A few of my favorites
Pinned four high and twelve across a wall, Tara Geer’s 14x11 monoprint drawings at Planthouse Gallery are a hallucinogenic periodic table. Botanical illustrations from a monochromatic world. Renderings of Guillermo del Torro’s fever dreams, “intentionally ambiguous, trustworthy and traitorous, enticingly worrisome and enchanting...”
Geer tells me they’re the substance she imagines living under the city’s pavement. “How do things grow here?” she asks. “How do they have the strength to break through the pavement and live?”
I think they feed off the gum on the soles of our shoes. Siphon the nutrients from the slow decay of a once rotund rat, now melted into the sidewalk, its spine marked if you dare to crouch low. You can see her blooms strain after the rush of a skateboard, ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunks leaving behind chips of polyurethane to mix and mingle and become part of their mycorrhizal world.
Under the watchful eye of an energetic and patient young biologist named Luke Bullough, O'Hanlon joins the manic crew as they haul and gut fish every hour of the day and night in varying levels of physically challenging storms. As promised, sleep deprivation takes hold and the crew steadily go mad, “And you, Redmond, you, too–you’ll crack up," Bullough warns. "And so will I. I’ll crack up. I always do.”
And oh–the things you’ll learn! Flying skate–they fly! And a catfish is actually a dogfish. Then there's Bullough's convincing case that “God likes squid best":"their eyes are so superior…. whereas with us, God was having a sleep, he messed up, big time!…Aye!”
“If you don’t get to sales early you have to wait in line,” Josh tells me. “They’ll let X number of people in first and the next group is just losing it, wondering what’s happening inside. And when the door reopens, we’re looking to see if they got a big haul, which is bad because that means they took all the good stuff, but if they have nothing, we’re thinking there’s nothing worth seeing. … It’s giving me anxiety just talking about it.”
A woman walks past the truck and angles for the front door. Harris checks his rearview to see more treasure hunters moving into position. “We better get in there.”
In a red-bricked strip mall in the Crestview neighborhood of Austin, Texas, nestled in between a laundromat and a barbecue joint, is Lala’s Little Nugget, where it’s always the most wonderful time of the year.
“I been comin’ here since 1980 or ’81, I can’t remember,” Pat Painter tells me. Pat owns Pat Painter’s Wigs and Hair Pieces up the road on Burnett and is almost certainly Lala’s oldest regular. “I picked me up an air conditioner guy in here; I picked me up an electrician in here; I picked me up a honey-do man in here.”
“A what?” I ask.
“A man that always calls to see how you’re doin’ and fixes things you need fixin’.”
“I need one of those,” I tell Pat, and she gives me his number.
I’m not a beauty blogger. I’m not a celebrity. But I am a human—a female human—and I’ve been using beauty products for a long time. Does that make me an expert? Meh, maybe just someone who wants to share.
So here’s a random list of stuff I love; some of it might not work for you, in the same way, you might not like gefilte fish or houndstooth sweaters. This list is totally personal, highly selective and no one has paid me to mention them.
This is the story of a couple of regulars. They love this bar. They come in for a couple after work, before going home, on a steady basis. They come here as a coda to their day before the rest of their night, which they will spend together, just the two of them, in each other's arms. You serve them and get to know them, in this way, becoming a part of their intimacy, “friends” of a sort — no numbers are exchanged and you never hang out outside the confines — were you to run into each other, say, at Trader Joe's, it would take a while for their eyes to focus and figure out where they know you from. Yours is a special kind of friendship — like a vacation romance, it exists in a bubble devoid of minutia; you will never know each other so well that you will fight. You will never tire of one another's quirks. There is always just enough time for a funny story, a glimpse into the highjinks of your life, admiration for the outfit, and a tip.
In 1908, after being hospitalized for three years for hallucinations, delusions and manic-depressive episodes, a man named Clifford Beers wrote a book titled “A Mind That Found Itself.” The book led to what was known as the “mental hygiene movement,” the first widely recognized call for “reducing the preconditions for mental illness by taking such social measures as the right upbringing, selection of decent work, adequate living and working conditions and fast and accessible psychiatric services.”
This was a considerable step toward recognizing mental health as a treatable condition rather than a punishment sent by God, a possession by the devil or the byproduct of being a witch or a warlock.
With Kim Sun Young having worked its restorative magic, my hair and I meet Courtney in the parking lot of Poor Dog Group’s warehouse performance space at the end of a dead-end street called Hunter, somewhere between downtown and the Art Loft District. It’s the kind of street in the kind of neighborhood on the kind of night that brings me unmitigated joy knowing that it’s there. I mean, the area is desolate. The street is dark. The homeless man banging around inside the Dumpster sings along to “Yesterday” on his iPod. He smiles at us theatergoers and waves. He’s missing an astonishing number of teeth and I wonder if he’s part of the show.
We grab a Tecate and head for our seats where we’re regaled for the next hour by men showing their balls, pulling tampons out of their asses, singing Sting’s “Fields of Gold” and doing some impressive Russian dancing punctuated by recordings of NASA’s flight records.
We need sustenance.
The Sidecar is a one-wheeled car for a single passenger attached to the side of a motorcycle. The Sidecar is also a drink that, as popular lore has it, was invented at a bar in Paris for a World War I American Army Captain who liked to arrive in the whimsical vehicle.
Dale DeGroff, in his book The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks, argues that the term “invention” is misleading, as the drink is merely a twist on the Brandy Crusta which was invented in New Orleans by a man named Santini. DeGroff goes so far as to debunk entirely the customer-in-a-one-wheeled-vehicle as pure myth.
“The word sidecar means something totally different in the world of the cocktail,” he says. “If the bartender misses his mark on ingredient quantities so when he strains the drink into the serving glass there's a bit left over in the shaker, he pours that little extra into a shot glass on the side—that little glass is called a sidecar.”