sometimes I don't know what to write

Appropriately, I just watched 5 episodes of the secret life of the american teenager. in a row. online. That marks the beginning of my "vacation". My last day of work was today. I leave for New York in 20 days. Pretty good vacation. The secret life of the american teenager is about amercians and how good people practice abstinence and are pro-life. More specifically: pretty blondes practice abstinence. latinos are slutty. asians are smart. and african-americans are insightful.

5 episodes. 250 minutes.


vacation.






abstinence.

----

so anyway, did you know how Michael Cera's parents stole my DNA when I was a baby and made him with it? I think I'm gonna have to demand royalties.

"all those picassos and stuff" -on art and animal cruelty

I was going to write a real thing about this but I am too lazy and it is too late so I am just going to paste the (splendid) instant messenger conversation I just with Alex Fitzgerald about the matter. I did edit it for easier reading.

Before you start I want to say: I have my own very firm opinions about what should and shouldn't be done with animals. I'm not going to get into it too much, but if you want to discuss it with me you are welcome. I just want to clarify that I do like dogs. I am just not delusional about them. I also think that hippie americans should leave people who have a tradition of whaling (=iceland (japan, etc.)) ALONE. just wanted to throw that in there. ok here's what i'm talking about:

alxfitzgerald

At the costa rican bienarte, this one artist tied a dog he had found on the street to a wall, and wrote "you are what you read"

in dog biscuits on the other side of the gallery

and then he took pictures of all the people standing there at the opening not doing anything about the dog

and then he let the dog go, but he led the people to believe that it had died

and everyone on the internet has gotten incredibly worked up about it

because people like to pretend they care about things on the internet


Júlía

oh blah


alxfitzgerald

but anyway, I joined the facebook group today, after a 5th invitation

and I stated my opinion in how it was a successful piece, and that too many of the people in this group had gone as far as threatening to kill the artist without doing the proper research to find out that the dog lived, and that while people are investing all their efforts into this one not dead dog, there are thousands of dying dogs no one is thinking about right now. And I also talked about the fact that the petition for this one dog has over 2 million signatures while the petitions against the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of strays in romania didn't even get 20,000

and now I am getting facebook hate mail


Júlía

people can be so hysterical


alxfitzgerald

and seriously, if I read "HE COULD HAVE PAINTED IT OR MADE A SCULPTURE"

one more time

I think I might cry

for all of humanity


Júlía

I want to join the group just so I can tell them they are dumb

and that they probably EAT MISTREATED ANIMALS EVERY DAY


alxfitzgerald

BUT THOSE ARE NOT DOGS JULIA

OTHER ANIMALS DON'T COUNT


Júlía

and what about the dude at the tate modern with the goldfish in the blender

and everyone else who starves themselves or others or pretends to do so as performance art

are they gonna make petitions about that too


alxfitzgerald

I want to start a group about that

WHAT ABOUT HERMAN NITSCH

I should post that in there


Júlía

i wanna write them all sorts of things

"your mom is “art”"

"your mom is an “artist”"

“dogs suck and they need to die”


alxfitzgerald

"i feel really bad if the owner had lost the dog and then this guy took it and did that to him. i mean, the dog has to come from somewhere......" -group member


Júlía

they are so stupid.

there are probably more stray dogs than people over there. like in so many other places. they just hang out in the street and suffer and starve.


alxfitzgerald

I KNOW

also, I love the ones who are like “I JUST WANT TO GO OVER TO THE GALLERY AND CUT THE ROPE AND SAVE IT”

this happened in 2007.

it lasted for a day.

" Abey Interante (Mylton High School) wrote: you know i think that the mona lisa and all those picassos and stuff are pretty good art and nothing died in the process of making those, why does a dog have to die for this! this is sad!!!!!!"


Júlía

i am going to start referring to good art only as "all those picassos and stuff"


alxfitzgerald

I want to go to MoMA

and just say "he's not bob ross" and "these definitely aren't as good as all those picassos and stuff"

Jonathan Lethem is trying to tell me something, I am not listening.

You know what I like almost as much as movies? Books. Yeah super original, I know. I wish I had a cool hobby like rock-climbing or extreme body modification. Well I don't so I bought a bunch of books last night/this morning. I'm not gonna bore you with long descriptions of them but I feel the need to mention a couple of things. Okay I need to mention a couple of long boring descriptive things.

First: Jonathan Lethem. Jonathan Lethem fucking haunts my life. Jonathan Lethem is trying to brainwash me or some shit. He is a writer. He is a New York Jew person. He is everywhere. This is Jonathan Lethem, trying to force me to think about ducks:



I first came across a book of his in the Powerhouse Arena bookstore in brooklyn in the fall. I picked up a book thinking it was on color theory or disappointed people (I was kind of disappointed at the time) because it looks like this:



But then I read the back and found out it was actually a collection of Jonathan Lethem's essays on star wars, cassavetes, new york etc. So I bought it. And read it. And it was pretty good.

okay so I am in this book "club" (bookmooch, link on the right) where you can swap your books that you dont want for books you want. I have a list of maybe 30 books that i want if someone decides they wanna swap them, and what's the first book that I am offered? The only Jonathan Lethem book on my list: Motherless Brooklyn. Okay, fine, I wouldn't mind reading something else by him, but not for a while. So it's sitting on my nightstand. ok.

I go home to Iceland for christmas and ask my mom to get me some books in icelandic from the library because I haven't read any in a while. She sort of misunderstands and gets me all these originally english language books that have been translated into icelandic. She picks up, yeah you guessed it; Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of solitude and says "this one is supposed to be really good!"

I tell her yeah I wanna read it but maybe later in english, Give me something by Gyrðir Elíasson.

Last night I hung out at the St. Marks bookstore for a while because it was freezing outside and decided to buy a cool looking book of short stories about made up people mostly because Daniel Clowes is in it (and Charles Burns did the cover and I ALWAYS judge a book by its cover):



I totally DID NOT NOTICE until this morning in school when I was reading it that, guess who, YES Jonathan Lethem has a story in it. Okay wow. I can't really get rid of this guy.

So I pick up another few books at Strand after school, including Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings that I have been super excited about. As I was reading that this afternoon, Rachael London who's sitting next to me on the couch says "oh did you buy this because Jonathan Lethem loves it?" Surely enough, THERE HE IS AGAIN on the back cover of Tomines book praising it.

What the fuck. Did someone do a Jonathan Lethem voodoo curse on me? please let me read something that he is not involved in for ONE MINUTE.

Alright. Sorry about that. I just... if my life is to be taken over by one writer I would want it to be someone I really really love and not just pretty-good-Jonathan-fucking-Lethem.

The End.


As for Adrian Tomine, he happens to be one of the first people I was into when I got into my serious alt-comics stage at around 12. I remember reading this online and being like "yeah seems like a pretty cool guy." Then I read Optic Nerve and Summer Blonde, and always just thought of him as such a typical white american comic dude, maybe because he sort of did that on purpose as I learnt in a great radio interview with him (Fresh Air with Terry Gross). Turns out I've been pronouncing his name wrong for half of my life and his new book that's blowing everyone's mind these days, Shortcomings, is sort of intensely about NOT being the person I (and a lot of other people) assumed he was for a long time. I can't even comment on it further, I am too intensely intensed out after just having finished it. Well he's come a long long way since those teenage comic strips that I linked to earlier. If you like graphic novels you kind of need to read this. I just want to say this: in the beginning of the book there is a list of characters with pictures, names, occupation, birthplace and height. Every character in this book is shorter than me.

Thanks Tomine, thanks a lot for making me feel like a FREAK OF NATURE GIANT.


(this is the sad face that Adrian Tomine makes when giant scandinavian people get angry at him.)

Two people really thought I was so american for a long time recently. It makes me kind of sad, although being so terribly ambiguous can come in handy some times I guess.

Who's going to make a graphic novel about being really icelandic and confused in america? Me? I don't have time for that. I'm too busy being mistaken for an american person.

lonely upstream salmon

I would say that 75% of the time I am entirely embarrassed for myself. the other 25% of the time I am entirely proud of myself. there is no in-between stage, no happy medium. I'm just too proud or too embarrassed all the time.

I had a rough week. strangers were mean to me for no reason. this made me embarrassed and sad.

in america people want to kiss you on the cheek all the time, even if they don't like you. (I always imagine that everyone doesn't like me. maybe because of strangers who are mean to me for no reason). Models want to kiss you on both cheeks. I never know which cheek to go for and always end up awkwardly mashing faces with the other person or shaking my head from left to right too many times. "what's that supposed to be, an impression of an upstream salmon?"

my apartment is empty and completely quiet. I have nothing to do so I'll go to bed. I am so glad I have a radio next to my bed. Listening to it makes me feel better.