O, happy day.
Moments ago received a package from Bill down in the PA and much to my joy and amazement it is much-coveted venison jerky that I found a few times on non-aimless roadtrips and never could ever quite manage to find again, though I did look with racing eyes amongst the sad racks of mass-produced beef teriyaki product and such.
A whole pound of venison jerky is mine, mine, mine, mine.
I will share, however.
If You would care for a slice of deerly flesh cured and spiced up, just freakin' ask.
Resolution of new year: Meet Yoko Ono.
Off shortly to purchase some lobsters, dead.
With a gift cert from Perfect Mom & Dad I did purchase my first-ever Big Girl matchy-snatchy set of cookware (including 8-quart stock pot with fitting steamer ever-ready for lobsters and such but I'd rather buy them dead, maybe even beheaded). More about the pots: I do have a rag-tag assemblage of pots and pans that are excellent but needed more (some cast iron, some Le Creuset, some other heavy-enough-to-be-weapons items). These pots and such are not all related Le Creuset in that gorgeous sage green they have now - but they will do.
Oh, more than do, they will make, do, and be.
It has snowed out in the Middling City, one of those half-assed droppings just enough to make the wearing of suede boots or shoes not such a good idea but not enough to make some quality snow sculpture.
Parties as of late have been satisfying and far-reaching of cast of characters:
- Jamie and Paul Johnson held their final holiday party on Ashland in the Big House before they move to their improved row house around the corner. Paul has turned into quite a real estate mogul. At this party I was informed by one that he, in a cold meds haze, caught my Five Minute Video on cable access in the dead of night. I also saw Rockstar Tony there which was great, as was getting reunited with Hillary H, not to be confused with Hillary C.
- Loomis's parents - Ed & Joan - held that swingin' party up in Canada and the only bad spot was when she insisted on feeding the two fam dogs generous hunks of Stilton. As I informed her last night as we swung ourselves down to Hardware for yet more holiday action, Stilton is for Nancy, not for dogs.
- Was invited last night to Deb's for some of her supreme matzoh balls, and soup. What do I dig more than mballs+soup, fruitcake (for real), venison jerky. Well, alot, but hell, for literature's sake let Us say Not a dang-blamed thang.

Pyrotechnics of a New Year's Love.

I left the slippery to drive along the slippery to the even more slippery, steel bridge, to the party this strange winter night. I wended through woods and roads thinking I'd miss a sign but no and ended at the house somewhat familiar. There is nothing quite like the feeling of arriving at a party, of seeing faces through the windows smiling, thinking in a flash, in an entrance, in a scrape of boot, I will be joining, will be a guest, one of them.
I demanded a fireplace moment, Loomis made it happen as the logs had dimmed. I needed a full-on, full-view of a heap of logs afire. Maybe like others need gravlax, or a withering christmas tree, or cocoa. I needed the stinkin' fire this night and I got the fire.
I Got the Fire: The Nancy J. Parisi Story.
Amongst others tonight, as at last night's fete, I met a person who will catapult me into my new venture/adventures.
I am not delving into detail yet.
What I will say is that the nouveau Neil Diamond is Perfection.
What I will also say is that the new Mercury Rev is grand but track #7, In a Funny Way, is a song that gets Yours Truly SCREAMING with delight.
And that is always a delight, the delight of YT.
In a funny way I am ever your epinw correspondent.

Ever Love.

Sometimes precautions backfire.
Not only might this be attributable for perhaps, for the sake of epinw argument, 10% of the planet's human population - certainly not that of bombus fervidus - but of belongings gone missing, good intentions and plans gone haywire.
sidenote: Yours Truly thinks that this haywire business might be yet another example of agrarian holdover in our lingua that we no longer recognize as such. And, I imagine, that haywire was a farmly article that could, from time to time, snap back, break loose, causing some sort of bodily harm.
YT is in process of a refinancing/reevaluating kind of thing. Amongst trudging duties is paying a wack of dough to have a building rescoped/reappraised. This meant an appointment with a stranger and an agent de moi suggested that, being a femme and all, a femme surveyor of scenes be used. So I do not confirm a theoretical reappraising situ for today but get a message from the femme in question that she'll be present and accounted for and accounting all things good & bad in a few, as in hours.
So this appraising femme shows up and she scares me.
As I told Kennedy if she had said Oh, I am a bounty hunter in actuality and do this property-related shit on the side I would not have questioned her burly faux-blonde figure at all. She clucked her tongue in a most peculiar manner, made odd comments, asked even odder questions, and was ever curt and snide, matching the demeanour at hand - or afoot.
She did not bother to open doors to things (hey, who the hell is YT to tell a bounty hunting appraisor how to do their gig) but instead would inquire as to what lay beyond or behind things. She did note decrepitude and such and when she left I felt a need to burn sage but had none so a quick vacuum of her bounty hunter bad vibes had to suffice.
Moral: bounty hunter types walk amongst us in a cornucopia of forms, including the mall-esque lady version, but if one is not a scofflaw one must only dodge verbal barbs, not TASERS.

Sage Love.

Two somewhat horrific things Yours Truly includes for dramatic and narrative effect.
For f-b*mb's sake, YT is a writer and may a: let It all hang out; b: investigate the incomplete and the effusive and the uncomfortable (related to a.); and c. narrate and dramaticize.
So, there YT is, in the midst of the familial portion of this holiday, this mid-Hanukah and Kwanzaa Eve = Christmas. The one with Jesus is the reason for the season, key player.
sidebar: Rio informed me, non-truthfully, that a banner hangs above her familial KY home stating same so that Santa knows that we are not heathens. I move along.
I am at the home where I was raised, so to speak, from age 2-20, before I hit the awaiting adult world that has led me, convolutedly, to this place. I am in that home, Christmas night. The place where my parents live, where I am from time to time bumping up against the past of me that is awkward and I would like to say jam-packed with familiarities that are pleasant but I cannot.
The usual hodgepodge, collage of the good, bad, adolescent, etc.
At some point in the holiday proceedings two highly evocative/awkward things happen.
The first is that, in the midst of one of my tales, my father claims that he has heard the tale-in-progress before. I question him. A few times. I realize that the only place he ever - ever - could have heard this traipsing and difficult tale was here, on epinw. epinw. My dad is an abashed epinw reader. For once he was busted he could not admit to anyone, even Perfect me, that he reads this daughterly blog.
The other horrendous thing was this.
When I was a child I wrote poetry beyond the abilities of a child but nonetheless I was still a child. When I was a child I lived at the home of my parents and discarded a few hand-written books of poetry written by me as a child into the ol' trash, to learn, in complete shock and horror, that these books had been dredged from the trash by my mother and were being not only read by her but read aloud to gatherings of her lady pals.
I have told, here and there, others of this not only lapse of judgement but lack of homestead privacy and tonight sat diplomatically as one of these high school books of pomes was again extricated from the archive, cracked open (I was catapaulted down memory lane when I saw the little Asian, hand-bound volume) and in-part read aloud.
I had to step outside of myself and say to YT OK, this is your mother and obviously she derives some happiness out of this and your ever-thickening skin can survive this newest fiasco.
What made an entire weekend of ebbing & flowing, self-congratulatory holiday smarm tolerable were a few final hours spent with old friends - Erin and Justy - at the newer Middling City joint of gatherings and such. And what really was the proverbial whipped cream and jimmies (if you go for that sort of thing) on the whole tasty escapade was a meeting-up with a woman - Peggy - in a wolfhead. I made her pinkie swear we could be pals. We did. She is the assistant to the director of the Salvador Dali joint in Florida, so close to the land of Papa and cigars and home to alligators and whatever else. Oh, that team.
So Peggy Wolfhead when saying goodbye opened up her plastic jaws and spread them atop my head and I let out my patented MeatScream that was perfected oso long ago by YT and Elba in the midst of Summer Camp Chaos. It is a from-the-toes kind of scream and one was emitted by Perfect me as the faux wolf had my scalp, stopping all action in the room, a similar sensation was being hit by that car whilst riding my bike, the feeling of being in a vacuum.
The moral of the story is this.
Every counter-intuitive event which cramps the soul and psyche and style needs an antithetical faux-wolf moment, a delicious and spontaneous encounter with grace and art and kindred joie-de-vivre.

Faux Wolverine Love.

Today Yours Truly is photographing foster kids who are pre-teenish and looking for a permanent living gig. The two I'm photographing today are siblings and are in a temp situ. I was just talking to teahouse Jen telling her of my next stop and we discussed how foster girls at this age sometimes land in less-than-stellar places - sometimes to be the live-in babysitter, sometimes worse. I told her of my decade of working with the Summer Camp, how half the 8-12 year olds there were fosterized, how some of them had horrific tales. My assignment is to make these kids look so adorable that they get scooped up by good people. There is a slew more of occasions to bust out holiday tights and the like. Jamie and Paul are having their ultimate gathering at their supersonic house that they redid from shingles to front steps, before the relocate to a rowhouse somewhere nearby. Then there's another soirée in Loomis's honour in a week, at her parents's Canadian shorehouse. Jen, rushing YT, just slapped my check on the table stating Time's a-wastin'. So off I go there and points be-be-beyond.

Foster Love.

Dubithy:

Somewhere under the radar, way down low.
There's a land that I heard of once, where the oil still flows.
Somewhere under the radar, folks are screwed.
And the schemes that you dare to scheme really do come through.
One day I wrecked the family car, and daddy and my mummy Bar remind me,
Of my troubles taking acid drops, the night they had to call the cops,
And then they fined me.
Somewhere under the radar, I'll get high. Drink Rye under the radar,
Try, oh yes I'll still try
Why, why must I be dry?
(The above was forwarded to me by Paul Morgan of Avalon Scarves fame and the entire, brilliant adaptation can be seen here.)

This notion that El Presidente is in fact dry and ryeless seems rather at odds with his behaviour as of late, most notably his press conf yesterday about spying and wiretapping any available and questionable American up and out the wazoo as Papa/El P/Bush deems necessary. I did catch one quick visual soundbite with him answering a press corps question. To paraphrase: It's about your safety . . . it's about your civil liberties.
Hmmm, last I heard this genre of practice was completely opposite what good ol' civil liberties are about.
Onwards.
As there is a transit strike in the Shiney Apple, something threatened for about a week, I opted out of pre-miasmic - nay, make that Double Miasmic - conditions and am hanging in the Middling City until post-strike, post-holiday-travel-meltdown.
Over the weekend Yours Truly met up with a college pal, writer Harold Goldberg, firmly entrenched in the Shiney Apple and writing each and every day.
Besides the Perfection that is epinw, YT does a smattering of writing.
I have been back to drawing, not the drawing board, but grooving on my pencils and such and do still feel slightly bemused when others find great joy, etc. in this scrawling.
I now embark into the MC WW (white wasteland) to pick up Dorota and Jason at the MC "International" Airport and then points beyond.

Well-balanced Love.

With the help of Nick, my new record shoppe pal, I discovered that the Nouveau Neil is out when Yours Truly believed there must be weeks to go. But of course Neil released his new gems out into the world now, in time for the holiday hoopla and gift-giving sector of the calendar and such. What I've paid attention to so far has been wondrous - Neil (and fercrissakes I do hope that you know I write most lovingly and obviously about Neil as in Diamond, resonant voice of the 70s and beyond) and backup musicians, all new material written by Neil. At a soirée last night I revealed my Neil Luvv and an alternamusician claimed to love Neil, too. I suspected that this was a move to sound hip, now, etc. Other record shoppe purchases that sojourn were the new Sigur Ros (always a grand choice for winter), the digital v of Bright Eyes, and partyrific Gorillaz (featuring that inescapable iPod song so overplayed at the Geek/Mac Clubhouse).
Worked an hourly wedding last night that stretched and stretched away, so much so that it caused me to pass on party number one. I did my trademarked party drive-by, sussing out if it was in high or low gear, gleaning info from the shadowy heads or lack thereof and clues from nearby cars. My clues pointed to move on. And so I did.
When I did arrive at the second joint I informed my co-hostesses that I had been held hostage by a wedding. I attempted to eat snackdinner but was thrown off my nosh course by Mary who desperately wanted me to dance. So I said Cheesh, my friend May wants to freakin' dance, who cares any more about stinkin' bean dips and such.
At some point I decided it was necessary to get a running start and skid along the hardwood floor into the dance floor action. I made a few others do the same.
I busted out my new toy, the iZone digital camera and found it to be fraught with a few glitches but do love its size and design.
It is time to call this a wrap and do some holiday wrapping and wending through snow and sip and sup some holiday cheers.

Love, wrap it.

Completely, resolutely minding a business that was nobody's but mine own, tonight, the following transpired out in the Middling City suburbs, during a freelance gig.
I arrive during an ice storm, a real throw-down of crystals thick and hard, rendering the landscape a death trap, a suicide rap. Baby, you like were so not born to run during this shit.
I digress. Momentarily. As is my wont, and your pleasure.
I am at the gig. I am waiting for things to get proverbially rolling. You know, things like intros, helpful hints, a discreet waiting and drawing-out of time as if another few dozen may traipse on in during the death rain of icy terror. Death Rain of Icy Terror: Middling City Winter Rants.
I digress again.
So I am waiting, even leaning against a wall at one point when I note a rustling on the other side of the wall and this rustling is rather loud during the intros which have finally begun. There are blinds on the inside of the windows to this glass-walled office I am leaning on. I peer into the blinds and note a small old man on the other side of the glass/blinds.
The man keeps rustling about. Perhaps he's trapped, Perfect me thinks to my ever-helpful self.
More rustling.
Finally, I try the door and it opens.
I stick my head in and ask the codger Hey, do you need to get out of here. Thinking he's demented, stuck, lost, disoriented after hours.
The man says nothing and just stares at me rather oddly. He may have muttered something but it was so illegibile, as it were/was/is as to be ignored.
So the intros continue. There is even an intro video that the guest artist has provided, probably carried with him in his carry-on. And here it should be noted that the guest artist is a world-renowned vocal coach who has worked with the likes of Judy Garland's equally-doped-up kid, some other vocal luminaries. Et al. Et freakin' al. Testimonials are read. Famous names such as Tony Bennett praising the work of the featured guest artist.
So all is finally stinkin' over. It is time for the guest artist to hit the stage, actually just a few simple risers fronted by some super floral arrangements that would be suitable for any gravesite. So it's time. The guest artist is to appear. Is he sitting in the front row. Will the guest artist descend from the stairs like a cheeseball musical.
No.
The guest artist emerges from behind the blinds/glass office.
He muttered in shock, Yours Truly imagines, for YT not knowing who his vocal eminence is.
Hey, I see a senior in apparent need and I dive right in. You know, being ever-helpful.
From there it was on to Soup Night at Monique and Blair's joint.
I had dropped, pre-gig, my soon-to-be-famed Brazilian soup and by the time YT appeared in their spec kitchen it was nearly a distant evaporated memory. So I ate Blair's scorching soup instead. It was high times, subtle misdemeanours. I realized at one point a demi-room of people was hanging on to a story I was regaling at some familiars. Then the somewhat edited version emanated.
It is time to move along.
It is time to think more art thoughts.
And dream soupy dreams.
Beautiful soup, beautiful soup, soup of the evening, beautiful soup.
So said Mock Turtle during Alice's foray into the Fantastic.

Fantastic, soupy Love.

(Perfect me wished this what does this have to do with the prix of bananas image at the end of this post but here it rests front and center. It is a shot of the nouveau flagship pornorific A+F store in the Shiney Apple, outfitted with oversized photographic images of models with oversized ab muscles. Focus in on the ab muscles to the right of the image. Terrifying.)


Just downloaded a plethora of musique, via the full-on wi-fi molecules emanating from the Airport of the tea joint, and for some oddball reason FireFox was unable to hack it and had to use boring ol' Explorer. I mean really.
Jen just lit my little tea candle and, before setting it down, asked that I not set anything afire. I asked if I had before. I do seem to recall something nearly blazing at this tea joint but think it may have been Allen's fault. I did set a menu afire at another nearby restaurant whilst resting it upon a candle. Perhaps Jen is clairvoyant. Perhaps I emanate pyromaniacism.
Perhaps I should depart this tea joint as I've been sitting and working here so long on their hardassed wood chair that I am certain that the arse of Yours Truly is as flat as they once believed the Earth was centuries ago.
I have slightly committed to an art exhibit and have work shuttling off to the bi-annual CEPA auction next month. There's creative fire for You. Some good-natured fuel for the artful adrenaline boosters. Technical shit.
More tech shit:
satellite radio, not nearly as expensive as You might think. And shortly the sole way to hear beloved Howard.
Trudy of the tea joint just gave me a graduation present after explaining that I completed my Master of the Universe degree late August and now am ruling my own aesthetic universe.
Tonight I make soup. Tomorrow night I make soup for a party. Saturday I make yet more soup for yet another party.
Soup, like photography and other genres of creative expression, is art.
Like a good bowl of chawan mushi - each bite/spoon a tiny universe, a whorl of opposing textures and colours.

Love's textures, colours.

Last night I was out with Liz and JimB and at some point they mentioned that HOOats is under attack by the Natives as this, it turns out, is the future site for the dreaded Middling City casino. Not the waterfront, really, as described by Middling City News, but a distance away on an industrial block with a few businesses, some open space. I drove a short way to this wreckage and felt like my parents's generation may have as they watched Olmsted's Delaware Park get sliced in half for an expressway. Progress and change and history slips away, bit by bit, in this Middling City. I watched as the cast iron bridges were torn down in my neighborhood/The Historic Old First Ward, told my engineers and planners and politicians that these were hazards and were too costly to fix. So I shot them, preserved their images, and down they crashed. Now HO Oats, immortalized by several photographically (YT, the Bechers, et al), is being wrecked by the Sovereign Senecas. They are saying that the brick portion of the grain elevator is getting yanked down (JimB pointed out his buddy's company name - Empire Dismantling) but not the elevators themselves. We shall see. The head of the Sovereigns stated that the Senecas were once chased from Buffalo Creek and now they are back, Forever.
About to embark on a sleuthy gig for a woman, documenting someone, unbeknownst to them, for a holiday gift.
Parting mantra: Industry is beauty.

Beautiful, industrial Love.

The year before the shit hit the NJP fan, the year when Dark Side of the Moon landed in my ten-year-old hands and changed my mind about all I thought I knew about understanding and poetry and such until that point, there was John and Yoko on Mike Douglas. Somehow I watched Mike Douglas, a grownup talk show in the late afternoon. (Somehow, also, I watched the inappropriate-for-kids Love American Style at lunchtime, munching on my pbj as I watched comedy about blow-up dolls, oral, and the like). These two took it over, so to speak, in '72 and I watched it all. The militancy, the guest artists, the staccato explanations of the way things were. And Mike, earnest Mike, watery-eyed, took it all in, as did I. The only way I heard the Beatles music and Lennon was via my older cousins as I was a freakin' kid with no money but an AM radio, cousins, a cast-off manual typewriter from my father in the basement on my grandfather's cast-off carved desk, and daydreams. I loved John before most men I have known (or sort of known) because of his earnest artist demeanour - that what he made is serious so, therefore, what you made is and could be, too. His music went beyond entertainment, became the music of dreams, of psyche, of inspiration, of pain, of all the everyday welts of life. His nose, in my opining, surpasses those of all others and remains the greatest nose that ever breathed upon the earth. His eyes were those that are a surprise, the type that no matter how many times you glance into surprise with their colour and depth. He wrote, drew, protested, loved, and still wanted to, despite the CPW situ and such, remain a pedestrian, someone who could walk in the park and breathe and be. John Lennon's legacy is to remind all artists that it's not only important to make work and be true to the muse, but to use the muse to push social change, what is good for the world, a goal that surpasses those flimsy goals of most politicos and so-called spirituals.
All we are saying is give peace a chance, he wrote as an artist, he said, to update the message of peace beyond We Shall Overcome.
Imagine.

Imagined Love.

Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of John's death and I will not be in the Shiney Apple in Strawberry Fields as I was five years ago. But at midnight tomorrow night, wherever I find myself, I'll sing Imagine as They will be over there, as is custom.
To commemorate, celebrate John I've been looking at Memories of John Lennon which I bought last week - a compilation of essays by people who knew him.
I like what hardassed Norman Mailer wrote:
We have lost a genius of the spirit.
And the whole assemblage of Annie Leibovitz's rolls from the famed shoot mere hours before The End are in the book, You know, the famed clothed Yoko/naked John shots.
Last night, post free free jazz gig, had a band meet-up of sorts with ScottV and then suddenly Kunji, who was also there, presumed that she could join Our band, KnifeCall. I said diplomatically that Scott and I needed to have another band meeting to discuss. I threatened to leave the band and begin a solo career.
Kunji, not even a member (!) wants to change the name.
She also did not even seem agreeable to the band uniform.
The Who's Pictures of Lily (about porn & such, lest you did not hear the news about three decades ago) is on the hi-fi, a fine place to sign off in a post about feting life and creative expression, even if it involves some good-natured sparring.

KnifeCall Love.

ps: should You be so inclined, check out my FiveMinuteVideo, edited by supersonic Richard Wicka, @

This, Yours Truly is pleased to pronounce, is one well-researched blogpost: as in field work, a lifelong string of taste tests, and a half-assed Google search.
Wow, and what a Googling that was. And no Wikipedia ref . . . yet.
This holiday season (trust me, You must, this will be all handily tied together but you must slog through, like a well-hung Dickens paragraph) I would like to propse in lieu of guilt-addled resolutions (and I've blogged many a year about this practice of resolving) that each and every one of You instead embrace a guilty pleasure. And embrace this guilty pleasure, whatever it might be, at least once a month for in embracing such we embrace who we ARE, not what we think we might like to be. And by guilty I think of things that are silly, out of our alleged element(s), kitschy, crapful, puerile, adult.
A few days ago, while merrily lunching on a gas station tuna sandwich I came up with all of the above, now blogged to inspire You.
I have horrified some by my love of tuna (even eliciting tales of poisoned horror, warnings from strangers - the old retired engineer in midtown East, for one) to begin with and even more by my adoration of the gas station tuna sandwich. I am a food snob yet love them. It's like that Middling City sushi chef who dug hotdogs. I speak of him in past tense as he split the MC.
Perfect gas station tuna sandwiches have a strange sweetness (NOT like the egg salad sandwich I ate in the Shiney Apple this summer whose underbelly was covered with a black mold that tasted oddly sweet-n-sour... until I wretched it into a garbage can), are wrapped lovingly, have little chunks of color. Cost about $2.
Yours Truly plans on eating at least 1/mo. in '06.
Thanks for your tuna attention in this matter.
You can share your guilty, sanguine, secret pleasures with me any time before 12/31.

Guilty, delicious Love.

Lest you wonder.
Lest you wonder where Yours Truly might be post-asscrack-of dawn tomorrow.
You will find YT at a ribbon cutting at Middling City U.
Bright eyes, tail all bushy, as they say.
Meandering through my beloved SPIN I discovered there's a new Sigur Ros and that is also on tomorrow's make&do list.
And then there was an ad in the same issue for Lady Sovereign, which thrilled me as it jogged the memory of the words of rec by Mats as something to give a whirl to: he is a jazz star but one who straddles the world of alternative rock and sometimes combines the two in practice, who is not afraid to have The Thing (his trio'd jazz ensemble with guest *'s) cover, for a primo example, The White Stripes. Though you may not be able to hum along, it's the melodic and appropriative thought that counts.
So over drinks post-Thing gig Mats raved about Lady Sovereign, a young lady rap artiste.
And together we enthused about White Stripes' new one, a perfect assemblage.
I neglected to ask Mats if he ever puts forth a cd with any known weak links or if they are all, in his mind, or his producer's mind, a string of perfection.
String of Perfection, dang, another fine band name.
Bought last Beethoven's 3rd and 4th piano concertos, inspired by hearing one of them on a radio station beaming out of Toronto's environs - one of those perfect moments when music matches landscape. But, in record store situ, I could not recall if it was indeed B's piano concerto #3, #4, or #5. I figured that the Frenchies effusing over the recording must be doing such for a new recording so, super-sleuthically, I had Mary at B&N record centre Google away and she said there was a new v of #3 and #4. I have listened. I think it is the rondo of #4 that had me.
Interpol out of iTunes at this second is matching my landscape.
Without music life would be like food with no taste.

No taste = No love

Tech disaster.
Why o why is the epinw OKcounter suddenly askew. The people who made the skin for it are in Korea and their site is a bramble patch of demi-English and demi-Korean = a challenge for sure.
Online at Middling City U in a quadrant of the library I thought was reserved for collections searchers. How utterly wrong I am for this is, unbeknownst to me as of 15 minutes ago, The Gratis Online Centre. So what if it's on a crappo Dell pc with blindingly wiggly-jiggly screen that seems to be in green-o-vision. Hey, I like green a lot but this screen is making me feel sea sick.
Heading out to Toxicville to perhaps acquire some holiday gifts and cheer for others.
Time to head north.
Time to sign off.

No love for Toxicville.

Today has been one Perfect, well-balanced day of excellent freelance gigs of a photo nature, of interesting people and so engaged was I with photo subject numero uno that we talked for over an hour which floated by in a freeform, coffee-fueled blip. This is one thing I most dig about my life: I get assignments, I arrange, I arrive, I engage, I shoot, I leave. This first subject was an MD associated with Middling City U, a dog lover, and we shared political views. She asked about me, she asked if I had met Maureen Dowd. I said Not yet. And I mean it. This woman doc knows Dowd and was suggesting that I do meet her, that she become my mentor of sorts. I have just purchased Are Men Necessary?, her new book, inspired by not only her but a profile of her in VF so this was more fortuitousness in today's numero uno meeting. And, when I explained how her directions via email first landed me in the wrong parking lot and then the wrongo buildingo she asked if I'd ended up at Middling City Morgue. I replied NOOO, but I'd like to. To much concurrent mirth and amazement by numero uno and her colleague. I explained that I've always been intrigued by the MCM, that I had a college photo colleague who made work in there, heads in buckets and that sort of thing. I have no apparent desire to make work of heads in buckets (although I have photographed Buckethead, but that's another story completely) but do have that Mutteresque/Witkinesque thread in me.
Photo subject number two today was a hard case, an arms-crossed crank until I worked my Perfect magique upon him, ending our photo engagement with laughs and such. At one point when I was making images of him, posed in the midst of a complab of sorts, a frat boy shouted out Hey X, what's all this. To which I replied on his behalf... Swimsuit Edition, SI. This kind of shocked my subject. And to that I say Oh, velcro.
Between and around these things were social and shop engagements and at one point I was checking out at a bookstore, minding mine own beeswax when the clerk asked if I'd like any gift receipts. Gift receipts, I questioned back at her, NO, these are all for me - the holidays are not JUST for others. (In keeping with the holiday shopping theory of Yours Truly that one should not forget oneself in the throes of heartfelt and pressurized holiday acquisition. My solemn decree reads as such: Yeah, sure, buy for those others but treat yourself, you deserve it and will enjoy the holidays oso much more when you're in those new duds, having arrived at the holiday soiree having just listened to some shiney new music, spritzed-up with some new fab scent... and the like.)
A parting holiday shot is this.
Every part of the year we should remember, recall our friends, acquaintances, family, helpers, etc. and the faux sense that all is heightened or that the sense of giving is enlarged now is shit. Be generous with your heart and time and money all the time. This is a time of pandemics, war, desultory vibes and no person in your life should be taken for granted. All through the year, not just Now in this fabrication of joy, love, bon vivant espousal.
And with this, I virtually hug You and speed off to a holiday party for writers for the Shiney Happy Mag, the annual throw the freelancer writer tipplers a festive little bone.

Festive bones of Love.

O happy happy, snap-happenstanced day.
A new Johnny Depp movie.
Well, the good news is it hits screens in the Shiney Apple and I know how to get there and the bad side of the news is it will probably not land in the Middling City.
The movie is The Libertine and the good news, again, is that he's in the damned thing, a biopic type of film about 17th C writer/poet/libertine/sex addict John Wilmot (so on-screen imagine he didn't have to think Mynameis Mynameis because it's handily one and the same).
The bad, again, is that like in that thuggish movie about blow he'll get all ugly at the end and word on the street is his character lost and loses his nose via some bad molecules that entered his libertine body.
Chronicler of the times Sam Johnson said he 'blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness.' Let this be a lesson to You. Or a touchstone for some remorse or even still some cause for tales of the ol' glory days.

Libertine love.

Just completed what felt like on-camera therapy, at Home of the Future/Richard Wicka's joint, for his ongoing Five Minute Series.
First off told the story of when the life of Yours Truly felt like a bad reality t.v. show - when the breakup with the X happened, when all came to fortuitous fruition after receiving two emails from a stranger (the Angry Husband) in Cleveland, OH.
Then he presented YT with a list of scenarios and I was to expound if one hit a chord, so to speak. One of my favorite expoundings was about an encounter with an insect and I told of how as a child I was stung repeatedly, how my mother noted that in a playground there could be a group of players and a bee would dive-bomb me.
So, one family car trip, I had a wasp stuck inside the sleeve of my blouse. Which I did not realize until I felt something and hit my shoulder and then was stung and went hysterical.
My mother, turning from the right passenger seat, struck me with an amazing blow to my face, an open-handed slap to assuage my hysteria. It worked. I was stunned and she ripped off my shirt, exposing me and the newly-dead wasp.
The End.
And so much more.
I feel slightly mentally depleted from this Five Minute experience,
now onwards to Kennedy's concert this fine Middling City evening, to hear The Thing at SoundLab. Chilly, frigid SoundLab.
Yours Truly is dressing accordingly - layered beyond belief.

Layers of Love.

After a few rounds of saber-rattling, Yours Truly confronted this holiday, the first of the triad, and at the moment I am on top, perhaps prematurely brandishing my saber in the air, waving it in triumphant loops overhead.
Ran into, amongst others, Bob Stubblebine last night, of Flynn's and BoHo fame. A past regular of my feted and fabled Thanksgiving feast. He queried and I replied that these past two years I have become a spectator of the day rather than an Olympic athlete who prepped and trained for weeks whilst amassing recipes (in addition to what I deemed a tradition, the somewhat godawful ginger candied carrots I made at my first feast fourteen years ago and subjected all others to from then on), getting the work/live space into a suitable dining room situation (replete with two very long rectangular tables side by each to make one fucking huge table) and scrape the photo dust bunnies off the ceiling, making calls, fielding the RSVPs, shopping, cooking, cooking, more cooking, then the big E, then the big C.
E = entertaining/good.
C = cleaning/bad.
I did squeeze in some excellent cooking today for me and Kennedy (before I trek to parents' place and visit and see the fam) as that is what I do. I read the recipes, I imagine, I shop, I slice, I dice, I spice, I serve and eat.
Just spoke to Rio and Ron (again, amongst others) and they are right now en route to Nature. If it was not 23 degrees in the Middling City I might appropriate that idea.
And Thanksgiving can only mean another thing - in two days it is the annual World's Largest Disco, a slopfest of non-stop memory lane hits. Was involved in a burst of emailing a few weeks ago with some North Buffalo fellas about this so-called event as JW,Esq. got all high and Cali mighty critiquing one of the MC's best attributes remaining. I jumped on his e-shit, noting that he is a walking disco narrative, a f/t party boy for certain.
And now, a fable:
It was roughly about a handful of centuries ago that some renegades sans polar fleece braved the Atlantic Ocean and headed out for spices and freedom and fresh air, so to speak.
Upon their journey they might have become hungry and eaten one of their group who perished. They landed. And upon the place they landed, a beach of rocks, they clung to one rock in a style remiscent of the Transcendentalists - deeming this rock, this place, this beach, this new land of spices and such heaven on earth . . . as suddenly an arrow whizzed past one of the group's head and then another whapped into the rock. They called it Plymouth Rock but it should have been called Pilgrim Rock. They did not sail in on the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria as that's another story. So they were then surrounded by natives in animal skins, who kind of laughed at the newbies in their light woolens and uncomfortable shoes. So they communicate as one does in the throes of travel, all voice and face and hands until they all became pals and feasted together. Actually, the natives did all the cooking. The arrivistes did not dig the maize soup or the newly-slain animal of undetermined origin but they feasted so as not to be rude, or at least they gave off that vibe. Cranberries, a native plant, were on the tables. Time went on. Cities were built, the natives faded out, the maize soup persevered. A meat that nobody particularly adores, turkey, became the representative food of the vague anniversary of the landing. Stuffing, everyone's fav, came later.

Stuffing Love.

Back in whitewashed Middling City, aglow this fine morn with crystalline beauty and that hushed, winter phenom.
Regarding the lack of EuroPosts, as You asked.
In Europe there are opera houses in each small city, coffee to beat the band up with - as they say - in every establishment (including some primo clothing stores), that whole 'We are like so united yet do manage to still have a loathing for at least one ethnic group, especially those trying to be our cabbies, our maids, our benefactors" vibe, and museums and galleries that run exhibitionistic circles around any of those in the MC.
Yet, when it comes to the wi-fi molecules, they are sparse. And when one does find internet service in one's five-star hotel situation one will be charged out the EuroWazoo to use said internet. Like at College Hotel in Amsterdam. 14euros for two hours. And they mean it. And odd deals like if you - oops - log on before 11AM you will be charged the daily rate for the next two hours tops. But if you sign on at 11:01AM you will be speeding along the autobahnnet for 24hours. And 24 hours does not need to be translated into metric. Dig.
So there was a dearth of good internet situs, resulting in the sad lack of Yours Truly even being on the internet. A bad thing. A highly unusual thing.
Now, back in the USofA, with the oddest of presidents repped thusly in the international press, I am back to absorbing up as many wi-fi molecules as I can net into my aura.
Amsterdam was not the Vegas-like sleaze centre I had imagined but a much more (well it is November, fercrissakes) walking and usual cultural city. But here and there you do spot the lusty conventioneers, those men of all ages who are there for the p.o.t., the window shopping.
And jazz sax Peter Brotzmann's art exhib, a dual exhib with jazz drum maniac Han Bennink, stretched into two adjoined buildings, filled every square inch with their sculptural, painterly, collage pieces. The PB I have my eyes locked onto was #18 on his list/prix list, a small abstract blur upon which he outlined in red his right hand. A must.
So all was beyond fab. The usual wonderments of Europe: the oddities, the better food, the champagne, the walking, the art, the design sense that encompasses most things, the trains.
No jet lag.
But here, in the MC, time passes most days more slowly than elsewhere.
Out into the new snow.

New snow love.