Decadism, Part 2

Amendments to the nineties list:

Cruises (thanks Carmen)
That boy who starred in Lady Bugs (thanks Rach)
Rum and Coke
Skylights
Carnations
Icemakers
Rollerblades
Central parts
Nickelodeon

Decadism, Part 1

Things that are 90's:

Hot tubs
Hot dogs
Having your parents pay for things
De Angelo ("Thinking about De Angelo makes me so emo." -Liz Chernett)
Dicaprio
The Razor cell phone (okay it was like 2005 but basically)
The Venus Razor
Freaking
Barfing
PC's
Plastic
Plaid
Doc Martins
Doctor Pepper
Impersonating Father of the Bride Part Two
Impersonating your mom
Saying "your mom"
Blow jobs
Blowfish (Hootie and the...)
"Chilling Out"
Chat rooms
Junior Lifeguards
Lifeguards in general
Go-Gurt
Go carts
Sunflowers
Celibacy
Sports bras
Skate parks
Splenda
PDA's
VHS

Post Script: The nineties are back.

Independence

The Perfect Day

Waking up at my parents house surrounded by a fog so white it feels like sunshine.

Homemade lattes with micro-foam.

Sitting in the garden on chairs that my father painted red, surrounded by sunflowers and other leafy greens, mostly edible.

Helping to build a fence (this appeals to my manly/rustic/get my hands dirty half).

Using a swing. Remember doing the spider? Where two people swing together and become a four legged animal? I can still do this with my four-year old niece. She is that small.

Driving up the coast. To the left there is fog, to the right there is sun. To the left there is ocean, to the right there are mountains. We are driving in the middle of everything.

Stopping the car whenever we want. (Cars are the most luxurious way to get around!) We can stop just too look at the rocks! Or to watch the valleys swim in their tee-shirts. Or for no reason, if we want. We are that free.

Remembering that San Francisco can be welcoming. And that on some evenings, it can be warm enough for an open window.

Watching the Billy Jean video and finding out I have all the right items to make up MJ's outfit.

Tribute to New York

In Summer I miss New York. Here are some writings that make me miss it more. For its hideous beauty, its hysterical seriousness, and its undeniable magnetism.

"It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before."

-Joan Didion, from Goodbye to All That

"Now that I, too, have left that city, I find it hard to rid myself of the feeling that life carries a taint of aftermath. This last-mentioned word, somebody once told me, refers literally to a second mowing of grass in the same season. You might say, if you're the type prone to general observations, that New York City insists on memory's repetitive mower - on the sort of purposeful postmortem that has the effect, so one is told and forlornly hopes, of cutting the grassy past to manageable proportions. For it keeps growing back, of course. None of this means that I wish I were back there now...At any rate, for the first two years upon my return to England, I did my best to look away from New York - where, after all, I'd been unhappy for the first time in my life."

-Joseph O'Neill from Netherland

"There was so much height and then within that height so many humans and so much motion that they couldn't zoom in at all and so they had to let all the height and th people and the motion flood into their minds; they had to open their minds to wideness. They had to open their minds to a different, dirtier, layered beauty. They ahd to open their minds to a beauty of different and contradictory ideas. To a beauty of lost-ness and never feeling fluent but feeling that that was fine, that that was part of being in this place and that one was in this place of lostness without fluency with a whole bunch of other people. This ability to recognize one's self as lost and belonging with the others in the lostness, this is what made the place matter."

Juliana Spahr, from The Transformation

" I said: I thank God ever day that I'm not in Europe. I thank God I'm American-born and live on East 172nd Street where there is a grocery store, a candy store, and a drugstore on one corner. One hundred and seventy second street was a pile of shit, he said. Everyone was on relief except you. Thirty people had t.b. Citizens and non-citizens alike starving until the war. Thank God capitalism has a war it can pull out of the old feed bag every now and then or we'd all be dead. Ha ha."

Grace Paley, from The Immigrant Story

Permanently Young

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Holden Caulfield, the precocious protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s most famous work, “The Catcher in the Rye,” will exist at least a little longer solely in a state of permanent adolescence, unburdened by the cares and recriminations of old age.

It seems that Salinger has won this round - and his wanna-be/nemesis Frederick Colting, Swedish author of a work titled "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye," (a projection of Caulfield as an old man) has lost. In this little battle of preservation versus permission to project onto/amend or expand another's work, what has become clear is that people want things to stay the way they are. They want their heroes to remain heroes (do not tell them that Obama was a smoker) and their adolescent wanderers (Caulfield) to remain adolescent wanderers. Beyond that, they want permission to keep their own versions of Caulfield alive in their minds, without having to compromise them with Colting's versions; however imaginative Salinger's nemesis may be, he will be stealing the stories that they wrote, and they will feel robbed of their own projections of Caulfield's future. In other words, he will no longer belong to them.

Much like the sequel to a good movie, or the reality of a place that you imagined in your head as picturesque but then discovered to be bland, an expansion of a work of art or literature can leave the viewer/reader feeling unimpressed and even undermined. The maker of the second work believes that everyone will be as impressed by his work as the original, that he may even surpass the original maker. He also believes it is a part of art to add onto and develop previous works. What he forgets is that the viewer has stake in the character's story as much as he does, and they want to call on that character in that story to make them feel a certain way; when they want to imagine youth, they will call on Holden Caulfield.

I take comfort in Judge Deborah A. Bates' decision to side with Salinger on this one- however crotchety and anal and reclusive and old-school he may be - because it means that authenticity, something that is quite rare in the days of post ironic irony, is being safe-guarded. Although I believe wholeheartedly in drawing from original works, expanding on them, and collaborating with them to make new work (no one can deny how good Nelly's reinvention of the childhood jump-rope rhyme was in Country Grammar back in 2000), I secretly want my own favorite works to be kept private and safe from tampering. I want the books I love to be kept in glass cases, to be yellowed and to smell like libraries, to be perfectly preserved, and to be mine. I find solace in the solid, unchanging nature of a work of fiction, knowing that I can find it in the same form ten years from now as I can today, and knowing that it will stay young when I grow old. Most of all, though, I want to reserve the right to make up my own endings, my own versions of the future, for my fictional friends. Otherwise I'd just hang out with my real friends instead of reading, which might be easier on the eyes.

I think maybe Judge Deborah knows what I mean about this - she may hold young Caulfield's innoncene close to her own heart, or she might just be old fashioned like I am, want things to stay the same as they always were, permanently permanent, permanently young. Because isn't that what fiction can do that nothing else can? Way to go, Deb.

Holler if You Hear Me

Wanting to be rich in a good way. Like with nice hats, small plates, the newspaper. But no cars.

Thinking three steps ahead. The bus ticket, the coffee, opening the door. There are never enough hands, in the end, for the bus ticket, the coffee, and your keys.

Saying hi to people can be exhausting. One little word, your whole breath. So you avert your eyes very slyly like a robber.

Being alone is the most terrifying thing. Feels like dying.
Being alone is the most liberating thing. Feels like cold air.

Paralyzed by opportunity and time. Its funny how everybody says you are more productive when you're busy. People say that because they want to be busy so they don't have to feel alone. We love to be busy!

Wanting to be poor in a good way. Like farming and stuff. Holes in the jeans. Paint splatters.

Wanting to go back on something you once said. Like I said I hated jean on jean and now I want to wear it but I can't.

Too hot, too cold, too hot, too cold. Sleeping temperatures are skitsofrenick.

When someone is with you you miss them more than when they are gone.

To The Sides of Mountains

photograph by Carmen Winant.

Where I Grew Up

Forrest and His Paradises

photograph by Carmen Winant

Forrest Lewinger is a San Francisco artist and musician who makes really amazing, inspiring, beautiful music. He is also my boyfriend, but I'm not just saying the music is good because he's cute. Here are links to Forrest and the Birds of Paradise and Wanda and Wonder, his two bands. Hope you love it like I do.

Birds of Paradise
Wanda and Wonder

Elegy of Language

On certain days of the week one walks under the freeway bridge. The shadow of the bridge makes a cold place and a shaded rectangle. Under there it is third world, packed dirt, all the swarming, loud and angry, Mexican, starving, windy, hollow, weeds, beneath, cement, makeshift, built upwards, pushing into blue sky gray. One does not know why one thinks of this freeway bridge so often, even when one is not beneath it.

Other days one finds a calla lily to devirginize. One puts two fingers in and removes its silk. One is looking to make oneself feel a certain way. In this case, soft.

One becomes deaf, dumb, and has not yet learned sign language. One flails about. At work, one cannot tell the man in the next cubicle what the percentage of what is. One cannot say one loves one’s spouse. One must write everything down on a pad of paper one carries in one’s shoulder bag. One writes: two cups of coffee, please. One writes: I’ll have the salmon. One writes please please please.

Under the freeway bridge, one sits on the dirt in one’s work clothes. One cannot hear the cars humming above on the freeway. This is a relief, since the sound is deafening and wind-ridden. It is also a relief that one does not have to explain oneself to the people that pass by. One would not know how to explain oneself while sitting on the dirt under the freeway bridge in one’s work clothes.

Because one cannot speak, one is dismissed from one’s job at the office. Although one is mortified at first, one soon realizes this too is a relief. One does not have to explain oneself with words to anyone, calculate the percentages of anything, or send electronic mail to people that are within earshot. People within earshot. People within earshot. When one cannot hear there are no people within earshot.

One thinks too often about the calla lily. One sees a red balloon. One writes calla lily and one writes red balloon.

One writes many things on his notepad. One writes notes to oneself and notes to others. One writes gray sky gray sky gray sky. One is tired of writing gray sky and so then writes dying sky. Dying sky dying sky dying sky. When one is tired of writing about the sky one begins to write about the freeway bridge. One writes wind tunnel dirt scraping hollow Mexican starving place. One feels relief when one writes this, because he had never been able to say these things before.

One gets struck by a car while walking across the street under the freeway bridge. One falls to the ground like a weight and lays there. One gets carried away in an ambulance that smells like turpentine, but because one cannot speak one cannot describe how one feels to the ambulance doctors. One tries to pick up his pen and his pad of paper to write: pain in heart, pain in chest, but one realizes one cannot move one’s arm. One cannot move any part of one’s body.

In the hospital bed, one thinks only of the freeway bridge, of the space in the shadows with the wind from the cars rushing above. One realizes that the hospital feels almost exactly like the shaded space under the bridge, a space where one is not meant to stay very long but rather to pass through. One thinks of when he was young and healthy and could move through these spaces fluidly. One thinks of an airplane to Chicago in the winter. One thinks of his cubicle at the office, of cold coffee and leftovers in Tupperware. One longs to make metaphors, parallels, and plans. One longs to document. But one can only nod or shake his head at the large colored cards that the doctors hold up. No to yellow, no to green. Yes gray. Yes brown. Yes black.

Bummer City

Bummer city is a real sweet zine that I made for the first year writing students at CCA. If you don't have a copy and really want one, let me know! I only have a few left.

Dave says Ciao

My friend Dave and I met in Italian class. The only thing we said to each other was Ciao Ciao because we didn't know much Italian at that point. But there was something in the way he said Ciao Ciao and the way he wore socks under his skate shoes that let me know we'd be friends forever. Now he is making cool things like this food font (note the melting cheese stick N) and writing things like this as his status of face book:

whiskey, menageries, aviaries, faulkner, international white ales, seafood, wine, rock and roll music, recession tequilla, laughter, ambidextrous finger bang, major league babe.



check out more of his pants-dropping work at daveisdrawing.com

Teeny Notebooks

Giant Squid, Revisited

An imprompteau dinner party sparked an imprompteau conversation about giant squid. Although this has been featured on my blog before, I thought I'd re-post so we can all be on the same page.



My New Yorker friend Rachel once told me that she thought that giant squid were going to be the "next humans."
She explained to me that squid had the physical capabilities (tentacles that can function like our arms, brains that rival our own in creative thinking, and the largest eyes in the animal kingdom that focus like telescopes) to be the next big things. (China is to the US as squids are to humans, sort of thing.)
This meant, Rachel told me, that squid were probably already using tools! They were most likely creating undersea villages and even cities that we humans (with our limited lung capacity and fear of dark depths) had not yet discovered! And they would soon, Rachel proclaimed as she licked homemade vodka sauce from a wooden spoon, take over as the dominant species on the planet!

(Rachel is super smart and knows every banal detail of the entire history of New York City and its subway system, so even though I found her squid theory a bit ridiculous, I eventually started to get into it.)

I was reminded of Rachel's obsession with marine cephalopods when I read that giant squid (and dangerous ones!) have made a cameo in usually benign waters of Santa Cruz.

Seven-foot squid lurking in my personal pocket of the Pacific? Oh no!

These things could squeeze the air out of a human (and that human could be me!) with a mere tightening of their tentacles!
They had beaks for flesh poking! (Many a dying WHALE were found with squid beaks lodged into their blubber.)
They had ink sacks for inking! (I've always fantasized about having a sack of ink all my own, readily available if I need to blind anyone, cover my tracks, or whet my quill for the signing of an important document...)
And the most intimidating squid fact of all: squids have THREE hearts! Did this mean that squid could not only overpower us physically but also emotionally? If I met face to face with a Giant Squid, would this mean I would be forced into a heart to heart?

And the Santa Cruz Sentinel had left me spellbound once more...

I started to imagine what a squid city might look like.

Would it be gloomy and maze-like, an under water Venice in the winter?
Would it be bubbly and effervescent, a Little Mermaid sing-song tale complete with crabs playing moroccas?
Would it be towering and translucent, a transparent version of Manhattan and its skyscrapers? (Would skyscrapers need a new name if they were built under water? Sea-scrapers? Would the underwater Manhattan be the coral jungle rather than the concrete?)

I imagined neighborhoods in a squid city:
The posh and pretentious Bush Club Squid, adorned in their finest tentacles, parading the streets of an under-sea Soho.
The rough and tumble Cuttlefish, their spear-heads ready for anything, in a blue version of Brooklyn.
The darling Jewel Squid out for a stroll in the deep waters of the Upper East Side.
The Colossal Squid making transactions on a wet Wall Street. The Hooked Squid shooting heroin in Harlem. The Inshore, the Calamari, the Grass Squid basking in groups of two and three on the Jersey Shore...

And if squid could already use tools, did that mean that they were on the road to as creative and destructive of a path as we humans? And if their brains were so big, and they each had EIGHT arms, would that mean they would move quickly past their cave-squid period and rapidly into an age of S-Pods and S-Macs that were faster and more reliable than our iPods and iMacs, and without the heavy exoskeletons?

Would squid like to get to know each other on Myspace? Poke each other on Facebook?

Or would those squid electrocute themselves with all those cords...that hair-dryer-in-the-sink, electricity-meets-water-and-you-die mumbo jumbo that our mothers always told us about?

Would they just not have the spine for all these complexities that we have come to relish?

I think I will call Rachel up today and ask her what she thinks of all of this. She will be in the kitchen in her underwear, pouring the vodka into her sauce, and she will laugh like a true youth when I ask about the squid. She will tell me that she has already done all the research there is to be done on squid, and did I know that they had the largest eyes in the animal kingdom? and that she still has the drawing of the squid on the refridgerator that she did in her math class when she already knew all the formulas and didn't have to pay attention, and that she misses me, come back to New York.