Pimp to the mouth-breathers

Dead Pigeon

The big snow happened the day after I found this pigeon. Walking back the next day, I looked for some sign of its existence. Maybe it was picked up by men in the night or maybe it was buried under the white, its little pigeon corpse like some baby mammoth, perfectly preserving itself for some Field Museum of the future.

“And this is what they called a pigeon,” the robots will say.

Or most likely they won’t say that. Because the thaw is coming and the odds are good that this particular pigeon will be out with next day’s trash. A little body in a big heap.

I thought I wouldn’t be able to see it at all, there was so much snow. But then the tip of the wing poked out and waved hello.

Yoga

It smells like day old throw up. Like some unknown household, walked into before discovering a unchanged toddler in the corner. Or some cat puke on the floor. It’s bright and hot and with lots of women - so many women - who keep repeating the same sayings acting like they’re just making a discovery as they say them.

Shine your heart towards the window. Blossom into downward dog.

And I’ve forgotten my towel. Which doesn’t make my dog blossom at all. Rather it sags into a sweaty heap of undog-like human arms and legs.

My dog gets adjusted.

I’ve had wine and watched about three fourths of Marie Antoinette, the Sofia Coppola movie, before coming to this. I feel like Marie Antoinette. Hair piled high, superior, towering. Straight back.

It might be the wine.

I am a jerk when I drink. Someone should cut my head off.

But they don’t. Instead they let me continue to do bad yoga. Some new kind of sentencing laws for the bad guys.

I talked to a cop a few weeks ago. She actually calls suspects the bad guys. At least those who’ve put holes through people.

During the yoga, it’s not all bad. The wine starts to wear off and my wig shrinks an inch or two. I think about the house I lived in when I was little and how we’d sit in the kitchen early in the morning as my dad would throw snowballs at the big window in front of us on his way out to school. I think of a guy I made out with in college, running through the woods, just the two of us, one of the only memories I have of him.

Will that ever happen again, I think as I lay in sleeping pigeon. You think you’ll love like that again and again but what if really it happens just a few times and then no more?

But I can’t think more on this, because I’m told to look to the left. There is a leg there, covered in a neon, weird-lighted tight. The leg looks like a dead leg. Like something pulled out of somewhere..too glistening and discolored.

Then I’m told to look to the right and the leg goes away. I see the skyline. I close my eyes and try to leave the bad-smelling room and dead legs. But some girl is telling us abut unconditional love and I can’t focus enough to leave. So I stay and lay in the dark and wait it out thinking how a glass of wine would really take the edge off.

Pineapple and JonBenet Ramsey

(JonBenet Ramsey. Photo: Flickr/My Eyes See)

Tonight, there are a lot of things I’m supposed to be doing. I’m supposed to be finishing an article. Supposed to do yoga or go for a run. Supposed to make a healthy dinner. But instead, I’m here, thinking and writing about JonBenet Ramsey.

JonBenet is a strange name and there’s a reason it’s strange. Because it’s really both her parents’ names. John Bennett and Patricia Ramsey made JonBenet Patricia Ramsey. And the six-year-old was not the first daughter John Ramsey buried. Four years before JonBenet was murdered, his daughter Elizabeth from a previous marriage was killed in a car accident near Chicago at the age of 22.

JonBenet would have been two.

The night of her death, JonBenet Ramsey ate some pineapple and for some reason her parents denied that she had. Denied it even after a bowl of pineapple was found on the kitchen table.

And I just can’t get that detail out of my head. Such a sad, sickening thing. Pineapple bits found inside of the girl the next day and her parents won’t even allow that reality.

What’s the story of the pineapple? Why was she eating pineapple at 9:30 or 10 o’clock at night on Christmas? Was it a long night for JonBenet? Did she ask for some pineapple as a way of de-stressing? Of pushing away what she didn’t want to deal with?

But JonBenet’s dead and now her mother Patsy Ramsey is dead too and it doesn’t really matter anymore anyway. Or, it does matter, if only in the same sense that wanting to know who Jack the Ripper was matters.

Because the narrative has more power as a ghost story. And if we can solve it, we can give ourselves back over to logic. We fear the strange man robbing us of things in the night, but more often than not, it is no strange man, but someone we know. It is our own lives that are hardest to face.

Denying the pineapple won’t make the pineapple go away. The truth floats to the surface sooner or later, and like any good Stephen King novel, the actions of the humans in the story are always more terrifying than those of any ghost.

Death and Dreams

In real life – not the dream anymore – I just interviewed an undertaker who owns the oldest funeral home in the city. He lives above the funeral home in the same apartment his grandfather lived in when he took care of the dead. We were talking about the importance of wakes. Back before the 1950’s, wakes used to go for three days. After the 50’s, it went down to two days and now of course it’s just the one. The undertaker told me the reason it used to be three was to help the living mourn. And by mourn, he meant, help them believe the person was really dead.

(Continue reading here at One Day at a Time, Chicago improver Steve Nelson’s blog)

Painting like a Black Man in Harlem (Part Two)

(Pushing babies and walking dogs. 2013, Gouache on paper. Unfinished.)

“One of the fascinating things about art is that it has a magic.”

-Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence - or Jake, as my art kit so familiarly calls him - was a painter who grew up in Harlem during the 1930s. This week’s Jacob Lawrence assignment involved painting the city you live in.

I live on Southport Avenue, one street south of Addison. There are more dogs and babies than people where I live and even less of those few people who say hello to you or know your name. There are also a lot of places to shop and eat.

The painting of Jacob’s that mine is supposed to emulate is called This is Harlem. It’s got a church with a kind of crooked cross and other crosses disguised as telephone poles and cars that are out of proportion and little squares of people walking around.

(This is Harlem. 1942-43. Gouache on paper.)

He’s got some words in this painting too. They are, left to right, Dance, Funeral Home, Bar, Beauty Shoppe, Lunch.

Like a little poem from Jake. The story of life in five words.

Anyway, I don’t know what kind of paintbrushes Jake used, but these art kit brushes are killing me. Halfway through my painting I switched to toothpicks and that made things better.

My kit asks me if is harder or easier to use the paint colors the artist chose for me.

I don’t know paint kit. I think if you had given me some better paintbrushes, you could have asked me to paint in black and white.

Redmoon Theater Comes to Pilsen

(Facebook/Redmoon Theater)

Hot diggity dog. Redmoon Theater wizened up and will soon be relocating to a warehouse at 2120 S. Jefferson in Pilsen.

Read ‘em and weep Near West Side.

Check out the details here at DNAinfo.com Chicago.

Painting like a Black Man in Harlem

(Living Room with Tree and Rabbi Fish in the style of Jacob Lawrence. Gouache on paper, 2013)

Instead of going out on the town Saturday, I gathered up the painting kit I received as a random gift, and quicker than you can say “Jacob Lawrence,” I was painting with the best of them.

Who is this Jacob Lawrence you ask? Well maybe you already know and maybe you don’t. I did not know. That may be ignorant, but I don’t ever remember old Jacob from my grade and high school art classes. Which may definitely say something about where I went to school.

According to this here kit, (aimed at the grade school age I must admit) “Jacob Lawrence was one of the first African-Americans to receive recognition as an important contributor to the history of modern art.”

Not too shabby. He also was born in 1917 in New Jersey, died in Seattle in 2000 from lung cancer. According to my kit, he also painted only one color at a time, had a soft place in his heart for fire escapes (a telling subject to paint over and over, arguably), and he also married Gwendolyn Knight, a painter for whom he modeled.

I like the way Jacob Lawrence paints because it makes me feel like I can paint too. I always enjoyed making things and painting growing up. My mom was the kind of mom who was constantly coming up with art projects for us at home. But around eighth grade, there was the one kid whose drawings looked like what they were supposed to and he became the go to “art” kid. I had one last official art class my freshman year of high school and then bon voyage painting.

I don’t know about the last time you picked up a brush, but man, it is harder than it looks. Of course, my art kit didn’t exactly have the most delicate brushes, but paint is still a fickle, fickle creature. It likes to go where it wants and just try telling it otherwise. But that’s what’s nice about it too. You start out with an idea and then paint has its own idea. You meet somewhere in between and voila, art.

My art kit comes with a frame. I’m going to hang my living room in the living room. Very meta. I bet old Jacob would be proud.

(My activity book. With a nude painting by Ardit Dizdari hanging in the background.)

Live From Chicago, it’s DNAinfo.com!

Martin McGarry, who won’t go down without a fight.

Hello kids! Been busy as a bee on ‘roids rolling out this new neighborhood news site (DNAinfo.com) in Chicago. You’ve got to check it out….So many amazing stories about bacon, gorillas, Todd Stroger…you know, all the great things in life. Today, read about Martin McGarry, a boxer who fights against the illness that threatens his life. Such a sweet and amazing man. The crazy talented Mark Konkol wrote the story and yours truly shot the video. Stay tuned every day, as I’ll provide you with news from the Pilsen/Near West Side/Little Village areas. And don’t hesitate to give a shout out if you hear something juicy.

Read Beverly Boxing Coach is in a Fight for His Life here.

People I’ve Met Who I Won’t Meet Again

That nice white older couple who spoke painfully slow Spanish, the cats who used to live in my apartment, my aunt who died last year from cancer, the German guy who gave me a tour of the Berlin Zoo, the woman who owned the little shop who would always tell me about her traveling daughter (also dead from cancer), the two Australian guys I got drunk with in the basement of a bar in Brussels, the old woman who sat in front of my dad and I in church when I was seven, an old man who would invite us to come in his house and play games at Halloween, a shy girl I met once at camp who later threatened suicide, my first guitar teacher (who I flirted with), my ballet teacher Ms. Barbie, this woman in Amsterdam who had a large dog named Baumser and who let us crash at her place for free for a whole week, plenty of people from grade school and high school who are either dead or who aren’t dead but I’ll just never see them again anyway, my favorite babysitter Diane, my first cat Misty, who could be a real bitch, but who originally appeared, like magic, under the christmas tree in a box.