"Mr. Hell moved to New York at the age of 17 determined to be a poet. But New York 'wasn’t the bohemian paradise I’d fantasized it was going to be...'"

"'Everybody was really competitive, even though there was nothing to win.' Disillusioned, he turned to music. 'I thought, as long as I’m going to be here, I might as well be in some profession where I can make a living,' he said with a laugh.... Like many old tenement apartments, Mr. Hell’s has its bathtub in the kitchen.... 'I love my apartment. I have no complaints about it'.... And his needs have evolved along with the neighborhood. 'Now I have an apartment where they actually keep the heat on, I can get the most fantastic food within walking distance, I’m central to all the stuff I love to go to in Manhattan, and I don’t want to go out on the weekends because it’s such a frenzy of college kids and bridge-and-tunnel people and tourists.... But I don’t want to go out anyway. I have everything I need right here.'"

From "Richard Hell/The punk-rock icon and writer has spent more than 50 years in his East Village tenement apartment" (NYT)(gift link, because you'll want to see the photographs, you voyeur, you).

I love articles like this — a real person in their natural habitat. It gets my "interior decoration" tag, but it's so much more interesting than those words make it sound.  

"During my second pregnancy, rats began clawing their way up our sewage pipes. For months, we found them in our toilet bowl."

"When I began peeing in the bathtub, my husband insisted it was time to move to Providence. He had grown up there — and he’d be able to run his family business. 'The kids will have more space,' he said. 'And if we don’t like it, we can always come back.'... As soon as we purchased the 'beautiful Dutch Colonial,' I was seized with panic. My husband already knew about, and barely tolerated, my penchant for returning things. The most Thoreauvian person I know, he purchased almost nothing in the first place. We were all burdened by our possessions; like Thoreau, he believed we had become 'the tools of our tools.'... [W]hat was it that made me want to reverse our decision...?... It was because the neighborhood wasn’t walkable and I, a New-Orleanian-turned-New-Yorker, didn’t know how to drive well.... [T]he nearest playground or coffee shop a mile away...."

Writes Jackie Delamatre, in "I Had Buyer’s Remorse. It Almost Ended My Marriage. When you can’t agree on the right city to live in, home can be more hell than haven" (NYT).

The way to avoid buyer's remorse is not to buy anything new. But you can't be peeing in the bathtub because of the rats in the toilet.

"Who wants to sit squeezed up to a big group of hairy men on a bachelor party?"

Said Jerelyn Taubert, 66, who moved to Budapest 20 years ago, when she would arrive at the beautiful historic bath house "at eight in the morning and there would be three people in the pool.... There were a lot of older Hungarian ladies and it felt private, in the women’s section."

She's quoted in "Tensions boil over as tourists swamp Budapest’s historic bath houses/Bathing culture is at the heart of the city but its popularity with foreigners is pricing out locals, and political rows are delaying desperately needed renovations" (London Times).

Maybe the older Hungarian ladies don't like squeezing up with a woman who only moved to town 20 years ago. I think it is important, when you are disgusted by some people, to remember that there are other people to whom you are disgusting.

AND: Speaking of pools and variable disgust, look at this question some guy sent in to the NYT "Ethicist": "I presume that most people pee in swimming pools and that everyone pees in the ocean. But suppose I’m at the beach. I need to defecate. It’s a 15 minute walk to the bathroom. It’s a Tuesday, and the beach is deserted. Is it OK to go in the ocean? I say yes! My wife disagrees." Just to ask is already to be too disgusting. Just the first sentence — the foundation for the question — is already too disgusting. 

I read that yesterday and didn't blog it, but I'm blogging it now because it lodged in my head. I know because it oozed up as I read about that Budapest bath house. I'm blogging it now to free myself of thinking about it again, because I won't blog it twice. 

"Once a week, his maternal grandmother would come home from the market with a live carp... 'We’d put it in the bathtub... and I’d play with this fish for a day until she killed it and made gefilte fish.'"

From "Frank O. Gehry, Titan of Architecture, Is Dead at 96/He burst onto the scene with an attention-getting renovation of his Southern California home before going on to design some of the world’s most recognizable buildings" (NYT).

Like many Angelenos, he was drawn to the laid-back, anything-goes atmosphere of the city, whose mix of garish mansions, flimsy bungalows, vacant lots, Googie coffee shops and colorful billboards was the antithesis of East Coast architectural academicism. And he became close to a generation of Los Angeles artists... whose surfboard-inspired aesthetic and raw work spaces suggested an alternative to the chilly austerity of late Modernism and the reactionary tendencies of postmodernism.... “I was trying to use the dumb, normal materials of the neighborhood,” Mr. Gehry said years later. “There must have been half a dozen cars in various states of deconstruction sitting around on the lawns; there was chain link in people’s backyards. They thought that was normal.”

For more about the fish, see "Frank Gehry, Fish Lamps/Paul Goldberger traces the history of the fish form throughout Frank Gehry’s career" (Gagosian.com).

"Then one day, damp and desperate, I furiously unscrewed the showerhead, found a sharp object and extracted the flow-choking gasket-and-screen device."

"I swear I wouldn’t have done it if I lived in the parched Southwest, but an invigorating blast from the Catskill/Delaware watersheds was irresistible. Little did I know then that I was speaking truth to shower. Meanwhile, nobody is throttling the cataracts of water needed to cool servers at the gargantuan data centers firing up our artificial intelligence future. In 2023, according to the Financial Times, data centers in Northern Virginia alone used nearly 2 billion gallons of water. University of California at Riverside researchers estimate that, in 2027, thirsty AI will slurp up between 1.1 trillion and 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally. Don’t blame China’s DeepSeek; its energy demands are much lower than competitors,’ and it uses no water at all to answer questions about Tiananmen Square, the Uyghurs or a democratic Taiwan."

From "Your showerhead is lying to you/Higher pressure is a blessing in more ways than one" (WaPo)(free-flowing-access link, so you can finally rinse that metaphorical shampoo out of your lusterless headhair).

Why was the author "speaking truth to shower"? Because studies show that people use less water when they're not struggling with low water pressure.

And here, listen to Trump talk about his "beautiful luxuriant hair" in "this crazy shower" that just goes "drip, drip."

Me, I take a bath. It takes me 15 minutes to fill the bathtub. I doubt I'd ever take anything close to a 15-minute shower. 

At this point, they're only asking you to suffer physically for the sake of the environment.

But you really ought to take that shower in "warm or room-temperature water — or even cold water"

I'm reading, "Why you should embrace using cold water, almost all the time/Heating water gobbles energy, leading to higher utility bills and more planet-warming emissions" in The Washington Post.

If I keep the house at 62° or lower all winter, may I still take the hot bath I think need to restore heat to my inner core? Or will the failure to take cold showers count as a sin henceforward? 

Look at the backhanded treatment of baths:

Instead of taking long hot showers or baths that can dehydrate your skin, dermatologists recommend showers of no more than 10 minutes, using warm or room-temperature water — or even cold water — which is less drying to skin.

They can't time limit a bath. Unlike a shower, the water usage is complete at the point when you get in (unless you stay in so long you need to reheat it with new water). But maybe you know the number of minutes it takes to fill your bath, so you could take a "10 minute" bath. Would that fill your bathtub? I ask Siri to set my timer to 15 minutes, and of course, I use hot water. Maybe I should only fill the bath 2/3 of the way — with room-temperature water — for the planet. I'd rather take a 3-minute shower and have it hot.

Taking away our hot showers and baths? It feels as if you want to deprive us of the most basic pleasures of living in the modern world.

The (dubious) outdoor-bathtub trend.

I'm trying to read "Ready for a Nice, Soothing Bath? Just Head to the Backyard. Cheaper than pools and more private than hot tubs, the bathtub is leaving the bathroom and has designs on your garden, or even your treehouse" (NYT).

We're told that "wellness" is a big "concern of homeowners" and that includes "intentional outdoor features, like bathtubs." These are not "hot tubs," which, we're told, are "social features" — associated with multiple users and drinking. These are for "one person just being with nature, being with themselves, having that detox from devices and daily life."

What does the NYT know about me?

I was scanning the front page of the NYT, looking for headlines to click, and I noticed that the Times had picked out a set of things recommended for me. I was pleased for an instant and genuinely ready to to share Penn Jillett's love for hot baths and cold watermelon, but...

 

... I don't like the implications of the rest of it. The kiosk and the toilet are okay — lowly and functional — but don't push Jeffrey Dahmer at me, and don't juxtapose him with a person with a mysteriously drooping face.

I go to read the Penn Jillette article and the word editing slows me way down:

I've picked out 8 TikToks for you. Let me know what you like.

1. When you fall asleep at a classical music concert.

2. Are we going to be impressed by this guy's construction out of chocolate?

3. I never cook pork chops, do you? Well, look at this.

4. Dogs at the meeting about all the barking. 

5. Remember that little boy with the corn I showed you on August 5th? Now, here he is, with musical accompaniment.

6. Why do you call when you can text?

7. The snowboarding toddler is just floating.

8. Bear in a bath.

"What's Up With The Ignorant Tattoo Style?"

I learned a lot from this fascinating video:

 

I became aware of this phenomenon yesterday, when I saw this and this at the subreddit r/shittytattoos.

Here's video of the "[c]reator of the famed Ignorant Style tattoo style, Fuzi... a street art legend."

And here's an Instagram collection of Ignorant Style tattoos.

I'm pretty amused by the concept and, especially, the name — though I think most examples of this sort of thing are a mistake. Many years ago, probably in the 1990s, I saw a young woman on campus that had a tattoo of a bathtub on her neck. Just a dark line drawing of an old-time claw-footed bathtub with the pipe extending upward for the shower head. I felt so bad about it. And I love bathtubs. But now I can see that it was an early example of the Ignorant Style!

ADDED: Back in 2009, I blogged about a tattoo artist that did things that he might characterize as Ignorant Style. It's at least adjacent to Ignorant Style. I said "I love these scribbly tattoos!" You can see a lot of his things at Instagram, here.

"In a fast-moving world of first impressions, where conversations have been replaced by 'likes,' our relations with others are governed by the skin."

"We speak with the skin: We get tattoos, we sit in the sun for a nice, deep tan, we cover up or show ourselves off, we get piercings or smear ourselves with expensive creams or go for Botox treatments in an attempt to remain eternally young. ...  And yet, at the same time, we pretend we don’t care about it. Skin-related issues — apart from those that affect politics, like racism — aren’t generally deemed worthy of writerly reflection.... Nobody cares about the feelings of shame experienced by those with skin conditions.... I never considered writing about my psoriasis because I resisted the very idea that it was a problem. It wasn’t part of me. My body wasn’t part of me; I existed purely in what was noncorporeal, in my writings, my intellect. All the itching, the patches of peeling, flaky skin — these were private problems....  I would sometimes come across historical figures and writers who suffered the same illness as I do. Joseph Stalin, for example. And Vladimir Nabokov. Their biographies would barely mention it.... But... the skin problems of these people had a considerable influence on their lives and work. Their skin was instrumental in shaping their ways of perceiving, understanding and relating to the world, which was almost always from a position of shame and rage. Studying Stalin’s life, I began to entertain the notion — I’m a writer, it’s my job to exaggerate — that the gulags were a kind of revenge for all the intolerable itching."

Writes Sergio del Molino, the author of "Skin," in "What Makes Me a Monster" (NYT).

I thought of Marat...

Not discussed in the column, but here's a bit — an itchy flake — from the book "Skin":

Look how they're advertising single malt whisky these days.

I'm finding that photograph so funny, because I like to take a bath and read a book, and I could be lured into bringing a glass of whisky into that scenario and to put it on a spindly table right by the tub. And I could see getting out of the tub, wrapping my head in a towel and putting on a satin robe and then picking up the book again, but under no circumstances can there suddenly be a big dog in that recently vacated bath... a dog with halfway shampooed hair, no less. That dog and all that glass... not just the whisky on the spindly table but all that extra glass on the ledge behind the dog. The message becomes: Whisky is a disaster waiting to happen. 

Also, I want my legs to remain attached to my pelvis. The faceless model has a leg that comes out of nowhere.

Speaking of reading — is that model really reading? it seems to be a travel guide — I wanted to quote something else from that 2000 article about Philip Roth that I talked about yesterday. This is something I was thinking about during my sunrise run today (as I realized I didn't finish reading "The Human Stain" by getting to the end of reading all the words on all the pages but that I'd only gotten into the position where I can begin to read it):

"You know what's nice? A horse trough. Sit out in that. You change the water every day. Siphon it out. Use it in the garden."

Said Meade, when the topic of inflatable backyard pools came up in a news report (they're selling well, these days, we're told).

This guy did it — spent $29 [OR: did he say $129?]:



ADDED: I did a little more googling and am seeing this referred to as a "hillbilly hot tub." I say that to Meade, and he says "I invented it — 40 years ago," then adds that a lot of other guys also "invented" it. And now that I'm thinking about it, I remember seeing many TV/movie cowboys getting immersed in a horse trough (against their will). Something about like this...



That's the sort of high jinks I'm picturing for our backyard. You can play too!

BONUS: If you scroll back to the beginning of that cowboy video — for the non-horse-trough part of the fighting — you'll hear different music. I was trying to figure out what that song was, and the lyrics came to me... He's the pip... he's the king, but above everything...



Notice that Top Cat's trash can is made of galvanized steel — same as a backyard guy's horse trough.

"At the first Women’s March, protesters carried signs with slogans like, 'Make Margaret Atwood fiction again!' and 'The Handmaid’s Tale’s not an instruction manual!'"

Writes Michelle Goldberg in "Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia, and Ours" (NYT).

You could argue that all this is melodrama; living under Trump may be degrading, but American women are incomparably freer than those in, for example, Saudi Arabia, a society that seems far closer to Gilead than our own. Then again, in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” America hadn’t crumbled all at once. Recalling her old existence, the book’s heroine wondered at how normal life went on even as horrors filled the newspapers. “Nothing changes instantaneously: In a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it,” she says.

And in a world of gradually heating bathtubs that boil you to death before you notice, you'd never be able to take a bath. But who sets up bathtubs to heat gradually to the boiling point?! Oh, that Margaret Atwood, she's quite the comic writer! Except that wasn't a joke. She really did take that old trope of a frog in a pot of water on the stove — a stove, which is designed to bring pots of water to a boil — and turn it into a bathtub, so it could be a boiling woman and not just a frog.

And, you know, that thing about the frog is false. The frog jumps out when it gets too hot. He doesn't just sit there in the water getting used to it while he cooks to death. So you really don't have to pre-jump based on hyped up fears. In that analogy. Assuming it's a good analogy. It's certainly a trite analogy. But so helpful in drumming up hysteria. Nothing happening yet, but we'd better act now, because otherwise if something does happen, we won't notice. So we notice the nothing now because later we won't notice the something because it will seem like nothing. So learn to think that nothing is something because future you thinks something is nothing. How crazy would life be if we used that theory?!

Anyway, Margaret Atwood has a new novel, a sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale," called "The Testaments." Goldberg (with a spoiler alert) reveals the plot. I don't care about the plot or the book other than the way it's important to some people as they go able coping with the reality of Trump's presidency.

“Writing dystopias and utopias is a way of asking the reader the question, ‘Where do you want to live?’” Atwood said when I talked to her last year. “And where you end up living is going to depend partly on what you do now.” “The Testaments,” it turns out [SPOILER ALERT] isn’t a dystopian work at all. It’s utopian. By the time it’s over, Gilead is a relic, and scholars in a more enlightened time are studying the women who subverted it. Praise be! Our descendants should be so lucky.

I went to Amazon to get a link for "The Testaments," and I was amused by the collection of things Amazon suggested for me to "inspired" by my search. Which one of these things is not like the other?



What the hell, Amazon??!!

"It was a market that had never been played to... Nobody had sung their song to them."

Said Peter Fonda in 2018, talking about "Easy Rider." He is quoted in his NYT obituary, "Peter Fonda, ‘Easy Rider’ Actor and Screenwriter, Is Dead at 79."

That movie was so important to us young Boomers, half a century ago.

In 1967, Roger Corman, then the king of the low-budget movies, directed “The Trip” from a script by an up-and-coming actor, Jack Nicholson. Alongside Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper and Susan Strasberg, Mr. Fonda starred as a mild-mannered television commercial director who uses LSD for the first time and makes the most of it. “Easy Rider,” which he also produced, came two years later.

There was also LSD in "Easy Rider."

What did Peter Fonda say about LSD in his later years?

“For me, it solved a great deal,” he said. “However, I didn’t take it and go out running through the city looking at lights. I was very circumspect and lay down on a couch.” Luckily, he added, “I don’t have an addictive character, and nothing except pot stayed with me.”

There's also The Beatles connection:

His mother committed suicide in 1950, when he was 10 and Jane was 13. Less than a year later, Mr. Fonda shot himself in the stomach with a pistol. Interviewed by The New York Times decades later, he insisted that it was an accident, not a suicide attempt or even a warning. “You shoot yourself in the hand or foot if you want attention,” he said, “not the way I did.”

Years later, he talked about the experience with John Lennon, who was reportedly inspired to write the line “I know what it’s like to be dead” in the Beatles’ song “She Said She Said.”

Here's how Wikipedia tells it:

"If I say I want to sail a small boat all the way around the world and it will take me two years, everyone says, 'Oh how exciting!' If I say I want to go and sit in my house..."

"... and not talk to anyone for two years, they say 'Have you got mental health issues?' or 'Why are you so selfish?'... I joke that wanting to be solitary is bad, sad and mad. It's immoral because it's selfish. It's sad because it'll make you miserable and it's mad because you must be a nutcase.... Silence is a place in which I can find ecstasy. I only get it in silence and most people I know only get it in silence. It is just a fabulous feeling. You know, you're walking along and quite suddenly you just say, 'Yes!' It's an extraordinarily intense response. Totally joyful.... I'm trying to position myself so the gift of mystical prayer is available to me, because actually the presence of God is a terrifically nice experience. I think it's heaven! Literally. I think that is what it will be like in heaven, that extraordinary sense of fulfilled intimacy - that feeling that one desires from sex, which is of both being completely yourself and completely with another person, is I think, what prayer does for me. It's a very particular form of intimate conversation with another, and it just so happens the other is God.... Food just tasted fabulous. But it wasn't it tasted particularly fabulous in any mysterious sense it just tasted MORE. So porridge tasted of PORRIDGE. But it also affected things like how strongly you experience physical things, like baths. Baths were fabulous - they weren't just some warm water, they became a completely luxurious experience. When you got cold, you got incredibly incredibly cold, or incredibly wet and just FELT it."

Said Sarah Maitland, quoted in "Why this man became a hermit at 20" (BBC). For some reason, the article's headline only refers to Christopher Knight, whose story is told in "The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit." Maitland's book is "A Book Of Silence."

"And that was his plan. He was going to live his normal life as if normal 'was living in darkness for the rest of my life.'"

"He had 720 hours and absolutely no distractions – and he’d use that time to improve himself. 'How can I give myself a better sugar scrub ... how can I stretch it deeper, how can I be more calm, how can I be more patient?' he says.... With so much time and only himself for company, Alati’s thoughts were a source of entertainment and a lifeline. 'The thoughts would just come to you, and if you don’t make sure that they go in a good direction, they can spiderweb out of control and lead you to a bad place,' Alati says....  '[Prisoners in solitary] are not given a bathtub with sugar scrubs, and essential oil and food, and a yoga mat. They’re not given that stuff, so if I didn’t have that stuff, and I wasn’t actually free and I wasn’t being paid, that’s why [it would be a] punishment.'...  When he finally emerged, the noise and commotion was overwhelming.... Friends and family surrounded him, and social interaction was 'a bit of a culture shock.' He was surprised by the number of choices he had and that social niceties needed to be observed. 'I knew how to do everything – I just forgot,' Alati says. 'I can’t just start doing push-ups on a bathtub in front of people. I can’t just start walking around with no underwear.'"

From "Hallucinations and $100,000: the poker player who shut himself in a pitch-black room for weeks/Rich Alati had a six-figure sum in his sights. As long as he could survive 30 days in the dark with no human contact" (The Guardian).

ADDED: Alati had control: If he could stay in, he'd get $100,000 and if he came out he'd lose $100,000. That's $200,000 of incentive, for a 30-day effort. The other guy, Young, could only wait and see what Alati would do. Young's advantage was that he didn't have to do anything difficult, and he might win $100,000. One alternative was that Young could communicate by audio with Alati and make an offer to end it earlier. And that's what happened, with Young paying $62,400 for Alati's 20 days in the bathroom.

Was there any real danger that Alati would lose his mind? If so, Young faced the risk of having to feel bad about what he'd lured Alati to do, and Alati risked suffering that would extend beyond the 30 day period. But Alati also stood to gain from the 30-day experience. There was the enforced meditation in solitude and the chance to see what visions grow in darkness. And then there was all that physical exercise. You'd do a lot of push-ups and sit-ups. It would be fun to look at yourself in the mirror after all that, no?

"Do Men Enter Bathtubs on Hands and Knees So Their Balls Hit the Water Last?"

That is the question of the day, I'm telling you. And the discussion — of how the question came up and how to answer it — is thoroughly delightful. With stick-figure drawings. Text and drawings by Kelly Conaboy (in New York Magazine). Excerpt:

A man named John said, “I didn’t know there was a plethora of bath entry methods. I put my feet in, swoosh the water around a bit so it’s not too hot in one spot, and then plonk my butt down on the tub.” Has he ever heard of the hands and knees method? “No.”

A man named Eric said, “I like to shower first then after a few mins plug the drain so it starts to fill up that way the water does not get gross and filled with pee. Once the water is at a good level sliding down the back wall in to the tub like I just got shot in a movie is the best way to get in to the actual tub, it’s fun....”

When asked if he’s ever heard of the hands and knees method, Eric offered a bit of startling insight. “Not that I recall. Some sort of crab-like walk from gym class is the only other method of entry I ever remember using but I have only ever had shower/bathtub combos as an adult so hard to say if a full-sized free-standing bath would change my approach.”

Some sort of crab-like walk from gym class? Some sort of crab-like walk from gym class??! Like this? [Drawing omitted.]

"There’s a growing concern in publishing about cultural sensitivities. Do you make a point of ignoring them?"

The Guardian interviewer asks David Sedaris. He answers:

A lot of times people will say after a reading: “I can’t believe what you said”, and I’m literally thinking: “What did I say?” I feel like so many of those issues are really just the enemies of comedy. After every show it’s something. There’s an essay where a woman shits in her pants on the aeroplane and I said it looked like she’d taken her skirt off a long-dead Gypsy, because I want people to see the colour of the skirt. I read that in Edinburgh and this young man comes up and says: “I have a bone to pick with you. I’m one-tenth Gypsy. I really don’t appreciate you using that word.” I’m like: “Call me when you’re nine-tenths Gypsy.” I mean, who isn’t one-tenth Gypsy? Writing isn’t propaganda.

Also, why David Sedaris hates "Moby-Dick":

About 15 years ago, Esquire asked me to pick a classic I’d never read, and I started it and thought there is no way I’m going to finish this book, so I told myself I could not take a bath or wash my hair until I finished the book. I hated that book.

How to hate a book. And so much water in that one:

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

That sentence is from "Moby-Dick" (obviously). Here's the new David Sedaris book, "Calypso" (which I've read a few times).

The dress culottes weren’t as expensive as the pants that come up to my nipples, but still they were extravagant. I buy a lot of what I think of as “at-home clothes,” things I’d wear at my desk or when lying around at night after a bath, but never outdoors. These troubling, Jiminy Cricket–style trousers, for instance, that I bought at another of my favorite Japanese stores, 45rpm. They have horizontal stripes and make my ass look like a half dozen coins collected in a sack made from an old prison uniform.

That's David Sedaris. See how different from Melville? And yet both authors have a bath.

IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandistein said:

Those two sucky types, married for mildness:

But even so, amid the tornadoed dress culottes, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in “at-home clothes”; and while extravagant stripes of unwaning fashion revolve round my nipples, deep down and deep inland there I still shoppe me in eternal mildness of Japanese stores.

"My secret to eternal youth is to take an ice-cold bath once a day."

From "25 Famous Women on Their Strangest Habits" at New York Magazine.

The eternally young ice-cold bather is Yoko Ono.