Rock. Hard Place.

No, it wasn't from listening to old Roxy Music. It was from hearing Surf's Up at the Booeymonger in Friendship Heights while my daughter had a frozen yogurt. Again, composed on the phone keypad.

Siren
Oh, this rock.
Sand in my throat, sand in my hair.
My tedious keening.
What a lot of work it is to wail you into destruction!
I sing the song without thinking,
Sink deep inside myself.
Ah. In dreams I indulge
In pratfalls, digging turnips, silence—
Nothing to do with sailors. Peace.

Another storm kicks up.

"I Think It's Kind of Sexy that John Malkovich Has a Portal"

For the sleepless with access to hundreds of cable channels, I recommend the replay Oracle: When you're stuck, awake, looking for insight and inspiration, switch on the TV for a minute, flip through the guide, don't get stuck on Real Sex, keep going, looking for a movie they run over and over--Pulp Fiction is usually my go-to. Turn it on, see what scene's running, and take that as a sign from the cosmos.

Three times in the past few weeks when I've tried it, it's been Being John Malkovich. And three times it's been the scene where Cameron Diaz pops out of the other end of the portal, exhilarated and inspired by the ride. "I finally knew who I was!" "But you weren't you!"

Last night, unable to sleep after a wedding rehearsal dinner, it was the scene where Malkovich was rehearsing his lines for The Cherry Orchard. And she pops into him. And is about to go on a date with Keener.

I love the way in a later scene Keener's all looking at her watch while she waits for Diaz to show up inside Malkovich.

So all the sudden there's a false debate about whether a woman can be hot and funny. Get out. Diaz has been doing it for years. Any doubts about her acting chops, just rewind this one.

When it's Pulp Fiction, I most often get the "Bonnie's Coming Home From Work" sequence.

Um, Happy Solstice, Sort Of

Well, not exactly the sweet midsummer greetings I was hoping for, but this is what came to me when the sun came up:

Air Conditioner: A Horror Story
Summer always lulls me into believing
I can write a ghost story
The bestseller, or the latest from M. Night--
Horror looks so easy, the kind of thing you could churn out
In your sleep, or with your toes buried
In the sand. Take something you see every day—
A car, a house, a child—and flip it into malevolence.
Of course, get into it, and it’s another story:
Conversations bog down when they should
Spur the action, the plot feels forced, the
Veneer of omniscience flakes, and
You get that sick feeling they can sense
Your uncertain steps. And there are only
So many ways to describe rot,
Aren’t there? Maybe you know more.

Maybe it’s the air conditioner—
The shudder of that one ragged streamer,
The corrosive drip, that hum and huff
As it struggles to keep things fresh.

There WILL BE Cookies

The latest memo by a executive-level newspaper serial killer with QUITE a PENCHANT for UNREGULATED CAPS USE snuck out of the office and gets taken down here. YOU HAVE TO read the comments. It just keeps getting better. The commments section, I mean. The media industry just keeps getting worse.

Wish I could go to the reading tonight by many of the writers in this anthology, BUT I HAVE TO BABYSIT. I NEVER REALIZED that was IRONY. And YES there will be cookies there:
Not What I Expected: The Road from Womanhood to Motherhood, ed. by Donya Currie and Hildie S. Block: An anthology of poetry, fiction, essays and artwork by Jody Bolz, Carole Burns, Grace Cavalieri, Christina Daub, Mary Doroshenk, Patricia Gray, Clarinda Harriss, Anne Hasselbrack, Jacqueline Jules, Mary Ann Larkin, Lyn Lifshin, Hilary Tham, Donna Vitucci, Mary-Sherman Willis, and tons more. Montgomery College, Thursday June 19, 7:30, Humanities Building Room #009.

The 13 Confessions

UPDATE: Completly forgot the whole reason I wanted to write today was about the beautiful and mysterious Anacostia River. Post had a story yesterday, but they'll make you register to read it--go here instead and take a FREE freaking boat ride and you'll see why it is beautiful. OK, there are lots of things you can do for river cleanup, but here's the biggest one: Don't leave your soccer ball in the yard. Serious. They get washed away in the rain and they end up in my fave river.

1. Stuck in midsummer’s amber, lying around like a full lion, licking my paws and waiting.

2. Happy wedding day, Californians! Apparently, licenses now read “Party A” and “Party B” instead of “bride” or “groom.” That sounds fun!

3. Caught a minute of a commentary by Colbert King this morning on stupid WTOP—gist was that after 47 years of marriage, he’d learned to mind his own business when it comes to other people’s arrangements. No offense to the always-great Mr. King, but I knew that one even before going in myself 12 years ago.

4. Picked 15 quarts of strawberries with DD, froze many bags of them and made an absolutely dismal pie. Have I lost my touch? Maybe it’s the weather. The butter just melts.

5. Still convinced pistachio is the nut for strawberry. Like hazelnut for blueberry. And pinot noir. But people keep asking me to update the template for the deliverable. Damn. Where’s the “…and the living is easy” part?

6. This is too effing funny.

7. I did my first public poetry reading in 20 years the other night, and I didn’t throw up.

8. But at one point I was reduced to hanging out the door yelling “There are cookies in here!” to get people to come in and listen.

9. It worked.

10. A “cultural trend research company” I had to deal with at work is predicting a baby boomlet fueled by high gas prices. It says 2008 will be a “summer of love” because no one can afford to travel. Newly married Californians, start your engines, so to speak.

11. I’m traveling a lot this summer. To France and New Jersey and more. But I don’t know, maybe I can fit a little love in there too somewhere.

12. Mostly I’m going to be locked up working on a oh lord don’t say it novel. And trail training. If the trees ever stop falling over.

13. Got to thinking about Sandra Bernhard in her movie singing “I Never Meant to Hurt You” and before I knew what happened I ended up downloading a bunch of Laura Nyro songs.

You've Got to Accentuate the Positive

I was bummed to hear Tristan Taormino won't be editing the Best Lesbian Sex annual anthology anymore, because I would have liked a shot at getting a story in with that editor. Maybe there will be another Taormino-edited project. I'll poke around, so to speak.

In a farewell to editing column noting the trend toward stranger sex in a lot of the stories--as in perfect strangers, not as in more unusual--Taormino quotes a therapist: "Most people look at anonymous sex with morality and judgment and rarely talk about any positive aspects," he notes. But "because there is no emotional investment in a relationship, there is no history and no future. The experience can be all about the here and now. It's not about attachment. It's very Zen."

Which gives me an idea for a story.

Photo: Zen rock garden. Photo is being sold as a poster by a company that does not see fit to say who the photographer is. So I'm not saying what the company is. Does that just make it worse?

Chemists and Alchemists

I had to be on stage the other night, and I wasn't nervous enough, and I was a little worried about it. I'm better at things like that if I'm nervous. No nerves, no energy. The guy running the performance, the co-director-star, made some recommendations about large quantities of Red Bull, then said: "It feels like falling in love." Now that I'd like to have in a can.

And then I thought about Kip Hanrahan's "Tenderness."

Photo: Hanrahan's pub photo. Mmmmm.

Why Two Touches Just Doesn't Get the Job Done

For the past two weeks, I've been writing about Member Development. Heh heh.

So, the buyouts were taken at our nation's capital's major national newspaper (and there really is only one. I've also worked at the other one that says it is, and trust me--those MFs all crazy up in there). I'm not going to cry for my favorite writers or columnists, or for me, Argentina (or any of the other bureaus that have been nailed shut over the years. Because who cares what's happening to those people anyway.). Most of them will go on as contract. (Paralleling the "efficiencies" in federal contracting--lose your job, get hired back for more money, and somehow we all save money from it.) Financial took a big hit, but who needs to know about boiler room mortgage companies, anyway?

Other people can mourn the writers. What I come to bury not to praise is the Washington Post's new copy editing structure, called the "two touch" system. Which sounds like what you get when you can't afford the Emperor's Club.

Even when I worked at a little local, we had at least three reads and a page proofing on all copy. No more. Now much of the writing at one of the two remaining major dailies (nah, I don't count LA either, and Chicago bowed out way back) will get a quick hand job and be sent straight to you!

When the good copy editors are gone, the skeptics are gone, the institutional memory is gone, the integrity is gone, the woodwork squeaks and plagiarists and fabulists and liars and starfuckers and self-promoting freaks of all stripes, not to mention simple scared barely interns who are easily fooled, come on in. And then someone's using the money that's supposed to pay for school building repairs to buy his cousin a Mercedes, and your kid is getting her ass shot off halfway around the world because someone started a war, and you couldn't get a straight read on what was going on early enough to at least try to do something about any of it.

Give me back copy editors and stay off my lawn, you kids!

Not everyone agrees with me.

Trying to Get Over

Dow Chemical is talking like the first-graders in the class I'm right now baking brownies for: "I didn't drop it, why do I have to pick it up?" Article also puts the Union Carbide contribution to Bhopal survivors at currently $550 a head. Mighty big of them.

Oh, but happy birthday Curtis Mayfield and Allen Ginsberg. Wish you were here.

Lordy, a two-poem blog entry run, ain't nobody coming back here ever again.

Clouds: A Business Plan

Keep churning it out;
Someone’s eventually going to want it,
Aren’t they? And we’ll have it ready for them.

We can’t pull out, we’re too far in,
So we’ll just pull back a little,
And then a little more; do more with less.

Take out the ones who know the right words,
The ones who know the rules,
The ones who know what to do.

Slide out the equipment, the plans,
Valves, plates, water spray, escape hatches,
A little at a time, pulling every prop

Until the factory, unsupported, hovers like a cloud.
Humming, barely running, emitting
A buzz of discontent and tension.

What a trick! Like coyote off a cliff,
Legs cycling frantically in midair
Before it crashes. And the cloud escapes.

He remembers a day in Catholic
Grammar school: He was castigated
By the sister for drawing clouds

With flat bottoms. Clouds are puffy,
She insisted; he knew better, little scientist,
And stuck to his guns and took the hit.

Then the toxic cloud rolled down the streets
Like a rogue wave, chasing humans,
Bringing them down. Three thousand

Souls escaped in that moment, spirits
Like smoke into the sky. What a haze
They must have made in paradise.

They say at least one more dies from it
Each day. They say they’re not sure
Where they’re sourcing that statistic.

No matter; today, the world is flat,
The clouds are flat. So he runs
It up the flagpole to watch it wave.

He sees cirrus wisps, but the crown chakra
Is not top of mind. Outsource democracy;
No danger of overproduction here.

The executive summary counsels
Keeping a keen eye toward opportunities
Presented by the fog of war.

Image: Rene Magritte's "The Castle in the Pyrenees," used so often by everyone, I'm sorry, sue me.

Handsome Mess

I wrote this today running. It's for now, but it happens to fall into a series of poems about invasive plants that I've been doing on and off.

Honeysuckle

You learn to do it young--
Pinch the end a bit, draw the stem out
With your teeth barely pressing, gently, gingerly
Tongue out the honey, and let the flower fall.

It smells stronger before a storm--
Pervasive, run as fast as you will;
It calls you to stop and taste, but you say no.
Leave its vines to thrash in the high winds.

It could strangle everything in the garden
You've made. You make the right choice.
Afternoon finds you kneeling,
Sweating, pulling at the invading vines,

Wild with frustration. You stumble back,
Stomping, hissing: "I'll never be rid of you!"
Maddened, but the sweetness persists,
Clinging to your skin, stuck in the back of your throat.

You're the type that doesn't even like
To kill a weed, now, aren't you? Yet here you stand,
With this handsome mess at your feet,
Choking. Torn.

PS: composed while running, but actually written with the keyboard of my phone. I'm thinking this forces shorter line lengths and am wondering about exploring this a little more...

Image: Cover of a blank book from Anathema Books.

On the Road and Off the Road

One maybe two trail half-marathons in the fall. Could the training please begin? The trails around DC are nothing but mush. Trees sliding down ravines (and me doing likewise, nearly), trails washed out, stretches of swamp. I actually got lost on the Hazen trail recently, which is never more than about a half mile from a major DC street. I ended up on the wrong side of the creek and was attempting to cross back to the trail via two fallen trees. I got halfway across the ravine walking on the lower tree and holding onto the upper, but then the trees crossed and I couldn't decide whether to duck under the upper tree or try to straddle the lower the rest of the way, and my overpriced sunglasses designed expressly not to slip off my face were slipping off my face, and a nice man strolling by on the right trail was giving me one of those curious I-wonder-if-I-should-help-but-I'll-mind-my-own-business looks.

If you like this poetry, she'll be reading at Artomatic Thursday, May 30, 7:30 p.m.

I just found out I was a finalist in a poetry contest. I missed the email notification back in March because I was sick and probably confused it with a Nigerian banking scam. But it's really real. It's a super-lefty-political-change-the-world-poetry contest, so there, complete with anti-war march (here's what it looks like when poets protest), and when is someone going to give E. Ethelbert Miller a MacArthur or sainthood or something, people. This entry's too long already so maybe I'll post the poem itself later.

My daughter stayed with her cousins a couple nights while I was off standing too close to the fire. We resumed her chapter book tonight on Chapter 9. Her words: "We would have been on chapter 11 by now, but I forgot to take it on the road."

The L Word and the B Word

Finally catching up on my Tivo'ed L Words. As usual: Writing, abominable; plotting, absurd; fashions and set design, fantastic; sex scenes, whoa baby call the doctor; music, how do they do it??? Issac Hayes' amazing Stax version of "Walk on By" at the finale, sounding for all the world like the new Portishead. And "Do the Strand"?!? Beautiful. Ladies, I take it all back.

Been meaning to write about some of my favorite blogs. I tried to get one of them blogrolls, but it's too complicated. I'll eventually add one. Promises, promises. Or was that "Walk on By"?

***While I was lying around whining and going to doctor's appointments all last month, she was writing poems. Good ones. Check it out. She also writes about rock and roll.

***Jill Matrix, I remember dancing with you to Curtis Mayfield at that party where you kissed a boy. Don't try to deny. Find out something about life, media, construction and cats here in her blog. I'd say something about the real L word, but that would just be too clumsy.

***Like that photo you're looking at? It's by my mad burner buddy who once got on a bicycle in New Jersey, rode it all the way to Burning Man, stopped to do his thing, then got back on and rode it to San Francisco, the promised land. Want to buy one like it? Want one in that style but starring you? Go here. Oh, and the blog traces a case of Obamamania that turns to rational second thoughts, tho supportive. Obamambivalence? We'll miss you and the bad songs of the '70s this weekend, dearie.

***Copper Stewart, whom I encountered through Reclaiming witchcraft, has a mind of depth and breadth that is positively scary and eternally amazing. Walt Whitman to ancient Egyptian sacred geometry to forest ecology to politics. His livejournal has lots of fun branches, creeks and ripples; Paganmonist has longer, more structured articles, poems, more.

Photo: Copyright Mark Still, and if you reproduce it without permission, Isaac Hayes AND Shaft will kick your ass. Is that clear enough?

Three Days

I'm off soon for my three days in the weirderness. This is a mashup of believe it or not, Jane's Addiction and Carly Simon. Both have songs called "Three Days."

Three days was the morning.
My focus three days old.
My head, it landed
To the sounds of cricket bows.
And lord, I feel lonesome
For the you I might have known.

We saw shadows of the morning light
The shadows of the evening sun
Till the shadows and the light were one.
And if the gods will please be kind
I'll be with you soon, soon again.

Bits of puzzle
Fitting each other
Never wonder.
Night is shelter
For nudity's shiver;
The way you turned
My head around,
The way you turned
My head around.

All of us with wings
All of us with wings
All of us with wings

Lit

I've been babysitting for three days straight. They are really cute and fun, but it will be so nice tomorrow to be around people who don't collapse when their juice pop isn't the color they want and don't have to be told not to pick their noses.

Today we stopped by the local elementary school rummage sale and while they played on the playground, I got the following literature, for $1 totes:

Dealing, or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues, by Michael Douglas (a pseudonym for Michael Crichton and Douglas Crichton; Beautiful Losers, by Leonard Cohen; The Happy Hooker, by Xaviera Hollander; and Wiseguy, by Nicholas Pileggi. What are these parents reading nowadays!

Been up late baking cookies. Don't worry, I washed my hands. A lot.

I missed the Preakness but check this out (thanks BA!). Go to photo #5 to see the Running of the Urinals.

Who's Your Coyote, Baby?

Nathaniel Mayweather took me to see the Patti Smith movie recently. Smith herself performed live afterward, accompanied by her son, Jackson, on guitar, singing a song she'd written for her daughter. OK, so a large part of the movie was her visiting cemeteries and remembering the dead, most notably photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, her bestest friend. Thank the goddess for Patti Smith. Her kids seem, blessedly, fine. Sweet. Talented. Doin good. Yet they were exposed to an influence, in the person of her best friend, so pernicious that the good people of Washington DC could not even allow his photographs to be displayed in a museum behind closed doors.

When your kids know they are loved and secure, they are richer for having artists around them. I'm going to keep on saying that until I don't feel guilty about being a human as well as a mother anymore. Check you in the year 2525.

Now my favorite scene in the movie was Smith getting a "guitar lesson" from Sam Shepard. Good god, boyfriend's 64 and he's still smokin hot. She pulled up her pants leg and then turned his wrist to the camera to display the matching tattoos they'd gotten so many years ago. She was still a little giggly. He still looked at her like she was a little piece of dark chocolate. They're so alive.

Speaking of chocolate, I am gulping my way through the book my husband got me, Girls Like Us, about Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Carole King. Ummmmmm, good reading. My goodness, was that James Taylor a nasty piece of work, from the sound of it. I try to ignore the base urge to pore over the gossip, like: "This song's about this guy, this one's about this situation," but there's one that's too rich to resist:

Mitchell's "Coyote," you know, "He drags me out on the dance floor and we're dancing close and slow...he's got a woman at home, he's got another woman down the hall; he seems to want me anyway...He picks up my scent on his fingers while he's watching the waitress's legs"?

Who was it about? SAM SHEPARD!!!!

"No regrets, Coyote!" Now that's what I'm talking about.

I am an Animal, Trapped in Your Hot Car

I told myself no more big arena shows. I swore I'd never go to Nissan. So what was I doing circling the bowl with a thousand others trying to get into the Radiohead concert at Nissan Sunday night? Radiohead Nissan clusterfuck. Radiohead Nissan clusterfuck. Put that into google and it comes up 547 times. 548, now.

It was so against my better judgment, but my husband got tickets, and last time we saw them, in 2003, it was such a great show...so we sat in the rain for five hours and never got in. The cops were turning people away at the gates because the show was almost over.

So. It's homegrown for me, from now on! Artomatic, parties full of homegrown music and chicks with flaming hula hoops, bottle of wine with a friend, a night in bed. I love professional musicians and dancers but you guys, your friends with the suits are just shits, buddies, I can't stand them, and they're always hanging around. I know you tried to get rid of them by giving your CDs away, but they're still there, hustling me, conning me, buzzkilling everyone. I'm all about the Home Entertainment Network now.

It's not the band's fault it rained so much! No, but it's their fault they played at the environmentally hostile Nissan Pavilion--especially after declaring that they intended to reduce their carbon footprint as much as possible in this tour. They haven't got a leg to stand on, and that footprint, after holding down thousands of cars idling for hours and contributing to acres of soil erosion, is shot to shit, boys. What have you got to say for yourselves?

Hey, the tickets said rain or shine! But Nissan and the county and state's civil engineering skills obviously aren't functioning rain or shine (in the area's venial rush to cash in on the development boom. As we sat in traffic, we wondered how many of the huge homes around us might be foreclosures now).

Well at least you weren't in Oklahoma or Myanmar! Gotta admit you got me on that one.

And, um, I don't want my money back. I just don't want Nissan to have it. Give it to the tornado survivors, y'all.

PS: The car I was in (with three others) was actually very comfortable. Poetic license.

PPS: And I might have to give up small club shows, too. Drive-by Truckers at 930 gave a great show Friday night, but someone grabbed my ass. Which was both annoying and confusing. I mean, there's just nothing much there to grab. What's the point?

Rat Talladega

Rat Sebring. Rat Daytona. Not a moment of my own. Got to go to Ratsbucks just to keep myself awake.

And Radiohead for the NBA playoffs!?! Ha ha ha ha ha.

Julie Christie, You Make Me Go Misty

She laughs, she cries, she feels angry, she feels lonely, she feels guilty, she makes breakfast, she makes love, she makes do, she is strong, she is weak, she is brave, she is scared, she is... an unmarried woman.

Word. But she's a married woman, too. And probably a drag queen or two.

During my recent adventures with legitimately prescribed pharmaceuticals, I was taking a course of steroids, which kept me up all night. That's how I ended up rerunning the 70s greatest hits on cable. One memorable night, I caught both The Eyes of Laura Mars and An Unmarried Woman. The lines above are the marketing tagline from the latter.

Lot to love about both, from the sculpted cheekbones in the former to the unairbrushed sexiness in the latter. Damn, what happened to Jill Clayburgh? I used to dismiss Paul Mazursky, claiming all he did was rip off European films--Willie and Phil, Jules and Jim; Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Boudu Saved From Drowning; and An Unmarried Woman reproduced chunks of Volker Schlondorff's much less sanguine A Free Woman. But now I'm not so callow. Love the scene where Alan Bates (looking like the Hairy Guy from the original Joy of Sex, also a hit around that time) gives the soliloquy on dog poop.

Coincidentally, my husband is distantly related to Mazursky. Apparently they share a Tante, of blessed memory, who was famous for the size of her bust and the exquisite silky thinness of her pastry dough. My husband's grandmother, GiGi, of blessed memory, used to do a priceless imitation of Tante rolling out the rugelah, chest heaving.

I cut my teeth on those women's movies of the 70s, sneaking into the multiplex at Landover Mall. But the greatest of all was Shampoo. Jeez, Shirley MacLaine, Lee Grant, and ahhhhh Julie Christie. And little Carrie Fisher. My best friend and I used to practice her notorious line, eating carrot sticks and hoping Warren Beatty might wander into our backyards. But not in our neighborhood.

UPDATE: Sigh. Drugs haven't worn off. Remove Shirley MacLaine, add Goldie Hawn. Forgive typos and spelling. Namaste.
UP SOMETHING: Forgot Mazursky also co-created The Monkees, Goddess bless him.

Waiting for the Sky to Open Up

Thunderstorms wake me in the morning. Hello, there, Thor. Found an old CD case full of buried treasure, including David Sylvian’s Secrets of the Beehive. Might be getting better, but don’t want to jinx it.

Standing firm on the stony ground
The wind blows hot, blows these clothes around
I harbor all the same worries as most,
Temptations to leave or to give up the ghost.
I wrestle with an outlook on life
That shifts between darkness and shadowy light.
I struggle with words, for fear that they’ll hear,
While Orpheus sleeps on his back, still dead to the world.

Sunlight falls, my wings open wide,
There’s a beauty here I cannot deny,
And bottles that tumble and crash on the stairs
Are just so many people I know never cared.
Down below on the wreck of a ship
Is a stronghold of pleasures I couldn’t regret.
But the baggage is swallowed up by the tide,
As Orpheus sticks by his promise and stays by my side.
Tell me
I’ve still a lot to learn
To understand
These fires never stop
Please believe me,
When this joke is tired of laughing, I will sing
The promise that Orpheus brings.

Sleepers, sleepers, we row the boat,
Just you, the weather and I gave up hope,
And all of the hurdles that fell in our laps
Were just fuel for the fire and straw for our backs.
Still the talk and the stories to tell
About all our visions of heaven or hell--
When we feel secure again, such mighty dreams,
And Orpheus sings of the promise tomorrow may bring.

UPDATE: Someone said he liked "my poem." uh-oh. It's David Sylvian's song, Orpheus. You can hear and see it here.

The Advent of the Unreliable Narrator

In her consideration of the occasional flicker from the traffic without that came to enliven the dark square of the study window, reflecting on the papers strewn over the sill, she felt each episode of brightness as an almost physical remanifestation of the obscure hurt that had darkened such a portion of her life early on, leaving a meagre exercise of force and will dampened as by the stirring of the spring breeze. But even as yet there could be no resurrection of certain winter-damaged limbs, could there not be a new birth nonetheless, she thought, as her eyes fell upon a date in the open book before her and she murmured: "Happy birthday, Henry James."