7:49 p.m. - 2003-07-13
Pidgeon Poop
When I was in art school, I had a professor who used to say, with unrestrained glee, "There is art in everything, students! EVERYTHING!!"
Well, Ben, it's time for the wake up call. There is no art in pidgeon poop.
Bruce and I went down to Birmingham very early this morning to help Wendy and Michael and Ray clean up the gallery's parking lot. The part of the lot that's under a roof is covered with pidgeon poop, which all needed to be cleaned up. It was hot and gross and I realised how much I love Wendy and her husband Michael, because there are very few people I would spend a morning scraping up pidgeon poop with!!
Oh, don't freak out! I wore a respirator!! And heavy gloves! And I got to see adolescent pidgeons, who look just like adult pigeons except they have bald heads.
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After the hazardous waste clean up, we went over to Wendy and Michael's to take showers and ditch our disgusting clothes. I knew we had reached a milestone in our friendship as they were very embarrassed about the messy state of their house, but they let us come anyway.
It's the messy house milestone, when you stop feeling that you have to put on a show for people because, after all, they are your friends and will understand that you have more to do with your life than scrub in between the bathroom tiles with a tooth brush and baking soda every Thursday.
It's a sad fact of life that I have become a 1950's house connessieur (man, I have got to get a dictionary.) Wendy and Michael have this fabulous 1953 house with a jaw dropping sunroom and hardwood floors to die for. And Wendy has been collecting art for years, so the house is like a museum. I was drooling so bad I almost forgot to take a shower.
And they have the same bathroom tile patterns that we do, except in green!!
And the crowning touch was their two cats, Jack and Henry. Sigh. I want cats with long, fluffy hair that have cute wrestling matches on the floor in front of guests. Dayam! All mine do when we have company is beg for food!
While we were recovering from the pidgeon poop overload, my sister in law, Dana, called from Paris. I was so overwhelmed at getting a call from Paris, PARIS!!, on the cell phone, that I couldn't even think of anything intelligent to say except "How's the weather?"
I'm inarticulate on telephones at the best of times, but international phone calls really throw me.
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Lunch was the buffet at Taj India. More drool. And they have a new toilet in the women's room, so I no longer have to worry about the old one tipping over while I'm sitting on it.
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And then we went to Birmingham's Museum of Art and watched "Pull My Daisy", the Alfred Leslie film which featured many of the Beat poets. I love this film, although I haven't seen it for years. I felt a little sad, watching Alan Ginsburg jumping around like a monkey and knowing what happened to all those guys when they finally grew up. Kerouac's drinking, Ginsburg becoming a sort of cranky old man....
I wondered what Bruce and I and Wendy and Michael and all my other dear friends will turn into? Will we look at eachother in 30 years and say, "Ah, you are so old and haggard now, but I knew you when you had blue hair and wrote faintly jaded poetry, and you moved to New York to make a name for yourself but wound up as a secretary at a video restoration house. And every guy you fell in love with was gay."
Sigh. "Up you go, Little Smoke..."
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After the movie there was a little intermission. I don't know how we got on the subject but somehow we wound up talking about the phenomenon of "artspeak". We all just really hate the ponderous prose of art reviews, and none of us could figure out where this inscrutible trend toward making them as linguistically complicated as possible came from. I explained to them how we were actually taught how to write like this in art school, so we could write our artist's statements in this sort of language. They were appalled.
Then Michael had this brilliant idea. "Hey, Ruth! You should write your statement about the dolls that way! Because the dolls are so cute and innocent, and it would be hilarious to have some overwrought, serious statement about them!"
Wendy and I just looked at each other and shrieked. It was so brilliant! So we all brainstormed about comparing the soft curves of the dolls to the idealised goddess figures of pre-patriarchal society, the stabbing motions of the embroidery needle referring back to the "few small nips" of Frida Kahlo, and the taking back of colour as a rebellion against the bland world that is 21st century society. It was a scream.
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The second movie was also an Alfred Leslie entitled "The Last Clean Shirt". It features a man and woman driving around New York, and the woman is speaking and singing in a beautiful nonsense voice. It's visually very interesting but the endless driving images do get tedious. I found myself wolfing down candy and wondering if it was sacreligious to be eating Sugar Daddies at an Alfred Leslie film.
Oh, and it sort of stops and starts a couple of times. So just when you're thinking it's over there's the serious man and singing woman driving around some more.
When it finally ended, the woman in back of us exclaimed "Oh, thank GOD!! I thought it was going to start up again!!"
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