Me

Peter Levine tagged me with the five-things-you-don't-know-about-me game. His own list is really hard to follow up. I mean, living with Marcel, the stuffed 19th-century baby elephant? Or creating a mosque with his daughter because he "wanted to figure out how to construct a public building--which could be a bath, a school, or a library--in the 16th-century Ottoman style." Or playing the clavichord?

I did not know any of these things. I'm especially envious of the mosque. Hey, Peter, you forgot the ablution fountain! Let's see you pipe water in.

Here are mine:

1. I was once blind for three days. I was about 9 or 10 years old. I used to play in the jungle in Taiwan (yes, Peter, while you were at Oxford, I was carving my way through deepest darkest jungle). One day, I caught a very pretty tree frog in the jungle. I put it in a coffee can and took it to school the next day. I wouldn't let anyone else hold the frog except for me, but everyone wanted to see it. Unfortunately, the tree frog was a poisonous one. I apparently rubbed my eyes after handling the frog. I ended up with eye washes and a constant compress.

2. I was in a band in high school in Texas called "Apollo" (not my choice of name, but it was better than the proposed "The Express"). Me on guitar and my friend Joe on drums and/or piano (I had an old multi-track reel-to-reel). We made a tape. It was truly awful. Then we made a cassette so that others could share. Another friend accidentally dropped his books on the cassette and broke it after a weekend over which we had bugged him over and over to play the cassette on his car stereo. In retrospect, I now realize that I overlooked the whole point of a band: groupie girls. The band split apart after a series of hotel-room trashings, public displays of nudity, and serious drug problems. I'm still not allowed to step foot in South Dakota.

3. Speaking of Texas high school (which was a culture shock after growing up in various countries in Asia), I went on only one date through all of high school since I didn't fit the social groups in Texas and was kind of an odd geek-hippie outcast. I tried to get some Texas social mileage out of the one date: I took the head cheerleader to my high school prom. It was a complete mismatch, but she was actually a real sweetheart who has turned out to be a very cool woman.

4. My father-in-law, a Spaniard living in Paris, is a great sculptor. He's also an old-style communist who gave up on the artworld in the late 1960s just as he was attaining some fame and fortune - word was that he was "the next great Spaniard." After a few bad cases of management of his work, unfortunately, he came to the conclusion that the artworld over-exploited artists. You can see some of his works in museums and galleries in France and Spain. But the greatest pieces were all given away to family and friends, or they are still stashed in his studio mostly because they are too large to give away.

5. I worry that my neighbors think I'm a crazy man because I mostly work at home, but spend time walking around the neighborhood reading, often before having shaved and showered. My wife pointed this out, and it then made me self-conscious. The books of the moment are on torture. I suppose this doesn't help matters. But I realize that this is all about place. I live among lots of Tracy Flick types. If it were Williamsburg, I'd be a hipster.

UPDATE:

Oh yeah, I forgot to tag. I'll take up anon's suggestion in the comments and tag Murky Thoughts. Ha ha, MT.

UPDATE 2:

As you can see from the comments, MT, who can be just the most special thing, refuses to play and has retagged me. Aargh. I now tag... Roxtar.