SONIC HEAT

Last night I saw Sonic Youth. By the time I disembarked from the MAX and walked through Old Town, it had cooled to 99 degrees. I don't mind the heat. I like extreme temperatures. They sharpen the experience. They make you feel something.

The show was hot. The band were hot, glittering sweat shaking off Thurston's soaked hair, Kim in a silver lamé dress, guitars going haywire. The intense human zoo aroma made me wish for a snorkel but I didn't even mind the sweat rolling down the backs of my legs. It felt good to be engulfed in sound and the heat became a physical element of it; dissonance is a hot sound, friction. Lots of Kim songs, lots of Lee songs, most of The Eternal, light on the hits, heavy on dude-roars for the hits, a crowd-surfer beamed in from the '90s, two encores, I would have killed to hear "Schizophrenia" but it wasn't in the lineup. Is it ever?

I like The Eternal a lot so far. It's solid. But live, I cannot even tell you how thrilling the song "Antenna" was. To approximate it, turn it up and up until you feel it in your whole body, and then when it gets to that single unison repeated eighth note, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, turn it up steadily louder and then at the pause, hold your breath for a second, and at the crash, flash all the brightest white lights on stage so the whole room seems to explode. It was like that. Pure pleasure. A thrill to the bones.


Here's "Antenna".

THE SEETHING STATIC OF EVERY PARTICULAR THING

David Foster Wallace, in the intro to the Best American Essays 2007, has this to say about writing nonfiction.

Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder--because
nonfiction's based in reality, and today's felt reality is
overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction
comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres
are scary; both feel like they're executed on tightropes, over
abysses--it's the abysses that are different. Fiction's abyss is
silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction's abyss is Total Noise, the seething
static of every particular thing and experience, and one's total
freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and
represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

I am always gonna miss this guy.

THE MUSE IS A STALLION

When a baby horse is born, it is said to be by its sire and out of its dam.

As in, Secretariat was by Bold Ruler, out of Somethingroyal.

In other words, the father authors the foal, the mother simply expels it.

This strikes me as a little sexist.

But it also reminds me of that timeworn writing trope wherein the author claims to be the mere vessel for some kind of divine authorial force.* You know what I'm talking about: "The words seemed to write themselves," "This character came out of nowhere and all I could do was sit back for the ride," et cetera.

In this context the writer becomes mare, and the muse the stallion.

Which is at least a satisfying switch of their classic gender assignments.


*a.k.a. "the Muse." I detest "the Muse."

BRING OUT YOUR VIVIAN GIRLS

The Builders and the Butchers music video I worked on had its premiere on Monday night at Mississippi Studios. It was like a reunion. Kristin was wearing some crazy Australian leggings that were part plastic. Rachel concocted plans for a "celestial voyage" to central Oregon to see the Milky Way. At first I did not recognize Lacey outside of her Vivian Girl costume, so sleek and brunette and grown-up was she in real life. And Alicia was showering us with drink tickets.

We watched the video five or six times that night. It was like Teletubbies: Again! Again! and someone would hit the play button. I personally am quite taken with it, no less enchanted for having witnessed its construction behind the scenes. Maybe more, in fact. That one-second underwater moment means a lot more once you've seen your friend immerse herself in a thick green pond to get it. (The "pondcam" aka "scumcam" shot.)

Today the video premieres on Spinner.com. Get your Darger on.


We filmed at the beautiful barn and property of Mike Midlo, whose charming musical project Pancake Breakfast is playing on my speakers right now.

CORE SAMPLE

The Waypost feels both open and cozy on an uncharacteristically gray July day. They're serving Stumptown's Panama Carmen Estate, subtle and delicious enough to drink black. The barista is taking it easy, sweeping, chatting. Low-key cello music and the hiss of espresso steam. This is what it's like here all winter, a good reminder of what I've left behind. One of the guys playing guitar outside is in buffalo plaid, the other is someone I played with in the Extreme Guitar Orchestra a few years ago. (I think his band is Sexton Blake?) It feels familiar, comfortable, brooding and gentle, productive and slackerish. It feels like my life again.

Trying to unpack that statement only leads me down a thorny path of how much "life" is the narrative you make it.

This morning I pined for the brilliant blue skies and river-ready sunshine Portland summers overcorrect with, but bunkered down here now I appreciate the introspective cloud cover. A gray blanket pulled over our heads. Good for closer reading and writing, taking stock, figuring out where the narrative is headed and what this twist is really about--as I pester my students, not just about, but about.

The word nostalgia comes from the ancient Greek nóstos (a return home) + álgos (suffering, pain). A suffering to return home. When I returned to Portland last month, the first week back was nearly unbearably good and painful. I ached, peculiarly, for the place I was already in. For leaving it, for returning home to it, with the knowledge I'd leave it again at summer's end. I think most of us tend to think of nostalgia as a softer twinge, sentimental, golden and hazy, but this was a sharp and difficult feeling, true to the root.

M. Ward "To Go Home"
("I'll be true to you forever or until I go home")

READER, I BOUGHT IT

I am now the proud owner of How Do You Want Your Hair Cut Today? from the wonderful Lesbian Art Show by my beautiful and talented friends Mary McAllister and Asza West. When I saw it online I thought it was cute, and then when I actually arrived in Portland and felt the enormous relief and joy and love of being among My People in such great numbers, and then saw it in person, big and beautiful and real, I knew I had to take it home with me to Ohio.


On Friday, driving through the Columbia Gorge en route to a video shoot, I listened to Mary and gallery co-owner Leslie Miller talking about the show on KBOO. Mary talked about the hand-painted barbershop posters that inspired her, and how hair is such a cultural marker, and the ways "lesbian haircuts" are both stereotypes and meaningful signifiers. I felt moved hearing my friends' voices on the radio, broadcasting real truths about queer art and life and culture. It's only when you actually do hear it that you realize how little it shows up on the mainstream radar.

The conversation hit me in an unexpectedly deep place, and the stunning stretch of the Columbia River I was on made everything feel epic and meaningful, and the second the show ended I called up Leslie and said, "I want it."

The Pacific Northwest in the summer is so beautiful I literally cry a little or at least feel that swelling in my chest every time I really look at the world around me. The green here is so saturated, so dark; in the winter the evergreen-covered hills are almost black, gothically so, but in the summer the golden light coaxes out the richest deepest green ever, stippled with the lighter-green of the deciduous trees that spring up between and in the clear-cuts. Red and gold cliffs jut out of the green, and the Columbia River is even bluer than the impossibly blue sky, and Mount Hood is sharper and whiter than ever by contrast, no mist or clouds to hide it.

I spent all weekend out on these mountainsides working on a video shoot for the Builders and the Butchers' new song "Golden and Green." The days were incredibly long and sometimes arduous, and most of us were working for free, but what better place to spend the weekend than in the sunshine in a place like this? Alicia Rose directed with meticulous attention to detail and a 20-person crew, and it's going to be gorgeous and spooky. (Henry Darger meets Deadwood!)






For really amazing shots, check out the Flickr sets of Casey Parks and band member Brandon Hafer.

TEA FOR TEETH

Whoa! I am reading already tonight! I'm reading a true story, which is something I never ever write anymore--I infinitely prefer to invent and distort. But this is the piece I started to write for Portland Queer and never finished in time--as in, it was due around this time last year and I am finishing it today.

Every bone in my body leans toward fiction but there is no better time, place, or audience to pull out the Portland Queer story. It's about when I lived here in the summer of 1995, the brokest and toughest and most coming-of-age period of my life. (Also a lot of fun.)

The reading itself is a benefit for my marvelous and talented neighbor and friend Nicole Georges, self-descibed in a recent advice column as "someone with a 'cool' job who hasn't eaten a tortilla chip in over a year based on my lack of dental coverage." Here's the whole story:

And here's the flyer for the event, which also features the incomparable Michelle Tea, the hilarious Dexter Flowers, the witty and raunchy Hope Hitchcock, a queer puppet show by Nicole and sts, and live advice-giving from Michelle and Nicole.

YOU REST YOU RUST

This is Vi. She's probably around eighty--"a spry eighty," guesses my dad. Vi lives in Texas in the winter and up here in Minnesota in the summer. She has a bountiful organic garden and sells vegetables and other relics and products out of her garage, hours: whenever.

Everything you see here is for sale, from glass bricks to flowering cactus. Swollen plastic jugs of honey: $7.50. Jars of beets she grew and pickled herself: $4.50. Old well-seasoned cast iron skillets: $5-10. Assorted glassware: 10 cents to a buck. Poplar logs: ask. Huge bottles of pure vanilla extract brought back from Mexico: $11. Radishes: she charged us 50 cents for a generous handful.

This is her garage refrigerator.


When I was growing up here, Dolores Nepsund (wildly creative cake baker, multi-grandma) had a perpetual garage sale out of her garage in town. In warm enough weather, she just left the garage door open, and you'd go in and sort through the heaps of donated clothes on the tables and racks and if she wandered in, you'd pay her, and if she didn't, you left the money in an honor system contraption. I wore a green wool duffel coat from that garage for seven years, from Ohio to Norway to New York, until it was threadbare at the hems and all the toggle-loops had broken.

Across the road from the lake, there is still an honor-system vintage shop set up in a little refurbished camping trailer parked in Iva Thielges' front yard. Inside, you find old picnic sets and paint-by-number horse portraits and dolls and embroidered dish towels etc., and a little hinged box where you write down what you bought and leave the money.

I prefer this kind of economy, run by old women and based on trust.

TEENAGE DEVIATIONS IN AN IDEAL WORLD

I am very happy to be in northern Minnesota right now, watching minnows startled by my foosteps shoot out from under the dock, biking in the cool evening air by the birch trees whose delicate round leaves jingle like green coins in the breeze, past a dairy farm with shockingly clean black-and-white cows snacking on towering fluffy haystacks, toward a burrito at Compañeros that is hiding midwest-style under a thick blanket of melted cheese and sauce, looking up to see a waxing moon emerging bright in the still-blue sky, chopping up tart fresh rhubarb stalks for a homemade pie with my dad, and eating the pie with ice cream, and etc.

But if there were any other place I could be tonight it would be Portland, for the preview opening of my friends Mary and Asza's collaborative art show at Fontanelle Gallery. It is called, succinctly enough, "Lesbian Art Show," and it opens for real tomorrow and if you live in Portland you should go see it. If not you should click on "Lesbian Art Show" and flip through the pictures. Some of it is tongue-in-cheek, some of it is really vulnerable and sharp, some is Dada, some of it has a Chris Johanson-esque vibe I like (maybe it's the hand-lettering and the townscapes), some is all these things at once. I can't wait to see it in real life. (Next week!) 

Here are a few of my favorites, at least as translated via the world wide web.

"Teenage Deviations in an Ideal World"

"A Map Mostly About Opinions"

"Styles of Lesbos" (just because Aubree and Torrence look so cute)

"Lesbian Art Show" itself

On a side note, I struggle with the strange fate of the word "lesbian"--it's been so misappropriated by straight porn and shock jocks. Decontextualized, it risks sounding lecherous and fake. (To clarify, I am not talking about "Lesbian Art Show" and other such specific projects and contexts, but the more generalized use of the word.) In case we can't ever fully reclaim it, at least in The Larger Culture, I wonder what will take its place? I would love to find a word that a) encompasses a broader sense of genders and b) doesn't conjure images of long-nailed girls gone wild frenching each other lasciviously with one eye on the camera.

BIRCH WATER AND OTHER DELIGHTS

I left Oberlin at 3:45 pm Sunday and arrived in northern Minnesota at 5:15 pm Monday. Turbo trip! My speedometer works approximately twice a month, and on neither day of this drive. The needle just hangs out at 20mph, going or stopping. So I had no idea how fast I was going, I would get myself into a comfortable car sandwich and go with the flow, figuring that if we were speeding outrageously the highway patrol would target the leader or the end of the line. Worked!

Emmett was an agreeable companion but no help driving.

On day one I blazed through Indiana and Illinois without pause. On day two I did the final 400 miles in a single shot, not even stopping for gas or restroom or Twizzlers. I just wanted it to be over. The right side of my body was numb by the time I arrived. Fortunately my dear and loquacious friend Melissa called around the time I was passing through Staples and we talked through the last hour-plus, 'til the phone grew hot and I had switched arms several times. This, I fear, is the point at which one's brain is being microwaved, but it made the time fly by.

Things I saw and heard on my drive, in order of appearance:
• a trio of glossy chocolate-colored mules, grazing
• a sign for FANGBONER ROAD
• an abandoned farmhouse collapsing backwards, overgrown with ivy
• speed metal on the radio while driving through rural Wisconsin at night, including a song called "Corey Feldman Holocaust"
• heat lightning over the field in Madison where my friends and I were running around with Emmett at midnight
• at least a dozen dead deer (which bear a disturbing coloring resemblance to Emmett), one of which had a neon-orange X spraypainted across its bloated and stiff torso in the dark
• two small crosses perched on a hillside next to 94, each decked with flower garlands and topped with a blaze-orange hunting cap
• a billboard for a place called Crystal Cave whose website is acoolcave.com
• an Adopt-A-Highway section sponsored by Minnesota Atheists
• girls walking through Menahga in shorts and flip-flops, it felt like true summer

Home at last, I went to Amy and Aaron's for dinner out in the woods. Amy had made homemade butter with local cream, which she sprinkled with pink Hawaiian sea salt. Delicious!

The leftover buttermilk she turned into a delicious cool cucumber gazpacho, which also featured pureed almonds and some kind of oil (walnut? olive?) and, best of all, juicy halved green grapes swimming near the bottom like little sweet treasures. This, along with tender mellow radishes from the garden and ciabatta and cheese and wine, is just the pre-dinner snack. Then we had a Spanish vegetarian feast, replete with shitaake mushrooms and sweet scallions grilled over the fire and homemade mayo and garden greens and chickpea stew and things whose names I cannot remember! And ice cream with cloudberries for dessert.

Then after dinner Amy pulled out the birch water. When the sap was running in May, she and Aaron tapped some birch trees and collected gallons of the gushing water. They boiled down some of it to make birch syrup (it takes 70 gallons of birch water to make a gallon of syrup, compared with 40 of maple), but they kept a lot of the birch water just to drink .

The taste is so delicate and subtle I can hardly even describe it; all I can say is that birch water is the purest, cleanest, most delicious water I have ever drunk in my life. It tastes clear and alive. Amy declared that she wanted to drink it until she replaced every ounce of water in her body with it. Sign me up!

P.S. You should see the crazy car cake she and Aaron made for their son's second birthday. And also, the cooking classes she is going to offer out in their deep-woods paradise.