The smell of creosote is so everywhere lately that I barely noticed that I should be smelling orange blossoms right now. 



I'm always on the edge of desert now.  I veered from my path today to drive through my old north central neighborhood, sure it was a space where the white blossoms would take over for the little creosote poms.  It was.  Dueling spring scents.

I love the musty musky smell of orange blossoms, and the creeping smell of the creosote, which makes me think of rain and delicate green grass that looks like carpet on the mountains.

I volunteer at a tiny art gallery every once in a while.  Because my schedule is insane, I only ever make it there about once a month, but I keep it on my schedule because why not.  The gallery is on the first floor of City Hall, almost completely unknown to the public, which is fine by me, because I just sit and read for a couple of hours in almost completely uninterrupted silence.

I was interrupted this morning by a quiet, somewhat grizzled older guy in all black and a feathered hat who came in to ask me about prints of the pieces, all recent shots of architectural landmarks around Phoenix.  He pointed to the Valley National Bank on Camelback and 44th st, saying, "That's my building."  Maybe I've just had too many downtown kooks up in my face recently, because I just smiled and nodded to the guy, thinking, yeah buddy, it's my building too, we all like it.

I asked him for his contact information to follow up about the prints and watched as he printed his name in exacting block letters, then spent the next 10 seconds squinting blindly into space, my mind desperately trying to remember and fact check without the internet.  As soon as he started to leave, I concluded: he designed the Valley National Bank building, the "mushroom bank," in 1968.

IT IS HIS BUILDING.

I didn't call after him to tell him that I had finally figured out who he was, because really.  His demeanor was interesting, very quiet, almost awkward, although I usually find introverted, subdued people to be interesting. 

Anyway, he is cool.  About the building.

Julius H. "G." Marx

Groucho: Say, I wanna register a complaint. 
Captain: Why, what's the matter?
Groucho: Matter enough. You know who sneaked into my stateroom at 3:00 this morning?
Captain: Who did that?
Groucho: Nobody, and that's my complaint!

All of the Marx Brothers films have little spaces after each zinger, allowing time for the audience to laugh without missing the next one.

It's amusing that Groucho is always the lech in the movies, but that may be an exaggerated reflection of life.  Lines like,

Waitress: What can I do for you?
Groucho: I'll tell you later.

...would probably piss me off in a modern film, but the way he alternates being completely ridiculous with making sly dog side comments just amuses me instead.

Like a lot of things that feel like a given now, the humor of these movies seems like part of a universal cultural memory.  When I first started watching these films, I was surprised at how familiar the jokes and antics felt.  Did I watch them as a kid and forget?  Maybe.  What's more likely is they were copied, referred to and lampooned in a lot of old cartoons and came to me that way. 

Oh, battleaxes.

Here's the thing - people hate salty, bitchy, eccentric old women.  Even salty, bitchy, eccentric younger women hate them.  Why?  That's you in 25 years, dummy!  Recognize! 

I like tough, grouchy old women because I find them to be kind of charming, and oftentimes, that brand of no-fucks-giving eccentricity is a sign or byproduct of above average intelligence.  Most people would have to agree that a quick survey of the most intelligent people they know also contains the fussiest, most self-embattled people they know. 

This Bette Davis appearance on Dick Cavett inspired me to explore this topic.  Look at her!  Wearing a mink beret and Emma Peel boots, and looking good.  She's sassy and funny but you know she could attack at any time. 




I have a weird relationship with battleaxes in that I almost always get along with them while the rest of the world avoids or merely tolerates them depending on their level of importance.  I don't find their gruffness to be a personal affront, and I seem to know how to talk to them in a way that quickly gets me out of their bitch zone.  Did you see The Horse Whisperer?  Like that.  It's amazing what funny little skills we develop based on adaptations made for survival in childhood.  My family is filled with "difficult personalities," and I grew up in a coven of old women and their friends.  I'm in.  I'm one of them. 

That's not to say that all crotchety old women are secret-charmers with valuable things to share with the world.  Like most old men, some old women are just bastards, perversely spreading their sourpuss misery as widely as they can.  I worked in retail as a kid, and the most unfairly, unpredictably mean people by far were old men, and then women of menopausal age.  Sorry - realtalk.

Since entering the museum world, I have been exposed to lots of eccentric old women, and I have cultivated positive relationships with them all while the rest of our peers can't stand them.  At the same time, I have a very difficult time connecting with those bubbly, frivolous persons most loved in their little networks.  I find them irritating, and they find me off-putting.  I belong to another world, and we'd all prefer that I stay there.

AGB

Today is the 10th anniversary of my grandma's death. 

I don't have a lot of introspection about this "milestone".  It somehow feels like much less than a decade, and infinitely more.  It's still a bit of an open wound for me and everyone else in my family.  After she died, I went home and wrote a long account of the experience, but I think I'd rather do just about anything than read it again.  There's no need to as it's all part of the architecture of my brain now.

Some people are just bigger than others.  She somehow managed to be highly relevant to everyone she knew, a detail that was never more evident to me than when I turned around at her funeral to see my dad's old friend, Big Don, dressed like a Guns & Roses roadie as usual, crying openly on the grass.

Her life is an interesting piece of Americana lost to the contemporary world, along with those of all her peers.  Her mother was born outside of Deadwood, South Dakota, around the time when it was at its rowdiest peak of now-cliched wild western danger, to a French mother and a Scottish father.  In her early twenties, she (the mother, Rose Emma) went off with her sister to participate in a land race whereupon they staked a couple of claims in Vermillion, SD.  Soon after, she met Tom Monaghan and returned with him to the family parcel in Percival, Iowa.  My dad's favorite stories are about Tom's father, Ed, the "Irish wetback," who almost got sent back to Ireland in the 1870s when his ship was quarantined in New York Harbor, containing as it did more sick people than healthy.  Certainly disappointed and probably figuring that another few weeks in that floating deathbox would be the end of him, he and some conspirators jumped ship and swam in, stealing onto the beach and into the streets, bypassing Ellis Island all together.  He deprived me of those records, but I understand.  Ed worked at some manual labor jobs for a few years before striking moderate wealth in something to do with the railroad, at which time he sent home for his wife and daughter, and resumed their family in America.

The reason my dad likes him so much is because he was a large, brutish man who drank and cursed like 19th century Irish dudes are supposed to, and because he survived having a house fall on him, unlike some witches we know.  Apparently, Ed wanted to pick his first Percival home up and move it over a few acres, but when he was underneath the raised structure, the supports failed and the house came down.  Ed wasn't killed, but he was physically pinned for a few hours.  The local papers dramatically retold the story of his herculean survival.  My dad can't get enough of stories like this.  I'll look for the articles on chroniclingamerica soon.

My grandma was born in 1920 and used to joke to me that she didn't bother to "get born" until the 19th Amendment came along and straightened things out a little.  She was the tenth of eleven children between Rose Emma and Tom, and caught and nearly died from scarlet fever as a child.  Her lungs were scarred by this experience and she lived the rest of her life with fluid in her lungs and a rattling cough.

The one in the middle, sticking her tongue out.

Home was a five-bedroom Victorian house built by her grandfather Ed not long after the old house fell on him.  He had come into more money and required a more luxurious domicile to house his large family.  The house was fancy, compact, and cute, with a scalloped roof, widow's walk, gingerbread detailing and spindles that had been turned by hand on the site.  As far as I know, it's still there.  My dad threatened to buy it the summer after she died, and I barely survived the life-rending disappointment when he changed his mind.  The house is hours from city-slicker civilization, an isolated and vulnerable white speck in a sea of soybeans and corn.  He didn't want to deal with it, but I had already sold myself on holding court in there for the rest of my life like a mid-western Little Edie Beale, wandering glossy wood hallways with a scarf tied around my head, making up dances, regular stuff. 

8th grade

My grandma didn't care about all that and if I cooed over the beauty of the house in photos, she would tell me what it was like to clean it with six filthy brothers tracking mud and grass all over it and having to beat those rugs and do that wash. 

Cleaning with her mother, mid 1930s

She attended grade school in a one-room schoolhouse and probably high school in Nebraska City.  She was the first of her siblings to bother to stay in school long enough to graduate; her brothers were all farming, one sister had been married off and the other had joined a convent as soon as she was old enough to go. 

Graduation 1938

Education was important to her parents, and she told me her father supplemented she and her sibling's schoolhouse education in their cellar using a chalkboard he had ordered by mail for that purpose.  He focused on math and language, primarily.  Unfortunately, he died in 1941, at which point they almost lost the farm, and five of his sons and one daughter trundled off to war, leaving my grandma and her mother to handle things on their own.  Rose Emma gave more than most to the war effort, with six children overseas and German POWs sent to work detail on the farm.  Almost as soon as he enlisted, the youngest boy was killed over the Pacific in 1941.  Straight out of a novel, he was 18, charming, and the shared favorite of a clan of contentious siblings.  My grandma said she felt sick to her stomach for a year every time she heard a plane flying overhead, and years later, her sister the nun recited to me from memory the contents of the letter that came to her at the convent to tell her of the death.  He was the only war casualty in the family.

My grandma remained in Iowa until, at age 26, she was told by a doctor to get her wet lungs out of the midwest or die.  So she moved to Sante Fe, where she lived with a girlfriend in an adobe house in the old part of town and worked in a typing pool.  

Far left, like you couldn't tell.

...until she met a dark dirtbag named Dale Benz on a blind date and was swept away to Arizona.  I don't know how she and my grandfather ever stood each other, but then, I don't know how my parents ever did either.  Vast differences in personality and goals seem less important when you're young. 

They moved to Arizona in 1949, and my dad was born the following year.  For some reason, a doctor had told my grandmother that she was barren prior to her pregnancy.  This was the blow of all blows to her because she so desperately wanted a large family.  "I always loved a crowd," she said.  This fear was compounded by the fact that she was already 30 and skating the precipice of old maidness.  She was so distraught by the thought of never having her own children that she said she went to church almost daily to pray to St. Jude, begging for children and wearing the finish off his toe.  Jude is my father's middle name.

My grandmother, her sister in law, my uncle, and Rose Emma in 1960

My grandmother loved children.  She delighted in playing with us, and was able to patiently take seriously all of the things that other adults seemed to dismiss.  We would very seriously embark on our crafting afternoons in which I glued plastic jewels and sequins to paper plates, and made wall art out of doilies.  We drove to craft stores all over town looking for the perfect supplies, but ultimately, our favorite resources were the dirty barrels filled with old buttons and trimmings at the local SAS store.

She would tell me stories about life on the farm, when her dad went out to work before dawn and returned after dark, or about learning to drive on the deeply rutted dirt roads, and about fleeing from the moccasins while trying to play in the ditches and "criks" in the summer.  Years later, on a pilgrimage to the old house the summer after she died, my cousin and I walked those dirt roads and peered into the wet ditches, looking for the snakes.  With disappointment and relief, we found none.  I can't think of many things more satanic than a swimming snake.  The roads and the fields and the house and the yard and ditches, trees and flat horizons in all directions felt like a hallowed place to me.  It was quiet and breathless for me to imagine her there as a young person.  Funny to think how many people have passed through that area not knowing what it is.

Somehow, her being gone still feels like the worst thing that has ever happened to me, because it's all still there.  It's a tripping hazard.  I feel disappointed and deprived, like a cosmic cheat has been committed in an area that I never thought was a vulnerability.  I have dreamt of her two or three times a year with total consistency since she died.  In every dream, she's alive again.  I'm always so surprised to see her, like finding a ring in the grass, there you are!  Usually, the dream-me exclaims and tries to ask how this can be, but she's always busy, shuffling around in her house, waving away my questions and putting me to work to fix or plan something.  She's always in her house. 

My cousin had a dream about her in which she was flitting about her living room in a great, loud party, drinking and talking and laughing.  My cousin started to cry at the sight of her in the dream and my grandmother said, "What? I'm fine! Look at me. I'm fine!"  Then she leaned in and advised her on a matter in her life, which turned out to be true.  I'm sick with the self-pity of missing her.  I can't imagine it any other way.

My three grandmas. 1920 on the left.

She looks alarmed in this pic, but she's actually just talking shit to my dad.

Tormenta Who Can No Longer Chew

I love shop cats.  I enjoy that homeless cats sometimes find a home in the business of some kind fool who can't stand to see them on their own.  I often resent the official policy in the city park where my museum is, which states that I, and people like me, must refrain from feeding and/or encouraging the many feral cats to hang around.  Obviously these people don't understand that feral cats do whatever the hell they want regardless of whether I'm giving them names and trying to pet them or not.

Anyway.

Our botanical garden has a sister garden in Guanajuato, Mexico, presumably because they are the two largest desert gardens in the world (ours is biggest).  I was browsing their site today when I noticed a post about a cat named Tormenta, who has been living in the garden for some years.  A local artist has been selling pictures of Tormenta to help support her in her final years.



"This work is currently on exhibit in our Gift Shop and shows our dear Tormenta, the cat that has been living in El Charco for 15 years. Tormenta arrived just eight years after the Garden’s creation (1999), a few months old and since then has been the watchman and charm of the reception of El Charco.

The work was donated by the artist, Terra Mizwa, who also has made postcards from the painting of this famous feline which are on sale in the Gift Shop for 15 pesos. The money from the sale of these postcards will go to buying special food for Tormenta who can no longer chew."

It appears that prints and postcards of Tormenta cannot be purchased online at this time, which is a shame.  You can make donations, however, and probably specify that they are for La Tormenta.

El Charco Del Ingenio

If I had to guess, I think I have listened to the Siamese Dream album by the Smashing Pumpkins more than any other album ever made. 

Because.



Probably 5 years ago, I came across Billy Corgan's myspace profile.  Ah, shut up.  He had used the opportunity to post a link to a Livejournal account to which he was semi-secretly posting huge chapters of autobiographical writing.  He started in early childhood and detailed year after year of strange, faltering, confusing experiences.  Some of them were profoundly sad.  He left off around the time that he was writing his first album.  They weren't famous yet, and he was sleeping on a couch in a storage unit or something.  He was still having his strange and sad experiences then, and I would guess that he still is now.



Also, Gish.

Plath drahms

1. Sylvia Plath's death date rolled around last week.  I know this because I in some fucking incomprehensible moment had recorded it in my phone's calendar, and so on the morning of Feb. 11 received an alert that said "Plath 1963".  What?  I don't even.  And secondly, I noticed multiple blurbs on the internet and in the news.  I found it a little strange that her death date was so widely marked.  What other celebrities are as well known for their deaths as they are for their lives?  I hate that she's handled as such a grisly specter.  Does anyone ever talk about Hemingway's suicide?  Even Hunter Thompson's death is just a little footnote, but it's a big old deal when talking about Plath or Woolf or Sexton or whatever.  Is it more shocking when women kill themselves?  Or are people just focusing on their biographical details instead of their bodies of work, as usual.

2. Certain persons of taste are pissed off at the generic and lame cover chosen for Faber & Faber's 50th anniversary edition of The Bell Jar, which would imply that the book is a kicky vintage adventure rather than a broody, complex masterpiece.  Apparently, the book should come in packaging that suggests the difference between it and lower tiers of fiction.  Clearly, the argument is kind of asinine and can't be made without making some unkind characterizations of other types of books.  Then again, perhaps silly mispackaging is just another way for the world to try to negate something it doesn't care to understand.  I've seen a lot of stupid and confusing covers on many classic books.  Sometimes publishers are just tasteless, right?  More here.

I went to google to view prior covers of The Bell Jar, and noticed that tons of past covers have been every bit as dumb and irrelevant as this one.  Perhaps I should speculate on what each cover is trying to suggest about the book:


Note the dead rose. This book must be hell of dark. Incidentally, my favorite cover.


The scandal-making cover. This book is about a glamorous girl having an affair or something. Also, the 60s.

Obviously, this book is about craziness, because circles.

This book is about an exciting trip to New York!

An early cover, still bearing the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas.  This one pretty much says it, right?

Night Toure

The artificial newness of Phoenix does things to people.  They freak out about weird stuff.  I know because I'm one of them.  Last night I was taking pictures of a hidden doorway on the corner of 1st & Jefferson because...the doors are like soooo old!  Some routine-ass turn of the century doors flipped me out.  I feel this viscerally enough that I think I would probably vandalize/steal from properties because, well, those doors should belong to me, not Dan Majerle, or whatever.  I mean, only from commercial properties.  I'm not that bad.  Or abandoned houses.  Nevermind.

I enjoy observing the way people react to my museum.  It is pretty unusual here.  It's definitely the only restored Victorian house in Phoenix that you can actually tour, and that probably applies to the entire megalopolis as well.  The others are either private or derelict.  Locals are amazed and almost disbelieving that it is authentic and in its original location, while people from eastern cities glance around like bored teenagers before disappearing into their phones.  Also, locals ALWAYS ask if it is haunted.  Because old houses like this are only seen in movies about ghosts.

No, dudes.  This house isn't haunted by anything but bad taste and the living (you should see some of these volunteers, whaaaaat). 

Anyway.  Some people came through for a night tour after an event a couple of weeks ago and I decided to take some poor quality phone pics of the house looking darker than usual.

 Pocket doors.  My favorite.  The good thing about people being idiots is they inadvertently protect things sometimes.  Example: some time in the 40s, the pocket doors were sealed up and a wall was erected in their place, thus protecting them from generations of abusive renters until restorers came along in the 70s.  The original wood floor was also protected by layers of linoleum!  The tin ceilings were protected when dumbasses lowered the ceiling to cut down on heating costs.  Bad taste kept the best original features intact.

 

Light ghosts!

Looking down Monroe from the turret.  I definitely try to scare people when I have occasion to be in the attic.  I just stand in the windows and wait for someone to notice me.  This is basically genetic assholishness.  My dad used to stand quietly behind doors wearing a Hulk (Incredible, not Hogan) mask, waiting for my mom to walk into the room so that he could lunge at her.  My mom has the constitution of an epileptic chicken, so it's probably lucky that she didn't die.  It was a pretty scary mask, after all. He once hung it over the handle of a vacuum cleaner, parked it in front of my bedroom door, and knocked.  It's one of my earliest memories. 

Frosty Berliners

I watched the documentary "Marlene" about Marlene Dietrich after my husband Dick Cavett mentioned it on some podcast, saying it was wonderful and illuminating.  Actually, it was terrible.  Not because it was poorly done, but because Marlene is irritating.

Is that allowed?  I feel like a terrifying gay harpy a la Angels in America is going to come shrieking through my wall like the Kool-Aid Man and make me take it back.  Two metaphors, one sentence, there are no laws here.


She's such a contrarian.  I definitely get that she's just old and bitchy, but she is so committed to letting us all know that no one has her figured out or knows anything about her life.  This is a predictable response to being famous for 40 years, but it's goddamned irritating to listen to her say NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN!!!!! when her interviewer mentions some factual incident or totally neutral perception of her.  She then presents some contradictory revisionist perspective, and maybe she's right, but she absolutely exhausts herself in letting us all know that she is an enigma.  Great, MD.  You're about 10% as enigmatic as your mom Garbo, so get over it.

She also refuses to actually appear in this documentary.  I think this is because she was old, and too vain to allow her elderly visage to be committed to film.  That makes me angry.  The way people struggle against aging is the most unseemly, embarrassing shit to witness, and refusing to let anyone SEE YOU because you don't belong in some panty-party cabaret anymore is so simple and ridiculous.  I know that aging is rough and often traumatic, but I think we've figured out by now that to struggle against it is a hundred times more graceless than to just accept the inevitable ravage that is the passage of time.  Also, it does a disservice to all of the impressionable people watching you, Marlene.  Anyway.  I realize that I'm speaking in the present tense and she's been dead for twenty years, but...no, that's it.  I also think it's so vain when people are like, "I want them to remember me as I was, not as I am now."  They will.  Don't worry. 

Dick Cavett said that Marlene called him up at home once.  He thought it was a practical joke on behalf of one of his friends, and hung up on her.  They managed to reconnect, and had a series of enjoyable chats that you can read about somewhere in his current NYT column, which is full of topics that are probably considered dusty and obscure by most people under retirement age, and which contain his delightful brand of sass and old man ire.  Mostly the latter.