I am moving to the community where I was born.

I am a Wine Personality.

I am schooling myself at home.

I am rooting for the Saints and this is why.

I am in agreement with a Republican…on this issue.

At a wine tasting earlier in the week, my new blogger/twitter friend Erika was describing her history on the blogosphere. It began with a “mommy blog” and as her children began to get older,  evolved into a “food blog.” She said that there was a time that all she really wanted to write about was the biggest, most painful thing happening in her life: her father’s illness and eventual death, but she felt held back by the subject’s melancholy and highly personal nature. So she stuck to the mommy and food writing.

Hear you, sister.

All the good…well, great, actually…stuff going on in my life has the cloud of *oh yeah, I’m getting a divorce* around it. I can’t shake the sad seriousness of this fact and the painful process of going through it when I start a post here. And I also can’t quite write about, either. (My lawyer is probably happy about this.) This leads to a lack of posts in general and fluffy, uninvolved ones when they do appear.

All this bloggy ennui and wishy-washiness will pass. [Lots of "time heals" clichés inserted here.]

And in the meantime, I’m sticking to wine and design writing.

Purging pictures taken from my iPhone in the last month.

I’m such a reticent packer. Love the travel, hate the process of getting there. And I will be there very soon.

New York, New York.

Lessons learned from the big road trip include, don’t eat fish and chips three times in one week in the suburbs of Dallas and don’t pack stuff you don’t wear at home. Silly chick-a-dee.

Except for: tights. Where oh where are those wool tights I know I’m going to want to wear?

The morning after returning home from the big road trip I woke up feeling stressed: Hurry–I need to pack-up and check out by 11:00 a.m.

That said, it is great, albeit strange, to be home. Save a couple of choice meals (Uchi, Café Pasquals, Café Amapola), the food is definitely better. Ah, and the L.A. weather and those gorgeous views and pretty, pretty cool people everywhere.

And traffic. Mistakenly got stuck in Rose Bowl traffic on the way to the gym. What’s up with all those orange t-shirts with cows on them? Oh. And why are my gym clothes tight. Oh.

Ah, Austin. (Not pictured above. That’s The Joule. Next to the pool. That I fell into.)

So happy to be here. Even though it’s one o’clock and I’m in the hotel room and back in my nightgown. Nap time? My hangover is coming in waves.

Prolly rally and go for a walk down by the river. It’s gorgeous outside. And I’m out of the suburbs and it’s NYE and the sky is blue and I’m all optimism and head-achy and happy and in love.

What I learned last night: mackerel is my favorite sushi ever.

And: Uchi is favorite place to have it.

And also: don’t try to stuff a menu under your shirt in front of four chefs and about 20 servers. You will get caught. Or rather, your cute drunk boyfriend will get caught and you will find him sheepish and giggling when you return from the restroom.

The bartender at Charlie Palmer’s restaurant in The Joule in downtown Dallas doesn’t like Cosmopolitans, but he does manscape.

I know this because I eavesdropped, not because I’ve seen his privates. I think I blushed when I heard it though.

Trim, shave, or both, I wonder?

Maybe that blush came after I asked outloud.

Night three of the big winter road trip was in Childress, TX and we stayed at our first chain hotel: the comfortingly generic Quality Inn. There was a painting of a golf course above the bed. The people next door were smoking weed and we were drinking Jack Daniels out of plastic cups.

In the morning we checked out of our luxurious digs and drove to the old downtown. Like so many old Western towns there is a central square around a large courthouse. It’s seen better days. The stone and brick buildings are fantastic but completely delapidated. Crumbling. But so great. I want to buy the whole downtown and make it into something.

We had a lovely, meandering country drive to Dallas yesterday afternoon. Made lots of stops including the coolest, quirkiest bookstore I’ve ever been to. (Lot’s of pics to post. As soon as I find that cord. Amongst my ridiculous amount of luggage. Really, eight pairs of shoes???)

And here we are. Last night we slept in a princess’ bed.

Bags are packed…outfit above included. Perfect for the 15 degree weather we’re about to encounter. First night is in a cozy wigwam in Arizona. The guy who answered the phone said: “The wigwam has a heater and cable tv.” Does that include Pay Per View porno?

What am I talking about.

Really my super-overstuffed bag is full of big, fluffy (and kind of sexy) sweaters. Bring on the cold.

The Big Winter Road Trip is firming up. Itinerary thus far:

LA to Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon to Albuquerque
Albuquerque to Dallas
Dallas to Austin
Austin to Marfa
Marfa to Deming
Deming to Phoenix
Phoenix to Home

With lots of stops at diners and dive bars and flop hotels along the way.

Okay, I’ll play too.

25. 5:55 – Charlotte Gainsbourg

24. When It Falls – Zero 7

23. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below – Outkast

22. FutureSex/LoveSounds - Justin Timberlake

21. The Neptunes Presesnts…Clones – The Neptunes

20. Picaresque – The Decemberists

19. Post – Bjork

18. Our Love to Admire - Interpol

17. The Black Album – Jay-Z

16. The Eminem Show – Eminem

15. Love is Hell – Ryan Adams

14. Funeral – Arcade Fire

13. Final Straw - Snow Patrol

12. Hot Fuss - The Killers

11. The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living - The Streets

10. Good News for People Who Love Bad News – Modest Mouse

9. Sound of Silver – LCD Soundsystem

8. Kid A – Radiohead

7. Gimme Fiction - Spoon

6. Voodoo – D’Angelo

5. Fever to Tell – Yeah Yeah Yeah’s

4. Garden of Eden – Paul Motain

3. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – Wilco

2. In Rainbows – Radiohead

1. Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea – PJ Harvey

(Eff…that was hard.)

Thanks to @sfj I couldn’t stop reading Ta-Nehisi. And thanks to Ta-Nehisi I can’t stop reading Cornelius Eady.

Victims of the Latest Dance Craze

The streamers choking the main arteries
Of downtown.
The brass band led by a child
From the home for the handicapped.
The old men
Showing their hair (what’s left of it),
The buttons of their shirts Popping in time
To the salsa flooding out
Of their portable headphones,

And mothers letting their babies
Be held by strangers.
And the bus drivers
Taping over their fare boxes
And willing to give directions.

Is there any reason to mention
All the drinks are on the house?
Thick, adolescent boys
Dismantle their BB guns.
Here is the world (what’s left of it),
In brilliant motion,
The oil slick at the curb
Danced into a thousand
Splintered steps.
The bag ladies toss off their
Garments
To reveal wings.

“This dance you do,” drawls the cop,
“What do you call it?”
We call it scalding the air.
We call it dying with your
Shoes on.

And across the street
The bodies of tramps
Stumble
In a sober language.

And across the street
Shy young girls step behind
Their nameless boyfriends,
Twirling their skirts.

And under an archway
A delivery boy discovers
His body has learned to speak,
And what does this street look like
If not a runway,
A polished wood floor?

From the air,
Insects drawn by the sweat
Alight, when possible,
On the blur
Of torsos.
It is the ride
Of their tiny lives.
The wind that burns their wings,
The heaving, oblivious flesh,
Mountains stuffed with panic,
An ocean
That can’t make up its mind.
They drop away
With the scorched taste
Of vertigo.

And under a swinging light bulb
Some children
Invent a game
With the shadow the bulb makes,
And the beat of their hearts.
They call it dust in the mouth.
They call it horse with no rider.
They call it school with empty books.

In the next room
Their mother throws her dress away to chance.
It drops to the floor
Like a brush sighs across a drum head,
And when she takes her lover,
What are they thinking of
If not a ballroom filled with mirrors,
A world where no one has the right
To stumble?

In a parking lot
An old man says this:
“I am a ghost dance.
I remember the way my hair felt,
Damp with sweat and wind.

When the wind kisses the leaves, I am dancing.
When the subway hits the third rail, I am dancing.
When the barrel goes over Niagara Falls, I am dancing.
Music rings my bones like metal.

O, Jazz has come from heaven,” he says,
And at the z he jumps, arcing his back like a heron’s neck,
And stands suddenly revealed
As a balance demon,
A home for
Stetson hats.

We have all caught the itch:
The neon artist
Wiring up his legs,
The tourist couple
Recording the twist on their
Instamatic camera,
And in a factory,
A janitor asks his broom
For a waltz,
And he grasps it like a woman
He’d have to live another
Life to meet,
And he spins around the dust bin
And machines and thinks:
Is everybody happy?
And he spins out the side door,
Avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk,
Grinning as if he’d just received
The deepest kiss in the world.

I’ve been posting pictures on Facebook (personal wall) of Lever House exhibits I’ve enjoyed.

And I’m looking for more. I can’t stop. Because I find myself obsessed…the new show looks bad.

Social networking is weird.

I couldn’t decide where to post the Lever House pictures I’ve taken over the last few years. FB? Okay, yeah, but which “wall”? Twitter? And if so, which account? The bloggy? And if so,  which one?

Nutty.

Sometimes cringing, sometimes sad, but really: mostly laughing…I’ve been manually copy/paste-ing my blog archive to a new host.

I comment on my own posts more than anyone, but second place goes to Clos. It’s crazy. Basically he was a whole other character in my bloggy story.

Which begs the question: what the eff does he do with all his free time now that he no longer communicates with me?

An example: September 2, 2008.

I hadn’t blogged in a couple of days and he had become distraught. Shit was going on in my life and I wasn’t sure how to write about it. Or if I should continue blogging at all.

Finally, I broke the silence, with a fluffy post.

And he approved:

I just came across the original artwork that I cribbed for my masthead. The “open 24 hours” image is tacked to the wall at the Somewhere Something studio.

Definitely time for an update on all shes-krafty fronts, but still dig the logo I made eons ago.

Went to a swanky screening of Tom Ford’s A Single Man last night.

I was hoping beyond hope HE would be there. TF’s been seen around LA recently and the NYTimes just did a feature story about his go at film making which took place at The Beverly Hills Hotel (ubiquitous, right? such things always seem to be either there or the Chateau).

Soo…I almost tripped and fell over in my ankle boots when I scooted by the seat in the theater with his name taped to it.

Michael Govan walked on stage and gave the introduction. Big fan of his too–I was shocked and nervous when he left DIA, but so happy to have him in LA. (The nervousness came from my fears for DIA’s future. I love this organization and want it to thrive. DIA:Beacon is a must see when I travel east–it is perfection.) Govan said some obvious things about TF’s greatness and a few words about the film.

Then it was time for the man of the hour.

Go ahead, guess what/who he was wearing.

So sharp, slick, dripping sex. And humble and articulate. The applause lasted a little too long and he demurred and invited us to judge the film for ourselves.

My review is at Swirl Smell Slurp (somehow it’s wine related).

I really enjoyed Hal Foster’s essay “Precarious” in the new ARTFORUM: insightful and concise reviews of five shows (Paul Chan, Robert Gober, Jon Kessler, Mark Wallinger, and Isa Genzken) in the context of what art in the last century is trying to achieve.

Read it.

And…beyond just a good art review, as a bonus there’s a bit of Self-Help advice in the closing paragraph:

I came to the term precarious via Thomas Hirschhorn, and many of his projects, such as Musée Précaire Albinet, staged in the Aubervilliers banlieue of Paris in 2004, are very much to the point here; his sometime collaborator the French poet Manuel Joseph has also used the term, in a short text on la précarité “as a political and aesthetic apparatus.”⁸ Yet what I want to underscore in the word is already present in the OED: “Precarious: from the Latin precarius, obtained by entreaty, depending on the favor of another, hence uncertain, precarious, from precem, prayer.” This implies that this state of insecurity is not natural but constructed—a political condition produced by a power on whose favor we depend and which we can only petition. To act out the precarious, then, is not only to evoke its perilous and privative effects but also to intimate how and why they are produced—and thus to implicate the authority that imposes this antisocial contract of “revocable tolerance” (as Joseph puts it).

I re-read this passage several times and felt the weight of it’s message: insecurity comes from the power we give to others.

Lists written by pop culture “experts” make you feel smart when you can say, Yeah I (saw, read, listened, etc.) that. And kind of dumb when you can’t. But they are fun, right?

From AV Club:

The best bad movies of the ’00s: I haven’t seen a single one these. And probably won’t. And don’t feel dumb about it at all, actually.

Our favorite film scenes of the ‘oos: I’ve seen a few of them (Ratatouille, Children Of Men, American Psycho, 25th Hour, Memento, Closer, You Can Count On Me, Before Sunset, Caché). Feel a little bit smart. And I hadn’t thought of Michael Haneke’s Caché in a while. Really is a stunning and scary film.

On our wine blog we ended the Thanksgiving Day post with the obligatory “I’m thankful for…” blurb and I, well, I couldn’t figure out what the eff to type. I actually struggled.

What an asshole.

What was/is my problem?

Not being grateful isn’t the issue. I am. I really, really am. Maybe it was the venue. Or typing such significant things for a snarky list. Or maybe it was the food/vodka hangover. I dunno.

Everything I ended up writing is true, true.

It’s a sensitive time of year. And it’s been a quite a year.

Yesterday’s Salon was fantastic…a really great group of people all of whom seemed to enjoy themselves and learn something–all while enjoying delicious wine. It was a treat to share our Sunday ritual with a group. Already planning the next one and making notes on how to tweak the Salons (less talking by me, for instance).

The festivities led to a lazy day. And now…I’m ready for a glass of wine.

I met Kenny, got harassed by Reda, and had my very first In-N-Out burger at The Battle at The Berrics 2 last night. Epic.

The ratio of boys to girls was like 607 to 18–so if you’re a single chick and like cute skater boys, you gotta get yourself invited to the third battle. (I’m not and I already have one of those.)

The chicks kicked ass at foos ball last night at Cha Cha. Of course we did.