I want to say a big Happy 40th Anniversary to my mother and father, Lita and Peter Fake. Wow. Forty years. Cheers! They're unfortunately out of town and don't have any online wish lists set up, so spontaneous gestures from total strangers are kind of precluded, but from me, I will say what children always say on their parents' anniversaries, I'm so lucky you two met! Happy Anniversary!
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You know, when I moved to California I was expecting a lot more of this:

But was sorely disappointed. I've been in two, count them, two (2) hot tubs during the six years I've been in California. Ridiculous.

The hairy guys though, are not fictitious. California is full of a certain breed of unkempt hirsute middle-aged men lurking and writing bad poetry in wood-panelled cafes full of spider plants. They do not keep Watermelon tic-tacs in their pockets. They seem completely unaware of how unappealing their smelly patchouli drenched selves are.... religiously maintaining the delusion that women find them irresistible, derived from too many hours spent reading Rod McKuen and looking at the drawings of those pot-bellied men and hairy-armpitted women in "The Joy of Sex". (Thanks latenightpool.net)
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I have become a fan of JustinSpace.com New discoveries from the frontiers of fabulousness! Creative consulting and design for the themed entertainment industry! Zowee! I love the Ebay Conceptual Art Gallery. Don't miss "Obscene Interiors". Hilarious. (don't remember where I got this link from, but thanks, whoever you are!)
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Derek has some beautiful thoughts on the occasion of his Uncle Charlie's funeral. That he marked an entire driving test "true". That he gave Derek nickels on the sly. These are the things that people remember. Give nickels. Be true. Pass it on.
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Caterina is no longer annoyed
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Since it's Crime Day here at Caterina.net, check out the Prison Activist Resource Center Did you know that the US spends more on locking people up than on higher education, social services, or health care?

Also check out No More Prisons, also a book by Billy Wimsatt. This from (thanks!) Ryan. I haven't checked it out very thoroughly, but there are some good blogs in there by Wimsatt.
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So I got a letter in the mail today from EthnicGrocer.com and decided to check it out. It looks pretty good, if buggy (the search field only works on the third try though, IE5 on the Mac). Free delivery for orders over $30. But when I searched for Pansit, the veritable backbone of every Filipino meal, they didn't have it, at least not under that name (which means, basically," rice noodle"), nor did they have any Bagoong, which is the, say, ribcage of every Filipino meal, shrimp sauce. They were out of stock with Tamarind Candy -- Sampaloc -- so I couldn't send any to my mother, who loves the stuff. So it looks like Corey and I will have to continue trekking down to Daly City whenever we have a hankering for some Pansit Luglug and Dinuguan. (thanks to Andre for help with my bad Tagalog spelling!)

Can't vouch for other national cuisines, however. I would venture to guess that since "Parminder Singh" seems to be the internic registrant, the Indian food supplies may be more complete.
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Crime Theme Day. Here's the Jail Cam, four cams of an Arizona jail. What's amazing to me is the striped uniforms in the photograph, and the restigmatization and "recriminalization" of criminals that is taking place nationwide, especially online (like the prostitution arrest photos posted every week in St. Paul where, sadly, they all look like somebody's Dad. ) Cultural attitudes toward crime tend to swing back and forth with the prevailing conservatism /liberalism of the zeitgeist or of the region. From all appearances, it would seem like we're in the middle of a pretty conservative era.

There was a great deal of ink spilled earlier this year over the push to undermine -- and possibly eliminate -- the Miranda Rights so familiar from television and film. But it was retained, possibly evidence of a countervailing force of liberalism and concern for civil rights. So who knows. Perhaps the pundits are right; we're becoming increasingly Balkanized in this country.
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"Last night, folding the bath towel so the monogram would be in the right place (after reading a piece on Rimbaud by Zabel), I wondered what I was doing here. This concern for outward order--the flowers, the shining cigarette box...enables us to delay our realization of these social disorders, to overlook the fact that our bread is poisoned. I was born into no true class, and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously."

--John Cheever, from "The Journals of John Cheever"
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Final Meal Requests. One of the web's creepiest sites, no doubt. If you click on the "offender information" link, there is a picture and a description of their crimes.
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How the web makes the world weirder department: I had no idea that doctors could bid for patients on Ebay, but apparently they can and do. So says the American Medical News.
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I like the fact that Harvest Market on Market Street has quotations on their receipts. The most recent: "Crime is a job. Sex is a job. Growing up is a job. School is a job. Going to parties is a job. Religion is a job. Being creative is a job." -- David Byrne
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This is definitely the most ridiculous spam I've ever received:

DR. JUDE OBI
Tel/Fax No: 234-1-7747569
Lagos, Nigeria.
Attn: The Managing Director/CEO

Dear Sir,

REQUEST FOR AN URGENT CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

After due deliberation with my colleagues, I have decided to forward to you this business proposal. We want a reliable person who could assist us to transfer the sum of Twenty Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars ( $20,500,000 ) into his / her account. This fund resulted from an over-invoiced bill from contracts awarded by us under the budget allocation to my Ministry and this bill has been approved for payment by the concerned Ministries. The contract has since been executed, commissioned and the contractor was paid the actual cost of the contract. We are left with the balance US$20.5M as part of the over-invoiced amount which we have deliberately over estimated for our own use. But under our protocol division, civil servants are forbidden to operate or own foreign accounts. This is why I am contacting you to be our custodian for this fund.

When I first decided to go into web design circa 1994, there weren't any books on the subject at all, but a conversation with Nathan Shedroff led me to a book called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. This book has since become a standard reference manual for web workers, and though his second effort Reinventing Comics isn't such a boon to this industry, it's still pertinent as a study of media evolution. Anyhow, there's an interview with Scott McCloud in Feed.
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Another good New York Times Writers on Writing piece: Andre Aciman: A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past.." write to find out who I am; I write to give myself the slip. I write because I am always at one remove from the world but have grown to like saying so."
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Got a lot of good writing and thinking done this weekend. Evan read me a lovely story by Robert Olen Butler called "The Trip Back", only the second story I've read by Butler. I've always loved his story Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot.
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By my calculations, I haven't smoked 510 cigarettes since I quit. Thats a really large and disgusting pile of butts and ash.
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" The Valet Chronicles is a series of 3-minute films made by Daniel Robin, longtime valet at Basta Pasta in North Beach. He's a filmmaker by trade, and has trained his lens on the people he's come to know during his long cold nights on the corner of Grant and Vallejo. A new film is added every week; currently they're on Episode 6. You can jump in any time, although I recommend you start from the first one. The films are so delightful! There are episodes about the homeless woman who lives on the sidewalk catty-corner to the valet station, the two little Chinese kids who visit Daniel every day, even the oldtimey Italian cafe owner across the street who sings opera in his restaurant and gives Daniel bottles of wine in exchange for parking services. It's small interactions with the people we see most often that make up our lives, and The Valet Chronicles conveys that in short, bittersweet, utterly smart and poignant three-minute segments. In the wrong hands, this material would come off smarmy, predictable, and shallow. But with Daniel Robin, a one-man powerhouse operation who shoots, edits, and uploads himself, we're in capable hands."

(You need DSL or else a lot of patience) This link is from the mailing list of San Francisco's best records store, Aquarius Records.
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Nothing much happening here. Just an average day of pushel pixing.
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It's happening all over. Austin, We Have a Problem. San Antonio anyone?
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From Jason comes some wonderful new websites about the work of Winsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo in Slumberland: Gertie the Dinosaur Also look here and here. Jason also reports that all of McCay's animated shorts are now out on DVD.

And on the affordable urban living front he has only one word to say to us: Chicago.
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Someone who has a site as good as this must be very funny in real life. Has anyone seen Dee Dee TV? Apparently she's on local access in San Francisco.
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www.zauberberg.org I don't understand any of this, but it looks like it's a site about a beautiful movie set in some kind of odd Gilliam-esque institution.
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Sometimes when I least expect it, I feel an Unordered List coming on. Here goes:

THINGS I LOVE(D) THAT I HAVEN'T THOUGHT ABOUT IN A WHILE

• "Sunday Morning", a poem by Wallace Stevens
• Birthday cards from Lillis Scheidel, my father's former secretary, now deceased. She was the consummate occasion-rememberer. She sent cards not only on your birthday, but also Valentine's Day, the Fourth of July, Arbor Day... Sometimes hers was the only card you'd get. They came like clockwork until she died.
• The expression of horror on the face of the girl whose bikini bottoms I tore down one day at the beach at Deer Valley. I was jealous. Her name was Kathleen and she was the girlfriend of this guy I had a crush on, whose name was Ford and was the counsellor at camp that took us on nature walks. He was sixteen and I assume Kathleen was too. I was five. She screamed as her bikini bottoms went south, immediately drawing the attention of everyone on the beach. I was sent to the wood shop to "think about what I had done." Far from feeling remorse, I derived great satisfaction from the whole episode.
• Ovaltine
• "The Monadology", by Leibniz
• Watching All My Children with Lola while drinking soda. Never allowed to drink soda otherwise.
• Being a sheep in the Christmas Pageant. Somehow got out of being a donkey or a pig or a cow. I think my sister was the Virgin Mary. Corey?
• Melrose, a defunct Novelle Cuisine-y restaurant in the West Village I used to go to with David. Always had the Rare Tuna Steak. They also had these amazing "ice cream sandwiches" made out of angel food cake with coffee ice cream in between and chocolate sauce dribbled over. Yum.
• David
• Spending most of the night on the phone with my best friend planning what we would wear to school the next day.
• Sneaking out after curfew at boarding school. I read in the Choate Rosemary Hall Alumni Monthly thingy that the security guards are now patrolling the campus on bikes. That is not a good thing. The whole reason boarding school was any fun at all was because they were patrolling the campus in cars and couldn't see you in the shrubbery at night. I also had the keys to the indoor pool. :-)

The more money you make, the more you have to spend. The problem is that it is becoming increasingly expensive to live in the cities in which I'd like to live (the only cities in which I've ever lived) -- New York and San Francisco. In the 60s and 70s these cities were significantly cheaper to live in. It used to be you could work one day a week in a cafe in San Francisco, and support yourself, make art the rest of the time. I tried being poor; I'm no good at it. Also tried being rich, and couldn't take the hours.

This is the problem that almost everyone I know is working on: expensive city, working hard just to live there, not enough time to pursue one's true vocation. It obsesses us.
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It seems like every week I have a new obsession. This week it's Little Nemo 1905-1914. I don't have time for this! (see below). :-(
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I think the more I work, the more money I have, and the less time I have, and the less books I read, and the less I see my friends and the less I think. I am also very fulfulled from working so much, but that is not to say that I wouldn't also be fulfilled if I were thinking, reading books and seeing my friends more.

The eternal problem.
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I am loving every minute of squidradio. Tune in!
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Just in case you were thinking of going to Burning Man this year, here's a good reason not to :

"San Francisco law firm Thelen Reid & Priest will rent a 34-foot RV for attorneys attending Burning Man, as a business retreat and as client development. "It's like going to play golf or to the yacht club in a different generation," said intellectual property lawyer Gil Silberman. "

Watched Cider House Rules on video this weekend. Started thinking about cinematic cliche. I was astounded about the sheer number of incidences of familiarity, predictability. About our cultural image saturation, the dilution of iconography and archetype. How fast cinematic innovation becomes cliche. How the hunger for the new seems bottomless, and in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. How shallowly are these images absorbed.
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Or you might try accessing the Elephant6 Radio fromLive365.com
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Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue. (Eugene O'Neill)
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Oooohlala. Fans of Neutral Milk Hotel and Apples in Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control take note. Elephant6 has a webbroadbast Radio Station which I've been listening to all morning and which is fabulous.
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Nous sommes dans notre langue comme nous sommes dans notre corps. -- Sartre
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Re:Comics. In response to a couple questions I got via email (Paula, Jason):

I got into comics during the 80s. I found Julie Doucet in Factsheet Five, and corresponded with her for a while. She sent me tiny photocopied comics in elaborately illustrated envelopes with letters in faulty English. They later became Dirty Plotte, published by Drawn and Quarterly. I then really got into another Canadian's work, Dave Sim's Cerberus, then was introduced to the more mainstream Frank Miller stuff, especially Elektra, and Dave Moore, and all those people in RAW, and Art Spiegelman and then the ones listed yesterday. It's a pretty minor interest of mine, really, but lately I've been thinking a lot about it since we're working in animation here at Yellowball where I am the creative director
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According to the graphs that I've been keeping at DailyRating, how much I sleep has little to do with my mood. I'd thought they were intimately related, but last night I slept only 4 hours, and my mood today was 7 on a scale of 1 to 10.

I also wonder what happened in New Mexico today that their moods were so blue. And the Utah folks had a particularly good day. Or maybe the distribution isn't dense enough in those states for a reasonable sample.
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I love the fact that my job requires me to look at lots of comic books. How weird and wonderful is that? This week I've got Chris Ware's brilliant Acme Novelty Library on my desk, as well as Daniel Clowes' Eightball, and Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve. Also brought in some Dave McKean and Barron Storey books from home to show Sasha, and some Tintin.
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Feeling a terrific need to go out and smell grass, trees, stand beneath sunlight. I've been living a terribly profane existence lately, having a job at an office and all. This has not been the case for years, when going to the park or the ocean on a whim was something I could do always, and instantly. I am reading with fascination Eccentric Spaces by Robert Harbison, recommended by, I think, Jouke (though I can't find it using his new search feature), similar in tone to Bachelard's Poetics of Space which was the theoretical underpinning for my thesis.

There is a fascinating Preface of how the book came to be written in extremely monklike conditions (I've always idealized St. Jerome in his study) and have secretly longed for an 19th-century style illness so I could take to my bed and catch up on my reading and writing.

It is now more than ten years since this book was written. My own position in the world has never been more eccentric than it was in the year (1973-1974) in which I wrote it. I was out of work, a condition the book cured me of, not by landing me a job (I am still looking) but my making me think it was the right way to be.

I had come back to America to find work after two idyllic years in England. At first I lived with wonderful friends who though they had a large family and a small house still made room for me. By the time I moved into the sleazy apartment where Eccentric Spaces was written I had applied for everything I could think of, including a post at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and been turned down.

From this bad fortune, Harbison goes on to explain how in the third week of his writing the desk, borrowed, was taken away, and he sat writing at a white plastic coffee table with his "own things laid out like a simplified map along the base of one wall." and "The room was bare except for a series of pictures I borrowed from the local library and stared at when I got stuck." These cloistered, spartan living conditions fascinate and inspire me. Why? From the Forward:

Art is troublesome not because it is not delightful, but because it is not more delightful: we accustom ourselves to the failure of gardens to make our lives as paradisal as their prospects.

So I've accumulated quite a number of parking tickets on my dash board, seeing as how I've been spending so much time in neighborhoods with street cleaning, which my neighborhood is devoid of, so I forget to look.

Kurt says I am the Gandhi of Parking, an exemplar of passive resistance to parking laws.
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Voyeur Alert: Here and Now is now broadcasting Ana Voog live, streaming, free. I don't know how long this has been up there but I just found it tonight. Not much going on there, just a little nude computing.
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Reading with great interest in the latest Emigre magazine about this "self-curating" exhibit held in Chicago in 1996:

And She Told Two Friends celebrates the female network that exists within the global design community and seeks to acknowledge the link between contributions made by women and the support and admiration that exists among them. By inviting two women to submit work, and asking each one to do the same, and so on, this exhibit curated itself.

This is a really thorough list of most (all?) of the major commercial type foundries. Tremendously useful. I always worry about sites that live at universities, however, because when their owners graduate, they tend to disappear.
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Aha. Even though the print version died a few years ago, Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse is online. An entire issue devoted to Celine?!
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I love Flash. I work in Flash. Flash does some beautiful things. But look at this: crave :: a radical business conference. Informational sites should not be built in Flash. This is a beautiful site (love the line drawings of all the products) but all I really wanted to know was who was speaking (Tom Peters) and how much the conference cost ($750) which took me about twenty minutes, navigating through the cumbersome pages just so I could get HTML popup pages. And no HTML version.

And here's another awful, frustrating use of Flash I encountered recently: The AIGA San Francisco site. I tried for a half an hour to find out when they AIGA specially scheduled events at Seybold were, but kept getting shunted back to the front page.
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Last night at the kickoff Typeset meeting, Saki Mafundikwa, a Zimbabwean type scholar studying Africa alphabets said, "No one has ideas anymore, only projects."

He also said that "Zimbabwe" means "land of stone houses."
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And more on the diary theme.

I've been reading the excerpts from Kenneth Tynan's diaries in the last two New Yorkers, and in the August 14th issue found this curious:

Dec. 1. Dinner at Christopher Isherwood's with Gore Vidal and Tony Richardson. ...I congratulate Christopher on... his new book contributing to the literature of testimony --i.e. eye-witness accounts of significant events--which I suspect will prove to be the most lasting of our time.

This to me is a very strange idea: that the most consequential literature could be a subjective observation of objectively "significant" events? And yet I am also fascinated by the idea that having seen something first hand gains in prestige in a world dominated by the virtual experience.And whether this privileged eye is somewhat anonymous (i.e. the person who filmed the Rodney King' beating) or strongly identified (Isherwood). But this person is really just a means, a medium, to channel the "significant event'".
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LifeFX. OK. Now here's a strange, fascinating and unnervingly realistic representation of a human face. Be sure to check out the Quicktime Movie. The creepiness is worth the download time.
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I >heart< Champion.
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Forgot one of my favorite books which was written in the form of a diary: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke. A book of youthful dreaming and despair in the form of a prose poem diary. It was this book that initially got me interested in prose poetry, and I have been searching for years in used book stores for a book of poetry by Francis Ponge (which I've just ordered).

There is a marvellous introduction to James Merrill's book of essays, Recitative, unfortunately out of print, in which Merrill talks about why he writes poetry instead of prose; the latter he thinks of as a "nighmarish" medium "coterminous with one's own life", perpetual "recitative where the aria never comes..." I'll have to get the book out when I get home so I can quote it properly.
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Did you know that pigs have general appeal to people across age and gender boundries? Which means they appeal equally to kids/adults, boys/girls, women/men. Some of the interesting thing we talk about here at Yellowball.
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What They Were Thinking is one of my favorite New York Times features. They're documentary style photographs that show average people in daily situations doing nothing special. And they say what they were thinking at the time. They're always quite poetic and profound.
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Both those suicidal ladies, Sylvia Plath and Viriginia Woolf had diaries. Hm. Didn't know that. I've put in an order on Amazon. (Thanks Mark.)
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Speaking of nostalgia for childhood, I saw Chuck and Buck this weekend and found it to be good, bad -- the kind of movie you mull over for days afterwards. It's about a boy who has an adolescent fixation on his best friend from childhood, and tries to recreate their former relationship -- in the present. He hasn't grown up at all. It was shot in digital video and cast with non-actors. Oodly oodly oodly oodly fun fun fun.
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I'm so awfully corny and emotional today.

I'm listening to S.O.S by Abba on my headphones. It brings me back to when I was 7 and I used to stay over at my best friend Nicki's house. She had this album and we listened to S.O.S. over and over and over and over until her father, Gerhard, told us to turn it down, at which point we turned it really low and lay down on the floor with our ears pressed up against the speakers. When there's that great building Stadium Crescendo, after the intro, it makes my heart do these funny wiggly things and i ... want ... to .... cry. But in a good way, you know?

Oh damn. And now here's Fernando. Funny. Wiggly. Things.
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Chicago folks: get thee to the Mexican Fine Arts Museum, pronto! You definitely want to see the Remedios Varo show. I saw it in Mexico City a couple years ago, by chance. She was born in Spain, and lived in Mexico City and was close friends with Leonora Carrington.

Amazing. Magical. Weird. Many of her paintings are about the joys of creation, and solitude, and discovery, others focus on travel or psychoanalysis, or ostracism. There is one image in particular that I love, which is a painting of a bird-woman working alone in her study, The Creation of the Birds. I'm not sure why she is not better known. There is a book about her: Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys, which gives you the basic facts (though it is somewhat clumsily written), and full of beautiful photographs of her work.
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Through Alamut I was introduced to the work of Maurice Nio, an architect working in the Netherlands. His work is deeply thoughtful.
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More diaries from nice nice people who've sent mail: Diary of a Nobody. This one looks really interesting:

The greatness of George and Weedon Grossmith's masterpiece of comic irony, THE DIARY OF A NOBODY, rests to a large extent on perceptions of class. It purports to be the diary of Charles Pooter, a lower-middle-class individual of the mid-nineteenth century who lives at "The Laurels," Brickfield Terrace, Holloway. This address alone, simultaneously poignant and stifling, reverberates with blandly devastating irony--a note sustained at perfect pitch throughout the book. Pooter is house-proud, thrifty, scrupulous in duty, alive to social niceties and given to the occasional punning witticism, but the story he tells is not quite the story he believes he's telling.

And of course, how could I have missed this one: Bridget Jones' Diary.
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A question for you: if you have a dream about someone should you tell them?
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Here's a novel promotional campaign: Name Your Baby IUMA! The music site www.iuma.com will give you $5,000 or free IUMA music, downloads, CDs, concerts and merchandise for the rest of their lives. See pictures of Iuma Heidi VanRyker and Iuma Rose Carter here.
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Right now I am listening to Possessed by the Balanescu Quartet. Which is a bunch of Kraftwerk songs played by a traditional classical quartet. Imagine "Pocket Calculator" as chamber music, and you've got it. It is beautiful and brilliant, and my favorite new thing. (besides the supersexy Bebel)

The last fabulous merging of classical and popular that I discovered was Rasputina -- three corseted women playing goth cello pieces. I have to listen to this one again; when I discovered them last I was mesmerized. They toured with Marilyn Manson about three years ago.
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Another diary, also illustrated, looks lovely, called Spilling Open : The Art of Becoming Yourself. It apparently hasn't yet been published, but is due out in a couple of weeks. (thank you Paula!).

I also found out yesterday that I can get *another* extension on my taxes -- until the end of September. Woohoo! I've been losing sleep over this the the past few weeks when I realized the deadline was looming. Haven't even called my accountant. It has been in my list of things to do since January and is perhaps the most severe episode of tax-avoidant behavior I've ever had.
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A good interview with Mark Danielewski on Britannica, for fans of The House of Leaves.
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Another weird Amazon search result
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Notes to myself: (arent' they all?)

Diaries. Thinking about diaries. Was surfing around this afternoon on Diaryland. I've always bought published diaries whenever I can find them.

Published Diaries:

• Samuel Pepys diary
• A year with swollen appendices by Brian Eno
• The Paris Diaries and The New York Diaries by Ned Rorem
• The Journals of John Cheever
• The Diary of Anne Frank
• Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
• The Diaries of Anais Nin
• Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather

Illustrated diaries

• Frida Kahlo's Diary
• Peter Beard's Diary
• Dan Eldon's diary

Fiction in the form of diaries:

• Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
• Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch
• Notes from the Underground

Notebook-y kinds of things:

• The Notebooks of Albert Camus
• The Crack-up by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Diary of Witold Gombrowicz

I know that there must be dozens more. If you can think of any others, let me know.
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It is mainly when I see listings for art shows that I get depressed that I don't live in New York anymore. San Francisco just isn't there, and I'm not sure it will ever be. L.A.? I don't think I could live there just for the art. *sigh* San Francisco is almost perfect.
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Mitsu writes:

My position on infidelity has evolved slowly over the years. I first note that the rather intense taboo against infidelity is a somewhat culturally-dependent phenomenon; for example, famously, in France, respectable people have outside affairs right out in the open, in full view of everyone. The Prime Minister of France has a daughter with his mistress, who appears with him at official events. No one thinks it is a big deal at all.

However, I notice that jealousy is nevertheless an intense emotion in many people, probably evolutionarily-determined by sexual competition.

Yet: I myself find that I am not a particularly jealous person. So the issue of the infidelity of my own partner is not a huge deal for me. Furthermore, I think: if I truly love this person, then why do I insist that this love come with a guarantee of them loving me back? Surely, if I really love them, I ought to love them for who they are, and to demand that they love me back seems an added factor. Do I love them only because they love me back, or because I love them? For the last reason I decided when I was much younger that I would forgive my partner if she had affairs, because a) I did not want to end a relationship just because of that, and b) I didn't think I had a right to dictate who she fell in love with, was attracted to, etc. My SO, however, is quite a jealous woman. So although I was open to her having affairs, she was much more conflicted. Out of respect for this I held back from having an affair, though I was tempted and it *might* have happened: but it didn't. And, over time (I am now 35) I found the intensity of my crushes on other women subsiding anyway, so now it doesn't seem like such a big deal anymore.

Since we've been together she had two affairs, one relatively brief at the very beginning of our relationship, the other longer, with a friend of ours. The second affair was completely with my approval and cooperation, if not exactly huge enthusiasm, and it eventually petered out. We're still quite close to him. It's not really the weird thing it seems... just a normal thing to me.

But I still haven't really had an affair. I don't know if I would at this point. I'm getting older, time to have kids and everything, and really, is it worth all the fuss? On the other hand, I don't quite believe that our huge taboo against it is really all that justified. Every other primate is non-monogamous, why should we insist on it? It seems that this one thing causes more relationship tension than anything else.

I love my SO regardless of whether she is "faithful" to me or not. I worry more about whether I am fully appreciating her than whether she is being sexually faithful to me. And if I were to have an affair these days, I think she *might* be able to cope with it. On the other hand, I don't know if I really would. Maybe. Who knows? Can't predict the future forever.

(quoted with permission)

There is much that I want to add to this, which I will do when I have some time to sit and think.
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Stanley Kunitz Returning as Laureate Look at his face.Look at his enormous hands. What a beautiful, beautiful poet.
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There are some artists out there who maintain their own domains, and many who don't, says this artnet article, which provides links for many hours of art browsing. Of the few that I was able to visit, Gilbert and George keep a good site, as does Steve Miller whose work I was not familiar with until just now. Damian Loeb's site is taken to task for featuring many pictures of his own photogenic face in glamorous locales with famous people (Moby!).
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Only one person seems to be enjoying herself in this picture.
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"Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Cherish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord." (John Cheever, from The Wapshot Chronicle, 1957)

A must read: Rick Moody on John Cheever.
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From Emily comes The Jew's Daughter. Slow art, textual transgression.
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Someone found caterina.net by this search string? "google.com/search?q=very tall women in high heels&amp;hl=en&amp;safe=off ". Odd. Only short women in sneakers here.
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Picasso: "Nothing's worse than a brilliant beginning."

I've often thought it would be a bad thing to peak too early. Then it's all decline. Teenagers: avoid popularity at all costs. The big secret that no one ever told you is that it's a great tragedy to be popular in high school. Also avoid careers in fashion and sports. It's much much better to peak at, say, 50. Or, like Louise Bourgeois, 80. Write epic, not lyric, poetry -- unless you are Edwardian and also tubercular. Or young and French and gay and known to drink copious amounts of absinthe. Or Kurt Cobain. Then go gangbusters until you expire.
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