proteanme

How is it a song from Hello Dolly can pop in your head when you’re not a queen or a diva? The other night all of  the sudden I was belting out “Put on your Sunday clothes when you feel down and out, strut down the street and have your picture took.” And somehow this led to “Easy to Be hard” from Hair. These lines from that song are really pretty terrific.

How can people be so heartless
You know I’m hung up on you
Easy to give in
Easy to help out

A friend at work asked me my opinion on concept records and I told him they were fine with me as long as the concept didn’t get in the way of the music. I’d even consider myself a fan if the concept produces something that kicks ass, like Tommy or Pet Sounds. And thinking about that made me realize why I’m not a big fan of conceptual art – too much concept, not enough art, especially when the concepts aren’t very interesting in the first place. I know that it’s a pretty broad and sweeping statement and maybe I’ll bite my tongue later. Or not. I’m open to being wrong on this.

I read this poem yesterday that had the air of a Dylan song or maybe something from Leonard Cohen, beautifully narrative. I’ve not been reading all that much poetry lately, which made discovering this a real pleasure.

I’ve had the headphones on a lot at work lately. Today started with Al Green, which is my default setting when I can’t figure out what I want to listen to. After that I let a random sampling of singles play, including the April March’es Chic Habit, which makes me feel like a letch, although maybe I feel that way for other reasons, Annie’s Chewing Gum, which I’ve never gotten tired of hearing, The Antler’s Bear, which I always forget how much I like, and Aretha doing Until You Come Back to Me, which reminds me why I love a divas.

As a late bday gift to myself I got RU and myself tix to go see Sharon Jones. I’ve not been to a show in a while and I can’t think of a better way to break the live music fast than some old school soul. If you’ve never seen Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, you are missing a show and I mean a show with a capital “S.” Sharon has tapped into the energy of James Brown and Little Richard and the Dap Kings are the reincarnation of a Motown studio band.

I was helping a friend move the other day and giving a ride to this super nice 20 something year old. We were listening to  my 2009 fave playlist and she said “I think I want to steal you Ipod.” I was pleased as punch, secretly, of course. I wish I could say it was about making a connection through music, but at the moment it was about having my tastes affirmed. I am self-indulgent.

RU pointed out that my Ides of June title made no sense so I looked it up and apparently I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. I knew the Ides was the 15th of March and that Caesar was assassinated on that date and before he bit it, the soothsayer had warned him to beware of the Ides of March, but don’t ask me where I got the analogy to stormy weather. I must have pulled that right out of butt. That’s what you try too hard to be clever and the rain is turning your brain into mush.

Here are some jokes about rain in Portland.

• A newcomer to Portland arrives on a rainy day. He gets up the next day and it’s raining. It also rains the day after that, and the day after that. He goes out to lunch and sees a young kid and asks out of despair, “Hey kid, does it ever stop raining around here?” The kid says, “How do I know? I’m only 12.” “I can’t believe it,” said the tourist.  “I’ve been here in Portland an entire week and it’s done nothing but rain.  When do you have summer here?””Well, that’s hard to say,” replied the local.  “Last year, it was on a Wednesday.”
• It only rains twice a year in Portland: August through April and May through July.
  
• What do you call two straight days of rain in Portland? A weekend. 

Seriously, it is the Ides out here. We had 77% more rain than normal in May and that was after a record breaking 25 days of rain in April and I just read that the mother fucking rain is supposed to continue through the end of this week. Fuck this. Seriously. I was trying to be all Zen about it this morning, about how this is good practice and about how I’m creating my own suffering, but I don’t want to practice with this nuclear spring cloud cover and the constant precipitation. Jesus. Right now I can see a small stretch of blue sky and it makes me want to jump in my car, race to the airport and buy a ticket to take me to any where that’s sunny and hot. I heard a story on the radio a couple days ago about hay farmers and how this rain is wiping out their most lucrative harvest, which is usually around now, and I thought to myself you have to be a seriously Zen mo’ fo’ to farm. Zen with good sense of humor. And I’m not a farmer, you know what I mean? I’m a bitter midwestern expat who misses the fuck out of summertime.

My birthday’s coming up. That’s part of it. I think it’s rained on my birthday here the last three years in a row. I swear, just to spite me. It’s an insult to person born in the beginning of June to celebrate out here in the land of eternal spring, minus the good parts, like thunderstorms. Enough already. I had pool parties growing up. I caught fireflies on my birthday. Everyone wore shorts and sandals or t-shirts and flip flops when I had a party. When we weren’t outside running around we were sitting in front of a fan or inside with the AC on. We had to eat our ice cream before it melted.

Today, I ran across this abstract painter I’d never heard of, Maria Elena Vierira da Silva. Here’s a whole slew of her work. She was the first woman to receive the French government’s Grand Prix National des Arts in 1966. She reminds me a little of Julie Mehretu, who was featured in the New Yorker this spring. Or Julie’s work reminds me of Maria’s. Either way, they both get at something that can’t be expressed in words, even something as elusive as poetry. It’s got to be experienced without language. It’s got to get to a place inside you without all the jargon.

Two weeks of rain in late May. Oh Portland, you’re breaking my heart. I should be used to this by now, a spring that runs from February through June, but every year it bums me out more and more. And this year I seem to be adding salt to the wound by looking at Facebook photos of friends in t-shirts and shorts and reading about how it’s hot and sticky and time to get out the kiddie pool. Today, I feel almost desperate for warm weather and sunshine. Fucking desperate. The prospect of having to wear a coat or a rain jacket on my birthday is bringing me down and pissing me off. I swear that I’ve got to reclaim my birthright for a summer commemoration.

May marks the end of my writing program. It’s been a terrific experience. I’ve met some really wonderful people, written my ass off and learned how to layout, print and bind a book.  I was so ambivalent about writing when I applied for the program. Grief had knocked so much out of me; it’s amazing now to feel that I want to write. Hmm. The end result of this endeavor is a self published book. I’m already getting ready to print  my 2nd edition seeing as how I found a number of typos in my first. And I cut it crooked too. There’s always a learning curve. But my plan is to have a pdf version available for download here for free and then sell the book version which has some extras, like photos, appendices, nice paper and a cool cover. Stay tuned on that note.

I’d be forever grateful if you sent me some wishes for sunshine.

I wanted to write about how I don’t believe in silver linings, but once I started writing I realized I couldn’t explain it very well. And it’s not what’s on my mind right now anyway. The sun is shining. That’s what’s on my mind. There’s a bunch of blue sky right outside my window, along with a stretch of hills that would be called mountains in Indiana. And yeah, it’s stunning and everything, but I don’t want to be here right now. Not here as in sitting at my computer, but here as in the great northwest.  I want to be New York or Paris or both. I want to see the Lucian Freud at the Pompidu and check out the Whitney Biennial. I want to ride a subway. I want to look out a window and not see mountains, but an endless city view. I want to hear horns and traffic and people talking. I want to walk down the street and turn my head because some guy or gal is dressed to the fucking nines. I want to wave down a cab. I want to be stunned by humanity. Not overwhelmed by nature. Or the unending whiteness of inner Portland.

On the other hand, it was pretty cool playing blocks with Finley at her first birthday party. And I’m gonna grow vegetables this summer.

Our poet laureate is an intellectual butch dyke. How did I not know that?  It’s a selfish thing on my part to feel left out of the loop. I could have paid more attention to the news or to poetry. I could have been a better dyke, I suppose, and kept up. It’s just I can’t believe that there’s somebody like me out there in the world (not in the poet laureate sense – she’s a genius and I’m a fan), but in the butch and intellectual sense.

Imagine not seeing yourself reflected back to you in most of the things you want to do and most of the things that give you pleasure. That’s how I experience the world. It’s kinda like being a ghost. Hard to take up space. I don’t think most folks realize what it means to see themselves represented in the larger culture. It’s powerful on a subliminal level, but still powerful. So much so, it seems to just be taken for granted, at least until you go missing in the larger picture. But don’t get me started about what happens when you butt up against the ever present male gaze or the straight point of view or white hegemony. No one is up for that kind of rant, no matter how real the rub is.

I just don’t hardly ever see intellectual and creative butch dykes in the public eye or holding prestigious positions. I mean, wow! And even more amazing is that Kay Ryan is an open dyke – married her partner of 30 years in SF when Gavin opened the floodgates for that brief, wondrous time – but no one seems to call her a queer writer, thank god. Because there is nothing like those qualifying labels to marginalize your work and hem you in in a hurry.

I really am just a little blown away by the whole thing.

Here’s one of her poems, but definitely check other stuff too.

Hope
What’s the use
of something
as unstable
and diffuse as hope –
the almost-twin
of making-do,
the isotope
of going on:
what isn’t in
the envelope
just before
it isn’t:
the always tabled
righting of the present.

One of my favorite public intellectuals, Tony Judt, is writing his memoirs via a series of essays in the New York Review of Books. At least a handful of them are available to the public and I can’t recommend them enough.

Although Tony hasn’t said it, I think there’s some real urgency on his part to get his story written down, because his health has deteriorated so severely in the last year and a half, since he was diagnosed with ALS. More than several weeks ago I linked to the first essay I read, Night; it’s an eloquent, brave and very powerful account of his experience with the disease – much of which got referenced in this recent interview with Terri Gross. He said this thing while talking with Terri, that I’ve been thinking about for the last day.  Terri asked Tony if people were expecting him to write about the life lessons he’s learned from ALS and he responded:

Gosh, I have no idea. I mean, I think my answer to that question is this: It’s a bit like, if you’ll allow me the analogy, which is a bit of a stretch, it’s a bit like what Primo Levi wrote about his experience of Auschwitz, which is to say that however terrible it was, that whatever he did to survive it, he doesn’t believe there’s any larger lesson or moral story to be learned from it. Because when you are hit by something as bad as a concentration camp, you survive, and there’s no lesson to be taught about surviving except how to do it.

In my case, I survive quite comfortably at one level because this is one of the worst diseases you can imagine, but it has no pain. So you have a lot of time in your untroubled head to think out of body, so to speak, about the reasons why the body doesn’t work, the implications of being immobile for hours on end.

I think the only life experience that I have to offer out of this is something we all know in the abstract but don’t experience in practice very much. That is that you can survive an awful lot of bad stuff, so long as your mind is intact. I’m afraid that’s the only life experience I have to offer.

I’m not sure what to add  except I’m grateful for how honest and direct a response he gave. Tony wasn’t dangling out some silver lining. He didn’t recount a list of the “20 things I learned from ALS before it killed me.” I keep thinking how much we struggle to deal what he said, the thing we know in the abstract, but don’t get a lot of practice with, which is surviving some really bad stuff.

Seriously, check out the interview of read the Night essay or both.

RU just finished her month long silent meditation retreat. It’s a big deal. Maybe the most intense experience in a journey she’s been on ever since I’ve known her. I feel lucky to know that part of her. Ru’s always shared that part with me, even if I’ve not completely understood because I’m not a practitioner myself. It’s really not my journey to talk about  though. It’s RU’s and I want to respect that. But what I can can say is that I got to talk to RU, after a month of not talking to her at all, and wow, that was the best part of my day.