"Live a bourgeoisie life and do the rest in your art."

I found this quote written in my own hand buried behind the pile of snacks in my "drawer of shame" at work. I barely recall writing it down and am certain I am not the author of it.

The Savitsky Museum

I've got a thing for Russian art. I am not going to pretend for a minute that I know much about it, or art in general. However, something about Russian art makes me weak in the knees. It is possible that my Ukranian great-grandmother's genetic influence is responsible, given my brother shares my obsession as well. The Hermitage would our mecca, however I just read about this:

"The Savitsky Art Museum, Nukus, is the ridiculous to the Taj Mahal’s sublime. If you get to Nukus in the semi-autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan, you will almost certainly be the only person you know who has. It is the most depressing and ugly place in the world; a rotting Stalinist excrescence built in the uncared-for nether-regions of the old Soviet Empire. It's a place that even in the old USSR was a forgettable, unimportant backwater, and it was precisely because no-one came here or cared about Nukus that one of the great art collections was built here by a remarkable archaeologist, who quietly saved the work of underground and officially degenerate artists. From the 1930s to the 1970s, he bought and was given artists’ entire portfolios. It is a remarkable and humbling collection, thousands upon thousands of paintings, drawings and sculptures produced in the face of great danger. The most moving examples come from the Gulag. Together this crammed and desperately under-funded gallery is a memorial to the power of culture, a candle of artistic resistance. The quality of the work varies hugely, from the great to the chronically derivative, but that’s not the point. Altogether they have a unique power."

-AA Gill

Know Your Asshole Footprint

I just came across this social-service feature in October's issue of Vanity Fair:

Regrettable, some American are simply not aware of how large an asshole footprint they leave on the planet. Here, Vanity Fair offers a questionnaire that will help such individuals determine the size and breadth of their footprint. If you answer "yes" to four or more of the questions for your age group, it is incumbent upon you to take urgent measures to reduce your asshole footprint.

1. Do you leave vitriolic comments in the "Comments" sections of blogs and web sites, even if you're commenting on something innocuous, such as an old Linkin Park video?

2. Are you convinced that it's only a matter of time before the world recognizes you as the next Andy Sambery?

3. Is your name Skylar, Taylor, Cat, Bryce, Morgan, Brandon, Braden, Hayden, Jaden or Brianna?

4. Do you work in an office with a Foosball or Ping-Pong table?

5. Do you run a T-shirt company that specializes in flimsy apparel that runs small and whose designs are essentially appropriations of old advertising and TV logos from the 1960 and 70s?

6. Before you go out bicycling, do you first change into a skintight spandex shirt with a gaudy pattern recalling a 1990s screen saver?

7. Do you refer to having young children as "doing the parent thing."

8. If you do indeed have young children, have you launched a blog, or, worse, a video blog, about raising them?

9. When you are being photgraphed, do you flash gang signs?

10. Have you or anyone in your close circle of friends written a roman a' clef about being a rich soicalite, working in publishing, working in film bonking the help, or any combination of the aforementioned circumstances?

Temptation by New Order

Cafe Mozart

Like most things from the West, Japan's relationship to coffee is extremely complicated. To judge by advertisements of a depressed and exhausted Tommy Lee Jones backed up against a wall and cajoled into holding a can of "Boss" coffee and the iconic jar of "Creap" coffee creamer in every staffroom, it would be easy to assume that Japan's approach to coffee consumption is as twisted and misguided as the seaweed-corn-mayonaise-hotdog pizza from our neighborhood Dominos.




Unlike Korea or China, there are no "tea houses" for socializing on this island, no one brings their ipod or homework to a tea cermoney. Drinking matcha is a solitary and silent experience. In other words, for the coffee house experience in Sendai, you have to suck up your misgivings about corporate ethics and go inside a Starbucks.
Unless you know about Cafe Mozart, which makes Seattle's collection of self conscious hipster cafes look as authentic and pretentious as a Leonard Cohen cover sung by on American Idol.

Marni

Marni is brilliant. The luxe Italian bohemian's answer to the slick sexed up vamps from houses like Gucci or Versace. Their earthy weird pieces make my heart beat a little faster. If aliens wore jewelry, it would look something like this. If Fellini dreamed about necklaces, they would like something like this.

Harajuku Bead Shop

Casey and I spent the last weekend in Tokyo. On a mission to find Milkfed in Harajuku, I stumbled across this amazing jewelry supply shop. Out front was fake moose whose antlers were dripping in chains and jewels and I promptly abandoned my search and got lost in front of a wall of swarovski crystals. The girls who worked there were eager and sweet, taking off their own jewelry to show me how they made it and giving me advice despite our language barrier. I am now obsessed and have spent the better part of the day fantasizing about the necklaces I am going to construct once I get home.

Parenting

Some friends of ours, a lovely married couple from Hong Kong, are undergoing the laborous and exhausting process of leaving Japan. Concluding 8 years of missionary service in Japan, they are tying up loose ends while being parents to their 2 infants. Packing up is hard, but packing up in Japan is infinitely more complicated, so I was surprised when my offer to help in anyway with moving was responded with a request to babysit instead.

I worked for 6 months at a children's school nearby my college when I was 18. My approach to day care was very much influenced by my father's approach to raising my brother and I. "Oh, you want to eat the whole tub of ice cream? I'll get you the spoon. In bed? Okay, let's get you a bib." And then I would insist on eating it next to my sleeping mother and drip ice cream all over her pillow. I even talked him out of taking me to the doctor for a week of daily vaccinations (Kuwaiti medicine-don't ask) when I was seven. So when the children I was in charge of serving strictly measured servings of carrots to requested the bag of marshmallows they spied in a partially open cupboard, I was more than happy to break open the bag and oblige.

But I picked up another habit, this from both my parents, a tendency to manipulate by making up scary stories. My parents told me there was a genie (djinn in Arabic) who lived in the crack between two pieces of carpet. At night, the crack would glow red with fire and the genie would come out and confiscate the toys I didn't put away. This wasn't Aladdin's genie but the menacing Islamic variety, and I clearly remember tearfully apologizing to a kidnapped Poppel for my carelessness. And being careful not to piss off the genie further by stepping on his carpet crack.

Whenever I had recess duty, the boys playing outside would kick the ball over the fence and into a rich neighbor's back yard. Shame-faced, I would have to walk over, ring the doorbell, apologize profusely and get told off everytime this happened. Because it was such an ordeal to get the ball back, the boys enjoyed this tremendously and wouldn't waste any time kicking the retrieved ball right back over the fence again. When I took away the ball, they started throwing thier shoes and anything within reach over the fence, laughing their little heads off. After a few days of this, I came back from the neighbor's looking as terrified as I could manage and told them in a whisper that we needed to have a meeting. I explained that the woman next door identified herself as a witch, and told me she is very good with fingerprints. She warned me that from now on, any items thrown over the fence will be examined by her for the offender's little fingerprints. And then she will use her magic to steal the offender's fingerprints and identity, so that when their parents come to collect them, there will be nothing to distinguish them from the other little boys. So their parents won't recognize them but instead go home sad and empty handed, wondering what became of their son. And then the boys will have to live at school forever or something like that.

Anyway, it was very effective. Too good to be true. Nothing went over the fence after that. And they begged me for more stories about the witch next door (and believe me, after my numerous encounters with the woman next door, it didn't require much imagination to think of her as a witch!) The fun lasted until there was a meeting with my supervisors where I was told that the boys were too worked up to go to sleep at night and the parents were questioning the source of their vampire stories. To say my supervisors were unhappy was an understatement, and looking back I marvel at my inability then to see why they were concerned. I was defensive because, after all, this was how I was raised and if the kids were having fun and behaving, then why not?
So tommorow, little Ken and Hitomi will be dropped off. They speak Cantonese and understand some Japanese. Our apartment is currently a moldy radio shack littered with books, bottles and all kinds of wrappers. We have no idea how we are going to entertain them. All we have going for us is a bag of cheerios and Casey's "helicopter" rides. Maybe it is a good thing we can't tell stories in their language because Casey's imagination is much darker and I suspect his "parenting" approach isn't too far off from mine.