Since a large part of my life is fashion and since it is often funny and interesting, I have decided to introduce it as another theme. Recently I’ve become obsessed with Vladimir Nabokov’s writing. From his prophetic Bend Sinister, to his eerily tender Ada, to the much loved Lolita, and in and out of collected poems and short stories his writing is impecable and awe inspiring. And so to celebrate the influence of models and fashion here is his amusing poem, “Ode to a Model.”
(Twiggy)
I have followed you, model, in magazine ads through all seasons, from dead leaf on the sod to red leaf on the breeze,
from your lily-white armpit to the tip of your butterfly eyelash, charming and pitiful, silly and stylish.
Or in kneesocks and tartan standing there like some fabulous symbol parted feet pointing outward — pedal form of akimbo.
On a lawn, in a parody of Spring and its cherry-tree near a vase and a parapet virgin practising archery.
Ballerina, black-masked near a parapet of alabaster. “Can one — somebody asked — rhyme ‘star’ and ‘disaster’?”
Can one picture a blackbird as the negative of a small firebird? Can a record, run backward, turn ‘repaid’ into ‘diaper’?
Can one marry a model? Kill your past, make you real, raise a family by removing you bodily from the back numbers of Sham?
My little sister Linnea has short fluffy brown hair, long legs, can recreate any good Johnny Cash song in perfect pitch, and recently became a model joining me in LA to shoot the new ck1 fragrance commercial. One weekend in July we shot a home video together pretending to be spies—her code name “Agent Russell;” mine “Agent Slotska.” I emailed the video to my agent and later the same afternoon he called to tell me he’d forwarded it to Steven Meisel and he wanted Linnea to shoot ck1. (Yes, Meisel has now seen me jump out of a bush screaming with a ninja move.) Below is the home video and the ck1 commercial— see if you can tell the difference!
One day my friend Lee Swillingham admitted to me that he suffered Pareidolia.
“What is that?” I asked him.
“It’s like when people see Jesus in their hamburger,” he said.
“You should take pictures of everything you see,” I suggested. “Then other people can tell you if you’re crazy or not. If you really are delusional then people won’t understand what the pictures are of. If, on the other hand, people can see what you’re talking about when you frame it for them, then you’ll know you’re much more observant than everyone else. “ He agreed and a month or so later sent me these.
People have many different interpretations of Pareildolia. Doing some brief internet research I found that some describe Pareildolia sufferers as crazy and insane, religious fanatics and worse. But there are those who see Pareidolia as an advanced human trait. The leader of this camp being Carl Sagan, an astronomer, who wrote,
“As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper. These days, nearly every infant is quick to identify a human face, and to respond with a goony grin (Sagan 1995: 45).
Of course trusting a scientist who uses the word “goony” isn’t easy.
I think it is Clarence Irving Lewis that provides a good middle ground. Founder of the philosophical school of Conceptual Pragmatism Lewis argued that one has no way of knowing whether or not perceptions are “true” in any absolute sense; all one can do is determine whether one’s purpose is thwarted by regarding it as true and acting on that basis. According to this approach, two people with two different purposes will often have different views on whether or not to regard a perception as true.
And so, here are the photos of what Lee sees. After you look at them leave a comment telling us whether you think he’s insane, advanced, or just one person with a unique perspective he has no reason not to believe.
…I was doodling. What do Columbia’s economics, writing, and statistics classes all have in common? Inspired doodling. After you look through the highlights of my semester, decide if you spend your time better than I did. Then send doodles to funnyandinteresting@gmail.com to enter the WHILE YOU WERE STUDYING worldwide contest! Winners will receive their own personal doodle by email.
At the Providence, Rhode Island stop the Acela conductor comes onto the loud speaker and announces “Ladies and Gentleman, this is a full train. Please take all your belongings off the empty seats and remember you only bought a ticket for one person and one seat.” Then he chuckles on the load speaker, coughs, and goes off the air. I dutifully remove my bag and newspaper from the seat next to me and make space for an oncoming passenger who turns out to be a middle aged woman, pale skinned, wearing a baggy hand made jean dress and a habit. A habit (I had to look this word up) is the headscarf nuns wear. She sits down next to me, gives me a serious judgment day look, and leans back closing her eyes. She opens her eyes, after this moment of silence — or prayer? — and takes out of her handbag a giant green ruggish thing: a book called Handbook of Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Performance.
“Ticket Ma’am?” says the conductor.
The woman leans over and picks up her purse. She shuffles through it concernedly.
“I can’t seem to find it. Oh no. I must have misplaced it!” She looks up at the conductor sorrowfully.
“It’s okay sister,” the conductor says and pulls a cross out from under his uniform.
“Thank you so much. God bless,” she says holding his hand in hers. He then punches a stub for her and moves on down the train. The woman then turns and looks at me with an unusual smile on her face. I take it as an invitation to chat.
“So where are you headed?” I ask. “Manhattan. I’ve lived there for years.” “Do you live in a nunnery there?” “Oh no, I’m not a nun,” she laughs as if I have made a ridiculous assumption. I look up at her habit and she explains, “Oh I just wear this for fun.” “The conductor called you sister.” “He did. People just assume I’m a nun.” “And you don’t mind?” I ask. “No I love it. That’s why I wear this thing,” she flips the bottom of the habit. “People are always doing nice things for me when I wear it.” “Yeah. I suppose the conductor was extra nice about that lost ticket.” “Lost nothing! I never bought one.” “Wow,” I say. She gives me another weird smile. Toothy and exaggerated. “So are you religious?” I ask. “Oh no, not really.” “But you’re reading about spirituality,” I say looking down at the book in her lap. “Yes. It’s fascinating stuff,” she says and opens the book.
We sit in silence for the rest of the train ride. I desperately want to ask her more questions but I feel awkward intruding upon the silent meditation of a nun, even if she is a fake nun. When we finally get to Penn Station I find myself helping her with her bags in the overhead luggage rack. I hand them to her and she says, “God bless,” and exits to the station.
I have asked Wesley Morgan, sophomore at Princeton, to write us a guest blog entry. Below is a brief interview with him, and then his essay. Why Wesley? Well, he is a generally fascinating kid who spent part of the summer in Iraq with the US military’s top dog General Patraeus.
Cameron: You had a pretty amazing summer. Tell me what you did. Wesley: After my freshman year at Princeton ended in June I went to Iraq for the summer as a reporter. C: That’s very brave of you, or crazy. What inspired you to go? W: I’ve been interested in counterinsurgency for most of my life. C: Not many people can say that, especially not many twenty year olds. W: I’m one of the lucky few then. Anyhow, about a year ago, I interviewed Gen. David Petraeus for my school newspaper, the Daily Princetonian. [Petraeus is an alum.] He liked my questions. And when he found out that I’m also an Army ROTC cadet, he stayed in touch. C: Are we talking about General Petraeus, the guy that the New York Times is always talking about? The guy in charge in Iraq? W: Yeah, that’s the one. Last winter, after he took command of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus suggested that I come to Iraq for the summer, and I of course jumped at the chance. My search for funding for the trip led me to Bill Roggio, a conservative blogger and embed who generously backed my project and helped me get credentialed as an embedded journalist. So, after working at a DC think tank for the first half of the summer, I flew into Kuwait in late July for what ended up being a pretty phenomenal trip. C: And you wrote all about your experience, right? W: I’ve written a lot about the military details and lessons learned from the trip at my own blog. C: Tell me a little about what you learned and the piece you wrote for me. W: Well Iraq is a fascinating place, so completely different from the States or any other country I’ve ever visited that I hardly know where to start – going chronologically or even just describing incidents that happened seems like it wouldn’t convey what the country and the soldiers are like. Since the last few days on my trip I’ve been thinking about how to write about Iraq through a different lens, one that would seem kind of out of place on my own blog maybe, but that would convey a sense of the place. Since you’re so artsy and original I think this blog is the place for it. C: I’m flattered! Thanks for talking to me. W: No problem. Thank you.
Here is the essay Wesley wrote for Funny and Interesting:
How I will remember Iraq
Before I left for Iraq, a soldier I know told me to choose carefully what book I brought along, because I’d always remember that as what I was reading when I first saw a war zone. I reread bits and pieces of Gen. Petraeus’s and Gen. Mattis’s counterinsurgency field manual while I was over there, and I did finish Harry Potter, but there really wasn’t a lot of time for reading (except the endless hours of waiting for flights, which I think are better spent talking to soldiers). There are movies and TV shows playing in every waiting area or lounge and on every forward operating base, but more often than not those just seem jarring and weird – watching episodes of Alias while waiting in a cavernous hanger, for instance, or a pirated copy of Transformers in the basement of a combat outpost between patrols, seemed strange and out of place, and not something that will stick with me as symbolic of the experience. What I will remember is the music I listened to here, and probably always associate a few songs with the experience.
A few months back, Tom Ricks wrote about soldiers’ music in a short piece in the Washington Post, and one the songs he mentioned I actually did hear a bunch of times. You know that song “America, Fuck Yeah!” from Team America: World Police, I’m not sure exactly how many times, but I heard soldiers playing that before or after patrols, either on speakers or once when a soldier gave me one of his iPod’s earbuds. Also, I probably played the “Army Strong” music from Army recruiting ads (yes, I do have it) a hundred times because I listen to it when I need to stay awake and write, which was all the time in Iraq, and it was also the background music to a slideshow that an infantry unit called the Black Lions was working on while I was with them. Those are both very hooah, Army songs, even though the Team America one is obviously tongue-in-cheek, and I heard them a lot, but even they don’t really seem like Iraq to me. They seem superficial somehow, and when I think back over the sounds I associate with the trip, they’re really not the first things that come up. Instead, two other, much more random songs do.
The first is a song called “Older” by Colbie Caillat, some new singer I know nothing about, which I got from the iTunes “new music” thing right before I left and which somehow copied itself into my computer three times, meaning that it is constantly coming up on shuffle. That song is completely un-Iraq-like – as one soldier told me with a combination of disgust and confusion when he saw it playing, “I can’t believe you’re listening to that queer-ass shit again,” which is a fair description, at least in Army vocabulary. But I heard it so many times while writing or updating maps and data that it was stuck in my head for a good week in Baghdad, and sort of still is. That might make for weird memories – associating a sappy, incomprehensible pop song with the sights and smells of Baghdad – but it’s true. I wonder whether that association will stick.
Most of all, though, the music that says “Iraq 2007” to me is “Mad World” by Gary Jules (I had to look up the name). It starts, “All around me are familiar faces, worn out places,” and you might know it from the movie “Donnie Darko.” When I first heard it in Baghdad, it took me a good hour to realize that that’s where I recognized it from. Anyway, sometime in my second week in Iraq, a Spanish journalist named David Beriain showed me a phenomenally powerful slideshow of his time with the 1-4 Cav in Dora, with that song in the background, and it has stuck like epoxy.
I’ve been back for two weeks now, and I still play that song whenever I’m writing about Iraq, because it brings back a vividness to the experiences and recollections like nothing else. I’d probably only heard it once or twice before I got here, but now it won’t go away. In Iraq, it was my brain’s default background noise whenever I spaced out from tiredness or was just trying to piece together everything I’d seen, heard, and smelled on a given day. When my mind went blank staring out the window of a Black Hawk, or sitting in the sweaty hold of a Stryker, I heard that song. When I sat down to write on military computers and didn’t have my own music, I heard it the whole time. It was running through my blank mind the first time my vehicle was ever shot at, and again the last time.
Two weeks ago, on the flight out of Kuwait, as I drifted in and out of consciousness while trying to run through the five weeks in Iraq in my mind, that song was just there, in the background, playing over a fuzzy mental montage of carbine-toting, grey-clad soldiers, crowds of hostile Shia pilgrims, an Iraqi cop with shattered and bloody legs, alert officers at intelligence briefings, frightened prisoners, and colorful reporters. The hundreds of new military and civilian faces I saw in Iraq, the least familiar environment I’ve ever been in, were anything but familiar, but when my mind was drifting sleepily back over all those faces on the plane ride – and now when I try to write about it – that was what I heard.
There’s something about that song. Maybe that’s why David chose it for his tribute to the cav soldiers he knew in Dora. Capt. Grim and the snipers on Haifa Street, the hateful glares of the Sadrist marchers, Gen. Petraeus with his intense energy and endless questions, the eccentric interpreters, the brilliant Lt. Col. Peterson, the journalists I met, the black-robed expressionless women, the quietly weeping sergeants at the Stryker memorial service, Lt. Col. Frank and his infantrymen, the soldiers from Southie in that Manchu infantry platoon, the blindfolded Mahdi Army detainees at a south Baghdad outpost, the eerie green drone feed of insurgents being reduced to chunks of meat by an Apache, the Sadrist intelligence source coldly giving us targeting intel on dozens of his comrades for a stack of cash, the Iraqi policeman washing the blood from his hands at Kalsu, the pride in the eyes of the Black Lions. All of those are, in a way, even if I saw them only once, familiar faces, faces I doubt I’ll completely forget, ever.
The Mad World Video—
Some of Wesley’s Photos— To read more about Wesley’s experiences go to his blog.
At the airport a middle aged French man sat two rows ahead of me on the bus running between terminals. He wore brown leather lace up shoes and black pants cuffed pants. On his right shoe a paper luggage name label was nicely attached to his laces. Perhaps in case he lost a shoe under his seat? Waiting in an airport line behind an older couple with practical American clothing and practical short hair I couldn’t help but notice the excessive luggage. The husband’s matched bags were snapped together in three descending layers from his larger wheeled jungle pattern suitcase. As the couple approached check-in the wife unzipped from the smallest outside luggage pocket neatly coiled green polyester straps with silver fasteners. They unfurl each belt and then put the Kelly green belts methodically around each of the already unmistakable suitcases so that now they will be easily seen on future luggage carousel?
In Battery Park three men in matching dark blue pinstripe suits sit on the bench across from mine. The first takes out his sunglasses from his breast pocket and the two others follow. All the sunglasses match. Another takes out his blackberry and begins to type a message and the two others remove their blackberries and begin to text as well. The make occasional eye contact, but it is brief and spy like. Synchronized, they all stand up and leave five minutes later.
Last night I was eating sushi in the East Village when a fifty something man dressed in a suit and tie carrying a black leather brief case sat down and ordered six Sapporo beers. He opened one and drank it. A woman also in her fifties then came in and sat with him. She was dressed in a loose dark-turquoise pantsuit. She refused a Sapporo and ordered green tea. They chatted and were very much engaged by each other, so much so I don’t think they noticed me staring. As I finished my ice cream five young Japanese women, none older than twenty-four or five came into the restaurant and sat down with the man and woman. They were dressed for a night of clubbing in tight red and black dresses, their hair ironed, their makeup fresh. The Sapporos were passed around. Conversation continued jovially and everyone appeared quite at ease with each other. The girls seemed comfortably intimate with the older couple and laughed and told stories at length.
My neighbor takes three chairs and a fan out of his apartment and leaves them on the landing. He puts a sign on them that says These Are Not Free. When I pass him in the hall I ask if they are for sale. “No,” he says, “Why would they be?” “Well if they’re not for free…?” I begin to reason. “They’re not for anybody, not for you, not for sale!” He has been unlocking his door while we converse and punctuates the now awkward silence by opening the door slowly, allowing it to screech while we stand too close and without conversation in the hall.
So many inexplicable events have led me to two conclusions. The first is that assumptions, that if something is not free it is for sale, that baggage tags are for luggage, and that women twenty-five years younger than the men they dine with are either daughters or prostitutes, have gotten me nowhere. The second is that I should stop staring at people because they are probably creeped out.
I’ve decided to turn this blog post into a contest of sorts. If you have an explanation for any of the above events, or if you are in fact one of the subjects of my confusion, or if you wish to report another odd event send an email to funnyandinteresting@gmail.com. The winners for the best submissions will be posted on the blog and will receive my hearty email congratulations; e-cards may or may not be involved.
(Twiggy)
