No Sleep til Brooklyn (parentheticals are the best!)

On my 36th birthday, now a few months ago, I was lucky enough to see Sleep No More. In case you don't read New York Magazine (my one true love, the charticle) or watch Gossip Girl (Nelly Yuki is back!) or have yourself been asleep for the last two years (Rip, you devil!), Sleep No More is billed as a piece of theater. Certainly there are theatrics and performance, but I would not call this a play. It is an interactive art installation, the focal point of which is the performance by a dozen dancers in a wordless adaptation of MacBeth, with some slight references to Hitchcock's Rebecca (based on the book of the same name by Daphne Du Maurier, which is even more beautiful and scary than the movie, and I'm a little sad the musical based on it turned out to be a giant scam), found mostly in the names of things and the general asethetic. Rebecca is one of my favorite movies and one of my favorite books. I, growing up among strange creepy death filled artwork (thanks mom), have an affinity for creepy. Not at all that I like to be scared, but that I can see things as beautiful even if they aren't necessarily pretty or alive or positive. And Sleep No More is this wonderfully decaying world of death, betrayal, sex, jealousy. The performance is in a warehouse that has been completely reimagined, five floors create a world in miniture-a hotel, a town, a house, a forest (two actually), a castel, a hospital, a churchyard. You are desposited into this world with little explanation, instructed to wear a mask and to explore, "take risks and you will be rewarded." The entire audience is masked, while the players are not. You can follow the players as they go from room to room, floor to floor, no space is off limits to you (yes, it sounds like directions for a board game, because that is basically what it is, interactive Clue, only you go in knowing who did it). Or you can stay in one place and watch the action unfold, wander through the world and stumble across people, things, secret passages, hidden moments, hidden room, orgies, murders. It is voyeristic, it is a haunted house, it is a living movie, a waking dream, it is angels in america and you are the angels, it is obviously inspired by Rupert Goold's MacBeth (with Patrick Stewart) but the actors hold your hand, guide you to a seat, sing to you, cry in your arms, whisper to you, give you clothes and you dress their naked bodies, you soothe them and they come together and pull apart, three shows a night. In short, if you miss this you miss an once in a lifetime, mind altering experience that is worth every penny ($100+). Do it. Do it now. (or maybe wait until they have power and running water.)

Vacation Land (a farewell to summer)

The following is a visual taste of the place that inspired my novel, The Rusticators (one day you will all get to read it, but for now it is making an Odysseian journey of agent inboxes). This is maybe the most magical place there is. If magic were made out of rope and seaweed and lobster shells and lichen and cocktails and ping pong and, of course, porches.

dancing in the streets of hyannis (isn't this where we all started, psychically speaking)

 Now, I know that all of you are familiar with the origin song, a song a band pens that chronicles their rise to fame, a biographical ballad, a musical memoir, a rock recitation (this one is a stretch, but you get the point). While those geniuses of the rap/hip hop world have basically taken ownership of this mini genre, the form is actually far older. Mama Cass called their version "An epic tone poem of historical nature."

So you may ask, To What End? Well, there is the obvious, this is the band's most current and profound life experience from which they draw inspiration and material. Sure. It is also a way for these highly successful bands to stay connected both creatively and psychologically to their roots, I believe the musical parlance for this would be "keeping it real." When faced with the money, success and fandom (read: p***y) these bands must find a way to appear, or to actually be, grounded in their former everyman reality. Doing so also helps them keep their audience, who, after the band's financial and creative success, may claim that the band has sold out, caved in to The Man, given up on some unknowable dream of creative success that is achieved without widespread noteriety or monetary compensation. This type of audience is basically a bunch of reactionaries that assume popularity=crap, this is why some people alway prefer earlier albums despite the fact that they may not be said band's best work. It took me years to get over Nirvana's popularity and embrace them for their pure awesomeness, but I digress. (What would a Nirvana origin song be like . . .....)

Anyway, self referencial songs, like the origin song, give the listener the sense that they have a unique perspective into the personal story of the band, as if 1. the band is secretly confiding in them or 2. that the listener, having already known this story, is among the special annointed few, a true fan or 3. for the new fan, that the band can publicly claim street cred that they may have lost in their meteoric rise to fame or 4. In the case of Boyz 2 Men they are referencing their far more famous mentors to build on the mentors' already established audience or 5. It's just an awesome story and they're are artists, so I can just shut up and enjoy the music. The bottom line here is I love me an origin song.

mean cat nice cat

Today my cat died. We decided to put her down, a tumor crowding her lungs. She had lived for months longer than expected, she had been fine. We had almost forgotten about it, thinking the exploratory surgery had some how fixed things, instead of just confirming the inevitable. We wanted to believe that a cat so mean, so tough, couldn't possibly do something as passive as die. Dolores was a powerful feline. She felt her power, her wildness and she exerted it often. She would tear through the house, pupils dilated, on the hunt, on the heels of her kill. Didn't matter that there was nothing there. She had the ability to scare everyone (except us), even pet-savvy people with mean cats of their own. When sitting at the dinner table she made guests afraid to stretch their legs under the table, eating their meals scrunched high on their chairs. A friend took care of her one weekend while we were away. On our friend's first visit Deedee (as we called her) chased her down the hallway. On her next visit she simply opened the apartment door, slid in an open bag of cat food, tipped it on one side and closed the door.

Deedee had a growl that connected her to her tiger brethren (rwowowowow) and was her chief mode of communication. If you did not heed the growl or if you didn't get clear fast enough, then a flurry of swats would follow, but the kind of panicked rapid fire of someone actually afraid of fighting. She would smack wildly with her head turned and her little green eyes closed, then she'd run away. Really, she was the queen of the tough face, of the stare, of the terrifying pop that only really mean cats make. But she wasn't actually mean. She loved to sniff the tops of our heads and would bury her little nose in our parts. She would sit on our laps and purr, though if we actively pet her she would then give a warning growl, a "this is a one way street sister" sort of growl. She liked to sleep next to us, she liked to sit on the balcony and sniff the wind, she liked to eat dirt out of the house plants. She liked peanut butter and tortilla chips. She never once scratched or bit our daughter (that can't be said for one of our other cats). She began her life the runt of a litter born under the stairs of some dilapidated collegiate housing. PBT went to pick up a kitten he had selected from the litter days before, but that kitten was gone and the only one left was Deedee. He took her home. She was crawling with fleas, too little for most of medicines he had to bathe her and massage flea repelling foam into her gray fur. He brought her home to boston, she scratched his father, his grandfather. He brought her to New York and when I moved in with them I brought my two brutes, tom cats used to running the show. And she held her own, never giving them an inch, never letting them be the alphas they wanted to be. They found an uneasy peace (punctuated with fights where the fur actually flew). So she began with PBT. And she wasn't sure about me. But I saw her. I saw that she wanted to sit in my lap. She wanted me to scratch the top of her head. She still woke and waited at the door when she heard PBT open the building door downstairs. And she would know when it was him, and when it wasn't. She didn't get up for a delivery man or a neighbor. So she was his. But for the last seven years she was mine too.

on the occasion of becoming a true new yorker. Ten Years.

Some people want to journey to the edge of things, to find themselves at the foot of mountains or fringes of forests. To find a patch of land to raise horses, chickens, see the sun moving across the entire sky. Then there are people like me, who just want to be in the middle of things, to go deeper into the compact spaces between things, who like hallways and elevators and alleys and streetlights. I want to be in the middle of everything, but most particularly of New York. I feel sure that Central Park is actually Eden, and yes that makes the rest of the city the barren dust parched land of toil. But wouldn’t you want to live close to Eden, to walk through it on your way to dinner or after a dentist appointment?

I want to be in the middle of things, I don’t want to cast out into the wider world, I want to burrow deeper in to here. I want tiny subway cars to run through my viens. 

Time

When I started this blog I told myself it was a place to be brave, a place to write without any expectations or judgements. Why do this in a public format, you might ask? Because I, like many people, am far too ruled by my fear of what others think. So this a a way to force myself to do the hard thing, to put my ideas out into the world regardless of how imperfect they may be. Not exactly the best way to generate a readership I know, but that's not really the point. So I've been feeling swamp lately, over committed, over tried, overwhelmed. I've been letting my fear and laziness get the better of me, half drafting posts only to let them languish. I was reading my favorite blog and wondered where the fifteen year old author found the time to write a blog, start a website for teenage girls, watch the entire Twin Peaks series, contact spirits on her Ouigi board, do her homework, eat, and of course try on outfit after outfit to create fashion collages that express her current aesthtic obsession. You could say, she doesn't have a job, or a spouse or a kid, but whatever, we are all busy and this girl is more productive then most adults I know, certainly more than me. So I started thinking about time, what the frog am I doing with my time, reruns of Friday Night Lights and BBC's North and South, yep. Living up to my creative potential, not so much. So I'm trying to use my time more wisely, to squeeze creativity into the crannies of my life (not sure why that sounds so dirty, oh well). During my daughter's naps, instead of looking at real estate listings that I can't afford and folding laundry, I'm going to write. The house will be messier, there will be one less looky-loo at the local open houses. But maybe I can get back on the old blog horse, maybe I can finishing a few frogging short stories, maybe I can prep for my classes.