Pizza Rulez

Avenue du Bois

pizzarulezz — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:58:00 -0400

My favorite part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the Robert Lehman Collection, a sort of mini-Frick in the back of the ground floor that’s something of a collector’s dream: paintings and drawings and sculptures and antiques from a period of over seven hundred years. I spent several hours there this past New Year’s Eve day, and grew particularly attached to this Kees Van Dongen painting 1925, “Avenue du Bois”:

I loved the crush of automobiles (particularly the Boston Cream Pie-colored car in the front right) and the three horses in the back who, though rendered in such rough brushwork, seem so disdainful of the motorcade they’re forced to navigate. And then there’s the Arc de Triomphe in the back, just smudged out of the gray day and wintry trees.

The best part, of course, is the throng of fashionable pedestrians, beginning with the elegant, twig-legged woman hopping into the car, and then the the mother and daughter, the former dressed in a gray sheath (very Chanel) and a beautiful caramel fur coat, and her daughter in a kind of flippy tennis skirt with straw-colored bob. The couple next to them has the wonderful sketchiness of a fashion design illustration, I think: mostly silhouette and insinuation. Behind them, everyone is reduced to a mass of black hats. Add a Sidney Bechet tune and that’s it.

Avenue du Bois (now Avenue Foch) was and remains one of the most fashionable and expensive streets in the city of Paris, and the portrayal of the street as a kind of runway for fashionable dress and automobiles charmed me.

When I returned to look at the painting again a few days later, it had disappeared. They must have rehung the gallery at the very, very beginning of 2013. Much of it—di Paolo’s Creation scene, Ingres’s Princesse de Broglie, Balthus’s nude—remains in tact, but ”Avenue du Bois,” I suppose, no longer invites our gaze.

howtotalktogirlsatparties: Weird things women wear,...

pizzarulezz — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:21:18 -0400

howtotalktogirlsatparties:

Weird things women wear, EXPLAINED!

Do U knowwww what it feeeels liiiiike for a giiiiiirl

From n+1: Fedora

pizzarulezz — Tue, 14 May 2013 08:43:59 -0400

“Lindsay’s hat was not this way—and to me, the hat began with Lindsay. I would like to know which Hollywood stylist put a fedora on Lindsay Lohan’s head because I think that person is a genius. Lindsay first began to appear in hats after the first cycle of her eating disorder, post-rehab, during her lesbian relationship with Samantha Ronson. It was Lindsay’s funny way of saying that she was the femme—because of course Ronson, a DJ with a UK skater-boy thing, would always out-butch her: tight pants, big shoes, greasy hair tucked back, vampiric dark circles. In photos Samantha was always snarling like a tough orphan, though under the soot and freckles you knew she had nice parents. Instead of just wearing lipstick to imitate a woman, Lindsay wore a fedora to imitate a man imitating a woman—imitating, more specifically, a sort of closeted ’50s homosexual whose excessive display of formal masculinity revealed how much of life was costume. On Lindsay the hat said: Yes, I am experimenting, but not in the way you think. Also: leave me alone. This is an essential quality of hats: they announce one’s desire to be unannounced. A hat is an advertisement for a disguise.”

Take yourself, multiply it by 10, add a sprinklez of Cool Potion from the witch down the street, and you will be Dayna Tortorici.

Fedora, by Dayna Tortorici, from n+1.

“Spirits Rejoice,” Albert Ayler. If you missed the Whitney’s expressively...

pizzarulezz — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:43:00 -0400

“Spirits Rejoice,” Albert Ayler.

If you missed the Whitney’s expressively surprising, wackily cerebral, wonderfully confounding Blues for Smoke exhibit, I apologize to you 100 times over on your own behalf, because that means you missed Stan Douglas’s Hors-champs. The 1992 film, mounted in the lobby gallery, features four musicians tackling Albert Ayler’s insanely knotty “Spirits Rejoice” (above) shot with two cameras. On one side of a projector screen is the shot of the soloing musician; on the other is a fellow quartet member ‘off camera’ (“hors-champs,” you see). As The Times’ Holland Cotter described it:

“One by one, and together, they pry the piece apart, pump it up, empty it out, add vinegar to its gospel riffs, make its mocking quotation of the French national anthem sound positively sardonic, all the while detonating explosions of fioritura. The music they make is violent, adamant, enthralling; unmistakably political; almost embarrassingly expressive; for fleeting instants, sweet; and from start to finish go for broke, which is where blues goes every time.”

What he said.

When my mother's high school boyfriend sent me a love poem.

pizzarulezz — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:20:00 -0400

Once in a great while, when I’m having a bad day and can’t manage to giggle uncontrollably at rude internet comments like I normally do, I look back at something that took me longer than an hour to write and feel OK. I wrote this in my last year of college, as a part of a project to construct a narrative of my mother’s life when she was about my age.

All of it is true.

***

On Valentine’s Day 2011, my mother’s high school boyfriend sent me a love poem.

I had never met him. I didn’t know what he looked like, nor did he know what I looked like. Only a few days before Valentine’s Day, he didn’t even know who I was or that I existed. I had found him on the internet. I had written to him because I had hoped he might be able to give me some hint of why my mother nearly flunked out of college in her freshman year. As an eighteen-year-old beauty, shy but flirtatious with a carousel of boyfriends she cared about vaguely, my mother had left her modest home in Wilmette, Illinois, one of Chicago’s tony North Shore suburbs, to attend the University of Oklahoma in the fall of 1967. She was a C-student who had never been away from home for longer than one night, but she badly wanted to leave Illinois for college. So she turned down her other option, Southern Illinois University, and her father, a midlevel manager at GE, took out a massive loan.

As a freshman, she was taking yearlong courses, and she couldn’t recall paying much attention to what her grades were throughout the year. But when her grades arrived home in Wilmette in June shortly after she did, she had two F’s, two D’s, and one A, in English.

***

In the winter of 2011, I asked her how she’d gotten those grades. We were sitting in her office in our house, which sits at the end of a gently sloping cul-de-sac in suburban Greenville, Delaware. Everything in the office is a sunny yellow or lime green. On the walls hang my senior portrait from boarding school, a photo of my brother performing at CBGB shortly before it closed in 2008, and eight handsomely framed clippings from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and sociological journals detailing a study she wrote in the late eighties on why women leave the workplace. The study was the germination of her current business as a consultant for female executives working in male-dominated fields.

She sat on a puffy couch, upholstered with yellow fabric patterned with giant flowerpots like some WASP nightmare, and I sat next to her, just as we’d do weekly over the next several months. Her blonde hair and smile were exactly as they are in the pictures I’d seen of her as a teenager, but she’d long ago traded her long hair and miniskirts for a bob and a purple sweater set and pearls. When I listened to the tapes of our interviews, it struck me for the first time how strong her midwestern accent was.

“Well, the problem was that I had never been away from home before.” She had always told me she detested her home life. She’d always described her parents as taciturn, both with her and each other. This made my mother’s difficulties with her brothers, particularly her older one, all the more problematic. Her older brother wasn’t home very often; 25 and married, he’d visit every few weeks and offer platitudes about the demonic power of the Beatles. Her younger brother was an introvert who spent his days on the couch watching TV. She was devoted to poetry above all other things, with guys also ranking high in her pantheon of interests. Even though the rebellious spirit that would define her generation had only the gentlest grasp on her, she felt like she had nothing in common with her family.

It seemed strange, then, to hear her pin her troubles on homesickness. Then again, as she pointed out, “Things weren’t exactly normal in Norman, Oklahoma.” There she was, at a gargantuan university, without anyone she knew, in a town that challenged the limits of what she knew as conservative. Her hall mates spoke in voices ladled with Southern accents about joining sororities, the immediate need to get engaged, and the impropriety of panty raids. (My mother became infamous for her propensity to throw her housemates’ underwear out the window to the fraternity brothers below during these raids.) Their desire to wear pearls and tea dresses to class everyday was foreign to my mother, who sewed all of her own clothing (no big accomplishment: they were mostly miniskirts) and was satisfied with the idea that she might never get married.

When accounting for her poor freshman year performance, my mother is also quick to point out that she had tonsillitis, “which was, like, really serious in the ’60s,” she said. She missed a number of classes her first semester and found it difficult to catch up in courses like biology and math.

But despite her illness and what seemed to be a particularly acute feeling of homesickness, I came to believe that the truly destructive agent in my mother’s freshman year downfall was poetry.

Every night, she would sit up in her room into the early hours of the morning writing pages and pages of poetry. (This was apparently no bother to her roommate, whose name my mother can’t recall—though her legacy lives on to the day, when my mother hears the phone ring and, still mocking the accent forty-some years later, drawls, “Is that my telephone ringin’, y’all?”

Of course, after staying up until 4 or 5 AM, it was nearly impossible for my mother to rouse herself for a 9 AM math lecture, and so she rarely went.

Her poetry output, though, was abundant. She’s kept most of them, and one afternoon, we dug the box out of the basement. “Life is a merry-go-round,” began one twelve-pager. “And we can never get off.”

“Well, some of them are actually pretty good.” She shrugged, and put the lid back on the big plastic container.

My mother’s single “A,” in English, reflects that she did have strengths as a writer. And it certainly suggests that her grades were not the result of a lack of intelligence.

“And also,” she told me, “that class was actually later in the day.”

***

1967 turned my mother into a lot of things: an insomniac, a late-night poet, and an introvert, just to name a few. But one thing that didn’t change was her romantic life. She is understandably hesitant to tell me about failing grades and her interactions with her family. But she is eager to tell me about her boyfriends. She has a wonderfully breezy, self-assured way of telling me these things. Somehow, she manages to tell me, without sounding callous or self-absorbed, that she’d spend an afternoon writing a love letter to a guy she’d met over the summer, then go to a Beach Boys concert with another guy that night. Until she met my father, she seemed to have a suite of boys who all seemed to love her desperately while she kept herself just out of their reach.

Daniel Dahlen loved her desperately. She met him in the Wisconsin Dells, where her family spent their summers, the summer before she left for college. (My mother had actually helped her father build, by hand, their house on the Baraboo River, where her mother lived until she passed away in 2002.)

The Dells are a camp paradise, where middle class Midwestern families still descend each summer to watch women dressed in lederhosen-swimsuits water-ski while balancing on each other’s shoulders, or tour Top Secret, the to-scale replica of the White House turned upside-down, or to eat giraffe burgers (made of beef) served by waiters in Native American costumes at Call of the Wild.

The Wonder Spot, a house built askew on a sharply sloping hill where “the laws of gravity are repealed!” provided my mother with two summers of employment. But such attractions aren’t appealing to eighteen-year-olds. Instead, in the midst of this camp entertainment overload, my mother and her friends spent their days “walking up and down the street.” (In retrospect, this may be code.) This was how she met Daniel Dahlen.

Like my mother, he was from suburban Chicago, with glossy blonde hair and a cerebral nature. He insisted, at least for that summer, that everyone call him “Cauley,” a name he felt better reflected his Swedish background (and, perhaps, his level of pretension).

But what really drew my mother to Daniel Dahlen was his poetry. Their dates were something like suburban teenage salons: “they were us reading poetry,” she explained. When my mother wasn’t giving tours at the Wonder Spot, she and Daniel would sit on the floor in the living room of her house on the river and read poems to each other. Sometimes their own, sometimes others’. She’s told me several times, when making a case for his talents as a poet, or even when discussing war or poetry broadly, that when drafted, Daniel (whom she still calls Cauley), successfully wrote a poem to get conscientious objector status.

Daniel and my mother didn’t stay together when my mother left for the University of Oklahoma and he went off to the University of Wisconsin, though it’s hard for my mother or me to say how “together” they were in the first place. She kept in touch with him sporadically in her first year, though she quickly lost interest and contact when she met the infamous Gary Hoffman.

But when speaking to my mother, it was clear to me that she sees him as an extricable part of this moment in her life. He’s a hinge in her obsession with poetry, his firm dedication to and talents in the art a reflection of hers. And so I knew I had to find him.

***

Google has taken all the mystery out of “I wonder whatever happened to…” When I wanted to find Daniel Dahlen, all I needed to do was type “Daniel Dahlen.” His faculty biography on the University of Wisconsin website indicated he’d dropped “Cauley,” and provided a fine primer on who he has become: he’s an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, with a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Southern Illinois University. He also holds an MFA with an emphasis in poetry form the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has published a few books of poems. What’s more, his email address was right at the top of the page, which seemed to strip the whole find-your-mother’s-long-lost-boyfriend thing of most of the romance.

But Professor Dahlen delivered romance nonetheless.

I emailed him, briefly explaining my project and who my mother was, and asking him if he might be the Daniel Dahlen I was searching for. If he was, I mentioned, he should know my mother was always impressed with his CO status poem.

“Yes,” he wrote back the next day, “that would certainly be me.” He asked how my mother was doing, to tell her hello, and for more details about my project and who I was.

“I don’t remember writing a poem when I applied for CO status, but I did write an essay, of sorts. Perhaps this is what your mother remembers,” he wrote. And then, a closing sentence that made me wince but smile: “Please tell your mother I am reading love poems on Valentine’s Day at the Women’s Center on campus…and one of the poems will be by e.e.cummings…a poem I read aloud to your mother at her house in 1967. I have aged, but the poem is as youthful as it was then. Warmly, Daniel.”

Despite the ease with which I found Daniel Dahlen, I was still giddy when he wrote back to me. Here was someone who knew my mother not simply before I was born, but before she even met my father, when she was younger than I am now, when she was in a period of her life she seemed hesitant to discuss in any real depth. It was a less solemn iteration of the sensation I felt when I held my father’s Vietnam letters in my hands.

My mother didn’t seem to share my enthusiasm. I called to tell her right after receiving his response, and exclaimed, “I found Daniel Dahlen!”

She said nothing for a few seconds. “Well… don’t contact him.”

I considered lying, but it didn’t seem right in light of what I was asking of my mother. “I kind of already…did.”

“What are you doing? Are you trying to write some thing about my life?” she asked.

I told her then, as I had several times before, that that was exactly what I was doing.

Regardless of how I explained my desire to understand her story, to get a fuller understanding of how she had come to be who she is and where she is today, my mother always seemed to speak about the project with a kind of suspicion. Between her slamming the door in my father’s face and her father’s reservations about Gary Hoffman, that seems to be a Wood family trait.

“Well, just don’t call him or anything.”

“I just wanted to ask him what you were like. He said he still thinks of you warmly.”

As if she didn’t hear me, she said, “He was always very upset that I didn’t become a poet.”

***

Daniel Dahlen’s first email, brief but friendly, didn’t prepare me for where our correspondence then went. I hadn’t really set a plan of action for what I’d say next, for what kind of questions I’d ask Daniel to get an idea of what my mother was like. And a day later, before I’d even had a chance to respond to his first email, he wrote to me again: “I just thought I would let you know I have written a poem about your email. I will send it to you. You could then decide whether or not to share it with your mother.”

On Valentine’s Day, it arrived. “To Rachel,” he scribbled at the top.

Hi Professor Dahlen

Don’t Facebook tweet or twitter

no cyber anything if I can avoid it

earthly bound am I

but this email reaches me: “Hi Professor

Dahlen I’m a senior at the University

of Pennsylvania working on my creative writing

thesis, for which I’m doing research

on my family. My mom dated

a Daniel Dahlen who wrote a poem

to get Conscientious Objector status during

the Viet Nam War and I wondering

if that might be you.”

Hi _______,

I am holding a copy of e.e. cummings’ Selected

Poems on my lap in the sun room of an Arts

and Crafts house in Wilmette, Illinois.

It is 1967 and you might be born

or you might not. Your mother

is my goddess. She is Michelangelo

and sky blue. Sunlight hair cut

in a bang straight across her forehead.

Her lipstick is frosted pastel,

perfect. She is beauty

to me, I want to love her

but she never lets me, quite,

and this is perfect because I am bluffing

my way into being a poet and being

in love, because for some of us creative

writers at seventeen that’s all

we can do. In the interest of research

here’s my clue: You are onto something,

tracing family tissue between love

and objection to stupid war

and poetry, too. I am old now,

maybe a little more likely to tell

the truth, so, here: The poem I wrote,

if it was a poem, to be officially

approved as Conscientious Objector

to war—this was a bluff, too.

Like my Dad, and probably your Dad, too,

if anybody came into my house today

with the intent of harming a member

of my family I wouldn’t hesitate

to hurt him.

I’d kill him

if I had to, although

with only a baseball bat or kitchen knife

I would likely end up dead.

I had to deny this,

then.

True, and yet,

he sits beside your mother still,

the seventeen year old who wants to write,

and not kill.

And this, I think, is what

the artists mean

by the creative possibility of the lie.

At several moments, I hurried over the words with discomfort. I can’t imagine anyone being comfortable reading a poem about your mother written by someone who isn’t your father, especially when there are lines like, “Your mother is my goddess. She is Michelangelo and sky blue.”

But among the hyperbole and slight affectation, there was somehow my mother, or at least a piece of herself she wasn’t quite able to offer me. I had a new physical image of her in my mind, her hair and pale pink lipstick re-imagined and more real through Daniel Dahlen’s saccharine words.

I could also see Daniel Dahlen trying desperately to affect a personality that would impress her. It did, and the impression has stayed with my mother years later. Still, he wrote, “I wanted to love her / but she never lets me, quite.” And forty years later, between lightweight explanations about what a big deal tonsillitis was and generalities about homesickness and that didn’t quite match up to the facts she gave me, I felt she wasn’t quite letting me get what I wanted, either.

howtotalktogirlsatparties: How to become an art expert. Let me...

pizzarulezz — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:14:37 -0400

howtotalktogirlsatparties:

How to become an art expert.

Let me tell you howwwwwwwwwwww.

howtotalktogirlsatparties: The 10 types of people you meet in...

pizzarulezz — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:53:08 -0400

howtotalktogirlsatparties:

The 10 types of people you meet in New York.

hot deal we do chicken right

From Bullett: Beyond the Costume Institute: Gorging on Fashion...

pizzarulezz — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 22:21:51 -0400

From Bullett: Beyond the Costume Institute: Gorging on Fashion at the Met.

(I wrote that.)

Bullett Trend Report: Beanis Are Bad, Hats Are Rad Penned a...

pizzarulezz — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:44:15 -0400

Bullett Trend Report: Beanis Are Bad, Hats Are Rad

Penned a screed against beanies for Bullett. Czech it outtt!

Blouse 2 Joust

pizzarulezz — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:08:54 -0400

I just bought this blouse for jousting tournaments at Medieval Times, because it is encrusted with jewels like a decorative medieval armor breastplate.

Get your Jousting Blouse from J. Crew today!

TAP DANCING IN TABITHA SIMMONS AT BARNEYS NEW YORK

pizzarulezz — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:23:23 -0400

GINGER ROGERS IS UPSTAIRS IN HEAVEN LIKE “UH HUH!”

CURRENT/JUST FINISHED READZ

pizzarulezz — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:59:21 -0400

In order of most recently read/in the middle of reading, since 2/5/13:

DREAMING IN FRENCH: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, & Angela Davis // Alice Kaplan ~
DELIRIOUS NEW YORK: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan / Rem Koolhaas ~
THE IDEAL MUSEUM: An Art Lover’s Dream Collection // Philippe Daverio !
PLEASE KILL ME: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk // Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain * # ! & $
GOOD PROSE: The Art of Nonfiction // Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd &
GOD AND MAN AT YALE: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’ // William F. Buckley * # !
TWENTY MINUTES IN MANHATTAN // Michael Sorkin # !
MEANING IN THE VISUAL ARTS // Erwin Panofsky #
THE BOY LOOKED AT JOHNNY: The Obituary of Rock ‘n Roll // Julie Burchill & Tony Parsons # & +
I DREAMED I WAS A VERY CLEAN TRAMP: An Autobiography // Richard Hell # $
Expatriate Paris: A Cultural and Literary Guide to Paris of the 1920s // Arlen J. Hansen ! =
A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY: His Own Selection of His Own Choicest Writings // H.L. Mencken ! &

Articles of note:

FLASHBACK: Splendor in the Grit // James Wolcott, Vanity Fair June 2009 # ! & $
NEW YORK: What we were before; what we are now // Peter Kaplan, New York Magazine, September 2011 #
INTERVIEW: Lee Radziwill // T, February 2013 ! &

KEY:

* Life-changing

# Mind-altering

! Will make you great at cocktail parties

^ Just like had to read again

& Will make you laugh

~ TBD

+ Total BS

$ Totally necessary if you’re going to the Punk exhibit at the Met

= Totally necessary if you’re going to Paris in May

Pre-Velvets Lou Reed: "The Ostrich"

pizzarulezz — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:21:39 -0400

“In 1964, he scored a minor hit with the single ‘The Ostrich,’ a parody of popular dance songs of the time, which included lines such as ‘put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it.’ His employers felt that the song had hit potential.”

brooklynesque: #menswear; where are they now? episode 14:...

pizzarulezz — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:37:47 -0400

brooklynesque:

#menswear; where are they now?

episode 14: Rachel

omg i’ve maaaaade iiiiiiit

howtotalktogirlsatparties: A complete guide to #coupleswear.

pizzarulezz — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:26:07 -0400

howtotalktogirlsatparties:

A complete guide to #coupleswear.

The Skirt: The Skirt: Reimagining Four Pins As A Women’s Website

pizzarulezz — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:05:21 -0400

People always ask me, “Why isn’t there a Four Pins for women?” And I always say, “Hey, this isn’t the NCAA, toots. There’s no Title IX for fashion blogs.”

Sorry I don't really post clothing anymore

pizzarulezz — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:45:00 -0400

but I ran out of outfits!!! Will buy more clothing soon. Til then—!

I WAS DREAMIN WHEN I WROTE THIS FORGIVE ME IF IT GOES ASTRAY

pizzarulezz — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:23:00 -0400

NewTrENDS on BULLETT: Art Chicks Are Killin’ It

Solange all up in Vika Gazinskaya, arting out.

Men's versus Women's Fashionz

pizzarulezz — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:36:00 -0400

via the New Yorker’s 3/25 Style Issue, which also has a 2rad4tad story about Dapper Dan.

The Promotion by James Tate

pizzarulezz — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:25:39 -0400

I was a dog in my former life, a very good
dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being.
I liked being a dog. I worked for a poor farmer,
guarding and herding his sheep. Wolves and coyotes
tried to get past me almost every night, and not
once did I lose a sheep. The farmer rewarded me
with good food, food from his table. He may have
been poor, but he ate well. And his children
played with me, when they weren’t in school or
working in the field. I had all the love any dog
could hope for. When I got old, they got a new
dog, and I trained him in the tricks of the trade.
He quickly learned, and the farmer brought me into
the house to live with the family. I brought the farmer
his slippers in the morning, as he was getting
old, too. I was dying slowly, a little bit at a
time. The farmer knew this and would bring the
new dog in to visit me from time to time. The
new dog would entertain me with his flips and
flops and nuzzles. And then one morning I just
didn’t get up. They gave me a fine burial down
by the stream under a shade tree. That was the
end of my being a dog. Sometimes I miss it so
I sit by my window and cry. I live in a high-rise
that looks out at a bunch of other high-rises.
At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak
to anyone all day. The human wolves don’t even see me.
They fear me not.