My sign!

I'm so excited! learningtoloveyoumore.com posted my sign!

Link

Hello?

It's hard to maintain your dignity in some outfits

I wouldn't

This is what Zina Marina* sees when she reads "Do you want to be a model?"


*"Zina Marina" = the Gogol Bordello song I'm currently obsessed with. It's about sex trafficking in Ukraine.

After the Deposition

After I testified all day I felt like I had climbed a mountain, or defended my village against intruders or something.

Lynda Barry says: "You know that feeling? when you finish a book you really love, that you almost want to make out with it?"* I'm feeling that way about this Steinberg book, Reflections and Shadows.



I wish it would go out with me.


* not an exact quote

Saul Steinberg on America

"Here there is every sort of felicita, including the horrendous happiness of Florida, concentration camps for old people, the happiness of the rich, who want only to buy things, and the happiness of the bums, the human wrecks. In every large city there's a place called skid row (in New York, it's the Bowery), which is the free zone for derelicts and drunkards, people who want to end their lives in their own way, looking for happiness until the end according to their own judgment, even if they're idiots or lunatics. As long as they don't bother others too much, the police leave them alone. When winter comes they arrest them all and put them in jail, just to keep them warm, so they don't freeze to death...There are those who work steadily for years, businessmen with families, and all of a sudden they enter the skid-row world, and prefer to spend the rest of their lives there. Suicide, except it takes a little longer.


On the Bowery you see many noble faces, marked by life's sufferings, but without the degradation of vulgarity and cunning. There are artists there, painters (I'm not talking about musicians or writers, who don't belong to the same family), defenseless, childish creatures who use their intelligence and courage not for survival, who are primarily concerned with their integrity; who don't exploit anyone, or live on this earth like those who are born with a specific purpose and think of life as something from which to gain the greatest possible advantage."

Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows (The Saul Steinberg Foundation, 2001. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., NY, 2002, English translation copyright 2002 by John Shepley)

Candy

I'm just getting home from school. I have my red plaid book bag. One of its buckles is undone and my messy papers peek out. Mommy is wiping her hands on her apron and smiling. She says did I notice what was on the table? I look over, there are two red velvet heart-shaped boxes. One's for me and one's for my sister. They are from Grandpa who makes candy and sells it in his cafe. It's weird for him to give me such a nice present. I don't even remember meeting him; maybe once. He had a cigar and needed a shave. He didn't talk to me but "played poker" with my sister. She was 6 or 7. She was supposed to have played golf with him too and gotten a hole-in-one. I can't figure out what this means but it makes all the adults happy.

When Grandpa died we had to hang around this hotel with big-patterned, reddish carpet and wait a lot. My cousins were there. We watched Gilligan's Island in the room and looked at what brands all the grown ups smoked by reading the butts in the ash tray. Some had lipstick on them.

My Mom made me go look at him in the coffin. She said "Maybe you could say a little prayer for him." We never pray in my house. I don't even know how. Something about the whole visit has made my Mom nervous.

Pug Muffin

Dream

The Feathered Couple

Violet on couch

Brave New Nose?

(I hit myself in the nose with a chair. Smooth, yes?)

Gallery of Feathered Bangs