ROB V. FUNERALS
(Or “why I loved my grandmother, but hated her wake – and hope that when I die, I’m outlived by at least one friend who will have the balls to notify everyone of my demise by altering the voicemail prompt on my cellphone to say, “If you want to pay your last respects to Rob, please come to the White Sands dunes of New Mexico where I plan to burn his skinny, pale carcass, drink Hendrick’s gin and read some of the more difficult passages from ‘Infinite Jest.’”)
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I almost wrote this column about the lack of transparency/sincerity in the arts (after finishing a freelance job for which I had to answer a magazine Q&A for a very gifted/successful photographer who felt pressured to sound “smarter” and “more conceptual” to impress a bunch of art-world bozos) or the inefficiency of the internet to help one definitively self-diagnose abdominal pain (after a week of wondering if the dull ache in my right side was the byproduct of the 5k I recently ran or the night of pounding beer, beer, beer that followed at Spitzer's, Vol de Nuit and Rabbit Club).
But how much can you really write about the unfortunate necessity of appealing to superficial would-be patrons/curators or the effects of fat deposits on the livers of surprisingly fast short-distance runners? And wouldn’t laying out some oblique wishes for my funeral be more important if I am, in fact, killed by cirrhosis/ hepatitis/ swallowing a blue Lego than some swan-song screed about how “juxtaposition” is just a douchey way of saying that when something is next to something else it changes the perception of each?
I think so too...
