looking back it was easy

It's been more than two years since I lost my last pair of glasses. I still suspect that the BF's former pug ate them, but no remnants of the lost metal frames ever materialized, so who knows? This week I finally got around to replacing them, an effort to give my eyes a break from constant contacts. The exam revealed that I've lost vision in both eyes, though it's a negligible change.

I picked up the new frames Wednesday morning. That night, I flew home for my grandmother's funeral. It was after 9pm when I finally made it to my parents' house, and I stayed up past midnight talking to my mother. Her mood was less frantic than I expected. She was still in the quiet phase, with long gaps of staring into space. We sat on the couch on talked about her side of the family, a conversation that prompted me to pull out the laptop and start recording some of this oral history before it was lost forever. By the end of the night I'd charted out a vague family tree going back four generations.

After the funeral the next day, a distant cousin took me on a walking tour of the old country cemetary where my grandmother's family is buried. She pointed out the grave of my great-grandmother's grandfather, a man named Andrew who fought in the Civil War. He was shot in Virginia then walked all the way home to Georgia, and lived a long life after. I'd never heard him mentioned before.

That night I showed my mother the new glasses, and we agreed that they reminded us of the ones my grandmother had when I was a child: thick, black plastic frames that sit on my prominant nose the same way hers did.

Back in NYC, all this talk of history has put me in documentation mode. I sat down last night and charted out a timeline of my life, starting with birth and listing all the major events that have happened year by year. I know what year I started middle school, but I can't nail down exactly when my mother's dad died. How old was I when my aunt left her husband and came to live with us? When did she move out? I remember my dad's surgery that almost killed him when I was 12 or 13, but which is it, 12 or 13?

I guess this is a component of getting older, a growing hunger to know about genealogy and also an effort to make sense of the greater story arc of your own life. Your eyesight starts to fail, your grandparents succomb to old age and then you realize you've got three decades worth of your own memories that are beginning to get hazy. There's a sense that some things can be misplaced and never found. You put your new glasses on, you stare intently at the blinking cursor on screen and wonder if any remnants of the things that were lost will ever materialize again.

good grief

I picked up a copy of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking Saturday morning, many months removed from the flurry of press that surrounded the book when it was released last fall. When a book gets that much attention it usually makes me actively not want to read it, for fear of falling prey to the hype machine that so often makes a sensation out of excrement. Not so with this nonfiction wonder, a winner of the National Book Award. Didion writes in a chillingly clear tone about the sudden death of her writer husband, an event made all the more harrowing by her only daughter's concurrent collapse into a coma. It's a hard book to read. Absorbing it on the couch Saturday afternoon, I kept sighing and groaning. The BF finally made me stop and go read in the other room.

I guess you could say the timing of this purchase was cosmic. Saturday night, my mother called to tell me that my grandmother had died. We knew it was just a matter of days until her passing; she'd suffered three major strokes last week and was nonresponsive. My mother was calm when she told me the news, much like Didion in the book after doctors let her know that John had died of a massive coronary. Mom cried a little at the end of the phone call, but has been, as Joan writes, "one cool customer" throughout this whole ordeal.

It's fascinating to note how different people deal with death. In the book, Didion digs into the literature of grief and finds that the way society faces mortality has changed in the past hundred years. She quotes an Emily Post book of etiquette from 1922, which gives detailed instructions on the care surrounding funerals and the requisite period of mourning.

No one speaks of mourning anymore. Didion says this is a cultural change that happened in the middle part of the last century, when there arose "an ethical duty to enjoy oneself" and not be bogged down by depression. I'd argue that imperative has increased tenfold in today's Zoloft-fueled zeitgeist, when any hint of gloom is taken to indicate illness.

I'm not so much sad about my grandmother's passing. She had Alzheimer's and hadn't really been herself in years. We were never close even before then, not like I was close with my other set of grandparents or with her late husband, who died when I was a child. I'll be going home for the funeral tomorrow night, with Magical Thinking in mind.

water works (except when it doesn't)

I'll confess that I went into Lady in the Water hoping against hope that the critics were wrong. Sure, I didn't love The Village, and I thought Signs had several major honking holes in its plot, but there's something about M. Night Shyamalan I still admire. I saw Water cautiously expecting the best and fearing the worst. Oddly enough, that fear turned out to be the scariest thing about this mostly tepid attempt to mold a modern fairy tale. Which doesn't mean it's awful—I actually quite enjoyed the final third of the film—but I did find the project fundamentally flawed.

Big spoilers ahead, so stop reading now if you care.
OK, let's extend our disbelief as far as possible. Say a "Narf," who is a clairvoyant sea nymph sent to give mankind a divine message of hope, actually showed up in an apartment complex's pool. I can't buy it that The Cove's maintenance guy Cleveland would react to her the way Paul Giamatti did. One second he's telling her she's too young and she needs to leave; the next, they're curled up on the couch together. Creepy, especially given the current national outrage toward older men picking up minors on MySpace.

(Another small quibble: The film's name doesn't fit. We never really see the Narf in the water, but whatever.)

I found the characters strangely flat and often offensive. It's bad enough that Shyamalan felt the need to give himself such a central and self-righteous role, and worse that he had two key figures, the Asian mom and daughter, act like Chop Socky caricatures. Their interaction felt like a cheap Margaret Cho routine, but with none of the heart or humor.

Bryce Dallas Howard is beautifully haunting, but her Narf makes no sense. She's sort of an oracle, but not really? And why did she suddenly go mute in the pivotal shower scene? Honestly, I spent the first half of the movie thinking about how much she looked like a young Sissy Spacek.

But if Carrie White wandered into The Cove, I'm pretty sure she'd stop dicking around and start kicking some telekinetic ass, starting with the vaguely menacing Scrunt, the Narf's terrestrial enemy.
I jumped when the hell hound pounced—everybody in the theater did—but such B-movie chills feel contrary to the subtly menacing spirit of Shyamalan's previous works. Here, the baddie is essentially a guard dog who happens to be working for the forces of darkness. (Hmmm—an evil wolf chasing a fairy tale savior? Well, Gmork from The Neverending Story just called, and boy is he pissed.)

Finally, I think the biggest problem comes down to the movie's central conceit. In case you missed the hoaky cartoon exposition before the credits, there's an old Asian bedtime story that explains the Narf's mission. Said story gives all the residents of The Cove a role to play in the Narf's return to her homeworld. News flash: A story has a beginning, a middle and an end—not just a round up of job descriptions. Can you imagine Snow White told in a similar manner: "There's a princess, an innocent. And some dwarves, seven of them. And a prince. Oh yeah, and a Queen, also a Witch." Well, so what? Verbs! We need verbs!

I can't help but think that Shyamalan was onto something really unique and potentially great at the begininng, a fable about faith set in the unexpected locale of soulless suburban apartment squalor. Given the way he treats the film critic in the movie, and the strange hubris behind his own role, I seriously think he knew this Lady was going to get trampled. Since he casts himself as the movie's messiah, it seems like he was longing to be crucified.

As I said before, the film finds its legs in the latter half, but by then I'd already stopped caring. I almost think some enterprising film geek could re-edit the flick (a la the version of The Phantom Menace that floated around the Internet a few years back) and plug up all the holes. But as the film critic laments in the movie, there's just nothing out there that's original anymore.

fowl play

For Friday, a Frank Green list:

• I can already tell I'm going to be annoyed by this season of Project Runway. The fast departure of Malan, who I liked, irks me. I hate Vincent, and not in a Santino-we-love-to-hate-you sort of way. And Heidi is just a bitch.
• My conversation with Queer Duck creator Mike Reiss. Enjoy.
• The Devil Wears Prada. Anne Hathaway, a tool. Meryl Streep, brilliant!
• On assignment from JP, I've been watching Making the Band 3. Please, god, no more.
• Is my page f-ed up in your browser? It looks weird for one of my co-workers, but on no other screen I've found. Techies: Advice?
• Sea Tea? We have tix for this Sunday's three-hour tour, but the BF cringes when I bring it up.
• San Francisco. Looks like we're making a cameo appearance on the West Coast at the start of next month. Maybe I'll actually get to see the freakin' bridge this time. (It was covered in fog during my list trip.)
• Is adult life supposed to be so hard? Did I miss that lecture in college?
• Diana Ross, Blue. Amazing.
• Dear Tray: We miss you. Love, Equinox.
• The new Peaches CD sort of sucks. Discuss.
• The Lady in the Water. Reviews have already been unkind, but I really want to see it this weekend. Is that so wrong?
• No, really. It's summertime. Where's the joy?

capture the flag

Shame that this week's Blotter doodle couldn't have run two weeks before: It would've been great for the Fourth.

The item had to do with a robbery, and I wanted to try a more simple, stripped-down approach not only to the flag but also to the background. I also wanted to bring back a character I haven't drawn in ages, the once-ubiquitous Shadow Man who is always up to no good. Note that he's the only thing fleshed out here (but just barely), which says something about the way I picture the faceless/nameless perps who never get caught.

Blot: Someone stole an American flag off the deck of a man's home on Flynn Street.

just a pie, my love

The changes keep coming here at TRAYB.com. Yesterday I put up a new masthead, but I'm not sure I like it. More tweaks are sure to follow.

I also got around to updating my list of friends, finally adding favorites like Bryce's awesome Plastic Music, Sean's Rocket Garage and a few other keepers. I've also gone ahead and deleted the links for blogs that were no longer being updated (you know who you are).

This round of link updates was inspired partly by my discovery that my friend Mark is now blogging. Yesterday I came across his post about Madonna-inspired pizzas and nearly peed my pants laughing. Genius!

Do You Want Divas With That?

don't call u-haul

At dinner the other night, BB mentioned he'd found a cool site that lets you fill out a survey on your ideal living conditions and it then tells you where you should live in the U.S.
It's called Find Your Spot, and it weighs factors like weather, population, education, housing costs and even religion into deciding what little corner of the greater 50 would be your own personal heaven.

My results were, in a word, terrifying. Here's my top 10:

1. Honolulu, Hawaii
   It's known as "America's Tropical Paradise?" Perhaps, but what in the hell do people do in Hawaii? I think I'd enjoy the sun and surf for, oh, three days, then be tempted to hurl myself into the mouth of Mauna Loa.
   
2. Las Vegas, Nevada
   I've never been, but after watching that trashy season of The Real World, no.
   
3. San Diego, California
   Now, this might be a contender. My dear friends Michael and Clay love it there, but other friends say it's way too small.
   
4. Orange County, California
   The O.C.? Not me.
   
5. Little Rock, Arkansas
   Wow. I'm not opposed to a move back to the South, but somehow doubt that'll include a stop in Clinton country. The only other Southern city that showed up on my list was Shreveport, Louisiana. Double no.
   
6. Portland, Oregon
   My hipster/artsy/indie rock pals say Portland's the shit. It's also home to Chuck Palahniuk, which gives it points. But again, what do people actually do there?
   
7. Long Beach, California
   Note that this is the third Cali entry on the list. Fascinating.
   
8. Los Angeles, California
   And the fourth. I've actually weighed the pros and cons of moving to West Hollywood, though I'm not so keen on paying for a car again, or having to get pec implants.
   
9. Washington, D.C.
   For years I said that D.C. would be my next stop after ATL. I still adore the majesty of the city, and it seems like there's a lot to keep a person plugged in there. Plus, a handful of close friends live in D.C., even if one of them says he doesn't want to stay too much longer.
   
10. Baltimore, Maryland
    Um, no.

The list goes on, with California showing up four more times and the BF's favorite city, San Francisco, clocking in at number 19. Oddly enough, when the BF filled out his own survey, guess what landed the top spot? Honolulu. Coincidence, or is this universe telling us to cash in all our SkyMiles and head to the South Pacific?

(Disclaimer: No, we're not considering a move away from NYC just yet. I'm just keeping my options open.)

notes from the underground

Is it just me, or has this been a remarkably rocky summer for the New York subway? Consider:
• A power-tool attack on the 1 train
• A slashing on the 2 train
• A tourist stabbed on the C train
• A postal worker attempts suicide in front of the 2 train
• News that Al Qaeda had plans to release poison gas in the subway system
• And last, but certainly least, reports of a plan to bomb the PATH train to Jersey

On a more personal note, the BF got an eyeful of subway sketchiness the other morning. At the station near our apartment, he spotted a homeless guy taking a dump at the end of the platform. Once the guy had finished, he used his hand to wipe up and walked away. Lovely.

With a mass-transit system that averages around 4,900,000 riders PER DAY, surely this city can do better. Where's the security? And where's the outrage?

check up on it

This week's Blotter doodle was a challenge, mainly because it seemed to be a slow week for colorful crime. I kept going back to the confused old lady because it made me think of my own grandmother, who never seems to know where she is or what's going on. (Funny, it must run in the family.) The finished drawing looks nothing like my own Granny, but her spirit is there.

Blotter: An 87-year-old woman walked into an office building ...

welcome to the attention economy

As some of my friends know already, for the past two years the BF and I have been working on an online start-up idea on the side. (OK, so he's been the one mainly working on it, but I've been there all along, playing the much-needed role of sounding board, devil's advocate and chief thesaurus operator.) It's a concept called Meople, and it has to do with getting paid for your time and attention. I'll save a longer explanation for the site itself: Meople.net.

Now, something strange has started to happen. Though our little foundling community hasn't officially launched yet, tech folks are starting to talk about it. Yesterday it was mentioned in a blog posting on Attention Trust. Today, the M-word comes up again on a blog called User Generated Data. Granted, we're still months away from a mention in the WSJ, but this is a pretty big honking deal, especially considering that the site's only got, oh, thirty-some odd Attention Stores online now. (Lingo, I know; read the site for details.)

In the meanwhile, I just added a couple of products to my own Meople Attention Store. Send me a MeMail, pay me $15 and I'll draw your dog.

It's just that easy. Did that grab your attention?

(For anyone who's in NYC and wants to know what the heck an "Attention Economy" is, come to the Meople Meetup on Aug. 2. Or you can read the Meople blog, The Attention Store.)

blogging botox

On an unrelated note, some of you may have noticed I've made a few cosmetic changes to TRAYB.com, including the addition of a Flickr-powered gallery of my illustrations. I'm intending this to be the first of many small improvements to the site, because we all know that any old whore needs a new pair of panties every now and again.

Watch and see if I actually get around to round two of the renovations.

If you have comments, post 'em here.

a five-letter word for awesome

"You've turned into one of the Ironic Gays," a certain friend told me yesterday.
We were at brunch at 202, a swanky shop/bistro inside Chelsea Market, seated almost within mimosa-spilling distance of the racks of clothes and baubles. The friend said he felt like we were eating at Anthropologie. The BF ordered the breakfast lasagna, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, but was delicious. I had pancakes with a blackberry compote. Our friend, apparently, had an order of sass with a side of wit. The usual.
Given our setting, I'm surprised he didn't call me one of the "Pretentious Gays," but no, the word was "Ironic" and he was sticking to it.

It was my Pride photo with Queer Duck that led to the label. "Your hair, those glasses, you're totally going for an Ironic Gay thing," my friend said. I'll confess, I don't see it. I was genuinely happy to find Queer Duck out and about — it's been a while. For once, I actually wasn't going for irony.

Or was I?

Have we reached a point where irony is such a given that any glimmer of genuine emotion still comes across as laden with sarcasm? Are we so steeped in the Seinfeld world view that we can no longer see past the rim of our own smug experience? If this is true, am I inadvertantly hilarious — or unintentionally tragic? Or both!

Despite the existential crisis, the BF and I took the friend's advice and went to see Wordplay that afternoon, a movie with moments tragic and ironic (and both!) but overall brilliant, a true feast for Word Nerds like myself. (The BF was bored; go figure.) It's a somewhat slow-moving documentary about the people who create The New York Times crossword and the obsessed contestants who compete each year to be the best puzzler in the nation. Comparisons to Best in Show might bubble up, but Wordplay works not by making fun of its oddball cast of misfits but by showing just how normal they are.
I was also wowed by the celebrity cameos: Bill Clinton? How cool is that? The Indigo Girls. Even Bob Dole. The only person who seemed to not fit was Jon Stewart, whose thorougly tongue-in-cheek take on crosswording felt somehow contrary to the gentle spirit of the film.
I actually got choked up a little near the end. While Shawn Colvin's acoustic cover of Talking Heads' "This Must Be the Place" plays, the film rapidly pans through a handful of high-school yearbook moments captured at the annual crossword convention. It's a saccharine maneuver on the part of the filmmakers, but one that works.

After the movie was over, I put my Ironic Gay sunglasses back on and cooly exited the theater, eager to return to a veneer of superiority and affected detachment. Walking up 6th Avenue, I thought to myself, "Ah yes, this must be the place."

india, illinois

• A while back, I was assigned by a friend at LOGO to write a travel guide to Chicago — which I thought might be a challenge, considering I'd only visited the Second City once. Thank gawd for Brad and his BF Bob, who gave me the inside scoop on all things Chitown. With their advice, along with half-remembered flashbacks to my own trip last fall, I came up with a newbie's manual to the Midwestern mecca. Months passed, but now LOGO has finally launched its travel site. I was a little bummed my piece wasn't teased on the home page, but it's there if you dig. Thanks, Brad!
LOGOonline: Trip-Out: Chicago

• I need to write a longer post on all the new music I'm absorbing these days, but in the meantime here's this: The new India.Arie album rocks. I don't adore every track, but four or five of the songs make me deeply happy. The upbeat "Better Pepole" sounds like classic Staple Singers (who I love) and deserves radio play, even though I'm betting it'll never happen. "Good Mourning" will make you want to dump your boyfriend, and "Private Party" will make you get back together. Finally, I'm fascinated by her cover of Don Henley's "The Heart of the Matter." Such an odd choice, but oh so sweet.

My interview with India ran in extremely abbreviated form in this week's HX. Shame, because she offered some lovely insights on living a meaningful life.
India's Summer
Neo-soul princess India.Arie may not be her hair, but she’s relaxed and on a new roll

P.S.: If you just download a few tracks, go for the iTunes single version of "I Am Not My Hair" — which is head and shoulders above the hip-hoppy album mix.