Author: Gil

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Shock the Monkey (with caffeine)

A few months ago, I wrote about a strange moment in a Dunkin Donuts on my morning commute. Today, I pulled in to another nearby DD on my way back from lunch, and a woman driving a Jaguar walked in ahead of me. She was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a sweater, with a plaid flannel shawl.

I stood behind her on line, and noticed that she had some sorta loose collar on her neck. It was red, with little silver buttons. A red, heart-shaped “dog tag” was hanging from it, on the back of her neck. It read

PET MONKEY
BILL IS
MY MASTER

I’m just gonna hide under my desk for a while.

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Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king

Here’s a neat interview with architect Renzo Piano, who over the years has inherited a bunch of projects from other architects (for a variety of reasons).

When you visit buildings by other architects, what do you look for?

Haha! First, I enjoy them very much. Second, I steal everything. Stealing is maybe too hard a word. There’s an Italian word, you say “rubarro,” which means a nice robber, without a mask.

What did T.S. Eliot say, “Good poets borrow, great poets steal”?

It’s really about that. But art is about that. Music is about taking and giving back. In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything — from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up — grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music. And you know what, I put all my robberies in a little piece of paper that I have with me and fill almost a whole sketch pad. Even when I don’t like a building, I still find something to take. This is probably because I was never a good school boy, so I grew up with the idea that I was not the first in class and I was a problem all the time. When you grow up with that idea, you spend your life taking from others.

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Cereal Killer

Back in November, I wrote about how I’ve boycotted the large-sized box of Wheaties at our local supermarkets because Alex Rodriguez is the featured athlete. At least I could get by with the 12-oz. box, since I had got no beef with Steve Nash.

It just got worse. I hit the supermarket this week and discovered that A-Rod is still the large-box athlete (I need to check the expiration dates on those boxes; is it possible that no one is buying them?), but the Nash-boxes are gone. The 12-oz. box of Wheaties now features . . . your WNBA champions, the Detroit Shock!

Seriously. It’s a team photo of a WNBA team, which would be bad enough. But the picture also includes the smiling faces of the team’s head coach and top assistant: Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn.

I’m goin’ back to Atkins.

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Low-res

Well, it looks like my New Year’s resolution of posting every day is already shot. That’s what I get for having a modicum of ambition.

Amy wrote about our quiet New Year’s Eve celebration over on her site: she cooked a nice meal, we watched Annie Hall & some South Park episodes, and we barely made it to midnight.

We “watched the ball drop” (huh-huh-huh) on Dick Clark’s show, if only to remind ourselves of our mortality during the celebration. Yesterday, Howard Stern read the overnight TV ratings for the New Year’s Eve shows. It turns out that a stroke-impaired Dick Clark still drew twice the audience that Carson Daly drew. Make your own joke.

I didn’t really think up any good resolutions for this year, outside of the aforementioned “post interesting stuff every day” one. It’d be nice if I could keep up with my correspondences with my far-flung friends; I tend to let those slide when work gets too pressing, and it bothers me, because I pride myself on being a good friend.

I would resolve to keep up with the self-taught yoga I started practicing this fall, but that’s just a continuation of something I’m already doing. Howzabout: “I resolve to post a picture of me holding the standing bow-and-arrow pose”? Maybe not this extreme a hold, but hey.

I don’t think there’s any reading resolutions I can make. I’ve read an awful lot of books in recent years, and I’m happy with my ability to stick with significant works like Proust and that Robert Moses biography. If anything, I might actually slacken my reading this year, or at least finish fewer books, because I’m hoping to get started writing a work of fiction this year, and that’s going to necessitate more research-reading and less novel-reading.

Which, of course, opens a whole can of worms for me. I’ve been hemming and hawing about writing fiction for a decade-plus. Mainly it’s because I’m afraid I’d actually suck at it, although I’ve come up with lots of other excuses to keep from trying. I’ve received plenty of encouragement from laymen and established writers alike, but I’ve tormented myself pretty neurotically. I mean, “flat-out crippled myself,” actually.

So here’s my resolution: stop doing that, and start writing a novel. Or collection of interconnected short stories. Whatever.

In closing, here’s a piece from A German Requiem, one of Philip Kerr’s detective novels:

I thanked him and left him to his Engineer of Urban Conduits and Conservancy. That was presumably what you called yourself if you were one of the city’s plumbers. What sort of title, I wondered, did the private investigators give themselves? Balanced on the outside of the tram car back to town, I kept my mind off my precarious position by constructing a number of elegant titles for my rather vulgar profession: Practitioner of Solitary Masculine Lifestyle; Non-metaphysical Inquiry Agent; Interrogative Intermediary to the Perplexed and Anxious; Confidential Solicitor for the Displaced and Misplaced; Bespoke Grail-Finder; Seeker After Truth. I liked the last one best of all. But, at least as far my client in the particular case before me was concerned, there was nothing which seemed properly to reflect the sense of working for a lost cause that might have deterred even the most dogmatic Flat Earther.

Alright, maybe that’s too depressing a note upon which to start the year. Since my iTunes just shuffled up a “duet” of sorts with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Lori Carson, I’m going to share something from that. It’s about seven minutes of the Khan’s qawwali chanting, followed by a few moments of Lori’s breathy reading of some lyrics by Rumi:

The door is open

Let the beauty we love be what we do

Don’t go back to sleep

Don’t go back to sleep

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It was divine!

Not having a ton of family in these parts, I use the time off during the holidays to visit friends. On Friday, Amy & I went down to Lumberton, NJ to visit friends of hers who were in the area for their own holiday family-tour. We had an entertaining afternoon, centering around a lengthy meal at a P.F. Chang and a discussion of why Shawn Bradley never panned out in the NBA. Good times were had by me, which counts for a lot.

Yesterday, we drove up to Providence, RI to visit my friends Paul & Deb. They’d been having plenty of family get-togethers during the week, so it was a nice change of pace for them to get a visit from their weird friends in NJ.

I always love seeing Paul & Deb, because they have an awful lot of diverse interests and are quite passionate about them. We exchanged some holiday gifts — we brought back some neat tea from our Paris trip, and I also made them copies of a few Mad Mix CDs, while they gave us books, fancy knitting yarn, and unique coffee mugs from a local artist, before deciding we also needed to take back an amaryllis and some paperwhite bulbs. And a loaf of sweet bread from a Portuguese bakery.

In between these two bouts of gift-giving, the four of us drove over to the museum at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), which was exhibiting Wunderground: a collection of Providence poster art from the past decade, and a sculptural village called Shangri-la-la Land. I took a ton of pictures of the exhibit, before a staffer ran up to tell me that I wasn’t permitted to snap pix in the exhibition. I apologized and pretended I’d just taken one. Here’s a collection of 19 shots from the show. (The sculpture area was dimly lit, so I tried a few shots without flash, but gave up and started snapping away. I included both types.)

Comics Reporter and official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon wrote a great (and lengthy) article about Fort Thunder, one of the main groups of the Providence arts scene during that period:

Fort Thunder was different. The Providence, RI group has achieved importance not just for the sum total of its considerable artists but for its collective impact and its value as a symbol of unfettered artistic expression. The key to understanding Fort Thunder is that it was not just a group of cartoonists who lived near each other, obsessed about comics and socialized. It was a group of artists, many of whom pursued comics among other kinds of media, who lived together and shared the same workspace.

As an outgrowth of the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] where nearly all of them attended (some even graduating), Fort Thunder provided a common setting for creation that imposed almost no economic imperative to conform to commercial standards or to change in an attempt to catch the next big wave. They were young, rents were cheap, and incidental money could be had by dipping into other more commercial areas of artistic enterprise such as silk-screening rock posters. Fort Thunder was also fairly isolated, both in terms of influences that breached its walls and how that work was released to the outside world. This allowed its artists to produce a significant body of work that most people have yet to see. It also fueled the group’s lasting mystique. The urge — even seven years after discovering the group — is not to dig too deeply, so as not to uncover the grim and probably unromantic particulars.

We had a great time in the exhibition. Over the years, Paul & Deb had snagged several of the posters from lampposts and walls in town, but they told us that most of the posters were stuck with pretty heavy glue, making it impossible to take home these amazing pieces. I figured it said something about the confluence of art, commerce and paste, but I say that about everything. I think it was also the first museum exhibition I’d been to where the art was held up by thumbtacks.

Before visiting the museum, Paul wanted to show us one of his favorite places in town, the Providence Atheneum. It’s America’s 4th oldest library (est. 1753) and requires an annual membership. Paul pays it gladly, because he loves coming to the place, reading magazines and newspapers, checking out the great collection, and soaking in the ambience.

After the Atheneum and the Wunderground exhibition, we were off to a Portuguese restaurant where I ordered the Shish-Kebab of Damocles, evidently an Iberian specialty.

If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you probably realize that a day that includes

  1. a comics-related art exhibition,
  2. an old library,
  3. some bizarre cuisine, and
  4. conversation with good friends

is pretty much as good as it gets.

(If you want to see pix from the whole day, go here. If you just want that Wunderground set, head over here. And you can check out Amy’s pix from that day over here.)