Practice, practice, practice

People who know me well tend to think I attempt too much--always writing, musicking, promoting, working, more musicking; planning, planning, planning. Even my "relax alone" nights consist of something yummy for dinner, a little something for dessert, and four hours of movies.

The trip to Spain has completely heightened the intensity of my life's needs and wants. Right now I'm so stressed with determination and purpose and trying to get back to some imagined state of being that I almost can't stop and breathe.

I'm realizing that truly the only way, step by step, for me to get to where I need to be mentally is to stop.

Just...stop.

And breathe.

In essence, I'm trying to re-teach myself how to sit in a living room chair and look around. My feet are propped on my turquoise footstool, and my upper limbs lie slack on the the chair's worn wooden arms. Nice pictures on the walls. There's a rip in the tooled leather of the old 40s chair. Gee, look at the thread hanging off of the old 30s armchair. My toenail polish is scuffed.

I'm teaching myself how to sit quietly and simply look at my immediate sourroundings; not because they need cleaning or reorganizing or anything need be done with them, but just to notice they are there. Kind of like I do when I go hiking in the woods, only I don't need to use gas, and I don't need to get up there before the heat of mid-day, and I don't need to take water or exert anything at all.

I'm teaching myself a small but significant meditation that will allow me to gently re-focus on just being, and not doing. If my life can't be simple, than at least I can temporarily train my brain to be. There's a singular glory in the act of intentionally NOT accomplishing anything.

I'm going to start making a regular habit of doing nothing. And I mean, NOTHING.

Excuse me....I've got to go some stuff. Err, I mean, I've got to go do no stuff.

We can't go on together...at procrastination time

Today I lay around a lot. I find it funny and a little sad that, not through any fault of their own, the mere presence of other people can actually hinder my activities instead of increase them when I am feeling I need some alone time. I didn't want to stay in my room today, but somehow I felt that I had to. Argh. All I wanted to do was everything I wanted to do, yet instead I crankily lay in bed and read self-help books. Good god, get over yourself, woman!

The good side is that I got some things done today, two minor things actaully, that I've been putting off for ages. I got to sleep early enough last night that this morning when I awoke I got enough time alone to play some SIMS and do some mending that I've been putting off for like a year. I now have like three new outfits again as a result of my mending mania. Woohoo!

I also FINALLY got the rubber hosing onto my new fuel pump with the aid of some canola oil. Hopefully it won't catch me on fire when I try to start the valiant after I re-install it. Maybe I should have the fire department stand by just in case?

If I can get Digby running and air in his tires, I at least have a better chance of selling him soon. Of course as soon as I was going outside to go install the new fuel pump, it started raining. Whatcha gonna do?

I need to sell the Valiant right away. I need to hock everything and just find a place already, no matter how much debt I accrued while I was in Spain. It's now a burning, yearning need within me to be able to do things like read my books and study in my living room and sit there for two hours trying to figure out my applications for financial aid, or to clean at midnight and not watch cable or have to talk to anyone for like maybe TWO whole days. Heehee. It's funny how much my need for having and creating within my own space has increased exponentially during the past six months or so.

How I see my life right now.

Now that I'm back

So now that I've returned from my big Spain trip, I'm seeing my life in a sharper reality. Getting away from the everyday can really force about changes that one may not have even known existed!

1) I need to pare down my spending and my belongings.

2) My own space is precious, as is my time alone.

3) Life is too short to waste on not having a great time.

4) I thrive on vocalized positive reinforcement, love and admiration, and need to seek out those who give it to me.

5)Negativity and depression are not good for me to be around, for it's all too easy to succumb myself.

6) My body is dire need of a health makeover. The weight and the knee and the teeth and the rest of me all need to be exercised, polished, cared for.

7) My town is a wonderful place to live; it has much that makes me happy.

8) My job values me and will continue to reward me and bring me up into its fold for as long as I desire. Even though ultimately, I desire a creativity-driven profession, it still makes me happy.

9) Some friends I thought I would want to see I really don't feel like talking to. I feel guarded about telling them what's happening with me. Others I can't wait to spill my heart out to.

10) I need to take very good care of ME.



And later...trip details!!!

Startling realization

I'm terrified to go on this trip.

Many reasons, oh so many reasons...most of them deep-seated; a few of them, trivial and only bred out of ignorance.

Don't get me wrong; I'm excited and I'm definitely going. I just wonder what's going to happen to me while I'm gone and what'll happen to me while I'm there; ditto for my relationships. I mean, I worry about losing my head while trying to speak Spanish and getting very frustrated ni the more rural sections of Catalonia, but that's something I will just have to deal with. The stuff I'm really talking about is deeper, and seemingly perpetual.

My worst fears of abandonment DO surface at times like these. In my deep-down, secret, not-let-on-to-anyone self, I am frightened to death that people will turn on me if I'm gone. It's the worst sort of paranoia and it makes the usually healthy me a complete wreck. Sometimes, if I give it enough leeway in my mind, I will even take steps to make those fears occur, apparently out of some bizarre form of "self-preservation." Luckily I've curbed that somewhat over the past ten years, since I've built a home for myself in Austin and have gone on lots of far-away trips. But still, it happens.

Here's the deepest stuff, which I know is ridiculous, but still can become very real to me when I'm at my most vulnerable:

I worry that my belongings (what's left of them) will be out on the lawn and the locks changed. Hey, it's happened to me before.

I worry that I'll come to work and find out that my access code doesn't work because they got rid of me while (or because) I was absent. It's also happened before.

I worry that my cats will have died. That hasn't happened before.

I worry that something will happen to my mother while I couldn't get to her. That kind of happened before, with my father.

It's so funny, because overall I'm healthy and happy, but these fears resurface with a vengeance shortly before I do something kind of big. I forgot until today that this is how I get before I go on all of my dramatic journeys.

Hmmmm.....

Some Enchanted morning...

I had the most amazing time with Steve this weekend. We drove out to Enchanted Rock and it was truly idyllic. The cactii were in full, riotous flower, so much so that they appeared as out-of-place rosebushes set in the middle of a field of cows, brambles, and native grass. One weekend later or one weekend earlier, things would not have been so lush; so utterly wild and paradisical.

We went early, so we were able to get to the top of the batholith and find our own stone recliners. Quiet. Cool breeze. Hazy mountainous vista, and us sitting there with legs splayed and not a care in the world. Aquamarine-colored lizards scuttled by; tender succulents bloomed out of the cracks in the pink granite. High winds rustled in our ears. True, occasional sounds of civilization were there (other people, distant trucks), but they fell onto deaf ears as Steve and I happily lost ourselves in a relaxed, whimsical conversation and the sight of a tiny jumping spider with a bright blue body. We stayed until the midday sun drove us to exlopre further--crevasses and vistas, and eventually, wend our way down the rock back to the car.

Every Saturday morning should be like that.

Like the omnipotent sugarplums....

These images are dancing in my head:

A whole month since my last post?!? Good god.

Wow--it sure has been a while but overall, that's a wonderful thing. Hooray! I've got my plane tickets and hotel stay for Spain all taken care of, album plans are in the works.

However minute or multiple, I've got some decent goals, aspirations and inspirations. I'm getting awfully tired of spinning my wheels--of fantasizing and what-iffing, of planning and then being disappointed because it's not happening. I'm sick of saying and not doing.

And so, I've decided to 'do.'

I love the feeling of forging ahead on my own, both literally and figuratively. I'm looking forward to taking a little local train to some Spanish village and wandering around out towards the edge of town, maybe even off the road onto more wild terrain. I'll be in the mountains though, and since I'm not the best climber, I'd probably better stick to more populated areas. Unless I get a pair of hiking poles and bring them with me...we'll see how things unfold.

On the more depressing side, I've got some deeper stuff in my life that I'm not satisfied with and need to make decisions on, and I don't think I can ignore them for much longer.

Time to talk to Ms. Shrinky-dink.

Sol LeWitt oBit

Sol LeWitt was a contemporary of my cousin, Allan mcCollum. I'd read a fair amount about him only recently, and I'm glad I did.



Sol LeWitt, Master of Conceptualism, Dies at 78

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: April 9, 2007


Sol LeWitt, whose deceptively simple geometric sculptures and drawings and ecstatically colored and jazzy wall paintings established him as a lodestar of modern American art, died yesterday in New York. He was 78 and lived mostly in Chester, Conn.

The cause was complications from cancer, said Susanna Singer, a longtime associate.

Mr. LeWitt helped establish Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant movements of the postwar era. A patron and friend of colleagues young and old, he was the opposite of the artist as celebrity. He tried to suppress all interest in him as opposed to his work; he turned down awards and was camera-shy and reluctant to grant interviews. He particularly disliked the prospect of having his photograph in the newspaper.

Typically, a 1980 work called “Autobiography” consisted of more than 1,000 photographs he took of every nook and cranny of his Manhattan loft, down to the plumbing fixtures, wall sockets and empty marmalade jars, and documented everything that had happened to him in the course of taking the pictures. But he appeared in only one photograph, which was so small and out of focus that it is nearly impossible to make him out.

His work — sculptures of white cubes, or drawings of geometric patterns, or splashes of paint like Rorschach patterns — tested a viewer’s psychological and visual flexibility. See a line. See that it can be straight, thin, broken, curved, soft, angled or thick. Enjoy the differences. The test was not hard to pass if your eyes and mind were open, which was the message of Mr. LeWitt’s art.

He reduced art to a few of the most basic shapes (quadrilaterals, spheres, triangles), colors (red, yellow, blue, black) and types of lines, and organized them by guidelines he felt in the end free to bend. Much of what he devised came down to specific ideas or instructions: a thought you were meant to contemplate, or plans for drawings or actions that could be carried out by you, or not.

Sometimes these plans derived from a logical system, like a game; sometimes they defied logic so that the results could not be foreseen, with instructions intentionally vague to allow for interpretation. Characteristically, he would then credit assistants or others with the results. With his wall drawing, mural-sized works that sometimes took teams of people weeks to execute, he might decide whether a line for which he had given the instruction “not straight” was sufficiently irregular without becoming wavy (and like many more traditional artists, he became more concerned in later years that his works look just the way he wished). But he always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input of others — their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever — remained part of the art.

In so doing, Mr. LeWitt gently reminded everybody that architects are called artists — good architects, anyway — even though they don’t lay their own bricks, just as composers write music that other people play but are still musical artists. Mr. LeWitt, by his methods, permitted other people to participate in the creative process, to become artists themselves.


A Dry Humor

To grasp his work could require a little effort. His early sculptures were chaste white cubes and gray cement blocks. For years people associated him with them, and they seemed to encapsulate a remark he once made: that what art looks like “isn’t too important.” This was never exactly his point. But his early drawings on paper could resemble mathematical diagrams or chemical charts. What passed for humor in his art tended to be dry. “Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value” (1968), an object he buried in the garden of Dutch collectors, was his deadpan gag about waving goodbye to Minimalism. He documented it in photographs, in one of which he stands at attention beside the cube. A second picture shows the shovel; a third, him digging the hole.

Naturally, he was regularly savaged by conservative critics. By the 1980s, however, he moved from Manhattan to Spoleto, Italy, seeking to get away from the maelstrom of the New York art world. (He had had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978.) His art underwent a transformation. Partly it grew out of what he saw in Italy. But it was all the more remarkable for also proceeding logically from the earlier work.

Eye-candy opulence emerged from the same seemingly prosaic instructions he had come up with years before. A retrospective in 2000, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, concluded with some of these newly colorful wall drawings. (Mr. LeWitt always called them drawings, even when the medium became acrylic paint.)

His description for a wall drawing, No. 766 — “Twenty-one isometric cubes of varying sizes each with color ink washes superimposed” — sounded dry as could be: but then you saw it and there were playful geometries in dusky colors nodding toward Renaissance fresco painting. “Loopy Doopy (Red and Purple),” a vinyl abstraction 49 feet long, was like a psychedelic Matisse cutout, but on the scale of a drive-in movie. Other drawings consisted of gossamer lines, barely visible, as subtle as faintly etched glass.

Some people who had presumed that Mr. LeWitt’s Conceptualism was arcane and inert were taken aback. He began making colored flagstone patterns, spiky sculptural blobs and ribbons of color, like streamers on New Year’s Eve, often as enormous decorations for buildings around the world. It was as if he had devised a latter-day kind of Abstract Expressionism, to which, looking back, his early Conceptualism had in fact been his response.

Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, on Sept. 9 1928, the son of immigrants from Russia. His father, a doctor, died when he was 6, after which he moved with his mother, a nurse, to live with an aunt in New Britain, Conn. His mother took him to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. He would draw on wrapping paper from his aunt’s supply store.


Finding His Way

At Syracuse University, he studied art before he was drafted for the Korean War in 1951, during which he made posters for the Special Services. After his service he moved to New York to study illustration and cartooning. For a while he did paste-ups, mechanicals and photostats for Seventeen magazine. He spent a year as a graphic designer in the office of a young architect named I. M. Pei.

Meanwhile, he painted, or tried to. For a while, he hired a model to draw from life and copied old masters. He felt lost. An aspiring artist in New York during the waning days of Abstract Expressionism, an art squarely about individual touch, he thought he had no particular touch of his own and therefore nothing to add.

But then he took a job at the book counter at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met other young artists with odd jobs there, including Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold. He noticed the nascent works of Flavin and also absorbed early art by Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. Minimalism, a yet-unnamed movement, seemed like a fresh start. Mr. LeWitt was meanwhile intrigued by Russian Constructivism, with its engineering aesthetic, and by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs, sequential pictures of people and animals in motion, which he came across one day in a book that somebody had left in his apartment. From all this he saw a way forward. It was to go backward.

He decided to reduce art to its essentials, “to recreate art, to start from square one,” he said, beginning literally with squares and cubes. But unlike some strict Minimalists, Mr. LeWitt was not interested in industrial materials. He was focused on systems and concepts — volume, transparency, sequences, variations, stasis, irregularity and so on — which he expressed in words that might or might not be translated into actual sculptures or photographs or drawings. To him, ideas were what counted.

At the time, linguistic theorists were talking about words and mental concepts as signs and signifiers. Mr. LeWitt was devising what you might call his own grammar and syntax of cubes and spheres, a personal theory of visual signs. It was theoretical, but not strictly mathematical. Partly it was poetic. He began with propositions for images, which became something else if they were translated into physical form by him or other people.

He also liked the inherent impermanence of Conceptual art, maybe because it dovetailed with his lack of pretense: having started to make wall drawings for exhibitions in the 1960s, he embraced the fact that these could be painted over after the shows. (Walls, unlike canvases or pieces of paper, kept the drawings two-dimensional, he also thought.) He wasn’t making precious one-of-a-kind objects for posterity, he said. Objects are perishable. But ideas need not be.

“Conceptual art is not necessarily logical,” he wrote in an article in Artforum magazine in 1967. “The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.”


Relishing Collaboration

To the extent that Mr. LeWitt’s work existed in another person’s mind, he regarded it as collaborative. Along these lines he became especially well known in art circles for his generosity, often showing with young artists in small galleries to give them a boost; helping to found Printed Matter, the artists’ organization that produces artists’ books; and trading works with other, often needier artists, whose art he also bought. Some years back he placed part of what had become, willy-nilly through this process, one of the great private collections of contemporary art in the country on long-term loan to the Wadsworth Atheneum, his childhood museum and the one that again was in his neighborhood after he moved, in the mid-’80s, from Spoleto to Chester. He lived there with his wife, Carol, who survives him, along with their two daughters, Sofia, who lives in New York and works at the Paula Cooper Gallery, and Eva, a senior at Bard College.

It was said that Mr. LeWitt didn’t like vacations. His pleasure was being in his studio. He explained that he had worked out his life as he wanted it to be, so why take a vacation from it?

To the sculptor Eva Hesse, he once wrote a letter while she was living in Germany and at a point when her work was at an impasse. “Stop it and just DO,” he advised her. “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” He added: “You are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work, so do it. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.”

Gary Garrels, a curator who organized Mr. LeWitt’s retrospective for San Francisco in 2000, said: “He didn’t dictate. He accepted contradiction and paradox, the inconclusiveness of logic.”

He took an idea as far as he thought it could go, then tried to find a way to proceed, so that he was never satisfied with a particular result but saw each work as a proposition opening onto a fresh question. Asked about the switch he made in the 1980’s — adding ink washes, which permitted him new colors, along with curves and free forms — Mr. LeWitt responded, “Why not?”

He added, “A life in art is an unimaginable and unpredictable experience.”

Lower the crank, Caroline

Today started out pretty smooth-sailing. Now I just want to hole up and not talk to people.

Thanks, mom. For a nun, your trust and faith in people needs a bit of work.

Grrrr--but also great.

Blog-reading isn't always a good thing. I just found out that Rachel has changed her mind about moving back, AGAIN. So she won't be here in June,and I'm very, very disappointed. Of course that's why she posted that blog--she knows I subscribe to it and always takes a less direct approach. Ugh.

This is why I don't blog on Myspace much anymore. Anyway.

Also found out today that my rent's rising by almost $100.00 a month. So much for the raise I just got at work; this makes it pretty much null and void. Of course, it'll be good practice because it's going to go up when I move anyhow, but still--makes saving a bit harder. Grrr.

People sometimes make me feel very tired. Which is more often than not a euphamism for how I'm *really* feeling.

BUT--my weekend was still wonderful! I went to eat Persian food at Alborz with Ashleigh on Friday evening, and the entire experience was amazing. And on this coldest, rainiest of April Saturdays in Texas, I awoke early and met Steve and Will to head over to Trailer Space for goodie-browsing. I bought some great stuff from Mike Mariconda (back issues of PUNK magazine, anyone?), and afterward there followed migas at Juan In a Million (but I was cranky by then). At home, I puttered for simply HOURS--I went through all my 45s and 78s and records; I scanned pretty pictures of Marilyn Monroe; I messed about with my guitar and did some computer-ish stuff.

Last night Steve made this amazing supper of baked salmon with asparagus and basil sauce, peppered goat cheese and hefty bread. Candles and everything--ahhh! I felt happy and alive. We drank a bottle of white wine, listened to records, read back issues of CREEM, talked (of course), watched some film shorts. By the way, Todd Haynes' "Superstar" about Karen Carpenter is nothing short of brilliant--but I unintentionally drew the line at his creepy faux stop-action vignettes. Gaaaaahhhh.

This morning was sleepy late, and coffee with discussions on the Old Bailey Courthouse, which was one of the central courthouses in London as Steve described to me. Even better, they have a website (www.oldbaileyonline.org)that contains verbatim transcriptions and courtcase notes dating back to the 1670s. For an hour and a half I read numerous court cases of bigamy, sodomy, and rape ('cause I'm pervy, I guess). Time after time I read of the acquittals of men for these transgressions, and death by hanging and burning for women who did the same.

I know that history shows this to be true, but seriously...it was quite another thing to see written over and over about how the woman was of unsavory character and the man was deemed of good character, so undoubtedly he could not have committed the crime brought forth towards him.

I also shopped at Whole Foods with a shocking amount of clumsiness (I knocked like 3 things over today, what was that about?)--but came away satisfied and in good food stead to watch "Antonia's Line", which kept me laughingly, cryingly engrossed for nearly two hours.

Now I'm watching "Shortbus", an indie film about a bunch of horny New York hipsters. It's almost like a porno, in fact--I'm waiting for the plot to hit but haven't seen much yet other than an approach that seems to say: "Look at the native New Yorker hipsters. See how they have sex and videotape themselves! Aren't they fascinating? And aren't they HOT?"

Hmmmm....

The Week in Review

In the past week, I have

1) Gone 'pescetarian' again. No meat meat.
2) Played a kick-ass garage rock show.
3) Reinforced my desire to start a new musical project.
4) Scheduled tentative rehearsals for new members of said project.
5) Made a tape of all my Spain songs (sans three I still have to record).
6) Gotten one of the worst blisters I've ever had (ewwww...pus!!!.)
7) Burnt 450 calories' worth of cardio at the gym, twice.
8) Spent the most glorious weekend with Steve.
9) Made myself crazy at work.
10) Missed my mommy.
11) Seen approximately 18 minutes of Borat, which is the ultimate in loatheworthy and underscores everything that is wrong with our country--not by content, but by its very existence. I sent it back to Netflix with a stern admonishment.
12) Read a third of the new Nancy Cunard biography. Good content, bad writing.

Back in the saddle again.

My crud is gone. The cough is almost gone. I went to the gym and cleaned my room and I am going to get lots of overtime for the next couple of months while Rebecca's gone on FMLA. I have decided I am okay with singing "War" as long as I have a tambourine that I can shake around while I do it. A tambourine will give me a false sense of confidence and allow me to do something other than grip the mic like Public Enemy when I sing about "young men's dashed hopes."

I've got to get some songs together so that Steve can put them on a CD for me. I have a bunch and I think I'm just gong to make a big tape and use that.

This week I'm hoping to hit the gym a lot and attend a couple of rehearsals for the show on Friday. I've only got to find out where they are, now.

I'm currently devouring "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?" about the Carter Family.

How can I resist?

Who wouldn't want to live in these places, advertised as such?

1br - *****Nice Place & U Still Have Beer $$$$$$*****

$499 / 1br - If You Have A Broken Lease or Eviction Call me

1br - Like a Wallet on the Side Walk this will be picked up quick

Where my heart is....

I just watched the Carter Family documentary from PBS.

Wow.

As far as documentaries go, I've seen better, but to their credit no film could really tell their story. I said, NO FILM COULD REALLY TELL THEIR STORY. Ya hear that, Hollywood? How about you don't even try?

Anyway. As I watched it, I felt the familiar visceral tug of yearning, excitement, and blind determination roil and rise within me until they bubbled out so fast I had to pause the recording and pace back and forth, trying to gain control of my thoughts again.

What I want, well...it's been done before, I know. There will always be those that do it better than I. But still, I know in my heart that it is what I love--all other possibilities fade in comparison.

I need to shout out to the world my love of music and the soul-deep magic it brings to me.

I need to write.

I need to make music and the history of it a very central part of my life. If I don't, I will feel as if I have let myself down. I know this in my heart. I want this so badly for my life that I am fighting back tears as I write this silly blog.

I must immerse my life in the two. Writing. Music. Make music of my writing. Write about my music. Write about my life and the constant juxtaposition of the two.
I must not get caught up in whether this man or that man is giving me the love I deserve, whether this girl likes me or whether I got a good review or if I'm overweight or if I'm broke. None of that matters.


I have a good start, as I have been darting in and out of this knowledge for almost twenty years. I also have been dallying with the dance of life and love,and that's all well and good...but most of all I need to ensure that I do not lose sight of my goal. I must continue to write articles about the things that I love, no matter how trivial they may sometimes seem; no matter how swamped my teleconferences and numerous daily duties get.

I must get my own space again, physically, where I can delve into my creative being without one thought for another's well-being. I casn write songs all night and clean at 8AM on a Saturday morning. I can mutter and pace and sloth if I must. I must censor my relationships with television and the computer. I must rediscover that which is truly me, and will always be.

You know me...just a rockin' and a-rollin'....

I wish I could write about all that happened over SxSW, but it gets fairly overwhelming if I attempt to gather my thoughts about it.

I saw:

Los Straitjackets w/Big Sandy
The Alarm Clocks
The Reigning Sound
Mary Weiss
The A-Bones
Sam the Sham
The Cynics
Paul Collins Beat
Peter, Bjorn, & John
The Stooges
The Clutters
The Woggles
The Mullens
The Ugly Beats
Muck & the Mires
Dirty Fuzz (*gag*)
The Jungle Rockers
The Beasts of Bourbon
The Detroit Cobras
The Waco Brothers



SxSW was great fun but as usual I got "The Crud". To my credit, this time I doubt it was really the dreaded SXSW strain since I came down with it so early on and I had taken precautions. I've been sleeping lots. Trying not to let this go bronchial, and taking lots of Emergen-Cs.

I've also been spending some time emailing my friends and ummm....working up a version of "War" for the Dandy Lyons spectacular on March 30th. So far I've determined that my version of this should be entitled "Big Ball of Suck."

In other news, I briefly flipped through channels tonight and noticed a VH1 special entitled "Lindsay Lohan's Most Shocking Moments." They made a TV show out of this????

I quit American society.

New song

In the midst of cleaning, I just stopped and write an extremely depressing song called "Unlovable Loser." Woo! I mean, the protagonist? Pathetic. Me? Never.

Yay. More songs.

*

*

It's getting to be time I wrote a happy one, damn it.

Cah-razy!

Mmmm...bed....kitties....Swedish cheese.

Oh, wait! Whiskey...Norwegian friends...countless opportunities to poke fun at feather-haired, blazer-sporting film guys.

How ever will I choose?

In the end, The latter won out. But as late as I got down to Casino el Camino to meet Tor and Magne, I got a fantastic parking spot and had enough time to have a ball without having more than two drinks and without getting "downtownies" overload.

Today I exercise, purge myself of books and other belongings, do a spot of laundry, pick out some songs to work on, and maybe eat some tasty and healthful food.

I found out that the Skatalites are playing tonight and although Tommy McCook and Roland Alphonso joined that great ska band in the sky many years ago, they are still undoubtedly the best live ska act that I've ever seen. Doreen Schaffer, Lloyd Knibbs, and Lester Sterling are still keeping things cooking. I believe I shall go and let all my friends know and of course, Tor and Magne and Richard and Steinar will come, because they squealed like wee girls and jabbered in unintelligible Norwegian when they heard about it last night. Of course all Norwegian, when jabbered, is well nigh unintelligible to me...so we'll just forget I said that.

In the meantime, I'm drawing on my battle gear and starting pull myself into the frenzy that is SxSW. A heartening conversation with Laura yesterday assured me that even if the Shim Shimmy Go Go Girls don't put in an appearance at the official SxSW showcase of the Woggles/Cynics/Ugly Beats/Reigning Sound, there are still ample opportunities to enjoy each of these bands at some of the day shows. Plus Muck & the Mires are here; they're our buddies from Boston who won the Little Stevens Garage Contest last year. And of course, I think I will have to *ahem* be very ill on Friday March 16th, because the Stooges are playing at Waterloo and well, I need to see some of the Raw Power for myself.

So yay!

Although, I *really* would like to see Mary Wells sing with the Reigning Sound backing her up. Good lord, what joy! I'll have to see what sort of finagling I must do in order to achieve that.

And now...elliptical trainer, more coffee, maybe a tasty smoothie and a burrito later on.

Sometimes there are no other words.

Ugh.

Arrgh.

Blecch.

Ew.

Tsk, tsk.

Hmmmph.

Bleargh.

*flick*

Sigh.

I leeched this one from the New York Times. Heehee...

There is even a doily! How I adore doilies.




HELLO, SUCKER
By William Safire


I would suggest moving back,” said President Bush, from the cab of a yellow Caterpillar tractor at the company’s East Peoria, Ill., plant. “I’m about to crank this sucker up.” He started the engine, watched a puff of smoke belch from the stack, steered the machine around the assembly line and announced, “That was fun,” as he got off.

The local press caught the carefully staged symbolism of a dynamic economy and global demand for American construction equipment, not to mention more well-paying jobs thanks to a free-trade policy. But the message that got through to language mavens around the English-speaking world was that another new meaning had been accepted, at the highest level of government, in the saga of a great old English word.

All of us who cavorted at the bee’s-knees speak-easies in the 1920s, swilling bathtub gin and waving feather boas to the tune of the “Charleston,” fondly recall the image of Mary Louise (Texas) Guinan perched atop a stool in the middle of the El Fay Club in Manhattan, greeting every wide-eyed “big butter-and-egg man” from out of town with her trademark shout, “Hello, sucker!”

That roughly affectionate use of sucker was derived from its meaning of “simpleton; a gullible mark often fooled, hoodwinked, swindled or otherwise easily taken advantage of.” The metaphoric source, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, is that of a young mammal before it is weaned from its mother’s teat, calling to mind a picture of a suckling pig. The great lexicon’s earliest citation in this sense is from an 1838 Toronto Patriot: “It’s true that pigs has their troubles like humans ... constables catches ’em, dogs bite ’em, and pigs is sometimes as done-over suckers as men.”

That sense of gullibility was exemplified in several famous American sayings, like “Never give a sucker an even break,” falsely ascribed in the 1880s to the showman Phineas T. Barnum by a rival impresario. The Barnum biographer A. H. Saxton credits Paper Collar Joe Bessimer, a notorious confidence man, with “There’s a sucker born every minute, but none of them ever die.” To be fair, the bumptious Barnum never claimed coinage; indeed, according to the Columbia World of Quotations, he later thanked his envious rival for the publicity. (P. T. Barnum is legendarily remembered for suckering his circus customers with a sly exit sign, “This way to the egress,” which enticed paying visitors to leave a crowded tent in the hope of seeing a live egress, presumably a caged female eager.)

Paper Collar Joe’s born-every-minute aphorism lives: in a segment about outlandish gifts on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Diane Sawyer recently admitted buying a “Memory Pillo,” confessing, “Because if there’s a sucker born every minute, I’m the sucker born in my minute.” In the 1936 film “Poppy,” W. C. Fields first said, “Never give a sucker an even break,” which reinforced the sense of a sucker being a born “loser.”

Other senses of the word live on inside longer locutions: vampires, always a popular attraction in horror movies, are bloodsuckers, and media pundits, proliferating madly in the blogosphere, present their views in what we like to call thumbsuckers.

Even so, many feel slightly uncomfortable using the verb suck or a noun built on it. In a column about teenage slang a few years back, I reported that the term being used to describe what we used to call soul-kissing, or French kissing — a pleasurable form of osculation, if somewhat sloppy — is now sucking face. Some readers found that phrase to be unsuitably descriptive, even odious, and urged that its users be banished to tonsil-hockey’s penalty box. The same adult distaste is shown toward such innocent childlike derogations as “Algebra sucks.”

I ran this hidden concern past Grant Barrett, editor of Oxford’s excellent political etymology, “Hatchet Jobs and Hardball,” a host of the KPBS public-radio show “A Way With Words” and whose “Double-Tongued Dictionary” is available at www.doubletongued.org. “While it is debated regularly,” he e-mails, “some linguists and lexicographers do think that sucks, as it is currently used, such as ‘Algebra sucks,’ without a direct object, is probably not derived from longer forms.” Obviously, other language scholars disagree and are free to send their always profound comments to one another on the American Dialect Society listserv because I must use my remaining space to deal with this question: Is there anything unduly suggestive or remotely lascivious about Bush’s “I’m about to crank this sucker up?”

Not to anyone with clean hands and a pure heart. Here is Harry Smith, paragon of media virtue, on the CBS “Early Show,” displaying a large, expensive toy named PlayStation 3: “We’re going to show you how this sucker works.” And here is Representative Phil Gingrey, Georgia Republican and a stalwart of the right, on a Democratic bill ordering Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices: “It’s a loss for our seniors; we need to kill this sucker dead.” And reaching back to 1969, John Denver’s rendition of the romantic lyrics “You dun stomped on my heart and mashed that sucker flat.”

Sol Steinmetz, member of Olbom (On Language’s Board of Octogenarian Mentors), is the voice of calm sagacity: “Sucker in this context is a slang term that uses the standard word sucker for any unspecified thing, and is synonymous with other terms like dojigger, bugger, gizmo and others for ‘a machine or contraption.’ ”

If the reader will move back, I will zip this column to my copy editor in New York as soon as I can find the right thingamabob, doohickey, whatchamacallit, whoozadingy or sucker to hit on this weird ergonomic keyboard.