xtcian

7/13/02 Chapter XVIII of the

7/13/02

Chapter XVIII of the never-ending tome called "Projects for the Columbia County Farm" was in full swing today, as I sanded the floor in what will someday be the library. Any of you who have operated a rented floor sander knows what kind of dreary work this is, especially in a place like ours boards laid in 1867 don't respond so well to being fucked with. The floor is puddled with sixteen coats of paint and polyurethane, most of the planks are bowed in the middle, and several of them are hammered into the floor with some sort of ancient nails that rip the sandpaper all to hell if you don't bash them within an inch of their lives. Three abortive attempts into the ordeal, I put on the "super grit" sandpaper - you know, the kind the hardware sales clerk only lets you have with a prescription – and had to sand crossways against the grain. Yes, I've transgressed every rule that Master Carpenters hold dear, but so far it's: Ian: 1, Ancient Floor: 0.

None of this was easy, since I am pretty much full-fledged sick ironic, since I spent last night on here yammering about the placebo effect. It seems like I should be able to will myself better, or give myself a sugar pill or meditate or something, but I largely suspect that it's my stupid-ass deviated septum getting infected or something. This is the kind of thing, left unchecked, that used to kill medieval astronomers and such, so it looks like I've got to find a General Practitioner before my face falls off.

In other farm news, the tomatoes I planted look like they're thriving, and the newly-thinned pumpkin vines are beginning to rock. Ever since my days worshipping Linus, I've wanted a pumpkin patch, and to grow my own jack-o-lantern for Halloween (my fave holiday). Fortunately, the internet has several pumpkin dork sites (check out this message board or the Pumpkin Nook with it's shameless pumpkinization of history!) so I know precisely how to make my pumpkins have sex with themselves (more on that when I actually do it).

I took a break today mid-sanding and just sat in front of my garden while the sun prepared to set behind the Catskills. Probably twenty minutes I sat there, trying to feel better. Seeing plants you've grown with your own hands, from tiny seeds to a flowering vine, makes you believe that at least one part of your life is purely honest.

7/12/02 Before the "pledge marathon"

7/12/02

Before the "pledge marathon" drowned out any chance of decent public radio broadcasting on my drive up to Columbia County, I heard an astonishing bit of news about arthroscopic surgery on knees: basically, it's a useless procedure. A double-blind study over the last ten years has shown that patients who get the surgery do exactly as well as those who get a "fake" surgery (where, I assume, they make little scars and douse it with saline solution). Coming on the heels of the recent revelations about the neck-and-neck efficacy of antidepressants and placebos, it begins to make you wonder exactly which medicines work the way we think they do. It's a bit scary for doctors and patients alike, because any time the placebo effect works, we're tapping into our unconscious abilities to heal ourselves, and there's nothing more unnerving to Westerners than flaky, holistic, touchy-feely solutions when there's so much laser surgery just waiting to be had.

The placebo effect is also hard to harness, as it relies on deception, and there's not one doctor in the world who will risk the malpractice suit of a fake surgery, even if it works. But jesus, does it work - apparently, the subjects of the knee experiment were actually told that many of the surgeries would be fake, and yet the placebo still did as well as the real thing.

This raises some fascinating stuff: first off, it illuminates an incredible lack of unity in our mind-body connection. The placebo effect only works because we want so desperately to be well - yet at the same time, left "unmedicated," our conscious finds a way to keep us sick. I assume our longing for health comes from a survival instinct, but our ability to stay sick is more mysterious. I imagine it's a lack of self-understanding, a belief that we're far removed from the mystical times when we could heal ourselves. But now, give us a sugar pill, call it "Zyxafifor" or something, and we can stave off cancer. Other cultures must find us laughably inept at self-knowledge.

But what is the one thing that unites all of these fabulous placebos together? I'd say it's the hour or so of time spent on the patient the surgery, the physical therapy, just the fucking attention may be all we're really looking for. When a psychopharmacologist prescribes a medication, and a doctor performs a surgery, what they are really saying is "I understand you hurt, and I believe you, and I believe you enough to use my skills to make you better." Since sickness is such a subjective thing (we can never truly express how bad we feel to others), it is only through the active belief of a respected figure that we can actualize our pain, and if Freud is right, that alone can make it go away.

This isn't to say that all drugs are suspect. My sinuses are only unblocked when I spray Afrin into them, and my mom's hip actually does need the oil changed. But I accept that everything I feel from the Celexa may be induced by my own character. I begin to feel anxious, and then I stop, telling myself, "you can't feel anxious you're taking a powerful, expensive drug!" and sure enough, it stops. It could all be a sham, and maybe Sean's knee surgery was also a sham, but this I know to be true: I was miserable, then I took a pill, and now I'm not so miserable. Sometimes the destination is the destination after all.

7/11/02 Excuse me, but is

7/11/02

Excuse me, but is there a decent size 13 basketball shoe left in the five boroughs of New York? I've been to seven different stores, including Paragon, and every time I ask for my size, the hapless, underpaid shoestore employee comes back and says some shit like "the biggest we have is a 9 1/2."

9 1/2! I haven't worn that size since the NBA gave up on Chuck Taylors, for god's sake. When the shoe guys return from the bowels of the store, they're usually holding a size 14 pink women's volleyball sneaker and gossiping about how fucked up the shoe racks are. They remind me of the scene in "Raising Arizona" when Glenn tells Hi how he had to wait five years to adopt a healthy white baby ("I said 'Five years? What else you got?' Said they got two Koreans and a negro born with his heart on the outside").

The shoe I really want, poetically enough, is Vince Carter's signature line, the heel of which looks like something off the draft table of a 19th-century carriage designer. All I desire is something that has ankle support and doesn't jar my back when I land, and unfortunately, those are the shoes that cost the most. Tessa and I have a little rule about things we'll spend good money on, and one of them is "stuff that will be constantly touching your skin." Technically, shoes don't count for me, as there are socks in the way, but it's still in the spirit, right?

Other rules include "stuff that impacts your career," "places where you fall asleep," and "experiences that don't come along that often." You'd be surprised how often these things come up.

Having failed on the basketball shoe quest, I wore my old high-top Nikes to hoops tonight, mindful that these were the same shoes I wore every day to the Pink House shoot last year. They have zero bouncy-ness left (you wouldn't either, if you'd been at that shoot) but I still managed to play relatively well. Dripping with the sweat of my compadres, I trucked over the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn Heights, where I got to descend into an already-full-steam gossip session with Tessa, Lorraine Tobias, Nell Casey, and Virginia Heffernan - four of the reigning queens of media in full dander. Most guys don't get such pleasures as to hear these women swap stories, and I consider myself blessed to be surrounded by such company. I mean, but for the grace of god, I could still be fixing ham radios in Brad Loney's basement.

7/10/02 I went through a

7/10/02

I went through a period from about 1997 to 2001 where there are virtually no pictures of me, or taken by me. I think I can honestly say that I've made up for it in the last few months.

The digital camera just makes everything too easy, and now that I'm not ensconced in a particularly self-loathing mode - and, god willing, living an interesting life - each day is getting way too much documentation. For instance, this is Tessa sleeping (or whatever you call "sleep punctuated by nonsensical phrases every five minutes") next to me right this second:

she just said "he IS very particular"

But mostly, it's fun to have a camera in a city where something cool happens every millisecond or so. I know I have a dorked-out thing for ghost ads, but there are also the fleeting moments you can catch if you have an eye for preservation. Right now, the summer solstice has two curious effects on my world in New York: it sends a brilliant shaft of light through a tiny hole in the roof of our brownstone's stairwell, a la the Egyptian scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark"; and the sun sets right in line with the crosstown streets of Manhattan, blinding every westbound cabbie for a few days. The sun, passing unabated across town, nothing in the way, brilliant magenta in gorgeous pollution:

18th St. at 5th Ave., 8:19PM click for a larger, much prettier version

And then, if you're truly kissed by the muse, you can catch the human form at the zenith of its actualization. The flash of the camera in synergy with the perfect moment. Lesser photographers have trouble with the capture of their subjects, but a masterful eye always knows when to pull the trigger. To whit:

Sean and Jordana in glorious tandem at Haveli's Indian restaurant. What are they saying? What am I saying?

7/9/02 Sometimes I think this

7/9/02

Sometimes I think this is less of a journal and more of a semi-private rant space with little or no connection to the world on a daily basis. I suppose that's what happens when you live a life of lugubrious internal dialogue like I do, but sometimes it's necessary, in the interests of posterity and archivism, to actually say what I did on some of these days.

I made a private agreement with myself that I would never open one of these blogs with the word "Today," as in "Today I..." or "Today was..." or "Today we..." because that's the first tripwire in the minefield of clich. I know I'm not being graded on any of this, but avoiding trite shit can't help but make you a better writer. Sure, I'm not getting paid for this, and I have naught but a small, disturbed following (hi Mom!) but blog writing is the same as being in a cover band: you may not be playing what you want, but you're getting better at your instrument.

My Auntie Donna, though I love her to pieces, may be one of the most insane diary/letter writers ever to grace the Earth. Being the anti-Buddhists (and therefore obsessed with permanent records), Mormons make for exhaustively detailed diarists, right down to laundry loads and hedge clippings. My Aunt Marilyn, who spent 1972-1981 with the CAPS LOCK key stuck on, shouted her family letters with an attention to detail that was almost savantly autistic. I love her letters and find them impossible to out down.

But Donna (ne Idonna, due to some weird linguistic quirk of my great-grandmother Pearl) is the queen of the crop. Her letters were best described by Kent as "Joycean in the extreme, even as her subjects are mundane - sentences roll on for 40 or 50 words or more, and subjects, objects, tenses and verbs bob in a sort of goats head stew." Indeed, when she passes beyond the veil in a decade or two, Idonna completists will have roughly 15,000 typewritten pages to sort through, each with their own litany of Relief Society meetings, the installation and removal of Christmas lights, and of course, the melons she did – and, in some cases, did not – throw away.

Oh wait, I was going to say something about what I did today!
It rained, and I took a picture!

passing over the Manhattan Bridge during a squall

7/8/02 Sometimes you go so

7/8/02

Sometimes you go so long without seeing your inspirations that you forget how much you've stolen from them. I sat Tessa down tonight and got her to watch Sixteen Candles, one of the best of the early-80s genre. It was, unfortunately, a network broadcast, which bowdlerized all the good lines, making it a lot less dark and freewheeling than the original - but she dug it nonetheless. In 1983, Tessa was busy reading Anne Sexton poems in her room at Choate while the rest of us were going to the googleplex, so I take it upon myself to fill her in on crucial missing elements of the American experience.

Anyway, I saw some things I'd subconsciously pilfered for The Pink House without remembering where they had come from. For instance, in the bathroom scene where Anthony Michael Hall reveals Molly Ringwald's underwear to an awed crowd, the freshmen all go "ahhhh" in a recoiled fascination. In our movie, the sorority girls do the same thing when Heather Matarazzo shoves the nose ring onto Michelle (at my behest, of course).

In our movie, I envisioned a prop that would marry Pink House past and present: a lawn jockey. The 1929 Pink House would have a lawn jockey with a horse tied to it, and the present-day house would have the same statuette painted rainbow colors with toilet paper strung on it. Of course, "Sixteen Candles" has a nice panning shot at the beginning of the party sequence... of a lawn jockey, crap strewn all around it. Tessa vetoed the lawn jockey from our movie, saying it had too many racial implications (I still disagree, but didn't want to press my luck with audiences), but the Pink House lawn still looks quite similar:

The Pink House has homages to other movies there are some very subtle Animal House references (Murray saying "that makes sense" when the Nazis storm the party) and some outright obvious ones (Charlotte's speech to her girls - and to the Pink House residents - is straight out of the Dean Wormer playbook). But I hope these thefts don’t get in the way of the Pink House's overall goal, which is to give off the same feeling of brotherhood that was the benchmark of all the great 80s comedies. I also want it to be quotable, I want people to watch the movie and desire to live there, with those people.

Neil and Bill predicted in 13th-GEN that our particular generation would be an immensely creative one, much like the Silent Generation (born 1925-42) and the Lost Generation (born 1883-1900) before it. So far, our track record has been pretty abysmal, especially where movies are concerned. While codgers like Woody Allen and Boomers like Spielberg get all the screen time they can handle, virtually nobody from our age group has stepped up to create something profound. Only Wes Anderson, M. Night Shyamalan and the Coen Brothers have any visual style (and the Coens are actually baby boomers age-wise).

Only abject cynicism and a commitment to irony could possibly shackle an entire generation to such mediocrity. 30-year-olds who grew up on "Sixteen Candles" and "Ferris Bueller" are painstakingly trying to recreate these movies without bringing anything else to the table except much lamer dialogue and "plot" twists that can be seen an hour and a half away. Piffle like "Can't Hardly Wait" and the other legions of three-word movies ("Down to You," "She's All That," "Whatever It Takes," etc.) have fully destroyed the genre, making possible "Not Another Teen Movie," which was dreadful itself. Peyton Reed's Bring it On is the best of the lot, wonderfully directed, full of great performances and overall pretty delightful, but damned if I can remember one quote from it.

Which leaves me with the hope that we've done something interesting with the Pink House movie, that we're not some derivative, shrill xerox of a bygone era; that we've managed to say something. In "Ferris Bueller," Cameron stares deeply into a Seurat painting at the Chicago Museum of Art, connecting with a small boy made of blurred dots, while the Smiths play softly in the background. It's a gorgeous moment that needs no explanation. I pray we have such ammunition in our movie.

7/7/02 Looking at the sun

7/7/02

Looking at the sun is so forbidden that actually doing so is like stumbling upon a superhero while they sleep. It's rare that something in nature takes on such perfect form, and ever since I was a little kid, I've been mesmerized by the flawless circle of the Sun. The Earth looks oblong and messy, even from space, and there something about the Moon's craters, as well as its waxing and waning, that offsets the sphere. But if you get to observe the Sun on those lucky days when it won't microwave the back of your occipital lobe, you will see, from nature, the perfect circle.

Of course, you have to wait until days like today to do it. Due to some freak fire up in Canada, visibility up here in New England has been substantially reduced by smoke, making every landscape look like those Polaroids from the 70s that have been exposed to air too long. While pictures don't do it justice, I snapped a quick one of Tessa gardening our urn (boy, that sounds like a euphemism, eh?) with the sun hanging in the background:

It reminded me of a day in 10th grade calculus class, when our teacher Mrs. Baird was explaining something on the chalkboard. In the middle of a mess of graphs and formulae, she accidentally drew the most perfect manmade circle any of us had ever seen. It remained on the board for a few minutes during her lecture until someone in class raised their hand and said, "Um, I think you just drew a perfect circle." She stopped, and the whole class continued to stare at it. Everyone looked for a flaw, even a slight one, but we couldn't find any. She left it on the board for weeks until a custodian, not knowing, washed it away.