Truth in advertising

This needs no commentary really.
Crap on sale, courtesy of the same genial shopowner I wrote about a few months ago.

Book-selling louts and big mouths

The New Yorker published several remembrances of J.D. Salinger this past week. The most affecting and personal was by Lillian Ross. (Full disclosure, I've read Salinger but I'm not unhinged about him--sort of like last week I confessed to not being much of a Beatles fan and by the bug-eyed stares at the table you'd think I'd admitted eating babies. But I digress.)

Ross describes Salinger's work ethic ("long and crazy hours") and his disdain for pretty much all other writers ("book-selling louts and big mouths"), most vituperatively, Truman Capote. While I get this, I struggle with it. Can true genius simply not abide the other 99% of the human race? Salinger of course had a deep and complex understanding of humanity which he was able to translate into superior fiction, so I guess this earns him a pass.

And there's this: “When I sit down to work. . . . just taking off my own disguises takes an hour or more." Considering his mad skills, I wonder if I've ever even gotten the mask off once.

What trees

My sis posted this found note for me to her Facebook page.
"What trees does Tawny have in her backyard?"
Is this code for something?
Actually, it reminds me of the wartime Agatha Christie novels: Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, or N, or M? Strange title, unfamiliar protagonist, pseudo-modern plot.
Nonsensical and strangely comforting.

Supa cool

So check out this video. It's re-posted from Nico Nico Douga (warning, I don't know the Japanese for "re-write your disk" so click at your own risk) which is a video sharing website that apparently hosts all kinds of video game and music video mash-ups. (Wikipedia tries in vain to make sense of it all.)

I've watched this one a couple of times and marveled. Each bitmap image seems to be projected onto a square that moves around an interior room. Clever, mesmerizing, amazing.

Mind games

Sometimes I wish I could turn off my brain. Mostly it feels like I've got about a dozen hamsters churning away up there, working overtime and then some, along with a monkey on a typewriter (or maybe that's just the hangover).
One of my goals for 2010 is to think less and experience more. As a Capricorn and nervy--okay anxious--person, nothing makes me happier than a well thought out plan. But sometimes, a plan becomes a fence, and sometimes you just need to run free.
*
I've had some horrendous dentist visits the past few weeks and during the worst of it, I tried to think of people and places that made me happy. One image I kept coming back to was this one, of me and a friend on a dhow off the coast of Tanzania, heading to Bongoyo Island. I was dirty and hairy and hadn't slept in days and my body was covered with bruises from 2 weeks of construction site work but it was an extraordinarily happy moment, a warm sunlit happy day with swimming and lounging and a beach barbecue ahead of us.
I miss Frenchie. We did early morning yoga on the roof of our hotel together, we pulled pranks and drank gallons of konyagi and played dice til all hours and tried to solve the world's problems. She's a rare, lovely girl, and I hope the universe is kind enough to let us meet again.
*
I am a lucky girl and have the good memories to prove it. I'm trying to figure out how to make them the video loop in my head, because sometimes the Novocaine just doesn't cut it.

Style vs beauty, round 2

I started this blog in October 2008 with thoughts on style, and Carole Lombard. I'm still thinking about style, especially as it relates to beauty. American culture seems confused about the two--everyone touts having their own style, when mostly they are attempting to achieve some bland bottom shelf of generic beauty.

Julia Roberts? Beautiful.
Chloe Sevigny? Stylish (and irritating as fuck, but there you are).

Growing up I felt like an ugly lump; my middle sister was blonde and radiant and sweet (everything I was not). When my father said I looked attractive, I was pretty sure it was code for "despite your moustache, crooked teeth and surly disposition, you are not entirely disgusting." A family friend even told me, "You look handsome--not pretty. But handsome."

Sexist jerks aside, I had such a passion for style. I couldn't get enough, collecting ESPRIT catalogs and devouring fashion magazines, snipping out photos of outfits that appealed to me and pasting them into little notebooks. My part-time job at the Mission Thrift Store was an addict's dream--I scooped up vintage dresses and a cloisonne brooch and a black wool toreador sweater with rhinestones that I am wearing as I type. I slouched around town in a man's fedora and raggedy brown Keds and was delighted when I was pronounced too seedy to ride in the family car.

I continue to study the stylish. At Sartorialist, which you know about. And here. And here. Oh here too. I absorb the images of Wallis Simpson and Sofia Coppola and (sometimes) Kirsten Dunst, and Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis. None of them classically beautiful, but so powerful and compelling that you can't look away.

Maybe that's the difference. Beauty is, and it is pleasant but it does not invite reflection, where style is elusive and variable, and you may not like it but you can't not look.

Joy in the crosswalk

In Wallingford this morning I was waiting at a traffic light and two boys skipped into the crosswalk in front of my car. They were maybe ten or eleven, in sk8ter outfits, with lanky blond hair and easy strides. Halfway across the darker-haired one did a balletic leap, grinning as if with sheer joy of the physical stretch. It was so natural and beautiful that I laughed out loud.