my style icon for 2011

TEDDY PENDERGRASS.

me at adam and krista’s wedding

…with charo hair, and a dress that was a LITTLE short, and a LOT tight on the derriere. please note giant whiskey bottle in front of me. giant whiskey bottle and bottle of champagne. and a bowl of crackers. of course.

love is overtaking me, part 2

first, i want to make a t-shirt that says this.

LOVE IS OVERTAKING ME.

second, love is actually overtaking me. it feels like a soft internal cloud of dewy-eyed-ness that distracts me from work, life, basically anything productive. monday night crush #2 sent me this text:

Okayyyy. Sleep tight love. Manana banana. XO. R

when was the last time someone called me “love”? has anyone ever? i mean, old boyfriends from a 1000 years ago were sweet with me, but that was a 1000 years ago. (LITERALLY? i was born in 974 AD?)

and then today he sends me this text, responding to my question about buying whiskey online:

Probs not online dear. We will hook u up tho.

for normal people, this is just a normal text. normal people would be like, “cool.” normal people might even be like, “why does he use the text shorthand for you?” but this unnormal person is completely destroyed by the word “dear.” by someone being so sweet with me in the most casual way.

3 charos

today i decided that my hair lately has kind of a charo-vibe, so i started looking for images of her, and fact is: it’s super fun to look at pictures of charo.

in non-charo news, roland barthes on karaj:

chicago

drinking metaxa and smoking cigarettes in the chicago cold.

the films of tom palazzolo

went to chicago this weekend and walked in the rainy cold to the art institute and saw the new modern wing and amazing impressionist art and charles ray’s hiroki and lewis baltz’s photography and ate a mediocre-but-cozy panini at the museum cafe and watched the surprisingly awesome films of tom palazzolo. whenever you walk into those little video rooms, you don’t really know what you’re getting into. but this was awesome. hilarious and poignant.

you can watch two of them online: “ricky and rocky” and this one, “jerry’s deli.” (maybe not as well served on a computer screen, but…still awesome.)

the locomotion of vitality

from “the fun stuff” by james wood in this week’s new yorker, a personal history of keith moon:

There is no great difference between the live concert recordings and the studio songs: all of them are full of improvisation and structured anarchy, fluffs and misses; all of them seem to have the rushed gratitude of something achieved only once. From this exuberance emerges the second great principle of Moon’s drumming; namely, that one is always performing, not recording, and that making mistakes is simply part of the locomotion of vitality.

love is overtaking me

crush #2 introduced me to arthur russell’s album love is overtaking me, he played “i couldn’t say it to your face” when we drove from austin to marfa, and i made him repeat it 5 times. it’s terrible and crushing. if i’m in a vulnerable place, it makes me wet-eyed. i started listening to the other songs, and so far, they are all equally wet-eye making. to wit, the lyrics to “your motion says”:

Eyes, they are just glances, a mouth,
it is just kisses, a hand, it’s just a handshake, and I am just
another guy.