ROCK-BOTTOM '09

1. During your wildly-successful drawing salon, attended by two people, you hear a menacing "clink" coming from your bathroom.

2. It is an inexplicable "clink", like glass on porcelain. Inexplicable because you have no dishes to shift against your porcelain sink, which has not yet been installed and sits collecting dust in your wretched kitchen.

3. Later, in the bathroom, you notice that your Red Currant-scented Votivo candle had burned down to the wick, annihilating all the wax and heating the glass base to such an extent that the glass shattered.

4. Hence the menacing "clink."

5. You reflect that you've been using this same Red Currant-scented Votivo candle for 3 months.

6. You also reflect that you haven't replaced it, though it was charred and low, because you simply cannot afford to pay the $26.50 required for another candle.

7. The dire nature of your squalor also becomes clear in this reflection, as you realize that the Red Currant-scented candle was necessary to cover up the looming stench of mold.

8. You locate this looming stench of mold as coming from the pile of dirty socks and moist towels heaped up in the corner of your bathroom.

9. You wonder why you did not notice this before, and if the two guests of your wildly-successful drawing salon, in fact, did.

10. The moldy towels are in a neglected pile on your bathroom floor because you have not done the laundry.

11. You have not done the laundry because you cannot afford to do the laundry.

12. You have not noticed that you cannot afford to do the laundry because you've relied on a sweet-scented Red Currant Votivo candle, which just burnt itself down to it's last shred of wick, heating the naked glass up to such an extent that it exploded on top of your toilet, which is beside a moldy pile of old towels, producing a menacing "clink."

13. "Clink" rhymes with "stink."

Jocks

The other day, I was riding my bike down the West Side, thinking about skateboarding. Not the actual act of it, but more the state of it. I do that quite a bit. It's pretty much why I hardly blog anymore, because most of these thoughts are worthless.

Funnily enough, I don't really know the state of it anymore. What little opinion I have of it is based on whatever shit-talking I may have gleaned off of the Slap Message Boards 5 years ago when I had a soul-crushing office job. In my mind, I'm still debating whether Dan Wolfe's "Closure" was overkill or not.

I also think a lot about how skateboarding has been infested with jocks, and whether or not that's a good thing. That inevitably leads me to wonder whether it always was infested with jocks. What's a jock, anyway? Does being a jock mean that you're competitive, you take an overtly athletic approach to your skating, throwing around terms like "training" and "dominate" and "double pits to chesty" with indiscretion? Or does it mean that you dedicate a huge part of your day to some physical activity? Are there energy drinks involved? Homophobia? Where do you draw the line?

Also, where would skateboarding be without them? If they weren't driving by in their pickup trucks antagonizing us while we were younger, would we maybe have skated less and partied more with the other soches? If there weren't brolick vert dudes killing it in spandex and fluorescent volley ball gear in the 80's, would street skating have seemed so cool in the early 90's? Also, if there weren't dudes that through their own innate athletic ability who could push tricks farther and higher, would skateboarding have progressed the way that it has?

As I was pondering these un-answerable and ultimately boring questions, I passed a flock of rollerbladers. Not even aggressive in-liners. I respect those guys now, because they're the underdogs. Who still rollerblades?!? Not those guys. This was a pack of leisurely bladers, all in their mid 30's, crowding up the bike lane coming towards me. They were cheering, as if this was sort of some critical mass for leisurely rollerblading.

Though I had just been thinking of how nice it was not to have been a jock growing up, how skateboarding has shaped me to be a reasonable and sensitive shell collector, I could not help myself from bellowing a sustained "BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" as I passed by the throng.

It was the sort of thing that may have made me happy and proud a lifetime ago, but immediately after riding away I felt embarrassed and, yes, jock-ish.

SACE

"I skate for RYOOO-KYYEEEE" he half-screamed, half-slurred, and then grabbed Tino's board and tried, coming surprisingly close, a kick-flip. For someone who could barely pronounce Rookie, in the state he was in, he wasn't half bad.

We all tumbled out of the Fish, quite literally, as we were all equally inept on two feet as we were on four wheels, and kept on tumbling towards Mars Bar. Sace was screaming, running through traffic, ZER keeping as close as he could on his board. The rest of us stayed back, mainly because we couldn't keep up. Also, at half a block ahead, we could effectively distance ourselves from any trouble they were getting in. At 1st Ave between Houston and 1st, for example, they both put up huge throw-ups on a white van, and were gone, leaving only dripping black paint, by the time we got there.

I finally caught up to them at Mars Bar. Tino had just ordered a round of Jaeger shots and handed one to me as I opened the door. We all clinked glasses, Dash took his, and fell back through the door flat onto his back on the sidewalk, empty glass still in his hand. That was it for him that night.

Eventually the rest of us made it back to the Fish. Allen kicked me out that night for wrestling with Tino in the back booth. This was November of 2002, and this kind of stuff was normal.

The next night I was back at Max Fish, on day 3 of my 4-day bender. This being the case, what happened next was inexplicable. Austrian Mike had just handed me my 4th beer of the night. I was sitting on a plastic couch talking to a friend of Yara's, when, at once, I found it very hard to hold my head up. I was still conscious, but needed to put my head on the girls shoulder. I looked down and noticed that my arm, now limp, was laying on my lap, and my Corona was emptying itself against my leg.

"Come on, Ted" Shannon said. Now the girl was gone, and Shannon was picking me up by my arms and walking me out of the bar, which was fine with me because I couldn't walk at all. Down the back of my pants I had a wet stain that I hoped was beer, but could just have as easily been piss.

Shannon gingerly laid me down on the metal basement gate in front of Max Fish, and I tried as best I could to sleep inconspicuously. This was not as easy as it seemed. For one thing, I was in my t-shirt and some beer (or piss)-soaked pants on a frigid November night. It was also about 11 o'clock on a frigid November night and everyone I knew in New York was most likely either in the bar or out on the sidewalk in front.

I heard a lot of chuckles and familiar voices, as my head spun and I tried to make a pillow out of my shivering arms. Any small movement and the wind would whip up the back of my shirt, or my bare arm would touch the basement, but I didn't have the energy or it seemed the ability to raise myself up or change my position.

"yo, what the fuck? You need to get up, man."A new voice. This one was close to my ear, and suddenly two hands were under my armpits, lifting me up. I half-stumbled to the curb. I could stand now, but barely. I still couldn't recognize the good samaritan that had actually hoisted me up and led me to the curb, where I was now leaning on a car with my head below my shoulders.

I puked and puked and puked some more. Tears were in my eyes. Between heaving gags I could hear someone punctuating each gag with:

"You just need to drink some water, man"

Blaaaarrrgh

"You should take it easy tonight"

Bwooorrgh

"Get something to eat, at least"

Blaaargh--cough--blaaawargh

"Just take care of youself. Take a deep breath. You'll be alright tomorrow"

I finally stopped puking and looked up to see who was talking to me.

It was Dash.

The Better You Look, The More You See

Artful dodging for art-less dogs: The Better you Look, the More you See.

As Brother Muzone said in season 2 of The Wire, and I paraphrase due to propriety and not wanting to seem racist: What is America's worst nightmare? A black man with a library card. Although I can safely attest to never having woken up in a sweat over this, the implicit fact is that there is a lot of valuable information available for free at this country's fine public institutions, libraries, and museums. You've just got to know how to find it.

This, in part, requires knowing how to look. What follows is a step-by-step process in museum behavior and looking at art. A lot of people are either intimidated or not intrested in looking at art, most likely because it is so intimidating and boring. But not really. It's actually pretty simple, and in most cases art mas made to be understood by a much simpler and un-intelligent audience than ourselves. Or at least that's what you should tell yourself. But now I'm getting ahead of myself.

1. Enter the hallowed halls of the great museum with a strong sense of purpose. This entails taking a lofty and effronted air, looking above the rabble of dawdling codgers with their pilly visors askew, tottering on wobbly walkers, muttering about Van Gogh's Sunflowers. This entails making your way around the chattering gaggle or rowdy schoolchildren whose hostage-like howls of torture in being dragged to a museum against their wills hardly reach you in your position of priviledged purpose.

2. Saunter up to the Admissions Kiosk and hardly blanch at the suggested price of $20 for general admission. Suggested prices are for suckers. Proudly brandish a shiny new nickel and plop it down onto the counter with an awesome crash. You are not part of the general admission, that bellowing and fidgeting crowd behind you. No you are entitled be here, you are (most likely) a tax-payer in an expensive city, and admiring the bountiful booty looted from other countries over the past century by your great country in a museum is a right that you are entiltled to, and what better way to pay tribute to this right than by paying no more than 5 cents?

3. Ignore the exasperated sighs of the clerk as they hand you your ticket, and try not to notice the knowing shrug she gives the guards as you enter.

4. Now, the key to a succesful museum visit is to distinguish yourself from the crowd with the utmost delicacy and refinement. This means, quite simply, that if there are 20 people crowded around the Mona Lisa, make sure that you are found just outside of that crowd, enraptured by a second-rate Veronese or a daub by Bronzino (if you're at the Louvre). The entire history of Art-Historical scholarship operates on this idea of finding beauty in the obscure, meaning in the ignored. That may not be true, but making outlandish and astonishingly impossible platitudes like that is at least a big part of it.

5. So, while everyone else is looking at some sickly blue bathers by Renoir, turn your back to them, and find what would appear to be an un-remarkable landscape by a second-rate Impressionist. For this example, I choose Alfred Sisley's "Bridge of Villeneuve-la-Garenne", of 1871.

6. While nobody is looking, quickly scan the placard next to the painting to see if there is any information to be gleaned from it. Autobiographical details, conditions under which this painting was made, when it was sold, who owned it, all of this can offer some sort of clue as to what the painting is about.

7. It is important not to be seen doing this, because everybody knows that reading information at museums is for amateurs and for the type of people that pay $20 admission. Also, under NO circumstances, should you ever be seen with one of those museum-supplied headsets. Although very helpful and offering insightful perspectives on the art, they look dorky and are completely classless in the most base way possible.

8. Now, once you have discreetly scanned the placard for any juicy information, of which there is none, look at the painting. The first thing that struck me about it was the couple, little more than a few strokes of black, white and grey, under the bridge.

9. Looking at the strong vertical lines of the bridge-posts, chimneys on the roofs, the couple seems to be almost bisected by the vertical line implied by the grey tollbooth above them and the black post holding the curved suspension cables.

10. What is more, they are directly in the center of the shadow of the bridge, though they are not really under the bridge at all.

11. Know from your copious reading of the many social novels of the 19th century (this is a given), that these outlying towns along the Seine, made newly available to day-trippers thanks to Napoleon III's massive expansion of bridges and railways, served as the appropriate setting for men to have adulterous affairs with their mistresses or for procuring prostitutes, many of them local women, for the afternoon.

12. This couple then, seeking shade on a hot summer afternoon, can only sit in the shadow temporarily. As the sun moves across the landscape, they will soon be in the light again, their perhaps adulterous affair once again exposed to the other tourists, like those in the water, cavorting about in the freshly-painted rowboats that line the shore.

13. In the direct center of the painting is a vanilla house with a sloped brown roof. On the corner, it's facade sports pink and white striped awning which services the users of the bridge and this main thoroughfare. The front of the building seems freshly painted, but notice, however, how, as the building steps down the hill, the architecture becomes less public and more domestic, finally ending in the grey building with open shutters and dark windows to the right.

14. This newly populous tourist town was once just a shabby provincial outpost. The bridge is hardly finished. This house on the corner, only partly painted for these new patrons, like the man and the woman under the bridge, expresses the changing nature of a small riverside village as it is pulled sleepily, by this new bridge that connects it to Paris, into the modern age.

15. Sisley's name is signed on the lower left corner, in a dark patch of water under the same shade of the bridge that the couple sits. This dark patch of rippled water and brown paint strokes follows the bridge from the lower left to the upper right corners. The suspension cables of the bridge also emphasize this direction, as does the upturned canoe above the couple underneath the bridge, the sloping roof of the building in the center, and, notice, a strip of blue cloudless sky moves in rougly the same direction.

16. Trace, without touching the painting, a this diagonal line, and imagine the painting as two triangular halves: on one, the upper right corner to the center, is modern life. Bourgeoisie paddling in boats, seeking privacy under the newly-built bridge that brought them there, and the freshly-painted town ready to take their money. On the other side is the old town, all shuttered windows and vernacular stone architecture, un-remarkable and humble. Notice that not one figure is in this half of the painting.

17. One thing you will have read on the placard next to the painting is that Sisley, an English painter from a family of silk merchants living in France, had recently suffered the loss of his family fortune in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Unlike most of his fellow Impressionists, Sisley actually had to live by the sale of his art. And so, this painter at a turning point in his own life, seeing his livelihood jeopardized by the very events of the last decade that engendered such a scene to be painted in the first place, interestingly chose to depict this town that is both new and old, prosperous and shabby, whose visitors don't quite know what to do with themselves and whose very presence is fleeting.

18. Sisley's vantage-point is the same as the couple under the bridge. Like them, his position is temporary, and like us, he will soon have to move from the river banks and get back to work.

19. While reflecting on this, be sure to move towards and away from the picture's surface, crossing and uncrossing your arms, tilting your head from one side to the other, and making appropriate grunts and chortles of recognition and understanding.

20. And remember, looking at art is not so much about what you see, it's more about the rabble around you seeing you seeing what you see.

College

1. Spend a hugely inordinate amount of time in your dorm room. You won't be necessarily studying per se, but you'll be doing things.

2. What things? Things like affixing the obligatory John Coltrane poster to your wall, in a nod to your 1995-era Stereo proclivities which, most likely, set you on the path of wistful intellectualism that eventually landed you in college. Things like that.

2a. Not, however, things like picking up that sock that has been at large on your floor for the last two weeks. Your roommate will say things like "Damn, Ted. That one sock has been on the floor for a long time and I know it isn't mine, because I don't wear dirty white socks." His insistent delicacy will be lost on you because you're into things like jazz and knowing time and can't be concerned with bourgeois ideas of neatness or consideration.

3. Another thing you're not into is shaving your face with your electric razor because, you've found this out the hard way, it gives you razor-bumps. Nonetheless, it sits on your dorm-room desk, next to your dusty collection of Black Sparrow Press edition Bukowski books, your CD boombox (playing Coltrane, of course) and your even more neglected Gillette after-shave lotion.

4. While on the phone with your mother, feet up on the desk, incorporate the electric razor into your routine fidgeting. Turn the razor on and off, while most likely making desultory requests for money and/or sympathy.

5. Without really putting too much thought into it, slowly glide the electric razor's rotating blade up and down your left shin, noting only vaguely the satisfying smoothness of your shin's skin after being so closely shaved for the first time.

6. As this feels good, without really registering the inherent weirdness of it, shave the back of your calf, too, noting a similar satisfying smoothness, almost silky, of the entire bottom half of your left leg, from ankle to knee.

7. Still on the phone, reach for the Gillette aftershave lotion. Balancing the phone between your shoulder and your face, squeeze a satisfying dollop of blue oily lotion on your hand, and rub this lotion into your newly-shaved skin.

8. Luxuriate in the tingling sensation afforded by this alcohol in the lotion airing out your newly shorn pores and hair follicles of your leg. It is redoubtable and utterly satisfying.

9. End the call with your mother and decide to go to the library. Roll your pant leg down smelling only a slight whiff of after-shave lotion on your leg.

10. Bottom half of left-leg newly bald and doused in lotion, the cool evening air will feel particularly fresh as it slips up the channels of your flapping pant leg. This will make the over-all pleasant fact that you are a young college student on a cool evening physically palpable.

11. As a young college student on a cool evening, you will invariably have a crush on an older and sophisticated looking senior, who you will only catch fleeting glimpses of, walking across the quad, talking in the student lounge to professors, etc.

12. Entering the computer lab, you see said crush sitting at a monitor, and there is an empty seat next to her.

13. Sauntering as slickly as you possibly can over to her, heart beating at an awesome rate, you sit next to her.

14. She turns to you and smiles. Your heart in your throat, you manage to gulp out a casual-sounding "hey" to her.

15. Moments later, she chuckles. You alertly glance at her, and she is leaning in to whisper something to you.

16. As her blond hair brushes your shoulder, she whispers "Oh. My. God. Someone here is wearing way too much cologne!!! Do you smell that?!?"

17. Of course you do, because it is covering your left leg, which is now sweating only a bit more profusely than the rest of your body, which is of course sent into a near heart-stopping panic.

18. She of course does not realize this, and this perhaps explains her look of startled confusion as you quickly grab your things and leave the computer lab, login still halfway filled in on the abandoned computer screen, leaving just your first initial, last name, and no password for the girl to mull over as the over-arching musk slowly disappears with you.