Filed under: getting out of the house
Yesterday boasted two adventures in bringing Florida’s wildlife indoors. First, the successful venture was Flux, my friend Tony’s dog. Tony is going to Hong Kong next week, so Flux and I were testing each other out. It went well.
The second was more traumatic and involved closing my venetian blinds.
At least now I know why my dining room smelled funny.
Also in animal related matters, I’ve gotten some flak from animal lovers about my new gator head. Perhaps the purchase was a little rash (as was the white jumpsuit), but to justify my decision, a brief history of gator farming from The Gator Hole:
During the 1960’s the alligators population continued to diminish. Poaching of the alligator was widespread, and because of a loophole in state laws, authorities were unable to shut down the interstate network of illegal hide dealers. Finally, in 1967, the American Alligator was placed on the first Endangered Species List. In 1970, federal regulations were imposed that effectively ended the illegal alligator market, and the populations of alligators began to rebound. It has been speculated that perhaps the alligators population was never as bad as originally thought, but that the alligator had just become more adept at eluding humans.
In 1977, the alligator was reclassified from an endangered to a threatened species. This change in status allowed the alligator to once again be available for commercial use. During the 1980’s the alligator became to be viewed as a renewable resource, and several alligator management programs were instituted by the State of Florida. These programs allowed for controlled hunting of the alligator by private individuals and the collection of eggs and hatchlings by licensed alligator farms.
Alligator farming is now a thriving business, with an estimated 30+ alligator farms in the State of Florida. This multi-million dollar industry generates approximately 300,000 pounds of meat and over 15,000 skins a year. Alligator meat averages $5-$7 a pound wholesale, and while skin prices vary year to year, the average price is around $25 per foot. Currently in the state of Florida, it is estimated that we are home to over 1,000,000 alligators, not counting those raised on the commercial alligator farms.
Filed under: getting out of the house
i knew it would happen, and well, it happened: writer’s block. scrub is at the printer, i edited blue-eyed apples to cut out most of the first-person-crazy-lady and thus shift the narrative voice a good deal, bless came and left, and well, i did my laundry and couldn’t figure out what to write next. instead, i did a bunch of stuff:
1.my first gator head and my first florida orange of the year get acquainted.
2. cornell art museum was meh. really good for such a small school, rollins. there was a little bit of impasto that made me happy, and one of the profs had an instatllation of underwater art that was pretty neat-o (98 different sea creatures!) especially consdering the context:
3. i am reading moby dick.
4. i also read an essay from 2005 about the 20something generation and how we’ll never have babies or responsibility. actually, it was more about how 35 is the new 25, but it also hit the nail on the head in terms of how i am struggling with what to do with the balance of the decade. all the 30somethings in essay club enjoyed giving me a third degree of sorts. think they like to see me squirm.
5. i dressed up like a human cannonball and then headbutted people i don’t know really very well until close to 5 am. the party also featured a clown named eddie (the host), a mangina (not unlike the breathtaking conclusion of ace ventura, pet detective), finding beer money in the street while riding bicycles, and a lot of gay cowboys. The evening devolved into a crying clown, boys-hitting-girls fights, and being serenaded by a man twice my age that sounded a lot like elvis (costello).
6. a girl in a white leotard and furry boots gave me snus. i read an article in the nytimes about it, so i thought i’d try it. once i put it under my upperlip, as instructed, i got really scared about cancer and threw it all way.
7. cover letters galore, for readings of scrub in nyc, for the next jobs. i think breathing into a paper bag may have helped in the process.
8. baseball. may colorado rest in peace.
9. lips. lemons. lips. lemons. repeat. pictures tk.
Filed under: getting out of the house
The space shuttle launched from Kennedy Space Center at 11:38 this morning. After haranguing a number of friends and board members for a ride to the coast, I ended up staying in Orlando, watching the launch from the side of Lake Ivanhoe. Here’s the goods:
also, for all of you that actually work during the days:
did you know that this happened?
Filed under: getting out of the house
things that happened this weekend:
1. keys to a volvo, which enabled us to get lost in cape canaveral. imagine: 9 pm, saturday night and dying for dinner, dead ending into the space center air force base. whoops. and driving around the coast during biketoberfest. such a bad idea. and a car wash, which was just plain confusing. (me: how are you? cashier: 6′4″)
2. walks on the beach.
3. canoeing in wekiwa (wii-KIE-vah) state park with bless and harrison. very deliverance. very nice. i mustered the courage for a rope swing off shell island.
4. a bottle of nice scotch. and cigars. and the pitter-patter of rain on the porch’s tin roof.
5. gatorland. so many gators.
the gator jumparoo
you can pay extra for a paper bag full of turkey dogs. idea is that you feed them to the gators, but sometimes that doesn’t go quite right:
6. the best sunset florida’s seen in a while.
Filed under: art appreciation 101
While I’ve seen a number of tours, this week I saw my first local music, which was a good learning experience. The band, here known only as Tom’s band (he plays the flute, there is sunshine somewhere in their name), was playing at Taste’s fourth birthday party. They did some very nice (and very loud) things with found footage:
The mouths were right up my alley. The bad part, which is implied by deeming it a “learning experience” is that a girl really should not be left alone in this town. Apparently “no” means “I’ll call you next week.”
I made it two galleries into Downtown’s Third Thursday gallery night before I got distracted by sushi. I saw some wierd biblical lightbox art:
before heading to the Gallery at Avalon Island (the name, yes?), which was having a puppet show as part of the Orlando Puppet Festival. Jim Hensen’s daughter was there, along with a whole load of puppets. We discussed puppets vs. clowns at length, enjoyed the finger puppets, and met Wavy Davy, the show’s curator. You may know WD from his day job at Nickelodeon. He made slime and designed stick stickley. I spent a while blubbering about how much slime meant to me, and went into something about how it (and by extension wavy davy) had entered the cultural canon —or was it the “contemporary vernacular”?—when my friends based a whole music video on the premise of getting slimed at a new jersey kegger. He seemed pleased.
Filed under: getting out of the house
Saturday was adventure day in central Florida. Lisa, a film prof at UCF, took me to Marjorie Kimmel Rawling’s cracker house (their term, not mine) and orange grove, where she wrote the Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Yearling.
her writing desk on the porch
green oranges
Then it was to the Yearling Restaurant, for friend green tomatoes and gator. Ten minutes to Micanopy, more antiques than you could shake a stick at.
Then to the farm, for fifty pounds of BBQ and no less than a dozen potato salads. Also, a chicken poop (whoever’s name tag the bird shits on gets the kitty), hay rides and a cowboy effigy got lit on fire.
Austen considering his options:
waiting for chicken poop
Filed under: art appreciation 101
I went out last night, rode Tony’s old-new bike across town to Beta Boutique. It sure went fast down Livingston. Anyway, the show/party was full of young people. And art. And Red Bull. And vodka. But really, folks, the art, that’s why we’re doing what we do. “Small Talk” was good—all square foot pieces, laid out in a shoe store.
Andrew Spear (colored pencil!) was especially great:
I met the curator, Dustin Orlando. Like so:
and of course, there were shoes to match.
Also of note, after meeting Dustin and a couple of the artists, and Lisa of the skateboarding circuit, I’ve moved onto using the fingers of my second hand to count the number of young people I know in O-town. It’s nice, knowing folks. Miss you, too.
Filed under: art appreciation 101
Today’s adventure was the Orlando Art Museum, in the Loch Haven Park complex off Mills Avenue. After working at the Metropolitan, whose collection may be the closest thing to encyclopedic in the western hemisphere, if not the world (only the Hermitage, and the Louvre are larger, the former’s collection reflects generations of idiosyncratic rulers and their tastes, while the Louvre’s holdings end in the mid-nineteenth century), I have a particular way of approaching regional art museums. They will not have a comparable collection to New York, so it is a questions of what they do with what they have. You’ve gotta shake what your momma gave you, as they say. Go on and flaunt it.
Past a blue and green Chihuly, which served as the central atrium, was a show of Puerto Rican Art. The 2-D show of over 50 works only included a few pieces from the past decade, and many of them were well executed but fairly generic. That being said, it was bilingual and the pallate of the artists—supersaturated colors and a whole lot of black—gave you the idea that they came out of a shared of cultural aesthetic.
There was a room of Latin American Art, one of Native American, a hall of prints (the Richard Tuttle was wonderful!), and, well, an assemblege of assembleges. Here is a turtle of sorts:
Okay. Take a deep breath, past Chihuly again and through a few rooms of American art, standard portraits and landscapes. A small and lovely O’Keefe:
Nice little gallery on the end, with a nice Chamberlain and an Ursula von Rydingsvard (she had a show at Madison Park in 2006 for those of you who visit the Shake Shack). One of my favorite things about UVR’s work is the smell of the wood, they are very piney, which gives it an affect along the lines of the large scale and choppy texture. This one was from the early 90s and didn’t smell much any more.
There was a good room of juxtapositions from the collection, ie a still life with Roxy Paine salami, one of Rauschenberg’s Florida prints (he lives in Captiva) with a more tradition Floridian landscape.
The museum ended on a high note, a room of contemporary art making statements about society. It was a little like Art21 in a 30′ square room: Fred Wilson, Dennis Oppenheim, Ellen Gallagher, etc.
here’s something from scrub. the rest of the stories are longer and more story-like, this is an epilogue of sorts.
next year in jerusalem
We arrive at the time of Friday that is bustling above and below, blue-domed minaret calling straightaway to market. To market we will go, after prayers. We will buy challah and tuck it under our arms and return home before sundown. One Sabbath is coming, one is here. We approach.
Past tourist camels with large, yellowed teeth and through the old city gate, the air thick with green spice, I put a long skirt on. We are in front of King David, his sunken green courtyards and sandstone. The group shuffles through security, reaches the plaza before the wall. Each of us forty pilgrims faces it alone. Our eyes go up, eyes go down, eyes brim and blink at the stone. We approach, drunken, fearful, reverent of its history. Our fingers shake, outstretched to touch. The contact makes me shudder.
Then they come, released from gloved hands above our heads. Pigs. They sail over the wall with flailing legs. Porcine squeals mix with prayers, shouted in tongues twice foreign. These are bombs. These are prayers. These are calls for an end, and calls for peace. We go silent, listening to our assailants bellow and their artillery shriek. Not in the first moment, when leather-clad fingers are still wrapped around pink bellies, but upon their release, for these fleeting seconds the pigs are not halal and they are not kosher. They are not anything, weightless and dancing through the air.
They oink upon landing, a symphony of baritone miniature pot-bellies and alto razorbacks, soprano piglets pitched so high that dogs, dogs in the Arab village on the mount’s far side, pull at their chains. They whine and consider breaking loose, giving chase, catching, grasping hairy pink flanks between their teeth, and pressing jaws together, into flesh. The canines lick their chops and tug, tails dropped down between skinny legs.
Chains hold and the pigs continue to sail down, plunking amongst the devout: shortened thick ladies, black-clad men, fresh-eyed foreigners making aliyah. In the moments before landfall snouts catch on tallis and hooves rip long skirts. The animals land and spread out on the terrace, scrambling between rabbis and beggars, scattering clumps of elderly women with frantic snouts. In self-preservation, the bodies of all push forward, away from the arc of falling tref. We no longer have one hand to the disintegrating wall, now there is a cheek, a breast, whole flanks and faces pressed into the worn stone. We cry, we smell the paper of others’ wishes and send our own in whisper. Above, the assailants remove their gloves, finger by finger.
The last pig lands, and we wait for the retaliation to begin, the rapid pop of so many guns at our heels. We wait because we know, we know because we have seen: there are so many guns. Rifles at the airport, uzis across the bus’s back seat, semis on the hotel lobby’s couch, revolvers flanking the city’s gate, pistols cocked and ready at the turnstiles and along the ramp. One does not turn one’s back to the wall, but if one did, the guns would be there, too, just over shoulder. The soldiers ready their guns, we can hear their clicking, but not one fires, fear of blood on sacred stone trembling trigger fingers.
Oblivious, the pigs gather into a herd of pink and fat, and they press forward as one mass, up the ramp, across the plaza, and under the turnstiles, out the old Gates of David. They trip down the steep street, hooves failing on the cobblestone slope. But each catches the others, and they descend. The clopping of their hooves on stone fades into the valley.
We rub our eyes. Like sunspots the pigs remain frozen mid-air, but they are gone, the last piglet disappearing through the stone gate. The press eases, and the faithful return to Friday prayer. We finish, and we leave. We walk to market past shoe stores and sidewalk cafes and pharmacies, each building is built in the same Jerusalem stone. The same camel stalks by, its footfalls make us start. At the market we buy our bread, and later we break it by candlelight.
Meanwhile, the pigs walk all afternoon, through the tzedakah forests and under new freeways, following the sun’s course towards Tel Aviv. By moonlight they walk through the city’s new suburbs, streets lined with mirror-image houses, and then make their way into the city’s center, past hotels and thumping discos, scuttling between dumbstruck taxi cabs and blinking city busses. They reach the sea in the hours before dawn, snouts sinking into damp sand, feet heaving against the beach’s resistance. One by one they enter the water, saline and lipids turning them roly-poly in the surf. Then they dive, pink skin disappearing into the inky Mediterranean. The undertow carries the pigs past the breakers, and the Saturday winds blow them straight to Málaga.
I am very excited to announce that Shady Lane Press is going to publish a book of my short stories and illustrations called Scrub. It looks like it’s shaping up to be 70-ish pages, with four stories, an epilogue, and an illustration for each. Below’s the cover, which features a painting I made last week.
I wrote four of the five pieces my first month here (the fifth was the writing sample that got me the room and board at Kerouac’s house in the first place). It was September and I’m Jewish, which means that in addition to the introspection of being in this creaky old house alone, I was thinking about a lot of repentance and atonement. The stories that came out of those weeks are all about the kind of reckoning Jews go through on Yom Kippur, but without the Jewishness. They’re stories of repentance, forgiveness, and acceptance. With little pictures.
The production’s been a little gangbusters—they’ll have it ready for the reading I’m doing in November (tentatively Saturday, November 18), but it’s exciting because such a fast turn around makes it a really honest document of where I am right now. No, I don’t mean Orlando… but as with a lot of my work, geography and nostalgia are given big roles. Maybe the next one will be about O-town. Anyway, I’ll be selling them in NY and they’ll be on Amazon in a month or two. Stay tuned.
