A Big Laugh

I once worked in a design studio. The studio was open plan. So, it was just one big space that several artists rented out-all doing different things. So we were all in one space, eclectic, eccentric and everyone thinking they were more high-minded than the next guy.

There was a man named Harry who worked in the space next to my space. He was one of the most esthetically driven people I have ever met, but very very impractical. He once told me to clear the desk off of all of the papers and magazines I was working on, just so it would be clean. He was a minimalist. He was a minimalist. He often had a vase of white tulips on his desk. He loved Basquiat and sushi from the Food Emporium. He stole our cokes in the fridge. He never paid the bills. He walked around with no shoes on, just socks and even if I could not see his feet, I knew he had no shoes on, because he was suspiciously quiet when he walked. He talked on a portable phone and had it on speaker, but held it up to his ear. He sometimes tucked himself away in his boxes of organized clutter and set up a chair and slept. We followed the snore and we found him. He never finished anything but he had new ideas every day. He was the editor of a quarterly magazine, but it only came out once a year. He owned two apartments next to one another in the West Village. He once told me he hated money. He had a wife named Marion, but they weren’t married.

But most of all, Harry laughed. He laughed so loud and deep that when you heard his laugh, you wished you were laughing too. His laugh started with a drawn out {Ha}, then a pause, and then more {Hahahahah’s} followed. It carried through stairwells, through walls and doors and into reluctant hearts who he owed money to. Harry died this week and the world is less one very big laugh.

remove bouche

There is a quote about women’s fashion that I cannot find, but it goes something like this. {Before you leave the house, when you are fully dressed, remove one accessory, or article of clothing}.

The idea here is to emphasize minimal elegance.

Well, I have taken this idea and applied it to emails and it seems to be serving me well.

I always write too much to the wrong people and so, right before I send the email, I remove one sentence. The one sentence that is a little too strong, a little too iffy or bold or soul bearing. There is always one.

tell me a tale of crazy

Tell me, do you think there could be a connection between being paranoid and being creative? I say this because I am certifiably occasionally both. More one than the other I would say. and I know that both require connecting ideas in long strings or networks, things that normal people may not connect, and the next thing you know you are either talking crazy or talking eureka.

and why, tell me, is it that when a man in history is a little crazy he often gets the crazy genius title. Whereas a woman who is crazy is just all Zelda Fitzgerald and should just sink away with her intense grey eyed stare and wine glass shattering incidents, and be forgotten? Tell me about crazy women who have been lauded, and not just as a romantic curiosity, tell me.

Five Second Fiction

You know how when someone uses a hypothetical person as an example of a point in conversation...when someone just invents a little fictional character to illustrate a story they are telling. {you know, the guy who...}

Well, I had a thought today about all of those five second fictions...lets get all those people together, all those jokers who never existed and who only enjoy only a second of our time. The ideas of people who have no purpose other than to briefly represent something, an act or a type of person, or a situation.

What if we let them enjoy more time in our thoughts, what else would they become, what kinds of things would they do?