Crossing the Mighty Mississippi

Acey and me cross the Mississippi in a monsoon, June 9, 2009

Selling the last remnant of my east coast connection -- apartment went to closing Friday -- seems to make an inventory of the past, present and future pressing.

Well. Here I am in a place where if there is anything first rate intellectually or artistically, I haven't encountered it. I used to collect performances of La Bayadere back east, which is probably the apotheosis of my effete mandarinness.

Just came from a lecture and demo on traditional [native American] gardening, which was too diffuse and not informative enough, given the four hours set aside for it. Ditto the Tsankawi expedition we made, about water management structures by an anthropologist who -- well, one of the ones who'd give his subjects blow jobs if they let him any closer, a terrible undercurrent in the field. My sistacousin is a real expert on certain pre-Columbian matters (PhD., Yale) and this cat was just full of shit on a topic both she and I have a lot of interest in. The botanical garden curators, from whom I hoped to learn something, are both arrogant and lazy -- a corporate culture which seems endemic to the place (talked to somebody at the trad gard workshop today, an environmentalist, who applied for work there and rejected their acceptance on account of same). The uni will build but not buy slide projectors for the art history department.

A general impulse to fuck with the Indians and go for the baloney, which I sense is both a Macondo aspect -- Coronado came here looking for Cibola, the seven cities of gold, which the Indians he left alive kept telling him were just a little farther on -- and a Californication issue, all artificially watered Tea Party lawns, Zorro/hidalgo mystique, and tooth veneers. I live next to a park named after the genocidaire of the Navajo which is, in turn, next to the country club and the Pueblo Moderne little theater building designed by the local architecture luminary John Gaw Meem. The previous mayor so prided himself on his descent from Onate [TILDE!!!!!], best noted for cutting the feet off the Acoma Indians who rebelled against his draconian demands for military supplies, that the mayor had the statue of a conquistador to be placed in front of the museum stamped with his own face, to commemorate Onate. This the city council, full of chicanos and native American-descended mestizos, roundly and completely refused to do. This is the west from which Cali gets a lot of its tropes and a good portion of its water; so too does ABQ look to Cali for a lot of Didionesque suburban tract ethos, Mulhollandesque water rights skulduggery, and a kind of rundown Route 66/atomic/Googie/Unser Museum/lowrida/kar kultur/'50s energy. Lt. Uhuru's son lives in Silver City. I am in love with the busman at the local greasy spoon. He has a big black greasy pompadour, fold-up dark wash jeans, a zoot chain for his wallet, and a closet full of vintage '50s clothes. Get your kicks.

There is much to love here.

Tomorrow, the good.

The Generalissima of the Fashion Police: Givhan on Kagan

Tied up in the assessment of style -- Kagan's or anyone else's -- is the awkward, fumbling attempt to suss out precisely who a person is. For Kagan, that means folks are using fashion as a limited tool for making sense of her sexual orientation (Well, she's 50, a bit plain and never married!) and then going on to the larger question of whether being gay or not matters on the high court. (Doesn't everything matter -- including whether one has a small-town background or an inner-city one -- in how one interprets the world?)

So the chatter on the Internet and in the coffee shops, turns to the lesbian archetypes: the Birkenstock-wearing, crunchy granola womyn; the short-haired, androgynous type; and the glamorous, lipstick-wearing Portia de Rossi girl. What does Kagan's short hair mean? Or the fact that she wears makeup?

Is it so wrong to lean on cliches for guidance? Well, yes. And, also, no.


( The Pulitzer-Prize-winning fashion commentator deconstructs Kagan's wardrobe. )