A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
The photographer’s online proofing page of our wedding pix is available! Here’s how to check them out:
Go to http://www.gillieweddings.com/OnlineProofing.html
Click on “click here to view your wedding”
Click on “Amy & Gil”
Use roth for the password to see the whole shebang!
My rubberface antics make EVERY click an adventure!
Flew to San Francisco last night, via Houston, picked up our rental, and drove on up to Sonoma. For our first dinner as husband and wife, we stopped at the In-N-Out Burger on 101 north of SF.
Now we’re staying in an artsy villa with a really weak wireless connection for the laptop. After the stress of the last few weeks (more work-related than wedding-related), it’s nice to be able to relax and not have to be anywhere. It was wonderful to have so many of our friends and so much of our family together for the weekend, but it’s serious sigh-of-relief time right about now.
We’re married! The wedding was wonderful! The guests danced, ate, drank, and otherwise made merry! I have NO pictures yet! (but as soon as we get them, I’ll start posting stuff)
As wonderful as the whole evening was, as great as our first dance was, as lovely as Amy looked in her wedding dress, the hands-down best moment of the evening came after we left the venue.
The photographer wanted to shoot some pictures of us outside, with Jackson Square in the background. When he was done, Amy & I walked over to our hotel, passing the Cafe Du Monde. A ton of people were having late-evening beignets and coffee at the open-air cafe. Someone saw us in tux and gown and shouted, “Congratulations!”
Then another. Then another. Then the entire cafe was applauding and congratulating us as we walked by. I stopped and gave Amy one of our great husband-and-wife kisses, which led to a great cheer from the cafe-goers.
It was magic.
Wedding bonus: Here are the readings we asked our friends Scott and Cecily to perform before we got to the vows:
Amy’s reading
Excerpt from a 1950s home economics textbook titled The Good Wives Guide
Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs.
Prepare yourself: Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking.
Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.
Over the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.
Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to see him. Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first. Remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.
Your goal: Try to make sure your home is a place of peace, order and tranquillity where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit. Don’t greet him with complaints and problems. Don’t complain if he’s late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.
Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or have him lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low soothing and pleasant voice. Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgement or integrity.
Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.
A good wife always knows her place.
–Author Unknown
A Word to Husbands
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
–Ogden Nash
Gil’s reading
Laughter
Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.
Do not take away the rose,
the lanceflower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in your joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.
My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.
My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.
Next to the sea in autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.
Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.
–Pablo Neruda
We got our marriage license Friday morning. The woman at the clerk’s office of the parish courthouse knew Amy from childhood, so her part of the process was pretty smooth. However, when it came to asking me, “Which state was your father born in?”, we discovered that they weren’t prepared for the answer of “Cluj, Rumania.” But everything went off pretty smoothly.
We made it into our hotel in the city yesterday and met up with numerous early-arriving wedding-guests, including my parents (both Scylla AND Charybdis!). Ate beignets at Cafe Du Monde, had dinner at the Asian Cajun, and drank a bunch of gin with friends.
Today, we meet with the DJ, pick up tuxes, get a spa treatment-thing that Amy booked, and get all our parents in the same room for the rehearsal dinner (heavy on dinner, light on rehearsal). Then we hold court at Pat O’Brien’s for more of the early-arriving guests.
Bourbon Street was pretty lively last night. A group of us, including one guest’s 13-year-old son, walked down a ways to meet up with Amy & her group of buddies. I laughed about the idea of being 13 and walking down that street, but the kid didn’t seem too fazed.
Haven’t taken any pix since I got here, but I’ll try to take a couple tonight. They’ll be stupid candids in a bar, but those are cute, I guess.
It’s Mardi Gras in Iraq! Head here for pictures! There’s a song-file that plays when you’re on this page, so turn the volume down on your computer before clicking through.
Good article by Robert Hughes on Rembrandt, in honor of the 400th anniversary of the artist’s birth. It turns out that Hughes likes one of my least favorite R. paintings, The Polish Rider, which I saw at the Frick and was convinced was a joke.
Discussing the majesty of Peiro, Raphael and Poussin, he writes
But what you are not likely to feel is a sense of community with these magnificent products of human thought and imagination. Were there really people who looked like this, who could be seen walking the streets of Rome, Arezzo or Paris? Who could be spoken to, and answer your voice? It seems implausible. We look at them for quite different reasons. We admire their difference, and their distance, from us.
But then there are artists whose work is not like this. They are the ones who acknowledge human imperfection and mortality. And not only acknowledge it, but in some sense glory in it, making it the prime subject of their art. For if men and women were perfect, mentally, physically, morally, spiritually, why would they need art at all?
For that, we need Rembrandt. I’ve written about his paintings a few times in the three years I’ve been keeping my virtual memories (I missed my blogiversary a few weeks ago), but I’ve only done so tentatively. The best of it was probably in this Interminably Long Ramble.
If you’re going to be in Amsterdam in the next few months, you should check out the Rembrandt-Caravaggio exhibit that Hughes’ article is plugging.
If you’re a fine art aficionado and a NASCAR fan, check out the Rembrandt 400.
Just finished reading Rob Walker’s Letters from New Orleans, which I enjoyed much more than Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters. I found the latter to be far too preachy, bordering on a sort of “White Man’s Burden” for why no expense must be spared in rebuilding the city. Walker’s book, on the other hand, made me care much more for the city and what it means and has meant.
Maybe the big difference is that one writer was discussing NO,LA pre-Katrina, and the other post-Katrina.
Or maybe it’s that one writer is a journalist, and the other is a novelist.
Or maybe one guy is someone you could just chill out and have a beer with, and the other guy is a douche.
A week or so ago, I mentioned a whole lot of reading that I’m doing as part of my attempt to understand what can be done to help New Orleans recover from the devastation of last August’s hurricane.
The fact that I’m starting with Virginia Postrel and Jane Jacobs probably indicates that I don’t think that federal micromanagement is the way to go. One of Ms. Postrel’s early points in The Future and Its Enemies is that there is no “scratch” from which to start, in a dynamic society. Even annihilating swathes of the city doesn’t mean it’s Year Zero in NO,LA; there are tons of people who have claims on their homes, who don’t want to move away for good, and don’t want to live in federally subsidized housing projects.
All of which is to say, I’m not in agreement with Representative Baker (R-LA), who proposes an $80 billion federal program to “to pay off lenders, restore public works, buy huge ruined chunks of the city, clean them up and then sell them back to developers,” according to the Times. Or, more expansively:
Under his plan, the Louisiana Recovery Corporation would step in to prevent defaults, similar in general nature to the Resolution Trust Corporation set up by Congress in 1989 to bail out the savings and loan industry. It would offer to buy out homeowners, at no less than 60 percent of their equity before Hurricane Katrina. Lenders would be offered up to 60 percent of what they are owed.
To finance these expenditures, the government would sell bonds and pay them off in part with the proceeds from the sale of land to developers.
Property owners would not have to sell, but those who did would have an option to buy property back from the corporation. The federal corporation would have nothing to do with the redevelopment of the land; those plans would be drawn up by local authorities and developers.
So, from what I gather, the plan will involve massive federal involvement and funding, coercive land sales (why not just employ eminent domain, while you’re at it?), and a close alliance with “local authorities and developers” who are among the crookedest in America.
One of the best things about the article — besides the line “the bill has become increasingly important to Louisiana because the state lost out to the greater political power of Mississippi last month” — is that virtually every positive quote about the program seems to be delivered secondhand by . . . Rep. Baker!
And mourn the likely departure of a NYC institution, while you’re at it.
I’ve been reflecting on Proust for the last few days. Here’s a passage about going home again:
Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But there are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night’s rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue — if the latter does not itself cease — fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramification and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations.
I promised I’d post the New Orleans pix from last week, including the Katrina Ridge Christmas display, and here they are:
Pictures from the French Quarter
Enjoy!