brooklyned

Kitchen Magic

2006-03-27T14:17:00.000-05:00

I'm back to report that I eagerly romped around with other eager house-hungry American Apparel/Anthropologie types through the open house held in that seemingly charming shingle home posted below. I thought I could love that place, no matter what, but today am coming to grips with this: the Guff is empty in Brooklyn real estate in what might quite nearly be almost my price-range (if I put out for money-wielding strangers who fancy moms wearing dirty American Apparel and Anthropologie sale items and eyewear from many a yesteryear.)
I won't post any heartwrenching photos, only give you this: where there were mantles, there are now only outlets. They are not even grounded outlets. The children couldn't even hang the Christmas stockings out over a semi-attractive space heater. No, we'd be looking at a toaster placed neatly on the plasticated 'Q' grade wood floors for the holidays to warm our newly Brooklynified Utah assies while I, being Ma and what not, would be in charge of pushing the lever down every three minutes.

So, I am now going to cheer us up with these before and after photos of my present co-op kitchen that is 6' x 12' (yes, people in the West, you read that right) and remind me that I worked that Ikea software to a nub to design the most efficient, workable kitchen pos. I turned it into an EIK, I did! (If you have to ask, consider yourself blessed and chosen.)

Now, on a surely metaphoresque note, an SUV fell into a pothole in Brooklyn today and ruined the 'R' train below. It's a very confusing scenario, but I feel it is meaningful on some levels not yet reachable to my lax, unlimber mind.

This I know: co-op life continues and Brooklyn continues. And it's alright.

That Moving Feeling

2006-03-14T15:28:00.000-05:00

So, measuring 900 square feet, our co-op has grown too small.
Yes, we are fortunate among the many New Yorkers who torment each other in even less space. But my acceptable-square-feet-for-raisin'-up-a-family scale is tainted by the grand suburbias of the west where I found perfect isolation for desperate pre-, mid-, and post-pubescent breakdowns. In my big bedroom I was left quite alone to quietly confront the freakshow that was my bosom. For one tearstained solid year in front of a suburban full-length door mirror, I watched my right breast grow to a gropeable size while my left breast (wisely) clung to the predictable plains of childhood. Oh, the beauty of fourteen.

Now, I watch Emmie, 9 1/2, from the corner of my eye. We all do, for how can we not? Where can she go? To dress, she has taken to standing with her back to everybody while one hand covers her no-news chest and another works a shirt over her head. Closed doors are meaningless, because she knows that the minute she shuts a door, Boone will hear it and come barging in. It is his room too.
She has hung sheets around her lower bunk, carefully tucking them under the upper mattress and pinning the openings shut. Such a tiny tent for the upcoming freakshow.

Naturally, then, we are occasionally looking at real estate, usually in a not as expensive area for the best run-down bigger house we can get for the buck. I am intrigued with this house, although the realtor tells us that there is nothing left inside. I think we're talking about a carcass, a carcass which we would need to share with renters to make the mortgage. But darn it. My daughter deserves her own little space in which to privately view her own upcoming freakshows, audience of one. (Or two, if I can get a ticket.)

(On the other hand, we could move to Tokyo and live in one of these modules for around the same price. Freaky.)

Big Love

2006-03-09T13:07:00.000-05:00

So, at pick-up time in the schoolyard one afternoon, a dad/journalist in possession of an advance copy HBO’s newest grope-opera, “Big Love” (premiering Sunday) passed me his reviewer’s package. He told me to keep it on the “DL.” I felt so instantly cool in that moment, almost like an insider, or at least somebody who gets to peek through the windows of or deliver a pizza to What’s Going On Manor. The DL. It's cool.
I must be on the UH (up-high) with you though and tell you that the probable impetus for letting me in on the review-copy of the series likely had very little to do with my special j’ne se quois. No, I believe the journalist said something about me being Mormon and wanting to know my perceptions and/or thinking, and that I might enjoy the series since it is based on Utah polygamists.
Now, I have thought I was done correcting people about me and the Mormons. In Utah, I am not considered Mormon anymore, in NYC I am That Weird Mormon lady from Utah. Well, then, the truth: somewhere in the middle is most accurate, somewhere near Ohio.

So what was I to do with this advance copy of something being majorly hyped all over the city? We’re talking about bus-billboards, a wedding cake with a groom and three brides in an “It” Lower East Side bakery (thank you Shelley), actual wedding announcements with the series’ husband and three wives’ names embossed and postmarked out of Utah….And that’s all I have inactively become aware of. Clearly, HBO’s really trying hard here.

As well they better.

On a couple of nights over the past week, I gathered with Mormon friends to screen the series. Here’s the premise from HBO:

The owner of a growing chain of home improvement stores, Bill (Bill Paxton) struggles to balance the financial and emotional needs of Barb, Nicki and Margene (Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin), who live in separate, adjacent houses and take turns sharing their husband each night. While managing the household finances together and routinely sharing "family home nights," they try to keep simmering jealousies in check and their arrangement a secret.

Well, oddly, this polygamous family never joins up with any polygamous community. They are living “The Principle” on their own although I do believe from my own observation that they could easily fit into some of the more mainstream polygamous sects in Salt Lake without much trouble from the law. They could even pull the Plyg classic: Collect-Wellfare-as-a-Bunch-of-"Single-Mothers" This could alleviate some of the aforementioned financial stress. (I'm just trying to help.)
Honestly people. Utah looks the other way as Utah is naturally conflicted on the issue of polygamy. But I guess they need to be on the DL because the series needs, what’s it called? Oh yeah. Tension.
Although voyeuristic viewers may be initially snagged by the spectacle and logistics and promising tension of three hot ladies voluntarily sharing one dowdy husband, the novelty wears off by about episode three. Eventually, what the series becomes is slack, yes even flaccid, limping around in a lot of household wifey bickering with a husband saddled by issues with his teen-weddin’, money-lovin' father in-law,“The Prophet.” (Harry Dean Stanton, about whom my friend Shelley quipped, “they just keep raising him from the ashes don’t they?").
Seriously. That’s about it. Yes there are some funny aspects to a guy living every Joe’s dream and having to turn to Viagra to keep it all up, if you will. But the jokes aren’t good or frequent enough, the lifestyle isn’t dark enough (like "The Sopranos" or "Six Feet Under"), and the characters are just not likeable or hateable enough. What we are left with is a nearly mainstream dull suburban family that fights a lot over everyday things.

Perhaps I just don’t feel I need to watch TV to see that.

The Big Questions then:

Q: Are Mormons polygamists?
A: Not the mainstream LDS sect (the one I grew up in.) They renounced it to gain statehood in 1890 although it probably took one more generation of Mormons to really get it out of the system (my grandfather grew up in polygamy.) However, Mormons do believe that polygamy is essential to attain exaltation in the afterlife in the Celestial Kingdom, the highest degree of Heaven. When younger, I participated in many hand-wringing discussions with other Mormon girls who did not look forward to this principle in the afterlife. In the end, we usually guessed that we just needed faith and that it would all work out.

Q: Do the Fundamentalists really dress like that?
A: What, with the poof-top melting into French braid, a prairie dress, and some Reebok tennis shoes? Why yes. Yes they do. They also seem fond of acid wash denim vests. HBO researchers did their homework here.

Q: How was the acting in “Big Love” ?
A: Chloë Sevigny gets the look of a Fundamentalist down, what with her largish inbred looking noggin. She seems adequately catty and bossy as what would be considered a polygamy prima Dona.
Grace Zabriskie who aptly plays a fundamentalist gone mental older mother is a scene-stealer. I can’t imagine that she is not the pants-wearing, gun-totin’, P.O.’d, compound pariah that she plays.
Tina Majorino who plays Heather, a mainstream Mormon teen who is onto the Plygs is as real as it gets in the world of acting.
The others are pretty unremarkable and can I already just say that I did get sick of Bill Paxton’s heinie on screen, especially when clad in demi-transparent briefs? Mercy. Enough already.

Q: Do they get the Mormon details right?
A: Right enough for HBO’s purposes although you would think that they could have hired a Mormon for very little to coach them on how to pronounce things like, “Celestial Kingdom.” (We say, “Celest-CHOL” not, “Celes-TEE-ahl.”)

Maybe I just find this series pedestrian because it’s where I’ve walked for many years minus, personally, sister-wives. I do find it suprising thought that after a sexy NY columnist, the Mob, carnies, and undertakers, Utahns are the next big exotic.
Oddly, from what I hear, "Big Love" is being very weakly marketed in Utah, if at all.
It's on the DL.
Utah's not feeling the Big Love.

(For a much different appraisal of "Big Love," by one of the Mormons who watched with me, see Adriana's review.)

Super Varmints

2006-03-06T14:25:00.000-05:00

Growing up in suburban Colorado meant that cheese-resistant mice could be outfoxed with some peanut butter or a jar of bacon fat.
I recall a pleasant afternoon spent extracting a nearly drowned mouse from his plunge into the grease and observing his woozy, stumbly decline into death-by-bacon. He seemed so utterly satisfied.
Other business with vermin included blindly reaching a groping hand down into the long six inch-wide PVC tube in the lawn to fish out errant toads when the irrigation was acting funny.
Oh, and there were the bunnies and groundhogs to be dealt with. My dad did something to these, though I won't ask what and neither should you, really.

Pests. Really cute pests. Colorado has pests who can be sold to Buena Vista or Disney and quickly caricatured with darling, diminutive homes, furniture, vests and shoes, trials and temptations, families, and songs.

But here I am in the most expensive real estate market on the entire planet and what vermin does my buck buy me here? Bedbugs? Roaches? Lice? No. Not just. Add, "super" to the front of each of these. You would think the people would have demanded better here.

Ok then. Here's the (partial) roster.

Bedbugs
I read (in bed naturally) in the New Yorker not very long ago that even rich, pretty people are being confronted with these cheeky blood suckers.
"It's becoming an epidemic," said Jeffrey Eisenberg, the owner of Pest Away Exterminating, an Upper West Side business that receives about 125 bedbug calls a week, compared with just a handful five years ago. "People are being tortured, and so am I. I spend half my day talking to hysterical people about bedbugs."
(That would be me if I had bedbugs.)
Well, Gothamists. Looks like we better just leave that heaving, soggy-but-free mattress on the sidewalk from now on. My friend Elizabeth is a notorious trash picker. Bedbugs could ruin her home-decor M.O. Hopefully they don't cling to wood and lampshades.

Roaches
Right on. No prob. I am clean. Clean enough (thought I). Yet, naked and vulnerable, I found a roach one day that was about two inches long enjoying my clean-enough bathroom wall (yes, I was naked and vulnerable, but upon re-reading this sentence, I have decided not to edit it in the interest of fairness to vermin. I attest that the roach was naked, and I assume, felt vulnerable. See, I try to be fair.)
I picked the roach up with toilet paper, its antennae waving around in a wild WTF manner, applied a pinching pressure, and with the other hand, called Elizabeth for reassurance. (What was I thinking calling Elizbeth for reassurance?)
(You may now be getting the impression that Elizabeth is gross. She's not exactly. She is just on a first-name basis with gross.)
In an even voice, Elizabeth told me that roaches can live and even perform romantic duties (screw) for like 48 hours after their heads are cut off. I took no chances then and with the bang-trimming scissors in the medicine cabinet, cut the roach up into 6-10 pieces and flushed him/them away. I resisted the urge to call Elizabeth to ask if individual pieces of roaches can crawl up the sewer system and reassemble to enter your bottom. I am fairly certain they can.

Lice
Oh lice. I know we shall meet someday.
On Friday, Boone came home with the latest note in a neverending series of such notes saying that these meanies have made yet another appearance in the classroom. Lice and Fifth's Disease. It's a wonder the New York City schools manage to even make it to lunchtime everyday. This time the lice were camping out on a little girl who tends to be dressed to the nines. My children are regularly far, far, far less well-groomed than she. I felt a chill in the spine, a tingle on the scalp. After once again reading the descriptions of these bugs and their tricks, I took down my bun and clawed at my head while trying to examine my own scalp in the mirror.
I then called the children in and picked at dandruff pieces and pencil shavings on their scalps. I asked them if their heads itched, phrasing the question differently over and over until they finally said, "I guess so." The lice are phantom-lice for now, but surely this status is temporary. And how about you, dear reader? Surely your scalp is itchy?
Are you sure?
How about now?
I can help you, I think.
One of the moms from school emailed everyone with the name and number of the Hasidic Jewish nit-picker (ah-hah! The origin of that word.) She said it was truly the only way to go for delousing. I googled the nit-picker's name, Abigail Rosenfeld, and found a media darling. I suppose she's the only game in the borough. According to the NY Sun:
The mother of 13, Ms. Rosenfeld honed her skills as a teenager as she helped her mother remove nits from her brothers and sisters. She has gained such fame that earlier this year a pediatrician from Boston flew into the city with her children to Ms. Rosenfeld because nobody had been able to rid her children of nits. (Note to self: do not sit on airplane seats previously occupied by Boston pediatricians or their offspring.)

Since Hasidic girls don't have much in the way of careers to look forward to, Abigail's thriving business must be somewhat enviable if not controversial in her community.
In Manhattan, however, there is another Jewish (Orthodox maybe, though not Hasidic....I think) team for the lice. Their effort is a bit more assertive as they reportedly dispatch white-coated examiners to the schools who then send crabby evidence home on a piece of tape to horrified parents.
The upshot apparently is this: over-the-counter remedies aren't hacking it anymore. We're looking perhaps at resistant strains of lice.

Super.

Oh, for the days of bunnies.

Even superbunnies.

(But keep your supermice. We've got 'em.)

Margaritaville

2006-02-28T14:26:00.000-05:00

Thank you to all of you-all who chipped in with comentary about the yarn-art, or, as I will call it henceforth, Yart. It still hangs in Manhattan. I have chosen to ignore it.

Last week, we proved to ourselves that other places do exist. You might have heard this from others. Not only do other cities exist, but other countries. Not only other countries, but countries where the garbage is not frozen to the sidewalk, but flies freely in the warm breeze of the passing automobile.

But really. We went to Costa Rica and found not so much garbage and a village of people who have learned how to speak restaurant English for the fat Gringos. It almost rips your heart out. And we found so much beauty there that our eyes rolled around in their sockets not knowing which way to point. Ah, Costa Rica.

Even doing laundry in Costa Rica was slow and beautiful.

And warm.

Conceptual, Continued

2006-02-14T12:09:00.000-05:00

And so to console myself, I went to the movies.
I chose that new M. Winterbottom, "Tristam Shandy" about the handling and mishandling of a what has been called an, "unfilmable" memoir. Had I seen this film and been on my toes before the incident at the gallery, I could have read it as some sort of forshadowing device in the story which is the Mishanging of My Diptych.
Instead, I guess my choice of that movie was possibly my subconscious saying, "look, the comical bungling of the filming of an unfilmable eighteenth century memoir. How apropos!"
Or something. The bungling part anyway. (And I suppose I relate in some cosmic and symbolic way to the accidental circumcision of young Tristam by a slamming window although utter castration would be more apt in my scenario. Symbolically, of course.)

Before the movie began, my phone began to vibrate. Checking to see if the babysitter was calling with inevitable bad news, I fled to the theater lobby. Instead, an unfamiliar voice identified herself as the director of the gallery where my diptych hangs, all bound up.

"Lori Nelson?"
"Yes?"
"Oh, hello. This is the gallery director. I called the other number you gave us, but it must be wrong. A child answered."
"Heh. Oh."
"Anyway, the committee met about your request."
"Right. I need you to remove the binding from my diptych. It's not supposed to be part of the piece. I wrapped it up that way so that the jury would know that it is a diptych and so it wouldn't fall to the ground."
"Hmmm."

She then went on to tell me about the pains the jury, headed by a grand Chelsea gallery curatorial guy, had taken to not move one single criss-crossing fiber on the piece and that they had thought the binding very smart in light of the title ("Interchangeable Diptych".) She also complemented my seemingly strategic placement of every strand of yarn, assuring me that nothing had been disrupted during the piece's hanging.
This all made me wonder exactly who the genius is taking up residence, rent free, inside of me. It certainly isn't me or any part of me that I can take credit for.

"Right," I said, "but can you take it off soon? Can I just snip it with my nail-clippers tomorrow?"
"Uh, no."
"No? It's not meant to be all bound up like that. It's an interchangeable diptych."
"All diptychs should have been submitted fastened together. Joined."
"But that would defeat my intentions. It's an interchangeable diptych."
"So it said in the title. That's what makes the binding interesting."
"No."
"Well. We can't rewrite history, can we. Mr. Chelsea chose the piece the way it was presented."
"But that was binding. Packaging"
"The curator chose it that way."

So there it is. The Genius inside of me who, in 30 quick seconds created interesting work out of what took me a solid two weeks to paint and the Curator know best.

Who am I anyway but an accidentally circumcised little git trying to relay an unpaintable memoir? This memoir is up for grabs.

Conceptual

2006-02-09T13:51:00.000-05:00

I'm having a hard time letting this go. I submitted a piece to a juried exhibition to be held at a gallery on Washington Square in the Village with no expectation of being accepted. The piece, "Switch," is an interchangeable diptych that in one position shows a woman threatening a man with a, you know, switch. He's accusational. She's got someone in the offing. They're both quite cranky and not a lot of fun to be around, I bet.
In the next position, if you, ahem, switch the pieces, he's now the one threatening her with another woman in the offing who is holding out a branch to him. The roles are switched. She is the one who is accusational now.
Right? Ok then.
So I bundled it all up in yarn and paper and submitted it and, well cool!, I got in.

On the 4th, the show opened and I dragged Emmie down a Brooklyn subway tunnel, onto the 'F', and up the W 4th tunnel, through Washington Square where a squirrel who knew no fear and had no tail lunged at us, tired of garbage and hungry for human blood. We screeched and slogged our way through the rain holding hands and umbrellas. At the opening, we were confronted with a packed gallery. It was fairly impossible to see the entire show, but when we finally did spot my piece, nicely placed and on a good wall, we both had to laugh and then worry and then laugh some more. Now, I am aware of and thankful for my good fortune in having this nine year-old as my constant support and advisor. When we saw my diptych hung there with the packaging still around it, my good daughter forced me to go up and ask the desk-people for the string to be removed.
A form needed to be filled out. The committee would discuss it. I was not allowed to touch.
As of yesterday, the diptych is still bound up in string. This all raises many questions for me. This makes me rethink my work. Am I a conceptual artist? I don't really like conceptual art usually. What does this piece mean now? Do I like the meaning?
How is it that the jurors accepted my work this way? Will they ever remove the binding? Will they like it the way I intended it?
Why can't I just snip it off with my nail clippers?
Who's in charge here?

Do you ever say one thing and the person you are conversing with hears wrong and laughs because the thing they think you said is really clever? Then you let it slide and claim the witticism as your own because it's better than the original?

Maybe that's what this is.

Corpse Regulations, etc. (An Interview With Utah Senatorial Hopeful, Pete Ashdown)

2006-02-06T11:28:00.000-05:00

Lori: Hey. Thanks for agreeing to spread the word to my massive audience.

Pete: My pleasure

Lori: First of all, I want to know what your favorite thing about New York City is. Besides me.

Pete: I like the varied architecture and the quantity too. In Utah we have small examples of great architecture, in New York you have thousands.
The same applies to food too.

Lori: How is it that you were able to enjoy the "Bodies" exhibit while my husband ran away in a cloud of nausea?

Pete: I don't know if I really enjoyed it that much. From a scientific perspective it seemed like it would be interesting to see. Then when I got in, it was a bit appalling to see the "artistic" portions of the exhibit. It also made me wonder if these people agreed to donate their bodies to science, but not to be on display.

Lori: Would you agree to be displayed in post-mortem cross-section if it were not artistic but purely scientific?

Pete: Yeah, I've already told my wife that I want my body donated to science. However, I think I want strict rules on what kind of science. I read an equally appalling article in Harpers about the body trade which I would not want to contribute to. That and what happened to Alistair Cooke.
I understand that students do use cross-sections for study, which is OK by me.

Lori: Ok. So do you think that this kind of exhibit could have originated in the US with the current rules regarding body-donation?
I guess i don't know much about the regulations here. I've always supposed a crowd of cute future-doctors would be crowded around my impressive circulatory system.

Pete: The rules dictate that there should be no profit generated from body trade, but according to Harpers, they get around that by equaling the expenses. I also question whether the public would allow that kind of thing. There was similar outrage over a photographer, in New York if I recall correctly, that took pictures of bodies in a morgue. He had things like little ladders going up to their ears and there was no identifying features, yet people were understandably angered because he did it without permission.

Lori: I hope I don't get plasticized.

Pete: Cremation will ensure that. Gemstone is another option.

Lori: Whew. I guess I would like to be a diamond.
Moving along. My friend dug wonders how you feel about The Police. He says, "anybody who loved the police has to be outraged by what's happened to sting. sting went from the forefront of punk ska and became julio iglesias." (Forgive dug. He does not capitalize.)
So, how do you feel about Sting's career as of late?

Pete: I feel the same way. I had an early passion for Sting's music, but it was a cheap replacement for the fact that I never got to see The Police live. I was 15 and couldn't drive when they came to Salt Lake on "Ghost in the Machine". I told my older sister that I wanted to go, but I ended up being left behind. :(
I saw Sting four times (twice on "Blue Turtles") then stopped altogether around "Tepid Heart" or whatever he's been putting out for the past ten years.

Lori: I saw Sting in the "Three Penny Opera" in the late 80's in NYC. Not so good.

Pete: I took Robin the last time I saw him and we were both disappointed with the show.

Lori: Still. I think he's cute. I vote for the plasticization of Sting. Do you support that?

Pete: Yes, that would be worthwhile, but only if it was artistically done.

Lori: Next, my friend, keepyerbag says, "I'll vote for him just because he's not Orrin Hatch. He could be Michael Bolton's biggest fan and I'd vote for him just because he's not Orrin Hatch."

Lori: Has it been indeed proven that you are not Orrin Hatch?

Pete: There is a lot of sentiment like that I hear, but I'm trying to express new ideas instead of simply not being Orrin Hatch. Let me check my driver's license. Yes, I'm still not Orrin Hatch.

Lori: Have you cut an album?
Orrin has.

Pete: No, but I took honorary mention in an Orb remix contest.

Lori: I thought that was XDZebra, my favorite DJ.

Pete: If only I could get an endorsement from that great DJ.
Plastic bodies and multiple personalities, you should do this for a living.

Lori: That LEGENDARY and GREAT DJ.
Ok, my friend Mike, a postal worker in Australia, says you have his support if, you will "sponsor my plane ticket and green card."
How do you feel about immigration, legal and otherwise?

Pete: I need to know if he's good at fixing houses first.
I think immigration is a necessary part of America, but it has been mostly uncontrolled for too long. I advocate for yearly limits and the use of technology in green-cards so they can't be counterfeited. I believe if you make a reasonable process for guest workers and students to go across the borders efficiently, then illegal immigration is a much less attractive.

Lori: Let's get back to what makes you different than Hatch? What are the major difs? What are your best new ideas?

Pete: The major difference between not only me and Hatch, but the rest of the congress, is that I understand technology and have a good picture of what the future is going to bring. With tech becoming the underpinning of nearly everything we do, I think its a good idea to have someone in government who understands more about it than where the power button is. My best new idea is revitalizing democracy through modern communication. I believe this is where our government is headed and with all the recent scandal, it presents the apparent need for transparency and empowering citizens.
I have been very pleased with the results the Wiki on my website has garnered. What is important about that is the fact that the Internet is blind to race, creed, demographics, political party, and ability. It simply promotes good ideas.

Lori: How do you feel about technology and privacy? Should technology be secretly used if it can interrupt oh, I don't know, terrorist plotting?

Pete: If it receives a proper court order first and the constitution is followed. Privacy is near and dear to my heart as I have treated my customer privacy at XMission as if it were my own. I find it problematic that by default companies can sell your information to other companies. I would like to see that reversed, where they have to ask for permission by default. Conversely though, I think that elected officials should have very little privacy in relation to their jobs. I've promised to post all my meeting schedules and who I'm taking phone calls from once elected.

Lori: Ok. I'll enjoy knowing how often your wife calls you.

Pete: Maybe I can do graphs of top callers.

Lori: My friend Julie asks if you, "would have voted to filibuster the Alito nomination?. If (you) would have NOT joined with the 19 dems who were courageous enough to take a stand, then (you do) not get my vote. (Although, technically, I'm not registered in Utah.)"
She then promptly apologizes.
But what do you think?

Pete: I wrote a press release on that very topic, which is here. The problem with the filibuster is that its obstructionist. I think the Democrats need to work harder on changing who is the majority rather than being roadblocks as the minority. I apologize to Julie.
I wouldn't have voted for Alito because I think he's got a loose grip on the balance of branches of government.

Lori: What has been the biggest problem for the Dems? Or how can they stop being a minority?

Pete: I believe it is leadership. Can we look to anyone inside the Democratic party and say, "That individual is another FDR." Can we see anyone back to JFK and RFK who fit that mold? I think Obama is a good start, but we need more. Rather than waiting for Republicans to fail we should be presenting new visions for America.
I'd rather have a selection of Democrats for President that is hard to choose just one from, rather than the best of the worst.

Lori: Why are there so few choices?

Pete: I think the major problem is the barrier to entry. Most people think you need to be a career politician, a millionaire, or have a good family name to run for congress. I wish there were hundreds of people running for this office and not just two. I'm trying to attack that barrier head on by not doing things the traditional way.
The fact that every Senate winner outspent every loser in 2004 is obscene to me. Especially when you're considering the $5 million minimum.

Lori: Piles of money! What's your plan?

Pete: In the same manner that people couldn't make feature films 30 years ago, but can do so now (don't you know something about that?), and international business can be launched tomorrow on eBay, I believe that technology is the great equalizer. In addition to traditional campaign methods such as speaking engagements and visiting towns throughout Utah, I am using the Internet as much as I can to spread the word and encourage others to do the same.

Lori: But are many Utahns likely to vote for a Dem? I thought Utah was fairly Red (as in un-blue.) How can you reach out to those whose tradition is ultra-Right, ultra-conservative? And does the Internet reach much of rural Utah?

Pete: The majority of Utah is independent leaning right. When I talk to people like that, they are more concerned with who the individual is than their party. They are impressed by my efforts in business and the community and the fact that I was actually born and raised here. I am encouraged by the fact that in 2004 when Utah went 70% Bush, it voted 43% for Scott Matheson in a race that was essentially nice Democrat against nice Republican. I don't think most Utahns would consider this race in that same light. As far as the ultra-conservatives go, I can appeal to them on my strong beliefs in regards to privacy and the constitution, but there are admittedly many people who I can not appeal to.

Lori: Speaking of Utah and its traditions, my tenant, Jodi says, "I think the minds in Utah would like to know where you stand on this new HBO series about polygamy. I haven’t heard much about it, but you know’¡Ähow do you feel, Pete, about the stereotypes Utah folks are encumbered with? People think of us as liquor-fearing, multiple-wife having, and movie-theater-gay-movie-banning wack jobs. How can that ever change? Or should it?"

Pete: I think that people shouldn't stress over those perceptions. I've always heard how nasty New Yorkers are, but everyone was really nice to me when I was there. Dan wrote that off as being in tourist areas. Maybe so, but outside perceptions are generally wrong. In high-school I used to talk about leaving Utah as soon as I could, but that was before I saw the rest of the world. I've seen a lot of it and I think we have something very nice here, in spite of the news-making oddities.
Lori: (Big Love)
Pete: Haven't seen it yet, although I enjoyed Rome and Carnivale. HBO makes good TV.
Bill Paxton eh? Is he going to say, "Game over man!" to his three wives?
Lori: Har. And Chloe Sevigny. She wears only "Imitation of Christ" designs when hoofing around NYC. Restructured thrift store clothing. $1,000's of dollars for it.
Not very polygamist.

Pete: And to think we used to get that for cheap.

Lori: So, anyway. Regarding your personal/family life, Rocky, my financial advisor, asks, "I don't know Pete. I know of him and I have heard good things. Here is the burning question. Why would you want to tarnish an otherwise decent reputation by mixing it up with the good 'ole boy's network that is Utah politics? For goodness sake, Pete. You have a good, happy life. Don't mess with it."
Oh, and my mom says, "So, Pete, do you think it is possible to be in Washington and not become one of the crowd? to really be who you are?"
(She's kind of worried about you.)

Pete: Complaining only went so far with me. I think its tremendously sad that people are not only unable to run for office but they're scared to as well. However, I've talked to a lot of past candidates who had their names dragged through the mud, but they still felt good about what they did.
To your Mom, that is a common concern. I think its possible to stay above it. Over the past decade, I was presented many offers to sell XMission. Although I would have seen short-term financial gain, it would have been lousy for my customers and my employees. Selling your business is an admirable thing to do, but I still weighed the consequences of how it affects other people. I think I can translate that trust well to my constituents and stay true to who I am. A large part of it is staying grounded to your roots. I plan to get an apartment in D.C. and keep my house in Utah and not the other way around.

Lori: How does your family feel about your running for senator?

Pete: Robin has been supportive since I first started considering it. She does find it harder because I'm not at home as often as I used to be, but she believes in what I'm doing. Robin is also essential to me in this campaign because she is a better and more inclusive communicator than I am. I am very fortunate to have her. Madeleine and Henry have enjoyed the parades and events so far. My Dad has found a new project with this campaign. He's getting the family motorhome ready for me to use on tour and hand-painted an "Ashdown for Senate" sign that he has hanging on his truck. He tells me that he stays awake at night thinking about ways to promote the campaign. I am also very fortunate to have a great and inspirational father.

Lori: That's a nice family!

Pete: Yes, and a nice baby who isn't too hard to deal with. :-)

Lori: Ok. Rapid Fire time because I know you have a job. 1. Do you have a year's supply of food?

Pete: 1. No

Lori: 2. What's your favorite dessert?

Pete: 2. Baked Alaskan

Lori: 3. What's your favorite Winter Olympic event?

Pete: 3. Freestyle Snowboard

Lori: 4. What will you give your wife for Valentine's Day?

Pete: 4. That would spoil the surprise.

Lori: 5. Can I have a tee-shirt?

Pete: 5. If we get them printed, certainly. Until then: (these are sold at cost)

Lori: 6. Who is your favorite musical group currently?

Pete: 6. Ulrich Schnauss except he's solo. I like the new "Mirror System" album.

Lori: 7. Do you think "Avenue Q" would be a hit in SLC?

Pete: 7. Yes, its hilarious.

Lori: 8. Do you support same-sex unions?

Pete: 8. I think the government should be out of the business of marriage. That means no ban or affirmation.

Lori: 9. Do you believe that Lance Armstrong has retired?

Pete: 9. I think Lance is watching Michael Jordan.

Lori: 10. What is your best feature?

Pete: 10. Physical or emotional?

Lori: Both.

Pete: 10. Physical: high metabolism which burns anything I eat. Emotional: empathy

Lori: Thanks, Pete. Thanks for making time for the Little People.
(Whoever they are.)

Pete: Thanks for the interview Lori and thanks for the cot and good times in NYC.

You Are Not Alone

2006-02-03T14:40:00.000-05:00

I'm still here with you! Really, I am.

I have been licking a lot of e-postage stamps as I send out portfolios to the Art World. My life as of late has been a funnel with all I've got going to applying everywhere.
Finally, some results:

NYC-"Small Works": Washington Sq., Feb. 4, 2006
Nashville, Gallery 310-"Secret Show Series": March 11, 2006
Grants Pass, Oregon, Wiseman Gallery, "Women's Thing": March 2, 2006
Salt Lake City, Art Access Gallery, Invitational: May, 2006
Salt Lake City, Phillips Gallery, Solo Exhibit: April, 2007

Yay. That represents many, many, many applications and submissions. (And a lot of rejection.)

And on another note, I took all of your questions and comments for Pete Ashdown to Pete Ashdown, senatorial hopeful from Utah. I will post the interview on Monday. It's a good one.

Thanks for the questions for Pete and thanks for always checking back to the blog, people. It matters.

The Candidate Slept Here

2006-01-26T11:14:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like we have a house guest. Our ole' friend Pete is lodging with the paintings in my studio and yes, we took the hamster cage out before he got here (and the hamster found a jostled toob connection and used the opportunity last night to bust out of captivity and binge on dropped goldfish crackers, cement-like oatmeal, and an orange peel and eventually passed out in the garbage can under the kitchen sink where we found her in distended belly bliss this morning. But that's another blog for another blogger. Unless you people want to hear more about the hamster. Do you?)

It may surprise you to think that I know someone like this, but Pete is an idealistic young contender for the Utah Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. He's tired of people (such as I) complaining and doing nothing about their government so he's kicked the victimish lethargy to the curb and hit the campaign trail. If he won, do you realize he would pull the seat out from that 20 (or so) term Orrin Hatch who loves Alito and eavesdropping and all things Bush? It's tough going against someone so well-funded, but Pete does seem to be accruing a following of people who think that Hatch has had his turn and doesn't represent the people well. Well, Pete hasn't cut an album or anything, but he does have a history in the Utah rave scene. Pete was none other than DJ XDZebra. You may have heard of him? No. That's ok.
When I first met him, Pete lived in the slummy row houses near Pioneer Park where Dan and I first lived and he went around talking about Sting and the Police and the Internet. This was 1991 or so. If you recall, there was no Internet then. Not really. Not like you see it right now with all the cartoon pictures and colors all over the screen. As I recall, it was white letters on a black screen in the closet of a nail salon in convenient proximity to the essential University. That was the Internet then. Pete was on fire about it. We thought he was weird. We were wrong.
Pete brought the rumor of the Internet to reality in Utah with the first ISP in the state. He started it with little more than high hopes and pocket lint and Xmission is now a huge part of technoculture in Utah.
So Pete agreed to an interview for this blog. Kind of. Ok, maybe he won't exactly know he's being interviewed. I'm not sure how to approach this. I'll ask my friend Julie who does good blog interviews.

Well then, you can help. Will you help? Do you have questions for a senatorial hopeful/technogeek? Please help me or else I'll end up asking stupid things like, we know he's an Englishman in New York, but is Sting really a legal Alien? Have we seen his papers?
Or, If you were to cut an album, what would you call it?
Give me questions, people.

As one senator from New York said, it takes a bunch of questions to raise an interview. Or something.

Loving the Alien

2006-01-24T14:58:00.000-05:00

Today on the subway an old man with really cool vintage glasses like Elvis Costello's in the seventies and a homeless-style knit hat was shuffling up to each and every person, screwing his face up into theirs, and asking them, person to person, if he could have some of their money. He wasn't giving the song and dance at all. His method was direct and suprisingly effective. I wish I could do that. I can't even ask a waiter for my check.
Another subway guy gained my respect last Friday.
I was hunched over and scribbling away on my spiral notebook doing my best at my own song and dance/sob story. There's a do-goody foundation in Colorado that will give free studio space in NYC to the 14 artists with the best neediness. At that moment, I felt I was on fire and like I might nail that studio afterall with my well-worded great need. Then a pee-smelling raggedy old man sat next to me. Please don't talk to me, please don't talk to me, please don't talk to me, I noislessly begged him as I curled into myself.
Well he talked to me.
Pee Guy: Are you a student or something?
Me: Um, no.
PG: What you writin' about there?
Me: I'm just scribbling.
PG: Is it January?
Me: Yeah. End of January (scribble, scribble, hunch, hunch.)
PG: Well, it just gets confusing. We usually don't come down until April and it feels like April. And now I don't really know what to do. I'm not sure where to go until April.
Me: It does feel like April.
PG: Your planet is getting very warm. We usually don't come until April.
Me: My planet?
PG: I'm from another planet.
Me: (No longer scribbling, still hunched.) Another planet?
PG: My planet is called, Ah-Ah. We usually don't come down until April and I am really confused. I don't know where to go.

At this point, a guy behind us who was stiff with religious ferver and couldn't contain himself turned around to the alien.

Religious: Brother, you need to turn right now to your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Only He can help you get through what you're going through. He helped me and he can help you. Turn to him right now. Right NOW!
PG: We don't have Jesus Christ on our planet.
Religious: Brother, I tell you this out of love. You must turn your heart today to Jesus.
PG: Well, I think this is my stop.
Religious: This is my stop too. You can make it out of the place you are in. He can save you too.

The train stopped and the alien hightailed it out with the Jesus Freak full of the spirit and closing in. Right as the doors were sliding closed, the alien slipped back into the train. The subway lurched forward and he made his way back to the seat next to me.

PG: You'll have to pardon me. I had to get rid of that guy.

I wish I were as deft as that alien.

Alright

2006-01-13T15:36:00.000-05:00

Some of those little things that didn't seem right to my uncitified self have over time become alright. Not just alright. Good, somehow.

The grocery delivery guy has no reservations about stepping into my studio after dropping off my order to look at what I'm painting. Same goes for the locksmith, the plumber, and the UPS guy. Except for the locksmith who called me goth and spooky, I have enjoyed the honest opinions and apt critiques of these otherwise strangers.
The laundry guy (who is the sweetest man in my life) pushes a makeshift cart for his rounds around the neighborhood all day. He waves to everyone while he pushes a dishwasher-sized box constructed of 2 x 4's mounted with bungee and c-clamps to an old wheelchair. The community's laundry, Armani to Ann Taylor, hangs and swings from a raised horizontally mounted broomstick. At first, I thought this was very unprofessional. I thought he must be hurting for business if he can't afford a proper cart. Now I know, this is a proper cart.
The mailman sorts the mail at Dragon Garden every single day while he leisurely lunches on sloppy, saucy, Chinese food. I used to believe the USPS would catch him cheekily dining there in the window, reading peoples' magazines, licking his fingers. Now I know the USPS is just happy if the mail gets delivered, sauce-dribbled or otherwise.
The neighbors above me rearrange their furniture every single evening. I don't know who these people are, but they are never content with the placement of that sofa. They are also easily startled and drop fistfuls of hardware (I think) and pennies (I think.) And marbles (I'm certain.) Would you put up with that? I used to wonder if I would. Now I feel nervous when I haven't heard something drop for a while. And yes, I start wondering if the jazz guy downstairs is doing ok if I don't feel that guitar through my feet for some time (although the days when I planned to take the self-produced jazz CD he gave us when he came up to complain about our noise one day, and play it at full volume and on 'repeat', while I take the kids to Utah for a spell are close enough to still taste.)
I was confused (if not slightly excited) about the number of people I could see at any given time in various stages of undress out my windows and through theirs when we first moved into this building. Now I know. New Yorkers don't care if people see them naked. My 19 year-old nephew visiting from Colorado was at once pleased and disgusted when one evening, while we sat around and talked, Dan told him he could probably see a naked lady out the back window if he wanted. Indeed. Not ready for her closeup, perhaps, but genuinely naked. At this point, I'm sure you've guessed where I am personally on this one.

I lean toward being New Yorker in this case.

Ouroboros

2006-01-10T11:16:00.000-05:00

These days I am all aflutter entering juried shows all over the U.S.A. I have fond hopes of showing in Austin for some reason, and Nashville for, I believe, the same elusive reason. The more Hee-Haw, the better! I guess after knocking on so many frozen gallery doors here in cool NYC and talking to impassive and tired people while searching for that rare fit, cowboy towns seem like a breath of fresh air. Or maybe I just saw Brokeback Mountain. Hello, Wyoming.
Or, hello Utah?
Yesterday, the gallery I burned a bridge with in Salt Lake City offered me more love and a show.
It sounds nice.

My life is the snake which devours its own tail, the Ouroboros. Jung recognized this snake as an archetype that appears in cultures over and over with this basic message: my end is my beginning. I guess that's just how it goes sometimes. I guess sometimes that's alright.

Has your snake ever eaten its own tail?
Was that good or bad?

What I'm listening to: nothing because the ouroboros iPod ate itself up. But for obvious reasons I guess, I hear in my own head, Journey's, Wheel In The Sky.

I am my own worst enemy.

Homing In

2006-01-04T16:20:00.000-05:00

We flew away from New York City on Christmas day. On the way to the airport, the cabbie slowed down to point out a century old street clock that had just been hit by a car and now lay injured on its side. A variety of citizens stood around on the sidewalk, hands cupped over mouths, not sure what kind of first-aid to administer to a large, elderly timepiece. We all stopped our chatting and planning to rubberneck. It was a sweet, frilly double-faced mechanism on Eighth and Flatbush with a twin on Sixth Avenue who will certainly feel lost now. The romex and old wires hung out of its cast-iron post in a painful way and I somewhat expected fluids to be spilling forth out of the open wound and onto the thoroughfare. The situation seemed dire. I can't be certain, but I think the caption implied below this sad scene, were it to be documented, would be, "So much for ye olden days. Ye can't turn back ye olde clockity clock now!"
Aw, true.
I spent half a hazy, dizzy holiday drifting from one childhood home to another in the rarefied Colorado air, recognizing all the characters of my family and even some neighbors, but wondering why they all looked older. Had I lived in New York City? Had I even lived in Salt Lake City? Who were these opinionated shorties who kept referring to me as Mama? Disconcerting, being back home in that sandstone town.
The other half of the holiday was spent in Salt Lake City. Pictured above is a replica of our Salt Lake City home (it is the homemade gift I clumsily stitched for Dan the whole while I was stranded east of the East River with nary a train or bus to distract me during Transit Strike 2005.) Visiting that old house for the holidays, I drifted upstairs and down, pondering the generosity of Western proportions and feeling like one of those poor ghosts in Limbo who don't realize they are dead, knocking around their old haunts, annoying their loved ones. Here also I tried to figure out who the quite big opinionated shorties were who continued with the "Mama" biz.
Where are my babies? Where are my babies? Where are my babies?? OOOOoooooooooohhhhh.....

Now I'm back in New York where I don't really belong and feel much better. The garbage and grit of the subway felt predictably disgusting and normal today. The grass and sandstone of Ye Olde Life have given over in my mind's landscape to asphalt. My world now is brownstones backed up by bridges and skyscrapers and hemmed up by streets and sidewalks, and the occasional antique street clock tipped over on its side. Why this feels real and solid I do not know. I guess I believed myself when I told the kids that New York City is our home now. I thought that I was lying.

Holiday Greetings

2005-12-23T14:31:00.000-05:00

This week I was forced to make, with my own two gnarled hands, the Husband's Christmas Gift.
You may have heard the subway was switched off? I guess I didn't really want to ride with strangers by hitchhiking into the city (suddenly encouraged) or walk across the freezing Brooklyn Bridge (although the Media attention and free cocoa did tempt me). Ah, Manhattan, where the men are ok about boutiques and flowery gentleman-scents and even a wedge heel. You were so far away!
And with UPS drawing its blinds and locking its door in my neighborhood, clothinghewillsurelyreturn.com was not a true option anymore. So with humility, no small amount of desperation, and little more on hand than lint, saliva, and a few eyelashes, I contacted the Mormon Homemaker who lives inside of me, rent free, for assistance. As is her bent, she was happy to help.
My gift for Dan turned out beautifully, thanks to Mormon Homemaker. But something nags at me.
Dan was prickly with curiosity. He thought he had his gift figured out after I spent three days locked in the studio with my project and the kids spread out all over the floor. With his burning ear flat against the door, Dan tried to decode Em and Boo's muffled but obviously blown-away exclamations (which have never been dispensed with such profusion about my paintings) over their mother and her craftliness.
For an afternoon, Dan was convinced that I had gotten hold of his ($250.00 U.S.) El Bulli cook book and a hot plate and cooked him up a Christmas foam.

Dammit.

No. It's not that.

But now I'm wishing I had given Inner Mormon Girl her walking papers and turned to that Crazed Spanish Chef and his foams instead.

I wish I had made him one of two foams which may or may not be included in the 24 x 18x 4 inch, 6 pound cookbook:

1. A multigallon-sized foam with prescription strength sedative effect. Dan could take this long-lasting foam on the plane for our trip to Utah. The sizeable foam, stashed in a lined duffel, could occupy the man as he spoons at it during the long flight. With a cute ring of foam 'round his razor stubbled mouth, Dan could find peace and maybe unconsciousness, his mind distracted from that disatrous combination of tight travel factors that tends to lead to an unamusing claustrophobia very specific to Dan. A few years ago, when the world was a little different, in a plane at the tail end of a line of waiting aircraft on a tarmac, a sweaty Dan leapt around the coach-class cabin forcing the flight attendants to open the doors to let him run around outside. They did, and then let him back in when he ran his demons off.
During these times, that business gets a husband shot.

Or

2. A foam sleeve with nutritious properties. Dan could nibble on this neoprene-like, gravy-flavored forearm foam to stave off the trembly low-blood-sugar-meanies that take over him every day at about 11:00, miles from a cafe or hotdog man. For whatever reason, Power Bars and the like get lost, or the kids snack them down and other portable foods get forgotten all around the city. A foam sleeve, then. Gravy flavored.

Oh, for a foamy Holiday. I wish I had indeed lovingly made a froth. But no. As cosmopolitan and contemporary as this city is, and as I absorb new thinking everyday, when it comes down to it, I craft.
So Merry Christmas to all of you, and especially to my husband.
And even to the Mormon Homemaker inside of me who earned her rent this month.

And a foamy New Year!

Struck

2005-12-20T06:44:00.000-05:00

The city grinds to a halt today as the transit union strikes and I pause to consider that crazy carnival ride, the subway. I realize this morning that the rattletrap has become so usual to us that we now miss our stops not because we don't know what we are doing, but because we fall asleep on the lurching train.

When my family walked that tightrope from Salt Lake City to New York City one and a half years ago, I truly felt that I had run us all away and joined the circus, forcing my nice Utah family to become carneys. I am responsible for this raucous life of rattling trains, shouting people, and a tiny, shaking co-op in a former tenement built over the 'F' train line. On spinning plates, I have balanced these guilts and responsibilities: two kids who had gone only to an essentially Mormon private school thus far and a husband who had no reason to live in New York other than a glancing regard for the skyscraper. My own reasons are unwieldy and flighty.
We just came to New York for the summer and never went home.

So our building wakes up today and I smell the neighbors cooking bacon, hear greetings in the hallway, hear the Puerto Rican supers fighting in spanish in the courtyard as they sort the garbage. It's not so unlike a circus train with the cars stacked vertically here. I find that the close, rattly living that I deeply questioned in the murky wee hours of our New York existence has become something like home. The clomp, clomp, clomp upstairs? Home. The jazz guitar I feel from below in my feet and up my legs as I stand at the easel? Home. The ten month-old who screeches for my kids every time he passes by our door on the way to his? Home.

At 3:00 a.m. this morning, Dan and I both awoke with nothing in particular on our minds, just a disconcerting wakefulness. Turning on the TV, we found that at 3:00 a.m., the transit strike had been called. Our building is still now like I've never felt it, its bricks not needing to realign themselves every 7-10 minutes. The measured, regular vibration of the 'F' train was something that, when we first heard it in our skeletons, seemed like a deal-breaker when we moved our timid Utah troupe into our apartment. "How will we sleep with that?" we wondered and pulled out the legal papers to reassess our commitment.

And now I suppose we listen for the train without knowing it, even in our sleep.
I guess we now may almost be New Yorkers.

Striking

2005-12-15T23:00:00.000-05:00

The snow in the air mixes dangerously with electricity as the city waits on the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the Transport Workers Union Local 100 to loosen the arms so tightly folded across their chests and shake hands by midnight. The mayor has encouraged us to use our bicycles tomorrow if, in the next hour, the Union calls a strike. Impossible! Has he not seen?

It's so impossibly cold and slick outside. But there is such an air of suspense all over. What will our lives be like without that rattletrap subway? The city huddles together around this issue in a way that makes a strike seem strangely unifying and appealing. We'll be forced to stay in our neighborhoods and shop more locally than ever. Yay! School starts two hours later if there is a strike. Yay! Dan and I encountered no competition at FAO Schwartz tonight because nobody is going out. Yay! We took one of the last 'F' trains before midnight and now we can't sleep. Yay!

Ah, but the economy of the city if the strike lasts more than a couple of days. And oh, people will die if the streets are so crowded with cars that the ambulettes can't pass.

Will they strike?

Can they really, "stop the clock?"

60 minutes more.

New, New Amsterdam

2005-12-14T12:41:00.000-05:00

Last night I saw a sight that took my breath away and confused me right through 'til morning when Boone whispered quietly between bites of oatmeal, "Mama. I saw a lady with a gun last night in the city."
"Oooh, Booney," I confided, "I saw her too. Wasn't she something?" She had taken our breath away.

Playing the part of good New Yorkers, Dan and I had dragged our bedraggled youngsters straight from school to 34th Street to see if Santa Land at Macy's was as miraculous as memory rendered. I can't help but momentarily set aside my crass life-observations when I see my Believer child, Boone, (Em is now an Unbeliever) nervously approach that bearded temp in thin red fur, plastic belt, and phony specs and hand deliver his childish hopes and dreams. This moment of perfect faith and innocence is a needed shot in the arm during this very Cold Season.
But then I'm back at the ol' crass observations with Dan: This Santa Land is a helluva ringer for Olde Amsterdam's own twinkling Red Light District. Cheaply costumed and heavily rouged, young women and men ditch all pride in favor of the bux, calling out to passersby, "Heeeyyyyy! Don't you wanna see Santa?" "Yo! Come on, don't be shy! Come sit on his lap!" And so we are escorted by a compact Tinkle to a private hut. With lively talk and movement Tinkle is careful to not let us notice that there are many huts and many, many other customers. We are made to feel as if He is our one and only and we, His. Many promises are made then. Whispers, clumsy pats on the head, awkward silence and then the whole episode, so anxiously awaited, ends before we feel entirely satisfied. On our way out of the hut, I glance back and see another family, all flushed, enter the hut. We are then nicely booted out to the shopping throngs. Ah, New Amsterdam.
But I digress. Often.
So, post-Santa Land, and at the grand portal to Macy's on 34th Street, we exited, task accompli, through a heavy revolving door. Boone did his requisite joke where he acts as if he can't get out of that crazy contraption and, shouting junior expletives, takes it around two or three more times while shoppers get pissed, missing the humor altogether as Boone finally stumbles, dizzy, out to the sidewalk and plops on his rear on the cement.

And then there she was, outside the revolving door at Macy's, a staggering symbol for our times. She was taller than Dan, so she stood over six feet tall and stood dark in the shadows. She had her scarf wrapped up to her eyes, her helmet pulled low, and stood with her feet a shoulder's width apart holding her AK-47 (I think) at the ready, across her uniformed chest, pointing at the freezing sky, ready to blow away the bloated moon if need be. Standing in her own self-generated fog, this woman is a new Statue of Liberty, chilly and inaccessible. She is somehow a symbol of our freedom, our democracy, our security.
Yet twenty-four hours later I'm still not exactly sure how.

Home Sweet Home

2005-12-12T18:11:00.000-05:00

This is my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The people who live in the brownstones here are cerebral, famous, and cool. Many of them are foodies.

This could be my home. As you can guess, I don't know what to make for dinner.

*What I'm listening to: A month's worth of podcasted NPR book reviews.

Tears Of Nice

2005-12-08T16:04:00.000-05:00

A gallery owner in Williamsburg looked at my work and told me that, while he'd love to purchase a piece for himself, my work is not, "edgy" enough to hang in the gallery. (Drip, drip.)

I told him I'd huff my solvents then since I don't know where to begin with heroin and try to locate my inner porn.

At that point he invited me to hang something in the gallery.

And that's what's all over. Porn, porn, porn. I'm getting sick of seeing weird couplings that are meant to shock me. (Drip, sniff.)

Dear Williamsburg, I am not shocked.

Later, I met up with and foolishly asked one of the parents at PS 107 if he thought I was prim. This was obviously the invitation he'd been waiting for (sniff, drip) because as we walked toward the school, he gathered more energy than I've ever seen on him and lit into me.
"You're the %^&*(% happiest person I know. You'll never shake that guilty, nicey Girl From Utah thing no matter how cool you dress. Go ahead and keep dressing weird but you'll always be that poor little girl who feels guilty for not having 17 kids.
"And you just can't let yourself hang out with a straight married man, blabbity, blabbity, always so nice to everyone, blab, eff that crossing guard, you don't have to do what she says! See?!!!! Blab."

Indeed.

So when I got home I just cried into the brownie batter that I was preparing for a bunch of kids who are over watching the Lice Episode of Arthur.
Not to get all Isabelle Allende, but those nice brownies just might break some Brooklyn hearts.

(Snif.)

What The Kids Want

2005-12-07T10:14:00.000-05:00

I came upon a moving scene in the park one day while on my morning run. A young boy who evidently did not have the use of his legs tearfully pulled himself along the turf, slowly maneuvering himself by clutching the grass at the root and sliding on his chest. Pulling, clutching, pulling, courageously inching along. I recall that he may have been appealing to somebody to, "Wait up. Wait for me!"
So sad. So inspiring!

The thing that ruined this nearly perfect vignette for me was the film crew hovering above this brave child and his wasted limbs. Unfortunately, he was really a child-actor who doesn't have to go to school and who can easily pop up and climb into his trailer for a snort and a foot rub. A security guard told my nosy running partner (while I just gawked at the child-actor) that this would become something like an After-School Special or a Nicolodeon Snack. Perhaps an Oxygen Kids'-Fixie. It was the nutrient-free foam of children's fantasies, made only sweeter because, you see, not only was the child gimped, but it was his parents' fault. They were getting a divorce, naturally, and his cripplehood was momentarily keeping them together. Apparently, psychosomatic crippling can be a very effective tool for getting what you want. I am grateful at least that the mother wasn't dead which is often the case.
The security guy said it was going to be a really, really nice movie. You know I can't wait.

So, that's what kids really want. They don't fantasize about animals who talk or mer-communities. They want personal drama and manipulation tactics. To wit: things hum along smoothly in our apartment with the usual dropped dishes, walking on tables, and periodic homework glancing, but when the commercial for Nanny 911 surfaces on the TV (which is talking to itself in the other room), everything stops and the kids (and I) rush to the television, mouths agape, six inches from the screen to watch quick edits of mouthy children, loser New Jersey parents, and a Brit nanny who hands their cheeky bums to all of them all in about thirty seconds.

Kinderschandenfreude? Almost. Something like that.

*What I'm listening to: Wilco-Yankee, Hotel, Foxtrot

Make A Painting! Part IIII

2005-12-06T16:21:00.000-05:00

Today's Lesson

Today's lesson is that to make this painting we must paint it over and over and over. Oh, and over.
I think you may have thought that once everything was filled in, the thing would be done.
Sorry.

P.S. Hey! Have you heard about face transplants?
Real.

What I'm listening to:
Sigur Ros' Takk--I don't know what these Icelandic kids are saying but I'm fairly certain it's something about the wind in the park in Brooklyn when it blows a branch-full of snow into a blue sky lit by a frozen sun. They are singing in Icelandic with extended vowels and stretched vocal cords about how the fragmented snow hangs in the air, sparkling and stopping the heart, because these things, spoken of in English with an American accent, sound ridiculous and embarrassing.

Avenue 'Q', the Soundtrack-- For reasons that may be obvious to some. These are muppets on Broadway with real life problems.

Smashing Pumpkins' Meloncolie and the Infinite Sadness--I return to this one even though Billy Corgin is not easy to love.

Sometimes I tire of sharing my space with a hamster.

Make A Painting! Part III

2005-12-02T14:13:00.000-05:00

Ok. Who's ready to paint?
Well you have to whether or not you're feeling it because you have to retrieve the young Brooklyners. Then not so much paint thereafter.

Today's Lesson:

Step 1:

Add some lights to the back, start messing around in the front. Realize that the silly atmospheric perspective tricks you like to sarcastically employ are going to require you to repaint the background altogether at some point. Ignore this and sing along with Meatloaf and warmly realize that your music is surely turning the jazz guitarist downstairs into a bubbly puddle of hatred.

No More Steps.

*What I'm listening to: Meatloaf, obviously. Bat Out of Hell

Make A Painting! Part II

2005-12-01T14:18:00.000-05:00

Today, I would like to add a feature called: What I Am Listening To to my blog, as my friend last night was going on over dinner about another painter's blog who does this. This painter is better than I, so I should rip off his ideas whenever possible.
Also, I've been unexpectedly nudged by guilt over a lie that I told in the previous entry. To set the record straight, I admit here that my Inbox has never been crammed tightly with requests for step-by-steps for painting. But I wish it were.

Today's Lesson

Step 1: Make a shadowy blue haze over background and on skin. This will be used later as shadows that seem to surface through the paint rather on top of the paint.

Step 2: Fill in details of the background taking care to leave some pencil line showing. (This penchant for pencil-lines is no doubt due in part to the reported, "drawing craze" taking place in NYC. That's a good craze.)

Step 3: Step back, turn off music, go to class-parent meeting.

*What I am listening to: The Pogues: If I Should Fall From Grace With God and Pogues Mahone

Make A Painting!

2005-11-28T12:38:00.000-05:00

Today I thought I'd demonstrate the steps for creating a painting since every now and then I can't even open my Inbox, so tightly crammed it is with requests to do so. (Did all you people know that I paint? Remember that? Oh, some of you thought I was just one of those excessively bloggy moms. But not just! Read on.)
People are cheap these days. D.I.Y. will ruin the artworld, but sobeit. That's inevitable. So I will capitulate to the demands of the public and shall, over the next week or so, show you all how to make this painting, a painting for our times called, "Headin' For The Hills." However, I am omitting the steps of surface prep because, frankly, surface prep would bore you.
Also, I tend to pay extra these days for somebody else to prep.

Step one: Think about the article in The New Republic about impending doom where the author, Richard A. Posner, rightly says, "Americans simply do not accept the inevitability of disaster." Think about it a lot. Think about it on the subway and then pull out your sketch journal and sketch a mother dragging her puzzled kids into the forest as they literally run for the hills, disaster at their backs. Accept the inevitability of disaster. Close journal.

Step two: Redraw image, freehand, onto 24 x 24 in. gessoed surface. Use frantic and scribbly lines because frantic and scribbly is how you feel on the inside. Glaze with a gravy colored transparent layer of medium to seal the graphite.

Step three: Insert sky. I work from the distance forward. So will you, I guess.

Step four: Eat lunch, blog.

To be continued....(as is my inner panic.)

P.S. Speaking of disaster, Big Mike caught it all the way in Australia, but did anybody else notice the Killer Balloons at this years Macy's Thanksgiving Parade? See? Next year, only mylar Get Well balloons allowed.

Man Handler

2005-11-23T10:56:00.000-05:00

So tomorrow, with forecasters calling for rain and heavy winds, many untrained volunteers will help wrangle flopping towers of polyurethane through Midtown guided only by instruction sheets reminiscent of airline safety cards.
-The New York Times

When I heard a balloon handler interviewed on the radio this morning, I had to pause, head not quite poked out of shirt, as I thought I was hearing myself. I had missed the part about the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade and the part about the nearly fatal Cat In The Hat balloon mishap of years past that left a New Yorker brain damaged. What I heard was somebody saying that when stirred, there's no knowing what could happen with this unwieldy, careening beast as it bullied its way down the streets of Manhattan. Essentially, the frustrated handler had gotten no training whatsoever for how to control something many thousand times larger than she and filled with something that unevenly buoys it up in the most unpredictable of circumstances. She had been given only a little card with scanty drawings and she was basically giving up on the spot, live.
She is almost me, but I never got any little instruction card and instead of the Cat in The Hat, I get Dan (who shares the body type but does not ever wear red and white together.)

My husband is a force. I don't know what makes him go exactly, but while some would try to medicate it, others would harness it if they could. Maybe the best and worst thing about Dan is that he gets ideas and then actually carries them out. Dan:

Quit high school to work.
Decided that he didn't like his boss at Lagoon and walked away from the Ferris wheel he was charged with, mid-ride.
Borrowed money to fix and flip decrepit houses, amassing many properties before he was 26.
Went completely planless to England and filled a shipping container with antiques he had culled during one week.
Auctioned off the antiques and broke even.
Bought more and better French antiques with every last inch of our credit.
Lost all of the antiques when the container was punctured mid-voyage.
Lost all of his properties.
Had our cars repo'ed by a high school friend-cum-repoman.
Lost our primary residence.
Started a crazy Internet business.
Almost lost his wife.
Watched his Internet business take off.
Got new cars.
Went completely planless to Transylvania and filled a shipping container with antiques he had culled during one week.
decidedly did not break even on the antiques.
Bought film equipment and went to Austria and soon, the Philippines, to make a documentary.
Bought a car off of eBay.
Moved to NYC with the insane wife and kids.
Is building a robot that will do something which the wife can't exactly wrap her mind around.
Walks Manhattan while conducting business all day on a cell and knows the City like it's his own.
Is doing something wacky with the Internet that promises World domination soon.
Bought up lots of land on a trip to Costa Rica and is building his hideaway (take that literally, or no.)

So last night a weighty package arrived at our door and within was something I was completely ill-prepared for; a cook book that Dan had ordered. For himself.
Does that sound nice? Yes, I too was suspicious. The last time this person cooked (as in combining ingredients, not the heating up of prepared comestibles) was when we were living together, pre-married, in creaking poverty. We were earning a combined 400.00 per month by waiting tables and working in a print shop, so there we were in thrift store clothes, not completely for the grunge of it. We were two kids, alone in a slum, cooking potatoes on a found hibachi. Dan got hold of some variety of things one special evening and combined them to create what I think of now as Edible Bruise or perhaps, Hopeful Destitution. That was his cooking, and in the cabbage and ketchup, we found love swirling around like oil. It wasn't that bad.

Do you believe he will cook now? The world-dominating documentarian entrepreneurial spaz. Cooking. Well here's the part in the equation that makes sense: this cook book is from elBulli, a restaurant in Spain that some consider THE best restaurant in the world with its array of twinkling Michelin stars. The hulking book comes with software, which becomes understandable when you read descriptions by foodies frothing on about, "an impossibly light, dusty popcorn piece served on a spoon, which disintegrated and then disappeared on the tongue; sheer glass panes of sweet nori seaweed; tiny puffed quinoa grains in a cornet; and a parmesan and lemon crunchy asteroid ball." Well, we'll see.

I'm also to believe that the chef has included recipes including cough drops and other common things found in one's purse or desk. This is the part that grabbed Dan. If he's going to cook, he better be doing some serious alchemy. He's been an alchemist for so long now, creating gold from balls of dung. I asked him if there would be rubber-band tortes for Thanksgiving then, maybe roasted band-aid fricasee? He says there just may be some complicated but tasty foams.

At 250.00 for the book, well those foams better be transforming.

Happy Thanksgiving

How It's Going

2005-11-21T10:41:00.000-05:00

I find myself thick in a thicket that I blithely wandered into when I was kind of cute, fun, and young. An inviting marquee at the entrance of the thicket said, "Come, See If You Can Get Pregnant, Have Your Own Kid!" There was probably some good music playing and I may have sung along, saying to Dan something like, "It's the beginning of a great adventure!" and he must have said, "If you say so."
It was fun going in for sure, and the Baby Bjorn was a blast. Small people added a whole new category to thrift-shopping and refreshed that flickering flame for me. Haircuts that we would never try for ourselves could so easily be tested upon tiny crowns for fun.
I'm quite certain that I did not enter into the thicket fully comprehending that part of the great adventure would involve the shaping human minds. The thicket at this juncture grows thorny as mind-molding is not really my bag. So here I am now and you can be quite sure that I'm winging it in a sweat, trying out self-devised techniques like bad haircuts on these unfortunate young people, and flying by the seat of my pants. Things are getting harder as the human minds set and for many things I have no reference points to guide me. For instance, I can't remember discussing sex with anybody over four and a half feet tall when I was Em's age. As I got taller, the parental conversations didn't really happen either. Church told me not to. Period. (Speaking of period, that was a total mystery too.) But I've gleaned from the media that this shouldn't be so, that dialogue is absolutely necessary if you don't want to end up housing your very own infected whore. Or worse. I don't and so therefore, whenever it strikes me, often when I am crossing a street or on the subway with Em, I'll fire off, "How's your vagina? Do you have any questions? Don't feel ashamed of it. But don't show it to anyone, ok?"
She tells me that it's fine. Fine! She gets surly about it, so I'm pretty sure I'm doing the sex-ed wrong. (Nobody asks me about my vagina and I think that it'd be nice once in awhile if someone did, but that's another blog entirely.)
Sex-ed needs work.

Sometimes, though, I find I've gotten lucky. Sometimes, I find I must have done right, somehow. My kids are basically good and surprise me by having better hearts and less hangups than I at their age (or now for that matter.)
To wit:

Racial Differences
While I grew up with nary a black person to talk to in my western Colorado childhood, Em and Boone often find themselves in a pasty minority on the playground and at school. I say they find themselves, but that is inaccurate as they simply do not realize their minorityhood. Only I do, fresh off the boat from Utah. Since we've been here, I've been waiting for them to ask, what's up with all the brown skin and curly hair here? But it's been a year and a half with no questions. Looks like we got here early enough for them to not notice. I feel good about that. I feel like I have given them a flat ground to stand on instead of an artificially elevated one. Also, they will never have to deal with the inner shame of thinking to themselves as adults, "I'm talking to a black person. Act natural. Act normal. Act like this isn't the first time in your life that this has happened." It is with regret that I share this about myself, but with complete pride and happiness that I share this about Em: in school, she had big rivalry with a snappily-dressed black girl who was quite dominating. Her hair was just so, her lip gloss was just so, and her coordinated tights were, you guessed it, just so. She didn't like Em's vegetarian, animal-rights, anti-fashion attitude. Em didn't like this little girls attitude. One day, Em came home triumphant and upon questioning, revealed that she had finally come up with something to say back to Crystal (who is expert in the dis.) What was Em's excellent retort? "At least I'll never be a slave!"
My heart sank. I had held off explaining that skin-color variations didn't mean anything because the very explanation of such meant otherwise. "Effed-up again," I told myself.
"Em? What do you mean by that?" I asked.
"At least I'll never be a slave to fashion! Ha! Never!"
Yayyy! Tabula rasa prevails and the slate is not tainted by racism or fear of racism. Only the despising of fashionistas and beauty queens. That's ok. (By the way, in Emmie's protracted rivalry with Crystal, neither girl has mentioned the other's race. Only the other's style. I consider this a tiny victory.)

Cultural Differences
When we first moved here, Boone thought the Hasidic Jewish boys with their ringlets and yarmulkes were wearing uniforms for their school. During the still, wet heat of summer and wearing little more than an underwear brief, Boone watched these boys from the sprinklers on the playground. He took notice of their long sleeves, black woolen vests, long wooly pants, tassels, and sensible black shoes. The hats, the ringlets, the Yiddish. I explained that this tortuously hot clothing was more than a school uniform, that it was part of a complete and complex lifestyle. My knowledge, naturally, was lacking though. I stared at these kids right along with my son. I tried to talk to their mothers. Their mothers moved themselves away from me.
One day, while breaking up the summer days by visiting Coney Island and that famous Deno's Wonderwheel, Boone and I spent a miserable 30 minutes in line for a chance to get above it all and turn upside down in a cage a couple of times. We were directly behind a group of Hasidic kids. Finally, the Jewish boys were crammed and locked into their cage and ours was descending for us. Boone, in his rather friendly but taunty way yelled out, "Heeeeyyyy Jews! Heeeeyyy, Jews! You better watch out, Jews!" I was frozen in the summer heat. It sounded for all the world like a threat. With all of Coney Island listening with dropped jaw, I demanded, "Boone! What are you talking about?!" Wounded and confused, he answered, "It's a scary ride! Those boys might get scared!"
We got into our cage and I thought of Boone with no knowledge of the holocaust, no notion of all the jokes made about Jews, no notions of how New York City is divided up. His only relevant notions at the moment had to do with how scary a ride can be at Coney Island and his obligation to warn some fellow boys. Boys who, just like Boone, must really love the Wonderwheel.

Differences in Sexuality
When we lived in Salt Lake City, I was contacted by the press because I was a straight mom who let her kid hang with the kid of a lesbian mom. Big news in Utah as I wasn't outwardly perverse, kept my house clean, and scaled the food pyramid properly.
Now, here, I'm no news. Well, yes, I am news, but I'm news because I am Mormon, or grew up Mormon (confusion: in Utah, I am unmistakably NOT Mormon. In NYC, I cannot convince people that I'm not Mormon because I was born, blessed, and baptized. The rest is of no consequence, but that is another blog altogether.)
So, our good friends here, Brett and Roland are integrated into our kids' lives like uncles, really nice uncles with a big dog and a willingness to rough house. They are there in a pinch and irreplaceable. They bring cookies. They want to be married. They want a kid.
The other night, it occurred to me to ask Em what she thought about Brett and Roland together.
"What do you mean?" She asked, a little tremor in her voice as if I were about to break it to her that they were splitting up or something.
"I mean, two guys together. Is that weird to you or anything?" I was gauging how much the outside world had gotten to her.
"No, why would it be?" she asked.
"It's not. Never mind."
More triumph. This could never have been me at her age. She is better.

So that's where I am in the thicket. That's how it's going. The sex-ed thing still needs work, but I am letting Em and Boo read the New Yorker. The cartoons within have the benefit of teaching them about sex and what's funny about sex. Just the other day, Em asked, "what's a condom?" as she surveyed one cartoon where one of the King's men was saying, "At least he was wearing a condom," while all other King's men hoisted a cracked but condom-encased Humpty up off the ground. Well, it's not that funny, but at least it gave me a chance to ask Em, "How's your vagina?"

I'm taking suggestions.

P.S. If anyone wants to analyze the violent drawing above, feel free.

I O U

2005-11-16T21:52:00.000-05:00

I owe you an entry, people. I know, I know.

In fairness I should disclose today that I am a blogger looking for something really easy to blog because, let's face it, I'm sick of doing the deep-dive for these entries. Fine, medium-dive, but same sick-itude. I know of seven people who I entertain with these slavishly pecked out words and one is myself and three are my family members. So no more suicide/murder musings for an empty house and for sure, no more complaining about the weather. Today, I just describe a thirty-second (possibly less) exchange I had with a mid-twenties boy who I'm pretty sure was wearing foundation makeup. Then I knock off.

The setup: My friend Shelley and I had dragged her nap-deprived two-year-old into a gallery in SoHo featuring huge psychedelic geodesic structures and a room jammed wall to wall, floor to rafter with rotating multicolor spirals. The sensation of the show was alternately impressive and nauseating and Shelley's son had had enough just after crossing the threshold and was letting us know. Plus he was hungry. The gallery attendant, the boy with the powder perfect skin, was eating his lunch at the reception (har) desk (behind the black and yellow ball above) and completely ignoring us while catching up with friends. We probably seemed like we weren't going to understand or buy the roomful of spirals. Well there's a lost commision, Nancy boy, but I digress.

The exchange:
Me: Um, excuse me?
(The friends part and stare at me as I approach the desk. Palpable judging is palpitated. By me.)

Him (surely irritated, sort of mean, but cute anyway): Yes?

Me: Do you mind telling me where you got that?

Him (looking at his blouse): This?

Me: Oh, no. But that's great. I mean, where did you get that dumpling?

Him (gesturing with a wooden chopstick): This?

Me: Yeah.

Him: Broome Street (shows me the take-out bag.) Here's the address (we read it together.)

(He picks up part of the dumpling with his chopsticks and we regard it together.)

Me: That looks really good.

Him (quiet and flattered): Thanks.

In the end, Shelley, her baby, and I did not go get dumplings. We got noodles somewhere else entirely.

But I may go back for the roomful of spirals.

Turn To The Left, Turn To The Right. (Fashion.)

2005-11-11T08:20:00.000-05:00

I was at the Herald Square H&M this morning and the Stella McCartney gorge frenzy was in full swing.
Stella, a Beatle's daughter, has deigned to do a momentary couture-for-the-masses stint for the Swedish-based clothing store where I buy 83% of the family's apparel.
Planets aligned so that I happened upon a clot of about 200 women tearfully tearing every last piece of designer goods from the racks. The Stella McCartney fashions distinguished themselves from the ordinary H&M cheapies-but-goodies sewn by precious and tiny third-world hands by their special mauve and goldtone plastic hangers. Otherwise they were cheap fabric and weak stitching as usual. This reality did not impede the hordes of women who clutched their piles of hope to their pounding hearts unaware that, even worn all at once, there wasn't enough Stella McCartney in the universe to stem that ugly desperation on their faces causing them to claw at one another and sneakily pick items off one another's piles. No Stella McCartney garment would ever be enhancing enough for the girl with the tattered soul who promised anything, I mean anything, to the passive dreadlocked dressing room attendant if he'd just pull out some special Stella McCartney pants in her size from the back room.
"Lady, I want to make everyone happy but that ain't gonna happen today."
By the looks of it, nobody seemed very happy. Then again, Stella McCartney wasn't around.

Weekinceptiphobia, Plus, Plus!

2005-11-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

Aquastripteasipublicaphobia--fear that the urge to publicly peel off one's clothing and jump into a beautiful urban fountain will eventually step on one's superego's throat.

Giganteeniphobia--nervous twitching panic upon seeing a group of now standard six-foot-plus teens approaching one on the sidewalk.

Humoramutaphobia--fear that one's friends did not quite hear one's clever joke (may lead to Humorarepetitia).

Humorafatiguiphobia--fear that one's friends do indeed hear one's jokes, but that said jokes are just not clever.

Technobserviphobia--fear that somebody or some agency can see one through one's monitor.

Intimiperceptiphobia--fear that one's friends or family believe that one would like to make out with him/her/them.

Illgottenadmissioniphobia--fear that the ticket-ripper at the movie theater does not believe that one actually did pay for one's movie ticket. Also arrises as a fear that one will be perceived as a "crasher" at an event to which one is legitimately invited, yea, perhaps of which one is even the guest of honor.

Maternimpossibiliphobia--fear that the NYPD security guards at one's childrens' public school will judge one by her paint-slopped clothing and bad breath to not possibly be mother material and hence will not allow one to retrieve one's honestly attained children.

malexploitiphobia--fear that one will someday appear in one's many writer-friends' novels, articles, or blogs as the shameless idiot with a barely altered name.

nonexploitiphobia--fear that one will never appear in one's many writer-friends' novels, articles, or blogs in any form at all, ever.

A Daughter

2005-11-03T10:32:00.000-05:00

Oh. I'm not sure who she is, this nine-year-old. She listens with a very familiar half-lidded gaze, focussing on a distant planet. Sometimes I snap at her, thinking she hasn't heard, but she has. She absorbs me. This feels dangerous as I don't know how fitting a substance I am to be taken in. I never meant to make my campaign to be anti-fashion, anti-pop culture, anti-advertising. I just always thought it was all dum and couldn't find the time, though I sometimes mean to bone-up, but don't ever. Somehow, though, I heard myself in her answer to her aunt's question, who do you think the most beautiful celebrity is? Well, you may well know that her auntie is a shameless swiller of Pop, and she may well have had People magazine in her clutch. Em wearily answered, "Oh, Jodes. You know I don't care about celebrities. I think my mom is the most beautiful. You are second." Let me die now because this is the most perfect moment in my mothering career.

And she understands my art. She knows it's partially sad but mainly hillarious for me. For us. She came into my studio last night when Dan and Boo fell asleep on the couch, the television talking to itself once again. She closed the door and sat down to observe, telling me she loves to watch me work. Shyly, she said she would like the kind of sketch book I use someday, the big square kind. I put my pencil down, reached up to my cluttered supply shelf, dug out a book I bought at Pearl for myself last time I was in the city, and handed it to her. Really? she asked, those beaver-teeth prominent in her open-mouthed glee. Really, I said. She helped herself to my pencil tin and started sketching right away. This book, she said, will show me what really goes on inside her head. I believe her quantities of previous sketchbooks have been bound up in the propriety assumed by the books' presentors of a nine-year-old girl's imaginings. Squirrels and bunnies with flowers and nuts ensued. Houses with chimneys. Girls with their hands folded in front. This new sketchbook then holds the promise of being special because she knows it was mine and that I marinate in a barely disguised impropriety with my work. We laughed together at the new panel I am working on which depicts a nude office scene. Water cooler, fern, secretary with baggy breasts at the computer, boss with a baggy bum on phone. And how about my smoking forest bears? Delicious for us. Just for us.

Straight away, she set to work on a sketch of forest bunnies who have just happened upon a piercing-gun. Can you imagine? Oh, yes. The bunnies are enjoying cigars, naturally. This is our world. Emmie knows that to expose this book to the air where commonplace expectations of kids hang languidly about the shoulders would be to invite scrutiny and trouble. But if she brings that book into the studio and closes the door, we can inhabit a place where I believed once I was the sole human kicking around.

There's a new kid in town.

Hallowe'ened

2005-10-31T10:04:00.000-05:00

There's a down town fairy singing out "Proud Mary"
As she cruises Christopher Street
And some southern queen is acting loud and mean
Where the docks and the badlands meet

Ok. It's just Park Slope and this Halloween Parade isn't the exact one Lou was talking about when he talked about how much he missed you, but still, it is a NYC Halloween. Last year, it blew my tiny Utah mind. The 7th Avenue Halloween Parade took the breath out of me. We were swept up, hands held tightly, in a frightening and exhilarating wave of costumed crazees. Hippie to Hipster, MacClaren-pusher to dope-pusher, everyone was represented and marched along with a variety of impromptu bands and kids on sugar.
The children trick or treat right after school until the parade starts and then the entire community congregates to get lost in the massiveness of each other.
It's fantastic.

New York was built for Halloween or Halloween was built for New York. Either way, my friend, Julie was right when she said that the Halloween gods always smile on NYC.
The weather corrected for Halloween, oh yes it did.

The Fall

2005-10-27T18:00:00.000-04:00

In an kindly effort not to bring anybody down (man), I've chosen a neutral topic today.
Today, I will address The Weather.

Is it really fair for Winter to sink its fangs into this city before Fall has really had a chance to hit the town? Has the NYC Fall had time to haul out that ageless red/gold combo that the fashion industry defers to year after year? Has Fall had time to visit the old ladies and the babies, get comfortable with friends? Has Fall even had enough time to luxuriously disrobe, leaf by leaf, before being led away to sleep? Why, no. Not this year. Not for New York City. Winter came and rushed things, forcing Fall to drop its leaves all at once in a heap like sullied laundry. It's a case of bad manners for Winter to be slinking around already, jabbing, pinching, and slapping. Bad form.

Summer was equally rude this year, lowering itself on us like some visiting lardy distant cousin, plopping its soggy tush, unawares, on a squirming, suffering city as if we were its own ratty sofa. Summer remained wedged upon us, unmoving for months while we slogged around in its gelatinous flesh. It simply didn't feel us or care about us. It didn't really even remember who we were. We were just a place to park it.
Then suddenly, weeks past school's start, its welcome completely ragged and worn out, Summer disappeared. Over night Summer was driven away and by morning a nasty rain had moved into the vacancy left behind.
Into the canyons of Manhattan, against the filthy shores of Coney Island, and somehow even into the underground tunnels we all crawl through, the rain drilled away at us. Eight days of a piercing rain that made the paint fall in sheets off of pillars in the subway tunnels so we could count back, layer by layer, years of MTA maintanance (the pillars started off as a leadish blue, were pink at some optimistic time, and brown during some pessimistic period. Aged mustard has been the most popular and repeated paint color throughout MTA history. We are in fact in an aged mustard phase at this time.)
If Summer was indifferent and slovenly, this rain was blindly vengeful, actively attacking New Yorkers like a sibling with a chemical imbalance who moves past the fun of tickling, past the annoyance of tickling, past panicky tickling, right into the pain and torture of unending, pants-peeing tickling. "Uncle! Mother f****** Uncle!" the city cried. The rain couldn't care less. The rain was off its meds.
Was that Fall? That couldn't be Fall. That rain was shameless, shameful imposter. No Fall I've ever been acquainted with behaves that way and then leaves without apologizing. The days of recognizable Fal-as-I-know-Fall could be numbered on my tiny shivering hand this year. So then where is Fall? I suspect Fall has been gagged and bound and is in some windowless basement somewhere in Jersey being forced to listen to poetry about Summer.

It's so cold already. I haven't taken enough walks yet and everyone's hunkering down in parkas already. I've heard the farmers upstate had to throw many pumpkins onto the garbage heap because everybody gave up on Fall this year. How about that weather, you know?

Oops.

This Planet

2005-10-25T10:46:00.000-04:00

Why would we ever need to visit space and its assorted rocks? Why dive into the sea to see what there is to see? Why stink of pachouli and backpack all over Europe?
Within my own country, I am still a foreigner with much to see, much to mock and not understand.
Remember that rather embarrassing song where Sting sang, "I don't drink coffee, I take tea my dear. I (something, something more genteel with my toast than you Americans, and then something, something classier than you Americans, tra, la, la)....I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien, I'm an Englishman in New York!"? Of course that's a blushingly silly song, one Sting certainly hopes nobody recalls, and yet, and yet. I'm ashamed to say it, but I feel you, Sting.

This week, my mother visited me from the Colorado orchard town where I grew up, bearing along with her a shimmering attitude and some family videos from the '80s. In days of yore, the days of antetechnologia, the gods lovingly allowed Man the gift of forgetting his past and replacing it with some generous reconstructions and revisions. I was quite enjoying this nice gift myself before my mother's visit. Eyes shut and peering down a hole which with a little effort widens upon my fuzzy teen years in Colorado, I have seen the vignettes I've created, the self-portraits and dioramas of a heartbreaking teen loner with madly dyed hair and artfully altered mall-clothing skulking and kicking along crow-ridden vacant lots at a bruised dusk. She is shunning the ever-so-ordinary citizenry of the orchard town who would have loved to have known this special teen if she could only have risen through her soul-pain to let them in. But why bother? She was too deep for them. She had to leave.
But alas, the hard evidence of my youth is now before me, crammed into a pretty little disk. I see now that I wasn't a loner in any cool, photographable way. I was actually a loner in a walking wound, smell the tortured trying and recent crying sort of way. The me I am now would cross the street to get away from the disaster of the me I was then. I was clumsy and never got around to fixing the back of my hair as I don't think I realized that I could be viewed at 360 degrees. My facial features were rounded, puffy, and ill-defined, still deciding which way to go and sprouting shadowy fuzz in suprising places. I wore what my mom gave me for Christmas because I didn't know better and it was ruffled and patchworked. One developing breast outpaced the other. I was cruel to my mother on Christmas, sneering at her video camera nastily while my sisters and brother were cute, sassy, and joyful (yet pretty ugly as well at that point.) The gist of the past is really what matters I guess. We dress it up however we need to. I was alone then, just like Sting (though he wasn't quite alone at that time but rather surrounded by the Police. He would speak to his alienation in four years hence, the years when I really got a grip on New Wave in Utah.)

So, where am I now? I'm not decorating the present too much when I call myself a loner with no sense of home planet. I do not belong in the orchard town of my messy adolescence. I never did. I no longer belong in Utah with its unrecognizable but predictable strip-malls sprouting up where the landmarks I've known have, sadly, vanished. ( I find this very painful.) And here? Here in New York City? I still step outside my building every morning as I drag the kids through the streets of Brooklyn to PS 108308 and wonder how I got here. I feel like I am participating in a fictional accounting of Me. And yet, and yet.

I stopped an ancient Chinese woman in the park this morning to ask her what she was collecting off of the ground. Hurricane season has whipped up a little weather in the city and the gingko trees have much windfall at their bases today. The woman wore a garbage bag over her clothes in the driving rain and gathered the gingko fruit with surgical gloves into a burgeoning grocery bag. It smelled like vomit. "Ugh. Why? What do you do with them?" I asked. She made a motion with her hands up to her open mouth in a pantomime of happy eating. I wanted to know more because I couldn't see any good reason to ingest these foul fruits. She just shook her head, waved me on, and got back to collecting. We don't have language in common and so I can't get her recipes for, oh, essence of regurgitance soup. We are both alien visitors. We both walk this city in the way that we need to for totally different reasons, Gingko Lady and me. And Sting.

Perhaps this is how I belong then. Perhaps this is what makes New Yorkers.
Aliens.

Wash It Away

2005-10-13T21:37:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the saddest thing I've glimpsed through a window in a long time is that big bottle of Clorox sitting front and center on the lino inside the abruptly shut down beauty salon on 11th Street.
A deli owner, a hairdresser, some passion, some rejection, and of course, a murder-suicide.
When the tragedy was fresh, there were daisies and mums carpeting the sidewalk in front of the locked up Delores' Salon so that you had to tiptoe through the flora when you walked by. This spontaneous eden seemed fairly lovely to the kids who believed the intensity of those color-injected blooms may be natural after cartoon saturated mornings sweetened by sugar flavored breakfasts. Others such as I were dismayed at those flowers, dyed out of their tiny God-given heads. But perhaps screaming mums really are what the situation called for and even when the mashed blooms were bagged and carted away, their angry fuscia and aqua petals had left a properly nauseating field of color on the sidewalk. Ah, but the stains are gone now. The sky opened up five days ago with such an embarrassment of emotion that we all turned away in hope that it would finish up soon with this cleansing jag. It hasn't yet.
But how do you use a bottle of bleach to really clean away the mark of a beautician and her jilted lover on a neighborhood, much less a couple of families?
Do you wonder if a bottle of bleach will someday be purchased especially for you? Will the place you work right this minute instantly sprout a sad kooky garden in your honor? Will the sky open up in a ridiculous fit for you?
Will someone be kind enough at the very least to delete your blog?

Weekinceptiphobia Plus!

2005-10-10T14:00:00.000-04:00

Transpariphobia: Fear that one is invisible (usually flares up on line while others order their lunches.)

Comprehensissueillustrataphobia: Fear that one's friends and family will understand the veiled slights in one's paintings.

Juvenfocusiphobia: Fear that the world centers itself upon not only the next generation, but also the generation thereafter. Certainly, not one's own generation.

Subterraeneaconversaphobia: Fear that someone may try to talk with one on the subway.

Filthilucrecontactanourishmentaphobia: Fear that the money-handler is also the food-preparer.

Progeniadiscoveriapecadillomeophobia: Fear that one's children will discover some of one's shennanigans.

Progeniacomittapecadillomeophobia: Fear that one's children will commit some of one's shennanigans.

Malpronunciaphobia: Fear that in the desire to appear classy, one will mispronounce words one has just read in the New Yorker but one has never actually heard amongst one's real friends.

Closetiproximiadiviniaphobia: Fear that one's friends, simply by standing close to one's closet, will somehow know the contents therein.

Presenciapreviasubterraeneaphobia: Fear of sitting on an already warm seat on the subway.

Mind Tricks

2005-10-05T07:04:00.000-04:00

Dan took me aside and told me I needed a vacation. He asked where I would like to go. How would you take that? I suspect he was asking this because I have been exhibiting crazier and crazier behavior such as keeping up on the laundry, staying right on top of the daily sheaves of notices sent home from PS 107 requiring weird dates, phone numbers of emergency contacts, and signatures in hidden places. I've been making fantastic lunches for the Vegetarian so she doesn't have to confront blended and breaded fowl/beasty school-lunches. I've gotten progressively more efficient at keeping things truckin'. I am painting when I can sneak away. But here's the catch: I'm not feeling a thing! This might seem good, indeed sometimes I think maternal anesthesia is nature's way of keeping moms from filling up the bathtub and....Well.

So Dan could see the spirals that had replaced the brown part of my eyeballs and asked where I needed to go. I recognize that since he is out of town much, much of the time, I am in survival mode. I'm not so good a mother alone. I want to paint, I want to read. I get exhausted in my mind. Boone's public displays of unevolved rage-handling (conflagration) have nearly undone me so that I don't really have what it takes to listen to Em's analysis of the class bully. Sad. And I can now separate myself from all this and send my body out on the tasks of home-maintenance while my mind hangs out in Honolulu.

I first discovered mind-body separation magic when I worked under the mustached tyrant named Mike at Wendy's fast food restaurant in high school. What? I just prepped the salad bar? When?
I perfected the magic trick under the demanding iron rule of Spiro and Maria Nicolopolopolis, the owners of the photo lab I retouched for later in dewy young adulthood. Maria would pass by my work table, pause, slap me in the back of the head, cull laughter from the other workers, and move on. Hello Maui! These, and a parade of other bosses, stole my youth. They snacked on my carefree heart and beauty like it was baklava.

So who is my tyrannical boss now?

I guess people reach adulthood when they have become their very own self-housed tyrannical boss.
My boss now not only wants me to keep this place tidy and the kids off the TV, but she also wants me to have at least twenty-six paintings ready to show the people from the Whitney Museum on Monday.

Here is my vacation, then: Dan took the children away to Boston and I am alone here. My clothes are all over and fruit flies are camping out on the dishes in the sink, drunk off the rotting fruit in the bowl on the table. There's not really any thing to eat unless you can tell me how to cook up pantry moths. The blinds are drawn. My family has been gone now for five days and I paint to a clock with two times on it: Light and Dark. Absent are all those niggling hours divided up into little minutes, dripping down all over the place, disappeared.
These days alone have not been the binge of movie-watching, fine dining-out, chick-lit reading, or even nothing-staring like I thought they might be. My vacation has consisted of painting without interruption. This has to be the best vacation ever. My mind is once again residing in my head which is happily still attached to the rest of my body.
That's not to say that I don't feel bruisingly guilty about all this. Don't worry.
Furthermore, I miss those raucous Utahns like crazy. Ha.

A Round of Apologies For All My Friends!

2005-10-04T10:46:00.000-04:00

Happy Jewish New Year, reader!

Let me get this year started with a big soggy apology to everybody I know for my general self, but mostly:

S: Sorry I didn't go to your show during the Howl! Festival. I just couldn't get onto the train to see all the paintings that got into the show that I was rejected by. Wah. Really. I am sorry and pathetic.

Mom (and some others): Sorry that I have a laff sometimes at the expense of the Mormon Church. I do that not out of spite, but more out of endearment and nostalgia. Your Mormonhood is great and I would never want you to change it. Except for Mormon chapel architecture circa 1955-present. Change that.

Hasidic Jews: Sorry that I sit there on the subway and stare at your clothing. It's awesome.

Errorista: Sorry for setting you up for a bad haircut circa 1976. I think you know the Bubble Yum was mine.

Fat Cyclist: Sorry that my blog is far too not exciting enough to EVER post a comment on ONCE during your cult-like fame. Someday you will regret that. Right?

Jazz Musician Downstairs: Sorry that my raucous young Utahns are messing up your rent-controled jazz vibe. For $350.00 a month, you deserve better. Oh, and also, sorry that I still haven't listened to the self-published CD that you gave me the last time you came up to complain about the noise. What you don't know is that I've already lived that CD over and over through the vibrations rising up through my floor and into my feet as I paint. Unpleasant? Why, yes.

Young Utahns: Sorry that I always ask you to stomp more quietly.

Pete Ashdown for U.S. Senate: Sorry that I registered to vote in NY. I really hope you do beat that Orrin Hatch. Fool can't sing.

Dad: Sorry that your granddaughter is a vegetarian who considers fishing barbaric. I still haven't told her about the elk.

Cashier At The Korean Deli: Sorry I always refer to you as, "Nice Cashier," when you are so quietly sweet to my young Utahns. I honestly don't know if you are a man or a lady, or even a girl or a boy. You are a beautiful mystery.

Elderly Next Door Neighbors In Utah: Sorry I moved to NYC without really saying goodbye. I know you invested a lot of heart and birthday cards into our family. Goodbye.

Sis: Sorry that I didn't end up giving your son a kidney. I really wanted to and still might if you want it.

Running Buddy: Sorry that I didn't believe you today that I would sink down into that elephant-sized pile of mulch instead of miraculously being able to scale it. I heard someone once walked on the water so I thought mulch would be easy for me because I'm a pretty good person. Maybe not.

Galleries I Left This Year: Sorry.

Afghanistantastic: Sorry that you are in the Air Force serving in Afhanistan, baby sister. I know you are not sorry, but I wish you had taken an interest in something safer like....anything else.

That's enough of that, wouldn't you say?

Weekinceptiphobia

2005-10-03T11:51:00.000-04:00

A run-down of a mere few of the heretofore un-named phobias that crawl all over me, day in, day out.

1. Exasperabarristaphobia: fear of screwing up one's coffee order/forgetting what one wanted in the first place at a coffee counter where a long line has formed behind one's back.

2. Historiaelectronicaphobia: Fear that someone knows and cares about every place one visits on the Internet.

3. Veritamormoniphobia: Fear that one's childhood religion may actually be right.

4. Bloggidiscoveriapaterniphobia: Fear that one's parents are reading ones' blog.

5. Intelligenciabsentiaphobia: Fear that one is in fact not smart.

6. Modignoranciaphobia: Fear of not knowing what to wear anymore.

7. Modambivilenciaphobia: Fear of not caring what to wear anymore.

8. Utobviophobia: Fear that it is plain to everyone that one is from Utah.

9. iPounciphobia: Fear that one will get iPounced for one's iPod.

10. Subterraneaportadentataphobia: Fear of not standing clear of the closing doors.

Letterboxing

2005-10-01T11:37:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's weather was what keeps New Yorkers being New Yorkers. Just when everyone was ready to call it quits here, someone pulled a lever and the hot summer went down the hatch. It was finally perfect outside and so I agreed to follow Elizabeth on one of her kooky adventures, one that didn't involve a landfill, a toxic canal, or a canoe. I brought Em and Boo along.
Elizabeth and I dragged the kids up to the highest earthen point in Brooklyn (not high at all) to meet her husband and young daughter. Apparently last summer in Massachusetts or Upstate or someplace unlittered, she and six year-old Lucy had come across a half-hidden box in their outdoor travels that upon inspection was found to contain rubber stamps and a pad with instructions to sign in, stamp your own pad (like a passport), and re-hide the box. A web address was included in the box. Intrigued, they followed the link and now had made their own letterbox which Peter and Lucy had just hidden. The base of a lamp post, a log, and a bunch of leaves were employed after we decided the raw wires dangling inside the lamp post where it somehow had a nice hole bored into it made it an unsuitable hiding spot for the box. The clues for their letterbox will be posted (in verse, I’m told) on the website so other letterboxing enthusiasts will track it down, indulging a contagious want for seeking and discovery. The why of what we were doing was never completely answered to nine year-old Em's satisfaction, but I do believe we will end up on the answering end of this question soon even though I don't believe we will ever come up with any solid answer.
I checked the website and found verse-y clues for other Kings County letterboxes such as:

Did the Butler go to Sterling Arms?
Oh my, I’m afraid he did.
In Prospect Heights, Brooklyn this box he hid.

A nearby hydrant standing guard
Makes your search not very hard.
A deuce and alpha mark the yard.

(etc.)

For some reason, this makes me want to drop my brushes and seek boxes. Why?
Evidently, a whole subculture exists devoted to this British game. Look in your hometown.
I think you will be surprised.

Step, Step, Turn

2005-09-29T12:29:00.000-04:00

When you have lived in New York City long enough, you learn how to walk down a street. In the beginning I often took part in that crazy tourist dance where you blush and lurch to the left and then to the right and then to the left again with an unwitting and pissed off partner who tries desperately to ditch you in the pedestrian traffic. But without your noticing, that awkward dance will one day leave your body, along with the superfluous thank-you’s and a constantly dropped-jaw. With time, you begin to feel the route in advance, in your body, in your feet. Without looking at an approaching person’s face I now know which way to step and turn myself so that we slide by each other without touching. The opposing twist you can do with a stranger where you move your torsos sideways in harmony as you pass, face to face, eyes cast down, touches me in a way that leads me to believe that the person I have just passed is good. No dance-card filled, but our hearts were in such proximity. After a turn like that I walk, relieved that nothing happened--no faulty stepping on my part—on to the next step, step, turn.
How can so many people in such proximity achieve so little touching?
This morning, my friend Brett coaxed me out to Café Regular on 11th Street. (Or is it Café Normal?) This café is his haunt and it is so lovely, small, and dark. Lively with good neighbors, the cafe sits in a New York-typical contrast next to an old-school beauty parlor hung with posters of hairstyles unlikely to be achieved. I sat with Brett’s neighbors and their many dogs outside on some steps with our coffees and breads. We talked about art. We laughed at Brett. I looked through a sculptor’s catalogue of his work. The sculptor seemed like an artist in the way that I like to mock because he is what they base television roles on with his unabashed staring and funny beard-do and connection with his feelings.
When a hearse pulled up to the beauty salon and weeping Puerto Ricans dressed in black and heaped high with brightly dyed flowers spilled onto the street in front of us, I panicked and asked Brett if we could leave.
The artist said, just stay and feel this. Can you feel the vibration? I could mock him here and now, and for the rest of our possible acquaintance, but I did feel it and I had to put my sweater on. The clouds were gathering and I had caught the chill coming up off of a fresh murder/suicide in the beauty salon. These killings were committed in passion or because of passion, or something about that emotion, passion. Whatever it was, their weeping rattled me, made me want to run with my eyes closed, but, because I couldn’t really run while another artist stood so solidly, I made myself stand. I breathed and watched the moaning relatives with their pomades and precise curls, the children in new clothing, laying down crayoned notes upon the sidewalk, the old ladies lighting those useless candles.
I let my raisin roll drop.
How dangerous it feels to be touched.

Effin' A

2005-09-16T00:37:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth Royte, my critically admired friend who wrote, Garbage Land: On The Secret Trail of Trash had the charity of heart to get me out of my Chuck Taylors and up to Fifth Avenue for a publicity event for her book last Tuesday.
I'm sure she didn't think about how a 24th floor view of the Park strikes a girl accustomed to blinding white salt-flats, but all I could think of was, broccoli florettes. It was like that, out-of-towners. When you go to the supermarket next time, make an, "O" with your fingers, close one eye and narrow in on the broccoli bin. That's what I saw, but with mist and such a slight variation in green that you know that Olmstead and Vaux are residing on Posthumous Genius Row for their mortal tree-selection for Central Park.
A man who will be played by Ralph Feinnes here approached quietly as I ate up my broccoli view. He waited a good measured minute and then uttered, "It is endlessly beautiful, isn't it?"
I thought he must be making funny. I've never heard an actual person speak Merchant-Ivorese in real life. Regrettably, I laughed and whipped my head around to share his joke. No joke, though. Had he muttered a western, "Effin' A," in the typical reverent voice reserved for vistas, I certainly could have responded well. I am not an adaptable animal. Better that he moved on to a real New Yorker for that high talk.

And the curator from the museum contacted me again.

Effin' A.

In Gratitude

2005-09-15T13:30:00.000-04:00

I'm goofy with glee over my most recent purchase. Not only goofing on the purchase, but the purveyor and the purchasing experience.

After pricing out birthday cupcakes for twenty-one expectant Brooklyn third-graders at the Little Red Hens Bakery ($57.00 U.S.) I said, no. Emmie who was with me had the good third-grade sense to wistfully say no, and shuffle out the door with me. She's a frugal Utahn yet and is not about to shell out in that fashion to an establishment that poses as a down-home neighborhood bakery. Like we're dum? Second option; make the cupcakes myself. I said, no. Emmie graciously understood this because she is a smart third-grader who realizes that although her mama can create an entire based-on-reality-as-I-feel-it painted community, she cannot actually create a based-on-your-fantasies-or-even-lowest-expectations real cupcake. Also, we don't own the pans I've seen people on television use to make the cupcakes. And using cups isn't really done I've been told.

So the nearest and best option I could come up with? Donuts Luncheonette on Seventh Avenue. Americans, do you realize that donuts can be displayed like they are a special treasure and not a bad habit? I was in Thiebaud (see painting) heaven. This is what people who mow down old buildings to build chain restaurants are trying to emulate, except in their sad case, it's usually a rumor of this they are basing their plans upon.

A trophy case of filled, sprinkled, frosted, pastries, a group of apron-clad, hatted, shouting men, a stack of white boxes with the store logo stamped on them, a weighted dispenser hanging over the register dispensing red and white striped string, a counter where one can dine and watch oneself in the mirror, speckled Formica, a window you can order from while standing on the sidewalk, sickening green and white backlit photos of egg offerings lining one wall, and customers. Plenty of Brooklyners don't give a second-thought to that Little Red Hens it would seem.

The guy who called me Hon punched a flat white box into 3-D and filled it up with a ravishing variety, totally confident when I asked him to choose on his own. Tied up in string like that, I can barely let myself deliver these donuts to the third grade. I want to hold my donuts a little while longer.

Oh, and they were $7.00 U.S. Take that, Hens.

Terror

2005-09-13T13:58:00.000-04:00

I wonder what it would be like to be stepping onto Afghanistan today.
I wonder what novel you would read during a flight to Afghanistan.
I wonder what kind of special things you would gather up for a trip to Afghanistan.
I could have asked my youngest sister the third question for the months that have led up to her being required to go that wrecked desert. I could have asked her the second question yesterday. I could ask the first today.
I haven't asked her much at all, though, lately and I guess maybe I won't until she's back safe at her new Arizona house next spring, poring over paint chips and studying an Ikea catalogue with me. I bluster around with my other siblings about her deployment but keep my mouth closed with Air Force Christy. Part of this silence could be confrontation-cowardice. The other part just might be me holding my breath.
These questions are not so tough really. I gave them a lot more blog real estate than they require. They could have been reduced to one query; how is it for you to go to Afghanistan, Christy? But all I've ever really gotten out from behind these teeth was a vow to her that come springtime, I'll fly across country to help her decorate. This wispy promise becomes more real to me than the recognition of that which she will be doing in the months preceding her return. I focus on the Vlack shelves vs. the Bjorgstjyl shelves. The Celestial Robin's Egg Blue or Storm Drain Grey paint? Will Ikea have a new catalogue out when she gets home? Silly small questions, these are everything that I hang my hope on. If we decorate her new house next spring, it will mean she is ok.
So then will I be brave enough to ask her what she saw at war with terror in Afghanistan?

How It Works

2005-09-08T22:39:00.000-04:00

There are four old-fashioned but transparent cogs devoted to each human and some of the animals clomping around Planet Earth.
Hovering in clanging dis-concert above the head or at times around the feet, these cogs grind, spitting grease and grit. They are all wired up with a split Romex line jacked into the base of the skull and into the chest, causing us to lurch in this direction and that. Each gear can represent Family, Work, Romance, or (Alternate) and rarely work well all at once. At least one cog will languor in rusty, guilty neglect or else spin in oily overuse leading in either case to complete mechanical seizure. Said cog is then ejected only to rest and rotate unevenly about the ankles.
Sometimes, however a very precious sometimes, the machinery all trips into place with a thunk and an echo and a hot arch of sparks.
To wit: you get an email from a curator at the Whitney Museum saying she is interested in your work and would like to make a studio visit. The eff-word, made holy in this instance, is jubilantly and liberally released and the Romance cog thuds into place with a single phone call, setting free more eff-word, and now the Family cog gets its varied tiny notches in place with much dancing and to-do and amidst those flying sparks, real happiness is ground out.

Then a week passes with no word from that curator. Then a few more days. You reluctantly realize that Planet Earth is still Planet Earth and there are floods and temper tantrums to be weathered and twenty or more undone paintings to be resolved and nothing but curling Smart Dogs in the fridge.
And so. Cogs reset and jam and fall. And the work grinds on.

A Grand Town

2005-09-06T01:09:00.000-04:00

I have returned to and am walking around this house I own in Salt Lake City and find that it is so sizeable that I cannot find myself. This average American home is too much, really. I chase winged shoes, balls, PowerRangers, LeapPads, Build-a-Bears, books, etc. around the house and finally just let it all get away because, housepersons of America, I would not paint or hold conversations with people or even blog to you if I got this place under control (luckily my ambitious caretaker sister has taken over the chase.)
Big, big, big.
Utah is big. The grandeur is no delusion. You can take dry, big, rattling breaths here and feel the panic rise as you wonder how you will traverse the valley six times this day as you shuttle the unlicensed and underaged to far-flung playdates. Ah, the big Sport Ute. Ut? (Apropos.) We pig out on gasoline here to fuel our work on a large scale.
But, oh those beautiful mountains, flexed reassurances that we are God's chosen kids after all, living out our lives in His rocky embrace. And would this beauty and golden light be wasted on the wicked? Pave, pave, ye saints. Make the streets wide because our cars are wide and we are wide and He loves us dearly. Accept more nuclear waste and bury it in His wide desert. Crush good historic buildings in favor of foam-filled, wide, California/Seattle-derived architecture. Those sharp stars at night can mean only one thing: approval.
We deserve much here, and by God, we're going to take it.

Y or Y Not?

2005-08-26T14:34:00.000-04:00

For an unreasonable amount of time I've been perched on the fence about swimming lessons for the kids at the YMCA down the street.
Every time they see the cover of that class catalogue, they nervously ask to please not have swimming lessons there.
I think I see why, but he is the father of Psychoanalysis.

Those Kids

2005-08-25T20:19:00.000-04:00

So often these days I see teens wearing not so much punk rock clothing as New Wave clothing. How excellent except how devastating that I am a mom now and not still a Waver. When we pass, I can tell that these kids can't see me for who I am.
At sunset tonight, I saw three sixteenish boys flitting around the Slope in pegged girl-jeans, skinny ties, floppy hair, and acne flare-ups. I was ready to volunteer to drink Robotussin with them behind Fruita Monument High School but certainly I'd get hauled in by the same cops who saved the daughter I lost on the 'F' train.
But shout it from the rooftops people; New, New Wave is here!
Now, let me flashback to about 1983.
Thank you.
I've gone to the Salt Lake City temple with my Grand Junction Mormon youth group and the big city is working its magic on me. Yes, I am aware that we are there to participate in proxy baptisms for all the dead people who walked the blue-green Earth (walked while they were alive,) but how pedestrian is that when this city is chock-full of New Wavers and Mods! Not a farmboy as far as the eye can see. The Vespas, the skaters, the shaven-off eyebrows and black eyeliner used as lipstick. Oh, my. It's possible that during the qualifying group-interview to do baptisms for the dead that I may have not raised up my hand when questions like, "do you ever entertain the idea of ripping off the shirt from and licking the concave chest of the skinny, shy, but sadly, gay boy you hang around with behind Fruita Monument High School? Brethren? Sisters? No? Okay. A roomful of temple-worthy teens is such a joy, honestly, such a joy." (I know what you are thinking but this is what the question generally felt like to me, the, "flavor" if you will. The outcome was the same any way the question was posed: no horny teens copped to horniness in the group, thus many people from 1800's Europe involuntarily became Mormons posthumously via horny small-town American teenage liars that weekend.)
So I am in the van parked at Temple Square, an invisible but very tough mental veil dividing me from the hometown hicks in the youth group while they sing along to, I don't know, Journey. Out the tinted windows, I see the Godlike beauty of a Waver flicking, flicking, and again, flicking his inky bangs out of his eyes. All this will be mine, I think, someday.
And it was mine. And it is mine. Dan was a Waver in Salt Lake City at exactly that time. He hung out downtown by the Temple right where the Ford van with the tinted windows was parked and guess what! That was him with his bangs in his eyes. He remembers a beautiful girl looking out the window of a Ford van and not being able to not love her. Ok he doesn't, but in the movie he will and she will breathe on the window and in that mist draw a heart with her finger around his head and say, "I'll come back to find you Waver Boy and when I do, I will make you marry me and have two kids with me who we can mess up good and take to live in New York City, New York and it'll be rad."
And, Bretheren. It is rad.

Passing

2005-08-24T11:23:00.000-04:00

I see in my neighborhood:
-a store selling underwear with a padded bottom
-a dead rat become completely integrated with the asphalt in less than 24 hours
-Paul Auster and Siri Husvedt walking their dog, backlit and looking race-of-giantlike
-candles for sale that remove creative block or make someone shut up
-a useful and magical oil called, "I Can & You Can't"
-pigeons pecking at vomit
-a superhero supply store selling breathable water
-girl-on-girl porn in the trash bin atop of a heap of muffin wrappers inside Two Little Red Hens
-Hasidic fur disk/hats and woolen cloaks in murderous heat
-a guy who sets up his fancy telescope on the streetcorner for anyone who wants to see the moon, stars, mars....
-a big hillside of people on blankets singing along to "The Sound of Music" playing on a giant screen in the park
-a man whose wife won't let him inside all day so he sits on our building's wall and smokes cigars
-a brilliant cellist who can't stand up straight
-a jazz guitarist who plugs it all in and plays on his stoop at night
-Las Rubias del Norte playing across the street every Monday
-a building burning down for the third time in two years and everybody getting together to giddily watch
-people holding hands and dancing in the street for Purim
-13 NYPD officers feeding my seven-year-old vending machine doughnuts after she was lost, and found, on the subway
-Jonathon Safron-Foer giving a reading at our school
-my six-year-old waiting in the window well every morning to call out to our Puerto Rican supers down below
-a blizzard that shut down traffic and brought everyone, hipster to trader, out to marvel and sled in the streets
-a crazy, ancient woman from floor 5 sneaking in visits to the crazy, ancient, man-who-wears-underwear-only on 2.

This is why I have to stay.

So, Now What?

2005-08-22T11:47:00.000-04:00

I've been in New York City long enough to have an identity crisis.

At hazard of defining myself as solely homemaker and lovemaker, I've toyed with tossing away the painting I.D. and a whole bunch of paints and solvents because, I'll be plain; this place intimidates my pants off. I haven't quit yet however because I don't exactly know how to dispose of toxic materials here and my friend Elizabeth Royte, a published environmentalist, sits tiny but constant on my shoulder so I can't really set my materials in somebody's can during the night and run off. Even my paintings would probably create leachate in the landfill so they're hanging around too. (By the way, if you would like Elizabeth on your shoulder, and you should, check "Garbage Land: On The Secret Trail Of Trash.")

I sneak around Chelsea, stepping in and out, in and out, of galleries. Later, I quietly hash out the art-trends with myself on the 'F' train on my way back to Brooklyn to pick up the brood at PS 107. Trend: rip of Darger, nod to porn. I've searched for my type of work on that map the same way I used to pore over the MTA Subway map as bedside reading, trying to figure out how I can get a handle on this place, where I am. I hope I have the wrong map because I'm not showing up anywhere. How did I get to this place?

I took leave of a SoHo gallery last spring because I didn't connect with the rest of the work there (heavy on paperweights, light on heavyweights) and thus felt restrained in spite of, or perhaps because of, constant sales of my work. I don't want to be the most challenging thing going I guess. I also pretty much dismissed my other two Utah galleries for much of the same reason. I admit that I set myself up.

Now I have no commitments. No shows. Nobody knows who I am except my kids' friends who, it must be said, love my work. I can paint whatever I want. What do I want to paint then? Do I want to paint? (Yes.) I have ideas, but seeing contemporary work has made me second-guess my execution and subjects. I've spent a long season painting and coming to no real conclusions, just moving a brush over and over the hesitant tracks that it has already made. I have around 17 paintings started and close to being finished, but I just can't see what I need to do. I wonder at night right before I sleep if the best thing would be to become part of the as-of-yet nameless yet identifiable movement of painting (I wonder what it will end up being referred to as.) It is narrative and that fits. But it's so derivative. No, I can't. This last week, I decided to forge ahead as if I'd never seen what is going on out there. And so I continue where I am but with no audience over the age of eight (that's alright) and with a curious merging of Utah landscape with Brooklyn landscape and a whole bunch of people running around feeling lonely.

Somebody would like that, right?

Hide The Nice, Part II

2005-08-20T12:43:00.000-04:00

Never drive, carry, or wear nice things as they will be crushed or removed from you.
I read "The Blotter" every week in the "Park Slope Courier." iPod snatching has run amok.

(Fortunately, I am already comfortable with this rule as virtually the same kicked in around the time I joined the ranks of Parents Everywhere. )

So the thinking when Dan bought me a surprise new bike was, "get something not worth stealing."
But I am smitten. I love this new bike. It's gorgeous. It came from a shop on the polluted banks of the Gowanus Canal and outweighs me. It's painted with house paint. Sigh.

Hide The Nice

2005-08-19T11:04:00.000-04:00

My first year in Brooklyn I spent grinning around the neighborhood wondering what had gone so wrong with the (surely) good people of New York. A boroughwide, yea, even citywide, cloud of crappiness hung overhead in all kinds of weather and it tended to really hurt my tender feelings. See, I've never been somebody who puts it all out there, but I ask for things with a smile or at the very least I ask for things, period. My consideration and charm was appreciated with exaggerated smirks, items shoved my way, and an eye on the next, surely better, more Brooklynesque, person on line. People didn't like me. Often I was met with something like suspicion. Was I too nice?

Back in Utah, I prided myself for being a negative person, finding the rotten in about every situation. I never partook in, "hon" or, "thanks a million," or, "I pree-chate that/cha." I bucked at all that sweet posturing, was above that insincerity. So how, then did it crawl or soak in? I am sweet. Sweet, sweet, sweet as a frothy Mormon dessert of no nutritional value . In Brooklyn, I am that which has for many years grossed me out at home.

So I began a regimen of consciously sloughing off the nicey-nice with the pumice of anger, indignation, and disgust. I tried demanding. I jockeyed for position. Did I smile? Only when the transaction was over and to my exact satisfaction and then only very briefly. "I'll take a lemon-rosemary tofu wrap and I'm in a hurry and could you wear a rubber glove so your likely toxic hand-tattoo juice doesn't get on my food?", or, "No, I don't need help with this motherlode of a suitcase up these endless barf-ridden subway stairs. Get the eff away, tourist!", or, "Hey, overheated upper middle-class white dad. That kid was NOT at fault for your doughy toddler's fast-forward descent down the slide. Your kid fell! Fell on his clumsy own!"

That's the new me and guess what? People love me now. Lick my flip-flops, good people of Brooklyn. Lick around my toes. But really, is this me? I think it just may be. It's the me that was wrapped up in swaddling, um, nice stuff that made it hard to connect or feel people. I think the people here suspected that I was in sales or was some sort of missionary which makes sense since I came from the Salesman Capital and Missionary Making Emporium of The Entire Blue and Green Planet. Now I think people know that I'm a lady who needs a wrap.

Here's a secret, though. I'm still so nice that I want to hug the guy making my wrap and dab Neosporin on his reddening piercings, but that's entre nous. (Or entre moi, as nobody reads this.)

Now if I can only figure out why everybody I've gotten to know wants to kiss when we meet up.

Talking To Myself In The City That Never Sweeps

2005-08-18T18:48:00.000-04:00

Ok. The city does sweep, but it just seems to sweep stuff from over here to over there.

Here I am in New York City. Nobody really knows why I left behind a fully furnished house with a double garage and Land Rover in the driveway. I'm not certain myself but somehow all that space and stuff seemed indulgent and already won. In the years from bankruptcy to middle-classiness, I built up a good and workable art-career in Salt Lake City, Utah culminating in the classic earmark of fame: being recognized in the grocery store by a blushing fan (which made me blush too, but, so?). The county had purchased a piece for their collection, my local gallery had a waiting list for my work, and I was guaranteed at least one solo exhibit annually if I wanted it. Sales were steady.

So, I talked it over with Dan, packed a big box of our favorite pillows and books, disenrolled the kids from what was turning out to be an increasingly conservative private school that would re-comb Boone's rocker-do, found a sublet on Craigslist, got tickets and got out.

I think it was mediocrity and the Easy Life I was uneasy with. With harmless people who say, "Thanks a million!" and ample thoroughfares for the auto, I knew the ease and convenience of Salt Lake City would tenderize me slowly if I stayed. I needed raw living to reach the nerve where my best painting resides. I needed a place that was sincerely tough and brutally sincere.

So Brooklyn it was.