ex boyfriend drops a funny little email with a photo of himself in elf-like pageboy costume to perform Don Carlo in Japan with a link to a spoken word poet called sarah kay. like many powerful wordsmith superwomen playing to multiracial young audiences in the demographic of the Rising Jedi Knights (cover of Time magazine, kawanahoo or whatever they call them in Hawaii, mongrel progressive yuphippies), she is herself of multi heritage and a breathless believer of her role in the liberal progressive battle for the something greater than. she writes that "hands are made for loving," and with aside coyness that, in this light, "hands are not political." Of course, she is trying to make the point that hands are political, in her understanding of love in the polis. She confesses to her unborn child, "from a scale of 1 to overly trusting I am naive," but she is not only a believer but believes in her believing -- which makes her believable and unbelievable.
i am in the untethered, water-less winnebago of finding my way to writerland, and just thought to myself to remember that i am not that writer. the kay cadence, a self-conscious post-90s reasserting of the trope of the spoken word artist, something to be made fun of at parties on last saturday night in artist lofts where kuan yin stands blessing unshielded bathtubs and fun boys are thieved by curly-haired blondes who look like sarah jessica parker. speaking with the gangly 7 foot tall man seated upon said bathtub and his oddly-paired, well-dressed girlfriend, somehow i get to blabbering about the kuan yin statue and old chinese mystical wushu movies where the transliterations breed absurdities like "I am Divine Virgin Divine Dragon Gang 9" and in said absurd movie the said Divine Virgin can only save the village/gang/treasure/something by copulating with the town idiot in the middle of a forest clearing in a giant cocoon swirled into being by the whip of her long sleeves. the catch phrases for the evening were "swoop, dragon, swoop" and "rapturous embrace in a cocoon". in the telling of this said story, we jointly mocked the kay cadence, not specifically hers, but the cadence of the spoken word artist of whom I may have once and always desired and will never be.
because who are one's audiences, who listen because you speak in their voice? somehow, i speak for the old men, the loser lover, the ones who can't help themselves, the divorcee putting a daughter through school for acting partly in order to piss off his ex-wife. those who spend their lives fighting their minds that take them to dirt-filled places; the haggard wanderer, homeless, death-obsessed, constantly overflowing with treacherous life. the leech, the leach, la que sabe the one who knows. those who do not hunt, but cannot help to smell spilled blood. sharks, dung beetles, carrion eaters.
she lives on pages but keeps her mouth shut. she keeps nameless people company when they don't have any, can't have any, hope for any while feigning casual intelligence while reading in public. with peripheral feelers, minions of skin dust scattering to attract to oneself, he -- reclined seductively against a public park statue, artfully sliced trousers to shorts, spends time with a writer like she. she next to a smushed banana, she worn down and thrown in a book bag, she in the brown donation bag, she the designated driver, she with the paper back. she, the working man's lunchtime sunshine mistress. she, who pilgrimages to have friends and lives in residence with god. she of the 52 minute battery remaining. she of the clackety clack of bones and keys. she, who speaks well to strangers, estranges her kin, and walks home alone.
i am which writer?
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Friday, July 03, 2009
lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy jane
It's half way through the year and this is only my fourth post. I have become so boring. I have become so boring. I have become so boring. I have become so boring.
I have become so boring. I am still enamoured of sexy, artsy, marketable European names like Jan Fabre to the point where I am watching his performance chronology on DVD and am still trying to pay the sort of attention that looks for genius like looking for nails in rubble (the metal might be valuable!) even after the first completely unappealing, unintelligible rape scene. It's half way through the year and I am 27 years old and the present me would not currently write much of what I have written here in the past here now, but as it seems, I have not lost my one consistency of stupidly endless trains of thought. THERE IS A LOGIC TO THIS SENSATION, old young Mel tells current older still young Mel.
Hmmm. Hmm of the Moment. So much more booring than an Um of the moment. Thoughts that were once hesitations symbolic of the struggle to articulate through the morass of inarticulate conflated experience, through the helpless pure self webbed in complex multiselves, have now become the dull, sandblasted Hmm-ings of a pauser, an indecisiveizer, an oh-this-is-how-it-goes-what's-my-next-meal-er. Next, I will be wanting love, kinship, marriage, family involvement, world travel, settling down, figuring out, regular intercourse, societal relevance, a house as the creative expression of myself, and BABIES. UTERINE EXPLOSION. WANNA WANNA CRACKER!!
.......
OK!
Sold!
I'll take it!
Put it on my karma tab!
Life is good! I am enjoying life!
I am no longer spending large amounts of my present missing the conflated pasresent!
I am not experiencing an immediate nostalgia for right now, or rather, right before just now, if only I could catch up to it!
I am relieving my back pain by sitting back, taking time with my thoughts, being only mildly irritated by the heat of the laptop on my two wrists, rocking back into my green-gold rocking chair I found on the street and fixed up myself!
I just farted! Glorious fart of the loveable and provident universe!
The only thing left that I lament -- no swan song for the lost nation, the forgotten friends, the idea of forgetting -- is Melinda Lee as rationally understood as a compilation of her parts and conflicted dreamings! Melee with Issues! Melee with Ideas ....! Melee with Imperative ....!
The vinegariness of methane lingers, as does my vulgarity, as does my repetitive vocabulary. Here, she is only getting smarter for the sake of it, as in "smart ass". I don't even lament being alone for so much of my life, because without that lonely time, when would I be able to do the important work of writing down my thoughts about twice a quarter? [CODE: I am mad at myself for not writing more regularly, more marketable artsily, but mainly for not writing more]
I have become so boring. I am still enamoured of sexy, artsy, marketable European names like Jan Fabre to the point where I am watching his performance chronology on DVD and am still trying to pay the sort of attention that looks for genius like looking for nails in rubble (the metal might be valuable!) even after the first completely unappealing, unintelligible rape scene. It's half way through the year and I am 27 years old and the present me would not currently write much of what I have written here in the past here now, but as it seems, I have not lost my one consistency of stupidly endless trains of thought. THERE IS A LOGIC TO THIS SENSATION, old young Mel tells current older still young Mel.
Hmmm. Hmm of the Moment. So much more booring than an Um of the moment. Thoughts that were once hesitations symbolic of the struggle to articulate through the morass of inarticulate conflated experience, through the helpless pure self webbed in complex multiselves, have now become the dull, sandblasted Hmm-ings of a pauser, an indecisiveizer, an oh-this-is-how-it-goes-what's-my-next-meal-er. Next, I will be wanting love, kinship, marriage, family involvement, world travel, settling down, figuring out, regular intercourse, societal relevance, a house as the creative expression of myself, and BABIES. UTERINE EXPLOSION. WANNA WANNA CRACKER!!
.......
OK!
Sold!
I'll take it!
Put it on my karma tab!
Life is good! I am enjoying life!
I am no longer spending large amounts of my present missing the conflated pasresent!
I am not experiencing an immediate nostalgia for right now, or rather, right before just now, if only I could catch up to it!
I am relieving my back pain by sitting back, taking time with my thoughts, being only mildly irritated by the heat of the laptop on my two wrists, rocking back into my green-gold rocking chair I found on the street and fixed up myself!
I just farted! Glorious fart of the loveable and provident universe!
The only thing left that I lament -- no swan song for the lost nation, the forgotten friends, the idea of forgetting -- is Melinda Lee as rationally understood as a compilation of her parts and conflicted dreamings! Melee with Issues! Melee with Ideas ....! Melee with Imperative ....!
The vinegariness of methane lingers, as does my vulgarity, as does my repetitive vocabulary. Here, she is only getting smarter for the sake of it, as in "smart ass". I don't even lament being alone for so much of my life, because without that lonely time, when would I be able to do the important work of writing down my thoughts about twice a quarter? [CODE: I am mad at myself for not writing more regularly, more marketable artsily, but mainly for not writing more]
Friday, February 06, 2009
meeting me
"me on stage" - a title.
The following, a paragraph:
"I don't know what I would do," she replied, when I asked her how she'd react to meeting a younger version of herself. "Fall hopelessly and violently in love with her, I guess."
The self-reflexive precociousness of the prose grows large; I can see the serif font on fibrous, yellowed pages -- a chapter ending of a paperback novella written for the teenage market. I see it on the page so clearly. Never the right story, but one that "made do." It's like how I never called Roland back after sleeping with him for two weeks because I got a new job doing data entry and he commented quizzically: "You mean, you like data entry?" Fool. I like the feeling that I'm getting by. The idea of success gives me the emotional shits and inspirational hemmorhoids (just a little something obstructing delivery).
Yet again, the spectre of my middling, make-do, improvised future! Glorious unplanning!
"I haven't met who I am going to have been, but I have been the met."
That means, there were others who came to me laid claim to me saying: I was once what you are and in that I was just as alone and that means we should be together; but then I says, that means you would have been us and been alone and I would be us and not be alone and you are cheating me of my destiny to be just like this and learn just like this and perhaps one day meet us again and have little us say, oh no, i have evolved. oh, spot! I'd like to damn it! But these are the gripes of lesser woman than that lady!
The gentleman in the train has short cuffed trousers and elegant expensive shoes. That is correct!
The strange man in the train wears flannel as a jacket, too much gel combed through his hair, moosen ear muffs, khaki pants that are a correctly short cuffed length, and NO SHOES. LOAFERS. That is not quite correct!
The following, a paragraph:
"I don't know what I would do," she replied, when I asked her how she'd react to meeting a younger version of herself. "Fall hopelessly and violently in love with her, I guess."
The self-reflexive precociousness of the prose grows large; I can see the serif font on fibrous, yellowed pages -- a chapter ending of a paperback novella written for the teenage market. I see it on the page so clearly. Never the right story, but one that "made do." It's like how I never called Roland back after sleeping with him for two weeks because I got a new job doing data entry and he commented quizzically: "You mean, you like data entry?" Fool. I like the feeling that I'm getting by. The idea of success gives me the emotional shits and inspirational hemmorhoids (just a little something obstructing delivery).
Yet again, the spectre of my middling, make-do, improvised future! Glorious unplanning!
"I haven't met who I am going to have been, but I have been the met."
That means, there were others who came to me laid claim to me saying: I was once what you are and in that I was just as alone and that means we should be together; but then I says, that means you would have been us and been alone and I would be us and not be alone and you are cheating me of my destiny to be just like this and learn just like this and perhaps one day meet us again and have little us say, oh no, i have evolved. oh, spot! I'd like to damn it! But these are the gripes of lesser woman than that lady!
The gentleman in the train has short cuffed trousers and elegant expensive shoes. That is correct!
The strange man in the train wears flannel as a jacket, too much gel combed through his hair, moosen ear muffs, khaki pants that are a correctly short cuffed length, and NO SHOES. LOAFERS. That is not quite correct!
Sunday, February 01, 2009
apocalypse, how?
On certain downswings of my usual hypomania I wake with heavy eyelids I fear are from insidious chemical gas coming through the heat pipes (and the phantom hole that was once in my ceiling) and walk Nostrand Ave wondering if this is where I will be for the apocalypse? Who would I call first when people start dropping dead?
Of course it will be biochemical, I imagine. I don't think I fear artillery nearly as much. I fear people and how they react unprepared under stress. I fear the mass' survival instinct and how quickly the hard-fought unravelling of ancient tribalisms will retrograde when there's only so much to go around.
Perhaps I fear my cowardice. Perhaps I underestimate, as usual.
But really I wanted to write about pending doom only to celebrate previous glories, inspired by a subway ride's salivation over the word "crab" after dancing in a club where I worried the black people would judge me as trying to be black and the Asian boys were all called "David".
It's a scene for the far-flung during lunar new year week, the recitation of long-lusted homestyle dishes and the resonance of their memory. I joked today that it felt like a recitation of the names of the dead, only, it's not funny, well, only because I feel guilty that I've never sat through a recitation of the names of the dead, nor have I any historical attachment (yet -- oh god, no) to a historical event that would warrant it. HOWEVER - there is always the recitation of foods undeliverable across multiple oceans to my craving, homesick mouth.
slowly now, easy now ... as the genteel mother admonishes, "man man chi ..."
MEE GORENG
TAU POK
HOR FUN
DRAGONFRUIT
CHEE KUAY
TAU WEI
NGO HIANG
LA MIAN
MEE SIAM
JACKFRUIT
JACKFRUIT CHIPS
MANGOSTEEN
NASI PADANG
NASI LEMAK
CHILLI CRAB
PEPPER CRAB
MAN TOU
KANG KONG
SAMBAL
CHOK
PAU
MI
MEE REBUS
POH PIAH
CHEE CHONG FAN
PANDAN
PULUT SERIKAYA
KAYA
KOPI
..... I feel like at least 5 of the above words could be passable middle names for Western-born children on the basis of pure phonetics and new ageism.
But my point. That feeling. That feeling that is not lostness or homesickness, persay, but a distinct and slight rumbling of the "what if it really were all gone", what if you became too old to want something new and all you knew as that which preceded you, well, was gone. I used to lament this. I've lamented it enough in this very brog (coveting the childhood stories of innocent Singapore as seen through the lens of my willed sweetness upon the bitters of my parents' adulthoods). But it all feels different that the world does not seem infinite, that our water and skies and crispy vitamin-D generating sun-basking and naked days of skin on skin and a sense of do gooding (not un-badding) was a clear motive. What if? What if??
Out here in Crown Heights I here a low-flying plane above -- I wonder what it would sound like if there were hundreds. I walk to the subway on trash-littered streets (plundered by the local crazies, and strewn) and wonder how long it would take for a lack of trash service that trucks it magically away before disease would spread and unrest to ensue. Of course, these are mediated imaginings -- oh, to be caught by the future Gestapo dressed in nothing but red ribbon; oh, to be the sole-seeing heroine who knows exactly how to find the foods in the basement bunker! -- but my generation is growing up and I am growing up to see exactly what I am inheriting.
Is the home mantra strong enough? Who will stand up for your millions? The isolating, painful, homogenizing familiarity of that place is diminishing to the creative will, or willfulness, but ... forgetfulness is already a form of apocalypse.
Of course it will be biochemical, I imagine. I don't think I fear artillery nearly as much. I fear people and how they react unprepared under stress. I fear the mass' survival instinct and how quickly the hard-fought unravelling of ancient tribalisms will retrograde when there's only so much to go around.
Perhaps I fear my cowardice. Perhaps I underestimate, as usual.
But really I wanted to write about pending doom only to celebrate previous glories, inspired by a subway ride's salivation over the word "crab" after dancing in a club where I worried the black people would judge me as trying to be black and the Asian boys were all called "David".
It's a scene for the far-flung during lunar new year week, the recitation of long-lusted homestyle dishes and the resonance of their memory. I joked today that it felt like a recitation of the names of the dead, only, it's not funny, well, only because I feel guilty that I've never sat through a recitation of the names of the dead, nor have I any historical attachment (yet -- oh god, no) to a historical event that would warrant it. HOWEVER - there is always the recitation of foods undeliverable across multiple oceans to my craving, homesick mouth.
slowly now, easy now ... as the genteel mother admonishes, "man man chi ..."
MEE GORENG
TAU POK
HOR FUN
DRAGONFRUIT
CHEE KUAY
TAU WEI
NGO HIANG
LA MIAN
MEE SIAM
JACKFRUIT
JACKFRUIT CHIPS
MANGOSTEEN
NASI PADANG
NASI LEMAK
CHILLI CRAB
PEPPER CRAB
MAN TOU
KANG KONG
SAMBAL
CHOK
PAU
MI
MEE REBUS
POH PIAH
CHEE CHONG FAN
PANDAN
PULUT SERIKAYA
KAYA
KOPI
..... I feel like at least 5 of the above words could be passable middle names for Western-born children on the basis of pure phonetics and new ageism.
But my point. That feeling. That feeling that is not lostness or homesickness, persay, but a distinct and slight rumbling of the "what if it really were all gone", what if you became too old to want something new and all you knew as that which preceded you, well, was gone. I used to lament this. I've lamented it enough in this very brog (coveting the childhood stories of innocent Singapore as seen through the lens of my willed sweetness upon the bitters of my parents' adulthoods). But it all feels different that the world does not seem infinite, that our water and skies and crispy vitamin-D generating sun-basking and naked days of skin on skin and a sense of do gooding (not un-badding) was a clear motive. What if? What if??
Out here in Crown Heights I here a low-flying plane above -- I wonder what it would sound like if there were hundreds. I walk to the subway on trash-littered streets (plundered by the local crazies, and strewn) and wonder how long it would take for a lack of trash service that trucks it magically away before disease would spread and unrest to ensue. Of course, these are mediated imaginings -- oh, to be caught by the future Gestapo dressed in nothing but red ribbon; oh, to be the sole-seeing heroine who knows exactly how to find the foods in the basement bunker! -- but my generation is growing up and I am growing up to see exactly what I am inheriting.
Is the home mantra strong enough? Who will stand up for your millions? The isolating, painful, homogenizing familiarity of that place is diminishing to the creative will, or willfulness, but ... forgetfulness is already a form of apocalypse.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
in the span of a song i see our lives pass
always parallel, never in present or past
tense -- i miss you. there is nothing I don't love about you. maybe there are things i don't like. probably mostly about me, or the world
and behaviors at large that i can't but help but run with with my curiosity and bleeding heart.
your head looks like a bed of mulch, hatted, a wizened druid; me hooded and drying my eyes flat palms into fists, together we box and giggle and make Wii we. i trust you with myself unlike anyone i have ever met. or, i don't trust myself with hardly anyone, it's true, but it's not a problem, or rather, one that i can change. i feel i am in my truest form near you, i am unafraid. i will never forget feeling that way in the days before i met you, through old friends i bumped into that led me to a puffy-eyed night at an absurdist bar and your hands on my ribcage: "don't disappear".
but now we say "don't wait." you're right, I agree, i needed to be with you long enough tonight to let go the fantasy of a Lionel Ritchie song, but it still hurts to think that this is how it happens, it might move onward to convenient relationships and one day i won't see you in my mind's eye wandering oafishly through my truest dreamings. don't wait for me, i'm not waiting for you. oh wait, do wait, wait for me, i'm waiting too. i'm not waiting, i'm living, i'm loving, but wait, just live, live for me, yes, love for me, don't tell me, well, just, let's, well, no, well, don't wait, ok, we're not waiting, no, we're not waiting, but you see, he's optimistic, and you know, really, after all this, well, so am i.
i feel like "not waiting" is like playing a game of peekaboo with a young child who revels in the pure dynamics of changing time and space and perception, but knows well enough to know you're there and you haven't really vanished.
i'm not disappearing, i swear, i won't do it.
always parallel, never in present or past
tense -- i miss you. there is nothing I don't love about you. maybe there are things i don't like. probably mostly about me, or the world
and behaviors at large that i can't but help but run with with my curiosity and bleeding heart.
your head looks like a bed of mulch, hatted, a wizened druid; me hooded and drying my eyes flat palms into fists, together we box and giggle and make Wii we. i trust you with myself unlike anyone i have ever met. or, i don't trust myself with hardly anyone, it's true, but it's not a problem, or rather, one that i can change. i feel i am in my truest form near you, i am unafraid. i will never forget feeling that way in the days before i met you, through old friends i bumped into that led me to a puffy-eyed night at an absurdist bar and your hands on my ribcage: "don't disappear".
but now we say "don't wait." you're right, I agree, i needed to be with you long enough tonight to let go the fantasy of a Lionel Ritchie song, but it still hurts to think that this is how it happens, it might move onward to convenient relationships and one day i won't see you in my mind's eye wandering oafishly through my truest dreamings. don't wait for me, i'm not waiting for you. oh wait, do wait, wait for me, i'm waiting too. i'm not waiting, i'm living, i'm loving, but wait, just live, live for me, yes, love for me, don't tell me, well, just, let's, well, no, well, don't wait, ok, we're not waiting, no, we're not waiting, but you see, he's optimistic, and you know, really, after all this, well, so am i.
i feel like "not waiting" is like playing a game of peekaboo with a young child who revels in the pure dynamics of changing time and space and perception, but knows well enough to know you're there and you haven't really vanished.
i'm not disappearing, i swear, i won't do it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
