mills

In my family, it is customary to deliver news very late or not at all; as a result, I recently learned that my parents’ 40th anniversary occurred on October 11th of this year. This weekend, I spent some time scanning in a few photos of them and many photos of their childhoods, their parents, their early lives in the 1940s. Many of those are to come, as I find them transfixing.

Update: Disqus is failing to show comments left earlier, again. I apologize and am hoping to get it fixed.

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.

Even though I wore my silliest hat, today brought what in the corporate world we call “poisonous wrath” and the “deepest despair of the soul”; it is in such moments of extremity, seized by paroxysms of fury, laid low by the toxicity of stifled rage, melancholic and exhausted, that I know I am delivering value to the shareholders and being the best middle-manager I can be.

Nevertheless, it takes a toll, so when we left I thought it might be sound to take a few photos in the overgrown field next to our building. It was, and made me feel better, and then I came home and Five’s new explosive diarrheal habit had produced another kitchen-floor Pollock. After I titled, photographed, catalogued, and wrote an essay about it, I broke out the bleach to erase this most ephemeral form of art.

Then, my sister Nudawn sent me the oil painting below. I strongly dislike hugs, or human touch of any sort, or even basic human decency or warmth, outside of a relationship (a purely theoretical phenomenon at this point). When I was a child I amused my parents and teachers by drawing a two-headed beast called “The Hugging Monster” with the faces of mom and dad on it; it was chasing me. Nudawn has captured it beautifully.

This weekend I will be in New Orleans again, meeting Tumblr-users Mandalay (1st time), DHK (Umpteenth time), and Hell Belle (Nth time), probably in that order, and getting as drunk as possible on non-alcoholic beer. Don’t ever think dreams can’t come true.

(From Photophobia, here is this dumb grass even larger).

GPOYW: I am very much my parents’ child, happily. (Mom and dad, 1975, photographed by my father’s brother).

Mom came to visit, which was -as usual- totally awesome; then her car came to grief, which has forced her to stay: even more awesome.

I also went to Janetta’s family-reunion / party, which was spectacular. I had more fun than I’ve had at any gathering in a long time. Then I helped Frank with yard work, which was also a perplexingly good time; I think growing up with games like Sim City and Populous encouraging the habit of obsessive terraforming has made me the ultimate yard man. That and the fact that I was born to sleep with bitter, pill-popping housewives.

This pedestrian update brought to you by Frisky Dingo.

My mom took this photo in Metairie yesterday; the flag is made out of Go-Cups in a chain-link fence, and seems sort of remarkable. It’s interesting how some people are drawn to the process of creation in such a direct and unaffected way.

Whoever made this, living in a suburb of New Orleans in some dated, archetypal middle-American dwelling, is probably not an artist and likely doesn’t know many artists. Without much sophistication in the selection of subject*, s/he exemplifies an unmediated folk-art sort of craft that seems very genuine to me.

In such a milieu, s/he would have no peers or context; it’s unlikely others on the block are creating analogous offerings, so there’s a kind of radical individualism in it that’s absent among artists whose art itself may be more unique or sui generis. That is, such folk art occurs in an artless environment where the most creative and original act is merely making something at all.

(*It is perhaps rather elite of me to derogate the subject of the work, but I think defensibly so).

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! I was going to come to town, but Will put the kibosh on that plan; I’ll send you his number and you can tell him what you think of that.

My mom is a member of Muses, a female crew in New Orleans whose parade features, among highly satirical floats and hilarious themes, a very famous ‘throw’: custom-designed and decorated shoes given to lucky folks.

She’s been visiting up here over the last few days, and brought some supplies to work on her shoes (see here and here for some great shots); she also went to a local thrift store to see what they had to offer, and found the above.

It’s a bright orange size-10 monster covered in comic art, which I thought was pretty hilarious.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Mom! I wore that red tie you bought me!

My mom is in the Krewe of Muses (or see here or here), which has far and away the coolest and most creative throws in Mardi Gras. The shoes she makes each year to give out to the parade-goers of New Orleans are totally brilliant; check out her gallery of shoes for 2008. Her old Katrina-themed creations were always my favorite.

Here were their floats from 2006. They’re known as the funniest, most bitingly satirical parade (plus, since their riders are all female, guys tend to catch a hell of a lot).