Tagged as “Activity partners”
…And so begins the Ragbag’s epochal Word Idol Week. All week long, Raynor has charged several of his semi-professional acquaintances with taking up the cause of an obsolete F-word and re-introducing it back into the wild.
I am one such acquaintance, and I have chosen ”fourings.” A four o’clock meal. Proletarian high tea. Post-work happy hour chowtime. Eating your feelings about Oprah’s imminent disappearance from daytime TV. Yum.
Stick around, consider carefully what I have written, enjoy the other entries, and then vote for fourings at week’s end. Or, better yet, consider adding fourings to your meal schedule. I will be posting fourings-related content much of this week in an attempt to begin moving my readership in that direction. You eat at 4pm anyway; might as well make a ritual out of it.
Via the ragbag
If I am at a party or opening, and I am in charge of marking people’s hands for drink-buying purposes, and it has been determined that the best hand-marking mechanism is custom Sharpie knuckle tattoos, then I am prepared to make that happen. If the drink-buyer happens to be from Cleveland, all the better.
Happy Wednesday, reader. On the eve of our potential Thursday snowfall, here is a photo that captures the precise moment before I learned to ice skate last winter. Under the tutelage of Mount Holly’s own Tammy Dahlke, I seconds later cast the chair aside and completed three perfect, broken-ankle free laps around the pond. Tammy said I was a natural.
On a related note, I was asked last week by Vita.mn magazine to recommend a Christmas gift for their readers . This is what I told them:
A customized hockey jersey from Hockey Giant in Bloomington. They’ll put your name and number (mine is 00) on the back, and any crazy thing you want in big, beautiful block lettering on the front (“ART SCHOOL,” “SOCIALISM,” etc.).
This is still my favorite customized skating jersey, from last winter. The big, beautiful block lettering on the front says AREA HIGH SCHOOL, and the back does indeed say STURDEVANT / 00. Maybe this is the year I actually do have one made that says SOCIALISM, so I can being the long and thankless task of reclaiming ice hockey from the Sarah Palins and Tim Pawlentys of the world. I’ll probably have a punch thrown at me by some jerk with a mullet, but hell, I’m 30 years old now. It’s about time I finally took a punch to the face over something important.
It’s Wednesday, which in many cultures means you are going to be forced to look at a picture of me.
Last summer I went to go visit my friend Tom in Oakland, where this photo was taken. The bandana scarf and jaunty cap indicate that I am at the dizzying apex of my celebrated Fiorello La Guardia-Era Newsboy look.
Earlier in the day, Tom had taken me to his favorite flea market in Berkeley. Every Saturday, apparently, he biked down there to pick up new conspiracy theory DVDs from a very excitable vendor that knew him by name and had an endless selection of titles with bizarre Photoshopped covers on subjects ranging from UFOs to weather control to Freemasonry.
Tom’s particular interest was in Freemasonry that summer, so he’d loaded up on titles related to that, no matter how crazy they seemed. Some of them did indeed seem crazy. For example, he was breathlessly telling me about one he’d bought that drew some parallels between Freemasonry, the establishment of the University of Texas and George W. Bush. You know, Longhorns. I couldn’t follow it, but it had to do with the “longhorn salute” and its relation to the One-World Satanic salute. Or maybe it had something to do with the University of Texas’s creepy fight song, “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You.”
Whatever it was, there is an agreeably sinister, omniscient Masonic quality to the lyrics:
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
All the live long day.
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
You cannot get away.
Do not think you can escape them,
At night, or early in the morn’.
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
Till Gabriel blows his horn!
Anyway, after the flea market we biked up to Amoeba Records, and the first record we found was a cheap used copy of Elvis Presley’s Flaming Star soundtrack, where he sings — oh my God! — “The Eyes of Texas”! Yikes! The Freemasons planned it that way!
So in tribute to all-seeing eyes of the Texan Freemasons and their Satanic One-World Masters, Tom is throwing up the Longhorn salute, and I am forming the “Eye of Texas” with my right hand. We are under the thrall of Texas Freemasonry. It is important to have friends that share your interests.
Later on, we saw DJ Shadow at a stoplight on Telegraph Avenue, and he was blaring the organ solo from the extended version of “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” for some reason.
What a great trip! What a great guy, that Tom Hall!
On my birthday last week, my friend Kurt led a few people on the banjo in the singing of this number in lieu of the customary “Happy Birthday to You.” There were few on the scene, but most of them knew the words, so it was perfectly, appropriately sobering. I encourage you, too, to sing murder ballads on your birthday.
Thanks to Colin, Andy and Shanai at the WBSC, too, for a tremendous birthday party Saturday night. There was singing at that one, as well.
Also, uh, since it’s my birthday and all, it seems like it’d be OK to point out this hilarious and utterly terrifying photo — my friends Allen and Pamela went costumed as your correspondent for Halloween last weekend, right down to the red socks, vintage campaign lapel buttons and furry Russian hats. If people didn’t know who I was, they just said they were “Amish rabbis,” which works, too.
There is also a photo of them making out, but I have sworn to never look at it. The metaphysical implications are too terrible.
I’m not a dad or a homeowner, Obama. What can I do to help?
I am hoping the answer is “form a bluegrass band and travel across the country in a red-white-and-blue solar-powered conversion van solving mysteries.”
Susan Sontag
Patti Smith
Georgia O'Keeffe
Susan Sontag
I was out at the Town Talk with a friend a few weeks ago, and as we were both leaving, I realized there was a Rainbow Foods right across the street, and I needed deodorant and toilet paper. Since (in the parlance of social media) I also consider my friends ”activity partners,” I asked my friend if she’d like to come with me to buy deodorant and toilet paper. “Of course,” she said.
While we were in the deodorant and toilet paper aisle, my friend — a brunette in her 30s — remembered suddenly she needed hair dye, which is in the same aisle. I was very surprised to learn that she dyed her hair. “Of course,” she said.
“It’s almost fifty percent gray,” she explained. “Look, you can see it at the roots.” She bent over, and sure enough, half of the bottom sixteenth-of-an-inch of her dark hair was in fact gray. It was stunning. I almost fell over backwards.
“Are you kidding?” I shouted incredulously. “You’re dyeing that out? It looks tremendous.” I explained that I have always found women over thirty-five sporting shoulder-length or longer bunches of half-gray salt-and-pepper hair to look absolutely amazing.
It was now my friend’s turn for incredulity. She disagreed strenuously — the gray looks old, stodgy, corporate. True sometimes, I explained, but I said I wasn’t talking about those short corporate-looking Kathleen Sibelius-style things. I was talking about Susan Sontag and Patti Smith and Georgia O’Keeffe! Defiant as middle age approaches, but with dignity and poise! Walking into a crowded cafe with giant sunglasses and a notebook and a full floppy head of salt-and-pepper spilling all over! Watching the stupid 26 year old boys reflexively look up from their inane college-age girlfriends and mouthing, in awe, what if…?
This isn’t even that dumb-ass Cougartown bullshit — this is something much more profoundly exciting and earthy. “I am a woman, and you had better believe that I am old enough to have hung out with Glenn Branca, but I understand poetry in a way that you do not, and I can still buy better marijuana than you and could actually smoke you under the table but I don’t have to prove anything and don’t have time for that sort of juvenile nonsense anyway because I am too busy writing an essay for Film Comment.” Oh my God! Yes, please!
My friend wasn’t totally sold. So I sent her the images above as proof. Gaze in awe. Are you dyeing or plucking those grays away, reader? Reconsider. Because look again at these three women, and consider that there is a good chance they could be you.
