At the root of things, I’m a taxonomist. My only talent lies in identifying things, naming them. We call prostitution the oldest profession, and maybe it was the first paying gig, but it wasn’t first job in the Garden. Adam’s first task was to name, so perhaps my obsession with what things are and what to call them shouldn’t seem too strange and certainly isn’t something new. I am not one of those literalists who are stodgy about language and flip out over incorrect word usage or will scream bloody murder over a split participle (wait, it's infinitives that you split; participles are for dangling), but I can get rather stern about calling a spade a spade. After all, a rose is a rose is a rose.
I’m mulling around thoughts of names and their magic after listening to “Murder in the City” by the Avett Brothers. It is a beautiful song if a little melancholy. At a certain moment in the song, telling his wife to find a note he’s left of things he wants to make sure his loved ones know if he dies, he concludes with instructions for her: “Always remember there was nothing worth sharing like the love that let us share our name.” Such a beautiful line in a beautiful song. I’ve listened to it a million times and each time that line stands out and strikes me as so wonderful. I find myself wondering how I could communicate feelings like that.
The emotions I can relate to; sharing a name I can’t. There is nothing in the feelings in that song that I can’t intimately relate to, but that relationship to a name and the notion of sealing a relationship with a name is foreign to me. The easy explanation is that I’m gay and there isn’t any traditional way of taking another’s name when the union is between two men. Gay marriage leaves me cold as a solution and although I know many people already participating in the new and only sometimes legal institution, I just can’t cozy up to it. I maintain a grumpy rejection of the way things are supposed to be that won’t let me countenance doing things that more securely center me in my proper place in society. I like life on the fringes and have no desire to see my black sheep backwater turned into a suburb.
Still, if economic and social normalization arguments leave me cold (very cold), taxonomic arguments have slightly more traction. My desire for generic approval has been completely short-circuited through years of trying and failing to achieve it in earlier years, but I’ve always understood that value of knowing what to call something. The thing about understanding names through biology is that you begin to appreciate that there not only are often more than one name for each thing, but that each name carries information and significance and meaning. Behind all the various common and regional names, the scientific names are hiding, and within them is not simply a name to call a thing, but a whole story of how this thing is related to the next thing and where it fits in our system of understanding the world. Our system of naming isn’t perfect, as nothing useful should ever be, but it is functional. A name isn’t simply willy-nilly; it is a place in the world.
So singing about sharing a name hits a soft spot in my heart. I’m softened by the semantics. If he had sung about her taking his name, I’d never have listened to the song twice. I’ll roll with the sentiment and leave aside objections that marriage is an economic agreement and that giving up one name to take on someone else’s is symbolic of ownership and loss of self. Quite the romantic, aren’t I? Really I’m not that harsh. Listening to this song I really do think that sharing a name is a beautiful gesture. Language is our magic and names are our most powerful spell. Why wouldn’t working that spell on a relationship be powerful?
Still, I don’t know how to share my name and wouldn’t know how to share someone else’s. Someone tried to take my name once and I responded like a scalded cat, so I won’t be repeating that experiment again. If we aren’t doing the same old thing, why should we look to the same old magic to make it holy? I’m sure there is naming still to be done and a name to be shared but it certainly won’t come from a sir name. Perhaps sharing our lives will be enough. We can figure out what to call it along the way.
Maybe I’m also just trying to sneak out of this conundrum. Maybe sharing a name is exactly what I’ve been doing for a long time. When you can’t say one person’s name without conjuring a second person’s image also, perhaps the spell has already been cast.
These have been fun gymnastics, trying to reconcile all of these discordant feelings, but almost instantly I knew, regardless of any philosophical remedy, that I would resort to the most literal of solutions: anagram. Truly shared, not just one taken by the other, our names chopped into letters and reassembled become:
Genuine lion fag let able dinosaur friend jar hymen.
Monday, March 29, 2010
15 albums
This list was started a year ago when folks were listing their “15 most influential albums” on Facebook. John and Nicole had both listed theirs and I always want to play along, but as always had to obsess over it first. Just making a list without any explanation wasn’t working; more than explaining to anyone else, I found I had to pick through my list and work out for myself why each album should be included. The original list was much, much longer; but despite the fact that some people (cough, John)decided to ignore the 15 album limit, I decided to play by the rules. I’ve come back to this list on occasion adding or removing something as the mood hit me over the last year and finally think I’ve got something I can settle on. This was originally a Facebook trend, but having spent so much time on it I think it deserves a more permanent home, so here it is.
In working on it, I was amazed to realize how much I do process through music and how much I really think the way I think and how I approach the world has been shaped by the music I cling to. It could be argued that maybe I’m just picking my soundtrack according to how I feel and matching the music to myself, but I think that there definitely has been significant shaping done by what I’ve listened to as well. Apart from the first album, these are in no particular order. Some of them have names or places associated with them, but not all of them. These were just quick association notes to myself, but I'm not deleting them, mostly because I'm lazy.
Without further ado, here is the list it only took me a year to complete:
1) Swamp Ophelia - Indigo Girls.
In high school, when I got to ASMS, my roommate Traber had a cd collection heavily influenced by his lesbian older sister. So searching through his music, I stumbled upon Swamp Ophelia. When I graduated, Jay gave me a copy of the album, which Mason later bore the brunt of. After playing that one to death, I think I've bought the cd at least twice and once on iTunes and I still listen to it as much as almost anything else. This album totally taught me how to love people, self included. Think I’m crazy if you will, but that last sentence is closer to understatement than it is to hyperbole.
2) The Red Headed Stranger- Willie Nelson mason
Stardust - Willie Nelson dean
(I know this is two albums, but I'm counting them as one because they are both Willie Nelson and both came to me at the same time and their effect is combined.)
I already liked Willie Nelson. I've always liked Willie Nelson; my first clear memory of a song is of him singing "The City of New Orleans", which still might be my favorite song of all time. But these albums began my appreciation of him as a special, unique talent beyond this image of him: pony-tail, beard, bandana, and New Balances. Dean gave me Stardust and Mason introduced me to The Red Headed Stranger and both blew my mind. After ingesting these two albums, I can pick out not just his voice, but his guitar playing anywhere. These two do really showcase his special way of singing though. Also, both are perfect albums. Not just a collection of good songs, but the whole albums have coherent feels, listening to them in their entirety takes you somewhere. Stardust remains one of my favorite albums to listen to going to sleep.
Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen fits in here somewhere, even though it isn’t a Willie Nelson album and I’m not going to give it its own number. Mason introduced me to it around the same time and I always think of it in conjunction with The Red Headed Stranger because it is also a perfect album. You have to listen to the whole thing and it takes you somewhere.
3) Wrecking Ball - Emmylou Harris mason
Mason brought this cd to the apartment after having visited his parents. Both he and his sister or mother had bought it to give his dad for his birthday so he kept the extra copy for himself (us). We were already fans of Emmylou, but this was a whole other ballgame. On this album, she really catapulted from warbling songbird into this ethereal angel, but not a gentle angel hovering over a baby's crib but one singing out of a twilight thunderstorm. I think also the accidental over buying of this cd happened more than a few times, with two people simultaneously buying it and then gifting it to others. That or us losing it, then rebuying it, then finding the lost copy, then giving one away, then really losing it and rebuying. Actually, I think maybe Mason accidentally brought back his dad's copy at some point, who then went and bought a new one, so we kept the extra, but this album kept on reproducing somehow (this was before burning cd's). We had the same strange occurrence with a Bob Dylan cd, going to put it back in the cd binder only to discover that there was already another copy there; giving one away, then having it happen all over again. This was when we lived on Short Street, with all our insane neighbors and when Brock and I became each other's sidekick and Dean and I started dating. I always listened to music when I slept, and he stayed at my house quite a bit because he had just moved back to the city and was living with his parents at the time. The music was sometimes not to his taste, though he didn't much complain, but when I put this in, he immediately asked what it was and if memory serves me correct went out and bought it (or took one of the reproducing copies from us). When he didn't like what I had selected, he would ask if we could listen to Wrecking Ball or Stardust as a sort of diplomatic way of vetoing my selection.
4) Everything But the Girl, Acoustic - Everything But the Girl rusty, john
My freshman year, while still very much in the closet, I had the good fortune to meet a gentleman named Rusty. His casual matter-of-factness and easy intimacy did an enormous amount to help me begin to feel comfortable in my own skin, particularly with regards to my sexuality. He introduced me to the acoustic album by Everything But the Girl, though I think I had also already listened to it at the listening station at Millennium Music on King Street and in John's collection of cd's. The songs on this album are so beautiful and heart wrenching, but also soothing and comfortable at the same time. I would listen to it on repeat, grabbing certain songs and just diving into them and drown myself in the feeling of the music. Their version of "Alison" was also my first introduction to Elvis Costello. Several of the songs on this album are about touring for them I suppose, but also about being away from home and the sacrifices made to live a traveling life as well as the joy of it. Already then I was pulled by the wanderlust that has marked my life, but now really forced to travel and ripped away from home by my job, I feel like listening to this album was early conditioning for this life, like having the feelings from these songs stored and digested inside me has made this life easier. Perhaps that sounds silly, but I mean it.
5) Rabbit Songs - Hem florida
Most other albums on here came to me through someone else, or at least are strongly associated with someone else from the beginning. This is all me. When I was in Pensacola, going out of my mind and worked to death and emotionally parasitized by my job at the camp, I would go to the Barnes and Noble and stay for hours on my day off. Reading, but also sitting at the music listening station. I saw they had a Patty Griffin cd and I sat to listen to it, but they had the stations mislabeled and instead I heard Rabbit Songs. I think I listened to almost the entire album before buying it. At night, after the kids finally went to sleep, I would lay on my cot and put my head phones in and listen to this album over and over and over again. Every night. It was just so beautiful and peaceful. And when I finally escaped Florida and was starting over in New York, they came with me, providing the quieter part of the soundtrack for this new adventure. Even though their other albums are brilliant, this is still the one.
6) Exile in Guyville - Liz Phair - ASMS mix tape
I think we were on some kind of class trip at ASMS (special projects rock climbing trip maybe?), and someone was playing a mix tape which had "Divorce Song" on it. I got so sucked into the song, asked who it was and what album it was on. That song is kind of the saddest song in the world, but also in a weird way hopeful. But it wasn't just the song. The whole album, wow. I've gone through several stages of listening to it on repeat in different times in my life and obsessed with different songs each time. Having just said that each of the songs has taken on a larger than life meaning at one time or another, it should be said that “Fuck and Run” holds a special place, hitting some feeling that I didn’t know anyone could say out loud and feeling like it was written just for me.
7) Little Earthquake - Tori Amos
Like so many other things, I was introduced to Tori Amos at ASMS, and at first I found her kind of annoying. I never really put on her cd's, but so many other people did, particularly this one, and suddenly one day I realize that I know all the songs and it is the soundtrack to so much and so many intense adolescent moments. After graduation, I went to one of her concerts at the Alabama Theater in Birmingham with Robert, Liz, and Jay. One of the best concerts I've ever seen and perhaps the most intensely awkward situations I've lived through (I smile as I write this). Years later, I steal Mason's copy of this cd and start listening to it on repeat. He has always had it, but never listens to it, because "Winter" (easily her best song) breaks his heart right down the middle and puts him in a blue funk like you've never seen (not kidding). I love "Winter" and usually stole it to specifically listen to that (not out of spite, I just like the song) but this time I kept listening to the whole album. "China" is drastically underrated, but at this time, Ben was actually in China, so suddenly this album did to me what it does to Mason. Of course, unlike Mason, I purposely listen to and like singing all the saddest songs in the world. And listening to her sing “China” made me feel like someone knew what I felt like having my love all that distance away. China, all the way to New York. Again, this song was written just for me.
7) Mermaid Avenue - Billy Bragg and Wilco
I can't imagine why John left this off his album list. It was a mistake. We listened to this so much in college it is ridiculous. And for years after college. I'll occasionally hear one of the songs from it and remember it and then I've got to hunt it down and listen to it on repeat. I inexplicably don’t have a single song from it on my computer right now. This combined effort is easily better than anything else either Billy Bragg or Wilco has done separately.
8) Ecce Homo - The Hidden Cameras
Bought off the merch table at what I think was their first show in NY. They were the first of five acts that night at the Mercury Lounge and blew my mind. This was the band I had waited for. Joel Gibb was working the table after the performance and was self-conscious about this album because he didn't think the recording was of good quality and tried to convince me to buy their EP instead (this is before they had done a full length studio album), but this had the songs I wanted to hear. As one of the other members of the band flirted with my then boyfriend Nate, both Gentleman Reg and Owen Pallett flirted with me. Everyone was in a good mood and flirty that night. I was waiting for Joel to emerge from behind the table, which he finally did and we started chatting... and I came down with a horrible fever. No other symptoms. Just an insane fever. So instead of forging a friendship with the members of my new favorite band ever or staying to see Adam Green of the Moldy Peaches sing, Nate bundled me into a cab and I spent the night praying that I wouldn't suffer brain damage from the worst fever I've ever had in my life. I was fine the next morning. And I had made the right choice. Despite the warnings about the quality, Ecce Homo was amazing. Many of the songs have made it onto subsequent albums, but I still haven't found another source for "High on the Church Grounds".
9) 69 Love Songs - The Magnetic Fields brock
When I met Brock, it was kind of like falling in love, except that wasn't what happened, though for years afterwards, depending on whether they felt threatened by me or confused by him (or conversely, threatened by him or confused by me), his girlfriends (and my boyfriends) periodically suggested that either one or both of us were in love with the other. And perhaps they were right, it just was never romantic. He had just moved back to the city, and our awkwardness and confidences complemented one another and we fast became partners in crime. If he was one thing, it was the king of indie rock. His bedroom in his apartment (later our apartment) was so stuffed with cd's that you had to walk over them. Piles of them everywhere, a foot deep. I'm reminded of walking over them, trying to tread lightly and distribute my weight so they wouldn't crack when I walk on the crabs in the live-hold on the boat. He had always heard of every band before you and knew all the obscure releases. And listened to a whole lot of crap. But occasionally he did really knock it out of the park with discovering new things before anyone else. He saw Belle & Sebastian coming way before anyone else. Even when he found great things, I feel like I was a hard sell and other people might play me songs by them and I would pass on it, then he would sit me down and pick out just the right song to stop me in my tracks and make me reevaluate their music. For Belle & Sebastian it was "I Don't Love Anyone"; he was not the last person to tell me that they thought it was my theme song. I suppose I'm just that kind of grump. I always took it as a compliment. (In fact, I love everyone.)
He played me a few Magnetic Fields songs before "Papa Was a Rodeo", but it was the one he sat me down and told me I had to listen to, again my theme song. And he was right. Holy shit if this didn't catch all of my world weary skepticism and still sort of hopefulness about romance. And it was by a gay band, written by a gay song writer who didn't hide this orientation in the music. And it wasn't just a gimic, Stephin Merritt is one of the best song writers there is. These days, I can find quite a few gay artists who are actually good, but at the time, this was a first for me. Erasure and the Pet Shop boys might have been plenty gay, but they never said "grand pianos crash together when my boy walks down the street." I didn't know you were allowed to sing that! Listening to these songs helped me more than I'd like to admit in becoming comfortable being gay and helping make that identity a casual side note to who I am rather than this overwhelming burden.
After graduating I took a job in Pensacola working as a counselor at a wilderness camp for trouble youth. We were understaffed and underfunded and were taking kids for whom the program wasn't ideal and rushing them to complete the program at too fast a pace. This was largely because of jeb bush and his cronies in the legislature working to destroy the programs that had made Florida's juvenile rehabilitation system a model for other states. They worked to turn it from a service to help people come out better on the other side into a putative system, which is all so much politics except that I was there on the ground, there to help and finding myself drowning in the mess they made. In the little time I had off, I found Pensacola to be an amazing town, with a surprisingly alive alternative scene. A bunch of fun little bars and cool people and one great little record shop. They didn't have 69 Love Songs in stock, but they ordered it for me, and I purchased it and Tiger's Milk. Angry at the end of the day, worn out and emotionally exhausted, I would listen to "I Don't Love Anyone". It was exactly how I felt, really, at that moment. Not even Christmas.
After finally being completely out and non-secretive in Charleston and even having come out to my family, I was back in a situation where I had to be neuter. I had to be this unflappable superhuman thing, whose personal life stayed outside of work and that kind of thing really grinds at your mind. I'd listen to 69 Love Songs as a sort of therapy, rebuilding the broken down parts at night laying in my tent. I don't know that I've ever heard anyone else call it beach music, but at some point that is what it became for me. On time off, I always headed to the beach and would blast it as I rode along the water. "I'm Sorry I Love You" became my ultimate beach jam. As soon as I got past the hotels and crap, and was riding with only dunes on either side, I would play it, singing at the top of my lungs.
10) Tiger Milk - Belle & Sebastian brock
See above.
11) O.C.M.S - Old Crow Medicine Show Ben
I had read about Old Crow Medicine Show in an issue of No Depression and immediately knew I wanted to hear them. This was before this album had come out and I couldn’t find any of their earlier stuff. (It is worth noting that this same issue of said magazine was also what convinced me to buy Patty Loveless’s Mountain Soul and to find and listen to the Be Good Tanyas.) Anyway, this album came out and I wanted it but hadn’t managed to find it yet, so Ben got it for me on iTunes and burned in on a cd and made a cover for it that he put stickers on (I cannot remember if this was a gift for an occasion –Valentine’s Day or birthday or whatever- or just because I wanted it). I still have it somewhere. The album was everything I had hoped for. Here are these hillbilly fuckers with crazy harmonies and sick instrumentation singing about everything and something else. Are you allowed to sing old-timey country about cocaine? Apparently you are. But more than then just doing something new by doing something old, their songs hit a just-right cord with me. Mason had moved up to and we revived our tradition of singing together and “Wagon Wheel” quickly became our favorite hootenanny anthem. It still is.
12) The Essential Leonard Cohen - Leonard Cohen
When Mason and I first became roommates, he introduced me to Leonard Cohen via “Famous Blue Raincoat”. I knew “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire” but this made me sit down and listen to it all again. The emotions in “Raincoat” are so complicated and intense; I would dive into it over and over again soaking up the intensity but also practicing that feeling of release and acceptance that the singer in this song is forcing himself to have. At this time I felt so twisted and turned and yanked around by circumstance and other people that it was a relief to hear someone sing about a situation so complicated and heartrending from somewhere approaching the other side of it. I also always felt like this was somehow the sort of situation that my brother Charlie and I would have eventually ended up in if I were straight and the potential had existed for us to fall for the same woman. Who would have been the singer and who the sung to?
But this wasn’t the only song on the album to strike a chord. “So Long, Marianne” and “Lady Midnight” and “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and… basically the whole album is brilliant, but perhaps “Chelsea Hotel #2” was the one that really got me. Partly of course there is the shock factor: I didn’t know that you could sing, “giving me head on the unmade bed”, but the shock never lasts as long as you hope. It was the sentiment in the chorus that left its lasting mark, “I never once heard you say, ‘I need you…I don’t need you…I need you… I don’t need you’ and all of that jiving around.” I pulled it out of context, but somehow the idea of never jerking a lover around with games of I-need/don’t-need-you planted a seed in my young mind as important. Partly it might have warped into an aversion to the idea of allowing need to tangle with romance, but mostly I took from it a desire to be a person who does not yank people around.
“Hallelujah” wasn’t on this album, but Mason at some point brought it to my attention (through Jeff Buckley’s version), saying that the line “All I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who out drew you,” encapsulated my experience with love (which makes more sense if you know the stories I was sharing with him of the twists and turns and backstabs that marked my early romantic life). I took this as a high compliment, but also perhaps as a warning. Being told that you knew how to outshoot someone better than you might be flattering, but it reminded me that I’d rather avoid gun fights or at least that I never want to be in them with anyone I love.
13) Prime Prine – John Prine
As an adolescent, my relationship with my father was sometimes strained. We are both stubborn and I was pretty miserable and ready to lash out at the least provocation and nurse any wounds for as long as possible. Thankfully, such bitterness can’t last too long, and I have a hard time remembering a single fight we had. What I can remember is one night him inviting me out to the car to listen to a tape he had gotten. It was John Prine. I was uptight and slightly scandalized by “Illegal Smile”, but listening to a song about pot with your dad sort of marks a crossing point where your parents start to act like real people and stop playing the character of ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’. And the music was a little silly, but really great. “Dear Abby” was the song in particular that Dad had brought me out to share. He liked the succinct advice in the chorus, and I suppose so do I. Feeling sorry for yourself has never gotten anyone very far in my family, and I hear that chorus in my head when I find myself starting to drift into self-pity. Which makes me smile and laugh at myself.
Of course, John Prine isn’t just silly songs. He’s got a special way of hitting the mark. This early introduction grew into seeking out more of his music and gave me some common ground later when I met Mason and we started talking music and singing together. It is also through Mr. Prine that I found Iris Dement; I will forever be thankful to him for that. "In Spite of Ourselves" might be the anthem of my relationship with Ben.
14) I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got – Sinead O’Connor
This album hits like a brick slamming into the side of your head. It is so beautiful and painful and other-worldly. If Sinead O’Connor only had that voice, she’d still be devastating; but the lyrics she writes… damn. She really killed us all with “Nothing Compares 2 U”, the one cover on the album, but for me it is “Black Boys on Mopeds” that puts this on my list.
For some reason, the Tiananmen Square Massacre stands out as one of the most impactful memories of my childhood. Not so much the details, but the lesson that people would kill other people who weren’t a physical threat. People kept saying everything changed after 9/11, that innocence was lost, that we now knew what horrible things people were capable of, but the whole time I kept thinking it was insane that anyone whose eyes had been open at all would not already be aware of this in spades. But I suppose that everyone needs something to strike that match of realization and for me it had been Tiananmen as a child. So when Ms. O’Connor sings, “Margaret Thatcher on tv, shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing. It seems strange that she should be offended; the same orders are given by her,” I’m already punched in the gut right from the first line. This song to me was a devastating protest song, not so much because of a call to action, but as such an unblinking witness. The blunt refusal to believe that the bad things in the world happen somewhere else or are done by a distant Other perhaps affected my political attitudes more than I know. If nothing else, it certainly resonates with me.
It is more than just that song though. The whole attitude of the album. Even just the title, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” does deserve its own mention. I would listen to it on repeat, over and over again. It starts so quietly and you can hear the hurt, but it is defiant and grows in strength and volume until it is this rattling war cry. But early on, there is a line, “You used to hold my hand when the plane took off.” As a past tense statement, it encapsulates all the hurt and makes her case for the breakup, but it is effective also because listening to it as something she had lost, it made me want someone to hold my hand when the plane takes off. This gesture became for me the ultimate romantic gesture.
15) Give Up – Postal Service
This album was hitting right as I arrived in New York. I landed in the city with barely any money, but my brother and friends from college were there and we were all clinging together and helping each other stick it out. This album (along with Le Tigre) is the soundtrack for my memories of my over-crowded dingy Greenpoint apartment. We would buy a bag of potatoes, a bag of onions, and a couple dozen eggs and this music would play while someone cooked our meager ingredients and we drank Balentine tall-boys or fourties. Something about the music was perfect. The sound was just right, the lyrics and the voices caught the tenor of our excitement and our desperation and resonated with us. I’ve never been able to fully get into either Deathcab for Cutie or Dntel, but this synthesis does it for me. It also contains both the best break-up song and best love song ever. “Nothing Better” was originally my favorite from the album, so brilliant in the counterpoint of desperate and over-it duet, but before too long, I fell hard for a certain beautiful boy and “Such Great Heights” would play over and over again in my headphones. It still does.
In working on it, I was amazed to realize how much I do process through music and how much I really think the way I think and how I approach the world has been shaped by the music I cling to. It could be argued that maybe I’m just picking my soundtrack according to how I feel and matching the music to myself, but I think that there definitely has been significant shaping done by what I’ve listened to as well. Apart from the first album, these are in no particular order. Some of them have names or places associated with them, but not all of them. These were just quick association notes to myself, but I'm not deleting them, mostly because I'm lazy.
Without further ado, here is the list it only took me a year to complete:
1) Swamp Ophelia - Indigo Girls.
In high school, when I got to ASMS, my roommate Traber had a cd collection heavily influenced by his lesbian older sister. So searching through his music, I stumbled upon Swamp Ophelia. When I graduated, Jay gave me a copy of the album, which Mason later bore the brunt of. After playing that one to death, I think I've bought the cd at least twice and once on iTunes and I still listen to it as much as almost anything else. This album totally taught me how to love people, self included. Think I’m crazy if you will, but that last sentence is closer to understatement than it is to hyperbole.
2) The Red Headed Stranger- Willie Nelson mason
Stardust - Willie Nelson dean
(I know this is two albums, but I'm counting them as one because they are both Willie Nelson and both came to me at the same time and their effect is combined.)
I already liked Willie Nelson. I've always liked Willie Nelson; my first clear memory of a song is of him singing "The City of New Orleans", which still might be my favorite song of all time. But these albums began my appreciation of him as a special, unique talent beyond this image of him: pony-tail, beard, bandana, and New Balances. Dean gave me Stardust and Mason introduced me to The Red Headed Stranger and both blew my mind. After ingesting these two albums, I can pick out not just his voice, but his guitar playing anywhere. These two do really showcase his special way of singing though. Also, both are perfect albums. Not just a collection of good songs, but the whole albums have coherent feels, listening to them in their entirety takes you somewhere. Stardust remains one of my favorite albums to listen to going to sleep.
Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen fits in here somewhere, even though it isn’t a Willie Nelson album and I’m not going to give it its own number. Mason introduced me to it around the same time and I always think of it in conjunction with The Red Headed Stranger because it is also a perfect album. You have to listen to the whole thing and it takes you somewhere.
3) Wrecking Ball - Emmylou Harris mason
Mason brought this cd to the apartment after having visited his parents. Both he and his sister or mother had bought it to give his dad for his birthday so he kept the extra copy for himself (us). We were already fans of Emmylou, but this was a whole other ballgame. On this album, she really catapulted from warbling songbird into this ethereal angel, but not a gentle angel hovering over a baby's crib but one singing out of a twilight thunderstorm. I think also the accidental over buying of this cd happened more than a few times, with two people simultaneously buying it and then gifting it to others. That or us losing it, then rebuying it, then finding the lost copy, then giving one away, then really losing it and rebuying. Actually, I think maybe Mason accidentally brought back his dad's copy at some point, who then went and bought a new one, so we kept the extra, but this album kept on reproducing somehow (this was before burning cd's). We had the same strange occurrence with a Bob Dylan cd, going to put it back in the cd binder only to discover that there was already another copy there; giving one away, then having it happen all over again. This was when we lived on Short Street, with all our insane neighbors and when Brock and I became each other's sidekick and Dean and I started dating. I always listened to music when I slept, and he stayed at my house quite a bit because he had just moved back to the city and was living with his parents at the time. The music was sometimes not to his taste, though he didn't much complain, but when I put this in, he immediately asked what it was and if memory serves me correct went out and bought it (or took one of the reproducing copies from us). When he didn't like what I had selected, he would ask if we could listen to Wrecking Ball or Stardust as a sort of diplomatic way of vetoing my selection.
4) Everything But the Girl, Acoustic - Everything But the Girl rusty, john
My freshman year, while still very much in the closet, I had the good fortune to meet a gentleman named Rusty. His casual matter-of-factness and easy intimacy did an enormous amount to help me begin to feel comfortable in my own skin, particularly with regards to my sexuality. He introduced me to the acoustic album by Everything But the Girl, though I think I had also already listened to it at the listening station at Millennium Music on King Street and in John's collection of cd's. The songs on this album are so beautiful and heart wrenching, but also soothing and comfortable at the same time. I would listen to it on repeat, grabbing certain songs and just diving into them and drown myself in the feeling of the music. Their version of "Alison" was also my first introduction to Elvis Costello. Several of the songs on this album are about touring for them I suppose, but also about being away from home and the sacrifices made to live a traveling life as well as the joy of it. Already then I was pulled by the wanderlust that has marked my life, but now really forced to travel and ripped away from home by my job, I feel like listening to this album was early conditioning for this life, like having the feelings from these songs stored and digested inside me has made this life easier. Perhaps that sounds silly, but I mean it.
5) Rabbit Songs - Hem florida
Most other albums on here came to me through someone else, or at least are strongly associated with someone else from the beginning. This is all me. When I was in Pensacola, going out of my mind and worked to death and emotionally parasitized by my job at the camp, I would go to the Barnes and Noble and stay for hours on my day off. Reading, but also sitting at the music listening station. I saw they had a Patty Griffin cd and I sat to listen to it, but they had the stations mislabeled and instead I heard Rabbit Songs. I think I listened to almost the entire album before buying it. At night, after the kids finally went to sleep, I would lay on my cot and put my head phones in and listen to this album over and over and over again. Every night. It was just so beautiful and peaceful. And when I finally escaped Florida and was starting over in New York, they came with me, providing the quieter part of the soundtrack for this new adventure. Even though their other albums are brilliant, this is still the one.
6) Exile in Guyville - Liz Phair - ASMS mix tape
I think we were on some kind of class trip at ASMS (special projects rock climbing trip maybe?), and someone was playing a mix tape which had "Divorce Song" on it. I got so sucked into the song, asked who it was and what album it was on. That song is kind of the saddest song in the world, but also in a weird way hopeful. But it wasn't just the song. The whole album, wow. I've gone through several stages of listening to it on repeat in different times in my life and obsessed with different songs each time. Having just said that each of the songs has taken on a larger than life meaning at one time or another, it should be said that “Fuck and Run” holds a special place, hitting some feeling that I didn’t know anyone could say out loud and feeling like it was written just for me.
7) Little Earthquake - Tori Amos
Like so many other things, I was introduced to Tori Amos at ASMS, and at first I found her kind of annoying. I never really put on her cd's, but so many other people did, particularly this one, and suddenly one day I realize that I know all the songs and it is the soundtrack to so much and so many intense adolescent moments. After graduation, I went to one of her concerts at the Alabama Theater in Birmingham with Robert, Liz, and Jay. One of the best concerts I've ever seen and perhaps the most intensely awkward situations I've lived through (I smile as I write this). Years later, I steal Mason's copy of this cd and start listening to it on repeat. He has always had it, but never listens to it, because "Winter" (easily her best song) breaks his heart right down the middle and puts him in a blue funk like you've never seen (not kidding). I love "Winter" and usually stole it to specifically listen to that (not out of spite, I just like the song) but this time I kept listening to the whole album. "China" is drastically underrated, but at this time, Ben was actually in China, so suddenly this album did to me what it does to Mason. Of course, unlike Mason, I purposely listen to and like singing all the saddest songs in the world. And listening to her sing “China” made me feel like someone knew what I felt like having my love all that distance away. China, all the way to New York. Again, this song was written just for me.
7) Mermaid Avenue - Billy Bragg and Wilco
I can't imagine why John left this off his album list. It was a mistake. We listened to this so much in college it is ridiculous. And for years after college. I'll occasionally hear one of the songs from it and remember it and then I've got to hunt it down and listen to it on repeat. I inexplicably don’t have a single song from it on my computer right now. This combined effort is easily better than anything else either Billy Bragg or Wilco has done separately.
8) Ecce Homo - The Hidden Cameras
Bought off the merch table at what I think was their first show in NY. They were the first of five acts that night at the Mercury Lounge and blew my mind. This was the band I had waited for. Joel Gibb was working the table after the performance and was self-conscious about this album because he didn't think the recording was of good quality and tried to convince me to buy their EP instead (this is before they had done a full length studio album), but this had the songs I wanted to hear. As one of the other members of the band flirted with my then boyfriend Nate, both Gentleman Reg and Owen Pallett flirted with me. Everyone was in a good mood and flirty that night. I was waiting for Joel to emerge from behind the table, which he finally did and we started chatting... and I came down with a horrible fever. No other symptoms. Just an insane fever. So instead of forging a friendship with the members of my new favorite band ever or staying to see Adam Green of the Moldy Peaches sing, Nate bundled me into a cab and I spent the night praying that I wouldn't suffer brain damage from the worst fever I've ever had in my life. I was fine the next morning. And I had made the right choice. Despite the warnings about the quality, Ecce Homo was amazing. Many of the songs have made it onto subsequent albums, but I still haven't found another source for "High on the Church Grounds".
9) 69 Love Songs - The Magnetic Fields brock
When I met Brock, it was kind of like falling in love, except that wasn't what happened, though for years afterwards, depending on whether they felt threatened by me or confused by him (or conversely, threatened by him or confused by me), his girlfriends (and my boyfriends) periodically suggested that either one or both of us were in love with the other. And perhaps they were right, it just was never romantic. He had just moved back to the city, and our awkwardness and confidences complemented one another and we fast became partners in crime. If he was one thing, it was the king of indie rock. His bedroom in his apartment (later our apartment) was so stuffed with cd's that you had to walk over them. Piles of them everywhere, a foot deep. I'm reminded of walking over them, trying to tread lightly and distribute my weight so they wouldn't crack when I walk on the crabs in the live-hold on the boat. He had always heard of every band before you and knew all the obscure releases. And listened to a whole lot of crap. But occasionally he did really knock it out of the park with discovering new things before anyone else. He saw Belle & Sebastian coming way before anyone else. Even when he found great things, I feel like I was a hard sell and other people might play me songs by them and I would pass on it, then he would sit me down and pick out just the right song to stop me in my tracks and make me reevaluate their music. For Belle & Sebastian it was "I Don't Love Anyone"; he was not the last person to tell me that they thought it was my theme song. I suppose I'm just that kind of grump. I always took it as a compliment. (In fact, I love everyone.)
He played me a few Magnetic Fields songs before "Papa Was a Rodeo", but it was the one he sat me down and told me I had to listen to, again my theme song. And he was right. Holy shit if this didn't catch all of my world weary skepticism and still sort of hopefulness about romance. And it was by a gay band, written by a gay song writer who didn't hide this orientation in the music. And it wasn't just a gimic, Stephin Merritt is one of the best song writers there is. These days, I can find quite a few gay artists who are actually good, but at the time, this was a first for me. Erasure and the Pet Shop boys might have been plenty gay, but they never said "grand pianos crash together when my boy walks down the street." I didn't know you were allowed to sing that! Listening to these songs helped me more than I'd like to admit in becoming comfortable being gay and helping make that identity a casual side note to who I am rather than this overwhelming burden.
After graduating I took a job in Pensacola working as a counselor at a wilderness camp for trouble youth. We were understaffed and underfunded and were taking kids for whom the program wasn't ideal and rushing them to complete the program at too fast a pace. This was largely because of jeb bush and his cronies in the legislature working to destroy the programs that had made Florida's juvenile rehabilitation system a model for other states. They worked to turn it from a service to help people come out better on the other side into a putative system, which is all so much politics except that I was there on the ground, there to help and finding myself drowning in the mess they made. In the little time I had off, I found Pensacola to be an amazing town, with a surprisingly alive alternative scene. A bunch of fun little bars and cool people and one great little record shop. They didn't have 69 Love Songs in stock, but they ordered it for me, and I purchased it and Tiger's Milk. Angry at the end of the day, worn out and emotionally exhausted, I would listen to "I Don't Love Anyone". It was exactly how I felt, really, at that moment. Not even Christmas.
After finally being completely out and non-secretive in Charleston and even having come out to my family, I was back in a situation where I had to be neuter. I had to be this unflappable superhuman thing, whose personal life stayed outside of work and that kind of thing really grinds at your mind. I'd listen to 69 Love Songs as a sort of therapy, rebuilding the broken down parts at night laying in my tent. I don't know that I've ever heard anyone else call it beach music, but at some point that is what it became for me. On time off, I always headed to the beach and would blast it as I rode along the water. "I'm Sorry I Love You" became my ultimate beach jam. As soon as I got past the hotels and crap, and was riding with only dunes on either side, I would play it, singing at the top of my lungs.
10) Tiger Milk - Belle & Sebastian brock
See above.
11) O.C.M.S - Old Crow Medicine Show Ben
I had read about Old Crow Medicine Show in an issue of No Depression and immediately knew I wanted to hear them. This was before this album had come out and I couldn’t find any of their earlier stuff. (It is worth noting that this same issue of said magazine was also what convinced me to buy Patty Loveless’s Mountain Soul and to find and listen to the Be Good Tanyas.) Anyway, this album came out and I wanted it but hadn’t managed to find it yet, so Ben got it for me on iTunes and burned in on a cd and made a cover for it that he put stickers on (I cannot remember if this was a gift for an occasion –Valentine’s Day or birthday or whatever- or just because I wanted it). I still have it somewhere. The album was everything I had hoped for. Here are these hillbilly fuckers with crazy harmonies and sick instrumentation singing about everything and something else. Are you allowed to sing old-timey country about cocaine? Apparently you are. But more than then just doing something new by doing something old, their songs hit a just-right cord with me. Mason had moved up to and we revived our tradition of singing together and “Wagon Wheel” quickly became our favorite hootenanny anthem. It still is.
12) The Essential Leonard Cohen - Leonard Cohen
When Mason and I first became roommates, he introduced me to Leonard Cohen via “Famous Blue Raincoat”. I knew “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire” but this made me sit down and listen to it all again. The emotions in “Raincoat” are so complicated and intense; I would dive into it over and over again soaking up the intensity but also practicing that feeling of release and acceptance that the singer in this song is forcing himself to have. At this time I felt so twisted and turned and yanked around by circumstance and other people that it was a relief to hear someone sing about a situation so complicated and heartrending from somewhere approaching the other side of it. I also always felt like this was somehow the sort of situation that my brother Charlie and I would have eventually ended up in if I were straight and the potential had existed for us to fall for the same woman. Who would have been the singer and who the sung to?
But this wasn’t the only song on the album to strike a chord. “So Long, Marianne” and “Lady Midnight” and “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and… basically the whole album is brilliant, but perhaps “Chelsea Hotel #2” was the one that really got me. Partly of course there is the shock factor: I didn’t know that you could sing, “giving me head on the unmade bed”, but the shock never lasts as long as you hope. It was the sentiment in the chorus that left its lasting mark, “I never once heard you say, ‘I need you…I don’t need you…I need you… I don’t need you’ and all of that jiving around.” I pulled it out of context, but somehow the idea of never jerking a lover around with games of I-need/don’t-need-you planted a seed in my young mind as important. Partly it might have warped into an aversion to the idea of allowing need to tangle with romance, but mostly I took from it a desire to be a person who does not yank people around.
“Hallelujah” wasn’t on this album, but Mason at some point brought it to my attention (through Jeff Buckley’s version), saying that the line “All I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who out drew you,” encapsulated my experience with love (which makes more sense if you know the stories I was sharing with him of the twists and turns and backstabs that marked my early romantic life). I took this as a high compliment, but also perhaps as a warning. Being told that you knew how to outshoot someone better than you might be flattering, but it reminded me that I’d rather avoid gun fights or at least that I never want to be in them with anyone I love.
13) Prime Prine – John Prine
As an adolescent, my relationship with my father was sometimes strained. We are both stubborn and I was pretty miserable and ready to lash out at the least provocation and nurse any wounds for as long as possible. Thankfully, such bitterness can’t last too long, and I have a hard time remembering a single fight we had. What I can remember is one night him inviting me out to the car to listen to a tape he had gotten. It was John Prine. I was uptight and slightly scandalized by “Illegal Smile”, but listening to a song about pot with your dad sort of marks a crossing point where your parents start to act like real people and stop playing the character of ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’. And the music was a little silly, but really great. “Dear Abby” was the song in particular that Dad had brought me out to share. He liked the succinct advice in the chorus, and I suppose so do I. Feeling sorry for yourself has never gotten anyone very far in my family, and I hear that chorus in my head when I find myself starting to drift into self-pity. Which makes me smile and laugh at myself.
Of course, John Prine isn’t just silly songs. He’s got a special way of hitting the mark. This early introduction grew into seeking out more of his music and gave me some common ground later when I met Mason and we started talking music and singing together. It is also through Mr. Prine that I found Iris Dement; I will forever be thankful to him for that. "In Spite of Ourselves" might be the anthem of my relationship with Ben.
14) I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got – Sinead O’Connor
This album hits like a brick slamming into the side of your head. It is so beautiful and painful and other-worldly. If Sinead O’Connor only had that voice, she’d still be devastating; but the lyrics she writes… damn. She really killed us all with “Nothing Compares 2 U”, the one cover on the album, but for me it is “Black Boys on Mopeds” that puts this on my list.
For some reason, the Tiananmen Square Massacre stands out as one of the most impactful memories of my childhood. Not so much the details, but the lesson that people would kill other people who weren’t a physical threat. People kept saying everything changed after 9/11, that innocence was lost, that we now knew what horrible things people were capable of, but the whole time I kept thinking it was insane that anyone whose eyes had been open at all would not already be aware of this in spades. But I suppose that everyone needs something to strike that match of realization and for me it had been Tiananmen as a child. So when Ms. O’Connor sings, “Margaret Thatcher on tv, shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing. It seems strange that she should be offended; the same orders are given by her,” I’m already punched in the gut right from the first line. This song to me was a devastating protest song, not so much because of a call to action, but as such an unblinking witness. The blunt refusal to believe that the bad things in the world happen somewhere else or are done by a distant Other perhaps affected my political attitudes more than I know. If nothing else, it certainly resonates with me.
It is more than just that song though. The whole attitude of the album. Even just the title, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” does deserve its own mention. I would listen to it on repeat, over and over again. It starts so quietly and you can hear the hurt, but it is defiant and grows in strength and volume until it is this rattling war cry. But early on, there is a line, “You used to hold my hand when the plane took off.” As a past tense statement, it encapsulates all the hurt and makes her case for the breakup, but it is effective also because listening to it as something she had lost, it made me want someone to hold my hand when the plane takes off. This gesture became for me the ultimate romantic gesture.
15) Give Up – Postal Service
This album was hitting right as I arrived in New York. I landed in the city with barely any money, but my brother and friends from college were there and we were all clinging together and helping each other stick it out. This album (along with Le Tigre) is the soundtrack for my memories of my over-crowded dingy Greenpoint apartment. We would buy a bag of potatoes, a bag of onions, and a couple dozen eggs and this music would play while someone cooked our meager ingredients and we drank Balentine tall-boys or fourties. Something about the music was perfect. The sound was just right, the lyrics and the voices caught the tenor of our excitement and our desperation and resonated with us. I’ve never been able to fully get into either Deathcab for Cutie or Dntel, but this synthesis does it for me. It also contains both the best break-up song and best love song ever. “Nothing Better” was originally my favorite from the album, so brilliant in the counterpoint of desperate and over-it duet, but before too long, I fell hard for a certain beautiful boy and “Such Great Heights” would play over and over again in my headphones. It still does.
poem for Michael
it should be noted
how the sunlit (or
sometimes grey) mornings
around the table -waiting
for you to finish
making grits, others
drinking their coffee to
wake up, me probably
already drinking a beer-
are missed, when
I wake up alone
without a plan
for the day.
in our full
house you never
had to look for a partner
in crime, you just
had to wait for
one to wake
up or come home.
how the sunlit (or
sometimes grey) mornings
around the table -waiting
for you to finish
making grits, others
drinking their coffee to
wake up, me probably
already drinking a beer-
are missed, when
I wake up alone
without a plan
for the day.
in our full
house you never
had to look for a partner
in crime, you just
had to wait for
one to wake
up or come home.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Limbo...
Just a quick short post about where I'm at right now to clear my head a little bit. I'm in Dutch Harbor for Opilo crab season. I can't really complain, because I'm on a great boat and everything has gone pretty smoothly. Except the ice. So I'm finding myself spending longer in town than a trip would have taken and my season drags on. I wasn't too keen on being away from home this season in the first place, but it is nice to have a pay check and its been really great seeing friends up here. The rub is still being here after I already thought I'd be home. I'm getting paid while I wait for things to start up and I know that everyone thinks getting a paycheck for doing nothing other than being there and ready when the work picks up sounds nice, but I actually find it harder than just being out there doing the job. At sea, I can't call anyone or get online; I'm trapped in my own little environment. Which sounds bad, but sometimes when you are cut off from your home and where you want to be, it's easier when the isolation is complete. The first day back on land, being able to call home and check email and see everyone who is in town is amazing and kind of fills up your tank. Having a couple of days to hang out with friends while you sit out a blizzard is awesome. Suddenly, after a few days something shifts. There isn't that much to do and you find yourself trapped in Groundhog Day, doing the same things over and over and not feeling any closer to things changing. That's where I am now. I totally understand the reasons for the delay and I like getting payed for not so much effort. Still it feels like limbo and makes me feel more isolated and cut off than I do when I'm actually trapped in a floating prison freezing my ass off.
I know we'll get moving soon and I'll get to do my work and read my books and then I'll be home before I know it; just needed to air out the nagging thoughts swirling around my head.
I know we'll get moving soon and I'll get to do my work and read my books and then I'll be home before I know it; just needed to air out the nagging thoughts swirling around my head.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Zagats for Faggots: New Orleans continued…
In the last post, I mentioned most of the gay bars that I’m very familiar with, but there are a few other places of note (bars and otherwise) that should be mentioned before moving on.
If you continue away from the hullabaloo walking down Bourbon St., you come to an area where the streets go at different angles and don’t quite line up the same way after you cross Esplanade Ave. Welcome to the Marigny. This might be my favorite neighborhood. Close to the French Quarter, but still off the beaten path, this neighborhood has some beautiful houses and really cool little bars and shops. I like my bars, but if like anything more it is bookstores and you can find my favorite one here. Faubour Marigny Art and Books is at the corner of Frenchman and Chartres and it is that super small, super local kind of bookstore that is getting harder and harder to find. While you can find all kinds of books there, it also caters heavily to a gay clientele and I always find books there that I can’t find anywhere else. The fellow that runs the store is this charming gentleman Otis who is always ready to help you find a book, or talk literature or just about the neighborhood and New Orleans in general. I have a fantasy of Ben and I moving to New Orleans and taking over the bookstore when he retires. He told me when I visited there last time that there are a line of people eagerly eyeballing his location and at least one who regularly comes by and asks him if he’s ready to retire so he can snap up the location. Unfortunately none of the people seem remotely interested in keeping the site a bookstore. But let’s not think of endings; the store remains and the owner is far from retiring, though he did say he is going to start shutting down for a month or two in the summer and just hang out at the Country Club or travel.
The Country Club (634 Louisa St., between Royal and Chartres) is a place I am kicking myself for never discovering before my most recent trip. I’d heard of it, but never quite knew where it was and it is well out of the way if you are on foot (though truth be told, I did walk there from the Quarter and didn’t regret the ramble), so I hadn’t ventured there. This last trip my friend Nicole mentioned having heard of it and never having gone and the bookstore owner told me about it too, so I resolved to venture a little farther this time. It did not disappoint. It is in this kind of grand house in a quiet residential neighborhood. What make it unique aside from its location are two things: food and pool. In the front is a fairly nice restaurant. Nicole and I went and grabbed dinner there one night and I’ve got to say I was pleased with the food. In the back room there is a bar, and this was also fairly pleasant and I should say the bartender was attentive and super friendly. What makes this place popular in the summer is that it has a clothing optional pool out back. Now, I image this becomes quite an intense scene, particularly during the big celebrations, but I was there in January when an arctic cold front was running through and had dragged the temperatures down in the 20’s and lower so you would be correct in assuming it wasn’t hopping. But they had a hot tub and they had heated it up, so it seemed an appropriate escape from the cold. I went back one evening and snagged a glass of wine and headed back for a dip. It was just me (bare ass naked) and an older lady (in a frilly floral swim suit) for a while, though another guy did come join us after a while. While I not describing a rollicking party time, and it wasn’t, I really did have a super pleasant time chatting with those two and sitting beneath palm trees pretending it was warm and wondering if it might start snowing. I’d go back on a similarly empty night in a heartbeat, but I do want to go when it is livelier sometime. Another note, that while this is ostensibly a gay bar, at least on the slow nights I was there, a majority of the customers were straight. Just an observation.
As I was walking towards the Country Club, I passed a bar called Friendly Lounge (Chartres St at Marigny St). It is back in the Marigny and I’d passed it before and seen it advertised in Ambush. I had needed to pee since well back in the Quarter and still had quite a walk ahead so I decided to give it a try. The bartender has to buzz you in, but once inside I’ve got to say it lived up to its name. There were a couple of clumps of friends at either end of the bar and everyone was smiling and laughing and the bartender immediately introduced herself and started talking to me like we were old friends. I had a couple of drinks and felt guilty having a different destination in mind and leaving so quickly simply because the place was so welcoming and friendly. High on my list of places to revisit. It definitely seems to be a local place that tourists stumble into only occasionally.
Having said before that the straight end of Bourbon Street is filled with the worst kind of irritating tourists, it is worth pointing out that other neighborhoods have some pretty amazing bars and nightlife. These bars I tend to get taken to by friends so I don’t remember really well the names or even necessarily how to find them, but a couple of neighborhoods stand out. I’ve already mentioned the Marigny. The one fun straight bar I do remember the name of is there and is called DBA. I remember this 1) because there was a live band and people swing dancing and it was basically super awesome, and 2) because this is also the name of what seems to be a sister bar in New York of the same name, but the New York bar is so annoying my friend Michael and I speculated that the initials must stand for DoucheBagAlley. The one in NO, go to; in NY, avoid. There are also other cool bars in that proximity so is worth wandering around there.
The other neighborhood that is more local and cool and less tourist trap is around Magazine Street. Lot’s of hip little bars and stores and restaurants. I couldn’t name one off the top of my head but if you go to the general area it is easy great places and a welcome break from the French Quarter madness.
Before I wrap this up, it might be worth mentioning accommodations. I’ve tended to visit when I’ve had friends living there, so I’ve mostly couch surfed. This is, of course, always the best way to go. The one time I did have to find my own accommodations, I stayed at the India House Hostel (124 South Lopez St near Canal). I can’t say enough good things about the place. It is in midtown, away from the Quarter, but close to a cable car so getting there is easy enough. The place has a super friendly vibe and a little front porch and a big back yard. The rates were reasonable and they have shared and private rooms. I’d happily stay there again.
Oh, and a quick note on getting to the Big Easy. My family lives in Alabama, and my brother discovered that it is a quick and easy train ride from Birmingham to New Orleans, and pretty cheap, too. This is also true from Jackson or Memphis or Atlanta.
Please feel free to leave any suggestions of your own in the comments.
If you continue away from the hullabaloo walking down Bourbon St., you come to an area where the streets go at different angles and don’t quite line up the same way after you cross Esplanade Ave. Welcome to the Marigny. This might be my favorite neighborhood. Close to the French Quarter, but still off the beaten path, this neighborhood has some beautiful houses and really cool little bars and shops. I like my bars, but if like anything more it is bookstores and you can find my favorite one here. Faubour Marigny Art and Books is at the corner of Frenchman and Chartres and it is that super small, super local kind of bookstore that is getting harder and harder to find. While you can find all kinds of books there, it also caters heavily to a gay clientele and I always find books there that I can’t find anywhere else. The fellow that runs the store is this charming gentleman Otis who is always ready to help you find a book, or talk literature or just about the neighborhood and New Orleans in general. I have a fantasy of Ben and I moving to New Orleans and taking over the bookstore when he retires. He told me when I visited there last time that there are a line of people eagerly eyeballing his location and at least one who regularly comes by and asks him if he’s ready to retire so he can snap up the location. Unfortunately none of the people seem remotely interested in keeping the site a bookstore. But let’s not think of endings; the store remains and the owner is far from retiring, though he did say he is going to start shutting down for a month or two in the summer and just hang out at the Country Club or travel.
The Country Club (634 Louisa St., between Royal and Chartres) is a place I am kicking myself for never discovering before my most recent trip. I’d heard of it, but never quite knew where it was and it is well out of the way if you are on foot (though truth be told, I did walk there from the Quarter and didn’t regret the ramble), so I hadn’t ventured there. This last trip my friend Nicole mentioned having heard of it and never having gone and the bookstore owner told me about it too, so I resolved to venture a little farther this time. It did not disappoint. It is in this kind of grand house in a quiet residential neighborhood. What make it unique aside from its location are two things: food and pool. In the front is a fairly nice restaurant. Nicole and I went and grabbed dinner there one night and I’ve got to say I was pleased with the food. In the back room there is a bar, and this was also fairly pleasant and I should say the bartender was attentive and super friendly. What makes this place popular in the summer is that it has a clothing optional pool out back. Now, I image this becomes quite an intense scene, particularly during the big celebrations, but I was there in January when an arctic cold front was running through and had dragged the temperatures down in the 20’s and lower so you would be correct in assuming it wasn’t hopping. But they had a hot tub and they had heated it up, so it seemed an appropriate escape from the cold. I went back one evening and snagged a glass of wine and headed back for a dip. It was just me (bare ass naked) and an older lady (in a frilly floral swim suit) for a while, though another guy did come join us after a while. While I not describing a rollicking party time, and it wasn’t, I really did have a super pleasant time chatting with those two and sitting beneath palm trees pretending it was warm and wondering if it might start snowing. I’d go back on a similarly empty night in a heartbeat, but I do want to go when it is livelier sometime. Another note, that while this is ostensibly a gay bar, at least on the slow nights I was there, a majority of the customers were straight. Just an observation.
As I was walking towards the Country Club, I passed a bar called Friendly Lounge (Chartres St at Marigny St). It is back in the Marigny and I’d passed it before and seen it advertised in Ambush. I had needed to pee since well back in the Quarter and still had quite a walk ahead so I decided to give it a try. The bartender has to buzz you in, but once inside I’ve got to say it lived up to its name. There were a couple of clumps of friends at either end of the bar and everyone was smiling and laughing and the bartender immediately introduced herself and started talking to me like we were old friends. I had a couple of drinks and felt guilty having a different destination in mind and leaving so quickly simply because the place was so welcoming and friendly. High on my list of places to revisit. It definitely seems to be a local place that tourists stumble into only occasionally.
Having said before that the straight end of Bourbon Street is filled with the worst kind of irritating tourists, it is worth pointing out that other neighborhoods have some pretty amazing bars and nightlife. These bars I tend to get taken to by friends so I don’t remember really well the names or even necessarily how to find them, but a couple of neighborhoods stand out. I’ve already mentioned the Marigny. The one fun straight bar I do remember the name of is there and is called DBA. I remember this 1) because there was a live band and people swing dancing and it was basically super awesome, and 2) because this is also the name of what seems to be a sister bar in New York of the same name, but the New York bar is so annoying my friend Michael and I speculated that the initials must stand for DoucheBagAlley. The one in NO, go to; in NY, avoid. There are also other cool bars in that proximity so is worth wandering around there.
The other neighborhood that is more local and cool and less tourist trap is around Magazine Street. Lot’s of hip little bars and stores and restaurants. I couldn’t name one off the top of my head but if you go to the general area it is easy great places and a welcome break from the French Quarter madness.
Before I wrap this up, it might be worth mentioning accommodations. I’ve tended to visit when I’ve had friends living there, so I’ve mostly couch surfed. This is, of course, always the best way to go. The one time I did have to find my own accommodations, I stayed at the India House Hostel (124 South Lopez St near Canal). I can’t say enough good things about the place. It is in midtown, away from the Quarter, but close to a cable car so getting there is easy enough. The place has a super friendly vibe and a little front porch and a big back yard. The rates were reasonable and they have shared and private rooms. I’d happily stay there again.
Oh, and a quick note on getting to the Big Easy. My family lives in Alabama, and my brother discovered that it is a quick and easy train ride from Birmingham to New Orleans, and pretty cheap, too. This is also true from Jackson or Memphis or Atlanta.
Please feel free to leave any suggestions of your own in the comments.
Friday, February 12, 2010
zagats for faggots: New Orleans edition
When not in Alaska, I pick up various odd jobs. One of the gigs which has come my way via the dazzle employment network is helping change out the window display in a 5th avenue store. Working late into the night during the last window change, we were discussing going out in different cities around the country and I found that I had something to say about the nightlife in every town we named, and after giving a detailed history of a gay bar in Honolulu, one of the guys commented, "What are you, like, Zagats for faggots?"
Which I, of course, thought was funny.
So why not collect some of that boozy expertise here. It would probably make sense to start with New York since I've lived there longer than anywhere else, but I was recently in New Orleans and Ben is down there visiting right now, so we're gonna start with the Big Easy.
The first time I went to New Orleans was for a school trip in high school. They took us there our first weekend at ASMS, and I didn't know anyone and was going to just wander around by myself. This would have suited me fine, I like wandering around by myself in new towns, but a guy who was afraid of walking around by himself asked me if I wanted to wander together. Our day was bland and uneventful. The guys who later became my best friends all travelled in a big group and seemingly had a blast. The take-away story from the trip and the only reason I still remember this trip was the comment made by this kind of sheltered red-neck fellow (who studdered when excited) when they wandered in a sex shop: "H-h-h-h-hey guys! L-l-look at this! A t-t-t-triple ripple v-v-v-v-vibrating butt plug with three rotating heads! I-I-I-I ain't never seen nothing like that!"
(The Golden Girls is playing in the background and makes staying focused difficult)
In general, Bourbon Street and the French Quarter is the first thing people think of when they think of New Orleans. I've got to admit, I kind of totally love Bourbon Street but it is kind of a different place for gay people and straight people. I say this because we tend to flock to different ends of the street. The straight end is the super touristy area. Strip clubs and bars and tourist trap stores, it is interesting to walk through on occasion but not really where you want to go out unless you are a drunk sorority girl with a feather boa or some d-bag dude on spring break. Really.
But at the corner of St. Ann's, something changes. The crowds thin out, at night is is just a little darker as soon you pass this corner. On either side of the street are the two big clubs, Bourbon Pub and Oz. Before I ever visited New Orleans, I had heard of Oz. People in other parts of the South talked about it as this awesome club, the coolest gay club they'd ever seen. Then you get there, and, eh. I've had fun there, but as a general rule it is usually pretty lame. The drinks aren't particularly cheap and the vibe is a little too clubby and too tourist. It is dead in the afternoon and at night there is usually a cover. Late at night the dance floor devolves into a cluster of muscle men seemingly drugged out and leaning against each other in a sweaty mass. The only time I've really enjoyed myself there is hanging out on the balconies outside and talking with people. It does have good balconies. I was met Christopher Rice there, when the person I was talking to turned out to be his friend. Mr. Rice seemed nice but a little flighty and kept going in and out and eventually took off his shoes and left them under my bench. He forgot them when he went to leave (when his limo arrived) I pointed this out to his friend and he thanked me. He also lost his wallet when it fell out of his pocket. I found it beneath a bench and returned it to him also, but having suddenly recovered two items that went missing, his friend looked at me like I was a pickpocket, though I don't know to what end he could have thought I stole and returned them.
Bourbon Pub is a little more likable. There is a downstairs bar that is open to the street. It is a reasonably pleasant place to have beer in the afternoon and gets lively at night. There is also an upstairs which can be fun. There are frequently shows in the upstairs area and you can see anything from a deliciously tragic drag show to live comedy (in my experience, just as tragic) to a sex show. Or sometimes it is just clubby, but the bar as a whole is more interesting than OZ.
Alone, any of these bars is kind of silly, but what makes the Quarter fun is that there is a dense concentration of then in close proximity. If one is boring, you pour your drink in a to-go cup and try another out. The best thing about New Orleans is wandering the streets and looking at the houses and people anyway. When bored with the two big clubs there are two directions to go.
If you take a right out of the Pub and walk up St. Ann's, Good Friends is on the left at the next corner (St. Ann's and Dauphine). I have nothing bad to say about this bar, but I have to admit that it isn't always my favorite place. It is friendly, and seems to attract a more local crowd, and it has drink specials and karaoke nights; which are all things that tend to make me like a bar. Still, it always seems harder to start a conversation in there unless there are a ton of tourists in town making it more lively. I imagine it would be plenty fun during Mardi Gras or Southern Decadence, but during an average week I tend to walk past it more times than not.
If you do keep walking past it, Rawhide is in the exact same spot on the next block (St. Ann's and Burgundy). Rawhide is exactly what you would expect it to be. It is pretty small and dark and kind of sketchy, but it's sketchiness is a friendly sort of fetishy, off-color sketchy. I've never been there when it was too crazy, though I'm told it can get pretty nuts on the right night. Almost every time I've been there it has been pretty dead, but people are usually friendly and the bartenders charming and gregarious. My favorite memory of time spent in New Orleans revolves around this bar. It was a hot summer day and I had been walking around in the sun all morning and gotten a bag of crawfish at the farmer's market which I ate sitting on a stoop and watching people walk by. I finish and start wandering and the sky goes dark and just completely opens up on my head. I'm soaked to the bone in a matter of seconds and the friend I am staying with is at work and I can't get in his house til he gets off work. To escape the rain, I duck into the Rawhide. It is the middle of the afternoon and I'm the only person in there except the bartender. When I say I'm completely soaked, I'm not exaggerating. I'm sitting shivering, so the bartender offers to try to dry my clothes for me. I can't remember if he hung them over a radiator or hung them over a stove, but I hand him my soaked clothes and sit in my (also wet) tightie whities and have a few drinks. The rain doesn't last very long, but it takes a while for things to dry out and I've got nowhere to be so I sit and talk to the bartender and the various people who drift in and out for a few hours. People who walk in seem a little surprised but mostly just amused. Eventually, he gives me my mostly dry clothes back and I head off to meet my friend, but thinking about that afternoon always makes me smile.
Burgundy Street is quieter than Bourbon Street, but there are several gay bars dotting it. If you step out of Rawhide and take a left, you will come to the Corner Pocket at the corner of St. Louis. There are a couple of other gay bars along the way, but they are kind of sketchy and not in the good way. New Orleans is crawling with grifters and hustlers and these other bars aren't places that I really have ever had a good experience with. Ben is down there now and tells me that to warn people against going to doubleplay after an experience of brazen thievery.
Now, if you do wander along and go to the Corner Pocket, you will find yourself wondering what kind of crowd is in these other bars if they are too sketchy for my taste. This is my point exactly. Be careful everywhere in New Orleans, at all times, but some places are sketchier than others. The Corner Pocket is a sort of fun trashiness. It is a gogo bar, with trailer park boys dancing on the bar in their underwear every night. Some nights are amateur nights or wet jock contests, but any night after nine there are almost naked boys dancing for dollars. On slow nights there are often more dancers than patrons, but the place can get really packed. It is of course a place you want to watch your back, but the biggest danger there is getting talked out of cash by hung twinks. They are running their own scam so more dangerous types are mostly kept away by the management. It tends to close earlier than other bars, so don't wander down there expecting it to be open after 2am (again, this may not be true during big events).
If you hadn't turned up St. Ann where it intersects with Bourbon but instead had continued down Bourbon, Lafitte's in Exile is on the next corner (Bourbon and Dumaine). This bar/club tends to be friendly and fun. I like going there for happy hour. Usually not too packed in the afternoon, it can get really lively. There is an upstairs section that isn't open during slower times, but all around this can be a pretty fun place. They claim to be the oldest gay bar in the U.S. Across the street is the Clover Grill, which is always open and has great food. It can get pretty packed at the end of the night.
Another block down is Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop (Bourbon and St. Philip). I've never quite gotten a straight answer on whether or not this is a proper gay bar. The crowd has always been mixed when I've been there and usually feels like it is more straight than gay. That said, it is a cute little piano bar and I've always liked it, though I usually think of it as a place to go with friends rather than a place to meet new people. They claim to be the oldest building in the country used as a bar. It really is charming place. I like getting fruity mixed drinks here in the afternoon.
I'm going to take a break here and continue this later. I've been too long-winded and this is taking forever and I need to escape the computer.
Which I, of course, thought was funny.
So why not collect some of that boozy expertise here. It would probably make sense to start with New York since I've lived there longer than anywhere else, but I was recently in New Orleans and Ben is down there visiting right now, so we're gonna start with the Big Easy.
The first time I went to New Orleans was for a school trip in high school. They took us there our first weekend at ASMS, and I didn't know anyone and was going to just wander around by myself. This would have suited me fine, I like wandering around by myself in new towns, but a guy who was afraid of walking around by himself asked me if I wanted to wander together. Our day was bland and uneventful. The guys who later became my best friends all travelled in a big group and seemingly had a blast. The take-away story from the trip and the only reason I still remember this trip was the comment made by this kind of sheltered red-neck fellow (who studdered when excited) when they wandered in a sex shop: "H-h-h-h-hey guys! L-l-look at this! A t-t-t-triple ripple v-v-v-v-vibrating butt plug with three rotating heads! I-I-I-I ain't never seen nothing like that!"
(The Golden Girls is playing in the background and makes staying focused difficult)
In general, Bourbon Street and the French Quarter is the first thing people think of when they think of New Orleans. I've got to admit, I kind of totally love Bourbon Street but it is kind of a different place for gay people and straight people. I say this because we tend to flock to different ends of the street. The straight end is the super touristy area. Strip clubs and bars and tourist trap stores, it is interesting to walk through on occasion but not really where you want to go out unless you are a drunk sorority girl with a feather boa or some d-bag dude on spring break. Really.
But at the corner of St. Ann's, something changes. The crowds thin out, at night is is just a little darker as soon you pass this corner. On either side of the street are the two big clubs, Bourbon Pub and Oz. Before I ever visited New Orleans, I had heard of Oz. People in other parts of the South talked about it as this awesome club, the coolest gay club they'd ever seen. Then you get there, and, eh. I've had fun there, but as a general rule it is usually pretty lame. The drinks aren't particularly cheap and the vibe is a little too clubby and too tourist. It is dead in the afternoon and at night there is usually a cover. Late at night the dance floor devolves into a cluster of muscle men seemingly drugged out and leaning against each other in a sweaty mass. The only time I've really enjoyed myself there is hanging out on the balconies outside and talking with people. It does have good balconies. I was met Christopher Rice there, when the person I was talking to turned out to be his friend. Mr. Rice seemed nice but a little flighty and kept going in and out and eventually took off his shoes and left them under my bench. He forgot them when he went to leave (when his limo arrived) I pointed this out to his friend and he thanked me. He also lost his wallet when it fell out of his pocket. I found it beneath a bench and returned it to him also, but having suddenly recovered two items that went missing, his friend looked at me like I was a pickpocket, though I don't know to what end he could have thought I stole and returned them.
Bourbon Pub is a little more likable. There is a downstairs bar that is open to the street. It is a reasonably pleasant place to have beer in the afternoon and gets lively at night. There is also an upstairs which can be fun. There are frequently shows in the upstairs area and you can see anything from a deliciously tragic drag show to live comedy (in my experience, just as tragic) to a sex show. Or sometimes it is just clubby, but the bar as a whole is more interesting than OZ.
Alone, any of these bars is kind of silly, but what makes the Quarter fun is that there is a dense concentration of then in close proximity. If one is boring, you pour your drink in a to-go cup and try another out. The best thing about New Orleans is wandering the streets and looking at the houses and people anyway. When bored with the two big clubs there are two directions to go.
If you take a right out of the Pub and walk up St. Ann's, Good Friends is on the left at the next corner (St. Ann's and Dauphine). I have nothing bad to say about this bar, but I have to admit that it isn't always my favorite place. It is friendly, and seems to attract a more local crowd, and it has drink specials and karaoke nights; which are all things that tend to make me like a bar. Still, it always seems harder to start a conversation in there unless there are a ton of tourists in town making it more lively. I imagine it would be plenty fun during Mardi Gras or Southern Decadence, but during an average week I tend to walk past it more times than not.
If you do keep walking past it, Rawhide is in the exact same spot on the next block (St. Ann's and Burgundy). Rawhide is exactly what you would expect it to be. It is pretty small and dark and kind of sketchy, but it's sketchiness is a friendly sort of fetishy, off-color sketchy. I've never been there when it was too crazy, though I'm told it can get pretty nuts on the right night. Almost every time I've been there it has been pretty dead, but people are usually friendly and the bartenders charming and gregarious. My favorite memory of time spent in New Orleans revolves around this bar. It was a hot summer day and I had been walking around in the sun all morning and gotten a bag of crawfish at the farmer's market which I ate sitting on a stoop and watching people walk by. I finish and start wandering and the sky goes dark and just completely opens up on my head. I'm soaked to the bone in a matter of seconds and the friend I am staying with is at work and I can't get in his house til he gets off work. To escape the rain, I duck into the Rawhide. It is the middle of the afternoon and I'm the only person in there except the bartender. When I say I'm completely soaked, I'm not exaggerating. I'm sitting shivering, so the bartender offers to try to dry my clothes for me. I can't remember if he hung them over a radiator or hung them over a stove, but I hand him my soaked clothes and sit in my (also wet) tightie whities and have a few drinks. The rain doesn't last very long, but it takes a while for things to dry out and I've got nowhere to be so I sit and talk to the bartender and the various people who drift in and out for a few hours. People who walk in seem a little surprised but mostly just amused. Eventually, he gives me my mostly dry clothes back and I head off to meet my friend, but thinking about that afternoon always makes me smile.
Burgundy Street is quieter than Bourbon Street, but there are several gay bars dotting it. If you step out of Rawhide and take a left, you will come to the Corner Pocket at the corner of St. Louis. There are a couple of other gay bars along the way, but they are kind of sketchy and not in the good way. New Orleans is crawling with grifters and hustlers and these other bars aren't places that I really have ever had a good experience with. Ben is down there now and tells me that to warn people against going to doubleplay after an experience of brazen thievery.
Now, if you do wander along and go to the Corner Pocket, you will find yourself wondering what kind of crowd is in these other bars if they are too sketchy for my taste. This is my point exactly. Be careful everywhere in New Orleans, at all times, but some places are sketchier than others. The Corner Pocket is a sort of fun trashiness. It is a gogo bar, with trailer park boys dancing on the bar in their underwear every night. Some nights are amateur nights or wet jock contests, but any night after nine there are almost naked boys dancing for dollars. On slow nights there are often more dancers than patrons, but the place can get really packed. It is of course a place you want to watch your back, but the biggest danger there is getting talked out of cash by hung twinks. They are running their own scam so more dangerous types are mostly kept away by the management. It tends to close earlier than other bars, so don't wander down there expecting it to be open after 2am (again, this may not be true during big events).
If you hadn't turned up St. Ann where it intersects with Bourbon but instead had continued down Bourbon, Lafitte's in Exile is on the next corner (Bourbon and Dumaine). This bar/club tends to be friendly and fun. I like going there for happy hour. Usually not too packed in the afternoon, it can get really lively. There is an upstairs section that isn't open during slower times, but all around this can be a pretty fun place. They claim to be the oldest gay bar in the U.S. Across the street is the Clover Grill, which is always open and has great food. It can get pretty packed at the end of the night.
Another block down is Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop (Bourbon and St. Philip). I've never quite gotten a straight answer on whether or not this is a proper gay bar. The crowd has always been mixed when I've been there and usually feels like it is more straight than gay. That said, it is a cute little piano bar and I've always liked it, though I usually think of it as a place to go with friends rather than a place to meet new people. They claim to be the oldest building in the country used as a bar. It really is charming place. I like getting fruity mixed drinks here in the afternoon.
I'm going to take a break here and continue this later. I've been too long-winded and this is taking forever and I need to escape the computer.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Gays vs.Ourselves
Earlier this week, I got on the computer to find that Ben had left open an article from the Advocate.com, "Gays vs Democrats". Reading the article, I got a sinking feeling. I've been complaining that the gay community has been ill served by the myopic focus on specifically "gay" issues while neglecting to build alliances with potential allies. I'm certainly not the only person who has commented along these lines, but by and large, most of what I see in terms of political coverage from the major gay organizations is disappointing.
Reading this article, one word kept screaming into my head again and again: "crybabies".
After 8 years of bush, which started with him jimmying his way into the Whitehouse with a super-legal crowbar, then passed through idiotic tax breaks for richie-riches, bungled handling of terrorist attacks, wars against brown people for control of resources, demonizing of gay people for political gain, finally leaving us with a downward facing economy and all kinds of other crap to clean up; we elect an inspiring but long-shot candidate who doesn't embarrass us every time he opens his mouth. I don't think the election was so far back that there is any reason any of us should have forgotten already how arduous this campaign was. It wasn't easy beating Hillary, and it wasn't easy winning, even if john mccain did more to help himself lose than he did to win. Obama won because we got out there and pushed and pulled and raised funds and rallied and kept momentum and energy pumping into the campaign.
Part of why he won was that he didn't try to do everything at once and didn't play into his critics' hands by reacting to every little complaint. He had a long game. I don't think he is perfect and can find plenty to complain about, but I don't think that he has any less of a long view now that he is in office.
He made it pretty clear during the campaign and early in office that healthcare was his number one priority. It was/is at the top of the list. He's made good on that. He went in and has pushed and prodded congress to force some kind of healthcare reform through. He's faced a complete stonewall by the republicans, who are simply trying to derail his reform as a way of neutering his administration. This is his big gambit; this is our big battle. If he passes a good healthcare reform bill, he has political capital to spare; if he fails, it is going to be a long, hard slog on every other issue. We all know this.
We all also know he can't do this without us. All of us who wrote friends and family during the campaign or donated or volunteered, where are we now? Did we only have the energy because we thought we'd get exactly what we wanted as soon as he was in office? Did the battle end on election day? Where have we been now that he really needed us? And when I say he really needs us, I mean we really need us because he's got great health coverage: we're the ones this fight is for in the end. He does need to win this battle to have the wiggle room to take on trickier challenges, like DOMA or ENDA or DODT, but you've got to be crazy to think he can touch any of those with a ten-foot pole if healthcare reform fails.
I've tried to keep my energy up and comment where I could and push my support for healthcare reform as much as I can. I've got my small sphere of influence and can only do so much, but I've been looking over the last year for similar energy from people with wider voices. I'd been waiting for the articles in the Advocate or Out rallying gay people around healthcare reform. I've been waiting for the HRC to throw some of its clout at the issue. Partly this all just seemed obvious to me: healthcare is a gay issue. The catalyzing event which fomented our community into a cohesive political entity was the AIDS crisis, a large-scale public health crisis. One of the major disparities between married couples and un-married partners is access to health insurance through a partner's coverage. How is healthcare reform not an issue of specific and urgent concern to the gay community?
More than just being important to our community, it is important to everyone else. It is something each of us needs and it is a natural place to build allegiances with other communities. If we want support on our pet issues, we've got to put our weight behind issues that we can find real common ground with other constituencies. Part of the reason Harvey Milk was able to get elected was because he rallied to get dog shit cleaned up. The reason the Briggs initiative was deep-sixed was because of that political capital that Milk and others in the gay community built through working on other battles of interest to more than just the gay community. Working with unions in their battle with Coors helped build our political clout. That battle wasn't won because we were right; it was won because we campaigned harder and smarter.
We aren't going to get gay marriage because Obama likes us or because it is right. We'll get it when we out-game the other side. Some of our strength comes from our weakness, from our otherness. We can go and scream bloody-murder and say things that anyone else wouldn't dare say. We should have been point people, out there in the streets or on tv demanding the farthest extreme of socialized medicine, pushing and tugging things as far left as we could. We should have been the voices asking for more than could ever possibly pass so that when the compromising started, they could come back from how far we pushed and hopefully compromise somewhere in the middle. We aren't the largest constituency, but we can be pretty damn loud when we want to be. We are well connected and are quick to organize. Instead, we were quiet. We didn't give any political cover on this most central fight. We didn't help out in the biggest battle for control and upper-hand in Washington today. What did we do?
We whined. We complained that we didn't get enough; that our specific issues weren't being taken care of fast enough. The exception to this is John Aravosis, who, incidentally, is quoted in this article. He screamed at the top of his lungs about healthcare reform at least as much if not more than he's gone on about gay marriage and ENDA and DOMA. But even from him, I never heard a clear rallying cry connecting our ability to push more specifically gay issues with our ability to mobilize behind this bigger battle. By and large, most of what I've read from the gay press has simply complained that we aren't getting what we want fast enough. Really, people?
Again, healthcare is Obama's biggest battle. It has already taken twice as long to get close to any progress on it and it still isn't there and looks like it is only going to get shoved through as a butchered version. With what political capital was he supposed to be repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell? He's having this much of a fight with something that benefits almost everyone, and we expected him to do what exactly about making gay marriage legal? bush was an obvious idiot and he got elected twice largely campaigning as protecting America from gays and brown people and we suddenly think now that a brown man is in the Whitehouse that all that resistance has magically disappeared and he just has to wave a wand?
This isn't Obama's battle to win or lose; it is ours. His success or failure is ultimately going to be to our credit or our fault. And we can't just fight one little part of the game without getting in and laying the groundwork necessary for the politicians on our side to have the wiggle room to attack these issues. Where is the cover story calling for us to do what we can do so our leaders can do what we need them to do? There have been enough cover stories for crybabies. I'm tired of reading whines; I want growls.
Reading this article, one word kept screaming into my head again and again: "crybabies".
After 8 years of bush, which started with him jimmying his way into the Whitehouse with a super-legal crowbar, then passed through idiotic tax breaks for richie-riches, bungled handling of terrorist attacks, wars against brown people for control of resources, demonizing of gay people for political gain, finally leaving us with a downward facing economy and all kinds of other crap to clean up; we elect an inspiring but long-shot candidate who doesn't embarrass us every time he opens his mouth. I don't think the election was so far back that there is any reason any of us should have forgotten already how arduous this campaign was. It wasn't easy beating Hillary, and it wasn't easy winning, even if john mccain did more to help himself lose than he did to win. Obama won because we got out there and pushed and pulled and raised funds and rallied and kept momentum and energy pumping into the campaign.
Part of why he won was that he didn't try to do everything at once and didn't play into his critics' hands by reacting to every little complaint. He had a long game. I don't think he is perfect and can find plenty to complain about, but I don't think that he has any less of a long view now that he is in office.
He made it pretty clear during the campaign and early in office that healthcare was his number one priority. It was/is at the top of the list. He's made good on that. He went in and has pushed and prodded congress to force some kind of healthcare reform through. He's faced a complete stonewall by the republicans, who are simply trying to derail his reform as a way of neutering his administration. This is his big gambit; this is our big battle. If he passes a good healthcare reform bill, he has political capital to spare; if he fails, it is going to be a long, hard slog on every other issue. We all know this.
We all also know he can't do this without us. All of us who wrote friends and family during the campaign or donated or volunteered, where are we now? Did we only have the energy because we thought we'd get exactly what we wanted as soon as he was in office? Did the battle end on election day? Where have we been now that he really needed us? And when I say he really needs us, I mean we really need us because he's got great health coverage: we're the ones this fight is for in the end. He does need to win this battle to have the wiggle room to take on trickier challenges, like DOMA or ENDA or DODT, but you've got to be crazy to think he can touch any of those with a ten-foot pole if healthcare reform fails.
I've tried to keep my energy up and comment where I could and push my support for healthcare reform as much as I can. I've got my small sphere of influence and can only do so much, but I've been looking over the last year for similar energy from people with wider voices. I'd been waiting for the articles in the Advocate or Out rallying gay people around healthcare reform. I've been waiting for the HRC to throw some of its clout at the issue. Partly this all just seemed obvious to me: healthcare is a gay issue. The catalyzing event which fomented our community into a cohesive political entity was the AIDS crisis, a large-scale public health crisis. One of the major disparities between married couples and un-married partners is access to health insurance through a partner's coverage. How is healthcare reform not an issue of specific and urgent concern to the gay community?
More than just being important to our community, it is important to everyone else. It is something each of us needs and it is a natural place to build allegiances with other communities. If we want support on our pet issues, we've got to put our weight behind issues that we can find real common ground with other constituencies. Part of the reason Harvey Milk was able to get elected was because he rallied to get dog shit cleaned up. The reason the Briggs initiative was deep-sixed was because of that political capital that Milk and others in the gay community built through working on other battles of interest to more than just the gay community. Working with unions in their battle with Coors helped build our political clout. That battle wasn't won because we were right; it was won because we campaigned harder and smarter.
We aren't going to get gay marriage because Obama likes us or because it is right. We'll get it when we out-game the other side. Some of our strength comes from our weakness, from our otherness. We can go and scream bloody-murder and say things that anyone else wouldn't dare say. We should have been point people, out there in the streets or on tv demanding the farthest extreme of socialized medicine, pushing and tugging things as far left as we could. We should have been the voices asking for more than could ever possibly pass so that when the compromising started, they could come back from how far we pushed and hopefully compromise somewhere in the middle. We aren't the largest constituency, but we can be pretty damn loud when we want to be. We are well connected and are quick to organize. Instead, we were quiet. We didn't give any political cover on this most central fight. We didn't help out in the biggest battle for control and upper-hand in Washington today. What did we do?
We whined. We complained that we didn't get enough; that our specific issues weren't being taken care of fast enough. The exception to this is John Aravosis, who, incidentally, is quoted in this article. He screamed at the top of his lungs about healthcare reform at least as much if not more than he's gone on about gay marriage and ENDA and DOMA. But even from him, I never heard a clear rallying cry connecting our ability to push more specifically gay issues with our ability to mobilize behind this bigger battle. By and large, most of what I've read from the gay press has simply complained that we aren't getting what we want fast enough. Really, people?
Again, healthcare is Obama's biggest battle. It has already taken twice as long to get close to any progress on it and it still isn't there and looks like it is only going to get shoved through as a butchered version. With what political capital was he supposed to be repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell? He's having this much of a fight with something that benefits almost everyone, and we expected him to do what exactly about making gay marriage legal? bush was an obvious idiot and he got elected twice largely campaigning as protecting America from gays and brown people and we suddenly think now that a brown man is in the Whitehouse that all that resistance has magically disappeared and he just has to wave a wand?
This isn't Obama's battle to win or lose; it is ours. His success or failure is ultimately going to be to our credit or our fault. And we can't just fight one little part of the game without getting in and laying the groundwork necessary for the politicians on our side to have the wiggle room to attack these issues. Where is the cover story calling for us to do what we can do so our leaders can do what we need them to do? There have been enough cover stories for crybabies. I'm tired of reading whines; I want growls.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
abbreviation
I was too angry
to say good
night when my
mother said it
to me each
night without fail
during those years
trapped and confused
in my adolescence,
so I simply replied
an abbreviated “ ‘night.”
The omission was
not unnoticed, but
she never stopped
saying, “Good night.”
or “I love
you” even when
I replied only,
“You too.”
She wasn’t why
I was angry;
it was that
age, the trapped
situation, the people
and the hell
they formed by
being other; but
she was close
and constant so
that was where
I lashed. I’ve
always aimed for
marks I could
hit.
Laying beside you
tonight, I was
a mark you
could hit. I
said, “I love
you,” you said,
“Me too.”
My mother never
stopped saying, “I
love you;” neither
will I.
to say good
night when my
mother said it
to me each
night without fail
during those years
trapped and confused
in my adolescence,
so I simply replied
an abbreviated “ ‘night.”
The omission was
not unnoticed, but
she never stopped
saying, “Good night.”
or “I love
you” even when
I replied only,
“You too.”
She wasn’t why
I was angry;
it was that
age, the trapped
situation, the people
and the hell
they formed by
being other; but
she was close
and constant so
that was where
I lashed. I’ve
always aimed for
marks I could
hit.
Laying beside you
tonight, I was
a mark you
could hit. I
said, “I love
you,” you said,
“Me too.”
My mother never
stopped saying, “I
love you;” neither
will I.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
and the city did love him...
I didn't know the man who sold peelers at Union Square had died. He always made me smile when I saw him. I've got one of his peelers in my kitchen drawer.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Until you can walk again...
Perhaps I am arriving late to this internet discovery, but at a friend's birthday party this weekend I was pointed towards the blog Missed Connections. Or more specifically towards this post: Phoenix With Crutches.
The illustrations are gorgeous and whimsical and punny. All of them make me smile and laugh a little, but this one in particular melts my heart just a little bit. "I would love to carry you around piggyback until you can walk again..." Such a brilliant scream out into the air; I hope the message found its way to the intended recipient.
The illustrations are gorgeous and whimsical and punny. All of them make me smile and laugh a little, but this one in particular melts my heart just a little bit. "I would love to carry you around piggyback until you can walk again..." Such a brilliant scream out into the air; I hope the message found its way to the intended recipient.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
A few thoughts on Margaret Atwood’s Payback
There is something cringingly jolting when you find yourself embarrassed by someone you revere. I can't shake that feeling right now having just finished Payback by Margaret Atwood. This isn't to say that the book isn't brilliant and that I'm not going to recommend it to friends; it is and I am.
The book overall is full of that casual genius that so much of her work teams with. There is that sharp insight, crisply illuminating details hidden right in front of our faces, and her amazing ability with language, using it so crisply and also plussing out double meanings. Travelling with her through an inquiry is a pleasure. This book is the bound form of a lecture series she presented, and you can sort of feel that as you read. It is communicated to an audience, not just a reader. This sounds like a silly distinction, but something delivered to a group versus individuals has a different feel to it even after it has been rendered for individual perusal. This is not a complaint; this is the same form that Negotiating With the Dead was born out of.
If I have no complaints about the scholarship or the handling of the subject or the form, why start off with a complaint? Because it is how the book ends which left me wincing; it is what I am left to walk away with.
Mrs. Atwood warns all the things this book is not about in the beginning, explaining that "Instead, it's about debt as a human construct –thus an imaginative construct- and how this construct mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear." Or, "…that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect…" For the majority of the book, this is exactly what she satisfyingly delivers. Personal memories of childhood interactions with money and banking are shared, scientific studies are examined (providing what I found to be perhaps the most indelible anecdote in the book: monkeys in a study going apeshit over an unfair exchange rate for their pebbles when one gets a grape instead of the lame cucumber slices the rest of them had been given), and literature and popular culture are plumbed for relevant nuggets. It all flows smoothly and build progressively and works well together. Until the end.
Scrooge (Ebenezer and McDuck) is a reoccurring character throughout, at once recognizable and both beloved and reviled, an archetypical persona who would have been hard to avoid in any case while discussing debt in a modern Western literary context, and she uses him deftly and to good effect… for most of the discussion. But he is more than just a universal type, he is also a temptation. You can't have a cautionary tale to tell and invoke him and not end up tangled up in a late night trip with the ghosts of [subject of cautionary tale] past, present, and future.
It is a good story and a brilliant device, but I'm still a little surprised that she stepped in it. Still, it isn't necessarily that she went there, but that this departure lacked the style of the rest of the book. Also, it feels like a mugging. Her Dickens moment takes us through a night ride with a modern Scrooge who is painted to be everything obnoxious in a modern mogul –more on this in a moment- forced to look at his and, indeed, all of our effect on the earth and what the wages of that will be. It becomes an ecological tale. I've got absolutely nothing against a good ecological warning; we could use more of them. My complaint is that this comes flying out of nowhere and seemed so forced. The book was about debt as a human construct, how it is born out of our sense as social animals of value and fairness, and how this understanding plays out in the real world and how it informs the stories that we tell. The ecological angle isn't an unfair one, but it is a break with the narrative that had been built up. I can't argue with any of the information she drops on us, and I can't complain that it is being said. It just pulls away so much from the rest of the book and seems artificially inserted that I can't help feeling annoyed by it.
The ecological Scrooge presented also struck me as hitting the wrong note. I'll stand by my complaint that the book hadn't done anything to build up to the ecological warning, but if the Christmas Carol ploy had been explored differently I might have been less hostile to it. The Scrooge was too much a caricature and not enough of a Scrooge. Part of Scrooge's appeal as redeemable villain was that as we were shown how he failed and what turned him into who he was, it also made us care about him and understand how someone might end up there. You might want to grab him and scream that work and money aren't the most important things or that he should care and that other people care about him, but you find yourself wishing for a better future for him; you want him to get a second chance. Our new eco-Scrooge? Not so much. He is painted as this horrible smarmy nightmare and even if you find yourself terrified by this future we are getting warned of, you can't sympathize with the character being dragged through the night this time. Instead of finding him emblematic of ways any of us could get off track and find ourselves needing to reexamine our lives and beg for a second chance, he ends up playing more as a scapegoat for us to look at and revile and blame for where we are going. This is exactly opposite what the message needs to be: it isn't that some rich guys are going to kill us off with their greed, but rather that all of us are racking up this ecological debt and are going to have to make good on this withdrawal one day. She makes this point but her eco-Scrooge works against her efforts and discolors an otherwise spectacular book.
red claw
I bought Red Claw by Philip Palmer at the airport, wanting something fun to read. It looked like it would fit the bill and I liked how the cover felt. I’ll spare any detailed analysis about why this relationship didn’t work out, but I just can’t see it through. 67 pages in is as far as I go. It is embarrassing and distracting in that same way a Clive Cussler novel is: you can feel the author trying as you read the story. The difference is that though you can feel Mr. Cussler’s heavy hand forcing the story, his narrative drags you along for an adventure. Mr. Palmer’s does not.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Folding on Folding Star
The Folding Star was already sitting on our shelf at home and had caught my eye earlier in the week, so when John recommended it, it secured a spot in my duffel bag library. This would not be my first tangle with Alan Hollinghurst. Back when The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize, I kept hearing it's praises being sung and seeing gushing reviews, so when I saw that my boss had it one day at work, I had asked her if it lived up to the hype. She seemed a little skeptical, not really loving it and seemingly feeling guilty about this. She enthusiastically suggested that I could borrow it when she was done, which hadn't really been my intention when I asked about it, but when she brought it to me at my desk one day and said she'd like to hear what I thought of it, I thought, why not?
It was wondered if perhaps something would click with me that didn't with her because, like me, the protagonist was gay or if maybe it would resonate more with someone from a younger generation. These seem like reasonable assumptions, and I thought going into it perhaps that would bear out. It did not. Well, at least not until the end or until I found myself discussing it with her later.
From the beginning, I hated the protagonist. Ok, hated is too strong a word. I never actually wished him harm; he just struck me as a sort of irritating narcissist. Part of this is the practical person inside of me hating the shallow stupidity that gleamed through anytime he spoke of love and lust and all that. He lusted after the obviously inaccessible straight friend in whose house he had found himself staying. The family had invited him in as a family member and he treated this proximity simply as an opportunity to incubate this glowering desire. Now at this point it should be noted that I am not trying to suggest that I've never had any inappropriate desire or lusted after someone who was for some reason or another never going to happen. The attraction and desire I can understand, it was his relationship to this desire and how it colored his relationship to his friend and other people that grossed me out. Throughout the book, he shits on potential friendships and wastes the affection of others, until he finds himself at the end with both everything sort of taken care of and also falling to pieces around him.
In his downfall, I find him more likable and less heinous, but I also felt like he had been carefully laying the foundation of his ruin along the way. At this point, he also shines in contrast to how horribly those around him are painted (when margaret thatcher comes across as one of the more agreeable characters in a gay novel, you may be sure there is a problem), though if I remember correctly, the object of his affection was the most likable of the bunch, visibly wounded by being left out of his confidence about being gay and dating their close friend in secret. I found myself moved by the rejection the protagonist felt, but also feeling resentful at being forced into solidarity with him. Nagging in all this was that the book was written beautifully. The construction of the story, the way it was told, the visualizations, the language – all amazing. I simply found myself inside the head of a character whose head I didn't want inside of.
Not the entirety of the character, but parts of him and how he thought reminded me of perennial arguments between me and close friends. Particularly my friend John, who has now recommended a second Hollinghurst novel. Our relationship is famous amongst those who've known us since college for being lovingly antagonistic. On so many things we agree heartily and connect and understand each other, but on others, we are like oil and water. It was almost as if we were each other's punishment. Neither of us would let the other get away with any glib conceit. He thundered political and identity certainty, openly challenging and proclaiming things that were wrong in the world, which terrified me at the time, but I howled back about dealing with things the way they are and being realistic instead of idealistic, making peace and making do. I don't think it is too much to say that either of us would be unrecognizable today without this push and pull from the other. Even today, no longer in daily conference with him, I run things past an idealized version of him in my head, anticipating his objections or critique or praise.
This, of course, would be a person I'd enthusiastically read a novel about, but it wasn't a full image of John that this character evoked for me. Rather, it more recalled things that had irritated me about him, things that we never saw eye to eye on and only those things. I wonder if there is some ugly literary other out there, some worst scenario version of what I'm like given a glimpse inside my head.
It was the glimpses inside the character's head that made him insufferable, not most of his exterior action in the story, so I wasn't surprised when Ben told me he really like the mini-series based on the novel. I'll watch it one day, and perhaps forgive and make up with this character and quit my silent judgment of his vacuous self-importance.
Getting back to my own current vacuous self-importance, I've started trying to read The Folding Star. And I've stopped trying to read it. Again, beautifully written. The language and description is brilliant, but this character has even less to redeem him. He is basically the same character, only he seems to hold less potential for redemption this time around.
If I knew someone else was reading this right now and could compare notes with them, I might trudge on through, but in absence of that, finding that I have less time for reading than I had originally anticipated, I can't devote more to this bland fool. I would have kept going but for a single scene which abruptly launched me out of the book (literally throwing the book to the other end of my bunk), no longer able to care about anyone in it. I'll not describe it fully, but for those of you who have read it, it is the moment in the bar with Cherif when the main character makes his declaration of love. This was my deal-breaker.
When I gave Ellen back her copy of The Line of Beauty, I had to agree with her that it was beautifully written and left a bad taste in my mouth, though as we discussed the particulars I found myself defending the protagonist and even the story itself. The language and the story I could defend, just not the narration. I may yet come back to The Folding Star, but for now it is only the language that I can defend and with other books begging my attention, that is not enough.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Thoughts on rereading Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation”
Mrs. Turpin is Hoyt's mother from True Blood. I couldn't help but picture the character in the story the same as the character in the show, but the funny thing is that I don't think this is something new from having watched the show. I think Hoyt's mother is the way I've always imagined this character. I think I've watched the show and wondered where I'd seen that actress before and now I think I might have never seen her, but rather found her familiar because she is the precise embodiment of that particular archetypical woman that Mrs. Turpin is the perfect literary description of.
Oddly enough, even though she isn't fat or ugly, Sooki is always making the expression ("…snapped her teeth together. Her lower lip turned downwards and inside out, revealing the pale pink inside of her mouth.") that the fat ugly girl keeps making at Ms. Turpin in the doctor's office before attacking her.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Priorities, people!
(written a few weeks ago; I've been slow to publish these days, but I've been thinking and arguing along similar lines in the run up to the big gay march in D.C. so maybe I should put this stuff out there finally.)
I just when to advocate.com to see what kind of political coverage we are getting from them. I've been doing this a lot lately. My eye was caught by the headline "Clinton Blames the Gays for DADT?" Read the article for the whole story, but the statement by Clinton which inspired this headline was this:
"And all most of you did was attack me instead of getting some support in the Congress." I'm afraid that we are setting ourselves up to hear that rebuke from another ex-president down the road. People in the gay community are screaming bloody murder about how Obama hasn't repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell yet or about how enough isn't being done about gay marriage. Really? Is this really at the top of our list right now? I'm not asking anyone to roll over and play dead and forget about issues which are of particular importance to our community, but we've got a new president who inherited a shit pile from the last schmuck and years of a republican congress. Right now, he needs to get a firm hold in Washington and honestly, if people are losing their homes and losing their jobs and instead of focusing on the economy he was focusing on issues of specific interest to gay people, he wouldn't be doing us any favors.
So we want the right to get married or to serve in the military openly? Then we should be out there screaming bloody murder about the need for healthcare reform and give him some political cover. This is his big fight. If it passes in any recognizable form, he is going to have political capital to spend. If it fails, he is going to be in a hole. The republicans recognize this and are trying to sink this as a way to neuter him. He won the election talking about this issue, keeping out front and selling it. And we voted for him and through him, for healthcare reform. If we want him to stick his neck out for us, we've got to get in there and push in this fight. If we can't help deliver support for healthcare in Congress, then we aren't going to be able to deliver the support he is going to need to overturn DADT or DOMA. And he isn't this lone figure that should just do all the fun stuff he talked about during the campaign because we voted for him; we've still got to get in there and do groundwork and push and shove.
I just when to advocate.com to see what kind of political coverage we are getting from them. I've been doing this a lot lately. My eye was caught by the headline "Clinton Blames the Gays for DADT?" Read the article for the whole story, but the statement by Clinton which inspired this headline was this:
"You wanna talk about 'don't ask, don't tell,' I'll tell you exactly what happened," Clinton said. "You couldn't deliver me any support in the Congress and they voted by a veto-proof majority in both houses against my attempt to let gays serve in the military and the media supported them. They raised all kinds of devilment. And all most of you did was to attack me instead of getting some support in the Congress. Now, that's the truth," he said to significant applause.
"And all most of you did was attack me instead of getting some support in the Congress." I'm afraid that we are setting ourselves up to hear that rebuke from another ex-president down the road. People in the gay community are screaming bloody murder about how Obama hasn't repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell yet or about how enough isn't being done about gay marriage. Really? Is this really at the top of our list right now? I'm not asking anyone to roll over and play dead and forget about issues which are of particular importance to our community, but we've got a new president who inherited a shit pile from the last schmuck and years of a republican congress. Right now, he needs to get a firm hold in Washington and honestly, if people are losing their homes and losing their jobs and instead of focusing on the economy he was focusing on issues of specific interest to gay people, he wouldn't be doing us any favors.
So we want the right to get married or to serve in the military openly? Then we should be out there screaming bloody murder about the need for healthcare reform and give him some political cover. This is his big fight. If it passes in any recognizable form, he is going to have political capital to spend. If it fails, he is going to be in a hole. The republicans recognize this and are trying to sink this as a way to neuter him. He won the election talking about this issue, keeping out front and selling it. And we voted for him and through him, for healthcare reform. If we want him to stick his neck out for us, we've got to get in there and push in this fight. If we can't help deliver support for healthcare in Congress, then we aren't going to be able to deliver the support he is going to need to overturn DADT or DOMA. And he isn't this lone figure that should just do all the fun stuff he talked about during the campaign because we voted for him; we've still got to get in there and do groundwork and push and shove.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
update.
I have moved into a new apartment.
My name is on a legal document with a significant other (who is not Mason).
I turn thirty two this weekend. I keep thinking I'm turning thirty three.
A hurricane named after me is set to hit (ok, at least brush) New York for my birthday.
My bowl is broken; I did not go crazy. Maybe just a little crazy, but not much.
My cat has learned how to spoon.
Orchid blooming in the bathroom. The moonvine didn't die, but did refuse to grow this year.
I really want to shave my head but I like my haircut so I feel like I can't shave it all off right now.
The keys for my new apartment are ugly so I can't wear them on a chain around my neck. I hate keys in my pockets.
My name is on a legal document with a significant other (who is not Mason).
I turn thirty two this weekend. I keep thinking I'm turning thirty three.
A hurricane named after me is set to hit (ok, at least brush) New York for my birthday.
My bowl is broken; I did not go crazy. Maybe just a little crazy, but not much.
My cat has learned how to spoon.
Orchid blooming in the bathroom. The moonvine didn't die, but did refuse to grow this year.
I really want to shave my head but I like my haircut so I feel like I can't shave it all off right now.
The keys for my new apartment are ugly so I can't wear them on a chain around my neck. I hate keys in my pockets.
after the fall
(this was written weeks ago. I am safe and secure in a new abode. I apologize in advance for my melodramatic musing.)
I have not bought a one-way ticket to Mexico and I am not hitchhiking vaguely towards the western openness and the liberating/dangerous adventures offered by unplanned time in arid and alpine expanses. Equally surprisingly, I have not crawled head first under the covers of a tightly made bed and slowed my breathing, nor have I piled the couch cushions on top of myself and lain flat pretending both that this is completely normal and that I am somewhat invisible, secretly wishing that oblivious people would come in and sit on the cushions to add that delicious numb weight that the cushions themselves can't deliver. I can claim small victory in having not fled in any meaningful geographical sense; this I did choose. I looked at tickets and didn't buys them. I randomly chose meaningless destinations, but forced myself to think of the practicalities required for the trip and to acknowledge what I would be leaving, what it would cost me. This sounds like simple practicality, an unenviable affliction I am occasionally struck with, but it is not. Thinking practically breaks the magic. A man in free fall or the drowning woman doesn't consider their options; there are only two: acceptance or panic. Not consideration, and that is what I have been doing, so whatever descent I might have found myself is not the final trip after slipping over that edge.
Staying out from under cushions and not crawling into bed the wrong way isn't an actual accomplishment though. I really want to (and would), but our current couch isn't long enough and it is too hot to be under a sheet, much less enough quilts to offer the gentle smothering required for a moment of pretend relaxation and pantomime calm that is the point of such an exercise. Of course it is a good thing that I haven't quite cracked or gone over that edge; I'll concede this. That I can't quite manage my sillier coping mechanisms I'm going to lament for the moment, but at least being unable to act out in such a way makes me appear something that approximates stable. This is not an illusion. I'm stable, deadly stable at the moment. The problem with that is that this isn't any balanced stability. It is, perhaps, more geologic, like a rock or lump of clay. I can sit unmoved and weather most anything, but I can't say that I've got much dynamism or oomph.
I'm getting tangential; back to not snapping as a good thing. I've got to dwell on this because falling is the dream of heights. Vertigo is not only the fear of falling, but also the desire to fall. The dream of the control freak is loss of control. When not confronted with some true menace directly threatening actual survival, so many of our fears are also perverted desires. The idea of flying off the rails terrifies (like rattles my bones terrifying) but also titillates me. Note that I only deal in extremes, so when I'm talking about losing it and acts of rebellion, I don't mean half measures. Acting out for a moment just sounds like so much clean up work. This is why I don't tend to lose my temper and why I gave up on things like grudges or revenge: if you aren't going to go all the way, why waste the effort? But oh how I dream of letting it all fray at the edges, just let go of the narrative and take off. Losing it doesn't have to be violent, but it should at least have flair.
I'm dreaming of the fall because my cabinets fell. As best I can read from the pattern of wreckage that greeted me when I returned to find a terrified kitty (thankfully so, the fear drawing a line she would not cross, keeping soft feline paws away from a landscape of broken glass) glaring at a blitzed kitchen, the screws near the top pulled loose first letting the cabinets lurch forward allowing a few pieces in the front to fall out of the doors onto the floor. My bowl was in this number. A single screw seemed to resist the momentum, dragging through the drywall at the bottom edge and leaving a deep gouge. This appears to be the only one which presented any real resistance, but this perhaps is what caused the beast to lurch forward and hit on its front edge midway across the sink, mercifully(barely) sparing our kitchen faucet before flipping across its face, slamming back in much of its contents and flipping completely onto its back to lay confusingly prone on the floor. It spared my orchid and avocado trees a foot away in the window and didn't hurl anything more fatal than bacon grease (previously collected in an empty tin can) at the tv, but it did manage to send broken glass flying into the tub through the open door to the bathroom. Where it had resided on the wall is a mosaic of mold, which I'd find strangely beautiful in an abandoned building. In my kitchen, not so much. Adding to the texture and pattern of this sporific landscape were clues to the why behind this great leap. Among the fungal blotches, walls and mounds of dirt and crud. Not dirt that had fallen behind, but lovingly and painstakingly applied, a careful construction. Here and there on the floor amid the shards we began to find strays of these foul architects: termites. When broken glass isn't enough, add an undermining infestation to the mix.
Living on the fourth floor of a structure which apparently is infested enough with termites that they have made it to the top floor and compromised at least some of the studs in the wall to the point that screws can't hold in the wood should be why my mind is numb this week. And I suppose to a certain extent it is; I'm very good at worrying... full-on, hyper-realistic, this-is-how-the-world-will-end worrying. So don't doubt that I am doing plenty of that, but that kind of worrying has real world parameters to reel you back in at a certain point. The real catalyst for mental disarray was one bowl, neatly split down the middle and chipped on the edges.
This shouldn't have ever been my talisman. My sister brought it back to me after she spent a year in France. I remember thinking, "Oh, thanks... a bowl." Eventually though, this bowl (and a cup, of thick plastic, able to survive the fall) took on a special meaning. In a crowded house and an emotional adolescence, this was one border I could guard. This was the line I drew that no one crossed. It wasn't until years later when people unknowingly attempted to choose this bowl (or cup) that I discovered that this wasn't just a vague boundary; this was inviolate. This was my singular sacred ground. All other trespasses forgiven even if not always tolerated or allowed. Nothing else could shake me.
This sounds crazy and in a way it certainly is, but it is my crazy and, I don't mind saying, a comforting neurosis. If you are going to compartmentalize all fears and weakness and vulnerability, stash it somewhere mundane. Blandness is its its own certain protection and if someone really is fired up and crazy enough to want to strike at what they know you hold as sacred, they will want a sexier target. Smashing a mirror or keying a car is so much more cathartic than taking a hammer to what your enemy eats their cereal out of and attacking a bowl would feel kind of silly even if you know it is the only chink in the armor and you would feel rather stupid having to physically fight off a crazed attacker because you assaulted kitchenware. Occasionally people wanted to steal into the sacred and simply use said these vessels; I understand this instinct and perhaps am willing to do something that approximates forgiveness, but forgetting is asking too much. But unmalicious attacks I do let go of. Even this event of unspeakable destruction -the worst thing I can imagine happening to myself (I can imagine worse things happening to loved ones; in speaking of comparisions with the bowl I go only as far as my own skin)-, it wasn't intentional. It wasn't done to me; it simply happened to me.
Perhaps this is some of the frustration; there is no enemy to fight back against. It is just my bowl, lying broken on the floor. Spare me suggestions of taking rage out on the termites or my landlord, I'll get away from both.
All of this isn't so much a lament as a frustration. This happened and this is what it means. Nothing more. Dramatic explosion would only make it all seem silly. It is frustrating to me for the same reason it would be an unsatisfying target to a potential enemy: at the end of the day, it is just a bowl. The sacredness, its life as a talisman was always all in my head, nothing inherent in and of itself. Screaming and wailing wouldn't be about the bowl, it would be about everything it represented, every assault that didn't matter or stick to me because this boundary stood between me and those dangers. And it did to its job, it did stand between me and all that, everything. These threats and assaults weren't stored in the bowl; it wasn't a terrible artifact imprisioning demons and monsters. It sent them away.
This distress is vertiginous, not any kind of fear of the dark. The bowl was never my only totem. The cup and the cactus remain. The cup is thick plastic. It survived this fall and I imagine it could survive far worse (note to the cosmos: this is not a challenge). The cactus could be happier and will die one day anyway, but for now it seems happy enough and it has its own formidable defense system. And it never protected me; it was never supposed to. It has always just been a friend; one that makes no demands except the necessary and which makes me feel comfortable in loving and refusing to shed my spines and dangerous edges. It would look silly without its spines; it would be something all-together different. The same is true of me, and when other people try to convince me to let them prune me, the cactus quietly reaffirms my decision to refuse these makeovers. So I am hardly left defenseless after this fall.
These are the talismans that I admit to; these are the famous ones that I'll bore anyone about who is willing to listen. They aren't my only magic. I also have a feather. It is from a blue heron, it was floating on the surface of our lake in the middle of the night. This is where I admit that I was that ridiculous type who would go paddle around a silent lake during full moons partly because it seemed that a moody, misty atmosphere like that shouldn't be wasted and partly because I was a chronic insomniac perpetually looking for an alternative to staring at the ceiling until I started hallucinating flashes of color in the darkness. I saw it as perfect in the moonlight, floating on its back on the rippleless water. I'd never seen something so perfect. This is really how I felt. I stepped outside of everything else around me for a moment and was only with this delicate message of peace. Its edges were perfect, it had no blemishes or frayed bits. When I picked it up and examined it in the moonlight I couldn't believe how amazing this thing was, and, still being my uptight self, I couldn't help feel silly as my never resting inner realist whispered persistently that it was just a stupid fucking feather. That voice was of course correct. It was(is) just a stupid fucking feather. It said this again when I looked at in in harsh artificial light back in my room: it did have frayed edges and was not by any stretch of the imagination some pure undamaged beauty. This did not seem to me any reason to let go of it or how I felt when I saw it. It seemed rather useless as a perfect object; the tatters gave it more heft and made it something I could live with instead of something to be in awe of. I have retained this preference over the years.
The fall isn't something I only feared; the excitement and disruption also seemed like something exciting. When I sat in miserable jobs or felt like going crazy, the existence of these sacred objects held me fast. I'd dream dramatic escapes of taking off and going AWOL, just disappearing. My zephyrous path might look flighty and not so thought out from the outside, but the truth is I am plodding and careful. The path might not be direct but I am careful where I put my foot down. The idea of one of my objects being destroyed was so horrible, but because this seemed so momentous to me, it also seemed freeing. Having these stabilizing anchors also meant not having permission to go off the rails. If I go off the rails while they are secure, it means they weren't what I believed they were and this wasn't an option I was willing to consider. But if one broke...
This is vertigo.
One did break... now what? It feels in a way like I have been cheated by the mundaneness of how the tragedy played out. Or rather by not going nuts: this is my one big chance. If I want to just lose my mind make some dramatic shift/complete change of direction, this was the one chance. If I had still been sitting in a quiet office feeling directionless and frustrated, this would be my moment to quit my job and take off for some exotic locale. Or just walk out and slowly head down the road. I could do something crazy and rash, just go and quit thinking about practical responsible ways of changing my situation. This kind of catharsis seems so dreamy and amazing to me. Act and just pick up the pieces later.
Even if this kind of dramatic rashness has its charm, how can I do it when I am happy? If I don't want to be somewhere else, why would I take off from here? Actually let me correct that: there are many other places I want to go; I have not lost my adventurer's heart. If I want to be where I am, why would I leave?
I have not bought a one-way ticket to Mexico and I am not hitchhiking vaguely towards the western openness and the liberating/dangerous adventures offered by unplanned time in arid and alpine expanses. Equally surprisingly, I have not crawled head first under the covers of a tightly made bed and slowed my breathing, nor have I piled the couch cushions on top of myself and lain flat pretending both that this is completely normal and that I am somewhat invisible, secretly wishing that oblivious people would come in and sit on the cushions to add that delicious numb weight that the cushions themselves can't deliver. I can claim small victory in having not fled in any meaningful geographical sense; this I did choose. I looked at tickets and didn't buys them. I randomly chose meaningless destinations, but forced myself to think of the practicalities required for the trip and to acknowledge what I would be leaving, what it would cost me. This sounds like simple practicality, an unenviable affliction I am occasionally struck with, but it is not. Thinking practically breaks the magic. A man in free fall or the drowning woman doesn't consider their options; there are only two: acceptance or panic. Not consideration, and that is what I have been doing, so whatever descent I might have found myself is not the final trip after slipping over that edge.
Staying out from under cushions and not crawling into bed the wrong way isn't an actual accomplishment though. I really want to (and would), but our current couch isn't long enough and it is too hot to be under a sheet, much less enough quilts to offer the gentle smothering required for a moment of pretend relaxation and pantomime calm that is the point of such an exercise. Of course it is a good thing that I haven't quite cracked or gone over that edge; I'll concede this. That I can't quite manage my sillier coping mechanisms I'm going to lament for the moment, but at least being unable to act out in such a way makes me appear something that approximates stable. This is not an illusion. I'm stable, deadly stable at the moment. The problem with that is that this isn't any balanced stability. It is, perhaps, more geologic, like a rock or lump of clay. I can sit unmoved and weather most anything, but I can't say that I've got much dynamism or oomph.
I'm getting tangential; back to not snapping as a good thing. I've got to dwell on this because falling is the dream of heights. Vertigo is not only the fear of falling, but also the desire to fall. The dream of the control freak is loss of control. When not confronted with some true menace directly threatening actual survival, so many of our fears are also perverted desires. The idea of flying off the rails terrifies (like rattles my bones terrifying) but also titillates me. Note that I only deal in extremes, so when I'm talking about losing it and acts of rebellion, I don't mean half measures. Acting out for a moment just sounds like so much clean up work. This is why I don't tend to lose my temper and why I gave up on things like grudges or revenge: if you aren't going to go all the way, why waste the effort? But oh how I dream of letting it all fray at the edges, just let go of the narrative and take off. Losing it doesn't have to be violent, but it should at least have flair.
I'm dreaming of the fall because my cabinets fell. As best I can read from the pattern of wreckage that greeted me when I returned to find a terrified kitty (thankfully so, the fear drawing a line she would not cross, keeping soft feline paws away from a landscape of broken glass) glaring at a blitzed kitchen, the screws near the top pulled loose first letting the cabinets lurch forward allowing a few pieces in the front to fall out of the doors onto the floor. My bowl was in this number. A single screw seemed to resist the momentum, dragging through the drywall at the bottom edge and leaving a deep gouge. This appears to be the only one which presented any real resistance, but this perhaps is what caused the beast to lurch forward and hit on its front edge midway across the sink, mercifully(barely) sparing our kitchen faucet before flipping across its face, slamming back in much of its contents and flipping completely onto its back to lay confusingly prone on the floor. It spared my orchid and avocado trees a foot away in the window and didn't hurl anything more fatal than bacon grease (previously collected in an empty tin can) at the tv, but it did manage to send broken glass flying into the tub through the open door to the bathroom. Where it had resided on the wall is a mosaic of mold, which I'd find strangely beautiful in an abandoned building. In my kitchen, not so much. Adding to the texture and pattern of this sporific landscape were clues to the why behind this great leap. Among the fungal blotches, walls and mounds of dirt and crud. Not dirt that had fallen behind, but lovingly and painstakingly applied, a careful construction. Here and there on the floor amid the shards we began to find strays of these foul architects: termites. When broken glass isn't enough, add an undermining infestation to the mix.
Living on the fourth floor of a structure which apparently is infested enough with termites that they have made it to the top floor and compromised at least some of the studs in the wall to the point that screws can't hold in the wood should be why my mind is numb this week. And I suppose to a certain extent it is; I'm very good at worrying... full-on, hyper-realistic, this-is-how-the-world-will-end worrying. So don't doubt that I am doing plenty of that, but that kind of worrying has real world parameters to reel you back in at a certain point. The real catalyst for mental disarray was one bowl, neatly split down the middle and chipped on the edges.
This shouldn't have ever been my talisman. My sister brought it back to me after she spent a year in France. I remember thinking, "Oh, thanks... a bowl." Eventually though, this bowl (and a cup, of thick plastic, able to survive the fall) took on a special meaning. In a crowded house and an emotional adolescence, this was one border I could guard. This was the line I drew that no one crossed. It wasn't until years later when people unknowingly attempted to choose this bowl (or cup) that I discovered that this wasn't just a vague boundary; this was inviolate. This was my singular sacred ground. All other trespasses forgiven even if not always tolerated or allowed. Nothing else could shake me.
This sounds crazy and in a way it certainly is, but it is my crazy and, I don't mind saying, a comforting neurosis. If you are going to compartmentalize all fears and weakness and vulnerability, stash it somewhere mundane. Blandness is its its own certain protection and if someone really is fired up and crazy enough to want to strike at what they know you hold as sacred, they will want a sexier target. Smashing a mirror or keying a car is so much more cathartic than taking a hammer to what your enemy eats their cereal out of and attacking a bowl would feel kind of silly even if you know it is the only chink in the armor and you would feel rather stupid having to physically fight off a crazed attacker because you assaulted kitchenware. Occasionally people wanted to steal into the sacred and simply use said these vessels; I understand this instinct and perhaps am willing to do something that approximates forgiveness, but forgetting is asking too much. But unmalicious attacks I do let go of. Even this event of unspeakable destruction -the worst thing I can imagine happening to myself (I can imagine worse things happening to loved ones; in speaking of comparisions with the bowl I go only as far as my own skin)-, it wasn't intentional. It wasn't done to me; it simply happened to me.
Perhaps this is some of the frustration; there is no enemy to fight back against. It is just my bowl, lying broken on the floor. Spare me suggestions of taking rage out on the termites or my landlord, I'll get away from both.
All of this isn't so much a lament as a frustration. This happened and this is what it means. Nothing more. Dramatic explosion would only make it all seem silly. It is frustrating to me for the same reason it would be an unsatisfying target to a potential enemy: at the end of the day, it is just a bowl. The sacredness, its life as a talisman was always all in my head, nothing inherent in and of itself. Screaming and wailing wouldn't be about the bowl, it would be about everything it represented, every assault that didn't matter or stick to me because this boundary stood between me and those dangers. And it did to its job, it did stand between me and all that, everything. These threats and assaults weren't stored in the bowl; it wasn't a terrible artifact imprisioning demons and monsters. It sent them away.
This distress is vertiginous, not any kind of fear of the dark. The bowl was never my only totem. The cup and the cactus remain. The cup is thick plastic. It survived this fall and I imagine it could survive far worse (note to the cosmos: this is not a challenge). The cactus could be happier and will die one day anyway, but for now it seems happy enough and it has its own formidable defense system. And it never protected me; it was never supposed to. It has always just been a friend; one that makes no demands except the necessary and which makes me feel comfortable in loving and refusing to shed my spines and dangerous edges. It would look silly without its spines; it would be something all-together different. The same is true of me, and when other people try to convince me to let them prune me, the cactus quietly reaffirms my decision to refuse these makeovers. So I am hardly left defenseless after this fall.
These are the talismans that I admit to; these are the famous ones that I'll bore anyone about who is willing to listen. They aren't my only magic. I also have a feather. It is from a blue heron, it was floating on the surface of our lake in the middle of the night. This is where I admit that I was that ridiculous type who would go paddle around a silent lake during full moons partly because it seemed that a moody, misty atmosphere like that shouldn't be wasted and partly because I was a chronic insomniac perpetually looking for an alternative to staring at the ceiling until I started hallucinating flashes of color in the darkness. I saw it as perfect in the moonlight, floating on its back on the rippleless water. I'd never seen something so perfect. This is really how I felt. I stepped outside of everything else around me for a moment and was only with this delicate message of peace. Its edges were perfect, it had no blemishes or frayed bits. When I picked it up and examined it in the moonlight I couldn't believe how amazing this thing was, and, still being my uptight self, I couldn't help feel silly as my never resting inner realist whispered persistently that it was just a stupid fucking feather. That voice was of course correct. It was(is) just a stupid fucking feather. It said this again when I looked at in in harsh artificial light back in my room: it did have frayed edges and was not by any stretch of the imagination some pure undamaged beauty. This did not seem to me any reason to let go of it or how I felt when I saw it. It seemed rather useless as a perfect object; the tatters gave it more heft and made it something I could live with instead of something to be in awe of. I have retained this preference over the years.
The fall isn't something I only feared; the excitement and disruption also seemed like something exciting. When I sat in miserable jobs or felt like going crazy, the existence of these sacred objects held me fast. I'd dream dramatic escapes of taking off and going AWOL, just disappearing. My zephyrous path might look flighty and not so thought out from the outside, but the truth is I am plodding and careful. The path might not be direct but I am careful where I put my foot down. The idea of one of my objects being destroyed was so horrible, but because this seemed so momentous to me, it also seemed freeing. Having these stabilizing anchors also meant not having permission to go off the rails. If I go off the rails while they are secure, it means they weren't what I believed they were and this wasn't an option I was willing to consider. But if one broke...
This is vertigo.
One did break... now what? It feels in a way like I have been cheated by the mundaneness of how the tragedy played out. Or rather by not going nuts: this is my one big chance. If I want to just lose my mind make some dramatic shift/complete change of direction, this was the one chance. If I had still been sitting in a quiet office feeling directionless and frustrated, this would be my moment to quit my job and take off for some exotic locale. Or just walk out and slowly head down the road. I could do something crazy and rash, just go and quit thinking about practical responsible ways of changing my situation. This kind of catharsis seems so dreamy and amazing to me. Act and just pick up the pieces later.
Even if this kind of dramatic rashness has its charm, how can I do it when I am happy? If I don't want to be somewhere else, why would I take off from here? Actually let me correct that: there are many other places I want to go; I have not lost my adventurer's heart. If I want to be where I am, why would I leave?
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
we the sheeple
I've been letting some of my political rage simmer. It is summertime and I've got a beautiful community of people around to love enjoy the (occasional) sunshine with. But I'm still just as pissed off at all the stupid.
Among the more odious things happening at the moment are these asshole teabaggers trying to shout down townhalls meant to be opportunities to discuss healthcare reform. Over at Talking Points Memo they are doing a great job reporting on this. Shamefully, not so many other news outfits can have the same said of them. They are looking at how this push is being framed in the media, today suggesting that this is likethe Brooks Brothers protests used to disrupt the 2000 recount. I take their point; this is the same monster and some of the same players, but I think we have a more iconic comparison to made. Is it possible to learn of this activity and not think of Animal Farm? Even if you where in this bleating blob, surely you must know that in our game of George Orwell edition if-we-were-who-would-we-be? that these players are the sheep. The stupid, stupid sheep.
Among the more odious things happening at the moment are these asshole teabaggers trying to shout down townhalls meant to be opportunities to discuss healthcare reform. Over at Talking Points Memo they are doing a great job reporting on this. Shamefully, not so many other news outfits can have the same said of them. They are looking at how this push is being framed in the media, today suggesting that this is likethe Brooks Brothers protests used to disrupt the 2000 recount. I take their point; this is the same monster and some of the same players, but I think we have a more iconic comparison to made. Is it possible to learn of this activity and not think of Animal Farm? Even if you where in this bleating blob, surely you must know that in our game of George Orwell edition if-we-were-who-would-we-be? that these players are the sheep. The stupid, stupid sheep.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Thursday, July 23, 2009
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