Futility Now

So before the whole Christmas thing got underway, my dad came up to visit. We went to Oak’s Park, which C and I hadn’t been to in ages. By coincidence, they had the organ going. It was totally fantastic.

Here is the locker we kept our stuff in whilst being overcome by insouciance.

(Man, that is so insouciant!)

Here are the beskated feet of me and C.

(Man, those are so beskated!)

We also went to the Portland Art Museum to check out the rather remarkable The Artist’s Touch and the Craftsman’s Hand exhibit. Unfortunately, everything in that exhibit was (understandably) behind glass, so my photos from it are crap. Instead, check out these pictures of “special” babies from the Renaissance.

Now we’re at Ocean Haven again, and I’m sure I’ll have something to say about that soon.

So we went to a charmingly goofy opening at Monograph. While we were there, availed ourselves of an old typewriter by the door. True to form, Hazel wrote something sweet, and I wrote something standoffish.

(standoff fish?)

Pictures from that cool little park at the end of Skidmore.

Here is Yoshi stepping on my face.

This appears to be graffiti of a yakking bird, over stencil of a raccoon head.

I’m not sure what exactly this sculpture that someone near Alberta had in their yard says about man’s inhumanity to man, but it’s certainly something.

I got a rather severe spider bite on my ass last week. Attributing the incident to pants that had been sitting in the back of the closet for some time, I took everything out and washed it. Unfortunately, there isn’t a conveniently-located dry cleaners, so my 1960s Brook’s Brothers suit is still sitting around for Yoshi to use to demonstrate his habit of sitting in the worst possible places.

As a metric of how much we listened to that Eluvium album, consider the following. It was in a CD changer with a Blonde Redhead album after it. When the Blonde Redhead album started, we found it harsh and abrasive. That’s a lot of spacing out, folks.

The other thing that I’ve been listening to a lot lately is a 2 disc collection of the incomparable Jonathan Richman. People make a lot of Richman’s break with the material from his first record, and his decision to do more lighthearted material, but the fact is, that material doesn’t necessarily cohere as an oeuvre any more than the pre and post break material do together. Johnny Rotten wouldn’t have been any more likely to forget the words to “Hospital” than he would “Rockin’ Government Center.” Considered stylistically, there was never any tradition from which to break.

What is recognizable about Richman, and the thing that holds all epochs of his production together, is. . . well, it’s sort of hard to explain. It’s the fact that how he thinks comes across really clearly, and it’s really weird. But also awesome. He also has an apparently naive but incredibly exacting command of language. I think my favorite example of this is “The New Teller,” where he rhymes “teller” with “well” by adding “er” to it for the first iteration of the line. Subsequently he leaves it off, leaving the first instance to create the rhyme in the listener’s mind while simultaneously making a little self-deprecating joke (“I didn’t really do that, did I?”) Guy sure writes great lines.

(Note about tags: I chose two from “Roadrunner” not to privilege that track, but because listening to this record makes me nostalgic for Amherst; pretty sure that’s the definition of senility.)

On Wednesday we woke to the glory of knowing we didn’t have to go to any train stations. Feeling beautiful and unfettered we proceeded to Paris’ finest musem: the Musée National d’Art Moderne at Centre Pompidou. To fortify ourselves we had eggs and coffee at the adjacent Cafe Beaubourg.

Then we made our way reverently throughout the galleries. This was the only place where we made sure to check out everything, and even though we took a break in the middle we were really on our last legs by the time we were finished. Hindsight being 20/20 we probably should have gone on an earlier day when we weren’t already exhausted from previous excursions, but whatever. It was amazing.

For our last night we went and had like a real meal instead of like massive salads or whatever. Hazel had lamb and I went for delicious steak tartare. Everything was very nice, and we managed to get to bed fairly early, because we knew some grim business was on offer in the morning.