Dear
Adorable Cheeesemonger girl
at New Seasons.
I <3 you like Havarti,
I'd like to see you
shake your Chevre,
Your gruyere has me wanting to compare
the curvature of your derriere.
your Brie just makes me giddy
and your Limburger...
Well, it makes me somethin'.
Yeah,
I think
that just about
covers it.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
FDR
I cannot tell you
the number of love affairs I've lost,
the way a woman's eyes stop sparkling,
When I said I loved
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
the number of love affairs I've lost,
the way a woman's eyes stop sparkling,
When I said I loved
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Revelry
What a joy would it be
to have a funeral
brimming with laugher,
full of celebration and revelry.
And yet the only people
with delighted deaths
seem to live their lives
as horrors.
to have a funeral
brimming with laugher,
full of celebration and revelry.
And yet the only people
with delighted deaths
seem to live their lives
as horrors.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Our friend Scott didn't wake up this morning.
Scott was the lead singer in a band we became friends with while we lived in St. Johns. We drank and smoked pot with him and his bandmates countless times over the course of the year I knew him, our involvement being of the fuzzy sort which seems to develop at bars, friendships which accept the peculiarities of one's life and asks no deeper questions than to find something to laugh over. In all this time, I never knew Scott's last name. Uncomfortable with this, over a drink one night I asked him. The question seemed to puzzle him, but he answered. It's funny now to realize I was too intoxicated to remember what he said.
I thanked him but wasn't in the right frame of mind to explain my reasoning. Had I been sober enough to do so, I would have told him how strange it feels to know someone, and yet remain unaware of their surname, as if their name itself feels alien inside your mouth. Growing up, we encounter entire family trees. I can explain precisely how a high school acquaintance's whole extended family is connected, down to random ex-wives. And yet, with an unknown last name, all of this is circumspect, people become ghosts, uncertain spirits only half-connected to the world you know, names tenuously tied to faces that can change without warning. A surname gives grounding, presence. Reality. A surname can be traced down the pages of a phonebook, the ink of a birth certificate or at the very least known to the almighty Google. A surname forces you into being. In going back to school, again I know everyone's last name, I know their collective histories. In St. Johns this was never the case.
In the time we knew each other, Scott repeatedly told the story of a poem he penned for a class, a sonnet, how much he thought I'd like it. Finally, after weeks of back-and-forth badgering, him promising he'd show me, me demanding he just recite the stupid thing, he shoved the original copy in my hand and said "Read it." It was on a tattered piece of college-lined paper, smudged and probably home to the residue of countless coke lines. I scanned the poem more than a few times. It was far from perfect. Words were misspelled, the rhyme scheme completely fell apart in the last few lines. He pointed out a bit of wordplay that was only somewhat witty. But still, I couldn't tear my eyes from it. It was an elegy, to longing, to hearteache, to misplaced desire, to the bitter regret we feel for mistakes we know we make. The kinds of mistakes for which Scott's fingers and nose and lungs and finally his heart were routinely picking up the tab.
His life was in shambles. He barely managed to hold a steady job at Subway. Once, when his student loan check came in, he bought drinks for the entire bar, keeping a bottle for himself, which reliably dwindled down to nothing by the end of the night. The stories of his evenings after the bar were of the obscene amount of drugs he consumed, from the occasional eight-ball of heroin to a day spent huffing paint cans. Of his real life, I heard rumors of rich parents, a psychotic ex-wife, years spent huddled in a clunking van. Nothing I ever felt comfortable verifying. And every night I knew him, it seemed his body was a canvas, a startling panegyric to suffering and self-hatred, pity and fear, dutifully accepting everything he threw on it. We always joked that he'd die before he made it to thirty-six. If you looked at the stretched exhausted skin, you could have sworn he was nearing fifty. He was twenty-nine. I joked once that Scott was the epitome of today's youth. That if we were to have our Don Quixote or Jack Kerouac, it would be him, that he was who we'd need to write about, and his death would be the only way to end it.
But this poem humanized Scott for me. Until that point, he had been at most a caricature, a character. It was in reading this poem I felt his unsteady heartbeat, saw him crystallize as a real person, no mere ghost at the bar. The poem was marker, just as a grave, that said "I was here. I existed."
After I finished reading, he told me to keep it, for posterity. My roommates and I pondered giving it back to him, that he should keep it to build it into a song, make it into something more, or perhaps just for himself. But we knew he would refuse. And partly, we admitted that maybe it was good for one of us would have it. In case he really did die. We laughed off the possibility, but the laughter felt shallow. Why is death always a laughing specter?
All I have left of Scott is his poem. My heart isn't broken for the loss of a friend, and yet it feels sorrow for the loss of someone who could have been a much closer friend. Someone whose last name wouldn't escape me, whose mother I could call and offer apologies, someone whose obituary I knew existed and could see, to learn what kin he left behind, where he came from. An official history. But that perhaps will never happen. Scott will forever be only half-known to me. One may argue that I knew him just as well as I may know anyone else, that merely knowing someone's last name is at most a formality. And that may be true, we are more than words on a page, or the ink of our birth certificates. But those words do mean something, as do the physical objects they inhabit. Just like Scott's poem, They help to make us more. More than just ghosts of memory and uncertainty.
Scott was the lead singer in a band we became friends with while we lived in St. Johns. We drank and smoked pot with him and his bandmates countless times over the course of the year I knew him, our involvement being of the fuzzy sort which seems to develop at bars, friendships which accept the peculiarities of one's life and asks no deeper questions than to find something to laugh over. In all this time, I never knew Scott's last name. Uncomfortable with this, over a drink one night I asked him. The question seemed to puzzle him, but he answered. It's funny now to realize I was too intoxicated to remember what he said.
I thanked him but wasn't in the right frame of mind to explain my reasoning. Had I been sober enough to do so, I would have told him how strange it feels to know someone, and yet remain unaware of their surname, as if their name itself feels alien inside your mouth. Growing up, we encounter entire family trees. I can explain precisely how a high school acquaintance's whole extended family is connected, down to random ex-wives. And yet, with an unknown last name, all of this is circumspect, people become ghosts, uncertain spirits only half-connected to the world you know, names tenuously tied to faces that can change without warning. A surname gives grounding, presence. Reality. A surname can be traced down the pages of a phonebook, the ink of a birth certificate or at the very least known to the almighty Google. A surname forces you into being. In going back to school, again I know everyone's last name, I know their collective histories. In St. Johns this was never the case.
In the time we knew each other, Scott repeatedly told the story of a poem he penned for a class, a sonnet, how much he thought I'd like it. Finally, after weeks of back-and-forth badgering, him promising he'd show me, me demanding he just recite the stupid thing, he shoved the original copy in my hand and said "Read it." It was on a tattered piece of college-lined paper, smudged and probably home to the residue of countless coke lines. I scanned the poem more than a few times. It was far from perfect. Words were misspelled, the rhyme scheme completely fell apart in the last few lines. He pointed out a bit of wordplay that was only somewhat witty. But still, I couldn't tear my eyes from it. It was an elegy, to longing, to hearteache, to misplaced desire, to the bitter regret we feel for mistakes we know we make. The kinds of mistakes for which Scott's fingers and nose and lungs and finally his heart were routinely picking up the tab.
His life was in shambles. He barely managed to hold a steady job at Subway. Once, when his student loan check came in, he bought drinks for the entire bar, keeping a bottle for himself, which reliably dwindled down to nothing by the end of the night. The stories of his evenings after the bar were of the obscene amount of drugs he consumed, from the occasional eight-ball of heroin to a day spent huffing paint cans. Of his real life, I heard rumors of rich parents, a psychotic ex-wife, years spent huddled in a clunking van. Nothing I ever felt comfortable verifying. And every night I knew him, it seemed his body was a canvas, a startling panegyric to suffering and self-hatred, pity and fear, dutifully accepting everything he threw on it. We always joked that he'd die before he made it to thirty-six. If you looked at the stretched exhausted skin, you could have sworn he was nearing fifty. He was twenty-nine. I joked once that Scott was the epitome of today's youth. That if we were to have our Don Quixote or Jack Kerouac, it would be him, that he was who we'd need to write about, and his death would be the only way to end it.
But this poem humanized Scott for me. Until that point, he had been at most a caricature, a character. It was in reading this poem I felt his unsteady heartbeat, saw him crystallize as a real person, no mere ghost at the bar. The poem was marker, just as a grave, that said "I was here. I existed."
After I finished reading, he told me to keep it, for posterity. My roommates and I pondered giving it back to him, that he should keep it to build it into a song, make it into something more, or perhaps just for himself. But we knew he would refuse. And partly, we admitted that maybe it was good for one of us would have it. In case he really did die. We laughed off the possibility, but the laughter felt shallow. Why is death always a laughing specter?
All I have left of Scott is his poem. My heart isn't broken for the loss of a friend, and yet it feels sorrow for the loss of someone who could have been a much closer friend. Someone whose last name wouldn't escape me, whose mother I could call and offer apologies, someone whose obituary I knew existed and could see, to learn what kin he left behind, where he came from. An official history. But that perhaps will never happen. Scott will forever be only half-known to me. One may argue that I knew him just as well as I may know anyone else, that merely knowing someone's last name is at most a formality. And that may be true, we are more than words on a page, or the ink of our birth certificates. But those words do mean something, as do the physical objects they inhabit. Just like Scott's poem, They help to make us more. More than just ghosts of memory and uncertainty.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Imagination
Our imaginations die.
Time becomes a spool of string rewinding itself.
Clocks stop ticking and each second
the giant fingers refuse to move
becomes unbearable eternity.
Sparrows refurl their wings
and collapse back into their bodies.
Sunken ships rise from their graves,
shedding layers of mud and kelp,
and emerge from the water,
returning to ports long forgotten.
Pages of books unravel from spines
and fly out in a storm,
leaving libraries barren.
Newly built houses burn themselves down.
Piano strings snap, wood, metal,
ivory and ebony uncarve themselves,
sheet music, ink, lacquer,
it all reconstitutes itself in some previous state.
Melodies drift out our ears, never to be heard again.
Don Quixote buries his lance
where it sprouts once more as a tree.
Ancient warriors unswing their weapons,
arrows unpluck from their targets and
float in reverse, nuzzling archers' cheeks.
whole armies walk backward over the sand.
Femme Fatales are left waiting helpless,
ballads remain unsung.
Romans a clef perilously teeter
with nothing to stand for.
Paint unsplatters,
canvasses sit pristine and white
in buildings slowly pulling themselves apart.
Rhythms becomes memories.
The last jokes in the world
crawl inside our minds and barricade the door.
We forget how to laugh.
A thousand stories flow back to our tongues
and disappear untold between our lips.
Would that we could
bellow to each other
the closest-held truths of our hearts.
If only we knew what to say.
Time becomes a spool of string rewinding itself.
Clocks stop ticking and each second
the giant fingers refuse to move
becomes unbearable eternity.
Sparrows refurl their wings
and collapse back into their bodies.
Sunken ships rise from their graves,
shedding layers of mud and kelp,
and emerge from the water,
returning to ports long forgotten.
Pages of books unravel from spines
and fly out in a storm,
leaving libraries barren.
Newly built houses burn themselves down.
Piano strings snap, wood, metal,
ivory and ebony uncarve themselves,
sheet music, ink, lacquer,
it all reconstitutes itself in some previous state.
Melodies drift out our ears, never to be heard again.
Don Quixote buries his lance
where it sprouts once more as a tree.
Ancient warriors unswing their weapons,
arrows unpluck from their targets and
float in reverse, nuzzling archers' cheeks.
whole armies walk backward over the sand.
Femme Fatales are left waiting helpless,
ballads remain unsung.
Romans a clef perilously teeter
with nothing to stand for.
Paint unsplatters,
canvasses sit pristine and white
in buildings slowly pulling themselves apart.
Rhythms becomes memories.
The last jokes in the world
crawl inside our minds and barricade the door.
We forget how to laugh.
A thousand stories flow back to our tongues
and disappear untold between our lips.
Would that we could
bellow to each other
the closest-held truths of our hearts.
If only we knew what to say.
Friday, October 2, 2009
considering art
An art gallery:
the sunset caressing the hills,
and flowing through a wall of mirrors
onto canvases almost
bleeding paint.
You, me.
And I know should care
about the art we're viewing,
analyze or contextualize
or deconstruct its
thematic structure.
Maybe theorize how the direction
of a stroke of a brush
belies whatever and
what have you.
But you look gorgeous
in your evening gown,
admid all these
mummified women
reeking of perfume and mold.
And the nape of your neck,
drawing devastating lines,
is calling me to a heaven
unknown by fleshless creatures.
And the curve of your calves
sneaking out
the hem of your skirt
is driving me to
half-rendered Shangri-Las
Such that art or metaphors
or silent brush strokes
gliding this way or that
are proven
completely insufficient.
the sunset caressing the hills,
and flowing through a wall of mirrors
onto canvases almost
bleeding paint.
You, me.
And I know should care
about the art we're viewing,
analyze or contextualize
or deconstruct its
thematic structure.
Maybe theorize how the direction
of a stroke of a brush
belies whatever and
what have you.
But you look gorgeous
in your evening gown,
admid all these
mummified women
reeking of perfume and mold.
And the nape of your neck,
drawing devastating lines,
is calling me to a heaven
unknown by fleshless creatures.
And the curve of your calves
sneaking out
the hem of your skirt
is driving me to
half-rendered Shangri-Las
Such that art or metaphors
or silent brush strokes
gliding this way or that
are proven
completely insufficient.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
2:38 AM
And I have seen the blue
shades of the morning.
And I know that
hope is a curse
more than a blessing.
shades of the morning.
And I know that
hope is a curse
more than a blessing.
Monday, September 28, 2009
preparing for winter
i.
On the cracked and ravaged sidewalk,
the concrete knolls barely clinging
to the tops of angry tree roots
An army of ants scurries about,
preparing for winter
among ocher autumn leaves.
Hopping over this pebble,
that chunk of moss
creeping through up
through the crevice.
One ant stares up at the trees,
those shining beacons of
a rarely pondered heaven
by relativity.
They're alive now
with the screaming of noises
The ant can't begin to comprehend.
ii.
In the trees, the warfare of the cicadas
is in full bore.
The symphony of their machine gunning timbals
and the timpani of tossed acorns.
Leaves caught in the crossfire
drift gently down.
Three cicadas in a burl foxhole,
the first firing rounds of ammunition
and expletives.
the second screaming commands to
unseen cicadas hidden thin-veiled
behind the dying leaves.
The third holding his head down,
sobbing for his mother
as bullets chip away at bark, leaf and nut.
The second screams at him to fire his weapon.
He jumps up just in time to catch
an enemy bullet in the exoskeleton
and fall.
He does not drift gently down.
iii.
Below, the ant sees something
falling fast between the leaves.
He only just avoids being crushed.
Hiding behind a nearby hunk of rock,
he notices the rush of green muck spilling
out of the creature onto the concrete,
the gossamer wings flapping
with quickly-sapping strength.
The blinking, fading black eyes
filled with fear.
The ant cannot move.
He remains at rest, staring
like an unsure David
at this unknown Goliath
and his strange portent
from the heavens.
iv.
The third cicada, falling fast
but fading slowly. Memories flicker
between shafts of light,
cutting this way and that, through the
palisade cells of the fluttering leaves
illuminating maps to
unwandered territories.
A vision of his mother now,
his countless brothers and sisters.
Another blade of light.
His mother's eyes obscured,
the brightness is almost too much to bear.
A thousand eggs burrowed in bark,
a beam caresses him.
Another taunting map.
He knows what should be coming now,
and yet he is forever waiting
for this pain
to cease.
On the cracked and ravaged sidewalk,
the concrete knolls barely clinging
to the tops of angry tree roots
An army of ants scurries about,
preparing for winter
among ocher autumn leaves.
Hopping over this pebble,
that chunk of moss
creeping through up
through the crevice.
One ant stares up at the trees,
those shining beacons of
a rarely pondered heaven
by relativity.
They're alive now
with the screaming of noises
The ant can't begin to comprehend.
ii.
In the trees, the warfare of the cicadas
is in full bore.
The symphony of their machine gunning timbals
and the timpani of tossed acorns.
Leaves caught in the crossfire
drift gently down.
Three cicadas in a burl foxhole,
the first firing rounds of ammunition
and expletives.
the second screaming commands to
unseen cicadas hidden thin-veiled
behind the dying leaves.
The third holding his head down,
sobbing for his mother
as bullets chip away at bark, leaf and nut.
The second screams at him to fire his weapon.
He jumps up just in time to catch
an enemy bullet in the exoskeleton
and fall.
He does not drift gently down.
iii.
Below, the ant sees something
falling fast between the leaves.
He only just avoids being crushed.
Hiding behind a nearby hunk of rock,
he notices the rush of green muck spilling
out of the creature onto the concrete,
the gossamer wings flapping
with quickly-sapping strength.
The blinking, fading black eyes
filled with fear.
The ant cannot move.
He remains at rest, staring
like an unsure David
at this unknown Goliath
and his strange portent
from the heavens.
iv.
The third cicada, falling fast
but fading slowly. Memories flicker
between shafts of light,
cutting this way and that, through the
palisade cells of the fluttering leaves
illuminating maps to
unwandered territories.
A vision of his mother now,
his countless brothers and sisters.
Another blade of light.
His mother's eyes obscured,
the brightness is almost too much to bear.
A thousand eggs burrowed in bark,
a beam caresses him.
Another taunting map.
He knows what should be coming now,
and yet he is forever waiting
for this pain
to cease.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Letters of Complaint
Dear Port Authority of Allegheny County: I have no problems paying taxes. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, a republican, no less, once wrote "I like paying taxes. With them, I buy civilization."
What I DO have a problem with, is that having paid those taxes, I expect some moderate degree of acceptable social services for them. I like libraries. I like the Postal service. But I LOVE public transit. I do not have a car. So I NEED the aforementioned public transit. As a disabled American, it makes my life easier. In fact, as a disabled American, you can bet that reliable service will keep me from invoking rights afforded me from the Americans with Disabilities Act, and suing the Port Authority of Allegheny County.
According to your website, the 64A bus is scheduled to arrive at 11:12 PM, and 12:02 AM at the corner of Murray and Forbes. Why it is only scheduled to come ONCE EVERY 50 MINUTES is beyond me. I'll assume that it's a funding issue. Either way, this evening, I waited at the aforementioned station for over an hour, and no 64A bus arrived. And this is not the only time I've been forced to wait OVER AN HOUR for the 64A bus. In fact, it's probably the 3rd time. The funny thing is, the other buses seem to run on a decently reliable schedule. But the 64A seems to be an anomaly akin to a midget without a head. I was forced, in my frustration with your chronologically challenged bus, to call a cab. As an avowed socialist, this made me sad. I'd rather pay taxes and get reliable bus service. I'm put off when my taxes go toward a bus that seems to have no concept of space or time.
Please do not make me lose faith in public works. Just pass a stupid bond measure, or yell at somebody, and get the 64A bus to run on schedule. That's all I want.
Sincerely,
Matthew J. Hall
PS: While we're on the subject, your website won't let me submit a complaint without a vehicle number or an operator number. This is clearly silly, since there was NO BUS FOR ME TO RIDE.
What I DO have a problem with, is that having paid those taxes, I expect some moderate degree of acceptable social services for them. I like libraries. I like the Postal service. But I LOVE public transit. I do not have a car. So I NEED the aforementioned public transit. As a disabled American, it makes my life easier. In fact, as a disabled American, you can bet that reliable service will keep me from invoking rights afforded me from the Americans with Disabilities Act, and suing the Port Authority of Allegheny County.
According to your website, the 64A bus is scheduled to arrive at 11:12 PM, and 12:02 AM at the corner of Murray and Forbes. Why it is only scheduled to come ONCE EVERY 50 MINUTES is beyond me. I'll assume that it's a funding issue. Either way, this evening, I waited at the aforementioned station for over an hour, and no 64A bus arrived. And this is not the only time I've been forced to wait OVER AN HOUR for the 64A bus. In fact, it's probably the 3rd time. The funny thing is, the other buses seem to run on a decently reliable schedule. But the 64A seems to be an anomaly akin to a midget without a head. I was forced, in my frustration with your chronologically challenged bus, to call a cab. As an avowed socialist, this made me sad. I'd rather pay taxes and get reliable bus service. I'm put off when my taxes go toward a bus that seems to have no concept of space or time.
Please do not make me lose faith in public works. Just pass a stupid bond measure, or yell at somebody, and get the 64A bus to run on schedule. That's all I want.
Sincerely,
Matthew J. Hall
PS: While we're on the subject, your website won't let me submit a complaint without a vehicle number or an operator number. This is clearly silly, since there was NO BUS FOR ME TO RIDE.
Friday, August 28, 2009
S.B. Redux
A herd of minotaurs comes trouncing into the city,
moving slow but steady, with human grace and bovine girth,
grabbing the citizenry, charging at bums,
heads lowered, nostrils flaring,
horns ripping homeless flesh from homeless bone.
They ransacked a local Albertson's,
collecting every milk product they could find:
cheeses, yogurts, even the dehydated stuff,
making low furious noises,
mixtures of moos and wails of anguish.
They just stomped all of the goat
and sheep's cheeses on the linoleum,
grunting angrily.
Eventually they headed east,
grazing their way
over the mountains to Tillamook,
where they took to standing at the gates of pastures,
whistling obscenely at the cows,
a dangerous look of sex lingering in their eyes.
But their cow-calls were all for naught,
the unknowing women just absently chewed on grass, and stank mightily.
In a few days, the minotaurs, angry and unsated,
invaded the factory, and confiscated
every last beefstick and bag of squeaky-cheese,
and smashed up all of the expensive machinery,
and became bloated and fat and sad from all
of the ice cream they inhaled.
They were especially disappointed by one called "Brown Cow."
Finally, sighing with great man-beast malaise,
they abandoned their womenfolk's breastmilk,
each chopped off their left horn
and disappeared into the hills,
like great, sexually mistaken Amazons.
moving slow but steady, with human grace and bovine girth,
grabbing the citizenry, charging at bums,
heads lowered, nostrils flaring,
horns ripping homeless flesh from homeless bone.
They ransacked a local Albertson's,
collecting every milk product they could find:
cheeses, yogurts, even the dehydated stuff,
making low furious noises,
mixtures of moos and wails of anguish.
They just stomped all of the goat
and sheep's cheeses on the linoleum,
grunting angrily.
Eventually they headed east,
grazing their way
over the mountains to Tillamook,
where they took to standing at the gates of pastures,
whistling obscenely at the cows,
a dangerous look of sex lingering in their eyes.
But their cow-calls were all for naught,
the unknowing women just absently chewed on grass, and stank mightily.
In a few days, the minotaurs, angry and unsated,
invaded the factory, and confiscated
every last beefstick and bag of squeaky-cheese,
and smashed up all of the expensive machinery,
and became bloated and fat and sad from all
of the ice cream they inhaled.
They were especially disappointed by one called "Brown Cow."
Finally, sighing with great man-beast malaise,
they abandoned their womenfolk's breastmilk,
each chopped off their left horn
and disappeared into the hills,
like great, sexually mistaken Amazons.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Cord
As I
Trace my finger down her spine
the world slowly dissolves to light
every rock,
sinew of thousand year trees,
orange peel, idea,
(in your dreaming,
I know)
love itself.
My fingers on
cervical vertebrae.
her bones are mountains
explored by my digits
Who leave flags to mark
their affection.
(Mine, if only during slumber)
Down to
Thoracic Vertebrae--
Not to be confused
with Jurassic vertebrae--
Though
in creaking
they almost seem
to roar against
my careful excavations
of tender fossils
telling tales
of their demise.
(My fingers tremble)
To the Lumbar Vertera
(I can almost sense
you waking now,
soft intervals of breath.
Hold.
Be at peace.)
To your Sacrum and Coccyx
(Your sharp inhaling.
Let me bother you no more.)
Trace my finger down her spine
the world slowly dissolves to light
every rock,
sinew of thousand year trees,
orange peel, idea,
(in your dreaming,
I know)
love itself.
My fingers on
cervical vertebrae.
her bones are mountains
explored by my digits
Who leave flags to mark
their affection.
(Mine, if only during slumber)
Down to
Thoracic Vertebrae--
Not to be confused
with Jurassic vertebrae--
Though
in creaking
they almost seem
to roar against
my careful excavations
of tender fossils
telling tales
of their demise.
(My fingers tremble)
To the Lumbar Vertera
(I can almost sense
you waking now,
soft intervals of breath.
Hold.
Be at peace.)
To your Sacrum and Coccyx
(Your sharp inhaling.
Let me bother you no more.)
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Suburban Elegy III
Last week
I walked past
plastic-lined homes
to a wetlands reserve,
where I cursed god,
and my loneliness
and felt my Anger almost
claw itself out of my tired muscles
as I screamed, smashing
a branch against its tree,
while my Sadness sat
nearby on a log,
looking on in almost
scientific curiosity.
Only days ago
a newly unemployed father
walked his two children past
those plastic-lined homes
to the wetlands reserve.
He was probably near the same
place I had been.
the boy in second grade,
the little girl in kindergarten.
He shot them there,
one in the stomach,
the other in the head,
before blowing a hole in his own.
Near the place I felt so angry
about things I can't even
remember now,
the place
where his daughter
must have felt glee
in the mid-morning sunshine,
about finally learning
the mysteries of the letter Z.
Where his son must have
grown restless in
waiting for summer,
but still his heart
almost shook
at the thought
of all the things
he had yet to learn.
Like forgiveness.
I walked past
plastic-lined homes
to a wetlands reserve,
where I cursed god,
and my loneliness
and felt my Anger almost
claw itself out of my tired muscles
as I screamed, smashing
a branch against its tree,
while my Sadness sat
nearby on a log,
looking on in almost
scientific curiosity.
Only days ago
a newly unemployed father
walked his two children past
those plastic-lined homes
to the wetlands reserve.
He was probably near the same
place I had been.
the boy in second grade,
the little girl in kindergarten.
He shot them there,
one in the stomach,
the other in the head,
before blowing a hole in his own.
Near the place I felt so angry
about things I can't even
remember now,
the place
where his daughter
must have felt glee
in the mid-morning sunshine,
about finally learning
the mysteries of the letter Z.
Where his son must have
grown restless in
waiting for summer,
but still his heart
almost shook
at the thought
of all the things
he had yet to learn.
Like forgiveness.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Old work rediscovered
Production Meetings for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Producer One: Who can we get to close out the movie with an inspirational pop song linking the Magical world of Narnia to 1940s London?
Producer Two: OMG, we like, sooo need to get Regina Spektor?
Producer Three: Doesn't she write songs about manic-depressive women and drug abuse?
Producer Four: God, it's Perfect.
---
Screenwriter One: So, after everything is done, and the human soldiers are slaughtered wholesale by a veritable freakshow of mythical creatures they (the humans) have been told don't exist slash (/) are evil, Caspian is crowned king and the humans, (who have lost their sons and husbands to the Narnians, who themselves were also slaughtered by those very same soldiers) join hands and experience totally perfect racial integration.
Screenwriter Two: Exactly.
Producer One: Wow. That is so true to life. This is why you fellas are in the movie biz.
---
Director: Right, even though it's his land of Narnia, filled with loyal Narnians who love him and are being ruthlessly murdered by an oppressive force as they attempt to fight for their land and freedom, Aslan (Remember guys, this is All-E-Gory, he's not actually Aslaaaan...), well, Aslan refuses to come help them until the Pevensie children blindly go looking for him in the middle of a forest, and then he gets angry and makes them apologize for not blindly following him earlier. Only then does he stop the genocide being committed upon his people.
Screenwriter One: C.S. Lewis was such a visionary.
Director: Guys, I'm so proud of you, this is really going to resonate with Christian audiences and help kids come to love 'Aslan' and want him in their hearts. Because they should. If not, they're going to burn in hell and regret it FOREVER.
(Meanwhile, outside in the hall:)
Random Eavesdropper One: Golly-Gee-Willikers, I never thought of it like that. I certainly don't want to burn in hell! Thanks, C.S. Lewis, you are the bee's knees!
Random Eavesdropper Two: Man, why didn't I learn from the FIRST movie?
(He runs to the nearest restroom to look at himself in a mirror, sobbing and smashing his face against it.)
Random Eavesdropper Two: STUPID FAT COW! WHY CAN'T YOU LOVE ASLAN! LOVEASLANLOVEASLANLOVEASLAN YOU FUCKING FREAK! YOU PATHETIC FAILURE!!!! I SHOULD JUST CUT MYSELF! I'M NOT WORTHY OF ASLAN'S LOVE!
(He picks up a shard of mirror glass. There is blood everywhere.)
---
Director: Also, even though its not anywhere in the book, since Susan Pevensie is like twelve and Caspian is like eighteen, we should let them have a fling. If Warren Jeffs can do it, then by golly, SO CAN WE!
---
(In the theatre, after the first showing:)
Audience Member: The film on my teeth after a three-day drunk has more cinematic value than what we just watched.
Producer One: Who can we get to close out the movie with an inspirational pop song linking the Magical world of Narnia to 1940s London?
Producer Two: OMG, we like, sooo need to get Regina Spektor?
Producer Three: Doesn't she write songs about manic-depressive women and drug abuse?
Producer Four: God, it's Perfect.
---
Screenwriter One: So, after everything is done, and the human soldiers are slaughtered wholesale by a veritable freakshow of mythical creatures they (the humans) have been told don't exist slash (/) are evil, Caspian is crowned king and the humans, (who have lost their sons and husbands to the Narnians, who themselves were also slaughtered by those very same soldiers) join hands and experience totally perfect racial integration.
Screenwriter Two: Exactly.
Producer One: Wow. That is so true to life. This is why you fellas are in the movie biz.
---
Director: Right, even though it's his land of Narnia, filled with loyal Narnians who love him and are being ruthlessly murdered by an oppressive force as they attempt to fight for their land and freedom, Aslan (Remember guys, this is All-E-Gory, he's not actually Aslaaaan...), well, Aslan refuses to come help them until the Pevensie children blindly go looking for him in the middle of a forest, and then he gets angry and makes them apologize for not blindly following him earlier. Only then does he stop the genocide being committed upon his people.
Screenwriter One: C.S. Lewis was such a visionary.
Director: Guys, I'm so proud of you, this is really going to resonate with Christian audiences and help kids come to love 'Aslan' and want him in their hearts. Because they should. If not, they're going to burn in hell and regret it FOREVER.
(Meanwhile, outside in the hall:)
Random Eavesdropper One: Golly-Gee-Willikers, I never thought of it like that. I certainly don't want to burn in hell! Thanks, C.S. Lewis, you are the bee's knees!
Random Eavesdropper Two: Man, why didn't I learn from the FIRST movie?
(He runs to the nearest restroom to look at himself in a mirror, sobbing and smashing his face against it.)
Random Eavesdropper Two: STUPID FAT COW! WHY CAN'T YOU LOVE ASLAN! LOVEASLANLOVEASLANLOVEASLAN YOU FUCKING FREAK! YOU PATHETIC FAILURE!!!! I SHOULD JUST CUT MYSELF! I'M NOT WORTHY OF ASLAN'S LOVE!
(He picks up a shard of mirror glass. There is blood everywhere.)
---
Director: Also, even though its not anywhere in the book, since Susan Pevensie is like twelve and Caspian is like eighteen, we should let them have a fling. If Warren Jeffs can do it, then by golly, SO CAN WE!
---
(In the theatre, after the first showing:)
Audience Member: The film on my teeth after a three-day drunk has more cinematic value than what we just watched.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Pioneers
The Starbucks cup informs me
that I'm a Pioneer in using recycled cups.
My mind floods with images
of the nearish future,
Where kids in silly outfits
get out of a flying bus,
heading to a museum devoted to Pioneers.
One room just for Lewis and Clark,
They press their faces against the glass of
Dioramas depicting men in raccoon hats,
huddled over a fire in the Rockies,
their plastic fingers tinged blue
for effect.
Another room devoted
to the rest of the settling of the West,
Filled with photos of men and women
in front of Conestogas, and off to the left,
the graves of babies dead from Typhoid.
And to another room, where they enter
one of those old-timey Atlantis Shuttles,
and read a copy of the speech Nixon would have given
if their shuttle exploded up in the atmosphere,
or their landing vehicle couldn't take off,
leaving Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to
die on the cold moon, all alone.
Lastly, to a room devoted to We,
the Pioneering Starbucks customer,
who braved $3.95 and the price of gas
for a cup of sludgy sugar.
And their teacher laughs and says
"Luckily, these pioneers never suffered a scalping."
that I'm a Pioneer in using recycled cups.
My mind floods with images
of the nearish future,
Where kids in silly outfits
get out of a flying bus,
heading to a museum devoted to Pioneers.
One room just for Lewis and Clark,
They press their faces against the glass of
Dioramas depicting men in raccoon hats,
huddled over a fire in the Rockies,
their plastic fingers tinged blue
for effect.
Another room devoted
to the rest of the settling of the West,
Filled with photos of men and women
in front of Conestogas, and off to the left,
the graves of babies dead from Typhoid.
And to another room, where they enter
one of those old-timey Atlantis Shuttles,
and read a copy of the speech Nixon would have given
if their shuttle exploded up in the atmosphere,
or their landing vehicle couldn't take off,
leaving Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to
die on the cold moon, all alone.
Lastly, to a room devoted to We,
the Pioneering Starbucks customer,
who braved $3.95 and the price of gas
for a cup of sludgy sugar.
And their teacher laughs and says
"Luckily, these pioneers never suffered a scalping."
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Suburban Elegy II
Today,
I played a game with a student
and
let her win. After,
she said:
"Thanks for letting me win.
That never happens at home."
Later, another child asked to
share something with the class.
She said:
"My daddy was beaten to death.
This is
the dress I wore to his funeral."
Then she twirled around.
I played a game with a student
and
let her win. After,
she said:
"Thanks for letting me win.
That never happens at home."
Later, another child asked to
share something with the class.
She said:
"My daddy was beaten to death.
This is
the dress I wore to his funeral."
Then she twirled around.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Jerky
But Lot's wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.
-- Genesis 19:26
Thus spake the Lord:
"Disobey me not!
Lest I cure the earth
like jerky
with your body."
Seriously, though:
There are big salt-shakers somewhere,
which were once a woman.
That is horrifying.
So many people
want to cure what ails us,
But apparently
God is just going use us for seasoning
before he swallows the earth whole.
-- Genesis 19:26
Thus spake the Lord:
"Disobey me not!
Lest I cure the earth
like jerky
with your body."
Seriously, though:
There are big salt-shakers somewhere,
which were once a woman.
That is horrifying.
So many people
want to cure what ails us,
But apparently
God is just going use us for seasoning
before he swallows the earth whole.
Friday, March 20, 2009
echoing through
In the last moments of my life
I hope the only sound echoing
through my head
is your voice laughing.
I hope the only sound echoing
through my head
is your voice laughing.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Odyssey Americana (Part DC)
In which our hero rides a fucking scary escalator, and descends into the utterly absurd center of the American universe, and marvels at what he finds there. He also makes a couple of stupid jokes.
The train ride--
Entering and exiting trains is a wonderful experience. As travel goes, train entrances and exits are like the day spa of travel bureaucracy. They check your ticket every once in a while, but other than that, no big hassle. Unless you count travel time. In that case, it's the part of the day spa where some new employee locks you in the sauna for a day and a half, forgetting you were there, and when they finally remember you, you emerge looking like Emperor Palpatine. The trip just drones on and on. My travel companions, comparatively, were priceless.
First-- Incredibly White Fratboy with his iBook, blasting Lil' Wayne from Boston to Stamford, Connecticut with no regard for others. It was especially endearing when he started mouthing the words with that half-smirk I've come to expect from guys like him, which simultaneously intimates, "I Think Can Nail Any Bitch Who Walks By Me" but "I Don't Know How To Read."
Second-- Yakking Ivy League Girl, who spent from Stamford to New York City squawking on the phone with someone, discussing whether or not she wants to go to Yale or Harvard for Grad School... in English. It was almost frightening having to listen to her almost moan over Victorian poetry while name-dropping (apparently) famous literary critics and talking about her new shoes, or forgetting that "she was, like, not even 22 yet, [she's] still only 21. Oh my goooood."
Last-- NYC Hipster Asian who nested EVERYWHERE. She got on in New York City wearing leggings, and plugged into her iPhone. From New York to DC, she plowed through about eight In-Touch Magazines and steadily spread out all of her belongings into our little section. First the seat adjacent to her, then the seat adjacent to me. Not that I was using it, but that she was so presumptuous was rather annoying.
DC--
It's hard, at first, to write about Washington DC. In the last eight years, my own relationship to this place, as with many of countrymen, has become, to put it delicately, strained. To a certain extent, I still liken entering this city to entering the belly of a beast. I tire of the thought of writing something beautiful and moving about my frustration and fury with the United States since the 2000 election. So I won't say anything, more than that I'm apprehensive. Though we've seen a change in administration, I'm hesitant to put myself full force behind anyone who would actively pursue the leadership of the country. (As John Adams once remarked "No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it," and years later, Douglas Adams nodded in agreement when he wrote "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.") To a certain extent, I come to view Washington DC less in terms of Jimmy Stewart and more as a place of inimitable corruption and inhumanity. This paragraph has quickly lost its flare.
This Washington DC has the scariest escalators I have ever been on. Descending (or rising) from (or into) the bowels of the city. These escalators bearing people to (and from) the subway are about 200 feet long, they drop down about 100-150 feet and they are incredibly steep. Every time I've gotten on them, I've been completely mortified.
The subway they descend to is easily the nicest I've ever seen. Composed of tube-shaped concrete wall/ceilings, the place smells like a human factory, but is awfully well-kept. The trade-off for this nice subway is that the prices are astronomical. My week-long Public Transit pass in Boston was $15. In DC, a single day pass was $7.80. And they don't allow you to buy them in bulk at a cheaper price, or to buy week-long passes. It was infuriating. More infuriating, though, is that due to discrepancies in prices listed in each station, some places require you to pay an exit-fee, if you paid less money than you were supposed to, (not that you had any control over it, a machine did all the math) they gouged you a bit more. If I were more inclined to hate taxes, I assume this would get my ire up enough to protest, but I don't think that's necessary.
By and large, this expensive nature extends to the rest of the city. A friend and I met up and went to a hookah bar. In Oregon, a round of shisha costs about $5-$7. A nice price for an hour-long activity which can be shared by several people. At this place, we paid $22.99. Plus tax. To be fair, my companion said that even for DC this was pricey, her old hookah bar cost about $9 a round. On top of that, the lounge itself was blasting house music, draped in dark red curtains with plushy chairs, carrying an array of awful beers, with trashily dressed waitresses. In short, it felt like we shouldn't have been smoking hookah. We should have had our noses on the coffee table snorting lines of coke. At least then the $22.99 tab would have been a steal, not a shanking.
The next morning, laden with all of my bags, I hoofed it from Massachusetts Avenue over to the campus of American University, where I was staying with a family friend. The walk from Massachusetts Avenue to the Dupont Circle Subway station in the daylight gave me a nice glimpse of the city. It's lowlying, filled with ornate block-like buildings, most of which (at least on Massachusetts Avenue) are filled with fascinating enterprises. In a two block radius, I walked passed the Chilean Embassy (a flamboyant little building), the Congressional Black Caucus, which was almost directly next to the inauspiciously named Tobacco Lobby, which was near to the appropriately Spartan, (or appropriately oppressive) Uzbeki Embassy, followed by the massive SEIU building, and finally, the Australian Embassy, which dwarfed both of the previous embassies but lacked the free-range kangaroos of my dreams
The rampancy with which Embassies clog this city is almost scary. In my time, I passed by those embassies, as well the Russian, Japanese and Swedish Embassies. Later on in my trip, with my family-friend/tour guide, I would learn more about the idiosyncrasies and jokes surrounding these places. That on Halloween, the French Embassy supposedly passes out glasses of champagne to those of age in America. Conversely, that the Russian Ambassador had to squelch rumors of free vodka shots for the same evening. We joke that Serbia hands out homemade bombs and AK-47s. This lead to a discussion, more serious in nature, about the way these embassies act during moments of national crises-- Earlier this year, for example, when the war with Georgia ramped up and the United States wasn't terribly friendly toward the Russians and their place in the conflict, the Russian Embassy took on a bunker-like mentality and status. Passing the Swedish embassy, we worried that raising tariffs on whitefish or restrictions on viking ships would result in a horde of helmed vikings walking through Georgetown wielding battle-axes and growling at every passerby.
I managed to wander over to the AU campus, meeting up with my companions. From there we traveled back over to the city, to see the Mall. It's going to be slightly difficult for me to put everything I felt seeing the central hub of the nation into perspective, so bear with me.
We exited the subway into the middle of the mall, between the Washington Monument (again, the forefathers? Not fond of foreskin) and the Capitol Building. The mall is massive. I've always understood the mall in abstract, but to see it, the long sloping grass knolls, corridors created by drooping, leafless elms, the late winter grasping at strands of near-warmth hidden in the wind, is almost overpowering. It was conceived by Pierre Charles l'Enfant in his original plans for the city from the late 18th century, but wasn't fully conceived until the early 20th century, with the McMillan Commission, and inspired by the City Beautiful Movement.
We decided to go first to the National Museum of American History. It's another block-like building, about 3 stories tall. Outside, the sound of Billie Holliday drifts down from somewhere, almost ethereal. We passed by just as the words "he can be happy/with just a sip of gin" fell from her lips. Or it did, when she recorded "Can't help lovin' that Man" all those years ago. It made me smile so that I just paused and let her fill my ears for a few moments.
Inside, the Museum is filled with the miscellanea of more than 250 years, starting with Washington's uniform from the French and Indian War. I use the word 'miscellanea' intentionally. The scope of what we've amassed culturally versus the detritus we've jettisoned, the artifacts, art, music and ideas which have become, over the years, uniquely American (or in some cases, things we've co-opted).
Dorothy Gale's glass slippers, Oscar The Grouch, MC Lyte's Journal, Kermit The Frog, Fab Five Freddy's boombox, Carol Channing's Dresses, Grandmaster Flashes' turntable, C-3PO, Elvis' guitars, a board game based on the Kennedy's (inappropriately we joked: "Will you get shot, get brain cancer, drive your plane down into the sea?") A portrait of Stephen Colbert, a whole room filled with co-opted Stradivari instruments, Grover Cleveland's top-hat and overcoat from his inauguration, a silver toy ship gifted to Teddy Roosevelt, Ike's uniform, a failed attempt at creating empire-invoking uniforms by Tricky Dick, an unsettling death mask of Abraham Lincoln, articles of his clothes, the whole of what makes us who we are, not the wars, the destruction, hate, but the creative acts are the ones we keep, the bizarre, the inane, the tacky, the beautiful, anything and everything that has proven significant, all here, all part of what makes us American. Billie Holliday's voice singing somewhere for each of us. Outside, the homeless man with the saxophone, blowing for his existence, blowing "Pure Imagination" and in every line I can hear pain, sorrow, joy, humor, anger, hanging in every howling note and every empty space between them. Everything we've taken from people and everything they've given us. Jazz. If ever there is a quintessential artform which relays the chaotic, numbingly beautiful underpinning of the universe, it is the pulsating, confused melodies and the carefully random rhythms of Jazz, and the music most likely to exist long after this nation, deeper than any words on paper, it is the very soil of this country. It is surely the most pure form of music we as a nation have ever created, and its influence, like vines, crawls up and sparks even the most austere of constructions, and I am glad that here we acknowledge its roots in our cultural life. But I digress. It is in this rambling I attempt to reach a point: that in this place, though we know our country to be a quilt composed of bitterness and thievery, the whole that it creates is marvelous, possessed of the ability to be objective and welcoming of every artform to which the country owes something.
And after this we walk the mile, lie down beneath the Washington Monument, the breeze slowly picking up, surrounded by people of every color and creed I can imagine. The reflecting pool empty for some reason ravaged now by sons and daughters, lovers and friends digging in the dirt for pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters ("has the recession gotten than bad?") the sunset fading over the Lincoln Memorial, where silent I mouth the 246 words, especially the last, "and that government : of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
From there, the words still echoing on my tongue, we wander out along a path which takes us past a reservoir, an outcropping of the Potomac where, resting for a moment on a bench, the reflection of the Jefferson Monument and pinpricks of light dance like fireflies in the night water. We continued on to the Roosevelt Memorial (of which I have only two things to say: Not enough wheelchair. And it was like a concrete hedgemaze. So maybe they were trying to make it a visual metaphor for Social Security) and then on to the Jefferson Memorial itself, another neoclassic shitshow (As proof of the brazen and silly obsession the forefathers had with Grecian ideals, it is said that somewhere, in a Smithsonian basement, apparently rests a gigantic statue of George Washington in a toga. I both thank and rue the man with the wisdom to keep that under a tight lock and key.) The building had more of the clever quips and phrasings of both the Roosevelt and Lincoln memorials, which were lovely and heart-throbbing, yet I cannot deny that I secretly hoped to find, etched in a tiny crevasse in the wall, a quote from Jefferson canonizing Sally Hemings' booty. Or at least something along the lines of "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to tap that big black ass, aww yeahhhh!"
Which only makes the next joke about how Obama's memorial, if he ever gets one, may not be neoclassical, but it ought to be made of obsidian, all the more atrocious. Be thankful I got rid of that paragraph.
Thought I certainly mock, the truth is that I recognized, as the designers of this place recognized, the power it must hold, both internal and external. But at these moments, because of that place, I was learning to love my country again. Perhaps this was the real reason for this trip. After eight years of frustration, war, hatred, sadness, screaming furor, everything that began not on September 11, 2001, but on October 7th, the night we began bombing Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, the night my father, brother and I howled in righteous furor at fire and death, death of innocent people, the destruction of hopes for people I'd never even met, while my mother sat unspeaking and how it haunted me, and my own regret and anger at my actions ever since have made my life a struggle make up for the failure of our humanity and compassion that night.
It led up to this. I still have issues with my country. I still disagree with it, still wish it embraced peace more, welcomed death less. But in hearing, for example, that on election night, most of Georgetown, thousands of students, ran to the gates of the White House and impromtu sang "(Na Na Na Hey Hey Hey) Goodbye" to its occupants, I can do nothing but smile. Even as I edit this, some 3 months after, I read in the news that a man named James Hill is running for congress as an honest-to-god pirate. Bless him. I read that a few days ago, the legislature in Missouri, in a move to confound Neo-Nazis who adopted a road, approved the name-changing of the road to memorialize a rabbi who fled Nazi Germany. Each day I read more and more concerning reports of the travesty of the Iranian election. In all of this, I am re-learning the beauty of what freedom of speech means, the beautiful, Jazz-like nature of Democracy and existence, where we have the opportunity to embrace everything from the silly to the sacrosanct, the pretty to the putrid, the strange fits and starts of humanity's tiny cul-de-sacs of thought, we see that in embracing the beautiful, we must also embrace the bizarre and the completely ridiculous. Where we learn that the meaning of free speech is not only the right to one's opinion, but the imperative to educate one's self and defend it. It's about learning what makes this country beautiful, and utilizing it, not sitting in reverent fear. That this great experiment must be pushed, prodded, poked and even stabbed. And that it will only be stronger for it.
And I thank the universe, and Jazz, for it.
The train ride--
Entering and exiting trains is a wonderful experience. As travel goes, train entrances and exits are like the day spa of travel bureaucracy. They check your ticket every once in a while, but other than that, no big hassle. Unless you count travel time. In that case, it's the part of the day spa where some new employee locks you in the sauna for a day and a half, forgetting you were there, and when they finally remember you, you emerge looking like Emperor Palpatine. The trip just drones on and on. My travel companions, comparatively, were priceless.
First-- Incredibly White Fratboy with his iBook, blasting Lil' Wayne from Boston to Stamford, Connecticut with no regard for others. It was especially endearing when he started mouthing the words with that half-smirk I've come to expect from guys like him, which simultaneously intimates, "I Think Can Nail Any Bitch Who Walks By Me" but "I Don't Know How To Read."
Second-- Yakking Ivy League Girl, who spent from Stamford to New York City squawking on the phone with someone, discussing whether or not she wants to go to Yale or Harvard for Grad School... in English. It was almost frightening having to listen to her almost moan over Victorian poetry while name-dropping (apparently) famous literary critics and talking about her new shoes, or forgetting that "she was, like, not even 22 yet, [she's] still only 21. Oh my goooood."
Last-- NYC Hipster Asian who nested EVERYWHERE. She got on in New York City wearing leggings, and plugged into her iPhone. From New York to DC, she plowed through about eight In-Touch Magazines and steadily spread out all of her belongings into our little section. First the seat adjacent to her, then the seat adjacent to me. Not that I was using it, but that she was so presumptuous was rather annoying.
DC--
It's hard, at first, to write about Washington DC. In the last eight years, my own relationship to this place, as with many of countrymen, has become, to put it delicately, strained. To a certain extent, I still liken entering this city to entering the belly of a beast. I tire of the thought of writing something beautiful and moving about my frustration and fury with the United States since the 2000 election. So I won't say anything, more than that I'm apprehensive. Though we've seen a change in administration, I'm hesitant to put myself full force behind anyone who would actively pursue the leadership of the country. (As John Adams once remarked "No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it," and years later, Douglas Adams nodded in agreement when he wrote "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.") To a certain extent, I come to view Washington DC less in terms of Jimmy Stewart and more as a place of inimitable corruption and inhumanity. This paragraph has quickly lost its flare.
This Washington DC has the scariest escalators I have ever been on. Descending (or rising) from (or into) the bowels of the city. These escalators bearing people to (and from) the subway are about 200 feet long, they drop down about 100-150 feet and they are incredibly steep. Every time I've gotten on them, I've been completely mortified.
The subway they descend to is easily the nicest I've ever seen. Composed of tube-shaped concrete wall/ceilings, the place smells like a human factory, but is awfully well-kept. The trade-off for this nice subway is that the prices are astronomical. My week-long Public Transit pass in Boston was $15. In DC, a single day pass was $7.80. And they don't allow you to buy them in bulk at a cheaper price, or to buy week-long passes. It was infuriating. More infuriating, though, is that due to discrepancies in prices listed in each station, some places require you to pay an exit-fee, if you paid less money than you were supposed to, (not that you had any control over it, a machine did all the math) they gouged you a bit more. If I were more inclined to hate taxes, I assume this would get my ire up enough to protest, but I don't think that's necessary.
By and large, this expensive nature extends to the rest of the city. A friend and I met up and went to a hookah bar. In Oregon, a round of shisha costs about $5-$7. A nice price for an hour-long activity which can be shared by several people. At this place, we paid $22.99. Plus tax. To be fair, my companion said that even for DC this was pricey, her old hookah bar cost about $9 a round. On top of that, the lounge itself was blasting house music, draped in dark red curtains with plushy chairs, carrying an array of awful beers, with trashily dressed waitresses. In short, it felt like we shouldn't have been smoking hookah. We should have had our noses on the coffee table snorting lines of coke. At least then the $22.99 tab would have been a steal, not a shanking.
The next morning, laden with all of my bags, I hoofed it from Massachusetts Avenue over to the campus of American University, where I was staying with a family friend. The walk from Massachusetts Avenue to the Dupont Circle Subway station in the daylight gave me a nice glimpse of the city. It's lowlying, filled with ornate block-like buildings, most of which (at least on Massachusetts Avenue) are filled with fascinating enterprises. In a two block radius, I walked passed the Chilean Embassy (a flamboyant little building), the Congressional Black Caucus, which was almost directly next to the inauspiciously named Tobacco Lobby, which was near to the appropriately Spartan, (or appropriately oppressive) Uzbeki Embassy, followed by the massive SEIU building, and finally, the Australian Embassy, which dwarfed both of the previous embassies but lacked the free-range kangaroos of my dreams
The rampancy with which Embassies clog this city is almost scary. In my time, I passed by those embassies, as well the Russian, Japanese and Swedish Embassies. Later on in my trip, with my family-friend/tour guide, I would learn more about the idiosyncrasies and jokes surrounding these places. That on Halloween, the French Embassy supposedly passes out glasses of champagne to those of age in America. Conversely, that the Russian Ambassador had to squelch rumors of free vodka shots for the same evening. We joke that Serbia hands out homemade bombs and AK-47s. This lead to a discussion, more serious in nature, about the way these embassies act during moments of national crises-- Earlier this year, for example, when the war with Georgia ramped up and the United States wasn't terribly friendly toward the Russians and their place in the conflict, the Russian Embassy took on a bunker-like mentality and status. Passing the Swedish embassy, we worried that raising tariffs on whitefish or restrictions on viking ships would result in a horde of helmed vikings walking through Georgetown wielding battle-axes and growling at every passerby.
I managed to wander over to the AU campus, meeting up with my companions. From there we traveled back over to the city, to see the Mall. It's going to be slightly difficult for me to put everything I felt seeing the central hub of the nation into perspective, so bear with me.
We exited the subway into the middle of the mall, between the Washington Monument (again, the forefathers? Not fond of foreskin) and the Capitol Building. The mall is massive. I've always understood the mall in abstract, but to see it, the long sloping grass knolls, corridors created by drooping, leafless elms, the late winter grasping at strands of near-warmth hidden in the wind, is almost overpowering. It was conceived by Pierre Charles l'Enfant in his original plans for the city from the late 18th century, but wasn't fully conceived until the early 20th century, with the McMillan Commission, and inspired by the City Beautiful Movement.
We decided to go first to the National Museum of American History. It's another block-like building, about 3 stories tall. Outside, the sound of Billie Holliday drifts down from somewhere, almost ethereal. We passed by just as the words "he can be happy/with just a sip of gin" fell from her lips. Or it did, when she recorded "Can't help lovin' that Man" all those years ago. It made me smile so that I just paused and let her fill my ears for a few moments.
Inside, the Museum is filled with the miscellanea of more than 250 years, starting with Washington's uniform from the French and Indian War. I use the word 'miscellanea' intentionally. The scope of what we've amassed culturally versus the detritus we've jettisoned, the artifacts, art, music and ideas which have become, over the years, uniquely American (or in some cases, things we've co-opted).
Dorothy Gale's glass slippers, Oscar The Grouch, MC Lyte's Journal, Kermit The Frog, Fab Five Freddy's boombox, Carol Channing's Dresses, Grandmaster Flashes' turntable, C-3PO, Elvis' guitars, a board game based on the Kennedy's (inappropriately we joked: "Will you get shot, get brain cancer, drive your plane down into the sea?") A portrait of Stephen Colbert, a whole room filled with co-opted Stradivari instruments, Grover Cleveland's top-hat and overcoat from his inauguration, a silver toy ship gifted to Teddy Roosevelt, Ike's uniform, a failed attempt at creating empire-invoking uniforms by Tricky Dick, an unsettling death mask of Abraham Lincoln, articles of his clothes, the whole of what makes us who we are, not the wars, the destruction, hate, but the creative acts are the ones we keep, the bizarre, the inane, the tacky, the beautiful, anything and everything that has proven significant, all here, all part of what makes us American. Billie Holliday's voice singing somewhere for each of us. Outside, the homeless man with the saxophone, blowing for his existence, blowing "Pure Imagination" and in every line I can hear pain, sorrow, joy, humor, anger, hanging in every howling note and every empty space between them. Everything we've taken from people and everything they've given us. Jazz. If ever there is a quintessential artform which relays the chaotic, numbingly beautiful underpinning of the universe, it is the pulsating, confused melodies and the carefully random rhythms of Jazz, and the music most likely to exist long after this nation, deeper than any words on paper, it is the very soil of this country. It is surely the most pure form of music we as a nation have ever created, and its influence, like vines, crawls up and sparks even the most austere of constructions, and I am glad that here we acknowledge its roots in our cultural life. But I digress. It is in this rambling I attempt to reach a point: that in this place, though we know our country to be a quilt composed of bitterness and thievery, the whole that it creates is marvelous, possessed of the ability to be objective and welcoming of every artform to which the country owes something.
And after this we walk the mile, lie down beneath the Washington Monument, the breeze slowly picking up, surrounded by people of every color and creed I can imagine. The reflecting pool empty for some reason ravaged now by sons and daughters, lovers and friends digging in the dirt for pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters ("has the recession gotten than bad?") the sunset fading over the Lincoln Memorial, where silent I mouth the 246 words, especially the last, "and that government : of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
From there, the words still echoing on my tongue, we wander out along a path which takes us past a reservoir, an outcropping of the Potomac where, resting for a moment on a bench, the reflection of the Jefferson Monument and pinpricks of light dance like fireflies in the night water. We continued on to the Roosevelt Memorial (of which I have only two things to say: Not enough wheelchair. And it was like a concrete hedgemaze. So maybe they were trying to make it a visual metaphor for Social Security) and then on to the Jefferson Memorial itself, another neoclassic shitshow (As proof of the brazen and silly obsession the forefathers had with Grecian ideals, it is said that somewhere, in a Smithsonian basement, apparently rests a gigantic statue of George Washington in a toga. I both thank and rue the man with the wisdom to keep that under a tight lock and key.) The building had more of the clever quips and phrasings of both the Roosevelt and Lincoln memorials, which were lovely and heart-throbbing, yet I cannot deny that I secretly hoped to find, etched in a tiny crevasse in the wall, a quote from Jefferson canonizing Sally Hemings' booty. Or at least something along the lines of "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to tap that big black ass, aww yeahhhh!"
Which only makes the next joke about how Obama's memorial, if he ever gets one, may not be neoclassical, but it ought to be made of obsidian, all the more atrocious. Be thankful I got rid of that paragraph.
Thought I certainly mock, the truth is that I recognized, as the designers of this place recognized, the power it must hold, both internal and external. But at these moments, because of that place, I was learning to love my country again. Perhaps this was the real reason for this trip. After eight years of frustration, war, hatred, sadness, screaming furor, everything that began not on September 11, 2001, but on October 7th, the night we began bombing Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, the night my father, brother and I howled in righteous furor at fire and death, death of innocent people, the destruction of hopes for people I'd never even met, while my mother sat unspeaking and how it haunted me, and my own regret and anger at my actions ever since have made my life a struggle make up for the failure of our humanity and compassion that night.
It led up to this. I still have issues with my country. I still disagree with it, still wish it embraced peace more, welcomed death less. But in hearing, for example, that on election night, most of Georgetown, thousands of students, ran to the gates of the White House and impromtu sang "(Na Na Na Hey Hey Hey) Goodbye" to its occupants, I can do nothing but smile. Even as I edit this, some 3 months after, I read in the news that a man named James Hill is running for congress as an honest-to-god pirate. Bless him. I read that a few days ago, the legislature in Missouri, in a move to confound Neo-Nazis who adopted a road, approved the name-changing of the road to memorialize a rabbi who fled Nazi Germany. Each day I read more and more concerning reports of the travesty of the Iranian election. In all of this, I am re-learning the beauty of what freedom of speech means, the beautiful, Jazz-like nature of Democracy and existence, where we have the opportunity to embrace everything from the silly to the sacrosanct, the pretty to the putrid, the strange fits and starts of humanity's tiny cul-de-sacs of thought, we see that in embracing the beautiful, we must also embrace the bizarre and the completely ridiculous. Where we learn that the meaning of free speech is not only the right to one's opinion, but the imperative to educate one's self and defend it. It's about learning what makes this country beautiful, and utilizing it, not sitting in reverent fear. That this great experiment must be pushed, prodded, poked and even stabbed. And that it will only be stronger for it.
And I thank the universe, and Jazz, for it.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Odyssey Americana (Part Boston)
In which our hero braves the wild airports and discovers things most mundane, before landing in Boston, marvelling at some stuff, and going to sleep, over the next few days exploring both the outer-rim and the most historic inner-rim of Boston, seeing old things once revered now hyper-commercialized.
Morning-- Too goddamn early. I wake to go to the airport. My flight leaves at 7:20 AM, which means, according to my family, that the only appropriate time to arrive for a flight, if it leaves at 7:20 AM, March 1, 2009, is to arrive sometime a few winters previous, maybe late January, 20o7, at about 2:53 AM. That is, barring any inclement weather, in which case, your arrival should be no earlier than autumn, 1986.
A few bits of hygiene care later, we are off, racing down the highway in the damp, blurry pre-dawn, the first few fingers of light clutching the western mountains as it hunted us.
Check-In has changed since the last time I flew. In the days of yore (about a year ago, anyway) check-in consisted of staring down an unnervingly cheery attendant, who smile and bat their eyes at you, even as they tell you that, yes, in fact, shaving cream is a weapon and you cannot bring it on the plane. However, the ripostes with Air Travel bureaucracy are nullified by the replacement of those eerily chipper attendants by LCD screens. Why bother with pesky employment, with its 'salaries,' and 'benefits,' and 'genuine human interaction,' When you can have mass mechanization? Brilliance, I tell you! This change, in effect, has created a sort of check-in bottleneck, where passengers do all the work themselves, and where once these desks were manned by at least five attendants, they now are manned by one to two employees who flit from computer to computer, checking everybody's IDs. That's all.
After this disheartening experience, I was hoping for painless air travel, with a nice movie and some reliably atrocious airline food. My hopes, to my utter dismay, were half-dashed. The trip was uneventful, enjoyable even. It flew by quickly with the help of a book and a catnap. But instead of the cumbersome, blocky (but blissfully gratis) headsets from the air-travel of my childhood, the quaint, semi-unconstitutional-but-mostly-just-ethically-iffy edited in-flight movies have been replaced by tiny 'digeplayers,' on which passengers can watch almost anything, for only $10, credit card only. And the meals, my god, the meals! Using the sort of advertising language that makes me want to wretch, the front pocket included a pamphlet which described different 'picnic baskets' which could be purchased for $5. So, great! A picnic basket!... On a plane. Right.
The only other harrowing portion of the journey pertained to the skittish woman seated next to me, who scooted over to the window seat the second the plane door was closed and we were free to do with our row as we pleased. It wasn't so much that she did it, had I been in her situation, I would have done the same thing, but she was so quick about it, it was rather strange. The other portion pertained to the man sitting behind me, who, in what I've come to expect from American Exceptionalism, felt it was his prerogative to talk on the phone as long as he wished, regardless of FAA regulations which state phones must be turned off.
Boston--
Upon arriving in Boston, I found a very simple, streamlined process to retrieving my luggage, and I was greeted by Laurel, one of the friends I was staying with here. We then took the bus to the train station (colloquially, 'the T.') This took us a little longer than expected, as we took the wrong bus, thusly receiving an extra tour of Logan International, which is a lovely concrete block, definitely worth that second, superfluous trip.
The T is just as it sounds. It has multiple lines running through the city. My first glimpse of which, as we exited the tunnel (the train is like the bastard child of a subway and a trolley, some parts are on ground, others, beneath it) was of a gigantic Barnes and Noble, which serves as both bookstore and school bookstore for Boston University. Near to that was a brick building, sitting like an old man among teenagers in the city, with a tower, and old-archictecture (none of the few archictectural terms of which I know to describe this building are springing to mind, of course.) This intermingling of old and new which is rampant throughout the city is clearly visible on the bus ride back to Laurel's apartment. But in the day since arriving, at the time I'm writing this, I've been able to see much more of the city, and indeed, the whole place is littered with these brick neo-classical relics seated next to glass and concrete behemoths of modernity.
No where is this marvelous reuse of the cities old buildings more evident than the place Jake and Laurel live. Chopped up from an old house into apartments, it was probably built in the early 19th century, what with its vaulted ceilings, closed up fireplaces, gorgeous moulding, perennially squeaky wood-flooring and like just about every old building ever, staircases seemingly made by dwarfs suffering from vertigo.
On Tuesday, I took the commuter train from Boston out to Newburyport. It took me a bit of running about, asking for directions from almost everyone, and made it onto the train with only a minute to spare. As a rule, on public transit I try always to sit next to little old ladies, for they are generally composed of sweet natures. So, I wandered up the aisle, looking for an open seat, finally finding one near the front of the car. Politely, I asked to sit. Expecting a voice crackling from years of over-perfuming and Better Homes recipes, instead, the woman growled at me like a bear and snapped "Kid, do whateva you want." At that point, I was so embarrassed I couldn't even move on, I just sat down and cowered.
Luckily, crazy old bear lady got off after two stops, and I was able to look out the window at the passing towns. The land is dotted with groves of leafless oaks rising above frozen marshes, cut through every so often by half-frozen rivers. Which is a nice way of saying 'swampy.' The outlying suburbs, filled not with the cookie-cutter homes with sprawling driveways and massive chainstores, are instead beautiful entities unto themselves, made up of brick-and-ivy storefronts and dutch colonials stacked neatly against each other. This subtle bit of city planning is significant in that it shows that even in America, there are places where our outlying cities have not splayed themselves out entirely for the benefit of cars. Where western suburbs are made with automobiles in mind, (the age old question: which came first? the suburb or station wagon?) every place, be it a home or a business, feels it has a prerogative to provide more-than-adequate parking space. Part of what makes the central city such an artfully compact wonder is that it disregards this equation.
Newburyport exists in this vein. It is comprised of beautiful colonial homes, its high school is an old georgian ogre, just fun to look at. My hosts (one of whom was engaged in the town governance) while driving me through town, were giddy to point out a home built in the late 17th century, and, to my delight, positively rueful when we passed through the newer chain-store consumerist hellholes.
Antithetical to the graceful aging of the city and the suburbs is that this place is filthy. It's hard to determine what these people hate more: taxation without representation or brooms. I mean, I know these people live in a swamp, but c'mon.
Also slightly antithetical, but mostly just aggravating is the way that people treat one another. I've never considered the west coast a particularly courteous area, yet compared to Bostonians, Oregonians (or, by extension, most Westerners) are like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. On the T coming home from Newburyport, there were a group of rich kids discussing where to get off, in relation to where they parked. During this conversation, a man dressed in punk attire entered the train. He stumbled slightly over my feet, and apologized. I motioned that it was fine. He was only on for a stop, but heard enough of the rich kids' discussion to say, before exiting "yeah, you should get off at Park and you'll be fine." He then exited the train.
There was a momentary pause before the rich kids, as well as another local, began mocking the man.
"What the fuck wazzat?"
"Who the fuck he think he is?"
"Di' we ask him? Di' we ask 'wheh should we go?' Fuckin' tourist."
"Whyn'cha fuckin' get awf at Wonderland, then see wheh you're at, fuckin' mook."
Of course, then they got off at Park.
A few minutes after that, a tall, stuttering man came rushing into the car, asking if he could borrow someone's cellphone. No one offered, and I felt bad. I pulled mine out, checking the reception bars. We were underground, so, naturally, barely any reception. I'm about to apologize to the man for my lack of reception, when the local from the first interaction blurts out,
Morning-- Too goddamn early. I wake to go to the airport. My flight leaves at 7:20 AM, which means, according to my family, that the only appropriate time to arrive for a flight, if it leaves at 7:20 AM, March 1, 2009, is to arrive sometime a few winters previous, maybe late January, 20o7, at about 2:53 AM. That is, barring any inclement weather, in which case, your arrival should be no earlier than autumn, 1986.
A few bits of hygiene care later, we are off, racing down the highway in the damp, blurry pre-dawn, the first few fingers of light clutching the western mountains as it hunted us.
Check-In has changed since the last time I flew. In the days of yore (about a year ago, anyway) check-in consisted of staring down an unnervingly cheery attendant, who smile and bat their eyes at you, even as they tell you that, yes, in fact, shaving cream is a weapon and you cannot bring it on the plane. However, the ripostes with Air Travel bureaucracy are nullified by the replacement of those eerily chipper attendants by LCD screens. Why bother with pesky employment, with its 'salaries,' and 'benefits,' and 'genuine human interaction,' When you can have mass mechanization? Brilliance, I tell you! This change, in effect, has created a sort of check-in bottleneck, where passengers do all the work themselves, and where once these desks were manned by at least five attendants, they now are manned by one to two employees who flit from computer to computer, checking everybody's IDs. That's all.
After this disheartening experience, I was hoping for painless air travel, with a nice movie and some reliably atrocious airline food. My hopes, to my utter dismay, were half-dashed. The trip was uneventful, enjoyable even. It flew by quickly with the help of a book and a catnap. But instead of the cumbersome, blocky (but blissfully gratis) headsets from the air-travel of my childhood, the quaint, semi-unconstitutional-but-mostly-just-ethically-iffy edited in-flight movies have been replaced by tiny 'digeplayers,' on which passengers can watch almost anything, for only $10, credit card only. And the meals, my god, the meals! Using the sort of advertising language that makes me want to wretch, the front pocket included a pamphlet which described different 'picnic baskets' which could be purchased for $5. So, great! A picnic basket!... On a plane. Right.
The only other harrowing portion of the journey pertained to the skittish woman seated next to me, who scooted over to the window seat the second the plane door was closed and we were free to do with our row as we pleased. It wasn't so much that she did it, had I been in her situation, I would have done the same thing, but she was so quick about it, it was rather strange. The other portion pertained to the man sitting behind me, who, in what I've come to expect from American Exceptionalism, felt it was his prerogative to talk on the phone as long as he wished, regardless of FAA regulations which state phones must be turned off.
Boston--
Upon arriving in Boston, I found a very simple, streamlined process to retrieving my luggage, and I was greeted by Laurel, one of the friends I was staying with here. We then took the bus to the train station (colloquially, 'the T.') This took us a little longer than expected, as we took the wrong bus, thusly receiving an extra tour of Logan International, which is a lovely concrete block, definitely worth that second, superfluous trip.
The T is just as it sounds. It has multiple lines running through the city. My first glimpse of which, as we exited the tunnel (the train is like the bastard child of a subway and a trolley, some parts are on ground, others, beneath it) was of a gigantic Barnes and Noble, which serves as both bookstore and school bookstore for Boston University. Near to that was a brick building, sitting like an old man among teenagers in the city, with a tower, and old-archictecture (none of the few archictectural terms of which I know to describe this building are springing to mind, of course.) This intermingling of old and new which is rampant throughout the city is clearly visible on the bus ride back to Laurel's apartment. But in the day since arriving, at the time I'm writing this, I've been able to see much more of the city, and indeed, the whole place is littered with these brick neo-classical relics seated next to glass and concrete behemoths of modernity.
No where is this marvelous reuse of the cities old buildings more evident than the place Jake and Laurel live. Chopped up from an old house into apartments, it was probably built in the early 19th century, what with its vaulted ceilings, closed up fireplaces, gorgeous moulding, perennially squeaky wood-flooring and like just about every old building ever, staircases seemingly made by dwarfs suffering from vertigo.
On Tuesday, I took the commuter train from Boston out to Newburyport. It took me a bit of running about, asking for directions from almost everyone, and made it onto the train with only a minute to spare. As a rule, on public transit I try always to sit next to little old ladies, for they are generally composed of sweet natures. So, I wandered up the aisle, looking for an open seat, finally finding one near the front of the car. Politely, I asked to sit. Expecting a voice crackling from years of over-perfuming and Better Homes recipes, instead, the woman growled at me like a bear and snapped "Kid, do whateva you want." At that point, I was so embarrassed I couldn't even move on, I just sat down and cowered.
Luckily, crazy old bear lady got off after two stops, and I was able to look out the window at the passing towns. The land is dotted with groves of leafless oaks rising above frozen marshes, cut through every so often by half-frozen rivers. Which is a nice way of saying 'swampy.' The outlying suburbs, filled not with the cookie-cutter homes with sprawling driveways and massive chainstores, are instead beautiful entities unto themselves, made up of brick-and-ivy storefronts and dutch colonials stacked neatly against each other. This subtle bit of city planning is significant in that it shows that even in America, there are places where our outlying cities have not splayed themselves out entirely for the benefit of cars. Where western suburbs are made with automobiles in mind, (the age old question: which came first? the suburb or station wagon?) every place, be it a home or a business, feels it has a prerogative to provide more-than-adequate parking space. Part of what makes the central city such an artfully compact wonder is that it disregards this equation.
Newburyport exists in this vein. It is comprised of beautiful colonial homes, its high school is an old georgian ogre, just fun to look at. My hosts (one of whom was engaged in the town governance) while driving me through town, were giddy to point out a home built in the late 17th century, and, to my delight, positively rueful when we passed through the newer chain-store consumerist hellholes.
Antithetical to the graceful aging of the city and the suburbs is that this place is filthy. It's hard to determine what these people hate more: taxation without representation or brooms. I mean, I know these people live in a swamp, but c'mon.
Also slightly antithetical, but mostly just aggravating is the way that people treat one another. I've never considered the west coast a particularly courteous area, yet compared to Bostonians, Oregonians (or, by extension, most Westerners) are like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. On the T coming home from Newburyport, there were a group of rich kids discussing where to get off, in relation to where they parked. During this conversation, a man dressed in punk attire entered the train. He stumbled slightly over my feet, and apologized. I motioned that it was fine. He was only on for a stop, but heard enough of the rich kids' discussion to say, before exiting "yeah, you should get off at Park and you'll be fine." He then exited the train.
There was a momentary pause before the rich kids, as well as another local, began mocking the man.
"What the fuck wazzat?"
"Who the fuck he think he is?"
"Di' we ask him? Di' we ask 'wheh should we go?' Fuckin' tourist."
"Whyn'cha fuckin' get awf at Wonderland, then see wheh you're at, fuckin' mook."
Of course, then they got off at Park.
A few minutes after that, a tall, stuttering man came rushing into the car, asking if he could borrow someone's cellphone. No one offered, and I felt bad. I pulled mine out, checking the reception bars. We were underground, so, naturally, barely any reception. I'm about to apologize to the man for my lack of reception, when the local from the first interaction blurts out,
"You won' get no reception down heeah."
At this point, I handed the phone to the stuttering man, just as a fuck-you to the local. The man needed help dialing, so I helped him. Sadly, the phone, being spurned by reception bars, didn't even dial out. The man thanked me, and I apologized that I couldn't be more helpful.
The local then looked down at me, smirked, and spat "Nice try."
I just looked back at him hard and shrugged.
Thursday, Jake and I decided to wander to the older portions of Boston and walk "The Freedom" trail, which is, as it sounds, a delightful trail of bricks lain down going around to different historic sites in Boston, including the Common, the old State House, Faneuil Hall and the Granary Graveyard.
The Granary Graveyard was its own block of the city, filled with both little weathered near-anonymous gravestones, and massive, hulking phallic memorial columns symbols of our nation's forefather's virility. (John Hancock's was circumcised, thank God.) Walking around, though, it was hard to see why the city couldn't just assign someone to come in and at least shovel out decent pathways, much less get the snow away from these stones, already badly beaten by the elements.
Meandering up the path, we passed both the gravestone of John Adams, and his very much non-jewish friend, Hancock. (I am doing my best to refrain from the easiest of jokes.) In the far end of the yard lay the gravesite of Paul Revere, (the town loves him) which was easily the tourist highlight. In front of Jake and me, two middle-aged hipsters were taking pictures of practically every gravestone whose engraved words were still visible, and when they happened upon Revere's grave, they guffawed over "never hearing about him before." And one of them, determined to get a good photo, knelt down next to the memorial stone (not the actual grave), his friend with the camera lining up the shot, and he set his starbucks cup on Revere's grave, so that it wouldn't be in the shot, of course.
Now, I'm not a hugely proud American. Pride is such a weird concept. I have a hard time with people who exhibit pride in being things they didn't choose to be (White, American, even Gay, Presbyterian, a radiator, the number 4) and neither do I subscribe to any thoughtless hero-worship of the founding fathers. I'm certainly not above mocking them if the situation permits and the joke arrives. But to see a starbucks cup carelessly strewn over a man's grave like its his personal coffee table is pretty pathetic. But I guess I'm glad his twitter-account will have this killer pic of some old guys' tombstone.
This sort of aggravation only grew worse with the continuation of the trail. At one of the next stops, we found The Old Corner Bookstore Building, a place which once published the writings of "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott." Of course, this location is no longer a publisher. It's naturally become a jewelry store known as Ultra Diamonds, advertising 'ridiculous' 80% off sales prices. I'm glad that a place which once celebrated the birth of a country which celebrates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is now inhabited by a company of hacks peddling pieces of carbon mined by wage slaves in Africa.
Further on, a tavern calling itself "the first tavern in America," established in 1795, (though that seems dubious. Did nobody drink from 1620-1795? Puritans, oh Puritans! Still, being sourrounded by swamp-land certainly makes me want to drink. So, someone in 175 years MUST have had a drink.) was now filled with buzzing television sets buzzing with sports, and their taps were filled with Sam beer, and only Sam Adams (These people love freedom AND shitty beer.)
At this point, I handed the phone to the stuttering man, just as a fuck-you to the local. The man needed help dialing, so I helped him. Sadly, the phone, being spurned by reception bars, didn't even dial out. The man thanked me, and I apologized that I couldn't be more helpful.
The local then looked down at me, smirked, and spat "Nice try."
I just looked back at him hard and shrugged.
Thursday, Jake and I decided to wander to the older portions of Boston and walk "The Freedom" trail, which is, as it sounds, a delightful trail of bricks lain down going around to different historic sites in Boston, including the Common, the old State House, Faneuil Hall and the Granary Graveyard.
The Granary Graveyard was its own block of the city, filled with both little weathered near-anonymous gravestones, and massive, hulking phallic memorial columns symbols of our nation's forefather's virility. (John Hancock's was circumcised, thank God.) Walking around, though, it was hard to see why the city couldn't just assign someone to come in and at least shovel out decent pathways, much less get the snow away from these stones, already badly beaten by the elements.
Meandering up the path, we passed both the gravestone of John Adams, and his very much non-jewish friend, Hancock. (I am doing my best to refrain from the easiest of jokes.) In the far end of the yard lay the gravesite of Paul Revere, (the town loves him) which was easily the tourist highlight. In front of Jake and me, two middle-aged hipsters were taking pictures of practically every gravestone whose engraved words were still visible, and when they happened upon Revere's grave, they guffawed over "never hearing about him before." And one of them, determined to get a good photo, knelt down next to the memorial stone (not the actual grave), his friend with the camera lining up the shot, and he set his starbucks cup on Revere's grave, so that it wouldn't be in the shot, of course.
Now, I'm not a hugely proud American. Pride is such a weird concept. I have a hard time with people who exhibit pride in being things they didn't choose to be (White, American, even Gay, Presbyterian, a radiator, the number 4) and neither do I subscribe to any thoughtless hero-worship of the founding fathers. I'm certainly not above mocking them if the situation permits and the joke arrives. But to see a starbucks cup carelessly strewn over a man's grave like its his personal coffee table is pretty pathetic. But I guess I'm glad his twitter-account will have this killer pic of some old guys' tombstone.
This sort of aggravation only grew worse with the continuation of the trail. At one of the next stops, we found The Old Corner Bookstore Building, a place which once published the writings of "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott." Of course, this location is no longer a publisher. It's naturally become a jewelry store known as Ultra Diamonds, advertising 'ridiculous' 80% off sales prices. I'm glad that a place which once celebrated the birth of a country which celebrates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is now inhabited by a company of hacks peddling pieces of carbon mined by wage slaves in Africa.
Further on, a tavern calling itself "the first tavern in America," established in 1795, (though that seems dubious. Did nobody drink from 1620-1795? Puritans, oh Puritans! Still, being sourrounded by swamp-land certainly makes me want to drink. So, someone in 175 years MUST have had a drink.) was now filled with buzzing television sets buzzing with sports, and their taps were filled with Sam beer, and only Sam Adams (These people love freedom AND shitty beer.)
The rest of the freedom trail, including Paul Revere's house (!) was great, with the exception that in most cases passersby are inundated with streams of advertisements, gigantic multinational companies (Starbucks in particular) who made it their goal to link the American Revolution, every spot of hallowed history to their mission statements, 'proud to be part of the birth of America,' etched onto pieces of useless plastic. I was waiting for a sign saying "Boston Common! Brought to you by Verizon! (Are you in?)"
On further reflection, my frustration with this modern state of our historic sites, a corporate commercialization of practically everything we've tried to deserve is perhaps misplaced. Perhaps it's too idealistic of me to expect we'd keep a purified, reverent attitude toward our history, (for even I lack that) protecting it from such bastardization. But as I looked around, to every nearby Border's, Starbucks, WellsFargo, Ruth's Chris Steakhouse (In the basement of the Old City Hall! And How!) I realize that maybe corporatism is our legacy. It is the disease we've wrought upon the world, and that the Freedom Trail is a testament to that, it was destined to fall prey to corporatism, in fact. That just as we were founded upon the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (the meaning of which, actually is intended to be 'money',) those principles were only important insofar as they saved the rich founding fathers some money, that perhaps this is the true nature of America. Giving free reign to these enterprises, it is our destiny to consume, consume, consume until we swallow ourselves whole. Perhaps this is the only natural course the country would take. Even one hundred years ago, it's conceivable to imagine a local con-man selling trinkets commemorating these places, cheaply made and cheaply broken, in order to make a quick buck. And now that man is a faceless hedge-fund monolith. The pursuit of happiness. Maybe this is just who we are.
That sounds hopelessly dour.
Final Thoughts on Boston: I love Portland.
On further reflection, my frustration with this modern state of our historic sites, a corporate commercialization of practically everything we've tried to deserve is perhaps misplaced. Perhaps it's too idealistic of me to expect we'd keep a purified, reverent attitude toward our history, (for even I lack that) protecting it from such bastardization. But as I looked around, to every nearby Border's, Starbucks, WellsFargo, Ruth's Chris Steakhouse (In the basement of the Old City Hall! And How!) I realize that maybe corporatism is our legacy. It is the disease we've wrought upon the world, and that the Freedom Trail is a testament to that, it was destined to fall prey to corporatism, in fact. That just as we were founded upon the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (the meaning of which, actually is intended to be 'money',) those principles were only important insofar as they saved the rich founding fathers some money, that perhaps this is the true nature of America. Giving free reign to these enterprises, it is our destiny to consume, consume, consume until we swallow ourselves whole. Perhaps this is the only natural course the country would take. Even one hundred years ago, it's conceivable to imagine a local con-man selling trinkets commemorating these places, cheaply made and cheaply broken, in order to make a quick buck. And now that man is a faceless hedge-fund monolith. The pursuit of happiness. Maybe this is just who we are.
That sounds hopelessly dour.
Final Thoughts on Boston: I love Portland.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Anis Mojgani at Pix
A roommate and I went to see Portland local Anis Mojgani at Pix Patisserie last night. Mojgani won titles in the National Individual Poetry Slam in 2005 and 2006. He has also been on Def Jam Poetry.
It was apparently supposed to start at eight, but the whole thing felt a bit more like a concert, sluggish to start, everybody squished up against walls because the place was so packed. The event got barely a whisper in the Mercury, but it was cool, as even Mojgani pointed out, to see so many people come out to a poetry reading. The fact that it was free probably had no effect on attendance, of course.
Pix is a nice place, medium light on bright walls, tasty desserts, a fine selection of beers to be drunk, seating for maybe 30 people, and yet it held about 75-100 for Mojgani.
The evening started off (if there are "openers" at poetry readings, and not just self-aggrandizing organizers) with a fellow who worked at Pix, and had, lo and behold, organized the reading. His poetry was fine, but his voice fell into what we've generally deemed "the slam voice." This sort of snivelling, raspy voice which sounds like it's aiming to make every word sound like it could save the world and is constantly struggling to find and stress a rhythm and a cadence in their poems, which don't really require them to be found or stressed. White poets love this voice.
Mojgani, on the other hand, got up with a sort of surprised, quiet demeanor that immediately filled every corner of the room with his presence. He was humble, collected and jovial with the crowd, continually mentioning how surprised he was that everyone came out. In short, he seems much more like a writer than a performer; throughout the reading, he was able to trick and divert the energy of the crowd, but ultimately didn't feel totally comfortable holding on to it.
That sounds as if it might be negative, but it is very much a compliment, this demeanor only added to Mojgani's spontaneous, precarious, almost lilting style. His whole body was an effective part of the performance, fingering his arms as he mentions veins, his arms and head flailing frenetically about to illustrate certain points. Where those movements could have seemed stilted or overdone, they worked perfectly to emphasize every phrase of his poetry (which has a sort of child-like, star-gazing quality,) illustrated well in the poem ""Here Am I,"
Let your smile twist / like your heart dancing precariously on my fingertips / staining them / like that high school kid licking his Sharpe tip / writing / "I was here / I was here, muthafucka / And ain't none of y'all can write that in the spot I just wrote it in / I am here, muthafucka / And we are all here, muthafucka / and we are all muthafuckas, muthafucka / because every breath I give / brings me closer to the day that my mother may die / because every breath I take / takes me a second further from the moment she caught my father's eye.In this respect, one of the reasons Mojgani is heads above other poets is his voice. It's his own. He sounds like an unsure, geeky teenager, and he knows it, so he doesn't shy away from that, he utilizes it, makes it work for him, and with the poetry he writes. This tends to be true of all really great slam poets, they don't try to sound like everyone else, or to sound like some ideal of how poetry should sound, they merely find and nurture their own voices, (both written and spoken) and Mojgani has done this to powerful effect.
Each piece performed works as a sort of love poem shouted out to the world, delicate but strong. This is what makes Slam Poetry such a different beast than written-to-be-read-quietly poetry, (and what makes my quoting it on here so silly) the source material is so manipulated by the performer, made so pliable as to suit the audience, and to ensure they have a more powerful experience than simply reading these poems would provide.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
four rats
The slow sweep of the day, Golem locked in
his hard chamber. Hundreds of years in
some kind of slumber for a few hours of
Pro-Semitic, bloodcurdling pleasure,
and then it's "Back to the cold, solid loneliness
for you, dear sir, yes, indeed!"
But even the last, lingering splinters of light,
and the naked promise of warmer breezes and
light rain, whispering "Spring" at Golem,
his hard chamber. Hundreds of years in
some kind of slumber for a few hours of
Pro-Semitic, bloodcurdling pleasure,
and then it's "Back to the cold, solid loneliness
for you, dear sir, yes, indeed!"
But even the last, lingering splinters of light,
and the naked promise of warmer breezes and
light rain, whispering "Spring" at Golem,
nudging him
in the direction of rebirth, are somehow waylaid,
slow to the call, its back groans in the morning.
The working world awaits, so no more is Golem hiding in the dark,
but walking silent and mournful to his desk job,
shadowed in the streets by four rats squeaking sentences at passersby,
knowing full-well that the age of mythic, ghostly apparitions
is at an end, ideals once beautiful are rotten,
and the coming Spring seems suffering
from a case of Mono.
slow to the call, its back groans in the morning.
The working world awaits, so no more is Golem hiding in the dark,
but walking silent and mournful to his desk job,
shadowed in the streets by four rats squeaking sentences at passersby,
knowing full-well that the age of mythic, ghostly apparitions
is at an end, ideals once beautiful are rotten,
and the coming Spring seems suffering
from a case of Mono.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
a funeral pyre of our despair
On the day my sweet Ragnar left,
our tears mushed up the words,
left them dripping off the page,
and GoogleMaps had muddled
the directions to Valhalla.
And in earnestness, we gushed a bit,
stared at our feet, made jokes,
but there was no avoiding the inevitable,
no reprise from what had come.
Our love awash, gone with the sea
from whence Ragnar came, those who explored,
and dug their mighty dragonships
into the wet sand, only to find the land of prosperity
gone horribly awry, found nothing
for which worth staying, except dear
Ragnar, who stumbled upon me while raiding a Starbucks,
a bit of plundered soy chai dribbling down his beard.
My dainty fingers met his beautiful, gnarled, dirty knuckles
and dropping a seax, he clutched my hand,
turned to his compatriots and growled in
stark, empowered affection.
He searched for work for months
to support our misinformed, ill-timed love,
had found nothing. Every potential
employer was mortified at his magnificent,
terrible visage. In poverty our affections slowly
waned, until the day I came home to find the door
shut in my face for a younger lover.
One who sported a beard and an angrier demeanor.
And so now we stood upon the shore,
lighting a funeral pyre of our despair,
constructing a raft of our loneliness,
and thus did Ragnar roar, as he wrapped his cloak
around his bulging frame and boarded his final venture
"My cup is laden with grief,
my heart is heavy. Life tires me so."
A moment passed. His mighty glaive fell
sullenly to his side. And his silent lips said
"I am obsolete."
our tears mushed up the words,
left them dripping off the page,
and GoogleMaps had muddled
the directions to Valhalla.
And in earnestness, we gushed a bit,
stared at our feet, made jokes,
but there was no avoiding the inevitable,
no reprise from what had come.
Our love awash, gone with the sea
from whence Ragnar came, those who explored,
and dug their mighty dragonships
into the wet sand, only to find the land of prosperity
gone horribly awry, found nothing
for which worth staying, except dear
Ragnar, who stumbled upon me while raiding a Starbucks,
a bit of plundered soy chai dribbling down his beard.
My dainty fingers met his beautiful, gnarled, dirty knuckles
and dropping a seax, he clutched my hand,
turned to his compatriots and growled in
stark, empowered affection.
He searched for work for months
to support our misinformed, ill-timed love,
had found nothing. Every potential
employer was mortified at his magnificent,
terrible visage. In poverty our affections slowly
waned, until the day I came home to find the door
shut in my face for a younger lover.
One who sported a beard and an angrier demeanor.
And so now we stood upon the shore,
lighting a funeral pyre of our despair,
constructing a raft of our loneliness,
and thus did Ragnar roar, as he wrapped his cloak
around his bulging frame and boarded his final venture
"My cup is laden with grief,
my heart is heavy. Life tires me so."
A moment passed. His mighty glaive fell
sullenly to his side. And his silent lips said
"I am obsolete."
Monday, February 9, 2009
And on the eighth day, god created irony.
Science shows homosexuality
occurs most often as a response
to overpopulation.
So, if we take that conclusion
to its logical end, the populations
with the highest rates of homosexuality
are probably Mormons and Catholics.
occurs most often as a response
to overpopulation.
So, if we take that conclusion
to its logical end, the populations
with the highest rates of homosexuality
are probably Mormons and Catholics.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Our Trip to the Azores
The day I had to tell my children their mother and I were separating, I called them into the Dining Room, instructed them to come home promptly after school, that we were to conduct an important family meeting.
About what? Their eyes wide with wonder.
Unable to bring myself to tell them the truth, I fabricated a story concerning a family trip to the Azores.
The boys whooped with laughter and sprang out the front door onto the brick sidewalk, yelping and howling like Indians. I'm fairly certain they were mistaken about the location of the Azores.
By the time their mother arrived to see what all the commotion was about, the boys had raindanced their way around the streetcorner.
I informed her of my actions. She was appalled. She demanded to know what had brought me to say such a thing. She said it was devious, malicious and cruel. I told her I figured it was easier to let them be happy now and crush their spirits later. At least this way they wouldn't be apprehensive all day.
She slapped me on the face and called me a bastard.
I said that at least for the next six hours, one rotten lunch and two recesses, their dreams weren't dead like mine.
About what? Their eyes wide with wonder.
Unable to bring myself to tell them the truth, I fabricated a story concerning a family trip to the Azores.
The boys whooped with laughter and sprang out the front door onto the brick sidewalk, yelping and howling like Indians. I'm fairly certain they were mistaken about the location of the Azores.
By the time their mother arrived to see what all the commotion was about, the boys had raindanced their way around the streetcorner.
I informed her of my actions. She was appalled. She demanded to know what had brought me to say such a thing. She said it was devious, malicious and cruel. I told her I figured it was easier to let them be happy now and crush their spirits later. At least this way they wouldn't be apprehensive all day.
She slapped me on the face and called me a bastard.
I said that at least for the next six hours, one rotten lunch and two recesses, their dreams weren't dead like mine.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
note to all people immortal
Just think:
After the earth explodes,
you will still be here, floating silently
through the emptiness of space,
like some lonely, intergalactic blowfish,
for the rest of eternity.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
A sort of Battle of Hastings
A man walked past me today,
as I sat reading in the window of a coffee shop.
He wore a black metal mesh wastebasket atop his head,
seemingly determined to look like a Norman knight.
Soon, I was imagining cadres of knights, storming
up the streets, swords flailing, scabbards dusty,
rusting chain-mail clink-clinking over the pavement,
darting through passing traffic as they
engage in duels upon horses and on foot, swinging
mighty blades in graceful arcs down upon the neck
of some sworn enemy they've pinned down on the hood of
a Toyota Celica. Sweat drips from the foreheads
of squires as they drag broadswords, shields,
morningstars, javelins, crossbows, sheathes of arrows,
maces and battle-axes up the sidewalk,
hunched over, pausing and gasping pathetically
for breath at each corner, unsure which of the other
squires to trust, and which to stab,
so exhausted they come cautiously to truces
amidst the dread of the looming safe-crossing signal...
Nonetheless, this does not answer the central question:
Why would this man walk about with a wastebasket on his head?
To incite questions? To incite a furor over art?
No. I will not wonder. I will not dignify his smutty arrogance
with even a thought.
as I sat reading in the window of a coffee shop.
He wore a black metal mesh wastebasket atop his head,
seemingly determined to look like a Norman knight.
Soon, I was imagining cadres of knights, storming
up the streets, swords flailing, scabbards dusty,
rusting chain-mail clink-clinking over the pavement,
darting through passing traffic as they
engage in duels upon horses and on foot, swinging
mighty blades in graceful arcs down upon the neck
of some sworn enemy they've pinned down on the hood of
a Toyota Celica. Sweat drips from the foreheads
of squires as they drag broadswords, shields,
morningstars, javelins, crossbows, sheathes of arrows,
maces and battle-axes up the sidewalk,
hunched over, pausing and gasping pathetically
for breath at each corner, unsure which of the other
squires to trust, and which to stab,
so exhausted they come cautiously to truces
amidst the dread of the looming safe-crossing signal...
Nonetheless, this does not answer the central question:
Why would this man walk about with a wastebasket on his head?
To incite questions? To incite a furor over art?
No. I will not wonder. I will not dignify his smutty arrogance
with even a thought.
Friday, January 23, 2009
A few frivolous beheadings
The lawn flamingoes have been acting peculiarly.
In fact, I was recently informed of their plotting an uprising.
Not to worry, I squelched their plans with some nasty rumors
and a few frivolous beheadings.
Still, it had me worried, and I wondered
at the private avalanches of pressure
which must come from the day-to-day
responsibilities of being a lawn flamingo.
All those sugar afternoons and scotch-drunk evenings.
I plopped down on the grass and locked eyes with Roderigo,
one whose betrayal had hurt me most, I think, of all.
I tried to tell him I was sorry,
to console him for all his deep-rooted angers.
He but stared back, and after a moment, declared
"We were nothing to begin with, no home, or birth.
Just dust, dust and bitter irony."
The hollowness of his voice struck me like a knife.
In fact, I was recently informed of their plotting an uprising.
Not to worry, I squelched their plans with some nasty rumors
and a few frivolous beheadings.
Still, it had me worried, and I wondered
at the private avalanches of pressure
which must come from the day-to-day
responsibilities of being a lawn flamingo.
All those sugar afternoons and scotch-drunk evenings.
I plopped down on the grass and locked eyes with Roderigo,
one whose betrayal had hurt me most, I think, of all.
I tried to tell him I was sorry,
to console him for all his deep-rooted angers.
He but stared back, and after a moment, declared
"We were nothing to begin with, no home, or birth.
Just dust, dust and bitter irony."
The hollowness of his voice struck me like a knife.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Sea Goats
My friend Ethel rang me and shouted into my ear
"Get down to the docks! There's something you have to see!"
And sure enough, moored to the dock
was a gigantic ship made entirely of paper,
"Get down to the docks! There's something you have to see!"
And sure enough, moored to the dock
was a gigantic ship made entirely of paper,
bowers, davits, capstans, bumpkins, the whole shebang was paper.
"Aren't they afraid of waterlogging?" I asked the man
standing next to me, who was staring up at the crow's nest
with what I'd guess is a mixture of awe and terror,
"No," he said-- his face was littered with the craters and crevasses
of time's abuses,
"Just hungry sea lions who gnaw at the rudder.
'The billygoats of the high seas,' they call them."
"Oh," I said. "I've never heard that before."
"Yeah, they'll chow down almost anything."
"Yeah, I getcha," I said.
Ethel pointed out a myriad of tiny paper boats
drifting over the baby wakes crashing onshore,
lost in the current, helpless to anything,
and further on, barely specks,
we watched as little paper tugboats
slowly hauled away the few years we had left.
standing next to me, who was staring up at the crow's nest
with what I'd guess is a mixture of awe and terror,
"No," he said-- his face was littered with the craters and crevasses
of time's abuses,
"Just hungry sea lions who gnaw at the rudder.
'The billygoats of the high seas,' they call them."
"Oh," I said. "I've never heard that before."
"Yeah, they'll chow down almost anything."
"Yeah, I getcha," I said.
Ethel pointed out a myriad of tiny paper boats
drifting over the baby wakes crashing onshore,
lost in the current, helpless to anything,
and further on, barely specks,
we watched as little paper tugboats
slowly hauled away the few years we had left.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Suburban Elegy
Tonight my father smiled warmly,
bent down in the driveway. Said
"Watch out. There's a slug here.
Be careful not to step on him."
And for a moment
I almost forgot
that yesterday
a bomb in Kabul,
filled with all those
blinking metal contraptions
which paid for our home,
exploded
killing several children
playing in the street.
Introductions and Reveries
With no small degree of trepidation, I'm beginning my first foray into the world of blogging. This being done in small part to a dear friend of mine who has been studying, among the vast array of things his mind ponders, the seemingly endless ways in which the internet can be used to harness the world we live in.
But by my own admission, I'm a bit sluggish, and more than a bit churlish, at the thought of changing my old habits. It takes much deliberation and more than a reasonable share of doubt before I act, before I myself able to throw my full weight behind anything. I also wear the badge of 'luddite' perhaps more proudly than I ought. Perhaps it's the soft comfort a book provides me that a flickering screen seems unable to do.
At any rate, my goal with this blog is to give myself a space to write, let thoughts prosper and, naturally, to engage in the shameless self-aggrandizement that comes with with having my own soapbox. (In particular, bits of poetry, and social commentary which at times come screaming out of me with a furor I can barely comprehend.) My interests are somewhat eclectic, but lately, I find myself drawn to questions of finding meaning in an increasingly isolating world, finding one's right place and work, and the ways in which the work we do in the world can be used for the betterment of all people. I find myself particularly drawn to the question of the role of art, and its functions and worth in a society which seems determined to follow a maxim laid out by the CEO of IKEA: "An idea without a pricetag is meaningless." Joy.
That sounds hopelessly pretentious. How about I write about that stuff, but I'll include nifty pictures too? Sound good? Yes? Good.
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