Belle Epoque.

Let’s be real: Degas was a dick, and every time I see a ghostly ballerina, I get violent. But his paintings of café singers are my jam.

And girly synth pop is immortal.

A sickness.

One day you’ll stop measuring your self-worth in words; and then you’ll wonder why you spent so much time talking instead of doing.

As shaky as a…

Have I mentioned that I love “Fiddler on the Roof”? That I cry every single time I watch the film version? That I know all of the freakin’ words, including to songs cut from the show? That I went out and taught myself my favorite song from it on the ukulele?

If not, are you really surprised? 1) It’s a musical. 2) It’s a musical about trying to find the balance between staying true to your history and living in the present. 3) It’s a musical.

Musical Comics: Part One

Most people have really weird shit on the mind at any given moment. Christine’s no different.

This is what happens when I make myself laugh in the bathtub. I start thinking I’m funny.

On Newness.

As a kid, newness was everything – it was the freshly painted hallways of Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, which opened the year we moved to Delaware and I started first grade.  Pristine Apple computers lined the walls of each classroom, and the beginnings of an elaborate butterfly garden pressed up against the windows along the back entrance to the building. The gym floor smelled like a bouncy ball fresh out of a 25-cent dispensing machine at the grocery store, and the hallways were covered in moldings shaped like large Crayola crayons.

I loved newness. It was clean, simple, and comfortably pungent.

I loved it when Mom took us shopping for clothing at K-Mart, because it meant that I would get to wear clothing that hadn’t belonged to another cousin at one point. I loved it when Mom signed us up for swim team, because it meant I had to have a new bathing suit – a sporty little number covered in a blue prism design that completely overhyped my snail-like breaststroke. And while my family didn’t vacation anywhere we couldn’t drive to in a day, I loved how my mother used those car trips as an excuse to buy new books to keep us entertained. (To be fair to my mother, she loved any excuse to shower us with the wordy stuff.)

I hated moth balls, ivy-covered walls, creaking floorboards, dark corners, and faded lace. They were the drippings of lifetimes that didn’t matter, that were completely irrelevant to a five-year-old girl. They came with deer ticks, spiders, costly repairs, and long, tragic stories. Right before my family moved to Delaware, we spent a year living in one of my grandparents’ houses  – a late-19th century brick thing swallowed up by the surrounding woods, forever buckling under the weight of rot and a sad family history. It was filled with mice and prone to bats. The peach wallpaper looked like it was barely holding on to the walls. And if you poked around enough cabinets or pried up the right floorboard, you’d find old photos of people you didn’t recognize; while exploring the large closet in my bedroom, I accidentally came face-to-face with a rubber-faced teddy bear that was given to my dad back in 1950. The paint had flaked off its face, and the moisture in the house had distorted the mouth into a terrifying sneer over the years.

I hated every minute we lived in that house. It had history, and history was horrible.

At one point, that changed.

–

The house mentioned above collapsed on itself very recently. A relative is now selling off the property. It pains me now to think about it, since I legally relinquished any claims to it back when both grandparents on that side of the family had passed away. While I was alive, it was always a dump, and I think I was rightfully scared of it. But I think about the fireplace, the large grandfather clock, the precariously narrow stairs with the curved wooden bannister … and I sigh sadly at all the wasted potential. The only pictures I have of the place come from the Google Map image of the driveway. It still gives me the willies.

Also, I read a really wonderful article about the Hajj in last week’s issue of The New Yorker. One of the ideas it tackles is the Mecca’s constantly changing architecture, and how the desire for newness relates to curbing tendencies to idolize material things (i.e., buildings of historical importance). The abstract is here.

Jesus walks – because the subway smells.

It seems three events have convened to shape this post:

1) Instagram finally came out for Android phones.

2) I’m training for the Broad Street run, which means I’ve been running up and down Broad Street a lot. Like, a lot. LIKE I NEVER WANT TO LOOK AT CITY HALL EVER AGAIN. And today I cut my foot open about halfway through a four-mile run, meaning I walked my way home — and made a pretty pathetic, limping flaneur of myself.

3) My copy of  “Philadelphia: A 300-Year History” just came in the mail.

Now, I realize this post downplays the absolutely immense religious diversity of Philadelphia, and I hate myself for it; hopefully this post will lead to further exploration of a topic that would take hours and hours of walking. But three times a week, as I run up and down Broad Street between Washington Avenue and Pattison Avenue, I find my lazy agnostic self amazed by how much of the ol’ J.C. is found in the span of 2 miles.

William Penn originally envisioned Philadelphia as a paradise of Christian community — a wide, open town where Quakers and Anglicans and Catholics and Christians of pretty much every variety would co-exist in harmony. (How that plays out is a much different story).  And if there is one place, 300+ years later, where you sorta get the sense of what Penn envisioned in that regard, I think it’s South Broad Street. Apart from a small travel agency that specializes in planning trips to Mecca for the hajj, Jesus has a pretty tight monopoly here.

My photos start at Oregon and Broad, just because everyone knows the Phillies are the official God once you go south of that point.

Here’s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints on Broad and Oregon — it’s conveniently a mile away from my door, making it almost coincidental that I find myself screaming “OH DEAR GOD” when I am almost done a ten-mile run.

The Lighthouse Baptist Church on Broad and Ritner.

While technically not a church, the prominent Methodist Hospital cross deserved an honorable mention…

… as does this supplier of papal fashions.

The River Outreach Church knows what you want…

… while the least fun D&D guild sits at Passyunk and Broad.

This Chinese Mennonite Church on Broad and Moore is really the coolest stinkin’ thing in the world. It offers services in Chinese, Vietnamese, English, Indonesian, and Burmese — putting the international masses at Notre Dame de Paris to shame.

Miracles? Around the corner of my house? It’s more likely than you think.

Arguably the smallest church on my run, and yet its intended audience is so ambitious!

St. Rita’s of Cascia at Ellsworth and Broad, or the point where I get cold and go home.

And this is just the tip of the iceburg. (And I wonder why the significant other’s mom gets the impression that I’m religious. At my pious best, my system of faith resembles a college production of Jesus Christ: Superstar.)

Simply, humanly hideous.

Albrecht Dürer, Three Children’s Heads (detail)

Nobody wants to be friends with Ricky Chisholm, the most unspeakably ugly kid that anyone at Pulaski Elementary has even seen. Picture blubbery lips set low on a face as long as a 2 x 4, with the upper lip twisted into a slight sneer. Picture a bulbous nose covered in scaly, bubbling red blisters. Picture little, round piggy eyes constantly held wide open. Picture one comically large right ear, and one left ear that shrivels up like a prune. All of this, and the greatest cruelty is that Ricky barely comes to the shoulders of the other boys in our class.

None of the other unpopular kids will come near him, either. Not Kathryn who has a face like a hatchet and screams when people tell her Ricky plans to kiss her after art class. Not Roman, who is obsessed with glitter and is so fat that he wears adult-size pants. Not Corine, whose body odor is so pungent that the other kids call her Swamp Thing. Not Ritvik, who is fully fluent in Klingon and Elvish. Ricky stands alone in his singular ability to repel people away from him.

It’s not that we think Ricky’s a monster or anything like that — inhuman or malicious or incapable of feeling; we are too old to really believe in that kind of nonsense. He is human enough — he goes to school, after all, and is second-best at long division in our grade; he reads all the popular book series, crumbles Cheetohs into his pudding cups, and has a Gameboy that goes everywhere he goes. And, most of all, he cries when you say anything mean to him: high, metallic shrieks heard up and down the hallways, that last long after the teachers have half-heartedly intervened on his behalf.

And monsters don’t cry. Anyone who watches TV can tell you that.

Ricky Chisholm is simply, humanly hideous.

Silvestre, the demi-human.

Click link for image source.

Most people never saw too deep into Silvestre — a great tragedy when you considered the elaborate cogs that lurked underneath his deep widow’s peak, the intricate cams that whirred and clicked below his lacteal skin. The crowds came for his soldier’s uniform, giggling at the severity of the oversized hat on his little head. They came to watch to stare at his pink lips, set into a firm, zen-like ‘m’ of concentration. They came for his silly French poems, which were nothing but coquettish frippery, and for the airless architectural drawings that he cranked out on the hour, every hour.

There was a great human miracle at work underneath those wooden limbs, that fine pine noggin’ (as P.T. Barnum had once referred to him) — spindles of metal that bent and waved with memory, all lovingly crafted by human hands, all capable of creating a half-life where absolutely nothing was before. But, alas – all the pennies thrown at Silvestre’s feet were for mere ribbons and trimming.

It’s not that there weren’t unwelcome suitors; there was always the odd old man or overgrown professor that harassed Silvestre’s keeper after shows — people who stayed up too late reading alone in bed, people who weren’t content to have the slightest bit of mystery in their lives. People who wanted to crack open Silvestre and dismantle him and then boast about how they had figured him all out, just like a taxidermy frog.

Only his dear little keeper, a dour little Scotsman by the name Mr. Moncrief, was capable of showing Silvestre with any sense of love. There was no infatuation when he cleaned the dozens of brass disks that made Silvestre blink and bend. There were no greedy stares or licked lips when he mended a tear along the inseam of Silvestre’s satin pants. There was nothing but a firm understanding of the figure’s inner workings and an even firmer sense of duty in maintaining them, the sort of unfussy devotion that most people only dream of.

Most people, for that matter, could only dream of being as well-traveled and worldly as Silvestre, who had been everywhere from New York City to Nizhny Novgorod over the past sixty years. Most people could only dream of being as adored as Silvestre, who always received top billing on every poster that announced his arrival, whose presence has been requested by emperors and kinfs. Most people could only dream of owning his fine clothing, his cushy home at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, his gilded writing desk. Most people, when one drilled down to the most basic hopes and dreams, could only dream of a life like Silvestre’s.

But for the automaton, it was very much a lonely existence.

<< Part One.

Gloat, gloat, and now you’re broke.

It’s official: I’m off to Japan for nine days in May! While the general itinerary is still being sketched out, most of it will be spent in Tokyo with a probable side trip to Kyoto. I’m so sick with excitement that I might puke, but I’m also nervous … because I know maybe ten Japanese words, and half of them are because of memes that trickled down from 4chan. Ugh.

It’s also the first time the significant other and I will be traveling internationally together — and I am not the most easy person to travel with, because I’m selfish and always want to do things my way. (Dry, geeky, cheap). We’re both so game on this trip, however, that I think this will play out quite nicely. It’s one of the few places we have a mutual enthusiasm about visiting.

Until then, no sleep for the next month … and I will content myself with the cherry blossoms in South Philly.

The automaton.

Click image for the original source.

The fair was not Duckie’s idea of a pleasant afternoon — she would have preferred spending the day jabbing at her needle work, with nothing but the sound of Papa wandering in and out of his study to keep her company. The humidity that day was enough to curl Duckie’s fingernails and kill all the roses along the front porch. How did anyone ever come to associate winter with death, she would wonder, when summer seems to sap the life out of everything it touches. Summer made her indolent. It made the lawn brittle and nut-brown. It made Titus, the family spaniel, too lazy to chase his own tail, let alone summon the energy for a walk. An afternoon spent pressed up against strangers, trying to catch a fresh breath between the smell of rotting food and animal dung seemed like torture.

But unfortunate Duckie had little say in the matter.  At breakfast that morning, Papa announced she was to go the fair — and so she would go, with no choice in the matter. Not when Papa’s voice boomed with such authority that it seemed as if it were echoing off the cliffs of Mt. Sinai.

The meal had passed as it did every day, which was in complete, but thoughtful silence. Papa read the paper. Duckie planned her itinerary for the day in her head. And though Mama never joined the two for breakfast, the empty chair where she used to sit before her extended fit of melancholy took over creaked at almost conversational intervals. The only sign of the supernatural was the amount of sweat rolling down Papa’s forehead — truly exceptional when you considered how much Papa was inclined to sweat on an average day. Big and beefy as he was, with a neck that seemed to be in a constant fight with his cravat, perspiration only made him all the more unpleasant to look at. And poor, jelly-stomached Duckie was constantly looking for ways to avoid catching his eye.

On this particular day, she was lazing circles into her porridge with her spoon, her eyes tracing the molding along the ceiling — she found herself wondering about the craftsman who worked on it so lovingly when she only looked at it to distract herself from her grotesque family. I suppose he’s much less well off than we are. I suppose he has nothing to distract himself from his family at breakfast.  And then, with more bitterness than Duckie thought she had in her fragile constitution, I suppose he actually likes his family. Lost in thought, she was now spinning her spoon around so quickly that it tapped out a chintzy, fractured melody.

This lapse in manners hardly mattered, for Papa rarely ever made it a point to talk her, unless it was about marriage, money, or dog breeding. In her darkest moods, Duckie wondered if setting fire to the rug might wring a sentence or two out of him. So when Papa actually spoke in between the pages of the morning paper and the gobs of jam on his beard, it was enough to make her suddenly drop her spoon with a piercing clatter.

“You must go see the automaton,” he said simply, barely registering the sound of the fine silver as it bounced against the floor.

In her confusion and efforts to recover the spoon, Duckie thought she had misheard her father. “Papa?”

“The fair down at Penn’s Landing,” he said, practically shoving the newspaper across the table, bunching up the fine lace tablecloth in the process. Duckie withered slightly at the disarray. “There’s an automaton of some sort on display. They say it can write poetry on its own.”

“Oh,” said Duckie in earnest disinterest, caring neither for poetry nor mechanical men, both of which struck her as vulgar.

“It’s made by a Swiss watchmaker,” said Papa, slightly trembling, for he fancied himself something of an amateur clock collector. Unfortunately, Papa lacked the finesse or the actual daring-do to research his purchases, so the house buckled under the weight of contraptions of a highest pedigree — saved from the palace of Versailles, nicked from Joseph II’s palace by one of Maria Josepha’s handmaids – that also managed to have been made no more than 100 miles outside of Philadelphia, and maybe ten years before Duckie was born at the earliest.

“Oh,” said Duckie in earnest disinterested, caring nothing for clocks, if only because Papa liked them so much.

 

Part Two >>