Fair Face of Flanders

Today's New York Times blog article on weeding out excessive Facebook friends is just the thing to cure yourself in the new February month of Valentines and ice-slicked streets: better to be close to the ones you truly love than to be bogged down by a host of peripheral acquaintances.

The other night I attended a lecture at the Yale University Art Gallery by two world-renowned experts on Picasso. One of the speakers was a close friend of Picasso's. They talked more about long wine-soaked lunches and torrid affairs than anything else. Apparently, the original love of Picasso's life, Olga, a beautiful Russian ballerina, was wounded and forced to walk around with a cane soon after their marriage. From then on, she became a monstrous figure in Picasso's eyes. He was never faithful to her.

I would be interested to discover some famous male artists who weren't womanizers. Maybe Edward Gorey or Joseph Cornell. At the reception for the lecture, they served Picasso's favorite cocktail, a Kir Royal, which seems a bit flighty for Picasso.

Image Consumption

There is something to be said for being trapped in a library for hours on end. It can lead to agonizing forms of procrastination and exquisitely OCD behavioral patterns. Whenever I arrive in the pristine art & architecture library, I retrieve my stack of enormous books from my shelf, spread them across an empty table, lay out my various pens and highlighters, arrange my Blackberry, iPod, laptop, gum, planner, sheets of various inspirational notes, then I open my computer, and proceed to write a blog, because, well, it is quite fast-moving in comparison to my senior thesis.

Gauche Things to do in the Library:

1. Wearing leggings in garish colors instead of pants, and tromping around loudly in fierce winter boots as you search for your books in the stacks. The leggings can have a dizzying effect upon the other, more focused, students.

2. Typing on your laptop while sending and receiving text messages every 90 seconds. You may not think that the vibrations of your phone irritate those around you, but the fact that you have a raging social life (while they are married to their book on "Ancient Oriental Tea Caddies") may upset them more than the disturbance itself.

3. Picking up men. Men are here to work, not to respond to flirting.

4. Picking up women. Women are here to study, not to be publicly embarrassed by your inability to flirt while pretending to be in the process of thinking "really important things."

5. Blogging, while pretending to be in the process of thinking "really important things."

The above picture is of the sinister Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. Right now it's surrounded by bare winter tree branches and a frozen artificial pond.

Behooves You

During yet another pilgrimage to Manhattan from New Haven, I had a surreal extended tea time with the famous Vogue and Vanity Fair photographer, Jonathan Becker. His two-storey Sutton Place studio is a converted doctor's office with exquisite wood paneling, linen screens, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and shell-shaped folding doors reminiscent of Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre in Paris. Becker's world is of a day and age "When people wanted to work at magazines," when Town & Country spreads possessed an understated elegance that had little to do with the demands of advertisers and more to do with visual quality and articles for the readers.

Dressed like a European gentleman and smoking a cigar, he chatted with me in the most leisurely and refreshing manner. With the idea in mind of researching for my senior essay on the society photographer, Slim Aarons, one of Becker's mentors, we ended up talking for three hours about everything from his year in Francois Truffaut's Parisian maid's quarters, to good old boarding school kung foolery. Being in his studio was like being transported to another time when people could sustain a conversation without flinching at the buzz of their Blackberries.

The search for the secrets to Slim Aarons' intriguing/garish/mesmerizing/glossy/documentary pictures continues, and I still miss old Manhattan—the one I never ever knew.

The Lonely Hearts Club

New Haven's Duncan Hotel is a vision in authentic outdated suicide aesthetic. My glorious coucou troubadour friends took a trip to picturesque New Haven to visit me in my collegiate glory. The evening was filled with the following things (not necessarily in this order): sipping wine, examining Slim Aarons photography for senior essay research, dancing in the attic of a grungy house on Howe Street, sleeping in a claw-footed bathtub, drinking a curiously strong champagne and whisky cocktail, singing "My Funny Valentine" while ambling down Chapel Street, ordering Alpha Delta Pizza, walking up and down five flights of stairs due to out-of-service elevator attendant at suicide Duncan Hotel (to retrieve Alpha Delta pizza), sleeping in purple leggings under suspicious satin bedding.

My dear friend came to visit us around one in the morning. During the walk from his off-campus apartment on Edgewood Street to the Duncan Hotel, he thought contentedly about how lucky he has been to have survived almost an entire four years at Yale without encountering any of the crimes of allegedly sketchy New Haven. At that very moment, two anonymous Wankers of the Week approached him from behind, and before he knew it, he was being punched in the face by an aggressive stranger with a shaved head.

With the doors of the David Lynchian Duncan Hotel only steps away, my friend raced to the entrance. The nighttime receptionist buzzed him inside, saving him from a potential sidewalk tragedy. Safe and sound in the hotel suite, he paced around with a new found appreciation for life and a slight anxiety about an unhinged jaw.

The Class Dynamic

I am very much in love with one of my professors. A friend came to me desperately in the Art Library today with a similar predicament, asking, "What should I do? What can I do?" I am thinking it over and will get back to her with a more detailed plan. I have done the oh-so typical frustrated undergraduate girl dating the graduate student thing, a couple of times. But it turns out that the German Studies PhD student you think is so cute is actually one of two things, or two of two things:

1. Too absorbed in his eleventh year of his dissertation to tend to your basic needs in a romantic relationship.

2. Secretly dating the rest of the undergraduate student body, male and female.

I am going to advise my friend to do one of two things, or, if she's really desperate for a proper date with this ravishing professor, she can do two of two things:

1. Attend his office hours with such frequency that it becomes clear that she is interested in more than just edification in "The History of the Viking Culture."

2. Attend the 300-student lecture wearing nothing but her laptop case (which she can then use as a convenient seat cushion when she is explaining herself in the dean's office).

I recently met a new graduate student, a real over-achieving dashing type who smells of musk, was raised abroad, and knows Japanese. I don't think I'll have to resort to the whole laptop seat cushion fiasco. Unlike me, he could never be gauche, even if he tried.

The Good Life

It is a labor to forget those once loved. My Parisian friend asked me, "Is love possible? And not in a friendship?" I had to tell her, "I don't think so." A friend of mine is struggling in his marriage—the problem being that his wife is "emotionally checked out of the relationship" and is satisfied with that. This dynamic is more common than people let on. Romance and love become marriage and parenting, which often degenerate into the disconnected cohabitation of two veritable strangers, more business partners in the raising of children than anything else.

Is it idealistic to ask for more? To expect perfect lasting love that sustains a spark, along with beautiful children, a lucrative (and fulfilling) career, good health, and a country house? When I hear of people staying in unhappy marriages, "for the sake of the kids," "for the sake of avoiding an unpleasant divorce," I cringe. I am a firm believer in the unapologetic eradication of denial. There is nothing worse than living a lie. Sometimes the only way to maintain human energy is to trudge unabashedly into the darkness, and to hope for spring.

The above picture is of two little fellows that my Parisian friend mustached and named: "Alberto Donatti." He is quite cute, in the end.

Pirates in Winter

There's nothing like a shot of two beautiful semi-foreign souls to purge oneself of a mid-January existential crisis. The Parisian love of my life is on her annual winter visit to Manhattan. Decked out in various fur garments (including an old-fashioned muff that most New Yorkers have only read about in Tolstoy novels, and black fur boots that look like Park Avenue puppies), she is the only sensible companion for a New York snow. We became the Three Coucou Troubadours with the help of her equally internationally disposed friend, the Korean Captain of everything from Italian car design, to Egyptian desert meditation, to home-cooked Japanese "porridge" breakfast (an elegant "rice bowl" dish, with uni, seaweed, and root vegetables, that is just the thing for an eye-opening morning).

I am still waiting for my senior thesis inspiration to solidify itself, but until then, it's nice to be in a quiet snow with two friends who live by the belief that type-A planning can kill the creative energy of life. With the proper company, any day can feel like a nautical getaway.

Frigid Fantasies

I am overwhelmed by the prospect of spending a solid two months buried under a pile of books in the Art & Architecture Library. Luckily, the interior is recently renovated to glamourous mod good looks, and library intrigues always abound. Just this afternoon I was innocently making my way to the ladies' room, when a former Wanker of the Week whom I hadn't seen in eight months, emerged from the men's room. We had a brief exchange that was only somewhat awkward. My suspicion is that he's evolved since I last saw him in the sultry month of May. Perhaps the ice will thaw eventually.

Earlier this week I had another reunion, which involved an unfortunate incident on the edge of a frozen, snow-covered lake. It involved three things: an ATV, a bramble bush, and a missing gold hoop earring.

My Fiction Writing professor is an effortlessly dapper Midwestern expatriate who ordinarily lives in Berlin and writes for The New York Review of Books. He opened our first class by declaring, "There are only two reasons to write—desperation and revenge." Sadly, both motives suit me quite well.

Fireplace

"Shopping Period" is the decadent time during the first two weeks of every Yale semester when students can enter and exit classes as the mood strikes them. For indecisive undergraduates torn between studying "Biophysical Spectroscopy" and the "History of the Opera Libretto," Shopping Period seems like a necessary luxury. But for faculty, it can be a degrading return to middle school's last-picked-at-dodge-ball dilemma.

Undergraduates have free reign to be as gauche as they please. It is acceptable, even common, for students to walk into a lecture midway through, listen to the professor utter seven words, decide they don't care for the color of the professor's shirt, and promptly waltz out of the classroom as quickly as they arrived. Becoming a celebrity professor takes a lovely accent, a fetching wardrobe, a naughty slide show with which to open, or at the very least, a bestselling book.

My life is like a dream now that I have a proper Woolfian Room of One's Own, above an Oxfordian Gothic arch, and with its own green slate fireplace reminiscent of Charles Ryder's hall of residence in Brideshead Revisited.

In Transit

Roman Polanski's Repulsion with Catherine Deneuve is a beautifully atmospheric look at two weeks in a young woman's life as she suffers from paranoia and sexual trauma. The rape and murder scenes turned me onto Roman Polanski's directing for the first time. Deneuve is perfect as she creeps around her dark London apartment in her diaphanous nightgown, hoarding the rabbit carcass that her older sister was supposed to cook for dinner. Deneuve's 1965-beauty is the sort that Gwyneth Paltrow exuded in her pre-holier-than-thou-pseudo-British-motherhood days.

On the eve of my return to university life, after an eight-month hiatus, I am struck by the ridiculousness of a student's lifestyle: the moving in and out of at least four dorm rooms or off-campus apartments, the procuring of two-month summer sublets in high-rent internship cities, and the holiday returning home for awkward lengths of time. I used to think it would be better to do college in two or three years, without long summer vacations, but with the current state of the economy, the thought of remaining indefinitely in Yale is more and more appealing. A recent college graduate told me that she had a "hire-and-fire" situation with two jobs before even entering the building.

Zest of a Lemon

A day of freezing ice and rain in New England is best spent at the Peabody-Essex Museum, ogling the eerily atmospheric Yin Yu Tang Qing dynasty merchants' house. As the historic Chinese house's only visitor today, I was alone with the two guards, amidst the trickling raindrops and grey natural light of the atrium.

My New Year's Resolution is to give off more positive energy. When seemingly gloomy situations present themselves, I will try to create lightness from them. It is a bit like making lemonade out of lemons, but more often than not, it will be a matter of simply enjoying lemons. My favorite high school English teacher used to eat straight-up lemons, ranting about their health benefits. He'd even chew on and eat the peels, since they apparently carry many of the nutrients.

Gauche New Year's Resolutions:

1. Resolving to lose weight. It's tragically unoriginal, and better not to waste your energy on something as arbitrary as a number.

2. Resolving to quit drinking. Drinking too much is all relative. Maybe simply spending less time with your relatives will alleviate the desire to drink excessively.

3. Resolving to save more money. Being thrifty is an underrated art, but by the year's end, your bank may go under, and who knows if the U.S. Treasury will be in a position to insure your savings? Spend blissfully and enjoy the moment.

The above picture is of a pair of salt shakers from 1780 (possibly Austria or Bohemia). They are made of glass, paint, and gold leaf. I was struck by their day-glo quality. Whatever happened to the tradition of married couples having portraits of themselves painted on their kitchenware?

Anxious Landscapes

Months since my last Manhattan footsteps, contemplating the after-college depression-era job market, I read an article on "How the City Hurts Your Brain." The pace of urban life not only tends to put people in foul moods but also impairs a person's memory and ability to focus. Jonah Lehrer's article touches on a phenomenon that I experienced while living in Manhattan: "A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things." In the country there is no drunk male aggressor propositioning girls on the street corner, no subway system packed with people in unreasonably close contact, no shiny illuminated store windows luring passerby to buy luxury goods. With all the energy it takes to avert one's eyes, there is little left to pay close attention to all the lovely things in one's life: the good book, the face of the new lover, the beautiful film.

To alleviate the frenzied plight of the urban brain, scientists suggest that even a simple view of a tree outside one's window, or in a picture frame, can make a difference. A more major shift away from skyscrapers, density, and underground transit appeals to me. Perhaps I will move to Miami, take in some sun, and live with ficus trees and a cat. It will be a sort of retirement at age twenty-two.

In light of the natural world's benefits to the brain, the Tara Donovan exhibition at the ICA in Boston transforms everyday objects into whimsical landscapes that possess the gradual mutability of a wave. The above photo is of a man standing in front of a transparent wall of vinyl. It reminds me of the sand art toy at my grandmother's house on the beach.

Get Tested

The only relief that comes with New Year's Eve is that it marks the end of the frustrating string of holidays. The season from mid-November through January 1st reinforces the conventional and exhausting notion that a person should be a part of an intact family unit and a romantic couple. New Year's Eve is especially at fault when it comes to this institutionalized feeling of inadequacy that I haven't found The One, or at least The One to kiss me when the annual clock turns.

Yesterday my sister and I decided to make a positive change away from convention. First, we went to Project Trust, a free clinic in Boston, and got OraQuick Advance rapid HIV tests. Within twenty minutes we had some refreshing news to ring in 2009. To celebrate, we prepared a Spanish tapas feast, drank champagne and sangria, and watched Almodóvar's exquisitely meta film of transvestites-and-priests-and-familial betrayal, Bad Education. As the New Year approached, we watched Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together. After Almodóvar's campily fantastical tableaux of drag queens and Wong Kar-wai's dreamy photographic images of Chinese gay men in Buenos Aires, the approach of midnight recessed into the background.

We fell asleep around 11:15, having had just enough to drink to make us sleep like babies for twelve hours (two glasses). No offensive parties cluttered with uninteresting guests, no big crowds or foolish drunks, and no distracting boyfriends or wankers of the week--only the sweet scent of coriander and fennel prawns, and the lovely homoeroticism of world cinema. Jealous?

(The above photo is of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum courtyard, all dressed up for the holidays.)