re: lewis lapham hangup

the tribeca film festival is showing the american ruling class, which is somehow billed as an energetic combo of fiction and documentary satire without ever being called a mockumentary. heard it wasn't that great, but i must say i'm curious. lapham wrote the screenplay, in which two yale grads (fake) are taken around by mentor lewis lapham (real) to meet major cultural figures like vonnegut, cronkite, and robert altman, as well as targets like larry summers (all real). if they're using real cultural elites, why use fake ivy elites?

the ny times noted with (understated) amusement that the afterparty for the film's premiere was held on the floor of the new york mercantile exchange (see 'bashing the rich, then celebrating at a hub of commerce', april 18, if it's still up).

i'll have to see if i can catch the last screening tomorrow. may be in the throes of moving, though. whenever we get internet in the new place, i'll post pics for y'all. before and after, for sure. we'll be painting before we leave for july, getting a cat after we return. i keep asking ed what color he wants to paint the cat, but no decisions have been made.

pergo slope

so ed and i got a place today. and it's actually in park slope. i'd resigned myself to the idea of living somewhere on the slope perimeter, or even in some parkless section of brooklyn, but then this listing (below market value and rent stabilized) just popped up on craigslist and here we are.

it has a big bedroom on one end and then a railroad configuration of two doorless rooms and then the kitchen. fake wood floors, fake marble in the kitchen. the fake wood makes me feel slightly unsettled, which unsettles me further. why should i feel attached to the authenticity of walking on a real dead waxed tree instead of a fake one?

the bedroom has two windows that look into trees. not big ones but trees!! i suppose i'd rather look at living trees than walk on dead ones. i look forward to one day living in a place where trees are not a luxury. that just feels so wrongheaded.

the cover of this week's ny press is a cartoon by david rees called get your friedman on. it is awesome. please go look at it. the article's ok too because it makes fun of thomas friedman, albeit nongraphically.

i suppose his other option would've been 'my new flattening technique is unstoppable,' as long as by unstoppable you mean entirely stoppable.

craigslife - $900 obo (park slope)

my new pastime is looking for the many elements of my new life on craigslist. now that i may be closing in on an apartment, i'm starting to hunt for trashcans and shelves and pyrex cookware (no aluminum and no teflon, intones worried mother) on CL. damn, a lot of people sure have ugly stuff. sort of the humbling underbelly (humderbelly?) of the shiny new death-deferring no-interest-till-christmas-2013, as-seen-on-tv offerings of our daily existence.

i think i will shell out for a new mattress, tho, because of that scary new yorker talk of the town piece on bedbugs. those things suck!!

suburban oasis just 25 minutes from midtown

ed and i checked out astoria saturday night, and we were impressed. it is truly diverse, as they say. unlike most ny neighborhoods, which are predominantly one race or another, astoria is one big 'rainbow' of a party that would make any college admissions counselor cry. i submitted that it's something of a yankee berkeley (without the posturing), except i've never even been to california, so that's probably not accurate. i've noticed that descriptions of queens tend to follow that rubric—"something of a ____, but without the posturing."

there's A LOT of stuff at the last stop on the N, ditmars. we thought we were going to some dissipated, end-of-the-line area, and it was truly hopping. we ate at this italian place that new york mag made out to be an out-of-the-way find, but was actually a warehouse-sized suburban-style restaurant with valet (if you've ever eaten out in charlotte, it was like that), waterfalls, sucky murals of vineyards, and a lounge singer who performs his own stuff. it was really hard to get a table, but i had to do it because the whole thing was just so weird, so strip mall, so not new york. all the natives of suburban brooklyn and queens flock there in their cars and use the valet and eat giant plates of pasta and meat and order ex-presso. we overheard a lot of conversations about baby formula, mortgages, and the way-out-there neighborhoods (middle village, mesbeth?) i've always wondered about on the subway map, all in accents you don't hear so much in soho.

they took us into the wine bar to wait for a table. turns out the wine bar is not a bar at all but a whole separate creepy room with little tables and more murals. this is where the lounge singer puts on his 'show.' we were so weirded out by the time we got a table, and so full of the pretzels, cheese, and bread that you get before you even order, that we barely finished half of our entrees. ed's lasagna was rather disappointing, but my gnocchi with tomato sauce was pretty good. everything was real—no shortcuts or substitutions. when the assistant manager came by and saw that we were not eating and actually wanted to leave, he was dismayed and forced complimentary tea on non-tea-drinking ed and coffee on a sheepish me. the macchiato was great, i have to say, even if it contained enough milk to be a cappuccino. they tried so very hard to make sure we would come back (also a new experience in this city), but that's just never gonna happen. for a while i thought it would be a fun joke to play on my roommies when they come visit ("hey, i know this great restaurant—it's new york's best-kept secret"), but ed pointed out that anyone who lives outside of new york drives by these places all the time, and it would not be funny.

at last, word arrives

i got into nyu's cultural journalism program!!!! (i maintain that cult jism is a better term. maybe i can get them to change it once i enroll.)

found out over email—it was so weird. i've been checking my mailbox compulsively, fearfully, unreasonably, since mid-march, and it never occured to me to be afraid every time i open my email. good thing, too, considering how often i check it. i'd be an emotional wreck. oh wait...

if we were cooking roommate dinner in jam304...

i would be ranting about armpit hair and its shades of meaning. for example, right now, i have armpit hair. quite a bit of it. haven't thought of shaving in a while. not that important. it's cold out.

now, i would like for the follicular status of my underarms to have nothing to do with my identity, to not signify as a meaning-laden political choice. yes, i'm a feminist, and i happen to know my share of ani songs thanks to a rather limited cd rotation in college, but that has nothing to do with the trifling matter of shorn b.o. factories.

but no. i live in a world where R&D for razors, which resemble luxury automobiles* more with each passing day, expends more of the nation's creative energy than your average hairy folksinger can muster. of course it has to mean something when i don't use the damn things.

instead of having an apartment full of lovely lady lushes on this friday eve, i have a blog. damnit. and i have to move out of my actual apartment. screw the world!

* men's = exterior, women's = interior

i woke up feeling very satisfied with myself, which is rare these days considering that any day now my fate for the next year and a half will be determined arbitrarily by a piece of mail, and that my brain has entered superscramble mode from doing every variation of a craigslist search for the "SWEEET BKLYN 1BR SUblet (byebye manhatten)" of my future.

i suspected that i did something impressive in my dream, and, sure enough, about five minutes into my shower it came back. i had gone to jury duty, which didn't look at all like jury duty. there were all these little tables with nice chairs in a darkened room, and people were scrunched around them talking intently. it was like a hotel dining area with the impersonal edge taken off—no febreeze, no offensive minimuffins. i squeezed myself into a group at one of the tables, and a friendly 40something fellow was talking about what the experience of jury duty should be like. a blond woman piped in, very excited about the idea of people coming in to little tables and talking and learning from each other. 'i could learn languages,' she enthused. and, rather unnecessarily, 'i could work on the language that so many people speak here in america.' spanish, of course, but she didn't think it PC to say as much. normally i would scoff at a declaration of this sort, but the energy of the group was so earnest and engaged in the ideas themselves that i didn't even mind. this was totally a liberal-arts circle jerk.

yes. in my sleep, i invented the academic's jury duty, which apparently combines the highbrow intimacy of a bistro with the democratic expansiveness of a walmart. the whole affair was very much in the style of those self-consciously clunky believer inquiries, like, 'what for are english departments?' except this time it was, 'what for is jury duty?'

it was one of those self-reflexive moments where we were participating in the very scene we were inventing, right as we were inventing it. sort of a phenomenological chicken and the egg performance—the kind you can walk in on in any upper-level english class. i can't remember whether i thought it was brilliant or shameful that all these people were so engaged in a conversation that would never reach high enough on the bureaucratic ladder to effect any change. was it enough that these people felt like their voices were important, or did they actually have to be important? is there a difference? there wasn't one in this case, because the thinking was the doing, and that was the point of the exercise. in the dream i tried to imagine the infrastructure that would carry people's ideas up the civic ladder, more as a perfunctory ass-covering measure than anything. you know, in case anyone demanded that reality actually match what was in their heads.

some people dream in black and white. some dream lucidly and have wild crazy sex every chance they get. this morning pretty much confirms that i dream in caricature. five years ago it was the fashion to be self-consciously self-deprecating (which is probably redundant, but then, that's in style too). what to do with a person who is subconsciously self-mocking? if someone wanted to make fun of me, they could hardly do better than to write a little one-act in which i turn a bland symbol of civic responsibility like jury duty into an opportunity for indulgent self-reflection among the citizenry...unless they have me holding a sweat lodge in the camping section of walmart.

it seems like my brain is manufacturing its very own grad school curriculum while the turbo digressive lush in me is asleep. totally the opposite of college, when i would dream i was writing a brilliant paper (i swear the phrase 'donut darwinism' really meant something at the time) just so i could keep hitting snooze on my 3am alarm.

the swindle of organic snacking

yesterday i bought some 'carrot chips' from the health-food store. there are pictures of carrots on the bag, and the ingredients list contains both carrot juice and carrot puree in the first few items. the very first ingredient, tho, is organic stone-ground corn.

it took me ten chips of a hauntingly familiar salty cornfried taste to realize that i was eating fritos.

i'm beginning to grasp the cleverness of the organic-foods spin machine. they are clearly learning from our current legislative architects, whose basic premise is: if it sounds like an improvement on what came before, it is. to question the healthfulness of these carrot chips would be, in effect, to question the judgment of our president. and that would be un-P.A.T.R.I.O.T.-ic.

so i will go back to my organic bologna sandwich and my organic creme sandwich cookies and congratulate myself on knowing the difference between what is good for me and what isn't.

the armory show

on saturday i went to the armory show (big art show at the piers in midtown) with gabriel and ginny, who adopted me into their art-world circles so that i could get in for free. the few things that i liked were all drawings with a playful/cartoony element. i definitely like my art with a punchline. marcel dzama is the only name i'm remembering right now.

some of the more silly sights:

· a giant red watering can that played 'hey-ya.' there was a toddler trying to stick his face in it.
· a print/drawing of four large hourglasses, the first of which said 'art' on top and 'life' on the bottom. i was about to roll my eyes and walk away when i saw that the next one said 'mary-kate' and then 'ashley.' the one below that was '60 minutes' and 'nightline.' awesome. the last was lame, optimism and depression or something.
· a long, vertical print/drawing called 'the pen is mightier than the sword' but with the words broken up like this:

THE
PENIS
MIGHT
IER
THAN
THES
WORD

no doykee, says sean connery on SNL celebrity jeopardy.

kindergarten snack

my gooier, crunchier answer to last summer's hippie snack is nothing but kashi heart to heart cereal (same idea as cheerios, yet so much better) and whole foods 365 creamy peanut butter (just peanuts and salt) eaten with a spoon.

i could live on this stuff. also easy to eat while multitasking at work.

i fucking hate multitasking. it is a miserable perversion of ford's already miserable assembly line in which people do not one mindless thing repeatedly, but many mindless things at once, thus removing any possibility of order and ruining the (already tenous) zenlike joy some find in monotonous repetition.

some perspective

in my old life, i would get emotional over the problem of intimacy in artificial communities, and in defending students' right to talk about such things without censorship.

in my new life, i get emotional when my solution for the dangling modifier is not adopted.

well, i could go for a quirkier occupation, like the "mouth sounds expert" who is coming to the museum's event for pucker up, a new documentary about whistling that's supposed to be as charming as spellbound and best in show.

why worry? counting all the ages i have ever been, i've found that my mean age is 11.1. my median age is 12. so much lies ahead.

i don't have a mode. working on that.

lake tea party

lake tea party
Originally uploaded by grammar lammer.

dorothy and me at katie's lakehouse in TN last august. aren't dresses fun!

the chair that no one wanted

Originally uploaded by grammar lammer.

tonight i got a call from a giddy holly, who said, 'you'll never guess what i found.'

me: what, holly, what?

'the most fabulous chair. in the street,' says holly, who has a history of adopting chairs she finds on the street, particularly in the west village. there are four of the armless orange velvet variety currently inhabiting our apartment.

me: where are you?

holly: [giggling] the west village.

me: of course you are.

holly: it's blue corduroy and it's darling. as you know, i have no more space in my room for chairs i find in the street, so this one's yours.

me: ok, stick it in a cab and i'll pay you back. if i love it, great, if i hate it, we'll just stick it back on the street.

i hated it.

it's a component of a la-z-boy set. has that tier of fat floppy cushions, which holly described as 'vaginalike.' i took one look at this pathetic beast of a chair, grimaced, and there was much laughter. a photo shoot with Reject Chair and a somewhat baffled ed ensued. holly insisted on thoroughness before we parted with the chair, and so i was ordered to assume such poses as 'whistler's mother' as well as make various lovey-dovey faces at ed. five minutes after the chair was back in the street (which confused our brazilian doorman very much), the photos were transferred onto my ibook and i was winging it with the .2 iphoto skills i have to make a slide show. itunes automatically opened and allowed me to select a soundtrack, and so i picked what was already highlighted—the magnetic fields' 'absolutely cuckoo'—which, i must say, matched the mood of the chair photos quite well.

it's sort of sick that we have all these technologies set up so smoothly that i could instantly, effortlessly create a multimedia presentation about the chair that holly brought home from the street. and here i am posting it to my blog before the chair's even had time to get cold out there.

so, to see all twenty photos of the chair and us, click on either photo, and it'll take you to my flickr account. i'll get them up tomorrow, because all this instant gratification shit has gone too far.

so happy:

thanks for the sympathetic emails. it seems like things are straightened out. i went down there and got to talk to a reasonable woman. it's comforting to know that behind the formidable wall of the bureaucracy is a nice human being happy to sit down with me. i probably overreacted, going down there with a prepared speech (including the smart-alecky thinks i shouldn't ever say, like 'it would be lovely if i could see the future so that i could've known the post office would screw up, but if i could see the future, i wouldn't be applying to journalism school now would i?') and every piece of documentation i could think of, including my passport, but i am glad i can rest assured and start thinking about more interesting things. like the next book i want to read, on bullshit, by a princeton philosopher. see the new york times article.

so crappy:

my nyu app is being counted as late. when i called i got the troll of the graduate admissions office. you know the type--the unresponsive, dead-sounding admin lady whose every answer is constructed so that you'll hang up asap. she told me it was late and that i could send post office documentation but that it would only be 'added to my file,' end of story. i called back but i got her again, so i hung up.

i'm going down there during lunch with my whole pile of stuff to try and sort things out. i only hope i can get through to these people...my boss said you never know, sometimes screwups like this can help in the end because my application might land under the nose of someone important. eh. i'd like to think that. if i were of the 'footprints' mentality, i'd say it's all part of god's plan, but i'm much more of the onion mentality ('bullshit, god, those were my footprints'), and i can't shake the feeling that i'm pretty much fucked.

i'm a cock, i tell ya

my mother called just to tell me that it's the year of the rooster and therefore my "power year." you know, i thought i'd been so damn hyper because only this week did i return to all those postsurgery hallmarks of normalcy (going to the gym, walking more than four blocks at a time, packing a full pair of shoes when i go on trips), but you know, my recent emancipation from the binds of apapthy and juvenile tantrums must just be because the year of the rooster began yesterday. i mean, duh.

poll: has anyone ever heard or used the expression "no doykee" (pronounced "no DOY-kee") as an intensifier of "duh" and the slightly more confrontational "no duh"? it was common in my elementary school, and i want to know if it was a florida thing, or even a tallahassee thing, or even just a fad insult at my school? i.e., has anyone besides anna ever heard of it?

this came up because i have the occasional but very strong urge to use this phrase in formal situations, like, say, the meeting i'm about to go into here at work. adults, who didn't so much grow out of immaturity as learn how to sublimate it effectively (or ineffectively, as evidenced by the daily show's "great moments in punditry as read by children"), should really be more forthright with their disdain for others' opinions. except it would be dumb if i said "no doykee" to someone who didn't know what that meant. i mean, no doykee.

look at my adorable friends

brewton and ginny at joshua tree 12.20.01
Originally uploaded by grammar lammer.

finally, a photo hosting service that allows me to post directly to here, without those lame links to fotolog's weirdly sized pics and maddeningly backward apostrophes.

here are brewton and ginny at the joshua tree bar, near santa maria novella in florence. those are [brewton's host mom] manuela's fingers as she gestures at freddy, not shown.

this morning i was listening to NPR (guess i'm an adult now), and the news segment was an analysis of bush's proposed $250,000 "hard cap" on pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice suits. the segment was brief without sacrificing nuance, and it even suggested the kind of underlying cause that most newscasts avoid, the systemic kind that can't be swept away by one tidy piece of legislation. i could feel a deep love for public radio, nurtured by kodak-style dream sequences of our future together, taking root in my heart. the main point was that the malpractice liabilities that drive up doctors' insurance costs are not pain and suffering, but the actual fuckups that they make in treating people. this is not because the formerly rugged individualist physician archetype has been hijacked by a bevy of incompetent liberal ninnies unfamiliar with the maladies of jus' folks, but because medical advances over the past fifty years have created a lot more situations in which doctors can be blamed. (the example the newscast cited was that fifty years ago, diagnosing cancer early didn't matter; you were going to die anyway. now, in some cases, it can mean the difference between life and death.) in short, bush's proposed cap trivializes the problem and fails to remedy anything other than his shortage of policy initiatives to thump his chest over. all of which you could read in any times editorial, except they then played a statement from paul o'neill about how we live in an adversarial society where people think of misfortune as the fault of malevolent (suable) perpetrators.

brilliant. it is so true. i was at peace with the world this morning as i drank coffee and listened to my beloved NPR until, on the walk to work, some asshole (see? see? delusions of others' malevolence) gave a big rude honk, directed at the car in front of him, which was turning but letting me (the wronged victim, the girl in the legbrace) and others cross the street on our walk sign. angry at this small injustice even though the honker couldn't have known he was lashing out at the handicapped, i tumbled irretrievably into the me-first indignance of every pedestrian and motorist and everybody in new york, and now another day has been contaminated by arrogant suspicion of my fellow citydwellers. it's hard to go twenty feet without experiencing or even witnessing that emotion in others, which is a big part of my problem with new york. it's a hundred times more adversarial than any other place i've lived (which, admittedly, isn't so hard to do, considering i come from small-town florida and went to school in even-smaller-town davidson). i can understand how it happens here, because we're nine million people, all with our own agenda, crammed into such a tiny space. but i still don't like it, especially when i see it in myself.

i've started drinking my coffee black. amazing. my father told me this would happen, and i didn't believe him at the time, which was when i was like three and, although (involuntarily) not a coffee drinker then, i could not fathom a time when i would elect not to add sugar to something. i also am getting gray hairs, which i don't mind at all, but all i ask is that my body stop producing pimple-causing hormones. pimples AND gray hair is unreasonable.