Matt Runkle

Foodies United for the Future

2012-02-27T09:50:00.001-08:00

New collages and flash fiction on BOMBlog!

2012-02-24T15:49:00.000-08:00

BOMBlog has posted two of my collages and short stories in their weekly feature, Word Choice. One of the collages, I think, could be considered weed art!

History of the Book.3

2012-02-22T19:16:00.004-08:00

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2

For various reasons, that “summer trip to the West Coast” has now lasted seven years. I’m surprised those books I made years ago have survived like they have, considering how much I did not know what I was doing. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I was salvaging from more solidly assembled structures. But still.

Which leads me back to that space between the second and third dimensions, and the challenge of addressing it in a venue as seemingly flat as, say, a blog. Because this is where I’ve been channeling that energy—once reserved for dissembling and mashing up longer-form, structural narratives—into compressed one- and two-shot collages.* There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. My attention span has waned, what with the Internet and all that. I try to fight it in some arenas, but since the blog is a medium suited to quick little glimpses, I figure this is one battle not to pick. Also, I finished writing a novel last year, and since then, most things I do—whether writing (flash fiction) or art (collage as blog posts)—want to be microcosmic.

2. Binding kind of stresses me out. I love the results: a sturdiness that allows for shifts as you turn the page. But there’s a commitment there that’s scary. Besides, I’ve never really gotten the math down.

So there is a kind of liberation in the blogged collages, in that they are both low commitment and ephemeral. I can knock one out in an evening if I want, and I don’t have to worry about it lasting. Once I’ve placed it in the scanner, and made sure any wayward details are straightened, I can shove it in a milk crate and forget about it. If for some reason in the future, I try and dig it back out to hang on a wall, and it crumbles in my hands, I’m okay with that: I’ve prepared myself. Anything that survives is—if not a miracle—a bonus.

Because all that matters here is the scan, those few crucial seconds after the lid closes when the light cranks by. And here’s where it’s hard not to think of the scanner as a book. Its design seems modeled after the codex, doesn’t it? And it “reads” the things you put inside it, a fleeting act that ends up feeling kind of like a fossil record. A mummification in the ether. An anti-binding, maybe? Or at least a binding that takes place in some unnamed dimension.

There is a whole genre of scanner art, I’ve discovered, called scanography (scannography) or scanner photography—where images use the technology of the scanner in their composition. Just as zine aesthetics (and Xerox art) came about through the advent of the photocopier, the accessibility of the scanner has created an aesthetic of its own.

One thing I’ve thought about is how zine aesthetics changed a lot when photocopiers digitized and Kinko’s became harder to scam. As zine makers have focused more on using pre-Xerox printing techniques, such as silkscreen and letterpress, there seems to be less of an emphasis on the textural nature of collage. This makes me wonder about the future of the scanner: what might be marketed to take its place? That’s why it’s good, I guess, that I’m trying to become less reliant on—and take take less comfort in—technologies that are ultimately temporary.

The book, though, is not one of those technologies—despite the hand wringing that’s happening with the spread of ebooks. The physical book is becoming increasingly fetishized as it threatens to disappear, and with it, I think, the sense of touch. Although all our coveted devices are sold to us by boasting features such as touchpads and touchscreens, once we step away for a second, we see how flat these things really are. And what about CGI? These “3D” creations would deflate with a fart if you tried to grasp them. A simple line drawing is more dimensional than CGI's special effect placebos. So, yeah, there's my side-rant, and I guess my point is this: there is a longing, I think, beneath all this prognosed dematerialization, for something you can hold in your hands. And that longing is here to stay.

So the neglect I’ve been giving bookmaking lately is temporary. I'll return to it, I promise myself, after I tire of the fun I'm having completing things that can remain incomplete. In the meantime, I like the challenge of trying to bring tactility—or at least the illusion of it—to the often textureless realm of the Internet. I also like the freedom of being able to incorporate three-dimensional elements that I couldn’t in a book whose pages must ultimately lie flat (the scanner's fine with not closing all the way). Who knows? Maybe one day, when blogs are obsolete, I can come full circle and take on the challenge of translating this blog's content into a physical book. How's that for completion?

*I’ve only made a couple altered books since I’ve been on the West Coast: Tarpaulin Kingdom and The Witch, a Lemondrop Wedged Firmly In Her Cheek, Begins Her Evening Prayers.

History of the Book.2

2012-02-20T13:05:00.003-08:00

Continued from History of the Book.1

After that bleakest of Bellingham winters, I moved to New Orleans, into a Mid-City warehouse where all the rooms were only half built. On more than one level, I was entering a place about which I knew very little. That’s the thing about picking up someone else’s old book, right? Sometimes there is marginalia, which gives you a peek at the lens through which past owners have read it. Other times, a book has been so cared for, you’d swear it had never been opened. Either way, there’s a deliberate ignorance in choosing to destroy a book—even with the intention of giving it new life.

The few windows in the warehouse were new, recently installed by my roommates, my friends. I even put one in myself—that soul-sucking sound of the Sawzall, then the light coming in, at last—and there were vines on the other side, stretching out across the corrugated roof next door. Beyond that, graveyards, which sprawled in almost every direction.

There seemed to be a few ghosts in this building, too, which for myself, mostly manifested themselves in dreams: My dad and I, putty knives in hand, urgently trying to repair a warehouse wall. Inside the wall, there were ghosts, increasing in sinister pressure, always on the verge of leaking out—which they did, at last, with the sound of a hellish scream. When they escaped, it meant certain death—one of the few times a dream allowed me to die.

These are the sorts of things that happen, according to Wikipedia, when you alter a book: “cuts, tears, glues, burns, folds, paints, adds to, collages, re-binds, gold-leafs, creates pop-ups, drills, bolts, and/or beribbons …” And this, I think, is what makes it such an appealing art for for me: its interdimensionality. On one level, a book (and when I say book, I mean the traditional non-e sense) strives to lay flat; it purports to be there to display a readable page. Yet the pages refuse to stay constrained to the second dimension: they demand to be touched, to be lifted and turned, to rise toward the reader and be sculptural, to inhabit an infinite number of angles before again pretending to be flat. And with altered books, all those add-to's and cuts only complicate the interdimensional confusion.

In one of those warehouse walls I built—this is in waking life now—I installed dioramas, which merged scenes of caveman with roses and chunks of polished glass I’d found on the beaches of Bellingham Bay. Remember: to obtain those pictures of cavemen was barbaric. New Orleans, too, had a good source of cheap books: a large Thrift City only blocks from my new home. Soon, we at the warehouse began hosting art shows, which gave me deadlines, which inspired me to create (re-create?) more books. One of those art shows, parasite-themed, inspired Tiny Monuments (They start eating you long before you're dead). I still have Tiny Monuments today thanks to Michelle Embree, who talks about its rescue over at her blog.

Stories change. Sometimes they merge and sometimes they haunt one another. They’re taken apart and re-ordered. New Orleans was where I first finally came out of the closet, a moment that had been building up for way too long. Once that ghost was released, I tried to ride with it, and was manic about it in the shyest sort of way: I wrote all the necessary people, and told the ones who I most hoped would tell everyone else. Then returned to the West Coast for what I thought was a summer trip. While I was there, though, my roommates all fled as well, and the warehouse was evicted and then looted. This was all several years before Katrina, so who knows what’s happened since, with those less than watertight windows, and those fragile dioramas which probably only weakened the walls. I have not been back to where that warehouse stood; I guess my ignorance has remained deliberate.

Click here for Part 3!

History of the Book.1

2012-02-17T13:19:00.000-08:00

I first started making altered books during a cold, gray winter in Bellingham. The town of Bellingham is as northwest as you can get without stepping into Canada, so there you go: imagine the bleakness. My room was a sublet and filled with objects that weren’t my own. There was a shelf with some decorative bones, and one day I found a femur in my bed. Soon after, my pillow vanished for several days before reappearing. I thought maybe I had a poltergeist. Also, though, I was smoking a lot of weed.

I’d found a wallet in a grocery store parking lot and quickly spent the ten-dollar bill inside it. I then failed to return the wallet, and it sat in that room for way too long. I looked at it sometimes, peripherally, and wondered if it was cursed. It held pictures of its owner, who was ex-military, posing with muscles flexed. He looked scary, and grew more so the longer I waited. The wallet also held a membership card to the food co-op, which I later realized was my ticket out of showing up at his front door. When I handed it to the hippies at the co-op’s counter, they made some magical motions with their hands and wished me good karma.

Still, there was something sinister beyond that room: the whole house was decorated a bit like The Shining. The roommates were each on their own very different trip: The eerily silent hardcore dude. The good-natured Ren-fairer who made chain mail. The aspiring 1950s hostess who had taken riot-grrrl irony way to seriously. Each of these people had an unreadable interior. Each of them deserves a much longer character study that would fast veer into fiction. Each could have easily been fucking with me.

Anyway, this was the setting where I first started taking books apart and putting them back together. It’s funny, now that I write it out like this, because it seems like such a reflection of my surroundings at that point. Things were showing up where they didn’t belong. Problems were being transmuted rather than solved. And on some level, the whole situation echoed what was going on in my head. I was still in the closet then, and I think some obscure agent of my brain must have been devising an escape plan. Experimenting with new narratives—pieced together from old ones—seems now like an apt area in which to be working.

On a more practical level, materials were abundant. There were bottomless free boxes outside the public library and Michael’s Books. Aladdin’s Antiques had old photographs for a nickel (this was back before such things became an art-student commodity). I couldn’t help but take these treasures home: well-worn paperback covers with scenes of interplanetary colonization; fortuitous doubles of women holding cats; dreamlike photos of laser projections on a canyon wall. Themes would arise in the midst of digging, then morph or develop as I spread my finds out on that weird little room’s shag carpet. One of the books I made, I named Recipes: Incubus, Succubus, Poltergeist.*

I’m trying to remember now how I came to feel like I knew what I was doing. My bindings were simplistic and intuitive, mostly figured out from having learned to sew patches onto things. The collage elements I’d absorbed, I think, from album art, as well as from exchanging mail art and from reading and making zines. The biggest specific influence I can remember is my friend, Stephanie Pierce, who I’d spent the previous year palling around with in Asheville, North Carolina. When she’d showed me the books she made out of trash, something clicked.

That’s why it’s weird, now, when I look at the Wikipedia page for altered books: a disproportionate number of the artists listed there are from Washington state. So maybe the geist I was being haunted by wasn’t so much polter as zeit. This, I should remind you, was a time before the Internet, and I was oblivious. It’s hard not to feel nostalgic, though, as I sit here, a glassy-eyed Internet addict. Like I had access to something more unquantifiable then. Was this chance? I think it was. Chance is when one image just happens to lay on another. Thank god for those last oblivious days of chance.

Click here for Part 2!

*An unconsciously perfect title. The incubi, now that I think of it, were making themselves just as known as the poltergeist. My friend, who I had an unacknowledged crush on, spent the night on the living room couch and complained of experiencing sleep paralysis—the ghost that sits on your chest. But in my memory now, I clearly had the same experience myself. I was sleeping on the couch (But why? Was I trying to escape the ghost in my room?), and awoke feeling terrified and unable to move. What makes this memory so vivid, though, is that it’s connected to another one: hearing the eerily silent hardcore dude come home drunk and talk more than I’d ever thought possible. He and his friend laughed as they took some meat out of the freezer and tried to cook it. I wonder now: is this something I really experienced? I’ve never had sleep paralysis anywhere else—although my friend, who was asthmatic, had. There is an image I used in Recipes: Incubus, Succubus, Poltergeist, that when I think of it now, was a signpost on my way out of the closet: a naked man asleep, his cock and balls on display. I don’t remember now where I found this picture, but there was power in it—a pre-Internet kind of power, right? I had barely missed the Mukilteo Fairies when I moved to Bellingham.

Give It Up Madonna for Advent

2012-02-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

V-Day Art Show at Down at Lulu's!

2012-02-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

A Valentines-themed group art show opens tonight at Down at Lulu's, and here's a detail from my contribution: a valentine featuring Barbara Stanwyck in the iconic compact reconnaissance scene from The Lady Eve. I like that it kind of looks like a Hallmark card—like one of those wink-wink ones for women to give their office friends? The show features a lot of exciting artists and should be up for the month, but come get in on some free food and drinks tonight from 7-10 pm. Down at Lulu's is a hair salon/vintage store located at 6603 Telegraph Ave in Oakland.

Letter from Pedestrianica.4

2012-02-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B is by car. This letter should really be a diagram, but for now, I’m just going to write my way into it.

Because this letter is not a straight line. But then it’s not a motorist, either—we’re in Pedestrianica, aren’t we? We’re going to do some meandering. Still, this will be quick, I promise: when walking, we try to keep our sights set, no matter how obscured, on Point B.

To accommodate cars, cities become a convoluted tyranny of angles. Think of all those turns you must make, softened though they may be by the guiding voice of the Garmin: rarely do they stray from 90 degrees. Your route, when mapped, looks like a series of steps:

Ridiculous, you say, and you’re right, and you list off a dozen exceptions: Streets that bleed into one another, that merge or veer in an ordinal direction. Scenic drives that follow the curves of rivers or bluffs. Corners with their elbows lopped off to allow for smoother turns (and longer crosswalks).

There’s a 6-way intersection near my house that I swear was designed to kill crackheads. There’s a liquor store there, and a lot of marginalized foot traffic, and though there does seem to be some sort of traffic light somewhere, we pedestrians still have to look in a lot of different directions to make sure no cars are careening towards us. This intersection frees the motorist from that 90-degree tyranny: you can turn up the diagonal street without even tapping the brake. That’s why you’re driving, right? Momentum.

Another interesting way to cut corners is the gas station parking lot. Here, if you are a motorist, if you’re waiting in line to make a right-hand turn, you can use this corner lot as a kind of warp zone, speed right on through and knock a couple minutes off your commute. If you have a more immediate goal in mind, if you need to suckle for a minute at petroleum’s pricey teat, you use this space to engage in a series of awkward maneuvers. You back up, then inch forward, then back up, then inch forward, then erratically lap the lot on your way to a better pump.

Your range of motion—best seen in spaces like these—while forceful, has its limit.

As pedestrians, we too use this space to cut corners, but warily, as we never know from what direction you might veer. Taking the long way around can be just as tricky: the skin between gas station and street is manically permeable, a series of ins and outs that void the safety of the sidewalk, and that never cease.

Because beneath the apparent order of the right angle looms a chaos, a violent unpredictability that city planning fails to tame. Cars, by nature—even the sleekest—are clunky, are stilted and averse to curves. Paradoxically, though, they are sprawling in the amount of physical and mental space they take up.

Dolly Sneak Peek

2012-02-05T09:17:00.000-08:00

Here's a panel from a comic about Dolly Parton I'm working on with Janelle Hessig for the third issue of Rob Kirby's THREE. THREE, which is due out in June, features an all-star cast: Ed Luce, Carrie McNinch, Jennifer Camper, Ivan Velez, Jr., Howard Cruse, Diane DiMassa, Ellen Forney, Joan Hilty, and of course, the unstoppable Rob Kirby. For another view of Dolly, click here.

Pigflower's Under the Couch Again

2012-01-31T15:09:00.000-08:00

The Business of Staying Alive.2: An Interview with Nora Benson-Glaspey

2012-01-27T10:15:00.000-08:00

Not only is Nora Benson-Glaspey a recent graduate of CORE (Citizens of Oakland Respond to Emergencies), she’s also a good friend of mine. Her storytelling skills are legendary, and it’s been a pleasure collaborating with her on “Nora Stories,” a comic featured in Runx Tales #2. Nora and I are now working on a new “Nora Stories,” one that started with a trip to the Winchester Mansion, and is beginning to turn into something bigger: a project where we hope to explore the role of the psychic in modern America.

Nora, who has lived in both pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans, currently attends San Francisco City College, where she’s pursuing a certificate in Trauma Prevention and Recovery. I talked to her recently about Hurricane Katrina, the transformative power of disaster, and the problems with getting to know your neighbors.

Matt Runkle: Do you want to start by talking a little about CORE? What it is, who organized it, how you found out about it, why you decided to pursue it?

Nora Benson-Glaspey: CORE was started in 1990, in response to the Loma Prieta earthquake, by the Fire Department’s Office of Emergency Services. Basically their goal is to train as many people as possible to be better equipped to deal with large-scale disasters, whether it be earthquakes, fires, chemical accidents, severe weather or, yup, terrorism, too. After Loma Prieta, first responders were swamped—there just wasn't enough people trained to help everyone who needed the help. Kinda scary to think about. I found out about the program from a friend who took it while I was living in New Orleans. I was bummed cuz I didn’t know of any equivalent where I was at. It just seemed smart.

CORE consists of five classes and one practice disaster, and happens over a six-week period. Topics include personal emergency preparedness, community organizing, disaster first aid and triage, search and rescue, damage assessment, and disaster psychology. The great thing is it's all free: CORE members, firemen and EMT's all volunteer their time to skill share. There are lots of reasons I decided to go—living in New Orleans post-Katrina, I heard enough stories about survival that if I had the chance to learn more about it, I’d better! I also like its focus on community—the idea is to get to know your neighbors before everything goes to hell.

MR: I think a lot about my neighbors, how in a city, you just kind of end up next to these people you have no history with, and what it would be like to weather a disaster with them. I’ve pretty much failed at fostering relationships with my neighbors here in the Bay. Do you feel like CORE gave you any kind of tools to create pre-disaster communities?

NBG: Yes and no. CORE can be used as a legitimate conversation starter. It looks official, it's registered with the city—that really appeals to certain folks. Some people, though, don't want anything to do with the government! CORE also really encourages people to start neighborhood watch groups, participate in Night Out Against Crime. I'm uneasy about all that—I don't want to forge vigilante relationships like that with my neighbors.

MR: You’ve talked a little bit about how CORE was this place where a funny mix of people collided (disastrous pun intended). Do you have any “Nora Stories”-style anecdotes you want to tell from your experience in CORE?

NBG: This one woman I spoke to admitted to me that she worked for FEMA, but she didn't want anyone to know—she whispered it in my ear after I told her I moved here from NOLA. At first I thought she was funny, but the further our conversation went I really kinda hated her. She told a group of us that she thought that people who stayed for hurricanes probably deserved to die. Not like I haven't heard that before.

Come to think of it, there were quite a few people who expressed defensive attitudes about who deserved help—mostly intended at their neighbors already singled out as undesirable. I got the impression it was because they didn't know them—or they were renters. Homeowners don't seem to like renters. Attitudes like this scare me more than anything: they're bred out of fear, are cruel, and can incite violence. I was subjected to similar attitudes in New Orleans, neighbors who thought I was squatting repeatedly called the police and threatened to steal my dog. I was shocked no one ever directly asked me about it. We were renting, so they couldn't get rid of us.

I unintentionally met one of my accusers at the bar; she was a wreck of a yuppie, hell-bent on squatters. She told me, “Don't worry you're on the ‘good list.’ People on the ‘bad list,’ if they don't comply, their bodies will end up in the Bayou. I have a gun.” It was really sad and strange. You see, she snapped. Before the storm, her personality and lifestyle were similar to a Berkeley lady—a middleclass, save-Tibet, Volvo-driving liberal. The stress of living through a catastrophic disaster has the capacity to completely transform us, in ways that we never would have expected—for better or worse.

MR: Can you talk a little more about Katrina? I think you had actually just moved back to California prior to the storm, right? What this was like, experiencing from afar this horrible thing happening to what had become your home?

NBG: Well, I started smoking again. Watching the news was maddening, listening to people talk about what they thought about the news reports was disturbing. Not knowing if my friends were safe was terrifying. I knew from my experience in New Orleans that the media was hyping up the violence. I'm not denying violence by any means, but the way they framed it was so freakin’ sensational. Highly disturbing. It set up dialogues I still hear today that echo the FEMA lady at CORE—“they” just weren't acting right, so “they” don't deserve help. According to a few looping FOX news reports, it almost seemed that New Orleans was full of baby-raping, gun-toting looters, and it was their fault response was slow. What the fuck ever! Years later the media has been called out for racializing looting pictures—white people were “scavenging” and blacks were “looting.” The whole conversation sidestepped the point that our country's infrastructure sucks, and that the government reacted inadequately. The media facilitated this insidious outlook on our nation’s largest disaster, in a way that condoned how our institutions were responding.

MR: Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay for Harper's a few years back, pre-Katrina, I believe, but I think it was actually published around the same time the storm happened [it later became the book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster]. It talked about how, contrary to the myth of the stampede and the panic, communities form in the wake of disasters. It’s become clear, it seems, that the real panic occurs within the media. I’m just curious about this idea of communities that are born out of disasters. I know the final phase of CORE involved a simulated emergency. Did you feel a stronger sense of community forming as you participated in this simulation? If so, is this something that will continue into the future?

NBG: I haven't read Solnit's essay but I have read a handful of studies which indicate that directly following a disaster it is more likely that people will help each other out; however, the longer communities go without basic resources the more likely violence is to increase. In the first few months after Katrina, I witnessed way more people coming together and helping each other out than not. There was this intense momentum to get the city back up and running again; rather than wait for the government, people started getting done what they could on their own. Over time, though, the strain created by lack of resources and aid to the city really took its toll on people.

To answer your question, yes and no. I made some connections with some really great people, none of whom lived in my neighborhood. As far as I can tell, there are not many CORE groups in my neighborhood. The simulated disaster is very chaotic, partly due to learning how to operate within the CORE framework, a hierarchical Incident Command system. People are split into groups to survey damage and find victims, and required to report back to an elected Incident Commander who then, either by foot or radio, reports back to the Emergency Operation Center—usually a local fire station. In our first exercise, information bottlenecked and all I felt was panic. The second exercise went smoother and people were working together. In one respect, it’s easy to see why response can take so long—there is so much paperwork! I hate paperwork, and at one point in my life I would’ve flipped off the whole concept of CORE because of its bureaucratic model, but now I feel more comfortable knowing their protocol so I can make more informed decisions.

MR: I’ve noticed there’s kind of a stigma to being prepared for emergencies, like, “What’s up with ole Doom n’ Gloom over there?” When I talk about putting together a survival kit, some people have been excited about it, while others act like maybe I’m being a little paranoid. Have you encountered this at all?

NBG: Yesss! Mostly, it's “Oh, well that will never happen here” mentality. It's too bad really, cuz there is no harm in having a few more of this and that around the house if something were to come up. I think there is this idea that when and if something happens, there will be people there to respond with supplies. And there will be, but depending on the magnitude of the disaster, it might take time. The government suggests having enough supplies to last for 5-7 days. That's a long time. I get it though, not wanting to think about it.

In one of my classes at City College, we were assigned the task of adding a supply to our disaster kit. Coincidentally, the Fukushima disaster happened that week, so it occurred to me maybe vitamins and iodide tablets wouldn’t be a bad add. Next class we shared what we got with one another, I was scared to mention what I bought and even almost lied. People were very upset, some didn’t even know there had been an earthquake in Japan, others thought I was foolish and some just thought I was ridiculous for thinking something like that could happen here. I never ended up getting my tablets due to a shortage caused by mass buying. My favorite was seeing a couple whisper-fight in Rainbow Grocery about what was better: pharmaceutical or natural iodine.

MR: Did CORE cover nuclear fall-out situations at all?

NBG: Mmmm . . . not so much, but it did come up. Basically their advice was “shelter in place,” which obviously didn't sit well with anyone in the room. There was definitely a quiet “we're gonna run like hell” vibe in the room. The firemen assured us that all nuclear facilities in the state of California were being checked, refitted and super safe. There was a handful of cynical comments and we moved on to the next subject.

The Business of Staying Alive.1

2012-01-26T13:36:00.000-08:00

My terror of death has gotten worse lately, and it’s surprising—I guess I assumed the end would become easier to accept with age. Not so much with me. So, let me start by saying I’m sorry about how angsty this post is. Something practical will follow, I promise.

Underpasses have become harder to walk through, the threat of an earthquake a dull rumble from both above and below. I’ve always been conscious of reaching the underpass’s halfway point, knowing that the moment I feel the earth move, I should run forward rather than backward to escape the collapse—irrational, I know, especially after a Loma Prieta story I heard: a man told me the sidewalk was rolling along like the surf.

Somebody else told me an obsessive fear of death is the result of a Catholic upbringing. This could be true, although I’m not looking for pity here. I realize such fear is a luxury. I asked my grandma (who wasn’t, by the way, raised Catholic) how often throughout her life she’d thought about death, and she told me never—she’d worked so much, she never had the time. These days, though, 80-something and retired, she mentions death in most conversations. Which is healthy, I think, at her age, but I’m in my 30s.

Sometimes I wonder: would the world be a better place (i.e., people not be assholes) if we all knew what was going to happen to us when we die? Really know, I mean, through rational thought, not blind faith. Would there be less fear in the world, the source of so much human suffering? So many resources and such tremendous scientific effort are put into prolonging this life, but little go toward trying to answer the question of what comes next. The big question no one wants answered. But maybe I’m being overly curious here. Every year it seems like fewer mysteries remain in the world, and I know there’s something to be said for not having all the answers.

But back to that escalating terror, which it seems now is in the very air, it’s become such an effort not to absorb it. Could the places I pass through daily (subway tunnels, wastelands under the interstate) cause me terror merely through their repetition? Is that why they’re getting darker and less stable as I age—are they literally becoming the stamp of death? Haven’t I always expected it to end this way, in collapse, those same subway station tiles imprinting themselves on my forehead, finally, with the finality they’ve always promised? The constant unpredictability of cataclysms—as well as the effort it takes to stave them off—can be numbing.

Numbing or not, I like being alive, and so there’s something to be said for being prepared. Last year I put a lot of work into assembling disaster kits for both my boyfriend and me, and there was something nice about the control it made me feel. Part of this, of course, is illusion: as my grandma pointed out, it’s hard to brood when you’re busy. But it also doesn’t hurt to be prepared.

There is, though, a lot of denial around the need for such preparation. That’s why I’d like “The Business of Staying Alive” to be a semi-regular feature here, one small avenue for casual conversations around emergency preparedness. Now that I’ve got that angst off my chest, it’s time to get out the waterproof matches. Or put them away, rather, and wrap them in plastic, and remember where it was I put them. Tomorrow I’m going to post an interview with Nora Benson-Glaspey, who I’ve collaborated with in the past in the Runx Tales feature, “Nora Stories.” She’ll talk about her experiences going through CORE (Citizens of Oakland Respond to Emergencies) training, as well as her time living in New Orleans both before and after Katrina.

To be continued . . .

Recommended Reading: Junot Diaz, “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal”; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communites That Arise In Disaster; Elaine Scarry, Thinking In an Emergency

You're Gonna Have to Make Your Own Family Tree

2012-01-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

The Anti-Wedding: An Interview with Ariel Goldberg

2012-01-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

I’m really into weddings. I mean that in the most complicated way possible—weddings have caused me a lot of misery, but at the same time, they’ve been a really bountiful source of material. My work as a caterer inspired the wedding reviews I’ve posted here, and I made a comic explaining the underlying gayness in straight weddings for the first issue of Runx Tales. I’m now gearing up to write a novel framed around the ceremony. I’m interested in how the points of view of the different participants—the couple, the parents, the wedding party, the guests, the caterers, etc.—might interweave/clash with the vision of a dictatorial wedding planner.

Ariel Goldberg, a New York-based writer/photographer/performance artist, has spent the past several years doing something similar: brazenly competing with the event’s master narrative. It is a confrontational project in a setting that strives to be devoid of conflict. Weddings, of course, are actually Petri dishes for conflict: nerves are high and multiple relatives are gathered in one place. Yet, still you’re expected to smile. And this is what Ariel refuses to do. They attend the weddings they’re invited to with camera in hand, wearing either high-femme drag or traditional tuxedo butch. Then they ask fellow guests to take their picture. The results are brilliantly uncomfortable. Not only do the photos speak to the strange role-playing that happens at weddings, they also make you re-think throwing around the word, happy.

Ariel has also inhabited their role as the Photographer in many other settings and incarnations. They are currently writing a related epistolary novel. I chatted with Ariel recently while they were lounging in New Jersey, wearing their dad’s sweats and drinking Ketel One on ice.

Matt Runkle: One of the reasons I’m so interested in weddings is because they are such a defining—maybe the defining ritual. I mean, we’re kind of inundated with this from every direction—our families, pop culture, etc.—from childhood on. Was there ever a time when you could picture yourself walking down the aisle?

Ariel Goldberg: Never. I imagined my Bat Mitzvah, very clearly, because it meant the end of Hebrew School. But then I went to Hebrew High, then I got a job at the Hebrew School...

I imagine books and art projects, I think, like people imagine weddings.

MR: Yes, weddings are so aesthetically crafted, they do seem like weird art projects if you step back for a minute. I think when I was a kid, I just assumed I would get married one day. Never thought I would be a priest, though, which is what my parents really wanted.

AG: I actually couldn't imagine my future when I was a kid. Or I cannot remember my imagination of the future. I think my parents wanted me to enter a more lucrative professional class than an artist who teaches. Lawyer? But they deny that accusation.

A priest. Have you ever been one for Halloween?

MR: No! I always thought they were so boring. Did you ever consider becoming a rabbi?

AG: No. Hebrew School was mostly social. My parents' friend has a lesbian daughter who is a rabbi and is married to a rabbi. This satisfies them.

MR: That's nice, it takes the weight off your shoulders. OK, I really want to talk about your wedding photography project, but first, one more warm-up question. What is your least favorite wedding tradition?

AG: When the bride and groom sit alone at that table that is in between the bride's side and groom’s side—it reminds me of bored couples out to eat at restaurants.

MR: Like a harbinger of the boring years to come?

AG: Or just symbolically unnecessary isolation.

MR: That's interesting. A wedding is ostensibly about the joining of two people. Do you think it's actually a more divisive event than it lets on?

AG: To join two people, but also to make them like celebrities to their families and friends. I think it's a risky event. Fun in a way where you have to work for it. All the triggering moments come up with people in your life, it seems. But I also feel like someone who cannot speak for a wedding being divisive as a guest. Or it has only seemed like a party I get invited to, and asked to celebrate. So I cannot call it divisive.

MR: You’ve written about your wedding photography project: “I was very insistent on being alone in the pictures, as if I was imitating the grandeur and spotlight on the bride, but I was the anti-bride.” Can you talk a little bit about the role of the bride and your role as her sort of foil? Have you gained any insight into bridal psychology through posing as this “anti-bride”?

AG: The bride is supposed to look beautiful. And they do in this very prescribed way. I think I am a foil of another version of feminine. Thinking about Judith/Jack Halberstam's Masculine Femininity. It's like that question of if you wear a suit, do you then identify as a man? Am I in drag? Or am I passing as the gender my family doesn't know me as? I just want to disrupt whatever molds are happening.

MR: Do you think these roles manifest themselves more when we’re wearing our wedding “best”? Boys wear suits and girls wear fancy dresses. Do you feel the pressure is greater?

AG: Definitely. And also my family doesn't really see each other much outside of holidays and birthdays. So it's a performance day in general. But I think it's important to think about how I might go to a wedding in a dress and feel like it is drag, or in a suit or tux and want to pass, and I don't think much about what I'm doing in the moment. It's more to pose a bunch of questions about my role as going to a wedding as an artist. Like I cannot just go and not be an artist. I want to perform with the bride and groom. The performance I do is incredibly slight, but it has read as insensitive and selfish.

MR: Can you talk about this a little? What sort of conflicts have the performances caused?

AG: Well, I think the biggest conflict is that they haven't gone away. At the most recent wedding (of my family's, which was the third one where I asked other guests to take my picture, in a directed self-portrait way), I was accused of being a show stealer, or just doing something that upset the whole dynamic of it being the bride and groom’s special day.

My pictures take about one minute or less to shoot. I asked about 30 people at that wedding. I'd say half of them know me. What was interesting was comparing the way I ask people to take my picture alone—as if I am in a foreign country—to how people at weddings will always have cameras, and the photographers are constantly taking pictures, and they also ask people to take their pictures. It is disturbing, I think, for someone to ask another person to take a picture of them alone. And this is strange because people are photographing themselves more and more because of the demand for an online profile to represent you.

I think my pictures are not in the vocabulary of the posed picture. People were confused about me not wanting to smile. I think I make pictures better when I don't smile. I think smiling in pictures is like saying something inauthentic. People are terrified of looking unhappy.

MR: I know this sounds dramatic, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt as abject as I have as a wedding guest—it’s worse, even, than when I’m working as a caterer. With catering, at least, I’m anonymous and I can go hide if I want to. Do you feel like not smiling is reflecting your misery in the moment?

AG: Well, it is hard for me to splice. Because as a photographer, and someone who thinks so intensely and constantly about the way people are photographing and the pictures surrounding me and the history of the medium, I am across the board not interested in smiling in pictures. I think I am not necessarily miserable at weddings. I may be having a great time. I have had fun at weddings. I guess it depends on so many things. But what does make me miserable is the command to smile. The sort of presumption that if you are not smiling then you are miserable.

MR: I've had fun too, but I feel like there's always this underlying resentment, because my experience doesn't translate into the “straight” world. All the rituals (bouquet toss, garter toss) point us down this trajectory toward marriage we’re all expected to—enthusiastically—pursue. And if we don’t, then we’ve ruined the wedding. Everyone is required to be happy, because that is the goal of a wedding, isn’t it? Enforced lifelong happiness?

AG: Yes, that is an interesting point. There is a lot of myth making. Like how can you be at a wedding when you don't totally agree with the institution of marriage? How can you be at a wedding and be happy for people who have rights you don't have? How can you not even harbor resentment to the powerhouse gay rights nonprofits at these weddings for fighting so hard for assimulationist rights?

The happiness weddings are ushering in—"they are so happy together," "we are so happy for you"—is like billions of probiotics. It cannot be a whole emotion. But it is totally expected to be. There is a lot expected of wedding guests, I think. They have to be obedient extras.

MR: Totally! And there’s even more expected of the bridal party. There’s this real objectification that takes place. You’re being shuttled around like a prop, and you’re kind of there as an item in the bride’s collection. Can you contrast your experience being photographed as a member of the wedding party with being photographed by other guests as The Wedding Photographer?

AG: The experience of being a bridesmaid—or "bridesgay," as the other two gay male friends in the bridal party called it—felt like somewhere I didn't belong. I don't know what to do in formal group portraits besides write down notes of what the photographer directed us to do so I could work it in to some of my writings on photography. It was something I felt like I would mess up. Or that it was an unrealistic commitment. It was out of love for my friend, to be part of it, and to represent this part of her life that was high school, but then I felt like this loose screw. There was a lot of waiting around. I felt like as soon as the wedding started, and the group pictures were over (there were many stages of photos, I mean, so, so many photos—candids while getting ready, the ceremony, at a location near the reception, group portraits at the reception, and then they did family portraits, then candids of the party) … Simply put, I felt exhausted by the photos in the wedding, taken by the photographer.

I felt like my role at this recent wedding was to be an observer. The only person I wanted to photograph me, in a directed self-portrait way, was my partner, Amanda. And she did a very nice job. But I wanted it done quickly. I knew what type of directed portrait I wanted, and we just did it. This was a big break from the other three times when I would go up to many more people. I think I've become slower and more refined. It can be more a performance for myself. I mean, a photo—even one—can be an infinite gesture.

MR: I want to talk for a second about the groom. He kind of occupies this weird realm of masculinity, like in between virility and emasculation. He’s in the spotlight, yet remains overshadowed (or out-lit?) by the bride. Did you find yourself identifying with him at all as The Wedding Photographer? Or were you just as much the anti-groom as the anti-bride?

AG: I think I am the “art-wedding”—can I take back the “anti-bride”? I guess “bride” is some metonym for the whole wedding, because women are thought to get more into wedding fantasies than men? Like there is Bride magazine but is there a groom magazine?

I guess I am the “anti-wedding,” or maybe just the problem or the consciousness at the wedding. Because I don’t think marriage should be what we’re working towards. I think it is nice for some people, it is right, it is perfect, but for me right now, I see love and relationships outside of marriage. I would prefer it to be de-gendered. So I don’t associate with the masculine or feminine side.

MR: That makes sense. I like the idea of you calling yourself the anti-wedding. OK, last question: Where are you now? You’ve mentioned you feel like you’re through with being The Wedding Photographer. In what ways do you expect to cope with future weddings you’re invited to?

AG: The last family wedding I was invited to, I did not attend. I actually couldn't be faced with the question of: do I continue my pictures as I was doing them, or do I stop them, or do I change the project? My family actively requested me to stop the project. I think it was misinterpreted for attention grabbing, as opposed to a minor and necessary part of the wedding landscape. What I needed was time. I think when you do a project that is serial, it is hard to know when to stop it. I think the way of asking many people to take my picture is over. That project has ended. It will be different now.

A lot of queer people I know, they just don't go to weddings. Perhaps I need to sit out a few more. I'd like to go to weddings when I am actively part of the people's lives getting married. But having some picture of me at weddings seems important. It would be interesting if everyone did that in some way. I see my project mostly as a performance script; I'd want many more people to do it. We come so close to those self-portraits in the total abundance of photography, but everything is posed. I want less posing, more confrontation with cameras.

I have been to two friends' weddings this year and felt no interest in taking any pictures of myself, in "doing my project." I did ask friends what they thought about me doing these pictures of myself at their wedding and they gave permission, but then I didn't do it. In that way it is shifting. It cannot be this totalitarian prompt. I have to feel it out. Maybe the ingredient is estrangement. I didn't feel an outsider among these friends' weddings, and one of them was a lesbian wedding, where I knew so many people. There is less to resist or critique when you can feel a critique of marriage amongst us.

The Christening Sunk the Septic Tank

2012-01-17T10:16:00.000-08:00

Interview featured on The Collagist's blog

2012-01-15T11:05:00.000-08:00

The Collagist interviewed me! I talk about hoarding and being bossy and holiday iconography. Read it here.

Paper or Plastic?

2012-01-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

Here I go, in my pepaw-on-the-porch voice:

I remember when food stamps were actually stamps. And by stamps, I mean perforated pieces of paper you tear out of a book, not stickers you peel off a coated backing. As a teenager, I was a grocery store checker, and people would pay with these stamps, which were a little bit dollar bill-like, only in non-green colors: ones were rust, fives were purple. If the total came out to a non-even number, I’d give back regular old change. People who were smart and diligent and wanted to buy something that wasn’t food—generally drugs or alcohol—would return time after time, paying for twenty-five-cent packs of gum until they’d collected enough change to buy what it was they really wanted.

It was a pretty good scam. Back when scams were still somewhat possible, before everything became plastic. Like, literally, everything. It’s how we prove ourselves now.

And yes, plastic existed when I was a teenager. Plastic bags were very popular. And those bags are still out there somewhere, I promise you, and always will be, no matter how much we wish they never were.

But food stamps, they were just stamps. They were paper, they had leeway, they were ephemeral. Who knows where they might have ended up?

All my life, I’ve heard whispers of a national ID card. Just when I think it’s been long enough—that the rumors were paranoiac, that it’s a scheme that’s impossible to implement, that there are other, even more sinister ambitions to preoccupy the powers that be (indefinite detention, internet censorship)—just when it seems like something not worth worrying about, it rears its head again. The Real ID Act of 2005 required state IDs to be in accord with standards set forth by the Department of Homeland Security (The ACLU—who really seems to have their hands full these days—explains why this is a bad idea). The act has met with widespread resistance from the states, and its future is currently in question. In a recent debate, however, Mitt Romney endorsed a national ID program as a solution to the “threat” of illegal immigration.

If you’re going to exist in America, Romney insists, you’d better fucking exist.

Anyways, those plastic bags? They’re still around. I probably have a pound of them under my sink.

Just over four years ago, the city of San Francisco made plastic bags illegal. Large grocery stores are prohibited from using them. The city council’s reasoning was that not only were the bags clogging SF’s storm drains and taking up landfill space, they had also gathered together to create an enormous oceanic clot of plastic—the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Some reports estimate the size of this trash vortex as being up to twice the size of the continental US.

This shit is not going away. This shit is only getting bigger. It’s our shadow, this shit, only it’s real. How long before it taps us on our coastal shoulder?

When you walk out of a store and the security guard sees that white flash of plastic, you can feel secure. You’ll be okay; no one’s going to keep you from leaving with your groceries. You’re proving yourself with plastic.

Receipts? Receipts disintegrate, receipts just blow away. Think of how well—and how permanently—we can prove ourselves once everything we’ve bought is contained on a plastic card. Think of how crime rates will plummet then, how every last scam will be scanned into oblivion. It is only then that we will truly exist, once we can track each and every item we’ve ever removed from the shelf. It is only then we will live forever.

I live in Oakland, a city that attempted to ban plastic bags in 2007, and was forced to reverse its ordinance when plastic bag manufacturers threatened a lawsuit.

I step outside to get some air. I sink into my pepaw chair, which is a rocker. A plastic bag floats by, and it’s beautiful, something we’ve learned from American Beauty. A plastic bag floats by, and though we cannot catch it, we don’t panic.

We’re safe here on our porch, as long as we don’t need to eat. As long as we never leave again, here on our porch we have nothing to prove.

TVanR.6: Dolly Parton as Miss Mona Stangley

2012-01-07T08:16:00.000-08:00

The September 1982 issue of Texas Monthly reviews The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas shortly after its release: “Nearly every lingerie ensemble whipped up by costume designer Theadora Van Runkle is a frilly, plunging horror.”

Doug Tomlinson writes in the September-October 1991 issue of American Film, of Thea’s

‘romantic’ style: sensual satins, furs, lace, and velvet. With The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, she was allowed to indulge that latter penchant to great effect, director Colin Higgins agreeing with her that costumes are an effective shorthand to character. In that film Dolly Parton was never more appropriately, nor more lavishly attired: one costume, dubbed ‘Miss Mona Aflame with Passion,’ cost $7,000.

I’m assuming the above drawing is of that $7,000 piece, as fiery and passionate as it is. Theadora, who went on to dress Parton again in 1984’s Rhinestone, was really allowed to let the camp loose in Whorehouse, giving Miss Mona and her chorus of hookers the full “romantic” style treatment. Maybe it took critics nine years’ worth of perspective to fully appreciate the designer who twice packaged that Tennessean gem, swathing her in dazzling blue-streaked crimson with taffeta sleeves that morph into a boa.

Theadora Van Runkle passed away this last November. Lucky for us, her wide array of clever wardrobe creations have all been captured on film. Her energetic sketches are a little harder to track down, but there are a few posted here. She is much missed.

TVanR.5: Bernadette Peters as Marie Kimble

2012-01-06T07:27:00.000-08:00

In a letter to me, Theadora Van Runkle described Bernadette Peters as “adorable,” and it’s hard to think of a better adjective. This drawing doesn’t do that adorableness justice, although it does suggest failed attempts at sophistication—something that rings true to the character of Marie.

Theadora really brought the world of The Jerk its charm, opting for a subtle absurdity that syncs well with the movie’s childlike tone. Who can forget that raggedy bathrobe? She dressed Peters again for 1981’s Heartbeeps, an Andy Kaufman film about robot domestics on the lam.

Tomorrow: Dolly Parton as Miss Mona Stangley!

TVanR.4: Raquel Welch as Myra Breckinridge

2012-01-05T08:06:00.000-08:00

I really wanted to draw Mae West as Leticia Van Allen for this post. Raquel Welch is a bit of a dead pulse in 1970’s Myra Breckinridge, a movie notorious for making critics’ Worst lists. Its costumery is really what takes center stage, each scene a new and different sartorial showcase, and it looks like Theadora Van Runkle had a really good time dressing the movie’s cast.

Except that Thea didn't dress West. For her return to the silver screen, the aged icon demanded she be outfitted by an equally legendary artist: Edith Head. So, while West’s dresses may look fabulous, they are not technically Van Runkles.

Several years earlier, when Theadora was shopping for fabric for Bonnie and Clyde, she'd run into Head and asked for advice. “Oh, darling,” Head said, “do everything in chiffon—you’ll have no problems.” Bonnie and Clyde ended up being noted for its chiffon-lessness, and when the two designers collaborated on Myra Breckinridge, their differing visions resulted in just one of many on-set aesthetic clashes: West’s signature look for the movie was black and white, and when Welch came to set dressed in a black dress with a white ruffled collar, West demanded the collar be spraypainted blue.

I liked drawing this look because of its tension between the profane and sacred, the cleavage taking center stage amid an almost saintly hood. That iconic American-flag one-piece does this too, I guess, but I wanted to draw something here that was a little more Thea and a little less Raquel.

Check back tomorrow for Bernadette Peters as Marie Kimble!

TVanR.3: Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker

2012-01-04T10:57:00.000-08:00

Theadora Van Runkle taught herself how to design during her inaugural costuming job: 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde. Rather than go with 1930s high femme for the period piece, she took a tomboy approach that was unconventional for the time, and ended up sparking a fashion trend. Following Bonnie and Clyde’s release, beret sales soared, maintaining their popularity well into the ‘70s.

Her vision at first was met with resistance. “Faye thought I didn’t care how she looked,” Theadora said in a 1989 interview. “Faye thought I was trying to make her look ugly.” Nonetheless, Theadora went on to costume Faye Dunaway for The Thomas Crown Affair, and even dressed her off-screen for her 1969 Oscars appearance.

I wanted to avoid that iconic beret for this drawing, and so picked this moment, which although it’s just as posed as every other still from Bonnie and Clyde, still comes across as more intimate. Warren Beatty is somewhere in the background taking a bath, and Bonnie sports an embroidered slip tucked into her midi-skirt as she flirts with the idea of a hat with a brim.

Tomorrow: Raquel Welch as Myra Breckenridge!

TVanR.2: Shelley Long as Phyllis Nefler

2012-01-03T15:47:00.000-08:00

It was really hard to choose a Phyllis Nefler outfit to illustrate, there are so many in Troop Beverly Hills that look fun to draw. The original drawing I sent to Theadora Van Runkle was of one of Phyllis's Bo Peep-ish outfits, and it ended up looking even more awkward than this. I decided to go with one of the more restrained ensembles—a suit with a giant bird attached to the shoulder. I figured showing the conservative end of the spectrum would better emphasize the otherworldly sort of Beverly Hills that Theadora created here. My biggest regret about this one, though, is its lack of a hat. TBH director Jeff Kanew on Theadora: “The producers wanted to hire one of the designers from Dynasty, and would have pushed for a much more ‘tailored,’ tasteful style. And it would have been BORING! My big contribution was to fight for Thea and support her vision.”

For more on Theadora Van Runkle, read this. Check back tomorrow for Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker!

It's a Van Runkle. Isn't it fabulous?

2012-01-02T14:14:00.000-08:00

Thus speaks Phyllis Nefler (Shelley Long), the spoiled fashion plate/housewife who tries to get earthy in 1989’s Troop Beverly Hills. Phyllis cycles through costume after elaborate costume, each one more fantastic than the next, and even when she dons her Wilderness Girl uniform, she does so with perfectly tailored—albeit, absurdist—flare. All of this is thanks to the brilliant Theadora Van Runkle, who died this past November.

When I was a kid, my dad said we had some sort of relative who was a Hollywood costume designer. It seemed like a strange thing for him to make up, so I always assumed it was true, although I never found out any details about the relative. Years later, as an adult, I happened to catch the costume designer’s name in the credits of Troop Beverly Hills: Theadora Van Runkle. I knew my family had dropped the Van from our name during World War I, and so I wondered if Theadora was that mysterious relative. A little further research (i.e., her IMDb page) found that her other work had been just as energetic and imaginative as TBH. She also outfitted the casts of Myra Breckinridge, The Jerk, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, as well as The Godfather: Part II; I Love You, Alice B. Toklas; Peggy Sue Got Married; Rhinestone and New York, New York. She was nominated for an Oscar for her breakout work in Bonnie and Clyde, and was respected for the influence its iconic costumes had on the mainstream late-1960s fashion world. Finding all this out about her made me really hope that she was the one.

So I found her address and decided to write her. I told her I was a big fan of her work. I drew a picture of one of Shelley Long’s costumes in TBH (which, having since seen Theadora’s beautiful sketches, I now feel pretty ashamed of). I asked her if we were related.

The letter I got back, in beautiful, hand-brushed calligraphy, answered no. Her husband had died very young, Theadora said, and she kept his name to use professionally. “I think it sounds art deco,” she wrote, “don’t you?” She also claimed the name had brought her luck. She started out working as a sketch artist for Oscar-winning designer Dorothy Jeakins after meeting her at a party. The veteran costume designer went on to recommend Theadora for what Jeakins described as “a little western over at Warner brothers”—a movie that turned out to be the acclaimed Bonnie and Clyde. Theadora, who had never designed before, winged it, and went on to receive that Oscar nod. The letter went on: “My first screen credit inspired others with unique names to use theirs without changing to something less ethnic or more conventionally glamorous.” She ended the letter by saying Warren Beatty had encouraged her to change her name to Thea Vee, but she refused.

Theadora wrote that letter in 2009, when she was 81. I feel privileged—despite the fact we’re not blood-related—to have gotten to know, however slightly, an artist with such warmth and singular vision. In memory of Theadora’s passing, I’m going to post a drawing a day this next week: five Van Runkle-costumed leading ladies from some of my favorites of her movies. They’re not attempts to compete with Theadora’s original sketches, which are genius, seriously—you should look at a couple here and here. The drawings I post this week are through my own awkward film-viewing lens, and are gestures of love and admiration.

Look for Shelley Long as Phyllis Nefler tomorrow!

Blue Santa

2011-12-31T15:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve grown used to spending Christmas alone. There’s something therapeutic about it, and I’ve learned to really embrace the lows. I’m not looking for pity; I enjoy this way of celebrating. I’ve cultivated my own family-unfriendly rituals, stockpiling frozen pizzas and bottles of wine. Sometimes I join my friend Janelle for her Christmas-day tradition of seeing the shittiest movie in the theaters (Yogi Bear: The Movie; Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel). These are some pretty consumerist traditions—I won’t pretend otherwise. Yet there’s something weirdly purging about such solitary, small-scale binges. By the time the holiday’s over, I feel refreshed.

This year, I caved for a family Christmas. My boyfriend has a generous, welcoming family who lives in suburban SoCal and who really embodies the Yuletide spirit. They’ve invited me to join them in the past, and I’ve turned them down in favor of my usual solo Christmas. This year, though, I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s about presents.

I knew this, of course. I was a child in an American middle-class family, and spent a lot of time circling things in the Sears catalog. I watch TV, I see the wish-list fervor, I see the reports of injuries and mania that ensue in the rush of the holiday sales. I love to get gifts, myself, and while I could really take or leave Shopping, I like giving gifts, too. But, goddamn, the presents.

We spent a lot of time opening gifts. I mean, a lot of time, to the point where we were long past the point of feeling loved, where we weren’t getting things we needed anymore, but rather bracelet after bracelet, cologne after bottle of cologne, reindeer after nutcracker after angel. Because Santa and the gang were going gangbusters, Christmasland was out in full force (a kitsch that seems so cliché it’s not even kitsch): Caroling snowman families. Miniature ragtag pageants. Santa-capped puppies. Angler elves with baubles on the ends of their poles.

On the drive back to northern California, we made a stop at a thrift store, where all the holiday trinkets had been crowded onto a half-off table. In among the polar bears and wise men and sugarplum snowglobes, sat a holi-deity like none I’d ever seen. It was a Santa, not a Saint Nicholas or Father Christmas, but that twinkly-eyed, cotton-bearded type who was first drummed up by Clement Clark Moore. He had the black boots, the fur-trimmed jacket drawn close to his potbelly by a shiny belt. He looked jolly. But here’s the kicker: rather than red, he was dressed head to toe in blue. Blue Santa. I felt like I’d discovered some undocumented species of bug.

The variety of consumer goods is just that great.

Has the actualization of human desires become so perfected, that the diversity of trinkets has surpassed that of nature? Meanwhile, the number of plant and animal species that disappear increases each year. We sit around a tree, a dead evergreen—always—an evergreen that slowly sheds its needles. Perhaps someone hands us a gift-bagged ornament: a giraffe, the evolutionary marvel of its neck bedecked with twinkling lights. The giraffe, in all its evolutionary wonder, has somehow become entangled as it reaches for that star at the top of the tree.

And like that giraffe, with our everlasting plastic and our distant nations full of barely existing slaves, we too, reach for the star, or stars rather, until Christmas becomes about seeing how many shiny things we can hold in our hands. And once we have too many to keep track of, we panic.

We are panicking, right? We just don’t want to say so for fear of ruining Christmas?

And that’s why I like to spend the day alone. At least when I’m alone, I can create a psychic cap. There are only so many bottles of wine I can drink without dying, only so many pizzas I can fit in the freezer. There are only so many classic cartoon characters they can convert into CGI blockbusters, right? Only so many sequels they can squeeze out of each before one loses money.

And Santa—that most generous of spirits—Santa can only give so much before he drains himself blue.

The Long Awaited Fall of the Triangle Fruit Company

2011-12-30T13:32:00.001-08:00

Interview with Katarzyna Bazarnik & Zenon Fajfer

2011-12-28T19:22:00.000-08:00

Katarzyna Bazarnik and Zenon Fajfer are a Krakow-based duo that coined the term liberature, a literary genre that focuses on the physical form of a text. “The term we coined for this kind of writing,” the couple says, “points out that it is nothing else but literature in the form of the book (one meaning of Latin liber), liberated from any literary and editorial conventions (another meaning of Latin liber)—it is a kind of ‘book in freedom’.” Baxarnik and Fajfer have released a series of liberatic titles under the Liberatura imprint for Korporacja Ha!art publishing house. They recently toured the US, where they participated in a “Liberty Poem” at an Occupy Wall Street action and visited Mills College here in Oakland as artists in residence. They graciously answered some questions for me this month, which are posted at San Francisco Center for the Book’s blog:

The Liberating Bond: An Interview with Katarzyna Bazarnik & Zenon Fajfer

Letter from Pedestrianica.3

2011-12-23T17:33:00.000-08:00

When I was in my early 20s and at the height of my intellectual hubris, I made a zine. It was called Now It’s All Behind You—appropriate, right, for something you pick up again years later and feel really embarrassed about? The whole thing is vaguely themed around physical space (and by extension, time), from comics about maggot real estate to artsy analyses of industrial displacement in Eraserhead and Daydream Nation. But the feature that’s really stuck around—both for the shame it causes and because it articulates a way of thinking I still haven’t outgrown—is something called the Pedestrian Manifesto.

Have you ever tried to write a manifesto? Well, this was my only stab at it, and I have to say it was kind of fun. I can feel it when I read it today: as cringe-worthy as it is, there’s actually a sort of energy that makes me want to keep going.

I may have been young and dumb, but I was smart enough to take a certain precaution: Irony (after all, this was the late ‘90s; what other stance could I really take?). I knew the other meaning of the word pedestrian, and how at odds it was with the urgency I was trying to create, as well as how perfectly that other meaning described the style of most political screeds. So excuse me while I pat my younger self on the back.

Because there’s A LOT in the Pedestrian Manifesto that’s not so pat-worthy. I make questionable use of quotes from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire to advance my argument. I write lines like this: “How can the modern-day walker … waltz drunkenly amid the urban confines of right angles?” My levels of condescension are at an all-time high. I don’t allow for the privilege inherent in walking, and for the existence of physical disabilities. I also don’t get much further than a lengthy introduction before bringing out that lazy old standby: To be continued . . .

But, yes, irony: here you are, just like I knew you would be. Here to represent, to offhandedly deflect my shame. Because I didn’t really mean it!

And because all the while I must have secretly believed I would outgrow this idea.

And thus, irony has rewarded me. Can you blame me then, for the detachment I maintain today, as I pick up where I left off twelve years ago and write these Letters from Pedestrianica? Because it remains something I feel passionate about: The stale, unceasing onslaught of car, after car, after car, after car, after car. I mean this. I do. It’s a feeling I have yet to outgrow.

It’s hard to approach a utopian project without a certain level of ironic distance. Humor is protective. The levels of dysfunction and cruelty are staggering, the odds unbelievably low. I’ve been watching, a little at a time, Chris Marker’s protest documentary, A Grin Without a Cat, and have come away from it pretty discouraged. Patterns are on display here—popular calls for change and resulting state suppression—patterns we’re once again in the midst of repeating. But there is hope still, there in the moment, just before the cops show up with their scowls and their batons. And while A Grin Without a Cat is far from being laughably earnest, its disconnect is not to the extent that it doesn’t mean what it says.

But: By simply envisioning a different world, will it come to fruition? No. Especially if your utopia is as logic-less as mine.

Maybe utopias aren’t meant to physically exist, at least not in the ways they’re first imagined. And perhaps they’re better conjured, anyway, through a series of letters rather than a systematically propagandic presentation of logic. Especially, I guess, for a brain that’s twelve years further frayed.

So this utopia—the one I’ve named Pedestrianica—is a personal place, but it’s not exclusive, and while I’d like to see profound changes in the way we move, I’m not trying to start a movement (or am I?). When it comes down to it, I guess what I’m hoping for is some sort of confirmation I’m nuts. Perpetually hyperbolic, yes. But not nuts.

Is it nuts to address a letter to a carless nation?

Easter Basket

2011-12-21T09:37:00.000-08:00

Interview featured on Michelle Embree's new blog

2011-12-19T18:58:00.000-08:00

I recently had a great conversation with Michelle Embree, who posted it over on her brand new blog. Michelle and I were neighbors years ago in New Orleans, and she tells an anecdote about rescuing my artist's books from mattress-discounter junkies. Since then, Michelle has gone on to write a novel (Manstealing for Fat Girls) and two plays. Her play Hand Over Fist, which is about a quartet of post-Katrina con artists, was winner of the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival playwright's competition. I hope to talk to Michelle soon about the narrative magic of Tarot.

Companion Collage

2011-12-15T09:58:00.000-08:00

Here are two collages in celebration of my short story, "Warmth," which appears in the new issue of (what else?) The Collagist. The story is a Christmas-themed, fabulist, homosexual tragedy that was inspired by Depeche Mode's song, "Pipeline." Its villain is loosely based on Sarah Palin. Read it here.

Like notches in a clock . . .

2011-12-08T10:02:00.000-08:00

Vertical Diptych.6

2011-12-03T15:06:00.000-08:00

Interview with Myrtle Von Damitz!

2011-11-30T11:07:00.000-08:00

I've started blogging for the San Francisco Center for the Book, and my first post is an interview with Myrtle Von Damitz, III. Myrtle is a New Orleans artist who founded the annual book arts exhibition, Babylon Lexicon, in 1999. She goes into the history and evolution of the exhibition, including what makes it unique to NOLA, as well as some context of the city's underground literary and journalistic history.

Wedding Review.9

2011-11-26T10:19:00.000-08:00

As wedding season came to a close, a storm was rolling in. This couple was making things legal just barely ahead of the months of heavy rain.

There were several perfumed candles burning in the entrance.

Fighting off a chemical headache, I uncorked the wine and took this time to reflect. I stood in solidarity, I'd always thought, with the spell each wedding attempts to cast; we’re doing similar things here, aren’t we? Me with my pen in hand and you with your better spun, less acerbic sense of narrative. Your signature cocktail, your monogrammed satchel of artisan sweets, the curated perceptions of those who give your toasts: themes emerge. Themes that sneakily defer both future and past to the present.

The fragrance of the candles was taking over, a rose-scented sort of bathroom smell. A smell that works hard to hide bullshit. This, then, weddings, was the difference between you and me. The cooks, who were concerned about the candles clashing with people’s appetites, opened up the kitchen door. The first few drops of rain were falling.

You’ve always been a little neurotic, the maid of honor read from her notes, the tears lining up behind each awkward pause. But that’s what I’ve always loved about you. She spoke for us all when she said this. It was clear that tonight would veer toward bereavement, not chaos. Fizzle not bang, drizzle not thunderstorm. Sympathy cards all around for the bride. Either way, I regretted not saving that “November Rain” allusion for tonight.

I went outside to the pantry to eat my dinner, letting the rain loosen up my food on the way. Nothing was going to clash with my appetite—even the raccoons, who despite the open pantry door, failed to make an appearance.

I pondered what sort of changes next year’s season would bring. Would pudding be the new tarts be the new pie be the new cupcakes? Would weddings tighten or ease their imaginative grip?

I went home with several slices of braised pork.

The 7 Dental Muses

2011-11-23T19:25:00.000-08:00

Letter from Pedestrianica.2

2011-11-22T13:43:00.000-08:00

I’ve been doing a little marching lately—marching as in walking with a large group of people (not as in lifting your knees in sync with an external rhythm). This marching—which is a simple act, but which is cathartic, thrilling, terrifying, mournful, ecstatic—this marching is the action of the Occupy movement I can most fully get behind.

I’ve mentioned before the creative usefulness of walking, as have many others (Thoreau and Robert Walser, to name a few). And I’d like to explore it further in the future. But for now, let’s quickly touch on it again, and remind ourselves of the loosening that happens while in stride. The stagnancy of the desk gives way to air and stimuli; frontiers of the imagination expand. And what happens on an individual level takes place communally as well. A movement is about moving, after all, and that’s why the march is so symbolic. The world is changing right before our eyes; possibilities come into view that would have stayed obscured behind a windshield.

Not to say the more stationary aspects of Occupy are unimportant, the camps and the general assemblies with their well-honed ways of conducting large meetings. I tend to fear interacting with strangers, though, unable to articulate myself in ways I wish I could, easily annoyed by certain types within activist communities. Isolationism, then, is what I gravitate toward, ironically a symptom of car culture: each enclosed in their own machine, with no time or proximity to study the faces of those you pass. But that’s the way—for right now, at least—things are over here in my region of Pedestrianica. There are comfort zones that need to be transcended, and we’re working on it.

But marching. Marching is an act that doesn’t require verbal interaction. Most of the verbiage is canned and one way: chants. Still there’s an understanding, one that grips and that will crush you if cling too strongly to your feelings of separateness. One that after the numb refuge of individuality, can paradoxically be freeing.

And the power. Rarely do I feel such Pedestrianican power. I’m usually one small body in a sea of steel and speed, but when the crowd takes over the street (for there’s nothing more flaccid than a march that’s been restricted to the sidewalk), there is vindication. At last, one small slice of space and time not subject to the motorist’s tyranny. For once, this crowd says, you cannot go where you want, when you want. For once the streets are whose? Ours. The crowd brings to light the stupid, stunted, unadaptable nature of the car.

Which is dangerous, this smug reversal of violence. The names of the crimes in these instances—the infractions the police cite as reason for breaking out their “less than lethal” weapons—the names of these crimes are telling: obstructing traffic and pedestrian interference.

In the last couple days, the media focus actually seems to have shifted from violent protesters to violent police. News sources have been forced to address police brutality as more and more footage of it surfaces. But two of the most disturbing examples of violence during protests in the last few weeks have been at the hands of motorists. During a march in support of Oakland’s general strike on Nov. 2, a man appeared to deliberately run over two pedestrians, badly injuring both. After Oakland police failed to respond to a 911 call, onlookers ran to the nearest BART station to ask the transit police for help. After taking down information, the BART police let the man drive his Mercedes away from the scene.

And in Washington, DC, when Occupy protesters set up blockades outside of a convention center where the ultraconservative Americans for Prosperity Foundation was meeting, a driver plowed into the crowd, injuring four, including a pregnant woman and a 13-year-old boy. Rather than charge the driver, though, police chastised the pedestrians for being in the street.

It makes sense that police would be on the side of the motorists. So much of what they do is based on an ethos of bullying, and the driver’s right of way comes from a similar place: Get the fuck out of my way, pussy, I’m bigger and faster and more armored than you. And get a police officer behind the wheel? This kind of compounded power is terrifying, resulting in gratuitous high-speed chases. My old roommate was skittish about walking her dog after cops unnecessarily chased a car into our Oakland neighborhood, resulting in the deaths of two innocent people. This kind of fear is in the air on so many different levels. It divides us, which makes us even more afraid. On a side note, which is unfair, I know, and simplistic, but perhaps a topic for another time: it’s interesting that fascism rose in the years after our cities became fully infested with cars.

There has been a call to replace the name Occupy with Decolonize. America stands on land that once belonged to other nations—the Ohlone here in Oakland, for one—and the implication of the word Occupy is imperialistic to say the least. It’s staggering to think of the layers upon layers of asphalt and cement, these concrete colonizations that smother the ghosts and bones of those whose land was stolen. When you look at it this way, the cars are just the icing on the cake. Some heavy icing, yes, some icing that's not going to be easy to scrape off. But we need to start working toward that first step, slow down this needlessly constant motion, stroll around the block for a second, acknowledge our common humanity, and discuss how we can work toward righting the injustices of the past. It’s this kind of reflection that will allow clearer visions of the future to finally come into view.

Dream of Aimless Unemployment

2011-11-20T18:55:00.000-08:00

In this dream, I had a job where I was unappreciated—to the extent that my boss could never remember my name. I decided to walk. Perfect timing, as my grandma pulled up in a minivan to treat me to lunch. Sitting across from her at a table in a woodsy diner, I tried to explain the injustice of my workplace. She didn’t understand.

Circumstances became such that we had to leave the minivan at the diner and walk through a busy park. There were all kinds of men with mild, mysterious smiles, wearing red athletic uniforms and chucking soccer balls against a fence. My grandma walked confidently ahead, skirting the fence, the men pausing to let her pass. As I followed, though, they began to throw the balls again, and I could feel the whisper of each as it sped past my head. The violence was in strange contrast to their smiles.

Somehow I lost track of my grandma, and went inside a decrepit parks maintenance building to try to find her. There was something wrong with this place, I realized: it was rat infested, I could sense them scurrying around in the shadows. The building’s unease felt more like a haunting than an infestation. There were all sorts of spiders and webs and egg sacs which clung to me now, and which I couldn’t get to fully leave my skin.

The sunlight outside was a relief, the men and their soccer balls less of a visceral threat as I began to make my way back to the minivan in hopes that my grandma was there.

Stink Out Your Friends!

2011-11-18T14:15:00.000-08:00

Even the most genius of jokes is doomed to not hold up

2011-11-17T18:03:00.000-08:00

Interrobang?! has posted a very short story of mine called "Windowless Room, Silverless Fish". It's told from the point of view of a comedian whose vampiric existence is causing him to get a little existential.

Wedding Review.8

2011-11-13T21:51:00.000-08:00

Why, I feel it’s time to ask, do we drink so much? Are we caterers such drunks because our work is more stressful than most, and thus we need more numbing? No. Martyrs aren’t the type to wear all black. Maybe it’s just because there’s so much alcohol around. Get it while we can, we think, or maybe we don’t think—we just unthinkingly reflect the behavior of our guests.

Or is everyone—weddings be damned—always this drunk?

This was a wedding that neglected to provide its guests with champagne. There was moscato, yes, there was moscato. But moscato is something that’s too sweet to consume like air. Thus I waited a few hours—of sobriety, mind you—I waited a few long, long hours before risking that telltale hematic wine lip: before going on in for the red.

The bartender was yelling. A man had grabbed her, and at the same time was threatening the structural soundness of the bar. Baby, just believe me, he told her. I can hold my liquor. She was torn, she said, between running away and standing there to prevent the bar from falling over. The bar—this was a wedding, after all—was not a bar, but rather a linen-draped folding table. Give and take, you might advise this bartender, trapped as she was between the two. But by now, something like this for her was second nature.

And weddings, perhaps, should now stand and examine their dusty old clusters of give and take. We all know who’s doing the taking, don’t we? The theatricality makes it obvious (The couple? The couple’s mothers? Just bear with me). And the giving, of course, is given unwillingly. The father had a tear in his eye as he gave the bride away.

The moscato, unlike champagne, seemed too celebratory to become habit. I went home with yet one more bottle of red.

I put on the best clothes I own and passed hors d'oeuvres

2011-11-09T09:33:00.000-08:00

I just finished this broadside, which is a heavily fictionalized account of catering a children's birthday party. I wrote the piece last year, and, in a way, it prefigures the wedding reviews I've been writing for this blog: it's told from the point of view of an acerbic caterer and highlights the more sinister aspects of ritual. It does, however, run a little more freely into the realm of the absurd. I'm not sure how I feel about the visual results—I tend toward a cleaner aesthetic. The content of this piece, though, is so chaotic and debauched, I figured it was a good excuse to lay it on thick. To see more broadsides, visit my website.

Vertical Diptych.5 (Rent Free Lombard Street)

2011-11-07T12:23:00.000-08:00

Rant.5

2011-11-06T20:23:00.000-08:00

Daylight savings. Such a slight adjustment, yet something, if you're sober enough, that reverberates, that scolds. The state finds it useful, amusing even, to remind you twice a year: they are the ones who decide who you must be and where you must be and when.

Nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything

2011-11-06T09:26:00.000-08:00

Here I am with my pals Bart and Tintin yesterday, as they graciously hosted me as Cartoonist in Residence at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.

Interpretive Propaganda

2011-11-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

This poster is an idea (using a phrase taken from a Mekons song) conceived by artist Gabby Miller as a tribute to today's general strike in Oakland. "I was amazed by how quickly something unimaginable become a possibility," says Gabby, "and how rapidly the idea spread. For me, the Occupy movement is very much about going beyond the imagination." The layout was adapted from a silkscreened companion poster that teacher Miriam Klein-Stahl developed with her students. Chinzalee Sonami and Andy Turner bravely assisted us last night as we printed over 400 copies! We hope to someday invite artists to collaborate by filling in the poster's blank space. You can put money toward this project here. Gabby will be at 14th and Broadway today in downtown Oakland, handing out free copies!

Cartoonist in Residence!

2011-11-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

I'm the November Cartoonist in Residence at San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum! Which means I'll be there this Saturday, Nov. 5, holding court at a drawing table from 1-3 pm. I'll have some comics and zines for sale, and will display the just-finished originals from an illustrated essay memorializing the legendary drugstore, Super Longs. I also hope to get going on some doodles for an interview I did with fiction writer, Jincy Willett. The Cartoon Art Museum is located at 655 Mission Street, between New Montgomery and Third.

Wedding Review.7

2011-10-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

Halloween was in the air, and so I prepared myself for a spooky wedding. There were pumpkins on the stairs, but was this a spooky detail? They were white ones, marshmallowy, like Casper the Friendly Ghost, so squeaky clean they threatened to outpure the bride. Rather than homage to terror, a concession to a less than fortunate scheduling choice.

Still, something about this wedding, in the beginning, at least, felt like a funeral.

All around the country—all around the world, in fact—people were haunting public squares with tents and signs and demands to open up a conversation about class. Thus, at this wedding, the difference between those who carried the platters and those who plucked things from them was starting to be more starkly lit. Half the wedding party spoke with British accents, which didn’t exactly soften the delivery of such lines as: Now that’s a caddy who didn’t deserve a tip.

The maid of honor, though, defied such trite dichotomies, dressed as she was in heroically tacky pink. She toasted the bride by calling her classy, then explained to the audience—again, heroically—that while her friend was touring Europe, she had been working at Hooters.

My boss left the wedding early to prepare for a costume party. Her costume: Marie Antoinette. Such a strange way of looking at the world, eyes hidden just beneath a prosthetic, sticky neck, a head in the crook of your arm like a big white pumpkin.

The funereal atmosphere began to melt away, the closer the guests got to being snockered. Is snockered the British word for being drunk? One of the cooks could hear the raccoons encroaching outside on the stoop, but when she went to shoo them away, she found they were guests.

At the end of the night, two of the guests sat their baby on the bar, and we all lined up to watch him joyfully suck on a piece of ice. The help was on one side of the bar, the helped on the other, yet how could we help but take a moment to act like friends? The baby’s head was so small and his temperament so serene, he could have crawled right out of a painting.

I went home with some risotto and a roll of toilet paper. Times were tough.

Letter from Pedestrianica

2011-10-28T23:55:00.000-07:00

I go for a lot of walks. It’s how I get places, for one thing, but it also serves as a sort of therapy, a varied repetition that soothes and gets me safely past the blocks (after blocks after blocks) in my head. It can also help alleviate anger, but then again maybe it can’t: I’m talking about a theoretical world here, I’m talking ideologically. I’m talking about a world without cars.

A world with breathable air. A world without the relentless, numbing drone of motors. A world where we aren’t on that constant grave-robberly quest to unearth oil, waging eternal war, slaughtering entire populations, and, woops, poisoning oceans in the quest to get our next hit of gasoline.

A world with fast, reliable, comprehensive, cheap public transit. A world where we can bike without fear of dying. One where freeways become so extraneous, we make them parks. Where the transportation needs of the elderly and people with disabilities are given priority.

A world that is crisp rather than blurred, where we linger and pay attention to the spaces we inhabit. Where we don’t have to look for parking. Where we don’t have to look both ways. A world with some room to really move.

Am I being a diva here?

Self-righteous, maybe, I’ll accept self-righteous. And hyperbolic. But I’m just one small body in the face of a nonstop flow of hurtling, two-ton chunks of metal (how’s that for hyperbole?). There’s a power dynamic here, one that I never hear talked about, but one that becomes conversely clear in times when I ride inside those chunks of metal.

When we're behind that windshield, we are God.

We can’t go on like this. And this seems so urgent to me, and obvious. It’s seemed obvious for most of my life.

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries," Roethke said.

There was one walk I went on, a walk around my neighborhood the other night, in the company of a thousand other people. The Occupy Oakland movement had just voted to declare a citywide general strike for Wednesday, November 2, and I joined them as they walked around downtown in celebration. It was the kind of march that took up the entire street, the kind you usually need a permit for, but there was an odd absence of cops, which must have felt extra freeing to the marchers who’d suffered through the cops’ fascistic tactics the night before (those who weren’t in the hospital or jail). We walked: past the jail and past Mexicali Rose, past apartment buildings with people dancing on fire escapes. Past a club where my friend Gabby had gone to dance, and after seeing us all out walking, decided to come say hi. Past an enclave of condos the city subsidized but never filled. Past the freeway onramp, where a debate ensued over whether we should storm the interstate (I’m not the only one who wants to make it a park). Past my house, how convenient: goodnight.

Mainstream media pundits have complained about the OWS movement's lack of a focused message (here is a great article about why those pundits are mattering less and less). So let me walk around the block for a minute and complicate their message even further. On second thought, though, how complicated is this? One of the movement's favorite chants is “Whose streets? Our streets!”: cars, more than anything else, embody the unhealthy, unjust ways in which we occupy this planet. And the reason we all need our cars like we do stems from money. Los Angeles once had one of the most efficient streetcar systems in the world. Prior to GM's buyout of their public transit system, Los Angeles—the city whose name now conjures immediate images of gridlock—once strove for the same thing I want.

What I want is a world without cars.

The reasons for this are many, and to be honest, right now, I don’t even know where to start. So this is just the first of many Letters from Pedestrianica, the name I’ve decided to give this carless world I’ve been talking about. Even now, as I write this, those wavy red lines have attached themselves to the undercarriage of carless: Microsoft Word has decided that carless is not a word.

The software feels the same way about the word, classism. But at the rapid rate political discourse now seems to be shifting, we’ll see how long that lasts.

Welcome to Pedestrianica. It’s a mouthful, for sure, as we lift ourselves up out of the smog. But who knows what sort of things we’ll articulate, one day when we walk together, that day when we’ve finally freed ourselves of our dull and cumbersome cars?

Nice Not Inspired

2011-10-27T18:24:00.000-07:00

3 ways a contact lens, once lost, becomes a mask

2011-10-23T09:05:00.000-07:00

I gave a workshop last week at Mills College on the art of sequential collage. We talked about visual themes, the narratives that form out of forced juxtaposition, and the similarities between typeset letterpress and collage (as well as the liberation that can stem from such material constraints). One student used the word collaboration—which I loved—when talking about the relationship between collage artists and their materials.

We also talked about the Kurt Schwitters exhibit currently at the Berkley Art Museum, and the inadvertent narratives that rise, even in work with nonsensical intention. I brought in my book Tarpaulin Kingdom, and we discussed the tactile nature of the book and the way it exists in a space between two-dimensional and sculptural art. We also talked about the exciting shift that can happen with the turn of a page.

We approached our assignment with this shift in mind, creating simple collaged trifolds with interlocking imagery, such as the one above.

For homework, I would encourage pondering the word manipulation while watching this video from Mark Leidner and keeping in mind the following quote from Lautreamont:

Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.

Personic Truth: An Interview with Jasmin Lim

2011-10-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

A few months back, one of the display windows at San Francisco's Artists' Television Access (ATA) was packed with a mishmash of photocopied news snippets, photographs, collages, and quotes on the nature of truth. At the center of the display was a TV with the image of a burning book: Sarah by JT LeRoy.

Yes, that JT LeRoy. The teen hustler/literary prodigy who wrote four works of fiction, received accolades, and befriended celebrities before being exposed as a “fake.” LeRoy’s critically acclaimed books, it turned out, had been written by Laura Albert, a woman in her 30s, and his public appearances had been performed by a costumed accomplice.

The backlash that followed was nuts. That image of the burning book is appropriate; a witch hunt would work, too. LeRoy/Albert had simply pissed off too many powerful people. The thing was, what Albert did was something fiction writers do on a daily basis: she pretended to be someone she was not. Who she was and was not, however, remains up for debate. Albert describes LeRoy as a “veil” rather than a “hoax” and maintains that the persona was not simply a scam; rather, he was an avatar created to indirectly express past traumas. Albert, who lives in San Francisco, continues to write and recently explored issues of sexual abuse in an essay on Roman Polanski over at Fandor. Last year she spoke about her experience as JT LeRoy on The Moth.

The window at ATA, Untitled (Persona Case Study), explores some of the complex issues of identity raised by the case of JT LeRoy. It was created by Jasmin Lim, an artist who has developed a close bond with Albert. Lim is no stranger to questions of perception. Her photographic experiments have featured altered perspectives via slight manipulations such as folding and tilting. I love the tactile nature of Jasmin’s work and am fascinated by the layers of identity involved in the case of JT LeRoy, so I was excited to get to ask her some questions. She talked about her relationship with Albert as well as the ATA installation, which at some point she hopes to adapt into a zine.

Laura has talked about JT LeRoy as being a coping mechanism, a kind of way of dealing with past sexual abuse, as well as an integral part of her creative process. In this way, JT seems to straddle several dichotomies, one of which is that of healing/destructive figure. Do you see destruction as being key to the creative process, either as initiator or result? What about healing?

I think for many of us, especially when you grow up around abuse, violence is normalized, and when we choose to redirect that energy, it is healing. Laura often quotes writer David Milch, "People say that my writing is dark. And for me it's quite the opposite. It sees light in darkness and it doesn't try to distort darkness. The essential thing is that the seeing itself is joyful."

Art can be a practice of deprogramming ourselves. Like the Indian deities Shiva and Kali, destroyers of illusion. They grant liberation by destroying illusions of the ego.

Do you have a relationship to JT LeRoy? Is he a presence for you in your interactions with Laura?

Yes. He is a manifestation of Laura’s inner world, and I feel the contradictions and complexities she embodies are important to explore.

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation you and Laura had in August [a panel discussion at ATA moderated by Chuck Mobley] was when she talked about the photo of her as a child wearing a T-shirt that reads “I Want to Be Me.” There’s something so haunting about this image and the way Laura discussed it in the context of identity. Can you talk a little about this?

She said that her mom had her wear that shirt, but at the time, “being me” was the last thing she wanted. At the same time, it was the thing she wanted most without realizing it.

There is an excerpt I included in the window, by theorist Jose Esteban Munoz, about survival strategies the “minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere”. It describes the contradictions we negotiate in forming our identity, like identifying with something that you are simultaneously in conflict with; because we absorb ideologies around us, we become a site of conflict.

Of course at her core, Laura really did want to be herself, but the external pressures to conform were often louder.

There are several other quotes from theorists featured in the window. Can you talk about the significance of some of these?

There is a George Steiner quote that says, “It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past."

This quote is like theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman’s concept of the "adjacent possible," that the “complex systems best able to adapt are those on the border between chaos and disorder.” The adjacent possible describes both the limits and the creative potential of change; that we can only work from the framework that currently exists; that innovation is a recombination of what we already know. And everything we do increases the possibility of what is possible next. So imagining that there are realities beyond what we are capable of perceiving right now gives us room to perceive something beyond literal truth.

The Jorge Macchi quote says, “I’m absolutely against categorizations. Their function is to tranquilize the spectator."

Both of the quotes describe how focusing on literal “truth” neglects a deeper meaning. If we allow for ambiguity, then more complex understandings can develop as previously separate ideas coalesce.

Another quote is from the Authors Guild, regarding the lawsuit brought against Laura and what it means for authors who want (or need) to write under a pseudonym or anonymously. There is a clear miscarriage of justice here that will have ramifications for the literary community, yet I rarely hear it discussed. Can you talk about this?

The production company, Antidote International Films, bought the rights to Laura's book Sarah. After her identity was revealed, they didn’t want to just adapt the book anymore—they wanted to make what they called a "meta-movie, like Being John Malkovich," incorporating Laura's life into her fictional book. Laura said no, and they sued her for fraud because she signed the contracts as JT LeRoy—even though the contract signature does not change the fictional book they purchased.

They spent four times more on the case to supposedly recover the cost of optioning the book. Laura's case became a principled issue to demoralize her. During the court case, the plaintiff's lawyers said they wanted her to "behave." Somehow the ambiguity was threatening to the president of the production company, who made an example out of Laura to retain his sense of power. That they won sets a precedent. The Authors Guild amicus brief for Laura's case states, "the district court's decision which holds that Laura Albert's use of pseudonym breached the Option and Purchase Agreement, is one that will have a chilling effect upon authors wishing to exercise their right to write anonymously."

There is a photocopied collage in the window that features images of computers and softcore porn. Where did this collage come from and how does it fit in with the window?

It is about 15 years old. Laura made this collage before JT (Jeremiah Terminator) was JT. Maybe at the time JT was just Terminator—I'm not sure. She only faintly remembers it and doesn’t really know what she meant to make.

More than softcore porn, it is bondage imagery combined with images of communication technologies at the time: early computers, telephone land lines, floating CDs, and flying saucers that share the same scale, etc. It's about buying fantasies of people and what is being communicated during these exchanges.

There is so much visual information all arranged in a dense mound that takes up 90 percent of the paper. Each time I look at it, I see something I didn’t see before or draw new associations between things inside the collage. I also make connections between what I imagine the conditions were while it was made and what they tell us today, now that we have 15 or so years’ perspective.

It’s similar to how the information in the window operates. There is so much information that I continue to understand it differently as I change and the world changes.

Can you talk about some of these juxtapositions that happened as you were assembling the window? Did anything become clearer to you through pushing separate fragments of writing together?

When I immersed myself in the materials, it seemed like nothing made sense; each individual piece had many layers within it, and combined with other pieces, you could draw infinite associations.

I couldn't make decisions about what to exclude. This response seemed appropriate. The framework that I normally position things in became more fluid and open, and there was less hierarchy because each article or excerpt took approximately equal real estate. In this way, the concept became about how we process information, how we restrict our perceptual potential, and how reframing shifts our interaction with information.

The window’s centerpiece features a copy of Sarah hollowed out with an unlit candle inside. A couple years ago, you engaged with the book/movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar in a similar way, creating an image of a hollowed out paperback copy of Mr. Goodbar with a candle inside. What led you to approach these two works in this way? Are there thematic similarities between Mr. Goodbar and Sarah?

Both Sarah and Looking for Mr. Goodbar have protagonists who can't be themselves in their cultures/environments. Both of these books are also expressions of real events: Sarah is a figurative expression of Laura’s experience with trauma and abuse, and Mr. Goodbar is both a book and a film inspired by the brutal murder of Roseann Quinn.

Reading this Saturday at SOMArts!

2011-10-17T10:58:00.000-07:00

I'll be reading as a part of Gathering the Embers: a Día de los Muertos Tribute Show this weekend. It's a stellar lineup of writers and performers including Fredrick Cloyd, Carolina De Robertis, Jennifer Derilo, Kenji Liu, Vickie Vértiz, Amanda Vigil, Natalia Vigil, and more. It happens this Saturday, October 22, from 7-9:30 pm at SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan St. San Francisco. Tickets are $5 in advance or purchase at the door.

Kiss From a Rose

2011-10-14T17:20:00.001-07:00

Pity (in the City) Party feat. Isaac Babel & Jules Renard

2011-10-12T19:25:00.000-07:00

For a long time, I’ve wanted a writing residency. It’s embarrassing, but I’ve sunk a lot of money and time into applying for the things, without any real results. The last year I spent living in a windowless apartment in Oakland, my nature starvation reaching epic levels. Still, though, I managed to stay inspired and produce a lot of material. I even used my tomb-like surroundings as a setting for a short story, “Windowless Room, Silverless Fish,” which appears in the latest issue of Interrobang?!.

But besides the toll the natural disconnect took on my mental health, I also worried my writing process was being affected. I read Isaac Babel’s “The Awakening,” a memoir-ish short story where the young Babel spends a summer skipping violin lessons to try to learn how to swim. His efforts are mostly unsuccessful, and he’s told by the gentile “water god,” Nikitich, that his ignorance of nature is going to hamper his dreams of being a writer. Nikitich asks him,

“What’s that tree?”

I didn’t know.

“What’s growing on that bush?”

“What bird is that singing?”

I knew none of the answers. The names of trees and birds, their division into species, where birds fly away to, on which side the sun rises, when the dew falls thickest—all these things were unknown to me.

“And you dare to write! A man who doesn’t live in nature, as a stone does or an animal, will never in all his life write two worthwhile lines. Your landscapes are like descriptions of stage props…”

It wasn’t the comparison to stage props that worried me so much—I’m into the intersection of the natural and artificial. I just felt like there was this essential element, this green-glowing life force I was neglecting. Still there was one fairly large tree on my block, and as luck would have it, it stood just outside the ventilation system’s intake. My desk was right up next to the vent, and at the height of the tree’s blossoming, I could smell it. There was something weirdly liberating about this, the constraint of every sense except one, and I felt like I was experiencing the tree in this way few others had access to.

Anyway, events have conspired since then to offer me a sort of impromptu writing residency. I moved into an apartment with windows—and an office. I also lost my job, resulting in my getting unemployment benefits, which feels like I’ve received some sort of art grant. I also have more time to go out into nature and walk around; yesterday I spent a couple hours on the eerie paths of San Francisco’s Glen Canyon Park. There were informational signs there, and I came away learning a new word, chert, which I can’t define much beyond the fact that it’s a type of rock. Still, though, maybe Nikitich would be proud.

I’ve been reading Jules Renard’s Journal, and he writes, “It is in the heart of the city that one writes the most inspired pages about the country.” Maybe what he means is that precision isn’t so much necessary in describing nature, but rather surrender, a concession to its (decreasingly) sprawling mysteries. Is this something that’s better understood from the enclosure of the city?

Babel’s great ending to “The Awakening” seems to suggest so:

The moonlight congealed on bushes unknown to me, on trees that had no name. Some anonymous bird emitted a whistle and was extinguished, perhaps by sleep. What bird was it? What was it called? Does dew fall in the evening? Where is the constellation of the Great Bear? On what side does the sun rise?

Wedding Review.6

2011-10-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

My commute was once again monomythic. First a train, then a ferry out across the bay, which was clotted with Fleet Week sailboats. Overhead, the Blue Angels, those bullying otherworldly visitors, flew in formation, smoke rings and insurance ads drifting in their wake. Once back on land, I climbed a mountain, relieved to be overwhelmed by trees, the earth finally soft and dark. A group of teens drank beer and watched the planes make swathes across the clear, deep sky of the bay. On the other side of the mountain, I crossed a meadowed valley. I stopped to take a leak, was approached by a deer that almost seemed like a man. This was the sort of peace that was ripe for hyperbolic mosquitoes: the Blue Angels had followed me across the bay.

The wedding party was assembled in the grass and seemed to be taking it all in stride. The lack of craning necks was refreshing. Of course, they seemed to be thinking, the planes grandstanding just above. This was fated. This was their Something Blue.

There’s the bride, someone said, and I turned to see a woman in an ill-fitting pink floral dress. Is it possible, I wondered, could there ever be a bride this brazenly un-vain and impure? The answer was no: this woman was the groom’s twin sister. The bride, despite being pregnant, wore her dutiful white with vigor.

Toward the end of the evening, my voyage caught up with me: my knee gave out. Stairs became epic, carrying buckets and bus tubs now a Promethean task. Many of the guests, I thought, had traveled much farther than I. Under less rigorous circumstances, granted, but still, I understood that nagging, not-drunk-enough doubt: the instant where the event of a lifetime becomes an afterthought. This is why we must work so hard to make memories.

Due to a lack of hard alcohol, the guests all left in a timely, ordered manner.

I went home with two small bunches of parsley.

Vertical Diptych.4

2011-10-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

Make Your Trip Have Meaning

2011-10-04T16:45:00.000-07:00

Wedding Review.5

2011-10-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

The evening, for me, involved a lot of sweeping, because this was a wedding that was fraught with broken glass. Yes, the guests were drunk, and they dropped their drinks like they always do. But there was something stronger here, more constant: unity must be disrupted. What has been joined together must—over and over and over again—be divided into a thousand skittering glass chips.

I swept and I swept, a blister soon forming: a circular flap of skin dyed blue from the broom handle’s cheap paint. A Cinderella in search of a wicked stepmother, I tore that piece of skin right off.

My stepmother soon surfaced, a glamorous guest who wore black but still outshone the bride. Sunhat, pearls, dazzling bracelets over arm-length gloves, a possibly lifted face: this guest had attended the Joan Collins School of Beauty. Her one against-type trait? She spent the evening drinking not white, but red wine.

Meanwhile, bees, confused, drifted into the banquet hall to die. Outside, the raccoons were gathering momentum; it must have been a bumper crop year. I looked at the circle of raw, damp flesh that punctuated the crook of my thumb and forefinger. It seemed so alarmingly permeable. It was going from red to purple, getting closer to the unnatural blue it had been before. Is this what it feels like, I wondered, to be a tree in the fall?

I went home with a pot of hardy-looking succulents.

The Big Thaw

2011-09-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

Today a man stopped me in the street, complimented my hat, high-fived me, told me he had just been released from prison, and asked if I was on my way to BART. I told him I didn’t have any money, which was true. I’m not asking for money, he said, offended. I was trying to ask you where the BART station is.

The thing is, asking for directions doesn’t involve such elaborate strategy. Information, unlike money, is generally freely exchanged between strangers. Our instinct, if someone simply asks, is to give directions to the train station—even if we don’t really know exactly where it is.

Money, on the other hand, tends to be frozen, and thus involves some thawing: flattery (I like your hat) or the instant creation of a bond (High five!) or of sympathy (I just got out of prison). Another—ingenious—tactic, of course, is to begin by asking for information:

Hey, do you know where the ocean is?

Yeah . . . Seven or eight blocks that way, then take a right at the Best Buy.

Thanks. Do you have a dollar?

While sob stories and undue respect may actually put potential donors more on guard, the opportunity to freely exchange information warms them, unwittingly puts them in a generous mood, softens up any previously frozen cash. Springtime in Moneyville.

I’ve noticed an increase lately in this tactic. We are, after all, in the midst of the Information Age; maybe what was already a generous instinct—the free exchange of information—has only quickened with the invention of the Internet. It’s hyperbolic, of course, yet strangely true to say that information has come to be almost as essential as air. From the protests sparked by BART’s suppression of cell phone use to the discussion around keeping the Internet regulation-free to Wikileaks to the Arab Spring to the rapidly spreading Occupy Wall Street movement, even institutions are increasingly being held responsible for withholding information—it only makes sense that these phenomena would color our daily interactions in the street.

Money, however, both on an institutional and individual level, seems to be growing ever more frozen, concentrated in the pockets of the wealthy few. It would follow that it’s probably only gotten harder to get passersby to give you spare change. Thus people—desperate people locked outside those glacial stores of wealth—are learning to take cues from the customs that have formed around that essential-as-air commodity: Information. A commodity that, however valuable, won’t buy you shelter or food.

Money is an object used to get you more objects. Information is something more abstract. Yet is this really true? Money’s worth seems so arbitrary to me, so far removed from the needs of those whose lack of it impedes their ability to survive. As cash becomes rarer, and information more free, perhaps this arbitrariness grows more apparent. Information access for all, yes, of course, but what the hell are we standing on right now? Maslow’s pyramid has been built on melting ice.

Vertical Diptych.3

2011-09-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

How to Name a Bitch

2011-09-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading Gavin Lambert’s The Slide Area, which is a collection of short stories (some call it a novel) about 1950s Hollywood. While it covers a lot of familiarly bizarre territory, there are plenty of moments all its own, such as this (titular) one:

On one section of the highway a crowd has gathered. An ambulance stands by, winking red lights. A sheriff directs operations. From a great pile of mud and stones and sandy earth, the legs of old ladies are sticking out. Men with shovels are working to free the rest of their bodies. Objects are rescued first, a soiled tablecloth and a thermos flask and what looks like a jumbo sandwich, long as a baby eel. Then an air cushion and more long sandwiches, and a picnic basket, and at last the three old ladies themselves. They are all right. They look shaken and angry, which is to be expected. A few minutes ago they had been sitting on the Palisades, in a pleasant little hollow free from the wind.

The prose is consistently this great and there are several unforgettable characters, including Julie Forbes, an unabashed bitch of an actress reportedly modeled after Joan Crawford.

Like Joan, Julie Forbes has undergone a variety of identity reinventions during the course of her career: from the “chorus girl with a jaunty grin and busily tapping feet” in 1927 to 1933’s wholesome and victimized country girl to the cigarette-smoking, frivolous sophisticate to the noble humanitarian, where “(s)he played a famous woman doctor who went blind, and a member of the Norwegian resistance.” After a slump and a false retirement announcement, she reappeared:

Mature but unravaged, she presented a ruthless schemer in For Pity’s Sake, a woman who didn’t care how many lives she destroyed in her quest for … what? She stole other women’s husbands, became rich and feared and famous, drove her enemies to drunkenness or suicide, yet she never seemed happy.

And this is the Joan I know, and the one who seems to remain today, her lifelong ambition rewarded: a Hollywood legend, albeit one recognized mostly as an archetype she embraced for only a fraction of her career. I have to admit, before reading “The Closed Set”—the story that focuses on Julie Forbes—I didn’t realize the extent of Joan’s shape shifting. While I knew she had a long and varied career, it’s always been those shoulders and that malevolent mouth that stuck.

As a child of the 1980s, it makes sense I came to know Joan through Mommie Dearest—as unfair to her as that may be. Faye Dunaway’s “Joan Crawford” fuses so melodramatically well with the roles Joan played during the Cutthroat Bitch phase of her film career; thus, Joan’s most iconic roles remain the ruthless ones.

Anyway, it’s always the villains who get remembered. Survival takes ruthlessness, no? Well, yes, but maybe more importantly, it takes adaptability.

Lucille LeSueur—who was born in Texas, raised in Oklahoma, and commonly went by “Billie”—had a birth name with an implied exoticism that defied her small-town roots. She used this name to appear in three films before an MGM publicist decided she should change it. Not only did the name sound fake, the justification went, it also sounded like “Le Sewer”. A contest was held to decide the starlet’s new name; the winning moniker was “Joan Arden”. Because another actress was already using this name, an alternate surname was employed: “Crawford”. So Joan, in a way, was christened by the public, which is funny, as the public is the only boss Joan ever had.

Joan, nee Lucille, initially preferred the first half of her stage name to be pronounced “Jo-anne”. She also turned her nose up at“Crawford”, saying it was too few letters away from “Crawfish”. Years later, after she had been well established, “Joan Crawford” began to take on an aura of security for the actress. Perhaps it was a reassuring constant behind the array of personalities she found herself circulating through.*

Which brings us back to Lambert and his decision to disguise Joan as “Julie Forbes”. For me, while “Crawford” and “Forbes” are pretty much interchangeable, “Julie” is a far cry from “Joan”. Once again, though, maybe this is generational. Earlier this year, I read the autobiography of character actress Mercedes McCambridge, who famously clashed with Joan both onscreen and off.** After dealing with some diva-like behavior, McCambridge insists that Joan was much more of a “Lucille LeSueur” than a “Joan Crawford”. I really had to think twice about this one. Until that point, “Joan Crawford” was so “Joan Crawford”, I had never once attempted to separate her from her name. “Joan”: something about it sounded like a woman who takes no prisoners. It was a name that was brutal in its simplicity.

I realized then that maybe Joan had managed to alter the implications of her own name. If people weren’t going to pronounce it “Jo-anne”, well, then she was just going to have to make that name her own. Before Joan (and this was so unbelievably fortuitous for the actress), perhaps "Joan" was simply some bland sort of comfort,*** upon which any sort of desire could be projected. Something more like “Julie”, in fact.

This doesn’t explain, though, why Lambert decided on Julie Forbes’s birth name. He writes that the actress came to Hollywood as “Julia Katzander”, a name with a vulnerable awkwardness that’s far removed from“Lucille LeSueur”. Was this perhaps Lambert’s way of humanizing a character who acts so monstrously? In a story that often flirts with misogyny, the enigmatic narrator of“The Closed Set” relents for a moment, offering a view of Julie that—while not quite sympathetic—is less condescension and more awe:

Regulated as time itself, she was a source of power, energy, habitual purpose. When she entered the brightly-lit set, it was as if somebody stepped up the current. From every side the light glared white-hot.

During “The Closed Set”, Julie Forbes is attempting to transition her public image from Cutthroat Bitch into something hearkening back to the roles that jumpstarted her career 20 years before. She even dons the original top hat, tails, and fish nets that first launched her career, items that—like her face and body, whose preservation portends the soon-to-come plastic-surgery age—she has literally kept behind glass.

It’s hard not to think of Madonna here, the logical heir to Joan’s career strategy: when the public gets sick of you, simply shift your image. In the past few years, rather than dramatically depart from what came before, Madonna has been employing the crucifixes and lingerie that first brought her to our attention. She’s even made her daughter over in her own early image. Like Joan, she’s also been upping the Bitch factor: witness her recent hydrangea moment, which, deliberate or not, she has used to harness the attention offered by the viral video. Madonna’s bitchiness has been intensified by the meticulous British accent she’s been using for years now.**** Is she perhaps taking a cue from Joan? Does she realize she must now present the full extent of her ruthlessness if she wishes to remain immortal?

But Madonna, contrastingly, is just one name (Is this contrast, though? Or distillation?).

Let’s pause for a minute and look at them all, that staggering number of names that exist just outside of the acting roles Joan took on:

Lucille LeSueur; “Billie”; Joan Arden; Joan Crawford; Joan “Crawfish”; Jo-anne Crawford; Christina Crawford; Julie Forbes; Julia Katzinger

Whether or not Joan was really the Bitch she has come to represent (and she is represented as such in The Slide Area), it’s hard not to give her some credit for reaching such a mythical state. Besides, how can you fault someone so tough, her dying words were Don’t you dare ask God to help me?

God, too, has been called by many names; but God, as vindictive as he may have been in his Old Testament phase, suffers from abstractness and undefined shoulders. When it comes down to it, at that moment between this world and the next, if we choose to call on someone to lead our way through, what else can we possibly call that someone besides “Joan”?

* Joan actually gave her adopted daughter (the one who would later write the tell-all that sealed Joan’s reputation as Cutthroat Bitch) the same name as her own adopted persona: Christina Crawford spent the first several months of her life as “Joan”. This gets really weird when you remember the events portrayed in Mommie Dearest: Christina, a regular actress on a soap opera, falls ill, and her famous retirement-age mother weasels her way into playing her 24-year-old daughter’s character on the show.

** It’s a book worth reading for a lot of reasons, one of which is an anecdote McCambridge tells about working with Joan, and the threatening way the actress insists on the dainty size of her feet.

*** Although, as harmless as the name may have seemed in the mid-twentieth century, when you think of Saint Joan, you realize there always must have been some balls involved.

**** Joan, throughout her career, devoted hours a day to purging her diction of its Okie accent.

Wedding Review.4

2011-09-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

The wedding blessing began, Father, you have made the bond of marriage a holy mystery. True words in the name of the Lord? Truer were never spoken. But wait, lest we forget the blatancy of marriage, the drunken bursts of color that throb just beneath the fondant. In this sacrament, the soul is worn like a veil, a pellucid, shimmering veil, beyond which it’s all BAM and POW and multi-colored panels.

Crunch time: the ceremony was underway and still no sign of desserts. A rumor began to circulate that the driver had crashed and half the tarts she was carrying were destroyed. What are we going to feed the rest of the guests? This we asked as we walked between the tables and poured both water and wine.

The groom was a giant—oafishly sturdy—and during the toasts, jokes were made about having to live in his shadow. By contrast, the bride was brittle, unappreciative, more tightly wound than most. A question over the mechanics of consummation hung in the air.

One group of guests became hysterical when, after calling a cab, it was slow to arrive. Arguments started, tears began to flow. They somehow became convinced that they'd be stranded at this wedding forever. Had the mysterious nature of marriage robbed them of reason? I’ve experienced the same sinking feeling myself.

Late that night, as we were tearing down the aftermath, I went outside in the moonlight to throw some things away. I opened the trashcan and screamed as a raccoon, snarling, leapt out. Its fur grazed my skin. This, for me, was the night’s central mystery: how did the raccoon get inside that lidded can?

Another mystery: why were there so many leftover tarts?

I went home with three, and they were lemon curd.

Some More Items in Memory of Super Longs

2011-09-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

I've been drawing some more merch for the shelves of my upcoming tribute to the legendary Oakland drugstore, Super Longs. For more information about the tribute, check out this post.

Rant.4

2011-09-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve lately been sinking all my creative energy into a project of destruction: trying to get my psychopathic boss fired. I’m not a naturally vindictive person, so this process is draining. I am, however, into survival. I’m also okay at organizing my thoughts on paper—or in emails—and so I’ve been fine-tuning incident reports, narrating wrongdoings, and assembling general cases for insanity. This is war, I guess, and writing—for me, at least—is strategic.

The first day he shows up, Boss looks like he wandered in from People’s Park. It’s okay: we don’t deal with the public, but Jesus, it’s your first day on the job. Maybe wash your jeans or something.

He immediately rearranges the office so as to minimize its functionality—including turning his desk to face mine. Foolishly, I decide to let this slide in the interest of establishing rapport; I reason that it will be fine as long as Boss doesn’t turn out to be a prick.

A deceptively un-pricklike gesture: he hands me a letter opener with a quarter taped to its back, and tells me the Chinese do this when giving each other something sharp (No one involved, by the way—the quarter included—is Chinese). Keep an eye on this object, coin piggybacking on a blade. It will make an appearance again, you’ll see, as a weird little weapon of justice, a foreshadowy, lackluster back-to-bite-you-in-the-ass.

His ineptness becomes increasingly clear. I constantly have to argue with him about whether we’re going to meet deadlines. This isn’t like me; I tend to take my time. I also tend to take the path of least resistance. But look: This is a magazine we work for. It’s an industry that uses time-based words like periodical and quarterly. People are expecting their magazine during the month that’s printed on its cover.

Rather than subscriptions, though—which are a sort of contract, and a shitty one to break, nothing being sadder than a lack of mail—rather than subscriptions, Boss wants Lists.

And so my job description shifts to include spending hours on end generating Boss’s Lists. Boss means BUSINESS. He may be one big hippie mess, but he sees some numbers out there beyond the ether, and those numbers WILL become subordinate once they attach themselves to Lists. Despite the fact that the magazine is nonprofit, we are out to make some money.

Lists, he tells me, I need more Lists.

Boss proceeds to take over payroll, and tells me my check will be ready on the evening of the 1^st. Special trip in at 7 pm, only to open the drawer and see no check. Where is it? I email him, having spent my last four dollars on train fare.

Now it’s the 2^nd. Where is it? I email again, and call him, my bank account overdrawn. It’s there now, he writes without apology. Another special trip and yes, there it is, finally, and now it hits me that this uncashed check won’t pay for my train ride home. I rummage around in the bookkeeper’s drawer for some nickels, do an under-the-furniture scan. I’m almost there, I think, clenching the coins in my fist. All I need is one more quarter.

I think you can guess the rest. Why does this feel like a victory, though, the loosening of the coin from the blade? I’ve just left my pride under the desk where I scrounged for spare change.

Things are deteriorating rapidly. No magazines mailed, no renewal notices sent, no letters thanking donors. An unnecessary printer has landed in the middle of my workstation. My inbox now perpetually contains the same two items: a useless highlighter and a tub of gummy bears (I don’t ask). People call to complain about not receiving their magazines. The traces of tape on the letter opener turn yellow, then darken with grime: abandoned hope. Boss, who has always behaved as if on a sinking ship, increases his demands for Lists. Lists are his white whale.

Rather than Lists, I work on my opus: that collection of incident reports that need to be worded just right. This is creative writing. I’m not exactly making things up, but as with fiction, it’s important to know which details to include. Bring to the surface the worst of his offenses, leave out the ones that are simply my own overblown pet peeves. Pour my heart and soul into this, because this is Important. At last—as sad as it may be—at last, I’m writing something that will make or break whether I can pay my rent. So this is what it feels like when people get paid to write.

And my readers? A personnel board, unfortunately: a meeting of easily flattered egos. In my literary frenzy, I forget the importance of sucking up. This is how Boss got where he is: servile lies and bland reassurances. I’ve seen him at work on the phone. A propagandist, not a writer.

Resulting in MY termination.

Of course. Suck-ups are always bestsellers.

Wield that letter opener, I guess, and be grateful for small, pointless victories.

Darwin, Jesus, and the Devil walk into a polymer clay factory . . .

2011-09-13T17:33:00.000-07:00

Parsing a Sentence Overheard on the Bus

2011-09-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

The sentence:

We’re kind of like bff’s a little bit.

The speaker:

A college student on a “crazy lesbian” she knows.

Now parse:

First get inside the prepositional object, which here serves as a sort of nucleus, the first b (best) and second f (forever) both such superlative qualifiers, one referring to the highest possible quality, the other to the vastest amount of time. Now unpack them both and send them sprawling out into perfection, only to hit those two mediocre, tempering walls: kind of like and a little bit. You now hold in your hand, like an eggshell with its guts blown out, the brittlest sort of f, which stands for friend.

In essence:

We’re friends(?).

6 Restorative Camping Procedures

2011-09-08T16:02:00.000-07:00

"Well, middle class was fun."

2011-09-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

Thus speaks Rosanne Conner in the seconds after her power’s shut off halfway through Season 5 of the classic sitcom Roseanne. Who else on TV would bring up such a taboo topic as class but good old Roseanne? She had to choose between water or electricity, she tells hubby Dan, and well, you can only live for two days without water.

The Conners find themselves in the darkness of their living room, their TV down for the count (ironically enough), and they’re forced to entertain themselves.

Dan: You know when I was a kid, my grandpa used to tell me about when he was a kid. Before there was TV, they used to sit around and tell stories.

DJ: What kind of stories?

Dan: I don’t know. That was his best one.

Roseanne: (after some thinking) Ok, I got one. Well, once upon a time there was these four princesses, and they lived in this great big house all together, and they never left. Ok, and uh, and they just sat around all the time, talking and talking and yammering and yammering, and they killed every single man who ever came over there, except for one who they kept as a pet. And then one time these two princesses left and these other two came on and they and they really stunk and—

Darlene: Mom, that’s Designing Women.

Roseanne’s story is probably my favorite, her delivery, as usual, perfectly timed, and Darlene’s punchline is funny on several different levels of meta, my favorite being Roseanne’s almost instinctual attempt to cover for the now silenced TV.

DJ’s story is equally hilarious:

DJ: (serious, thinking hard, interspersed with lots of glazed looks from his family) Ok, um, there was this guy … and he was walking down the street … and he kept walking … then he found something … and then he lost it … and there was this car with a guy in it … then he got something … and there was this dog … and he was barking because the window was open … not so much he could jump out, but, ummm …

Darlene: The end.

I like that he begins to realize that his story is too abstract for anyone to follow, and so tries to save it by adding more specific detail: the exact position of the car window.

Roseanne tells one more story before the scene ends:

Roseanne: (trying to bond with Darlene by asking her to go with the mall with her to “soak up some electricity”) Aw, come on, it’ll be a lot of fun, you know. Uh, Becky and I used to go down there, ok, and this one time (laughing) we were over at Rodbell’s, you know, and, uh, we went in and, uh, stuck all the mannequin’s skirts right up their butt, you know. (grinning devilishly, slapping knee) And then we went over to Hickory Farms and we squeezed all the cheese logs and ran. (cackling) What do ya say?

(knock on door)

Darlene: Please let that be Child Welfare.

Darlene really gets all the good punchlines in this episode.

The next morning, the power still out, the Conners are at the breakfast table when in comes Aunt Jackie, played by Laurie Metcalf, who’s such a great physical comedian.

Jackie: (looking worn out in club clothes from the night before) Hi guys. Oh, you guys are not going to believe the time I had (putting bread in toaster) at that singles dance last night. I haven’t even been home yet (pouring milk in blender)—not that I met anybody or anything, but Nancy and I had a few so … I just decided to crash at her place for awhile, you know, just, uh, for the night (getting something out of freezer) You ought to, uh, turn the freezer up, it’s getting kind of warm in there. Anyway…

Roseanne: Um, Jackie, let me make you some breakfast, ok, because—

Jackie: (putting something in microwave) Roseanne, I’m right in the middle of a story here, ok? Anyway, the second we walk in the door, it’s like Nancy starts throwing herself at any jerk who’s wearing Old Spice (picking up and dialing phone), which like leaves me completely alone having to fight off this whole parade of losers (pouring powder in blender). One guy actually said, ‘You’re under arrest for stealing my heart,’ it was quite, it was so … pathetic, ahem, I just wanna (still holding phone) … see if any of ‘em called. Hey, uh, there’s a message from you on here, Roseanne. What do you need candles and flashlights for? (hitting blender button, turns and looks at everyone) Oh.

Roseanne: Well, we don’t have any lights but now we know the speed of stupid.

Jackie: How was I supposed to know they cut your power?

Roseanne: Well, we thought maybe the lack of electricity might tip you off.

Dan: (answering ringing phone) Hey, you wanna shut down that blender? I can’t hear.

Roseanne has been making the rounds again this year, promoting a new book and reality show, and it seems like she's starting to get some of the respect she deserves. Read her article in New York Magazine and check out her interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.

Dream That Ends Like a Wedding Review

2011-09-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

Looking at dreams from waking life, motivations become unclear. Our reasoning in dreams is intuitive, based solely on emotion or something thereabout: something we don’t have the luxury of understanding while awake, what with the constant grind of logic. And so in this dream I found myself wrapped up in Scientology.

I was in a red brick plaza and wanted to see a psychic; the one I chose entered as part of a procession, carrying a cross. She was an elderly white woman in a cloak, and something about her was untrustworthy from the start. Her fellow psychics flanked her: one had a horned headdress, the other was a pathetically friendly young man.

This psychic held a power over me, like a boss or a parent, and I continued to take long, confusing bus rides to see her in her office at the edge of the red brick plaza. Her fellow psychics—all Scientologists, I discovered—were always somewhere nearby. I continued to give her money, hating her the entire time. Part of this relationship was based on fear, but there was something else unnamable between us.

At one point, my psychic required me to attend a wedding, which took place in the plaza. I stood at the very back of the crowd and had trouble telling what was going on. I took out a fine-point purple pen and began to doodle on the red brick. One of my psychic’s fellow psychics—the pathetically friendly young man—told me that drawing on the brick wasn’t allowed. It comes right off, I told him, and spit on what I’d drawn, and rubbed it clean with my finger. It’s still not allowed, he said, and I exchanged an eye roll with one of the other guests.

If you start making less expensive weiner whips . . .

2011-09-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

Approach-Avoidance

2011-09-01T09:58:00.000-07:00

How do I reconcile my longing for whimsy with my extreme hatred for it?

Dream of Impermanent Buildings

2011-08-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

I was driving through the country with a friend and an acquaintance, and we were all on our way to Asheville. Somewhere in our past, we had squatted a house—a mansion, in fact, labyrinthine and unlike any other. It was present in our minds because now it was lost. That was the thing about this dream: at one time, so much could have been ours.

Our plan now was to make the best of things by house sitting. The acquaintance, who was at the wheel, had the most experience at this. She had been on a lot of solo house sits in remote locales, she said, and I marveled at her bravery, as it was hard for me to sleep through the night in a strange place by myself.

I had heard somewhere that the Asheville Art Museum couldn’t afford to fix its roof and was going to have to close down. In the last few days before it shut its doors for good, its treasures were to be made available to the public on a frenzied first-come-first-served basis. Unfortunately, we were getting to town just too late to join the raid.

When we arrived at our house sit, I saw that it was my childhood home. The power was out because it was on the same circuit as the now closed museum, which it neighbored, although the two buildings were separated by a crumbling old garage, which at times became one of the museum’s abandoned wings. I had to make a long, fruitless, bureaucratically frustrating call in an effort to restore the power.

During this time, there was a news item, something so over-reported, it was hard to discuss anything else. A little-league football player had covered his face with bright blue eye shadow, and tempered it with a small spot of blush on one cheek. Bafflingly, little boys everywhere were beginning to consider this a masculine look.