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.

HP etceteras

The Knipe house gets a roof.  Here's a recent article about it at Vanishing Phoenix, a great but ultimately totally depressing historic preservation blog.

I noticed this 1914 architectural watercolor of the Monroe School hanging askew in the Kenilworth School basement during my tour of their archive last year.  No one at Kenilworth seemed to know or care what it was, so after a few months of emails, I was able to pick it up to take over to Monroe.  I don't really think they care either.  DAMN IT.  Doesn't anyone ever care about anything important?  Anyway, it will be home, at least.  I just hope they re-frame it.  This photo also features me and my favorite show, Rehab Addict.

I feel that there is a need for blogs about feminist humor, and also, about coping with it.  Partly because of how the concept is perceived by outsiders (NON FEMINISTS), and the stupid mirth and also confusion that happens when you are paying a lot of attention to anything.

Sometimes I say something and I'm like, Wait, Jesus Christ I'm offending myself.  I need a place to record my confusion about these moments.  The other day I referred to my mother's really-elderly neighbor as "the slut upstairs" and it was so funny.  Was this wrong?

Or, is this song offensive?  Is this social commentary or Lolita fetishization?  Because I enjoy it.  Should I feel smug, or guilty?  TBD.



My friend Anita and I spent all of Thanksgiving riding around in cars in New Mexico with men (Kaveh), listening to NPR and saying WHY AREN'T THERE MORE WOMEN IN THIS SHOW!  THE PATRIARCHY IS AT IT AGAIN.  I TOLD YOU ABOUT THEM.  etc.  It is funny, but am I making jokes because society makes me feel that I should humorously attack my people? Or is it just funny?  Seriously, this is dissertation material.

EAP's birthday, again

In honor of Poe's birthday, I have looked at the internet for evidence of Poe in the news. 

I should like to go to there: The Chamber Music Society of Mississauga is putting on an evening of "dramatic music" interspersed with various readings of Poe in honor of his birthday.  How nice. 

Secondly, a reader of the Baltimore Sun only somewhat testily reminds the paper that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not invent crime fiction.  "Perhaps you have heard of Edgar Allan Poe?"  Thank you, reader. Isn't everyone so stupid? 

I would point out again how cute the Poe Museum's website is.  Here is their schedule for Poe's 204th birthday party:

Noon: Guided Tour of Poe Museum
12:30: Performance of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Jamie Ebersole
1:00: Lecture on the 170th Anniversary of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by Poe Museum’s Curator
2:00: Guided Walking tour of neighborhood Poe sites by author of Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond
3:00: Poe’s Loves Face-Off (Sarah Helen Whitman, Virginia Poe, and Elmira Royster)
4:00: Guided Tour of the Poe Museum
4:30: Birthday Cake with Poe’s Cousin, Dr. Harry Lee Poe
5:00: Multilingual Reading of “The Raven”
5:30: Performance direct from London by English actor Tony Parkin
6:00: Guided Tour of Poe Museum
7:00: Poe Trivia Showdown
8:00: Guided Walking Tour of Neighborhood Poe Sites with Sarah Helen Whitman
9:00: Live Music by The Blue and the Grey
10:00: Guided Tour of the Poe Museum
11:00: Victorian Seance with Poe’s Fiancee Sarah Helen Whitman
Midnight: Champagne Toast to Poe

It seems like a pretty good event aside from the face-off of actresses portraying his exes.  Yuck.  I hate living history performances, but if they must do it, why don't they have a Fanny Osgood?  She was the most famous lady in his stable.  The seance turns me a little green as well.  Can't please everyone, meaning me.

John Evangelist Walsh wrote a couple of books about Poe which I think are worth reading if you care.  Midnight Dreary is an account of the last months of Poe's life which includes a very convincing hypothesis of the circumstances that resulted in his mysterious death.  Because Poe had a reputation for terrible binge drinking, his sudden death was shrugged off as the result of an impulsive bender, however there are many details that would indicate that this is either not the case or not the whole case.  Plumes in the Dust is an account of Poe's affair with famous lady writer Fanny Osgood, who allegedly bore his child.  Both are recommendable.

I came across this old picture of Arthur, my grandmother's "disgusting" Chesapeake Bay Retriever, and laughed.  This corpulent and sad-eyed dog was a confusion for me as a child, because he was the first un-fun dog I had ever known.  Arthur spent his days looming moodily in the backyard or lumbering unpredictably through the house, knocking over children and tripping my grandmother.  She was forever treating him for fleas and ticks, which involved a hand-administered "dip," so that he always exuded a rank, chemical smell, and his rumpled coat left a sheen of poison powder on the hands.  She would always say, "Oh, don't touch him, honey. Now go wash your hands."  Poor Arthur.

My grandma sometimes made up songs about him, most of which were about how awful and pathetic he was, that she would sing as she went about her day.  It was funny because it was true, but also because we knew that she secretly loved him but would never admit it.  She often traded in the uncharitable but ultimately affectionate brand of humor that I enjoy.  She always started the song I remember with a jaunty, "Oh..." the memory of which cracks me up any time I'm reminded of it.

Thank god someone took this picture of him.  

Nick Cave

Not responsible for how this video may change your life.



& something for the older crowd.

The Tenement Museum

One of my favorite museums that I have not yet visited is the Tenement Museum in Manhattan.  It's a Civil War-era multi-family, well, tenement, that housed immigrant families for generations.  I love the mission, I love the interpretation, I love the marketing, I love the blog, I love this museum.  The way they found the building and what it turned out to be is like a fairy tale to me.  A total time-capsule, almost untouched for decades, loaded with clues and small items lost to history and found again under floorboards and inside walls and fireplaces.

You know what else I love?  While parts of the museum have been restored to various moments of the 19th and early 20th century, replicating the domiciles of people who actually lived there, other sections of the museum have been left in the state of decay that I presume they were in when the organization moved into the building.  They've been preserved to prevent further deterioration, but that's it.  I LOVE that.  I love ruins.  Why?  Who cares.  Check it out.

Yeah!  That!

Innovative Conservation at 97 Orchard

The idea of living in a large beehive of a city crammed with people and activity makes me feel anxious.  I have no starry-eyed desire for New York, and one of the only things that could possibly change my mind about that is this very museum.  It engages at least three of my Main Themes of Interest!