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Weak XXVII

2 July 2015

No. 9 (cartoon)

I’ve told you this before!

I’m not listening.

I’ve told you this before!

3 July 2015

Reading Hands

Stewart and Veronica have been married for a millennium, or at least since the last one. Stewart says they’ve developed a nuanced personal language that goes far beyond words.

“For example,” he explained, “I can often gauge her mood just by looking at her hands. If she’s holding a butcher knife and waving it at me, after all these years I can almost intuit that she’s probably annoyed with me.”

Ah, love. I wonder what it’s like to be that close to someone? Without getting cut?

4 July 2015

Alice Day

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote, “I am fond of children (except boys).” Thus it was no surprise that he took a seven-year-old girl, Alice Pleasance Liddell, on a boat ride one hundred and fifty years ago today. On that historic trip, he told her a story that’s still quite popular today.

Dodgson is more popularly known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll. It’s now been exactly a century and a half since Alice was the first person to hear the tales of Alice in Wonderland.

I’ve always liked Carroll’s book, especially the Dutchess’s wise advice: “Be what you would seem to be—or, if you’d like it put more simply—never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

How can a timeless story be that old? I shall have to ask Alice when she’s three meters tall.

5 July 2015

Listening to Explosives

The last thing Devon Staples heard was the sound of a mortar exploding. It was also probably the loudest thing he ever heard; he died after the projectile exploded beside his head. Authorities reported that alcohol was involved.

Staples should have been paying more attention to the news: a Michigan man died a few days before then when a lit fireworks projectile he was holding beside his head exploded. Authorities reported that alcohol was involved.

I’ve never been injured experimenting with explosives, and remain comfortable playing with them. On the other hand, alcohol appears to be much deadlier than I ever imagined.

6 July 2015

I’m Grateful They’re Dead

The musical—I use the term loosely—ensemble the Grateful Dead played its final concert yesterday. What is there to say about a group of hippy shysters whose most notable accomplishment was to monetize mediocrity? Three words come to mind: good fucking riddance.

I fear, however, that their last concert wasn’t their final one. They’ll regroup if they live long enough to run low on money; I’ll be most grateful if that never happens.

7 July 2015

The Baking Catch

Brandon showed up at my studio with his friend Anita. She’s a baker at Le Marais Bakery, and brought some great bread that was still warm from the oven. I was struck by her appearance, especially her elegant hands.

I asked her how she could bake for weeks on end and not have any burn marks on her hands, adding that I had a couple just from putting frozen food in the oven. She told me that there was a simple way to avoid such injuries that she and her colleagues relied on, and asked me if I’d like to know what it was.

She was playing me like a cheap fiddle and I loved it.

“What’s the secret?” I asked.

“You have to have the hand-eye coordination of a four-year-old,” she explained.

Dang; I knew there had to be a catch. Why is there always a catch?

8 July 2015

Twin Death Bed Revisited

Julia asked me about my Twin Death Bed piece. I was confused; it’s something I thought about doing fourteen years ago but never fabricated. Donald Judd would have understood my temporary amnesia.

“You can think about it forever in all sorts of versions,” he noted, “but it’s nothing until it’s made visible.”

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©2015 David Glenn Rinehart