july 31 2000
sometimes i feel like i swing from minutiae to bone-dry raconteuring, with nary a middle ground between poles. recently, there's been a bit of the latter, so i want to take a minute to inventory the detritus swamping my desk on this beautiful partly-sunny monday morning. think of it as a venture of limitless benefit: for the face-value-appreciating among you, you can get a sense of what i see during my days. for the stalkers among you, you can close your eyes and envision me taking each object (except for the jagged rusty off-brand soup cans next to my phone) and running it sensually over my taut young body with a haughty pout and smoky eyes. for my hyperintellectual heads, you can think of it as a neo-borgian exploration of the methodology of catalogue. my workspace is a desk composed of a right angle, roughly eight feet on the longer side (to my left) and six feet to my right. i face the vertex, where my computer sits squat and impassive. we'll be starting with the left edge, and proceeding to the right, around the sweep of the angle and on to the cross-hatch-ventilated sky-blue/grey metallic divider that separates me from my boss the curmudgeonly meatman.
-two white plastic feet. they're not really so much feet as they are mannequinesque foot-shaped molds, but lacking biological differentiations such as toes or heels. they came into my life as companions of something called the monofin, which looks sort like two flippers bound together. ostensibly, it's a swimmer's aid of some type, though once someone straps it on it doesn't do much good other than make you fall over. the feet came inside the footholes, presumably to let the consumer know where to stick his or her own feet. the monofin, on a side note, prefectly illustrates the deluge-of-crap flip side of receving promotional freebies from merchandising pr people. to return to the feet, though, we have diffuse long-term plans to paint them to look like sneakers, then hanging them strategically from a cabinet to make it appear as though one of us has someone stuffed inside. serial-killer humor is a can't-miss. a real hoot. hoooooooot.
-a small stack of books about louis armstrong, from a story i fact-checked two months ago. i should really those back to the writer, but since he's on a book tour right now, i don't think he'll be needing them. i've thus taken the liberty of scrawling "[writer's name here] chugs cock" intermittently throughout each book.
-one styrofoam cup containing the remainder of the morning's iced coffee. half-and-half and half an equal (yes, i know it sounds effeminate, but it dissolves well in cold liquid, so shut up.)
-one small 15-oz. container of "very valentino" cologne that smells a bit like the kind of magician that works in a bush-league dinner cabaret and goes from table to table with a tattered burgundy felt mat upon which he conducts various trivial manipulations with balls, coins and cards. actually, just coins and cards. feel free to e-mail me suggestions for good "manipulations of one's balls" jokes. ball gags, if you will.
-one cd, nelly's country grammar, which boasts tracks like "thicky thick girl" and "tho dem wrappers." i didn't buy this. i was sent it. but still, st. louis represent-sent.
-one tartan-patterned cardboard container storing two whiskey-flavored condoms. seriously. there's a picture of a bottle of scotch on the package. i don't know where it came from, and despite being a diehard empiricist and amateur mixologist, i can't bring myself to verify the taste sensation of single-malt latex.
-four pages saved from my jazzman-a-day desk calendar. these pictures are 1) muddy waters, 1956, 2) donald byrd's wife on 48th street hailing a cab with her husband's trumpet, 1960, 3) folk singer and two tons of fun odetta, 1953, and 4) bassist john pattitucci, flashing the gayest smile i've ever seen in my life. not herb ritts gay, more like a look-ma-it's-my-bar-mitavah-picture gay. i saved it so that i could show it to people. he looks like he's standing behind one of those 19th-century-mesomorph-in-a striped-["striped" here being pronounced like "biped"]-singlet-with 500-pound-barbells standup wooden panels with the head cut off so a 5-year-old girl can stand behind one in the middle of branson, missouri and get her picture taken, then take it home for her misty-100s-smoking aunts to guffaw phlegmily at. it's like that, instead it's . you really need to see it.
-one 11-oz. container of vaseline intensive care lotion, dry skin variety. despite the thug appeal, i have the hands of a scholar. like a baby's ass, these hands.
-one woefully sparse rolodex. the only interesting item in it is greil marcus' home phone number. back, you vultures.
-one snackwell's cereal bar. this is me trying to keep my womanly hips at bay. or, perhaps more accurately, this is me getting very hungry on friday and that being the only breakfasty thing available and then getting an extra one in the vending machine that i couldn't pawn off on anyone.
-one bathing cap. i haven't put it on in a while, because people look at me sidelong. sidelong, they do.
-one whole bunch of paper crap.
-one blow-pop, grape. four months old. i imagine that upon unwrapping, this would taste very much like dimetapp. when i was little, and needed to take it, my sister and i would pull out the bottle and put it on the kitchen counter, then spell "dimetapp." "d-i-m-e-t-a-p-p. p-p?" then we would make the explosive-diphthong-plus-sibilance sound peculiar to childhood mimicries of urination and laugh uproariously. it was a bit like the algonquin round table, if dorothy parker had called robert benchley "doodyhead" while edna ferber made that hand-in-armpit noise.
so saturday was the rock steady crew anniversary concert, a big all-day free hip-hop show at the chelsea piers. it was also an excuse for people everywhere to dust off the biggest shirts and pants in their closets and attend in all their hem-dragging glory. my favorite person wa sa tall gawky white kid wearing a t-shirt that read, simply:
i
treat
my
bitches
right
a class act.
last night in the pizzeria, there was a little boy eating dirt off the top of the bar. "stope eating dirt off the bar," she said. "we're going to sit down soon." "but i'm really really hungry!" said the child. just like life, no?
to recap: a standup wooden panel of a big gay jazz bassist in a polka-dotted shirt, with a big gay guy and his big gay six-day-stubble beard standing behind it with a big gay smile. dorothy parker calling robert benchley "doodyhead." thank you.
p.
and yo. my full-on venture kneejerk.net is up and running, though not nearly full. go and getcha read on. for me.
props to darkcounter.com
and sitemeter