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© Greg Wasserstrom

Merry Christmas, everybody. I hope you’re enjoying quality time with your family, thinking about the birth of Christ, etc. And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, you know, like me, then I hope you enjoy the day, few days, off from work or school or whatever it is that occupies your time. Here’s what’s been occupying mine:

• Last week, after about 9 months of “interning,” I began work as a contributing editor over at Wonkette, Gawker’s political site. I finally have a regular gig that also happens to be sort of a dream job! So, you know, go and check out my handiwork and stuff, even if you hate politics! So we do! Mine are the posts that say “Greg Wasserstrom” next to them and for the moment, I write 5 per day. To celebrate, I’m writing this entry in the style of one of my ubiquitous headline roundups. [Wonkette]
• Tiny Vices included me in a recent update, took me like more than a month to find out about it. Also, I friended Tim Barber on Facebook and OMG we’re totes friends now. [Tiny Vices]
• Finally stopped holding up the entire Fjord project. Opps! Sorry guys! [Fjord]
• Website tweak and a couple of new photographs. [Home]

I think that’s everything. So, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year,

There’s a new David Sedaris piece at the New Yorker website.

The night flight to Paris leaves J.F.K. at 7 P.M. and arrives at de Gaulle the next day at about 8:45 A.M. French time. Between takeoff and landing, there’s a brief parody of an evening: dinner is served, the trays are cleared, and four hours later it’s time for breakfast. The idea is to trick the body into believing it has passed a night like any other—that your unsatisfying little nap was actually sleep and now you are rested and deserving of an omelette.

Read the rest at the New Yorker website.

Nan Goldin, Rise and Monty on the lounge chair, NYC, 1988, from the Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

I was in Houston almost a week before I bothered to see what was going on there in terms of art. It happened that Nan Goldin has a large show up at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I went to see it with Bryan Schutmaat and it was terrific. The Ballad was there, playing every hour on the hour, along with galleries full of grids of Goldin photographs, classic and recent.

Goldin is perhaps enjoying a second Golden Age. Her influence can be seen everywhere from a Wolfgang Tillmans show to an American Apparel ad. Bryan noted at one point that Goldin’s work, a highly auto-biographical document of the seedy Downtown scene of the 1980s, comes across in the Ballad as something of a cautionary tale. Conversely, much of the contemporary work it has inspired is far more celebratory of the lifestyle depicted. I seem to remember reading something about Dash Snow that described his work as “Nan Goldin hit with a happy wand.”

And when you’re doing a line of coke of somebody’s dick, why would you want to stop to think about what that actually means? These are the times we live in. Goldin’s New York was a much more menacing place than ours. For all the camaraderie and intimacy on display in her work, danger, death, were lurking everywhere. AIDS claimed many of her closest friends and she struggled with addiction, all fully documented in here work and on display in the Houston exhibition. These themes are largely absent from the work of her twenty-something disciples. We live in a low-risk environment and we know how to have a good time.

Early New Years resolution: more dick in my pictures.

© Peter Voelker

Peter took this of Bea Fremderman and Andrew Laumann and I think that’s just swell. Check out Peter’s hot new site, also.

I’m headed back to New York sometime in the next couple of days, and in a moment I’m going to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a distinguished institution, to see Nan Goldin’s Ballad, which is a big deal to me for obvious reasons and I’ve never seen it in person. No doubt I’ll have all kinds of reverent things to say upon my return.

I hope things are going well with you. I’ll be back in the city soon and we’ll finally hang out again.

Just in case you’re wondering, I went back to Houston to get over bronchitis that had me coughing so hard I actually broke a rib. So now I’m sitting around drinking Robitussin and watching TV, contemplating what I’m doing with my life.

Jealous?