FLAK BOOK

First there was a vague e-mail about a strange Virginia-referencing note found on the campus where I teach. Then an announcement that the school would close at 5:00 pm. Then at 4:15 an adminstrator with an urgently officious tone in her voice found me obliviously internetting in the distant partitioned-off corner of the writing center: "Everybody out, now. We're closing and locking. You won't get back in."

Even though I rationally knew the threat was probably nothing, I walked to my car fast (but not so fast I would stand out as a target--yes, I thought that) with a book clutched over my chest. As if Seeing & Writing was going to take a bullet for me.

I felt jittery the whole way home.

I spent part of the newly freed evening reading a friend's advance copy of Miranda July's book. Of course it is freaky and amazing and wonderful. You have seen the site, right?

FROM AN INDEX CARD I USED TO HAVE TAPED UP BY MY DESK

SNOW PIECE

Think that snow is falling.
Think that snow is falling everywhere all the time.
When you talk with a person, think that snow is falling between you and on the person.
Stop conversing when you think the person is covered by snow.

Yoko Ono
1963 summer

MADE EXPRESSLY FOR YOU

Pop Tomorrow poster
Originally uploaded by chelseyhotel.

PICTURE WINDOW

Portland afternoon light
Originally uploaded by chelseyhotel.

A wave of light broke through the rain and the world looked like this. Sun vs. impending doom, and I was on the sun's side, for an hour anyway.

This is one of the things I like most about Portland. The light and the texture of the sky are always changing. The rain moves in and out like a mood, the colors saturate and mute and gleam accordingly, no one carries an umbrella. I wish this picture could catch the candy-pink cherry blossoms down the block but you will just have to picture them there against the velvety gray sky.

ARE YOUR GLASSES FAKE OR REAL?

a.k.a. A Really Long and Post About One Person Shows Because They Came Up Twice In Two Days.

On Friday I went to see Fred open for Janeane Garofalo at the Crystal, and he did this funny thing about how he hates one-man shows, and then he performed an intro to a fake one-man show wherein he plays 400 characters (but he only does three here.) Sort of weirdly, one day earlier, I had gone to Powell's and bought the manuscript of 2.5 Minute Ride, a one-person show that I had seen seven years ago. And even though I laughed at Fred's parody and totally recognized the truth in it, I also have seen really amazing--I mean, is it hyperbolic to say "transcendent"?--solo shows.

But also, the last one I saw sucked, and it wasn't supposed to. It was Thom Pain (Based on Nothing), by Will Eno, in 2005. I was visiting my ex-town New York, and I was pretty broke, but I had read a rave review in the Times months earlier and had that in the back of my head when I laid out 60 bucks for the ticket. What did Charles Isherwood see that I missed? I was not feeling "one of those treasured nights in the theater" with "a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation" so much as White Guy With Hipster Glasses In Foul Mood Because Nameless Abstract Girlfriend Dumped Him, Thereby All Of Humanity Cursed From Birth, Especially Him. I did like the way he used a certain "picture this" trick, and there was one passage I really loved, wherein a boy walking through a meadow accidentally kicks a nest of bees:

They swarmed into his eyes and mouth, stung him on every skinny surface. The boy did not, at first, make any sound. The poor thing did not understand. He thought, out in the meadow, that he had done something wrong. He thought that the pain was already in his body and was only coming out then to punish him, that the bees had only happened along later and were trying to help. His body was exploding in painful sores, which the bees were trying to salve, to soothe.

Then the narrator of course turns this into a bitter metaphor for his own romantic persecution, "mistaking the bee for the flower, giving our heart away to the first prick or bitch to come down the trickling river," ad nauseum, and ruins it.

This was the first time ever I have been to a play where I thought, This is just so hetero I can't feel it. But really I think it wasn't the hetero-ness shutting me out, just impenetrable solipsism.

On the other hand, as mentioned, the day before I saw Fred's thing, I thought of Lisa Kron and her one-person show 2.5 Minute Ride, which I saw at the Public in 1999. 2.5 Minute Ride was the opposite of Thom Pain. Lisa Kron (one of the Five Lesbian Brothers) shows slides, which are actually blank squares of light, and describes scenes from her life and her father's life in them, juxtaposing an amusement park and Auschwitz, humor and horror. So like Thom Pain, there's a picture-this trick, but here, the details and stories accrue so elegantly and beautifully (and, key, Kron is bitingly funny as well) that by the end your chest is swollen huge with the humanity of it all. I found a used copy at Powell's and took it over to Half and Half, where the afternoon sun and the smells of coffee and concrete floor and light sweat triggered an olfactory summer. I read this in the introduction and wrote it down in my notebook:

First, the goal of autobiographical material should not be to tell stories about yourself but, instead, to use the details of your own life to illuminate or explore something more universal. Second, the work should not merely be a series of recollections. There has to be a dynamic element--dramatic action and conflict. Something must happen in the course of the performance.

When I look at Thom Pain now (yes, I bought the script, solely for the bees), I notice a lot of language that I hear and read from a lot of young male writers now. Cynicism and yearning are duking it out in a big flurry of overconstructed verbiage, and the resulting tone is kind of... arch, detached, in-joke, masquerade bandit-mask in form of black-framed glasses.* It thinks it is a knowing tone, but all it actually knows is itself.

(*Not a reference to Fred's glasses, btw. Or Fred.)

THINGS I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE APPEAL OF

Cocker spaniels;
patchouli;
salmon, especially the white gluey bits;
handbags.

REAL SKINNY VS. REAL SKIN

Au Revoir Simone is the skinniest band I've seen since Slant 6 in 1994.* The one on the left, in high-waisted jeans and a flowy narrow blouse, was a dead ringer for Karen Carpenter. They all three have long, straight, brown hair and sing with the exact same high, sweet, airy voice. The triplicate effect disconcerts me--like the Doublemint twins, it evokes replicability, which stokes some kind of industrial-revolution fetish, sexualized and a little dehumanized. Overthinking? Whatever. David Lynch is a fan, which I think validates my point. Anyway: They all stand there in a row behind their keyboards, and one of them wanted to rock out, and swayed more vigorously and nodded her head hard; the other two kind of swiveled their shoulders and occasionally stomped their feet. Fact: It is hard to rock out behind a Roland. Their single, which sounds like all their songs, is called "Falling Snow," and their songs are kind of like snowflakes: cool, lush, delicate. The way their songs are not at all like snowflakes is that no two snowflakes are alike.

ARS ended and all the human-seatbelting hetero couples disentangled and dispersed, so when Frida Hyvonen came onstage the room was mostly empty, forty at most. Sitting at her piano in a drapey black T-shirt dress and tights, she was seven hundred times cooler and more engaging than all three waify Au Revoir Simones bobbling behind their keyboards. I like her records, but live, her voice was bolder and stronger, with a little scrapiness around the edges, more of an ache in it, and a shot of theatricality. Also she was more beautiful than I'd realized, and made funny wry little comments between songs with her sweet Swedish accent. And when she sang "Once I Was a Serene Teenaged Child," you could see people kind of start and giggle when she says "cock" right there in the second line, and then sober up; I got shivers from it. Especially the "no, no, no, no, nooooo" part, which wrenched out despair that doesn't come across on the record.

Au Revoir Simone were a performance. Frida was a performer. Another point for Sweden.

* Slant 6, Euclid Tavern, Cleveland, 1994. Me: 19, brain-drunk on riot grrrl, aquiver with anticipation, luckiest girl alive to score a ride to Cleveland for the all-ages show with the all-girl D.C. band. Then they came out in trousers so tiny and tight they could have only come from the boys' department. The kind of tight where your hipbones ache and maybe you can't sit down at a 90-degree angle without bisecting yourself. They played a great show but I couldn't stop feeling weirded out by the 2-D thinness of all three members, clashing with my mental xeroxed images of riot girls writing on their stomaches and reclaiming their own bodies in all their so-called imperfection.

HOME OF THE FUTURE

I moved all my Norway posts here. Some of the photos need repair.
Soon I'll start writing here. I am warning you it will be mostly about karaoke and dogs.

No Pants / No Shock

Goodbye Norway,


hello Stockholm.

I went to the Moderna Museet today to see this Paul McCarthy exhibit that keeps getting written up. It is purportedly gross and shocking and controversial--the hype has been sort of Karen Finley crossed with Sensations hoopla. Not suitable for young viewers, etc. I came in the back door and so the first thing I encountered was a screen in the hallway that played a taped interview with Paul McCarthy. He was talking about how his art was his critical commentary on America. How America always looks in, never looks out. Here he was, looking closer. That sounded good.

My enduring impression: chocolate syrup, ketchup, and lots of dicks. Plus some garbage and gore and Disneyland. Tell me something about America I don't know.

I'm not saying that in a snarky way. I genuinely wish for it.

Then I went into the "Framtida" ("The Future") part of the museum, and right away in the first room there were three pieces by Swedish artists that focused solely on American cultural figures and icons.

Have you ever wondered what a moose looks like when it is sleeping?
Well, here:

See baby moose back there too.

This reindeer allowed me to rub his sweet antlers.

They were velvety and knobby and they felt alive.

Girls Write Messages On Missiles

It is interesting, this being in another country when a world crisis breaks out.

I was briefly in Norway in 1999 during the Kosovo fighting, when the Magnetic Fields played at So What in Oslo. So What's performance space was in the black-painted basement, with a chain-link fence in front of the soundboard that effectively caged in the audience with the band. Between songs, some people in the audience yelled out comments about Kosovo and Clinton--neither questions nor declarations, neither heckling nor encouragement, but some testy middle ground, as if the yellers were testing this American band to see where they stood, but also as if they weren't sure where they themselves stood, antagonized both by the Serbian slaughter and by Clinton's bombing thereof. The atmosphere tensed. I tensed. I wanted to shout back a paragraph where room only existed for one-liners, so instead I muttered it to my friends Kristin and Mona standing with me. The band managed to say something brief, considerate enough and non-provocative, and launched into a song. Diffused, sort of.

And now the attacks on Lebanon. One thing I've noticed--and this might not be entirely accurate, but it has casually caught my attention--is that in the newspapers here, the headlines tend to say LEBANON. And the focus of the articles is on Lebanon, the country, and what is happening to the people there. Same with the television news--reporters talk about the bombing, the damage, the fear, the dead and wounded, and the evacuation of Norwegians and Swedes. But when I read the New York Times online, the headlines seem mostly to say "Israel." "Israel" and "Hezbollah." Israel declares, Israel makes this move, Israel warns Hezbollah, etc.

Did you see this photo?

It was published in Dagbladet yesterday with the dark caption GREETINGS: Israeli girls write messages on a missile at a heavy-artillery station near the border.

I want to ask them, What are you writing?
And who gave you that pen?