TRANSIT

I have been crossing time zones a lot. This is what I have looked like for the past two weeks:

I am settling in now. Incidents and other reports coming soon.

ARTIFACT #5: BEST RUM CAKE EVER

I found an ancient mimeograph of this folded into my great-aunt Adeline's* first-edition Scrabble dictionary.

Best Rum Cake Ever

1 or 2 qt. Rum 1 cup butter
1 tsp sugar 2 large eggs
1 cu dried fruit ¼ tsp baking powder
1 tsp soda lemon juice
brown sugar chopped nuts

Before you start, sample the rum to check for quality. Good, isn’t it? Now go ahead. Select a large mixing bowl, measuring cup, etc. Check the rum again, it must be just right. To be sure the rum is of the highest quality, pour one level cup of the rum into a glass and drink it as fast as you can. Repeat.

With an electric mixer, beat 1 cup butter in a large fluffy bowl. Add 1 seaspoon of thugar and beat again. Meanwhile, make sure the rum is of the finest quality. Try another cup. Open 2nd quart if necessary. Add 2 arge leggs, 2 cu. fried druit, and beat till high. If druit gets stuck in beaters, just pry it loose with a drewscriver. Sample rum again, checking for tonscisticity. Next sift 2 cups of pepper or salt (it doesn’t really matter), sample the rum again. Sift ½ pint of lemon juice. Fold in chopped butter and strained nuts. Add 1 babblespoon of brown thugar, or whatever color you find. Wix mell. Grease oven and turn cake pan to 350 gredees. Now pour the whole mess into the coven and ake. Check the rum and bo to ged.

* Adeline: 94, walking, and still reading political hardcovers every day.

ARTIFACT #4: I LOATHE THE OPERA

From the Opera News office, New York, 1997.

My first job out of college was at Opera News, the magazine published by the Metropolitan Opera. One of my tasks was to trudge through a box of blow cards (that's what they call those things that flutter out of magazines) and sort each one according to its source code (on this one, DUT81). Of all my lowly duties, I detested it most.

This card (apparently a group effort!) came in like a beacon from the outside world. It hung above my desk for the rest of my morose tenure there. Cheered me every time.

ARTIFACT #3: OUTLET INCIDENT

From the Park Rapids Enterprise incident report.

ARTIFACT #2: I'M NOT SURE WHAT WE'RE DEALING WITH HERE

From the Iowa City Add Sheet (sic), circa 2000.

ARTIFACT #1: THE TROUBLE WITH WOMEN

No time to write. But am finding funny scraps from the archives. Quote from a student's research paper about divorce, as-is:

Women seem to be giving out sex easier than before, being promiscuous results in guys less interest for monogamy. Could this be a reason our marriage numbers are dropping?

(In case you are wondering, the author is a U.S. born-and-bred English speaker.)

FILE RECYCLE THROW GIVE AWAY

Did you know they really exist, pack rats? Despite what certain parties might tell you, I am not quite as messy as a real pack rat--I do not preserve my surroundings with urine, for one--but I do live in a universe of private souvenirs whose meaning is clear only to me. And actually, not even, as I keep some things so long I forget why I ever had them.

This tendency is exacerbated by the fact that
a) I moved seven times in two and a half years
b) in a hasty move, which they always are, I'll throw all the remaining stuff into a box at the last minute, allegedly to be later unpacked, which it never is
c) whenever a pile of papers accumulates in my room or coffee table or kitchen chair, my quick-clean solution is to toss them into a box in the capacious garage/studio.

Now I have to deal with it.

Nothing in the world stirs up the emotional sediment more than moving. Any song I play, regardless of genre, can make me teary. That kind of goes for everything I do, actually. And it doesn't matter that I'm not leaving my house for good, that my things will remain stored here, that I'm leaving for a place I'm thrilled to be headed to, and that I'll be back in less than a year.

There is something about Going Through Stuff.

Old homes, old story drafts, old tickets, old programs, old lists, old lovers, old photos--photos I took, photos others took, photos sent to me across the country, the letters, oh the letters. Old tapes, VHS, cassettes, floppy disks, hard disks, ZIP disks, obsolete technology, all-access passes, address books never filled before becoming obsolete, an old Mac Powerbook from 1993, old journals, old trinkets, old boxes, old papers, old receipts, old bills, old statements, old promises, old articles, old scraps of writing, old love. Old life.

The old life is still in me of course; it can't be returned to, but neither can it be obliterated. All these scraps and files and shoddy archives overcompensate on both counts. The archiving impulse is a weak little fist shaken against mortality and forgetting. Universe: I was here, and I remember!

And I have the magnetic refrigerator calendar from Le Gamin in the East Village from 2003 to prove it.

BANG BANG

Rock'n'Roll Camp for Girls: The Book is out! Chronicle published it and it turned out great. Neighbor Nicole illustrated it, Carrie wrote the foreword, Beth Ditto wrote an amazing piece called "How to Sound Like a Vacuum Cleaner," Cynthia Nelson eloquently explains "Why I Am Not A Rock Star," and that is just off the top of my head, basically everyone I love from rock camp wrote funny and moving and most importantly useful words of advice. My contribution is a nonglamorous but pragmatic thing called "How to Spin the Web (and Not Get Caught)." The internets, they're outlaw territory.

We had a book release party at In Other Words the other night. Sts handed out chopsticks and taught the whole audience how to play a rock beat on the back of the folding chairs.

This reminded me of a certain goal I drew in January.

So yesterday after rock camp was over and everyone was filtering out I grabbed a pair of drumsticks from the giant bucket by the rock room and sneaked into the Volcano Room, a tiny windowless room where a kit was still set up. I shut the door and turned on the light and sat down behind the kit. And I did it. One-and-two-and, one-and-two-and, faster and faster, and then I tried hitting really hard, and it was incredibly loud and a little scary but in an awesome way. I could feel the sound traveling through me via my arms and feet. I heard people going back and forth in the hallway outside the door and I felt bashful despite myself so I turned off the light and slipped back out. But I was grinning all the way home.

WHERE DID YOUR HEART GO, MANIC CAT?

My friend Lena is an artist and Ukrainian and used to wear a gray coat with a huge furry collar that she called Squirrel Girl. In college we played in a band called Endor with our friends Ginger and Gillian. At one show when Lena was drumming on our cover of "The Metro" by Berlin she played so hard her hands bled. Like, blood spattered the snare. At this same show I was wearing a unisuit made entirely of duct tape. It was astonishingly heavy.

Lena drew this eleven years ago when we were still in school. Since then it has hung on the walls of many of my dwellings.

Those last few panels get me every time.

Lena has started posting Manic Cat things here, and I can't wait until a decade's worth of drawings and wood-block prints and silkscreens and mythology all get collected in a completist Manic Cat compendium. Would a book hold it all? It might need to be some kind of box set.

P.S. Ask Lena permission if you want to repost it.

MONSTERS WALKING 'CROSS THE FLOOR

At the Ambassador last week with Douglas and two fellow rock camp counselors, we had the place to ourselves, so I sang whatever showed up on the first page of the new song updates. Which, logically, was "1 2 3 4" by Feist. iPod ads be damned (or praised), I love "1 2 3 4." I can no more resist its coy charms than I can a box of Saint Cupcakes. But there's nothing like karaoke to unmask a song's weakness. Feist has a slight substance dissonance--her voice is full of it, rich and sorrowful and subtle, but her lyrics don't carry it. They tend to be half-formed, vague, and repetitive. They sound like scratch lyrics.

However, when tweaked and transposed to Sesame Street, "1 2 3 4" gains some concrete meaning! (Thanks Douglas, pop miner extraordinaire).

Still a cupcake. But a cupcake you can sink your teeth into. Plus the line "chickens just back from the shore."

By contrast, the depth and substance of the girls who played Saturday's rock camp show blow Feist out of the water. This was the first-ever Rock Camp Studio, where veteran campers learned not just how to play but how to record themselves. Here is a clip of the Sneak Team, ages 15-17. Formed their band Monday. Wrote and recorded this song, "Let Me Tell You," by Friday. Had the entire audience of the Bagdad Theater on their feet, and the hairs on the back of my neck thoroughly on end.


Let me tell you how I let it go
Let me tell you what you'd never know
Society saying what to be
Just an illusion of confusion that they all seem to see
Well let me tell you how I let it go

In a world of freedom I feel oppressed
For the way that I talk and the way that I dress
For the people that I love and respect
Don't know why I can't be different without being depressed

So breathe it in, as it begins
(ignorance, arrogance, negligence and sins)
So breathe it out, and do not doubt
(confidence, happiness, innocence and dreams)

...Well let me tell you how we let it go

Feist can do the Muppet monsters. Leave it to the teenage girls take on the real ones.