Jenny Lewis is playing in Atlanta tonight, but I'm not going. This is not because I really do not like her new album, Acid Tongue, even though I really really do not like it. In fact, I wrote a haiku about how I do not like it for the October issue of Paste. Also in the October issue, also in haiku form, my managing editor calls me a "biiitch."
Up and went to Texas! Had a sinus infection, but it was fun. I've reached a weird point in my life where flying-- and not just flying, but flying to Texas-- actually seems like a normal thing to do. Meanwhile, not being able to fill up on gas when I need to? Doesn't feel normal, but looks like it might have to soon.
Front to back, and a little bit more: Ben Folds Five reunite in Chapel Hill
Kelly and Marie, I missed you so much.
I wasn't expecting to be so interested in the William Morris exhibit I saw with my parents at the Hunter Museum on Sunday, but I'm still thinking about it a few days later. It was the Artifact Panel that left the biggest impression upon me, and I keep finding myself wishing that I'd taken a covert illegal photo of it as was my first instinct.
It was huge, a panel running the length of one big wall, with hundreds of hand-blown glass vessels and objects attached to it with delicate, spindly claws that looked more like giant straight-pins, giving it all the effect of a meticulous collection of gargantuan insects pinned to a board. The vessels were straightforward vases, small and round to almost goofily phallic, but also abstract shapes and other figures-- and my favorites were the birds, which the almost undetectable fingers of the pin-claws curled around like they were keeping them from flying away. The colors ran bright to muted, but everything nearly glowed in the low light that cast shadows of the items and the pins in a weird web pattern across the wall.
It was, to be completely inartful with words here, just really cool. I can't find a suitable image online, but the Hunter posted this video of the panel's 14-hour installation process, which impresses me almost as much as the artwork itself because I would have broken that shit all to pieces, I guarantee you.
Incidentally, I found out Sunday that William Morris is also responsible for what I considered the single most terrifying piece of artwork in that whole museum when I was a child, Artifact Still Life. The name gives nothing away about its sheer capacity to so frighten me that I refused to go near it for many years, and neither does the Hunter's website, which doesn't have a photo. Suffice it to say, it involved sparkle-dusted femurs and a skull, and I think some gold chains, but who cares, the pile of iridescent bones was enough.
Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator (thank you, Anne Lamott)
If I was Sarah Palin's baby, my name would be Mullet Troll. If Sarah Palin was Sarah Palin's baby, her name would be Flack Gobbler.
Don't worry, friends. I'll still remember you even after I become famous for being the first person on the Internet to point out that Lo from The Hills and Shirley Knight ARE BASICALLY THE SAME PERSON.
But let's not talk about how the title of that post basically follows the same formula as every title of every paper I ever wrote in college (ie, Something: Something, something and something in somebody's something).
Having just been reminded of my love for Tina Fey by a 30 Rock re-run last night, the prospect of her returning to SNL to play Sarah Palin has me a little giddy. Way more giddy than watching an hour of Michael Phelps doing anything other than swimming, that's for sure. Durp durp durp.
The search is on for ONE reasonably priced, preferably non-student ticket to next Thursday's Ben Folds Five reunion show in Chapel Hill. I've got mine, but my dear friend Kelly is still looking (somewhat desperately, at this point) for one for herself.
[sob story]
Kelly has loved Ben Folds Five since she was twelve years old, when she copied Whatever And Ever Amen to cassette because she didn't have her own CD player. Despite her best efforts (ie, trying to convince her older brother to let her accompany him and his friends to a show out of town, to no avail) she was unable to see the band live before they broke up in 2000. Kelly is a first-grade teacher, upstanding citizen, gummy bear enthusiast, pays her taxes, stops at crosswalks, loves animals, recycles and, most of all, loves her some Ben Folds Five. She knows all the words. She will sing along louder than anyone else there. She might even cry a little. Your ticket will not go to waste!
[/sob story]
If you know of anyone trying to get rid of their ticket, please email me: rachael dot maddux at gmail dot com.
For those of you similarly rankled about Sarah Palin, but I've found these pieces helpful in calming my ire (by, at least, giving some shape to the intellectual/emotional bile frothing about in my brain): "McCain's choice won't fool women," from the Chicago Tribune (thanks, Maggie) and Gloria Steinem's "Palin: Wrong woman, wrong message," from the LA Times (thanks, um, half of my female Facebook friends).
Though, really, I'm not sure if understanding her candidacy as a softball to the conservative right is any more insulting and terrifying than if it was fully an attempt to pander to American women. But, per Lindsey, the list that's been circulating of books Palin allegedly tried to ban from the public library in Wasilla is fake. Most likely. At least there's that!
YearbookYourself.com is the best thing to happen to any wide-open Saturday afternoon of mine since the Simpsons avatar generator. I just spent forty minutes painstakingly time-warping myself into oblivion.
Determined this morning that Smitten Kitchen's egg-poaching directions are far superior to Mr. Breakfast's. It's the whirlpool!
I dislike Sarah Palin for every single reason that she's supposed to be likable: Her policies, her personality, her choices as a woman and a mother. The world-champion snow-mobiling, high school sweetheart husband. The spunk. The hair. All of it. I hate it. And I cannot get over how much I hate it.
The past two nights, Joe and I have had multiple, lengthy phone conversations about her, if you can even call them conversations, because both have mostly just involved me working myself up into an indignant lather and cutting Joe off whenever he attempted to interject. Or breathe. For hours.
Last night, he called me on the way to a party and we got going on the subject. An hour later, he mentioned that he was standing outside the house where the party was and that he better go in because they might be getting worried about him. By then I'd reached the point where all I was really doing was muttering, "Sarah. Fucking. Palin!" and pulling my hair, so said yeah, you better go.
Sarah. Fucking. Palin.
And my dislike, and my guilt about my dislike, and my fixation on my dislike and my guilt, comes from this: I have never had the opportunity to dislike a woman with this much power. Or potential power, as it may be. Either way, I'm used to disliking men in her position. I'm used to them being presented as protector of my rights, my interests, my life. Used to detesting them, loathing them, feeling my skin crawl when I see them, when I hear them talk, resenting their policies, dreading their edicts. It's nothing new.
But this is: To have a woman paraded in front of me and so blatantly, so unapologetically, so unequivocally offered up as my ally, when the stakes are so high-- a woman whose femininity and alleged likability seem to be, if not the whole point, then a good bit more than half of it-- and to have her be, actually, so far removed from my own beliefs and concerns and fundamental standards of a nice human being, is an absolute affront to me.
And don't tell me it's unfair to look to her family as an example of her leadership and the efficacy-- or failure-- of her policies, when it's so clear they're being used to sell her as a candidate. Don't tell me it's wrong to question her decisions as a mother and a woman when those decisions are being offered up as her credentials. Don't tell me to hold her to the same standards I would a man when her selection and, now, Vice Presidential candidacy are both so obviously centered on the issue of her as a woman, as such. And don't tell me she would have been chosen, still, all things being equal, if she was a man.
Don't tell me that, and don't believe it yourself.
And don't call yourself my ally, Sarah Palin. Don't you dare. One day I'd love to vote for a woman on the Presidential ticket, but if voting against one's the best I can get right now, I'll happily take it.
