Month: June 2008

I’m dropping my manuscript off in midtown today so I was checking all the museum exhibition schedules for something to do afterwards when I remembered it’s Monday and they’re all closed (annoying tradition). Before I realized this I had settled on the American Museum of Folk Art, where I was going to see some paintings by Henry Darger (that’s one of them here) and others. I’ve never been to the American Museum of Folk Art, which is insane because I love folk art and know nothing about it. I should have visited that museum a billion times already.

Henry Darger is quite famous, although I’m not really familiar with him. I’m at the level of “Yeah, I think I’ve heard of him,” and “Yeah, these paintings look familiar. I think I’ve seen them before.” Explaining who Darger is would just take too much time, but I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia entry about him here. He did a series of paintings called, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. From the Wikipedia entry: “The fictive war was sparked by Darger’s loss of a newspaper photograph from the Chicago Daily News of Elsie Paroubek, a five-year-old Chicago girl strangled in 1911 whose murderer was never found … Darger believed the photo was among several items that were stolen when his apartment was broken into. He never found his copy of the photograph again. When he located the picture in a public library newspaper archive, he couldn’t have it photocopied, and his attempts to trace it proved futile. Paroubek, under the name of Annie Aronburg, became a character in the story.”

My kind of obsessive (that’s Elsie here). How many Dargers are out there, whose work we never see, whose work almost no one gets to see because it wasn’t preserved. I was thinking how I love going through forgotten remnants, the boxes of things that were put away and then never looked at again, but especially poignant are the people who where basically already forgotten in their lifetimes, working and living quietly away behind closed doors, with no one who really knew what they were doing or what went on in their heads.

There must be so so many of them. I think I might have become a Henry Darger had I not gotten into therapy. Now I am the opposite of Henry Darger and seem to want to put what’s inside my head out there IN AS MANY WAYS as are available to me.

Sad little Elsie though. Now that’s going to bug me.

There are all sorts of gaps in my education. I remember there was one personally traumatic year, the 7th or the 8th grade, nothing genuinely horrible happened, it was regular growing-up stuff, but I don’t think I paid much attention to what went on in school all year and to this day I’m fuzzy about how a bill becomes a law.

Luckily, I find pretty much everything interesting, so I’m always looking up something or other, trying to find out more about it. But unluckily, unlike the stuff I learned when I was a kid, within months or a year, I forget whatever it is I looked up. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to look up how a bill becomes a law, except I don’t really keep looking that up, I’m just using it as an example. A better example: I have a map on my desk because I don’t want to be one of those people “who can’t find Iraq on a map,” except within days I forget where it is and I have to keep looking it up repeatedly.

The biggest gap in my education is in science, which is such a shame. I really have to wonder about all those science and math teachers who made it seem like the most dull, irrelevant subject in the world. I regularly have my mind blown when I read the science Times or go to a lecture. I would be hard pressed to come up with anything more exciting than science. Thinking … having a revelation when you’re in therapy. Not that it does you any good, but better to know than not know! It might even be fair to call that science. Anyway, there’s probably more examples of equally exciting things, but still.

My problem is often I am without any foundation to truly grasp what I am reading or hearing. I’m trying to make up for it, like reading Natalie Angier’s book The Canon. I perked-up yesterday at the movies (M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening) when the main character, a science teacher, was telling his students to remember the scientific method as they ran out the door. “Identify the variables, design experiments …” It went by too fast, alas.

I would love to see a TV show, with an ensemble cast of actors playing scientists, where this process of discovery is regularly dramatized, something really high-level though, not crappy. Where the scientists are people and not cartoon nerds. There’d be challenges to doing such a series, but there are plenty of ridiculously talented people out there. Get on it, talented people!

The picture is from Nasa’s website and the caption reads, “A Perfect Storm of Turbulent Gases in the Omega/Swan Nebula (M17).”

Photo lost! I don’t know where it went!

LOVED the opening number last night, loved it! Hated the camera editing though, as usual. It was so frenetic I couldn’t really focus on the dancers. I don’t envy the camera people, there was a lot happening on the stage, but still. Just hold onto each dancer or group a little bit longer, just little, little bit longer. Less with the jumping around, okay? Please.

I agreed with the choice of who went home, though. I don’t agree with all the criticism being leveled at Matt, however. Jesus, Nigel. If he wore a bra with beads would you be happier?

As usual, I love reading other people’s recaps. Here’s a favorite from this morning about last night’s show, from Levy on tv.

Oh, hey, look, it’s a group of dancing prostitutes. What’s that, they’re a popular band called The Pussycat Dolls? Ok, got it. There’s a group of dancing prostitutes on stage called The Pussycat Dolls. The song is atrociously bad, with no melody or, you know, singing to speak of. At least they’re dancing though, which most musical acts last season did not do. I have to say, I truly hope they’re not lip-synching because then the song is actually that atonal and spoken. Yikes.

In other news: Two fun movies opened today! The Happening and The Incredible Hulk. I’m going with The Happening first.

So I was walking home from the library, and I was stopped on Fifth Avenue by the sight of these paintings in the windows of Lord & Taylor by Spanish painter Juan Genoves (courtesy of Marlborough Gallery). Art! At Lord & Taylor! I think even in this low-res photograph you can get a sense of how amazing it is.

– Got a pedicure (pictured).
– Went through all the copy edits for my book. (Apparently I don’t know when to use the word “that” and when to use “which.”)
– Made a few phone calls to California law enforcement about the Bruce Kremen case. (Waiting to hear back.)
– Also tried to follow up on a New Jersey murder. (Freaking amazing that I tried to stay far away from murder and my book ends up having murders in it. Not amazing in retrospect, given the subject, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.)
– Wrote the acknowledgments for my book. (No-win. I’m sure to have left out someone I shouldn’t have.)
– Emailed a few people about physicist Hugh Everett’s many worlds theory. (Wish I had studied science in school.)
– Finished my legal issues to-do list. (Phone call meeting today.)
– Ordered a Father’s Day gift online. (And second guessed myself immediately after.)
– A bunch of reading. In fact, I will post soon about what I’m reading. It will be a post about science. But I was reading from The Elegant Universe, and The Canon (a book about science for people who know nothing about science, a nice overview, thank you Natalie Angier).