ChaiTeaLatte

Keeping Notes

1. So, the weather is no longer unseasonably warm (she says drily.....)

2. Saw the David Hockney exhibit at the MFA. Sheer and utter happiness.

3. The picture that I like best (not talking about Hockney, see post below) was a large photograph, very flat and without depth, of a slightly overweight blond woman in jeans sitting on a very red couch. Window behind with curtains, a room filled with furniture and books and shelves and a television. You could see every strand of thread in the cloth of her clothes, the furniture. A wooden floor with every detail crisp. But, not hyper-real digital camera detail, you know? Warm. Claustrophobic and beckoning, all at the same time. Messy, colorful and patterned.

4. Jonathan went to a fashion show last night and said it was fabulous. I was safely tucked up in bed.

5. I am closing on a place soon, but the place is not ready, and I have already sublet very close to the closing date. A bit of a problem, no?

6. Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con nonsense is irritating me to no end. Why is it that people make such a big deal of their consumer choices, when it's green and organic, and then decry other consumer choices? Yeah, yeah, Mr. Dreher. I get that you're better than me. Except, my mother can make a fabulous meal out of a little flour, two potatoes, and like, a broccoli floret and wouldn't write a whole book bragging about it. Crunchy Con! Dude, please.

*Oh, and the corollary to this is that aesthetics and beauty have different arguments. I'm not talking about subjectivity; I argue that strip malls and gleaming American suburbs are objectively beautiful. I have Indian parents who look at the 'small and particular' Mr. Dreher talks about, and, well, want no part of it. They think the shiny new houses are beautiful, that they are about space, cleanliness, order, possibilities of a better future, and that they have a certain grace that comes with all of that. Remember, my lovely parent's idea of 'small and particular' is the Taj Mahal, not some New England colonial farmhouse, okay (well, maybe not the small part......) ?

**Michael Blowhard seemed to like the Crunchy Con book, which does give me pause. There's probably something to it, but the tone (from the original essay, I haven't read the book) still irritates.

7. I am looking forward to Bush's trip to India. I plan to enjoy it in a thoroughly non-partisan fashion. I like it when Clinton visits, too.........and then Howard is going. Oh my, someone is coming of age.

8. Watching Miami Ink (love Ami James), Project Runway (love Daniel V) and #1 Single (Lisa Loeb has very sharp 90s connotations for me - back when I was living in Albuquerque and believed in everything).

Eleven stories up, at Mass Art

Yesterday I went to a photography show at Mass Art.  Someone I know asked me to go; one of the photographers is a friend of hers and was showing two photographs. It's been unseasonably warm much of the winter in Boston and so we walked to Mass Art, directly after work. Well, we would have walked in any case, but the good weather certainly added to the good mood. "This area has improved so much since I got here," I say as we walk along Longwood, "it used to be all potholes,  but look at it now!" And I point to the shiny, newly surfaced road which makes me unspeakably happy. All roads should be so nicely resurfaced, litter should be placed neatly in trashcans, etc, etc, boringly and stultifyingly, etc. Is it so wrong to want your corner of the world to be well run and well cared for? My deeply conventional - bourgeois - heart feels this all so very deeply.

I liked the pictures.

Well, not all, but most. The show was on the eleventh floor and the first thing I did was run to the ransacked buffet: I had eaten almost nothing the entire day. The buffet table had a few remnants of food, about three chicken skewers in a silvery serving dish and chips scattered like a decoration around the base of the serving dishes (0n clean white cloth, of course).  Obligatory bottles of  wine on another table, guarded by a polite man in a red vest. This part of the gallery looks over the city, toward the downtown, over Huntington Ave and the MFA and Northeastern. I could look down and see a big green field with players running around playing, cars honking and halting and turning and zooming, tall buildings half-lit with workers half-leftover from the day of work. A buzzing, hive-like place. A buzzing little city.......

Note: More about the photos at a later date.