Julia > Recent Status Updates

Our town today with Hank Fiset - at loose in the Big Apple

A trip around the moon

Alan Bean plus four

A month on Greene Street

Father and son going surfing on son’s birthday

Welcome to Mars

The newspaper going all digital, no print

Our town today with Hank Fiset - an elephant in the pressroom

Sweet. No judgement, just humour, some sarcasm and tenderness towards people, big or small

He jogged along the dark paths of the Tiergarten stopping to do push-ups at the steps of the monument to the Russian army complete with actual tanks that crushed Berlin in 1945.

A supporting actor on a European tour for a movie with Willa Sacks (?)

A junket in the city of light

Christmas Eve 1963 - peaceful cosy family Christmas and memories of a soldier after his mate’s call

Three exhausting weeks - absolutely hilarious

Our romance had ended years before; she got comfortable, I got restless.

You think there's some nobility in being above anger? Anger is a kind of fear. And fear saved you. ... You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus. ..
I just think about it a logt The ugliness of anger. I don't disagree that it can be harnessed. But it's so irredeemably ugly.

And then my friend told me about Orkideh and her installation and I thought I could write a book about it. Martyrdom. The gulf between my mother making nothing from her death and this artist in Brooklyn making something. These two opposite Iranian women... except it was the same person.

Painting saved me, but I can't say I loved painting, I painted because I needed to. What I really loved, what I love, is having-painted. That was the high.

2/2 It's easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.

1/2 It happened like it does for anyone, fame. Bullshit luck disguised as a lifetime of hard work. But also vice versa. ...
88% Yes, the sheer dumb luck, as many have said, as I've said myself. To get such a change from a gallery, even a small one, is one in a million. To catch the attention of a Times critic as a nobody, with no connections, no experience. Impossible. ..

Seneca said grief should last no longer than 7 years. Anything more was indulgent. Nazim Hikmet said 20th grief lasted at most a year. It dwindled like that. Maybe 21st century grief had gotten down to a fraction of that fraction, just a few hours before it was supplanted by necessity.

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, "It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn't David"

That's when everything became supersaturated. One of those memories you can squeeze like a rag and watch details drip and pool.

Cyrus told me once you were the best-selling poet in America. A dead Persian poet! ..
Well, I don't know how Persian the me they read in America really is.

But he was also awash in the world and its checkboxes - neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk nor in meaningful recovery, neigher gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim

Zee had joked that a hotel's fanciness was directly proportional to how long it took you to figure out how to turn on the showerhead

The kiss lasted three second, maybe four, but it set everything else in motion. My life was a painting I'd been staring at upside-down up until that moment, that moment when Leila wandered in and flipped it right-side up for me. Just like that. Everything clicked into place, the picture came into clarity.

Zee talked about how luxurious it felt to do nothing in New York City, a place where you could do anything. He kept saying "opportunity cost," that the opportunity cost of doing nothing in the city was so immense that it felt opulent.

And even those were written after he got sober, when poetry simply became a place to put his physical body, something he could do for a few hours without worrying about accidentally killing himself. That was poetry then, a two-by-four floating in the ocean. When Cyrus wrapped himself around it, he could just barely keep his head above waves.

whenever he asked her something she didn'T know the answer to, she'd write it down on a little notebook she carried everywhere and then, as soon as she could, she'd take it to the library to look up the answers.