no dogs found

Got into New Orleans yesterday.

It's crazy here .. today we had a location scout, and so we've driven all over the place: it's like Hurricane Aftermath 101. There are areas that were heavily storm damaged where houses were never repaired, or were gutted (wooden beams still standing, walls torn out) and never rebuilt. Some have partially collapsed roofs, or look like they've been burned, or wooden slats seem to be falling off the side of the house. Whole shopping centers, schools, churches remain empty or boarded up but somewhat structurally intact (minus the windows), atop piles of rubble. Trees that snapped in half still sit there looking trampled. Boats lie around in the most random places, where they drifted and were abandoned. Three years later!! 300,000 people left the city, driftwood where houses used to be, and never returned.


There are cryptic spray painted notations on the houses, meant to help evaluate the damage quickly when driving by (but still there!), so you'll drive through a trashed neighborhood - weird in the first place, because even in the slums here a lot of people have whole houses, and even where things are in good shape, it looks like everything is about to fall over and peel off. There's a thin line between what's inhabited and what isn't. People sit out on their front steps in these neighborhoods. So you'll drive through an area like this, where there was a total storm evacuation, and there will be these X's in spraypaint, with things written in the spaces between the lines (like the old NY hardcore symbol - remember that?) and the one on top is the date someone went in to assess (after the flood waters went down: September, October; but no year. evidently it didn't occur to anyone that no more would be done afterward) and the one on the left I couldn't figure out, maybe the crew that went in, and the number on the bottom is dead bodies found. On one I saw "O D, O A." Zeroes with lines through them (zero dead; zero alive?). And the right side is* - best guess - who or what was found alive (usually nothing, since everyone would have to have evacuated long before .. but sometimes dogs or cats). Some have a big red X sign affixed in a window: maybe slated for demolition. A few say "no demo" but don't appear as if the owner with such good intentions ever returned. *(note: see rebecca's 2nd comment for further info. on all this)


Some houses are built on stilts, a whole storey off the ground. You drive around looking at the houses that start at ground level, then the ones that start one story up, and think of both: what were they thinking?? That's not high enough! The whole city isn't high enough. Flying over it, everything looks like a flood. It's impossible to look at the city as a whole as something other than a disaster waiting to happen, and a disaster that already happened. It's absurd. Unreal. The way to forget, as with all the hideousness in life, as with global climate change and American capitalist world domination and the erosion of our civil rights, and remembrance of the Holocaust, and the knowledge that further atrocities are occurring and will occur, and the recognition that profit drives many people more than does respect for individual life (or the future of life at all .... ) is to inspect the minutia. Under a microscope, everything is beautiful.

(Well, not everything .. maybe not your lover's scalp, or the grime between the faucet handle and the porcelain around your bathroom sink, but my point is - look at everything, really every little thing. It's all you've got, when the big picture sucks. It's the little things; they go on. Little snapshots.)

We drove over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. Almost 24 miles! (Should've thrown my camera in the lake. The batteries pissed out on me five minutes into the location scout! But I'll be back to most of these places.) Saw alligator heads for sale near the airboat swamp tours in Lafitte.

Haven't gone anywhere for fun except Bourbon St, where tourists on second story balconies were throwing Mardi Gras beads down at people on the street. (What do those shoes mean, anyway??)


The hotel looks haunted. All the hotels look haunted!! Even in the day, little daylight gets in. But they are full of dim artificial lighting (mostly chandeliers) and have weird room divisions, too much furniture, and mirrors everywhere. The lobbies border the streets but feel like they're a mile underground. Still, better than the job I left behind: touching up black light paint for a ride at Universal, in endless identical rooms. And the underbelly of the building, en route to the supply office, was like a mine shaft, or an episode of Fraggle Rock where everyone was wearing hard hats.

Check out these table legs in the hotel lobby!


This is me reflected in the spooky elevator doors. Everywhere there is the feeling that there is something there which isn't actually there.


Rearranged the furniture in my hotel room(s = a suite!), covered up the televisions. Turned up the thermostat three degrees.

And here we go.

__________________________________________________________

APPENDIX:

here's the photo of Matthew I refer to in the comments.

venom

I normally would consider such negativity counterproductive*, but in the spirit of exorcising some demons and therefore finding my dream apartment the minute I come back from New Orleans, I've decided to make an exhaustive list of all the things I hate about this one (*and in fact there are things I like very much about it, but that's not important right now):

1. the barking dog
2. helicopters over the highway at 3 a.m.
3. the metal retrofit bars on my floor that make it impossible to put anything that's not on feet against a wall
4. the not level floors
5. the lead paint
6. the rusty water that comes out of the pipes on maintenance day
7. the mushrooms growing out of the bathroom floor
8. the building management
9. the building maintenance
10. the water that leaks onto the floor when I take a shower
11. the bathtub which is so rounded it's difficult to stand in it without losing your balance
12. the windows which either don't stay open or are impossible to open
13. the spanish radio my neighbors listen to
14. the loud young child my neighbors have
15. the two teenagers who live upstairs and play video games loudly
16. the vacuum cleaner upstairs
17. practically everything that happens upstairs, because I can hear a pin drop up there
18. the neighbors' barbecue, which makes my apartment smell like lighter fluid
19. the light switch in the bathroom, which operates both the light and the fan, and so I can't turn one on without the other
20. the spiders and fruit flies (which apparently subsist on compact fluorescent photosynthesis or something, because I don't patronize rotting fruit - but hey, I have to admit I prefer them over the roaches I used to have)
21. that the walk-in closet is not a second bedroom
22. that the bedroom is too small
23. that the parking lot is not a roller rink or a shuffleboard court
24. the semi-broken outlet in the kitchen that turns the refrigerator off when I unplug my toaster
25. the Jehovah's witnesses that come knocking on my door at 9 a.m. on a sunday
26. the cat pee smell in the hallway (from a feral cat living in the maintenance crawlspace under the building; although I'm sure I will be blamed for it)
27. the sucky laundry room, which is so sucky I haven't used it in about four years
28. the cracks between the hardwood floor beams, which are so large small children could fall in them and drown
29. that the awesome fire escapes (from which you can see the Hollywood sign) are now off-limits
30. that the roof, where I used to paint with Nick (and where I once took a date much too young for me), is also now off-limits
31. the popcorn paint which the painters were somehow (unfathomably) unaware has no place on the crown molding
32. that the hot water out of the sinks is generally lukewarm, and
33. that it trickles
34. that some of my favorite people have moved out of the building, and my other favorites are moving out
35. the brick dust
36. the rattling metal bolt in my bedroom window frame that serves no purpose
37. the fact that I have to pay rent
37. the view out my bedroom window:


and 39. did I mention the barking dog? (and that I can't count?)

Well, that's enough.

Turbeville / Cloisters

well, you can tell where I stole these photos from.





pix by deborah turbeville.




busy bee.
back to say things when I've found a new place to live.

`c vsswcaA`

On Tuesday I left my laptop open; Phoenix was milling about on my desk and when I returned, she had done a Google search for the above term (quotation marks hers).

Nothing came of it, although Google did have this suggestion:

Did you mean: `c nyswcaa`

I really want to know what my girl is up to - do we need to have a talk about boys? Drinking? So I clicked on it. She seems to have developed an interest in the New York State Women's Collegiate Athletic Association. I hope this is a passing fancy - New York is far away - but I do have to say I'm proud of her ambition. It's just all happening way too fast. Last week she went into heat. This week she lost a tooth ... it's rough being a cat mom. You're putting baby teeth under her pillow, and your progeny is ready to flee the nest.


(The Tooth Fairy brought us some cat treats, by the way.)

I have lots of art shows to talk about, but for now I'd rather play scrabble.

So here are some pictures I've collected, which otherwise don't have anything to do with one another.

spoon chandelier.

a nightstand made of picture frames, or facsimile picture frames .. I think it's from anthropologie.


a cozy reading room that desperately needs cats but has a fantastic chair (i have a chair thing. this one is probably my favorite so far, but more chairs here and here)



a room more modern than I'd generally go for, but I love the seafoam couch, and the green shadow in the windows


Audrey Hepburn shopping with her pet deer ..


brilliant artwork, source more or less unknown .. *

{i got it here, attributed to Belarusian artist Mikolka-Parovoz; a French blogger credits him with the work as well, citing this page (in Latvian - no help there) as a source; but I can't find a damn thing about this cat in English, other than in blogs citing the blog where I found it as a source. And to confuse things further, apparently Mikolka-Parovoz is a movie, which makes me wonder if the information is erroneous in the first place. shame. a bummer of a dead end.}

Alright, well I'm going to go eat dinner, but I thought I should add that while I was typing up this post, Phoenix changed the title to `c vsswcaA`98 .. I'm sure that clarifies things.

If not, this certainly will.

(don't be scared. it's just a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon.)

Yay! It's raining.

hey, new color. is it good? is it too white? does it look like it's been through the wash?
I thought it looked good with the spoon chandelier ..

* late breaking news!! (5/8/08) .. anonymous tip, which I'm very happy to have received: the artwork above is called Machine (III) and is by Vladimir Tsesler and (the late) Sergey Voichenko

illusion

You have perhaps been sitting in a car at an intersection, spacing out. The car rolls backward - you're driving a stick, and have accidentally let your foot off the break. Whoah! Better drink some coffee.

Then a bus next to you has rolled away, and you can see your surroundings: you're not moving at all. And very suddenly, it doesn't feel like you're moving anymore either. You thought you were moving, actually felt it, because of the visual cues telling you that you were.

I don't know about you, but a little thing like that can freak me out all day. I remember as a kid scraping up my knees in a bicycle spill, and not feeling anything until I noticed I was bleeding, then screaming out in pain. I always thought it was one of those little kid things, magical thinking or whatever. Not so, I don't think. I have a huge cavity in one of my back teeth, right this second, and it was only after I discovered it that I realized I'd been having toothaches.

In a way it is my expectation that is causing this experience.

So let's agree that very realistic motion/sensory hallucinations can happen (to sane & sober people - I was going to say "unaltered," but that makes us into pets that still need to be neutered, and ruins the eerie effect) quite easily, and that pain can actually be prompted, or at least heightened, by the right visual cues. We all know also that some other physical sensations can be provoked solely by visual cues, and the visual cues need not necessarily be realistic ones. Characters in video games will do, allegedly, for some people. I digress.

Still with me?

I have noticed when I manage to keep the same cell phone for awhile, that my ear is trained to pick out its ring amid a barrage of background noise; that I actually sometimes "hear" the phone ringing in the music I'm listening to, when it's not there. I hear something similar, and my mind fills in the gap. Maybe we can call that a sort of auditory hallucination. Whatever we'll call it, when we take all of this stuff into consideration at once we recognize that what our brains feel it necessary to do is gather bits of information from our environment and leap to conclusions about what those clues mean. What's the point of this, if we can so easily be tricked?

As I think the way to understand something is to dive further into the murk, check this out.

Although a little bit of variation occurs within each square (even unshadowed), square A and square B are the same color. Yes. But you can't see it that way, no matter how hard you try, can you? Neither can I, and I'm a painter. There is this toy at The Exploratorium in San Francisco which consists of two colored squares within two other (differently) colored squares. You have a little rollerball, like you use to move yourself around in the arcade game of Centipede (remember Centipede?) that changes the color of one of the inside squares, and your task is to roll it around until the middle squares match. It's supposed to be difficult: the color of the outer square changes your perception of the inner square. I am exceptionally good at it. I was once sent to get a quart of paint without a color chip, and matched the desired shade of lavender by memory. And I still cannot see that those squares are the same color.

This thing has driven me nuts. I spliced a bit of square A in Photoshop, and moved it to square B. Then I took a piece of square B, and moved it to square A. It appeared to change color as I moved it. Crazy. Should we be unable to do both, it is clearly much more important to recognize something as poorly lit than to recognize what it actually looks like.

This illusion was designed by (as you can see) Edward Adelson, who is (or was) a professor of vision science at MIT. (How cool is that job??)

If you want to play for awhile before moving on, here are some fantastic optical illusions:

illusions of light at lottolab

more lightness illusions by Ed Adelson

online exhibits @ the Exploratorium (including some auditory illusions)

When I was new to L.A., I ate lunch at a cafe with a raised wooden patio. Everything trembled. I thought it was a tiny earthquake and, à la L.A. Story, everyone was ignoring it. I've been there enough since to ignore the tremors myself: cars driving by cause them; people walking on the patio cause them. It's just a shaky patio. I ate there a few days ago; a girl at a nearby table was compulsively wiggling her foot, making my whole table shake. My coffee was clinking. Crossword puzzle answers leapt out of bounds. But I knew it wasn't an earthquake. How many times do we have to experience something before we're sure we know what it means? Is the first time we see or feel something the only time? After that, does whatever knowledge we acquired recede into the background, to build the framework within which we position the experience when it happens again? Or has the experience been cached? To save time - especially when threatened - do we simply recall what occurred before, without considering new information at all?

I suppose these sorts of dilemmas drive some people to philosophy.

A philosopher / cognitive scientist, on illusions and consciousness:

Dan Dennett TED talk (< click me)

In German there is a word, katzefrau. It means cat woman. Also: funktionslust. Function desire, or the joy that comes from being very good at something. In English, we have a word for throwing something out of a window.

And there we go. I retire for the night.

Maybe, like a Hemingway story, what I've said will take shape gradually, after you've put it all away.

lucky things

1. saying "rabbit" on the first day of the month

It's supposed to be your first word in the morning, but I sometimes make exceptions for somnolent utterances directed at bedmates - usually cats in my case, but you can imagine your own scenario and exempt as you see fit.

My family's done this as long as I can remember, but we're all space cadets and I myself am probably batting about .100, having spaced it for years at a time. While apparently lots of people besides us do this, we might be the only ones too lazy to say it twice.

If you're not yawning, you really need to see this. Note the lilliputian people actually standing on the rabbit. If you suspect this is a hoax, I assure you it is not. well, unless that news site is also a hoax.*

2. missing a plane (accidentally, of course)

Someday a plane I miss is going to fall into the ocean. I'm sure of it.

3. midgets

I know they disturb some people. But I think they're lucky.

4. the number 13

besides: everyone knows Euclid is 13th street, the 14th floor is really the 13th, and the horse in stall 14 at santa anita park is number 13.

5. odd-eyed cats

(and other animals, and people. but especially cats)

6. thrift store clothing (or purses) with money in the pockets

7. my birthday

(especially if it falls on a friday; see number 3)

To tarot readers, it's the "double death card." Scorpio is the astrological sign associated with the death card, and the death card is the 13th card in the major arcana. The death card in tarot bespeaks change (it's less about death than rebirth; it should be the phoenix card). Remember this when puzzling over my reluctance to settle on a city, a husband, or a career.

er .. if you believe in this kind of crap.

8. getting absolutely nothing in your (snail)mailbox

(but if it's because you forgot you checked it already, that's just pathetic)

9. a bird landing on your table at a restaurant

or on you, but this never happens. also: ladybugs landing on you.

bird poop landing on you=not lucky.

10. heat lightning

11. two fortunes in a cookie

... not that I can eat fortune cookies, but who cares.
you've got to take the cookie that's pointed at you, of course. the open end. like it's going to eat you.

12. february 29

a most unusual day.
One would hope you, too, would find oddities lucky if, say, your child was born with an errant limb.

13. when the moon is visible during the day

unless there are vampires flying through it, or it's silhouetting a werewolf.

And what about bad omens?

bah. what a stupid idea.
If you dread breaking mirrors, your odds aren't good. I do it at least every seven years. I've owned a black cat. and I walk under ladders regularly.

(all that and the double death card - I'm doomed.)

By the way, searching rabbit pictures on the web is no picnic (or too much like a picnic). I kept finding rabbits in soup (and PETA ads).

__________________________________________________________

* 2015 update on the enormous rabbit

deus ex machina

I got an antique typewriter today, and I wonder what's been written on it. Love letters? The Communist Manifesto? The lyrics to "Macarthur Park?"

And why not leave the cake out in the rain? I've oft wondered.

Of course you'd be daft to leave cake out. Flies and pets will get it. People will think you've gone a little wonky. But what does rain have to do with it? Frosting erosion? Scared it'll catch pneumonia?

The more you think about this, the more ridiculous it gets. Exponentially. It doesn't take long to get to a walled exercise pen in a mental institution here, but we're not sure if we're visiting the person who put out the cake, or whoever penned the lyrics.

I remember, from reading it five years ago, a partially eaten ham sandwich left halfway up the stairs in The Virgin Suicides. Creepy enough when all your daughters are killing themselves, but something really went over the top when I read about that ham sandwich. The stink of death infused the carpeting. Future owners of the house wondered if they'd made a terrible mistake.

You could stick a plate of spaghetti nearly anywhere and invoke something, depending on the company: put some Italians in the room, and you've got a birthday party. Leave a kid alone with a TV tray and Magnum P.I. reruns, and you've got a single mom working two jobs. Pan from the plate of spaghetti up to a teenager making a sour face and you've got a high school cafeteria. Turn off the lights, stick your hands in it, and you've got a plateful of brains at a Halloween party .. and so on.

But eat half the spaghetti first, or take a bite out of a meatball, and you've got something else entirely: a crime scene; a phone call from the hospital; an anorexic; a seriously bad cook. A first date gone horribly wrong.

Now what happens when you leave the spaghetti out in the rain?

I don't think it invokes absolute madness, like the cake. 

It might just be a rained out picnic.

Certainly not, say, weapons of mass destruction.

Ok, now I bet you're wondering how I got from point A to point B there (the first meaning of the title, I'll give to you for free). So let me back up a second.

My imagination has been stretched to the limit. When I was a kid there was no internet. I mentioned this to a seventeen-year-old recently and he "hmphed" me. I clarified: "no, I don't mean like 'when I was your age I walked to school in five feet of snow, uphill both ways' ... there really wasn't." For better or worse, I could not have predicted this world. We can videoconference (ala phone calls in The Jetsons); a digital photograph can be sent through the air in seconds; anything we seek knowledge of is at our fingertips; but still we tolerate politicians who expect us to believe that, for example, they're not really convinced about global warming when in fact by melting the polar icecaps they're exposing new (profitable) oil reserves?

(but why stop polluting the ocean if all the fish have gas masks?)

Tomorrow I get to step into a voting booth and choose between two presidential candidates I believe in.  And one happens to be a woman, and the other a black man. Is this the same country that elected George W. Bush twice? I'd like to shake that man's hand, because if it weren't for his reign of terror, we might not be so anxious to put Politician Beta to rest, so ready to embrace the future. 

Well done, sir. I finally understand what it is you were put into office to do. Now go home, and take your mission from god with you. We've got some celebrating to do.  

You have pulled back the slingshot. You are sending us to the moon.