The Wilde

I cried at the gym last week. It surprised me so much that I laughed immediately after, adding an essential tinge of "crazy" to the spectacle (not to worry, no one saw), and why all the fuss?
Because Oscar Wilde died!

I listen to stories, interviews and programs at the gym because it's the only way I can distract my brain long enough to allow me to stay there longer than 20 minutes. This time I was listening to the excellent Omnibus Wilde biography, but suddenly lost my shit at the end when the lonely and bitter hotel death is being discussed, and it's pointed out that Michael Bracewell is sitting on the bed in which Wilde died. That was too much for my Tuesday elliptical session and I found myself sniffling and blinking furiously. It's too pure proof of sadness and brutal loss in the world that the bed that he died in still exists! Can be touched and seen and slept in like any other bed even though it's some sort of horrible portal. Also raw to see old toothless and wavering Shane McGowan quote him and comment on his life like an old friend.

WAUGH!

I'm like this all the time now, brimming over about any pet interest. I think it's a byproduct of getting rid of my horrible prior occupations and being surrounded only by that which I want to be near. Like emerging from a dark room into noonday sun, it's almost too much, and I find myself feeling intensely sympathetic, sentimental and moved by the things that I love. I remain cooly ambivalent about everything else.

Like I said, really excellent biography. And yes, Stephen Fry is in it.

Asylum Suitcases

So amazing. A New York asylum catalogued and stored the suitcases new patients brought with them from 1910 to the 1960s, and there they remained until having been recently discovered.

They were stored with all of their contents and it sounds like the patients never had access to their things again. They are the amazingly preserved, intact time capsules of people who were removed from society to rot away in unknowable circumstances. A photographer has started a project to document the cases and all of their contents.

I can't believe how new some of these items still look! I guess it's a product of being shut away from light and air forever. This is interesting on a lot of levels. I love old forgotten things that haven't been touched in ages. The connection between "then" and "now" seems much stronger with those secret little things locked away for decades or more.

It's also interesting to see the things these people chose to bring with them. As the photographer says, the asylum was for people with chronic mental illness; they probably never left the facility once they went in. These are days when mental illness was poorly understood and poorly treated. Rosemary Kennedy, shock treatment, the freakish regularity of lobotomies! This asylum was probably a really unfortunate place to be.

I have a few favorite suitcases.




But!


This one held a zither! Remember the crazy music from The Third Man? Zither music. Weird, carnivally. Rad.

NPR article on the project

Jon Crispin's blog

La Llorona

La Llorona! My cousin told me she would rise in a mist from the canals in Phoenix looking for children to steal away into the water. ay dios mio.

This song isn't about the same weeping woman, though. I love love JB singing in Spanish.

Homecrafts

Hey, these are easy to make!

I took this from an old etching I saw somewhere on the internet. I wanted to do something monochromatic. Now I want to learn to embroider Mexican dresses but it'll take me a year to finish one.

Not pictured: I learned to make flowers out of tissue paper! Finally! All these years. I had to learn so I could show some kids, who already knew how. whatever.


I heard this song on 8tracks the other day for the first time in years. It was somehow familiar and sweet even though I decided I didn't like him before. He has a song called "Sylvia Plath" and the lyrics are so retarded that I guess I just stopped liking him then and there. DON'T MESS.

Wallace & Ladmo

I didn't realize how ridiculous and adult the bits on Wallace and Ladmo were. I caught the tail end of this show's run and my remembrances on it are as such:

-I hated/was afraid of Gerald
-I preferred the cartoons
-My cousin went on the show with her brownie troop and won a Ladmo bag. She was slightly older and bratty and mean to me. She used to make me let her open my presents! Anyway, I considered her getting a Ladmo bag to be proof of the end of all reason and fairness in the world. Turns out - maybe right.

Wallace and Ladmo was a famous local children's show that ran for over 30 years, ending in 1989. Children were obsessed with the Ladmo bag prizes. Some of the first-person narratives I've read about them are still filled with exhilaration or deep bitterness re: who did and didn't get a bag. I'm sure you can ask any Arizona native between the ages of 30 and 50 only for them to smash their fist into their palm and complain about not getting this brown paper bag full of posters and candy. My re-interest was piqued by an exhibit at the Mesa Historical Society. It was pretty all right, but the Lehi School building that MHS is in is a lot more interesting than the museum itself.


drunk?


"Aunt Maude's stories never turn out the way you expect."

Dia de los Muertos

Poor sweet brilliant OFOFWW. Crushed utterly by life but resurrected just like someone else we know. Except Oscar's story is real. ZOW!

-


And if you're so clever, then why are you on your own tonight?

My grandma grew up here. It was built in 1894 by my great-great grandfather.

After looking at my museum every day, it seems plain as hell. But it is rather fancy for the area, which is still a tiny farming community in Iowa.

I stayed there twice. The first time was fine, because I had to share a double bed with my cousin Emily and stayed up all night scaring her with ghost stories and asking was that a branch on the outside of that window, or...a hand? Too easy, until I later woke with the bathroom light on and no blanket as Emily had co-opted it for protection. The second time I was on my own, and slept in a tiny upstairs back bedroom with shag carpeting. There was an electrical storm that night and I had nightmare after nightmare. Like a scene in a bad horror movie, I woke at one point from a nightmare right as a thunderbolt clapped and the room lit with lightning, and screamed. I think the scream is what really woke me. I lay back down with eyes as big as saucers and wondered if I HAD actually screamed. I've never done anything like it before or since.

There is a sad mystery that I will probably never unravel about my grandma's aunt Julia, who I think died in the house very early. She and my great-grandmother were sisters and best friends. My grandma told me about her just once, and apparently never told my dad because he knows nothing, which is unusual. She said Julia was pale and small, with black hair and big dark eyes and died in childbirth in the house. She (my grandma) was a rather morbid storyteller (hmm) and I recall she said there was so much blood that it was running across the floors.

I've always thought about Julia and this story, and later researched her to no result. All I found was a record of birth as "Julia Angelia" and a claim staked in her name in S. Dakota which I knew about. No record of a marriage and no stories of a husband. Did she really die in childbirth and if so, where was he? It's a rather sad story and I would imagine my great-grandmother was much affected by the experience. A distant cousin sent me a childhood family photo of her, and she is innocent and sweet in a white dress, with loose hair around her face and her mother's hand rested protectively at her collar. She seems to be about five years old.

Everyone on this side of the family looks the same, with thick dark hair and dark heavily lashed eyes that look black. Maybe that's partly why she stays with me. She looks like, as my uncle puts it, "us". There's a photo of my grandma at this age that affected me deeply when I first found it. She looks like the picture of Julia in it. She had died about six months before I first saw this yellowing photo showing a little girl in a sack dress leaning against a split rail fence. Her hair is cut into a shiny black bob and she is barefoot and dirty, sticking her tongue out at her brother. I wanted to pick her up and stroke her hair and her child's face and it was a strange feeling to have about a grandmother that you last saw in a coffin.

Wait a second.

I think Theo Kogan had a nose job. Sometime in the past 20 years.

I just watched an interview with the Lunachicks from 1988 or something, very old, after they recorded their first album. I couldn't help but notice that Theo's face was not the same face as her current face! WTF MON? When I was a barely-teen, Theo taught me that doing what everyone else does IS LAME. And that unfair societal expectations of people, particularly young women, are BULLSHIT. And that whatever the fuck you look like via nature IS OK.

This is of course all totally true, with or without her old nose, but I'm still a little surprised. Maybe it should have occurred to me that there could be some incongruity when this message is coming from someone who is an actual working model, but.

I don't actually care because, you know? Whatever. They still convey an excellent message to young females and everyone else, as long as you can stick around after all of the fart jokes.

But still - really?


There are better quality versions of this song but they don't have this awesome video.

It's an interesting talk, I guess. Does the authenticity of a message suffer a little damage when the individual does something antithetical to it? Is it antithetical? Women love to say that cosmetic surgery is worth it (and no longer shallow or false) if it makes them feel better about themselves every day. But what part feels improved? Being viewed as "better" than old-you because your nose is 10% more narrow? That really feels better? Paying thousands of dollars to look more attractive to people with idiotic sensibilities? If that's where your head is at, then it shouldn't be very hard to toss out a fishing line for an equally fucked up male companion, without the surgery. But I can't really fight girls who say a little heinous bone-sanding brought them some peace of mind, because it probably did, but only because EVERYTHING IS RETARDED.

The Lunachicks are still painful-offensive-amazing authentic. If you don't like it, you can, yanno. Suck it.

These usually work out well

New moon in scorpius! I have pared my life back almost extremely. Like a fingernail cut short enough to protest, but not pain.

Usually I do this because I'm pissed off, but this time it's because I'm all business. For the first time in my life, I spend more time working than playing. And I recall Stephen Fry quoting Noel Coward when he says that, sometimes, "Work is more fun than fun."


Check it out, jerk. It's the newest new moon that the world has ever had. You can't see it because it's black on black, but it's still there.

Favorite piece

at PAM.


Ghostly Josephine Jessup. Or, The White Rose by Chase.

I visited with my Gram, who pulled me over to a 16th century jewel-encrusted altar, the kind the very religious would have traveled with. There was a small engraving of The Last Supper in the middle of it, and she stabbed at it with her index finger.

Her: Whose head is rested on Jesus' shoulder?!
Me: (quiet)
Her: Mary Magdalene!!! See! (stab) They were married!
Me: HAVE YOU BEEN READING DAN BROWN