Square One

Folks, at the end of this month we will be, I’m afraid, moving.

Granted, it will only be next door, to a house owned by the same landlord (with marginally more room, so finally the girls will have separate rooms and, therefore, can hopefully avoid killing each other), so there will be no specific inconvenience or expense of a moving truck, for example.

However, we’ve been living here for a decade now, and the amount of life’s accumulated detritus is positively staggering. Efforts to pare down the loads of completely useless crap we own are… floundering.

But every now and then, going through boxes, I find some super awesome prizeworthy shit. Like this children’s book, an acquisition from Diversity Thrift (where the cool people in Richmond shop, thank you very much). (Coincidentally, I am of the thinking that the “cool” contingency of Richmond consists of broke ass people like us.)

(Click through to Flickr for larger images/detail)

Some teenagers would kill to go to a Lamb of God show - never mind the luxury of VIP access and such, since we’re friends of the band members, in particular, vocalist Randy Blythe (as discussed recently) and guitarist Mark Morton (whom my husband has known since the seventies, and I’ve known since 1990). Here’s my girl at her first (and thus far, only) such show:

Now, contrast that with the same teenager’s reaction to a Jonas Brothers’ show? No contest!

The funny thing? At the very event where the latter show occurred (Virginia’s State Fair, 2007) we also hung out for awhile with Randy, who gave our daughter some good-natured grief for her lack of enthusiasm for the metal genre.

Well, no one can say we’re not exposing the kids to a… variety of cultural experiences.

From my pal D. Randall Blythe:

I am sitting outside in Paris @ cafe Les Deux Magots (waaaaay Hemingway!) having an espresso and getting ready to walk over to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’ house, then on to where Joyce wrote a good part of Ulysses. There’s your geek stuff for the day. XO, DRB

Can I just say? How rad is it that one of my dearest friends in the world not only throws down as lead screamer for Richmond’s own Grammy-nominated metal band, but also gets me as the literature dork I am. (And who was also my very first regular reader, in this blog’s first incarnation, in 2003 or so.)

Love you, Randy. Have fun out there and get your butt back home to RVA safe and sound. (And note that I waited a full twenty-four hours before posting this. Wouldn’t have wanted you to get stalked by Parisian metal fans or whatever.)

The quality of television programming available as workout accompaniment at our local gym ranges from trite and inane to offensive and enraging. (For which reason I have learned not to go at the 7 PM hour. I always get stuck at the Lou Dobbs treadmill.) Which is why I bring my iPod along and groove to Spoon or Pavement (shut up) or Otep or the podcast for This American Life or or, if I’m feeling particularly aggro, Lamb of God. But I am an attention deficit-disordered person, so even if I have awesome things to listen to, I will end up watching the TV too, or indeed all of the TVs, my eyes flitting between the screens (all the while guffawing at closed captioning borkings, because I’m nerdy like that).

So it was that today, at an earlier hour than that to which I am accustomed to working out, I was positioned between two monitors that had on some lameass shitsucking crossword puzzle-themed gameshow (really? a gameshow centering around crossword puzzles? Like gameshows aren’t already so inherently fucking¹ stupid²?), and The 700 Club.

I gleaned from this experience two pieces of knowledge:

1. I can never be a contestant on Merv Griffin’s Crosswords. That is because, if I were asked the question, “What does a lady who has been tied to railroad tracks need?” my answer, despite knowing the word had four letters and began with an h, would not be “hero.” Rather, it would be “Why, a knife! First, to cut the ropes. Second, to cut the motherfucker who’d tied her to the tracks.”
2. On the 700 Club, when Pat Robertson is supposedly praying? It does not appear to me that he is praying. Rather, it seems he is straining to have a bowel movement. And/or is passing a kidney stone.

You’re welcome.

__
¹ Cross-word puzzle enthusiasts of the world, I do not mean to diss you. Being a word geek, I get the attraction even if it ain’t my thing - but to debase that concept with a game show? That, my dears, is the phenomenon for which I mean to express my contempt.

² I would have elaborated here about the piece of crap garbage-chewing-and-regurgitating stupidity that is Deal or No Deal, which invades my home life with embarrassing regularity and against my wishes, but then it would have turned into a spiraling tangent about my eternal loathing for certain of my husband’s television watching habits, not least of which is My Big Redneck Wedding, and then I’d be all off-topic and shit.

Oh wait.

Fish Face, ca. 1987, originally uploaded by vmarinelli.

Hey folks. As you can tell, I’ve been a tad ambivalent about the blogging thing lately. (But not, as usual, about the twittering.) And since I have no dignity (and also because my asshole husband already put this photo up on Facebook), I provide it here, as an exhibit to the wonder that is youth.

As my notations to the image as hosted on Flickr (click through if desired) make clear, I really have no idea what prompted this particular makeup and costume situation. I can say that all the adults in the household were high as kites and engaged in a long, mad medley (a “jam session,” if this very phrase will not cause you to faint) comprised of such classics as Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue, Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, and Eric Clapton’s After Midnight. (Which, I am quite certain, it was. By several hours. And yes, probably on a school night.)

I also recall that I had a partner in this crime: my then-foster sister (a friend from school, whose mother was an even flakier hippie than mine, and thus had simply decided to move to the other side of the island without her), who was dressed and dolled up in an equivalently surreal manner, only I have no photographic evidence of this fact; you will just have to take my word for it.

I also know that when she and I came out of the bathroom, with the intention of seeing how much we could freak out the adults present (they tended to be rather unfreakable, so there was something of a high threshold to get over in that endeavor), that the medley had shifted to a rousing rendition of House of the Rising Sun. Which apparently is some ballad concerning a house of ill-repute.

Naturally, my mother would later seize upon the symbolism of this moment, in that I, her daughter (never mind her generally faultless foster-daughter), had, at the very moment she and her pals had been singing about whores, had come out allegedly dressed as a whore. (Though I’m sorry, but when I look at this picture, I think more “surrealist 1980s clown” than “whore”; plus, there is the detail that I was a bored teenager, who was making a fish face.) Then again, this was my whoredom-obsessed mother (for whom the end result of all equations fell along the lines of “daughter, you are a whore!”) whose perceptions and interpretations we are talking about.

Not that I’m bitter, because of course she has provided me with a lifelong stash of rich material to work with. (For example, the work in progress titled Tangled Up in a Whiter Shade of Pale Blue: The Random Years.) I am nothing if not blessed with (!@#$%^&*) material!

Because I have about fifty other things going on, including a few stalled blog posts and an increasingly urgent need to pack for my trip to Greensboro tomorrow (my BFF is treating me to the Amtrak fare and a long weekend’s mutual writerly support, yay!), but I also feel like shaking up the uber-serious mood of this blog ever since that last piece posted, and finally, because I have been inspired by a dear friend’s adventures in (ahem!) ‘art’ criticism, I give you… this.

Please understand that I do not, in any way, endorse the practice of taxidermy. (FFS, I’m a vegetarian!) But I happened upon this… thing in a bookstore near VCU (which, in keeping with its catering to eccentricity, is open sometimes, closed at other times, with no predictable pattern to it), and I just didn’t quite know what to do with the surreal image. So of course I’m foisting it upon you.

…And, what was even more inscrutable? The other end (business end?) of said chipmunk¹:

(Note: If you couldn’t make that out, the lettering says, The rule of consciousness is near. Um, okay, WHAT?)

Which, to me, doesn’t make me a lick of sense, but maybe I’m just not enough of a ‘real artist’ to get it.

I suppose this would be called, by aficionados of the form, either ‘mixed media’ or ’sculpture.’ (And/or ‘animal cruelty,’ ‘crap,’ and ‘OMFG what drugs was this person on when they made this thing’ by others.)

Let’s say we agree to call this ’sculpture.’ (For the purposes of argument. C’mon, just play along.)

If, indeed, it is sculpture, how did it get there? Is this ’student work’? And if so, is it, by any bizarre chance, the work of a student in VCU’s Sculpture Department, ranked again by US News & World Report as the top program of its kind in the country?

(Clearly, stranger things have happened.)

__

¹ Unless it’s actually a squirrel and I’ve got everything wrong. It’s not like I’m an expert in differentiating between varieties of taxidermied rodents, okay?

…I would probably still watch them. (For as long as we still have cable, anyhow…)