Happy Hallowe’en!

Last night the Great Pumpkin brought us the news that our house is now worth £15,000 more than it was when we bought it.  Thank you Great Pumpkin!

Last night I also baked a ton of sugar cookies with grey icing with the assistance of my friend Paula and the unassisstance of the 2 bottles of wine she brought with her.

And now for a special holiday issue list

Costumes of Halloween past in near chronological order (at least those I have seen photographic evidence of or actively remember:

1. Homemade pink gingham bunny costume wort at 6 months
2. An Artist.  I wore one of my mom’s shirts and we splattered it with paint.  She drew a curly moustache on me and gave me a beret.  I carried a palate and paint brush around all day.
3. Indian Princess.  Mom made me a dress and then we painted on authentic Indian markings.  I wore my hair in braid and had a headband with a feather.  I loved this costume and wore it year round wile playing in the yard.
4. Dutch girl.  I wore a green leiderhosen type dress and we made clogs out of papier mache.  Mom made me a paper hat with yellow yarn braids attached to it
5. Box of chocolates.  We cut a giant heart out of cardboard and then surrounded it with a red ruffle.
6. Punk rock girl.  Often.
7. Geisha Girl.  We bought some vaguely Japanese looking fabric and Mom used a pattern for a bathrobe to make me a kimono. Then we bought a cheap black wig, but it was too short so we used black yarn to create a bun and then stuck some gold butterfly christmas ornaments into the wig.  I wore full face paint to school and was completely unrecognizable.
8. Tourist.  My friend Laura and I wore ugly bermuda shorts and mismatched tops and put white makeup on our noses.  We wore visors and carried around cameras, maps and sunglasses all day.
9. After a long halloween drought I was informed by my manager at the Cass Cafe that I had to dress up for my shift.  I came in as an old school diner waitress.  Red wig, cat’s eye glasses, fake mole, orange Saunder’s dress, support hose, and orthopedic looking shoes.  I was called Mavis. Later in the evening I attended a party where I changed into heels and fishnets, Mavis was a bit of a vamp.  I also fell into a bush and ended up drunk and weeping in my friend Chris’s truck on the way home demanding to know why boys didn’t like me in great gasping sobs.  Mavis was also, all class.
10. A writer.  This was high concept.  i wore a t shirt that said FICTION, an old cardigan, ratty cords with a copy of On the Road in the back pocket and clipped pencils into my hair.  I spent most of that party smoking cigarettes on the porch.  I was in character!
11. A Gypsy (a very last minute costume idea)
12. A Cat Burglar.  I wore and black and white striped turtelneck, black trousers and black cap.  I painted a beard on and then carried around a sack of cats.  Get it?  Cat Burglar, burglar of cats!  Genius.
13. This year for one party I shall be a casualty of our current economic crisis, with a box of office belongings, fake p45 and pink slip along with runny eye makeup and disheveled appearance.  Tomorrow I shall be Sarah Palin with many of the obvious accoutrements, including a pretty awesome, if I may toot my own horn, Palin accent.

There comes a time

when you look at yourself (and by you I mean me) and realise that your gut has gotten, maybe, possible, the tiniest bit out of control.  And this will cause lamentations because you are prone to breaking when you exercise, and, as we all know, exercise tends to help guts reduce.  So you make a decision, you decide to stop eating KitKats every day (it’s not a nice decision, but you do it anyway!) and you decide to drastically cut the amount of sugar in your diet, because everyone says that sugar is metabolized too quickly and therefore helps make you fatter than you already are. 

So one cold morning, the morning of the first frost when you have have on your big scarf and your nose is cold, you order a latte, a goddamn skinny latte because if you’re gonna go you might as well go hard (or some shit like that)  and then you put Splenda into your latte.  And then, dear readers,  you want to die.  Because there is no better way to ruin a good cup of coffee than putting a little paper container of Splenda in it.

Damn you slowed down metabolism rate.  Damn you to hell.

Carolyn is full of hate

I am grouchy today.  I am not totally over the cold that kept me in bed all day yesterday and I would really rather be at home but I am not sick enough to be at home and as the supervisory type person I have to set a good example and I hate setting a good example.  It is boring.

I also hate the tights I am wearing today.  They have a saggy crotch which makes me walk like a penguin and that is stupid.

I also hate my half stuffy nose and my small headache and the grey rainy weather. 

I hate how sleepy and out of it I feel.

I hate that I still haven’t bought all the pieces to put together my Hallowe’en costume and I hate that I’m not sure how to make my hair do that poof in the back like Sarah Palin does.  I hate that I still need to buy decorations and look up a sugar cookie recipe.

I hate remortgaging the house and having to wait around on Monday for the surveyors. 

I hate that my throat is still sort of scratchy so I can’t smoke cigarettes.  I hate that I even want cigarettes at all.  I hate my lack of willpower.

I hate everything!  Everything in teh whole entire world.  No joke.

Bringin’ da culture, bringin’ da noiz

I need to figure out a more street way to write culture.  Maybe with a k?

Anyhow, this past weekend Jeremy and I decided to be tourists in London which meant, among other things, going to look at art.  We saw the current exhibit at the Royal Academy and it was really good.  I’ll be honest and tell you that I find Miro’s art to be boring and cold, but I tend to jump at the chance to see anything by Calder and Giacometti.  I know, I know Calder’s work could probably be seen as cold too, but there is a playfulness to it that I feel Miro lacks, and not just because of the movement in his mobiles, there are the toys he created or the circus he made.  

Fig 1

Also I have heard stories about his home and workshop from my old boss. whose father was close friends with Calder, and that adds to my affection for his work and my idea of him as a man.  I guess he hand crafted everything in his workshop.  According to my old boss, even the toilet paper holder was a handcrafted item.  The exhibit also featured some of his 2D artwork and I really enjoyed those as well.  they reminded me of Bauhaus art, but in a very loose way.  That’s a poor description but it’s all I’ve got.

Giacometti has become, over the last 4-6 years one of my favorite artist.  Jeremy has been a fan since he was a teenager and introduced me to his statues.  We saw a really good display of them at the Louisiana Musuem of Modern Art just outside Copenhagen that totally won me over (because the success of an artist (posthumous or otherwise) totally depends on my approval.  The ghost of Duchamps is totally annoyed with my distaste, let me tell you what).  And I liked most of what was featured on Saturday although I did not care for his more recent smoother sculptures.  I much prefer the tall thin sorrowful figures.  One of my favorite things in the whole exhibit was a sketch he made for the sculpture pictured to the right, Fig 1.   The sketch itself was very simple and sparse but still made me stop and stare.  It was hard to look away from it.  Whenever I can’t look away from a piece of art I know it’s really truly affected me and I am reminded why I like art.  I like that elemental pull I feel from an object that evokes a strong reaction of sorrow, joy, confusion, laughter, fear, whatever.

fig 2

The real surprise of the show for me were the paintings the featured by Braque.  I’ve always been kind of meh about Braque but don’t think I’ve ever seen any of his paintings featuring birds, eg fig 2, and I really fell in love with them.  There was one in particular that was painted on newspapers that really struck me.  Sure they’re remniscent of Matisse, but there’s nothing long with Matisse so far as I’m concerned.

After seeing htis exhibit we went to the Serpentine Gallery to see the Summer pavillion and the Gerhard Richter exhibit.  Both were Dullsville so we did not hang out for long.  But I like to mention the Serpintine because it was one of the first galleries I ever visited in my whole entire life and therefore no matter how many bum shows I might go to there I will always love it (just like Dolly Parton).

We also went to Broadway Market in Hackney (good!) and a show sort of thing at the ICA (bad!) and just wandered around a lot.  It was a good day, except I didn’t buy any of the pretty fairy cakes being sold, so if that’s my only weekend regret I’d say I’m ahead of the game.

Odds and ends

I just bought the new TV on the Radio album Dear Science and have become obsessed with the song Family Tree.  I think I listened to it three times in a row this morning and would have played it again if the damn UPS man hadn’t showed up.  He wasn’t even bringing me presents, just a new credit card for Jeremy.  Lame.

I also bought Acid Tongue by Jenny Lewis, The Stage Names by Okkervil River and for just 5 squid The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips.  So far I’ve only listened to Dear Science in its entirety.  It’s a good writing soundtrack.  Also song obsession makes me a little crazy with the repeat button.

In sad news, James E Reilly, creator of Passions and the man responsible for Marlena’s possession by the devil on Days of Our Lives passed away.  Who will bring the inspired crazy now?  Do you think they would hire me to bring the inspired crazy?  Because I would be happy to do it.  How do you get a job writing for a soap opera anyhow?  And once you have that job how do you convince people that what the storyline needs (and needs desperately) is a chimpanzee, a living doll, a zombie, aliens, and or a satanic possession?  I don’t know if I have the powers of persuasion necessary for such a position.

Oh, snap!

Plans for Thanksgiving are afoot!  How better to celebrate surviving that first bitter American winter than by going to a roller disco?  There is no better way!  Turkey pales in comparison to roller skates and disco music!

i cannot wait.

Random

1. I am on day 2 sans painkillers.  This is not to say that I am sans pain, oh no, that would be asking too much.  But I am at a low enough level of pain that I do not require the stomach killing Cocodamol!  Hooray!
2. There is a small kitchen / tea point at my office and whenevr someone goes to get a cuppa they will normally ask if anyone needs anything and one of the temps will always say “A frozen Coke!” Today I responded by asking if she might like anything I was likely to find at the tea point and she amended her request to “Hmmm, a cheeseburger!”  I admire her ability to aim high even in the face of constant denial.
3. Jeremy made noises about having babies last week.  I had a minor spaz about this and came back to him with conditions I need to meet before having a baby which caused him to have a minor spaz which I reacted to with yet another minor spaz.  Seriously, we are not fit to parent actual children.  The cat has enough mental problems as it is, that alone should grant us (and by us I mean me) a reprieve.  Shouldn’t it?  Well?
4. I am currently reviewing a spreadsheet of over 600 documents to try and sort out their status as either scanned, unscanned or rejected.  This is my glamorous expat lifestyle.  Staring at an Excel spreadsheet at 85% and trying not go blind, crazy or both (actually not so different from Chicago except that speadsheet was at 75% and detailed the order status of art books thus rendering it slightly less crazy making, at least there were pretty pictures occasionally).  I am considering ritual suicide or panhandling as alternatives.
5. I have not watched any of the presidential or vice presidential debates, but I have read about them extensively and remain satisfied with my assessment of John McCain as a tool.
6. Does anyone else remember the clip of McCain back in the 90s or ealy 00’s flipping out on an Asian American reporter and calling her a gook on camera?  I did a quick search on YouTube this morning but couldn’t find any proof of it there.  I just wonder how shit like that can have disappearred from the campaign entirely.  People keep saying oh at lest he’d be better than Bush, but I don’t buy that, he’d just be a different kind of bad. Neither better nor worse, just different.
7. The sun is actually shining right now.  I would so much rather be sitting in a park or just walking around London or doing almost anything other than sitting at my desk right now.  Totally unfair.  Working is stupid.

a song i like

I don’t much care for Snow Patrol, but this song kills me.  I think it’s the addition of Martha Wainwright that does it

What should I be for Halloween?

• The headless nun of Nunhead?
• Sarah Palin?

Either would be relatively easy, although I’m not entirely sure how Palin makes her hair do that.

Shameful moments in expatriate grammar history

So yesterday I was doing some knitting and watching some X Factor (because I am your English grandmother) when the following commercial came on:

Upon watching this commercial I said the following to Jeremy:

“That’s him from the Sex Pistols, isn’t it?”

 Jeremy just stared at me and said, “Yes.” And then I realized what I had said and how I had said it.  This is possibly the most English statement I have ever made since moving to the UK in 2005.  Prior to the move I would have said something along the lines of, “Oh hey, that’s what’s his face from the Sex Pistols!” 

The use of “That’s him from -” signals a huge shift in my syntax.  Normally I would say something like this in a mocking way, because it’s a silly thing to say, but this time I was just doing it without thinking, it just came out of my mouth unbidden.  The only thing worse would have been “That’s him/her off the telly.” But I won’t ever say telly in seriousness, I swear this to you now.  Unless, of course, I am referring to Telly Savalas.  Sure I’ve started saying rubbish bin instead of trash can, and pavement rather than sidewalk, but that’s more so people can understand what the hell I’m talking about rather than unwitting assimilation.  But this unitnentional use of mockney is inexcusable.

At least I didn’t say innit without irony.  That would have been too much.

Oh, and also:  What the hell Johnny Rotten?  Butter?  You don’t deserve to have your name remembered.