I’m twenty six years old and I still think smoking is cool. Then again, I also don’t really eat vegetables. I can’t help but think that all those PSAs failed me. The thing is, my parents raised me right – I never really did drugs or fucked up in school. I’m fiscally responsible, kind, compassionate, et cetera. I even somehow inherited the nickname “Mama Sian.”
But I just love the way a cigarette feels between my fingers. I love the way the smoke curls around my fingertips. I love how smoking cigarettes makes me feel like I’m sixteen again, living in France, drunkenly dancing around medieval fountains. Or seventeen, wrapped in a blanket with my first love, sharing a Camel Light. Or twenty one, chain smoking and drinking red wine in bed with my then-boyfriend and college roommates all piled in.
I’ve quit so many times. God, I hope this one sticks. Maybe I’ll start wearing perfume again…
In a conversation about Gothic novels, Strawberry Hill, neo-Gothic architecture, English moors, love and romance (what else do I ever talk about?) I was told by one of my dearest (and most new agey) friends that my spirit animal was Kate Bush. I don’t know how I feel about spirit animals or Kate Bush for that matter, but I’m intrigued…
me: oh st patrick’s day
what a retarded holiday Anna: haha
i love being irish
but yes it is a stupid day
but my mother is making sodabread me: st patrick’s not even my favorite irish saint
obviously Anna: ha
who is?
i enjoy gerome me: columba
duh Anna: why?
his apostolic skills? me: book of kells connection Anna: ohh me: plus he was kind of awesome Anna: i like st oliver plunket because of his name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Plunkett me: that’s also a hot portrait
my boyfriend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columba Anna: haha me: plus almost all of his miracles
have do with books
you know how i heart books
Someone recently asked me what I feared most. Not wanting to answer, I asked him back. He said drowning. I said loneliness. I’m also totally afraid of serial killers (to the point where I often refuse to sleep with my windows open in my un-air-conditioned apartment in July). But that’s an irrational fear. Very few people succumb to a grizzly death at the hands of John Wayne Gacy Jr. wannabes. Everyone’s lonely. All the time. Loneliness is the human condition. We’re obsessed with patching it up like a bike tire that just keeps deflating. We fill it with endless happy hour cocktails, late-night conversations, romantic relationships, meaningless sex. As someone much more adorable than me once said:
But more and more we’re suffering
Not nobody, not a thousand beers
Will keep us from feeling so all alone
Yesterday a friend sent me the following IM about my least favorite New York Times Column:
Anna: oh my god
you have to read modern love
you know i always hate it
hate it
but i love this one
and i’m almost in tears
Me too, Anna. Maybe we’re not alone. Maybe it’s possible to love someone even when they’re shitting in your bed. Maybe we’re all so lucky we should just shut the fuck up and skip through winter and into spring.
Then, this morning, another friend wrote something really pretty about sleeplessness and happiness and misery and a song I really like. And I couldn’t sleep the night before. And it was like, across an ocean, someone just knew that. And all of a sudden I wasn’t so lonely. I don’t believe in signs. But maybe I believe in looking for them. Maybe the only way we aren’t so lonely is if we continue to believe in fairytales, in illusions…
I’m in love with illusions
So saw me in half
I’m in love with tricks
So pull another rabbit out of your hat
If you’ve ever lived in Montreal then you know that Leonard Cohen is akin to a rare bird or a ghost; everyone’s always talking about their sightings of the troubadour. If you’re lucky you will catch a glimpse of him on a spring afternoon at an open-air café on rue St. Denis sharing coffee with a pretty young thing. At 74, the man, apparently, still has game. You’ll want to quote him that passage about Montreal in spring from Beautiful Losers. You’ll want to tell him that you went to McGill, too, and that you aspire to write a book of poetry, poetry about love and sex that only someone in their twenties could write.
Back on tour, the ladies’ man (lady’s man?) is getting a lot of press these days. He has been all over my personal life in the strangest of ways, too – his songs creeping into my love life and my iPod.
In a way, L.Cohen is my favorite sex writer. The majority of his songs, most of his poetry and both of his novels are unapologetically about sex. Well, sex and spirituality, which are, for the record, pretty much my two favorite things. So, to answer Let’s Talk About Sex’s question from my last post, maybe all sex writers are indeed “repressed, cheating, cruel, etc.” I mean, Leonard Cohen wrote a song about a dead woman having given him head on an unmade bed and a book in which one of the main characters spends his days masturbating in a dingy basement while the other rots away from syphilis. And God (and probably Buddha, too) knows he fucked around. Is that cruel? Perhaps. But maybe people who love imaginatively are always a little bit sadistic and a little bit masochistic. All the best lovers I know are. By lovers, I don’t mean people I’ve slept with. Open your minds! I mean all the people I know who are most committed to the idea of love. They wander through life, loving intensely, painfully and they usually leave a wake of broken hearts behind them.
Love is not a victory march.
*haven’t posted in awhile. this piece may or may not be featured on slice magazine’s blog, which you should check out anyway, if you haven’t.
This shit is ridiculous. And hilarious. But it certainly makes me realize that, nostalgia aside, you couldn’t pay me to go back to high school.
I’m 26 years old and I spent about ten minutes on gchat sending posts from this site back and forth with a friend instead of updating conversion series emails. FML.
Late into 2008 I naively declared that 2009 would be magical, a year of magic. So far it seems that people around me are either falling in love or losing people they love. Now, I recognize that this is not a magic made of illusions and parlor tricks. But, just maybe, it is still magical, perhaps in a deeper, older, more mystical sense. I do not mean to suggest that death is something to be taken lightly or to deny the pain of the mourning process. But, can we for a moment just consider the specific brand of magic that lies in sifting through the layers of someone’s life the way we do when we grieve, when we remember? Part of mourning is remembering the fullness that is a life. We simultaneously evoke both the details and the grand themes that flow through the rolling narratives of our memories like spools and spools of film. We experience and re-experience the whole person: their quirks, eccentricities, specific traits and also what they meant to us, how their life warmed, complicated and expanded our own.
Perhaps this process is not unlike falling in love? By love I don’t mean infatuation and I don’t even necessarily mean romantic love. I mean love in the broadest, most important sense possible. Falling in love with someone is learning to see through the parlor tricks, to see someone as a big, frightening, exciting, calming, undulating presence in the world. And yet it is also recognizing their smallness, their specificity. It isn’t giving oneself unhesitatingly to something shiny and new. It is recognizing a wholeness and an oldness in someone else. Because, if you keep sifting, there is an oldness in everyone that is, in the simplest sense possible, magical.
I don’t really like museum dates. But I do like going to galleries and museums with my lovely gallerina friend we shall call Shmessica. She always has brilliant insight into the work (see below for a reference to her in my review of two concurrent MoMA shows) and has often offered fantastic advice for the art newsletter I occasionally write. In fact, this whole post may or may not have been her idea. So, do it. Date a gallerina. You’re guaranteed a sexy little foray into the art world, lots of free wine and/or beer and probably a Jeffrey Deitch sighting here or there… If you’re lucky, maybe she’ll send you macbook photobooth pictures she takes of herself when she’s bored at her desk…
In 1989 Carol Duncan wrote a seminal article, entitled “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas,” which lambasted the Museum of Modern Art for presenting the feminine as a spectacle rather than showcasing female artists. We’ve come a long way. Or have we? The MoMA (and the Whitney alike) are still criticized for being old boys’ clubs. Closing next month, however, are two shows at MoMA that explore the feminine mystique, so to speak. Pipilotti Rist’s “Pour Your Body Out” is a giant, “immersive,” prelapsarian video installation in the MoMA’s atrium that Jerry Saltz referred to as a “seductively rebellious artistic gesture.” Indeed, it is lush, womanly (the projectors are hidden in giant breasts) and sensual. It also, as my date pointed out, failed to completely immerse the viewer in the cavernous space which still felt very much like the atrium at the MoMA and not quite like the dreamworld Saltz describes. Nonetheless, it speaks to Rist’s body of work which is at times romantic and at times irreverent but almost always engaging the female body as a site of production/revolution. And, besides, it’s sexy.
If Rist’s installation is a dream, then Marlene Dumas’s retrospective, “Measuring Your Own Grave,” is a nightmare of sorts. The exhibition showcases Dumas’s disturbing paintings which often deal with issues of race and sexuality. Roberta Smith panned the show which she felt should have been organized chronologically rather than thematically. She also claimed the work itself lacked a certain power and originality, ultimately leaving her with a lukewarm feeling. I still think, however, that there is a certain intense beauty in the walls of eery ink portraiture. But maybe I am just a little bit goth…”
Also, check out the shows before they close in February…
I don’t really like museum dates. But I do like going to galleries and museums with my lovely gallerina friend we shall call Shmessica. She always has brilliant insight into the work (see below for a reference to her in my review of two concurrent MoMA shows) and has often offered fantastic advice for the art newsletter I occasionally write. In fact, this whole post may or may not have been her idea. So, do it. Date a gallerina. You’re guaranteed a sexy little foray into the art world, lots of free wine and/or beer and probably a Jeffrey Deitch sighting here or there… If you’re lucky, maybe she’ll send you macbook photobooth pictures she takes of herself when she’s bored at her desk…