Oh snap indeed

My mom emailed me about this scandalousness:



Apparently, the nationwide teen favorite store dELIA*s (must respect their corporate choice of typographical branding, don't you know) is selling a t-shirt with the above image and logo! OMG!! I feel so...so...ROBBED! I cried about it for like three hours and then I went over to Bethany's house with Heather and Cisco, who has a huge never-going-to-be-consummated crush on Bethany, and we all totally freaked out some more, inevitably deciding never, ever to shop at dUMB dELIA*s ever again! That's right! Screw them!

Naw. Not even. As much as I would love to claim the image of a hand snapping and the words "Oh snap!" around it as my own, I simply cannot. It is everyone's. It's like the peace symbol. Well, not really, but hopefully you understand my meaning.

Also, thanks to Erica, I've had the Electric Company's "T-I-O-N, tion, tion, tion, tion" song in my head for THREE DAYS NOW. Help! And Beware! Do not watch the below clip if you do not wish the befall the same fate. But at the same time, I do highly suggest watching it, it's so brilliant. OMG, I'm so confused.

To get one's goat

It was P's birthday this past weekend, and in addition to the life-sized, crystal champagne glass full of his favorite bubbly, faux chinchilla coat and matching hat, and vintage rollerskates with flourescent wheels that I gave him as presents, I also adopted a goat for him, for the year, from a place called Little Meadows Farm in North Carolina. There are tons of places you can adopt animals from, but this place won me over for many reasons, including the fact that along with goats and sheep, they also have LLAMAS and ANGORA BUNNIES. ANGORA BUNNIES. The bunnies that can end up looking like this:



I had fun making a quick card for P announcing the goat gift:



P kept laughing each time he looked at the card so I guess he found something amusing about these drawings. I don't know why. They are incredibly serious goats, as you can see.



Also, while I was drawing, I am slightly embarrassed to admit, I was watching the Ridley Scott/Denzel Washington semi-disaster...no, actually, it's pretty much a total disaster...American Gangster. (That's where I got the idea to get P a chinchilla coat.) In the movie, Denzel, who is very boringly angry in the same dead-eyed, rigid expression-y way throughout the whole movie, gets a matching coat/hat chinchilla ensemble from his wife as a present. Well, this outfit gets him some unwanted attention and he ends up throwing the coat (but not the hat. What happened to the hat?) into his fireplace and then watches it, grumpily, burn, while his horrified and disappointed wife looks on. It was a very bad movie, never really an unexpected thing from Sir Ridley, unfortunately, but still.

But let's get our minds off that. I have other exciting news to report. Over the weekend, Frank and Patrick got married in L.A.! Whoop, whoop! It was all very last minute, so I didn't have enough time to jump on a jet plane and see this happen in person, which of course is a big bummer. One night, the proposal, the next day, the courthouse steps! But the next time I see them I'm going to pelt them with rice anyway, and you should, too. Heh, heh.

Graham Roumieu

This guy is hilarious. I've been clicking around on his website, cracking up to myself, a great deal today.



OK, perhaps I should have warned you: his work has a kind of dark sensibility.







But he can be kind of whimsical, too. Kind of!



Click on the below image to see the endless "dance, dance, dance!".

Putting words together

I couldn't help sharing this image I found in a vintage card shop:



I had such a moment of self-recognition when I saw it. That is EXACTLY what I look like every day when set eyes on my computer. I clasp my hands joyfully and a sort of exuberant red backdrop magically appears around me and sometimes I even say something like, "Oh, you wonderful, silly writing machine!" before I sit down and start typing away, page after page after page of my thrillingly inventive stories. Unless things aren't going so well. Well, okay, to be honest, what's more likely to happen is that I sit down, start madly chewing a toothpick, and then a small cat jumps on my lap. It's really not that exciting. There's never an exuberant red backdrop. Just a little cat. Which I must say, ain't so bad, y'all.



I know, I've posted about this before. Consider this an update! She is still incredibly, mysteriously invested in the new play I'm working on. It's not even about cats. (Hyuk, hyuk!)



I wonder if, when I'm done, I'll have to say "by Jocelyn Meinhardt...and Beatrix."

Also, I am still, and will probably always be, really angry and sad, not necessarily in that order, about David Foster Wallace's death. McSweeney's is posting memories people have written about him here. Apart from the incomprehensible human tragedy aspect of it all, there's the cap he put on his writing output by offing himself. All you have to do is read one of his essays or stories and you recognize his inimitable voice right away. And now it's gone for good. It really sucks.

This week's miscellany

I got a writing tablet last week, and its first test drive was when P. put a stylin' hairdo and moustache on a jpeg of Neil's painting. It makes me laugh because I've had the painting so long, it's entirely possible the guy could grow a very long moustache indeed. Riiight? Here's a closeup:



And while we're still in the land of the VanderVloed-Nash clan, here's the FRONT of Neil's shirt on his handsome tough-guy cousin Neil Nash. Watch out for this guy.



In other news, I am immeasurably sad about David Foster Wallace's suicide this past weekend. What the hell. I just read a nicely penned editorial about it here. It's just the most messed up thing ever. WTF. WTF.

Kingston, where Art is King

This past weekend, P. and I ventured upstate to Kingston to see one of my favorite artists in the whole wide world's latest show, which was a super cool father-son collaboration at the Kingston Museum of Contemporary Arts, aka KMOCA. Here's the postcard for it.



Neil VanderVloed and his son Jake are SILLY, FUN, MAD-TALENTED ARTISTS, PEOPLE!

Wayyyy back in the early 90s, when the internet was still just a rumor to the common people, some people still used telephones with actual cords attached to them, and urban taxi cabs were generally horse-and-buggy affairs, Neil had a show in the gallery above Flamingo East, in the East Village. This is where I first set eyes on his painting Big Guy Stepping Forward — the one that's been hanging ever so gloriously over my desk for the past 15-odd years.

It was the first real piece of art I'd ever bought, and the first time I'd ever experienced that weird, passionate art buyer feeling of "I want to LIVE with this!", "I must have it!" I even snuck back up to the darkened, empty gallery during restaurant hours a couple times while the show was still up to show it to people, I was (and am still) that nuts about it. And the plane — this plane:

— even made it into a birthday card I made for an ex-boyfriend, below. I have no idea what's really supposed to be going on in this illustration, but you can't mistake that VanderVloed-inspired flying machine. It's the same one!

It was super fun to see it on a shirt Neil made that his cousin and my former flame Neil Nash was wearing at the opening. See it, right under the collar, flying across Neil's back, this time encountering a sudden, one-cloud rainstorm?

Of course, the weekend wasn't only about Neil's brilliant work. I got to see old friends like Dawn VanderVloed and Adam Snyder and meet Dawn's preposterously cute son Dutch, and daughter and heartbreaker-in-the-making Joliet, and warm and wonderful husband Kent, and hang out with the whole awesome VanderVloed clan. And by awesome I don't just mean run-of-the-mill great. Growing up, I always had a kind of chip on my shoulder about being one of four siblings who were close, I was all like, damn, I have a cool family. Then I met the VanderVloeds and, I mean, they're even close with their cousins. They're close as siblings AND cousins. Damn! That's impressive. There was something so satisfying about seeing these guys with all their beautiful and beautifully named kids running around, in and out the art gallery, the backyard, the house....Viva la VanderVloed, is all I gots to say.

P. and I also swam in the pool at the Sky Top Motel, took a delicious nap, visited Fleisher's Grass Fed and Organic Meats and ogled the sausages, swam in the motel pool again, and went to Storm King, which I'd never been to. Not a bad way to wave farewell to the summer. Better than stumbling along a hotdog wrapper strewn beach with an empty liquor bottle crying and muttering to myself about the end of warm sunny days and swimming opportunities, which is what I'd imagined I'd be doing.

Memoir pile up

At some point this summer, I found myself wildly interested in reading a new memoir by a woman named Susanna Sonnenberg entitled Her Last Death.



I ran over to The Strand and got my hands on the last reviewer's copy! I started recommending it to my sister before I was 20 pages in! And then somewhere in there, I just lost — not interest, really, because hers is an interesting tale regardless, but faith in the narrator's voice and conviction. I felt like she was kind of whining a bit. So I told my sister, eh, don't read it after all, and I'll probably end up selling the book back to The Strand. (I know — harsh.)

But it's weird: after I finished the book, I read an interview on Amazon.com with Sonnenberg which starts:

Amazon.com: You follow a rich family tradition of writing memoirs steeped in eccentricity. Did you feel pressure to follow the familial literary path?

SS: My father, stepmother and grandfather all wrote memoirs. My stepmother has written two, both wonderful. She's taught me a lot about the difference between recounting a life and telling a story. It’s the story that’s important, if you're going to ask a reader to pay attention to it. So you better think really carefully about the way of telling. I never felt pressure to follow, but the anxiety of influence is another matter! I made a point of not looking at my father's beautiful memoir at all while I was writing mine.

This got me interested in her dad's memoir. I looked it up and got it out of the library.



Well, can I just say? Lost Property was my favorite book of the summer and perhaps the year! I've never read anything like it before or since. Sonnenberg the Elder grew up in 19 Gramercy Park, the huge, old mansion that was recently renovated on the corner of Irving Place, which in his time was full of crazy amounts of art, servants, and wealthy weirdness (and as I'm sure it continues to be). He's a highly literate lady killer who travels all over the world and dresses well and gets his dad to pay for everything but accrues debt all over the place anyway — in other words, lots of great contradictions, but also just beautiful, self-aware writing. I keep remembering a line he wrote that goes something like, "It was time for me to face myself. Being two-faced, this was difficult." I kind of get the feeling that if I'd met this guy at a party I'd probably want to smack him, but reading his highly entertaining memoir was great, great fun.

At some point I put it together that Sonnenberg the Elder is married to Dorothy Gallagher, a writer I also love! In fact, I have a quote of hers pinned up somewhere so I see it every day, I like it so much. It's from a New York Times article:

"The series of snags and calamities that Ms. Gallagher has bumped up against throughout her life — the ex-husband who carried brass knuckles, the psychiatrist who seduced her, her current husband's total paralysis — reminded me of an essay she wrote a few years ago for The Times about writing: 'Truly, life is just one damn thing after another. The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.'"

So now I'm rereading How I Came Into My Inheritance. It's still excellent.



And both How I Came Into My Inheritance and Strangers in the House have been recently released in a single volume entitled Life Stories, which is pretty cool, if you like two books squished together like that.

But it's just funny, isn't it? I don't mean to dis Susanna's book. I know — believe me, I know — it's not easy writing about your complicated relationship with your coke-sniffing mom and her sex addiction, your resulting sex addiction, and all the shenanigans that took place in tony locations like New York, London, Monte Carlo, Greece, Barbados — oh my. And she even took Gallagher's advice and wrote a good story. It's just, in this case, in my opinion, her dad and her step mom are just like, whoa. In a way, I admire this Susanna person more for the attempt to write something when she's got such crazy good scribes in her life to live up to, than for the end result.

Walk this Way

Now this is a great New York Times article, written by my old friend-in-passing David Rakoff. But I don't understand why it wasn't on the front page of all the New York editions, in a taking-up-the-entire-front-page kind of way. I'm going to post it here, and if you don't hear from me for a while, it's because I'm out on the street handing out xeroxed copies of it, too. Enjoy!

She's super fly, that's why

An image popped in my head last Friday as I was putting together a birthday box for my sister Erica, and I suddenly I knew I had no choice: I had to stop, drop, and roll over to my colored pencils and get to work pronto. Erica was the inspiration, as she is so totally super fly in ways too numerous to mention. (Well, O.K., here are some: She's beautiful. Whip smart. Incredibly insightful. Creative. Fa-Fa-Fa-Fashionable, I tell you. And phew! that's enough for now. The short list will have to suffice.) But another inspiring aspect was the fact that she'd recently bought 3 dresses in 3 different colors and sewed them together in a "I want them all, my way!" flurry of fashion-y chutzpah. So a big part of the image I saw involved the resulting dress. It also involved Pam Grier:



As well as the poster image for the movie Super Fly, which is, check it out, a color pencil drawing. (I knew colored pencils were S.F.)



The final result:



Oh my goodness, look how bad ass my sister is with Leo, her friend the A train, and an aquamarine umbrella we can all imagine might turn into a double-barrel shotgun if necessary. Which reminds me: Oh, how I wanted to draw my big sis with a big, double-barrel shotgun. But alas, that would have been so far out of character as to have been just plain wrong. Even faced with a dangerous criminal, my sister would find a way to get him/her to sit down and talk about his/her need for attention and how never knowing his/her father had perhaps contributed to a life of crime, rather than pistol-whipping him/her Pam style. That's just the non-violent way it is with this woman. And to each her own, right?

HAPPY BURFDAY, MY SISTAH!

Even frogs like to sew

How did the Japanese company that made these know perfect stickers would somehow involve frogs, cats, thread, buttons, pockets, sewing baskets, and a bunny with a bouquet of flowers? It's like a sticker dream come true.



P. got these for me when he went to one of his favorite hangouts recently: Mitsuwa. So I slapped him back by buying him this wincingly cute mug. Will you look at this thing?



It just sits there smiling at you until you turn it upside down and put some coffee in the sucker. There was a panda version, too, but interestingly, the panda lacked the bear's charisma. It's usually the other way around, I think.

And no, don't be thinking there's always such cutey cutey cuteness going on around here. Sometimes we give each other really gross, scary gifts like shrunken, taxidermied lizards, multi-tentacled, half-alive jellyfish, and other things. For serious...kind of. OK, not.

Purrrr

If only there were always old-school-ish cocktail parties in sprawling upper west side apartments going on, where one could encounter a jaw-droppingly awesome soap dish like this in one of the bathrooms:



Yes, that's what happened to me earlier this summer. I was having a great time, sipping perhaps one too many Brazilian drinks and shoving one too many Brazilian treats in my mouth. Isn't this amazing? Look at that sudsy cat! Considering how much cats notoriously hate to get wet, it's pretty amusing to imagine one in full-court bath mode. Brilliant.

Spooky city

There are all sorts of reasons to find yourself spooked in this city. Like when you're walking past the Fairway on 125th street near the river to get to some crazy new restaurant and you say to your companion, "THERE ARE RATS AROUND HERE, I JUST KNOW IT!" and your companion replies "OH GOODIE, RATS ARE CUTE!" and then you see A BIG HAIRY, GREASY ONE and your heart stops because you know it means 100 others just like it are milling around so you run shrieking into the dining establishment before a scary and assuredly life changing rat battle ensues.

OR

You find yourself strolling down First Avenue, uptown in the 40s, one night, having just enjoyed a dinner at a Turkish restaurant that would sadly and inexplicably close a few days later despite the fact that this place made you fervently decide you absolutely LOVE Turkish food, when suddenly, you look to your left and GASP WITH HORROR because something incredibly scary and dramatic is happening in the park near the UN! Oh my god!! And you might have to click on the image below to see what I mean.



"CALM DOWN, THAT'S JUST ST. GEORGE SLAYING THE DRAGON," your companion says, but you're still in shock and can only mutter "WHAT? WHY? WHO?" In response your companion yawns and basically tells you to "just bleeping google it." When you finally get around to doing just that, you realize this particular "mammoth statue" is actually called the Good Defeats Evil monument, and then it's like ohhhhhhhh, that's why it's a good thing to have right next to the UN.

It's still really spooky though, when you look at it at night, whether or not you know what it is.

Bizzy the Great

I just got back from a lovely week in Atlanta, Georgia, where I went to visit my dad, stepmom, and brother Max, and hang out with my sisters Brook and Erica, who'd also made the trip, not to mention the endlessly adorable and entertaining Henry and Hazy, and GO SWIMMING! YAY, SWIMMING! But oh my god. I lost my camera. Actually, I'm pretty sure it was NOOOO. YES! Stolen. In a playground, of all godforsaken places. And the worst part is the fact that I had just that day taken what I thought was a really great picture of one of my favorite beasts on the planet: Bismark, my dad's long-haired daschund. Oh, well. Here is an alternate picture, with an accompanying human foot.



Bismarck is a really cool dog. And not just because he loves green grapes and bananas and burrows under things with great zeal as all good daschunds do. He also inspired this portrait that Brook painted a few years ago. It's one of my favorite works of art anywhere, anytime. For serious. Every time I see it I practically start waving the cold cash bills at my pops in the hopes of claiming it as my own. I mean, just look at this thing.



Anyway, enjoy. And don't worry: The credit card I bought the camera with is reimbursing me entirely for the lost camera. Crazy credit card company. Damn thieves.

Smug berries

In the New York Times' Science section today, there's a lot to be thrown by...like the article about the possibly sooner-than-we-think end of the world, the fate of Magellanic penguins, or the guy and the worms. But what really stopped me in my tracks was this illustration for a query about which has better nutritional value, whole fruit or dried. Look at those cute strawberries. Victoria Williams is the artist, and she did an awesome job, eh? I wish more things in the Times had as much wit and charm. Oh, snap!

Grumpin' around at H & M

Now, far be it from me to say anything at all about fashion and the fashion biz. As much as I love fabric and sewing, I ain't no fashion plate. I can't even, nor do I ever want to be able to know how to, walk in high heels. I know, horrors!

But some time ago I posted about what I thought would be the happy marriage of Marimekko and H&M. And this spring — yes, I delayed posting about this, THAT'S how crotchety I got over it — P. and I were out at a restaurant when he said, "Did you notice the Marimekko stuff is at H&M?" Why no, I hadn't. So after dinner we stopped by the Soho store below Spring street, and after looking around and around again for the good stuff (it must be here somewhere...it must be...) I grabbed a hat, a couple shirts, and a bathing suit and went to try them on in the dressing room.



P. took this very accurate photograph of my state of mind: GA-RUMPY! Why? Well, not only did they not choose such great patterns. Which is really hard to believe since there are so many amazing Marimekko patterns to choose from — you really have to be seriously eyeball, brain, and sense challenged to pick crappy ones. But they made the clothing in yucky, cheapo-seeming fabric, and then jacked the prices on them. So you're not even getting what you came into H&M in the first place for: a good deal!

I could also write a long screed about the what-the-heck-is-H&M-thinking? bathing suit situation, but I think I'll hold back and just say bold prints on badly designed H&M bathing suits no looky good and fit even worse.

Of course, after my delirious post last year, my sister Erica, who is a virtual weathervane of all things fashion said, "They're not going to choose the good stuff, you know." And like the true fabric addict I am, I just thought, Now why is she all pessimistic? It's going to be FABULOUS! FABULOUS! So FABULOUS! etc.

I know: This is a very sad story, and I deeply apologize if it's inspired any tears or ruined anyone's afternoon. Remember, there's plenty of Marimekko stuff to pillage on ebay and other places, or if you want to throw down serious bank, you can always go fly off to Finland or drag your butt up to the upper East side and make your eyes pop out of your head over the cost of some dinky little change purse or whatnot. As for me, I — well, I don't know what I'm going to do, but I think I'll be OK. I think so.

COOOOKIE

As if taking on the Chimp face to face at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Assoc. dinner wasn't enough, Stephen Colbert (MY HERO!) was also brave enough recently to go nose-to-nose with none other than....well, check it out for yourself. Wow. It's hard for me to talk about Mr. Colbert without SWWWWOOOOON. Oh, excuse me. I feel sort of lightheaded. Whoa. OK, bye. Have a nice day. And thanks Erica, for sending me this!

Curiouser and curiouser

Here is the immensely adorable one-and-a-half-year-old Sofia.

Who I hung out with recently, in an apartment that boasted a view like this:

Not to mention Patti. Patti! And her marito italiano molto eccellente Umberto. (Not sure if that's correct, I did only take something like seven hundred and seventy seven years of Italian and still only know how to say "I'm hungry!" [Ho fame, sucka!] and something that's apparently not even really "Shut up!" [Stai zito, biotch!]) 

Sofia was totally into my tote bag and the Metrocard wallet, nail file, and box of tea-tree oil toothpicks she found in there. Was she interested in the beauteous Australian Aboriginal fabric I'd just purchased? Uh, no. What about the book about the whole world going to hell in a hand basket? Not really.

Soon after this picture was taken la bambina ate several tiny fistfuls of ravioli and then fell asleep in the arms of Mr. Molto Eccellente, after a diverting stroll up and down the hallway with her proud mommy Patti. Così perfetto!

Surprisingly macho fabric

The other day I came across some seriously crazy fabric at this oft-visited site, and bought it so fast my keyboard started smoking. (I'm serious! I ran over to the sink and dumped a pitcher of iced tea on it! And then the keyboard said, really gruffly, "Don't do that again!" and I was confused about whether it meant buy fabric so fast or dump iced tea on it. Of course, I'd been up several days without sleep and...ba ha ha ha, I wish shopping online resulted in such shenanigans.)

Here's the description of the fabric, with the picture beneath it:

100% Cotton
56" width/36" repeat
Designed by SALDO SWEDEN

Inspired by the famous chase scene in Bullit with Steve McQueen, this design diagrams shots from the movie using symbols. Red is Steve McQueen, stars are gunshots, arrows mean movement. Triangles are explosions, hearts mean love, crosses mean bodies, and so on. Great conversation starter. Light blue, white, and red. Order sample photo doesn't show details. We have 1 yard available.



Great conversation starter indeed! Whaaat? I mean, how often does one watch a movie and think, "Ah yes, I've thought of a new project. I'll make some fabric out of that movie I just saw!"? Here's the stuff up close:



Look at all those little Steve McQueens and explosions and movement. Here's a slightly better shot, maybe:



What am I going to do with it, you wonder? Well, you see...I have no idea.

Mark and Emily's wedding prez

I mentioned a wedding I went to recently down in hot, hot Texas a couple posts ago...well, the bride and groom are back in the city and P. and I had dinner with them just this very past weekend. These guys are one of my favorite couples to have brazenly silly and cocktail-ridden dinner parties with, and as I've never considered myself to be such a huge embracer of the coupley-er sides of coupledom (like indulging in unabashedly coupley dinner parties, for instance), that's quite an admission on my part! Well, tut tut for me.

They're super creative people; Mark designed the excellent poster for my play Six Available Men...

...and Emily penned an ingenious children's book about a lost elephant, among many other special things. When you're in their apartment, it's tempting to just walk around slowly looking at all the juicy images and fascinating book spines and beautiful pillows. So I knew as part of their wedding gift, I had to make them a drawing.

It's the one I hinted about in this post. (Click on the image if you'd like to see it larger.) I had a guest artist help me with the graffiti, but he shall remain nameless due to Sir Bloomby Bloomberg's recent zealous attempts to send anyone even thinking about graffiti to the jailhouse. Not today, Bloomby!

But more importantly: Congratulations, E & M! Your wedding was spectacular, and so are you.

Shameless copycat

I am a major copycat and I'm not afraid to admit it. As a result, I will write the rest of this post in meows, since that is my true native language. Or not. O.K., not!

One of my habitual check-ins on the web is with the talented and beautiful author of The Secret Language of Sleep, at her long held online diary, evany's extended cake mix. Beware: This woman is super funny and stylin', and you might end up trolling ebay in search of, for instance, an awesome plate, when you had every intention of spending that part of the afternoon writing a brilliant and persuasive letter to Mayor Bloomberg urging him not to rescind the new 6-day schedule for New York public libraries, instead. A very similar thing happened to me recently. (I bought one for myself, too!) But when you take a look at this thing, can you really blame me? This bird is crazy hypnotizing.



I really don't know what I'd do if I were, say, served dinner on this plate, and then discovered the bird slowly as I finished my spinach and mashed potatoes. I'd probably totally flip out, man!