Glamour

When I was in college, I was far more glamorous than I am now, which is to say I spent my parents’ money freely on baubles and fur shrugs and went to parties downtown at Bungalow 8 and other places that used to be cool.  I also interned at the most famous fashion magazine in the world, and I would stumble into work on Friday mornings wearing last night’s make-up and dark green wedge heels and proceed to romp around the closet and order messengers most of the day.  While there, I became friendly with my boss, who was close with the jewelry designer Lulu Frost, aka Lisa Salzer.  Lisa was making these necklaces out of the numbers from the doors at the Plaza Hotel, which at this point had just been sold.  I had a huge friend crush on Lisa and went to visit her studio, and she, in recompense for my affection, sold me a Plaza number necklace at a discount price.  And today I was wandering around the interwebs looking at jewelry in a moment of intellectual laziness and came across Lulu’s website and OH MY G-D I should have stayed friends with her and tried to snatch something from her “Let’s Bring Back” collection, such as this necklace made of eyes.

Casati-inspired.

It occurs to me that this is at least the second post I’ve written about ocular necklaces, and at least the third about necklaces designed to look like human body parts.  I would have made a great voodoo priestess.

Mansion Hunting

While (still!) looking for an apartment, I found Satis House.  It looks as if you’d need to bushwhack just to get inside.  A little bit of jungle adventure before the morning commute would do a person good!

“So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the house as to my thoughts and remembrances of it, any more than as to the actual fact. It bewildered me, and under its influence I continued at heart to hate my trade and to be ashamed of home.”

The Real World

Ever since I finally made my Real World Seattle gif, which you can see here, people have been encouraging me to reminisce about other seasons of the Real World –– the prime ones, mostly, like San Francisco and New Orleans, which was an excellent one, what with Julie the Mormon and Kelly who ended up marrying SCOTT WOLF OMG and that enormous beautiful mansion they lived in.  Oo-wee!  And as my friend JW pointed out this morning, they mostly got along, too, which is far more interesting to watch than the squabbles and bathroom hook-ups and declarations of murderous hatred.  Anyway, JW was telling me all about his obsession with Melissa, about whom I had completely forgotten, and about how he reads her blog, so I Googled it and I just spent basically the past thirty minutes blacking out on the Tumblr of that tiny Filipino princess, who apparently has converted to Judaism (mazel tov!) and is married to the guitarist from Glassjaw and was super super pissed about Casey Anthony getting exonerated.  And guess what?  She’s also hilarious.

A very young person on Twitter just said he’d like to start “a blog or something with just words.” I instantly felt old as shit recalling the days I’d sit in my studio apartment in LA putting up “web entries” before I knew it was even called “web logging,” then shortened to just “blogging.” In the year 2000, y’all. I kept that blog going into 2009. Just words. One place. Old school PrincessMelissa. It had exactly three looks in nine years. There were the icons of my paintings on the original. Then there was the splash page where you click on the sofa to come in, like “Have a seat and read with me.” And then there was the tiny PrincessMelissa logo all over with the tag line “Them chickens is ash and I’m lotion.” People really liked that last one because it had font control! Make this bigger, wow!

I want the old school PrincessMelissa!  I could read that shit for years.  Also, at one point she says she heard that JWoww and Snooki were looking to buy a house in Long Island so she tweeted at them that her house was for sale and would be perfect for them, which sounds like something I would do (except replace Tweet with “write long missive in microscopic handwriting and send via messenger pigeon.”)

PS UPDATE

The best looking bar in the world, two posts below, is located in Portland, Oregon!  It’s actually a creperie as well as a bar!  Must. visit.

The Burden of a Good Memory

Today, I received an email invite to a fancy party to sponsor a ballet school.  I received this invite because once, in college, when I thought for about 5 seconds that I might end up being a socialite, I went to a similar party for this ballet school, which is known for attracting chichi patronage.  I also went to the party in college because I was attracted to ballet and ballerinas because of the delicate, graceful aspect of the dance, which I thought maybe I would be able to develop by simple proximity.  (It didn’t work.)

Anyway, this invite, like all the others, listed at the side of the page the names of the people on the junior committee.  What this is, exactly, or what being on the junior committee of any philanthropic organization entails, I’ve never been able to figure out.  Still, though, I always scan the names to see if I recognize any.  Why I do this, I’m not entirely sure.  It could be that if I recognize one, it makes me feel somewhat closer to that fancy version of New York I once believed in –– the one in which lithe women lift up their gowns to hail cabs and the soundtrack is always fluttering laughter and the clinking of champagne glasses –– or it could be that I like to test exactly how entrenched I am in this city by seeing if I can pick out someone I know in any given situation.  It could be both.

On this invitation, I immediately recognized one of the names listed.  EC and I were in a group therapy together when I was in college and she was in high school.  This has to be almost nine or ten years ago.  I think we only overlapped by a few sessions, as my attendance at this group was sporadic over the five years or so I participated, so while I don’t have many memories of her, what I do have is crystalline.  She was Turkish, with a deep blond hair and a touch of olive in her skin.  Her disposition was sweet.  I remember the therapist mentioned that her father had recently died, and when I said I was sorry, her eyes welled up with tears.  I remember her saying that she drank Frappuccinos often because it was easier for her to get calories in that way.  I think she may have gone to a rehab program in Arizona, but I’m not 100% sure on that.

If I were to see this girl on the street, I would probably recognize her, but I doubt she would even give me a second glance, and why should she?  We met a handful of times almost a decade ago.  Since then, I learned from Googling her, she’s been to college and gotten her MFA.  She has a job at a big deal real estate firm.  She’s involved in high profile philanthropy projects.  There’s a picture of her on Patrick McMullan’s website.  In short, she’s had a life, a real one, so it seems, and probably, hopefully, any space that I took up in her brain has been taken over by someone or something more important, some relic of a better time.  If the situations were reversed and she saw my name on a list or an invite somewhere, would she spend 20 minutes writing about me in a kind of quasi-memorial?  Or would she just glance over my nomenclature and think, “Just another girl on a board somewhere?”

Normally an invite like this I’d just toss in my e-trash can, but I’ve left it so far in my inbox.  I considered using her real name here, in hopes that maybe she has a Google Alert out on herself and would find this and get in touch, but I figured that might not be nice as everyone deserves to keep their pasts private if they so choose.  Maybe she doesn’t want to think about the time she spent sitting on floor cushions in a therapist’s office crying to a group of girls about the horrors of consumption.  I even thought about paying the $85 –– throwing the money away, essentially –– and going alone to the party and watching everyone air-kiss.  I’d just stand by myself, scanning the crowd for her.  When I spotted her, I’d linger in her line of vision to see if she recognized me.  If she didn’t, maybe I’d rush up and ask, “Do you remember me?  Tell me: are you okay now?  Are you happy?  Because I’ve been worried.”

A New Gig for Me

My beloved and I went to see Ann Hamilton’s “The Event of a Thread” at the Park Avenue Armory last weekend, which was an art exhibit involving swings, a large curtain, pigeons, and –– hooray for me! –– people reading aloud, their words broadcast from radios tied up inside paper bags.  It was a pretty precious exhibit, but a fun one, nonetheless, and of course I was dying to find out how one gets a gig as a reader.  (They read excerpts from “Aristotle to Charles Darwin to the poet Ann Lauterbach.”)

Readers have pigeon friends.

A little bit more about Hamilton’s exhibit, from the Armory’s website:

“Visual artist Ann Hamilton combines the ephemeral presence of time with the material tactility for which she is best known to create a new large-scale installation for the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Commissioned by the Armory, the event of a thread references the building’s architecture, as well as the individual encounters and congregational gatherings that have animated its rich social history. A multisensory affair, the work draws together readings, sound, and live events within a field of swings that together invite visitors to connect to the action of each other and the work itself, illuminating the experience of the singular and collective body, the relationship between the animal and the human. The address of the readers to the pigeons shifts at the end of each day, when a vocalist on the drill hall’s balcony serenades their release to flight. Each day’s song is cut with a record lathe, and the resulting recording is played back the next day.”

My post-visit research has indicated that unfortunately the readers were hired from SITI Company, which is an ACTING TROUPE.

“SITI Company is an ensemble-based theater company whose three ongoing components are the creation of new work, the training of young theater artists, and a commitment to international collaboration.

“SITI was founded in 1992 by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki to redefine and revitalize contemporary theater in the United States through an emphasis on international cultural exchange and collaboration.”

As I’m not particularly interested in pursuing acting, I think I would not have been in the running for this one.  Damn you, Ann Hamilton!

Swingin’

*There’s always Tino Seghal!

FILL THE VOID

I want this movie to come out so badly I cannot explain it to you.  Actually, I can: I’ve watched the trailer about ten times, I look up the showtimes on Google at least once a week (“No upcoming showtimes in your area”) and I even emailed the distribution company to ask when it was coming out in New York, all to no avail.  Among other flicks, Fill the Void was the subject of an excellent NY Times article about Haredi women filmmakers some months back.  A bit about the director from that piece, which can be read in its entirety here:

“Films for and by Haredi women were relatively unknown outside this tightknit faction until the director Rama Burshtein unveiled her feature Fill the Void at the Venice Film Festival last month. The film, which earned the ingénue Hadas Yaron a best-actress honor there and later played the New York Film Festival, was praised by critics, who noted that Ms. Burshtein’s technical expertise belied her sparse résumé.*

“In fact, while Fill the Void was Ms. Burshtein’s first film for secular as well as religious viewers, she has spent nearly two decades making movies for the women of her sect — films featuring only actresses and without violence, sex and swearing. And she wasn’t alone: Ultra-Orthodox women in Israel have been making movies for some time now — about six a year — according to strict Haredi rules: Men and women may never be shown together on screen; plotlines considered subversive or counter to Haredi beliefs are forbidden; and when the credits roll, the audience must have a lesson or moral to take home. The rules also mean that audiences are strictly segregated by sex.”

My question for Mrs. Burshtein –– or maybe rabbinical authorities –– is how can a Haredi woman make a film “for secular audiences”?  Wouldn’t that require her to do a whole host of immodest things, or to promote improper thinking generally?  Or does it not really matter what us heathens do?  (If you read this, RB –– though I doubt you have a Google alert for your name –– you can email Siobhan at itinerantdaughterandson@gmail.com to set up a Skype conference call.)

 

*Editor’s note: Hadas Yaron is sooooo pretty!

Searching For…

… the vintage LP Radha Krishna Temple album (Apple Records) BUT ONLY if it has this cover:

Hare fucking Krishna.

If I can’t find one with this cover, I’ll just buy the audio for $4.95.  Ain’t no thang.

From George Harrison:

“Everybody is looking for KRISHNA.

Some don’t realize that they are, but they are.

KRISHNA is GOD, the Source of all that exists, the Cause of all that is, was, or ever will be.

As GOD is unlimited HE has many Names.

Allah-Buddha-Jehova-Rama: All are KRISHNA, all are ONE.

God is not abstract; He has both the impersonal and the personal aspects to His personality which is SUPREME, ETERNAL, BLISSFUL, and full of KNOWLEDGE. As a single drop of water has the same qualities as an ocean of water, so has our consciousness the qualities of GOD’S consciousness… but through our identification and attachment with material energy (physical body, sense pleasures, material possessions, ego, etc.) our true TRANSCENDENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS has been polluted, and like a dirty mirror it is unable to reflet a pure image.

With many lives our association with the TEMPORARY has grown. This impermanent body, a bag of bones and flesh, is mistaken for our true self, and we have accepted this temporary condition to be final.

Through all ages, great SAINTS have remained as living proof that this non-temporary, permanent state of GOD CONSCIOUSNESS can be revived in all living Souls. Each soul is potentially divine. Krsna says in Bhagavad Gita: “Steady in the Self, being freed from all material contamination, the yogi achieves the highest perfetional stage of happiness in touch with the Supreme Consciousness.” (VI,28)

YOGA (a scientific method for GOD (SELF) realization) is the process by which we puirify our consciousness, stop further pollution, and arrive at the state of Perfection, full KNOWLEDGE, full BLISS.

If there’s a God, I want to see Him. It’s pointless to believe in something without proof, and Krishna Consciousness and meditation are methods where you can actually obtain GOD preception. You can actually see God, and Hear Him, play with Him. It might sound crazy, but He is actually there, actually with you.

There are many yogic Paths–Raja, Jnana, Hatha, Kriya, Karma, Bhakti–which are all acclaimed by the MASTERS of each method.

SWAMI BHAKTIVEDANTA is as his title says, a BHAKTI Yogi following the path of DEVOTION. By serving GOD through each thought, word, and DEED, and by chanting HIS Holy Names, the devotee quickly develops God-consciousness. By chanting:

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna

Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare

Hare Rama, Hare Rama

I request that you take advantage of this book KRSNA, and enter into its understanding. I also request that you make an appointment to meet your God now, through the self liberating process of YOGA (UNION) and GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.”
There is a “process” called GIVE PEACE A CHANCE?  What, exactly, is the process?

Finally, BERGMAN!

I have been wanting to write about the novels of Ingmar Bergman for many years now –– I think the idea came at the time of this death, in 2007 –– but I have never been able to discover the right outlet, and now I have it!  Pre-Christmas, then, a little dive into the oeuvre of the master of existential despair, including but not limited to a screening of Fanny and Alexander, which I have shamefully never seen.

No, not Bergman –– this is my xmas card.

A snippet from his obit:

“In 1982, Mr. Bergman announced that he had just made his last theatrical film, Fanny and Alexander, a look at high society in a Swedish town early in the 19th century that was in part inspired by his own childhood.

‘Making Fanny and Alexander was such a joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,’ he told Ms. Kakutani. ‘I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn’t understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt.’

Fanny and Alexander won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1984.”

God Jul!

 

Shell Headphones

I saw a print at the Park Avenue Armory show this year of a hipster lady wearing these, and now I know that you can buy them for yourself!  Can you hear the ocean in them always?  Experiment: wear on the subway and see how people react.

Unfortunately they’re kind of expensive for things that are virtually useless.