Rational Reasons

The Parsons version of this song is heartbreaking, but the Fonda version is not to be overlooked.  It's an interesting combination of GP genius mixed with nerdy vocals and mariachi.  And who can resist adorable gangly young Fonda with his Byronic sideburns?

One of the best things about late 60s fashion is that male hairstyles were distinctly Napoleonic in appearance.  Is that so much to ask?  Christ, give me a reason, dudes.

Oh goody, we learned something

An alarming thing that I learned at some point on the internet was that people who overtalk about their goals and plans tend not to accomplish those goals, because discussing them at length gives them a sort of premature satisfaction in their future accomplishments, which causes them to spend less time, you know...trying.  I can't remember where I learned this.  But it seems legit.

At some point, I stopped articulating my plans.  Rather than plot them out in exhaustive detail or try to mentally counter potential obstacles in advance, I just leave them in a sort amorphous, ambiguous state once I am aware of them.  I leave them there because 1. you can ditch them as soon as you change your mind without having some inquisitive bastard asking when you're moving to Cuba and 2. it's easier to sneak up on them when they're asleep in space, unaware of their own existence.

I guess I do my best thinking when I'm not trying to think.  It's like having strokes of genius in the shower.

I set some "goals" for myself months ago, if you could even call them goals.  I envisioned a timeline and sequence of events that would suit me, and checked back on them every couple of months, mostly just to make sure that I still cared.  Very casual and vague.  "I'll probably do this sometime."  One afternoon I sat back and said, "Yanno what?  Now."  I spent a couple of minutes prepping, asked for a meeting, and emerged with the result that I had noncommittally decided would be best 6 months ago.  A result that I later learned was unlikely to happen, policy-wise.  I think this worked out because I didn't overthink it.  It didn't strike me as strategy at the time, but some post-conversations I had with the boss made me realize it was.  I turned the impatient and controlling part of my brain off, the part that has to make an announcement the second it has a feeling, and allowed a subtler, more perceptive element to take control.

This sounds like a slightly self-aggrandizing story about getting promoted (it is), but I believe in this method of self-direction.  Negotiations with other people are so delicate and layered, and I'm generally not interested in engaging with that at all for non-personal relationships.  I don't want to, which is why I have to turn my external brain off in order to be able to navigate situations.  Sometimes.  Other times, I just leave the outer brain on because it's always outraged and talking shit and that makes me laugh.

Thanks, Sofia

Kelly: Listen, I'm under Evelyn Waugh. Shh. Okay?

John: Okay, yeah!

Kelly: Okay, arigato.

John: [laughing] Moshi moshi!

[Kelly walks away]

Charlotte: Evelyn Waugh?

John: What?

Charlotte: Evelyn Waugh was a man.

John: [shocked] Oh, c'mon, she's nice. What? You know-- You know, not everyone went to Yale. Its just a pseudonym, for Christ's sake.

No, John, it's not ok.  You go, Charlotte.  IT'S OK TO BE RIGHT SOMETIMES.

"Take my name out your mouth, bitch."

Nope.

Jonathan Franzen has nothing to say, yet needs to produce, and therefore has to grasp about in the shallows for tools more familiar to middle school brats than literary fancymen in order to churn out a trite revision of an artist when he should, instead, turn his lazy two-bit microscope upon his own tired-ass cultural hangups.

Or at least that's what I think.

Unfortunately, for I was having such an exasperation-free day, I came across his base attempt to summarize Edith Wharton for us in a 2012 issue of the New Yorker.  This is truly simple stuff.

He says that her privilege as a member of an aristocratic and well-monied family makes her difficult to like, and puts her at a "moral disadvantage".  A MORAL disadvantage?  This woman was born during the Civil War into a puritanical society in which women were treated as chattel, but Franzen feels oppressed by all the stuff that she could buy to decorate her house with.

Next, he throws her a bone, and says that the moral repugnance of her income is lessened by the fact that she was plain of appearance.  That's right, she's not hot.  He doesn't want to fuck the dour-faced novelist, standing in her turn of the century cabinet cards, with her corset and lapdogs.  The unspeakable horror of this non-babe status humanizes her, it ratchets her down slightly from "rich bitch" to "ugly bitch," making her entirely more acceptable and less threatening to him.  Would you ever publish something that revealed your stunted, insecure little parts like that?  This article has nothing to do with Edith Wharton.  It's about Franzen and his lack of emotional sophistication as a writer and a thinker.

JF, you need to sit down.  Regardless of one's opinions on Wharton, who by modern perceptions can be anything from a stuffed shirt to a pioneering hero, this article is pathetic.  It's lazy, written by a resentful Beavis incapable of formulating hypotheses worth sharing.

Anyway, she's taken to task far more often than is sensible or fair when you compare the tidal waves of forgiveness lavished on many male writers of comparable fame who do come with biographies that strongly temper their credibility.  Perhaps people are made insecure that she still seems to be everyone's boss.

Because who in the bloody goddamned fucking hell would read this:

“The young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship, her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance. She was straightforward, loyal, and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly proved by her laughing at his jokes); and he suspected, in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy to waken. But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.”

and respond with "Yeah, but have you seen her pixxx?"

Edit: I decided to look into the fallout of Franzen's odious bullshit and found some far better responses to him than I am capable of at this time.

Victoria Patterson dispenses with him in a way that is diplomatic, authoritative, and interesting.  To be able to eviscerate someone in a kind way, a humane killing, must be an incredibly valuable skill to have.  I wouldn't know.  LA Review of Books "Not Pretty: On Edith Wharton and Jonathan Franzen"

Marina Budhos wonders why Franzen was unable to see the similarities between himself and Wharton.  Probably because one must be in heavy denial of one's own flaws in order to achieve such a level of schmuckery.

Not Sexy Enough

Every time I hear Marion Harris' version of Tea For Two (more often than you'd think; it's 1934 over on 8tracks), I think of Big Edie Beale singing along to an old recording in her squalid bedroom.  She's obviously transported at one point and really gets into it, reliving her prior glories.



This scene was one of the most memorable for me.  Big Edie shaking her arms at her daughter saying, "Dance to that waltz! How can you resist that?"

I love music of the 20s and 30s, but some songs are just way too adorable and saccharine or goofy for me to handle, and Tea For Two was one of them.  Rarely do I want to hear a song that you can tap dance to.  Still, Grey Gardens changed my mind and I quite like it now.  I think Doris Day is the reason why I couldn't deal with the song, originally.  Although I think she's an under-appreciated actress, she was often styled in a way that created an almost toxic combination of cuteness and squareness.

The real DD seems to be a bit of a badass.  Yes, be.  She still lives.


DD 1950


Marion Harris 1924

Researches

I miss this.  I tend to pick topics that are hard and ultimately probably unrewarding, but are nevertheless things that I MUST KNOW.

Current topic: What (if anything) stood on the land that now hosts my office building?  We are in a residential area that has a really curious mix of housing, age-wise.  We are just a couple of miles outside of the original Phoenix city limits, so it's reasonably likely that there was something there in the 19th century or around the turn of the century.  It could have been orchards, farmland, perhaps a mix of the three with a dwelling, etc.  We are close the the state hospital (formerly: The Insane Asylum of Arizona), too, which was located on a sprawling acreage that included orchards, grain crops and vineyards, but I have no real concept of how large 160 acres is, so I can't tell if we are close enough to have been part of that, or if the hospital ever even got rid of any of that land.  I haven't found a map of the hospital from that time.  Sidebar, the hospital also has its own cemetery with graves dating back to 1888.  Want to see!  It seems pretty securified there, though, and like many places, probably won't let me in.

Obviously, the reason I want to know is because of THE GHOST.  I mean, the alleged ghost.  I haven't seen shit and that is fine.  But continued conversations with someone who claims to have seen it indicate that it wears a giant, oddly-shaped hat the likes of which your great-great grandmother was probably into.

There are precious few early Phoenix maps that are of any use for this.  The Assessor's office doesn't seem to have any historic property info.  Do parcel numbers change, ever?  How can we keep track if they change them?  I can't seem to find anything about the previous zoning or address situation of any given parcel.  The current residential developments around us cannot be original - they're inexpensive 40s and 50s builds, some of which appear to have been built to house airport personnel.  And one street over, we have much earlier homes.

Because we are so close to the original city center, and not far off the path people used to get to Tempe, and because we are right smack in between the downtown area and the hospital (which was pretty impressive at the time and therefore a bit of a landmark), it seems likely to me that there could have been a few scattered homes in the vicinity of our office building.  Perhaps more than a few.  I'll find out eventually.

1890s hospital administration enjoying their "lake" hole

Westward

I just love that Robrt Pela at the New Times.  He is an outspoken and prolific preservationist who has gotten inside many of Phoenix's shuttered historic buildings downtown.  He expresses adequately the outrage that I feel about beautiful things being torn down and replaced by repugnant mundanity.

Last weekend, my dad, brother and I were thrown out of the Westward Ho after trying to sneak in to explore.  I thought we had made it after one of the residents negotiated the front buzzer for us, but a security guard quickly intervened.  He wouldn't even let us check out the lobby in which we were standing, and no amount of polite explanation (my dad) or angry-child outbursts (me) would change his mind.  He wouldn't even let me take photos.  Outrageous.

Robrt Pela made it in as described in this descriptive but photo-short article.  

This site has photos that seem recent.

This crappy site has some interesting pictures of the "tunnels" and a short video including some interior shots.

I'm just excited that so much of it has been preserved.  Unfortunately, there is no touring of the building due to "liability," which - fine.  But whose stupid idea was it to turn that building into a home for the old and disabled, thus closing it to the outside world forever?  Was there not a more appropriate, public use for such a building?

I'm not really aware of interesting WH trivia, and I've rarely heard it discussed among the old, native or history crowds.

"A long, elaborately-choreographed but awkwardly-executed dance"

Here is an article in which Jonathan Franzen and Clay Shirky debate whether technology is good, toxic or both.

The most interesting thing to me about internet culture is how it creates or facilitates relationships and interactions that would never occur otherwise.  This is particularly significant in the case of people who are reserved or not prone to making lots of new friends in their "irl" lives.  Suddenly, no one is totally inaccessible.  Potential friends and creeps alike have multiple avenues by which to pursue your attention.  In the past, when meeting interesting strangers or friends of friends, you generally had to rely on happenstance or time in order to get to know them.  You couldn't just go home and learn about them in anonymous privacy.  You couldn't just send a message that would instantly appear before their face, forcing the situation, the immediate extraction of a response.

Overall, I think it's a good thing that interactions are so easily had.  It makes it easy and less frightening to connect with someone you would never have a chance to know.  It helps the socially inept, the lazy, the reclusive, the avoidant and the noncommittal to carry on some semblance of a social life.  It helps to overcome otherwise deterring circumstances.

Example: I'm friends with someone my ex briefly dated.  I didn't know they were dating and she didn't know he was my ex.  It was a situation that could have been weird, but wasn't.  We chatted in person and later made internet friends, and I put her in contact with my out-of-town best friend because both women were about to move to the same city.  Weeks later I received a Snapchat of my old BFF and my new buddy drinking together in a bar in New York.  Technology!  The future!  Improbable connections made from random situations occurring thousands of miles apart.  In a historical context, I don't think it would have been possible for us to connect the way we did, with social mores generally dictating that we should be awkward around each other due to the nature of our mutual connection.  Or maybe she and I are just grown ass men who don't care about trifling shit.  Either way, it's a weird example, but they're all weird examples.

Still, in making private stranger-interactions so easy, the internet in turn makes them less meaningful, because there is almost no risk involved.  Interactions can almost seem random, motivated by boredom or curiosity rather than a genuine interest or purpose.  It's easy to stay in some vague contact with someone you don't care about, someone who otherwise would have fallen from your life like a dead leaf if you had to maintain that connection in person.  In the end, many of these relationships strike me as a false pantomime of human interaction.

Office Ghost

I recently learned that several people have seen an apparition in the building where I work.  Where does this apparition like to hang out?  Outside my office door.

Although I am generally skeptical of what most people believe about the paranormal, I still acknowledge that I have heard convincing stories from trusted sources, and have experienced some mid-level weird shit myself.  As a child, I was obsessed with ghost stories and had stacks of books of them.  This slowed into adulthood, but I have spent many an hour trawling Fortean Times' "It Happened to Me!" board, another source of high quality weird shit.  As such, I pay more attention than most when I hear about real, live stories of house hauntings.

Immediately upon receiving this rumor, I texted our admin and treated him to a Macaulay Culkin/John Candy in Uncle Buck style rapid fire questioning session.

B: I hear you saw a ghost and didn't tell me about it.
K: I've seen her three times.
B: TELL ME.
K: She's not very scary, she just stands there and looks at me.
B: When.
K: Late at night.
B: What is she wearing.
K: A white dress and large white hat.
B: Old fashioned?
K: IDFK!
B: Where did you see her?
K: In the back hallway...In the corner.
B: Which corner.
K: West.
B: AT MY DOOR.
K: Bingo.


Any time I try to re-decide if I believe that things like ghosts exist, I remember our experiences in my childhood home.  While I have no expectation of understanding that arm of the paranormal, I think it's there.  I wrote a creepy overview of my experiences in the house a few years ago.

Earlier today, I came across an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that I liked a couple of years ago and marked to remember.  A oddly-timed reminder.


The Little Ghost
I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high - higher than most
And the green gate was locked.

And yet I did not think of that
Til after she was gone-
I knew her by the broad white hat,
All ruffled, she had on.

By the dear ruffles round her feet,
By her small hands that hung
In their lace mitts, austere and sweet,
Her gown's white folds among.

I watched to see if she would stay,
What she would do - and oh!
She looked as if she liked the way
I let my garden grow!

She bent above my favorite mint
With conscious garden grace,
She smiled and smiled
There was no hint of sadness in her face.

She held her gown on either side
To let her slippers show,
And up the walk she went with pride,
The way great ladies go.

And where the wall is built in new
And is of ivy bare
She paused - then opened and passed through
A gate that was once there.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1917

Is it always like this?

Music for Moody Children from initials bb on 8tracks Radio.

Music to have a tantrum to.
Just kidding.  This music is awesome.

There's a very young Nick Cave, then some more Australians, Cocteau Twins singing in their made up baby language, classic Cure, my favorite Dead Can Dance song, extremely depressing NIN, amazing mid-90s Siouxsie, an excerpt from the dreariest Cure album ever, and we prefer to forget the last news stories about Peter Murphy as we listen to songs from Love Hysteria. THE END.