Hey, man, I can understand you wanting to pull out in front of a bicyclist. They do it to you all the time. Seems only fair.
But pulling out in front of a cyclist when it is fifty-five degrees, raining, and the sky is fraught with enough wind to knock a Geo Metro off the freeway? Come on, really? Didn’t your mama teach you any manners?
File this under #peoplewhodisgracethehumanrace
For everyone _else_, here’s a song (from a band that probably got cut-off in traffic once or twice). Pain – Island of Fear
While many will bravely take their birthday spankings, no secular ritual seems to incite more whining than that of the New Year’s Resolution. Those who do not participate do so with scorn and derision, you can almost see the spit fly from their lips with their ready quip about why they are better than such a ritual. Others list their resolutions with the temerity of a spurned lover waiting by the phone. For a ritual that more of my friends participate in than Christmas Mass, I can’t name anyone who actually likes New Year’s Resolutions.
Well I like them.
Yes, I understand that the first of the year is a totally arbitrary date. So what? So is Christmas. If you want to set goals in June, no one is going to complain. The problem is that most of us don’t. We hem and haw about how we don’t have any time and then another years slips by and our dreams sit in a tin box with our VHS tapes and our old photos and the rest of the things we never touch. They become memories, archival.
Whether it is arbitrary or not, the turning of a calendar year is end and beginning of a cycle, as much as the turn of the day into night or Spring into Fall. For us humans, the winter is our time of greatest hardship. It is cold. Food is scarce. The landscape is barren. It is why in this season we gather and feast. It is why we worship and *decorate mighty trees that leap inexplicably higher year after year, without death touching their leaves. It is also the time when the sticker shock of that big increase hits you: wait, 2010 is the end of the decade? Didn’t we just have the Millennium? Wasn’t that, like, yesterday?
Thus it is natural for us to think about the struggles we’ve faced and, in turn, where our life is headed. If looking at all the shit we didn’t get done last year doesn’t make us want to strategize about what to get done next year then I don’t know what will. We have made it through the dark heart of winter and spring promises new beginnings. You can have a say in what those beginnings will look like, or you can be one of those people who lets life happen to you.
I know, I know: now you are going to tell me that no one ever sticks with their New Year’s Resolutions for more than a few weeks. But if indeed we are so undisciplined that we only choose novel-writing, house cleaning and smoothie drinking over chain smoking, hooker shopping and pimple popping for several weeks a year than perhaps we should welcome even that brief period of accomplishment. And every time we fall off the wagon we have to put our panties back on, take two Excedrin, and hop back on it. Or rather, climb awkwardly up its wretched timbre, ignoring the hangovers of our chosen vice, cursing the splinters that imperil our ascent to righteousness. There’s no need to go all Amy Winehouse on our lives just because we suck at setting goals.
If anything, the problem with New Year’s Resolutions is that we need to spend more time on them, not less. We would all have shinier skin and resumes if April showers brought May resolution evaluations. The longest day of summer should be celebrated as a massive deadline crossing, wherein we get as much done in that day as we can, before dividing what’s left of our goals in half and throwing ourselves into renewed commitment. This occasion is marked by running through red tape, like winning a race, but we all get a turn. We may eat little white cakes with red check marks, and we are only allowed as many as there are achievements completed. When the fall trees lose their leaves, we should have a holiday for the slashing of our goals, a year-end-overstock-going-out-of-business sale for our annual To Do list. It would be celebrated by dressing like Used Car Salesmen and wishing people, “Act Now!”
Then when Santa’s checking his list, we already know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. And as the year’s end encroaches, we can see that the birth of the New Year is a cause for celebration. Because, arbitrary or not, history is about to put a great big lock on the filing cabinet of 2009 and that knowledge puts a gravitas on those of us who haven’t quite gotten our homework done. And isn’t it appropriate that the lightness of the foundling 2010 should be counter-balanced with commitments to all we hope this year should grow up to become? Who we are in 2009 has just become Who We Once Were. And 2010 is completely open, can only be defined as Who We Will Be. For those of us who look back in regret, it is an official chance for renewal. Either way, the looking back and forward is healthy, and to be encouraged. For those who accomplished much, we celebrate but, the old year being deceased, we are not allowed the humbrage of resting on our laurels. Instead, we collect our laurels along with our unfinished lists in a mighty heap, for everyone has at least one to contribute. Then we eulogize ourselves, burying the old with a baptism of alcohol poisoning, feasting, excess, and yes, fire: our laurels and our To Do lists will make such a beautiful bonfire, and the ashes, ink and rose petals must be trampled under our dizzy dancing feet.
2 Songs for the New Year:
*Thus cutting down a Christmas Tree is a sacrilege, like killing a Jew to celebrate Easter.
Time Magazine's example of Hipsters. Clearly, these freakish aliens are nothing like you and I! Let's go piss on their shoes!
Yes, I am harping on this one again. I wouldn’t be, if someone hadn’t sent me a link to this article in Time under the subject heading “Well stated.” Below is my point-by-point response.
Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They’re the people who wear T-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you’ve never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer.
MESSAGE: It is not possible that someone might have legitimately liked a movie that you’ve never heard of. Make fun of them. If you see someone drinking Pabst, make fun of them. Do not bother to ask them about their t-shirt or why they like that particular beer. You have all the information you need to wish that they would get evicted from their homes (no really, that’s how the article ends).
They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don’t care.
Berets and cowboy hats are not “hipster-ironic” fashionable. They are actually fashionable. As in, featured in regular department stores and sported by regular pop stars. Nothing “hipster” about it. So basically, anyone wearing a stylish hat is a hipster? Already in paragraph one and I’m questioning whether she knows what she is talking about. Nor do I see how wearing a trendy hat is a sign that one “just doesn’t care.”
Annoying, yes, but harmless, right?
Annoying? We should all be annoyed at someone’s choice of sunglasses or hat? No, actually, I don’t find it annoying that someone wears a cowboy hat and drinks inexpensive beer. I find it exceedingly annoying that someone else would make a big deal out of that fact.
Shamelessly hotlinking this from the Adbusters article she sites, which is even more absurdly offensive than this one.
Riiiiight. The psuedo-neutral tone of this article is aggravating. SHE’s not passing judgment on these people. She’s just pointing out that some people do. When the author will go on to imply that all hipsters are living off their parents, that they are annoying and shallow, and have no original ideas, she is merely passing on the beliefs of everyone else.
Though the subculture is met with derision in wider society, hipsters have been able to eke out enclaves across the country, chief among them the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Williamsburg. But now even that is threatened. The hip have been hit with a double whammy of economic reality (more are struggling to pay rent as parental support dries up) and population changes (the carefully gentrified neighborhood is gradually being infiltrated by squatters inhabiting Williamsburg’s stalled building projects). Hipsterdom’s largest natural habitat, it seems, is under threat.
Note the implicit assumption that people who drink a particular beer and wear a particular hat are all trust-fund babies. Don’t let that assumption slip by you.
Though the irony-sporting, status quo–abhorring, plaid-clad denizens of Williamsburg are a distinctly modern species, the hipster as a genus has its roots in the 1930s and ’40s. The name itself was coined after the jazz age, when hip arose to describe aficionados of the growing scene…
Hipsters were usually middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely-black jazz musicians they followed. But the subculture grew, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene attached itself to the movement: Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg were early hipsters, but it would be Norman Mailer who would try and give the movement definition. In an essay titled “The White Negro,” Mailer painted hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death — annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity — and electing instead to “divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” As the first hipster generation aged, it was replaced by the etymologically diminutive hippies, who appropriated their fears about the Cold War but embraced the community over the individual.
The word would fade for years until it was reborn in the early ’90s, used again to describe a generation of middle-class youths interested in an alternative art and music scene. But instead of creating a culture of their own, hipsters proved content to borrow from trends long past. Take your grandmother’s sweater and Bob Dylan’s Wayfarers, add jean shorts, Converse All-Stars and a can of Pabst and bam — hipster.
Apparently when the flapper-hipsters emulated black music, they were “aficionados.” When the beatnik-hipster emulated black music, they were “existentialists.” When the hippies became the counter-culture, they were anti-Cold War activists. But now that a new generation of youth emulates their past, they are shallow. The double-talk here is astounding.
Nevermind that the flappers, beatniks and hippies were all labeled as shallow in their own time. It is only in hindsight that we see the value of the bohemian artists. But here the author fails to see the chain of history in action, tricked by giving the Bohemian a new name and a new hat. Now she is saying that she respects Bohemians, just not THOSE Bohemians, you know, the ones that are actually relevant at this point in time.
Borrowing from trends long past is neither distinctive nor abhorrent. That’s all that fashion IS. Show me a fashion trend that is not “borrowing” from what came before. Moreover, if they are all borrowing from the same things, that shows value: clearly if a large group of people are all wearing their grandmother’s sweaters, they see a common value in it.
Overall, the people that I see that are commonly described by the H-word do have a common value with their fashion choices in that their thrift store finds are part of a common belief in anti-consumerism. Maybe they don’t feel the need to explain that to every person that walks down the street.
…Some of this ridicule is a bit unfair. As stores like Urban Outfitters have mass-produced hipster chic, hipsterdom has become a part of mainstream culture, overshadowing its originators’ still-strong alternative art and music scene. Those people, of course, no longer identify as hipsters, but they’re not the problem.
Wait, so the author is freely admitting that, like every counterculture, the aesthetic of the “alternative art and music scene” has been co-opted by corporate America, but it is not the phonies who are shopping at Urban Outfitters who are “the problem”? The REAL artists shop at Urban Outfitters and the poor schmucks who can only afford to drink Pabst and shop at Goodwill are the menace to society? WTF?!
And please tell me where in this article it explains why these people are a “problem”? This is the assumption slipping by again: we all agree that hipsters are a problem, but what is a hipster? seems to be the perplexing gist of it. The only annoyance and problem I see here is the continuing desire to ostracize strangers for belonging to a counterculture.
The hipsters who will be the dead end of Western Civilization are the ones who add nothing new or original and simply recycle and reduce old trends into a meaningless meme. It’s for that reason that when Williamsburg’s hipster playland is in crisis, there aren’t many who are concerned.
Right, nothing personal against them, we just all hope that they get evicted and go live somewhere else. But you know, only the Meaningless Meme ones! Those other bohemians, who look just like hipsters, they’re ok!
This is the crux of the matter. It is not socially acceptable to cast aspersions on artists, punks, hippies, ravers or bohemians of any kind. Fake bohemians, on the other hand are open season. But the beginning of this article shows a photo of New Yorkers who, for reasons that are inexplicable to me, are described as “hipsters.” Do we have any evidence that the people here are shallow? That their mothers pay their rent? That they are snobs?
Of course not. But because they have been labeled with the dreaded H-bomb, it is now ok to assume that they are the scum of society, and snobby at that. They are not real human beings enjoying a day in the park, who can now look forward to seeing themselves ridiculed in Time Magazine. They are cartoon villains.
I’ve been told that my logic is circular on this subject because I am defending real bohemians, and the hipsters are the fakes. But it is actually the opposite. Any time I point to someone that fits all of the external descriptions but is neither dependent nor shallow, I am told that those people aren’t really hipsters. My friend who drinks $3 Pabst tall-boys at the Indie nightclub and plays kroquet isn’t a hipster because she’s a feminist lobbyist. My friend who wears leg warmers and mismatched clothes is not a hipster because she is a freelance journalist getting her masters at Columbia. My friend who knows every person that works at the Stork Club in Oakland is not a hipster because she’s just a sweet little school teacher, and besides she listens to Brittany Spears, and I don’t mean ironically. Supposedly, I am not a hipster because I am neither snobby nor mean-spirited and I am (unironically, overbearingly) sincere. One will mistake my vintage Meatloaf t-shirt for some kind of ironic statement. But no—I got the shirt when I saw him in concert as a preteen. Once you get to know them, none of these people are shallow and they all pay their own bills. The list goes on and on: anywhere you point to the hipster, get a little closer and the stereotype evaporates under even the slightest scrutiny. Like all stereotypes, really.
But this is the argument: those people aren’t hipsters! The hipsters are the ones who look exactly like those people that I don’t know personally! The hipsters are “the ones who add nothing new or original and simply recycle and reduce old trends into a meaningless meme”! Fine, ok, you’re not generalizing people by the way they look at all! And when I hear someone describe a “hipster bar” or a “hipster coffee shop” or a “hipster neighborhood,” every single person inside that bar/shop/zip code is worthy of the derision of the masses? No, no, just lots of them. Which ones, then? That one, carrying a messenger bag and wearing a Cloud Cult t-shirt! Then we are back to judging them by the way they look, not based on who they are or their actions.
I suppose we could go into Ritual in the *Mission and ask every man in tight pants why he rides a fixie, drinks Ritual coffee, wears a messenger bag, and how much of his rent is supplied by his parents. But what fun would that be? Where’s the hate—er, fun—in that?
For the record, I have not met a single person that lives in the Mission that has access to any kind of a trust fund. Nor do I know any who sport the hipster look who shop at designer clothing stores. And, yes, I know tons of people that drink Pabst: no one is claiming it’s better than Tetley’s or Boddingtons. But it is much better than any other beer you can get for three bucks. Next time you want to give me shit for it, you best be buying me a Guiness.
My response to this article (and the dozens like it) is, essentially, fuck you. Fuck you for judging people who wear used clothes and support local businesses. Fuck you for judging people because they love art that you’ve never heard of. Fuck you for judging people based on their zip code. These people have done nothing to you and your sense of superiority is mean-spirited, short-sighted and shallow. Yes, shallow. This country is fighting two wars, recession, environmental collapse and cut-backs in all social services and you want to waste paper bitching about Brooklyn kids who wear skinny jeans? FUCK YOU. And the pitchfork-wielding, Polo-wearing mob you rolled in on.
My apartment is a disaster. There are dishes scattered about, paper strewn, twice-worn clothes in a heap. My ass has been reshaped into the form of the cushion, and it hurts. My shoulders are killing me. I’m sick of listening to music.
“No! Take it back!” you say. For I am never sick of listening to music, as you, dear reader, probably know by now.
But I have been sitting in this same spot, listening to music and staring at this novel for the last twelve hours. I had determined that a four-day weekend was plenty of time to finish the ten scenes that I haven’t been able to find the time to write for the last ten months.
OK, to be fair, I did write some of them. But writing scenes inspires a need to write more scenes, so no matter how much I wrote the conclusion of the novel seemed at least ten scenes away.
Believe it or not, in those twelve hours I got very little writing done. Hardly a page.
Instead, something even better happened. It was like a gift from my fairy godmother!
Where the writing happens, only much filthier
I had been miffed at myself of late. I had had plenty of good ideas for character, dialog, description (etc.) and not taken the time to get those ideas down. Then when I wanted to go write them later, of course the words didn’t take shape quite as easily.
I thought because I had been keeping up with entering the changes in my edited drafts, that I had most of the hand-written scenes entered.
I was wrong. I was so wrong.
Turns out those good ideas had been put to paper. I decided to go through every journal I have used since I started the novel and finally type in every last scrap of anything that I had hand-written but not entered into the draft yet. We are talking eight journals and assorted random pieces of paper. They were sentence fragments on legal pads, plotpoints in margins, conflict and dialog written sideways on notes from work meetings, whole scenes in journals I was sure would have nothing but diary entries cataloging various breakups…like the typical artist, my journals are as scatterbrained as my mind.
All together, in those twelve hours I typed seventeen pages, or roughly 8,000 words. I didn’t put them in their place in the story, just typed them straight through, separating them with useful headers.
You’d think it would be better for me to have written those enigmatic ten scenes, since this stuff would get entered at some point regardless. You would think also that it would be better if there were several whole scenes rather than a ton of fragments.
Au contraire! I say in a terrible French accent.
Because the hardest part of writing is starting. It is much, much (much) easier to finish off a scene than put one word on a blank piece of paper. Now most of the scenes I need to write have already been started. I just have to fill in the gaps. Even the two monumental mind-fuck *scenes that are going to be the hardest to rewrite had some significant edits hidden away that I had forgotten about.
Furthermore, this is tremendous validation that I actually did something in 2009 besides bite my nails, Blip, and fret over the aphids eating my tomatoes.
And plenty of what was written didn’t suck! That’s key of course. I’m excited just to get this fresh content in because I am sick of looking at the same tired sentences I’ve been editing for ages. And those ten scenes smell a lot more like four scenes at the moment.
Moving forward: First step, naturally, is to stick all those scenes in the appropriate place in the draft. That may take the rest of the weekend. Then I will reprint the draft and continue editing it. This time I’m going to leave big spaces where I think there should be more content. Not sure whether I will start from page one or pick up where I left off.
Now to get off my ass and be unproductive!
_______________
*They entail describing pretty much the entire history of humanity in a touching, infuriating, frenzied dream. Exactly like that scene from Adaptation, actually.
Janet said she wanted to go the Missouri Lounge to make fun of all the hipsters. Everyone agreed that The Missouri Lounge was just crawling with the little buggers.
I was surprised. Not about the Missouri Lounge—though I’d always thought the shack looked like more of a redneck dive—but that Janet wasn’t herself a hipster. She had the chunky, short-cropped hair and the thick black plastic glasses. But no. She was a hipster hater. How could I get them confused?
We ordered drinks and Janet picked out the most egregious violators and made fun of their outfits and drink selections. We did not stay long. Janet made a request from the DJ and there was some misunderstanding, or altercation. So we left.
That incident got me thinking. Did those people deserve to be made fun of? What made them worse people than Janet? What the hell was a hipster, anyway?
Since that day many moons ago, if I hear someone use the word I always ask them what it means. Two things quickly became apparent: 1) no two people seem to have the same definition 2) never have I ever heard the word used in a positive context.
For my money, a hipster is a person with an overly-developed sense of irony. But by that definition, the guy I know who is most likely to be a hipster is a 35-year-old Indian metalhead. He’s also the biggest hipster-hater I know. The “H-word” also seems to be associated with indie rock, though no one seems to know what the fuck that is either.
Here is what some of my research has come up with:
“Hipsters are trust fund babies who go to expensive private art programs.”
“Hipsters are people who wear mismatched, ill-fitting clothes and think they are hot.”
“Hipsters are the shallow types who live in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn.”
“Hipsters drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and ride fixie-bikes and make fun of normal people.”
Oh well then, that’s clear. If I am in Williamsburg and I meet someone in an art program I can assume they are shallow and living off daddy’s money. Additionally, if I meet a girl on a fixed-gear bike in Goodwill frocks I can assume she is a snotty bitch who can’t wait to talk about me behind my back. It would do the world a good deed to run off with her inexpensive union-made brew, taunting and laughing.
Much like the yuppies in The Last Days of Disco, “hipster” seems to describe a group of people whom everyone seems to agree is omnipresent and easily identifiable yet no one can find one among their circle of friends.
In case you can’t tell, this whole thing pisses me off. Being cruel to someone based on the way they dress, the music they listen to, their neighborhood or school of choice is discrimination. It may not be based on a thousand years of oppression like the prejudice we all like to think we’re too good for, but it is certainly the opposite of the moral high-ground the hipster-haters think they have.
The American College Dictionary defines Bohemian as “a person with artistic or intellectual tendencies, who lives and acts with no regard for conventional rules of behavior.”
I see very little to distinguish the hipster-hating of today from those who hated the punks and before that the hippies and before that the beatniks and on and on. No one can deny the fact that the hipster is the new bohemian, except the bohemians themselves, who’ve been tricked into thinking that the hipsters are the fake bohemians.
Can’t wait to meet this friendly guy!
Thus we have an odd scenario where sews-her-own-clothes girl (e.g. hipster) and shops-at-the-Gap girl (eg the anti-hipster) can both commiserate on how much they hate the shops-at-Urban-Outfitters girl (“fake” hipster). SewsHerOwnClothes thinks she is immune because she is more authentic than those people who shop at Urban Outfitters. But you can bet your best pair of Pumas that Gap girl and the Urban Outfitters “fake” hipster would be just as quick to make fun of the freak girl with the weird clothes she she probably made on her grandma’s sewing machine (as if that’s a bad thing).
The whole anti-bohemian attitude strikes me as a backlash against a group of people who feel slighted by those who have a different set of moral standards. An example would serve better than an explanation…
Someone who thinks that they are being “special” and “unique” for liking some underground bullshit no one else cares about. And they pointlessly look down on people who don’t know anything about indie culture, because that’s the only thing they know anything about. They’re quick to call the rest of the world conformists when in reality, they are the ones conforming by partaking in a “too cool for mainstream so i am going to reject it by looking and acting like a grungy asshole” way of life only to seem uber-fashionable. They just end up looking like idiots.
Hipster: I won’t drink at starbucks, it’s too corporate.
Non-Hipster: I want a Louis Vitton purse because they are cool
Hipster: You’re such a conformist, haveing [sic] a Louis Vitton purse is so unoriginal. I like my purse I found in the gutter for $4 dollars.
Non-hipster: but it’s fugly
Hipster: yah, but no one else has it. It’s completely unique.
Non-hipster: that bum over there has something pretty similar though.
Hipster: You’re ignorant because you can’t see the real beauty in life.
I don’t have time for this, I’m gonna go to my cave of an apartment and listen to some indie rock you’ve probably never heard of….
Non hipster: You need to see a therapist
Hipster: I am my own therapist.
So the sad fashion whore who wrote that definition feels as though she is being judged because she doesn’t care where her clothes are made or how her consumption choices affect the local economy. And she’s right! I think the person who wrote the definition above is shallow and ignorant! I expect to be hated and unkindly labeled by anyone who thinks avoiding Starbucks is an example of “some underground bullshit.” That’s totally fine. Fuck that girl, and the guy who runs http://www.latfh.com, we were never meant to be friends!
But when I see the anarchists, punks, queers, ravers and other manner of adorable bohemians bitching about the “H” word, it’s too much. When someone seeks to say cruel things about a nonconformist, hipster is the first word they turn to, even if the nonconformists themselves think a hipster is something entirely different.
The focus on the hipster’s inauthenticity as an outsider, art appreciator, or moral consumer is a defense mechanism based on the labeler’s own insecurities in those same areas. The Louis Vitton-lover in the example above is an extreme example because s/he can’t even conceive that anyone would care about the journey of their designer purse from sweatshop to landfill. Your average anti-bohemian likes to think they appreciate art and philosophy as much or more than any weirdos with their weird music and their weird hair and their weird clothes. The assumption is that any reasons for being different are not better or coming from any set of values, merely contrivances. In this way, anti-hipsterism becomes another extension of the big-city-elitist versus corn-fed-anti-intellectual debate that is the hallmark of the American class system.
When the freaks, geeks, queers and quacks take aim at hipsters they are supporting conformity, regardless of what they think it means when they are around other bohemian-types.
Let us celebrate the hipster. Let us drink inexpensive beer and wear used clothes. Let’s listen to obscure music. Let’s have debates about crap surrealist literature and condone veganism. La vie Boheme, under any name: embrace it.
As a birthday present to myself, I bought a copy of Poet’s Market 2008. I’ve put my novel aside for a bit but a sudden fire under my bum has been lit to get some of my other stuff published. I think Evan set this fire, by mentioning in his blog that he is interning with Sharon Olds, who is my favorite living poet. Or maybe it is this thing stirring in my belly, this turmoil about the state of the world and a desire to express that in writing. A lot of people ask me where the best places are to go dancing, etc, but I am not really interested in that. I want to go to poetry readings or stay at home and write.
The other day when I posted that article about global warming, wherein a scientist said that in one week the arctic had lost an area of ice almost twice the size of the United Kingdom, another interesting thing happened. My boss came back to work from his basketball game. The game ended early. Why? Because two players got into an argument over a foul. Not usually a game-ending event, but in this case one of the players left the game and came back half an hour letter and put a case full of bullets in the other guy. Somehow no one felt like playing basketball when one of their teammates was lying on the court full of more holes than blood. My boss seemed to be taking this pretty well.
The most striking to me about this was its insignifigance in the grand scheme of things. Oakland has a serious problem with the whole shooting thing (maybe you’ve heard about it). I’m not playing that down by any means, nor the suffering of the family. But the high murder rate in Oakland is not going to kill as many people as global warming, not even close.
This is what I want to capture in my writing: this feeling that the issues humanity is facing right now are huge, but they don’t feel huge. The day of the shooting, I also set a fire in the kitchen. I remember the exhileration of that moment, the thrill of the temporary emergency. No matter how much perspective I have intellectually, it is hard to feel the difference, it is hard to feel the suffereing of the vicitims of the shooting or global warming when that fire is the danger in front of me. And that same fire is a thousand other things, social conflicts or career concerns or a packed to-do list and on and on.
It seems that the only way people can reach these higher, more important concerns, is through art. Books and music allow us to feel, rather than only think about, these problems. And you can hear a lot of artists now are immeshed in it, this compulsion to capture the direction the world is heading. The Besnard Lakes, in a recent interview, explained it as the reason their new album is so dark. And Tom Morello described it recently in an interview on Sound Opinions, “Its preaching to the converted, well I strongly believe the converted need a kick in the ass. Why the White House is not ringed by pitchforks and torches I don’t know.” And the new (and frankly, the previous) Modest Mouse record captures that spirit as well.
This juxtaposition of what we are feeling and what we should be feeling is my new obsession. I know how to capture it artistically and maybe that’s why I have been so interested in drawing lately. I am only just beginning to explore what it means for me as a writer. I am very interested in how this conflict between the struggles of day-to-day life and the larger problems facing the world have affected the rest of you. Does it change your passion for the things you are pursuing? Some days, it makes my desire to be a writer feel like empty egoism.
On other days, that same desire seems like the only power I have to affect the world at all.
After my recent premier in Publishers Weekly Magazine, I have more grounds for bragging rights.
BRAGGING RIGHT 1
As many of you know, I have tried my hand in the past at growing things and I am the only person I have ever met that managed to kill an aloe plant. I was doing okay for a while with my bamboo, as I only had to fill a glass bowl with water every month or so and even that my girlfriend did most of the time. But tragically the bamboo disappeared off the back of the moving truck on the way to California. Very mysterious, no? Or perhaps not, since I barreled down the interstate in a 26 foot truck with the back open for several minutes.
I suppose there is something to that old cliche’, something about getting back on that dead horse and beating it until it rides because even I have managed to grow something. Yes, dear readers, I am the proud parent of a ripe cherry tomato.
This all started with a witch who put a potato in my backyard and expected it to grow and though I watered that potato the only thing that sprouted was an ugly desert dandelion. But since I was taking the time to water it anyway, I figured I may as well get something more promising than an old potato. So, basil and tomato it was.
Some of my lovely plants.
But after the birth of my first fruit, like every new parent, I went a little wild. I started planting every scrap left over in the kitchen: the core of a pepper, three cloves of garlic, a ginger root that was too old to eat. I spent sixty dollars on a flourescent lamp and special bulbs and fancy organic dirt. I have since bought strawberries, mint, a pepper, cilantro, dill, a second tomato, and more basil too. They can’t all die, right?
This blog is certainly long enough but I can’t have a whole string of posts that are mere self-promotion, so I will continue on.
BRAGGING RIGHT 2
Lately, my internal alarm clock has been surprisingly accurate. I want to get up earlier than I have been, so despite having six or seven hours of sleep I wake up at seven exactly. But I hit the “snooze” button in my brain and think, let’s sleep for another half-hour and then I wake up at exactly seven thirty. I think 7:40 is a much better time to wake up and I go back to sleep for exactly ten minutes. As impressed as I am with myself, I don’t seem to be getting out of bed any earlier.
BRAGGING RIGHT 3
Though this took the least amount of work, I think it is the bragging right I am most proud of! As you all know, I have been going on at length about the eighty pages of novel I have written. No matter how much I write, it seems to stay around eighty pages. I suppose I am deleting things too. I have read several places that a “manuscript length” should be at least 150. That’s a long way to go from eighty. But I wasn’t using the standard manuscript formatting so I changed my novel to one column, double-spaced just to see how far off I am. It came out to 172 pages! And this is at a ten point font. If up the size to twelve, it fattens to 219 pages! That’s a hefty manuscript. In pages to pounds, I like the idea of my manuscript weighing more than I do.
Of course I understand that I didn’t actually write another 139 pages. But knowing that what I have is actually novel-length is a relief. Feeling like I need to write another eighty pages is such an uphill battle. And I may have that much more to write yet. But I can do so because the story needs it, not because an editor would expect it.
IN CONCLUSION:
I may be walking proud these next couple of days but the truth is I don’t eat any healthier, get up any earlier and I don’t have a finished novel.
My Mexican neighbors keep throwing away their furniture. I don’t know how they go through it so quickly, but once a month or so I will see sofas and pillows and dining chairs stacked by the trash, like a big-boned house of cards.
I wonder how many tissues, crushed soda cans and credit card offers I can fit in the space these will take up in the landfill.
If they were white, I would ask them about it. I would ask whether they knew there was a thrift store three blocks up that will sell their furniture for the benefit of disabled children. I would say that I know a guy there who would walk the three blocks with a dolly to come get the stuff.
But they are not white. They are first generation immigrants living the American dream: a gas-guzzler in the driveway and furniture that matches the carpeting.
Herein lies the disconnect between us: conservation activism is a luxury. It is only conceptualized in a world of abundance. How can one think about the impact of all they have when all along the most glaring truth is all they have not? Those who cannot afford new clothes aren’t thinking about organic cotton. It is the middle class people that are replacing the innefficient bulbs in their house with longer-lasting ones. And I confess that as a poor college student I bought the cheapest ones because renters don’t stay long enough to see the economic benefits of the earth friendly light bulb.
I’m not saying poor people don’t struggle, on the contrary, their lives are defined by it. But it seems like the struggle of the poor is one for survival. They sure as hell aren’t going to feel guilty for not recycling when there are corporations privatizing their water supply.
Maybe I am wrong about this. After all, my neighbors are paying the same rent that I am. Maybe they are just typical Americans and I am blinded by white guilt. Surely there are no excuses, now that conservation is a matter of survival for everyone. But our exchanges now are smiles and nods and I want to keep it that way. Who am I to give them a lecture?
I threatened this balance the other day while murdering the kudzu in my backyard. There was so much of it that I couldn’t have told you what the fence beneath it was made of. This created quite a pile of lawn clippings. A young man and old woman come out of the apartment above while I am dragging branches to a heap half as tall as I am and just as wide. They look at me inexplicably. I ask if they know where the compost bin is (in Oakland, they have a recycle bin for compost). More confusion, some head shaking. You know, the bin that you put leaves in. The bisabuela points to the dumpster. No, I want the one for recycling. I wonder if she speaks English. But surely he speaks English. I can’t help but think that as a result of this exchange they gather that I am simply too lazy to walk the extra five feet to the trash. I vow to call the Oakland Recycling Center. They smile and nod. I smile and nod.
And isn’t this very same conundrum happening on an international level? Excuse me, China, but I can’t help but noticing that the smog in Beijeng is so bad it would be safest to never leave the house. Our Olympic athletes are precious assets and we’d rather not have them damaged by breathing in all your smog. But then someone comes along and reminds us: China is just getting the hang of the “first world,” give a country a break! And don’t get them started on the banana republics and African countries that are raping the oceans of what’s left of the big game fish. Don’t they get to have economies, too?
It is just a small two bedroom cottage; the garden in the back is almost as big as the house itself. It is decorated deliberately, but also as an afterthought. Most of the pictures are thumbtacked to the wall. The house is clean if a little cluttered. Most of their mail is high-class gloss ( the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly) or plees from charities they have likely given to in the past. They have tacked paint swatches to the wall to take time in deciding what colors to paint them.
There is a selection of books that reminds me of my vow to not read another second-rate book while there are so many more classics than I can read in my short life-time. Here I choose between Guns, Germs and Steel and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I settle on the latter partly because it is shorter but also because I am beginning to forget why I fell in love with the writing style in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Then I commit to Kundera, a big glass of Charles Shaw shiraz, and the queens of jazz (Ella, Bettie, Etta) for the rest of the evening. I could read my own books and listen to my own music, but why not partake of the best someone else’s home has to offer?
In that same vein, the next morning I breakfast on strawberries, raspberries and blackberries from the garden. They are the sweetest to ever pass my lips, not a bitter fruit in the bunch. The juice from an enormous strawberry runs down my hand like rivulets of blood. I don’t think I’ve ever seen juice flow from a store-bought strawberry.
I am writing this because it occurs to me that I am more comfortable in this house, the house of two people I have never met, than in my own home. Sure, it is a little cleaner here, and the ample, uncovered windows make it much brighter. But it is more than that. I like myself more in this house. I want nothing more than to dance and read and draw and write. These are the things I love, these are the things that make me who I am.
But I find that at home, these are not the things I do very often. Writing is something I do away from home, a catastrophe because I arranged my living room to make it as writing-friendly as I could. Perhaps to write, I must be alone? Or perhaps I don’t like to write in front of San’s critical eye.
This is no small matter. The one thing a writer needs, besides something to scribble on and with, is a mind free of criticism.
Additionally, there is always the tug of television. Truthfully, I don’t much like TV, it is an over-rated drug that all my friends are hopped up on. I find that when San goes out of town, I don’t watch any TV at all.
I read half of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the first night. I remember now: the way he asks questions of his characters and then always answers them, the way he is a character in his own novel, freely admitting that each character is fictional but they are still somehow so real. It is beautiful and intimate and honest. At one point, I weep.
I have so many things to do this weekend. Kat is moving to Azerbaijan today; tomorrow is queer pride. I think of how my sweetie says I never leave the house. It is not true! I am never hestitant to leave my home, with its dark, dusty carpeting and piles of boxes that still remain unpacked. But this house, this house that appeared as if out of my dreams, I want to be sequestered, contained. This house of strangers that lets me be myself for the first time since I’ve remembered who I am.
According to my sweetie, the best hostel in San Francisco is the Green Tortoise, so that’s where my best friend Ray and I stayed for the second day of our vacation. It is in the North Beach district, which is S.F.’s version of Little Italy. The Hostel is in the most famous part of North Beach, Columbus Ave., where it borders and blends with Chinatown. From a block away you can see the majesty of the Sentinel building and the Transamerica Pyramid. You can also see the Citylights Bookstore and the Vesuvio. The Sentinel building is a green flat-iron that was constructed in 1907. The frame was actually built in 1906 and survived the great earthquake to be finished the following year. Supposedly you can sometimes see Francis Ford Coppola upstairs in his office, he also owns the cafe on the bottom floor.
Citylights is about as famous as a bookstore can get. It is where Lawrence Ferlinghetti first published Ginsberg’s “Howl” though it had been declared obscene. Ferlinghetti went to jail and it started the court case that is still the precedent for whether a document is considered obscene (whether or not it has artisitc merit). Aside from all that, it is a damn good bookstore. On the same block are the Vesuvio bar and the Stinking Rose, (named because all the recipes are made with garlic) both well-known beatnik hang-outs.
Ray and I spent the morning at the Beat Museum. The museum is not glamorous. It occupies an office space, old doors are used as makeshift dividers to define the space. There was plenty of info but they could use more artifacts. It seemed like the kind of place that exists not as a tourist trap but because a small group of dedicated folks think it should be there.
Rather than eating at the typical North Beach hang-outs, we brunched at Juicy Lucy’s, a mostly vegan, organic juice bar. The atmosphere is just my style: vaguely (Eastern) Indian and very brightly colored. Instead of benches, I sat on a bale of hay. They serve juice in bowls. The owner commented that the strawberries were particularly fresh and tasty that day, I love that the ingredients list is seasonal. Everything is made right there from scratch so it took a long time for our food to come.
After brunch, Ray and I walked to Chinatown. In my mind, Chinatown is the best place in the city for shopping. You can’t beat the prices or the atmosphere. I bought a girlie hair pin in the shape of a spider. I had regretted not getting it the last time I was in Chinatown and I was determined to find the shop that sold it. I love spiders and there is something delightful about wearing a pretty ornament made to look like something that most think of as ugly. I also fell in love with these bracelet/necklaces that are held together with magnets. Ray was shopping for a digital camera and I was very happy to buy a memory card from one of the little shops (rather than a corporate chain).
That night Ray and I went to the famous Castro theater in the Castro district. In the tradition of guady, early theaters it is not the prettiest I have seen but it won big points for the organ player. Before the show, a pipe organ rolls up from a trap door, played by a formally-dressed gentleman. The sound fills the entire auditorium in a way that no paltry speakers can. The sound is so full it is like hearing an entire orchestra. Truthfully, I enjoyed the pipe organ more than the movie. The movie was a Japanese film entitled Vengeance is Mine. After the movie, Ray and I went home, vowing to continue our celebration at Booty later in the week.
