Teaching at the art school! (2 of 3): Art installations!.

The other week, they opened up this big exhibit in their skyscraper gallery space, with pieces by faculty and staff and workers at the school and the museum.

The thing that got me, was that a lot of the people who work in random offices there actually are practicing artists too, and so you'd have this cool freaky photo stuff, and then underneath the artist's name would be like, "Financial Aid", or, "Advising".

They had free food and wine, and so I loaded up my plate with cheese and fruit and went strolling around through the drywalled hallways and cubicles full of sculpture and paintings and photos, and right away I saw one of the highlights of the exhibition, several giant terracotta statues of a Mexican man, lying on the floor as if physically shattered with bones sticking out, only sometimes there would be a live agave plant or something coming out of an arm socket, and not a bone.

I strolled around it and looked closer, and as I did so, a piece of blue cheese rolled off my plate and bounced off the floor, and as I bent down to get it, it rolled under a giant limb.

I pretended like I was scooting in closer to look at a detail, but then I left, quickly, before anyone could see what I had done.

A little later, my one (light-skinned black) friend from Arkansas joined me, and as we rounded a corner, this cubicle was blocked off with chicken wire, and inside in the back was a short balding hispanic man in his mid- to late 30s in a thong with a few dollar bills stuffed in it, grinding against the wall, and as he turned to the people watching him, he displayed a very hairy untrimmed chest over a muscular paunch, and would hold your gaze intensely, as if he was mentally ill, while grinding his way to the front.

As me and my friend looked, he held our eyes intensely, creeping us out to the point where we had to get out of his range of vision, but even then, he grinded forward and leaned against the chicken wire and turned his head to stare at us, moving very deliberately and somewhat slowly, and never blinking or turning his eyes to the side, and starting to stick his hand out through the chicken wire...

As we quickly left, I glanced down, and it was a durational performance entitled "Don't Feed the [hispanic male first name]" done by [that hispanic male first name] [some hispanic last name] in 'Facilities and Maintenance'.

Teaching at the art school! (1 of 3): Fellow faculty.

I'm so stoked to teach my "modern American religious groups that do fucked up things with sex" class at the art school this semester.

Through friends, I've met a lot of MFA students in the past, and they're all really engaged, cool people who tend to get obsessed with interesting things...  I'm not sure that the BFA students are like that - they tend to be from richer families, it seems - but it still should be cool.

At a friend's party at the beginning of the month I met a (young) (white) (female) prof who teaches film, and she said that if you're in film or video, you're pretty much guaranteed to know what all your students look like naked.

"They use themselves as canvas," she was like.

Then, she told me about how she was curating a student film festival competition, and in this one piece, it was a documentary thing about 2 girls in a 3-way relationship, and it ended with them taking what looked like a glass vase but with a hole on the bottom, climbing into the shower naked, and shitting into it from both ends.

Only, the one girl messed up and dropped it while shitting, and the vase shattered, and she just started freaking out and crying uncontrollably because she messed up the take.

Then, the take begins again, and the girls have the largest shards of the glass vase, and they take it into the shower and actually manage to shit into it that time.

"No way," I was like.

"It was very bad," she said, "But I held judgment, and then some students on the committee spoke up and were like, 'This is awful,' and all I could think was, 'Phew!'."

I bit my tongue at that point, because actually, I think that could be a pretty sweet film, if done right.

A Recent Dream: My Coptic Article.

Recently, I dreamed I was at a conference where my recent Coptic article would be debuted...

As I sat there, Betty White was at the head table, as a celebrity guest who would be reading the papers.

After a bit of the first sentence, it was very clear that my clauses were too long and complicated, and that anyone not in the field couldn't understand it, and so she broke things up into short, stilted phrases where nothing made sense, and a part of me was beginning to wonder if she wasn't just a bit senile too, which was why her reading was so bad...

"I think you just have to read this one!", she said all of a sudden, putting the paper down halfway through the first sentence, and she let out a laugh that got laughter in return from the audience.

That made me relieved, and I admired her, since she gave both me and her a gracious out from an awkward situation.

My New Sunday Evening Ritual:

Every week I take a piece of paper, write the words "NEEDLESS ANXIETY" on it, then strike a match and light the paper on fire as I drop it in a glass and watch the words burn away.

My one friend who delivers singing telegrams went to a New Year's Eve party where people burned up their worries and cares, and she inspired me.

Window problems!

It's been super cold here in the city.

Sometimes, I open up my window to see how cold it is outside, so I can dress appropriately before leaving my apt. for the day.

Yesterday afternoon when I tried to do that, I discovered that my windows were frozen shut.

At night, condensation that had been sitting on the metallic window sills turned to frost - inside.

New Orleans vacation (11 of 11): New Years Eve.

For New Years Eve in the French Quarter, me and my one friend with the cat bet on how many people we'd see throw up.

Our rules:

1) We actually had to see them in the process of throwing up, not just someone leaning over and the pile of vomit already on the ground.

2) We had to leave whenever we felt like it, no stalling for time to try to win the bet.

At the end of the day, we only saw one guy throw up.

In New Orleans, they sell these hand grenade drinks in these distinctive green plastic containers that are fucking ridiculously huge:

At this one bar we popped into to get drinks around 11:30pm, this (20-something) (white) guy was passed out on a table next to one of them.

As we were in line, then, I look, and the guy kind of groggily wakes up, and as he slowly moves his head around, I can see this little gob of like opaque cream-colored white spit hanging languidly from the side of his mouth, and the next thing I know, he takes the empty hand grenade container, tips it a bit, leans forward, and just vomits up into it.

Then, he pauses, and vomits into more.

Then, he pauses even more, and vomits into it a final time, filling it up to like an inch-and-half from the top.

It was a plastic hand grenade container filled with vomit.

At that point, some bar staff came over to wake the guy up - he had passed out again - and wipe down the table.

As the guy staggered out, I could see a dark stain of vomit on the left elbow of his light yellow colored collared shirt he was wearing.

Worst of it is, since in the French Quarter you can walk around with drinks, I don't even think the guy had been drinking in that bar...  The bar didn't even sell hand grenades!

New Orleans vacation (10 of 10): More holiday home tour.

At that same house with the refreshments, this older (white) guy who were chit-chatting with at the patio said something offhandedly about the war of "northern aggression".

At the very next house, however, we had our only (black) tourguide of the day, this slightly potbellied (black) guy in his late 30s who had a southern accent and enunciated everything very precisely and seeemed kind of gay.

"And this is where the enslaved Africans used to go into the kitchen," he would say, gesturing to a door off the dining room.

Later, he said something like, "The [name of the family] Family had 4 enslaved Africans," too.

He even may have used that phrase once more, but I can't remember how.