Tuesday 6 May 2008
YIMBY
Remember last year when I waxed poetic about the turtle in my backyard?
That poor turtle is now a celebrity (see here, and elsewhere). This morning as I wiped down my chairs to enjoy my first al fresco breakfast of the season, there was a two-man CBS news crew in the yard next to mine, getting the video exclusive. The woman reporter spent ten minutes fixing her hair and make-up. It took about three minutes to get the story on tape.
Afterwards, the reporter said, “I’ll probably get twenty emails about this story and none about the shooting.” I wasn’t sure what shooting she meant, but it sounded wise and cynical and sad and true. And thus my morning. Watch the turtle exposé on CBS, tonight at 6.
Wednesday 30 April 2008
“A Cook in Brooklyn”
About a year ago I was made Extemely Neurotic by being asked if I had a “signature dish.” No, I did not. Was I supposed to have a Signature Dish? Did everyone else have one? Thank god Pistol was around to say something like, “I hate that question!” But then I thought, is there something wrong with me that I’ve never been asked before?
Enter Pork and Hominy Stew. It is the most delicious, satisfying, simple thing in the whole world. I made it like three times in February, five times in March, and when I was planning what to make for Big Daddy and his fiancé when they come over for dinner next week, I didn’t have to think twice. Clap clap! Signature dish.
I’m pretty psyched Big Daddy is coming over: I haven’t seen him in a very long time. In fact, I had to find out about his engagement from a third party. Our estrangement is due to the fact that his cat has been in my freezer for over a year, awaiting burial at his father’s house in Pennsylvania. OVER A YEAR. Big Daddy felt so guilty about it that he wriggled away into silence.
I foresee a few jokes about what, exactly, is the meat in my Signature Dish.
Tuesday 29 April 2008
It’s like my team won The Big Game.
Cuz I’m so highbrow, bitchez.
Son Plans to Publish Nabokov’s Last Novel
Monday 28 April 2008
…if you beat the tree with it.
I am such a late bloomer that I am just now assembling my first futon-couch, at age [redacted]. Yep, up until now I’ve been sitting on milk crates and drinking out of a tin cup!
All right, not really. It’s for my basement. Imagine: futon-couch, two folding tables, a 20-pack of toilet paper, and a ficus tree. It’s like the suburbs down here.
Anyway, the point! I think Dwight Schrute is in charge of Futon Covers Online™: The Web’s Original Futon Cover Store. For example, it’s a little weird that the various lines of futon covers are called programs. And that there’s a tutorial video. Also, this:
For $58, (the price of our full sized solid premium futon cover) which includes free shipping, you’re going to get a finely crafted American made product, with strong, vibrant color, double stitching on all sides, and a fat, nylon toothed zipper that would strip the bark off of a tree if you beat the tree with it.
!!!
Monday 14 April 2008
Real Life
Our advisory council has been warning us about dreamblogging, telling us that if we persist we must at least make a new category, T.A.D.L.A.R. (obvs), to warn readers of its mind-numbing content. Well, I’m not in the category-birthing spirit right now, but I must recount LAST NIGHT’S DREAM.
Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords said he loved me. I was skeptical. To prove it he wheeled a three-tiered dessert cart into our hotel room. What an extravagance! Chocolate cakes, caramel custards, blueberry tartlets, sticky toffee pudding, pink and yellow and cupcakes, parfaits and trifles, mousses and flans…
I took a hairpin out of my hair and slid it across the table. “The only thing I have to offer you is a hairpin,” I said. He put it in his pocket, and then all our friends came into the room and we feasted on the desserts. Everything was delicious.
It’s funny: after I got D’ed, I thought I’d never want to get hitched again. And now I’m married, or at least dream-married. It seems to be working out pretty well.
Send your Amazon gift cards c/o mirror.meta@gmail.com.
Monday 7 April 2008
Emo Diary
Some things are just stupid. A couple of weeks ago, Pistol and I were at Youpers, having the typical grand old time when we were approached by a random dude. Let’s call him Friend 1. He asked us to watch a potted bamboo plant while he went outside. He said it was a birthday present for a friend. We were like, Whatever, okay.
Friend 1 was a tiny bit amusing, but not nearly as amusing or charming as he thought he was. The only thing that prevented us from swatting him away permanently was that he seemed to flit away just as he reached major pest status. A few times Adorocop raised his eyebrows at us from behind the bar, which is shorthand for, “Ladies, I love you so much even though I am married and the only way I can show you how much I love you is by telling Friend 1 to leave you the fuck alone, if you just say the word.” (For the record, Adorocop has stepped in on a prior occasion, telling the hapless dude, “These girls are my favorite customers. Don’t talk to them. Don’t even look at them!” It was partly embarrassing and deeply thrilling.) Continue reading this entry »
Saturday 29 March 2008
The calf’s nose
I know that the supposed point of blogs is that they offer up-to-the-minute commentary on stuff that’s happening right now, which is why newspapers are dying and the world is ending and all, and hence, that it’s kind of pitiful to write a post about something that was in the New Yorker two weeks ago, but the thing is that until yesterday, I was convinced I would never blog this blog again. Because the other important thing I know about blogs is that they are actually completely pointless, and soon nobody will read them [does anyone read them now? –ed.], or anything else, because they’ll be too busy sending text messages from their brains or whatever.
Anyway. I read Peter Schjeldahl’s mini-review of the Met’s Courbet exhibition in the March 17th New Yorker, and it made me wish they gave out hot-shit literary prizes for pieces that are one column long and under 200 words. Because this is the loveliest writing I’ve encountered so far this year:
Edgar Degas said that looking at Gustave Courbet’s paintings made him feel as if he were being nuzzled by the wet nose of a calf. That’s an apt analogy for a tremendous Courbet retrospective that invades the Metropolitan Museum with pungencies proper to barnyards, bedrooms, and buggy dells. Courbet is the most purely forceful—because he’s forcefully impure, spitting on purity—painter of all time. (Among the Old Masters, only Tintoretto comes close.) “Realism,” his byword, describes less his method—a talented mélange of cunning and not so cunning, brazen artifices—than effects that stupefy the mind as only reality, when it overloads the senses, can. Vision is addressed, but vicarious touch and smell take delivery. Courbet’s drenching seascapes should come with towels and his steaming nudes with towelettes. He revels in the quiddity of paint: moist dirt. His art isn’t about life; it is life precipitated, with raucous panache. Nothing could be better therapy for a bodiless society of cybernetic narcissicisms than the mad wallow of this show.
Fuck the man! I’m awarding a citizen’s Pulitzer! Because that is some serious knife-in-heart brio.
Friday 28 March 2008
nightfreak
Last night at Youpers, Glen said something, and then I said something, and then Glen said something, and then I said, FUCK YOU, GLEN! and Glen said, In your dreams! and then while my poor soupy brain was trying to work up a comeback, Glen said, In your MARRIED dreams! and then Lefty and I were all, hahahahaha! and Glen turned away to pour us more drinks, and the drinks were free, and they’re always free, and Lefty said, God if dude only knew, and I was like, What? and she was like, You and your married dreams–y’know, implying that I’m pervy–so I made the Lady, I’m innocent! face, and then I said, Which tattoo do you think he got first? If I had to warrant a guess I’d say the big ship, and Lefty said, Maybe you should make a documentary about Glen’s tattoos, and I was like, Totes.
Then I got all the bartenders’ emails to invite them to my big-deal milestone birthday party next week (27!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) because I’m inviting all my friends, and bartenders are my best friends. Besides Lefty, of course. Glen said, I’ll give you my email as long as you don’t send me any pictures of cats playing with balls of yarn and cats hanging from tree branches–HANG IN THERE!–and cats playing the guitar, and so on. Lulz.
Then I went home and had a dream that I was giving the best bj of my life–which, folks, is not really saying much–to a hot terrorist. My mom was really afraid of him. Not that she was in the room! That would be gross! This was earlier, when he was painting my hallway. Because he was also a housepainter. (Long story.) I wasn’t scared in the least. The hot terrorist was just a man to me. Who, I just remembered, happened to be spectacularly well-hung. Yeesh!
Do you want to know something weird? When you search for “sexy terrorist” on Google Images, this comes up on the first page:
Which brings it all back around to Glen. Sort of.
P.S. IT’S LEFT HOOK’S BIRTHDAY!
Wednesday 26 March 2008
The Unlikely Heartthrob
Richard Widmark. 1914–2008.
He’s been in my Fantasy Film League ever since I saw Pickup on South Street, still one of my all-time favorite movies, many years ago. Sam Fuller, what else do you need to know? I think it’s a perfect film. And Widmark! My god the man had talent by the fistfuls.
(stills pinched from Jump Cut.)
Talent, and integrity. Here he is quoted in the Times.
“The businessmen who run Hollywood today have no self-respect. What interests them is not movies but the bottom line. Look at ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ which turns idiocy into something positive, or ‘Forrest Gump,’ a hymn to stupidity. ‘Intellectual’ has become a dirty word.”
He also vowed he would never appear on a talk show on television, saying, “When I see people destroying their privacy — what they think, what they feel — by beaming it out to millions of viewers, I think it cheapens them as individuals.”
Anyway, the sadness never ends. Until it ends!
Sunday 23 March 2008
SUNDAY FUCKING MORNING!!!
Monday 17 March 2008
The limits of credibility
Let’s see…
McGrath said that because he is on the Times staff and sometimes writes about books, he and his daughter do not talk about her work and she had not told him the Jones memoir was hers.
Either dude is a total liar, or the worst father in the world. Because come ON.
(NYT)
Thursday 13 March 2008
The part where she says the lyrics.
I’ve been telling people (okay, really just Pistol) about my new favorite radio show, Fair Game. It’s like they went into my brain, analyzed the funny receptors, and figured out how to pump the required elixir through the air. I suggest you try it. The first segment of today’s episode was full of quintessential yuks about everyone’s favorite whore.
nightcreeps
Just when you think Dr. Freud has been safely tucked in bed, thumb in his mouth and flask of whiskey between his knees, a dream like this comes along (T.A.D.L.A.R-ing one and all?):
My father had a terrible backache so, being a nice daughter, I rubbed his back gently. But even my light touch made him wince (shades of crybaby ex-husband?). Anyway, after a while my father got up, reached out, and CARESSED MY BOBES.
There aren’t enough shudders in the world to convey how grossed out I am at myself.
Wednesday 12 March 2008
Whore, Unmasked
How incredibly creepy is this article about Spitzer prostitute “Kristen,” with its strange nonchalance and weird cataloguing of her MySpace page? The tone is un-Timesy–it seems more like a puff piece about a runner-up for American Idol than an article about some sad girl with pitiful music-industry strivings who fucks 50-year-old men for money.
Tuesday 11 March 2008
No escape…
Tuesday 4 March 2008
“The Predisposition to Fantasy”
News analysis! Reader comments funcake!
(↑a very bad person?)
Here’s the article: Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction. And the other one, even better with slideshow.
As if you haven’t read it! But what you probably haven’t read are all 484 541 reader comments. You’re probably thinking, “What a multitude of unique voices! I wonder what all those intelligent, well-read people have to say about this issue! But how will I ever find out? There’s no way I can read them all!”
Well, now you don’t have to. If you’ll allow me?
READER COMMENTS (in order of popularity)
#1. The New York Times should have fact-checked the article(s)! Also her agent and her editor! (99% of comments)
#2. I don’t understand why she didn’t just publish it as a novel.
#3. Memoirs sell better than fiction, that’s why. (NYT readers know a lot about the publishing industry, okay?)
#4. This isn’t the first time this has happened, you know. [Insert names of other tarnished “memoirists.”]
#4. Why is this such a big deal? Writers of all kinds make stuff up. I don’t care.
#5. I can’t understand why so many people think this isn’t a big deal. THE TRUTH MATTERS.
#6. Hahaha suckers, I knew this lady was a fake the second I heard/saw/read [insert damning sentence].
#7. The lunatic fringe, a tiny percentage of comments, as embodied in the following (comment #214):
WHy would I be surprised? It’s a woman’s story, told by a woman, to a female reporter. It’s in the predisposition to fantasy is inherent in the female genes. And so is the ability to then turn the fantasy into some kind of skewed reality.
And that, ladies and germs, made all my research worthwhile.
Tuesday 26 February 2008
Idiot Boksen
And then, and then, and then.
Television!!!!
i.e., SPORTS ACTION TEAM.
I didn’t know what the hell was going on. What sports-themed sitcom parodies the puppet show from The Sound of Music?
Also: Sports-themed sitcom? Really, Left Hook? Sports???
Yes.
And yes.
This is on network tv—NBC to be exact. Can you believe it? Does it not renew your faith in humanity? Are you not ready to soldier on, Juno be damned, and seek out good work, wherever it may be? Even when it’s at 12:35 am on Sunday nights?
Sunday 24 February 2008
there go the movies…
Wednesday 13 February 2008
I’m back, and–
I’m sorry, but I invented this like five years ago!
The nanogenerator takes advantage of the semiconductive properties of zinc oxide nanowires — tiny wires 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair — embedded into the fabric. The wires are formed into pairs of microscopic brush-like structures, shaped like a baby-bottle brush.
(nytimes)
Ask anyone! I also invented a process that allows clothing manufacturers to selectively add stretch to certain parts of their garments! I also invented a special subway commuter’s umbrella! I also came up with the idea to put solar panels on top of bus stops to power heaters (winter) and fans (summer)! I also invented the nanocanoe (ask the Sadmaker!), which rides in a sick person’s bloodstream! All this and much much more! When I die I’m going to donate my brain to science because anything else would be criminal!!!
Sunday 10 February 2008
Awkward!
Because I am a narcissist, I am obsessed with figuring out what I look like. And also, because I am confused. Globally, I’m talking. Existentially! I really, really, really can’t figure out what I look like. Hence, there is a lot of staring in the mirror chez Pistol. I find photographs of myself fascinating and perplexing, even if they are of the back of my head, or my elbow. I gaze at them for a long time, trying to discern the essence of my corporeal self.
What an asshole, right?
Even with all that effort, if I come upon an unexpected mirror and catch a surprise glimpse of myself, I’m like, who’s that? And if I’m reading a fashion magazine and they have one of those guides to finding the best hairstyle or eyeglasses for your face shape, I can never figure out which shape my face is. Oval? Square? Round? Heart-shaped? I don’t know! When I meet an aquaintance on the street, I am always worried that he or she won’t recognize me. Do I look like anything? Do I even have a face? Also, once Lefty referred to me as a blonde, and my mind is still blown. Aren’t I a brown?
Last week at acupuncture, Dr. Chen said, “You know who you’ve always reminded me of?”
I pricked up my ears. My pulse quickened. Maybe this was it! The crucial, light-shedding celebrity comparison!
“The girl from the George Michael video for ‘Father Figure.’”