Letter #40
Flower power
Ah, spring. It opened in kind of a phlegmy haze, didn’t it?
Just last week the irises growing through the fence outside were iced with dew. Too cold to smell them; still distinct against the hard white light of the drizzling sky, emanating silent purple.
Now the flowers are singing on every block! In the garden dirt, a fairy’s lair of cream crocuses. Fluffy magenta peonies, the size and heft of shaking fists. A sly comma of spiky orange tulips, turning a corner by the trash.
I got these grapefruit pink sunglasses that make me feel like Cyber Queen of Flower Power, and I am seeing the world through them.
The sun! sun! sun! O golden syrup, making us less shy, not yet driving us insane.
I almost want to go on a date. But eh, I’m too prone to a spiral. What I really mean is I want attention exactly how and when and why I want it. If you don’t know what to do by looking at me it’s time to move along.
And besides there’s a lot of things I have to do right now that I’m neglecting, like:
Wash carrots, peel beets, slice apples, grate ginger, empty entire plastic box of of spinach into my humble juicer. Empty the detritus into my compost bag in the freezer. Store in my biggest glass jar.
Blend an avocado, rice vinegar, safflower oil, pumpkin seeds, and a head of cilantro in the food processor to make a green mix. Use as weekly salad dressing and egg accoutrement.
Empty out every single scrap I’ve ever owned or clothed myself with and separate them individually into keep, toss, sell, give.
Make my bed, every morning.
And wash my clothes before the laundry piles up to the point where I have no underwear and I start doing manic things, like sit in bathing suit bottoms on the bird-shit splattered fire escape to have myself a braless smoke at nine o’clock at night.
Gah, the sky! Sweet cerulean. And the leaves that neon green that means happy! I want to sniff the air until I — well —
Wait — I forgot to say. May 15, 2023, my tenth year living in New York City. Oh, my beauty! I sure hope you were worth it. But then again: who cares? You can have my past. Ultimately, the pleasure was all mine.
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There are so many intelligent things to be said about this remake of Cronenberg’s original. The ultimate body horror? Pregnancy— nay, birth. The ultimate most beautiful person alive? Rachel Weisz, 53 year old woman portraying psychotic twin gynecologists. It feels like the perfect (?) time to hold up this mirror to culture: this is what you’re forcing scared little girls and desperate women to do, huh? Does this look easy? Does this look blessed? Does this look like something God did, or does it look like something that God was named after?
It always depresses me how smart women are, and all of the ways their intelligence is tamped down, forced out and given no air before they even have a chance to really wield it.
Beverly and Elliot Mantel, together, are playing God. They are untampable, untameable, and un-out-wittable. They’re brilliant (both), insatiable (E), forlorn (B), cunning (both), and hopelessly intertwined. They need nothing else but each other: left arm, right arm, two halves of the brain. Outsiders exist in a haze, through the unnerving slow blur of amniotic fluid. All of the side characters who dare interject are perfectly played as real people, who could exist, who just happen upon this one strange, loving womb that contains these two deranged aliens.
Julian Adon Alexander graphite works
Alexander draws in glimpses, in transit — subway stares, milk crate bundles, hoodie-obscured profiles and crumpled dollar water bottles. Shadows cast from the depths of winter but also from silence.
Kay Ryan, “Tenderness and Rot”
It is important / to stay sweet / and loving.
Susan King doesn’t speak, but she communicates. What artist needs words when she can do what every artist who’s ever existed wants, and transfer exactly what she sees in her head onto the page? Of course, I’m assuming. We only have her drawings to go on, which look to me just like the mechanisms of dreams.
Or you can be the kind of artist, my pet favorite, who combines words and drawings. I’ve been a fan of Carly Jean Andrews’ bawdy awdy awwwwdy-serving ladies for a while, but I really love her recent forays into diaristic panels that really are all I’ve ever wanted from anything: hot girls discovering themselves as hot women. She also has an amazing old book typeface account for all my vintage font-heads out there.
Twirl, baby, twirl!
Why don't you please! your! self!
Delighter