Incredibly Stupid Bliss

I don't really know what to say.  This is us, right?  Me, my mom, sister, and dad, circa 1980 or so. I think it was taken at my dad's brother's house down the street, around Christmas time.  I don't think any of us knew what we were doing.  We were lost in different moments of existence, and my face especially reveals that:  I'm clowning my disdain.  I'm doing a schtick next to my mom, probably because she just said to smile, or maybe that she loves me.   I never really knew how to act outside of reacting.  I don’t know how to put it.  I never felt comfortable.  I never felt like I could relate.  I never felt like I was there.   A part of things.   There's no other way to verify these feelings outside of just saying I don’t really remember this day but I remember the feeling.   It's one that connects me to myself.  I feel alienated from most everything I am a part of.  It's just something...

I spent the summer reading William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair , and it was kind of a lovely slog.  It really is nice to say to myself:  I effing did it.  Finished that bad boy this morning and felt it all come together in my soul in a way novels really should.  Like you've been through a war and a couple marriages and a bunch of other shit, only this time with a large coterie of Victorian wannabes, an English middle upper-class that's frantically finding itself out of sync with reality, and yet clinging to old ways.  Um.  Like right now.   My biggest takeaway is the feeling this whole experience conjured inside my lowly skull:  I was 13 and it was summer-break and I was supposed to weed the yard and garden, so I opened all the windows in the house so I could hear Guiding Light on the TV.  If I couldn't sit on my ass and watch it, by God, I'd hear it!    I was addicted to soap operas when I was that age, that connection ...

Last night we went to the King's Island amusement park in Mason, Ohio.  It's 50 years old this year.  We didn't go into the park itself though:  there's an amphitheater on the grounds called Timber Wolf.  We went in a side entrance to see A Flock of Seagulls and Berlin there.  But still the experience was all drenched in this creepy stomach-ache nostalgia about the 70s and 80s and King's Island and people who go to King's Island.  The vast parking lot, the skyscraping rides and screams, smells of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and fried food.   Walking up to the front of the place I got weirded out, time-traveling back to when going here was like entering the Kingdom of Heaven.  Just thinking about it back then was hypnotic. Now of course it is something else. Nostalgia is something that unplugs you from your surroundings in a mostly beautiful way.  It isolates your feelings around the past, gives those feelings back to you in one sca...

This book has kind of saved my life in a way a lot of other books can't because they try so hard to make things meaningful "meaning" gets placated, sucked into ego and other stuff.  Molly Shannon, the memoirist, definitely has a sense of self, an ego, but her memoire is truly given over to other people, especially her father, who was a beautiful mixed bag of greatness and not-so-greatness, an alcoholic cheerleader/lunatic who was responsible for the death of Molly's mom, sister and cousin because of a horrible car accident in 1968.  But somehow all of that is contextualized through focusing on just getting through.  Molly's early life in Cleveland, her ambition to get out of there, her struggles and triumphs in NYC and LA...  And yet even though the book is stuffed with wonderful show-biz anecdotes (a lecherous Gary Coleman, a lovely Lorne Michaels, etc.), the focus always swings back to James F. Shannon, that boozy Catholic husband and father who is a combination...

Charles Williams made a lot of these, circa 1983-1998:  pencil holders.   They are still haunting me, after seeing them at the Intuit Art Center in Chicago a little over a month ago.  The functional capacity of these objects is what gets the whole aesthetic sensation going.  A concept so banal and delivered in such strange little packages, the whole thing feels almost not-art, which is kind of where I like to live aesthetically.  In the Land of Nod, I guess, the place where knickknacks and sculptures and pieces of litter and jewelry and pill bottle lids, etc. all combine into a sort of bracing nothingness.  All of that pseudo-philosophy right there makes Mr. William's whole project feel like a catatonic junk-drawer and a mesmerizing memoir combined.   A lot of the holders are fashioned from the extruded plastic he took from his job at IBM, off the factory floor.  Foamy detritus like candy-colored tumors, like toys melted in a fire. ...

A lot of people are talking about what they learned from the pandemic.  That's what you do, I guess, after a historical nightmare and collapse of just about every institution and truism you counted on:  you start telling yourself you learned stuff from it all.  It's the way you get through, figuring out how meaning can be made from a situation that really is pretty upfront and conventionally horrifying.  I mean we've lived through Stephen King's biggest book, right?  And here we all are still standing.  Hopefully washing our hands more.   What I learned from the pandemic:  how to love where I live.  Which is Forest Park, Ohio.  Population 18,583, according to the 2019 census, a decline of .07% from 2010.  There are a lot of "used-to-be's" here in the FP.  A huge vacant mall, a recently shuttered Aldi's, an about-to-close Walmart on Smiley Avenue, a Walgreens transmorgrified into a dialysis center.  A giant vacant Supe...

Netflix creators sometimes manufacture a lot of bloat for the sake of having something to binge, so usually I end up watching half of a docuseries or whatever, feeling like the makers of content could have done the job in an hour or so, not ten.  But with The Andy Warhol Diaries , a new 6-episode arc concerning the life and loves of the ultimate genius/weirdo, the opposite happens:  twelve or so hours of content feels like a dream you want to enter, and at the end I wanted even more.  There's a feeling in every episode of beautiful sadness, carried through to a penultimate sense of strangeness by recreating Andy's voice through an artificial-intelligence program, conjuring the voice and spirit of Andy so that throughout the whole thing his persona and identity swirl into a sort of deadpan, distant Godliness.  It's breathtaking.     Andrew Rossi is credited as writer/director, and you truly feel an auteur at work.  The series is sort of a grand 60s...