mills

A character in Milan Kundera’s Immortality notices that

“…painters and sculptors from classical days to Raphael and perhaps even to Ingres avoided portraying laughter…a beautiful face was imaginable only in its immobility. Faces lost their immobility, mouths became open, only when the painter wished to express evil.”

He notes that the exceptions, such as the Dutch painters, depict subjects “beyond ugliness or beauty,” as does much photography. Indeed, he compares the immobile beauty of the classical face to the photographs of the present, and specifically to a book of pictures of John F. Kennedy in which the president is laughing, lips parted and teeth bared, in every image.

“A few days later he found himself…in front of Michelangelo’s David and tried to imagine that marble face laughing like Kennedy. David, that paradigm of male beauty, suddenly looked like an imbecile! Imagine Mona Lisa as her barely perceptible smile turns into a laugh that reveals her teeth and gums!”

Kundera seems not to have seen the many advertisements and video images of precisely those transformations occurring, with precisely that effect. His character reflects:

“A face is beautiful because it reveals the presence of thought, whereas at the moment of laughter a man does not think…in the instant that he grasps the comical, man does not laugh; laughter follows afterward as a physical reaction, as a convulsion of the face, and a convulsed person does not rule himself, he is ruled by something that is neither will nor reason… A human being who does not rule himself (a human being beyond reason, beyond will) cannot be considered beautiful.”

I do not wholly agree with these ideas, although I like them; counter-examples occur immediately to me, but I’ll leave the arguments to you. I wanted only to say this: so far as I know, this is the only photograph of me laughing completely, laughing senselessly. I didn’t know Abby was taking it, and I like it a lot; this must be what I look like often; in real life, I spend enormous amounts of time laughing and being unreasonable, profane, and amused, however I come across here, and that is sufficient cause for this to be my GPOYW.

GPY-&-your-favorite-people-W: Will’s looming shadow, Abby’s silly boot, my dumb hat: outside of Juan’s Flying Burrito (remember, Nudawn?) on Magazine, in New Orleans. Raynor remarked: “Dalton has a very iconic silhouette.”

Ills Manor, Est. 2008 (larger)

I got many nice presents for surviving -in the face of no obstacles whatever- another year, from the gifts from the Locomotive Sisters to the kind note from Andy (happy birthday!) to Abby’s presence here in Louisiana to well-wishes from many to gifts from family, friends, and coworkers. It was all much more than I deserve, not solely because I’m a reprobate but also because -and I here channel my inner-athlete in the post-game homily of empty phrases- I just came out and tried to execute on metabolizing and not getting killed.

So I don’t want to slight anyone when I say that as far as presents go, Lacey’s absolutely incredible gift is hard to beat: a sturdy and beautifully-made wooden sign for application to the front of the ostentatious compound I share with Will and which is known far and wide as Ills Manor.

None fighting through the surrounding swamps to attend one of our lavish cocktail parties will ever again wonder, Which mansion do those guys live in? It’s the one that says Ills Manor, chum. Now get inside and grab yourself a Clearly Canadian.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lacey! What an awesome present!

GPOYW: Bandwagon Saints fans better respect the lifetime of suffering some of us have endured, afternoon depressions every Sunday that condensed into shattering headaches of such intensity that we’d pass out, dreaming of a day when the “Cajun Canon” Bobby Hebert or the Dome Patrol with Sam Mills would be enough to actually make it to the playoffs.

(This is not to be taken as a prediction that we’ll achieve postseason success this year; one hopes, but doesn’t jinx).

The wonderful Enormous Air posted Soren Kierkegaard in the Coffee-House, a sketch in oils by Christian Olavious, 1843.

Raynor wants to know why all Bakers have the same hairstyle. Raynor likes to ask questions. Raynor ought to be careful what questions he asks about the Order of Bakers unless he wants to wind up “rotto dal mento infin dove si trulla.”

But this is scarcely a secret: we’ve modeled our haircuts on the style made famous by the dashing Søren Kierkegaard, whose contemporaries were as smitten with him as ours are with us; said one Hans Brøchner:

“My only definite impression was of [Kierkegaard’s] appearance, which I found almost comical. He was then twenty-three years old; he had something quite irregular in his entire form and had a strange coiffure. His hair rose almost six inches above his forehead into a tousled crest that gave him a strange, bewildered look.”

Thus is this instantiation edition of GPOYW dedicated to Herr Ganan, who asks but never answers.

Semi-GPOYW with Abby: hanging out in the Dust Storm.

GPOYW. The lights in the distance are from Death Valley. Thanks and a biscuit for my assistant during the process.

(Also, thanks to Lacey for this abomination).

GPOYW: a bee buzzes the tower as Abby picks a seed out of my teeth on a bench in Telluride, CO. We’re like little monkeys. (Whole set; larger).

GPOYW. My mother showed me an album with this photo of my father and me; in it, he looks more like me than in any other photo I’ve ever seen, and we thought it amazing. Examining it closely later while showing Abby the presence on the mantle of some preserved butterflies -which are now, 27 years later, at our ranch, where she saw them and where, since she was reading Ada, I noted Nabokov’s fondness for them- I noticed that the photo is reversed.

“Chicago” is written backwards on the Jurgen Peters print on the wall; that print, incidentally, now hangs on the wall to the left of where I sit writing this. My father’s watch is also on the wrong wrist. When the image is corrected, he looks more like himself. I suppose this means my face is the mirror-image of his, reversed in its symmetry.

Here I am on a bed at our old house: 901 Jefferson Avenue, New Orleans, LA. There was a stained-glass window in that house, a shotgun camelback in the classic Uptown style. In the background you can see a dresser, then used by my parents. It’s been mine for ten years or so. Once, in a rage, I threw one of its drawers into a window and slept with cold air pouring in that guilty night. My clothes are in it now.

My father and I are here walking in Daneel Park, on St. Charles Avenue, blocks from where my parents live now. On Saturday, I went on a run with a friend down the wide neutral ground to Audubon Park and back; while crossing the street here at Daneel Park with Bayou in tow, the car that approached after the gap in traffic was my mother’s; she drove past, to Langenstein’s grocery, without seeing us.

My mother picks me up in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. I recently proposed to Sydney that I purchase some overalls and reintroduce them as a functional, comfortable form of attire for the American office laborer. This proposal has met with little enthusiasm, even after I altered it to specify that the overalls need not be blue, as above, but could perhaps be brown, as at the top.

Here is an ambiguous contribution to the theme of the day: me, in New Orleans this very weekend, with the skull of a cat. I don’t know with which side I am hereby allied, which is generally how I prefer it.

GPOYW. Mismatched socks, deliberately chosen as the best of all possible combinations, signal: (1) the beginning of my decline and fall, (2) the liberation of my aesthetic from an authoritarian obsession with symmetry, or (3) the fact that I am so lazy that even having a washing machine in my house doesn’t spare me from crises?

GPOYW: Frank / GI Joe edition.

GPOYW: M&Ms are what you drink at swanky parties when you don’t drink anymore.

GPOYW: Instantiation Edition with Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe. (First | Second)

I am always grateful to those who do more with this name than I do; I hope that, in decisive interactions, the cultural aura that surrounds it has been sufficiently enhanced by Haley Mills, C. Wright Mills, the Quasi-Honorable Semi-Judge Mills Lane, Sam Mills, military hero Gen. Mills, and others that otherwise suspicious interlocutors will give me the benefit of the doubt. A positive association with the original Parent Trap, for instance, could incline a policeman to overlook my poor driving.

I was pleased, then, to read about Wilbur Mills, a powerful Southern congressman, here photographed behind a plate that reads as I am addressed by a friend’s children: “Mr. Mills.”

Mills served in Congress from 1939 to 1977 and for eighteen years (1957-1975) was the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, a post he held longer than any other person in U.S. history. Mills was often termed “the most powerful man in Washington” during his tenure… His accomplishments in Congress included playing a large role in the creation of the Medicare program. Mills initially had reservations about the program because he was worried about the eventual cost, but eventually shepherded it through Congress and had a large hand in shaping its program. Mills was also acknowledged as the primary tax expert in the Congress and the leading architect of the Tax Reform Act of 1969. Mills favored a conservative fiscal approach, adequate tax revenue to fund government programs, a balanced budget, and also supported various social programs, especially Social Security Disability, adding farmers to Social Security, unemployment compensation, and national health insurance.

I hope there is something in there to satisfy readers of virtually all political inclinations. I felt proud to have an utterly incidental connection to this obvious hero of fiscal restraint, political compassion, and power-mongering ambition, until I came to this:

Mills was involved in a traffic incident in Washington, DC at 2 a.m. on October 9, 1974. His car was stopped by U.S. Park Police late at night because the driver had not turned on the lights. Mills was intoxicated, and his face was cut from a scuffle with Annabelle Battistella, better known as Fanne Foxe, a stripper from Argentina. When police approached the car, Foxe leapt from the car and jumped into the nearby Tidal Basin in an attempt to escape… On November 30, 1974, Mills, seemingly drunk, was accompanied by Fanne Foxe’s husband onstage at The Pilgrim Theatre in Boston, a burlesque house where Foxe was performing. He held a press conferencefrom Foxe’s dressing room. Soon after this second public incident, Mills stepped down from his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged his alcoholism, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and checked himself into Palm Beach Institute at West Palm Beach.

This article is even better: black eyes, lies, obvious lunacy! I suppose that qualifies as additional context for the question of how much our names govern our lives, how much of an effect an idiosyncratic name can have on our development. I now consider myself, and Wilbur, mere victims of a name that wrought debauchery through us quite without our consent. Pity us!