balding angrily

Frank Lloyd Wright’s head floats in an elevator in the Kalita Humphreys Theater, here in Dallas. No, really. The story goes that Frankie disapproved of an elevator that The Dallas Theater Center installed after his death but before the theater opened.

This raises some questions. Why did his head choose this particular project designed by his living and - I’m assuming - breathing self? Surely, there are far more important projects that FLW would want to haunt. If I were a ghost-head, and I wanted to haunt a place, I would choose a place that gets lots of attention. Fallingwater, for example. Taliesin. (His wife and kid got killed there, for God’s sake.) That place where they filmed Gattaca. Why a little-known project?

Where is the ghost for the rest of his body? Let’s assume that he split his ghost into various parts. Isn’t the head the most important part of the spectral entity? Wouldn’t he have - as postulated before - sent his head to Taliesin and sent, like, a pointer finger to the Kalita Humphreys?

I just think that if FLW - or his soul - was peeved at a past client, he or it would focus on something more substantial than a backstage vertical circulation device.

I went to my first writer’s workshop last night; I went as an observer.

First let me back up and share another bit. I am my father’s son; there are times when I can clearly see what he’s thinking. He once told me about an artist’s group that he was in. My dad is a pretty good painter, but he paints some bad pieces like any good painter will. When describing this artist’s group he intimated that his skill was superior to the other painters. I thought he was being boastful, but he at least showed some understanding; his boasting wasn’t cruel. He stopped going to the artist’s group after a while because he wasn’t getting what he needed out of it.

Well, last night I understood my dad’s feelings of superiority. I’m not proud of it, no.

Here’s another thing that my dad and I share. We are attracted to groups that come together in a common interest: writing, art, biking, motorcycling, etc. We engage in those groups for a while, but then we think to ourselves, “Wow. You guys are really into this. I mean, I’m into this, but you guys are, like, REALLY into this.” The thing is we are attracted to these groups because we can do the thing that we like to do with other people. Duh. But while we’re doing that thing that we like to do, we don’t want to TALK about doing that thing that we like to do.

There comes a tipping point when we’re talking to our fellow bicyclist, motorcyclist, writer, painter, etc. where we think, “There has to be something else that you are interested in. Can we maybe talk about you? Your kids? Your wife? Politics? Race relations? Cucumber salad dressing?” And we ask, “So what are you into?”* And our fellow bicyclist, motorcyclist, writer, painter, etc. looks at us like we sprouted a third eye.

The difference now is that I’m going to make a living off this thing. (With Gaia’s grace.) So, I can’t be snarky or stand-offish as is my tendency.

*Looking at that now, I see that “What are you into?” is chock full of innuendo. Another thing that my dad and I share: foot-in-mouth disease.

1. My toenails and fingernails are a mess.
2. The cats anticipate dinnertime by two or more hours. Jerry feeds them at six and they start moaning for food at three-thirty. I’ve always heard that we humans have crippled our internal time-to-eat clocks by being dependant on mechanical watches and clocks. Should someone invent a kitty-watch so that me and my kitties can have the same disassociation from nature?
3. While sonority may look like sorority; and while a sisterhood of college girls can be said to be a condition or quality of being resonant in a metaphorical sense, sometimes a play-on-words joke just doesn’t land.
4. Starbucks decaf espresso pods don’t produce a sufficient crema.
5. One of my cats has a licking fetish. My bald head. My clothes.* A bit of sheet poking from beneath blankets. Wood. She spends too much time making these things wet with her sand-paper tongue. I wish I were her.

*And not even the parts of my clothes infused with my manly scent. Just random patches of clothes. The part of my shirts adjacent to my back-fat, for example.

Jerry planned the best. birthday. ever. He warned me in advance to keep the day open, so I did.

Here are the events of the day, in theoretical order:

• Woke up. Made my own breakfast because Jerry loves his squishy pillow and cannot be moved in the morning.
• Made my morning coffee and poked him with a stick.
• Finished reading the announcements over the p.a. “Congratulations to Mrs. Claudia’s class for their win in the Tri-County Flame Throwing Competition. They took home the Golden Singed Eyebrow.”
• Threw a cat on Jerry.
• When he woke up, he brought me my presents: lovely Bodum coffee mugs, saucers, and the news that we would be spending the night in a historic Dallas hotel that I’ve loved since I moved here.
• Worked out. Checked into the hotel.
• Saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Who-the-Hell-Thought-Shia-LaBeouf-Could-Pull-Off-a-Marlon-Brando-Impression?* on an overstuffed loveseat, under a thick blanket, with our feet propped on an ottoman. Ate Junior Mints and Tangerine/Lime Soda. (Not a good combination by the way. Unless you thrill to alternately puckering and feeling your teeth vibrate.)
• Napped.
• Napped some more.
• Flipped through the Garden & Gun magazine that was provided for us in our lovely suite. At first I was all, “Wuh?” Then I was all, “This I gotta see. How does a magazine manage to combine these two seemingly disparate hobbies?” Then I was all, “I fucking hate the south.” Then I saw Jessica Simpson on the cover of D Magazine, and I was all, “Oo! Jessica Simpson!”
• Went to an awesome dinner that featured muddled cucumber, a waiter with too many hand gestures (I’m all for a good wave of the hand in the direction of a drink menu. I’m not in favor of every sentence being accompanied by florish of the wrist.), a short rib dish that I thought would be something else, an upside-down key-lime pie with candied lime zest, and cheese.
• Watched Family Guy.
• Slept.

There may or may not have been shennanigans during any or all of the above, but I’m not telling specifically when or where those shennanigans may or may not have been. As I said, it was the best. birthday.ever. Yay, Jerry!

*Can someone tell Spielberg or Lucas that, in 2008, motorcycle drag is associated more with Tom of Finland than The Wild One?

From Dictionary.com:
pau·ci·ty [paw-si-tee] -noun

1. smallness of quantity; scarcity; scantiness.
2. smallness or insufficiency of number; fewness.

She said to him, “You have a paucity of original ideas. Have you thought about joining a collective? Drones are not useless.”

Looking over the skyline, with its different windows, all green, grey, or brown, he felt melancholy. “There’s such a paucity of shapes a building can assume,” he thought.

Withered, grey hamburger meat lounged, its base widening as if to get a better grip of the cardboard. When he thought about the puacity of food in areas with people colored differently, he felt shame.

She stomped across the marble museum. The charcoal sleeves of her jacket made mouse-whispers that echoed around her chamber, and she stopped in front of the leaning security guard. She spoke in a thin voice with an undertow, “There are things to do. We’ve been through this. There are things to do.” He looked at the color at the outside edge of her iris. “You are a puacity, ma’am.” She took it as a compliment.

You might remember that I wrote an issue of The Dope Sheet for Filmspotting, way back when it was Adam and Sam, not Adam and Matty. You don’t know that I wrote a second Dope Sheet, hoping Adam would publish it. That didn’t happen because The Dope Sheet stopped happening. It went the way of the crows. Or magpies or whatever.

So here it is, The Dope Sheet that never was.

A Good Critic Will Eat Your Opinion for Lunch

Have you tried reading Moby Dick lately? Ooh-wee, T’Shane. That’s nappy-time you can hold in your hand.

Later on, I’ll tell you why I’m so comfortable writing that. For now, let its sophistication hit you between the eyeballs and enjoy a story that led me to it. No, no, no. The story didn’t lead me directly. That would be much too easy; this will require your patience.

In college my professor pointed to a sculpture and said, “Look how beautiful that is.” It was, in my eyes, quite ugly – all angles and rust. He followed that declaration with, “Of course there’s an objectivity when you look at art. You see something and it’s beautiful or not.” I looked at the sculpture again and thought, “Huh.”¹

A few years ago Adam said the following in response to some harsh feedback, “Well, all criticism is subjective. Anyone who says otherwise…well, that’s just foolish.” You can see how this statement doesn’t jibe with my professor’s.

Two weeks ago, Jerry responded to an argument for subjectivity in a review of a local exhibit. He said, “Well, of course there’s good and there’s bad in art. Everyone knows the difference.”

“But we see movies and we disagree,” I challenged him. “You loved Little Miss Sunshine. Me? Not so much.”

“But you’re talking about a work that’s at a higher level then say, a home video of two girls dancing to ‘Fergilicious’,” he said. “We enjoy something like that, but we agree it’s bad. It’s an amateur thing.

“Once you get to higher levels, judging goes from objective to subjective,” he continued, “it’s much harder to get everyone to agree. You start getting into how a work touches on the viewer’s past experience, as how a person can just prefer traditional design to modern design. At that level, everything gets grayer and harder to parse; there’s a criticism that requires more analysis.”²

I respect Jerry; I think he’s smart. I’m going to use his theory to work back up to that first statement. Follow along; there’s cake at the end.

Criticism is inherently subjective at higher levels, requiring finer analysis. That’s Jerry’s statement. I don’t do “earnest,” so it scares the hell out of me. Let me lay it flat and work on it a bit.

Analysis is “This thing is made of these other four things. And these four things inform each other, rub against each other like sandpaper, and give contrast to each other. And further, these four things are made of these smaller eight things. And looking at just one of these eight smaller things, one can see it as a seed or miniature of the overall big thing.”

Opinion is much different; opinion is “This thing is bad.”

Now look at the thick border between analysis and opinion. “Shaun of the Dead, an increasingly common combination of slapstick comedy, societal commentary, and horror, succeeds at none of the above.”³ That place is dangerous; it’s the area where the critic sits, an area that makes for tummy-aches. That’s the center of the rotted wood bridge through which Rudger-hunting soldiers fell in Ladyhawke. I don’t like that place; I’d rather opine.

So that’s how I got to that statement way at the very tippy-top. It’s so much easier to leave out all that cumbersome, muddy analysis. Leave the intelligent criticism to Adam and Sam.

And the part about the cake? I lied.

¹I’ve since come to love angles and rust.

²I’m paraphrasing; I don’t think Jerry has ever used “parse” in conversation.

³That’s an example only. Don’t get your nose hairs in a twist.

Today Jerry and I went for a bike ride around a lake with white sail boats on it. It was a comfortable ride, and halfway through it we saw a man sitting with some lawn chairs and a placard offering free advice. Jerry asked if I wanted to stop, telling me that Cols had once stopped and talked with the man. He told me that he and a friend have been giving free advice from that spot for 14 years.

Jerry & I stopped. We worked out a meeting time, and he rode on.

Randolph, the man giving free advice, smiled. A lot. He sat closer to me on the ground when he realized he couldn’t hear me. He told me that I saw beauty, and that I wanted to create beauty. He told me that I want to see feet tapping to my music. He told me that he used to deal with autism, that for ages he couldn’t tell left from right. But that he could work credits and debits on a spreadsheet. He told me that Arnold Palmer said, “It’s a mixed blessing for a golfer to be able to shoot his or her age.” He pointed out the political correctness of “his or her.” He told me that I should write restaurant reviews. He told me that Jerry and I are under grace, that we’ve been given a gift and that we’ve made the best of it. That we’ve spent years building a solid foundation. He told me to not forget our foundation. He told me to see August Rush and G.I. Jane. He told me that he saw me writing about atmospheres.

I thanked him, and told him he had a wonderful spot on the lake. It had perfect shade and a view of bicyclists riding by.

Today is my first day of unemployment, and I swear - I SWEAR - I will not let this feeling of bliss and contentment lull me into unending weeks of drinking coffee and watching movies. I WILL find purpose. I WILL!!! This is the beginning of a WHOLE NEW ME!!! I am free. I am not subject to the almighty paycheck, the almighty health insurance policy. My bonds are broken! The shackles are loosed!

I’m going to watch Speed Racer and get a Starbucks.

It’s rare that I’m blown away by YouTube because, in general, I’m not interested in what everyone else is interested in. Usually, I discover things that were viral three years ago. That’s my M.O.

So, imagine my surprise at finding the most awesomest thing at the top of You Tube’s Featured Videos.

Here’s the description:

Two girls find a mysterious radio left at their doorstep. They unleash a six armed goddess who seduces them with promises of wealth. They trade their souls for money and, in turn, become the goddess’ dancing elephant slaves.

I don’t know if this is The Heavy’s official video to “Coleen,” but it should be.

Relax and enjoy. (A warning. It’s a big file.)

I like how they used a pit bull to demonstrate the awesome abilities of this unicorn costume set. It’s like, “All your baby killings add up to zilch. You still look like a little princess.” (via Defamer)