today

i was having such a great day until i sat down at this table on the highline and started finding chocolate all over myself. i somehow failed to notice that this table was covered in melted milk chocolate. it stained the right part of my shirt you tuck in and the hem of the right leg of my shorts and got on the back of my red notebook and looked altogether so much industrially produced poop that i made a point of laughing heartily to try to feel less ashamed, thinking that people wouldn't think i had poop on myself if i looked so amused.

i really need to romanticize this lonely thing, something k once told me about. i need to invent dashing intent where there is only flailing loneliness. i also need very much to stop chatting with people on facebook because the lonely thing erupts out of me in unattractively unsolicited paragraphs of sociability. i really need to work on the codes of that kind of thing.

in other news, i watched 7 samurai and that was pretty much a day. there's a lot of terrific stuff in that movie, but i'm kind of skeptical of how we salute the epic for its size. it certainly was a big thing, but isn't it ultimately trite and silly to be mentioning that the movie's 3 hours long in criterion's synopsis of it? you can argue that you should tell people what they're getting into -- "an unforgettable ride" -- but i think it's evidence that we see that length as a big part of the achievement, which really makes us a lot of cows. it IS an unforgettable ride though and there is really great stuff in it, though it'd probably be better if it'd been split up into a million little pieces so we could appreciate the things that actually happen rather than how much happened. synthesizing such a majestic whole kind of ends up imitating life a bit too closely. but really though, it is a pretty fucking wonderful movie. and the ending is terrific, i was really worried that the battle was going to be won a bit too easily. it's a beautiful idea that fighting always means defeat.

another thing: these j.d. salinger stories are exhaustingly heavy on the dialogue, but i really love the initial opacity of people's ages. i think it's obvious salinger really loved kids, the greatest delight in these stories is matching up the banter retrospectively. you have to take the hint that ramona, of uncle wiggily in connecticut, is avidly picking her nose to realize that she is probably significantly younger than daffy eloise. but the words they speak speak to other hierarchies.

merlin the marvelous dog

I only know the Portland Maine reflected in the fur of a golden retriever. I have never taken a walk there not walking Merlin, a magical dog in that he has a yard in which he poops freely so that walking him is uninterruptedly unstooped. This dog, as far as I'm concerned, does not poop!

It's magical what a dog does to a place. As someone who walks staring distrustfully at the ground, walking Merlin means looking at the majestic mechanics of his swishing tail instead of cracked cement out to get me. I look at a literally golden thing. And people look at me attached to that thing, the leash like a painterly cue to lead their eyes. They're transformed by Merlin's presence: children writhe in their strollers, staring like pilgrims; adults wearing hangover sunglasses beam oddly. The air gets suddenly thick with words like "pumpkin" and "gorgeous." Merlin is kind of like beautiful weather concentrated in a dog: a dense package of universal happiness, water-cooler-happiness, as inarguably and as blandly good as the sun in the sky.

Walking Merlin also makes me aware of all the rabidly lonely dogs hidden behind windows, like having a radar for enraged spinsters.

dia beacon!

dia beacon is the best! oh my god what a wonderful place! what beautiful hallways! what luminous windows! what soul shaking artwork! so much cool shit! this was such a happy day, and the long drive back was a joy too, the taconic is fucking awesome.

am pooped, have to babysit at 9 15 tomorrow, goodnight little bloggy journal semi secret musings thing

they might be giants

it's funny, the bigness of business, its multinationalness and such, means that a labor movement has to be comically cosmopolitan. the people in society least likely to know exactly where foreign countries are have the greatest need to be politically correct, to understand the concerns of people on the other side of the world. what a ridiculous challenge a global labor movement is, and yet that's exactly what has to happen if big business, big, nationless business is to treat their workers better.

i went to a they might be giants concert at the williamsburg waterfront today, and that was a really pleasant thing. i sort of stumbled into it, i was reasonably sure they were the "istanbul not constantinople" band but i wasn't sure. anyway, the opening acts were comedians who led us through 3 hours of anticipation, a full hour of which was a total, bucket-over-the-head downpour. they were hilarious. the last guy before they might be giants played guitar and sang funny things and that's when i realized what they might be giants is, and what sort of crowd it was. as the highlight, he sang a song about a coworker turned zombie, and suddenly all these staring heads were singing along too, really crooning along with him, truly loving this shit. and that's when i realized how dorky it was. in retrospect, even the comedy intros are dorky because laughing unrestrainedly isn't cool. but when the singing comedian guy came on stage the dorkiness really bloomed. i don't think it was acoustics as much as the sing-a-long aspect that made that happen all of a sudden, that guy was, in a word, really there with the audience and they with him, he was there for them and they loved him, held his lyrics and his voice in a way that'd be uncomfortably, almost humiliatingly intimate for some kind of cool, artiste type. coolness is a kind of misanthropy, really.

and so with this crowd, willing to belt out "all we wanna do is eat your brains" with minimal provocation was so, so close to him.
the crowd, i came to realize, was also super dorky in how NICE they were. hardly anyone smoked cigarettes and those that did were so considerate that they'd always blow the smoke up rather than on their fellow attendees. when they might be giants came on, this instant camaraderie, this instant readiness to BE A PART OF THE BAND washed over everyone, and 5000 people were ready to clap at the slightest indication that clapping was what tmbg wanted, what would help them and make them one with them. and it made me realize that it must be fucking awesome to be the sort of band that plays for a crowd like this, this is the perma-best crowd ever, this is the crowd that loves with abandon, without any of that distant head bobbing shit that reigns with cooler shit. they made fun of fran leibowitz and "unhappy people" -- "i'm glad they aren't here." they did a fucking sock puppet show for god's sake.

and they were entertainers in the truest sense, in the complete sense that they were really there because the audience was there, that that was the whole reason. at some points this was almost embarrassingly explicit, they said things like "look at all those happy customers"

there's more to say about this, like how i now realize that no crowd but a tmbg crowd wouldve endured all that rain, it's own sign of dorkiness, their loyalty branded on their soaking shirts, but i am so tired from standing in the rain like a bona fide diehappy fan

more on the capitalism thing

and beyond the income equality thing, what if it was illegal to advertise stuff? in that same way that cigarettes do harm and so we're free from the pressures of advertised smoking (except in movies, but that's a separate matter), what if all kinds of useless shit was banned? in essence, what if skymall was banned?

writing this reminds me of bell hooks' writing on feminism because i think im describing radical reforms, sorts of things that would make for radical change if they were enacted, but could never be enacted under the current system; that i'd need to make a more courageous departure from capitalism to hope for real change. i hope that isn't true, i like this idea. id love for legislation to be passed equalizing incomes. id love taxes that redistribute, i think, and why can't we (someone?) go out and campaign for that? retake the word socialism with panache and intelligence? is this really impossible?

Loves of a Blonde, Lasky Plavovlasky

The most vile beliefs can come in neutered and pathetic and ridiculous packages, which is to say that anything can be cute, be funny, be the subject of a lighthearted movie. Anti-semitism can be a little old man, balling tiny fists, heroically alone in believing that Jews kill little boys, and racism can be my grandmother's feeble insistence on black servility. And sexism can be the men in Loves of a Blonde; it can be an aging charmer lobbying to move the army to a shoe factory town with 16 women for every man, pleading for a woman's right to be caressed. It can be an aspiring adulterer, crawling under tables chasing his wedding ring, peering up skirts like a gopher at the sky. The sexism of these guys is as hapless, as harmless and as sexless as a baby's.

But babies touch themselves, and they'd kill (rape) you if they had the strength. Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde does a terrific job of showing exactly how these man-babies aren't funny. A gap-toothed, gout gobbled thoroughly laughable doofus ends up bullying a couple of girls into finishing their wine, and there are forebodings of a forest where those girls don't want to go. There is an ex boyfriend running amok in the girls dorm. The air is thick with uncomfortably persistent men, with tugging hands, with the feeling that someone's going to be sexually assaulted. In a different movie, without the warbling soundtrack and fumbling, sweet characters, this could be the stuff of horror, and at moments it kind of is.

These men aren't actually rapists though, they're just sexually frustrated and out to do some dutiful caressing. They're the trickled down clowns of a sexist sexual politics they didn't invent, of one, rather, that is trying to invent them: they're supposed to be the "nice boys" the girls are lectured about, the ones who honor a "girl's honor," the ones a girl can "trust" for forever after. But this really sucks because nice boys and honorable girls are false roles embodying false ideals. They're roles that make women fear abandonment and men entrapment, that make boys connivers and girls dreaming dupes, that make the sexes into the bullies and the bullied. And, eventually, we see how those roles make women and men settle down into those crucibles of pettiness called marriages, and live with the dead-eyed bitterness that comes from getting trapped, or trapping someone into forever after, a partnership as dreary as any honest stereotype.

The movie had opened with two competing utopian visions of love: the credits roll while a wild-haired hog of a girl sings -- yells, really -- about a girl who turned the boy who loves her into a "hooligan" with her ballsy sexuality. Then it cuts to two hands, adoring and fondling a ring: "The real thing?" "You think he would give me anything else?" The sweet, sad thing is that both utopias are staged in the girls dorm in the factory town, the other sex safely sequestered in a lyric or a photograph.

jetlag life

hey lille blog. am exhausted, would like to know why a moral capitalism wouldn't work, if anyone'd like to explain it to me, i've got a very sympathetic ear. am i missing something if i think the world could be a dandy place if the highest paid person couldn't be paid more than say 4 times what the lowest paid person would be, and there was heavy, heavy affirmative action for the economically disadvantaged and a super terrific education system and no private schools?

i think i look good with eyes this sunken, i'll make a good corpse. open casket for me. it's raining pleasantly and i have never felt happier with my family. i miss k dearly.