"If You Reading This" (Which You Are Not)

"fuck you," title of Zoe Strauss' show, yeah?

Highlights from the New York Photo Festival 2008

Simon Norfolk's lecture on the juncture of modern warfare and 18th-century Romantic philosophy and art.

Jan Kempenaer's images of abstract communist monuments in the former Yugoslavia.

Jan Banning's portraits of bureaucrats in their offices around the world.

An Image that Haunts and Arrests Me, from Camera Lucida

Savorgnan de Brazza with two sailors [title?], by Nadar, 1882

My Sleep Schedule is F--ked*

This morning I woke up at 5:30 a.m. I got up, ate some grapes, took some pictures of the 5:30 light (which, by the way, is an eerie, but strangely lovely, shade of alien blue), read some more of Camera Lucida, and wrote some possible lines to potential poems. Then I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.

I have problems with Barthes. Lots of problems. Perhaps one can only realize this in the soft pastel hues of predawn, when the world has not yet achieved full consciousness and so the mind is able to get ahead. Studium, punctum, unary. What is theory but the futile, if not vain, attempt to impose scientific objectivity onto one's subjectivity, to dignify one's own idiosyncratic experiences of the world by attaching them to grandiose or arcane terminology and then providing one's own convenient definitions for those terms?

But I love theory. All poets do.
--

I can't remember if I washed my hair in the shower.

I thought I did, but then, when I discovered my hair to be stringy and limp after it dried, I realized that I hadn't.

*I'm cleaning up my language.

Reunion (almost)

Last night I had a dream that I ran into Kal Penn at a party. He was lanky and dressed in oversized T-shirts, the way I remembered him from high school, and running around the party, toasting people and making everyone laugh. I was sitting on a low wall, a room divider sort of thing, when he came toward me. I was very nervous that he had no idea who I was, but I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him a little anyway. Then I said, "Kal, do you remember me? I was your first friend at Governor's School." He squinted, looking at me harder. "Oh yeah!" he said. "I do remember! How are you?" Then he picked me up onto his back, so we were piggybacking, and he ran up and down the hallways, hollering nonsensical things. He could barely carry my weight, though, and I kept sliding off his back. Everybody just stared at us like we were the loudest idiots around, but I never felt more proud.

I think the dream may have resulted from watching "Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay" not once, but twice, in the theater recently. No, I'm not ashamed to make that knowledge public either.

Patti Smith Conversation

-I kept wanting to dye her moustache.
-Yeah, she's not a very attractive woman, is she?
-She looked pretty good when she was young. Like in that photograph where she's naked and holding onto a radiator or whatever.
-Everybody looks good when they're--
-Naked?
-Holding onto a radiator.

She Has Her Own Bag

The other day at the grocery store, I was in the checkout line with three or four items, and the teenage boy cashier told the teenage boy bagger before he was even finished scanning my items, "She already has her own bag." I did. I had my green Whole Foods bag on my arm [note: I wasn't at Whole Foods]. But I'm still not really in the habit of using it, because I never remember to stop the bagger before he or she starts bagging. It always dawns on me a bit late, and then I end up worrying about whether or not they're going to toss away that plastic bag I tried so hard to prevent them from giving me. But this cashier was on the ball. One can only imagine he also cares about the environment! He and I even looked at each other for a moment and exchanged big smiles. There was a moment of recognition about our green connection. A reusable grocery bag connection, if you will. Then we looked at the bagger and he was smiling too. It was a beautiful thing.

In other news, B is having a sharp pain beneath his ribcage. For a few weeks, he thought it was heartburn, so we went shopping for Tums and stuff, which he began popping like candy. But now he thinks it's his gall bladder. We were walking past this building near the hospital yesterday where pro-life people are always outside protesting on the weekends, and he said, "That's where my gastroenterologist is." I looked. "The abortion clinic?" "Yeah," he said. I guess there isn't going to be a baby.

Picture Perfect

The weather these past two days has been ridiculously gorgeous. The cherry trees are all abloom and the grass here has been newly mowed and the fountains are gushing. One can hardly believe it's Jersey. Despite all this rare, seasonal perfection, I locked myself in my apartment yesterday immediately after work to start and finish an art review. Of course it pained me to do this, but such is the fate of a person with a full-time job and one week to write a review (I saw the show last Saturday, during the last hour in which the gallery was open, with art handlers propping bubble-wrapped paintings in front of the pieces, no less. Hey, still looking! Gallery still open! But I didn't say anything, because I had a friend who used to be a sort of art handler/office manager type and he was positively shat upon, so I do know better than to make their lives any harder.) Normally when I'm stressed out and there's a deadline looming, I eat crap. Last night I wolfed down, like, half a box of Triscuits and cut the side of my mouth in the process. They're sharp! But luckily, before I left work, J and I had split an avocado, a pear, and a whole carton of strawberries, so I did have some vitamins in me. I felt so clean--verging on saintly, in fact. Tomorrow, I'm back on the train to review another show, which I forgot to see last Saturday when I saw the other one. What was I thinking?

On Wednesday night, I went to a fancy sit-down Asian American alumni dinner at my alma mater. There were a lot of young doctors in pin-striped black suits there. And a lot of big engagement rings. Apparently, everyone got the memo but me. I saw an old friend of mine who I haven't seen in a decade who just finished her residency. She said, "From now on, I'm doing an 80-hour week, no more." It kind of made me feel like a total slacker. "You look great!" I said. (She did.) "You look great!" she said. (I would've looked even better if I were wearing a pin-striped black suit and had a big rock on my finger.) And then we hugged good-bye. I like that: short and sweet. No false promises of keeping in touch or getting together. She didn't even introduce me to her husband. I think that's keeping it real.