the ubiquitous, modern advertisement. big sans-serif on a big picture.
applied to banalities from my photo album:
very common problem, no-nonsense solution.
this is poignant and might actually move some ties. or cats.
Showing posts with label silly things. Show all posts
Showing posts with label silly things. Show all posts
LIFE ADVERTISEMENTS
ART HISTORY
from the ghent altarpiece, 1432
these singing angels represent one piece of the massive, twenty-four paneled masterwork by brothers hubert and jan van eyck. they are singing in praise of christ the king, that old so and so. why the pained expressions, then? i find it very puzzling. speaking of puzzling:
the rubik's cube people have upped the ante. it is now a slicker, more maddening piece of miniature architecture. good luck and god speed.
(cube found via coudal partners)
MY FAVORITE IMPRESSION
i do a pretty good john currin painting.
ha ha ho ho! but how life is delightful.
LOOK AT THEIR EARS
it's so embarrassing to admit but i can't get this out of my head.
sorry, here's another one-
we now return to our regularly scheduled program.
NOISES
some people think farts are really funny. i don't think farts are that funny, but i do agree in principle that a good, well-timed noise is ripe with comedic potential. some noises i find funny include (but are not limited to):
a smattering of applause in any context
microphone feedback
the clinking of ice cubes (in the glass of a drunk)
real situations in which i might hear all three:
-karaoke night
-open mic night
fantasy situations in which i might hear all three:
-reading by an unknown ernest hemingway
-band practice with the doors
when we saw YACHT open for lcd soundsystem last year, and YACHT asked the crowd how everyone was doing, rhan's first impulse was to yell "I'LL HAVE A MEDIUM SOY LATTE." i would have liked to hear that.
the only other funny noise i can think of is someone (me) yelling at a male performer to "SHOW US YOUR BOOBS," but i've yet to actually hear that one.
fortune cookie fortunes: baffling, boring, hastily typed.
i don't remember the last time i got a fortune cookie fortune or what it said. i am, however, generally disappointed with the trend of dispensing platitudes and not real fortunes in these cookies; the second one down is a classic example. this is a similar disappointment to what i experienced my first (and only) visit to a psychic. what i wanted was a real scam filled with specific forecasts; what i got was her guessing (incorrectly) that i was a makeup artist and the basic advice that relationships are hard work. what a waste of forty dollars.
i'm partial to frank o'hara's "lines for the fortune cookies," which i've been quietly adding to the bottom of our site for a few days. highlights include:
"you will write a great play and it will run for three performances."
"relax a little; one of your most celebrated nervous tics will be your undoing."
"you are a prisoner in a croissant factory and you love it."
"who do you think you are, anyway? jo van fleet?"
we need more poets in the cookie factories.
they could probably use the extra income, too.
if you need to find us tonight, we'll be at the movies. oh boy!
on the subject of impersonators: yesterday this struggling actor came into the store where i work, and before i knew it i found myself the audience of one for an unsolicited christopher walken impression. he was a short, enthusiastic asian guy, and he performed chris walken as he might have been in star wars. christopher walken as han solo, say, or christopher walken talking to chewbacca. i knew this guy had just come from a bad audition, so the pressure to be demonstratively entertained was especially high. the whole situation embarrassed me.
all respect, actors--i don't know how you do it.
also, there was this man in my town growing up who dressed as santa all year long. his house was always decorated full-on for christmas, reindeer and lights and everything; we called it the santa house. it was only much later, as adults, that my sister and i realized that that's sort of fucked up.
rhan does a really good mark e. smith, but he maintains that anyone can do mark e. smith, mostly by yelling and adding ah to the ends of the right words. it still makes me laugh every time. EVERY TIMEAH!
my coworker performed a shockingly accurate impression of vanna white for me once, which consisted of walking sort of sideways along a wall, pausing to tap the wall, and then continuing to walk while applauding softly. make someone do this for you and you'll see what i mean. spooky.
and what's up with you can call me al?
is that a whole song about wanting to be somebody else or what?
so i was thinking yesterday that you can gauge rock and roll stars by how well their names could be used as nicknames for your genitals. bear with me.
to illustrate, here's how rhan's genitals and my genitals could be introduced:
chuck berry, meet...mama cass.
bo diddley, meet...nina simone.
ladies and gentlemen, the amazing miss nina simone!
grace slick, meet...little richard.*
*ew, that last one doesn't work on either count.
june carter, meet...johnny cash.
aw, that one is sweet!
i got stuck on how great a name chuck berry is for rhan's thing.
my ass, naturally, is chrissie hynde.
rhan's balls are ray & dave davies.
miss simone, chrissie--ladies, meet the gang...chuck berry and ray & dave davies.
now that's some beautiful music.
in brief: relationship hypothetical
another impossible and stupid question i sometimes like to pose to rhan is this little doozy: would you cheat on me with me?
it is a hypothetical situation that pits his fidelity as a partner against the extent to which he finds me irresistible. there is no good answer to this question, though there might very well be a right answer, which of course makes the whole inquiry just plain mean.
scramble the proposition, however, and ask me whether i, being me, would pursue rhan knowing he was currently involved with me, and i would probably answer "yes" pretty quickly, and without a great deal of soul-searching, too.
i need to think about that for awhile.
in brief: puzzles
hey, here's a puzzle for you:
a man lives on the twelfth floor of an apartment building. every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. in the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator -- or if it was raining that day -- he goes back to his floor directly. otherwise, he goes to the tenth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to his apartment.
what the hell, here's the answer:
the man is a dwarf. he can't reach the upper elevator buttons, but he can ask people to push them for him. he can also push them with his umbrella.
what? here's another one!
a body is discovered in a park in chicago in the middle of summer. it has a fractured skull and many other broken bones, but the cause of death was hypothermia.
but how? obviously:
a poor peasant from somewhere in europe desperately wants to come to the united states. lacking money for airfare, he stows away in the landing gear compartment of a jet. he dies of hypothermia in mid-flight and falls out when the compartment opens as the plane makes its final approach.
these, my friends, are lateral thinking puzzles, or "situation" puzzles, depending on who you ask. they've been on my mind since i walked in on my coworkers in the midst of one last week. they are also on my mind because i hate them. i mean hate. for the record, i'm not here to hate on my coworkers (whom i like) or anyone else out there who enjoys these sorts of riddles.
it's just that these things are stupid.
i know this is an easy question/complaint, but i have to ask: what is the point? is anyone satisfied by the kinds of answers listed above? these puzzles not only bore me but offend my very sense of gamesmanship; there is nothing clean or essential about these solutions. the answers to these problems are meandering and arbitrarily determined, and if i wanted meandering and arbitrarily determined causes for weird situations, well, i'd just look to my actual life.
examples abound there, i can assure you.
hey! on that note, here's another "puzzle" for you:
i am sitting at my computer sipping a mimosa. suddenly, i realize my hands feel really dry and dirty and there is a unpleasant odor in the air.
omg! here's the answer:
i live in los angeles, a city currently experiencing an unseasonable heatwave. i decided to drink a mimosa because it is cool and refreshing. my hands feel dry and dirty because our apartment is really hot, and the smell is coming from my sweaty feet. and my feet got sweaty because i worked all day today. making coffee.
who got it? if you did, five hundred points to you. you win. let's end the game early.
lateral thinking puzzles make me really surly and no, i won't get over it.
also, it's too damn hot in here.
imagined celebrity childhood
in which bill withers raises me from birth through adolescence
then my uncle mason williams gets his bicycle stolen
and my mom dates ben gazzara throughout my early teens.
in brief: music hypotheticals
sometimes i like to pose hypotheticals to rhan about my taste in things, to suppose out loud what if my preferences were different and how would he feel? i try to propose choices at varying distances from my actual taste; it's a way of sorting out the nuances and stretching his thinking. i reason that this is a marriage, and as such its limits must be routinely tested with difficult and retarded questions. what?
anyhow, below are some recent "what if this was my favorite ____?" questions and rhan's responses:
the album sports by huey lewis and the news
"that would be pretty rough."
recording artist seal
"ugh. he is awful. i don't know."
save the best for last by vanessa williams
"i don't know that song. hey, the other day..." (launches into unrelated anecdote)
recording artist peter gabriel
"ugh. (pause) ugh."
it's good to feel these things out.
in brief: embarrassment
i have a long memory for embarrassment. it is so long, in fact, that embarrassing things that took place years ago can make me grumble and shake my head in public, forcefully and without warning, walking down the street like a crazy hobo. they're mostly mundane things--moments that make for boring stories--but still they nag at me like little, skipping demons. this feeling must be fairly common.
what occurs to me most often? here are the greatest hits of my life so far:
-using the word "indignance" instead of "indignation" in front of my favorite professor in college
-calling an unpopular girl a "fag" behind her back in the seventh grade, failing to realize not only the ugliness of that word but also that calling a girl a "fag" doesn't make any sense
-visible sweatpits (various instances)
-the day in fifth grade when i wore my sister's acne prescription foundation
-mispronouncing "episcopal" for the duration of a presentation when i was twelve
-that one time when i insisted the film "the princess bride" was based on the book "the once and future king" for about two days
ridiculous, i know.
but surely everybody has things like these?
we're gonna go get dairy queen!
another post in the "negligent parenting" series (see yesterday). tee hee.
who needs to think when your feet just go?
my current desktop is this great evah fan illustration called "this is auto chop." rhan noticed the other day, however, that one of the little dancing men appeared to be kicking my hard drive:
sorry the image is so pixelated, but i had to make it big enough for you to get the full effect. tee hee hee. kick out the drives, motherf*ckers!
friday night grab bag
rhan recently introduced me to the delicious vinta cracker, manufactured by the industrious people at dare foods. this would explain why each cracker says "DARE" on it, which without knowing seems baffling and a little self-important.
dare yourself, cracker. i eat you.
rare images of boots being good. lately our cat has developed a disconcerting routine in which he yells at the door to go outside and within moments yells at the outside door to come back in again. it's awful. to make matters worse, i received incontrovertible evidence last night that our downstairs neighbor, whom we have never actually spoken to but who has already complained to the landlord about us (jerk), is as sick of the meowing as we are. i won't be a bit surprised if we receive serious noise complaints in the coming weeks. dilemma!
when i'm not listening to the cat yelling, i've found great joy in mulatu astatqé, in particular this beautiful song called "tezeta." rhan says this song is like a breeze, which is an apt and beautiful way to describe it. i put "tezeta" on a mixtape for my coworker yesterday, and i hope she enjoys it as much as i do.
it is a welcome respite from the gray days outside.
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