a simple lad in san francisco / the unpromising diary of a travelsick schmuck

Yelping dogs and trespassing apple trees and elves (especially the elves)

2009-07-30T23:40:00.000-07:00

If any kids today read poetry (though i don't imagine they do) I can imagine them saying ‘why read frost?’ I can answer that. But first read "mending wall".

Aloud.

Don’t be shy. Aloud.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me-
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

I love “We wear our fingers rough with handling them.” There’s nothing flashy about that sentence, it’s just very lovely, and very honest, and every time I read it, I feel the roughness on my fingers. I don’t know why. Tell me you do? there's not a spare word - he telegraphs the sensation right to my fingertips.

“I see him there / Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top / In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.” Who else can pull this off in so few words? You want showy – someone can throw a lot of lovely words out there. You want realism? Someone can describe every detail. You want economy? Ee cummings can spin something 14 words. But this – read it again, and see it – is a precise, complete portrait and a worldview in 20 words flat. You don’t need me to say. It’s virtuoso.

I don’t understand it all *perfectly* - e.g. “He moves in darkness as it seems to me / Not of woods only and the shade of trees.” - but I don't need to - I can still see the beauty, and I can feel something even if I can’t put it in exact words. And that’s worth everything. (If you could put your entire experience of a poem into words, what would the worth of the poem be?)

Yelping dogs and trespassing apple trees and elves (especially the elves).

You didn’t read it aloud, did you? Okay – just read the first 2 lines aloud. yes, right now.

Brilliant, aren’t they? It’s one poet in a generation who can make noise like that. Deep and sonorous (you think sonorous is an academic word but give me a better). Listen to all those low, long, open vowels. It’s lovely music. I once had a prof who said that frost’s major contribution was that he was the first truly American poet. He was the one who tuned into the natural music of American speech and made us all see the beauty of it.

And then the next line, the third line: “spills the upper boulders in the sun” – the slow syllables in the first two lines turn into a cascade in the third, and the entire poem alchemizes (it’s my word, just live with it) from stone walls and frozen ground into a sun-drenched, spilling, rolling chaos.

Does the wall separate them? Or does it bring them together in shared labor? Has frost written a koan?

That's like half of the things i love. half of the things that i love that can be put explicitly into words.

(i was in the sauna at the Y tonight, and i was trying to relax and slow myself down a little, and whether you want to call it prayer or meditation, i started mumbling frost. i decided i had to blog it, but i'm hoping i can turn it into a regular thing, because i think we all have too little poetry in our lives.)

thanksgiving obit / or / what people will say when you're dead

2008-11-25T23:39:00.000-08:00

the one benefit of dying is that you won't be asked to write your own obituary, and you won't be asked to speak at your funeral. i don't have any idea what i would say at my own funeral, and i really haven't got a clue what my friends would have to say about me. what stories will you tell?

assuming you're not an ex, or worse, a pseudo-ex, there are a number of compliments you might pay me at my wake. but if you want a story that, if not transcendent, at least crystalizes a few things that i held dear, then i can recommend one. it involves - what else? - thanksgiving.

it was november 2003 and zach had just returned to san francisco after volunteering in ecuador. he hadn't seen his best friends - the 'urban family' - in 18 months. thanksgiving was always his favorite holiday, and so he'd come back just in time to have thanksgiving dinner with them.

as i said, thanksgiving was zach’s favorite holiday, from beginning to end. he would go out the morning of thanksgiving day and walk to a wine shop in north beach. along the way he'd stop at cafes and call everyone he could think of, starting in cafe trieste and calling europe, dialing westwards as the morning progressed, until he made it to mario’s bohemian cigar store cafe and was calling california friends. In the afternoon, he never ever brought any food to dinner, but he did bring enormous amounts of beaujolais nouveau and a palpable caffeine high.

he loved the lazy afternoon gathering, the slow accretion of loved ones in a pervasive embrace that wandered through rooms and dinner preparations, through jokes, stories, and cocktails.

and it's fair to say that that on that specific day in 2003, zach had a fair number of drinks before dinner. it's also fair to say that he was something of an emotional wreck. he confessed to anyone he could corner that he was depressed. being back in san francisco didn’t help him; the sea change of arrival was as difficult as that of departure. after a year in ecuador surrounded by poverty, where loneliness clung to him like a useless limb, he was now back home; his future completely uncertain, credit card debts piling up and his bank account dwindling, bankrupt even in plans.

so he was in a delicate state already. but does that explain what happened next, as the urban family sat down to turkey and all the fixings? Two bites of stuffing and zach was... well, he was weeping.

now, sure, the stuffing was incredible. i mean, bark really outdid himself that year. (he still won't share the secret ingredient, but some of us have always suspected there was at least a hint of cocaine in the recipe.) but it wasn’t just the food. the food was nothing more than a precipitant. looking around the table, zach realized that to find so many people who love you, in a hostile and unpredictable world, requires a saturation of luck that’s no less miraculous for being so common.

in a moment of clarity put into sharper focus by the secret recipe stuffing at the end of his fork, zach was hit by the unassailable insight that, in all the world, he was one of the lucky ones.

and the significance of these tears should not be undercut by the fact that zach was known to cry at It's a Wonderful Life, Sex and the City, long distance phone commercials, and Jerry McGuire ('you had me at hello').

so if you have to speak at my funeral (and i do hope you survive me), i permit you to tell that story if you can't think of anything more original. (you can make it less floral if that suits you.)

riding the 48

2008-11-09T17:17:00.000-08:00

there's a man standing with one hand on the rail and he's telling the children they're all blessed and blessed and lord jesus they be blessed. the children are silent for once as we creak up texas street. there's a guy with a 40 in a paper bag and there's a kid who bangs his skateboard against the bumper because the driver won't let him on for free. quickly the night blocks him from sight and these projects he calls home and the bus's diesel drone drowns out his Fuck / You. there are girls in tight jeans taking the 48 to bart to the 15 to go to a club and if taneeka's there hitting on jay the bitch is gonna get fucked up. there's a nurse who got on at the hospital and she looks like a refugee wearing baby blue. bangers in baggy shirts and day laborers in flannel and hipsters with square glasses and the police. and the police are out in full force their lights red white and blue on 24th because someone else got shot near the alley that's dripping technicolor murals. the alley where the other night i passed four chicano boys in jeans and white t-shirts under a wall that's painted with cesar chevez's flag. they were oblivious to me, shooting their dice in a circle of streetlight.

but i didn't see lorna dee cervantes that night, and i didn't see her on november fifth when she wrote this poem:

They're Going Home In The Mission

On the 48 bus no one would think
to stare, no gawking in the windows
of the poor. The poor that hate
that phrase; they wouldn't use it.

I gawk out the glass, hawking
my wits, for sale in this post-election
Mecca of my birth. My placenta dumped,
buried here 50 years over, fish into flesh

in the bay. Trumpets weave through traffic.
The ocean comes to visit in the eternal
spray, a fine mist curling the pages.
Quintana/24th to 3rd+20th, at every stop, the walkers.

the rest of the poem is here

poem copyright 2008 lorna dee cervantes and i hope my fellow rider on the 48 don't mind me copying the first part

Feeling Fucked Up

2008-11-08T16:51:00.000-08:00

Lord she's done gone left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world
is bright bone white crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs —

Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck mary fuck joseph fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing

— Etheridge Knight

the 'h' word

2008-11-04T08:46:00.001-08:00

This is what I’ve been trying to avoid for over twelve months. What I haven’t allowed myself to feel, what I’ve tried to stifle, deny, and banish. The campaign has been about believing in change and renewal, but lofty rhetoric has been tethered. It's been a campaign where we've started to see the best of ourselves, only to focus on the worst. Day in and day out, I’ve tried to ground my personal dreams and push back the dawn (we've been betrayed before, always by ourselves). Throughout this election there have been days to argue and days to preach. Days to give and days to question. Days to hate the press, days to love the enemy. Days to believe, days to doubt. But today it's all over. Today there's nothing left to do but walk into a school gymnasium, sign your name, and take a ballot. There's nothing to do but to trust 130 million other Americans from every race, color, creed, and circumstance. There’s nothing left to do but

hope.

espresso of mists and mellow fruitfulness (apologies to j. keats)

2008-07-04T16:51:00.000-07:00

santana and lucinda and i went to bar bambino on thursday night. it was warm and friendly inside, bright and polished. they told us they could seat us at the communal table, but they'd need us to leave by 8:00 because another party had reservations. we had reservations, too, but whatever. or we could sit at the bar. we sat at the bar and ordered some tuscan wine, a plate of cheese, a plate of charcuterie. there were two open seats to santana's left, and two open ones to my right. lucinda huddled up to the bar and pounded her palms on the marble top, cooing at the lesbian bartenders pouring wine in front of us. they cooed back.

'would you mind moving down, so that more people can sit together at the bar?' the hostess interrupted. we'd gone from a table to the bar to far precipice end of the bar. it crossed our minds that if we didn't leave soon they'd have us in the back washing dishes pretty soon.

but: the wine was fantastic. and: the charcuterie, served on a thick wooden cutting board, was incredible. there was a circle of 'lonza' that looked like a translucent slice of brown agate and was cured to nearly the same hardness. the prosciutto simply melted on my tongue.

as i was blissing out on cured meat and santana was blissing on the wine, lucinda decided to check into her own little blissful bowery of sleep right there in her mama's arms. and that's where she stayed for the rest of the hour-and-a-half-long meal.

by the end of the entrees, i decided that i really liked bar bambino -- despite a bit of pretension from the wait staff, the food is excellent, the wines excellenter, the charcuterie simply delectable and the ambience is bright and lively. it's a fun place to eat. i thought it was a rather nice place--a little chic, but worth it. then i ordered an espresso.

'would you like our northern italian roast or our southern italian?' i had never been offered a choice of espressos before, save for one time in the early days of ritual roasters (before it became the hipper-than-thou hellhole it is now) when the barista made me a 'naked' shot. keeping with our tuscan wines, i asked for the northern italian espresso. it came, i sipped, and i fell madly in love.

friends, i hate to tell you how good that espresso was. because my words can't quite measure up. it was like letting the deepest dark chocolate sublimate into a smoky remembrance of itself on your palate. it didn't hit your tastebuds, it caressed them with a dozen silken notes, sweet and dark, flowing over your tongue like a lover's breath.

we left, me half-drunk from the wine, half-drunk from the espresso, and walked down mission street. summer mist fell along the foggy streets and twilight fell away to night. lucinda, awake now, squinted her eyes and lifted her face to the cool mist, blinking away the drops to see the streetlights. despite the espresso, i was ready for bed as soon as we got home, but she was awake for a long time to come.

(have you ever thought that espresso tastes like keats' autumn? or am i just looking for a reason to insert some gratuitous poetry?

TO AUTUMN.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

that's just stanza 1. here's the rest.)

let us all be from somewhere

2008-05-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

Birds have built a nest in the roof tiles over my windows and I woke to their song and the sun and the breeze this morning. I think some of them must be babies because they make such a racket, sitting on—what do you call the windowsill that’s on the outside of the window? (and who was it that thought ‘windowsill’ the most beautiful word in the english language—robert frost? and emily tatum, whom i loved). My windows were wide open because it’s been so hot in san francisco, so my mind was processing the soft breath of the air and the birdsong simultaneously, which is a lot to ask of my mind since I’m not a morning person.

I was in san diego on business all week, which is like putting an alcoholic in a bar and then making him take conference calls all day. Back now in my own city, the warm weather and the cool morning air is like a cocktail, and so i went to the cafe half-drunk already and then read this in the new yorker:

A Primer

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay as a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard , goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother.
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball!”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us all tell each other everything we can.

- Bob Hicok (published in the New Yorker, May 19, 2008)

amen.

unbecoming jane

2008-05-11T21:01:00.000-07:00

in the summer of 1992, i was 15 and living in my parents’ house in a woods surrounded by farmland west of saginaw, michigan. i didn’t have a drivers license, a girlfriend, a job, or even any friends within 10 miles. boredom doesn’t begin to describe it. i mowed the lawn 3 times a week just to have something to do. i suppose this is when most kids discover drugs, sex, and The Cure. i discovered jane austen.

on a table in the sunroom, my mom had placed the Everyman’s Library edition of The Complete Novels of Jane Austen, two inches thick and bound in peach cloth—it went with the decor. i read slowly but constantly, from cover to cover, from june to august, from sense and sensibility to persuasion. halfway through i realized that within the first five pages i could predict who would marry in the last two pages, but that didn’t stop me from reading. that summer after my freshman year of high school i was desperately and hopelessly in love with a.d., and she came alive for me in every one of jane austen’s heroines. in stately drawing rooms and on windy sussex downs, i chased her. on the old oak table over breakfast in the morning, and with elbows pressed into newcut grass after dinner in the gloaming, i read. jane austen got me through the summer of ‘92, and i can’t recall those days without remembering the reassuring heft and pleasant hue of that sizable book.

over the last few weeks, santana has been feeding this once-dormant addiction of mine, sending a steady stream of dvds from pbs’ ‘The complete jane austen’. (like a good dealer, she doesn’t give me all of them at once for fear of an overdose, but neither does she space them in intervals too long lest i sober up.) i watched all 6 novels in 6 weeks. but PBS had one more jane austen movie for me, 'miss austen regrets’, not based on a novel but rather a biographical movie about her later years.

on the jfk-sfo leg of my return from ghana this january, they were showing ‘becoming jane’–a biopic with anne hathaway. it wasn’t a bad movie, and if i pretended that it had no connection whatsoever with any historical jane austen, there was reason to enjoy it. but the problem was that it was meant to be about the real jane austen, and it was simply to hard to believe. anne hatahway's version of her was far too simple and uncomplicated, too perfect–in short, too ‘becoming’. such a jane would have never become a spinster; she would have married at 20, had a half dozen rosy-cheeked children by 30, and never published a first novel at 36. so expecting little more than another smiling, saccharine biopic, I slipped ‘miss austen regrets’ into my powerbook last night - and was happily surprised.

the jane of ‘miss austen regrets’ is something else entirely. her witticisms and sarcasm come off at times as cruelty. her personal misfortune poisons herself to others’ happiness, and she in turn uses that to poison them. she’s by turns sweet and cruel, playful and calculating, brilliant and depressed. she’s selfish. she’s even a borderline alcoholic. you might be sympathetic to her character, but you won't worship her. where other biopics offer us a jane who’s a conflation of her heroines, ‘miss austen regrets’ gives us a deconstruction of the singular woman who created them. this ‘new’ jane is rather unbecoming, but rather welcome.

(as a side note to calling jane austen ‘selfish’, she herself provided for her pardon: as mary crawford says in mansfield park: ‘selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there’s never any hope of a cure.’ – in the PBS version (produced by the BBC), mary crawford is played by my new favorite actress, haley atwell, and she delivers this line perfectly .)

from the files of a beverage freak

2008-05-09T17:17:00.000-07:00

after a, what, SEVEN year absence, calistoga sparkling juice is back! and it’s organic! the flavors are a little different, but it’s so good to have these at the corner tiendas again. i can’t fathom why calistoga ever took them off the shelves in the first place—i was crushed when they did. back in my very first apartment in san francisco—a small, poorly furnished studio at sutter and leavenworth—where i saw few visitors and no sun whatsoever, these were one of my first regular comforts. it was the taste of san francisco!

still, my dear calistoga sparkling juices, i’ve had to move on, and grow. over the last seven years i've become a bit of a lush and the taste of san francisco is now something closer to a mind-numbing margarita (either from el rio or the latin america club). and while you’ll always be my first love in the lightly carbonated natural juice category, you’ll never be able to do what Juice Squeeze Ruby Red Grapefruit can do—make a perfect paloma in 5 seconds flat—just add tequila! (try it at home and tell me if i'm not right. i'm right.)

marooned in shibuya / or / if there's a rock and roll heaven, well, you know they've got a tambourine man

2008-03-24T19:44:00.000-07:00

'can we go to room 601 at the karaoke-kan in center gai, shibuya?' i asked lisa non-chalantly on my last saturday in tokyo.

surprised by the specificity of my request, and its nature, she hesitated. 'there's really a million better things to do in tokyo,' she said. i insisted. i persisted. i cajoled, entreated, and bullied. then i got her liquored up on sake. finally she gave in, but not without having the sense to call in reinforcements. reinforcements, i might add, who could sing.

her friend hiroko led us straight to the karaoke place, she had obviously been there before, and i suppose that should have been my clue that she could, as i mentioned, sing. we couldn't get room 601, where those classic scenes from lost in translation were filmed, but we got 701 instead.

like a million things in japan, the japanese version is infinitely better than our approximations in america. this holds true for sushi, tofu, ramen, binge drinking, and karaoke. you get a private room to make a fool of yourself in, and there's a phone on the wall.

'i need 4 gin tonics and a tambourine!' you shout into the phone, and, wham! someone delivers 4 gin tonics and a tambourine to your room. it's like dying and going to stevie nicks' heaven.

bright lights, big city

2008-03-16T23:52:00.000-07:00

the lights of tokyo are even more beautiful at night when you take your contacts out. (god i love this hotel.)

sophia coppola, eat your heart out

2008-03-14T05:47:00.000-07:00

i spent tuesday wandering the hills in fushimi-inari, where thousands of vermilion torii gates line the hillside paths for kilometers. the effect, passing under these gates, one after another for hours, is hypnotizingly beautiful. friday was spent in the rainy rock gardens of the zen buddhist monasteries of kyoto. everywhere i turn, there's something indescribably lovely.

'i'm no fucking buddhist, but this is enlightenment.' - bjork, alarm call

top ramen

2008-03-13T05:59:00.000-07:00

tonight i went out to dinner with a friend from my hostel in kyoto. on the 10th floor of kyoto station there's an area called 'ramen-koji', where eight of the best ramen restaurants have set up shop side-by-side in fierce rivalry.

we had no idea how to choose between them. they all have vending machines by the entrance, with tiny pictures of ramen bowls. you drop in a few coins and press a button corresponding to the type of ramen you want to order. the machine spits out a ticket that you take inside. we looked around and chose the restaurant that had the clearest pictures.

we sat down, and i got a big bottle of asahi beer, half a liter for about $4.50. quickly, our food came. it was fucking incredible ramen.

'wow,' i said, turning to jos. 'this is like karma paying us back for all the awful ramen we ate as poor college students.'
jos looked at me skeptically.
'you know,' i said, 'the 25 cent packages of top ramen, the stuff you eat when you can't afford the time or money for anything else?'
'yeah, i know what you mean,' he said, slurping up noodles, 'but that wasn't really ramen.'
'no,' i said, 'but you know, i mean, that's really really bad ramen. and so this abso-fucking-lutely incredible ramen is like karma paying us back for our suffering back then.'
'but that's not really ramen, i mean, it doesn't count as ramen.'
'yeah, but, you get my point...' i said, turning back to my bowl, the noodles curling through the rich broth, the tender strips of pork, the onions and seaweed mingled in. i lifted some to my mouth. it was incredible.
'whatever you say,' jos said, ignoring me in favor of his ramen.
i took a swig of beer, the dry, sharp asahi cold from the bottle.
'but this beer, this beer is a fucking great deal,' i said, convinced i'd be right about something tonight.

jos agreed with me.

zen and the art of gay pickup lines

2008-03-12T01:31:00.000-07:00

trying not to wake up the other people in my hostel, i stumbled down from my bunk bed into my clothes and out into the rainy morning. it was early, and i'm not a morning person. i'm not a buddhist either, but i had a planned a day of zen gardens.

my first stop was the heian shrine, which isn't really a zen garden but is spectacularly beautiful all the same. i got there at 7 am, and there was no one else in the wide courtyard in front of the temple. there was me, and the sound of rain on gravel, and nothing else. i went into the garden and wandered around for an hour, skipping across ponds on stepping stones and dodging wet branches loaded with plum blossoms.

as i was leaving, the only people i saw were a few dozen buddhist monks hurrying through the red-pillared portico to their morning prayers. they went their way, under the roof, and i went mine, umbrella in hand.

the next stop was ryoan-ji, whose rock garden is one of the most renowned zen gardens in japan. i first read about this garden in kate walbert's beautiful book, 'the gardens of kyoto'. there are 15 stones in a sea of gravel, and no matter where you stand, one is always hidden. there's always something missing.

next i went to tenju-an and followed a path of diamond-shaped stones that had become an archipelago during the day's rain. i went to nanzen-ji, whose garden is called 'tigers crossing water'--a name inspired by the shape of the rocks in the garden. getting wetter as the day progressed, i ended up at konji-in a minute or two before it closed. i asked the ticket seller if i could still enter the garden.

'sure, there's plenty of time,' he said. 'where you from?'

'california. san francisco.'

'ah, very good city, very much fun, yes?'

'yeah, you know, no compaints.'

'how old you are?'

'31.'

he looked at my hand as he handed back my change.

'no ring? no married?'

'no. i was hoping to find a nice japanese girl.'

'ahh, yes, me too single man.'

i nodded my head, turned towards the 'turtle and crane' rock garden, laid out by kobori enshu nearly 400 years ago. the ticket seller grabbed my hand.

'but the problem with being single man...' he lowered his voice, 'i want sex.'

'yeah!' i coughed out, more in surprise than agreement, reclaiming my hand, 'yeah, that's umm, that's a good reason to get married, i guess.'

'but you know,' he continued, lowering his voice even further, 'i like to do masturbation.'

'yeah!' i coughed out again. it was getting to be a medical condition. 'wow, your english is really good.'

'you?' he asked, 'you like to do masturbation?'

'yeah!' i coughed out again, nearly breaking a rib. 'yeah, i've been known to...uhh, yeah, well, i should get on to the gardens.'

i could get used to this

2008-03-11T06:32:00.000-07:00

bullet trains, sumo wrestling, and geishas... i may never leave kyoto. (sometimes i look at my own photos and just can't quite believe that, jesus, this is my life right now.)

bright lights, small city

2008-03-08T05:49:00.000-08:00

first thing to remember before you go out at night in tokyo: you won’t be back until sunrise.

saturday night lisa and i went to a bar in shibuya called ‘the room’--a little club hidden at the bottom of a staircase in the basement below a fastfood restaurant. inside, like all the cool places in japan (or perhaps like ALL the places in japan) this place was small.

there were three tables and a bar about four feet long. a dj was spinning swing and samba for the burgeoning crowd which was packed onto a dance floor the size of a large volkswagen. the band that we came to see, a tokyo jazz ensemble called quasimode, came on at 2 am. even the hour was small.

quasimode set up on one end of the dance floor so that the music stands were mingling with the crowd, and you couldn’t tell where the players ended and the spectators began. the distinction was almost a moot point, as the band kept bringing more people on with each song until, at final count, there were eleven musicians filling up nearly half the room. instead of standing up straight, the trombonist had to point his instrument straight down, for fear of knocking out half the audience and a vending machine.

jazz for me has always been about the atmosphere. blues alley in georgetown was where i sat close enough to roy hargrove and christian mcbride to smell the marijuana coming off their suits, close enough to see the sweat beading up on mccoy tyner’s brow. saturday night at the room, we were pressed up against the keyboard, our legs against the stand. the band was tight, the crowd was dancing, and it was one of the best live shows i’ve ever been to.

they finished playing around 3 am, then we and the rest of the club settled in to wait the night out, nursing our drinks and absent-mindedly dancing until the first trains started running again at 5. a few of the patrons went to sleep at the tables. when we finally headed out into the still-dark morning, there were hundreds of people streaming across hachiko crossing in shibuya, either coming home from a night out or heading off to a day's work. the trains were crowded and full of passed out club-goers. we spotted two white-haired men who couldn't have been less than seventy, with heads tilted back against the windows, sleeping with their mouths open, looking quite the worse for wear. lisa smiled. ‘i’d kill to know what they were up to all night,’ she said.

fifteen minutes later we were walking through the narrow streets in the now bright morning. in the quiet lanes in the small hours of the day, tokyo seemed as docile as a sleeping cat. and for once, the big city felt surprisingly small.

meanwhile, back in the states, the heavenly states

2008-03-07T03:27:00.000-08:00

the heavenly states, my favorite bay area band, has a new album out (which I have downloaded from itunes while here in japan--god bless the internet) and a show friday march 7th at the independent. everyone should go. this album, 'delayer', is awesome from the opening track, 'morning exercise' with a catchy pop hook ('it hurts so bad, this goes on the record') to 'the system', a hard-driving piece that feels like a classic rock guitar anthem, to 'lost in the light' with its exquisite phrasing. this last track exemplifies the energetic post-punk feel that used to categorize all of their music. but the heavenly states have grown beyond that. i'm happy and sad about that, but i suppose we're all growing up. (i could philosophize on that theme for a while, but you wouldn't want to hear it, you already know it.) there are more slow songs on this album than the states used to do, but they're good--lyrical and well-paced, seductively cool. and just when you think you've heard it all, you get the fun kitsch of the folk-punk ballad 'never be alright'. (the only thing missing is their cover of john spencer blues explosion's 'bellbottoms'. but that might just be a personal favorite.)

in other sf news, this cracked me up today. it seems that muni's new hybrid buses have a switch on the outside that, when flipped, turns the bus OFF. i'm sure this was designed by some innocent automotive systems designer in some place like japan or finland where they've never heard of vandalism, who never thought that some kid would just decide to flip the switch and turn the bus OFF.

but c'mon, they're driving these things through hunter's point.

i miss san francisco. (and lucinda...i bought her that onesie)

disappointment peak

2008-03-04T23:19:00.000-08:00

In ecuador, a few hours south of quito, the town of riobamba is slung in a round valley ringed by five volcanoes. chimborazo is the largest of these peaks. on account of its location so near the equator, chimborazo's summit is the closest place on earth that you can get to the sun. it’s a broad, massive hulk that dominates the town and fills the sky. the problem was, after seven days in riobamba, i still hadn’t seen the thing.

lydia’s family invited me for almuerzo almost every day, and after a few days of frustration, i brought up the topic with her host father.

‘i just don’t believe that it exists.’
‘but of course it does! it’s just cloudy.’
‘it’s the highest volcano on earth, right?’
‘yes.’
‘and it’s about 10 kilometers from here.’
‘yes. but it’s cloudy. the clouds will clear, you’ll see it!’
‘i think it’s a fantasy, conjured up by the ministry of tourism to draw unsuspecting tourists here to spend their money in riobamba. because otherwise, of course, no one would ever come here. it’s made up, it’s a dirty rumor. a scam.’
he looked at me, and then back down at his yuca soup.
‘I’m sorry, but we won’t be abe to invite you here to eat tomorrow. Ummm, prior engagement.’

a couple hours south of tokyo is the town of hakone, which stretches through a series of valleys in the shadow of mt. fuji (they call it fuji-san here, using the honorific to show respect for japan's most iconic geological feature.) the town is renowned for it’s many spectacular views of fuji-san--it’s the reason, the only reason, you make the trip to hakone.

i met a singaporean at my hostel who was interested in going, and so we set out early on tuesday morning. arriving by train from tokyo, we got on a bus that took us to the shores of lake ashi. we couldn’t see fuji. we hiked through the cedar trees along the shore. snow fell in luxuriously soft flakes that settled on us like a whisper. we kept hiking, but we didn’t see fuji. i composed a haiku, a daughter of bitterness:

a single snowflake
then a multitude—white sheet!
fuji-san hates me

we boarded a boat to take us from one end of lake ashi to the other. 40 minutes on the lake bounded by mountains on either side, chugging slowly towards the base of mt. fuji. but see it we didn’t. we got into an aerial cable car (whatever it’s called, the tram thing, the gondola ride) that was slung between some peaks. high above the slopes and trees, i could see all of lake ashi, black and ringed by the mottled hills. i could see clusters of bare-branched trees skeletal against white fields and stands of evergreens burdened close to breaking by their snowy loads. i could see fingers of vapor rising from underground hot springs, the steam threading its way up the mountain face before letting go and dissolving in the wind. but i couldn’t see fuji. we got off the gondola and settled into a funicular train, descending back towards hakone. we switched to a local train, then the express back to tokyo.

to sum up:

transportation costs: 56,000 yen ($52)
modes of transportation: 7
hours of transportation: 11
views of mt. fuji: 0

but i did get to see snow falling among bamboo, and it was quiet enough you could hear the snow whisper as it hit the leaves. which is almost enough to make up for everything else.

oh, and before i forget, the 8th day in riobamba, as i was walking out of the university after meeting lydia’s english class, the clouds broke and i saw chimborazo, reaching higher up above me than i would have thought possible. it took my breath away. and there at the very top, that snowy peak, as close as you can get to the sun and still have your feet on the ground.

i'm just a traveller

2008-03-03T06:07:00.000-08:00

one of the more random things that can happen to you on a trip to japan is to be invited by a fulbright scholar to attend a lecture on how civil society influences policy decisions, especially with regard to divisive issues such as nuclear plant siting. and you'll accept that invitation, in part due to intellectual curiosity, but also because the fulbright scholar is nice, and cute, and actually the only person you know in japan.

getting there to meet lisa wasn't hard, as i'm a blackbelt at navigating tokyo's yamanote line trains. the only thing i hate is shinjuku station, where it feels like rush hour twenty-four hours a day. short of actually pushing a crowd off a cliff, the stairways into shinjuku are the closest thing i can imagine to an actual human waterfall.

once there, there lecture was interesting. the basic point of it being that in places where there's more developed civil society, such as a coastal village with a strong fishermen's cooperative, there's less probability that a nuclear plant will be situated there, due to the organized community-based resistance. it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling, like when i found the audiobook of matt damon reading howard zinn.

after the talk and before the q&a session, the host of the evening asked us to go around the room--there were maybe 25 people--and introduce ourselves.

"My name is Leonardo Scatellioni, I'm with the Italian Central Bank."

"I'm with Agence France Presse."

"US Embassy. I'm off the record."

"I'm writing my dissertation at Harvard."

"Oxford."

"I'm a member of parliament."

"Heinrich Gutenbergendorfer, vit dee Universitat of Heidelberg."

"I'm a Fulbright scholar, even if i tried to dumb down the subject of my research into monosyllabic words, you still wouldn't understand it."

and then it was my turn.

"My name is Zach Leinberger, uhm...ahem...I'm a, I'm just a traveller."

Which, when all is said and done and you've finished your sums, is as close to the truth as anything, I suppose. So close, in fact, it almost deserves to be put on a t-shirt.

(but first i have to do shirts with "Wesley Never Dies" and "Two Words: Tino")(oh, and thanks to lisa, for pointing out that that was worth a post)

shinjuku roppongi shibuya

2008-02-29T15:20:00.000-08:00

i think i could just walk around tokyo at night...and never even go in anywhere. the midnight crowds under the video screen glow, the stacked walls of neon, it's just beautiful. at shibuya crossing, to take one example, huge crowds build up at the crosswalks, staring up at the buildings clad in jumbotrons. traffic speeds in all directions and pedestrians can't cross to any corner. but when the lights change, and the intersection is completely clear of cars, hundreds upon hundreds of people start across from each side, like giant happy armies charging into each other. they melt together and mix into a single seething crowd under a neon sky. a moment later, they pull apart like oil separating from water, bound for a thousand different destinations.

(images top to bottom: shinjuku, roppongi hills, shibuya, shibuya)

maybe i'll vote for nader

2008-02-29T03:12:00.000-08:00

matt gonzalez is his running mate!

the fact that someone that i used to regularly see around the mission is going to be on the national ballot is kind of exciting. but it makes you wonder -- is this all matt gonzalez has to look forward to? i think matt gonzalez is a brilliant man, and i like his politics, and i think he's a leader, and it's frustrating to think that he has nothing better to do with his political capital than to run on a ticket with ralph nader. matt, tell us you've got something better to do with your time! at least run for something you have a chance of winning, otherwise, you're just wasting your gifts.

I'm just sayin'...

sushi at 7 am

2008-02-28T14:41:00.000-08:00

before sunrise at tokyo's tsukiji fish market, in a warehouse room flooded with halogen light, they line up hundred-pound tunas, and auction them off one by one. stooped over, the buyers walk down the rows of fish, inspecting them, noting the number which has been painted red on the tuna’s skin, jotting in small pads of paper. then someone rings a bell and the auctioneer stands amid the tuna, shouting out the number of the fish and the price, and with nods and waves the buyers bid. it takes about 5 seconds to sell a tuna. they get through a warehouse of fish in less than half an hour. then the buyers sort out the fish they each bought, men come in with wooden pull carts and load them up, and soon the hall is empty of everything but a surprising amount of fish blood and a thin film of scales, corruscating under the lights. someone comes quickly and hoses it all away. and you, too, leave and walk a few hundred feet through the now-brightening morning to a restaurant with six seats at a counter, where some of that tuna is being sliced just for you.

upside

2008-02-26T05:04:00.000-08:00

bending low—the joints,
the world, all upside down—
bamboo under the snow

i’ve got to go to bed. it’s only 9 pm here, but it’s like 5 am in san francisco. i hadn’t done the math until now and it’s made me even more tired. but who can sleep? i feel like rumi head over heels in love...i’m like this every time i travel, i suppose it’s become something like ecstatic religion for me. so that’s partly the reason for the basho haiku—head over heels, the world all upside down. the other reason for the haiku is that my first glimpse of japan, as the train pulled out of narita airport, was of a small fold in a hill, filled with tall bamboo, swaying and bending slowly in the breeze, like a crowd of tired drunks. it was beautiful, and exotic—we don’t have bamboo like that in california.

i’ll be honest with you: i was nervous about japan. i’ll still be honest with you: i’m still nervous about this trip. i don’t know if i can pull this off successfully. i don’t know if i can break the surface of japan, in three weeks, without speaking japanese. i don’t know if i’ll figure out the subway system, or meet any japanese that i can really talk to, or a hundred other things.

but i’m less worried about that now. because try as i might to not build up expectations, i did. and i’m finding i was mostly wrong. and that realization, that’s what puts this shit-eating grin on my face and knocks me head over heels—it’s like the fortune cookie that tony hoagland describes in a poem, offering “the twin pleasures of breakage and discovery”—when dreams are shattered by reality, and reality is ever more brilliant. in the countryside by the airport, the bamboo’s graceful bow. stepping off my train into the rush-hour-rush at ikebukuro, out into the narrow bright streets at night, i realized i had never been anywhere like this before. passing through shinjuku on the train from narita, where jukebox neon climbs the fronts of skyscrapers and makes canyons of light that make times square look like a country fair, i thought‘yes. it’s true what they tell you, but it’s so much more than that.’

and thus my world, upside down.

(ps – a special thanks to jeff rausis, my former boss, for the book on basho from which that haiku is taken. he didn’t even know i was going to japan, people. it’s probably the best gift i’ve gotten in the last year.)

ghana pictures

2008-02-09T12:08:00.000-08:00

I've finally posted them HERE. But it's such a ridiculously beautiful day in san francisco I've got cut this post short and get out into the sunshine. More to come...

how we make our travel decisions

2008-01-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

Gmail Chat, 11 November 2007

Brian: have i asked you what you are doing in January
me: working
Brian: say between the 18th and 28th of January
me: working. why?
Brian: any chance you can not be working
me: there's always a chance. but not a great chance
Brian: Ghana
me: Ghana?
Brian: African Cup of Nations
me: footie?
Brian: yup
me: you're asking me to take two weeks off work with no pay to watch FOOTIE in SOME THIRD WORLD MALARIAL JUNGLE?
Brian: yup
me: you're bonkers.
Brian: you have no sense of adventure anymore
me: ghana
Brian: you've gone too corporate
me: you're serious?
Brian: hey, look at me! i'm a marketeer!
me: look at me! i'm a lawyer!
Brian: direct mail for you
direct mail for you
direct mail for you
bill insert
bill insert
bill insert

what we say when we say merry christmas

2008-01-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

I’m goin’ where I lost my mind
Where the water flows like wine
I’m goin’ where the sun don’t always shine

I do this every year. during the most depressing time of the year i trade sunny california for the cold and overcast fields of saginaw, michigan. it’s for family of course, which is probably the only consistent—and valid—reason we ever have for knowingly and voluntarily worsening the state of our well-being.

late on the morning of christmas eve, on the crowded 40-seat plane out of o’hare, i was sitting beside a rad teenager from mt. pleasant, michigan. she was in some sort of art school, completely dismissive of her parents who sat nearby, and her hair was cropped tight in a wannabe-lesbian do. we were passing high over the clouds and it was full of sunny blue skies up there, nothing but silver lining below. there was a shadow far in the distance, riding the crest of a cloud.

“why is there a dark spot on top of that cloud?” she asked.
“oh,” i said, employing the practiced tone—omniscient and benevolent—of one who is twice the age of his audience. “that’s just god’s shadow.”
she laughed so hard she snorted, and her parents cast suspicious glances from across the narrow aisle.
“when it’s sunny out, that’s god smiling,” I continued, pressing my luck as i always do when i have an audience that’s both appreciative and captive.
“this flight is making my whole trip worthwhile,” she beamed.

fifteen minutes after climbing out of the clouds over chicago, we dropped back below them, nearing saginaw. out of the brilliant blue heavens, our descent brought us into the dull half-light of the michigan winter. endless grey fields of snow wallowed below the dense, low clouds, the thin country roads running into the distance between the leaden sky and the leaden earth. it was like someone had done a chalkboard drawing of the county, and then hurriedly erased it, leaving the indistinct shadows of trees and farms and houses, the outlines of the countryside half-obliterated in a wash of chalky grey.

“i’m not sure what you did,” i said to my companion, “but god is NOT smiling anymore.”

stepping off the plane into the mid-morning twilight, i took solace in the fact that i’d soon be in my parents’ house. having spent the night on a bench in o’hare, i imagined drowsily dropping to sleep in my old bedroom, warm and well-fed, filled with goodwill to all and my mother’s home cooking. dad met me at the airport. my bags didn’t.

“i’ll be honest with you,” said an airline representative. “we haven’t got a clue when these bags are coming. it may be a couple days.”
“well,” i said, turning to my father as we stepped out into the raw, cold air, “i’ve got nothing to wear to christmas eve church tonight. no dress shoes, pants, or a shirt. guess i’m not going.”
“don’t be silly,” he said as we walked the ten yards from the low brick airport terminal to his buick in the parking lot. he looked at his watch, calculating the time left before church. “we’ll go to Value City.”

along saginaw’s stripmall corridor, plows had bulwarked the parking lots with ragged mountains of greying snow. The parking lots glistened with the melting. Inside Value City, neon lights flickered from the high ceiling and sad, desperate ranks of clothes hung on endless racks. Value City is that faceless, boxy store where clothes go when no one else will take them. If something doesn’t sell at Value City it doesn’t go to the outlet mall, it gets burned. It’s like a concentration camp for bad fashion. there were pants being sold with matching belts already threaded around the waist, and garish shirt-and-tie sets wrapped in plastic. we walked along thirty foot rows of pleated slacks in khaki and olive green and grey-and-black checks. the smallest waist was forty inches. the larger waists were close to my IQ.

“what size pants do you wear?” dad asked.
“thirty.”

he frowned and passed his hands over a selection of $60 suits. he found a stocker and asked if they had any pants with a 30-inch waist. she looked at him blankly, then suggested we try the children’s department.

one thing i admire about my father is his ability to forge ahead even when it’s obvious there’s nothing to be gained. he’s oblivious to stupidity, and stubbornly believes that the people who work at places like Value City really want to help the customer. it’s some sort of miracle of denial that keeps him going. what’s amazing, of course, is when he turns out to be right. though the racks of clothes read like something by solzhenitsyn, my dad persisted with this employee, asking her about dress shirts.

‘you jus’ gon’ have ta hunt, git diggin through dere. ever’thin’ we got’s been picked over real good with christmas an’ all. ain’t nothin’ where’s s’posed to be, but it’s all here, you just gotta dig through, y’know? like one a them scavenger hunts,” she said with a chuckle. ‘oh, but we got a big ol’ rack o’shirts over dere. y’ken try dat.’

and damned if we didn’t find a blue dress shirt of the right size, on a rack that said “$7.99”. (When me made it to the checkout counter, this shirt actually rang up for $3.98 after tax, making it the only item of clothing I currently own that’s cheaper than a big mac.) We worked our way through the shoe department (the only thing more surprising than the fact that someone actually designed green alligator-skin shoes with a brass plate on the tongue is the fact that someone else agreed to manufacture and distribute them.) and then again through the pants. (everything had pleats. even the jeans.) Beaten, i picked out shoes and slacks. Humiliated, exhausted, and despondent to the point of medical concern, I took my new clothes to the checkout.

“look at that!” my dad said as we passed another rack, “lee jeans for $17.99!”

I couldn’t tell if he considered that a good price or if it was far too high.

. . . . . . . . .

We went to church in the late afternoon. st. paul’s is a magnificent old church in saginaw’s ‘old town’, where the streets are lined with large, proud houses from the lumber boom of the late 1800s. The church has thirty-foot stained glass windows that can manage a radiant lustre even on dark winter afternoons. Brilliant with lights and ornaments, two tall christmas trees flanked the elaborate white altar. Down the center aisle, carpeted in rich red, bone white candles stood aloft on poles, shimmering over the heads of the congregation. the mighty organ danced through christmas carols before the service started, and i was overcome with nostalgia for this tiny lutheran world, polished and sparkling with its own bright light.

the congregation stood as the pastor started the service. then we sat, and stood, and sat and stood and sang and sat and stood. and then the service was over and we filed out of the sanctuary into the basement, which, after any big service, is a mob scene of well-wishers and reunions of old friends and bubbling cheer. i try desperately to avoid almost everyone. inevitably, there’s some masochistic old grade-school classmate who spots me and comes over for an awkward conversation. i make it my goal each christmas to avoid this.

i tried to stay close to my parents as a defensive measure. my parents friends came up and pinched my cheeks and treated me like the prodigal son. but i wanted to tell them they didn’t really know me. They wanted me to explain what i was doing for work or why i lived in san francisco, and I wanted to explain to them how ‘these aren’t really my clothes,’ or ‘my eyes aren’t always this bloodshot.’ i wanted to tell them all about my night on a bench in o’hare and how my bag was supposedly on a truck driving here from chicago and about my trip to value city. i wanted to tell them about the $800 suit that i should have been wearing and my italian leather shoes. i wanted to describe the pleated jeans i saw at value city and the how the shirt they saw on me now only cost $3.98 and had only been in my possession for mere hours. but i knew that was only the start of it, and i knew none of it would get me out of the church basement any quicker.

‘can’t we just go, mom?’ i said, hopelessly, as i saw an old classmate, paul schmeichel, shuffling my way. ‘maybe i should go warm up the car,’ i suggested, though that hasn’t worked since i was sixteen and ran into a dumpster while warming up the car. ‘how about i get your coat for you, dad?’

but now there was no escape, and paul appeared at my side. we shook hands and didn’t say anything for a bit. I was thinking about at least explaining my pants to him. Then I noticed that he was wearing a bill cosby sweater . and his loafers seemed to have small brass chains looped across the tongue.

paul and i stood there in silence, for some time just short of a decade.

“merry christmas,” he said finally, nervously trying to roll up the sleeves of his sweater. And standing there dressed in my own despair, i recognized it in another. i realized that this was the one person in the church i didn’t have to explain anything to. because this is what we do. for these few days every year we shed the selves that we’ve become, the selves we’ve grown into. we leave them behind like lost luggage, and we become again our parents’ children. we give up sovereignty and let ourselves be clothed as they see us. it’s really the only gift they ask for.

“merry christmas,” i said back.

pinteresque pauses...and what we saw when we went out today

2007-12-22T22:30:00.000-08:00

I'm only halfway through this week's new yorker, but already it's one of my favorite issues in months. there's a brilliant short story by junot diaz ("...one of those Sonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatinas without whom you might never have lost your virginity.") and another great one by anne enright ("I'm not thinking that she has botoxed her emotions so she won't ever need to do her face.") and a fond and insightful article on harold pinter ("Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labelled, and ready for export is dead...and meaningless.") that makes me yearn for the days of play salons with saul galin at the mechanic's library.

once i finally pried myself away from the new yorker this morning, i left my cafe and headed out christmas shopping in the mission and noe valley, where i took a lot of pictures.

german poets are no comfort at times like these

2007-12-21T21:43:00.000-08:00

monday afternoon i got slugged by an email from a lover telling me she got married. just this spring she was in my bed.

just this spring she was in my bed, and now she’s married. though she was never more than a lover, i feel like i’ve had the wind knocked out of me.

we're all born under a death sentence, but truly great sex feels like your punishment has been commuted; it feels like a pardon. life, after all, is just a finite series of moments when you don’t die. but when d---- was in my darkened apartment it felt like a million instances of immortality. like death jumped on the wrong bus that morning and got off in albuquerque or peoria, which are nowhere near where i live. like death had lost his voice and was padding around outside on the sidewalk below making sad, wheezing little coughs, like a cat with a fish bone caught in its throat, which is a sound so pathetic we just laughed, there was nothing to fear.

there aren’t many lovers who can shove a bone down the devil’s throat, who can fend off death with breathless words. so now i feel oddly unprotected. unprotected and alone, with equal parts of longing and fear. it’s not love that’s left me feeling so exposed – that would be something to take refuge in, something to inhabit – so what is it? lust or a remnant of joy or a sweaty taste of immortality. no, love...is something different entirely; something that might have been a comfort. adrift at times like these i’m in the custom of turning to rilke, but to be honest with you, he’s never any real help.

but should you long like this, sing of your lovers; the fame of their feeling is not yet immortal enough.

the duino elegies, the first elegy

my children, one thing really relished in this world
will serve for a thousand. Never believe
that destiny is more than what’s confined to a chidhood;
how often did you pass the man you loved, panting
panting after the blissful chase, to dash into freedom?

it is breathtaking simply to be here.

the duino elegies, the seventh elegy

in which we defy augury, but not jalapenos or traffic

2007-12-09T20:04:00.000-08:00

S called today while my mouth was erupting in flames. I was not doing very well.

"Heybabyholdonasec! (gasp) must. (gulp) drink. (gasp) water."
"Whatsamatter?"
"Last (gasp) bite of burrito (gulp) pure. (gasp, gulp, gasp, pause) pure jalapeno."
"Oh, i know the feeling. but you shouldn’t be drinking water--that just makes it worse. you need to eat something bland."
"There’s (gulp) nothing bland here. except my life. (gulp, gasp) except my life. except my life."
"I heard you the first time. sorry, hon--" (crying in the backgroud)
"It’s shakespe -- "
"I know. Hamlet. Act II. but the baby’s crying, no time for shakes, sorry hon, gotta run." (click)

simply from momentum i drank four more glasses of water, to no avail, and then went for a walk. i actually spent part of the walk trying to figure out if shakespeare really needed hamlet to repeat that three times.

Polonius
...My honourable
lord, I will most humbly take my leave of you.

Hamlet
You cannot, sir, take from me any thing that I will
more willingly part withal: except my life, except
my life, except my life.

it’s one of the harder bits of acting in the play, and every actor seems to do it differently. does hamlet grow more introspective with each repetition, or more animated? louder or softer? is he plunging into madness or awakening to a new clarity? is shakespeare just repeating it for emphasis, in hopes that the audience doesn’t miss the foreshadowing? but he doesn't do this anywhere else -- not like this, not in any other plays that i can recall. and pay attention to the syntax – hamlet isn’t just saying that he we won’t let polonius take his life, he’s implying that he would willingly part with his life, but by his own hand, not someone else’s.

trying to unravel shakespeare’s lines in my head, i nearly walked through a red light and into an oncoming bus on 24th street.

Polonius
[Aside] Though this be madness, yet there is method
in 't. Will you walk out of the air, my lord?

Hamlet
Into my grave.

fortunately i didn’t walk into my grave. but continuing down the sidewalk and trying to avoid a homeless woman’s shopping cart, i did walk headfirst into a blossom of quinceanera dresses, floating five feet over the sidewalk.

and no, i’ve never taken pictures up dresses before. but maybe i should have.

thanksgiving

2007-11-24T11:43:00.000-08:00

when you’re washing dishes after thanksgiving dinner, and your socks have gotten wet from a leak in the sink, you might feel something grab your foot, encircled it tightly, and shake it vigorously. that thing is not some animal, loose in the house. that thing is a friend. after drying your toes, it returns wordlessly to wiping up the floor.

thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and as such i’ve layered it with a hundred invented customs, some well-known, some known only to me...

i get up early and take the bart train to montgomery street station and walk to north beach. i’ve been doing this for years now. i walk through the dark shadowy blocks of the financial district and then into north beach, up columbus avenue which sits at an angle friendly to the sun. i buy beaujolais nouveau at coit liquors, and then i watch the old asian women in washington square park. the sun warms them as they do their morning tai-chi and makes their brightly colored jackets glow, blue red yellow green, like a huddle of tethered balloons twisting slowly in the breeze. they’re stationed in clicques about the perimeter of the park, and the center is a grassy emerald gem, wet with dew, gleaming in the sun. dogs shoot across it like crazed zephyrs, blurry streaks of blond and brown, indistinct as smoke.

i go to cafe trieste and get an espresso. if there are no seats available on the sidewalk i’ll just stand. i’ll stand at the corner of grant and vallejo and look back towards the shiny silver wall of skyscrapers not so far away. nearby it’s all wooden buildings, tiny rambling facades and huddled entrances. on the narrow street, they clatter down the little hill together. and as i stand there in the sun, beside the tiny cafe across from tiny restaurants, in the shadows of the buildings downtown, the neighborhood seems like a quiet pool, or an enclave, or a family—it’s partly defined by what it isn’t, and it’s partly defined by me. whatever you belong to also belongs to you.

i call people. i call everyone i should, then everyone i know, everyone i can think of. and then i think of calling the people i know i shouldn’t. (i don’t call them, and i shouldn't.) i call my parents and my brother, friends from high school and the few college friends i still know. i call ex-girlfriends by the dozen. i call london, i call ecuador, i call bosnia,. and each call makes me happier. by noon i’m delirious.

to the actual dinner, i always bring wine—mostly beaujolais nouveau, to be specific. i do not cook and cannot cook. i know that this young beaujolais isn’t the best, but i like it because you can only buy it around thanksgiving. this day will be over so quickly, and the beaujolais, pert and inexperienced, will disappear as well. coming like a sudden blessing, like manna, and gone as quickly, too. and so it teaches me a lesson about embracing the present and about the fleetingness of youth. all of which isn’t bad for a $10 bottle of wine.

i slip in one egregiously expensive bottle of wine, and don’t tell anyone.

over dinner, i try not to cry. arrayed around sparkling crystal and heaped dishes, we’re talking about growing up in small towns, or about our terrible jobs, or someone starts arguing for a different method of preparing yams. and so we are. not rich or poor or any less blessed than the saints. just so, this process of joining together and eating and sharing is essentially holy, miraculous. and sometimes this all becomes apparent to me. i think alcoholics call it a moment of clarity.

i purposely eat to the point of pain. during dinner, i go slowly on the wine, in order to leave room for food. the next day, i don’t get hungry until sunset.

i have successfully avoided yams for 13 years now.

after dinner, i put off cleaning as long as possible. i recline. i relax. i wait for dessert to come to me. i chase untasted bottles of wine. i take them as i find them, and white might follow red, mixing a few drops so that it wears a faint blush. i wear laziness like a badge of honor and a treat it like a right i’ve earned. i wear it like a leaden cloak that presses me into the floor beside the fire. it keeps me there for hours. i pray quietly that my laziness encourages others. because i hate cleaning.

i straggle to the end; i try to be the last to leave.

[image from kyriell and erik's porch. left to right: pacific ocean, marin headlands, the san francisco bay, the moon]

then came thou, lucinda

2007-10-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

lucinda with her sea-grey eyes
looked down on all below
from her seat of majesty
on olympus’ lofty brow

the priests poured out libations
the fairies sang her name
the oracles spoke quite clearly;
and athena did the same:

"please take this throne, my mistress
and count me glad to serve
for you have eased our distress
with such great show of nerve.

the spartans are non-plussed
the attic hordes are sheepish
the boeotians linger
in earthen holes quite deepish.

strong-willed men were sent
with arms and shields aplenty
across the wine-dark sea.
ten thousand men and twenty

could not the trojans conquer
nor tear their walls asunder
encamped upon that plain
for vultures they were plunder.

for years they tried to prove
in manner quite vainglorious
their strength of will and courage
(which homer made notorious).

but they proved better at boasting
than winning that shameful war.
they heard not the victory trumpet
nor the welcome home crowd roar.

then came thou, lucinda
and with a fleeting smile
you conquered hearts impervious
to schemes and swords and guile.

then came thou, lucinda
and with a laugh so sweet
the nations bent their knees
and begged to kiss your feet.

then came thou, lucinda,
your sea-grey eyes shone bright
the wine-dark sea stood silent
the day held off the night.

waiting to do your bidding
the nations ready stand
the heavens are at attention
the wind and sea at hand.

the rose-colored fingers of dawn
will play the harp and zither
or if you command
the mountains will come hither

the gods all cry in unison
they plead with tears that glisten
vouchsafe your will to us!
just speak--for we will listen."

lucinda smiled coyly
but did not deign to speak
(she’d had no need of words yet
being born within the week)

lucinda seemed unfazed tho’
history had chosen her so soon.
she went back to her mother’s breast
and closed her eyes to the room.

birthday

2007-10-04T16:05:00.000-07:00

it was funny, but on such an august occasion, her thoughts were concerned not with interplanetary politics or the demands of war and peace or her meteoric rise to power, but rather with the area immediately above and behind her right eye. that was where a headache was gaining momentum, building pressure and fury like the typhoons that had turned her native california into a deserted storm coast. this wasn’t an author’s metaphor, the pressure was so intense at times that nothing but an image of a terrible world-encompassing storm filled her mind. she travelled enough to know that this would pass; her doctor assured her it was a harmless side-effect of the valence adjustments. if she could find her venerable aide, her vain but devoted godfather, in this sea of people, he might have some ibuprofen for her. but she couldn’t see him anywhere. she closed her eyes for a second and tried to wish the throbbing pain away.

a local onion-skinned dignitary with a formidable phalanx of legs—his actual name was lost to her, he had been introduced from one of the smaller nations on this planet, one nearer the tectonic surface than most, which was the only detail she recalled through the migraine blur—sensed her discomfort and, through the Algorithmic Instant Translator, conveyed his sympathy. his words caught her off guard, and for a moment she was perturbed. she knew they couldn’t read minds, but these blind subfaccia races were so attuned to the other signals of the body that their perception still felt invasive. she had won them over, had been elected as much by them as by the humans of earth, and still she felt oddly naked in their presence, at the mercy of their 8 hyperacute senses. but she had her mother’s skill in turning someone’s half-hearted sympathy into a common bond, and thence into friendship. and perhaps that was one of the reasons she was standing here, 37 earth years old, on the brink of history.

she rolled her eyes, and gave a conspiratorial sigh, “those fucking hadron transporters. i’ll never get used to them.” shaking her head she muttered, “beam me up a fucking scotch on the rocks, scotty.”

the translucent threwthreandrian- she remembered the name of his country now-laughed when the translation came through on the AIT.

“i agree with you,” the dignitary said. “But my name is not scotty.”

“oh no, i mean...,” but how to explain start trek in thirty missed cultural references or less?

“regardless...” he continued, in what her AIT indicated was a much less formal dialect. “i’m with you about these transporters. when they first started installing them in homes, i said there was no way i’d ever let them put one in my house. but you know how children are--we couldn’t be the last family in the pod not to have one. now we have three and one more for the dog” (her AIT translated that too well, she wondered what kind of pets they really did have.) “and i have to have my teenage daughter show me how to work the remote even if i just want to shoot to the outer mantle. when i was a kid everyone was happy with their vacuum sleds, now people treat you like if you’re not using a transporter with tau-neutrino replication, you’re going nowhere fast.”

they laughed together and fell into stories of their own families. on the dais in front of them, there were dozens of speeches being made in various frequencies and languages. The ambassadors from the outer core droned in their ultra-low frequencies, their slow language that could penetrate the plates of nickel and iron crystal, but that not even the AIT could speed up. so these two had time to talk. he told her about the 39 sons he lost in the Settler’s War, and of the garnet farm he had miles below his planet’s mantle. she told him about how her mother taught her how to salsa dance and make 3-hour enchiladas. she was actually about an hour into the enchilada story when her aide finally found her, forcibly grabbed her by the arm, and propelled her to the podium before the largest audience in the history of the known universe. she collected herself. she was the master of the moment, she always had been.

“i don’t wish to talk to you today of treaties and wars and the machinations of states. not the grand peace before us nor the horrors of the wars behind us shall be my focus. and i promise not to bore you with details of the wormhole that i’m responsible for in the feynman dimensions that brought our solar systems together. we have witnessed greater danger in the last three decades than we could have imagined possible, but we have overcome it with greater hope and a determination stronger than steel, stronger than phrthrrr’b’n,” she said, flawlessly pronouncing the word in one of this planet’s few humanly audible languages. “but what brought us together cannot hold us forever, and to bridge the gap between our cultures, our races, and our planets, we must start from the one thing we all have in common. we all have a story, and the path to understanding starts with each of us, not as earthlings, brobdignagians, or troglodotians, but as individuals, sharing our stories. and so, today, i want to tell you mine. I was born on October 4, in earth year 2007, on a cloudless bright day in a beautiful land that is now just a memory. my mother was a writer, and my father protected the last sequoia forests from destruction during the war of the second kyoto protocol...”

and so she told her story, which was vivicast to the underground audiences of troglodotians all around the planet and to the earthlings living above ground in their estindomes, and those in the mid-stellar Oxygen Colonies, and to the Ten Thousand trying to maintain a life on earth. (the last of these audiences, due to the quantum-time distortions of the vallejos wormhole, actually saw the speech before it was made.) and at the end of her speech, in the hushed silence that followed the deafening waves of applause, standing before the assembled ranks of dignitaries from many nations, peoples, and planets, she took the oath that would make her the first Interplanetary Secretary General.

“I, Lucinda Elizabeth Schaible Vallejos, swear to defend the principles of the United Nations of the Sister Planets..."

the meanest thing i ever said

2007-10-03T09:27:00.000-07:00

some of my readers have mentioned that my dear friend rachel doesn’t come across as being very nice in my recent blog post about austin. i never intended to convey such a thing--rachel is, in fact, one of the sweetest and most forgiving people i know. the simple fact that she’s still friends with me should be proof of that. she has every right to make fun of me and issue absurd commands ("hoof it!"), and as long as i live, i will recognize that as her right. i owe her all that and more, because of the meanest thing i ever said to anyone.

january 2000, in the nordstrom’s at 5th and market, across the street from the headlight.com office. we were shopping instead of working, and rachel caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror.

"i look terrible," she said, " i really need to get a haircut."

I turned to her with a slightly disapproving look and said, "isn’t that kind of like complaining about the curtains when really it’s the whole house that needs remodeling?"

sputnik sweetheart

2007-10-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of sputnik, and the fifth anniversary of my arrival in portoviejo, ecuador. i’m not sure how many of my current readers remember my lyricalgangsta blog, but shortly before i left for ecuador, i met a cat and named him sputnik. I had been living at home that summer, working on the blueberry farm driving tractors and designing websites. well, that’s enough setup, here’s my blog post from september 4, 2002:

thoughts on going far away

this past week on the farm, a gaunt and wide-eyed kitten stumbled out of the fields, mewing for all he was worth. hair grey like smoke. he has enormous, dark eyes, and a throaty, rumbling cry. i wanted to adopt him at once.

the first thing i always do when any new creature comes into my life is to give it a name. i can’t comprehend how some people don’t name their pets immediately. me, before i buy cat food or a brush or toys or anything, i decide on a name. it’s a prerequisite.

perhaps naming is an affliction, but it’s not just mine. as a society we’re obsessed with names. things we can name are things that we know how to handle, they give us the feeling of a little more control over the cosmos of our daily lives. there are pros and cons to this. a name can force someone into a group, make a stereotype easier, or it can identify a disease, and signal a cure. a name is a simple phoneme that holds together a complex gestalt of elements. it brings order to the chaos.

but names are also a signal of belonging. for me as an individual, my name comes from my family, it means something like home. this cat needed a home, and having a home means having a name. and though I can never remember meeting a single cat who responded to any name, that was my first order of business.

i won’t share with you all the names i considered; i settled on sputnik. he’s small, and likes to curl into a ball, and his hair has a silvery luster. he has a thin tail straight as an antenna, and enormous ears that stick out of his round head like radars. and though he’s a long way from home, he’s still broadcasting in meows and purrs, from his precosiously strong voicebox, sent out to the world at large.

i’ll confess that there’s another, more sentimental reason, for naming him sputnik, which means ‘fellow traveller’ in russian. in a week i’ll be flying to another hemisphere where i don't know the language, or a single soul, and no one knows me. and i know as alone and homesick as this kitten is now, i'll be feeling just like him when i get to quito. lost and lonely and skittish and very very far from home. this kitten and i are fellow travelers right now.

[begin moral] but it’s not just me and sputnik, sitting in a blueberry field by ourselves, making up cat songs about saginaw county. we're all of us fellow travelers. everyone on this crazy earth is making their own voyage--this is the bond that we all share. some have found someone to travel with, and some have figured out their destinations, and some of us are simply going, spinning in our dizzying orbits until we come crashing down or shoot out towards the stars. i'm not sure if it's ever about arriving; from birth to death we're constantly moving. all i know is that once we face up to our human nature and the precariousness of our situation on this earth, we realize that we’re all sputniks – a million miles from home and surrounded by the void. and though we may not understand the journey, at least we’re not alone. [end moral]

sunday at the revolution cafe

2007-09-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

11:50. kara and frannie joined me for a pleasant hour, and this time frannie did not nearly bodyslam a honda, broadside.

1:30. a concert pianist sat down for an hour or two at the piano and played with such beauty and virtuosity that it almost made we weep. it might have even surpassed the february afternoons when marcus shelby would come sit down and play thelonious monk for the 3 people in the cafe.

2:15. this woman walked in and gave me a new submission for vice magazine’s Do’s and Don’ts. This is definitely a DO--all the way down to the stockings that cover the shoes.

(this here, in macedonia, was a Don’t)

a fistful of memories

2007-09-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

it has occurred to me to disguise the fact that i went, gladly, to see a violent western last night. more people got shot in the film than i would be able to count. but the point blank murder didn’t register as anything more than a cinematic conceit--i’ve been desensitized to this violence since a young age, as most of us have. i didn’t go to see the violence, i went for nostalgia.

westerns take me back to the plains of my youth, those barren winter sundays when boredom lies as heavy on you as grandma’s quilted blankets and the thin daylight coming through the windows isn’t even bright enough to read a book by. i’d settle into a bean bag chair with some bible homework -- verses to memorize for monday morning --and the tv. (do you remember the tvs of our childhood? our family had two -- a 17” color one with a fake wood console in my parents’ room, and an 11” black and white that we kept in the dining room. this was before remote controls, when you’d have to flip the knobs around, that stacatto rat-tat-tat mixed with shotgun blasts of static as you flicked through the vacant channels. you had two knobs, one for VHF where the real channels were, and one for the UHF frequencies, those sparsely populated upper reaches of the spectrum where PBS fundraisers and televangelists shouted above a constant low static rumble, each selling their own brand of guilt.)

dad might come in the room and insist on watching the Victory Garden or This Old House on PBS, and I’d acquiesce, knowing that the cost of non-compliance would be a suggestion that a few hours of shovelling or hauling brush out of the woods would do me good. i knew they wouldn’t, and as soon as i could i’d be back to ignoring my father and spending time with other men--like john wayne, jimmy stewart, clint eastwood, and gary cooper. men who seemed just as quiet and taciturn as my father, but less knowledgeable about hostas and variegated miscanthus, and by correlation, more heroic.

left alone those sunday afternoons i’d flick the rotary dials with precocious dexterity, looking for what i thought i wanted, something with tight-lipped cowboys in a sun-bleached land redolent of leather and smoldering fires. on U25 there’d be something from the seventies -- say, ‘return of the saint’ -- where men in leisure suits negotiated in red-light lounges and chased each other in boxy fords -- but how many heroes ever drove a burnt orange ’76 catalina? -- and i’d keep twisting the dial. by the time i got up to U66, i usually found what i was looking for.

U66/WSMH was the Fox affiliate for mid-michigan back when Fox had Geraldo, Tracey Ullman, Gary Shandling and nothing else. Other than those few hours of network programming, the rest of the week was the responsibility of the local affiliate stations, and I guess westerns came cheaply. relegated from the major networks and cleft and cloyed with commercials for law firms, these movies seemed just as discontent with sunday afternoons as I was.

it always seemed to me like there was a time, a time just before i gained consciousness, when life was steady and people were happy. times when the oldies weren’t old and there was always an exciting pennant race, and westerns weren’t interrupted by commercials for personal injury lawyers. what i was feeling, when i settled down to watch one, wasn’t the enjoyment of the movie itself, but nostalgia for a time i never knew – if such a thing is possible; nostalgia for a time when the all the good guys wore white and all the heroes walked with a swagger – if such a time ever existed.

and so i’d sit through those long sunday afternoons watching westerns, unaware of how content i really was. mom would be playing the piano and brad would be working on a model plane and dad would start making an early dinner. and i’d be a little sad, knowing that my nostalgia for westerns was probably misplaced, knowing that things would have to change, and knowing that someday it would be these very days that i’d be feeling nostalgic for.

friday 12:15 am on the powell street bart platform

2007-09-21T01:25:00.000-07:00

a chubby guy wearing a t-shirt that says "intifada! free palestine!" and depicts a suicide bomber is talking to a girl in tall boots and stockings with many rips who has just gotten off her cell phone. "What's her problem anyways? why didn't she come out?" he asks.

"She's dating some rabbinical scholar and it's kol nidre tonight," she says with an eye roll, "she's trying to be, like, 'Super-Jew'."

and behind us four guys are headed back to the east bay.

"what i'm saying is that i served, alright? and i don't like it when people who didn't serve wear camouflage, i think it's stupid, i don't think it's appropriate at a bar. I served in the 82nd airborne, i wore camo for a real purpose, man."

"but, dude, she was hot and [unintelligible]..."

"all i'm saying is, she's trying to represent something--"

"yeah, she's trying to represent hotness."

"--she's trying to represent something that she doesn't really understand."

"dude, I think she understands hotness."

austin, vaguely

2007-09-19T14:04:00.001-07:00

i went to austin to see rachel, bark, and lukas and the austin city limits music festival. to remind me that music should be secondary in my allegiances for the weekend, rachel set an example by leaving the tickets in the car, and waiting until we’d already been on the #3 bus for 5 minutes before mentioning this. rachel concocted a brilliant plan whereby we would catch a bus going back to the car, i would run from the bus, get the tickets out of the car and meet the bus just as it turned around to go back towards the festival. rachel called this brilliant scheme the ‘hoofit plan’. “hoof it, zach!” she yelled from her seat as the bus stopped a few blocks from our car. and hoof it i did. unfortunately, well, the buses and rachel’s map reading skills didn’t coordinate. no worries, eventually we met up an hour later and made a second, more successful, attempt to get to the festival.

when i started critiquing rachel’s understanding of the austin bus routes as ‘rather vague’, she responded by critiquing my pronunciation of ‘vague’. we arrived at the music festival, spread out over many acres of zilker park along the river in austin, and i bided my time (gotan project, the killers, bjork) until i could get back to the house and crack open bark’s copy of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary to check the pronunciation of ‘vague’. unfortunately, the OED agreed with them. (there’s a world of difference between the “a” in bag and in bay...i never noticed that before. kara has recommended that from now on i just say ‘oy vague’ to find the correct vowel sound.) still, though bark and rachel have moved 1700 miles since the last time i opened their OED, i still knew precisely where on their living room shelves to find the magnifying glass needed to decipher the miniaturized pages. and that small bit of knowledge, of knowing my friends’ habits as well as they do, gave me the vague feeling that somehow, nothing has really changed.

[i didn’t bring back boots or a cowboy hat, but i did get some pictures for you.]

colorín colorado

2007-09-13T08:40:00.000-07:00

i got an email from lydia yesterday, who, in her new job for the washington PBS affiliate WETA has just published content for her first web pages, a bilingual site for english language learning for children. it’s called colorín colorado, which doesn’t directly translate into english, but it’s what you say at the end of a children’s story – “and so he slew the dragon and married the stuck-up princess...” and that’s the end of the story. and they lived happily ever after. colorín colorado. it’s the happy ending, the distinct click of the door closing on that chapter of history, and the mathematically precise conclusion of a moral lesson.

but now for the carrie bradshaw question: thinking about how few clean endings and clear lessons there have been in my experiences and relationships, i had to wonder – is there such a thing as a colorín colorado for real life?

rereading jon krakauer’s ‘into thin air’ last night, i came across this quote:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, in the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion, The White Album

[god, how do you follow a quote like that? joan didion is like an oracle] hmmm... perhaps we do tell ourselves stories in order to live, but i think we’ve just gotten really bad at telling those stories, at finding the sermon in the muddle of everyday life. personally speaking, most of the time my life feels like a giant run-on sentence, the kind of story told by a 5 year old with a short attention span – “and then...and then...and then...” lacking structure, lacking narrative cohesion, and certainly lacking anything resembling a moral. but maybe it’s good that life can’t be sequestered into discrete packets, right? maybe it’s good that the threads of past experience weave through the present as we search to make sense of an ever-expanding tangle.

or maybe the art of reinterpreting my life into a series of focused narratives with a discernible beginning, middle, and end is just a skill that i haven’t mastered. perhaps there is an over-arching structure that i haven’t discerned yet, and that’s what enlightenment is, it’s when you see the connection in everything you do.

or maybe i need to be a more heavy-handed editor.

or maybe you don’t give a shit about my navel-gazing, maybe you’re bored silly. just don’t count this post as a total loss, at least you got a carrie bradshaw reference and a good joan didion quote. and a good joan didion quote is nothing to sneeze at.

saturday at el rio / or / the waiting game

2007-09-11T18:01:00.000-07:00

i won’t deny that i spent a fair amount of saturday waiting for santana. it was probably 9 pm—5 full hours after she said she was leaving davis, a mere hour and a half from san francisco—before i gave up and conceded that my waiting had been in vain. so nursing an inexplicable bottle of gatorade, i sat down with chekhov and settled into uncle vanya. in many ways, a play about waiting.

fortunately, before i got too mired in the despair and ennui of serebriakoff's country estate, i remembered that nathan had mentioned a show at el rio – i called, and half an hour later he and heather were (needlessly) shuttling me by car the 3 and a half blocks from my apartment to el rio. the guy at the door recognized me and didn’t check my ID. i inwardly hoped it was a case of mistaken identity--it’s not a good sign when dive-bar bouncers start to recognize you.

10:30 _________ . i recall nothing about this band, not even the name. 3 songs in, nathan wanted to smoke, and i followed him out of the bar and onto the back patio. standing under the lemon tree and the light-stained sky, we waited for the botticellis to start.

11:30 the botticellis. this was who we had come to see, nathan had their CD and his friend blithe wrote a lot of their songs. but i couldn’t distinguish one song from the next. they had a kind of lazy 60’s psychedelic sound, with a lot of distortion and a keyboard that sounded like an organ, and they looked like stunt doubles from a tale-of-the-geeks movie (think “microsoft: the early years”). blithe writes, i’m sure, all sorts of wonderful and powerful lyrics for them. but with the distortion i couldn’t make out a single word, and with the lack of a clear melody line or compelling beat, i couldn’t make myself care. we walked back out into the cool night air, under the lemon tree and the palm, where we waited while tartufi set up. nathan said, apropos of nothing, ‘i think i need to get another motorcycle or two.” apropos of which i said flatly, ‘first, why don’t you try getting the one that you have to actually run?” apropos of which heather laughed, and feted me with compliments. apropos of which nathan is no longer speaking to me.

12:30 tartufi. these guys have made it onto all sorts of hip lists, including the guardian’s best local indie band. i won’t deny that they’re fairly talented musicians--all except the lead singer who sounds like some sort of despairing bovine animal that, if not dying outright, is at least under a considerable amount of stress. i guess their ‘thing’ is to stick every genre they can play into discrete sections of a song. these musical quanta are packed tightly together but severely segregated–think of the harsh clunks between recorded bits on a mix tape--so that a punk intro halts at a wall of emo that backs up to some experimental vocal wailing which drops abruptly into an instrumental ska-cum-klezmer rock. and then wild applause from the too-hip-to-shit crowd. and that’s just one song, that’s just four minutes of tartufi. schizophrenic doesn’t begin to describe the sound, and only hints at the effect produced in the listener. we didn’t wait for them to finish their set.

1:45 taqueria cancun. god bless the sobering, salubrious, and mind-clearing effects of the common taco.

back in my bed, waiting to fall asleep, i settled into uncle vanya. i was waiting for vanya to go crazy from waiting. he did.

Elena(uncomfortably): And fine weather today... not hot... (pause)
Vanya: It’s nice weather to hang yourself.

bel canto

2007-09-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

on wednesday, a doddering old priest reminded me about how much the Lord loves a party. It seems that the Lord loves tenors, too, since He’s taken Luciano Pavarotti to be with him. And He must love cliches, as well, because this week we’ve been treated to all of them, including a headline that ran on CNN for half of Thursday “’Now heaven has a Tenor’ says fan”. Which made me want to create a federal penitentiary for the criminally banal, but at least served the purpose of reminding me of a classic Righteous Brothers song:

If you believe in forever
then life is just a one-night stand.
If there’s a rock and roll heaven
well, you know they’ve got a hell of a band, band, band

pavarotti, like his voice, was larger than life. You couldn’t help but listen; he dared you to ignore him. even the philistine who calls himself my father could recognize it, could pause to look up from a gardening catalogue when pavarotti stepped to center stage during a ‘three tenors’ broadcast on PBS. ‘Look at him puff out that chest! That guy can sure blow the air out, can’t he?’ he’d say with an appreciative chuckle before turning back to his hostas. (I’ve played with the idea before that my father IS a hosta. But I digress.) and even as I write this, a bicycle crew is gathering in front of my cafe for the pavarotti memorial cruise to buena vista park, towing an amp, pounding out Rigoletto. but the true measure of pavarotti’s influence might be the fact that I received a telephone call from Lodi today, requesting this poem—

Honda Pavarotti

I’m driving on the dark highway
when the opera singer on the radio
opens his great mouth
and the whole car plunges down the canyon of his throat.

So the night becomes an aria of stars and exit signs
as I steer through the galleries
of one dilated Italian syllable
after another. I love the passages in which

the rich flood of the baritone
strains out against the walls of the esophagus,
and I love the pauses
in which I hear the tenor’s flesh labor to inhale

enough oxygen to take the next plummet
up into the chasm of the violins.
In part of the song, it sounds as if the singer
is being squeezed by an enormous pair of tongs

while his head and legs keep kicking.
In part of the song, it sounds as if he is
standing in the middle of a coliseum,
swinging a 300-pound lion by the tail,

the empire of gravity
conquered by the empire of aerodynamics,
the citadel of pride in flames
and the citizens of weakness
celebrating their defeat in chorus,

joy and suffering made one at last,
joined in everything a marriage is alleged to be,
though I know the woman he is singing for
is dead in a foreign language on the stage beside him,

though I know his chain mail is made of silver-painted plastic
and his mismanagement of money is legendary,
as I know I have squandered
most of my own life

in a haze of trivial distractions,
and that I will continue to waste it.
But wherever I was going, I don’t care anymore,
because no place I could arrive at

is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience
but to which experience will never measure up.
and that dark and soaring fact
is enough to make me renounce the whole world

or fall in love with it forever.

-- from Donkey Gospel by Tony Hoagland

the blessing of the holy blowtorch / or / what would jesus snort?

2007-09-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

It was a warm night in Fisherman’s Wharf, and in the Hotel Argonaut, before 40 wedding guests, the smiling, frail priest, was joking his way through the story of the wedding at Cana, which is the one where Jesus turns water into wine. “Our Lord, you know, loved a party.” He continued on, with a heckling Mary and a reluctant Christ who wants to get back to some cutie at his table. “...and so, just as Our Lord blessed the wedding at—”

“SALUT!!!” CLAP CLAP CLAPPITY CLAP CLAP!!!!

– who the fuck is clapping? could barely register as a question in your mind before you realized it was the groom, yes, the groom, and his friends took up the applause and built it into an italian chorus of Salut! and Vivi gli sposi!, and the priest, the dear, doddering man, cut off mid-sentence, looked like a deer in the headlights. Before the old man could even understand what had happened, the groom and a half-dozen coked-up italians were already up at the bar, toasting each other and waving their arms around. I’d say they were just following Christ’s example in partying, but it was still scandalous.

At this wedding reception, we didn’t need Jesus to zap water into wine, but we would gladly have taken a lesser miracle...say, maybe some dressing on the tired spinach salad, for example, or a holy blowtorch to help cut the dinner rolls. A clearly high italian girl sat at our table, wearing long black gloves on her hands and a fake red flower in her hair. Early in the night she spent half an hour holding her camera out with one arm, taking pictures of herself. Now she spent half an hour trying to saw into a roll with a butter knife. That was amusing. But not amusing enough, so a very pregnant Santana and I left early—though not before she pulled a groin muscle dancing (8 months pregnant must be the cut-off point for “Bust a Move”).

“I was in the mood for a Good Italian party,” Santana said, thrusting her belly into the street to demonstrate that a taxi will always stop for a pregnant woman (along with always getting a seat on a bus and having amazing skin, this has been one of her few consolations in pregnancy). “That was a Bad Italian party. If we want a good one, there’s only one choice left to us.”

Ten minutes and fifteen dollars later we hopped to the curb in front Lost Weekend Video. It was half-price Wednesday and we picked up “Big Night”, a movie with a crackling brilliance and thoughtful performances, about a Good Italian party at a restaurant in New Jersey run by two brothers, named Primo and Secondo. It has Minnie Driver and Isabella Rossellini and...ah, yes, Marc Anthony--who spends the entire movie mute and looking thoroughly stoned. he plays it well.

“I loved that movie...what a good party,” I yawned contentedly to Santana at 1:30 when the movie ended. I turned heavy-lidded and slowly to sleep, but Santana the Un-tired was already busy, replaying the movie through her favorite scenes. “I can’t believe he fucking cut a priest off...” I heard her mutter as she watched the movie, where Ian Holm, in a ridiculous italian accent was shouting:

“Bite your teeth into the ass of life, and draaaaag it to you!”

lessons in musical notation

2007-08-30T22:09:00.000-07:00

pp - pianissimo - very quiet
p - piano - quiet
mp - mezzo piano - medium quiet
mf - mezzo forte - medium loud
f - forte - loud
ff - fortissimo - very loud

cresc. - crescendo - getting gradually louder
dim. - diminuendo - getting gradually softer

prestissimo - extremely fast
allegro - fast and bright
adagio - slow and solemn, literally, at ease
con brio - with vigor and spirit

8:32 pm tuesday

z: hello? what’s that noise? are you getting a lobotomy?
s: <ff>i’m using the blender, i’m making a WHHHHRRRRRRRRRR for dannyWWWWHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRRR with some yog<dim.>WWHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRR what’s wrong with this thing, it won’tWWWHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRRR motherfuWWWWHHHRR
you piece of shWWWWWHHRRRdamn itWHRRRR piece ofWWRRR <mp>i’m gonna have to call you ba--<click>
z: <pp>bye.

8:34 pm tuesday

s: <ff>WWWWHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRR WHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRR
z: hel-hello?
s: WHHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRgoddamnitWHHHHRRRRRR
z: hello? santan—
s: WWWWHHHHHHHHHRRRRwhat the fuck is wrong with this thing? it won’t blend! DANNY!!!! Come fix the blender!!! <dim.>WHHR. WWHhhr. whhhrrrr. whr. shit. i’ll call you ba--<click>

8:37 pm tuesday

s: hi!
z: how was the smoothie?
s: fuck it. danny’s in his bath, he can fix it later.
z: you know, winston churchill always took bath—
s: <ff>AUUGHHH!!! <prestissimo> Omigod omigod!! There’s a fucking huge spider, augh!! it’s going into my clothes!! DANNY!! DANNY!! COME QUICK!! it’s the size of a small child! DANNY GET YOUR BUTT IN HERE NOW!! omigod, killit! kill the fucker, danny!! stop laughi--<click>

9:43 pm tuesday

z: did the spider get killed?
s: yeah, they’re all over this house though. <allegro> but did i tell you what we’re doing? i’m so excited, danny and i are gonna get up in the middle of the night and watch the eclipse!
z: <adagio> oh, that’s cool...umm, mean, a lunar eclipse isn’t bad, but it’s not like a solar eclipse.
s: <skeptically> oh really, and how many have you seen?
z: <p>two of each.
s: <silencio>
s: you’ve done everything...and...<pause> and yet you know <con brio> absolutely nothing about women.

Earl

2007-08-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

In Sitka, because they are fond of them,
People have named the seals. Every seal
is named Earl because they are killed one
after another by the orca, the killer
whale; seal bodies tossed left and right
into the air. "At least he didn't get
Earl," someone says. And sure enough,
after a time, that same friendly,
bewhiskered face bobs to the surface.
It's Earl again. Well, how else are you
to live except by denial, by some
palatable fiction, some little song to
sing while the inevitable, the black and
white blindsiding fact, comes hurtling
toward you out of the deep?

by Louis Jenkins, from North of the Cities. © Will o' the Wisp Books, 2007 via garrison keillor's writer's almanac, emailed to me this morning by mom

i believe i can fly (pirates and primates megamix)

2007-08-27T17:03:00.000-07:00

“i love the mission,” crowed kyriell (now a berkeley professor and living among the mountain gnomes in the upper reaches of twin peaks) as soon as i answered my phone on sunday. it was sunny and warm and there was a children’s fair going on at the mission playground, organized by 826 valencia. say what you will about dave eggers and the self-absorbed cult of culture that’s sprung up around mcsweeney’s and various hipster authors over the last near-decade, his 826 valencia is as close to a purely wonderful contribution that anyone has given the city in a long time. they offer free after-school tutoring and creative writing classes to the city’s kids. they reach out to the kids who need it. they teach them how to write, they encourage them to be imaginative, honest, and creative.

at the fair, i watched michelle tea get unceremoniously dumped in a dunking booth. junaid (age 7) got dressed up like a pirate, soaked me with a water balloon, and danced up a rock wall like nureyev with a climbing harness. ziad (age 4) got his face painted like spiderman and spontaneously began singing r. kelly’s “I believe I can fly” at the top of his lungs as he swung on the swings (this is in running for my favorite moment of 2007). the boys dragged us to the playground where they swung on the monkey bars (kyriell: “anyone who claims that humans are not descended from primates has obviously never spent any time with a seven-year old on a jungle gym.”) and made me chase them around in circles until i started hyperventilating and passed out on the ground, only to be taunted by a couple five-year olds that i’d never even met before. the little shits.

i went home and napped for the rest of the afternoon.

[step right up and view pictures of the amazing pirate and spiderboy!]

the co-opting of federico garcia lorca

2007-08-26T21:38:00.000-07:00

one of the reasons i like living in the mission is the daily practice that my spanish gets. as i was leaving my building by the back door today, tripping out into orange alley, i ran into the woman who takes care of the building, and her husband, nacho, washing their car. she only speaks to me in spanish, though – 40 years after coming from honduras – she’s fluent in english. (for those who may be wondering, yes, this is the woman who suggested, one evening a couple years ago when i had locked myself out of my apartment, that crossing the roof of the building and descending by the fire escape was my best bet. and it worked.) leaving her and her husband to their washing, i turned into 24th street where i was startled by the gypsy voice of federico garcia lorca.

Verde que te quiero verde

i love that poem. lorca is simply one of those poets who can’t be translated and can’t be read silently. you can strum his lines like a guitar. his poems scan like gypsy sheet music, and there’s nothing ambiguous about the notation. he doesn’t precisely use iambs or anapests; his metrical feet, rather, are as simple and complicated as the drumming beats of flamenco.

Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.

the last time i stumbled across these words on the street i was in granada, spain; green words brushed across ten feet of white stucco on a narrow, climbing cobblestone street in the labyrinthine muslim quarter of the city. happening upon him in san francisco was at first like running into a dear, neglected friend. i did a double take, and then a mental stutter step as i took the whole thing in. it was an ad for PG&E. are you fucking me? PG&E – toxic waste erin brokovich carcinogenic energy crisis market manipulating PG&E – has co-opted garcia lorca for a ‘green’ ad campaign?

let’s get this straight.

lorca was a communist.
lorca was gay.
lorca was into surrealism for a while.
lorca was fucking dali for a few, we can only imagine, very interesting years in the 20s.
lorca was a poet, a playwright, and a musician.
but lorca, to the best of my knowledge, WAS NEVER AN AD MAN FOR PG AND E.

jude the obscurely single thirty-something.

2007-08-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

Between sherlock holmes, thomas hardy, and jonathan strange & mr norrell, I have about 12 inches of solid English literature stacked beside my bed. Summer in san francisco, whatever that is with its mix of fog and sun and invariably cool nights and cold winds, has been happily exchanged for the leaden skies over york or an autumn rain on a sussex moor. Perhaps i'm bored of san francisco. I'll come back to it soon enough, I imagine.

(I'm waiting for September and October, those halcyon months of sun and warmth in the city by the bay. Until then, I prefer the windswept heath and crowded drawing rooms thick with cigar smoke.)

I suppose I've been doing a lot of escapism lately. This reclusion, I like to think, keeps me fresh for when I'm called to society. It's not depression. Whenever I get depressed I just listen to count basie's 'every day I have the blues'. I put that shit on repeat for about an hour and then everything's mo' better.

And after two years of not setting foot inside a movie theater, I went to two movies in three days this week. Once was "fucking brilliant" (to quote one of its characters), the music is amazing, and while the cinematography is almost negligently low budget, the cinéma vérité lighting effects leave deep, dark spaces, like blank canvases where the music and the characters' thoughts play out. I left the theater happy and in a puddle of tears. I also saw Superbad, which was dumb and funny and tracks three misfit losers in a nightlong odyssey, a seemingly hopeless attempt to get booze and be the heroes of a party. (there's genius in one character's 3 minute monologue to a home ec. teacher as he tells her it's a blow-off class 'i mean, no offense to you' and in a long exuberant montage of penis drawings.)

Speaking of lost causes, I went to each movie with a girl that I have tried to date in the past. I don't date a lot of catholics, but I feel like a lot of women who date me end up turning for help to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. (yes, even the jews.) i doubt st. jude has been any help to them. i should know, i've had plenty of reason to turn to st. jude myself, disoriented and pleading. oblivious to the hopelessness of my cause, i've forged many paths to nowhere. i've dated women who said 'I've thought about becoming a lesbian, because as a feminist i feel a very strong political affinity for it as a position that undermines the patriarchy,' and i continued dating them while i waited - waited - please god, for st. jude to deliver me, only to find deliverance forced on me in vitriolic phone calls and returned stacks of borrowed books piled at my door.

yes, i've invested time and tears in lost causes. sweat, blood, and prayers. but i haven't seen a bit of help from st. jude and my prayers died, unanswered. us midwestern lutherans don't get any of the good saints, we just get jello salad as a side dish.

monday at the library

2007-08-13T19:21:00.000-07:00

so, i'm sitting in the mission branch library on a monday night, wishing I had something interesting to blog about. but. i. don't. in truth, if i were you, i wouldn't read my blog, i would read either semprelaltracosa or socalledmylife. both have been cracking me up this past week. i'm jealous of both santana and kara for their recent posts. too. damn. good.

all i have for you are pictures from my new cameraphone that i've finally posted with my other pictures, a few of which i've slung about this posting. oh, and this article really cracked me up today.

people always ask what i'm reading, so I'll share that with you too (in hopes of make this THE most boring blog post in the history of a simple lad)

the complete sherlock holmes
[most beautiful line - at the end of the Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter, after a very sad death in a cottage in the english countryside, without the usual holmesian debriefing the story comes to an abrupt end, with this orphaned single-sentence paragraph:

" 'Come, Watson,' said he, and we passed from that house of grief in to the pale sunlight of the winter day." ]

genius: the life and science of richard feynman
[my new favorite anecdote in this book might be when richard feynman, at home in california and having just won the nobel prize, practices hopping backwards down steps, thinking that after the king of sweden has presented him with his prize, he has to leave the dais without turning his back on the king. the image of a nobel prize winner hopping backwards down stairs, for a false conjecture, is somehow, immensely humorous. to me.]

a widow for one year by john irving
[two (okay, three) favorite sentences so far: "Eddie died a little every time he heard his father talk to a stranger." and this one, just before the main character embarks upon an affair with an older, married woman, "In the summer of 1959 Eddie O'Hare inhabited a kind of masturbatory heaven. He should have stayed there--he should have taken up permanent residence."]

i had a bad hair day

2007-07-31T20:27:00.000-07:00

i was (santana can attest) nearly knocked off my feet by this self-portrait by gustave courbet that was in the new yorker this week. i put it up on my kitchen wall even.

i like to imagine that when he decided to do this painting, courbet was at his barber's and he was maybe having a really bad hair day (maybe it was humid out and his hair was just huge, like it was taking up lodgings in the 13th arrondissment while his head was still in the 12th) and he was running his hands through it thinking, 'mon dieu! i've got to just get rid of it all.'

what are poets for?

2007-07-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

what, indeed? it's actually holderlin who posed this question a couple hundred years ago "...and what are poets for in a destitute time?"

"to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods." or at least that's how heidegger parsed holderlin's answer. i personally think it's a lovely answer. [but then heidegger goes on later in the same essay to assert that "We must not think of will here as the abstract generalization of willing...rather, the human willing [remains] only the willed counterpart of will as the Being of beings. Rilke, in representing Nature as the venture, thinks of it metaphysically in terms of the nature of will. This nature of will still conceals itself, both in the will to power and in the will as venture. The will exists as the will to will."

....Um. yeah. what he said.]

martin heidegger aside, i like the question, and i like the answer given. poets are supposed to sing, and by singing to tease out, in the dark of the world's night, any hint of those deadbeat gods. (we know mother nature's sitting under a mountain saying "goddamn, i ain't seen my alimony check in about a motherfucking millenium." and we know dionysus and heracles are hanging out somewhere and jesus walks in and drains the dregs of a boddullabeer and says 'christ, i'm done. earth was the fucking pits, man.')

but back to wherever i was. the poets are on the right trail, they're busy making things holy -- all these holy little footsteps where we start finding our way. it's the poets who are on the track of the gods, the missing gods who knocked up mother nature with the human race and then decided to split, the deadbeat dads we all wish we could remember.

oh, which reminds me of why i started this whole post in the first place, my whole impetus for falling back in love with poetry today. it was this jack spicer quote that i found at the front of a book of poems by tony hoagland

You ask me to sing a sad song
How motherfucker can I sing a sad song
when I remember Zion?

(and if you were just dying for your tony hoagland fix for the day, here: totally)

saturday at the cellar

2007-07-22T22:09:00.000-07:00

i’ve been dog-sitting in potrero hill. everytime i come home, lily and cashmere are at the door the moment the key turns in the lock, yappingly announcing my entrance. actually, anytime anyone passes the door, they yappingly announce it. it gets a little annoying. i left potrero for a couple hours on saturday to read outside in the sun at my cafe. when i came home after a short interval, lily and cashmere greeted me like amundsen returning from the south pole, feted with a chorus of yaps. once they calmed down, we all three took a party nap, because i knew i’d be out late.

11:00. the cellar. i hadn’t been to the cellar since, i believe, the urban family made an outing there in 2001. back then none of us had children--we were the children--and i believe it was an excellent night where everything went as planned. we all drank too much, joanna may or may not have done her spank-me “i’m nine” dance move, kel got sweaty on the dancefloor and removed his shirt, jacquelyn left suddenly and with no explanation, and we all stumbled home and had no desire to go back anytime soon.

last night i went there to celebrate alex’s 30th birthday with barb, jonah, et al. while the cellar may be a place to ring in your 30s--when the desire is to confound Time and Nature by acting like you’re in your 20s--it’s not necessarily a place to go when you’re already 30. i mean, it’s called the cellar. we danced to snoop, dre, and biggie, mixed in with some jackson 5 and rihanna, and it was good. and to have a whole dancefloor sing along to tupac’s california love is always a wonderful, joy-making thing. but the floor was littered with spilled drinks and broken glass, and then someone got sick and added that to the mess. well then... let’s go out to the lounge. in the lounge, america’s ugliest bachelorette party was half asleep on the couch and the deafening confluence of noise from the two different djs was nauseating. yet even after they turned on the lights and the bouncers started pushing us out at 2 am, we fought to stay.

2:15. cafe mason. party inertia carried us together down mason street, noisily crowing about the evening like a flock of grackles. we fluttered into a 24-hour diner, along with straggling groups of other post-clubbers, the remains of the night. nine of us sat down together and then for the next hour and a half people kept disappearing. the girls outside to smoke (or was it in to the bathrooms?), the guys to the bathrooms (or were they out smoking?) and we never really could figure out where our waitress spent most of her time. conversation eventually devolved to one-sided observations about the quality of the service or how much each had already put in for the bill. we were tired children and it was past our bedtime.

3:45. i grabbed a cab and gave the driver catalina's potrero hill address. ‘oh,' he said, 'is very dangerous. you lucky i take you, most taxis, he not go there. very bad.’

'i know,' i told him, 'but i’m just house-sitting.' as if somehow that made it safer.

five minutes later he pulled up in front of the apartment. i looked at him in the rearview mirror and he looked a little upset and exasperated that i had brought him out here. i handed over the fare, and tip, and then added a few extra 1's as hazardous-duty pay. he took the money and then, still looking slightly hurt and shaking his head, he said, ‘you know, you don’t have to come home so LATE.’

as i turned the key in the door, i heard nails scratching on the other side, and there was lily, jumping up on my legs, and a sleepy-looking cashmere, as well, yappingly announcing my return. and they both seemed to be saying what the cab driver had said. ‘you know, you don’t have to come home so LATE!!’

friday at the independent

2007-07-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

i tried to console kara about being unemployed as we walked to castro to catch the 24 divisadero to dinner. muni was running late, and kara’s patience was running thin. “i’m not unemployed!” she protested, as we stood in front of the castro theater. “i’m a freelance editor,” she sputtered later, continuing her protestations, as the 24 bus climbed towards haight, “there’s a huge difference.”

“potayto, potahto,” i said. but the waitress brought edamame, and then amazing, sure-i’ll-believe-in-your-god sushi, and the only sake i’ve ever really loved. and it was very very loud in Tsunami, so kara and I lost the trail of our argument and frank couldn’t hear us say that we wanted to help out with the bill, and then we stumbled out into the downy cold clouds of fog that crashed down fulton and piled up against our backs.

10:30. some drum group was in the middle of the floor, dressed in white sports team uniforms and... and then i ran into anneke and sean, who are hard to miss because they’re both blonde and 6’2” and they bought me a tequila shot which i unceremoniously downed, because, i mean, some drum group was in the middle of the floor, dressed in white sports team uniforms and...

11:00. the heavenly states. they were by all accounts awesome. but i was drunk enough by this point that i loved it all and was ready to dance to anything. drunk enough to shout “bellbottoms!” three times before I got attitude back from ted, the lead singer, but in the end they did close with a cover of the john spencer blues explosion’s ‘bellbottoms’ so i figure, hell, i won after all. fuck you, ted.

12:00 . chow nasty. there’s nothing that i can say about this band that will be half as awesome as this video, so:

at some point in the show the bass player (“my soul”*) donned a transformers mask and stole the show until finally the drum group rushed up onto the stage and everything descended into a cacophonous chaos of bass and drums and funkadelic love and when we could stand no more we fled, en masse, out of the independent and into the blustery night where the fog still blew in himalayan gusts.

and perhaps it was the fog, or the alcohol, or my near-deafness, but nathan was really making sense as he sat on a fire hydrant ouside of Fly and explained his plan to raise his newly-bought 100-year old victorian onto a new foundation without professional help. and he was really convincing when he asked for my help, and it made sense, because Yes, we’re men, and nathan’s basically a structural engineer and my grandfather built his own house and of course we can lift an entire house 8 inches off the ground and it’s amazing that we haven’t done so already! And yes this is a brilliant, inspired plan and yes we need another drink! that, too, is a very good idea
so let’s go into this bar
that's right beside us
and delay not a moment more,
because we are
young and strong,
and we rock with the best,
and we're drunk on
soju, sake, and rum,
and our own splendid selves.

*"my soul" is the too-apt nickname coined by kara for the bassist and, yes, i'm just a little jealous i didn't think of it first. watch the youtube video, you'll understand.

a mission district 4th / or / post in which we idealize the mission

2007-07-05T14:31:00.000-07:00

10 am. a grand and glorious sunny day, i arose, showered, and shuffled to my cafe for a coffee followed by a coke while i read in the full sun. the acid from the beverages was necessary to help my stomach digest the approx. 2 lbs of meat i had eaten at a tuesday night barbecue. jeff smoked two slabs of ribs (each approx half the size of zach), a whole chicken, and a pork loin, for 18 hours. jeff is now my new best friend.
2 pm. nap
4 pm. rearranged the apartment. turned minimalist into ultra-minimalist. i like to hear an echo when i'm in my apartment, it's less lonely, like there's an annoying little brother following me around.

9 pm. walked with kara and a couple friends to mission dolores park, thinking we might be able to see the city fireworks. but those fireworks are along fisherman's wharf. between us and them were 3 miles. and many hills. the city fireworks looked like very tiny blossoms very very far far away. they were beautiful and delicate, but without any shock and awe. what we hadn't counted on, however, was the illegal fireworks show that we would be treated to right there in dolores park. it embodied something i love about the mission, this community show of thousands of dollars' worth of commercial-grade aerial fireworks set off by dozens of local punters.

the park is kind of half-bowl shaped, and the whole neighborhood was out sitting on the slope while fireworks were being lit in the playground at the bottom, exploding directly above us. everyone was there, latino families and gays and hipsters and, you know, AMERICA in all her messy diversity. all enjoying the simple pleasure of illegal fireworks, together.

and though these fireworks were big and noisy and visible for miles, and there's a large police station 2 blocks away, the police didn't really do anything about it. after about 45 minutes the cops made one pass in their cars, saying something unintelligible over the loudspeakers ("Fireworks are illegal..."), but never even threatening to get out of their cars and do anything about it. Not threatening, for example, to fine the skinny african-american guy (49ers jersey, flip-flips) whom i could see at that same moment, lifting a fresh box of fireworks over his head to the immense applause of the crowd. We turned our backs on the cops, and roared, and let the booms blossom and corruscate over us and our happy mission home.

thursday at the rickshaw stop

2007-06-29T12:09:00.001-07:00

For the first time in ages, I biked to a show. Riding up Valencia, with her wide bike lane and bums in the streets who help slow down traffic, is a cinch. Crossing market is always a bit nerve-wracking, and then you hit the one-way thorough-fares of Gough and Franklin and Oak and Fell and you realize that your lazy hipster cruise through the Mission is over and you're now in a terribly mis-matched battle of speed and brawn. I gotta start wearing a helmet.

9:30. Stacy Kray. Hands down terrible, I'm afraid. They could inspire a new MTV show called "Shooting the Band". I don't mean to be harsh, and I blame Stacy more than her band, who were just honestly trying to help. But a Good Samaritan would have pulled the plug by the second song.

10:30 Essence. The crowd was fairly light, so I claimed a rickshaw off to the side, settled in with my beer while Stacy & Band cleared their equipment (I was hoping there was an open, empty dumpster out front), and waited. I've known essence for 8 years now, and I can't claim to be unbiased, but I love her and her music. On Thursday, she had a full band, and she started out with some new songs, some solid, pop-y numbers that have a lot of promise and a good amount of 'move' that got me up on my feet. But one thing I've noticed, following essence for nigh unto a decade, is that it can sometimes take years for a song to grow up, get some guns, and blow you away. Which is what happened with "I don't care if you come home tonight" and "You only call me when you're drunk". Looking at those titles, I realize now part of what I love about essence: Her lyrics are country. Good country, I mean. Loretta Lynn Dolly Parton Patsy Cline country. Everyday emotions told with everyday words. This is the colorful, exasperating, and terribly banal side of love -- the drunken booty call, the unpaid cable bill -- the unglamorous but verisimilar slings and arrows of daily (mis)fortune that are resonant because we’ve all been there and we’ve seen and said the same things, even with the same words. And while her lyrics are country, her sound on her best songs is good ol' red-blooded rock. And as time goes on, it’s a sound-–aware, self-possessed, and confident—that’s increasingly her own.

11:45 Pedalsped. Okay, truth is i left long before they even came on. But I was so full of energy from the essence show that i wasn’t at all ready to haul my bike up to my apartment and put it to sleep. so i kept going past 1341 valencia, turning into the shadows down the darkest streets, coursing through the moonlight alleys of the mission district. bumping over their potholes, i counted off the names of the alleys like beads on a rosary. osage and orange, lilac and cedar, lucky and balmy, virgil and horace, like a litany of streetworn saints.

there’s an illicit feeling to a midnight ride through those lonely alleys crowded with ghosts and saints. it's like the line between observation and participation has faded with the daylight, and we're all wearing shadows. the clapboard backs of tenements with their bleached and cracked boards. forgotten signs for funeral parlors and tailors. three mexicans walking down a dark alley, arms around each other, singing a corrido. a few dealers hanging just outside the lightfall of a streetlamp. and a man in a top hat whose path i crossed three times.

[photo from essencemusic.com]

monday at cafe du nord

2007-06-12T21:30:00.000-07:00

the thing we all forget about lucky 13 bar is that they've got a little outdoor garden, with picnic tables and foliage all that jazz. but the neighbors complain and complain and so it closes at 11 every night, and when's the last time you even thought of going to lucky 13 before midnight? never. it's the kind of place that excels when you're already too drunk or tired to care.

but i went there on monday with jana because cafe du nord hadn't thrown open its inviting stairway to us yet. a pint of boddington's, an hour unter den linden as it were, and then down the stairs and into the noise of the opening band.

9:00. What were they called? Lilies of murder? Killing my lilies? They kill me, those lilies? I guess it doesn't matter. we huddled in the back, eyeing the suspiciously empty merch table, and tried to talk over them.

10:30. The White Rabbits. They got in very late from BFE oregon (which explained the empty merch table) and went on late. bad way to start with a monday crowd. but they got into the swing of things, after continously shouting directions to the sound guy. (can we all agree that 'i need more guitar in the monitor!' is the most annoying lyric in indie rock? first prove to me that i didn't spend my $10 on a ticket to see some jackass try to work out an Em chord on their gee-look-what-dad-bought-me-after-the-divorce stratocaster, then i'll give a shit if your monitor's plugged in.) fortunately, these guys actually have something. it's not polished, it's not tight, and it could use a lot of work. but it's something. the best i can do to describe them is to say i think they'd be a great roadhouse band. you know the thing i'm talking about, some peanut shells on a wooden floor outpost on a state highway where the band can just get drunk and beat up the place night after night, with a piano pounding out an easy hook and six guys on stage - six - who all seem to want to be percussionists (of the six, five of them played some sort of percussion during the set. and if you count pounding a beer bottle on your guitar during the encore as percussion, then it was all six.) call it indie roadhouse with a folksy populism, call it dylan, whatever, it was good. they closed strong and then brought the house down with the encore - a drunken, shouting, partying, who-gives-a-shit-if-the-cops-shut-us-down cover of dylan's 'maggie's farm' - that ended in chaos. the keyboard player stopped playing mid-song and staggered to center stage, throwing his arms around two band members and shouting the chorus acapella, the lead guitar replaced his pick with a bottle of bud, someone knocked a dozen empty beer bottles off the amp, and the bassist signalled the retreat by jumping off the stage toward the crowd and throwing his guitar on the floor. that's how you fucking close a set.

and next time they play here, yes, they can get more guitar on the monitor.

[image copyright 2007 by this-is-why-we-don't-go-record-shopping-in-west-portal photography]

a field guide to suburban mammals of marin county / or / things that go bump in the night

2007-06-10T16:15:00.000-07:00

felis badgerus - Though seldom seen during daylight hours, this 30-pound mammal is often mistaken for a common housecat (felis catus). Indeed, many field researchers have been decieved by the animal's apparent domesticity and sarcastic airs into taking it for just that. However, it is this creature's nocturnal activites that distinguish it as an altogether different species, likely an evolutionary offshoot from the badger/wolverine/jon lovitz family. The mistake is understandable, especially as the beast's diurnal routine bores many a researcher into a state of abject despair, and most in situ studies have been abandoned early, usually by the time of the local toddlers' 3rd demand for goldfish crackers. the local toddler population, which is never less than 2 and often swells to a half dozen depending on playdates and scarcity in the native babysitter herd, does have a detrimental effect on observation, as this reclusive critter retires to the deepest parts of its territory when nimble-fingered troops of toddlers are most active (generally 6 AM - 8 PM, with nary a break). It would seem the beast is reluctant to have its tail pulled, to be dressed up for tea, or to be used as a stepping stool to reach goldfish crackers. While daylight observation often proves fruitless, nature rewards the researcher who is patient, and who through a lack of foresight is obliged to spend a night encamped upon the living room couch. The nocturnal routine of this animal is comprised primarily of three activities: eating, prowling, and snickering. Eating and related activities occupy the bulk of its time. Between 11 pm and 4 am the subject has been observed making no less than 27 trips to its feeding site, which is reached through a small aperture (often referred to, mistakenly, as a 'cat door') located in an advantageously low spot on a door leading to a closet. Observation of feeding habits is indirect and generally auditory, as opposed to visual, as few researchers have the temerity or proper body armor to risk opening the closet door while feeding is in process. Even on a pitch black night, however, the field researcher will note the beginning of a feeding session by the unmistakable noise made when this feral heavyweight attempts to go through a 'cat door' designed for much svelter and nimbler suburban mammals. If you can imagine the sound of a 30-pound bag of mashed potatoes trying to push and wheeze its way through a mail slot, even as a novice biologist you'll be able to recognize the commencement of another feeding foray. Exits from the feeding den, are of course more difficult, and comprehensively more noisy, given the undigested caloric intake. These sorties, or attempted sorties, are characterized by an opening series of dull thuds, as if an upholstered bowling ball were trying to ease its way with panache through a plank. If this first attempt at sortie is unsuccessful, felis badgerus often seems to forget what it was trying to do in the first place and takes a nap, or an additional trip to the food bowl, or both, before trying again. Later attempts are characterized by a growing level of noise and battery; a violent shaking and trembling of wood, metal, and fur; the groans of door panels about to splinter; and a sustained breathless wheezing. At such points in the middle of the night, throwing out the reasearcher's proud code of professional uninvolvement in favor of maintaining one's personal sanity seems the wisest route. The field researcher usually rises and approaches the closet door, in which the unfortunate animal has become quite firmly stuck, half in, half out. I'll share with you my own technique for removing the unfortunate beast from this predicament, as it is a maneuver I have come to perfect in recent sleepless nights. Opening the door, and with felis badgerus still firmly impaling through the smaller 'cat door', grip the doorknob with both hands and use your dominant foot to apply sufficient force to the animal's posterior in quick, sudden, kicks. (Note, of course, not to let go of the knob, as a strong kick will send the door, and the embedded feline, swinging into the adjacent wall.) Adding approximately 1 cup of Crisco to 'grease the skids' or reversing one's position for a 'mule kick' can be successful strategies, but should be reserved only more extreme cases, out of consideration both to the animal and one's host.

coast to coast

2007-05-21T19:18:00.000-07:00

i feel like i should have better stories from my sunday, or at least a real story. i walked 7.5 miles across the city in a pack of 60,000 people. some were naked. some were dressed like vikings. or crazy mardi gras vikings. or salmon. i loved the girl at the top of hayes hill, her feet on a float, her head in balloons, and her sobriety clearly far far elsewhere as she shook beer out on everyone who passed. and the flabby bare-chested coach who decided climbing on the bus shelter was a good idea. and the pelican-man who climbed up onto the stoplight. everyone who climbed, really. and all the stoop parties along the route. days like this i love this city.

fotos of the freaks are posted with all my other crap.

i drink (nectar of papaya), therefore i am (a fruit bat)

2007-05-12T19:54:00.000-07:00

my friend aida from sarajevo posted this -- it made me happy:

a snippet from "I drink (coffee), therefore I am (Bosnian)":

And I am not exaggerating when I say that coffee brings people together. I remember that every time our neighbor knocks on our doors with a pot of coffee in her hands and asks for someone to drink with. I remember that every time my little cousin comes running to our house yelling “coffee’s been made” and we all head to grandmother’s place for our daily cup of strong black coffee. And I remember that every time I pass by “take away coffee” shop and see no one inside.

Sorry, but it’s just not fun to drink and walk…

amen, sister. it's that last line that cracks me up, because it's so true...we just forget it so often. that's what i'm talking about when i say I (heart) Sarajevo.

bum rap

2007-04-22T21:51:00.000-07:00

walking down bartlett sunday afternoon on the way to the gym, i saw a homeless man ahead of me on the sidewalk. i'd seen him before, he was dressed in rags of many colors, and i got annoyed and started thinking to myself, ‘i hope he doesn’t hassle me. i hope he doesn’t ask for money.' usually, i'd rather not acknowledge them, and i always feel guilty when i don’t give them any change. then i got annoyed with myself for thinking this way. all week long, in the wake of the virginia tech killings, i’ve been harping on the need for community and for us to all just talk to each other, to break down our walls and open up. and here i was closing myself down to a stranger, one who probably is really in need of help.

so i’m still walking, and getting closer to the bum, who’s propped up against the side of an apartment building. ipod on, head down, i’m thinking very seriously about all of this—community, dialogue, change--dourly striding down the sidewalk.

Then the man lifted his head to address me, and my expression probably worsened in that instant.

“Hey, buddy,” he called out, with a laugh. “It can't be that bad. Cheer up a little, or else I’ll have to tell you some of my problems.”

(epilogue: i burst out laughing and told him he was abso-fucking-lutely right.)

funk, take two

2007-04-21T23:52:00.000-07:00

all week i’ve been a little depressed, even drinks with a beautiful girl at the lone palm couldn’t completely bring me out of it. it’s the virginia tech killings—partly the act itself, partly the national response to it—that i can’t stop puzzling over.

i don’t blame weak gun control laws, though they ought to be strengthened. i don’t blame the mental health practitioners, though i wish they had taken a more active interest. and i don’t blame the university. but yet i can’t quite agree with the virginia tech professor who was quoted the day after the killings saying “none of us should feel guilty; no one is to blame.” without wishing to contradict anyone from the VT community, because i can’t imagine their personal anguish, I disagree: I think we’re all to blame.

as an individual, myself, and as a society, collectively, we’re all to blame. because we don’t reach out to the troubled people in our midst. because we label people as loners or bullies and then we’re surprised when they act out according to those labels. i’m to blame, personally, because i’ve known people who could have used a word of encouragement, a friendly chat, an invitation to coffee, and instead i’ve ignored them, decided they were someone else’s problem, or even ridiculed them just as other did.

we’ve tried to build a no-fault society where there’s never anyone to blame; no one feels responsible for anyone else. we draw the lines of responsibility-whom we should help, whom we should talk to—so narrowly; we circumscribe ourselves so tightly that we preclude the formation of anything like community. we’ve lost the ability, the will, and the knowledge of how to talk to each other. the result is that people like cho seung-hui can exist in our midst and no one will ever make any effort to help.

such is the extent of our isolation -- we don’t talk to the people we see every day, we don’t build communities with the people we live right next to. on the idea of happiness and social networks, robert putnam, author of ‘bowling alone’ was quoted in the new yorker two weeks ago saying, “there’s a simple rule of thumb: every 10 minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections.” Too bad for those of us who live outside of cities. there are also a number of studies showing that people’s sense of isolation increases in direct correlation to population density. too bad for those of us who live in cities. we’ve grown to think this isolation is normal, we’ve even come to think these bubbles of exclusion are quite comfortable. it seems like not even 33 deaths can burst that.

the real tragedy will be if america comes out of this limited tragedy with nothing but proposals for new gun control laws or mental health practices. what we need to learn from it is that when we lose any sense of community or responsibility, when we forget how to simply talk to those around us, we are failing each other. we failed cho seung-hui just as surely as we failed his classmates and professors. if we truly want to prevent these massacres in the future, we can’t legislate a solution, but maybe we can talk ourselves one.

funk

2007-04-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

i'm in a funk. the grand funk railroad runs right through the town of zach. probably has to do with working for the man. my life could be worse, i'm sure.

this morning, a man who i assumed to be homeless was staring deeply into the trash can beside revolution cafe, singing a long melodic ballad in jibberish. he was in baggy black-and-white plaid flannel pants, a crushed fedora, a green necktie with red yellow blue polka dots, a heavy cotton winter coat, and he was drinking from a tall can of beer in a paper sack. after his trash can serenade, and getting no response from the trash can, he wandered across the sidewalk and stopped at the table next to me, where he started talking to a more-or-less typical mission hipster couple. 'how are ya? i haven't seen ya in forever. mine-if-i-bum-a-smoke?' and then he stumbled on down the sidewalk. i was thinking, gee, that's nice, they must have given this guy money before or bought him a sandwich or something, and he remembered them. then the woman at the table says to her friend, as the bum passed out of earshot, "that's my roommate's baby's daddy."

recently unearthed

2007-04-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

having loads of fun in bulgaria last summer

(thanks for the pic, jana! but who's the grouch behind the sudoku book? je ne parle pas grumpy.)

jdate

2007-03-25T14:13:00.000-07:00

oh, the online dating world is a cold, frightening place
[real sentences from profiles of women who have messaged me on jdate]

"A man who likes to get his ya-yas out every once in a while, would be a plus." (i'm going to go out on a limb and theorize that anyone who says this has never gotten her ya-yas properly out)

"Research shows I'm wildly attracted to goofiness, smarts, and stability in equal measure. As for me: As comfy in clownshoes as I am in bunnysuits. Sweet yet rebellious, mellow yet outspoken, spiritual yet irreverent, too smart yet goofy, independent yet social" (research shows you're bipolar yet not institutionalized, dressed like a clown or a singing telegram yet not employed as a clown or singing telegram...)

"Let's play a game - two truths and a lie. I am going to write three things about myself. Two of them are true and one of them is a lie. If you correctly guess which one is the lie, you will win a prize (to be specified at a later date). 1) Barbara Boxer used the bathroom at my house. 2) I have swam along side a whale shark. 3) I was the captain of my highschool cheerleading squad. Looking forward to hearing your answers." (let's play a game with two truths and a lie. 1)i would never date you 2)i would never dream of dating you 3) you scare me.)

"I have something of a shut-in cat lady in me, but I'm a little too social and cute to fully embody that stereotype. In addition to hanging out with my two cats, I like to..." ("Cut! Okay, great take, now let's try this scene again, and this time i want you to imagine that you're not actually a psychotic shut-in cat lady. Give it a shot.")

valencia

2007-03-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

home street home

the beautifully worthless

2007-03-22T23:55:00.000-07:00

is the best title of a book that i’ve never read. i made this discovery while waiting on a plastic chair in the back of a bookstore on thursday night. michelle tea and ali liebegott had gone out to get coffee. the reading would start late. my eyes wandered across the cover of the book. the long, lyrically overwrought quotes from other lesbian writers, the b&w photo of the buzz-cut, tattooed author with her drooping eyes and big cheeks like a cartoon dog. my mind wandered.

last thursday at amnesia i saw treble low and ra ra rabbit and stole a pint glass for the simple reason that it was too crowded to set it down anywhere. treble low is your standard guitar-bass-drums trio, and they bored me. there was nothing wrong with them, just nothing terribly right. i guess i also have some notion in my mind that if you’re a lead singer and guitar-player, at some point in any show you should give the audience a sign that you haven’t gone completely catatonic. no need to break a hip or anything, but, you know, a little movement helps everyone get into it. it’s kinda like making love. you don’t have to seal your eyes shut.

thank god ra ra rabbit came on quickly afterwards. the stage at amnesia is maybe 10’ x 10’. there was no room for sylva, the pint-sized brighton (UK) rocker who leads the band, so after perching on the edge of the stage for the first few bars of the first song, standing on a tangle of cables with no shoes on, she jumped down into the audience. bouncing around barefoot on the bar floor, one hand pulling her hood over her eyes, the other clutching the mic, she sang, and danced angry little solipsistic dances. she eventually got back on the stage, but she never really slowed down. we love this girl, this band.

my mind wandered back to the reading in time to lose myself in ali’s mind-wanderings of a ‘surly, lost waitress of your dreams’ (m. tea’s jacket quote) and to notice the happenstance line formed by the three items in the bookstore: the author’s pound puppy face, the glossy cover of her new book, and the face of audrey hepburn in the film & music section, peering past a crystal chandelier through the window at tiffany’s, breakfast clutched in her gloved hands.

do your om thing (too hot in the hot tub megamix)

2007-03-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

every time i’m out with kelly it’s an adventure in sound. this weekend she stumbled on me reading The Tao of Pooh in the full sun in front of revolution cafe, and 3 hours later, on a whim carried far, we found ourselves in her car on the twisting roads to harbin hot springs, in the hills north of wine country.

at harbin it’s all buddhist prayer flags, a vegan kitchen, vedic healing, naked hippies, flowering dogwoods. in the heart of the settlement, conversation is generally prohibited. the pools themselves are a ‘meditation area’, leaving you with the sound of water rushing, a wind chime rocking, an unknown bird either complaining or rejoicing, and the occasional gasp as a body plunges into the 114-degree pool.

we camped beside a small stream strewn with boulders and a hundred little falls and rapids. as we lay in the tent, the rushing sound of water through the night was like a playful rain. walking through the woods listening to frogs, a bird’s triple-note trill, the dry-leaf skitter of a lizard. (nature speaks in a language that our embattled city ears can barely understand anymore; as hard as kelly and i tried, we could only name one of the birds we saw, two of the constellations, and three of the trees.)

and thus three days pass by in a blissful whisper.

finally, monday evening, back in the car, the playlist was shuffling something like: credence, the arcade fire, shakira, juanes, bjork, she wants revenge, the eagles, the bangles, the doors, manu chao, neko case, stevie wonder. all played at top volume, windows rolled up, tearing down 101 towards the golden gate. it was preparing us for our noisy re-entry into the bopalicious, chrome-plated, engine-racing, street corner-preaching, mariachi-singing, spanglish-speaking, tweety-bird-talking, soul-stirring, mind-numbing music of the city by the bay. following red taillights like fireflies and thinking

-we’ve been missing this clamor.

cover to cover

2007-03-06T12:54:00.000-08:00

saturday i passed out early, so sunday i woke early, happy see to the wandering beachhead of global warming through my open windows. under the sky, blue like a song, i watched the peregrinations of the yoga-mat toting tribes passing through the mission, stalking past my cafe. there was still a dark granite edge to one corner of my hangover, and i sat in the sun with an espresso and a novel, trying to wear down my consciousness to a uniform smoothness. the novel was the dancer upstairs, by nicholas shakespeare, which i read in one day, cover to cover.

“Don’t you think that each time a good book is written it’s a triumph for everyone?” said the man. “The same each time someone is cured of a disease or a criminal is caught. It’s one more tiny victory against the darkness.” It was touching, his faith in books. He’d only just discovered them and now he had discovered them terribly. p.17

[the father, a policeman, talking with his daughter after her ballet lesson]
... She uncrossed her leg. “Today I danced a painting.”
“How did you do that?”
“It’s easy. She said, ‘This is a painting. These are the dark colors. These are the light. Now express the colors for me.’ I was the light. Then she divided us into two groups. ‘Over here you’re angry. Over here you’re not interested. Dance it.’ ” p.63

rumi as a boy

2007-03-04T11:58:00.000-08:00

not to sound terribly academic about it, but i think the quality i admire most about rumi's poetry is its wide-eyed youth, its sense of discovery, and its jealous, pouting love that hasn't yet understood that it doesn't contain and control the entire cosmos.

747
There’s a strange frenzy in my head,
of birds flying,
each particle circulating on its own.
Is the one I love everywhere?

2157
The Bottle Is Corked

The rock splits open like wings beat
air, wanting. Campfire gives in to rain,
but I can’t go to sleep, or be patient.

Part of me wants to eat the stones
and hold you back when you’re leaving,
till your good laughing turns bitter and wrong.

I worry I won’t have someone to talk to, and breathe with.
Don’t you understand I’m some kind of food for you?
I’m a place where you can work.

The bottle is corked and sitting on the table.
Someone comes in and sees me without you
and puts his hand on my head like I’m a child.
This is so difficult.

speaking of youth, Nikki and i were discussing it on instant messenger the other day and i liked it when she said:

you know people say you will miss your youth and I think
I am still young
it is just not new anymore

poems from Open Secret: versions of Rumi, Coleman and Barks, trans. Threshold Books, 1983.

monday at the elbo room

2007-02-27T14:52:00.000-08:00

9:01. Le Meu, Le Purr. this small band out of ventura opened to a crowd of six people who seemed to be there primarily for the $1 pabst special, but they played like they were headlining at a stadium. loud, bold, and often quite fast, i loved them. i can’t describe their sound well, but it works. (a blurb on their myspace page refers to their debut album, the sweet smell of asphalt (2004), as “the rush and urgency of modern rock meets the honest affront of post hardcore and ear-catching sounds of new wave.”) there’s that punk speed (the drummer played shirtless, in a tight, unrelenting frenzy) and a wall of sound, and lyrics that alternate between lung-scraping pleas and melodic rock refrains. and in all that, this three-piece band has enough surprises to make you smile as you bang your head. good things can come out of ventura. (next sf show.april10.the make-out room.myspace)

9:56. the valley arena. there were four bands monday, and all i can remember about this one were the lead guitar/vocalist and the bassist. the former was a skinny rick moranis-type dressed in a tight brown and grey plaid flannel shirt that looked like standard issue for the son of a mountie in the yukon territory. but he played his guitar hard, his feet spread wide and swinging his hips forward, up on his tip-toes. it was kind of compelling, or at least intriguing, this howdy-doody meets elvis mix. the bassist, on the other hand, swung about like a spring that wanted to fold in on itself but kept bouncing back, like a marionette controlled by an epileptic. (next sf show.i can't be bothered to remember)

10:49. rararabbit. i liked this band a lot, and it wasn't just the cute lead singer, or her british accent, or the fact that the music reminded me, at times, of an indie-rock Sugarcubes (minus the creepy icelandic nihilist spoken-word). punkish prog rock with sometimes monumental guitar, and a lot of soul and quiet, urgent, angst. though she has to kneel down at times to focus on her guitar-playing, sylva -- with her beautiful voice and a spunky charisma -- holds the group together. and the key is that she's got a group that's worth holding together. (next sf show.march 15.amnesia.myspace)

11:42. amandla. the problem, as i see it, with headlining, especially on a school night, is that by the time the band gets on, the audience is already exhausted, half-deaf, and thinking about what time their alarm clocks are set for in the morning. and, apparently, sometimes this seems to be the exact state of the band as well. Former Ween drummer claude coleman started off playing a smooth-sounding gibson with a honey edge and a held-back band. Then the band got more aggressive, the beautiful gibson was drowned out by claude's whining lyrics, and i checked my watch. "Happy tuesday!" I said between songs, at 12:07. "Don't get all existential on me," claude said grumpily. They played for another half-hour as the audience politely filed out the door and applauded down the stairs. Half-deaf ourselves, kelly and i walked out into the rain-wet streets, and the city asleep was quieter than either of us could ever remember. (next sf show. i don't care.)

friday at cafe du nord

2007-02-24T10:58:00.000-08:00

9:34. karpov. pretend some russian and irish musicians got together in 1880 to try and create 'rock and roll'. imagine that dostoyevski and oscar wilde formed a band and wanted to 'get the party started'. oddly enough, it kinda works. (next sf show.march 17.amnesia.myspace)

10:35. the heavenly states. i've said it before and i'll say it again -- the best bay area band that Really Oughta Make it Big. post-punk-pop-rock is the best way i can describe them. ted nesseth plays a strong, prominent lead guitar and backs it up with a voice that swings between the raw passion of punk and the fun of pop. the drums and bass are solid, providing an urgent impetus that gives the songs a surging momentum, and genevieve on keyboard and violin adds some diversity to the sound, and now and then blows you away. it should be illegal for an unsigned band to make you feel this good. (next sf show.april 20.hemlock tavern.myspace)

11:50. shantytown. i don't know who these guys were, and i'm not sure they know who they want to be. they describe themselves as a rock / roots / jam band. i'm not sure what that means, but they went on last and nikki, jeff, tad, and i turned around halfway through their set to see the place was nearly empty. we left, too, for lucky 13 where iggy pop and the sex pistols were squaring off on the jukebox. (next sf show. who cares?)

discography

2007-02-21T10:49:00.000-08:00

the tapes of my childhood, in no particular order and as i recall them were: Phil Collins, No Jacket Required; Genesis, Invisible Touch; Air Supply, Air Supply (1976, 1985), and Greatest Hits; Hall & Oates, Private Eyes, and H2O; Men At Work, Business as Usual; Huey Lewis and the News, Fore!, and Sports; and I'm sure there was one Duran Duran album in there somewhere (contraband in my lutheran household) and one Mr. Mister album (Welcome to the Real World, acceptable because it had a song that took as its point of departure a traditional chant of the Christian liturgy).

Otherwise, my parents were coming out of an inexplicable country & western phase. In that my first concert was John Denver, I could be considered a beneficiary of this, until you also consider that my second concert was The Oak Ridge Boys.

For better or worse, the only constants in the soundtrack of my childhood were The Lutheran Hymnal and the music of Motown. The former provided me with the understanding that I could--even the obligation that i should--sing along with everything. The latter provided me with my songbook. Soul, as far as I was concerned, pervaded both. In this small Midwestern world of mine, A Prairie Home Companion was followed by Solid Gold Saturday Night, and it seemed impossible to think I was missing out on anything.

My brother and I attempted to engage contemporary music with tapes that made small but lasting impressions. Brad, who was older, more extroverted, and had lawn-mowing cash, was my link to the music of our time -- tapes copied from a gradeschool friend, or bought at Rock-a-Rolla Records, the only record store in Shields, our strip-mall suburb of Saginaw, which also sold amorphous glass sculptures that I immediately associated with the occult though their true purpose took me another decade to discover. But I never remember discovering any music. Jesus, lead thou on, Ain't too proud to beg, and Two less lonely people all seemed to come from some primordial musical consciousness.

Buttressed by the twin pillars of Church and Family, hymns and oldies and their sing-a-long spirit have stayed with me, while most of the time, the very notion of contemporary music seems flawed and frivolous (I'm mostly thinking of MTV-bands, local indie stuff is a different story). Still, out of social necessity I've started broadening my collection, achieved by evolving my definition of oldies to anything more than 10-years old. Anything more recent is like a foreign language tape--maybe it would do me good to try and understand it, but it's nothing I'd listen to just for fun. It takes at least a decade of regular radio play before a song seeps into my consciousness, and then it seems so familiar I can't remember ever not listening it.

Right now, I'm just wrapping up the first Clinton administration, and I'm totally into bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Counting Crows. But France Ferdinand, Lincoln Park, and Nickel Back might as well be Baskin Robbins' flavors of the month that my ears will barely glance at before I say "Double-scoop-Smokey-Robinson-and-the-Miracles-in-a-sugar-cone, please."

Zachary Leinberger is not a staff critic at the New Yorker and is not a regular contributor to Rolling Stone.

a dweam wiffin a dweam...

2007-02-18T20:47:00.000-08:00

if anyone asks, you can, in fact, drive from san francisco to yosemite and back in one day. but 'can' and 'should' are very different. it's a beautiful drive if you get up early, see the sun rise over the rolling, grass-covered hills, the great central valley opening up below, the sierras rising before you. highway 140 on a sunny morning is breathtaking, snaking through the scratch pine boulder foothills and insinuating itself into yosemite. if, as henri bergson contends, “the universe is a machine for the making of gods,” then yosemite valley must be where the broken molds are stored. the sheer walls still reverberate with the primeval upheavals that cast and shattered them, and in their open faces is manifest both glory and candor worthy of a god.

the wedding, of santana vallejos and daniel schaible, in such an auspicious setting and on such a perfect day, could not be anything less than beautiful, charmed by the splendor around it. after the ceremony outdoors, a little lunch and many mimosas, we went ice-skating, the snow-frosted brow of half dome catching the afternoon sun, gleaming silver through the pines.
a close friend's wedding is always strange. it's a chiaroscuro burdened with depths and shadows and the blazing future. but enough pseudo-philosphizing, it's time for me to wish them the best and a long life full of "wove, twue wove."

(i brought you back some wedding pictures, but i couldn't get you an extra piece of cake. sorry.)

from the archives

2007-02-05T11:01:00.000-08:00

from my old "lyrical gangsta" blog - january 30th, 2001:

"...reminds me of a comment I heard by some reporter covering the Superbowl this past weekend. They were talking about what a big event it was, all over America, and how "This is one day that we all set aside for just eating a lot of food and sitting in front of the TV." Hmmm...funny, Superbowl Sunday sounds a lot like Thanksgiving. And Christmas. And Tuesday.

Face it, we're a nation of fatties."

photo op

2007-02-01T21:57:00.000-08:00

i've finally organized some of my san francisco pics. i know you're excited. waiting with bated-breath and what not, yes? they're all here

dispatches from the revolution (cafe)

2007-01-31T14:06:00.000-08:00

2 construction workers, one black coffee, one au lait. the black coffee talks a lot more than the au lait, who's older and looks like he's a little weary of supervising parolees.

"Man, I was watcing discovery channel the other day, showed a 200, think it was 220 pound labrador. mon-ster. shit looked like a horse from behind."
"Yeah, i'm home in 5 minutes if i hit all the lights. 15 if i miss them. i can take mission street home. i can take valencia. i can get on guerrero and then get on the freeway. depends. you know, sometimes i'm in a hurry to get home. sometimes i take my time."
The au lait says he's been taking metamucil. black coffee says, "oh yeah, my dad takes that shit like every morning. pours it in with hot water, stirs that shit up, drinks it? yeah, man."
"... so this guy is sticking people up outside this pizzeria, right? and i guess the people like ran in there to get away. but the police were right around the corner. they drive up and the dude turns around with the gun and the police just stop, jump out of the car and shoot him dead. bang, bang. that’s the fucking way to do it..."
He's not done yet.
"They got damn good pizza there, too."

the di-vinyls

2006-12-08T13:15:00.000-08:00

overheard in the vintage-puma-only corner of muddy's, two hipsters playing on a cocktail-table ms. pacman console:

"I can't believe she's going out of business..."
"I know, I mean, I thought vinyl was making a comeback."
"It totally is, who doesn't love vinyl? It's so much better than digital."
"Digital sucks."
"I mean, if you want all your music to sound the same, go ahead and get digital."
"Seriously, I was talking to amy the other day and she was like, 'why would i ever want to buy a cd?' and i was like, 'you're so right!'"
"I mean, I really just assumed that an all-vinyl record store would make millions."

psycho jungle cats

2006-12-06T12:41:00.000-08:00

there's a very fine line between me and my psycho-jungle-cat self, i thought the other day. i found myself 25 feet over dolores park in a scotch pine, not quite sure how i had gotten there or how i would get down. thoughts flickered through my mind, a taunting magpie, a wild sprint, a desire to attack a christmas tree...

but seriously. i was at the cafe yesterday where a 20-something guy sat perched on a stool, houndstooth sportcoat and tyrolean hat, talking to the girl from guadalajara who works there about his introduction of a christmas tree into his apartment. "and my cat's just going crazy, like all-of-a-sudden she's this wild feral creature, fucking attacking that shit like it's her mortal enemy. like every ornament is an affront to her dignity. i don't even know her any more. she spends her days trying to figure out how to outwit the lowest branch. i just tried watering the tree yesterday and she gave me that deep-throated cat-growl, the one that reminds you of linda blair in The Exorcist."

"with dogs, i think there's a deep ancestral memory of being domesticated," i say, agreeing with him. "in cats, there's a very thin line between your lap-loving persian and a possessed jungle cat."

this much i know...

2006-11-27T11:11:00.000-08:00

...certain lesbians who work in cafes should never be allowed to set the playlist.

3 weeks in the states and that's about as good as i can do for any new insights. of course, not that you really need insights when you have thanksgiving leftovers in your fridge.

the world's turning upside down, for better worse--the democrats control congress, ecuador just elected a pro-chavez president, oaxaca is in revolt, james bond can't beat penguins in the box office--and i'm as lost a needle in the proverbial shitter.

oh, but i DID set up a page of my favorite photos from europe and egypt, so if you want to take a look, you know what to do.

thanksgiving

2006-11-25T20:34:00.000-08:00

rachel bark little lukas kel erik julie john cassiopeia the dog and myself sat down to champagne and erik's crab dip (to start) then opened the first of 5 bottles of beaujolais nouveau, then the whole spread, a masterfully prepared turkey and bark's virtuoso stuffing, mashed potatoes and yams and gravy, little biscuits (bisc-ettes), rachel's better-than-mom-makes cranberry dressing, broccoli with a rich cheese sauce, cranberry bread, and i know i'm forgetting something. after dinner general moaning commenced along with the slow-motion fight for open floor space where a person and his/her belly could recover in peace. a three-hour game of trivial pursuit was interrupted by sporadic pie-eating (apple and pumpkin, with ice cream) and port-drinking, but ended up in a tie. 8 hours after the first champagne toast, we filed out, fat and sleepy, under the star-spattered sky with the harbor lights on the bay glittering below us all the way home. i woke up, friday, still full.

bcn-stn-gtw-dtw-mbs-atl-sfo

2006-11-16T21:28:00.000-08:00

also known as the barcelona-san francisco flight with layovers in london, detroit, saginaw, and atlanta.

i suppose it should be weird to be in saginaw, michigan, the surreally flat michigan landscape under skies that are nothing but grey, a shade they'll hold until april. it should be strange to be surrounded by the too-familiar, after 6 months of the never-imagined. but saginaw is not much more than another name in a long series of stop-overs, from london to dubrovnik, to sarajevo, cairo, bratislava, barcelona, and the rest. they all merge into a tableaux voyage, and saginaw passes by in much the same way as the spanish coutryside or the hills of slovakia. they're all places that you have trouble calling 'here' before their resigned to being 'there.'

i don't even have time to finish this post before here is there and i'm in san francisco, drinking a margarita in the mission and finally, finally, unpacking everything.

final photo shoot

2006-11-16T16:23:00.000-08:00

london (click here)

oxford (click here)

barcelona (click here)

gaudi stuff in barcelona ( here)

cordoba (click here)

gleanings

2006-11-14T16:05:00.000-08:00

potato chips (aka 'crisps') are going out of style in england. at least, that's how the english are eating them. it's like they can't walk unless one hand is in a bag and the other is shoving transfats in their mouth.

in the netherlands, trains are on time to within 2 seconds, its uncanny. and this is the nation with europe's free-est drug laws. go figure.

the bosnians win my black humor prize. seriosuly, if 9/11 had been in sarajevo (and it kinda was) it would have been a comic windfall in the order of monica lewinsky or a dick cheney hunting trip

the french don't pronounce any letters immediately following a consonant, nor the final 4 letters of any word. any words of less than 5 letters come out as an audible sigh, in the case of nouns, or a dismissive snort, for verbs.

boqueria blues

2006-11-04T20:17:00.000-08:00

barcelona like the fringes of a dream
that scratches and has you
a little too tight
where you want to wake up
though sleep is precious
but you want to wake up
because the dream makes no sense
fuzzily you try to figure out what you'll do in a week or two, back on native soil, when you'll be telling stories about a trip you took to people who probably don't care. barcelona, it's all confused, and the transition is starting, the waking.

so i walked because i couldn't figure out what else to do. i enjoyed the shift of neighborhoods, their fantastic names. out to the beach at barceloneta, poble nou to las ramblas, up to l'eixample, gracia, around and around in barri gotic, la ribera, and el raval. i walked and looked in the tapas bars, the irish pubs always crowded with brits and aussies, the lines in front of the picasso museum, the street performers in the alleys around the cathedral, gaudi's overwrought facades, the redolent passages of la boqueria market.

it was the first place in europe where i really felt lonely. go figure, but it was. and my last night in my hostel in barcelona, i met a girl from san francisco, 6 months into her own trip, who was completing my sentences. we went to a samba bar (trailed by a brit, 3 sweedes, and a german) where a bald brasilian in snakeskin shoes tried to teach us how to dance. the euros stayed, but daphne and i headed home early, unlonely for a bit. i don't know if you've watched a german take a samba lesson, but we could see the disaster approaching. i've never actually seen anyone simultaneously dislocate all four bones that make up the hips, but i'd seen enough new things in europe, i decided to skip that one.

verde que te quiero verde

2006-11-01T06:57:00.000-08:00

Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.
Con la sombra en la cintura
ella sueña en su baranda,
verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Bajo la luna gitana,
las cosas la están mirando
y ella no puede mirarlas.

Verde que te quiero verde.
Grandes estrellas de escarcha
vienen con el pez de sombra
que abre el camino del alba.
La higuera frota su viento
con la lija de sus ramas,
y el monte, gato garduño,
eriza sus pitas agrias.
Pero ¿quién vendrâ? ¿Y por dónde? ...
Ella sigue en su baranda,
verde carne, pelo verde,
soñando en la mar amarga.

(from romance somnambulo, by federico garcia lorca, of fuente vaqueros, spain)

full text and translation here.

more photos of spain here.

pictures!

2006-10-30T12:26:00.000-08:00

blogger woin't let me put them here, so you'll just have to click on the links. go on, all the other cool kids are doing it. just one little click...

ridiculously placed ronda

muslim grandeur in granada

sultry and soaking sevilla

and a few other locales

paparrazzi...

2006-10-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

...caught me while i was lunching with a known arms dealer (i mean, i personally didn't know...who would?) on the ionian coast of albania. this was in the albania version of Hello magazine (Meer Mengyes!).

siesta days and flamenco nights

2006-10-25T12:48:00.000-07:00

(...the rain in spain is mainly a pain - sevilla is setting records for the wet stuff...)

boredom was creeping through the hostel like a damp mould, dark and sinister like the rain clouds sagging over the steeples of seville, those fiesta pinnacles of gold and indigo tiles stacked over the terracotta alleyways.

the weather was like a bad idea carried too far, and there was nothing to do so i took a nap, which is always a good idea. as the unseen sun slipped lower towards the obscure horizon, the rain slowed to a trickle, a mist, an echo, and then the air was warm and heavy and still. into the night like a sticky layer of gauze i stole out in search of flamenco.

at la carboneria on a plywood stage under a corrugated metal roof i found a gypsy with a long face, a mask of pain, singing like someone was driving spikes under his skin, alternating his song with the fluttering melancholy of the guitar. at el nuestro a couple danced, revolving around each other but not touching until the final note found them hopelessly thrown together by force of music. and at casa anselma, anselma herself joked and sang to the patrons seated around her in the single room bar. at 2 am she walked around the room, turning off the lights and saying that anyone who wanted to talk could leave then and there, because she was going to sing ‘el rocio’ and the song must be respected. the lights out, a statue of the virgin was lit by a half dozen electric candles, and with husband and son, anselma cried into the darkness, arms upraised to the goddess. she finished with a shout, the family embraced, the crowd erupted in applause. then we all filed out into a fresh shower of rain.

(sin titulo)

2006-10-23T02:42:00.000-07:00

for the sake of agument, let's assume that jerez de la frontera is the loneliest place in the world on a cloudy sunday afternoon in october. there´s still a bit to learn in our hungry rambles through the dark and depressing streets.

item. in any self-respecting american town, the old people would be in their nursing homes watching football scores on the early news and waiting for reruns of the lawrence welk show on pbs channel 28. here they´re outside so that all can see their lonesomeness, sitting in front of dusty roundabouts of bursting orange marigolds or beside the church that´s fenced off like a crime scene.

item. the graffiti artists here, surely the most bored group of juvenile delinquents in the world, have progressed to fully non-representational art. their ´drip´ paintings on the narrow side-streets have more to offer than half the pollocks in public musuems.

item. kicking a half-rotten orange down the street is the most excitement i've had this afternoon. there are lots of rotten oranges on the sidewalks, some of them beneath orange trees, others a hundred yards away from any tree, split open by kicks from other bored punters like me.

item. going back to my single room at a cheap hotel with a bottle of wine, turning on my mac, and watching one or four of the pirated dvds that i picked up in odd corners of the balkans becomes the most promising way of spending the evening. but of course the wall outlet in my room doesn't work and there's nowhere to buy a bottle of wine because every shop, store, restaurant, kiosk, bathroom, backroom, barroom and tienda closed at 2 pm.

help me ronda (the nefarious nerja remix)

2006-10-21T23:25:00.000-07:00

up at 5:40 to catch a bus in the dark foggy morning at capileira in las alpujarras, and dawn is barely breaking when i catch my next bus at 8:15 in orgiva. that bus takes me to nerja, coastal idyll of southern spain. but when i got off the bus, the coast was cloudy and the lingua franca was english, and rooms cost far more than any reasonable backpacker could deem conscionable. so i boarded the first bus to malaga, where i spent an hour in the bus station and maybe there was a mcdonald´s across the street, before catching the 4 o´clock to ronda.

ronda is the most impressively situated town i´ve ever seen. there's a 200 foot cliff along two sides of the old town, which is only reached by a few stone bridges, arching high over the gorge and the crashing river tajo below. i went to the bullring - spain´s oldest and perhaps most beautiful, the place where the red cape was invented - and to a small flamenco concert at the pensioners´club. an old man who looked like a mafia boss burst out with very loud phrases of swelling and utterly heartwreching emotion, alternating with the soft fluttering melancholy of the guitarist´s gypsy rhythms.

i don't have anything more to say than that. i know the last two posts have been a little precious. so sue me. the next won't be.

the cloudscapes of the alpujarras

2006-10-20T02:06:00.000-07:00

in southern spain, tucked between the peaks of the sierra nevadas and the warm shores of the mediterranean, lie the deep-folded valleys known as las alpujarras. the steep valleys are crossed by innumerable paths centuries old, by singing streams in the embrace of yellow poplars, and waterfalls that drop like lace over the grey rocks. strung along the sharp mountainsides and cliffs, which i can only compare to certain places in the andes, are a handful of small towns that are notable not only for the tenacity they display in not sliding clear down the rocky slopes, but also for the brilliant whitewash which covers every inch of every house.

hiking in these hills, the clouds are always around you. above or below, or opening to allow a glimpse of the rocky face right across from you. the mood of the valley, the trees, and those white houses change with every movement of the clouds, every shift of light. and they´re constantly moving, sailing through from the plains to the south, percolating up from below, cresting over the peaks of the sierra nevada and washing down in cottony rivulets through the folded mountains.

i´m just sayin´.

on the road

2006-10-16T10:57:00.000-07:00

perhaps i'm too enamoured of the concept of a photologue, but i like the story. of course, the story's about me, so of course i like it.

les fotos du voyage are online for your viewing pleasure

all the photos you never wanted to see

2006-10-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

sober and orderly vienna

crowded prague

macabre kulna hora

cesky freakin' krumlov

i forgot to tell you!

2006-10-15T15:43:00.000-07:00

i posted pictures from hungary, like, ages ago.

barcelona is pissing me off

2006-10-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

so i’m going south. to granada in andalucia. fuck barcelona’s third world efficiency with first world prices. french politicians, trying to block turkey’s admittance to the european union have said ‘we have to decide and define what europe is.’ if europe has anything to do with civilization, efficiency, and honesty, i’m going to start a movement to have spain kicked out of the e.u. on the basis of barcelona’s performance over the last 24 hours. fucking hell.

48 hours (by train from bohemia to barcelona)

2006-10-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

depart cesky krumlov (czech rep.) 6:20 pm arrive cesky budejovice 7:10 pm
depart cesky budejovice 8:40 pm arrive linz (austria) 10:42 pm
depart linz 1:55 am arrive munich (germany) 6:21 am
depart munich 12:40 am arrive strasbourg (france) 6:10 pm
depart strasbourg 9:55 pm arrive avignon 5:45 am
depart avignon 10:40 am arrive portbou (spain) 2:35 pm
depart portbou 4:20 pm arrive barcelona 6:45 pm

[as i've said before, anything that doesn't kill you, only makes you dumber]

bavarian rhapsody

2006-10-12T02:24:00.000-07:00

i´ve been to munich before. bavaria is the land of my ancestors. land of blue-checkered billboards showing grandmas gulping half-liters of beer. land of sausage and pretzels and and sausage-filled pretzels. i sing the praises of my people, the teutonically obtuse, bavaria´s dough-faced daughters and pasty-faced fathers, whose beer bellies bulge, belying their dry demeanour, their punctually ordered existence.

don’t know where i’m going, but i sure know where i been

2006-10-11T22:57:00.000-07:00

one a.m. in the ethereally bright gleam of the new train station in linz, austria. there’s nothing to amuse me but a yellow dog testily snapping its jaws at flies. it’s a sparkling clean station, i don’t know where the flies come from. the dog comes from its belligerently drunk owner who’s sitting beside me. i don’t know where the drunk comes from.

the dog moves to the center of the bright polished floor, trying to distance himself from his owner and, hopefully, the flies. the drunk owner passes out after half an hour of incoherent shouting at me and the dog. the beer can drops from his hand and tumbles over his leg to the floor where it glugs out happily onto the shining marble. the dog, a little thirsty perhaps, or just a connoisseur, comes over to lap up the quality german pilsener. i don’t know what’s going to happen when the drunk finds out his dog’s finished off his beer, and i don´t want to find out; i make a break for platform #3 where i wait an hour on the neon platform in the cold autumn air until silver-line salvation barrels down the tracks and takes me to germany.

bohemian rhapsody

2006-10-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

losing my mind in southern bohemia...the frescoed round tower of czesky krumlov, pink and yellow, topped with the verdigris copper cupola bristling with gold pinnacles...walking up out of town, towards the forested hills and the pastures slung between them...the grey tower girded in white trim, topped by a copper roof beside the dark wrinkled river that curves through town ...the castle gardens where white paths stride across the geometric flower beds bordered by tall hedges...the pond filled with water lilies and surrounded by goldening trees hemmed in by the castle’s white walls...the syrupy river reflecting dark the sky, the trees... a maple bursting noiselessly into yellow above the green river bank in front of the rocky grey castle ramparts...the chain of red green yellow trees laid across the hills, the interlocking pastures and forests, the red-roofed town jumbled below the long taut line of the castle walls, ringed by autumn forest hills...the silent mountain pastures like open hands locked together by the burgundy and gold fingers of the woods... three maples in crimson conflagration along a just-mown field...i wander dazed and elated through the eclectic town and ecstatic nature.

“i have come out of that landscape, ... that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world.” pablo neruda

“i’m no fucking buddhist, but this is enlightenment.” bjork gudmondsdottir

my peeps

2006-10-06T01:57:00.000-07:00

vienna, land of german blood
fascists, mozart, and good food
walking your cobbled streets i see
menschen who all look like me
my family's german! yours is too!
sausage is best in sauerkraut stew
germans, austrians, my homeland
hey! who wants to go invade poland?

lazy days in budapest

2006-10-04T11:27:00.000-07:00

what can i say, but life is good when you’ve got a hostel with free internet and a dvd player. i’ve been up to more than that here in budapest, but not a whole lot more. there are some lovely public baths here, and spending a day or three soaking in 110 degree water under white domes with lovely young things is no bad way to spend them. it’s a hell of a way to slough off a hangover, but that’s life when you’re on the road.

i spent my days wandering the streets and looking up at the crenellated domes, the spired cathedrals, the baroque churches with green copper roofs floating on white towers. my nights observing the protests in front of parliament, or at the cha-cha-cha club, a quite-literally underground bar, located in the subway station, where backpackers and hungarians dance to oasis and bush on the dark crowded dancefloor and mingle with beers in the concrete, neon lit vault of the subway.

i gave this city a week of my life, all i asked was for a small revolution. it looks like budapest can’t even give me that. lazy hungarians.