Happy Birthday, Love!
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There’s this band I’ve loved for years, The Moldy Peaches, mostly because I’m just in awe (re: drooling fan) of their singer Kimya Dawson for all sorts of reasons, like she says what she thinks and can pull off angry and funny at the same time and also she’s played with They Might Be Giants and Regina Spektor and, in the middle of a song, launches into a hard-core a capella cover of Whitney Houston’s Greatest Gift of All (HA!), plus she wrote a song with MJ Geier who A. is in tenth grade and B. co-chairs (in honor of her sister) the Love Hallie Foundation and also, on Kimya Dawson’s bio, it says this—
“The world is in a state of disarray and Kimya sees that, but she also sees all the magnificent strangeness and unwavering beauty in the world and in people. And she shows us how to see it too.”
—which is really inspiring, I think. I like that as a mission for an artist: to show people there’s greatness in the midst of all this craziness.
So anyhow, what’s got me thinking right now is her song I Like Giants which she wrote after a really kick-ass conversation as a thank-you. I’m thinking what a great idea that is: to thank someone for good conversation. When was the last time you had one? About … anything: the future or love or education or your fears or frustrations or art or books or music, anything that gets you thinking, helps you feel better, helps you feel something! So, thank you, Amanda, for that talk yesterday about the psychology of storytelling and the use of point of view as a possible defense mechanism and thank you, Jeff, for the talk about what it means to be a part of community and must you adhere to all the rules/stereotypes of that community and thank you, Betsy, for five years of You Can Do It I Totally Believe In You and Kim, thank you for that discussion last month after Kimberlee Soo’s play and Lott for that talk about what you and your students saw in New Orleans over Alternative Spring Break and thank you to all my students for everything you teach me every week and thank you, Dad, for the whole When is it appropriate to still parent your kid and when is it time to treat them as an adult thing and thank you, Randy, for pretty much the last decade of conversation and thank you, Dia, for every What Am I Even Doing With My Life talk and thank-you, Kat, for that one at Marigold last month about how sometimes I just can’t handle all the pressure and Julia for the Wednesday afternoon crazy caffeine-induced ramble sessions in your office and all the girls at the Bongo Room for ten years of Sundays at that back booth and Shiow for the This is How We’ll Take Over the World stuff and Adam for the turning dreams into actual reality discussions/planning sessions and Mom, thank you, for every pep talk for the past thirty years and Christopher—thank you. For all of it, every day, the silly talks and the big heavy ones and the This is How You Changed My Life stuff and everything we have to do to get through the day and the lists and the plans and the laughing and the laughing and the laughing.
Dear The American Motion Picture Association,
Can you please start producing more double features? ‘Cause that was the first time in a VERY long time that I’ve walked out of a theater thinking, ‘I LOVE spending nine dollars on a movie!' ('cause if you do that math it was probably four dollars a movie and twenty-five cents per fictional preview which, like--what a STEAL!)
Dear Richard Rodriguez,
We just saw your movie Planet Terror and Oh my God it was awesome!!!!!! I love zombie movies!!!!! Especially ones where the strippers have machine guns for prosthetic legs and also they can fly and the guy from Six Feet Under back-flips off the wall to Kung Fu that dead guy and the nurse, she had a thigh holster full of poisoned needles and also there’s motorcycles and convertibles and green smoke and brain suckers and bubbly pus-filled growths coming out of people's heads and it was soooo super cool!!!!!
Dear Quentin Tarantino,
We just saw your movie Death Proof and—[POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT] okay. That car chase ROCKED MY ENTIRE WOLRD and I’m a girl who’s into the car chases, you know? My favorites are the highway scene from the 2nd Matrix and the whole LeeLou-in-the-back-of-the-cab part in Fifith Element and also that scene in James Bond where Bond is handcuffed to a motorcycle with Michelle Yeoh and also, The Rock (that Hummer just tore UP San Fransisco!) and also Mad Max and also Ronin and the first Gone in Sixty Seconds (the remake sorta made me want to puke in my mouth) and, of course, OF COURSE, Steve McQueen in Bullit but what you did with Zoe Bell on the hood of that Dodge Challenger just about killed me, like, you know how you walk out of a theater at the end of a movie and some employee is standing there passing out mints asking how you enjoyed the show? I said, “It was f’ing AWESOME!” ‘cause I had all that adrenaline from watching Zoe slide all over that car and then—THEN! When they took off after the guy with that big-ass lead pipe I CHEERED OUT LOUD and it was just great, is what I’m saying, GREAT GREAT GREAT!!!!!
That said, I have a bone to pick, Quentin Tarantino. Here’s the thing: I like the ‘dialogue about nothing’ thing you do. I liked it in the beginning of Reservoir Dogs when they’re talking about Madonna and I liked it in Pulp Fiction with the whole Royale with cheese thing and I liked it in Four Rooms when Bruce Willis was talking about whatever he was talking about before they made that bet, like, what I’m saying is, I’m WITH you, you know? I GET it—that’s how people really talk, just jabber jabber jabber about not so much of anything and it helps the audience identify with these characters who do really horrible things, like I’m sitting there thinking, “Why yes, Mr. Pink, I TOO felt ‘Like a Virgin’ was a metaphorical song,” or “Thank you, Mr. Blonde, for sticking up for waitresses,” and what happens is I’m empathizing with these guys so when they do all sorts of horrible/stupid things later in the film, I already have that whole ‘Hey, I like that guy!’ kind of connection. HOWEVER—and this is a really big however, Quentin Tarantino—I’m really mad about all that jabbering the girls do in Death Proof and here’s why: YOU CUT VANESSA FERLITO’S LAPDANCE. And not ONLY did you spend nearly twenty minutes of film time building up to that lap dance, so not ONLY was it like the focal point of the whole story, and not ONLY did those girls spend EONS of time babbling about boys that had zero relevance and never showed up ANYHOW, BUT ALSO VANESSA FERLITO IS REALLY HOT. IN A ‘IF I WENT THAT WAY’ SORT OF WAY, OR MAYBE EVEN IN A ‘I’D CONSIDER GOING THAT WAY’ WAY. AND I WANTED TO SEE HER DO A LAPDANCE. AND NOW I HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL THE DVD COMES OUT, WHICH MAYBE WAS PART OF YOUR PLAN, QUENTIN TARANTINO, BUT I HAVE NOT SO MUCH OF THE PATIENCE. THEREFORE I’D APPRECIATE IT IF IN THE FUTURE YOU WOULD NOT WASTE MY TIME BUILDING UP STORYLINES YOU DON’T USE AND ALSO LET ME SEE VANESSA FERLITO DANCE SUGGESTIVELY. THANK YOU.
Dear Vanessa Ferlito,
I really enjoyed your performance in Grindhouse and look forward to seeing more of your work in the future.
Dear Zoe Bell,
To Hell with this writing thing. I want to be a stuntwoman. Specifically, I want to be you.
“I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Issac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, ‘Isaac is up in heaven now.’ It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, ‘Kurt is up in heaven now.’ That's my favorite joke.” from A Man Without a Country (2005)
When I woke up this morning I read that Kurt Vonnegut died and, it’s like—I really LOVED that guy, you know? I read all his stuff and shamelessly imitated him and told my dad the world was foma and then, later, when I started taking my writing more seriously, I tried to follow his rules of creative writing, especially when I read that Flannery O’Connor was the only one to have broken them all which A. taught me that Vonnegut must read like crazy if he knew that O’Connor was the only one who did that and B. made me read all of O’Connor’s stuff so I could SEE how she did that which C. trained me to read in a more constructive way and also D. turned me on to O’Connor in the first place and she’s one of my favorites to this day so ANYHOW, when I read that he’d died I made a pot of coffee and got out all my copies of his stuff (which took a while, FYI: we’re having shelves built right now so our books are still boxed up and I went through them all to find the Slaughterhouse V and the Timequake, the Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle and Welcome to the Monkey House) and, for the past hour or so, have sat here reading. RE-reading.
I do this thing when I’m reading where, if I like something, I dog-ear the page so I can find it later. If I’m really on my game, I write the thing down in my journal along with a few paragraphs about WHY I like it—it was funny, or philosophical, or it spoke to something I was going through personally at the moment or, after I really started studying writing, how was that passage written and how can I learn from it (ie use the technique to solve some of the problems I’m having in my own stuff)—and recording those impressions is pretty goddamn smart because if you DON’T write down why you like something, you’ll open up the book ten years later and be all Why did I dog ear this page again? Which sentence out of all these sentences grabbed me back when I read it, and why? (Dear my students who google me: yet another reason why you’re journaling about what you read week after week after week. It’s just not all going to stay in your head!) It’s an interesting marker of who you are as a person: when I was twenty I might notice one thing, and then something completely different when I’m thirty.
ANYHOW, I’ve sat here all morning with my Vonnegut books and there are hundreds of pages dog-eared. I mean, hundreds. In some places, I underlined passages, but for the most part I’ve just read through all these pages trying to find whatever took my attention back when I was reading this stuff so religiously (ten years ago, maybe?) (Vonnegut would probably be pissed that I used the adverb ‘religiously’ to describe how I read his stories. FOMA, he’d tell me. FOMA) and for the life of me, I can’t. BUT! I did find a hundred new reasons to dog-ear the pages, passages that are grabbing me now, and that’s the best thing about reading, if you ask me: the work will connect to you over and over again in all sorts of new ways. As you get older, live your life, break hearts and ache and laugh. All around you, the World will change, but the book will still find you.
One more thing: a fellow teacher of mine taught me a game. He says it can only be played with the novel Good Solider Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek, but I think it works with anything. Here’s how you play: I say, “Tell me when to stop,” and start flipping through the pages of a book.
You say, “Stop,” and I open the book to whichever two pages I was on at that moment and ask, “Left or Right?”
You pick one, and I put my finger to the top of the page you chose. “Tell me when to stop,” I say again, dragging my finger down the page, and whatever passage it’s on when you say stop is your fortune for the day.
This is what I feel like, rereading all the Vonnegut. These little passages jumping out at me, like fortunes—probably they’re illustrative of my current state of mind. I’m sure that, were I angry or sad or depressed or whatever, I could find passages for that, too: as in life, you can find any emotion in a good f’ing piece of literature.
So here’s some Vonnegut for you this morning—the Vonnegut that jumped out at me. Give it a read and then go get your own Vonnegut. Maybe open up to any random page, run your finger down it 'til someone says stop and that's your fortune (and if you want to send me that passage in the comments, that'd be nifty). Vonnegut’d probably like that. It would make him not so dead, to know people are finding themselves in his stories.
And is he really dead, anyway? Here, read this (from Salughterhouse V):
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
And also:
“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
“Listen: The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. ‘Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?’ she asked me. ‘The big show is inside my head,’ I said.”
“Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.”
“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.’”
“Roses are red and ready for plucking. You're sixteen and ready for high school.”
“All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
“I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.”
“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
“We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap,” (to be written on a wall in the Grand Canyon as a message for aliens)
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”
And, from an Interview with the American Public Broadcasting Service:
“(talking about when he tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
And—my favorite—written on Billy Pilgrim’s tombstone in Slaughterhouse V:
“Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”
And, from Vonnegut's Blues For America in the Sunday Herald:
“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.”
We dog sit sometimes for our friends Scott and Amy, and what their bulldog puppy does is suck on the Vizsla’s ear—for HOURS. It’s like she’s trying to swallow it but can’t because it’s attached to this great big dog. I can’t explain how fascinating it is: you just can’t look away, and then, like twenty minutes later, you’re all ‘Why am I still watching this?’
So, like five minutes ago I’m walking my dog and I pass these guys, five of them total, all baggy pants and puffy jackets and fifteen-year-old swagger, and one of them says—he actually says this!—“Hey, sweetie, you wanna walk me, too? TO THE BEDROOM?!” and I’m like, “How old are you? ‘Cause I’d bet my life you don’t even have a driver’s license and seriously, I’m thirty years old and I’ve put in my time listening to sorry-ass lines like that and I tell you what, I’m DONE, little man, so go home to your mother, read some books and learn to sting together a sentence that’s not A. cliché and B. gonna make a girl laugh in your smug-ass fucking face,” but the thing is, I don’t say any of that. Because it’s dark. Because I’m outnumbered five to one. Because opening my mouth would be stupid. We all know it’s stupid.
It’s all just so stupid.
This is one of those Damn, why didn't I think of that? things.
I woke up this morning to somebody leaning on my doorbell for ten minutes and when I finally answered (nine a.m., pre-coffee, snippy), “WHAT?!” my lovely, wonderful, rock star of a new neighbor, Zach, yelled, “Megan they’re towing your car!” (Dear Zach: THANK YOU) and I ran down the stairs barefoot in my pajamas and jumped into the car AS THEY WERE HOOKING IT UP TO THE TOW TRUCK and the driver laughed and took pity on me. What happened next was fifteen minutes of me trying to find a parking spot and not being able to because the streets were lined with ginormous tour buses.
FYI: I live next door to the Aragon Ballroom, a fairly landmark Chicago music venue (which may very well be one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen, all Spanish mosaic and colored brick and sculpture. Needs a little TLC for sure, but, man, the LOVE that went into building this thing is visible nearly eighty years later. I’m still very new to Uptown and am just starting to learn its history, but the dog and I go on these long walks in the morning and every time we turn a corner there’s something new to blow my mind [last week’s Chicago Reader did a cover story on Uptown and I learned a great deal, especially The High Ground and A Hundred Furnished Rooms]).
Also FYI: I’ve lived here since December and this was the first time I couldn’t find a spot, so I do NOT regret not buying the parking space that came with our condo (because A. it was forty grand [!!!!!!!!!!!!!] and B. it won’t even be BUILT for another two years [!!!!!!!!] [“BUILD a PARKING space?” you ask, to which I say, ‘RIGHT??!!!] and C. the idea of paying [re: borrowing. And paying killer interest on] FORTY GRAND to buy something that DOESN’T YET EXIST while there is still STREET PARKING APLENTY [with the one exception of, you know, this morning] is a little out there. Even for me).
So ANYHOW, I had to park all the way down at Argyle, in Vietnam Town, and walk the six blocks barefoot in my pajamas (and I thought that my getting married would put an end to my walk of shame days. HA!) past roadies (and you KNOW that’s the way to start your week. Walking—on the city sidewalk without shoes, which, like, OW—past a team of tour roadies in your blue nightgown) and these HOARDS of fourteen-year-old girls who must be skipping school in order to camp out in front of the Aragon and catch a glimpse of whoever’s in those tour buses. When I got back inside (and thoroughly washed my feet) I looked it up on the internet: OK GO, the guys who did the tredmill video, and Snow Patrol. They do that song without any chord changes, right? That played on Grey’s Anatomy when Izzie realized she didn’t want to give up being a surgeon? My friend Kim said she saw them before got big and they’re really good, and she has impeccable, very non-mainstream taste in music and the thing of it is, both Kim and I, back in the day, were pretty indie-rock [ie we liked the music and also dated indie rock musicians] and ten years ago would’ve gone on some big tangent about selling out and Fuck the Man and blah blah but honestly, I just don’t CARE anymore—I LIKE the idea of an artist making a living and, you know, eating, and since my thoughts on selling out are better expressed here I’ll just say Rock on, Snow Patrol. I don’t know any of your songs except that one but maybe Kim [Kim?] will burn me some of it and also it says here on the interweb that your show is sold out which, like—Good for you! Enjoy my street!).
FACT: the Aragon was here first. I moved into its neighborhood, and not only DON’T I have a problem with my street being taken over by roadies and buses and pre-teen girls (cue giggles), I LOVE it. It’s part of the character of this place, like the people and the architecture and the (awesome) Vietnamese food and Montrose Dog Beach and Café Too and a million other things. Back when I waited tables at the Bongo Room, this guy moved into the apartment above us and started bitching up a storm about how EARLY WE WERE MAKING NOISE. And it’s like, COME ON. This is a BRUCH RESTAURANT. A BRUNCH RESTAURANT that has been operating for over ten years—we’re GOING to be noisy at seven a.m.! There’s going to be music and laughing and people and crowds and delivery trucks and glass breaking and boxes thrown on the back porch and if you don’t like it, then you should not have moved in above a BRUNCH RESTAURANT!
SO. Note to self: keep Aragon schedule on fridge and park a couple blocks away the night before show days, because there’s going to be parking problems on show days, just like there’ll always be thousand drunk people walking back to their cars at two o’clock in the morning. The first night that happened, Christopher went out and bought earplugs, these little pink foam things that are like hitting a mute button. You never know just how much noise you’re dealing with until there is none: no wind, no cars, no radio, no conversation, no dog toenails on hardwood floors, no zzzzz’ing from the computer moniter, no ring telling you there’s a new text message or a new email, no hammering, no laundry, no dishwasher, nothing. Nothing. Just the sound of your own breathing.
My favorite film, Princess and the Warrior, has this breathtaking scene involving a tracheotomy with a Swiss Army Knife and a Big Gulp straw, performed underneath a Mack Truck by a suicidal thief who spontaneously cries when other people are sad on a Nurse in a mental ward who’s the daughter of a nurse in a mental ward so she’s always lived in a mental ward but supposedly isn’t mental, ANYHOW, she gets hit by the truck and knocked in the head and can’t hear anything. No sound at all. Silence—which initially is great, it’s really peaceful and everything, until she realizes she can’t hear her own breath, and then she gets scared.
When you have these little foam earplugs in, all you can hear is your own breath. It’s so loud, like thunder, but only because of the absence of all the other sound.