the brothers dickman

I don’t read much poetry anymore. In fact, my dirty secret is that I’m sort of suspicious of poetry in general, which is problematic and hypocritical given that (a) I’m a writer and (b) poetry was my focus in graduate school. But the sad realization that came out of the latter experience was that some of the world’s most wonderful poets, as people, suck a big bag of dicks and furthermore have the terrible power to turn the most delightful poems into noxious d-baggery using something I call Poetry Voice, which is when someone reads each line of poetry as though they were asking a question in philosophy class.

You see, graduate school has this special power to make you loathe the things you thought you loved. Sometimes my relationship with poetry makes me feel guilty and cynical and conflicted, but then I think: what is poetry really about anyway if not passionate ambivalence?

While I don’t read much poetry in general, I make a special point of not reading poetry in The New Yorker. It tends to run two types of poems: b-sides from famous poets who are well past their prime, or paragraphs that end with lines like “Translated from the Polish.” (It’s the article that kills me—the Polish.) That said, I’m a big fan of the magazine's profiles, so I had no compunction about reading a recent profile Rebecca Mead wrote about identical twins and rising poets Michael and Matthew Dickman.

I’ll admit I was also drawn in by the photograph that accompanied the article, in which these twins somehow manage to look thoroughly Other and totally hot at the same time. I can’t figure out how they pull this off given that one Dickman looks like any given member of Duran Duran circa “Hungry Like the Wolf” and the other reminds me a little of Clay Aiken. I can't find the photo from the article, but this should give you an idea of what I'm talking about:





The article (“Couplet”) is actually really interesting even though I think it’s mostly a gimmicky exploitation of the inherent weirdness surrounding identical twins. This writer is all about twin mind-meld and painting a picture of these brothers as the town freaks, which seems like a bit of a stretch given that they live in Portland, for heaven’s sake.

Despite the tabloid sideshow-vibe of the article, it wasn’t until, like, page seven that I learned that the twins played the “pre-cogs” in Minority Report, those strange hairless albino creatures that softly thrash and moan in Tom Cruise’s Creepy Swimming Pool of the Future. I suppose that little piece of trivia really does make a strong town-freak argument, but still: Portland.

In retrospect, what I like least about Mead’s article is the quotes that she chose to represent the Dickmans’ poetry. She started off strong with this Michael Dickman quote, a sort of romanticising of abuse that reminded me a lot of Theodore Roethke:

They used to be good at being alive,
pointing their index fingers at
the trees, passing
invisible sentences
proclamations

knighting the birds
one by one

All down my street the new fathers
beat the kingness
out
of the
kings

(“Kings”)

But from there her choices became problematic. The first Matthew Dickman excerpt makes him sound like a high school kid who just read Ginsberg for the first time:

Dear Lents, dear 82nd avenue, dear 92nd
and Foster,
I am your strange son.

(“Lents District”)

Her descriptions of their poetry are downhill from there—she casts Matthew as a practitioner of delirious sentimentality in the tradition of Ginsberg and Whitman, when he in fact puts me more in mind of Frank O’Hara’s upbeat melancholia. And she makes Michael’s poetry sound really desperate and bleak when in fact it has this sort of strange religious quality. It was a misguided exercise in compare-and-contrast, and now that I’ve been reading their poems, I’d say she has the inversion exactly wrong. There is something really sad and dark at the heart of Matthew’s exuberance (see “Grief,” which blew me away), whereas the whole point of Michael’s poems seems to be transcending his own gloomy trappings. In fact, Michael can be really funny:

I think the light
appearing, then
disappearing

across the trunk of the live oak
is the boss of everything

Not You

(“Good Friday”)

In any case, by the end of the article, I was in L-U-V with Matthew Dickman, eighties hairstyle notwithstanding. Because how can you not love someone who tells an anecdote wherein he makes out with Allen Ginsberg out of pity, or who describes his childhood thusly:

“We were fiercely picked on. We were weird; we were twins; we had these government-issue glasses; and our last name had the words ‘dick’ and ‘man’ in it. So we came home crying a lot of the time.”

And while I think the Rebecca Mead got a lot of things wrong, what really shines through in every sentence she wrote is how the Brothers Dickman are totally in love with each other in the best possible way. Won over, I went out and bought both of their books—the rather epic sounding All-American Poem (by Matthew) and The End of the West (by Michael)--the first books of poetry I bought since grad school...and also the first time I've felt positive about poets-as-people in a very long time.

Check them out. These guys are the real deal.

tastefully weird

So I told you I’ve been hired as a consultant to curate a gift shop in my home state. When I nominated myself for this job, I saw my role as a curator/buyer—picking new products, placing orders, and maybe organizing a few displays—and also as a writer of some of the specialized media stuff that will become important once we phase in all the new stock. (More on this later.)

As it turns out, my role has been much more involved. What I envisioned as a side project has sort of taken over my life, but I don’t even mind because (a) I’m a control freak when it comes to work and (b) I’m having such an awesome time doing it. Why can’t this be my real job? I might be in the wrong racket.

I’ll set the scene sort of vaguely in the hopes that my employer doesn’t accidentally land here and stroke out over my salty talk (sort of a witness protection program for bitches). The shop is owned by an artsy non-profit that occupies two prominent buildings on the main drag in a quaint little town in the middle of nothing and nowhere. The building that houses the shop is really quite lovely—lots of high ceilings, open spaces, and wood floors—except for its stale Kountry Kraft color scheme, which isn’t even that bad, all things considered.

The shop itself is an awesome space that is currently obscured by (a) “products” that are basically trash that even the most industrious dumpster diver would ignore in favor of, say, bags of poo (b) the most god-awful decorating job you have ever seen in your life. It’s sort of interesting in that the space has so much potential, yet it could hardly look worse. It’s got this whole retirement-home-meets-cluttered-attic-meets-crazy-cat-lady’s-rummage-sale vibe going on.

So as I entered into conversations with the organization about my ideas for products we’d sell in the shop, one thing that emerged was that the space itself desperately needed a new look. Before those meetings, I had been working on a notebook (sort of a three-ring version of my inspiration board) where I stashed pictures I’d found in magazines and on the internet, as well as keywords and snippets that described the look I was trying to achieve—a catch-all repository for ideas both specific and general. And in between these conversations the notebook evolved into a full-fledged look-and-feel guide that I shared with everyone involved, just to make sure we were on the same page.

I guess they liked the notebook enough to give me creative license over a full-fledged makeover of the shop, which has been exciting and awesome but also incredibly scary given that, you know, I’m a writer and not a designer, a stylist, or a maker-of-things, as much as I wish that I were.

The first order of business has been redesigning the interior—creating a backdrop for the stuff I’ve been picking out. I have been working with an interior decorator, which initially made me all sorts of nervous. I was worried, first of all, about communicating the look I was after. And beyond that, I was worried that I was altogether out of my depth presenting this professional with a sad notebook of magazine cutouts. I thought he would laugh at me and then cover the whole shop in prissy florals and pastels.

I felt less like an asshole once we really started talking, but new challenges quickly emerged. I received the decorator’s first proposal, and while there were elements that I really liked, I also worried that the whole look felt sort of stuffy. I thought the products I had picked would look schizoid against a formally designed interior.

Part of the problem was establishing the color palette. I had envisioned a sort of neutral color scheme that was animated by small pops of bright, cheery color, but the challenge was continuity—the rest of the building is predominantly yellow and more than a little conservative, and we had to find a way to make the shop ebb and flow with its subdued surroundings.

What we landed on is a really subtle palette of creamy whites, barely yellows, and cloudy grays accented with soft metallics (champagne and gold) and black. But that first iteration was still feeling a little stiff and formal—the metallic and black accents were lovely, but maybe too straightforward. I wanted to punch up the look with unexpected details, but any whimsical gestures had to work within the constraints of the shop’s existing environment. Otherwise, it would seem disjointed, and also it probably wouldn’t appeal to the patrons of this organization, who are sort of, um, square.

And by god, I think we’ve done it. We always knew that we wanted to repurpose most of the shop’s old furnishings to save on expenses, so paint and decoupage had always been part of that plan. The shop has lots of built-in bookshelves that the decorator wanted to paint a pale yellow, but I countered with tastefully weird paint treatments for the furniture and for the floors. Then, when the decorator found an amazing wallpaper that we’re using in one small corner of the shop, the whole thing felt like it was coming together.

Theoretically, this transformation will be occurring over the next three weeks, so hopefully soon I’ll have some before-and-after pictures. Meanwhile, here’s a preview of some of the materials and techniques we’re working with.

Hand-blocked Wallpapers
We’re using like five different wallpapers in a variety of ways throughout the shop. Some of it will hang on the walls a la proper wallpaper, while other patterns will be used in decoupage applications on bookcases, tables, and other furnishings. All of the patterns are hand-blocked, which closely aligns with our wares since they’re mostly handmade. The pattern above is among my favorites we’ve chosen. I love the way it's sort of elegant and contemporary and folksy all at the same time, and I think its soft sheen will really warm up our neutral palette without feeling too fussy.

Faux Bois Paint Treatments


We’re talking about using a really pale cream-on-yellow faux bois to give the bookshelves more depth while keeping the mood light.

Painted Floors

This is the element I’m most excited about, but we don’t have final approval yet. I saw this picture of a stenciled floor online last year and would have tried it immediately in my own place, except for the fact that it’s rented. I thought my betters might find it too flamboyant but the decorator seems really enthusiastic about it (w00t!).

peep vs. peep

Easter is always a magical time here at the manse. This year, in addition to the bounty of my annual Easter basket (courtesy of my mother), I was invited to a friend’s corporate-sponsored White Sox extravaganza, where we sat in some special clubhouse sipping champagne while staring down at all the peasants.

But even those awesome things pale in comparison to my very favorite thing about this Easter, which was the Washington Post’s third annual Peeps diorama contest, wherein crafty disturbed people make elaborate dioramas out of Peeps marshmallow candies.

Basically, this contest is the most delightful thing ever. In addition to the dioramas, which are themselves hilarious, I love the spirit behind the idea—using these iconic candies in such a weird way perfectly captures the whole cutesy-creepy Easter aesthetic.

So this morning, even though I was murderously sleepy and slightly hung over after staying out late drinking whiskey, coming home, and then staying up even later watching three episodes of Battlestar Galactica wherein that Cylon Strumpet had an imaginary baby or something(?), I ran straight to my computer and literally clapped with anticipation as I pulled up the Post’s front page.

This year I was interested to learn that the Chicago Tribune ripped off the idea and sponsored the exact same contest, and I think a little exercise in compare-and-contrast illustrates what happens when someone has a cool, original idea that someone else steals and then cheapens. Let’s take a closer look at the winners of the two contests:



This is Post’s winner, a woman who made a Nighthawks-inspired diorama. You can’t really tell from this picture, but there are all these awesome details like a plate of carrots on the countertop. It’s well made, witty, and deceptively simple; you can take in the whole thing at a glance, but if you linger over its details you can really appreciate the artist’s craft.

Now, here is the winner of the Tribune’s contest:



WTF is this? Whoever made it took all of the fun and wit out of the whole enterprise and turned it into something ugly and pathological. Clearly, he or she dedicated an entire room of the house and at least a year to what is not so much a diorama as it is a chilling exhibit of some debilitating mental disorder.

Since so many contestants use ripped-from-the-headlines pop culture references, several dioramas recreated the exact same scene. For example, here is a contestant’s rendering of the Hudson River plane crash for the Post’s contest:



And here is its counterpart in the Tribune:



The former is orderly, coherent, and straightforward, while the latter looks like a schizophrenic vomited Peeps all over a model airplane. The Post’s contest makes me smile; the Tribune’s makes my head hurt.

Anyway, I strongly urge you to check out the Post’s finalists. My favorite is the Chinatown diorama with the brilliant perverse Peking Peeps hanging upside-down in the window of a Chinese restaurant. But since I couldn’t find a picture of that one to post here, I’ll leave you with my third-favorite, a subversive group of Passover Peeps.