them, dead frogs and insects bobbed belly-up, not nearly so lucky.

Turtle, frog, spider

I saved your ass!

My mom said this scenario would make a good children’s story, so here goes:

Once upon a time, there was a baby turtle who lived in a back yard in Virginia. One August day, her dumb ass crawled into a swimming pool. Then some other dumbass animals jumped into the water after her even though it was obviously a swimming pool made for human beings and not a pond or lake or whatever made for amphibians.

Eventually all the animals got sucked butt-first into the pool filter.

Crickets and frogs swelled, then drowned, when they grew tired of treading water in this fatal lagoon. But not the turtle. The turtle didn’t know that her cause was hopeless – that she might as well be trying to swim across the Pacific Ocean – so she kept paddling in the inescapable filter. An exhausted baby toad swam up to the turtle’s buoyed shell.

“Please, turtle,” said the toad, “may I climb on your back and rest my poopy legs?”

“Do I have a choice?” said the turtle.

“No, you definitely do not,” said the toad.

“Whatever,” sighed the turtle, and the toad hopped on her back. But the toad’s weight was not much of a burden, and eventually the two of them got to talking in a friendly way about gas prices and Obama and the lawn mower that routinely tried to decapitate them.

Then a little spider swam up to the turtle. “Do you mind administering my Last Rites and then killing me in a way so that I won’t suffer?”

“I have a better idea,” said the turtle. “Climb on my back.” The spider crawled up the turtle’s shell. She was high and dry. It was a miracle. With her hairy arms she made the sign of the cross on her cephalothorax.

The toad also wanted to be heroic. “Climb on my back,” she said to the spider. “I’ll save you.” Even though the spider had already been saved, she climbed on the toad’s back so the toad would feel useful. Then they bobbed up and down in the filter for several days chatting about the DNC and cannibalism.

Finally, a beautiful princess wearing a bikini opened the pool filter to check for cool dead stuff that she could ask her dad to dispose of later. “You guys, c’mere,” she said in her mellifluous voice. “You’ve got to see this shit.” Then a crowd of human faces was peering down at the miserable, bloated totem pole of turtle, toad, and spider.

“She must be an angel,” said the spider.

“Hold on – don’t take them out of the water yet,” said the angel. “Let me get my camera first.”

After a round of digital pictures, the creatures were released into the wilds of the back yard. Like three scoops of disgusting ice cream, they held formation as they rode. And they all lived happily ever after.

The turtle is currently writing a memoir that she hopes will be optioned by Pixar.

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Moonlighting at the VQR

July 23, 2008 5:52 am , Leave a Comment ,

Here are a few posts I’ve done recently for the Virginia Quarterly Review blog:

1. Can I Get That Matisse in an Extra-Large

and

2. Where the Women Carry Fish on Their Heads

And I’m not being biased when I say that the Virginia Quarterly Review has the best blog in the world.

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You know I’m reluctant to post about my personal life. . .

April 22, 2008 10:48 am , 3 Comments ,

But I just discovered that my rival blogger (btw, Nate, you’re my rival blogger) posted about the wedding reception we both attended on Saturday night in Richmond. Nate already gets more web traffic than I do, so I don’t think he should have an exclusive on the party. Then again, he was a better-behaved guest:

  • Nate and I both changed our clothes halfway through the reception. I changed from an uncomfortable skirt and sweaty top into skinny jeans. Nate changed into an Elvis costume and serenaded the bride and groom. Guest advantage – Nate.
  • Nate and I both have websites. His website features pictures of naked hipster girls (nsf), which wrangles him invitations to the AVN Awards Show in Las Vegas. My website features book news, which once wrangled me an invitation to the Authors’ Reception on Carr’s Hill. Guest advantage – Nate.
  • Nate is actually a sweet guy behind his sleazy Elvis facade. I am actually a sleazy Elvis behind my sweet girl facade. Guest advantage – me.
  • Outside the reception, Nate and I saw a man simultaneously driving a minivan and shaving with a disposable razor. He had a towel, shaving cream, and by the time he was done, the cheeks of a pre-pubescent boy. Guest advantage – both of us.
  • Because we have quite a few mutual friends, Nate knows dirty secrets about my past. At the reception I drank enough to blurt dirty secrets about my past to anyone who would listen. Guest advantage – my dirty past. (My dirty past is now grounded and no longer accepting party invitations.)

But the party was not about me [Onestarwatt! Huzzah!] and Nate [Driven by Boredom. Boobs. 🙁 ]. The party was about Jamie and Laurie. Unfortunately for them, they don’t have blogs of their own. Newlywed suckaz!

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