About five years ago I started writing these early 20th century modern-style piano pieces. (As far as solo piano goes, those are the pieces I always enjoyed playing/listening to the most - the pieces that had the most emotional resonance).
I'm finally starting to think about playing them in front of an audience. My own silly fears shouldn't stop me from doing what I want to creatively, right? Right.
That said, I'm going to be playing Philly on 6/24 and Baltimore/DC on 6/25. The show in Philly is 100% booked; the Baltimore/DC one is like 80%. I have some Chicago possibilities, but none of them are certain either. It'd mean a lot to see some friendly faces in the audience.
It feels pretty great to get up off my metaphorical, musical ass, though.
Something that never fails to surprise me, no matter how many times I notice it:
Strangers in transit are often willing to tell you intensely personal things about their lives.
Damon (my roommate/one of my two BFFs) and I were on the bus with our bags of groceries today when a man (in his fifties, perhaps? Late forties? He had the kind of voice that sounded like every word was squeezed through some kind of strainer in his throat and was a huge effort to pronounce) asked us how close we were to Armitage (one of the major streets that goes all the way through Chicago). We told him. He answered a cell phone call: something about a wake. He then turned to us apologetically and informed us calmly that his mother had died and that the reason he needed to get to this particular street was to find a church at which to hold her funeral.
This is only one of many similar incidents - the guy in the airport who told me all about his divorce and his estranged son, the woman in the bus station who told me about her abusive husband - these stories weigh us down, and we are afraid to burden those closest to us with them, I suppose. When we are in transit, we are freed of our contexts for a small amount of time, and the stories come spilling out.
Road trip mayhem. I am seriously looking forward to seeing you guys.
I have too much energy right now and am the anxious because I haven't heard back yet either way about the job, which is the perfect, provided I get it.
I don't know what's up with my noun-izing up there. It just feels right. When did I become such a hippie? (Shut up.)
This particular pigeon was stuffed into a niche to the right of Cory’s front door, and she could have easily missed seeing it, like so many other daily oversights committed because she did not have eyes in the back of her head or in her hands. She slid in only one direction, along one plane. She had once been in the habit of flaying herself regularly for these sins of sensory omission, when she was younger and had more energy. She believed that a certain amount of guilt, like red wine, was healthy. She had been raised without religion, and guilt kept her in check. Too much, to extend the metaphor, was poisonous.
At any rate, Cory noticed the pigeon, perhaps because she’d caught it fluffing itself out of the corner of her eye. She’d been on her way to the bar to visit friends (fond acquaintances, really), but she paused for her visitor. It didn’t move much when she approached – in fact, it didn’t seem to notice her at all. This lack of reciprocity was good for her side of the relationship. The pigeon shuffled its claws and rounded itself off. It had come, an elementary equation, to Cory’s doorstep – to die.
This was the stuff, Cory thought, of which small myths were made – a baby in a basket of bulrushes, a falling-to-earth. She was naturally suspicious of stories in which too much meaning was made, in which precious conclusions universally drew themselves over some framework and stretched taut, ready to be hit, ready to make a sound. Those frames never held. Still, this sick bird had chosen her doorway, third on the block and gentrifidentical to all of the other doorways, and it had thus become her responsibility.
She called Ruth, her first-string fond acquaintance of the group she was supposed to meet up with. The pigeon’s presence had rooted her to the doormat; she sunk down onto the step. The bird continued to not notice/not care.
“I’m sorry,” Cory said to Ruth (or to her electronic proxy), as soon as the familiar pop and click and background-noise-hello? had taken place. “I know this is going to sound weird, but a pigeon chose my doorway to die in, and I sort of feel like I have to take care of it.”
Ruth’s disembodied voice registered the appropriate amount of mild surprise and dismay. “You’re not usually the motherly type?” Ruth herself was the motherly type. She had been given an antiquated name and had felt the need to grow into it via a series of behavioral glitches that, together, made a neat little meme. She carried Band-Aids and Kleenex in her purse, played mah-johngg, preferred tea, and was not averse to answering the door late at night with rollers in her hair. Somewhere along the line she had truly adopted the qualities she’d aspired to – she’d gone from affected to charming - and this was what made Cory like her the most of that particular group.
Ruth and Cory discussed options – whether to take the bird inside or leave it (“it might bite,” Ruth said, ever practical. “Rats of the city, you know”), whether it might want anything to eat, whether it might want a blanket. Then the rest of the acquaintances arrived on Ruth’s end of the line and she excused herself, always politely. Cory, feeling socially graceless, went inside. The bird hadn’t moved in fifteen or twenty minutes – not at all – and Cory wondered if it had just up and died on her. She didn’t know whether the bird would care (or if it was even able to care, being a bird) about the fact that she was trying to make its last minutes more comfortable.
She toyed briefly with the idea of becoming a sort of pigeon euthanasia specialist, traveling the city putting birds in doorways out of their misery. She wondered whether it could be nursed back to health at this point. She had a miniature moral crisis, in which small parties of imaginary lawyers and newscasters and senators blathered back and forth about life and death and nothing got solved. Cory Roget, playing avian God. She dismissed her existential angst as teenage and, following her gut instinct, got a cardboard box and a blanket and a small cup of trail mix and set to waiting.
She never took off her hat and coat. She got herself a pile of magazines and made herself comfortable on the doorstep, next to the pigeon, which (judging by its slatted eyes) was still sort of alive (at least in biological terms). She read about how celebrities are Just Like We Are while the bird shed feathers and attempted to shrink its head into its neck. The bird didn’t touch the trail mix, and it didn’t seem to mind when she picked it up very carefully with both hands, looking away from it as if it was toxic (which it very well might be) and afraid it might bite her (she could hear Ruth’s warning); it was past that. Like a pitiful molting grey Buddha, it was implacable.
Feathers continued to fall, littering the box. The pigeon’s eyes squinched shut. Cory figured she was mapping her sadness and discomfort onto it, and that she should probably go inside to bed because the bird was suffering enough as it was without her bullshit.
When she returned in the morning, it was, predictably, stiff. Flies had arrived at some point and were, by the time she checked, swarming over her little blanket and its contents, doing what flies do.
She swatted a few flies away and rolled the corpse up in a sheet of newsprint (from the classifieds – it resembled her grandmother’s Christmas gift-wrap. A series of disconnected, half-complete thoughts about the Depression and saving things trampled through her head and were gone).
She double-bagged it (“Thanks for your Business! Have a Great Day!”) and put it in the trash can out back. Having not been raised with religion, she wasn’t quite sure what other last rites to give it (she was fuzzy on what sects believed animals to have souls, or whether she believed that, or whether she believed in a soul in the first place – again, she thought, stupid! Cory! You are not sixteen!), so she muttered something about finding your final resting place among the refuse of so many other dead things and closed the lid with an appropriate clang.
She considered calling Ruth, but dismissed that idea. There was an emptiness that she didn’t feel like filling with activity, not this time. There was an economy of movement in her step. When she drew in her breath it felt like she was about ready to explode.
I just made this international hardcore mix for a friend:
cause of civilization - bastard (japan)
horror movie - dictatrista (italy)
medalla de oro - cop on fire (spain)
dangers/latent - tetsu arei (japan)
abuse of the state powers - confuse (japan)
wolf's rain - zoe (japan)
cash & greed - battle of disarm (japan)
rise from the dead - outo (japan)
need times - contrast attitude (japan)
storms of despair - crow (japan)
don't do too much - gauze (japan)
warsystem - shitlickers (sweden)
du kan bli jord - skitkids (sweden)
RU-1 - GISM (japan)
bloodsucking to death - lip cream (japan)
mass ignorance - vivisick (japan)
awave - acrostix (japan)
don't stop my way - systematic death (japan)
cold city - traumatic (italy)
05 - banjax (japan - this actually has a Japanese title but I can't read Japanese even though I took two years of it in college)
motorsavsmasahahakren - gorilla angreb (denmark)
victims of a bombraid - anti-cimex (sweden)
verloren zaak - makiladoras (holland)
give rise to doubts - abc diabolo (germany)
You want a copy? I will make you a copy.
Alternately, I can upload it and yousendit to you via email. Let me know in the comments.
Transcribed exactly, with t ypographical errors intact. It is printed in pencil. Some of it is crossed out.
Messing with these young girls is gonna get'cha locked up and nothing is more pricele
ss than (our) freedom so If I should die Today I can at least say He is always There (to) greet Them god that is
1-11-06 LIL-Leezy
I don't know if it can match the genius of this flyer, found by my friend Anthony taped to a telephone pole elsewhere in Chicago several months ago:
(I've been thinking about actually printing these out to put on people's windshields. Would that be a total dick move?)
To the people who park in front of the Starbucks at the Six Corners, usually, it appears, on their way to work:
I wonder what makes you think you're so important that you can't find a parking spot like everyone else? I realize that it's less convenient, but you are not just blocking a major intersection, you are blocking a bus stop. Especially in a neighborhood with ample independent coffee shops, it seems bizarre to hold up traffic for the five or ten minutes it takes you to get your foofy coffee drink at a chain that has a bazillion locations all over the city.
Amanda and I taught two guys to polka, and then one of them drunkenly informed us that we should be careful of the "abdominal snowman" and "the di-polar bear" on our way home.
RIP, 1979-2005:
My tolerance for anyone's flaky bullshit.
You want to hang out with me? You best come correct. Honest, straightforward, considerate. As long as those conditions are met, I can hang with anything.
This is a public service announcement AND an obituary in one.
So, I'm in a nasty lo-fi thrashy black/death metal band now (ref: Weakling for the sound we are going for), and we need a name.
Please post suggestions. We have already nixed "Broadsword" because:
1) There is already some Australian band with that name;
2) "It sounds goofy,"
3) It sounds like parody metal,
4) or maybe epic metal, like Falconer or whathaveyou.
Have at it, y'all. Your combined cultural knowledge will come up with something, I'm sure.
I realized the other day that the reason I'm such a huge horror movie fan is that I loved being scared shitless by my grandfather telling me Russian folktales.
His fish-skin clothes, which he scatters behind him, are blown away and scattered by the four winds. Flocks of ravens gather behind him to fight over and devour these shreds. Shreds of his clothing may be sometimes seen flapping in the tree tops throughout the steppes.
Thus freed from all worldly constraints he gallops naked through the wild Caucus mountains with his long spindly legs trailing in the dust. In the picture by Ivan Bilibin, he is seen brandishing his sabre, shrieking blood-curdling threats and urging the spirits of the steppes to come to his aid.
Quite an emotional character, it is said that he will weep with rage for hours afterwards when outwitted by his quarry and his sobbing and wailing often echoes throughout the Caucuses, terrifying both man and beast alike.
Also, Baba Yaga and the Firebird and the Black Horseman and and and.
I was just thinking about what an excellent group of human beings you are. Smart, loyal, fun (and funny), creative and interesting and talented - even if I don't know you well or talk to you often, I am glad to have entered your lives even briefly. Seriously. You are goddamned TOP SHELF.
So, you know, just know that a girl in Chicago thinks the world of you.
I'm also rereading Living in Truth, a collection of Vaclav Havel's essays containing the classic "The Power of the Powerless," which will always be one of my favorites.
