I just rediscovered that I have a blog. I think in the six years since I last wrote, google bought blogger, bloggers all migrated to twitter, I quit rejoined and got antsy with the same employer, cycled through about six boyfriends and five apartments, knit up about thirty miles of yarn and irretrievably forgot the password to the flickr account linked to this, but somehow google knows that it's me. Maybe I'll start again, shouting into the silence since I can't imagin anyone at all is looking at this.

Also I think my writing skills have gone downhill since I finished graduate school. Fuck.

Birthday fun

I had a lot of fun at my birthday party. Despite one moderately painful day-after chastizing from my landlord (oh, I am so bad with the guilt, be still my perfectionist heart) the li'l party went swimmingly: probably because no one went swimming. I drank too much, stayed up too late, ate too much cake, and generally acted as though it was my birthday. Despite the L train's best efforts at ruining everything, fun was managed to be had.

Today brought (in approximately chronological order): exhausted hangover, brunch, mid-level stress about my personal life, previously mentioned chastizing, and stress relief in the form of a season 2 sex in the city episode in which Charlotte lies about her age and acts a carefree, drunk, irresponsible, and unabashedly YOUNG twenty-seven-year-old.

My Lady in the Interweb

Check out Todd Gibson's DCM reference
While I am speaking of Dorothy Canning Miller (my thesis subject, for those of you who are wondering what the hell I am talking about) two incredibly small contributions to the literature that I plan to make soon:
1. David Hopkins's pseudo-textbook After Modern Art, which I bought in one of those Amazon "add-this-book-to-your-order-for-only-six-dollars" deals, not only misattributes curation of "The New American Painting," it misattributes it to "Alfred J. Barr," not Miller's mentor and friend Alfred H. Barr, Jr. I'm gonna write them and make them fix that shit in the next edition. The misattribution is somewhat understandable, given art historians' tendency to overlook Miller (which I address in my thesis, if anyone is interested) but getting the name of the most significant museum director (sorry, Mr. d'Harnoncourt) of the 20th century wrong? totally unacceptable.
2. DCM doesn't have an entry in Wikipedia. I think I will have to fix that.

No flags involved

On Friday I took advantage of "summer hours" - summer hours are the best thing that has ever happend to me - and went to Long Island City to do some third borough art perusing. (in case there is any doubt about my numerical system: 1. Bklyn 2. the Mall 3. Qns 4. Bx 5. Shaolin.) Yes, I went to PS1 and saw the show of dirty pictures, ahem, "Into Me/Out of Me, a group exhibition about the imagined, descriptive, and performative act of the passing into, through, and out of the human body," and a boring but significant show of Ron Gorchov's boring but significant pictures. (Best thing at PS1 was a 1959 Stan Brackage film, "window water baby moving", and the most stupid-yet-I-can't-look-away (there were too many to pick a worst) was a RISD-project-looking video of a girl being fucked while boredly and clumsily putting on makeup, by who knows)
But Sculpture Center made my day. First of all, Sculpture center has by far the cutest front desk boy of all arts organizations in the tristate. Second of all, he gave me some free postcards 'cause I told him one of the projectors was broken. Third, the show - Grey Flags - was super. I didn't think I like the Atlas Group, because in the last year they have been a little overexposed and nothing ever resonated with me, and plus I don't really understand if they are telling the truth or not, but in the (scary) sculpture center basement, next to a lovely Tacita Dean film of a sunset, they had a really great little film about a Lebanese security-camera operator who went off his intended target to film the sunset every day, and got fired but was allowed to keep his sunset footage. So the film is his sunset footage. And it's super. And I hope they are telling the truth.
Kelley Walker's installation was also super, and did I mention the front desk boy?
On that note, the Public Theater's MacBeth last weekend was fine, a little on the mediocre side, except for Liev Scheiber in knee high boots. Yow. Worth every penny of the beer, ice cream, starbucks, and lawn chair the 'free' ticket cost. And the agony of yet another dry-ice filled boil, bubble, toil and trouble. Or whatever.

back to the 9 to 5 grind

(actually, it's 10 to 6, but I don't want to make anyone jealous)

And I'm back to the blog, and the world, after June vanished into a crazy working-every-day vortex.

I have am master’s degree, and therefore should be too smart to write about work on my blog. So I’ll do my best to avoid it. But, as some of you know, I have a new job to go with my new degree, new roommate, and still kind of shiny single status. I started full time on Wednesday, as the museum professionals from former Communist countries have gone home, and therefore I am (mostly) done with that project.

For the past month, I have been squeezing in a few days a week at the new gig, but it felt like I was temping for myself. Now I hope to get down to business and figure out what I am actually supposed to be doing. In the meantime, I am re-learning how to pass for a professional, refining my pre-walking on the subway, and researching lunch places uptown. (Best so far is Kitchenette, even if it is a little pricey for nonprofit everyday.)

But, most happily, I reinflated the tires on my bike, purchased a NOVEL (Apex Hides the Hurt, it's fantastic so far), drank a lot of beer at the World Cup (Viva France! I mean Italy! I mean, penalty kickoffs! Whatever! Woooo!) and got from ebay the remaining yarn for my niece's first present. Soon I will visit museums again, so look for a ramp up on exhibition reviews on this page.

Mother's Day

Jose at Castro Food Center said, "Happy Mother's Day - I don't know if you a mother or not, but ..." Some mother I would be, since he only ever sees me buy Ballantine Ale, cafe con leche, and toilet paper.

I've been in a strange mood all day. In Josef Joffe's The Way We Live Now in the New York Times Magazine today, a phrase really affected me. "Between Vietnam and Iraq." Not as in, the similarities between the two, but as a chronological period: "Between Vietnam and Iraq, America's cultural presence has expanded into ubiquity, and so has the resentment of America's soft power."

I have never seen this phrase used this way in print before but it was instantly familiar. Four words that describe the time period of my life (our lives, most of us) thus far.

It made me really sad.

New observations

I didn't notice in the last post the parallels between getting a (master's) hood and leaving the (neighbor)hood. I guess no one else did either.

Other notes: Fortune 500 company apparently hates me. I hate them back (unless they change their mind). Looking for a job is worse than dating, seriously, in both situations you try to look pretty and sit across the table from someone and sound interesting, but no one even buys you a drink at a job interview. (If they do, please forward listings asap.)

And, finally, an observation during the research for my last paper of grad school: There is now one whole entire room on the fourth floor at MoMA devoted entirely to a single female artist. Ok, it's the smallest room in the place and it only has three pictures, but Bridget Riley wins this week's token prize. I honestly wasn't paying enough attention to the permanent collection galleries the last ten times I've been there, so I can't say if it's new or not. Heartening or disheartening, maybe both.