The Urban Sherpa - a blog by Christopher DeWan

(of all the blogs in all the towns in all the world, you walk into mine...)

Featured "Blast from the Past":

Stella of the Angels

Originally posted: January 22, 2009

(Also available as a downloadable MP3, thanks to Miette's Bedtime Story.)

I lost focus so I went to a fortune teller. I picked the first one within walking distance who took credit cards. She asked me to hold out my hands, and as soon as she touched me, I got a hard-on. Within ten minutes we were fucking on the sofa.

"You've got a really strong love line," she said.

I moved in that night. That was three years ago...

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Recent Entries:

Change We Can Believe In rating=2 new!

July 29, 2010
File under: Politic License

Change we can believe in

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Blog of the Future rating=3 new!

July 16, 2010
File under: Cogito Ergo, Mythic Proportions, Under the Hood

There's a blog that sometimes links to my blog, so people who read that blog sometimes read this blog too. Whenever this other blog links to my blog, I'm flattered: I sometimes doubt that anyone reads my blog. I sometimes doubt that anyone reads anyone's blog, except their own. So it's reassuring to see that someone has in fact read something on my blog, and even gone so far as to recommend that others read it, too.

In fact, whenever this other blog links to my blog, I read this other blog. It's as if their affirmation of my blog confirms my opinion of their good taste, and then I want to see what else they're thinking. I read it diligently, I'll find things I think are interesting, and often I'll add a link somewhere on my blog back to this other blog, so that presumably, the people who are reading my blog (if there are any) are now also reading this other blog, because of my recommendation. I assume this other blog sees that I've linked to them, and this causes them to read my blog more closely, and maybe find something they like enough to recommend to their readers.

It all reminds me of the closed-off glass globe they have at the Natural History Museum which has been sealed for years and contains an entire self-contained ecosystem, but would probably smell really bad if you open it up.

But it seems to work.

The closed-off glass globe and the cross-linking between blogs, that is.

However... a distressing thing has started to happen, because now this other blog is no longer linking to stories I've written. Instead, it links to stories I haven't written yet. It quotes these unwritten stories, and it points its readers to my blog seeking these stories which don't yet exist. It must be very confusing and disappointing for these readers.

The stories which the other blog says I've written, even though I haven't—I don't know if these are stories I would have written sometime in the future; but they seem interesting to me; so I write them.

I worry that the story I wind up writing is not be as good as the story that I was supposed to have written but didn't write.

These recommendations come, and I write for them, trying to catch up with their expectations, always a step behind, hoping not to fall two or three steps back, hoping not to stumble, hoping not to fall, trying to anticipate their next want, trying to fill it, to keep them happy, all of them, the readers and the future readers I don't yet have but apparently someday will. What do you want, stranger? And what will you want after that?

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Voir Dire rating=2 new!

July 13, 2010
File under: Cogito Ergo, Pithyisms

After Kant, can anyone ever swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"? Can anything be "beyond reasonable doubt"?

Our oaths and standards of proof really need to be brought into the epistemic 21st century....

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The Secret Museum rating=3 new!

July 11, 2010
File under: Anecdotal Evidence, Art Explained

or, Small Wonders from the American Collection

While walking through the hodgepodge and (to my taste) pretty unremarkable fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum ("American Art": side-by-side exhibitions of furniture, commissioned portraits, Abstract-Expressionist painting, bejeweled flatware, and a few sculptures of bronze, marble and wood—though separate sculptures, and not all those materials within a single sculpture1), this happened:

A couple approached, then unlocked, then opened a small knobless door situated discretely between two (boring) paintings—"Mrs. Sylvester Gardiner, née Abigail Pickman, formerly Mrs. William Epps," (1772) by John Singleton Copley2 on the left, and "George Washington," (1776) by Charles Wilson Peale3, on the right. This door was so unassuming that if I'd noticed it before4, I'd have taken it for a service closet.

Inside—I only saw it for a few seconds—was a small black pedestal, maybe waist-high, with a glass case on top and a single spotlight shining down upon it; and inside the case, centered within the spotlight, a small, abstract bundle of sculpted glass: fragile rays shooting out from a center and then ending in a hundred tiny droplets, so it looked maybe like a representation of pollen, or a snowflake, or, judging by the cascade of light that radiated off it, maybe a will'o'the'wisp, or a model of something powerful and subatomic. It was the most delicate, beautiful thing I've seen in this museum.

The couple took a quick photo, then closed and locked the door. A security guard pushed at it, to confirm that it was locked5 6, and then, their attention gone, it faded unremarkably back into the wall: it all but disappeared.

Then I noticed these secret closets are all over the museum.

And because mystery is more wondrous to me than answers, I never asked what or how or why.

1. The Brooklyn Museum's American collection is a sloppy survey of American art history which resembles your grandparents' attic, if your grandparents were friends of art collectors, but not collectors themselves, except accidentally, e.g., as the recipients of gifts. The following examples are all currently on display in the four smallish rooms that make up the American collection, arranged in such a way as to cause maximum confusion and frisson among museum patrons:

    a. Emblems of the Civil War, 1888, Alexander Pope.
    b. Giraffe Head, 1850-1900, maker unknown.
    c. Green Yellow and Orange, 1960, Georgia O'Keeffe.
    d. Chest of drawers, circa 1690, maker unknown. etc.
    e. Water jar, 1700-1750, Unknown Zuni artist.
    f. New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, no. 2, 1899, Thomas A. Edison.
    g. etc.

2. One inscrutable puzzle of mimesis is how the bearer of such a storied epithet could be rendered so inert in portraiture; but such was the style of the day.

3. Not the Gilbert Stuart portrait that we remember so fondly from elementary school, nor quite the other Peale portrait which graced our middle school, but this graceful albeit thin-headed one.

4. I hadn't.

5. As did I, once the guard stepped away.

6. It was.

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If wishes were fishes rating=3 new!

June 24, 2010
File under: Nursery Proverbs, Pithyisms

If wishes were fishes,
the sea would be tea,
and hope like a rope
of pearls around me.

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