Art/Life No. 1: The Results Are In.

I did my selection early. It was the perfect moment, the perfect time. Here are the results, the prescription for my year, chosen at random:

June
Color: yellow
Fruit/Vegetable: guava
Musician: Maria Callas
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Food restriction: caffeine
Filmmaker: Fassbinder
Initial thoughts: Thank God I got yellow in a summer month.

July
Color: blue
Fruit/Vegetable: lychee
Musician: Youssou N’Dour
Author: Joan Didion
Food restriction: Anything with over 10 ingredients in the pkg.
Filmmaker: Ingmar Bergman
Initial thoughts: I couldn’t have asked for more, color-wise. This is the month of my surgery. The hospital gowns at Northwestern are blue. I almost cried when I drew blue. And lychee is great, because lychee juice is sweet and yummy and I’ll be drinking a lot of fluids after my surgery, too. It’s a lot easier to handle lychee than some of the others. And Youssou N’Dour and Joan Didion are perfect, too—there’s a lot of pain and wisdom in that music and in Didion’s writing.

August
Color: purple
Fruit/Vegetable: white nectarines
Musician: Nina Simone
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Food restriction: wheat
Filmmaker: Pedro Almodovar
Initial thoughts: When I spoke with Ms. Bix, she was like, “Well, you’ve got some pretty seasonal music in your list. I mean, Nina Simone is not summer music.” It is now…

September
Color: orange
Fruit/Vegetable: plums
Musician: David Bowie
Author: Evelyn Waugh
Food restriction: dairy
Filmmaker: Spike Lee
Initial thoughts: Quite the British invasion with Bowie and Waugh…

October
Color: green
Fruit/Vegetable: parsnips
Musician: Led Zeppelin
Author: Camille Paglia
Food restriction: chocolate
Filmmaker: Kurosawa
Initial thoughts: Thank the Lord I’ll have Zeppelin to rock out to after reading all that Paglia, right?

November
Color: grey
Fruit/Vegetable: fennel
Musician: Robert Johnson
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Food restriction: soda
Filmmaker: Luis Bunel
Initial thoughts: For some odd reason, this line up strikes me as particularly poetic. And masculine.

December
Color: white
Fruit/Vegetable: kale
Musician: Dusty Springfield
Author: Flannery O’Connor
Food restriction: eggs
Filmmaker: Hayo Miyazaki
Initial thoughts: This entire month, I’ll be in Washington, D.C. with the show. Wearing white. In December. All month. In Washington, D.C. If any of the months strike me as particularly “performancy,” this is the one. It’s also heavily feminine, with Dusty, Flannery O’Connor, and eggs. And Miyazaki is heavy into the feminine, too, with films like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away both having female protagonists, I think. Very interesting.

January
Color: red
Fruit/Vegetable: rutabaga
Musician: The Carter Family
Author: James Baldwin
Food restriction: sugar (refined)
Filmmaker: Fellini
January: I also get a feminine sense from this lineup. I’ll be in Arizona during January, visiting D.W. out in the desert for two months. All that heat, all that Fellini… Maybe I’ll get pregnant.

February
Color: tan/khaki
Fruit/Vegetable: persimmon
Musician: George Gershwin
Author: George Plimpton
Food restriction: meat
Filmmaker: Orson Welles
Initial thoughts: A month of Georges… And another Arizona month. Can I get persimmons in Arizona? I can certainly make all vegetarian food, which is exactly what I’ll be doing.

March
Color: pink
Fruit/Vegetable: black-eyed peas
Musician: Afrika Bambataa
Author: Margaret Atwood
Food restriction: Anything out of a box
Filmmaker: Godard
Initial thoughts: The pink will be an uplift during the end of winter, and exploring hip-hop roots will be welcome, I’m sure. How will my knowledge of Afrika Bambataa influence my understanding of Godard? These are the questions I want to answer.

April
Color: brown
Fruit/Vegetable: artichoke
Musician: Elvis
Author: Philip K. Dick
Food restriction: Anything out of a bag
Filmmaker: John Waters
Initial thoughts: Elvis and John Waters?! And Philip K. Dick? I love it! This is by far the goofiest lineup I pulled. The camp!

May
Color: black
Fruit/Vegetable: rhubarb
Musician: Aaron Copeland
Author: Deepak Chopra
Food restriction: Anything frozen
Filmmaker: Kelly Reichardt
Initial thoughts: Yep. Black in May. Definitely counter-intuitive, definitely a little depressing to consider. But all this will be old hat by then. After all, it’s just for a month. And actually, the black is perfect for the last month. It’s a color of mourning, of passing, of ending. Or beginning.

3 Comments