David Chess gave me a word.
Actually, he gave me a bit more than that.
Two and one quarter years ago or so (roughly), something I’d put up whose traffic I was checking desultorily logged a couple of hits from davidchess.com. As you do when you’re checking traffic, I followed the link back and found this engagingly eccentric dailyish journal thing sprinkled with links to whatever had happened to strike his quotidian fancy.
I’d met my first blog-thing.
So I started checking in from time to time and through him met others (Medley, say, or the divine Textism) and through having become familiar with the general concept went on to find yet more without his direct help. And then back on 17 January 2002, I went ahead and started posting hereabouts. (Actually, it was over here, and I really need to clean that up, don’t I?) It’s been a year, I guess, though maybe what with the hiatus from August through November last year and the irregular posting before that, we don’t want to get too rambunctious with the anniversary talk. —Also, considering that I didn’t get around to writing this until the 20th.
I was suitably impressed, then, when he referred to linking to the Kip/Barry/Jenn ontogroup. —An ontogroup being a group or community that agrees on a similar ontology, or so it’s defined by Alamut, a member of Chess’s ontogroup. It’s a neat word, and I like it a lot, and I’m glad it’s in my vocabulary; it’s an interesting way of thinking about how you track thinking about the various groups you run into online and the ways they hang out and interact with each other. Barry and Jenn and I are linked, for instance, because we keep writing about how we’ve known each other for (yikes) a decade and a half, but that isn’t enough, I don’t think, for ontogroup status; that alone isn’t a shared ontology. It’s more the fact that we each take comics seriously (them as practitioners, me as a critic—and I hope by now you’re well enough acquainted with me to realize that’s as questionable as any other genre distinction), and even moreso that we were each molded to one degree or another by Scott McCloud at impressionable stages in our respective developments (for all that we’ve each reacted in different ways and done different things with that molding); that’s the ontology we hold in common—lightly, but. (On the obverse: I would not, say, lump Bruce and John and Ginger and Vince in the same ontogroup, for all that each can wax eloquent on the four stances.)
But ontogroups aside, for the moment: do me a favor and raise your glasses in the general direction of David Chess. To the extent that it’s anybody’s fault, he bears his share of the blame. —Also, be sure to read his post today: it’s an excellent example of his ability to take seriously something that seems whimsical and harmless enough—a sort of cultural reverse engineering that’s at once funny and thought-provoking.
So: thanks. —Onward and upward!
Kittenhawking.
I suppose it’s a better practice than Stephenhawking.
The handle, and flying off thereof:
Post in haste, repent in leisure; an unexamined screed is not worth uploading; never shoot back when you’re all het up. I’m looking over the past few long stories tossed off the short pier and wincing; watching myself dance out onto any number of limbs past the point where I know a damn thing about what I’m saying simply because I was set off and wanted to do something, anything—and speaking up is all too often confused with doing something. —It is; it frequently is. When you’re saying something substantive; when you’re bringing something to the table; when you’re telling a story you know yourself.
When you don’t know anything about Charles Pickering, Sr., beyond other people’s stories found with a couple of quick Google searches, you should maybe not rush to the Movable Type; when you can only link up to what other people are saying about the Bush stimulus package, you should maybe not bother bringing that to the table (especially if you miss one of the more in-depth kickings around it’s gotten); when all you say on the subject of the coming Iraqi war is “Here, look at these pictures of folks there on the ground,” you should maybe cast about for a little more substance before yelling something inconsidered. (For “you,” of course, read me.)
Sigh.
Everyone’s got to find their niche; everyone’s got to find the thing they give a damn about. I’ve whinged about blogging and tipping points and echo chambers, and this is, indeed, a thing blogs can do, and some of them do it very, very well. Their success is inspiring and even intoxicating. Which does not mean this is all blogs can do, or should do. No.
You’ve got to find something you give a damn about, or you won’t do good work. I give a damn about judicial reactivism, fiscal insanity, and grotesquely stupid wars; what I haven’t given a damn about is stopping to think for a moment, marshalling my arguments, finding something of substance and bringing it carefully, deliberately, and as irrevocably as possible to the table. —That’s how I am, sometimes, with politics, with the state of the world as it is; I want to leap up on something and point and shout at the top of my lungs, “Jesus Christ, can you believe this shit?” Or words to that effect. To do something. You know? And when done well, it’s preaching to the choir, and that’s a fine thing to do from time to time; it’s just that preaching to the choir is, in the end, about as effective as pissing in a pool. You get that nice, warm feeling—and then what?
The thing is that the thing I give a damn about is rooting around in pop culture. Digging through the so-called dross for the joy of finding unexpected gems. Watching how people use the stuff and re-use it, poach from it and recombine it; lining up the pieces of it in pretty, signifying patterns; kicking it apart to see what makes it tick. Criticism, I suppose. (A lengthy and whimsical for instance.) —This is what I give a damn about; this is where (I’d like to think, anyway) I can bring something to the table. A table, anyway.
It’s just that it’s so damn frivolous. Isn’t it?
This narrowing of the American mind is exacerbated by the withdrawal of the left from active politics. Virtually ignored by the media, the left has further marginalized itself by a retreat into introspective cultural criticism. It seems content to do yoga and gender studies, leaving the fundamentalist Christian right and the multinationals to do the politics.
That’s Brian Eno, being a wee bit uncharitable and even unfair in Counterpunch. Still. Stings a little. (A lot, actually.)
But what he’s glossing over and I’m being disingenuous about is that the best criticism is at once deeply and transcendantly political (especially gender studies; yoga, too, has that potential), and that in even the most irrelevant of out-of-touch ivory towers, clear, vital, engaged criticism can end up changing the stories we all tell each other and the ways in which we tell them. Which is cool and even in its own (modest-seeming) way, earth-shaking. The potential, at least, is there; the possibility. Sometimes. Now and again. But it takes so goddamned long. It’s almost utterly and frustratingly dependent on contingency and the laws of unintended consequences. And there’s so many pressing needs right here right now and I want to do something—
Eh. Maybe I should go volunteer somewhere already. —Next month. After the taxes are done and the downstairs is ready to rent out again.
Yeah. That’s the ticket.
Behind the scenes.
So blogrolling.com is fine (and dandy), I got the blog roll up and running with a minimum of fuss, tested the handy (also dandy) one-click bookmarklet, and the flow of whuffie continues unabated. That’s it. Carry on. Me, I’m heading back to work.
Denying whuffie.
So I haven’t read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom yet but I have read this squib on Boing Boing about how the Guardian dubbed whuffie as one of the 25 technologies and notions that hold the most promise over the coming year:
It’s the great conundrum of the web. Why do so many people do so much for free? What do people get out of it? Whuffie—that’s what. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow for his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Whuffie embodies respect, karma, mad-props; call it what you will, the web runs on it.
See, I use Sitemeter to check the stats on this blog-thing. (Arguably too much.) It’s down this morning; I can’t see how many people have visited, or where they’re coming from.
I’m also using blogrolling.com to build a blogroll. I went to do some work on it this morning, and it’s gone from the internet; there’s something up (at least temporarily) with the URL. Since the rolls are hosted at blogrolling.com, blogrolls all over the net (like the one at Rittenhouse Review) are gone, kaput, nada. —So people who might otherwise have browsed through to new sites can’t. At least, temporarily.
Obviously, there’s plenty of ways to host this stuff yourself and not be dependent on other people’s bandwidth or server issues. But for those of us without the requisite skillset, well, they’re darned useful.
But they’re also a glaring weak spot in any economy of whuffie.
—Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just cranky. More coffee, then off to work. Whee.
My God, the hair.
Barry, of course, weighed in with his two cents about the Haberdashery, and the evanescent, delicately necessary threadworks of artistic communities; now Jenn’s written up her own account of what it was like and how it all came together, Back in the Day.
With pictures.
What’s frightening is most of that hair is still around today. Be warned.
Bonus: Amy’s put in an appearance, in the comments to my original post; get thee a blog too, woman. And: if you lean on Sara, she might just post those Clarion ’91 photos. —This nostalgia kick could get to be a trend.
Roots.
I need to talk to my folks more at some point or another about this stuff; I trust vaguely that notes have been gathered and compiled in loose files somewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most of the family lore is in the memories stored in one head or another and yet to be written down in any but the most cursory form. (My father’s been on a geneological kick off and on—he tracked down a church in the Czech republic in a village where one branch or another of the ur-Manleys springs from—but my father’s office is, to put it charitably, a godawful mess.)
—And it’s families lore, isn’t it. Not “family lore.” Looking back into one’s ancestry is like looking upriver at all the many and various tributaries—rivers, riverlets, streams, creeks, cricks, branches, springs, trickles, washes and wets—that all could have been the proximate source of this or that molecule of water floating past you. You can pretend to follow one main track back in time, say this is the river, and the rest feed into it, but that’s a construct. It privileges one set at the expense of others. It’s families, not family. Bloodlines a-plenty, not a single, magisterial bloodline stretching back in time like the Mississippi.
But I digress.
Roots on my father’s side: mostly on the western and more hardscrabble edge of the Appalachians: Alabama, western Georgia. I know we had some folks in Winston County, who voted to secede from the Confederacy when the Confederacy seceded from the Union; Dad likes to say that folks in Winston County were too poor to own slaves and didn’t give a good God damn about states’ rights and just wanted to be left alone with their moonshine, so. —Of course, there’s also a Cherokee (or half-Cherokee) who served in the Confederate Army as a scout.
Which, apparently, qualifies me for this.
Though—aside from my own personal misgivings (which are legion), there’s the small matter of the Wiggin on my mother’s side who served with Sherman on his famous March. We have his cavalry saber somewhere in one of the closets of my parents’ house. That Wiggin unpacked his carpet bags and married into a family (families) come down in time and station from the mighty Middletons—genuine Southern plantation aristocracy of the rice variety, there on the South Carolina coast, where Gullah is still spoken by basket-weaving women on the street corners of Charleston, where society matrons still archly refer to “The Late, Great Unpleasantness.” (“War Between the States” being a vulgar term, you see.) We’ve visited the plantation, which is now a carefully maintained park; we had a feast of steamed oysters and pork in the old kitchen and heard ghost stories about the family crypt. —One of the Middletons, as is often pointed out, signed the Declaration of Independence. His grandson signed the Ordinance of Secession.
I was born in Sheffield, Alabama, and after about six months was moved to Richmond, Virginia, where I laid down my first memories. (The first one I can date with any assurance: in the car, pulling up the driveway of the smaller house, as someone on the radio noted it was the one-year anniversary of the Watergate break-ins. I have earlier memories, but none I can place with such precision.) When I was—five? six?—we moved to Arak, Iran, where I spent a year and a half in the small American school for the families of engineers working on a couple of projects for the Shah, reading Tintin comics and Boys’ Own Adventure stories from Britain. By 1976 we were back in the States, in North Carolina; in 1978, I saw Las Guerras de las Galaxias in Caracas, long, agonizing months after all my friends back in the States had seen it. When I went to the Breckenridge County Spelling Bee in Kentucky (sixth grade), I lost on the first round because I spelled parlor p-a-r-l-o-u-r.
All those British adventure stories, you see. (My brother-in-law, who’s from somewhere south of London and who gets asked from time to time—no lie—if he was in that band, is a professor of history who specializes with a kind of grim glee in the antebellum South. Go figure.)
I was born in the South, and did a lot of growing up there, but if you tried to cram my roots into a box conveniently labelled Southerner, it would be a hard fit. I’d be a hard fit. I don’t talk Southern. (Though I’m noticing more and more of my father’s turns of phrase popping up in my conversation. Shorn of the accent, but.) I don’t write Southern. (Though it’s a fine enough business for them that do.) I didn’t grow up thinking Southern. (Then, who does?) —Yet I am a Southerner.
What else could I be?
For all that I haven’t spent more than two weeks at a time south of the Mason-Dixon since 1985.
Getting on the bus last night, there was, at the back, a tall man in a long black trenchcoat and a black leather cowboy hat. On the hat in the middle was a buckle: the Confederate battle flag in all its starry, barry glory.
You see them, from time to time, here in Portland (one of the whitest major cities in America). Mostly in the windows of pickup trucks, or muddied SUVs. (Do they think like pickup truck people? Like people who go off-roading?) For all that this is the furthest north I’ve ever lived.
Seeing that flag makes me think of a lot of things: alternate histories (those damn cigars!) and the romance of vanishing chivalry and brutal, dehumanizing hatred and appalling, sugar-coated ignorance and The Dukes of Hazard and a satisfyingly juvenile fuck you! to the powers that be and gun racks and cowboy hats and For Us By Us and redneck frat boys and my brother driving carriages in the background of the upcoming Cold Mountain movie and red dirt and pine needles and the Smokey Mountains at dawn (Bat Cave, North Carolina and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee) and hey, remember that guy who clocked me outside of the pool where I worked as a lifeguard? I’d kicked him out for roughhousing, six foot mumble, two hundred some odd pounds, me a skinny white sophomore in high school, and when I was climbing into the car of the friend who was driving me home this guy comes out of nowhere and grabs me and yells and punches me, and Shark, my boss (a hair under six feet but more of it muscle), pulls him off, and we went to the police, and it turned out he had a number of previous convictions for assault (also battery), enough so that when I stood in front of a judge and swore that yes, this man attacked me, and he stood up and said he had, and he was sorry, when they led him away, a black man two or three years older than me with a kid (possibly two, the cops were unsure) out of wedlock (as they say), it was to a jail outside of Columbia for a six-month sentence; I think of that, too, and I also think of the basket women in Charleston pretending to hide from tourists’ cameras as if their souls would be stolen (until you offer them five bucks, or ten) and I think of what Gullah sounds like and how much I enjoyed those steamed oysters. And maybe in one way or another that flag “stands for” all of these things, for me if not for every Southerner; this is, after all, my heritage. Or some small part of it.
But the flag also stands for this. It always has.
And whether the guy in the back of the bus wants it to or not, it always will.
Boxing Day.
There’s this guy in Canada who insists that the perfect gift for Jenn would be for me to announce that I am giving up pornography. Instead, I think I’ll share some of my meager traffic with her, by pointing out that now that she’s got Movable Type up and running, I can link to her wonderful post about the last time she went to a strip club. (It was coincidentally enough my first. I got to find out what’s the cruellest song for anyone—male or female—to strip to: “Eleanor Rigby.” Ouch.)
In other Boxing Day news—but I should maybe first tell you about an email my mother sent me, several years ago. Back about ’95 or ’96, I think, when we had one email account for an entire household of college drop-outs (and a couple of graduates, yes yes) and I still remembered how to use Tin and Pine and whatnot. It was a simple email message: a hyperlink, and the words, “Oh really?” or something to that effect. The link was to an entry in the archive Oberlin had maintained of posts made to its intramural bulletin board, a limited Usenet-like forum called Infosys. Some bright young thing had put the archive on the web in those heady, early days, so that by clicking on this simple hyperlink, one was taken almost instantaneously to a post I’d made in—what, 1988? Thereabouts, anyway—about the best places on campus to have sex.
My mother, ladies and gentlemen. —The archive has since (thank God) vanished, a victim of limited bandwidth, perhaps, but the peculiar mixture of embarrassment (aw, geeze, Mom, close the door!) and sudden joy (she read something! That I wrote!) has stayed with me. (By the way: mostly braggadoccio and hearsay. In case you were wondering. Honest! It was!)
Now, we have our differences politically and otherwise that probably are not as great as we imagine (and our similarities, ditto) and we maybe don’t talk about them as much as we ought. Family. You know. So while I knew she knew about this blogthing (the link’s in my email sig, after all, shameless self-promoter that I am), I didn’t really know what she thought of it. Or even if she read it. Until I opened one of my packages from The Folks: The Tipping Point. And said to myself, “Aw, geeze, Mom, you read that mawkish thing?” and “She reads it! Wow!” all at once.
My father—you know, I think I will have some Utah Phillips waiting for him when he gets back from Spain. (See above re: differences, as well as similarities.)
And: I now have a lovely example of Arabic calligraphy (the alphabet, cunningly matted and framed) to add to my astrolabe, thanks to the Spouse; also, my mother-in-law (the lovely and talented Kathy Lee—take a bow) got me a cashmere sweater. “It’s the in thing, apparently,” she said. “Snuggly and comforting, since it was such a hard year for everyone.” She got Jenn one, too. —It’s the first cashmere sweater I’ve ever worn: it’s at once the lightest and the warmest sweater I have, and from now on I insist that all my winter garments be woven of the stuff.
Assuming, of course, that 2003 turns out somewhat less hard than 2002.
Now none of youse has any excuse.
For a good long time now, those of us who are blessed with God’s own computer and are in “the know” have blithely typed our simple text into the marvelous Tex Edit and then scrubbed it briskly with Dean Allen’s invaluable AppleScripts for web writing. It’s how you get decent punctuation and alternate characters and some small modicum of typographic competence on the web (plus easy linkin’) without having to remember the dam’ Unicode for an em-dash (——in case you were wondering) or whether you closed that strong tag three words back (oops).
But the unwashed heathens—or those of us who have to close our sleek little iBooks and trudge our way to day jobs in a stodgy, Gated world—were left bereft, forced to rely on our own meager (meagre?) devices.
Until now. —Mr. Allen has concocted a simple web-based Perl thingie that takes text you drop in and Unicodes it and wraps it with a decent assortment of happy tags. Post sparkling text with proper punctuation (and diacriticals!) to the web from anywhere at all.
So if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to get up, put on some pants, go to work, and pretend to do this-that-or-the-other while tinkering with this happy little toy on an infernal, fenestral device.
Cold hands, and a winterscape.
So I was up late last night what with one thing and another and I finally crawled into bed at half past one the next morning. The cat was grumpy but he should understand when I come to bed at that time of night I’m going to shake the blankets out and he’s just going to have to deal.
Jenn was still drawing. (Actually, speaking technically, I think she was applying a texture from a Yoshitoshi woodblock print, but technically it was drawing.) Garbage was on the stereo.
Sometime later I halfway wake up. She’s crawling into bed. Her feet are cold and she shoves them up against mine to warm them which is maybe why I halfway wake up. Her fingers are cold, too. (She’ll tell you it’s because there’s a hole in the wall of her studio where the electric space heater used to be and so she gets this fearsome draft, but really, the woman has poor circulation. Ask anyone who’s shaken her hand.) I manage to find the clock and hit the glowbar: it’s 3:37 in the morning. The cat is on the pillow by my head, so this wakes him up. He lets me know he’s grumpy. Dammit.
This is what she goes through to put up new panels of Dicebox.
In addition to which, she’s also got a piece in a First Thursday group show. That’d be tonight, it being First Thursday and all. (Which I realize is short notice and I’d have maybe said something sooner but I just found out it was tonight and not a month from now or so this morning as I was putting on my jacket.) So if you live in Portland and you’re at all curious then I recommend you make your way down to PushDot, at 833 Northwest 14th Avenue, there in the Pearl; we’ll be there ourselves at some point or another from time to time.
But if you can’t make it; if you’re in another state or unforgivably busy or some such excuse, well, I’m telling you, it’s more impressive in person, but if you just can’t make it, we’ll understand; we’ll try to understand. Here, then, is a taste of Hecate.
Pardon my dust.
Also my tardinesses, as I pardon the tardinesses of others (ha). I’m walking around my brand new copy of Movable Type, kicking the tires and sniffing the new-blog smell; it’s a little naked right now, and off-the-rack, and my spanking new domain name (www.longstoryshortpier.com; do keep it in mind) still hasn’t propagated, so I’m forced to explicitly use the directory I’m piggybacking off the Spouse’s site, and I haven’t even put any links in over there yet, and the funny thing is that by the time most of you out there read this one or more of those things just won’t be true (knock wood). —Ah, ephemera.
Anyway. The content from my old hand-built journal has been re-entered herein, and flagged with categories I haven’t gotten around to organizing, so you can wander through the archives in a somewhat more orderly fashion and leave a comment if you like and even permalink, if you are so inclined. Otherwise, go read Dicebox, and remember that Barry’s a better man than I, and oh, I dunno. Leave a comment if you have an idea or a suggestion or a brickbat or something.
Whoa.
Hang on, folks—me an’ her’s been married six years today.
Yoiks.
Scholar; gentleman; scoundrel; cad.
So there’s this thing my grandfather used to say. My mother’s father, who ran away to Canada when war first broke out in Europe (for the second time, last century, but who’s counting?) and lied about his age, because the States weren’t in the thick of it yet, and he wanted more than anything else in the world to fly airplanes. Which he did: Spitfires, among others. Then he did a lot of editing and writing. For a while, he managed a department store: Gaylord’s, it was called. He was active for a good long time in one of those men’s clubs that make public service fun by layering it with secret handshakes and weekend barbecues, and he was a fanatic about playing golf at the local VFW, and he was a diabetic. Smoked like a chimney, too.
But that’s neither here nor there: this is about what he used to say, or rather, I was going to use what he used to say as a starting point. I’d do something he’d asked me to do—brought him the remote, say, or a glass of water, and he’d beam. “You, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman.”
“Thank you, sir,” I’d say.
“No, no,” he’d say, “what you should say back is, ‘And there are damn few of us left in this world.’” And he’d bust out in this hoarsely infectious laugh, hack hack.
—Of course, he’d also set up his accoutrements for his morning insulin shot, syringe and vial on the table, sleeve rolled up, and he’d load up the syringe and peer at it in the morning light and then beckon me over. “Time for your morning shot, young man!”
“No, sir,” I’d say, shaking my big solemn head, as he busted out laughing again, hack hack.
It seems there’s a subset of our friends hereabouts who, upon discovering Jenn and I had not yet seen All About Eve (an oversight, we readily admit it, but we have seen The Lady Eve, so there, neener), were downright eager to see my reaction to it. Or not to it, per se; wondrous movie that it is, it has been sufficiently steeped into the public pop-consciousness that it’s impossible not to thrum with deja vu when the battle of wills begins between Margo Channing and Eve Harrington. —No, it was specifically the character of Addison DeWitt that they wanted to see me see: coldly scheming theatre critic and manipulative sonuvabitch par excellence, that coolly silky voice edged with menace like a velvet nap, wrapped in fine black suits like he just stepped out of those Arrow shirt ads from the ’20s and ’30s. A fop with an iron will; a fop with power, with a taste for power like a good brandy or a fine single-malt. I’d take to him instantly, they swore. A new Excelsior, a non pareil; a new paragon. I had to see him.
One is not entirely sure how to take that.
(Oh, I loved him. Indeed. Want his wardrobe and his cigarette filter. Still: one doesn’t like to be quite so—obvious?)
Having read a bit now about the actor who played him, I’m eager to rev up a George Sanders film festival. Rather like the Barbara Stanwyck bender we went on a while back—though Sanders doesn’t seem to have had quite Stanwyck’s luck in landing the classics. Still: it’ll be nice to get a shot of him in the system, to be able to have and to hold a clear picture of him: in evening dress, in an archetypal Stork Club, say, a quivering ingenue or slighted husband standing affronted before him, voice in high dudgeon: “You, sir, are a scoundrel and a cad!”
And he’d smile, just so, his eyes—sad? You wouldn’t call them that, but that’s the impression they’d leave, when you went over it after the fact—and this is what he’d say right back in that voice, that voice: “And there are damned few left of us in this world.”
Parades and cigarettes.
So I wake up just the other side of sober, and my best green suit’s a wrinkled puddle at the foot of the bed. It reeks of cigarette smoke, and I’m remembering enough to be obscurely glad that gin doesn’t stain wool. When I stumble into the bathroom for some clumsy ablutions, I see in the mirror I’ve still got an earring in one ear. Leaning forward does alarming things to various internal systems keeping track of such stuff as balance and pulse rate, so I swallow three prophylactic Advils and blink until everything settles.
It was one of those nights.
“Jemiah’s having a party to celebrate her second book coming out,” said the email invitation. “It’s ‘dress code fabulous.’” So Kevin dyed his hair red and Jenn (“his” Jenn, and not “my” Jenn, and let’s not get into all that right now) had red streaks and rhinestone piping, and I had the aforementioned green suit and the walking stick from Guatemala, and Sara bleached her hair bone white and then washed some nameless sunset color into it, and my God, you should have seen Steve’s underwear. Fabulous? Oh, yes, my friends. Fabulous. —So: off we set for the Mallory Hotel, a ten-minute drive from the Lloyd Center, tops; maybe another ten minutes to find parking if we weren’t lucky. Or twenty minutes by MAX. If that. But—
See, we’re all plugged-in people. We smirk (or groan) at how W’s written up in the Guardian and we listen to NPR through our computers (though we’d really prefer it if they used Quicktime) and we’re flinging links back and forth to the decision on CIPA hours after it’s made and a whole day before those lumbering newsprint dinosaurs can get their summaries on the streets. (And let’s take a moment to note that that’s my local library on the front lines of this good fight. Yay!) —Television? That’s for watching DVDs on, right? Radio? What?
Problem being that us international elite knowledge-workin’ webheads somehow missed—the lot of us—the fact that Saturday, 1 June, was opening night for Portland’s annual Rose Festival.
“There’s an awful lot of traffic,” said someone.
“Oh, yeah,” said someone else. “It’s the Rose Festival, isn’t it?”
We tried to cross at the Morrison Bridge, but it was going up. Kevin (who was driving) pulled a deftly illegal U-turn, and we cut north to the Broadway Bridge. Much clearer. No one was on it. Other side of the river, we found out why: Broadway was blocked off and all traffic being routed up Hoyt.
“Is that a parade they’re setting up?” said someone.
“I thought the Southwest Airlines Grand Floral Parade—the signature event of the Rose Festival, or so I’m told—wasn’t till next week,” said someone else.
And they were right. This was the Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines.
So we routed ourselves up Hoyt. All we had to do was cross 405 and double back to the Mallory. And we’d be fine.
“You know,” said someone, brightly, “we could just duck back to the Lloyd Center, park there, and take the MAX in. It does run right past the Mallory, you know.”
“Nah,” said someone else, pragmatically. “We’ve already come this far, let’s stick it out. It can’t be that bad.”
Roughly 45 minutes later, we were parking Kevin’s car by the Lloyd Center and climbing out with much groaning and stretching. (This is how the suit came to be wrinkled. “If you wanted,” offered Steve, mischievously, “you could nip into our place and borrow an iron…”) —“You know,” said someone, pointing to the Lloyd 10, “we could just be evil and bag the whole thing as a lost cause and go see Star Wars.”
“There’s no booze in Star Wars,” said someone else. Grimly.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll be booing up a storm, myself…”
There was more like that. —The MAX, of course, was terribly crowded, since we weren’t the only ones to note the difficulty of maneuvering an automobile through downtown. It pulled away from the Lloyd Center stop and everyone already crammed onboard glowered at the people waiting at the 7th Avenue stop who shrugged and squeezed on anyway. At the Convention Center stop, the conductor got on the loudspeaker and said something no one could entirely make out about how the MAX wouldn’t be going all the way and anyone who wanted to cross downtown could mumble garble squawk.
“You have got to be kidding me,” said someone we didn’t know.
But he wasn’t. The MAX trundled across the river and shuddered to a stop outside Pioneer Place, end of the line, everybody off—almost as close as we’d gotten yet, but still with many blocks to go. Though not so many we couldn’t walk it. (Despite the fabulousness of some of the shoes being worn.) So we surged ahead and—
Oh. Right. The Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines.
You ever try to cross a parade with that many corporate sponsors?
“Well, shit,” said someone.
“The Skybridge!” cried someone else, brightly.
The Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines, was trundling its way down 4th, between the two big blocks of Pioneer Place. Which are connected by a third-floor Skybridge. Saved! We dashed into Pioneer Place and clattered up two flights of escalators (okay, we stood impatiently still in a horde of people who’d had much the same idea as the escalators jerked us up too slowly) to find the doors to the Skybridge shut and locked.
“You know,” said someone, as we were jerked back down two floors, “there were people on the Skybridge. I wonder if they got locked in there somehow, or…”
“Not really caring,” said someone else.
None of us at this point were too terribly into the whole people thing. But: we were fabulous, dammit. We had our goal; it was a simple one, easily accomplished. We were bright. Resourceful. Thirsty. And it was only a few thousand people between us and our Excelsior. We’d tried ignoring it, going through it, going over and across it…
We ended up walking around it, and got to the Mallory in time to hear Jemiah finish her first reading. And put in a drinks order, but really, the important thing was to be there to support the book and the reading and what the hell was taking those drinks so long?
This, then, all of it, perhaps goes some way towards explaining why I threw down martinis at a steady clip, and perhaps also why I’m glad gin doesn’t stain wool. And why I am stingy with details as to the witty and amusing things Johnzo said and Victoria said and Kirsten said and Jemiah her own dam’ self and I’m sorry, I can’t find a link for Ralph the Chiropractor (it was Ralph, wasn’t it?) and if I did realize suddenly (or was told) that the reason Brandon had been naggingly familiar was that she’d taken some photos for Anodyne (yes, I’d been the managing editor, but it was only for a few months and I was always misplacing memos), or that vampires are (yet) big in the Zeitgeist not so much because of the linkage of blood and sex and disease and death (though yes, of course, that’s there) but because they are all of them so very tired and jaded and numb and laden with ennui (not such a bad thing to pretend to be when everything’s moving so far so very quickly), or that Portland doesn’t have a Cleveland (but it does have a Clyde), or that the rhetoric of cane gestures bears some intriguing similarities to the rhetoric of cigarette gestures which it might well be worth exploring when less impaired, and there was something in all that about tall redheads, wasn’t there? —Well. None of that is important enough to go into any of the details that are anyway thin on the ground, today. But that is, perhaps, enough to give you a taste. Oh! And Steve was able to inform us all that eating a torched M&M was rather like nibbling a chocolate chip cookie that had been in the oven a wee bit too long. There.
The cigarettes, though—
See, none of us smokes. But quite a few of us smoke, from time to time. Socially, you know. At parties. If someone else is. That sort of thing. I’d brought along the packet of cloves I’m working on this month; I’d had maybe two or three of the 20. There’s now just the four left, and that doesn’t count the pack of regular smokes someone nipped out and bought when I wasn’t looking.
So that, see, explains the whole reeking of smoke thing. —And I didn’t even tell you about the bar full of bitchy Rosarians. Or the Commodore. (Which wasn’t the bar that was full of bitchy Rosarians.) And did anyone ever figure out what the hell those big guys on the TV set were doing, with those giant rocks, and that wall? I wasn’t imagining that, was I?
(Jenn? “My” Jenn? Though she regretted missing an opportunity to wear her ball gown, it wouldn’t have had much fun on our trek, and anyway, there was the whole ankle thing from last week, and besides all that, she’s getting close to getting the first chapter done, so she stayed home and drew and made merciless fun of me when I staggered in at what, 2:30 in the morning? —Thanks to a bucket brigade of rides organized on the fly by people who’d had less to drink than I. Anyway, go, look, see!)
That quality of being cheesy,
or, Suspicions confirmed.
Before I get into this, I feel the need to affirm that yes, what follows is, indeed, true—in every important particular.
We—me, and Jenn, and Chris Baldwin—were cruising the Gorge, looking at waterfalls. Our second stop of the day was the impossibly picturesque Vista House, perched rather cheekily at the very lip of Crown Point’s precipitous plunge into the Columbia River. (A small plane flew by; we looked down on it.) Now, I feel the need to point out that, while I was nattily dressed, we were doing an old-fashioned outing in the country—and really, a straw porkpie such as the one I was wearing is, perhaps, not quite the thing to wear with tweed. So it wasn’t like I was being a stickler or anything. (I want to make sure you grasp this: we were all wearing tweed.) —Still, I was the only one with a tie, and a vest; perhaps it was this that singled me out for their attention.
“Excuse me,” said one of four (or perhaps five?) scruffily clean-cut young men. “Could you—?” He was holding out a small digital camera.
“Of course,” I said. Instructions were given—peer here, yes, hold this until it clicks, simplicity itself. The four (I believe it was four, and not five) of them arranged themselves, arms about shoulders, jockeying a bit to sort themselves out. I didn’t have to suggest that the tallest of them ought to stand in back. They knew the drill. “Horizontal or vertical?” I asked, as a formality; we’re in the Gorge, for fuck’s sake. “Horizontal,” said the one who’d handed me the camera. —Landscape it was. I framed them nicely (if I do say so myself), lower rightish quadrant, with the arc of the river and the deep, deep ditch of the Gorge, thirty miles or more of it, over and out behind them.
I should perhaps relay at this point my uncertainty regarding their clothing. I seem to recall that one of them wore a sweatshirt with the logo of some gym or perhaps a sports team emblazoned on the front; I recall some stylish corduroys. A half-zip polarfleece pullover, perhaps, on one of them (though that might be the sweatshirt, reduplicating oddly in my memory). —But surely the hearty salmon chamois shirt I insist on draping around the shoulders of one of them is some odd cross-referencing error from my days writing copy for Norm Thompson. (It couldn’t have been that obvious.)
Poses struck, smiles plastered, camera set, I poised my finger over the shutter release. “Say something cheese-like,” I said. Ever the droll one.
“Something cheese-like,” cried three (or perhaps four), all of them quick and game.
“Smegma,” said the fourth, quickest by far and droller than I.
(I’m pretty sure there were just four, come to think of it.)
An attempt at sketching in prose what goes through my mind when Robyn Hitchcock begins to ramble in that engagingly undrunken monotone about the Isle of Wight before starting to contort a guitar in his own unmistakable, beautifully ugly idiom.
I don’t like to point at someone and say, hey, that person right there, that’s my best friend, but looking back, I’m starting to think maybe Kim was my best friend in college, for most of it. Easily as tall as me and big, a black belt in aikido—the first time I ever met her sister was when I agreed to take Kim to a Moody Blues show in Cleveland, because Zak was out of town and Kim’s mother really thought it best that a man should accompany Kim to the concert, you know, for safety, and geeze, I felt safer with her around, and that was what was so funny, see? (I met her sister then because, you see, Annemarie was going to the concert too, with her boyfriend at the time, but let’s not get sidetracked. This isn’t about Annemarie.)
There was the night we were hanging out on the Memorial Bandstand thingie, the atrocious affront to undergraduate sensibilities put up my freshman year that Rob had the brilliant idea to hang a Fotomat sign off of in a prank that misfired at the last minute. (Would I have been caught by Security, had I gone that night, like that guy who was too stupid to do anything but run when it went down bad? —Who cares?) Me and Zak and Kim, and Zak had a theatrical rapier, light and flimsy, just the thing for wearing under your cloak on a cool autumn night when you’re a romantic college student (strike that; let’s go with Romantic, instead); I had the cane that had been an integral part of the costume (there is no other word for it: tails, top hat, white gloves, cane) that I’d worn to my senior prom and still carried from time to time as an affectation (I’d also worn zero-prescription stage glasses the first couple of weeks at college, because I don’t need glasses, but they’re cool to play with—until a friend who did need glasses gently pointed out it was kind of, you know, dorky) and Kim had nothing at all but her bare hands and, well, her aikido; anyway. We staged this mock running sparring Erroll Flynn donnybrook up and down that stupid pomo gazebo, all for none and your ass is mine: rapier on staff, click clack, and Kim reaching in every now and then to grab a hand or an arm or something and twist and send one or the other of us scuttle-rolling across the floor. Enormous fun.
There was the night, and this one I’m having trouble placing, because it took place in one of those gorgeous upstairs lounges in Asia House, and I didn’t live in Asia House until my disastrous third year (second-and-a-half, really), and by that point Zak and Kim were married and living in Kent, or maybe it was one of the towns near the place where Kent State is, I dunno. —Annemarie and I saw The Mountains of the Moon in a theater there—or was it Kim and I? And Zak? (All I really remember about the damn thing is when Speke kissed Burton.) So I’m thinking this pretty much couldn’t have happened that year, the year—semester, really—I was living in Asia House. But I’m hard-pressed to explain exactly how we came to be there otherwise, or why. But there we were, me and Kim and a boom box and a tape of the soundtrack to The Mission, and for whatever reason—whenever it was, my second year, or my second-and-a-half, there was stress and to spare—we were, well, dancing. Not together; not even to the music, per se. The music was a catalyst—that oboe, the chanting, those drums; the movement was, well, something else. But we did it. And never really spoke of it. (Did it have to do with Zak? Liz? Not Annemarie, no, not then, which would place it in my second year, and it doesn’t really matter why, really, not so long after the fact; whatever it was we were upset over or worried about is long gone, and all that’s left is the memory of what we did about it, which was striking and inexplicable and oddly haunting. And I still have no idea why we were in Asia House that night.)
The odd games she ran, the uncategorizable intersections of role playing, improvisational theatre, performance art and encounter group—geeze, that makes them sound terrible, which they weren’t. Chas, Zak, Liz, me, her: I’m thinking, say, of her vision of Eden: the room was dark, and Bach was playing, terribly loudly (organ fugues, but it could have been a Goldberg; my memory is lousy, ask anyone), and she as God was pelting us all with stuffed animals and fig newtons. Zak (Leviathan) sat in a closet and said things I couldn’t hear, and Chas (the Serpent) kept tempting Liz (Eve), but I (Adam) wasn’t following any of that; I was taking up the stuffed animals and naming them, pretty much. Just focussing on my job, what I’d been told to do, and when the whole thing went down bad it took me desperately by surprise. The music, the darkness, the animals, the food—all gone, and why? Why? —An image of Adam (it’s far from the only one, of course) I’d never have found myself, and always liked. (What of Eve? The Serpent? Leviathan? God? I don’t really know. Thus, the inherent limitations of the medium.) (In Boston, there was a Greek myth, with [sort of] masks; but that’s more complicated, much, and I don’t want to get sidetracked.)
I can still see her, in my mind’s eye, for all that it’s been years since: almost a parody of the Teutonic milkmaid, a Valkyrie in muddy boots, big blue eyes and ruddy cheeks (yes: ruddy) and a disarming handful of childlike expressions—fierce determination, glum disappointment, gleeful wonder—that could cross her face in alarmingly sophisticated ways, and all I have to do to smile is think of her tossing back her head and belting out “Ja, ja, ja, ja!” like Madeline Kahn. I can hear her still, too—not so much her voice exactly as the music of it: the pitch, the timbre. The rhythm. (Zak is harder to hear. Chas is here in town, so. Liz? Almost gone—a faint hint, the flavor of it, yes, but I told you: my memory is lousy. Annemarie—but no.) —We only ever slept together the one time, but it wasn’t like that, not at all: we were both trying to be fair to other people. Thinking back I can’t say for sure that this was the first time she’d ever slept with someone she didn’t love, didn’t long for, yearn for, need, but it was the first time I ever had, and it was—fun. Relaxed. We laughed a lot.
But it was Eva, not Kim, who gave me Hitchcock. “You’ve got to listen to this,” she said, and played me “Heaven,” and then the whole of fegMANIA!, start to finish. Eva, whom I took to my senior prom: me in that get-up, tails and top hat, white gloves and cane, and her in a white creation of lace and satin and silk, and white fishnets underneath. (I can see her easily enough, and hear her, too: she had an adorably goofy laugh, like Jenn does. Kim, too. Which is not to say Liz didn’t, per se.) Eva’s LPs I taped: fegMANIA! and Black Snake Dîamond Röle and Element of Light and I Often Dream of Trains and Invisible Hitchcock and Groovy Decoy or Decay or whatever it was called and yes, I found my own copies later and bought them all, and more besides, which is something the record companies claim they just don’t understand. Eva who was hunting for a copy of “Bones in the Ground” off the impossible-to-find Bells of Rhymney EP. (It was later included in a reissue of I Often Dream of Trains that I have on the shelf, over there.) And it was Eva I was trying to conjure up that achingly lonely night in my dorm room freshman year, the corner room I shared with Kevin in the cornerstone dorm of the main campus, and the windows were open and I had Element of Light in the tape deck cranked up high (Kevin was out) and when “Bass” stumbles to a halt, it’s then that the backwards guitar starts crawling out of the speakers and lofting up suddenly swooping into the sky with the drums and bass clattering after it, oh—
—and when it’s over, I look over at the door and there’s Kim, whom I’ve met maybe once before (Zak introduced us; there’s a whole story about how they got together, but I’d get it wrong, and anyway, I don’t want to go into it). It’s Kim leaning there on the jamb and that gleeful grin is lighting up her face, and I’m standing there blinking, slow on the uptake me.
“I heard the music,” she said, “and I thought it might be you. And then I looked up and saw the top hat bobbing around in the window and knew it.”
—Liz never liked Robyn. Jenn doesn’t much, either, but it’s more like she’s never really acquired the taste; Liz actively disliked him. (Still: the one time I saw him in concert—with Kim, and Zak, and Chas, and Annemarie and her boyfriend at the time were there, too, weren’t they—I bought a T-shirt [“One Long Pair of Eyes”] and when later that summer I bussed out to see Liz [Cleveland to Philadelphia over the Pine Barrens to Atlantic City and down the coast to Toms River] I gave it to her, which says a lot about how little I knew of what I was doing, then.) But that isn’t really why last week when I stuck my head into Movie Madness and poked around until I found Storefront Hitchcock I waited until a day when Jenn was at work and I wasn’t to pop the tape into the VCR and sit down and watch it.
But that is why—all of it, mind, every bit, and the stuff I’ve left out, too—that’s why when he started to talk about the Isle of Wight, I felt the floor drop out from under my feet, and I hung there, shivering, waiting—
“Every year I can walk along that beach,” he said, or something like it, “a little bit grayer, a little bit fatter, just walking through the same pools. And the thing is, the sand erodes, the soil is very soft there, it crumbles away; every year a few meters of that beach is just lost into the sea. So you can imagine that where people walked three centuries ago is now far out to sea, and their ghosts are literally walking over the sand dunes.”
And then, oh God, that guitar—
