The duo that brings you news and semi-uninformed views every Monday (A Feminist & A Comedian Walk Into A Bar Podcast) is hitting the stage from 6-8 p.m. Sunday, June 11. Come watch us yell at each other IRL!
Justin and I are joining our hilarious and talented friend Tom Simmons for his new weekly show, “Making Friends.”
We’ll talk about the power dynamics of couples and singles hanging out, news of the day, lady stuff and most definitely probably more. Even if you don’t like us, come for Tom. He’s written shows for Second City and has a weird, fascinating brain — the kind to treasure!
Mom’s in charge. She’s thrifty, but girl’s got style. Twenty years from now those lace collared gowns and acid washed denim dresses she’s got your chubby baby legs in are gonna make older-you gush. But you’ll want to talk about those bangs. Listen, she’s doing the best she can with what she gave you. Your hair is rowdy! Like a swath of velvet that won’t flow in one direction no matter how many times you smooth a hand over it. No worries. You’re a baby. Babies get away with everything, like having no hair and pooping themselves.
Is that Wynonna Judd at the Museum of Science and Industry?!
Age 9-12
You’re going to start experimenting, your looks are the thing you’ve learned you can control or at least try to improve upon. This fledgling desire for independence will lead you to taking a brown eyeshadow kit and brushing its heavy smudge over your near-transparent brows. You will look goofy but your beautification choice will also really denote your brother’s seventh birthday party. Eventually you’ll start pinning back one half of your bangs in an effort to look like Wynonna Judd. In fourth grade you’ll graduate to new glasses and switch things up again by separating your banged curly cues straight down the middle. You think it’s a good decision: After all, the curtained coif leads the eye directly to your cool new specs. It doesn’t. It could. But it doesn’t. Because the eye will simply stop the behold the bangs. They look like you have sprouted flaccid red devil horns that curl at the tip. That you have developed a passing prurient interest in things that could send you to said devil is not wholly inaccurate, you hair perhaps a symptom of your starter-sins.
Clearly a greatest hit.
13-16
As this is a childhood pre-Internet, knowledge of coconut oil and best practices for a straightening iron will be the white knight of your college experience, so now you are forced to figure these things out on your own. Luckily, foreheads are hot right now. You make a case with cut-outs from your “teenie bopper” mags, as dad might call them, and collage them into a diary that’s really now a journal (clearly denoted by the word “Journal” penned in something permanent across the front) because only little girls have diaries. Drew, Gwen, Christina. Bangs are for babies, clearly. Bare bulbs, for babes. You, being particularly well-endowed with a five head, decide this is the best route — just grow the bangs out and pull them back with a headband. This look is lukewarmly received by its peers but it makes getting ready in the morning a lot easier, offering five minutes of additional time to spend wiping the rouge mascara off your eyebrow bone and cheeks and vanity mirror and fingers and…
The Swoop. 10/10 for bangs selection.
17-29
It’s homecoming or prom or something important your junior year. You have figured out The Swoop. I cannot understate how revolutionary this will be for your life. You have been the cutter, shampooer and stylist of your own hair ever since a brief but raucous run-in with lice in sixth grade, which made you anxious to experience anything close to the kind of humility that is sitting like a wet rat with fleas in a place vomiting fluorescent lighting as, possibly, classmates walk by. But this. All your training has paid off. Something about the way the sweep of strands cover that presumably prize-winning forehead makes you look, dare I say it, kind of hot. The straightening iron and improved proficiency with a mascara wand have also helped, but my dear, we have something great going here. Let’s write it on parchment with our virgin blood and the trimmed toenail of an elfin queen and never, ever stray.
30
You won’t. The Swoop will be your companion through two presidents, four or five boyfriends, seven or so jobs. The Swoop is the steed with which you endlessly saddle your hopes and dreams that today, just maybe, you will good looking. You have learned how to experiment with lipstick and style choices, sexuality and email providers. But never The Swoop. You dare not risk another ginger-tinged failure. That is… until now. Until the New Year’s Eve between your 30th and 31st birthdays. You are bored. You have a lot to look forward to but it’s not here yet. So you are bored. You want to, need to make something feel exciting. And harkening to the lesson you learned a long time ago — that you are the only thing with which you can exert full control — you grab the scissors. You pull your hair forward with a comb because you’re not an animal. You check the Pinterest image twice. You cut. You keep cutting. Oh my god, why can’t you stop! Control, Mantey! The sink is now a battle field of red soldiers, chopped at the knees. You’re afraid to look up, decide to first bury the lost. With one eye and then the other you take a look upon the wreckage. Not too bad. Manageable. You throw on some lipstick (red for distraction), count down to the new year, and agree with all former selves that while bravery in the face of boredom is admirable, may we never stray too far from The Swoop again.
We’re not imagining that 2016 seemed unusual in its famous deaths. BBC took a look at its obituaries files and found that twice as many notable people died in 2016 compared to 2015.
But do you think the celebrity death toll will be even higher next year? I think it will be, and forever more. We just have a lot more people who qualify as celebrities now. Can you imagine what it will be like when Millennials hit their seventies? It’ll be Jennifer Aniston one day, Pauly D and the guy from the Bad News Brian meme the next. Every day we will mourn a celeb passing because we’ll have triple the celebrities as days in the year.
Plus, with social media, we hear about or see more loss than we would if we didn’t have a platform where we could follow people throughout their lives. When an acquaintance you worked with for a few months at Quizno’s your sophomore year of college becomes your Facebook friend and dies years later in, I don’t know, like, a freak boating accident and you read about it when you go to write on his wall for his next birthday, you’re naturally inclined to think it’s been a rough year out there, whereas before social media that guy would have left your social bandwidth the last day you two steamed a ranch chicken sub side by side.
Of all the celebrity deaths in 2016, I was most upset by that of David Bowie. His music was the soundtrack of my transition from high school into college. People who knew Bowie comment often on his chameleon-like qualities. He could blend in anywhere, which is pretty remarkable for a diamond among pebbles.
Some of the best artists I know are like this. The shape shifting they’re capable of correlates to their ability to empathize with multiple, often competing perspectives—they see the world in a way the rest of us can’t because they’re often living on their own one. They transcend structural identities and get on with it. When they’re good at what they do, they see to the core of humanity (through watching us and self inspection). They dispatch what they find through their work. That’s why art matters. It helps us better understand others and ourselves.
Bowie’s music did a lot of the latter for me. I loved how he could live in flux. I wanted to live like that. I do live like that. I try. Between David to Bowie to Ziggy Stardust, he moved flawlessly. He could be an alien and also the kind of good guy who would sing Christmas songs around a piano with American meatheart Bing Crosby. His manifestation of butterfly to caterpillar and back again is a feat no other musical artist has been able to pull of since—although that may not be entirely their fault.
We are such brands as ourselves, even you and me, those aforementioned pretty pebbles. Because we have (most of us anyway) so clearly defined who we are as people online, any attempt to be someone drastically different or made up feels contrived, even when its for performance. It’s hard to pull off a thinned mustache and angsty hairdo when you are a cowboy and have taught everyone else how to be one too (looking at you, Garth). Not even Beyonce could pull it off and she, as the good book predicted, can do almost anything. But her Sasha Fierce character fell as flat as Britney Spears vocals pre auto-tune.
But Bowie, man. His range of expression was part of his art and, thus, his charm. It’s hard to maintain credibility in pop culture as a capital-A-Artist without coming off like a complete twat. He never did.
I want to be like Bowie. Still. On a much less grand and glittery scale, but I want to be genuine in my different roles and identities.
Never false, but also never stuck.
I want to gracefully be able to change my mind, grow and love even when it’s difficult. Part of my admiration for him came from his fluidity and what he offered me because of that. I could listen to “Let’s Dance” with my mom and get weird to “Diamond Dogs” with my friends. In a way that seemed effortless he straddled the fence. Hell, he danced on it.
I long for that kind of ambiguity right now when everything is so polarized. Bowie could jump from lily pad to lily pad, bring them together without ever sacrificing his unique magic. This year I’ve felt more like a sinking stone between two.
My lily pads. The Chicago jungle. The central Ohio farmlands. They seem further apart than ever before. They are physically speaking, two different worlds, but after the presidential election, they felt like that emotionally and intellectually too. Distant planets. Like spiders from Mars. As quickly as Chicago turned blue, Marion, Ohio, seeped red.
I have a lot of role models who have showed me how to live in the middle of these two spaces. My experience of having radical beliefs and conservative roots is certainly not a unique experience. Reconciling the two requires a balancing act that is actually quite rewarding. I can never be too much of an asshole one way or another because I love people who are completely different from me—when I get mad at them, I remember why they’re still in my lives and find a new way to explain why I disagree instead of shutting the door. It challenges me to explore what I believe and why on a regular basis.
At first, after November 8, I didn’t want to go home for Christmas. Talk about identity issues: How can I be the only one who became a radical anarchist in a loving home of Republican Roman Catholics? I’ve always felt a little displaced there, even with all that love coming my way. Difference, even amidst love, can cause confused wounds and mine had healed with time and art and maturity and writing and, well, David Bowie.
But home I went (and I was so excited to do so after some perspective and self-care revealed ways I plan to make a difference during the next four years. Volunteering, donating, just trying to continue being a good person in whatever definition that takes for me).
When I was home, the 2016 death I kept being reminded of was not that of a celebrity. It was of my grandma. Grandma’s expressions of love for me could be spotted everywhere if I was paying close enough attention. And I was. She left behind a lot. From the stocking that she made for me that hung every year at the farmhouse where she lived with my grandpa, to the ornaments she made for all of us every year. She always tucked $1 into the ornaments’ folds. I used to love digging a little finger, sticky from sneaking Christmas cookies, into the ornament to pull out my prize. Every year of my life she gave me one of those.
Rural America is consistent. Just like those ornaments. I know what to expect there. It is slow to change and relatively simple. Sometimes that infuriates me, but I need that caution in my life too. I need to know I can always come home and some things will be the same. The tree will be up and gift with my name on it will be underneath, no matter what I choose to do, say or vote for the rest of the year. In my life are good people who are willing to listen, and so am I.
Later in the week, my dad was going through some boxes from grandma’s house and I was helping, which means I was just looking at the contents that made their way from box to living room floor. There were bowls and trinkets. A lot of religious iconography. I laid claim to a framed towel my grandma decorated after a Bahamas trip with seashells she found on the beach.
Then he pulled out a blue book. Looked at it. Handed it to me. It was the program from my college graduation. She rode up with my family to watch me walk across the stage and get my diploma, the young woman she saw there much different from the little girl she remembered. I smiled and opened the pages.
There’s no way she could have realized what a wonderful feeling her actions around this program would inspire in me years later. Not only was I moved that she had kept it, but that she had dog-eared all the pages of the book that listed my name. Had she looked at it again, after the ceremony? Maybe, maybe not. But she had been there and that mattered. And she had, in her deep pride of my accomplishment, made sure to note with a fold of the page where I was named for my efforts.
My grandma and I were not close, but I feel the unspoken power of this action and note how this feels different from the ornaments. She never would have known I’d see the book, her folds. She just felt love and excitement for me and did what she did. The recognition of her recognition created a deep tenderness in me as I watched my mom, that same night, crochet a blanket for her next grandchild. I hope he reaches the level of appreciation for the thought and care that went into that blanket as I do for my grandma’s quiet examples of what I meant to her.
On my flight back to Chicago, I read the following passage in an essay by philosopher Todd May. It seemed so fitting as I flew to my other lily pad, not quite knowing how I will define “home” in my future.
“Death and its other, immortality, present us with the paradox our lives must grasp. We must simultaneously recognize the evil to each of us that death inescapably is and yet also not pine for a future that would bleed us of the reasons to fear death. We must embrace the fragility that lends our lives beauty and, at the same time, withdraws beauty from us. There is no straight path, nor a crooked one, that will lead us beyond all this. Our home lies here, we might say.”
Art always finds a way to move my understanding forward. This passage just the latest example. But it’s nice to know even as I progress I will be tied to a place that, though different from me, will always hold me tight, no questions asked. My teachers include David Bowie. And my grandma.
Soon, out my window, Chicago blasts its lights. Thousands of beacons that say hello, welcome to the other side. From my angle, as we curve over Lake Michigan, the city looks like it goes on and on forever. As if all the life doesn’t eventually end buried in acres of dirt. I know it does. And I’m not afraid. I smile, take a pic, and text it to my family in Ohio.
Hello from Hawaii! I hope you don’t mind I’m still in my bikini. My goodness, it’s so balmy here I don’t want to wear anything else!
I’m sure I need no introduction. It is I who purr from your stereo every Thanksgiving through Christmas asking your main man of merriment for many an indulgence.
But in case you didn’t get the followup: Santa is a loyal lover, and my swooning did no swinging him over to my side.
He did bring me the 54 Convertible, though. Light blue. With a wink.
I like to think that, although he remained faithful (you try giving up Mrs. Claus’s cookies), he did applaud my audacity of asking.
After all, at least I was honest about what I wanted. Which leads me to the reason we’re here. I’ll make this quick. Despite what you think of me, I’m no tease. I have a pina colada and tanned pool boy to which I’d prefer to quickly return.
Here goes. Why are you all such haters on Ebenezer Scrooge?
See, Scrooge and I are on a long list of wintery villains meant to serve a lesson to the good little boys and girls of the world. And we’re sick of it.
The Abominable Snowman? Looking for a friend.
The mean magician stealing Frosty’s hat? A closeted gay man trapped in a suffocating world where snowmen are allowed be themselves but he is not. That would make anyone kind of bitchy.
The Heat Miser, a product of global warming. You did that to yourselves.
Thus, I beg this season you perhaps try to see the nice in the ways we were all naughty.
Through this lens, Mr. Scrooge takes on a warmer light.
He believed in hard work, making money, and screening someone for drugs before they got welfare.
He didn’t pay his taxes because he was smart. He was trying to bring jobs to his countrymen. He had high standards and didn’t pay his workers if he deemed what they did a bad job, even if they put in their time and totally gave him a chance to tell them to stop before they were done. He wanted to build a wall to keep the ghosts out and make them pay for it.
I know how much you all love a blustery old business man with “balls”! Why not love Scrooge, pre-epiphany? The mixed messages you send are really quite atrocious, holiday hounds.
Perhaps with this newly opened mind you can also get behind my theory that The Nutcracker is a really strange story about an uncle who is a little too interested in imagining his young niece of Victorian-era marrying age.
Apple pie. There’s nothing I craft that makes me feel more rooted to the past. So rich is the story of the apple. Juicy too. From Eve and her temptation to Johnny and his journey to Martha Stewart and her perfect display.
“Of all the delicates which Britons try
To please the palate of delight the eye,
Of all the sev’ral kings of sumptuous far,
There is none that can with applepie compare.”
To William King’s doughy poetry in 1713. The apple pie of his apple-shaped eye.
I’m always amazed at how easy it is to make. How few ingredients it really takes to make something so beloved and iconic. You’d think something that evokes this much lore and longing requires flecks of gold and the tooth of a troll.
Everything now is so complicated.
But this? Sugar. Apples. Lemon, the secret ingredient. That’s all. Mostly.
And a flaky crust, but that’s something that people are scared of until they make their first one and realize how ridiculously easy it is. Like driving a stick. Or reverse parking. Or calling your grandmother just to say hi.
Crumble top. Even easier. Unless you don’t have a blender and have to slice through the butter with two butter knives. But it’s manageable. The recipe should say, “Slice the butter in the flour and sugar with the butter knives until desired crumbly consistency is reached. Usually the length of two Al Green songs. To bake, restart the whole album and listen once through.”
When you’re done making one you can look at it for a long time. It takes hours to cool enough to tickle the tips of waiting tongues. You can say, “I made that.” And write a poem about it like William. Promise to plant seeds more like Johnny. Present it flawlessly like Martha.
There comes a time in every man’s life that he must decide whether he is a victim or not. So goes the old saying.
For women, per usual, navigating to the answer of that question has a unique set of complications. One can seemingly be being walked on while really playing the long game in which she is crowned victor, not victim. Women can get away with a few more negotiating tactics than men, but I also think it’s a disposition we’re more inclined to — whether by nature or by nurture — not to be confrontational.
At first, anyway.
For example, one time I got my car washed and paid an extra $20 to have the mats steam cleaned. I never ponied up for little indulgences like this, so it was a big deal.
That’s why I was so let down that when my car made it to the end of the line, sudsy and steaming, and the gentlemen cleaners were whispering anxiously to one another, taking turns looking awkwardly inside.
“Miss,” they informed me. “We messed up.”
Instead of putting my newly crisp-as-that-$20-bill-I-paid-for-them mats in my Honda Civic, they’d put them in the Jetta that just jetted off. So sorry.
I’d typically decline to call these guys idiots straight out the gate, but with the way the story unfolded, I now hold no shame in giving them a walloping, judgmental, stinkiest-of-stink-eyes stink eye three years after the fact.
Instead of offering me an immediate refund, the head gentleman cleaner got my phone number and said they’d call me as soon as the guy in the Jetta brought back my mats. Because he would. There’s no way he wouldn’t notice those mats weren’t his.
Which, in hindsight, should have been the line of thinking that raised the first red flag. If it was that easy to tell they didn’t belong in the Jetta, how could his team have placed them in there in the first place?
What happened next was a five-month battle with this car wash company. After two weeks of not hearing anything from them, I called and inquired about my mats. No one knew what I was talking about. They took down my number and said they’d call me back.
They didn’t. I tried two more times to be polite with my followup. By the fourth or fifth call, though, I was mad. I felt taken advantage of. They didn’t take me seriously because I was being nice about it.
Clearly they were blowing me off, hoping I’d forget about the mats or just buy my own so as not to deal with them.
Clearly they didn’t know the desperate stubbornness of a 26-year-old living paycheck to paycheck.
I stopped being polite and tried a new tactic. I explained to the owner/manager that I had worked really, really hard to buy this car by myself. Getting my mats steamed was a treat for my hard work. I just wanted this thing I worked so hard for to be a complete set. This will definitely work, I thought. If anyone can empathize with the need to protect one’s small fruits of labor, it’s a small business owner.
Yeah, yeah, OK, he said. He didn’t call back.
A few weeks passed. I’m boiling by this point… this was your fuck up, not mine, and you owe me a refund and my mats… That’s the angry line of reasoning I hammered him with a few weeks later after he continued to ignore me. He yelled back at me, saying his family had been going through something or something and I should be more understanding. I might have, I said, if this hadn’t have happened five months ago and if I hadn’t have been put off this whole time like some annoying fly you needed to scrape off the radiator.
Also, wait what?! I thought I was the customer?! Why am I helping YOU feel better about this?
I killed him with kindness. That didn’t work.
I threatened him with a lawyer. That didn’t work.
I called the Better Business Bureau. There you go, girl.
Two days later after making a formal complaint, the prick “suddenly” found a supplier for my mats. Imagine that! They didn’t fit right, of course, but at least they were mine. I got my refund. My car, my symbol of independence, was shabby but whole.
My white steed defended!
Every time I drove by that car wash from then on, I stuck my middle finger out of the window, rain or shine. I also evil-eyed the inside of any black Jetta I happened upon, looking for ill–fitting floor mats.
They say cars teach you responsibility—how to take care of something. Mine taught me some people are just rotten, only looking out for themselves. But there are ways to fight them.
I just wish I had fought sooner. On a lot of things.
But mostly this car has brought me very happy memories. It made a lifestyle possible in my twenties that was full of family visits, journalism assignments, friend vacations and simple errand running that happens as I came to define my adult self. It was my physical transportation as I tried to figure out the messy internal traveling to figure out where exactly I belonged.
And it had a loud radio that was perfect for singing along to the oldies, which is probably what I did most in it.
I sold this baby, my car, this weekend and am still kind of sad about it.
I think it was too, because it gave me a funny little goodbye—a reminder to pay attention, even when singing at the top of my lungs.
I got the car detailed right before I sold it. A few days afterward I pulled the mats out of the trunk to put them back in the now-dry car.
I was having one of those weeks where everything felt big except me.
I’d come home from work. Heat up some food. Pull out a TV tray. Eat. Lay in bed. Sleep.
I was adjusting, like so many, to a grimmer awareness of the world. It was like someone mowed the grass and I’m daunted to have discovered how many snakes were there all along as I sunbathed in cheery progressing warmth.
I’m also adjusting to a new living situation.
That pairing of words, “living situation,” politely implies that something heated and grotesque is boiling under a tepid surface — cohabitation out of necessity — but that’s not the case here.
We’re just settling in, Justin and I.
But, that week at least, it was too much for me. Too much changing. Too much not knowing. I needed to sleep.
On night three of 12+ plus hours of sleep, Justin asks what is wrong.
“I’m sick maybe.”
“Or you are sad.”
I am sad, so this comment makes me pull my mind’s curtain’s tighter with white knuckle anger.
“I want a couch. More furniture. All I have to lay on is this stupid bed that doesn’t even have a bed frame and so of course I fall asleep by 7 pm. I want to feel like a woman! How can I do that in this place?! What are we even doing with our lives?!”
What I’m really saying is that I feel powerless. He knows, and shields himself from my fire breathing with his knowing.
The next evening I come home from work and Justin is on the living room floor, screwing together a bed frame.
We don’t say much about it, but I know this him building a better cocoon for me to hide in when I don’t want to look outside anymore.
I go to bed early that night again. But the next night I don’t. And the night after that I don’t either. Quietly, he’s lifted me back up to where it is bright.
Love is simple, mostly.
Let’s remember that as we start to get to the work of tying the snakes into bows.
There are three things that are always in the eye of the beholder:
Beauty
Walks of shame
Hoodoo
Hoodoo — like good moonshine and my spiritual belief system — is an amalgamation to some, an abomination to others.
I choose to believe the former. This came in handy when we visited Louisiana on our final stop of the lo-class tour.
Voodoo is a religion. But Hoodoo is a practice meant to allow an individual to reign in supernatural forces to improve their lives. It’s about personal power, like setting an intention or meditating but, sometimes, with burning herbs thrown in. There are no Hoodoo priests or priestesses. Just people. I like that.
I bring this up because before our trip started, Justin proposed to me! Yes, marriage! My dowry of goats and pickled yams is in the mail as we speak!
It was awesome and everything it should be and followed by a fancy dinner and excited texts and phone calls to our families and friends. I knew it was coming but his timing was still a surprise and his performance grade-A-you-complete-me romantic.
But there was the issue of the ring.
It’s not that I didn’t love it. I did. In fact, I picked it out.
I didn’t want a new wedding ring so I needed to be involved in the ring-picking process lest I end up with something like a ball and chain wrapped around my ring finger for the rest of my life.
Why did I not want a new ring? Why did I end up going vintage?
Simple. I, like many a Millennial woman, watched the movie “Blood Diamond” in college and was traumatized by it. And I, like many a Millennial woman, believed I could make a difference in this world’s atrocious legacy of being terrible to one another.
The irony is that I probably ended up with a blood diamond but it’s like wearing old fur maybe? The diamonds are already out in the world so… ?
My ring is from the 1940s. I thought about getting a stone other than a diamond and was, in fact, searching for those when I stumbled across the listing for the one I ended up with. I got a weird feeling when I saw it — locked in and sure. I knew it was mine. Immediately.
Everyone I’ve shown it to has said the same. “Wow, that ring is so you.” “That ring is definitely yours.”
But it wasn’t. Someone else had worn it before. Maybe several someone else’s.
Here’s a photo I took while doing some writing work at The Bean Gallery in New Orleans. Because my self worth often is tied to my job performance (I’m working on itttt!), I crammed some freelance into our tour so I could worry for a few days about a deadline. 🙂 My sly attempt to get the ring in this photo is as obvious as this plug for you to follow my Instagram account.
Luckily, we knew a guy in New Orleans.
He’s a friend of ours and many other of our other friends’ “I Know A Guy” Guy. Other realm-y. Memory like a fly trap.
He knew exactly what to do with the ring.
I can’t share the exact process (because I don’t remember and also it felt more sacred than silly and I want to keep it that way), but it involved, among other things, burning sage and sandalwood and a salt water cleanse.
Justin and I took turns holding the ring as the ceremony, we’ll call it, progressed. We thought about who may have worn it before and who may still be emotionally holding on to it — in this life or the next. Don’t worry, I told them in my mind, I will take good care of this. Thank you for taking care of it until now. Thank you for bringing it to me. I will respect its past the same way I will respect you… and him, my love.
The ring looked brighter, felt lighter.
And that’s how we said goodbye to the spirits in my engagement ring. On an 80-degree New Orleans day. On our southern friend’s patio. Beneath a disco ball.
Just as the good lord(s) intended.
And the greatest was love.First up: Food. We went to Parkway Bakery and Tavern for po’ boys.Baby’s first po’ boy! (But not her first poor boy.)Mardi Gras beads were used like Christmas lights.Chilling. You must when it’s this damn hot. Fall does not exist on the bayou.One of my favorite things about New Orleans was all its architecture (below), word usage (like “boogaloo” below) and accidental color mixing (above and below).
Pro-tips: Get the cannoli and gelato and don’t look Angelo’s ghost in the eye.I also loved how spooky Louisiana felt. And not just because it was Halloween time.
The Ruby Slipper is so named because, for the owners, coming back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina felt like a fairytale. There’s no place like home.The food culture in the south is wild. That’s a fried green tomato and cane sugar peanut butter with my breakfast.We did some shows in Baton Rouge. You should definitely check out Spanish Moon if you’re ever in the area. It’s here you’ll find my favorite bathroom graffiti ever.
Another one of our favorite Baton Rouge spots was Atomic Pop Shop record store. Here we went home with a fresh copy of Latin Booty Party Jams.Some very specific candles at F&F Botanica in New Orleans. Worth a stop! If I win the lotto with my candle, it was nice knowing ya, suckas!
Luckily these were the only alligators we saw, and we even went kayaking through City Park’s sculpture garden. (That line was just a clever way to work in the fact that we went kayaking through City Park’s sculpture garden. I don’t think the water actually had alligators to begin with…)LOOK AT HIM GETTING HIS LITTLE ANIMAL-PEOPLE PHOTO TAKEN!Word.The spirit of New Orleans captured in rare bike form at the French Quarter.As seen on our walk to the French Quarter. A reminder as one struts through their French Quarter walk of shame back to their car.Nods to Nola’s musical culture and history are everywhere.
The spirit of New Orleans captured in rare Christmas nativity scene form in the French Quarter.The gumbo at 801 Royal in the French Quarter may have changed my life.My favorite photo from the whole trip. This is such a great visual of what we saw in Louisiana. A mix of old and new and a love and respect for both. Amalgamation indeed.
Referring to any day that has already occurred, any day that is not today, as “simpler times” is wrong. It wasn’t simpler. Today is simpler, at least if we’re speaking about the basics of getting the lower portion of our hierarchy of needs met.
Technology and industry have freed up time for us to find our purpose instead of our supper.
The only way in which is may have been simpler “back then” is the subject of fear. You knew who or what your enemy was, which ultimately makes that thing less scary. The boundaries and the sides were in black and white, for better or worse, however problematic.
Today we don’t have that mental resting ground, or at least we shouldn’t if we are to be aware and thoughtful about what is happening in our communities, nation, world. But what does all that thinking for the outside do to our insides?
By Joan Cornella
It leaves many of us numb. Left staring at the warring outside through a pulled aside velvet curtain made in China. Our alarm buttons have been on so long, their din has become background noise in a landscape of mental disbelief.
So what do we do? Turn inward. Or find a way to laugh.
That’s what Joan Cornella’s work is about for me—the recurring disbelief that things are never, ever what they seem and everything from enemies to heroes are indefinable properties constantly en morph. Essentially. there’s no place to land.
Except maybe on mental health islands, like those in paintings by Angela Dalinger.
The inaugural exhibit at Miishkooki Art Space in Skokie on Chicago’s North Shore features Cornella’s work. The Spanish illustrator’s comic panel storytelling style is sick in both senses of the word and absolutely worth seeing in person.
The show’s called “Sweet Spoils” and it features other big names in the world of illustration and Instagram-famous fine art: Angela Dalinger, Nate Otto, and Alex Gamsu Jenkins, to name a few.
“Ayahuasca Shaved Ice” by Sean Norvet
Sean Norvet’s majestic oil painting, a centerpiece in the show, is a nod to our post-apocalyptic mind fuck. There’s so much to feed our face, so much to distract us, we can’t see that everything around us melting away.
Or maybe we choose to indulge in all of that exactly because we can see what’s happening and it’s overwhelming. Which came first: the content or the binge?
Whether it’s Jim Ether’s playful fat-cat flies atop steaming piles of shit or Brandon Celi’s desolate spaces — where, when inhabited, his listless subjects go through the motions — this show is a testament to the fact that our modern melancholy can also look cool as fuck.
“Sweet Spoils” is on view at Miishkooki through Oct. 21.
