Music Writing

1. Streetlamp and a cozy cigarette by the window- she’s so beautiful walking with one hip sway.
2. We walk into this Mexican restaurant and my mum orders a Cadillac margarita while forcing me to talk to the waitress in Spanish.
3. Toby swings around, umbrella extended, making me laugh with his faux-sad smile.
4. It’s a big shindig here, out in the middle of the banks with the river dwellers calling out, a cook off, the outhouses are too far way to smell and the meat tastes soo good.  (try this one too)
5. I will stare at this clock until it turns to one thirty goddamn it, and we’re finally out of this math class.
6. Painfully pink these little girls dressed up to see yet another ballet as they wiggle their butts in time to the music.
7. Walking down the coast, off to the side I see the boat wrenching itself through the water, hauling up fish and seaweed.
8. I’m drifting along the sidewalk with the bus stop in mind, silent and scary- dark and scented with coffee.
9. Drops of water are falling down the windows and I’m sure there’s someone else outside because the phone won’t work.
10. We pop into the chocolate shop and gasp at the counter, beautifully stuffed with perfect wisps of cream and sugar.
11.  Cut to a blue neon sign followed by a sweet face, looking for the right motel.
12. Agh- will I ever leave this Spanish karaoke hell?!
13. Hide hide hide hide hide, duck down lower.
14. The beach is perfectly white, populated by gorgeous brown girls humming the sweetness of a horn solo, smelling of plumaria.

Lightning

It seemed like every time we crawled into Auntie Di’s above ground pool a thunderstorm started. We’d be herded inside by adults who warned us that water carries electricity as they covered our heads with towels. We’d sit on the screened in portch and watch the lightning, counting the seconds between the flash and the crash to determine when it was safe to climb back into the pool.

 We never went back in too soon. Never escaped the porch- sliding like old war soldiers along the deck railing. We were all scared to touch it- like the pool was a huge uncharged battery outside wating to be flipped on by lightning.

Notes and Proposals

Okay-

Note that in the post below the pictures are hyperlinked (for the most part) to the numbers. Not to any words.

 Now- as for this multimedia project we’re about to embark upon, I want to do something more along the lines of Alison Bechdel’s work- a comic book of some sort. Unfortunately, I’m not a particularly talented artist, so this work will probably include both drawing and collage in order to fill the panels well. 

The other medium I’d love to work in would be sound. I do a ton of that already, however. Optimallly, if I had time I could make a mini video, using audio as I read whatever text piece I come up with- and intersperse it with snippets of my songs. that would be amazing- but also incredibly time consuming.

The above notion would be really excellent if I did a text piece on music.

Subject content for this multimedia piece is still not firm in my mind- if I had to decide now I’d say the options are

1. Music- guitars, my lack of explicit knowledge- failure at music theory, obsession, concerts, Bumbershoot- music as it determines emotion, chemical reaction…  Different places you hear music- elevators, bars, restaurants, stores, on the street, in the bus, via headphones… where does it matter… what quality is it?  Musicians- is it a boys club (of course it is.. )

2.  Obsession with Latin America- El Salvador and Brazil predominately (that would be cool for the collage piece). The sense of being foreign in one place, fitting in in another- the desire to NOT BE AMERICAN. Why? To what ends to we acheive this goal? Is it a good goal?

Those are my two twisted ideas (form one goes with idea 2, form 2 goes with idea 1)

Sentences I did Write

1. Were people shocked before the invention of electricity?

 

2. Silent, the children crawl between long grasses and millions of grasshoppers, passing the parents with popsicles sweetening their summer mouths, through the tunnel, around the wood chips, over someone-less-important’s head until… finally…home base. 

 

3. Standing in line drives me absolutely crazy; especially when everyone else seems to have been helped to their final (seated) destination.

 

4. Jack shimmies out the window and hops down to the pavement haloed by security lights and the half eaten moon.

 

 5. Felipe once expulsed these words of wisdom from his mottled bag of brains: “ If you need a high so badly you can’t snort it or smoke it, there’s something wrong.”

 

6. I had an infatuation with Chinese lanterns and bought them by the armful for future use in my first apartment.

 

7. You can bargain and barter for anything in New York- it costs nothing to haggle, and the etiquette seems to call for it.   

 

8. She curls up, dozy after a couple of beers from her shopping bag.

 

9. I used to be jealous of Catholicism because of its gilded altars, sober offerings, precise rituals- all of which accumulated as superstition, yet somehow transmuted into faith.

 

10. I once had a dream where I was responsible for the lines- wire and taught, crossed in a square- remaining uncut.

Sentences I did not Write

1.

Songs like tiny hammers hurled at beveled mirrors in empty halls

Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon 

2. and did i tell you how i stopped eating?

 when you stopped calling me

 i was cramped up shitting rivers for weeks

and pretending that i was finally free

Ani DiFranco- Swan dive  

3. In its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.

The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien

4. Bring the tonic and the gin
say what was your name again?
Put another quarter in

Stay with me tonight

Anais Mitchell- Old fashioned Hat  

5. Penitential colours – less like something she’d chosen to put on than like something she’d been locked up in.

Margaret Atwood- The Blind Assassin

6.

According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but Jack’s most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother’s hand. He wasn’t acting then.

John Irving- Until I find You…

7. Maybe this was the same offhanded way his own notoriously cold father had shown him his first cadaver- or maybe he felt that he’d become to inured to death, and was hoping to elicit form me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of-

Or maybe he just needed the scissors.

Alison Bechdel- Fun Home

8. Could I pay a mouse with a tiny paintbrush to jump on my head and dye them one by one?

Miranda July, How to tell stories to children

9. That I found the house with ease surprised no one; it was, of course waiting for me- an 1840 white eyebrow colonial, in the enchanted beguiling Hudson Valley.

Carole Maso – The Shelter of the Alphabet

10.       who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of 

              beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-

              dle and fell off the bed, and continued along

              the floor and down the hall and ended fainting

              on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and

              come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

Alan Ginsberg- Howl

Furniture

Furniture is clutter and sentiment and that pull in your gut when you

Have to throw it out

Because the Adirondack chair brings back

The smoke on her breath as she shot into the night

Blanks from her mouth-

Ripping out words

The slurp the slip downwards

At the corner of her lips

Leaning back into the nestle and hum of a chair

 

In this instance wood is bones

And the cradle of her rib cage is

This furniture

 

September is still warm

The wicker is less comfortable.

 

I’ll keep the chair until it truly festers on the front porch  

Maps

Distance: 2,500 miles away, out west. The map- if I measure using fingers- tells me that’s where my mother is. But it’s static. Doesn’t show her transit

If I call her, she seems a block away. But maybe 3 years ago.

I trust the maps, the blood lines of rivers and the clotting of damns. I see the industry- lights, and power, the nerves- electricity. The power in knowing the exact location of the nation’s arteries.

I trust though I have not traveled the border between Montana and Idaho that it is there. Tangible- an edge, a cliff, a cut.

Seattle and the Sell Out

Ok y’all- I need lots of help here. I haven’t ended it b/c I don’t know how. I have three ideas of what the overarching point of the story is, and I need to weave this stuff together better. Here is the first draft…

SSO

Stranger Studies

She has an in between shade of red brown hair. Like it’s been hennaed, but not recently, and only a little bit. She holds the pool cue like a harpoon and circles the table swaying one hip out, and tucking her butt back in. It’s not a sexy walk, but a doc Martin’s walk. A confident pop. Blue sweater, not cleavage bearing but slim fit. Green pants. Cargo. Pool cue slides between her fingers. She doesn’t hit hard. She rests the pool cue in her hand, holding the tip one finger over. Her voice, what I can hear of it, is husky. Lower. Beer drinking- smoky.  She wears thick silver jewelry- a ball and chain necklace.

***

Dark hair, lamp light (powdered chocolate) skin, no liner almond shaped eyes. Her hair feathers around her face in unconscious curl. One leg is over her knee, and the foot jiggles, constantly. She breathes in, chokes forward her shoulders, and then relaxes them back against the seat.  Her eyebrows are drawn in towards her nose. She has an accent. They’re talking about relationships. Red shirt beneath brown sweater. No lipstick either. She folds her hands under her chin and in her lap, looking at the girl across from her. Nodding. Small nods. But definitely there- not weak.

 

Now she moves her hands up and down- one up, other down. Other up, first one down. A weighing motion. Her fingers are interwoven again, in front of her chin. Eyes focused on her friend.

 

***

His hands move in circle motions, a finger points at the listener, then he flops his whole arm in the air. He’s pulling his hands apart, putting his fingers together in the okay sign. Scratching his head, big knuckles tensed and raised. He’s bald in one batch- the front crest still exists, and the back head is full. The crown is pink, and the lamp above his head is shining on the skin. He’s wearing a white turtleneck with a grey crew cut sweater. The effect is something like a vicar or a priest. He’s sitting down, but holds on to the rail- sitting in profile as he sips from a free cup of water. Small pointy ears on his big head- stubble around the chin, up to the jaw hinge. Prominent brow. Smiles, only shows the middle 4 front teeth- and a slight double chin swells around his face.

 

1)      He wears a charcoal sweater over a white turtleneck. His face is broad featured and looks like it’s been pummeled multiple times. The ridge of his eyebrows juts out to make a shelf off his forehead.

2)      When he moves his hands they make monkey-like jerks. He’s always grasping to the handrail, except when he’s picking up his food and transporting it hastily from fork to mouth. The hinge of his jaw visibly moves when he chews- hard and deliberately.

3)      He reminds me of a cross between a vicar and a football coach. At the same time, he could be a salt-of-the-earth type. When he nods and laughs I see him cooking eggs and tending to chickens; or plowing the acres behind his barn.

Braided Essays

My options/ ideas

I.

An essay about Kris- the ex-boyfriend who I dated because he was Salish (native american) and had lesbian gaurdians like I did. The sense of an identity not being ENOUGH. The romanticization of a person via their past- ignoring them as an individual and paying attention, instead, to heritage.

Thread 1. The relationship as it was.

Thread 2. His mother, and her coin collection that he gave me.

Thread 3. The Salish tribe- the life on Reservations in Montana/ the pacific northwest. Reserach. Hard fact. the BIA etc. 18 money. Their case for fishing in Lake Cushman. The Dams.

Worries: It could end up being too sappy (always a problem) OR too Sherman Alexie (it’s already been done)

II.

SEATTLE

Why I loved it- why I can’t stand it anymore. 

Thread II. HISTORICAL, Pioneer Square etc. the districts, the docks, fires and logging- bainbridge island, the San Juans, the creation of Broadway as the cultural epicenter for the city

Thread III. MUSICAL. Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Sound Garden, Maktub, people who’ve played at the Paramount, the Moore. Grunge and the 90s. Indie and the present.

Thread I. PERSONAL- Concerts. Highschool. The houses. The dissatisfaction with moving up and on and out of the Central District. The separation of Rainier Ave- like a border line between rich/poor, white/black, educated/ screwed by “the system”.

I and III can be VERY tied.

Concerns: too broad. Might mesh better as written though.