Unrequired Reading: Jewel Eye

It’s time for another month’s worth of my tweets from twitter! First the retweets (the ones that begin with RT) and then the marginally more original ones! Remember, you can get these regularly by following groth18!

In honor of July 4th, we’ll start off with a bang!

RT @felixsalmon (Felix Salmon):

 

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RT @radleybalko (Radley Balko) – Letter from Cory Maye

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RT @sharilynj – Read about @marcmaron‘s powerful keynote address, opening up this year’s #JustForLaughs #jfl

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RT @kylevanblerk (Kyle van Blerk) – A bear. Made out of 20,000 zip ties. As you do.

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RT @susanorlean (Susan Orlean) – Wonderful!! “@NewYorkTheaterNiagara Falls lit with colors of rainbow on 1st day of N.Y.’s Marriage Equality

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RT @LettersOfNote – There’s so much to love about this photo of Jimi Hendrix

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RT FishbowlDC – Find out how the bridge of someone’s nose figures into The Atlantic‘s Megan McArdle’s (@asymmetricinfo) interviews.

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I don’t have kids, and that’s why I side with #GayTalese on dropping serious cash on clothes: #notthatIspendTHATmuch

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Because I don’t like kids, that’s why.

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Heartbreaking article about treating vs. screening #DownSyndrome

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Chinese govt. tries to disprove adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity: #weallcrashedthetrain

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The art of #RickyGervais.

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The #JewishAutonomousRegion sounds like the Off-World Colonies in Bladerunner: #Jewsinspace

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A Bentley SUV? But what if the NBA lockout doesn’t end soon?

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I’m disappointed the Hercules machine isn’t on this list: #pinball (Hercules is over here)

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Beetlejuice in NJ, via @nycscout

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I thought #PillowTie was the best Skymall product ever, but it’s no match for #DribbleBib

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Oh, look! It’s the scariest goddamned thing ever! #dummyland #ventmyrage

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Oliver’s Army is here to stay: #andiwouldratherbeanywhereelsethanheretoday #cromwell

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Timmy, have you even been in a Norwegian prison?

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The Midgard Serpent sleeps below Park Ave.

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Just #FranLebowitz and her awesome car

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@SimonDoonan on getting married to Jonathan Adler.

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A “thoroughly generic bookstore” (as per my 40th bday post) is closing: #bookberries

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Euroleague’s greatest hoopster is from West Memphis. #MarcusBrown

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Freelove: sister of Increase, mother of Wealthy: #nydutch

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“I’m looking for something hipster-y“: http://nyr.kr/p5opGB

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Can you tell us more often in 1 article that there was no internet in 1981, please? #shittywriting #tigerwoods

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Set taser to #KTFO: #zotz

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The #StopMakingSense fashion collection: #thisisnotmybeautifulcoat (does @davidbyrne know about this?)

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To quote #Nirvana, I think I’m dumb.

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(Hilarious) summer fashion trends, courtesy of @simondoonan.

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Leopard goes ape: #donotconfrontangryleopard

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5 major factors in the #Borders collapse: #bookswithoutborders

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Speaking of: Proving that people surrounded by books can still be total retards: #bookswithoutborders

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Bob Colacello, whose #Warhol memoir Holy Terror I enjoyed the heck out of, auctioned off his portrait by AW.

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On escaping and not escaping #Auschwitz

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Interview Your Own Damn Self!” the #Nabokov way: http://bit.ly/nrtMZQ

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Boy, #SeanBean sure does get killed a lot.

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Transocean: the “I didn’t do it” kid of the gulf oil disaster

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#WoodyAllen on Rilke, selling out Hannah & Her Sisters, and that new movie of his

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Lovely photos of writers & their dogs by #JillKrementz (no greyhounds, I notice)

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“Using .NET is like Fred Flintstone building a database”: Why #Myspace went boom

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Why is weed wacky? #potluck

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M(ormon)BA: Mormons are the new Jews? #wedressbetter

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Does the mind rule the body, or does the body rule the Ren? #renandstimpy

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Holocaust theory: #saturdaynightreading

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Busch-basching: http://buswk.co/pJrg9k

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Peter O’Toole on being awesome. #doublephallicname

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Nothing harder than getting laughs from a room full of comedy writers: http://bit.ly/poW20I

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I miss Karen Allen, but I’m still glad I skipped that last #IndianaJones flick.

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A stoic and a zen buddhist walk into a bar…

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Neat profile of @MaerRoshan that i missed till now: #offmyradar #harhar

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#Hitchens, on the Gandhi myth

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Mob scene: #mafiaTV

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Psst! It’s a secret bookstore! #brazenhead

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Pad See Yew Later, Addiction! #ThaiRehab

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Writer procrastination: (I bought a super-cheap PC laptop and deleted everything but @ommwriter) #mustdisablewifi

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Final meal . . . Cajun-style! (via @wadecortez) http://bit.ly/rukM1M

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Signal-to-noise and old-cooterism, by @binarybits: onforb.es/nRWJTq

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Crisis in Swedish Ballet Training: #WhyILoveMonocle

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The next generation of painkillers will come in small nuggets that you heat up in a pipe and inhale. #drugdelivery

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I still think that #CCTV building’s gonna tip over

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I guess it’s a good thing Brooding Persian isn’t on Twitter. #associationsanddisassociations

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Hegemony from column B: http://bit.ly/ott95H #SinoTheTimes

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Chimpanzee that! He’s a photographer! #GoApe #monkeynews

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@SimonDoonan on the Cute & the Savage: #notanewsoapopera

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Sometimes the gorilla gets the banana, and sometimes the banana gets the gorilla. #GoApe

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Nowhere, special: #NoUtopiaWithoutToddRundgren

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Orwell vs. God

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Building the perfect #KingLear: #Shakespeare

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#WinstonGroom on #TrumanCapote: #getyourmindouttathegutter

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I just want to stay ahead of my illiterate dad: http://bit.ly/kuJPUt (okay, here are all the books I’ve read)

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Chess computers are using PEDs?

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High school time capsule, courtesy of #BourgeoisSurrdender

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In this particular instance, I’ll chose NOT to #belikeMike, thank you: http://bit.ly/iYSriE

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The accordion market gets squeezed: #bwahhaha

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John Lindsay: one suave mofo: #mayorofcool

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To end this month’s installment, I offer 1 Lap of Manhattan in 26 minutes (soundtrack set to Underworld, of course):

Unrequired Reading: May not

Just another honkin’ load of links, courtesy of my Twitter feed at twitter.com/groth18!

RT @kylevanblerk (Kyle VanBlerk): Awesome people hanging out together. Early contender for Tumblr of the day.

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RT @neilhimself (Neil Gaiman): Remembering Douglas Adams in the Guardian. So odd to realise I’m now older than Douglas, who was always older than me.

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RT @mattzollerseitz (Matthew Seitz): The 10 greatest sequels of all time. By MZS.

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RT @magiciansbook (Laura Miller): “An entire train station full of used books

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RT @witoldr (Witold Rybczynski): The High Line succeeds in New York, but will it work as well elsewhere?

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RT @nerdist (Chris Hardwick): These Sci-Fi Ikea instructions are perhaps the best things ever formed with molecules: (via @CollegeHumor)

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RT @DwightGarner (Dwight Garner): I’m pulling for Clive James, who is fighting leukemia.

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Unfocused #RonRosenbaum column about #BobDylan (but still worth reading)

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Tappan Zee: bridge to the past.

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Will my forever stamps still be good if there’s no USPS?

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A lengthy review of #HaroldBloom’s career, masked as a review of his new book.

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Oy, with the brain-frying books! (Me, I’ll be Kindle-ing P&V’s translation of The Brothers K)

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Apparently, the house DOESN’T always win: #blackjack #theotherdonjohnson

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@hoopspeak demolishing some #NBA myths.

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Shaq is 15 months younger than me, and he’s done. NBA makes you feel old. #nba #geriatrics

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I like to think @DeShawnStevens takes his personal tattoo artist everywhere, not just preseason parties. #gomavs!

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Chester Brown: A praying mantis with testicles. (C’mon world! Let’s make #prayingmantiswithtesticles trend!)

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Lidsville! (On the road, I have to order a med. from @dunkindonuts because the small coffee lid tends to leak. Grr.)

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#MartinAmis vs. the Dead Bores (I thought #LondonFields was fantastic (and gorgeously lyrical in its apocalypticism))

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“But why did you need to build 2 synagogues?” #JewsinAmerica

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I’ve found another #AnotherWoman fan! #openingshots #youmustchangeyourlife #WoodyAllen

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To Hull and Back: #ChristopherHitchens on #PhilipLarkin (with a side-trip to #Orwell)

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“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” #techboom #howl

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“They called it show business, but it’s really showing-off business.” Awesome #BillWithers interview. #lovelyday

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Whatchoo got in that #BAG?

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Sorry, #MichaelJordan, but the stripes are not slimming. They are, however, giving me a headache.

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Bryan Ferry: Style Icon #bryanferry

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My pocket square, my self (with @simondoonan)

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@SeriousEats asks the serious question: In-N-Out vs. Shake Shack vs. Five Guys. #burgervsburger

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Rio Rancho and the Arena to Nowhere (sounds like a bad episode of @parksandrecnbc)

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Neat @LouisCK profile. #seasontwoinjune!

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Imelda Marcos, reincarnated as a man. #thatsalotofshoes

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You can get ugly, but make sure you don’t go full retard: #oscarbait #donthatemebecauseimbeautiful

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Art Books, part I: The Book Surgeon at work

Art Books, part II: @ChipKidd with Superman & Batman.

Art (Garfunkel) Books, part III: All the books I’ve read. #ArtGarfunkel

Art (of) Books(elling): 14 bookstores to see before you die. #Ivebeentofourofthem

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Treasure trove: SF writers on their favorite SF novels/writers

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fun recap of 13 roles by @mradamscott #partydown

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Sexy lady-spies of #Mossad

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Gandalf or Rick Rubin? #okayitsGandalf #thehobbit

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Guess what happens when you buy a piece of crap from H&M? #hm #crapiscrap

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Omar=Achilles? Brandon=Patroclus? Zowie! #TheWire #Iliad

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‘Twas architecture that killed the museum. #AFAM #bronzedKleenexbox

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Good night, sweet Tractor Traylor. #tractortraylor #nba #milwaukeecouldhavehadNowitzki

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Kane at 70: Labyrinth, Heart of Darkness, Everything. #OrsonWelles #CitizenKane

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Taking participatory journalism to its absurd conclusion. #LeeJudge #KCRoyals #beanball

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Nobody likes #Sbarro (especially in NJ)

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Great men’s grooming moments in movies (#SteveCarrell was only the runner-up? Boo…)

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The #DeathStar wasn’t a make-work project? #starwars

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#ChristopherHitchens has outlived #OsamaBinLaden: #thatisall

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#Shelfporn! (we have too many books for any of these configurations, but they remain awesome!)

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I really need to read The Leopard somedamntime, don’t I? #lampedusa (I read the Leopard a few weeks later, and it’s rapidly ascended to the top 5 of my favorite novels.)

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Pinball? Wizard!

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RT @nathanrabin (Nathan Rabin): Deep down I suspect that I’m incredibly lazy and toil ceaselessly so nobody ever finds out. Anyone else feel that way?

Unrequired Reading: April Link Showers

Bizarre! I was just settling in to collect my May Twitter-links for a big Unrequired Reading when I discovered that last month’s load o’ links never went live! So here’s all of April’s great stuff! I’ll post May’s tomorrow!

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It’s time for another month’s worth of Twitter links, dear readers! If you want to follow along, I’m at twitter.com/groth18!

First, the retweets:

RT @mookiewilson86 (paul raff): David Koresh had a better homestand than the Mets.

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RT @ESQStyle Esquire Style: And the best-dressed male guest at the #RoyalWedding is… not David Beckham.

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RT @felixsalmon (felix salmon): Wherein Martin Amis blathers on for 4,000 dutiful but unnecessary words about Christopher Hitchens.

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RT @kylevanblerk (Kyle van Blerk): Client request of the year.

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RT @simondoonan (Simon Doonan): Creative factory: Simon Doonan, My Faves!

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RT @GreatDismal (William Gibson): “WE HELPED YOUR GRANDAD GET LAID” #daytonbootsvancouver

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RT @mattzollerseitz (Matthew Zoller Seitz): “‘After Hours’ exists to prove that ‘Taxi Driver’ actually displayed some restraint. @notjustmovies

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RT @JPosnanski (Joe Posnanski): In honor of touching CNN story, I write a little more about Nick Charles and a moment I’ll never forget.

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RT @asymmetricinfo (Megan McArdle): Why Europe won’t develop as an independent military power

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RT @kottke (kottke.org): Hilarious fake TLC promo

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RT @kylevanblerk (Kyle van Blerk): Bored at work. Photoshopping Bieber’s head onto things.

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RT @questlove (?Love of The Roots): Man. Not even “OJ Guilt” is the proper colloquialism for what I feel after eatin Cinnabon.

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And now, the links!

NBA Action: Bet On It! #IhadSpursandMagicinthefinals

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Ah, #vodka, with your “marketing gimmicks that make getting drunk seem like a gateway to fame and fortune

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The bowling alley of the #Frick: it’s no basement of the Alamo, but still.

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There’s now a computer as dumb as my boss. #thatswhatshesaid

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Joe Queenan goofs on the #gehry glut.

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Is anyone at the #royalwedding sporting a monkey-tail beard?

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Via @khoi, abandoned Yugoslavia monuments of awesomeness.

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Xanadu comes back to life! (Will #MichaelBeck and @olivianj be at the opening?)

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Xanadu: More of disaster than @XanaduMovie? #likedecoratinganuclearreactor #bringbacktheAlexander’smural

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In the movie, I see Billy Bob Thornton as the local, and Pesci as the mobster: #greateststoryever #trustme

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Tefillin: it’s like Jewish blood pressure.” Go, @MitzvahTank! #areyouJewish?

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Will nobody think of the #pistachios?!

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#AllStarSuperman never should’ve released the sun-eater from captivity:

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The Walk of Shame goes #StreetStyle, via @sartorialist

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So VCs are like the AIDS activists of our time?

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I’m all for taking advantage of gorgeous chicks, but sheesh! #modelscam (via @felixsalmon)

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#HaroldBloom and his “elite Europhile glasses” #agon

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Eat lead! #staedtler and #fabercastell at war

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Every so often, I remind myself why I find contempo literary fiction useless and stultifyingly dull

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Go read this #BenKatchor interview! Nownownow! #CardboardValise (just plow through the “what is comics?” section)

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@felixsalmon delivers a (much appreciated) Jonathan Franzen smackdown

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@witoldr on the secret language of architects.

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This #Houdini article escapes from the need to write in complete sentences. #escapeartistry

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I guess I oughtta get around to reading #GeoffDyer sometime, huh?

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In honor of tonight’s season 2 premiere of #Treme on #HBO, check out this interview with #WendellPierce (#BunkMoreland)

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#ChrisElliott has a DAUGHTER on SNL? #igrowold

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Dali makes aliyah!

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Ron Rosenbaum implores us to visit (Joyce’s) Ithaca (but not much else). (I admit I’ll likely skip #Ulysses)

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I’m awfully happy with my @allenedmonds, I have to say

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I look down on my wife. #shekicksmeintheshins

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#Starbury = Jim Jones?

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Is it good or bad that my TV/movie/prose diet is so similar to that of #StevenSoderbergh? #MillersCrossing!

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25 years ago: Graceland and the Gatwick Baby

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“People who drink coffee are different in many ways from those who don’t drink coffee” #whataboutgin?

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Geoff Dyer on being allergic to David Foster Wallace’s writing (his compare/contrast w/Federer is great)

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“You look into the fiery furnace and see the rich man without any name” #wallstreet

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Neat video of @billy_reid at home.

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@simondoonan on camp: “I am not the brightest Art Nouveau lamp in the room…” #needIsaymore?

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NOLA: The Big Hypothetical

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Fun interview with Glenn O’Brien, onetime Warhol employee and current #StyleGuy for #GQ: #howtobeaman #glennobrien

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Ah, get back to me around yer 20th reunion, ya young bastid.

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Neat take on Android, Google’s business model, and moats.

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Authors and broken promises. #Icantgetstarted

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I would prefer not to poke you. #groupmeh

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Um, the good news is that “cancer” doesn’t exist (the bad news is that it’s more complex than anyone thought) #uhoh

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Would it have more success if it were called a “scrodpiece”? #probablynot

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“It’s still real to me, dammit!” #soareconcussions #andearlydeath #wwe

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When Antonioni met Tarkovsky: #shakeitlikeaPolaroidpicture

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RPG = Rocket-Powered Genius (of design) #rocketpunchgeneration

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@rupaul answers all questions, except, “What’s up with the mustache?” #dragrace

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@david_j_roth speaks truth to pizza (I still don’t understand how @pizzahut stays in business here in NJ.)

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Is there a Damien Hirst level to unlock? #jeffkoonsmustdie

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By @mattnycs: Vote for the man in the small hat: a rabbi runs for office … in Uganda: Parts I and II #really

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Hot chicks with (old) douchebags: #Iblamesociety #Ialsoblamehotchicks

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No Shakespeare in Topeka? #talentnotgenius #billjames

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#Koppenburg: why I don’t bike. #whoneedstheexercise?

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Accidental Mysteries: masked #seenandunseen

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GREAT piece by @comicsreporter on a trip to the #centerforcartoonstudies

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Because, as we know from #chrisrock, books are like Kryptonite to… certain people: #padandquill

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The Perplexitude of Hilfiger

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Proto-Facebook

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Darkness at Noonan: #tomgoestothebar (happy 60th, Tom Noonan!)

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And I close this month’s edition with a non-link:

“I used to believe that worry was a talisman against something bad happening to you.” thx for the wisdom, @ConanOBrien (& @MarcMaron)!

Got The Time

Following his quintuple-bypass a few years ago, my old man began compulsively buying watches. He bought a ton of them on ebay, convincing himself they were genuine Breitlings and such . . . for only $50!

Dad even bought cases that auto-rotated the watches, keeping their automatic winders winded. He must’ve bought more than 30 watches in the months following his recovery. He gave me one; it promptly crapped out. At one point he told me, “I don’t understand why I’m so interested in these now.”

My father, 67 and really facing mortality for the first time, could not put together the connection between having surgery for his ticker and the compulsion to buy timepieces. Literary symbolism is not his strong suit.

I try to be more honest with myself. Two weeks ago, I bought a nice watch to celebrate turning 40. It cost a bunch more than I ever thought I would spend on a watch, but that’s not saying much, since I never thought I’d spend more than $25 on one.

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I did some other things for my 40th, too.

The day began with a torrent of e-mails and Facebook notices from friends and family wishing me a happy birthday. I was cheered by them. I know it’s easy to send a quick b-day note to someone on Facebook, but still: it’s a few moments that someone took to think of me. I felt a little guilty about the birthday notices I’ve let pass by when I log on in the morning.

What did turning 40 mean to me? I’m not sure. I think I wanted to invest it with some sort of meaning, but I don’t feel as if a rubicon has been crossed. I’m realistic about what I’ve achieved so far, and am perversely looking forward to how fast the world will pass me by.

Once upon a time, I thought about quitting my job at 40 and spending a year writing and reading, but the prospect of re-entering the job market at 41 filled me with dread. So instead I just took the day off.

My birthday fell on a Tuesday, so after I finished editing some articles, I made my way into New York City for a few hours. My plan was to take care of some errands and then go to the Met to spend some time with a Rembrandt or two.

The errands consisted of returning some boots at the Billy Reid store on Bond St., where I came across the latest in Auschwitz fashion —

— and Sol Moscot opticians on Rivington St., as recommended by my pal Mark (as well as Anderson Cooper and John Hodgman). I ordered some prescription sunglasses, in the Lemtosh style:

lemtosh.jpg

From there, I drove to the Upper East Side. I’d written about the area a few days earlier in that piece about the movie Metropolitan, but I didn’t have much basis of comparison for the UES of today vs. c.1989. I’m sure it’s undergone some degree of New Jersey-fication, as the rest of Manhattan has.

I found an underground garage on 71st that had an entry ramp so steep I literally couldn’t see it beyond the hood of my Outback. There was a moment of panic where I thought it might just be a 50′ drop to oblivion, but was sure there would have been an expose about it in New York Magazine by now.

Safely parked, I walked out to Madison Ave. and decided to make a pilgrimage to the Ralph Lauren men’s store at the Rhinelander mansion on the corner of Madison and 72nd.

For me, retail therapy rarely involves actually buying anything. I’m content to walk through stores, look at wares, and maybe make snide observations about people’s shopping habits. Or, in the case of Ralph Lauren, I marvel over the way the entire retail environment is put together. See, stores really can have a narrative structure to them. It’s rare, at least in menswear (and especially in my suburban setting), to find one with a really well planned arc. Generally, they’re simply assembled in a psychographic/planogrammatical manner intended to maximize large-margin sales.

But a few months ago, I visited the Lauren store in Short Hills Mall in NJ (or, as Amy & I call it, “Rich People’s Mall”) and was struck by how carefully the shop was curated, how the various collections/labels were demarcated, how the tone of the store changed from area to area. And so I wanted to visit the new men’s store at the Rhinelander to see if that retail vision could be writ large.

Please note: I only own one piece of Ralph Lauren clothing. It’s a gray blazer I picked up in an outlet store. It looks awfully good, but it may be the cheap brand they make specifically for outlets. I’m not one to spend thousands on a single article of clothing, even if I have upped my wardrobe game in the past year. (Hint: you can get by with less expensive gear, but be sure to take your things to a good tailor. And no, your local dry cleaner doesn’t count.)

So, even though I was only window-shopping, I was nonetheless blown away by the layout and display of the RL mansion. The floor-by-floor transitions among collections were sharp, but not disconcerting, while the clothes and shoes themselves were presented beautifully. The elegance of the Black and Purple Labels segued with the rustic RRL section and the more affordable Polo collection. The only jarring experience was the RLX collection on the top floor, a brand so distinct that its sharp white walls and neon-colored sports/performance-wear have to be cordoned off from the rest of the joint.

I walked through the sections for a bit, laughing over price tags, listening in on wealthy British and Brazilian tourists as they talked about suits or casualwear. I demurred each request to help by the sales staff, which must have pegged me as a window-shopper. I wasn’t dressed poorly for the occasion, but I surely didn’t give off an air of money.

Once I’d had my fill, I walked up Madison for one more bit of menswear-meandering. JCrew had recently opened a men’s store on 80th & Madison, and some of the style-bloggers I follow (I’m not ashamed) praised it pretty highly. Sadly, compared to the Rhinelander, the JCrew men’s store was like a barn. It wasn’t simply the luxury of the RL goods, but the presentation and general sense of curation that made the JCrew shop pale in comparison. It’s good to know that my snobbishness can transcend literature and comics.

On the walk up Madison, I saw three things:

  1. an autograph store with a letter by Alexander Hamilton in the window, since we share a birthday,
  2. Tom Selleck (possibly), and
  3. the Whitney Museum.

I’d never visited the latter, and had no idea that its facade is a monstrosity:

Some people praise this building to the heavens, but it just looked brutal (not Brutarian, necessarily) to me. There’s an exhibit about Edward Hopper at the museum, so I thought I’d stop in and see it on the walk back.

But first, I needed food & caffeine. I stopped for lunch at an espresso bar called Sant’Ambroeus. The tone of the place reminded me of Milan, although less dirty and much more moneyed. I staked out a small table in the front of the place, ordered a coffee and two little prosciutto and mozzarella sandwiches ($9 each) and broke out my notebook to write about The Day So Far.

There was a steady parade of customers who lived in a different world than mine. Some of the women were Real Housewives-like in their opulence, plastic surgery, and vapidity of conversation. A middle-aged jet-setting British couple chatted at the table to my right, while a Bulgarian-Israeli fashion model to my left kept jabbering on her cell and adjusting her cleavage.

Looking up from my notebook, I found myself being glared at by a pair of European men in their 50s, who gave me the impression they were connected to one of the modern art galleries in the area. They were stylishly dressed, waiting for one of the few front-tables to clear, and fixated on mine. I imagined an art-house version of Road House, where I was challenged to a fight because I’d inadvertently sat at Their Table. Once the Brits left, they moved in.

Waiting for my coffee, I played wih my iPhone for a few moments. The sitemeter for my blog revealed a flood of hits coming in throughout the day. Investigating further, I discovered that my previous day’s post about Metropolitan caught the attention of someone on a forum at Criterion Collections. Between that web-traffic and the ongoing e-mails of birthday wishes, I felt pretty good.

Fed and caffeinated, I headed back out to the street. On a whim, I checked out a gallery called Other Criteria. The main room was a gift shop of various modern art books, DVDs and other paraphernalia. Further back was a room with a number of first editions of books from the 1950s and ’60s, followed by a room with international art magazines. A staircase with stenciled footprints led me down to a well-lit gallery.

The exhibit was of Damien Hirst’s work (he’s one of the co-owners of the gallery/store). Several of his human skulls were on display under glass; only the $25,000 variety, of course, not the $100 million one. There were various wallpapers from his studio on the walls. Rolls were going for $700, I think. I laughed over some of the pharmaceutical-oriented wallpaper. I consider most of this era’s art to be bullshit, but if it’s able to part rich people from their money, then more power to the artists.

Back outside, I decided to pass on visiting the Met. I was feeling a bit anxious, and worried that the sheer volume of people in the museum would drive me further into myself. I’m funny like that. I mean, I’d been alone all day once my wife had left for work, I’d missed phone calls from my mom and my brother — my old man didn’t call till 6:30 or so that night; I’m pretty sure he was tipped off — and had only spoken to garage attendants, the wacky old Italian salesman at Moscot’s and the manager at Billy Reid, but I felt pretty good. I felt like I wasn’t rushing anywhere, like the day was just for my whims as I chose to follow them.

(Just to be clear: this wasn’t anxiety. This was worrying about anxiety. Yes, I’m 40 years old and still experience this.)

I walked down Madison to take in the Hopper exhibition, only to discover that the Whitney was closed for the day. Undaunted, I walked down to the Frick Museum, one of my favorite museums in the city, where I could commune with the Vermeers, Whistlers, Turners, El Grecos, Holbeins, and of course the Rembrandts.

One of my favorites is a self-portrait from 1658. He’s seated, holding a stick, awash in browns, golds and reds. His dark eyes look out from under the shadow of his hat. Oh, heck. you can just look at it here.

When my old man was in the hospital for that bypass surgery — you remember the beginning of this post, right? — he was in intensive care for a while. The morning after the surgery, his girlfriend and I were standing vigil for him, when the doctor told us about the internal bleeding dad had suffered, and how they’d need to keep him sedated for a while, until he was stable. We stayed for an hour or more, while nurses attended to him in various states of what seemed like an emergency. My anxiety grew pretty intense, and I eventually begged off the scene. Dad’s girlfriend said she’d call if there was any change.

I went to the Frick that day, and for the first time I realized that Rembrandt’s self-portrait looked like my father. After his recovery, I bought him a small, framed reproduction of it.

What I’m not saying very clearly is, if 40 means anything to me, maybe it’s as a measuring stick of where I am in relation to Dad. I don’t want to go into that too much right now; I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our relationship, and I’ll write more about that when the time’s right. But I thought it was only fitting to spend some time with that Rembrandt self-portrait on this special day.

So you can imagine my disappointment when I learned it wasn’t on display. (I think it’s being cleaned up or otherwise prepped for the Frick’s coming Rembrandt exhibition.) I took a deep breath, turned around in the West Gallery, and bathed in the radiance of Turner’s Harbor of Dieppe.

I let the light wash over me for a while, before I took out my iPhone and looked up the painting. “Well,” I thought, “Turner was 51 when he painted this, I’ve still got time to –”

— to what? Not to paint, maybe, but to bring a little more beauty into the world. I thought about the Hirst skulls I’d seen an hour earlier and the Laurana bust that captivated me in previous visits (also not on display this time around). I thought about the sheer gray facade of the Whitney and the light from Vermeer’s windows. Goya’s smiths, forging and forged out of myth, a few blocks from menswear mansions and Eurotrash cafes. I thought about St. Jerome, the first El Greco I ever saw, sending me tripping back to George Orwell’s essay about Henry Miller:

In passing [Miller] refers to an essay that Aldous Huxley wrote some years ago about El Greco’s picture, The Dream of Philip the Second. Huxley remarks that the people in El Greco’s pictures always look as though they were in the bellies of whales, and professes to find something peculiarly horrible in the idea of being in a ‘visceral prison’. Miller retorts that, on the contrary, there are many worse things than being swallowed by whales, and the passage makes it dear that he himself finds the idea rather attractive.

I thought about half my life gone, or fulfilled.

Flooded with myself, I left the Frick and began walking back toward my garage. On the way, I saw the storefront for the Tom Ford men’s store. If I was following whims, why not? I entered the boutique and nodded to the pretty receptionist. Two young salesmen were in the casualwear section, so I walked instead to the formalwear room, eyeballing the $4,000 jackets and their broad lapels. In a side window, the world’s greatest smoking jacket was on display:

I admit that I find Ford an interesting character. I read an interview with him in Fantastic Man a year or two ago, and was struck by his degree of self-invention. I suppose I admire that trait, that willingness to blow oneself up and rearrange the fragments with pieces from the outside world.

But the clothes: impossibly gorgeous, occasionally outrageous, and so far beyond my budget that it was ridiculous. As I walked through the casualwear, one of the salesmen asked if I needed any help. I said, “. . . I turned 40 today and I’m having an aspirational day. I’d just like to look around, if that’s alright.”

“Congratulations, sir! Feel free,” he said. The store was empty but for us. I took it all in for a while: the perfumes, the shoes, the glasses, the . . . ibex horn with a cigar-cutter attached? “It’s for the man who has everything,” one of the men told me when I inquired.

I like to think I have everything, but that’s in the Whitmanian sense of containing multitudes, not ibex-horn cigar-cutters.

Outside, I inadvertently overshot my garage, but found a pair of bookstores on the next corner (Lexington and 71st). I hadn’t been to a bookstore all day. Once upon a time, they would’ve been the center of any trip I made. Now I have 1,500 books at home, a Kindle, and a desire to make up for lost time; I need to browse for more?

I browsed for more. I visited Archivia first, an art-book shop on Lexington. I decided that the only book I would buy there would be the glorious slipcased two-volume illustrated edition of Homer that Chester River Press put out last year. It goes for about $400, so I’m glad I found no sign of it.

A little bit south of Archivia was Bookberries, a thoroughly generic bookstore with a full collection of whatever the latest and best books are. It was a sad last stop for my day-trip, but the last stop always is. I looked over shelves of disposable contemporary books that I’ll never get around to reading, that help to discourage me from my own writing, that add to the cacophany I’m doing my best to avoid. (Present tempest in a teacup excepted.)

And then it was time to go home. I got the car, sat in FDR Drive traffic from the 70s to the Triboro and left voice-mails for my mom and my brother. I thought about how I used to drive up the FDR on Sunday nights after dropping Amy off at her apartment in Stuy Town. The night in 2005 I proposed to her, I sat in some FDR traffic on the way home. I remember calling friends to tell them the news. I remembered my friend Ian’s exclamation of “Outstanding!” I remember my friend Cecily being a sentence-and-a-half into a story before she realized what I had just told her, then bellowing, “WHAT?! Oh, my God! Congratulations!”

The traffic was crawling along, but I smiled. I was 40 years old and I’d had a wonderful day off from work.

Unrequired Reading: December 31, 2010

Happy New Year’s Eve, dear readers! Welcome to the final installment of Unrequired Reading! That’s right! Not a dream! Not a hoax! Not an imaginary story! This feature is O-V-E-R!

For a while now, I felt like I’ve been battling against the tide of instant/mini-blogging by posting a weekly collection of links I enjoyed and wanted to share. The thing is, most of the items I put on Unrequired Reading are recycled from my twitter feed or my facebook page, so it hasn’t made much sense to collect them here, except to allow me to say, “I posted something!”

So, it’s the end of the Unrequired Reading era. I’m planning to use this blog for longer writing, travelogues and the like. If you’re interested in keeping up with those links I posted to Unrequired Reading, then follow my twitter feed: twitter.com/groth18.

Twitter also auto-tweets links to my new blog posts, but adding my RSS feed to your reader will clue you in to any long-form posts I write, as well as my What It Is posts (the necessity of which I’m also reassessing). I really hope to do some longer writing next year, but I make no promises. I’m much more intent on getting a regular podcast series off the ground.

(I know, I know: podcasts are even more passe than short-form link-blogging, but I’ve wanted want to work in that form for a while now, and I think I have a recurring segment that’ll make it something more engaging than The Gil Roth Show.)

If you want to keep up with my pictures, check out my flickr posts here or subscribe via RSS.

In other news, I turn 40 in less than 2 weeks, so if you want to buy me something nice, you can check out my wish list on Amazon.

And now, on with the show! Have a happy new year, dear readers!

Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: December 31, 2010”

Chick Magnet

Last night / this morning, I watched God’s Cartoonist, a documentary about Jack T. Chick. I’d seen his comic-book-style religious tracts since I was a kid. Tammy, our next-door neighbors’ mom, made it her Baptist mission to save our souls.

She’d leave general interest ones on us, but when I was a teen, Tammy made sure to give me Dark Dungeons, the tract about why Dungeons & Dragons will surely send your ass to hell. A few years ago, she put Love the Jewish People in my mailbox. I mean, I assume it was her and not some bizarre anti-Semitic joke by other neighbors.

I thought the stories were just fine, but was entranced with the different visual styles of the cartoonists. I marveled at the jaunty, comic style of some of the strips, and their contrast with the Neal Adams-esque realist style of others. Sure, I hated the use of typesetting instead of hand-lettering, but I thought it was awesome how just about everyone got consigned to the lake of fire after death.

(I was kinda fuzzy on the notion of the various sects of Christianity as a kid; I had no idea why one group of Christians would believe the leader of another group of Christians to be the Antichrist. I didn’t really pick up on interdenominational hatred till college, so I never got why the comics had it in for Catholics, Mormons, Christian Scientists, et al. I always thought everybody just hated Jews. Go figure.)

Anyway, I enjoyed the heck out of the documentary, with its combo of interviews, excerpts of Chick’s tracts, and pseudo-animations of same. I thought the movie did a great job of not belittling Chick, even while many of the interview subjects (esp. Dan Raeburn) unloaded on the hate-filled content of some of the comics. (I’d link to the trailer, but it actually focuses on all the “bad” parts and makes the movie look like more of a hit piece than it really is.)

I really dug the varying perspectives and the attempts at filling in the enigmatic history of Jack Chick and his publishing company, but the Rev. Ivan Stang stole the show. He was entrancing with his good-natured, not-quite-earnest take on Chick’s comics and how they helped him start the Church of the Subgenius. I just loved Stang’s Texas groove and his marvelously dancing eyebrows. I’d better get slack.

The commentators and the strips themselves do a great job of conveying how the tracts’ simplicity is the key to their enormous success. There’s a neat discussion of the art style of one of Chick’s cartoonists, and how he may have been part of the “muscular Filipino school” of comics drawing, but the movie doesn’t go too in-depth about the comics craft of the tracts.

In all, I was thrilled to learn about Chick’s life and the leaps into weirdness he made over the years, as influential figures led him to rail first against the Illuminati/Masons/Druids (?), then Catholics, then witches/Satanic possession. And every other group out there (although there’s no racial animus, just religious).

At the office this morning, I thought the documentary would make a fun topic of conversation. I mentioned it to one of my coworkers, a drunken racist who thrills for early- and mid-century Americana. Chick was from a later period (c.1970 to today), but surely he’d have an opinion on Chick’s work.

He had no idea what I was talking about.

I decided to check with a couple of other co-workers, each in their early-to-mid-50s. Not a one had heard of Chick or knew what the tracts were. When I showed them samples online, they were amused, but had no recollection of ever seeing one. “You never came across one of these on a park bench or a bus-stop?” I asked. Nope. “But there are like a billion of them in circulation!”

English - This Was Your Life.gifI started asking the younger staff, figuring perhaps they’d seen them growing up. Not a one. Eventually, I found one person who knew what I was talking about: our circulation manager, who’s a few years younger than me and a big comics fan. He didn’t remember any of them in particular, but he knew what I was talking about. I was hoping we could bond over This Was Your Life and its beyond-creepy rendition of a giant faceless God.

Still, this was even worse than the time I polled the office to see if anyone knew who Paul Weller is. Two people out of fifty knew of him, The Jam or Style Council. But this? Weren’t Chick tracts everywhere? How could they never have seen one? Now, my office is neither in WASP Central nor Rome. But somehow, ‘nary a person in it lived close enough to people who wanted to save their souls, Baptist-style.

I e-mailed Tammy’s son Todd about this (and the documentary today). In the evening, he wrote back, “That’s funny, because I was out running this morning and I found one of those tracts on the railing of the bridge. I figured I should leave it for some poor soul lost in sin — besides, I have the whole collection (ha-ha).”

When I told my wife I was watching the documentary last night, she told me, “Don’t erase it! I want to watch that!” When she was growing up, she said, they used to have tracts on a spinner rack at the Assemblies of God meeting place. Which is a church, but not her church. (I’m still a little unclear about all these denominations.)

So now I’ve gotta ask: you’ve seen Jack Chick tracts before, right?

Update. Or Downdate. Whatever

I’m sorry I haven’t written. I’m usually good for a What It Is post every Monday morning, and I was trying to go with a movie review every Tuesday. But I didn’t watch any movies last week, and I found myself flat-out uninterested in writing anything about What I’m Happy About or What I’m Sad About.

I don’t feel depressed, just uninterested in writing. Maybe the act of composing this post will work that out a little. There are other things I’m interested in writing, some of which I can’t share just yet, some that would just take a ton of time and work to write. But I feel like I’m running short on time just now. I’m a bit ahead of the game on the September and October issues at work, but then my big conference is looming, and that always fills me with anxiety.

I don’t know what to share with you, my non-existent public. I’m quite immersed in that Andy Warhol book by Bob Colacello, for reasons I can’t quite put into words. I’m fascinated by the intersection of art, fashion, business and celebrity that Warhol in that era (1971 until his death) represents, but I’m also compelled by the workaday-ness of Colacello’s experiences. Everything — the Concordes to Paris, the nights at Studio 54, the conversations with Liza — is part of the work. And yet the surface of the work was playfulness.

Only those closest to him knew how determined and thorough this project was, because Andy deliberately made everything he did seem effortless — and meaningless. He liked to turn everything, including himself, into a party joke, partially to hide his true intentions, partially because it was the only way he could deal with life. He expected us to get the joke and simultaneously to take it seriously. It was noting more or less than he expected of himself. We were all walking a tightrope, and Andy’s rope was thinnest and highest of all. “If I think about things too much,” he told me many times, “I’ll have a nervous breakdown.”

I watched Greenberg, the new flick by Noah Baumbach, last night. During my drive down to Flemington today to meet a potential advertiser, I realized that four of the pieces of narrative art I’ve enjoyed most this year are Greenberg, Wilson, Louie and The Ask. It’s like I’ve assembled a Mount Rushmore of Mid-Life Misanthropy.

And I still have 5 months till I turn 40, a birthday that I steadfastly refuse to believe is a significant marker in my life.