Austin360 blogs > Globe-Jotting
Spain on the brain
And so it goes, I go to Spain. It’s about time: a) that I figured out where I’m heading this fall (South America beckoned, then recoiled); and b) that I return to that architectural Elysium eight years after my last visit. (I am older, wiser, slightly crazier.)
I love cities, old and new, big and smallish. My Spain trip will be an energetic hopscotching across a constellation of towns and regions, going like this: Land in Barcelona, spend a few or four days. Train to Valencia. Then to Madrid. Day trip to Toledo. Then Bilbao. Back to Madrid. With, I hope, some time for improvisational sidewinding, say, a skip to one of my favorite Euro ciudads Sevilla.
My desperate jonesing for world-class museums will be slaked, and I will wander the great, shiny halls, iPod implanted in ears, hands in pockets, and perhaps weep. I miss Guadi. I can’t wait for Gehry’s bendy Guggenheim. All that Velazquez. Never enough Picasso. Bring me the Prado, pronto.
My hotel in Barcelona is just off Las Ramblas, which means hustle and noise, tapas and buskers, commerce and rip-offs, billowing pigeons and ballooning hangovers.
I will hang over the spindly ledges of La Sagrada Familia, stroll the sinuous, candied curves of Parque Guell. The diet will be narrowed to red wine and jamon, and life, for a spell, will be reduced to something delicious.
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The ticket is HOW much?
Round trip to Buenos Aires from Austin is $1,031. The globe-hop is scheduled for Oct. 29 to Nov. 15.
Same dates to Barcelona is $731.
Can anyone convince me of the beauty and glories of Argentina? I’ve been blathering about this hypothetical trip for months and still can’t muster the verve to actually commit. Am I just being namby-pamby?
I skipped my spring trip, pure heresy. I need to get out of here.
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Helter swelter
It was a largish gathering, maybe 25 people, and it was hot outside and everyone was soggy by about 9 p.m. The sun fell and we got sweatier.
This was duly noted by attendees. “It only gets hotter as we sit here.” “It seemed cooler when the sun was still out.” Banal murmurs as sweat pooled around our butts and bled oval stains across the arm-pits of our garments.
Menus were used both as objects filled with useful information in jaunty typefaces and as desperate fans. They failed as fans; hot air was merely swished back and forth. Better to wait for one of those intermittent breezes that would rustle across the patio like a lover’s sigh. There were lovers, too. If they sighed, they kept it to themselves. The rest of us were glad of that.
Summer nights is not only a song, it’s a torture filled with vengeance and teeth. The stars look like ice chips, and they mock. We do the melting. Mist machines make you damp, too. (Don’t mist me, bro.)
All this moist languor leaves us soupy. Yearning for cooler nights will not make them so. We sigh, but they’re not the right kind.
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Shaking that tail
The rat chronicles are now in the ratty dance phase, and so Tina, rodent of certain magical talents, performs something that looks like a blend of the Hokey-Pokey and a circular mosh pit spasm. Barely a dance, more of an arcing sprint, yet still playful and rhythmic, it is a performance that musical accompaniment would unfailingly invigorate.
It requires some humility and lower back distress on my part. I have to get on my hands and knees on the rug in the kitchen while she’s in there (behaving devilishly, no doubt). She peeks out from behind the fridge, then scampers toward me. I stick out my hand(s) and gently grab her, softly rough her up.
She takes this as play and gallops back toward the fridge, but stops half-way and cuts a crescent on the rug and scampers back to me for more.
You have to see it to understand the dancey elements. Tina is elegant and precise in her moves. She is young but she has remarkable control over her growing body, unlike the shambolic, crashing-into-walls grace of, say, a puppy, or my niece.
Tina! I call. And out her snout juts from behind the GE appliance, whiskers twirling. Tina! A little more, some neck, those front bubble-gum-colored paws. C’mon! Out she runs, scrambling my way. It’s balletic in its almost entirely non-balletic way.
Pets are hard work. Even small ones will compromise the most ironclad routine, make you do things you never conceived of. I now spend about 10 minutes a night on my kitchen floor engaged in a paw de deux, a bonding ritual between human and beast that contains its own ineffable poignancy.
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Summer by the pages
The crippling summer blaze has kept me in-doors more than ever — 120-percent of the time as opposed to the usual, paltry 100-percent — and I’ve seized the indooriness to accomplish an almost unseemly amount of reading. Words are tasty, and I will devour them raw, unseasoned and in fattening, nourishing quantities.
A few menu items …
“A World Lit Only By Fire” by William Manchester: After the fall of Rome, darkness dropped in thick, dank sheets of backwardness, violence, pestilence, church tyranny and other retarding forces. Manchester chronicles this in how’d-he-know-that? detail, segueing to the revolutionary glories in thought, faith, science and art of the Renaissance, its players and monuments. Throughout it all, the Church remains a big ninny.
“The Comfort of Strangers” by Ian McEwan: This small and curious thriller by one of my writing idols, though limpidly written, didn’t do it all for me. That shocker ending is abrupt and not altogether earned. I shrugged, wrinkled my nose and asked it “So what?”
“The Prince of Tides” by Pat Conroy: A roaring storm of southern soap, with twisting squalls of family dysfunction and thunderclaps of hooey (a killer tiger?). Conroy’s magisterial control of tone and language knocked me down repeatedly, hard. Extravagantly controlled chaos.
“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” by Michael Chabon: Written with literary gifts no 24-year-old should have (that’s how old he was when he cracked open his big brain and poured out this wondrous novel), TMOP is about sex and summer and coming of age confusions. It’s about identity, a heady love triangle and finding oneself. It’s about all that impossible stuff, and making it as possible as one can.
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Pet peeved
I tried to be a puppy owner. I lasted two weeks. Much booing was involved.
They warned me, oh, they warned me. Get a dog, not a puppy. A puppy is like a demon toddler that barks and chews and paws, whines and pees and poops and tries to kill you with all its power. Sometimes they breathe fire and take off limbs.
The puppy almost hospitalized me. The nervous kind of hospital, the “Sling Blade” kind of hospital. I tried. I tried hard. Put everything into it, did everything right. I was a champion daddy. Baths, vet visit, playing with other doggies, meeting people, top-grade puppy kibbel topped with gourmet salmon oil and treats and toys and blankets.
She loved to gnaw on things. Including my raw hide soul. The teeth marks linger.
A hundred excuses for no more puppy. But that’s its own brand of whining. I found her a great new place, a friend’s home that features acreage and real estate and, best, another dog pal to play with.
I don’t feel so bad anymore. But saying goodbye rent me in two, much the way she did to my old pair of Adidas.
Only one cure for losing a pet. Get another. I’ve returned to rats. Smaller, calmer and funny in their own puppy-ratty ways. Also: frequently caged.
She’s Tina and I can already tell she’s full of a thousand vibrant stories, some charming, others maddening, a few heartbreaking. Something like life.
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Sea Monkey solo
The Sea Monkeys have thinned out, natural selection has selected. A sole surviving water simian remains in the small bowl on my desk, flapping his tendrily wings like a microscopic manta ray, whippy tail and all.
It’s a sad day at Sea Monkey manor. Algae the hue of fall limes blankets the glass walls and rests finger-deep at the bottom, a Day-Glo sediment, chalky, bloomy, thick. Salt encrusts the water line, and can be scratched off if anyone so wishes.
The last Sea Monkey is philosophical about his circumstance. He dives and arcs across the miasmic gunk, pondering the whys, working through the whats. His days are not gathering. He is losing time. He is the Omega man.
The Sea Monkey, diaphanous wisp, flutters round and round, knowing everything, without a clue.
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Making vacation plans, glacially
Five months from today I will be in Rio de Janeiro — doing what, I don’t know. I like beaches for a day or two, so I’m hoping it’s not too beachy. I plan good food, museums, pubs and magnificently unwise strolls through the favelas, or slum-shanty towns, and otherwise full cultural immersion. I will not play volleyball.
My lineage is 75-percent Portuguese — presumably my surname migrated from Spain — but pathetically I know only one word in the language and it wouldn’t go over jubilantly in mixed company. I will learn a few more words, good ones, before I go. I have five months.
I don’t know what to expect in Brazil. I also hope it’s not too Mardi Gras-y, even though, of course, I’m not going during that festivity. Masks and thongs: also not my thing. I was in India during Diwali, the Festival of Lights, and it was brilliant and strange. Two worlds, two kinds of partying.
I’m more interested in the second leg of my two- or three-week trip: Argentina. I hear Buenos Aires bears many shades of Europe, that it’s the most European place in South America. That’s attractive. Museums, beer and beef. I will write a lot. I will relax, a little. I want to see the glaciers in Patagonia.
I saw glaciers in Alaska 33 years ago and still remember their crunchy, marbled blue, fat frosty jewels, cracking, popping.
Between the two countries, Brazil and Argentina, flows a grand waterfall, the name of which eludes me right now. But it’s humongous and quite a misty sight. A friend just came back from the falls. He was a changed man.
Change is better than you think.
This nest of brushed-nickel bars, rubber discs and tangled cords is my musical instrument of choice — a drum rack. This is my actual set, where I play almost nightly wearing headphones so neighbors can’t hear a thing, while I hear thunder blasting open the earth’s crust. It’s my favorite sound.
This is the electronic kit I’ve mentioned before, the not-cheap rig that replaces my great little acoustic set. Lofts are trouble when it comes to making rackets worthy of Olympus. I miss the old set, but some day I will return to a splendid spread of tom-toms, sparkling cymbals and a snare drum that could unleash a mountain of tumbling glaciers with one solid whack.
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Kiss these boots
These just happened. We are gobsmacked, and smitten.
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Also: It just looks cool
Plumes and puffs poured in, swallowing the floor, engulfing the dark figures on stage. Even hundreds of feet away, your cough reflex jolted. Huff-cack. But we are strong, our fortitude impregnable.
Can fake smoke kill you? I mulled this rare idea watching Nine Inch Nails on Tuesday night at the canyon-like Erwin Center. The stuff never stopped billowing and rolling and skulking around the performers’ feet and legs, pumped in from stage left and right. It rose, and tendrils entered their nostrils. They rocked on.
(I had joyous flashbacks of the KISS concert in 2000 at the same joint. If only NIN was mighty enough for mushroom-cloud fire bombs, blood and balloon drops. I miss explosions.)
The smoke was almost comical in its frothing excess, as if the machines had broken loose from human control and decided to belch walls of cumulous gauze until the whole place was shrouded in fuzzy whiteness. Being onstage must have been like being stuffed inside a bag of cotton balls.
Dry ice and chemical fog are de riguer atmospheric decor at rock shows, establishing a mood of mystery and menace. Portent. Spookiness. Surface artiness. Nothing-to-snicker-at-ness. We-are-slightly-demonic-ness.
It’s very Universal horror, circa 1935. It makes the musicians look like creatures emerging from an otherworldly place — a more pretentious realm where calculated smoke emissions aggrandize and bless those snared in its smokey fingers.
I’m putting a fog machine in my bedroom.
It was something like (hack) this.
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The guppies — they’re great, too
The fish, all 20-plus of them, are doing splendidly, thanks.
Pretty much. A snail and two fish have died in the month since I started seeding my large cube of heated, filtered water. The snail was a punk, the two fish loser runts. “Survival of the fittest,” the fish store people mutter mantralike. Darwin’s all smiling.
One of the frogs (tiny, African, boingy) seems too skittish to eat — he ducks his head under the coral, his little behind poking out — but his spotted, frosty-white pal is a glutton, especially fierce when it’s time for the frozen bullion of bloodworms to appear. Feeding frenzy!
They mesmerize. I find myself constantly peeking over the book I’m reading (now: Geoff Dyer’s comic travel novel “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi”) to watch the fluttery fishies. They soothe. They inspire small wonder. What are they doing in there? They school and chase each other and kiss the plants and gravel with their rubber lips, puckering, plucking. They look happy, but mostly energetic, lusty.
When I jam my arm into the crystalline depths to adjust a plant or drop in the bloodworms, lots of the fish come circling around and kiss my skin, like it’s an enormous live shrimp, yummy.
Now that I’ve skipped my spring trip, reluctantly but wisely, I think I’ve cinched my fall trip: Brazil and Argentina. I don’t know much about either countries, but I’ve only heard raves.
I don’t expect to spend more than a few hours on the beach, unless snorkeling is involved, and many deep in the cities — Rio, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires. Also: waterfalls and glaciers, that kind of thing. I’m excited enough that my head is gurgling, ready to explode. Come on, October.
Glaciers, Argentina
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SoCo Sunday
Margaret and I looked at dogs today on South Congress, and we both sounded like cooing codgers pinching the cheeks of tiny children. The dogs were outside in pens — a rescue joint offering adoptions, so tempting on a warm and breezy Sunday — sleeping and gnawing and barking and bunching up blankets.
We talked about dogs. We shopped, but not for dogs. Margaret spent a lot of money. I bought a bizarre card for Mother’s Day that seemingly has nothing to do with the styrofoam holiday. We talked about aging and not aging and she touched the pimple by my nose.
Margaret’s in town. We caught up. I learned small things.
We also saw two chihuahuas. They have bulgy goldfish eyes.
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Spinning my wheels
Once upon a dust-clouded wipe-out, I rode and raced BMX bikes. I’ve always had an aversion to team sports — I’m not a team player; I dislike group grunting — gravitating to bikes, skis, skateboards, tennis, swimming. I need my space, no matter how dreadful I am at the activity, which is the norm. I’m pretty good at stinking up the joint.
As with everything, the brand of BMX bike you had was paramount, especially for a 12- and 13-year-old. I started with a banana-seated Huffy, whose unfortunate name, like a surly Hostess baked good, bespeaks lame-itude. Then I got the top-tier Mongoose frame, Team Mongoose, part chromoly steel, part aluminum alloy. (Loved those terms then — “chromoly,” “alloy” — and still do.)
Every other component, save the blue tires and forks, was alloy, the handlebars to the seat clamp, pedals to the inner-tube caps. The idea was loft and lightness. I think I got my bike to an anorexic 25 pounds, which was considered on the porky side with orthodox connoisseurs.
Soon enough I graduated to the unattainable PK Ripper frame, thick, beautifully welded aluminium. Light as an empty beer can, tough as a tank. Cost during the early ’80s in the East Bay Area: $107. Never forgot that piggy-draining price tag.
Looked something like this.
I’ve bought two bikes during my 10 years in Austin, and I sold both of them with humiliating haste. They weren’t BMX, because I can’t fit on that kind of bike anymore without folding my self in to eighths, and that just hurts. So I got BMX-cruiser hybrids that simply didn’t cut it. They weren’t as feisty and ambitious. Taking jumps was like trying to jump with someone on your back.
A week or so ago I tried again. This time I was going full BMX, getting a bike like I used to have. At the bike shop, that dream crumpled quick. I just can’t manage a bike that tiny these days. I felt like the giant clown on the pint-sized tricycle.
So I tried another BMX hybrid. I pumped the pedals eagerly, on gusts of false hope, took a few pipsqueaky curb jumps, popped and pedaled wheelies.
But it’s not the same. Some things have their exact moment, then exit gracefully. I’ve tried to retain those BMX days and failed. That’s OK. Letting go of childish things and all that.
I told the cool sales guy that I’d sleep on it, the hybrid that I gave a lusty test-drive. We shook hands, I put the bike back on the rack. I never returned.
Anybody know where I can get this poster? I used to own it, and it was my favorite wall ornament. Then it got water-stained, ruined. I’ve Googled and found it only at Amazon.com, where it’s “currently unavailable.” Help …
Other things you can get me for my birthday (yeah, you missed it):
1.
2.
3.
4.
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Tanked
As I said, dogs have been gamboling around my head lately, fetching errant ideas, chewing up awkward sentences, barking at ill-advised diction and using obscure words as fire hydrants.
Sit. Stay. That’s my latest response to the overwhelming proposition of getting a doggie. Don’t think I want the responsibility, the 15-year commitment. Not yet. I’m not ready for parenthood.
So, on Easter, I got a fish tank. I like fish. I like water. I like creatures that do stuff in large volumes of liquid. It was spontaneous, like that. I am known to be impulsive. What I want, I really want. What I want, I almost always get.
I got it. Twenty-gallons. And now, after a week of incremental population introductions, that big square of heated water teems with 18 fish, two African dwarf frogs and, gross, two aquatic snails that sweep up poo and untoward detritus.
Spending my formative years, 4 through 10, in Santa Barbara, I was around the ocean a lot. The sand and salt. The school field trips on the Pacific, watching grey whales migrate to or from the warm Baja waters. The day camps spent at tide pools. Shell collections. “Jaws.” All of it informed and shaped my Play-Doh brain.
I loved Sea World in San Diego. My favorite stuffed animal was a seal I got there. His name was Salty. I was not an imaginative child.
At one point I actually entertained being a marine biologist. Ha, ho, yes, me doing well in science. A good one, that.
To this day the ocean blows my mind. A while back, here in Austin, which has no coast, as someone informed me, I contemplated taking scuba diving lessons, not entirely unseriously. Partly because I get such a kick out of snorkeling, which I’ve done in Jamaica (disastrous), Thailand (somewhat better despite sun poisoning and coral cuts) and the Florida Keys (paradise).
I yearn to plumb the dark ocean fathoms, explore the watery gloom, meet fish and mammals, hopefully even a shark or, best of all, a mermaid.
My fish are pretty animals, dazzling, tiny neon signs: tetras, guppies, catfish, (including an albino feller), zebra dainos, sunburst wags and Dalmatian mollies that look splattered by Pollock’s brute brush. None, save the mollies, are longer than two inches.
You acquire them to nurture them, and to watch them hypnotically: the frogs and their stretchy, pumping legs; the fish, slashing and knifing the water. Sometimes the various species play and flirt, hector and circle each other.
The frogs have mellowed as new additions have emerged. Once vaulting comets, they are now reclusive, reticent, shy baby boys, tucked in the plants or floating up high by the heater.
I think the frogs are the silliest of them all.
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Coy dog pondering
I looked at the dog, the dog looked at me. We have similar eyes, the mutt and I, but mine have less goop. She yelped. I refrained.
It was a dog day on South Congress, literally: The weekly SoCo Dog Adoptions colonized their usual spot between Mars and the San Jose (not the planet, not the California city), dotting the area with makeshift pens for adoptable doggies. Today’s exhibition happened to coincide with that bounding swell of canine fabulousness, the Mighty Texas Dog Walk, downtown. (Ogle the Statesman’s pooch parade gallery HERE).
I’m in feral frame of mind. I’m thinking about dogs more than normal. I have dog dreams; dogs won’t let this sleeping man lie. Also: I bought a boatsize new bed and frame. I can envisage a medium hound pouncing and bouncing on the bed. And then eating it.
Dog idea: Waning with haste.
Not really. After the rat losses, and considering I love dogs more than any living creatures after dolphins and Anne Hathaway’s teeth, a pack of anonymous dogs, breeds changing kaleidoscopically, has been charging through my head. They pant. Tails wag. Paws gallop. They look like they’re having a ball. (Some of them do have balls — tennis balls, in their mouths.)
The SoCo show was thrown by the sweethearts of Austin Pets Alive!, whose mission is to rescue animals this close to being put down. So the dozen or so dogs there cheated death like a Disney creature — barely, and with a mix of horror and life-assessing glee.
You guys look like a good idea. Right?
I petted and talked to most of them. Some kept on playing with their pen pals. Others sang and whooped at my face. A few snoozed, cosseted in donated blankies. A litter of now-mange-free puppies wore various tiny T-shirts.
I felt for all of them. They pawed at my shuttered heart. Maybe I’ll install a doggie door right there.
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Panda-monium
So we went to the carnival last weekend and I barfed.
I waited until 4 a.m., shaken from a queasy slumber, to release my insides. But I absolutely blame the nastiest of the carnival rides — the ones that have no point but to thrash you about and dislocate sockets and limbs and dislodge major organs. (I’ve got your number, High Roller.)
The High (bleeecchh) Roller
It was fun, great fun, while it lasted. We went Saturday night and it was abustle with families and teenagers. Big guys carried ginormous bears and tigers for their girls. Kids chomped corn dogs. The grass floor was flattened by sneakers. Carnies barked at us to toss rings, hurl balls and fling darts.
I did the latter and “won” two tiny stuffed hyenas and a smallish panda bear. The hyenas are really cool — they look like my friend’s dog Ginger — but the panda liked the rides the best.
The panda’s big eyeball ogling the next scary ride.
Panda’s too short for the ride? Nonsense. We’re getting him on. Watch.
Wee!
On the best ride, the name of which escapes me (I probably upchucked it out), I took one of the hyenas and the panda with me. Find the three of us here. Ridiculous.
She took the animals with her. I left shaken up. Later, the evening poured out into the sink. The carnival is still the bestest.
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To hive and have not
My pod-mate here at work is a young woman named Liz who likes the Longhorns so much that she had the Horns’ logo sizzled onto the delicate flesh of her inner wrist. (Tattoos — the mistake that keeps on giving.)
We are fond of each other, Liz and I, in the hair-pulling, arm-punching way of 6-year-old siblings. Boogers are not involved, though they certainly should be. Liz, work on that.
The stories she shares from her collegiate, roomatey life are by turns jejune, appalling, hilarious and unclassifiable. Sometimes after hearing one I sit frozen, pondering space, time and large amounts of Xanax.
She had a semi-doozie today.
Liz claims she pulled a “brilliant” April Fool’s joke on her friends last year using Craig’s List, and, when she recited the intricate gag again just now, I have to agree it is resplendent. (To her friends: Burn!)
This year, yesterday, those friends attempted to get Liz back. They laced a batch of brownies with laxatives. But the looseners didn’t work. Instead, Liz broke out in hives. She is now gorgeously polka-dotted in pink. Like a freshly shaved cat, or a cupcake.
They got her, but not in the way they — and I — wished. Hives? I’d much rather watch Liz up-and-downing from her seat, fleeing to the wash room every nine minutes, her face pinched in a sour-lemon panic. Joke’s on all of us.
Lesions a la Liz.
The carnival is back, colonizing the vacant swatch of brush at Ben White and South Congress with great rusty machinery and galaxial constellations of blinking rainbow light bulbs. Thrilled, that’s me. I cannot wait to be upside-down and churned around like batter in a bowl.
The weather is fine, my mood is northward and I have a fistful of left-over golden tokens from the big show’s last appearance in December. Life is a magic bean stock. To the clouds. Giant, you’re on notice.
This is going to shred.
Where I wish I was this instant …
Istanbul, fall ‘08.
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Monkeyshine (and dine)
I was just talking to a co-worker about having a chimpanzee bite one’s face off. This phenomenon — a chimp gnawing a human visage to pulp and splinter — has happened twice in America recently. It’s a ghastly, ungodly thought, easily No. 3 on the list of Things I Hate. (No. 2: Marshmallows.)
Chimpanzees are creepy, with their gaping mouths that stretch to infinity and a mechanical docility that barely veils a fathomless, heartbreaking sadness. They’ve been so anthropomorphized that now they’re like freaky man-child-monkey-aliens.
Sort of like this mind-shattering doll I recently witnessed (and wanted to buy, desperately) at Okay Mountain:
Holy pow.
Apes. Monkeys. Baboons. Lou Ferrigno. … Once upon a time such creatures infused me, like magic air inflating a pink balloon, with joy and squeals. But I don’t know anymore. I no longer desire a pet monkey-creature.
Squirrel monkeys in tiny diapers appear as maniacal demons, one cute grasp away from clawing your eyes out and snarfing the tip of your nose. Too many apey critters have those Hot Tamale-red, tumorous Whoopie-Cushion butts, which trigger anxieties beyond enumeration.
Another dream, crushed.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, they shoot you before they ingest you.
Recent very good reads:
“White Tiger” (a bleakly satirical Booker-winning novel about India’s intractable corruption); “Revolutionary Road” (uncompromising snapshot of the life-snuffing power of bad marriages and cookie-cutter suburbs — five times better than the movie); Junot Diaz’s “The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (excellent but too drawn out and less about Oscar’s life than everyone else’s); Marilynne Robinson’s twin novels “Gilead” and “Home” (exquisite and wise; some of the most controlled writing I’ve ever read); and, now, Ian McEwan’s “Black Dogs” (a literary god who read this month at the Ransom Center and sunk me because I will never ever ever be a whisker as good as him).
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On a more positive note
Thought of the day: Austin softens the brain. It courts mediocrity, fuels inertia, retards ambition and rewards the half-assed. It narcotizes when it should stir and awaken.
(This is not unbending law. It’s a passing reflection. Sometimes it feels true, other times it doesn’t hold a drop of water. It’s a prismatic opinion: depending on how the day, the moment, is going, it changes, radiates spectrums. Indeed, Austin often shines. Sometimes it’s a place of Edenic absoluteness. We just need to keep working on it, but mostly on ourselves.)
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A litany of complete awesomeness
Week’s accomplishments:
Monday: Ordered copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “An Artist of the Floating World”. Cracked a joke at work. Gym. Red wine and white wine. Watched documentary about Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (he was a rascal) and another one I’ve already forgotten. Dammit.
Tuesday: Wrote review of “Wendy and Lucy”. Watched David Lean’s “Hobson’s Choice”. Liked the DVD’s documentary about Charles Laughton better than the movie. Continued reading Richard Ellman’s exuberantly written biography of Oscar Wilde. Austin waste management disposed of Tammy’s cage. (Sigh.)
Wednesday: Got my head examined. Stopped a squirrel in the Statesman parking lot from eating french fries. Ordered more books online. Re-watched “Adaptation” and was sucked into it like a helpless but happy quicksand victim. Also watched the astonishing 2008 French film “The Secret of the Grain”, which seared me with its bursting humanism. Many thoughts of dogs.
Thursday: Maddened by its languid pace, put down the Wilde biography for good. Picked up T.C. Boyle’s “World’s End.” Put it back down when the Ishiguro arrived in mail box with amazing haste. (That Amazon seller got five stars, unhesitatingly.) Saw Austin Shakespeare’s production of Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” at the Long Center. (Had seen it before in Berkeley, Calif., but it’s been years.) Verdict: pretty wonderful.
Friday: One thousand errands. Bought a new mattress, went to the doctor, got groceries and a haircut, but not at the same place. Started the Ishiguro novel. Not loving it. Might put it down. Gym. Later, The 04 Lounge, where a regular bought me a beer. He’s deaf, so I signed a thumbs-up. It was easy. Just lifted one thumb upward. Even though I’m a movie critic, I rarely do this. Fretted insanely for accepting John Pierson’s invitation to guest-appear in one of his Master Classes. Have to pick two movies dear to me to show clips from and, I imagine, discuss. I’m mulling over “Sweet Smell of Success,” “Annie Hall,” “The Killing,” “My Man Godfrey,” anything by Tarkovsky, “Oldboy,” maybe something Iranian. Great. Now I have homework.
Today: Epiphanies galore. This life thing — I’m kind of getting the hang of it. (Thoughts of Brazil, as in: going there.)
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Valentine’s, without all that saint stuff
I’m at a coffee shop, per the Saturday ritual, reading, tapping keys, people watching and, today, chatting with a hidebound atheist with whom I’m sharing a table. (This place is packed, all abustle with Valentine-y intents and gestures. The cafe is planted in a very huge store. No free plugs here. You figure it out.)
This atheist, whom I’ve serendipitously met, is a founding member of The Atheist Community of Austin, a full-bore non-profit group with all sorts of tendrils and tentacles, some of which are trying to throttle our nation’s “cartel of Christianity,” as my table-mate words it. I am not in disagreement, though organized anythings throw up my defenses and cynic’s caution.
We talk little about atheism, as I have stuff to do and I’m pretty well-versed. (Except in this factoid he produces: The Texas Constitution avers that atheists cannot hold public office. How brotherly of them.)
Then I read this on the wire about Saudi Arabia and its highly evolved theocracy:
Valentine’s Day is “a busy time for the religious police who are entrusted with ensuring that no one marks the banned holiday. As they do at this time every year, its agents target shops selling gifts for the occasion, and items that are red or suggest the holiday are removed from the shelves. Some salesmen have been detained for days for infractions.
Valentine’s Day is banned because of its origins as a celebration of the 3rd century Christian martyr. The day is also targeted because unmarried men and women cannot be alone together.”
I can think of many other reasons that Valentine’s Day bites that have nothing to do with religion or romance.
Re-read Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer” this week. Just what I needed, solid existential soul food, with an agnostic tang.
More in that mold is the commencement address late writer David Foster Wallace delivered at Kenyon University in 2005, which you can read in full here.
A chunk that I think is as instructive as it is inspiring:
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. …
As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. …
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
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You may feel like a denizen of Julian Barnes’ choir loft after reading his deathly treatise “Nothing to be afraid of”. His treatment of the ultimate finality is quite comfortable. I hope you like it, too.
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Hi Chris,
I studied abroad in Buenos Aires for 6 months and loved it. Once you get over the ticket price, it’s a very affordable place to vist. Several of my visitors rented apartments because it was more affordable than hotels. The city of
... read the full comment by Meghann Bolton | Comment on The ticket is HOW much? Read The ticket is HOW much?
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