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Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
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12:41 pm - A Word About the Weekend
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On Saturday evening, I continued my Mediocre Aerialist tradition. I put my (borrowed, half-length) silks up at a gallery in Alameda, where I did a 5-10 minute improvised set and a duet with a fabulous operatic singer, J. The ceilings were very, very low, which severely limited my repetoire and made separating the tissu at any height rather awkward, but I acquitted myself passably well and J, in all of his makeup artist/Sister of Perpetual Indulgence/opera singer glory, was so wonderful that I could just concentrate on enjoying his performance and staring at him meaningfully instead of mentally cataloguing my every screw-up.
M wore a crown of icicles and sang while A bellydanced. T displayed her trompe l'oeil paintings with their gilt door knockers and oil-and-beer woodgrain and veined multi-colored marble. A photographer set up a studio in the back room with an array of magical-looking props. S sold her jewelry and someone I do not know sold a variety of wrought iron figures, including a bat skeleton which I would have purchased if only I had a wall to hang it on. Fashion designers and their gazelle-creature models scurried around backstage. K showed a collection that was made almost entirely of the sort of thing that I wear clubbing: little corset-vest things, bare midriffs, pouffy bustled skirts to just below the knee, and kid leather gloves, topped with big hair and jaunty little hats. I would have happily purchased just about any of it. In fact, I think that I need one of those hats.
People asked how long I had been performing and said nice things about my act. The owners of the gallery asked if they could hire me the next time that they need an aerialist, and I said yes, but that next time I would bring a rope rather than a tissu. J and I toasted to our successful collaboration with rum and cokes because we were all out of champagne. I talked to people that I had not seen in a long time and felt pleasantly reconnected to many of the things that I had enjoyed about Burning Man - the notion that people might get together to create a maximum level of beauty with a minimum of fuss. I was pleased to know so many talented people, to stand next to them, and possibly be thought of as one of them.
In the morning, I woke up and went to the Deco sale, where I promptly spent half of the previous night's aerialist earnings on an enormous black velvet hat, which is sure to help in my continued efforts to impersonate Cleo de Merode, and a pair of a crocheted summer gloves. At my very next aerials class, I climbed thirty feet up in the air because I no longer had to practice with that low-ceilinged gallery space in mind, mastered a tricky move that required a lot of flexibility, and created a new drop.
I may now declare my weekend a success.
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| Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
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3:46 pm - A Word About Thanksgiving
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I would like to say a word about Thanksgiving. I know that it already well into December - shut up. I don't harbor any illusions about keeping a detailed record of my life. Sometimes I fall behind. Sometimes I leave things out. But I did not want to leave out Thanksgiving, not in the wretched year of 2009.
In all fairness, 2009 is not quite so bad at 2008. At this time last year, I was waiting for my cat to die. But Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the Holidays, all winter cheer and tables full of food, and my life is still in boxes. My life is likely to remain in boxes until March. And so, for the first year in living memory, J and I did not cook anything on Thanksgiving. We went to visit my co-worker and her friends for an early meal, where J carved the turkey and made some emergency gravy while the rest of us pondered which one of our co-workers at the Mysterious Workplace we would eat in the event of an apocalypse that drove us to cannibalism. Sorry, Vegan Pacifist Co-worker, you will be the first to fall. We snuck out before dessert so that we might still have room left over for Thanksgiving Part II, which was to take place at the bartender's apartment and for which we also did not cook a single damned thing, not even soup, because we don't know where the stick blender is.
The bartender's house makes me sad, not because of the places where the ceiling is threatening to cave in and crush us all, which certainly upsets the bartender, but because it serves to remind me that J and I are unable to host Thanksgiving. This is the table where we are not serving food. These guests are not sprawled across my living room. J and (mostly J) I have not toiled in the kitchen all day. This is not my tableware, which weirdly upsets me more than anything because last year I'd finally bought a proper gravy boat and now my gravy boat is wrapped in newspaper, sitting in a cardboard box somewhere in Oakland, unused and unloved.
The bartender's Thanksgiving dinner is almost entirely catered by T, who has planned this dinner with the kind of precision one normally one might expect for the landing of a Mars rover. She has made individually-roasted squabs for all twenty-something of us. While I myself am not a squabavore, I deeply admire the scope of her ambition. T's vision for this dinner is gloriously over-the-top. She has pickled pears months in advance. She has soaked raisins in rum. There is a wild rice stuffing and brussels sprouts that I think have been cooked in bacon fat and beets (glorious beets!) and a lot of brightly-colored roasted root vegetables and nearly as many pies as there are guests. I eat until I am ready to explode, then I pause for cheese and nitrous and feeding tiny little bits of chicken to K's itty bitty dog. I returned to the Fallback Position dizzy and tipsy and full, resolved to change in order to go dance on a box at MEAT, and promptly fell asleep on the couch.
I should be thankful to eat delicious food in the company of witty and charming people (and a very small dog). And I have to admit that for a little while, I was happy and pleased, but it's just a thin coat of happiness around a bitter chewy center. I miss my Bunker. I want it back.
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| Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
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6:39 pm - Problems with Poseidon
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On Saturday morning J reports that the basement flooded overnight at the Fallback Position. Our nice French Moroccan landlady, the one who is not a former burlesque performer from New York, is soaked in water. She has turned the water mains off, which is a problem because I would like to take a shower. The next day, we discover that she has failed to turn the pilot light back on, and while there is water, it is all freezing cold. I do not know what water gods J and I have angered, but they are not through with us just yet. We huddle under a blanket and discuss an appropriate sacrifice. F suggests that sacrifice to Poseidon is useless, so I should pray to Athena for protection and watch out for sirens. He wishes me luck getting home. M suggests the sacrifice of a virgin. I do not know where I will find a virgin in ess eff - at least now that the Star Wars-themed goth club is over. J suggests sacrificing the cats, especially in the morning when they try to wake him up by lovingly clawing his face. I suggest that we should sacrifice Donald Rumsfeld, our landlord. Poseidon will be pleased.
I am clearly behind on my sacrifices. In addition to angering the water gods, I have also angered the gods of scheduling. I forgot my keys at the office and wound up missing my Thursday rope class. My opera singer did not get back to me this weekend so that we might rehearse. I arrived at Burlesque Bootcamp only to find that it had been mysteriously canceled. I will sacrifice a clock, possibly several clocks. With a hammer.
The only thing that has gone right this week has been Hubba Hubba Revue, which was exceptionally good this month. A did a fantastic tissu routine. M celebrated her departure for points East by doing a rendition of New York New York. W made an excellent card girl. I wore a gown that would not have looked out of place at the Ice Capades. Tipsy plans were made to do a big Bob Fosse number in March. The dance floor was full. There were no costuming mishaps or surprise blackface. I danced until my feet hurt and then I fell asleep on the couch in my coat and sequined gown.
So it isn't all bad, boys and girls. And if I have angered some gods, there must be other, well-dressed, glittery gods who look on me with favor. Perhaps I can get them to put in a good word for me with Poseidon.
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| Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
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4:54 pm - Coat Whore (With Parasol)
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I have a coat problem. I've had a coat problem for years. By the Bunker door, there used to be a great big Art Deco wardrobe filled almost entirely with my coats: green velvet trench coat, brown double-breasted raincoat, be-grommeted black leather trench coat inspired by watching too many episodes of Farscape, regular black leather trench coat, black leather trench coat with enormous fur collar, blue velveteen double-breasted coat, black wool opera coat, black velveteen coat with faux-leopard collar and cuffs, and a couple of things owned by J. I may have more. These are merely the coats that I can remember. These are the coats that I need, which is a bit of problem because the contents of the Art Deco wardrobe are sitting in a vault in Oakland, where I will not have access to them until it is time to move back to the Bunker.
The cold months are upon us, my few remaining readers who not yet fled livejournal. Rain is falling from the sky and all I have are jackets! Which brings me to a whole new coat problem, a coat problem which has me scanning the vintage clothing section of eBay for something stylish, mid-length, and reassuringly warm which will cost me not too much more than the $50 fee I would need to pay in order to gain access to the Oakland vault. The black velveteen New Look coat has already passed me by. I have been outbid on the black-and-white striped mod trench coat. The blue leather coat with the (say it with me) enormous fox fur collar is too expensive. I pile on sweaters and jackets and scarves and gloves - where are my gloves? - and wonder why my toes feel like little icy pebbles.
To make up for having taken away my many coats, the Clothing Gods have dropped a Victorian (possibly Edwardian) parasol in my lap. There I was, sitting down to lunch with W. at the noodle shop closest to my Mysterious Workplace, when I spotted what looked like a somewhat beat-up umbrella propped up against the wall. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a rectangular Victorian parasol, half rusted out and heavily sun damaged, neatly trimmed with grey fringe. I alerted the noodle shop waitresses, who denied all knowledge of this item. I waved it around at the other customers, asking "Whose parasol is this?" and they looked at me, in my black dress, striped tights, and headsquid as if I had grown a second head.
Whose parasol is this?
It's mine, of course.
Unless you happen to have lost a Victorian parasol in your local noodle shop, in which case you should contact me so I can give it back to you. Then maybe the Clothing Gods will send me a coat.
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| Monday, November 16th, 2009
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4:31 pm - I Can't Talk to Famous People
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I can't talk to famous people. I'm always afraid that I'm going to gush and make an idiot of myself, so I overcorrect in the other direction and ignore them. This is why I don't wait in line to talk to Animatronic Trent Reznor. This is why China Mieville will never realize that we were meant to be together. This is why if Neil Gaiman is on one side of the room, I am guaranteed to be on the other side, shrugging my shoulders and pretending that I've never heard of this guy. I did once tell Meg Lee Chin that I was very impressed by the fact that she did a lot of her own production work and she hugged me.
So my first instinct when Adam Savage came to visit the Mysterious Workplace was to hide behind my desk and busy myself with the vagaries of keeping the crazy people away from the attorneys. I had very important complaints involving demonic Nazi-style remote-directed energy weapons to decipher! Unfortunately, Adam Savage was standing between me and the corn pudding left over from the lunchtime chili cookoff. Nothing stands between me and corn pudding, at least not for very long. I stuck around for long enough to talk about Adam's kids, and next season's myths and math and science, and that recent episode where they kept launching cars off of cliffs, trying to get them to explode, and then I retreated to my desk because the phone was ringing.
I returned to a dozen mocking messages from J, lovingly describing the posh new offices of his corporate overlords. Look at this view! Look at this kitchen, which is full of delicious free Italian food! Look at our custom-built inlaid marble conference table!
The conference table at the Mysterious Workplace is not made from inlaid marble. It is a second or third-hand oversized dinner table situated at an awkward height. I have suggested that we hold all of our future meetings seated around a table made of Adam Savage frozen in carbonite. This would allow me to handily win all future bragging contests with J: so what if your employers have hired servants to carry you to work on a golden litter -- we have the frozen body of Adam Savage! All we'd have to do is dress his wife up in the Slave Leia costume and lure him into...my Mysterious Employers were strangely unenthused.
And besides, we're all out of carbonite.
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| Friday, October 30th, 2009
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3:18 pm - Stupid Meat Suit
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Oh my meat suit, you and I were getting along so well. I was doing a reasonable number of pull-ups. I kept up with the more terrifyingly fit people in my aerial conditioning class. My stomach was very nearly flat and it was possible to discern where most of the muscles were. I was a little bit smaller than I'm used to being - not so small that I'd shrunk out of my clothes, but small enough that they fit a little better than they had before. I could run at a reasonable speed for 3.5 miles, and then still climb stairs for another six or seven. I'd been made flexible through the powers of yoga and circus girls sitting on me until I managed center splits. My hands were satisfyingly calloused. A few months at the Very Serious Circus School had improved my form. I was proud of you, my meat suit. We were going to go places and do things.
There's just one little problem, meat suit: you don't respond well to stress. You do not play nicely with the brain in a jar. So when Assaulty Assaulterson came along and punched me in the face and it turned out I had a concussion, and the Bunker began to flood, and suddenly we needed a new place to live and the movers hadn't moved all of our belongings out of the Bunker for the second time in a row, it became harder and harder to set aside 12-15 hours a week for yoga and bootcamp and running and three aerial classes a week. I got sick. I needed to spend a lot of time sleeping. I needed to spend a lot of time reading books or staring off into space or trying to convince my cats to stop being angry with me. And now, meat suit, you have gotten a little softer than I'd like, and running makes you feel like your chest is going to explode after a couple of miles, and after five or six pull-ups, you would really prefer to take a nap. Sure, you don't get all sweaty after just a couple of minutes on the tissu anymore, but when I reviewed your choreography after taping it on Tuesday, I couldn't help thinking that the meat suit climbing up a silk bears a remarkable resemblance to the hippos in Fantasia. It's not enough that you are not quite so strong as you used to be, but you've grown graceless, meat suit, and it makes me wonder if you were ever graceful at all.
I don't know how I feel about this Halloween, but I will make a deal with you, my meat suit. I will wrap you up in something pretty - my Victorian bathing costume or one of the 18th century gowns from the San Francisco opera sale (if I can find pocket hoops in time - who has pocket hoops I can borrow?), I will take you to the climbing gym and the Very Serious Circus School where pretty girls will sit on you, I will treat you gently and try to keep the brain in a jar from bothering you too much with its stupid worries about housing, and in exchange, you will stop this nonsense and I will go back to being a superhero.
Got it?
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| Monday, October 19th, 2009
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2:40 pm - Boxed In
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Forget what I said about the known unknowns: my life is a series of taped cardboard boxes. My Bunker is mostly empty, all echoing walls and astonishingly dirty floors. J and I have collected over $230 in spare change from around the house. The cats are cranky - they like being transplanted even less than I do. Ada paces through the upstairs bedrooms while Perl mostly prefers to hide under the living room couch. I think that the movers left my glasses in the top drawer of my vanity, which is a problem because my vanity is now in a vault-slash-storage container, which I cannot access without paying a $50 "handling fee." Many things which I would have gladly put in storage - vases (why do I own so many vases?) and throw pillows and framed prints - had to be ferried to the new place, while essential items such as my glasses and a bag full of J's laundry may or may not have been locked away for an unspecified number of months. I only have half a shelf of books, but I have a full-length seal fur coat in the closet. I was profoundly relieved to come to work this morning and sit in my office, where I know where everything is.
My days are now dedicated to opening boxes, then examining and sorting their contents. Here are a pair of shoes that I meant to throw away approximately five years ago. Here is a pair of boots whose heels turned out to be too high. Here is a dress that had unfortunate fitting issues. Here is a debate trophy from college. Here is a faded black tee-shirt commemorating a hacker party almost twenty years ago that J has, for some reason, hung on a hanger. Here is my digital camera from ten years ago. Here are all of my lost porcupine quills, which turned out to have been hiding underneath the bed along with dozens of lost socks. Strictly speaking, I may own a few more pairs of leather opera-length gloves than a girl really needs.
I did not go to APE this weekend. It seemed pointless to ask artists to draw squidgirls when I have no place to put them, and don't I have enough squidgirls anyway? I did not go to the Hay Maze. And even though I made it to the opera on Friday, Covenant on Saturday, and my mother's birthday dinner on Sunday, I still feel as if this move has methodically sucked the fun out of my weekend. Oh Bunker, I will miss you! Oh, Cute Little Potrero House, I resent you! Oh, countless cardcard boxes, I am sick of you already!
The future is grim, my imaginary readers. Now, who wants my spare high-heeled boots?
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| Monday, October 12th, 2009
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12:02 pm - Fallback Position
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Donald Rumsfeld is my landlord.
This is not true. My landlord is not the former secretary of defense. He doesn't even look like the former secretary of defense, but if Donald Rumsfeld owned a warehouse loft conversion in South of Market, this is exactly what he would be like. My life is a series of known unknowns: I do not know how much of the ceiling will have to come out of the Bunker, or how much of the walls; I do now know how long it will be before all of the work is done on the Bunker and I may return to it; I do know how much of my stuff I will move out of the Bunker, though my personal inclination is towards "all of it" because most of the repairs are being done by the same company that set off the sprinklers on the other side of the building and sent 20 thousand gallons of water coursing through three units; I do not know how much storage space this will require or how much it will cost, though I sure as hell know that my landlord does not intend to pay for it; I do not know when our moving costs will be reimbursed by the mythical insurance company; I do not know what the terms of my lease will be when I move back into the Bunker because we will not be signing the ridiculous lease the landlord has sent us and we must meet to discuss the new terms; I do not know when I will be getting my deposit back; I do not know if my landlord will insist on retaining the interest on our deposit, which is approximately four thousand dollars' worth of known unknowns. I would like to know these things before the movers arrive on Saturday to pack up all of my things and move them.
I do know that the occupants of the Bunker will be moving to a little furnished house in Potrero Hill for some unspecified number of months. Our landladies are nice Morroccan French women with a friendly little dog that they swear does not bark too much. We will have laundry in the garage and a yard, which will probably receive very little use because the rainy season is about to begin. I know that we have written a check for the balance of this months' rent and a considerable deposit, even though we have not yet received our money back from Donald Rumsfeld.
I am trying to think of our sojourn in the Potrero Hill house, our fallback position, as a vacation. I will visit a strange new neighborhood. We will eat the scallops at Live Sushi. Perhaps J will come to the climbing gym with me. We will enjoy having a bedroom door that closes and keeps the cats out. We will cook in a strange new kitchen. I will soak my tired, bruised and heavily abraded body in their very nice bathtub. I will pretend that I am someplace else and my life is not a hellscape of lawyers, insurance adjusters, landlords, contractors, and terrified neighbors, many of which have not yet found another place to live. They post questions to the mailing list: who has found an apartment? Who has used this moving company? How can we possibly be out of here by the 24th? And I feel a little bit better because I have made all of the decisions that I can make for now.
Now, all there is for me to do is wait. Things will be decided. And it will be known.
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| Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
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11:42 am - The Last Detail
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After you've been to a certain number of Folsom St. Fairs, they all tend to look pretty much the same. In spite of this week's cold and gloomy weather, the sun came out on Saturday to shine on the leather daddies and the pony girls, the naked old men and the women in ill-fitting corsets, the cock rings and the brightly-colored fur-covered jockstraps. The gatekeepers kept the children out, saving their parents the cost of many years of intensive therapy. Photographers were mostly respectful. I only once had to chastise some overeager pervert with a camera for taking my photo without asking first.
"I asked! You said yes!"
"That's really funny, because I haven't actually said anything in several minutes while waiting in line to get my boots polished."
"Well, can I take your picture, then?"
"Since you didn't actually bother waiting for me to say yes before...no, you can't take my picture. Bye now."
I never did get my boots polished. The line was very long and I did not have the patience. Instead, I went to Wicked Grounds to visit the painter and look at the pretty girls modeling Dark Garden corsets in the window. I drank coconut juice out of a coconut, which was wonderfully refreshing in the increasingly-unpleasant heat, and then I retreated back to the Bunker in order to host what will probably be my very last Folsom St. Fair party.
My upstairs neighbors, the nice people from the fetish porn company, were even more flooded out that we were a few weeks ago. Blowers and dehumidifiers have been running non-stop in their unit. Workmen have threatened to take out most of their walls. They are living in the Moorish castle where the fetish porn is produced until it is safe to return. All of which means that J and I ended up hosting twice as much party as we normally do. The fetish porn people were reasonably well-behaved. J only had to tell people not to hole up in the bathroom and snort coke once. The attempt to have sex on my bed were thwarted before any actual penetration occurred. We collaborated on a dizzying array of snack foods, so no one became too drunk at the open bar. J made pizza. Some friend of the neighbor's brought five pounds of home-made bacon. The bartender made cantaloupe syrup, which turned out to go wonderfully well with gin.
A few hours after the Fair was shut down, the police came by the Bunker, and for the first time in its long and storied history, they shut our party down. This merely gave us an excuse to downsize. Half an hour later, the Bunker was downgraded from packed-to-the-gills to pleasantly-crowded. Guests cleaned up after themselves and while I found many cups in strange places, I did not locate many wedges of lime in places where lime wedges should not be.
I fell asleep on the couch, halfway through an episode of Mad Men. I will miss my Bunker. I will miss my parties. I will not miss the naked men and their wide variety of cock rings.
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| Monday, September 21st, 2009
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4:24 pm - And Then, the Flood
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Oh, my little corner of SOMA, you are changing. No less than three new cafes have opened up, which is fortunate because the cafe on the corner has some of the worst espresso in all of Ess Eff. The stoner Frenchmen are doing well in their wine shop. The fancy French restaurant next to the co-op grocery has set up a roach coach serving French food to-go across the street. The former pizza place is going to become a fondue restaurant. I like fondue. The poorly run night club across the street has shuttered its doors, just as the poorly-run nightclub around the corner did a couple of years ago.
But the Concrete Bunker itself is a little worse for wear. There is a lot of graffiti on the building. A lot. Hooligans tag our windows with acid and diamonds. They spray paint the brickwork. It drives J mad. A few months ago, he caught some drunk guys from the suburbs wearing suits brandishing a spray can. On Friday, as I came home, some idiot was using my front door as a urinal. I was unable to get his address, so that if I am ever in his neighborhood, I can pee all over his front door. We live and learn. The landlord isn't very good about keeping the lights outside of the building in working order, or trimming the trees. Earlier this year, when our living room was flooded with sewage (again), the landlord promised that he would attempt a more permanent solution in a month, when he was planning to make a series of major capital improvements to the building.
The month came and went. Summer came and went. The first indication that we had of any real capital improvements came a couple of weekends ago, when construction workers began tearing the roof off of our building. Oh, he's replacing the roof! The landlord didn't say anything about the roof being in such poor shape, but I'm just glad that he has shown an interest in preventing the Bunker's slide towards slumdom. Sure, the construction workers were loud, and they set up their trash chute directly in front of my front door, and they knocked a couple of satellite dishes out of alignment, and they set off the fire alarm, but these were minor annoyances. Hurrah for building maintenance!
Then it started to rain. It rained all weekend, the weekend during which the construction workers had removed our roof. This did not bother me as much as it should have. Surely, I thought, my landlord has hired trained professionals for this job. They have had their work interrupted by rain before. They know what to do. And then water started trickling down, through the ceiling, down the beams. There are two stories of apartments above the Bunker. This did not bode well for them. Upon inspecting the top floors and the roof, J reports that the construction workers have covered the roof with plastic tarp, which merely gave the water a place to pool, and now it was pouring off of the tarp into the apartments on the top floor, trickling down to the apartments below that, and so on until water dripped into our living room. On the top floor, the residents yell at each other with such force and vitriol that J decides not to bother them.
The next day, our landlord has sent in an environmental restoration company. I remember a similar company coming in after that car was set on fire in our garage. They come bearing heaters and dehumidifiers. They pull everything off of the roof so that roofers may begin their work anew, and go into some of the upper units to tear out sheet rock and insulation. There is a rumor that the original roofers were neither licensed, nor bonded, nor insured. Tenants begin calling their insurance companies. It becomes harder and harder to reach our landlord on the phone.
That evening, while J and I are hosting a dinner party, the fire alarm goes off again. We are used to having the fire alarm go off now, so used to it that the only reason I step outside it to get away from the noise. J investigates. He returns, reporting that there is, in fact, something on fire two floors up. And a flood. The sprinklers have gone off, dumping gallons of water onto what may or may not have been flames, flooding a unit that has already had water coming in through the ceiling, and leaking water into the units below. Reporting from the second floor, J tells me, "You know those waterfalls in Chinese restaurants? That's what our neighbor's bedroom wall looks like right now." The bedroom floods. Our neighbor rushes to save his art collection. At midnight, the landlord finally arrives. He is drunk. I do not speak to him because I am certain that there are more than enough people yelling at him right now. The bathroom floods in the Facebook engineer's apartment, which is inconvenient because the engineer is in Japan and his father is housesitting. Water leaks into the Frenchmen's wine cellar, blowing the seals. The Frenchmen say they will not know if the flooding affected the wine until it is uncorked and they taste it. Their ceiling is sagging. They will be closed for several days while the landlord fixes it. We peer at our ceiling and see beams showing through the sheet rock.
J and I exchange worried expressions and start to look at real estate listings. It may be time to move.
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| Thursday, September 17th, 2009
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1:15 pm - Faux Diaries: The Unbearable Kookiness of Gaudi
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I am going to my happy place. I am walking on a beach in Barcelona. There are parrots in the trees. No one is punching me in the face. My head doesn't hurt. I don't require 12-14 hours of sleep. I have not made a doctor's appointment for next week, even though the doctor will only tell me to take some aspirin and not get into any more fist fights.
J and I head North, away from the sea and the Ramblas into L'Eixample, which we pronounce "Egg Hamper." L'Eixample is where Barcelona keeps its wackiest modernist architecture. I am informed that until recently, no one cared about Modernism and all of this beautiful tile and sinuous metal work had fallen into disrepair. We start at Casa Batllo, which is also called "The Dragon," because of the undulating roof tiled with scales and balconies that look like open jaws baring terrible teeth. Casa Batllo started out as an apartment block, but most of it is devoted to a Gaudi museum now. Gaudi is where Art Nouveau starts to go a little mad: away from the cute, the Victorian, and the twee, towards the psychedelic and the strange. The rooms in Casa Batllo are still designed with incredible attention to detail: Gaudi designed everything from the building itself down to the furniture and the fixtures. In some other house, he created the moulds for bronze door handles by grabbing a ball of clay and letting it squish out between his fingers. On the street in front of the house, the cement is pressed with a design of interlocking sea creatures. The only times when Casa Batllo fails to be beautiful are when the museum curators have added some ridiculous element: a screen saver projected against a wall, a holographic picture of the architect, an ugly little cement fountain in the attic room. I try to imagine myself living in a wood-paneled room with a whorled ceiling. It's not difficult, though it might be a little bit difficult to pull off in my Concrete Bunker.
We pass La Pedrera, another Gaudi apartment bloc, with its undulating facade and honeycomb front doors, its tangled balconies and spiraling towers, on the way to Sagrada Familia. If you are a fan of science fiction, Sagrada Familia is what you would expect a cathedral to look like if it had been designed by H.R. Giger, or perhaps aliens from space who had seen a cathedral once and were trying to recreate the thing from memory. In the great cathedral-building tradition, construction on Sagrada Familia has been ongoing for approximately 120 years. They have recently finished the roof and begun to guild the ceiling with a pattern designed to look like sun shining through the leaves of a forest canopy. The expected date for the cathedral's completion is somewhere between 2020 and 2040. Sagrada Familia is where Gaudi's three-pronged obsessions with nature, math, and God melded together until they became indistinguishable from one another. This is how you get hyperbolic paraboloid columns, quadratic surfaces and conic curves, and friezes embedded with cryptograms. The Cathedral of Saint Mary in Toledo was grand in order to impress onlookers with the power of the Catholic Church. Sagrada Familia is grand in the way that the sequoias are grand - it's just endless and miraculous and we're all very astonished and small in comparison.
Parc Gruell is also grand, which is funny because it was a bit of a failure. Located at the top of a hill in Gracia, the park was originally meant to be a housing development designed by Gaudi. The house in which Gaudi lived for the last twenty years of his life was the model house for this development, all trompe l'oeil purple-veined marble and curving nautilus staircases, lily pad chairs and colorful tiled chimney. I read somewhere that the house was not actually his own design. Only two show houses were ever built, and when there were no interested buyers, Gaudi purchased one of them and moved into it. The rest of the grounds have been converted into a park. When most people think of Gaudi, they think of Parc Guell, with its mosaic lizards and serpentine benches tiled in broken crockery. It's an idea that's been copied so often that for a long time in my mind, Gaudi was shorthand for "stick some broken plates to it." For some reason, everyone loves photos of the mosaics, so you never see the gingerbread gatehouses or the wrought iron palm frond fence or those whorled ceilings that look like the front room at Casa Batllo repeated over and over again, or the viaduct with its leaning columns made from piles of local stone. Immigrants of indeterminate origin appear out of nowhere and lay out cheap Spanish fans and sunglasses and plastic bracelets for sale. The world's smartest and fattest pigeon sits down directly under a water tap. We drink soda (I never drink soda) and sit in the shade next to the washerwoman column. It is not difficult to believe that the world is the creation of some benign and magnificent force, a force that makes mosaics that shimmer in the sunshine and tapas bars and very smart birds who know how to keep cool in the scalding heat.
And no one is punching me in the face.
current music: Lamb -- God Bless
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| Thursday, September 10th, 2009
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10:34 pm - Punch
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I was going to write about Gaudi. It was the next step in my Spanish chronicle. I was going to write about Balsa Man, in all of its miniature burning glory. I had a plan. But then some asshole punched me in the face.
Let me take a couple of steps back here. We are literally going to back up a couple of steps, the steps leading out of the Very Serious Circus School. It is 8:30 and I am leaving the Very Serious Circus School, having just finished my workout. I am wearing my gym clothes (tights, knee-high socks, shorts, leotard) with a sweatshirt and 20-hole boots. There is a gym bag slung over my shoulder. I pass a man smoking a cigarette in front of that vegetarian Indian restaurant that I never go to. As soon as I pass him, he starts to follow me.
Naive creature that I am, I slow down because I think that he may want to pass me on the sidewalk. He does not want to pass me. He keeps pace with me and flashes me a fist full of bills. Oh. I see. This asshole thinks that I'm a prostitute - a prostitute catering to sweaty gym clothes fetishists in a thoroughly middle-class neighborhood next to the teaching hospital. I shake my head. I don't think that I really need to do anything more to make it clear that I am not interested in trading sex for money. I cross the street towards the park, where my car is located. Halfway through the crosswalk I realize that he is still close behind me. I reach into my pocket and pull out my keys. See, creepy man? I am going to my car. I have places to be and they don't involve you. He does not appear to have received my subtle message. I close my fist around the keys, with the sharpest key sticking out between my fingers.
At this point, I realize that I need to stop at the corner. The place where I am parked is dark and there is no one else around. If I am going to shake this guy, I have reached the last relatively safe place in which to do so. I stop. He flashes his fist full of bills again. Apparently, "I am going to stab you with my keys," translates as "hey baby, let's go back to my place." He reaches out to grab me. I push his hand away and tell him to fuck off. He fails to fuck off. He's still standing there. For a moment, we face off and I get a very good look at him. I look carefully. I think, do I know this guy? Is this someone playing a joke on me? Is he waiting for me to recognize him so we can have a laugh? And while I am thinking, Assaulty Assaulterson punches me in the face.
I would like to take this moment to thank my friends in the East Bay, who met with me every Sunday morning for many years so that we could hit each other with sticks. Because of them, I know what it is like to be hit hard and I am not afraid. Because of them, my first reaction to being punched in the face is to reach out with my left hand, the hand which is not holding the car keys, and punch him in the throat. I feel my knuckles connect with his larynx. Assaulty looks surprised. His cigarette wobbles between his lips. I yell at him to go away. And he does so, running.
My nose is running. I take a moment to make sure that it's not blood. I pinch my face to make sure that my nose isn't broken. I run my tongue over my teeth to make sure I won't need an emergency trip to the dentist. I wait an extra minute to make sure that he isn't coming back, and then I walk to my car. I drive home. I put the car in the garage. I pull an ice pack out of the freezer. I Twitter and wait for the swelling to go down.
I never feel scared. I never feel the rush of adrenaline. I feel the way I feel at the top of the rope, thirty feet up in the air, doing a trick I've done a hundred times before. I know that I should be scared, but I don't feel anything. I am sitting on the couch, laptop across my knees, trying to play Scrabble when I feel a lump in my throat like I'm going to cry. That's when it occurs to me that I should file a police report.
I call 911. I have never called the police before in my life. I must be shaken up by then, because I mix up the name of the street where the Very Serious Circus School is located. They send a couple of policemen to the Bunker to take a report. By the time the police arrive, J has come home. The police are very impressed with the Bunker. J talks with one of the guys about the cats and painting the walls and all of our art while the other one takes my statement. I describe my attacker in detail. What was he wearing? How tall was he? What did he weigh? Would you recognize him if you saw him again? I don't think that they will find him, but if they do, I hope his throat hurts.
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| Monday, September 7th, 2009
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9:43 pm - Faux Diaries: Barcelona, Mi Amore
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I have a new happy place. When I am at the dentist and they've numbed most of my face and they're rooting around under my gums with sharp objects, or there is a tin foil hat person on the phone telling me that I don't understand how important it is that I put them in touch with an attorney who can sue the Obama administration for sending invisible helicopters to hover over their house, or I have spent an hour in rush-hour traffic driving to the Very Serious Circus School, only to discover that my class has been canceled, I close my eyes and I pretend that I am walking along Barceloneta Beach. It is ninety-something degrees on a cloudless day, the sand is white (okay, the sand has been trucked in due to years of soil erosion), and the Mediterranean is clear and blue and warm. You can look down into the water and see the fish. The beach is crowded with bodies, sprawled out under umbrellas, crafting sandcastles, flying kites and playing ping pong in the surf. J and I are walking along the shore with our shoes off. Later, we will stop at one of the beach bars and drink mojitos while listening to Russian and French tourists. We will see parrots in unindentified trees. The world has been crafted by some benevolent force - if not the world, then at least Barceloneta.
Barcelona is more crowded than Madrid. Presumably this is because everyone living inland has fled for the coasts. They're here to sit on beaches and eat tapas and drink sangria. They walk down the Ramblas, which is broad and lined with street vendors selling postcards and birds in cages. Magicians do tricks and acrobats tumble, somehow, even in the dizzying heat. Street performers dress like human statues and perform little tableaux. There are Roman soldiers and monks and a dizzying variety of fairies and gargoyle monster things. They seem to have gotten lost on their way to San Diego Comic Con. It takes about ten minutes for J and I to go from being impressed by the spectacle to being annoyed by the tourists. For the rest of our stay, we do everything we can to avoid the Ramblas. We hide in the Barri Gotic, eating fig gelato. Tomorrow, we see Gaudi.
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| Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
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10:32 pm - Faux Diaries: Holy Toledo
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Waking up early means that we can take day trips. J and I take the high-speed train to from Madrid to Toledo, which is about an hour away. Toledo has Roman walls and Moorish gates and winding little medieval streets, so narrow that I can spread my arms and touch parallel buildings with my fingertips. We gnaw on churros and hike uphill to the top of the city.
Toledo's best-known exports are steel and marzipan. I inspect rapiers (for decorative use only!) in the tourist shops. I feel mildly embarrassed to be attracted to something so cheesy, but Toledo steel has an almost mythical quality. For hundreds of years, all of the best swords were made with Toledo steel. They said so in The Princess Bride. J looks at kitchen knives. We decide that we do not need another kitchen knife, and we're unsure whether or not we can carry one in our checked luggage. The nuns of the convent of Santo Domingo el Antiguo make marzipan as part of their service to God. I am unsure of the connection between sweet almond paste and His Ineffableness, but the nuns are very devoted and God's taste in sweets is excellent. The bakeries close for siesta before I can buy a box for my co-workers. I am forced to console myself with sorbet.
Like any good medieval town, there is a cathedral at the heart of Toledo, the Cathedral of Saint Mary. It's a gothic horror filled with all of the loot left over from the years in which Spain had won the game of Civilization and Toledo was its capital. We Plundered the New World and All We Got Was This Lousy Gilded Monstrance. I'd never seen a monstrance before. I am under the impression that they are not usually made from 500 lbs of silver covered in gold. There are entire halls filled paintings - Titian, Goya, Velasquez, El Greco - just hanging on the walls where I can reach out and touch them (which I refrain from doing, thank you very much). Unlike the beautifully-preserved and restored works in the Prado, most of the masterworks in the cathedral have darkened considerably - they're nearly black with age.
I have to admire the irrational exuberance that goes into building a place like the Cathedral of Saint Mary. Here it's all Renaissance. Here's a medieval facade. Here is a room full of manuscripts. Here is a room full of cardinals' vestments - fistfulls of jewels sewn into a cape. Here is a Moorish tapestry. Here is a reliquary, the kind with a real chunk of some saint inside. I close my eyes and try to imagine a world in which you might only own one book. J says that places like this make him understand why people believe in God. I do not believe in God, but I sure believe in the Spanish Armada.
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| Thursday, August 27th, 2009
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4:12 pm - Faux Diaries: Prado Prado Prado
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The primary advantage of getting up very early is that J and I are in line at the Museo del Prado at 9 in the morning, well before the noonday sun begins to beat down in earnest, and certainly before the tourist queue starts to wind around the building. Tourist Madrid opens at 9. The real Madrid does not like mornings, possibly because it is suffering from a massive hangover. On another morning, we stop by a chocolate and churro shop that is supposed to cater to late night and early morning types. The sign says that they are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which is a bit of problem because the staff doesn't arrive until 10. Cranky as I was, I am pleased to report that churros and drinking chocolate are a delicious combination that should embraced by all right-thinking people.
The Prado is spotless and quiet at opening time, and so vast that for the first hour or so, it feels as if J and I have the place to ourselves. We move from room to room, communing with paintings that are mostly familiar from art books. Here are halls of assorted suffering saints, with and without creepy headless cherubim. A variety of Jesus Christs are born, held in the arms of the Virgin, visited by Wise Men - they preach and wash people's feet and die and are resurrected. I begin to feel conspicuously Jewish. El Greco's Jesus is elongated and slightly hallucinatory. El Bosco's triptychs are unapologetically weird - I spend fifteen minutes squinting at some alarming flower/shell/vagina in the Garden of Earthly Delights. Goya's Maja appears, both naked and clothed, aptly demonstrating the importance of finding the perfect dress. Velasquez's Mars, draped in a sheet, looks like a naked biker with a handlebar mustache. I see dwarves and more dwarves and sad-looking noblemen with hollow cheeks.
I've almost made it through the entire museum, feet aching, when I realize that I am looking at a painting of myself. It's 1853 and I've been painted by Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz and it is, for some strange reason, labeled Amalia de Llano y Dotres, the Countess of Vilches, but I have sat for no small number of portraits - I have my very own portrait painter - and I know what a portrait of myself looks like. There I am. Hanging on a wall. In this painting, the Countess of Vilches is 32 years old. She is wearing a very nice dress. I briefly consider buying a lot of blue silk taffeta and an anti-bellum ballgown pattern. I spend some time wondering what sort of shuffling of genes produces indentical 19th century Spanish Countesses and 20th century Soviet Jews. I get some vague notion of what Grace Kelly is supposed to feel like, staring at that painting of Carlotta Valdez in Vertigo, except for the flowers and Hitchcock and throwing myself into the Bay and the fake suicide. I buy a print, because I'm vain, and some Velasquez postcards to send home.
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| Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
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4:15 pm - Faux Diaries: Madrid
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I usually keep a journal when I travel, which leads to all kinds of awkward moments in which I am scribbling in my notebooks instead of actually enjoying whatever it is that I've found noteworthy. J takes the pictures; I write the words. Together, we are a crack journalistic team - or we would be if I hadn't been so slack about the writing. J posted pictures from the trip the minute we got to a place with fast enough internet access, while I didn't write anything more complicated than a post card during our Spanish sojourn. In my defense, those post cards were very witty.
Madrid is empty in August. Everyone who could possibly be on vacation is on the coast, drinking cocktails and dipping their feet in the sea of their choice. Only construction workers are on the job, ripping up the streets and the plazas. They have ripped up the street in front of the little apartment J and I rented by the Plaza d'Espana. They have ripped it up with jackhammers. They have ripped up and partially repaved the Plaza del Sol. There is hardly a square foot of Madrid that has not been cordoned off with caution tape and signs which urge onlookers to pardon the molestar. I feel profound sympathy for the construction workers, the only people laboring in all of Madrid, wearing heavy clothes in the hundred degree midday heat, cruelly deprived of their siesta.
J and I continually sleep through the middle of the day, wake up in time to go out for a few hours in the evening, and then wake up before dawn, when the only other people who are awake are revelers from the night before. Madrid has no last call. It is impolite or unlucky to order your final drink here. Madrilenos order their penultimate drink. J sounds deeply authoritative when he tells me this, so I decide to believe him. I am profoundly impressed by the madrileno capacity for nightlife. Dinner does not take place until 11 pm. At midnight and two in the morning, the streets are still completely full, sometimes with families with kids in tow. We drink lager and sangria and mojitos and the occasional horchata while sitting outside, people watching. We eat octopus Galician style - which is usually cooked with paprika and potatoes - and Iberian ham in vast quantities. We sit in the Plaza Mayor and watch flamenco dancers. Somewhere around La Latina, we stumble across an all-night street fair which may or may not be in celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin. I don't know what the Virgin is Assuming, but it seems to involve bingo and a reggae band and sandwiches filled with grilled and deep fried meats. Spanish women walk by in impossibly high heels. I have already fallen off of a curb and twisted my ankle on the cobblestones. Presumably, every woman in Madrid is an acrobat.
Over by the oriental gardens, where Madrid pretends to be Versailles, Spanish dirt hippies are fire dancing while one of them plays the guitar and sings Bob Marley off-key. They don't know all of the words to the song that they're singing, so they get a little stuck on "we'rejamminwe'rejamminwe'rejamminwe'rejammin'..." but I am tipsy and life is wonderful, and I am wearing a flammable dress, so I do not show them how this fire dancing thing is really done. J and I take pictures with his fancy camera. We help drunk Irish tourists home using the iPhone's compass application. We make lists of the things that we're going to do tomorrow. Early. Before it gets too hot.
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| Friday, August 21st, 2009
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11:43 am - The Bride Stripped Bare Pt. IV: An Honest Woman
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I got married. I've been married for weeks now, since August 8th. I don't know why I can write pages about a day trip to the aquarium, or surveys of Russian cultural history, or the difficulty of finding just the right pair of stripy tights, but I can't seem to write more than a sentence about my wedding.
Somewhere in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, J and I picked a nice scenic spot in front of City Hall, lined up our respective families and a couple of witnesses, read from a book, and then the emcee from our burlesque show had us exchange rings and pronounced us Man and Wife. We kissed with such enthusiasm that lipstick wound up smeared all over my face. We drank champagne at the Beach Chalet and then hauled our merry band across town to eat Venetian food in a nice restaurant. Our photographer and his lovely assistant charmed J's parents, while the Right Reverend Bobo and our stage manager charmed mine. My father was deeply impressed to discover that our officiant was accompanied by a date who was approximately half his age.
Everyone piled into their cars, and J and I fell into bed, tipsy and married. We woke up the next morning and tried to decide on what to call one another. "Ex-boyfriend" seems to work for J, though he will also accept "spousal unit."
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| Friday, August 7th, 2009
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5:04 pm - The Bride Stripped Bare Pt. III
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At this moment, I am wearing the very last size six Betsey Johnson raven dress available in the United States. That's not entirely correct - it is no longer available because I own it. This dress which was not available from the website, which was not in the warehouse, which was not in the inventory of any Betsey Johnson store in the country, which was not available on eBay or 6pm or Bluefly, which was not available at any of the major department stores across the country, was on the rack at a Betsey Johnson store in Nashville, which was just about to ship it to Vancouver. It is mine, and for 30% off. A nice lady from the Sherman Oakes store called her just in time to stop the Canadians from siphoning off our precious raven-embroidered natural resources, and continued to supervise the transfer of the dress all through her day off, during which she was moving apartments. The nice lady of Sherman Oakes also polled other owners of the dress, who informed her that even though the dress appears to run ludicrously small, the fabric stretches and all of them have had to go down a size. I would still add another inch in the bust and take an inch or two out of the waist for a perfect fit, but it's nothing that cannot be overcome with an appropriate bra and a skinny belt.
People really go the extra mile for you when you're getting married - not that I ever plan to do this again.
I have run many errands. I have picked up my soon-to-be-inlaws from the airport and deposited them at their hotel. I have braved the passport office and the pet supply store and the makeup counter, where a large gay Asian man fussed over me and I felt as if I was having my makeup applied by a panda. I have resisted the urge to drop everything and go for a run at the climbing gym.
There is nothing left to do now but to get married.
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| Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
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11:57 am - The Bride Stripped Bare Pt. II
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I was so proud of myself. I was going to be a reasonable bride. I was going to be that down-to-earth creature that smiled patiently while other people described their out-of-the-way locations, or the cost of booking a church, or complained about their fiancee's numerous relatives. J and I sensibly divided the event into three parts:
Part the first: civil ceremony at City Hall.
Part the second: honeymoon in Spain as a reward for putting up with our parents during the civil ceremony.
Part the third: wedding reception extravaganza in November, with a fancy dress and a farcical ceremony and a cake from beyond space and time. Trapeze artist! Industrial band! The set from Faust! A palanquin on an elephant! And other bizarre exclamations!
Stop me if you already know where this is going. Stop me if you don't want to hear about the things that have already gone horribly awry. I kept my cool when J could only take a week off of work for the honeymoon. I did not explode when my parents bought our airline tickets for the wrong dates and the honeymoon wound up being somewhat shorter than expected - these are free airline tickets that I am not paying for, I am not in a position to complain about them. I got a bit testy when J's parents travel plans forced us to change the date and nearly all of the plans for the civil ceremony. But I did not truly know what it is to be blinded by wedding-induced madness until Betsey Johnson sold out of my dress.
It was love at first sight. It is a terrible thing to fall in love with a dress. It will never love you back, not even if you drop everything and immediately spend $350 on it, which I did not. I walked away from the perfect dress, with its clean 1950's lines and embroidered birds and pockets because surely it would still be available in July, and perhaps it might even go on sale. By the time I had screwed my courage (and checkbook) to the sticking place and walked into the Betsey Johnson store to purchase the embroidered bird dress I so richly deserved, it was gone.
It was gone in my size. It was gone in every size. It was gone at the online store. There were rumors that the dress might still exist at the LA, or New York, or Boston stores, but those rumors turned out to be ephemeral. There were rumors that it was available under a different name on at online retailer, but by the time I found it, the dress had sold out. I cannot find it. I cannot find anything even reasonably similar to it. And now I am getting married in less than two weeks and I have nothing to wear.
Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to stand in a corner and rock back and forth while hugging myself.
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| Monday, July 20th, 2009
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10:37 pm - Fetish
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So, I'm standing by the bar at the Marquis Fetish Ball, waiting for my hard-earned lemon drop, when some guy in a latex shirt says, "So, what's your fetish?"
"I'm a performer. My fetish is for showing up, doing my job, and getting paid."
He might have said some more things after that, but I'd stopped listening. I am the rudest person in the world.
The truth is, I am not a very good performer. I am glad that my sad little five minutes was scheduled at the beginning of the night, when most of my friends had not yet arrived, and there were plenty of other acts to follow mine so that the audience could forget how awful I was. I am glad that I was scheduled early so that I could drink the overpriced cocktails and lounge around on the glorious Supperclub beds in the big white room with my painter and her companions. No one else had to know that, nervous and twitchy, I had sprayed too much rosin on my hands before the show so that the tissu stuck to me in awkward places. I have learned an important lesson about the overuse of rosin. All that it cost me was a little bit of my dignity. I wasn't using it anyhow.
I suspect that I may be doing something wrong, because I don't feel as if I'm making any progress as a performer. The Very Serious Circus Center has been good for me - I've improved my form and learned many exciting new tricks - but sometimes I look at video of myself practicing and I look like one of the hippos from Fantasia. For my next act, I will need ballet slippers and a tutu. I feel as if I have enough difficulty transitioning from one trick to another, much less emoting. I cannot put on a character and tell a story if I can't even keep from getting tangled up in the tissu. I do not know what I have to do in order to be good and I am afraid that there is no one who is going to be able to explain it to me.
I think about quitting. I think about taking up some other, easier hobby, something that I might eventually be good at, something I have talent for. But I am vain and I like being strong and I have been booked for the post-Apocalyptic Hubba Hubba Revue in September. I want to go all Cormac McCarthy and do a post-apocalyptic cannibal act to A Pretty Piece of Flesh. I want to do a Brazilian into the Full Monty into a Mermaid and finish it off with a great big drop. In my head, this looks fantastic. In reality, I expect that it will end is despair.
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