Meet Patty Marx

Hi. Do you know Patty Marx? She’s a lot cooler than you’d expect from a lady named “Patty.” She is the first woman ever elected to the Harvard Lampoon, for one, and she’s written for Saturday Night Live, Rugrats and Clarissa Explains It All. (She is not, I regret to inform you, the Brazilian singer Patrícia Marx, but now that I mention it, doesn’t the name sound like it belongs to a Brazilian lady?) Anyway, Patty (American version) write one of the funniest short essays I’ve ever read, and in lieu of anything special from me, I’m sharing it with you.

You will not regret reading this.

Attention: Lost Cat

Reward if you find my cat, Sally. Sally is eleven, but she has the face of a cat much younger. She is taffy-colored and has no distinguishing features except for the spot on her lung. Sally understands eight commands. Nine, if you count “Drop it! Drop the baby!” Sally loves a good steak but will gladly have whatever you are having. If she seems to have trouble swallowing, call Dr. Sidarsky, at (570) 555-1212. Dr. Sidarsky calls every day to ask if Sally is back. Once, Dr. Sidarsky invited me to a tennis match where a little girl who could not speak English beat the defending champion. If you ask me, Dr. Sidarsky has a crush on me. Before Sally was lost, Dr. Sidarsky nominated me for Pet Owner of the Year. When the judges came to our house, Sally would not come down from the breezeway. I’m not saying that was the reason I lost the title, but it cost me points.

Sally was last seen in Kansas, where she fell out of my car — a 1998 yellow Toyota Corolla, Indiana license plate FJ3-JR57. To tell you the truth, Sally didn’t actually fall. My ex-husband was trying to push me and my suitcases out of the car and Sally was in the way. I’d opened the door to throw out a pair of pants and some other garbage of my ex-husband’s. I hate a messy car. My ex-husband says he was leaning over to close the door, but I definitely felt a nudge. Sally and the gourmet-cooking cassettes that I had taken out of the library landed all over Route 23 in Kansas. Sally ran toward Nebraska. We were on the ramp toward Missouri. My ex-husband’s sister Sugar lives in Nebraska. I don’t like Sugar and I know Sugar does not like me. She sent me a bathroom scale as a wedding gift. Normally, I have nothing to do with Sugar, but I called her just in case Sally had turned up there. Sometimes animals have a sixth sense about knowing who your relatives are and how to get in touch. As usual, Sugar was unpleasant. She said I sounded like I had gained weight.

Sally has been missing for more than a year, and I am losing hope. Her mother belonged to my grandfather, and now my grandfather is dead. Sally is my last link to my grandfather. If you find Sally and she is dead, send her back anyway. My parents are dead, but I have their steak knives. Once, I had a locket of my grandmother’s. I gave it to my daughter for Christmas, since my daughter was named after my grandmother, who was named after her grandmother, who was named after Sally, but not that Sally. When I lost my daughter in the custody suit, I lost the locket, too. I lost everything. Well, not all of the steak knives. Or the weight — I didn’t lose that, either.

In spite of what the judge said, my ex-husband is not fit to care for my daughter, pony or no pony. The only things my ex-husband can cook are Texas Tommies. My ex-husband’s girlfriend cannot cook, either, but I have to admit, she knows good food.

If I still had Sally, I think the judge would have let me keep my daughter. Pets are a sign of a loving home life. I know the judge would have been impressed if I had been Pet Owner of the Year. I might have gone into politics if I had been Pet Owner of the Year, maybe alderman. I am not too old to get into politics, and I have a lot of ideas. Let’s not forget that after the Russian Revolution they turned the stock exchange into an aquarium. For the people! We could do something like that. If Sally came back, I would take a picture of me holding her and use that on my campaign poster. And if she didn’t my slogan could be “Help me help you find my cat!” Even if you don’t find Sally, please send cash. It’s not the same thing as a cat, but it is a consolation.

This essay is permitted without permission from The New Yorker, but given the relatively small readership of this blog and the age of this essay, I feel like The New Yorker doesn’t really care. Do you, New Yorker? Wait — don’t answer that: I’m conflicted about how I want you to answer.

Paint the World Red

Today, Angelenos could look up at the Hollywood Sign with an additional unit of pride, for the sign’s restoration was completed and its renewed state was unveiled. I say this knowing that from where most people live, they could not actually tell that the paint on the letters was peeling in the first place much less recently fixed, nor would many of known about the sign restoration unless Mario Lopez had tacked it onto the end of Extra, and he would have only done that because the C-lister who was supposed to appear got run down by the trolley at The Grove. And really, when you talk about the Hollywood Sign being restored, you have to overlook the fact that this project didn’t include the reinstallation of the “L-A-N-D” that once appeared at the end. I suppose everyone’s over that. But whatever, they redid the most easily recognized landmark in Los Angeles.

I accidentally got a look at the restoration project a few weeks ago when I hiked up there with Nate and a vagrant we met. Here’s a photo:

I realize it doesn’t show the most important part of the sign — that being any part of the sign itself — but that’s because we’d actually hiked above it. Below the ridge you see behind us, a chain link fence separated us yokels from the sign itself, and as if to compound the indignity of it all, the letters appeared backwards because we were standing behind them. Once done scoffing, we noticed the banners identifying the company that had sponsored much of the restoration: Sherwin-Williams. The banner had the logo. It looked like this:

Isn’t that… creepy? It looks like a some sinister twist a protestor would put on the actual Sherwin-Williams logo at some anti-paint demonstration. I mean, sure — any fool with an Icee stand can tell you that red and blue make for an eye-crabbing pair of colors, but when I see the color red dripping like that, I see blood. And if any company should have foreseen this potential association, shouldn’t a paint company be it? Even if I strain to just see red paint and not a crashing tide of human suffering, the idea of coating the earth in it still seems like it would end all life.

And then the slogan “Cover the Earth” — at worst, that sounds like a command the alien queen gives her army, and at best, it sounds like something a prude would tell the planet if her South America were showing (which it is). Fast Company design writer Rick Barrack agrees that the slogan smacks of ill omen, and he suggests “Color Your World” as a substitute that essentially means the same thing without sounding scary. And The Stranger can’t extricate it logo from oil spills. So clearly I’m not alone in finding the Sherwin-Williams logo odd, but how can it be that no one at Sherwin-Williams has suggested that they revise the logo to evoke something other than a world domination plot by a Roger Moore-era Bond villain.

… Right?

A Family Plot

Had you told me the weekend before Thanksgiving that I’d be soon flying to New Zealand once again, I would have told you that nothing could convince me to make the journey on such short notice. And then had you told me that I’d be enduring the long, sleepless flight over and back within the span of a single week, I’d laugh again. However, when you’re told that your grandmother has died, you act accordingly.

For the most part, I’ll skip the trite observations about the impossibility of death — the cognitive disconnect between the box at the funeral and the tall, bunheaded, rugby-loving woman who used to come visit her American grandchildren. It does cross your mind, though, doesn’t it? — where there was once a person, there’s now just a body, suddenly and simply, and you just want the person to jump back into this newly empty vessel. Why can’t it be so simple? Just. go. back. in. None of that occurred to me as I carried the coffin in — bore the pall, I guess you could say, even though no one ever states it that way — but that maybe resulted from the fact that we walked in, the six of us and Granny-in-a-box, to a reworking of “Don’t Dream It’s Over”, and no, I’m not kidding, and yes, that’s the most ridiculously New Zealand thing to happen ever. No, it was strangest after the service, when the coffin just sat in the back of a car where anyone who wanted to could drop flower petals on it. People talked. I couldn’t really, not while knowing that my grandmother was in a wooden box in the sun on an unseasonably warm New Zealand spring day. Whenever I thought about it, my head swam in a manner that I’ve only experienced once before: in a medical lab with a partially dissected cadaver. I suspect that I’m keenly allergic to death.

The photo I’ve posted above shows my dad’s family’s cemetery plot — a single rectangular acre surrounded on each side by paddock and currently containing the remains of only about ten of my family members. It’s serene, but only if you can accept mourning your loved ones in the presence of cows. Really, the family plot represents an older, less settled New Zealand, when private cemeteries made practical sense. Nonetheless, it’s where members of my family can choose to be buried today. And nonetheless that, it’s not where my grandmother chose to be: She opted instead to have her ashes scattered around the house where she raised her children. And while I can understand the significance of this location to her, I can’t yet understand why she’d decide against giving her descendants a permanent spot to mourn her — a site like a gravestone that would be forever dedicated to her memory.

Or am I just thinking about death in a more old-fashioned way than my grandmother did?

No one talked about this, before or after the service, though I did answer more than once about whether I participated in team sports and where Californians put their sheep.

Hand-Washing — You’re Doing It Wrong

At least according to the more fastidious minds of New Zealand, who think that hand-washing should involve more steps than you have fingers on your hand.

Click on the image to enlarge, because it’s really worth your time to determine if you’ve been cleaning your dorsums properly. Have you?

Where the Birds Sing a Different Song

Before I even woke up, my brain registered trouble. My dream shifted from a simple mistaken identity drama to something more surreal when the audio gave way to a soundtrack of unfamiliar music. Literally everything in the dream stopped so I could give full attention to these squeaks and beeps and unnatural flourishes. Then the dream ended, but before I could open my eyes and realize where I had been sleeping, I knew I was far from home: Awake but shut-eyed, I could still hear that music. It got into my dream. It was really happening. And it was the noise of birds we don't have in California.

It's been a long time since I've been far enough away from home that the birds sang a different song. I'd forgotten how strange it is to wake up and know that you're in the wrong place even before you figure out exactly where you are. I hadn't even realized that Los Angeles has birds that sing loud enough to overpower the noise of traffic, but they do. I suppose I missed them, just for a second.

Future Perfect, Present Tense

And after several weeks of murmuring and developments in a strange, shady world that I don’t understand, the video production team has completed the mini-documentary based on the article that I wrote about Danny and which, if you’ll remember, I implored you to vote for so many weeks back. Have a look:

Yes, Danny is sharing the spotlight with wealthy baby boomers, but hey — guess who’s most likely to watch public television?

We Really Need to Talk About The Apotheosis of Washington

Most intelligent Americans realize that our nation’s supposed separation of church and state doesn’t always hold up. After all, religion — Christianity in particular — often seeps into politics in a way that our forefathers either would have hated or been cool with, depending on whom you ask, but also don’t ask because that conversation will likely be endless and involve a lot of emphatic hand gestures. For a moment, however, disregard all the imaginary lines people like to paint between church and state, because there’s one aspect of Washington D.C. that would make both atheists and bible-thumpers respond with “huh?” And this thing is The Apotheosis of Washington.

via the capitol’s official flickr page; see a slideshow of details here.

I toured the Capitol Building when I was a kid, and if this work of art was included, our guide downplayed its whackadoo nature. I only recently had it pointed out to me in terms of how strange it is. Apotheosis, please understand, can have two meanings — either “the perfect example,” as in Webster’s example of “the apotheosis of the picaresque novel,” or a more literal meaning, “deification.” But doesn’t it seem strange to deify the guy who conceded that people should address the American head of state as “Mr. President” instead of anything loftier or monarchical? That’s nonetheless what this 1865 fresco depicts: George Washington riding clouds in heaven, styled like a character from classical mythology and flanked by personifications of victory and liberty. Scattered around the rim of this circular painting are founding fathers and Roman gods, side by side, in tableaus depicting war, science, commerce, mechanics, agriculture and, um, marine. (Yes, makes for a weird parallel construction in the style of running, dancing, leaping, purple and lobster.)

I find this all very strange, not only because the artist, the Italian-born Constantino Brumidi, began painting it the year Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and therefore during a time when the nation had other concerns. It’s also the subject matter itself, and it makes it no less weird to me to know that Brumidi wasn’t the only artist to give George the god treatment. That actually makes it even stranger in that this didn’t result from one crazy person’s idea but an aesthetic trend that a whole lot of people were willing to run with. However, there’s little I can say about it from my computer in my apartment which is not located in the Capitol rotunda, so here are some selections from other write-ups on The Apotheosis of Washington, whose matter-of-fact descriptions of all this religious kookiness verge on the surreal:

• Gazing upward to the dome, one sees Washington floating far overhead, a life-sized and heavenly vision.¹
• The peak of a rainbow’s arch passes beneath his feet, and there are thirteen maidens aside the central three figures (Washington, Liberty, and Victory) that represent the original thirteen states.²
• Surrounding Washington, Victory, and Liberty in a circle are 13 maidens who represent the original 13 colonies that formed the federation of the United States. Some of them are holding a banner which says E Pluribus Unum, but others have their backs turned towards Washington to indicate those states which attempted to break away from the union during the Civil War.³
• Ceres, Roman goddess of agriculture, is identified by the wheat wreath on her head and a cornucopia. She is seated on a McCormack reaper.⁴
• [In the “war” scene,] Brumidi may have expressed his own political feelings by using the features of the Confederate leaders on the evil figures being vanquished by Freedom: Jefferson Davis as Discord, with two lighted torches, and Alexander H. Stephens as Anger, being struck by a thunder bolt and biting his finger.⁵
• Holding his trident, Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, looks on as Venus, the Roman goddess of love who was born from the sea, helps lay the transatlantic cable.⁴
• Mercury, god of commerce, with his winged cap and sandals and caduceus, hands a bag of gold to Robert Morris, financier of the Revolutionary War, while men move a box on a dolly.⁵
• Minerva, goddess of wisdom and the arts of civilization, with helmet and spear, points to an electric generator creating power stored in batteries, next to a printing press, while inventors Benjamin Franklin, Samuel F.B. Morse, and Robert Fulton watch.⁵
• Paintings and sculptures of Washington’s celestial rise were soon to be found in living rooms and civic halls across the country.¹

Now think about what you must do to achieve veneration as a glowering god of old.

via the capitol’s flickr

1. The Apotheosis of George Washington — Brumidi’s Fresco & Beyond
2. DC Walkabout — The Apotheosis of Washington
3. Presidents Day and the Apotheosis of Washington
4. The Apotheosis of Washington
5. Painting the Apotheosis of Washington