Glass beehives swarming with crystaline bees.

End

2007-11-25T20:57:00.000-08:00

I've decided not to reactivate this web journal. I'll be starting another one soon, at that time I'll provide and appropriate link.

My new blog is here.

Roughly rough

2006-01-25T12:13:00.000-08:00

Disaster No. 1603

I remember the bar. I was doing my laundry and the place was one of those pubs where you could get pasta or a tofu sandwich and soup for eight dollars, or a pack of American Spirits for five. The convenience wasn’t too dear to be able to drink and do your laundry at the same time. Luckily there weren’t a lot of people out to wash their pants on Wednesday night.

I’d gone up to the bar to buy a pack of cigarettes. It was essentially me, the bartender and two guys at the bar. I ordered a Blue Moon and sat smoking, staring at the lemon floating in my beer. The boy with the curly hair lit his rollie and raked back his curls. He was somehow gray looking, dark looking. It took me a while to realize that a layer of construction dirt had settled on him and colored him completely.

I’m not sure how it began. Aren’t you supposed to remember those first words? I think I’d seen him before. Stanislaus Madrone was a friend of Edwina’s and she’d known him from the gallery. I’d gone to his opening at Barrister’s a month before and felt a little odd, had a the free red wine the gallery passed out, hadn’t really known anyone other than Edwina who’d invited me. She’d introduced me to a few people who I would never see again. I felt a little out of my element at those gatherings.

He made little towers, sort of boxes. They were not like Joseph Cornell’s but they were. They were like a carpenter’s workshop overtaken with antique gears and screws. Pocket knives and superheroes mixed with old photographs and girls. They had some element of Westermann but were more delicate, less bold.

I think he said, don’t you know Edwina von Hildegard? Aren’t you friends with (…)? And I could remember running into him Sundays at the French Market with June and Giovanni after our Sunday brunches-- him, his dogs, and Rosebud who’d play accordion with the band sometimes. His dogs, I guess they were his dogs, though I thought they were her dogs, would jump up and down and would run all over you like mountain goats. They also smelled a bit, and Baby Pearl would always chew on her brother’s head.

So really I had met him before, but mainly when he was being good. To be truthful the first times I saw him he was wearing an old tattered tweed suit, two tone shoes and a rumpled fedora. His hair was in twin braids Wizard of Oz style. I can remember what I thought of his art, or at least that first impression of it: I remember not understanding it. It was like listening to a story where you don’t know all of the characters, don’t quite understand what makes them important, or looking through someone else’s family portraits.

I said yes, that I’d known Edwina and some of the other kids from that café round the corner. He told me that he wasn’t very fond of the owners of that café, for reasons I’d already known having to do with Rosebud’s being sick. He told me the first time that he had seen Edwina’s work he had thought that she was much older.

The bartender gave him a bit of the pizza that she couldn’t finish. I think that she had teased him about eating only beans and rice or some other bizarre eating habit that he had fallen into. Stanislaus was too skinny. He would insist to me later that he only ever ate beans and rice though I had never seen him eat either of those things in front of me.

My laundry had finished. I walked out to my car and told him that we could talk some more outside. It was a bit stuffy and loud inside. It was one of those summer nights in New Orleans where the darkness makes the city a little cooler at night and the heat and humidity haven’t conspired to make it insufferable at all hours of the day. I sat on the curb. The pavement was still as warm as if it were mid-afternoon.

Anyway it was a beautiful clear night. The sky was indigo and deep and dark, not clouded yet. We were on the corner of Touro and Royal streets. He pulled two bottles of Moosehead out of his backpack and offered me one, promptly opening them with his lighter. I took it and drank with him. I’m not sure what I thought then. Perhaps that he was interesting or that I was bored and he seemed friendly. His comments were personal and self-reflective. He said, I don’t think that it’s terrible to have a drink after work. He told me that he dismantled houses all day, every day, and that his work drained every ounce of energy out of him and that by the end of the day he could see what he had done and that was most important, that he had done something every day and that he knew what it was, that he had completed something.

I told him that I was not exactly in that position at all, that perhaps I was in the opposite position of waiting and reading; reading novels and books about architecture and cultural theory, checking books out to patrons, but mainly telling them that the second floor of the library had been closed for renovations. We drank beer and stared at the stars. I told him that I had to go soon, you know, to get to work in the morning and fold my clothes. And he said, yeah, that he had to wake up early too to be at the job site, so he understood. I said that we should perhaps meet again but that if he wanted to and that it was very nice to have spoken with him.

He said, yes Marguerite Clark, you are a very neat girl and I like running around in your brain, and then he kissed my hand and said good night and rode off into the distance on his white bike.

I want to make something very clear. This was all an accident and I really didn’t want this to happen. I wanted to be alone, really, I wanted to work on my drawings, keep my house clean, and spend some more time visiting with friends. I don’t go to bars really. I simply wanted to do the simple and adult things one does alone.

Also

2005-10-05T09:22:00.000-07:00

I've been noticing the overall gloominess of my own recent posts and I think that perhaps it would be a good time to inform the three people that are reading this that I'm actually okay, and that is just a rough patch. You know, it happens to everyone and I'm very lucky, actually.

As it is currently I'm still looking for housing in Oakland. Wish me luck. If things don't work out there are certainly other places. I just want somewhere to call home, where I can get a job and get settled, do some volunteer work, go to the Quakers. You know.

Bad times

2005-10-05T09:20:00.000-07:00

I've decided not to go back to the library. It's upsetting. Here.

nevermind

2005-10-05T01:43:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in Berkeley. I think it's only 12.30 in the am. I've just finished a performance with the band and I'm going to be very shortly be eating some analog "chicken" nuggets. So anyway, I think that the show went well but that I'd like to get paid and that I miss the rest of our band (banjo, violin, clarinet, string bass). We're usually a seven piece but tonight we were a four piece and it felt a little naked being up there with a violin and string bass to hide behind.

I hate to say it, but it seems like the only people that understand where I'm coming from are other people from New Orleans. It makes for a very anti-social and odd situation. Anyway I was in the Berkeley Good Will and I ran into a friend from the ninth ward whose name is either Low Rent or Laurent depending on who you ask. So he's spent his money on a school bus which he is currently living in and driving around the Bay Area. I've shacked up with my friend Liz (fellow evacuee) & her mom who is infinitely patient, seems to find me mildly amusing and has an incomprehensible patience for rootless cosmopolitan scumbags like me. So Laurent was telling me that he's pretty much given up in his house in nola (he lived in a sort of shack like shelter, I mean really most birdhouses are built better these days...). I've got the same situation. The week of the hurricane my landlord Mr. Edwards was in the hospital and I haven't heard from him since. My apartment building was like some kind of Charles Dickens bullshit, ie. random people sleeping in the hallways, victorian plumbing, leaking roof, and one functional burner on the stove before the hurricane. So I'd be surprised if the roof wasn't collapsed and the windows weren't busted.

The New Orleans Public has been calling me to ask if I'll be coming back and if I need housing, but I don't know what I want. I'd like to run away and bury myself in some other thing completely, perhaps a new life some where else. My impulses tell me escape, escape! and never go back. But part of my will always be in that wreck of a small town city, because it has shaped so much of how I perceive my everyday surroundings. You know, I want to run because there was nothing for me there, even before the disaster. The jobs were horrible, the city government was corrupt, racism, classism, the failure of the public educational system and juvenile crime, all of it. Life was just a sort of violent expendable thing. The city was a disaster before the disaster.

Everyone I know just wants to go back home, but I don't think it will ever be the same. Liz tells me a helicopter crashed in front of her man's house. One of my best friends, her apartment flooded to the ceiling and all of her things are covered with black mold. Halliburton will probably put a no bid contract on rebuilding the city. Meanwhile the City of New Orleans wants me to come back and work part time for the library system when there's no potable/bathable water, the school system's been liquidated, and the tourism industry will be dead for the next year at least.

Hyerborean

2005-09-05T22:13:00.000-07:00

I've just returned to Schaumburg, Illinois, my childhood home. My parents have very generously offered to let me stay with them for a little bit until I can find my druthers. For right now I've been constantly in a strange state of mental flux, neither quite ready to accept what is going on down south or properly understanding it.

In Houston we were constantly watching the reports of Katrina on CNN. The hurricane sent sheets of rain down. Reporters seemed to be offering us the usual disaster pornography. At one point I watched a correspondent run into a parking garage, then out into a doorway in the rain, then duck next to a garbage can on Canal Street and throw a piece of metal debris down the street, commenting that yes in deed the rain was very heavy and the wind was very fast.

So as I'm siting here, in my old bedroom, the NPR station is playing brass band music. At the time, well in nola, I'd never liked it. It was sort of on par with Mardi Gras music and "When the Saints Go Marching In." Now I can't get over how lonely and sad it makes me feel. I mean, you're not supposed to feel melancholy listening to Ernie K. Doe or the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, but I can't help wondering if all of my very familiar surroundings, my home up until nine days ago, has become some artifact.

My boss at the library called my cell and left a message. We hadn't technically lost our jobs, but we couldn't work at our branch.

Everyone was talking to me about the looters and I didn't want to talk about it. I mean who gives a fuck! I would be going crazy if I'd been left to die in a city with no aid in sight, I'd be looting too. It's amazing how the mainstream media has the power to disassociate the effects and causes.

In the papers we see photographs of people dying in the street, of the tragedy, but very little was being said about why and how we reached that state. It seems like what I heard being reported was something to the effect of "Look at this tragedy! Look at the sadness, how shocking, how sudden!" Not "Where is the government? Why is this happening to people days after the hurricane? How does this qualify as an immediate response to devastating emergency?"

Michael Moore tracks Bush to San Diego the day after the hurricane. I'm reminded of that scene in Fahrenheit 911 with the president joking in front of a well dressed dinner full of supporters. How different we were. We, being New Orleans. The media coverage exposes so many of the ugliest parts of the American mind-- assumptions about the regional South, and anxieties about race and class parcelled along with that. I defy anyone to tell me that the word "looters" hasn't just become a stand-in term for black youth in American media coverage. Look at the representation in photographs. They're depicting us like we're savages. I mean isn't it the same old colonial mind trick, that we're not civilized that we're lawless, that we're other. And that somehow allows them to justify our mistreatment and neglect.

I am so angry! The only difference between me and the people who didn't evacuate was a car, friends out of town, and a credit card. I wonder about all the people who came into the library, or the bike punks I know. Where are they, did they make it out? Fuck this shit!

Houston and dark water

2005-09-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

I am still in Houston deciding what to do. It has taken me a while to fully realise the very long-term consequences of what seemed like just another storm in yet another hurricane season in nola.

I just dropped my friend Austin off at the bus-stop. He has a tech job. It seems like unlike most of the other jobs in the city, he'll be back to working with only a brief lapse in his regular schedule. He'll be living in Austin, things opened up for him pretty quickly there and he'll be in his new apartment by tonight.

I was employed with the city part time, waiting to be moved to full-time LA1 in light of some happy coincidences. I'm not really looking forward to starting it again and scooting back up to where I was before the disaster. I didn't take anything with me, just my cello, my car, some bank paperwork, cash, and some changes of clothes. ...

Hey asshole, why'd ya hafta hit my car?

2005-08-10T19:45:00.000-07:00

So dudes, check it out. Some dipshit totally hit my car this morning while I was inside delivering the savory and delicious homemade cream cheeses that I make for my coffeeshop. Oh the folly! Oh the savagery and remorselessness of it all. This is the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of everything ever! WHHHHHhhyyyyy! No one has ever been as sad as I am right now. Look upon me and know that no matter who you are, wherever you are, your life is pretty fuckin sweet compared to mine. No wait, don't look at me, I am too pathetic and pitiable to be looked upon. YYyyarrrrg! Whhhyyy! Sweet oblivian, embrace me...

Okay. My mom said I should put some tape on it or something. I might. Well I probably will.

I had a very strange dream

2005-08-03T18:21:00.000-07:00

The other night I had a dream about Chieu Ha Do the other night. It was a very nice dream but very strange. It was like I was in Brooklyn again. I walked into their store, her and her husband's. The mood was restrained, but there were all of these people in the store buying groceries. They had so many things to buy there. The store was bigger. There were lots of wooden crates full of fresh vegetables and other produce, which they never sold at the store in my building. It wasn't a liquor and convenience store but a real grocery. I walked in and was looking at avocadoes, all of them were cut in half and very green. The shelf under it had these small boxes of a strange Vietnamese drink that I'd never had.

I approached the counter to pay for my things and she was there working behind the counter with her husband. I said, you look just like her. I thought you... She smiled and shook her head and said that she was her sister. I apologized and said that the store looked really nice and that it was nice to see it so full and then left.

...

In real life her husband was I think cleaning up the store the other night. One last time. I don't think he'll open the store up again. I wouldn't. It's really terrible to think that his wife died there in my building, in his store while he was working in the kitchen. It's horrible.

I guess I'm feeling like talking about it a little more, since other people have moved into my house. I plan to leave the city before I turn 25 which will be in May 2006. Brooklyn is a really beautiful place. So is Chicago (even though it is cold). I would really love to live in Europe but that connection hasn't made itself clear yet. I'm tired of the violence, conservativism, and poverty. I'm tired of feeling desperate. I've had to scam and be scammed so much. I'm exhausted.

The other day the store was robbed while Drue was working. She can't work nights anymore. Her nerves are shot.

I was changing my flat on Decatur by Canal at 3 am on a Saturday night after the Macrosick show. Some random guy, his name is Geoff and he is actually a very good person, offered to help me change my tire. I was a little nervous because I was wearing something scandalous, but he was telling me about how he was studying a master's in public administration and wanted to join the FBI or work for Homeland Security.

While this is happening a man gets out of his car, runs up Decatur and starts pushing and hitting this lady. She starts screaming and crying for help while he's dragging her toward the car. I tell him to stop it. He doesn't talk to me, but tells Geoff that he should change the fucking tire and mind his fucking business. I look at the tire iron next to me on the ground and think things I shouldn't think. I get up and say that I'm calling the cops. He leaves. I call a cab for her but she wanders off into the night.

Geoff tells me she was pregnant. I say, no way, I thought it was just a little belly. He says she told him 2 months.

It's been a little difficult for me to relate to others.

I suppose I was pretty close to beating a stranger with a tire iron the other night while accompanied by a future federal agent. Swell.

Sixtieth Birthday for Little Boy

2005-08-01T17:51:00.000-07:00

"However, I gave up my parents, who had gone far away to heaven... I always tell myself everybody loses his parents when he grows up. In my case I lost them earlier than the others." (written at age 12)

MACROSICK, le post show lo-down from the outside in

2005-07-31T18:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday night I played with Macrosick, actually as it turned out we weren't opening, but rather headlining at One Eyed Jacks.

I'm not sure how to describe it really. I mean that in a good way, not in an ug way. I suppose that I'll have to talk about it in terms of comparisons and in the vague language of sweeping generalizations. Describing the show that is. I used to be a music critic at the now defunct www.electronicmusicreviews.com... which has caused me to be somewhat suspect of the theoretical basis of music criticism. Not because we were rotten, but ultimately because I didn't want to make pronouncements about music that may not have been true to the band and were rather based on some superficial impressions combined with my own preconceptions.

I was intially nervous about playing the cello with them. I have this asshole thing that I tell everyone who asks me to play cello with their band which is something along the lines of you have to pay me and you have to organize the time and meeting place for rehearsals. It really works out, because really I only want to work with people who are serious about playing and won't rely on me to do something unrealistic with their songs. Anyway Jonathan Odom contacted me and after a while I think that everything worked out.

I don't know where my impression of the kids came from (probably from really poorly written reviews) but I was intitally intimidated. I tend to become really shy because I'm not so secure with my performance and technique especially with larger amplified groups.

I parked and walked walked walked to One Eyed Jacks. By the time I got there I'd probably bumped into 32 drunks with my cello. On my part the performance went well. Glorybee opened first. I think that they're in a transitional stage. I used to play their cd on my radio show on TUL. I like the tension between Dirk's Luther Vandross meets Eminem delivery and Nancy Bee's sugary sweet hyperactive playground child voice. It seemed like there was a lot of space to be filled in the songs, however their performance was frenetic and very entertaining. I look forward to see how they progress.

Here are the rumors I'd heard about them:
1. Filthy rich.
2. Millionaire former Christian rockers.
3. Super polished radio indie rockers vying for superstardom.
4. Funfetti cakes every Sunday.

It's very confounding. Every review I'd read of them would have some little jab about how much money they most have spent for the production, or how they must have funded it etc etc. I really don't understand what it is about critics that motivate them to say such odd things. I remember having conversations with Parker from World Leader Pretend about his band and their representation in print. It was completely ridiculous, comments about their pretty boy good looks and fashion sense, and really lazy and sometimes totally innacurate comparisons regarding their sound.

Anyway, lazy music criticism is completely irresponsible.

SO now to join the ranks of the lazy:

1. sophisticated visual element, reminiscent of early Eno/Roxy Music
2. bare post-punk instrumentation ornamented with almost Cocteau Twins-esque reverb
3. very poppy. Like a combination of post-punk, powerpop and new wave informed by more recent indie auteur types like Radiohead & Jeff Buckley.

I will not give it all away. But I think it went well, though their were some technical difficulties. I am very much of the wabi-sabi-- Honor thy mistake as thine hidden intention -- attitude and tend to think that errors can be gracefully danced around or somehow incorporated into the show. People tend to like mistakes, it simply depends on how you present them. I think that perhaps this is very rare... rather nerve wracking for other musicians (see also right awful El Radio show at Cafe Brazil and various responses).

Their was a very good crowd in attendence. Most of the audience consisted of people I'd never seen out before. It's very surprising to see people I don't know out. Serves me right for only going to weird accoustic combos/noise shows and abstract electronic acts. Enthusiastic. Girls were screaming I love you and I want to have your babies at Adam, which was weird...

I suppose it reminds me that music has many different surfaces and the there are so many facets of presentation that can accompany performance. Perhaps someday I will be able to predict and understand audience response. Until then practice.

This post is dedicated to

2005-07-29T16:46:00.000-07:00

the love of my last month ago who could not be bothered to call me back because he was busy loving the bottle.

Rhymes with...

(complains
explains
insane
in flames)

I thought, because perhaps I am too selfish, that I could impress. But distress! I did not try to seduce. I was only being honest and then

then I sang a song to him while he was digging a ditch in the dirt. I said, hey you! Man in the tattered tweed suit, you sweet boy you! I'm going to sing you a song with this here toy piano and he said okay but I'm gonna dig this ditch. Then I said, well I'm gonna sing it anyway (I'm so nervous, so nervous) and I sang:

If I was the Grand Canyon I'd echo everything that you say
but I'm not, I'm only me. Remember you loved me that way.

while he dug his ditch.

And then I said, would you go out on a date with me? Would you call me after work? And he said yes and kissed(!) me. And he said yes! that he would call me and that he felt very special to have a girl sing to him. And then I was excited to see fireworks later that night with him.

And then I waited for a call that never rang. I turned my phone off after a while. I watched fireworks exploding over the river.

The phone hadn't rung.
repeat repeat. He never bothered to call me back. Really he hasn't called me back since then. I even asked him out other times and he said yes, I'll call you, and then didn't. And then I thought

(...)

There is a woman sneezing

2005-07-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

in the reading room. I am convinced that she is faking it. She sneezed, it was a distinctly girly sneeze, I can tell you that. Dainty as a mouse's fart. Now she's blowing her nose. Actually it would be for the third time in a row now that she is blowing her nose. It sounds like an elephant sitting on a whoopie cushion.

Who is she sneezing for, that slut? Who exactly does she think she is, doing that in my library?

this post is dedicated to Thomas Bernhardt.

from Elfreide Jelinek's Nobel Lecture

2005-07-20T17:14:00.000-07:00

My language calls over to me,
over on the sidelines,
it likes best of all to call over to the sidelines,
it doesn’t have to take such careful aim,
but it doesn’t have to, because it always hits the target,
not by saying something or other, but by speaking with the “austerity of letting be”,
as Heidegger says about Trakl.

It calls me, language does,
today anyone can do it, because everyone
always carries their language around with them
in a small gadget,
so that they can speak,
why would they have learned it?,

so it calls me
where I am caught in the trap
and cry out
and thrash about, but no,
it’s not true,

my language isn’t calling,
it’s gone, too,
my language has gone from me,
that’s why it has to call,
it shouts in my ear, no matter out of which gadget,
a computer or a mobile phone,
a phone booth, from where it roars in my ear,
that there’s no point in saying something out loud,
it already does that anyway,

I should simply say
what it tells me;

because there would be even less point
in for once speaking what was on one’s mind to a dear person,
who has fallen down on the case and whom one can trust,
because he has fallen and won’t get up again so quickly,
in order to pursue one and,
yes, to chat a little.
There’s no point.

The words of my language
over there on the pleasant way

(I know it’s more pleasant than mine, which is actually no way at all, but I can’t see it clearly, but I know, that I too would like to be there), the words of my language have, therefore, in parting from me, immediately become a speaking out.

No, no talking it out with someone.
A speaking out.

It listens to itself speaking out, my language, it corrects itself,
because speaking can still be improved at any time;

yes, it can always be improved,
it is even entirely there to be improved
and then to make a new linguistic ruling,
but then only to be able immediately to overturn the rules again.

That will then be the new way to salvation,
of course I mean solution.

A quick fix.
Please, dear language,
don’t you for once want to listen first?

So that you learn something, so that you at last learn the rules of speaking ...

warning warning short story rough drafticus

2005-07-20T00:12:00.000-07:00

Owen lighted a cigarette thoughtfully.
“We’ve sort of been pitched together – a couple of lame dogs ---“
“There’s nothing of the lame dog about me,” the girl retorted. “Maybe I’ve struck a rough patch, but I’m neither down nor out.”
“Hard-boiled, aren’t you?”
“The hardest.”

Henry Holt, The Sinister Shadow. (14, 15)

Are you surrounded by things we cannot penetrate?
Is the cage you love the home you also hate?
Your fear of death attracts such strange objects
Smothering you, hiding you, don't let it spoil you
Show yourself so the others may see you
So the others may feed you
They want to be near you

Coil “Where Are You?”

The Diamond Man, the Glimmer Man

We approached the refinery on a mess of a boat. The waves kicked at the sides of the ship as if our vessel were a deflating ball on a ghetto playground. As if the lurching of the motor alone weren’t enough to make my insides fell as if they were being jerked about on the end of a line. I could see the refinery growing larger as we approached it. In the distance the lights glittered like broken glass on pavement, but the walls of the building were dark as ash. The building was massive, black, and sinister.

The Indian Ocean at night is not the most welcoming destination on earth. During the day its waters are mild, tepid, a beautiful shade of blue. The sort of color one associates with beach scenes on postcards, lush aquatic life, and tropical skies. Night offers us a completely different landscape. It is like an abandoned city here on the water. The moon offers us its lonely headlight and the sea pushes on and out. It resists us and seems to kick us out of its bed like an angry lover.

My cover: we are supposed to be a charter boat leased by an eccentric professorial type. Played by me in this particular scenario, though why an anthropologist would expose himself to the absurdity of charting a boat to a derelict oil refinery at three in the morning is beyond my comprehension. I don’t write the stories, I merely play in them. So that is my cover. My name is Talinn, it is not really but that is the name that I will be known by and the only name I can give.

I walked into my room, a modest double in an Autahyya vacation resort. My kit was there in the room, set out for me. It was only a matter of verifying my reservation and taking the key. I took the pill with a glug of tap water and from that moment on I was Dr. Kilroy, anthropologist on a field study in southeast Asia.

I hadn’t expected the woman at the bar. Maybe she was tangled up in a local syndicate, some wandering graduate student temping an accounting gig for the local resort mafioso. “Hey, mister, give my cigarette a light.” She turned and said to me confidently. Maybe she had identified me as a white European and I simply affirmed her worst suspicions. Her English perfectly Midwestern American, but her was hair long and black, and her skin as brown-golden as the locals’. She looked at me. She was young, beautiful, a little too stylish for the guests at this hidden local second rate gem, and unaccompanied.

“Umm, yes. One moment miss,” I said, stumbling in the way that I imagined older academic types do. I liked to play my roles a little thick, better to be safe that way. Her large eyes regarded me then without surprise, but with a knowing, the same knowing that I had of her. Our thoughts twinned each other: Who the hell are you? Are you after me, have I been found out? Who are you working for? Are you working for us or someone else? We were both silent then, our internal motivations disguised by practiced cool demeanors. She nodded and glanced up, then took her drink from the bar and walked back to her room slowly without looking back, though you could be sure I was watching her.

Meanwhile the original Dr. Kilroy was being held in an outback hut somewhere in the jungle being pumped full of relaxants and hallucinogens. He’ll be woken up in his room in a day or two in his hotel bed attended by a very pretty local nurse, and told all about his nightmares. Dr. Kilroy will see the bottles of local liquor piled in his room. The very pretty young nurse will tell him about his drunken behavior in the most convincing heavily accented English, such that the good doctor feel ashamed of the distress he caused to the staff and her in particular.

I was on the boat now, thinking of the small errand at hand and then the next nights activities. Really I was trying to push the event that had passed a week ago in my mobile unit in Black Mountain. Tonight, all I had to do was climb up the side of the refinery and receive a package which would then be delivered to an elderly woman in Uttardit, some two hundred miles north, four and a half hours by train by myself.

II.

I had been reading a novel, seated in the middle of a forest glen seemingly isolated. I had heard a twig snap behind me. I turned immediately and Skopje was standing behind me.

“Talinn, don’t worry. We’re safe here and you know it.”

“Sorry, I can’t simply turn of my response. You know.”

“I understand,” Skopje said. “I’m the same way.” She sat down next to me. I had met Skopje during an operation in Vienna. It was a medical convention. We were sent as the support team, information and research division. We would feed character and miscellaneous information into the ear peace of an actor in a high security situation, providing anecdotes pertinent and consistent to that character. If a diplomat had been seen back packing in upstate New York we would feed his actor stories rooted in time, place and weather to that moment. A hobbyist in question? We would feed recipes in to the actor, lines about a particular vintage and varietals, information about the native foods and drink of a region. Whatever a politic and rarified conversation demanded, we could construct and deliver all of the necessary facts.

Skopje was on the ball. Brilliant, a memory for key facts and articles. She could find the exact digital image to deliver to the actor’s renal index at a moment’s notice. Her mind was a catalog swift as a steel trap.

The second time we met we were paired as a foreign diplomat and young lover. We were seen walking down the street in Luxembourg; a paparrazi snapped photos of us, blurry and from a distance exiting a candy shop kissing. Our role had been merely to place them at one scene at a particular time. It was an unexpected vacation almost. Our role had been to play a happy couple meeting secretly. We watched a lot of DVD’s, had a lot of expensive food, and drank and made a mess like children. It was a thrilling role to play with her, and though we never touched I found her smell thrilling. It was the smell of her, of women, which I had gone a long time without. I kept a tangle of her chestnut brown hair in my wallet, even as I transferred to separate tasks, keeping that small piece of her by me.

“Talinn, I came here to collect your information. I know that I shouldn’t tell you, but they had to do it eventually and thought to send me.”

“Information?”

“Genetic.”

“They could just take it with a cheek swab, or a blood sample.”

“Yes, well this would be for something else.”

“For active or for the archive?”

“For the archive. They acted like it was for the archive.” I looked at her face. She was a little nervous, but her look was honest and sincere. She was excited to be with me. I was too: having a moment of intimacy was a rare delight.

“I’m not going to do it. I’ll hope you understand.” I said.

“You mean make love to me?” she said quizzically. It wasn’t as if she weren’t beautiful. I found her incredibly attractive and truthfully I loved her. I was closest to her among all that I was close to.

“Yes.”

“I have my own reasons for not wanting to but I’m interested in hearing yours.”

“I don’t want you to get pregnant, not by me. Can you think of the sort of life that child would have? Some sort of pedigree operative. I don’t want you to be little more than a vessel for my information. Actually I don’t know what I want anymore at all. I half imagine that I might settle down from this life, move somewhere far away, if that sort of thing is possible. We are unfree, for better and worse of it Skopje. There are certain things in your life that you want to belong only to you.”

“I understand.”

“How do you feel?”

“It’s not something I want to talk about very much. It’s complicated and all completely insincere. You wonder why life deals you the hand you’ve got.” She abruptly changed the topic while nervously passing her hand through the young grass. “What book are you reading?”

“Dickens. Great Expectations.”

III.

The climate control in the shopping mall made me feel as if my hands were made of ice. Where was he? I couldn’t find my contact. He wasn’t where he was supposed to have been. A half hour had passed already and I was beginning to think that something had gone wrong. Possibly terribly wrong.

The entire shopping mall was too new. The glass and chrome was gleaming as if it had just been polished. I was surrounded by shoppers. They were wondering around, as if intent to distract me, bumping into me and each other. I was beginning to feel crowded, claustrophobic and frustrated. Where was he?

I had to pick up the gems. It wasn’t so much for their value as stones, but rather the information etched into their side. The unique serial number inscribed on the stone and the accompanying “personalized” messages were of more value than the rather large stones that they were etched onto. The inscription would be polished off at a later point and the diamonds would be sold on the black market.

It had been almost an hour since I’d been scheduled to meet him. The plans had been totally botched. It was supposed to be a very simple exchange. My trigger words were “The diamond man, the glimmer man.” I would have identified him by an article of orange clothing, asked him for the time (three o’clock) and said the trigger words. He was missing. We’d have to do a lot of work to fix the situation, in terms of investigation and planning. In the end it meant a lot of work for me, not being able to get the gems now; a lot of future complications for my research and support team because of one failed brief and otherwise uncomplicated exchange.

I was walking around the mall aimlessly, deciding whether or not I should abandon any chance of meeting or stick it out a while longer. I saw her on the escalator in front of me. She looked not quite right: nervous, slightly panicky. The girl with the orange bob kept looking behind her and biting on her lip anxiously. Looking at her I could read her like a book. She was someone’s pony; somebody’s girl or a junky who’d run any desperate favor if promised another fix. Either way it looked as if she was coming down off of whatever nasty street drugs she’d taken to ensure the swap, beads of sweat were dripping off the back of her neck and her hands were fluttering everywhere. She’d probably intercepted my man before me, or gotten the gems off of him through trickery. It didn’t matter, really, since I was on to her and it would take me a matter of minutes to get the gems off of her. It was too crowded for me to pick her pocket or slice out the bottom of her purse. I’d have to find somewhere isolated to corner her. The girl with the orange bob was sweating through the back of her white mini-dress-- who knew how she’d react in pursuit?

As if my thought were a cue she turned and looked up toward me on the escalator, glanced at me for a moment then bolted. Her run was cartoonish and clumsy. I ran after her, down the escalator, pushing through shoulders and stepping on a few feet. She’d managed to run off the escalator and her shoes were pounding rhythms on the tiled floor. I ran after her, trying not to lose sight of her, having given up the notion of a subtle and straightforward exchange. Speed and efficiency were my priority. Spectators’ questions would be answered later.

I began to gain on her when she fell. Her white-sneakered feet slipped out from under her. The white purse she was holding slid on the tile, opening up, expelling its contents. Among the lipstick and change the gems shined out in the scattered rubbish. She clambered for the purse, but I could see the gems exactly on the tile and ran toward them. The girl was quick, still wired, but sloppy. I slid for them, hitting the mall floor with a thump while grabbing for the purse. She wrestled for the purse, trying to wrest it out of my hands. Chiefly I grabbed it for distraction as I slid the gems in my pocket, but any information it contained would be useful in the future. She would not give up on the purse, so I let it go and fled, discretely. She bolted in an opposite direction. I found a door and slipped into one of the mall’s storage hallways unnoticed.

IV.

I was early. I’d walked down the residential street with my tennis racket in hand. The set-up was ridiculously simple but non-sensical. I was disguised as a well-to-do tennis hobbyist, a woman in her mid-thirties, possibly older. The wig had begun sticking to my face and my press-on nails were coming unglued in the afternoon heat. He was sitting underneath a tree, presumably on lunch break. My contact was a construction worker, Chicano, mustachioed, wearing sunglasses and a hard hat. He would be eating lunch with two lunchboxes. I was to take only the one on the right. It wasn’t difficult, the exchange. I suppose that’s why I’d been sent in to disrupt it.

“Do you know the time?” The setup was so transparent. I was the one wearing a wristwatch, not him. He was to answer three-thirty though it was shortly after one. I would take the box and return to the car waiting for me up the block.

“It’s three-thirty m’am.”

“Great.” He handed me the lunch pail. The whole scenario was so poorly written. It struck me as both magnificent and farcical. I could barely contain my giggles.

“Thanks a lot mister.” I walked down the block. It was disturbingly easy dangerous stuff. The scrap of fading newspaper and articles would prove exceedingly valuable to our research department. Really the job was only a matter of timing. I’d worn the proper disguise and said the right words; it was almost as if I’d taken a walk-on role in an afternoon sitcom. The construction worker’s real contact had been delayed by my partner. I’d only had to step in and quickly replace whoever he was scheduled to meet. Their agency was hopelessly primitive and underdeveloped compared to ours. By some fluke they’d stumbled upon the documents we’d needed.

It didn’t take long for my thoughts to return to Talinn again. Bucharest told me that I should be careful on assignments with him. Someone had put a contract on him. He probably already knew about it, knowing him he wouldn’t care. Talinn would more or less forget about those sorts of things or shrug them off. He was buried in his work. Or so I thought. When he told me at Black Mountain that there were some things that only belonged to you, I thought I had understood. But later when I had thought about it again I realized that the only things that were truly mine, truly intact inside of me, were those times with him.

He had an eye for the job. I wonder if he thought of me, if he was thinking of me, on whatever mission he was on now. It was silly to think such things, since I had no way of ever knowing and the answer was, realistically, no. I kept my head on work. The missions had a definite beginning and end. The task could be completed and finished, and there is no joy like a task completed. I had the feeling that Talinn was obliterating some aspect of his personality in his work. Maybe it was the pills we took, the drug made me sensitive to his motivations and gave me an ability to read them on his face. In work he was obliterating some darkness, pushing out a part of himself that he didn’t want to acknowledge. That part, I could not see and spent nights trying to untangle.

We were professionals. It didn’t suit me to engage the thoughts playing about in my head, but I had to do so. I couldn’t put them to rest. In the end, I’d like to say that it was not because he rejected me. I would like to think that I could put emotions like jealousy and anger aside and continue with the job that I had been brought up to do. His response was tactful and forthright. It had very little to do with me. Really who knew what he felt about me. He was older and I had no insight as to how he had raised himself within the agency’s hierarchy. Intimacy was such a dear thing. I suppose that I wanted it, wanted him to say yes or to at least say something else in that glen then. It would have recognized a shared understanding between us. But he hadn’t and I hadn’t, so objects would remain obscure. My greatest fear was that there was nothing to uncover.

I opened the door with no doubts that the driver would quickly deliver me and the information I carried to our destination.

my building yesterday

2005-07-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

Gunman bursts into store on Magazine, kills grocer
He fired one shot, didn't take money
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
By Walt Philbin and Trymaine D. LeeStaff writers

A 46-year-old Magazine Street grocer was shot to death Tuesday afternoon by a man who entered the store cursing and then fired a single shot at her as she ran to the back of the business to warn her husband, police and family said.

Chieu Ha Do of Gretna didn't reach the kitchen where her husband, Nghia Huu Do, was working. Just seconds after hearing his wife's words of warning, he found her collapsed on the floor near the back of Jennie's Grocery in the 3700 block of Magazine Street on Tuesday shortly after 1:30 p.m.

With the gunman at large and nothing taken from the store, her death left police and family with more questions than answers.

Police said they hadn't determined whether robbery was the killer's motive, but that the gunman didn't make any demands for money as Do ran from the counter. After shooting the woman, the man left the store empty-handed, police said.

Late Tuesday, Nghia Huu Do, clad in a rumpled, half-buttoned shirt and bloodstained jeans, repeated his wife's last words as a relative translated for him.
"He has a gun! He has a gun!" Do said his wife screamed, moments before the bullet pierced the shop's plexiglass and killed his wife.

"We're still in a state of disbelief," said a daughter-in-law, translating for Do.
The grocery was the realization of a lifelong dream for the Dos. The couple came to the States from Vietnam in 1980.

Three years ago, they opened Jennie's. Nghia Huu Do said he always worked in the kitchen, while his wife worked the cash register. Their children helped when they could, he said.

"At times we were afraid," Do said about the possibility that they might be robbed. "But this was our business. This is how we made our money," he said.
There were no customers in the store when Chieu Ha Do was shot to death. With no warning, the gunman entered and "shouted some type of obscenities," New Orleans Police Department spokesman Sgt. Paul Accardo said. He then fired a single gunshot, police said.

A witness provided police with a clothing description, and a surveillance camera at a Magazine Street service station a block away captured a man police believe to be the killer walking up the street. The tape didn't capture the man's face, police said.

Tina Owen, a friend of the victim's, said she was helping the woman apply for a small-business loan from the federal government. Chieu Ha Do wanted to buy more equipment and inventory for her business, Owen said, adding that the victim was "a shy, hard-working person."

Owen said she knew something was wrong Tuesday when her phone calls to the woman went unanswered. Chieu Ha Do had just sent over the paperwork needed to apply to the Loyola Small Business Development Center for the loan.

"I called the store around 4 p.m. to tell her I had received the paperwork," Owen said Tuesday. But she didn't get an answer.

Residents and business owners alike were shaken after the slaying on the popular strip of Magazine.

"This is scary for all of the neighboring businesses," said Lyn Anderson, who works at Pastiche, a business a few doors down from Jennie's. "They were just trying to make a living. . . . It's just weird, we were never really afraid. And usually there would be 10 to 15 people hanging outside of the store, but yesterday there was nobody out there."

Michael Cartwright, an Uptown resident who frequents the store, said Chieu Ha Do will be missed. "I don't think there is a person around who can't identify with the grief that family must feel right now," Cartwright said. "You start out thinking it's going to be just another day, things are going to be normal and fine, and now they've lost their mother, their wife. What a tragedy."

. . . . . . .
Walt Philbin can be reached at wphilbin@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3302.
Trymaine D. Lee can be reached at tlee@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3301.

so to go, getting over it all.

2005-07-11T19:25:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Dennis passed without incident, well for New Orleans at least. I feel as if I've been engulfed with too much information in days late. Congestion and paranoia. I feel very uncomforted by the behavior of the news media. I've been subjected to it... I don't think that one should watch televised new. I think that there is an unhealthy strain of fear and tension peretuated in it.

Leila, long haired girl confidante, and I went for lunch at Benechin, meanwhile CNN was blasting in the background. It could have been a jackhammer, but it was silent. How is that news, when there is so much of it but only on the most superficial level; I'm referring of course to the new tickertape that scrolls at the bottom of the screen. It's as if the illusion of information is enough to satiate rather than actual articles and incidents being explained and clarified. I talked to Leila about crime and modern life and various other topics.

She is going to take the civil service test. I think she may have already taken it today, or will take it in the very near future. She has ambition to become a conservator, which was oddly something I considered briefly. Paper and manuscripts conservation and preservation being something I was introduced to in my custom framing fiascos/scams. I respect it, but solvents and paste pH's aren't up my alley. Archivist archivist archivist. We agreed to apply together though she has her eye on UT Austin and I want to go the cheap and less fantastical route at LSU, the combo MA History and MLS degree. I hope that I'll still be a rabble rouser after it all. You know, living in Baton Rouge. It is the terminal degree. TERMINAL. (commitment anxiety).

...

I was in the Women's Center at Tulane University, scoping out articles, a private place to work, etc. I had the opportunity to have a look at Bust and Bitch, two periodicals for the younger, politically informed modern ladies set. I felt a little weird. I think that Bitch, though staffed with excellent writers and keen minds, is very quick to call out, umm, thoughtcrime and tends to perhaps be overdogmatic at times and not really consider alternative feminist models of explanation in their cultural criticism. There was an article about Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls, essentially three female backup dancers that serve to enhance the consumer/materialist spectacle that accompanies popular "pop music" performance in early 21st century America.

Some highlights from the article:

They shadow her wherever she goes. They're on the cover of the album, they appear behind her on the red carpet, she even dedicates a track, "Harajuku Girls," to them. In interviews, they silently vogue in the background like living props; she, meanwhile, likes to pretend that they're not real but only a figment of her imagination. They're ever present in her videos and performances -- swabbing the deck aboard the pirate ship, squatting gangsta style in a high school gym while pumping their butts up and down, simpering behind fluttering hands or bowing to Stefani. That's right, bowing. Not even from the waist, but on the ground in a "we're not worthy, we're not worthy" pose. She's taken Tokyo hipsters, sucked them dry of all their street cred, and turned them into China dolls.

Note 1, from Ms. Lucifer Morningstar: Tokyo fashion culture has nothing to do with street cred in any Western understanding of it. The whole gothic/Lolita Harajuku scene is about high capitalist commodity fetish and costume play. There's no scrounging in thrift stores and wearing clothes you made last night out of pieces of carpet and safety pins. The larger part of Tokyo street fashion involves going to a boutique and throwing down a lot of money for flaboyant fashion.

Note 2: There's this thing called performance art. When people perform sometimes the roles they play are different from real life.

I guess what upset me most is that there wasn't very much consideration for these women as artists and performers. Yeah, they're totally tools of Warner Brother's or whatever bullshit marketing mega-conglomeration record label they're on, but first and foremost they're performers. Professional dancers and actresses performing roles. I think what's more interesting and worth scrutiny is not the performance but the reception of the performance and how the audience responds.

Um, okay now for the personal note. I'm Asian-American. I'm a performer. I'm a feminist. I'm a radical. My opinion... um, is it disgusting? Yes, but I feel like that the thoughtless celebration of consumer goods and hypercapitalism woven into every single No Doubt song is more offensive than some very pretty dancing girls. They're really a fabulous gimmick, the entire act is. And as I am learning it takes skill and patience to model/pose and prance around in videos. Is it overvalued? Hell yeah. But it's not the easiest thing in the world.

Whoa to the day that we consult pop stars as philosophers. When did rock and rollers get intellectual cred? It must be from all the bars and cocaine, and those long nights reading Sartre on the tour bus.

Here's nice Bjork quotes from an interview I read

Bust: Do you consider yourself a feminist?
Bjork: Umm...no.
Bust: Why not?
Bjork: Because I think it would isolate me. I think it's important to do positive stuff. It's more important to be asking than to be complaining.
Bust: So you feel the term "feminist" is equated with complaining?
Bjork: A lot, yes. You could probably call my mom a feminist, and I watched her isolate herself all her life from men, and therefore from society.
Bust: You believe she isolated herself from men because of feminism?
Bjork: Obviously I can't take her as an example of all feminists, but I find that for my generation, it's important to do things instead of just sitting there complaining that things are not right. It's important to collaborate with both males and females and to be positive.

Hurray for Bjork! Boo to those no good complaining feminists. Let's all just write popsongs! Maybe if I write enough popsongs about how pretty I feel today with boys writing very nice beats... and wear Prada in my next video then, yes, women in the regional South will have the same reproductive rights as men there. Wow maybe if Oval remixes this track then civil society will return to wartorn regions of the Africa! Super!

There is a lot to complain about Bjork. And sometimes you have to make a big ruckus for anyone to pay attention. Not to knock art, but self-expression is not the end all and be all of mankind. There are a lot of people in the world and sometimes we can lose track of that, especially if we're millionaire popstars, and sometimes people have to sit there and complain because there are a lot of people suffering.

hmm...
too long atom bomb.

Next up... Why I am a Feminist.

In entirity the nawf so far, okay?

2005-07-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend Hermione is dead, I think. I’ve made an exhaustive collection of notes. Taken small articles of her from her room, attempting to construct the relationship between her and her things. Anything that I could pull from them would leave me more satisfied than the three months of memories and the simple resolution that we were over. So I write in the cheap notebook I purchased from the corner store, as I take an extended vacation, or prolonged unexcused absence depending on how you see it, from the gallery that I work at. This is not the story of my life, but an attempt at a full biography and explanation of every moment that we spent together.

When I sit back and think about her, I’d like it to be a flood of images, something like a film or a dream. I’d like Hermione to be a place I can visit, somewhere I can be completely surrounded by every moment I’d been with her. I want her to be a world unto herself. If I could somehow capture every aspect of her simultaneously and call them into being for me at once I would be completely content. As it is, my memory fails me. It falters and trips at times. There were moments in our short relationship when I was certain she loved me. However at other times it’s very hard to remember the more specific details, the evidence that proves the bond we had to each other. There is the postcard she sent me from a short trip Pascagoula: “I am very muchly looking forward to seeing you again Rainer. I miss you.” The other side was decorated with an image of a pizza made out of rice crispies treats and fruit loops. I ask myself if she meant it, or if that was what one was expected to write to a lover while away on vacation. Often I resign myself to believe it means nothing at all, that the closing of this letter was an arbitrary whim written in the space of less than two minutes.
My memories of Hermione are not very clear. I remember her in flashes. I never see her entirely at once as I’d like. One can stand in front of a painting or piece of art and be swallowed by it. When I first saw the Friedrich exhibit at the Alte Nationalgalerie, during a short vacation after I made my Abitur at eighteen, I stood in front of The Sea of Ice following the angles of the ice floes that jutted from the water. The eeriness of the empty landscape seemed to accentuate the museum’s smell of dust and paint. An odd feeling of vertigo mixed with headache passed over me. When I looked at the painting I somehow lost myself in the peculiar loneliness of the sea. For a while afterward I researched Friedrich on my own. It became a kind of hobby figuring out the clues he left in his paintings. I think one can remember a painting or a photograph completely. I can close my eyes and recall the essential parts of the image: the composition, contrasts, and perhaps some of the less subtle aspects of light play. Art has always been a flat thing that I can pull before me. Even quite some time after seeing a piece, I remember an image very clearly. Hermione is much more difficult. It’s hard to remember exactly how she looked. Even when I was with her I would find myself surprised each time I saw her. Her face had specificity, a clarity and sharpness that I could never keep with me. The photos I have of her lack the strangeness of her presence. They seemed to reduce her being to a single expression. Photographs are not true to the moment. I fear, though, one day I will only have her photographs. Memories and photos will become the same when I forget her. It will happen eventually. Her smile in a snapshot will become the content of a happy memory as I forget the complex and melancholy details of the situation.

I remember clearest her most striking elements. Physically, Hermione was short, shorter than me, though she was not terribly short in terms of other women. Her head reached to my chest. I distinctly remember the way her head would knock against me when she hugged me. Her hairpins would occasionally poke through my shirt. I had to lean down to kiss her. She stood on her toes while slinging her arms around my neck. Her balance was drunk. She wasn’t terribly graceful, but she had an unconscious charm. That was what was so winning about her; her complete abandon and utter lack of concern for sophistication.

Her hair was red like a beet. She dyed it, but I never saw her dye it. Photographs fail to capture the way the sun shone on it. It was violet at times, but redder at others. She had bangs that were cut to lie flatly on her forehead. I would run my fingers through her hair in the morning when she leaned into me sleeping. Her hair smelled like fruit punch.
The soap she used always left her smelling vaguely sweet like almonds, or marzipan. After her showers she would sit on the bed on top of a towel waiting for her hair to dry. I often kissed her neck trying to find the source of her marzipan smell. It was much milder than her shampoo, but for some reason it did not fade like the scent of her hair would during the day. I would catch hints of almond on my sheets after she had slept over. It lingered on my sweaters after she wore them. There are times now when I think I catch it in some article of clothing, or on a pillowcase, but it is so faint that it might very well be some ghost of my imagination.

When we were in bed, while she slept, I would stare at her hands. Her arms were flung over her head like a dancer’s in mid-leap. Her hands would land over my pillow. The nails were uneven, rather dirty. They would twitch. I would kiss them, but she never felt it. Or at least she pretended to be asleep if she did. She looked rather strange when she slept. I do not think that she was particularly beautiful sleeping. I think she looked like some sort of animal like a cat or a puppy. I was always tempted to wake her up when I watched her sleep. Her foreignness in sleep disturbed me a little. I would kiss her cheek or stroke her arm. She would murmur something and open her eyes. Her eyes were bright green in between blue and gray, a yellowish ring encircled her pupils. When she opened her eyes in the morning I was always surprised by their intensity. The moment she opened her eyes in the morning she became immediate. It was as if a great distance had been traveled from where she was in sleep to waking next to me.

Before she died, we’d been arguing. It had been a week of terrible misunderstandings and confusion. Her accent got thicker when she was angry or nervous. She would say one thing; I would misinterpret it and respond perhaps more extremely than I should have. Hermione would ride off on her bike, pissed-off, usually saying she would call me when she felt like talking again. I became quiet. Our arguments would happen too quickly for me to sort out my words and feelings. Tension made me even more confused about what she expected me to do. I was never sure if she preferred yelling to silence, but I could never yell at her. Hermione would ride off somewhere, perhaps around the city or next to the river, very quickly. I was too proud and stupid to ever tell her that it hurt to see her leave angry. I would hide my crying as I walked home kicking cans, small stones, parking meters, lampposts, etc.

The content of the arguments is not very memorable. One of us would say something that would annoy the other; one of us would get upset. She would accuse me of being too proud. I would tell her that she shouldn’t be so judgmental. She would call me cold. I would tell her that she was sensitive only concerning her own emotions. The arguments were never about anything, but they were so powerful as to obliterate all of my other feelings for her. I was convinced that she forgot any fondness for me the moment we started an exchange. In these moments all of the closeness of a previous morning or evening was destroyed. Often it was as if we were completely different people in each moment. I’m not being extravagant when I say it was hell. The arguments made no difference at all to whatever it was that we had been talking about, but they made all the difference between us.

I remember our last argument very strongly. We had gone to bed upset in her apartment. She was not so angry that she couldn’t stand being with me, but she lay on the other side of the bed with her back facing toward me. Hermione woke earlier than I did, which happened very rarely. I heard the door slam in a dream and woke up alone several hours later to the familiar interior of her apartment. The wide bed we usually shared was cold that morning. My hand rested on the pillow where her head should have been. I knew that I’d upset her again somehow. I looked around for a note, but could not find one on the refrigerator. Leaving notes on the refrigerator door had been a habit we’d developed with each other. Both of us kept messy bedrooms. Hers was a hybrid of study and sleeping area. Bookshelves full of papers, books and notebooks lined the wall. Every writing surface had a pile of papers collecting on top of it. Finding a single note in the midst of all of her things was impossible. She’d given me an extra key a month before to feed her pet crawfish. Eventually we decided to give each other copies of our keys out of convenience. We alternated staying over every time one of us had a day off.

I pulled my clothes off of her floor and left her apartment around nine am. It was an unseasonably warm day for January. The sky was bright blue and white. I was too embarrassed to walk past the kitsch shops on Magazine Street and wait like an idiot for the city bus while an entire Saturday morning cavalcade of shoppers inspected me. I walked around aimlessly; staring at the pavement and wondering how long the ugly stretch of arguing we’d stumbled into would last. I cursed myself for having ruined another one of my mornings off. I would’ve liked to have gone to breakfast with her, or bought some rolls from the bakery down the street. We could have had some coffee that morning. If we had woken up and had coffee together, things would have worked out all right the rest of the day I think.

I stumbled past the glittering homes of the rich. Their shrubs were very well tended, but that didn’t prevent me from spitting on them. A dog barked. I remember my feet crushing the dry brown leaves on the sidewalks. I saw what I thought was one odd large bird, wounded and struggling on the sidewalk. I leaned in to see if I could help it, but two sparrows flew off in separate directions.

I had supposed that she wouldn’t call me at all that day. The ride home on the streetcar was rather typical. Eventually I sat in my room reading the Hawthorne novel that Hermione had lent me earlier that month. I left some messages on her answering machine and felt like a fool for doing even that much. She never bothered to answer my calls. I measured out the nights in tequila from the corner shop. A week later her friend Anja called and told me she had died Saturday morning buying pastries. Apparently it took some time for the police to contact her parents and friends. I hadn’t gone back to her apartment because I hadn’t wanted to bother her.

Diagram

From the information the hospital and her friends gave me I’ve managed to reconstruct the events:
1. Hermione buys croissants and puts them in her bike basket.
2. Hermione rides back toward her apartment.
3. Car A parks in front of bookstore on Magazine.
4. Hermione is still riding her bike down Magazine Street, where she lives, which is both riddled with potholes and is wide enough for only two mid-sized vehicles.
5. Truck B is some distance behind Hermione.
6. Car A opens driver side door without looking in side view mirror into Hermione’s path.
7. Hermione attempts to swerve out of the way, but she is too close to make it.
8. Hermione is thrown from her bike to the left, the direction her bike was steered toward in order to avoid collision with Car A, and hits her head upon impact with street.
9. Truck B applies brake, but does not come to rest until it has passed over Hermione’s neck and shoulder.
10. Hermione dies instantly.

When I learned she was dead, this may seem odd, but I wanted very much to hug her. I wanted to pull her up from the place of death and tell her that I was sorry that we’d been arguing so much recently, and that it was a terrible thing that had happened to us. What changes take place between a man and a woman to make us argue as we did? I wanted to hold her and tell her that she didn’t need to die, that sooner or later things would work out. That we would have gotten over whatever it was that was bothering us.
I somehow would not believe she was dead. Perhaps Anja was preparing another performance piece, some sort of audio instillation about death and playing tricks on dopes like me. I sat on my couch and looked out the window of my bedroom that provided an uninteresting view of a palm tree and the side of my neighbor’s house. I think about six hours later it dawned on me that I should call work and tell them that I wasn’t coming in. I don’t remember exactly what the content of the call was, but I think I managed to spit out something like, I’m not coming in today my girlfriend is dead. I don’t remember how I dealt with it exactly. It’s hard to recall the fine points of pain after it has passed, but I do remember crying, a call to my mother, and several long walks that ended nowhere in particular.

Eventually I found my way back to her apartment during my wandering. I stood in front of the iron gate wondering if I should enter, and under what pretext it would be appropriate for me to enter. Part of me wondered if her apartment was unchanged since the last moments we had seen each other, or if people had come in searching for evidence of some sort of misdeed. I wanted to see her room again, to smell the way her house smelled and somehow call on all the fond memories that had taken place here. I unlocked the door and stepped into her empty apartment.

It was exactly as it had been when I left. It felt strangely like all those times I’d come to check on her apartment and feed her fish while she was gone, except there was no expectation of her return, none of the happy expectation of seeing her again. Outside I heard the birds calling and the sound of cars on the road. These were familiar noises to me, I remember all those days that the birds calling each other would wake me up next to her and I would stare at her sleeping next to me.

What I did in her apartment is embarrassing for me to talk about. I sat in her bed and touched a hair on her pillow, one of her long red violet hairs that I would never see again. I fell into her pillow and tried to find her scent in it. I cried without reservation. I crawled under her covers and held her pillow tightly against me. It was terrible to know that she was gone, that she had stepped out the door and disappeared a week ago. At some point I fell asleep.

Folks, readers, my future self reading this later, if you exist I must apologize for starting things off on a sentimental note, but what else can one talk about, and how can one talk, after death? My telling of the events may put you off, but I must record the exact depth and intensity of these vulnerable and perhaps too personal moments in order for me to understand how and why I feel as I do now, a month after the events. I must be completely honest and say guiltily, that I did steal the soap from her shower as a memento of sorts. The soap, with its familiar soapy almondy smell is too dear for me to ever use now. Even as I write this very sentence I am aware of the soap’s weight against my leg. Though the habit is mysterious to me, it always ends up in my right pocket. It comforts me greatly, but I am vaguely uncomfortable that it may be symptomatic of an unhealthy attachment.

Boudreaux

Hermione told me once that Boudreaux was the most charming pet that she had ever had. It was very hard for me to understand how that could be true. He was a muddy brown and red crawfish, with large wiggling black eye stems. His body had some odd looking parasites on part of his shell. Anytime anyone other than Hermione came near him he would raise his claws at them and begin snapping them open and shut furiously while bubbles dribbled from his clacking mandibles.

Hermione had found him at a party around Mardi Gras in a crawfish boil. As she told it, she was standing next to a kiddy pool full of live crawfish drinking a PBR and talking to some guy she’d met about fast food technology when something in the pool caught her eye. Hermione walked away from the conversation toward the pool and saw Boudreaux. In an instant she knew there was something very particular about that crawfish. She pulled him from the pool and placed him in an empty beer cup. When she first told me the story, I laughed and asked her how much she had been drinking that night. She insisted that she had only had one beer that night. Oddly enough I believed her, since Boudreaux had never pinched her and seemed to act like a crazy animal around everyone but her.

She told me that at that moment she knew that she could never eat meat again, and looking at Boudreaux in his large glass bowl helped her solve personal problems. Hermione spoiled him completely. He ate well. As Hermione ate she would drop a small of amount her scraps into the bowl for him. Their diet consisted of shared pastas with cream sauces, fresh rolls, baby greens. She insisted that he was especially fond of fresh tropical fruit, though I never understood how a creature with a natural diet of swamp sludge could exhibit a specific fondness for mangoes and bananas.
Often she would tickle his sides. Boudreaux would lean into her fingers and roll around. See, look, he likes it, she would giggle as I stood some distance away. Other times Hermione would take him out of his bowl and let him crawl on the palms of her hands, or would play tug of war with him with a chopstick. I was ever jealous of the attention Hermione lavished on the disgusting creature, wishing she would tickle me instead.

I was aware of Boudreaux’s icy gaze returning mine as I stared into his crawfish castle. Hermione had constructed a monstrous and odd home for him on her kitchen table. His house was a huge glass mixing bowl occupied by a castle, a sunken ship, miniature treasure chest and a tiny plaster skeleton. The mixing bowl, she insisted, replicated Boudreaux’s swamp home. Looking at him while we ate our meals had always made me feel uneasy. Now that I had the long awaited opportunity to toss him out the window, flush him down the toilet, or boil him alive and eat him, I felt oddly attached to the swamp monster Hermione had spent so much time spoiling.

Boudreaux and I stood locked in a staring contest. The results were disappointing. I was still tired from my crying and too short nap. Boudreaux had no eyelids. I became dizzy, and still have trouble remembering what exactly occurred. It was something like hypnosis I imagine.

Please forgive your humble narrator for lapses in memory on such a serious occasion. I imagine that the news of her death had caused me a great deal of stress. Stress that might manifest itself in bodily pains, loss of appetite, a disturbance of sleeping patterns, and change in mood, and might also make itself known in visual or audio hallucination. That is how I account for my brief conversations with Boudreaux, why they occurred and how they occurred. Rather than simply dismissing myself as a madman and running from the house in terror I stayed to chat with him. I was too tired to think of any other option.

So we find ourselves alone together at last. The fact presents itself finally, you hate me and I hate you. Though our mutual animosity will put a strain on our conversations, I think that we can agree to behave according to the boundaries that Hermione established, out of mutual respect.” Boudreaux’s voice was husky and dry; it had the tone of a wise grandfather. It was stern and spoke with the authority of experience. The words were slow and clear, pronounced with confidence and determination. His voice had the very real quality of speech, however I am now certain that we were communicating telepathically. I had no idea how to respond, or if it was appropriate for me to ignore the voice in my head hoping for it to disappear.

“I expected you to be shocked, seeing as you never struck me as terribly bright in your conversations with Hermione. She was much too good for you, by the way, but no doubt you had the same prejudices regarding her fondness for me.” He paused thoughtfully, “Tell me Rainer, are you familiar with the transmigration of the soul? I’m speaking of that esoteric notion often associated with Hindoo and Eastern philosophies. Though Hermione often entertained me with conversation, I have been greatly isolated from the auspices of human conversation and the society of man for too long I fear. I no longer know the philosophical spirit of the times. She was quite familiar with the concept which explains my current, unenviable state of affairs.”

I nodded, and stuttered my response in German mixed with English as the crawfish continued his self-important lecture. “Through no fault of my own, after my death I found my spirit inhabiting the body of a small crustacean. It is no doubt a strange destiny, to be trapped in this dirty and inappropriate shell, watching the mundane sequence of events that constitute human life pass before me like a play performed by my mistress.” Boudreaux coughed dryly. “One achieves an odd state of removal, separated as I am from the authenticity of human interaction. But by no means do I mean disrespect: I was singularly touched by Hermione’s company.”

“Watching her rise from bed, like primitive Venus, naked, hair wild, was a ne’er thought achievable life moment for me at one time. I was studying philosophy at Bowdoin, with an interest in pursuing law, too occupied with my scholarship to be interrupted with personal relationships. In life my name was Phineas T. Bradshaw, it feels so odd to pronounce the name that was once so ingrained in my existence. Slated to graduate into 1825, during an ill-fated walk in the Maine woods I was struck by lightning while seeking shelter under a near-by fir tree.”

He paused thoughtfully, and hesitatingly whispered, “I died deprived of the more gentle aspects of the fair sex, being exceedingly shy and inexperienced in their company. At which point I must express how marvelous it was to watch the two of you freely make sport with your bodies with almost daily regularity. The oriental and creative positions, kneeling on the divan, sprawled over the kitchen chair, leaning against the bookshelves. Frankly amazing… I must confess that often I would imagine myself in your place as you made love to Hermione. But what woman would ever be with a crawfish…? None, certainly.”

The conversation grew increasingly more uncomfortable as he ceaselessly recited the details of his long gone life, the limitations of his current embodiment and lovingly recollecting the particulars of my “white hot” nights with Hermione. I had been looking forward to some quiet time in her apartment, sorting out my thoughts, taking back some of the things I had leant her, saving personal items from the trash heap. The crawfish continued talking without any deference to whether I was paying attention or not. Flushing him down the toilet, despite his amazing powers of communication became a greater temptation as his rambling monologue showed no signs of fatigue.

“What a curious position I found myself in, one could hardly believe…”
“Shut up,” I stuttered.

“Yes, Rainer.” He muttered. “Predictable, I see how you power over me becomes readily apparent…”

“No, you don’t understand. I need you to be quiet. Nothing is easy to understand now. Of course being trapped in a crustacean body is a difficult place to occupy. So yes,” I was talking non-sense. It was hard for me to think of a response to Boudreaux’s invasive, yet incredibly articulate and polite, line of conversation. I felt bad for him. Obviously being stuck in a crawfish shell was humiliating. I would have readily discussed all of the complications and the tragedy of his situation if he hadn’t been such a jerk. Cutting him off mid-sentence was not kind of me, but I had no idea how to stop his awful talking.

I think that at some time or another we’ve all had fantasies about stopping time and traveling in reverse through it, to an earlier more pristine state. While we inevitably dismiss them as immature and fantastical sentiments, I constantly find myself wishing that I could travel back in time before the conversation with Boudreaux. If anything clearly designated mental illness or tragedy, it was my conversations with Boudreaux. I am of the opinion that normal people do not speak with crawfish. Quite frequently, to my own dismay, I engage in conversations with my briny friend, most end in bitter arguments. This was the first example of such, perhaps one of the more mild ones.
I don’t know what to do with the information Boudreaux gives me. He admits, quite regularly, that self-preservation is his foremost motivation. Therefore, it will always be to his advantage to lie to me, or deceive me with colorful and self-aggrandizing stories of his youth. Our conversations lead to mutual annoyance, hatred, and the basest shows of frustration. I have threatened to boil him more than once and regularly imprison him in the refrigerator for the sake of a moment of quiet introspection. I’m not sure if he plays games with me, or genuinely believes that we share a connection that transcends the immediate situation.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper, I’ve been under a great deal of stress since she died,” I admitted to the air and the crawfish.

“So you actually believe that she is dead then?” he asked with an audible sneer in his voice. His question had a terrible force, an impact like a ton of bricks crashing into my solar plexus. The tone of his voice was defiant and proud. Hermione was dead to me, though I had not seen the body nor spoken with the police. Boudreaux’s question disturbed me, yet renewed a sense of hope within me. Hermione alive and well, Rainer the victim of a simple misunderstanding regarding the circumstances of a very serious, but non-lethal car accident!

I could envision it, Rainer the dashing gent kneeling at her bedside with a bouquet of red roses, petals smooth as velvet. Hermione, bound-up in a cast barely conscious, muttering my name in her coma/fever dreams. I, dashing Rainer looking Valentino-esque, swearing my love to her forever, and awakening her with passionate kiss.

“You’re a fool Rainer,” Boudreaux said. My fantasies were interrupted by the crawfish’s crusty voice. “You were so blindly infatuated with her that you never stopped to notice that she had begun to loathe your very essence. Your arguments were ludicrous. You obviously did not respect her art, or her friends. She was ashamed of you, ashamed that you throw yourself to her with a total lack of self-analysis. Saying that you loved her without taking the time to know her.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked uncertain of his remarks.

“You are an idiot Rainer. I will never be able to make the truth clear to you; you’re obsessed with controlling a situation you never had control of in the first place.”
Shortly following his remarks, I placed Boudreaux, crawfish castle and all, in the refrigerator very carefully. Having no intention of harming him, I made sure to sprinkle a few pieces of lettuce in his bowl, before I stuffed him in the crisper.

Diagram #2

Hermione plans to leave me, discussing options with her friends and Boudreaux.
Hermione synthesizes an argument with me, and then leaves the house the next morning at an early hour in order to disappear/avoid conflict.
Hermione stays with a friend, either in town or out of state, until I commit suicide/forget about her.
Dressed in their best clothing, they all drink wine and laugh during my funeral.

The probability of diagram number two having truth value seems a stretch to me. I’m not sure that Hermione would orchestrate such a bizarre plan to avoid me. It would have been simpler put the phone off the hook, or have one of her friends tell me that she didn’t want to see me any more if she was thoroughly interested in avoiding me forever. However Boudreaux’s uncannily specific knowledge of our conflicts haunted me. I had never properly understood Hermione’s art, her life ambitions, or her obnoxious artsy friends. I could not be completely certain that I was not a victim of her aesthetic sensibilities.

Art and life were one entity, she always claimed. One had to think artistically, constantly questioning acts and speech, looking for the structures of power, sexism, and the political agendas that lay underneath the surfaces of everyday interaction. I never understood what she meant; though I would attentively listen to her explain the theories and philosophies that captivated her. It was difficult to concentrate; I would space-out quite frequently and find myself paying more attention to the cadences of her voice than her examination of French philosophers and American cinema.

Her draftsmanship was concise. Her ink and pencil work was crisp and clean. She worked with oils occasionally, and her control of the media as well as her sense of color impressed me greatly. In terms of craft, I can say without personal bias that her work was magnificent. She would sketch as a hobby, a way to relax after work and keep her hands busy while drinking and listening to the radio. I envied her abilities and often told her so. She would laugh and shrug, sipping more wine as free jazz blared in the background.
Hermione was not a photographer, nor was she a cinematographer. She had not received any specific literary training while at the university. It disturbed me that she dedicated herself to art that did not exhibit the purest aspects of her talent. I was not sure what to make of her various creative projects, which ranged from mundane and easily accomplished to expensive, time-consuming and bizarre. She finished them after a great deal of work and complaining, according to her self imposed schedules and deadlines, seldom ever late. Before she died, Hermione had been in the process of completing several action pieces. She had written an instruction manual and “acts” on small squares of brown paper grocery bag. Her plan was bind them into a book, then perform them in an instillation at a local gallery over a period of several weeks. She never bound them. I haven’t been able to locate the complete text since her death. I wonder if she took it with her the day she disappeared, or left it at a friend’s house. They seemed clinical. I experienced a sense of violation reading scripts and anger with her for making strangers the victims of her ideology. The scripts had a taste for deceit and sadism that I found inconsistent with her sweetness.

A Script for Action Number Sixty-Two

Construct a box, or use an old shoe box. Condition it to show signs of age and wear.
Fill the box with smooth stones, dried leaves or flowers, twigs, or shiny pieces of glass. Any objects will do, however they must evoke a sense of place.
Place a photograph of a couple in the box after obscuring the face of one of the subjects, or damaging the photograph in a visible manner. One may also choose to place strands of hair, fingernail clippings, or wisps of cloth in the box.
Give the box to a stranger after pretending to have happened upon it in a public place. Watch and document reactions.

Hermione’s apartment holds secrets, too many to investigate in an unmethodical manner. Her single-bedroom apartment is laid out in manner similar to the shotgun duplex I live in, except that hers shares a wall with the supply room of a drapery store that faces the street (DIAGRAM/FLOOR PLAN). The space cost her approximately five hundred dollars a month, slightly less than my apartment. I am not completely sure how she could afford living there, though I suppose that she saved money somehow. Hermione worked as a waitress at the Rorotorium, an odd café under the Mississippi River Bridge that kept irregular hours, usually opening sometime after nine pm. Her tips must have made up for her part-time hours.

The parlor, adjacent to the kitchen, contains her dinner table (red) and six mismatched chairs. The walls are decorated with her sketches, her friends’ drawings, and unfinished bits of stories. She had a profound interest for found objects and handwritten or homemade flyers, such that an entire wall was reserved for hanging the things that Hermione and her friends had found in the city. Her taste often puzzled me, especially concerning the papers she rescued from the kiosks, electrical poles, and bus stops around the city. The ephemera ranged from ads looking for roommates and lost dog signs to handwritten plays and children’s drawings on the backs of placemats.

I grabbed the flyer off of her wall. It was slightly smaller than a postcard. One side had an ink drawing of three hands and an orange printed on it. The etching evinced an eye for detail, the fingers tapered and lengthened around the ruddy surface of the orange and descended into tarry blackness. It was an advertisement for the show where we had first met.

December 6 – February 4, 2k.
Pop Surrealism
Opening Reception
Saturday, December 6, 6 – 9 pm.

Born 197x, in Belfonte, Pennsylvania; lives and works in New Orleans.

It was a group exhibit. The CAC was down the street from my gallery on Julia Street. Marry McGee and Yoshitomo Nara had been getting a lot of coverage in the usual glossy New York art journals. I had never really identified with the mix of cartoon and fine art, they weren’t particularly to my taste though it seemed like the next urban art phenomena. Anyway, I had to go to represent the gallery.

Hermione’s pieces were seemingly literal translations of the show’s theme. Three pieces were on display: a video and sound piece, a sculpture, and a large mixed media piece. Her work occupied the entire first floor. The pamphlet from the show explained that the work was from her Night Songs for the So-Called Space Age series, a greater attempt to mix the visual arts with pop music and youth culture.

I’d come into the show early, at six exactly. People were seldom punctual, typically the gallery set came in an hour later. The busy nerves of the CAC’s attendants buzzed around the bar and caterers. I slipped through the heavy glass and steel doors without notice. I appeared to be the first guest.

The more I look
The more I see
The more I feel

Hermione Rosenwinkel.
Justin Wilke, videographer. 200x

After snagging a bench on my pant leg, cursing myself and tripping in the dark, I sat down on a plastic bench as a motion sensor in the wall sent the video into cue.
The wall was flooded with the black and white image of a young woman’s face submerged in water. Her hair was dark, floating upward in the water and bobbing in some invisible current. Eyes closed as if sleeping. There was no change in her expression. It was unclear if she was asleep, holding her breath, or dead.

The room had been quiet when I entered it, but I became aware of the sound of water lapping at a very low pitch, very gently. The waves had a murky, soft sound that shifted into muted piano noises. On the screen a cloud of dark inky liquid snaked slowly through the water. The piano loop was still barely audible; old honky-tonk and out of tune but at the same time baroque. Minor thirds I think. The cloud over the woman’s face clouded over her face in a dense darkness almost like smoke. In the film’s last moments a voice whispered, in a controlled and almost monotone voice:

Come here, kiss me now,
Come here kiss me now.
Come here, touch me, kiss me,
Touch me now, touch me, touch me.

The dark cloud had completely engulfed her face. The video had faded into black, until I too was surrounded by the darkness.

As I got out of the bench and turned to leave I bumped into a small person in the dark. It took me some time to realize that the video had finished and, indeed, someone had been standing behind me asking a question.

Did you like it? I think you’re the first to see it tonight.”

“Blargh wah! Ahh. Sorry I didn’t see you. Sorry.” Brilliant first words, I know.
“Yeah. It’s dark, sorry.” She flipped a switch on the wall. The lights came on and I was staring into the opened eyes of the face from the video. Her face was heart-shaped, dark red bob framing her pointed cat-like chin. She was wearing an odd dress, white, it looked like it was made of feathers and it was covered with gigantic red cloth flowers.
“Oh I was a little confused. Same voice, you know,” She laughed at my comment. She was always laughing. “Yes. Very mysterious. I haven’t seen the rest of the project. I mean the greater context. I don’t know her work very well.”

“Oh, her? Hermione?” She cocked an eyebrow.

“I haven’t listened to Depeche Mode in a while either which doesn’t help I think. One of my high school friends had a copy of Violator. I think I’d dubbed a tape of it. I used to go to industrial clubs when I was younger. I suppose that’s where I place Depeche Mode, I guess. I didn’t properly understand the lyrics, but the synths were very catchy.” She laughed then too.

I wonder if she was nervous then, that time when we first met, pretending not to be herself, not admitting out right that she was more than a model in her own video. Was her laughter excitement about her first show, or as she laughing at me? I know that later she would agonize over her pieces; I would see her mood suddenly shift from pleasant to strained talking about her work with me and her friends. Hermione was never satisfied, or perhaps more correctly, she was always dissatisfied with herself.

I never understood how she could be so confident with others, but so insecure in her abilities. I would see her cry and sulk if she thought she’d been snubbed in a review, and become completely enraged if she heard someone make a flippant remark about her performance art while sitting in her café. This first conversation was so like but unlike her at the same time: cocky, self-deprecating, and ironic. There was sadness behind her weird humor. Her laughter halted a little too quickly, became quiet while her eyes struggled to escape my gaze.

“I liked them a lot when I was the same age. At the time I thought the lyrics were very deep stuff, emotional. Of course it never struck me as odd that they sang so many songs about fifteen year old girls. I thought it was a personal touch at the time.
“I’m a bit tired of them now. I had to listen to their songs so many times. Over and over again.”

As we spoke people trickled through the CAC’s doors. The galleries outside began to hum with conversation, punctuated by the occasional obnoxious laugh. Why were people always laughing at gallery openings? Always that single loud self-satisfied laugh. Meanwhile, Hermione having not yet introduced herself to me, suggested we get a drink at the bar.

“I should put the light out. I think if I stay here all night I’ll get paranoid seeing my giant head in the water. They have a really large space upstairs. I thought there would be more instillations. I guess I’m the show’s token video artist,” she said with a laugh as she turned out the light. “It seems like every museum has only one video installed at a time.”

“I’m more familiar with the similar large black painting phenomena.”

“Yeah, I think it’s a more modern version of the black painting. Or more post-modern maybe. I don’t know. I like them though, but I always wonder if you gathered them all up, if you could have some kinda all giant black canvas museum. Maybe you could wear all black and it would be like camouflage. If it were in New York you’d be constantly accidentally bumping into people trying to get a closer look at the canvases.” She grabbed a plastic cup of some pink bubbling stuff for me and herself.
“What is this exactly?” I asked.

“Pink Zinf.”

“Pink Sniff?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

A crowd had gathered in the main gallery. People were chattering about a thousand things, vacations, spouses’ passport status, and exhibitions on the coast. I saw my gallery director across the room in Donna Karan black talking with her husband.
“I suppose we should both mingle some. I don’t want to be rude.” She said with some discomfort as she wiped her nose.

“I have to do the same for my gallery.” I paused, “Is your name Hermione then?”

“Yes, that’s me stranger.”
“I’m Rainer. I work at Elizabeth’s gallery. Sufjan Pedersen.”

She shook my hand and walked into the crowd. I should’ve gotten her phone number, or suggested that we get together soon. Only later would I realize that so much of our future meetings would be entirely owed to chance meetings that were the result of Hermione’s cleverness.

I think of the blackness now, the casual dismissive comment about modernist painting that meant nothing, just a cheap joke at the expense of a sentiment too complicated to articulate. As I look back on it our pretension was a reaction to our mutual discomfort.

So we laughed and made jokes about nothing at all then. I wonder if it could’ve another way. Did the conversation determine the making light of all things dear to us? Was our interaction a series of self-conscious admissions veiled in irony, could it have been more than that if we tried for truth – to somehow reach out her essence rather than commit myself to the choreography of loathing, self-deprecation, and an endless stream of word plays, insults and veiled truths?

The blackness that crept like slow fog and coiled around her head like a serpent, did the blackness rise from her? Was it that stuff that crawls under our beds at night just before we go to sleep? Was it the darkness of death in us, the haunting shroud of her mortality, our own mortality? The ether of thought swamping around our minds?

Or was she dead already, wasn’t that the point, that we were all dead parcels that maintained the illusions of life and being – had we been symbolically paralyzed by our own finiteness?

What did she mean—what did her art mean? I would ask her at times, late at night as we lay in bed talking:

I like to think about it in themes. I try not to think about it as a literal translation. I organize the motifs and symbols in my head. It’s like going for a ride to the supermarket but ending up on the other side of town looking at the river. Not ending up where you thought you would but liking it. Finding it strange but familiar.

I would listen half asleep, never quite understanding her answers, or if they were even answers. She scoffed at other people’s self-importance, but at the same time there was an undercurrent of seriousness that belied the pop. Thinking on blackness one encountered only the unresponsive darkness. I find myself, the sound of my own breathing and the answerless void.

A Script for Action #31
The Adding and Subtracting Game

Locate a subject, preferably a casual acquaintance.
Add a gift or letter, content undetermined.
Note reactions. This requires the subject to be followed. May require a group effort for surveillance. The level of surveillance may vary in intensity from mild to obsessive.
Subtract, take something, whether it be obviously sentimental, dear, cheap or expensive. The material value of the subject must not over-determine the value of the object taken. Ideally a letter, notebook, phone or address book, novel or favored article of clothing.
Note response. Be careful not to be caught.
Add. Return object to subject, claiming to have found it.
Continue the game, either adding or subtracting with discretion.

Herm, who were the games for? Were these ever acted upon or were they waiting to be made real? Did you play the game with me ever?

An Excerpt from Hermione’s Diary

Thirteen. I was leaving France. I don’t remember it but do remember it well, feeling dejected. Pop had decided that it would be more profitable for him to act as a consultant in America, or at least that was the reason he had given at the time. Pop had taken his new wife, my new mom, really just Charlene, to visit our village. She never really formally lived with us-- however she stayed over for short bursts quite frequently. Just on holidays and summers, as evidenced by the ever-present supply of Veuve Cliquot in the cellar and the used orange juicer on the table August-long.

I suppose that the incident had escaped me until recently. I was waiting for Sybil at the bus stop when I saw the fur shop and the graffiti dripping from its window. Giant red X’s were spray painted across the windows like dripping bloody crosses.

I remember I had seen the bruises on Orianne’s hips, ass and shoulders those few days after the spring holiday. She was a quiet little thing. Small and blond like a tiny doll, very quiet, very shy, and she would talk to me when we ran in the woods around the convent. I knew she hadn’t had a fall, that she hadn’t ever been with any of the boys in town. I knew her father had done it to her. She’d never liked him. It clicked together in my head. I’d never liked the way he grabbed her arm when they were together. It was like the touch, seeing it, had told me the entire story.

Mr. Michelbach was the furrier. What an appropriate profession, selling the skins of all those little animals to other stronger animals that could afford to have someone else do their dirty work. I held it in me until the winter holiday. I remember that it was cold out, but I hadn’t worn a thick jacket.
I had the bucket of paint and a bucket of stones. The paint was white not red. It was snowing.

I don’t remember how it sounded, the glass breaking. Or if it was very fast or very slow. The furs were white and syrupy looking afterward. I’d filled the linings with rocks and sand.

As I left, I could here the alarm sound. When I got home I crawled under the covers and had a good night’s sleep.
Later I read the newspaper reports with surprise. The snow covered up my tracks. Some Arab boys got blamed for it later. Typical.

Yesterday afternoon Ronika rang my buzzer. I answered the door in some awful pants that I’d been wearing for the past three days and an old t-shirt. Baseball bat leaned over my shoulder.

“Herr Rainer I wanna go to the store,” she said in a voice between whining and commanding, in the sort of voice only a thirteen year old could possess.

“Yeah, let’s go.” I found myself pulled away from the writing desk, from the notes I’d gathered and the polaroids I’d glued to the wall.

“Hey Rayyy—ner c’mon.” She was insistent. “Nice shoes,” she said. I’d put on a brown and a black. “The dirty porno beard has got to go. That’s just nasty.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Thank you, comments noted.”

“Are you living like a caveman now? You’re like a vampire. Maybe your people are always pale, huh?”

“Ha-ha Ronika.” So I endured her insults as I grabbed my keys. I was tired and slightly wobbly. I wondered if there was a way I could avoid going out with her. Some excuse I could find to crawl back in bed at four in the afternoon on a Wednesday. I put the bat back into the umbrella stand.

“You know you gotta stop doing that.”

“What?”

“Answering the door with a baseball bat. People are gonna think you’re crazy.”

The Wednesday afternoon habit, where Ronika would come over and make fun of my clothing, make me buy her junk food and would open my beer and never finish drinking it, began one week after I had moved in. Feeling somewhat out of place I brought over a Käseküchen, something from a box of mix that my mother had sent me from home, shortly afterward Ronika came over Wednesday afternoons after school. Her mother insisted that I would be a good influence and teacher her about foreign cultures. Since that time I have become a babysitter/tutor for the bubblegum popping New Orleans public middle school student, attracting a number of unpleasant looks when we walked together in the neighborhood.

On more than one occasion walking together, I’d be wearing the bedraggled thrift store suit that I wore to work while Ronika wore her two sizes too small school uniform. The kids that saw us would point and call out at us, calling me her sugar daddy business man, calling her bunny bread. I had no idea what any of it meant until she told me. Ronika let loose a stream of foul insults and shut them up instantly. The adults gave us an odd mixture of icy glares and, disturbingly, knowing winks.

“Rainer I want olives.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“The good ones, from Langenstein’s.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll show you, okay.”

The olives were imported from Spain. The pits were stuffed with almond. They swam in garlic brine, flavored with French herbs. Moments after I bought them for her Ronika popped the top and inverted the jar, draining the liquid onto the frying afternoon pavement.

“Are you sure you don’t want some water?”

“No way.” She continued smacking on olives, eventually finishing the entire jar before we got home. Typically she’d ask me questions about living abroad versus at home, girl-boy problems, and other questions that I usually didn’t have the answers to. Generally she’d play it cool, pulling flowers off plants or ripping the grass out of someone’s lawn, then she’d slip one of her famous questions into the conversation. I’d fumble, and come up with some ridiculous response, pretending to be confident.

“Why are you wearing that baseball cap, it’s weird. Not like you.”

It was Hermione’s. “Yeah, yeah. You have some sort of problem with the Cubs? They try hard.”

“I don’t know. Your clothes seem weirder that usual.”

“I haven’t been doing my laundry.”

“Your girlfriend dump you?”

“Something like that.”

“Are you depressed or something?”

“Sometimes I get like that.” Green olives. Shreds of them fell from between her lips, onto the sidewalk, onto her shoes. She was talking with her mouth full. It didn’t bother me, not so much as her mother. We were casual. I was quiet.

“Yeah. I guess that’s like that. When Ariyell found out Tim Simmons was going with Dauphine she pretended not to like him, but you could tell that she did. That she liked him even though she said he looked like a frog and his nose was too big, but she was always talking about him anyway.” She looked at me. “You could tell me about it if it made you feel better. But I guess guys are different, huh?”

Guys are different. Maybe I should have told Ronika, but I hadn’t planned to have this conversation with her. In fact, I had no reason to bore or confound her with the weird secrets of adult romances. Who was I to burden her with my rambling? I didn’t presume to be interesting, but some part of me wanted to tell her, to lay my story out before her and hear her naïve advice. There was something so wholesome about our lazy chats, her seriousness and the manner in which she maintained the professional interview quality of our walks, her grudging belief that I had ever been like her or her age. I wanted the comfort of confession but hesitated.

“Yeah, I guess we should get something to drink. It’s hot.”

“I found that on the Champs-Elysee the last time I went to Paris. The visit was pretty bad, but I think there’s something really special about the poster. Every time I see it, I feel more cheerful. I can’t help but laugh.”

Framed with bar napkins and obscene doodles, there, pasted to her kitchen wall, was a poster of the Eiffel Tower covered with street graffiti. The poster itself looked like a reproduction from the files of a historical archive, but instead the tower had been made to gush liquid into a gigantic and poorly drawn, very hairy, vagina.

I remember that first visit to her house. It was a Wednesday. I was waiting for the bus just after work when she whizzed past on her bicycle. I was leaning against a trashcan reading a manual about painting restoration, solvents and technique. She rode back, sheepishly. Somehow after a few minutes of chit-chat she had already gotten me to agree to walk home with her for an hour in the June sun to have tea and cookies at her place. I’d wanted to take the bus; it seemed too impossibly hot to walk home in the afternoon sun. In reality it was. I feel as if a sort of haze had poured over me, and subsequently the memories themselves had taken on a dreamlike filter.

She rode by and rang her bike bell at me. I’m not sure if this is absolutely true, but I do seem to remember her emitting a wolf whistle in my general direction. After a few minutes of talking she had invited me over to her house for tea, proposing that we drink the tea that she had stashed in a plastic bag in her bike basket. I suspected something.
“It’s rather special,” she said with a smirk.

“Why?”

“Because it costs $180 a pound. Some random customer at the Roratorium gave it to me. I guess he thought I liked teas because I would recommend him different sorts.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you like teas?” I asked.

“Not particularly,” she said after some hesitation.

I can’t remember if her tea tasted good or bad. We drank it unsweetened. She had bought a gallon of spring water from the corner store. The leaves were loose and green. After the tea had steeped for five minutes the leaves looked like dandelion greens, or some sort of undersea foliage. Hermione declared it to be totally extraordinary. I was distracted by the bits of stem and leaves adhering to the sides of my teacup and occasionally my lips.

Her kitchen was a mess. She seemed completely unselfconscious about having me there, though to this day I’m not sure why. It seemed like after she learned how clean I kept my apartment, she became ashamed of her house. The cookies had been sitting on a plate on her table, really I can’t be sure how long. We ate a mixture of shortbreads and lemon tarts, she apologized for their staleness, but we both ate a large quantity of them gleefully.

Of course she had given me a tour of her house, my first tour of the house. It remained largely unchanged. At the time I had thought it was a bit cramped. Her kitchen had counters butting out of every corner. Some were covered with scraps of desiccated slivers of vegetable, crumbs and coffee rings. The table had a net of rings faded onto its dark uneven surface. A largish counter ran from next to her refrigerator to the opposite wall. She had constructed the table, her work bench from a door she had found in the trash and sanded smooth. Tiny butts of pencils, wood shavings and crumpled bits of paper were spread across it. There were also a few globs of plastic that had melted onto the table whose source I could not identify. There were scraps of wood and paper piled alongside her kitchen walls, piles of clothing and shoes huddling on her bedroom floors. Everything had collected in claustrophobic excess; no matter where I looked I had the feeling of distraction, stimulation and curiosity.

She never apologized for the mess, I liked that. The dirty dishes on the table were loudly scooped up and tossed into a sink teetering with more soiled china.

“Hold up. Do you want some water too?”

“Yes,” I said.

She filled what looked like and empty mayonnaise jar with tap water and plopped it on the table.

“Yeah, so my house is kinda messy, but I like it that way. Do you keep a clean house? I think it makes my nervous to live in a place that’s uncozy.”

“My house is perhaps more bare.”

“Why is that?” she asked. I imagine she was perplexed. Every inch of her wall was paper with a photo or come sort of flyer. Christmas lights were strewn like vines around the inside of her house. There was a collection of plants in various stages of desiccation and leafiness on the countertops.

“I suppose that I never had anything catch my eye. Really I’m very boring when it comes to collecting things. You know, I keep photographs in photo albums. I don’t have too many things since I’ve moved. I never bothered to make things as personal. I really like it here. It reminds me of a lot of rooms that they had in the group living situation in my college dormitory.”

“Was that long ago?”

“Maybe two or three years ago. The university system is different in Germany.”

“Yes. I’m vaguely familiar with the European university system.”

“I’m uncomfortably familiar with the European university system. I was thinking of finishing the terminal degree in art history, either here or there.”

“Terminal is such an odd word.”

“Yes, the doctorate is and odd and terminal thing. I suppose that that’s how I found myself here, not pursuing the terminal degree. Taking a bit of time off, or really running away to be truthful. My advisor knew someone that knew some one else, so that’s how I received this job really. Really, how I’m here talking to you. In a way it’s very arbitrary. I’m glad to be here, but it’s very random. In a way the decision made itself for me and I simply followed through.”

“No regrets, right?”

“Certainly not, but it’s very typical of me, to find myself here as a sort of accident.”

“When did you come here?”

“Something like three months ago.”

“Have you made many friends?” She asked. I sipped some water. The tea was beginning to boil and in a way I felt as if I was beginning to boil as well. I hoped that my answers weren’t too disappointing. Her life seemed so visibly full of social connections and meaning tied to this place, to the people here. Actually I had not made a lot of friends. The gallery was a mess but there was enough money flowing in and out to keep me busy planning shipments and keeping track of invitations and patrons. They were a burgeoning institution in the city, but as a transplant I never felt tied to it. I still try on occasion to feel elated about larger sales and well-attended shows at the gallery, but usually the effort is pretty pathetic and too self-conscious of my own lack of feeling to ever really convince myself that I had any personal involvement with my job.

“Yes, some here and there. I get along very well with my neighbors. My job keeps me occupied.”

“Do you like it?”

“In a way, yes.”

“I never liked working in galleries. I guess I’m pretty happy with tending bar at the Roratorium. It’s a gig, and I can work on my covert art activities. You know. Sales are the hard work. It makes me anxious, the thought of selling my things to strangers. I feel like I’m not good enough, but I feel angry too. Trying to convince people that you’re worth their time. You know. It’s better to sell directly too, not through a gallery, but how often do you get lucky enough to find people to sell you work too. I hate that in the end that it’s all about money. I’m not very good with worrying about money. It makes me crazy. Makes me paranoid.” She shook her head, “But you have to live, you need to pay rent. My parents were rich so I’ve always been a little uncomfortable talking about it, thinking about it, no making enough of it, wanting to make more of it then hating myself for thinking about it so much.”

The kettle was screaming. She poured water into ceramic teapot that was asymmetrical, with a gleaming syrupy glaze on it. To this day her things will always fascinate me, their seeming randomness and delicacy.

“Try these,” she said as she placed a heaping plateful of cookies in the middle of the table. “My neighbor gave me the recipe. A lot full of whipping cream was about to spoil at the café, so I made it into butter. I had to combine it with some cold butter to get the texture right. It was crazy, the cream smelled so good, but a lot of it ended up flying out the mixing bowl as I was beating it.”

The cookies were still cold from the inside of her freezer. The texture was somewhere in between a dry shortbread and an oatmeal cookie.

I wonder if she ever slept with anyone else, while she was with me. I know she would never do it to be mean-spirited or as revenge. I never wanted to tie her down to me. It sounds cliché, but she was such a free-spirit. I wonder if she would think to tell me if she did. If she would do it out of curiosity, or boredom with me, with us. I mean, would she struggle with telling me or go through with it as a matter of course? We were from very different places. I can’t help but think that I was a disappointment, my conventionality. It hurts to think about it, her in bed with someone else one night then in my bed another.

She was very attractive. I don’t doubt that she would’ve been approached by men. Hermione was so beautiful.

“Hello, Sufjan Pederson. This is Rainer.”

“Hello, yes.” The voice was a little gruff, but distinctly female. “I was calling to inquire about piece I saw the other day.”

“Yes, do you know the name of the artist, or perhaps what sort of content the piece refers to?”

“Yes, I was calling in regard to a rhinoceros.”

“A rhinoceros?”

“Yes. I would like to buy one rhinoceros.”

“Well, at the moment we don’t have any representational art, so perhaps you’re mistaking us for some other gallery.”

“No, no. I want to buy a rhinoceros.”

“The large gray animal?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Oh.”

“So? Is it a deal? How much will it cost?”

“Well, I’m afraid we don’t have any of those either.”

“No rhinoceros?”

“No.”

“So this conversation has been a total waste of my time then.”

“Yes, I suppose you could think of it that way.”

“Well, I’m very disappointed to say the least.”

“That’s too bad.”

The night after we had slept together for the first time, we walked through my door and out into the awaiting neighborhood. I watched her wrestle with her bike a little as she stepped over the threshold. In truth we looked in bad shape. My hair was a mess. Her clothes were wrinkled from being crumpled on my floor over night. The mockingbirds were singing loudly and the sun was painfully bright. As luck would have it my neighbors were sitting on the stoop. Ronika, Dee-dee and her youngest sister Chantel were sitting on one step, blocking our exit.

“Hey Rainer, how are you doin?”

“Oh, fine,” I mumbled, suddenly aware of our state of disgrace.

“Is she your sister?” Chantel asked.

“This is Hermione…”

“He’s my half-brother,” she answered jubilantly. “Isn’t that right bra?” She said as she slapped my back.

“Yeah, sure.” I had no idea what she was getting me into.

“He was adopted. My father adopted him when he was a teenager. He was troubled. That’s what the foster agency said about him. But my father always wanted a boy. My mom was too old and didn’t want to have anymore kids. My dad’s mistress didn’t want to ruin her figure either.”

“What’s a mistress?”

“Okay. Hermione and I have to go now. I’m sure we’ll have more opportunities in the future to talk to y’all later. Shouldn’t you be in school Ronika?”

“No. It’s Columbus Day.”

“Yeah great. Well, we have to go.”

“Hi, Rainer, this is Elizabeth from the gallery. I’m just calling to catch up with you. Donna’s probably going to be in later tonight. Are you going to be taking the rest of the day off? If I’m not here give me a call on my cell phone, okay? Talk to you later.”

“Hi Rainer, this is Elizabeth again. Look’s like we’re gonna be playing phone tag for a little while here. Could you give me a call as soon as you get in?”

“Rainer, it looks like we’re having trouble getting in touch with each other. I had a look at the log, and it seems like you’re on the schedule for today and the rest of the week. If something’s come up, could you please leave a message for me in the gallery, or give me a call on my cell? Thanks.”

I’m having trouble concentrating. I’ve been shifting between Hermione’s house and mine for I’m not sure how long now. I’ve found it difficult to get the laundry done, but no one’s around to complain about how wrinkled my clothes have become.
Boudreaux and I have reached an understanding, oddly. He doesn’t seem to bait me as much, though he hasn’t resolved to let me alone completely. I’d like to think that he enjoys my company, as much as he loudly disdains it, and that, ultimately, he prefers it to his loneliness. In a way I feel the same way about him. It’s as if he and I are united in a strange way. That only Boudreaux can understand my attachment to Hermione, having witnessed so much of our private interaction, having seen us unguarded with no one else around.

I find myself sitting at her kitchen table when I’m trying to sort everything out. Usually I’ll make little notes, while looking through the various stacks of papers that had accumulated in shoeboxes, trunks, and dusty file cabinets allover her apartment. On this occasion, I’d found an unlabeled notebook, filled with drawings and daily entries about the city. It was a more recent artifact. Though most of the entries were undated, they chronicled a six month period from around the time when she first moved to the city.
I’d been pouring over a doodle of a vase of flowers. Vaguely reminiscent of Odilon Redon and perhaps a little Egon Schiele. Was it done with a Sharpie fine point? The ink didn’t seem to have the characteristic blue-yellow distortion of that pen I’d seen her use so frequently. What pen had she been using at the time, perhaps another make that was more expensive and of a finer quality? Or was it an everyday Uniball?

I’d been in the midst of noting the finer points of her line work when my thoughts were interrupted by a very loud rock band playing happy birthday songs next door. It must have been around eight or nine in the evening. I wasn’t sure if they were drunk, practicing, or merely inept. I’d tried to get back to my work, but the garage-style covers of sixties classics and the yowling voice of the singer continued to jar me from my work.
Perhaps I should have politely asked them to stop playing so I could return to my research, but I opted to make an omelet instead.

Do you think that I enjoy this? Sitting here, wallowing in the pit I’ve dug for myself? Do you think I enjoy it? Hermione, where are you? Tell me what you’re doing. Why don’t you call me anymore? Do you think I’d be a coward to call you again?

Excerpt from Hermione’s diary

No, no, body, body, so sexing arresting world a walk war for.
Restless restless one one.
Five fire flower bee.
Figure five for four.
So love so live, walking down the street, thinking like a balloon, things floating sparking off like electricity. I will reach out into the blue cells of air, a thousand mega volts bursting and burling frictionless into the atoms of the air and universe, cleaving them smoother than a hot knife through butter.
Bursting forever.

Remember the ones that kissed with their eyes closed. Remember the ones that kissed with them open.
In a way losing can be beautiful. We just live in a culture of winning, but goddamn if it can’t be terrific to float away.

One gets the feeling that it is a matter of time before things blossom. I can feel the period before the storm. Maybe something good will happen & I’ll shake off all of the blues around me.

When I had my first period for the first time, I had only the vaguest notion of what was going on. I was at boarding school. It must have been Connecticut then, right after we moved. I’d spend the summers with father.

I guess it was my first semester at boarding school. I remember feeling tired during my trigonometry and algebra maths class. Sort of worn out. I went to the bathroom and there it was—a sort of darkish stain. I expected it to be red like blood, the way it looks in paintings and movies, unmistakably liquid and flowing stuff, but it wasn’t.

I’m tired Boudreaux.

I would say that I too am somewhat fatigued.

I was facing away from Boudreaux, cutting up green onions. We had gotten into the habit of bickering with each other, like an old couple that had ate breakfast at the same table, staring at each other every morning for what seemed like our entire lives. We had our gaps of silence and our moment of conflict, to be followed again by periods of unspecific silence.

Rainer, I’m a little concerned about your health and good spirits. Of which I’ve noticed a profound decline.

Spare me your pity, Boudreaux.

No, Rainer, I mean it sincerely.

I was silent.

It is currently a very early hour of the morning. You’ve been cooking for the last hour, more food than you and I could possibly eat.

Oh, yeah, I’d completely forgotten what I was doing. The potatoes had begun to soften and the frozen peas were warming up. The curry potato omelet had always been a favorite. I should’ve put the eggs out earlier, to get them up to room temperature.

Rainer, what are you doing?

The onions are bothering my eyes.

You should retire. You are obviously in need of rest.

I am a little tired.

Rainer, why are you wearing Hermione’s robe?

Boudreaux… I don’t know.

Monkey, monkey!
Yes, Ermine?
Do you like my robe?
Mmm… Yes, but I think that I need to take a closer look

I said as I pulled her toward me
And slipped the robe
Hypnotic multi-hued discs
From her pale shoulders.

I pretended to examine it for some moments before I wrapped my arms around her waist and wrestled her all giggling and kissed to the floor.

I picked Depeche Mode, mainly because everyone knows them and they had such a role in my youth. A lot of bedroom radio listening late at night and writing in my diary.
Do you have a favorite?

Maybe. “Question of Time” or “Shake the Disease.” I like the poppy beats. You?

“Stripped.” It’s grim, but I always identified with the song lyrically. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time which might explain why. A girlfriend had made a mix tape for me. It was after a Pogues song.

So were you into the anti-media culture lyrics? At the time?

To some degree. I found a lot of things frustrating in my life at the time. I had a pretty insular childhood, so I was generally upset about everything.

Really?

Yup.

That doesn’t strike me as too much like you.

Why is that? What do you mean?

I guess you seem really well-adjusted. You know, disturbingly well-adjusted.

I laughed. Thanks I guess.

My childhood was an uneventful period overall, though not entirely unpleasant. I grew up in a village of five hundred. The village lay in between two historic university towns in the middle of the Hessian farmland. I would open my front door into the wheat fields that bordered the forest. My parents were well-to-do, supportive both economically and personally. I remember my father videotaping my first concert with my high school punk band Crud at the EFZ, the local community center.

I was frustrated as a teenager, but no any more than anyone else. I wasn’t so happy-go-lucky. I could never muster up the rock and roll bravado that so many of the other kids had to go drinking at the regional festivals. I was too self-conscious. It all felt too provincial to me. Frustratingly quaint compared to Frankfurt and all of the modern cities I’d visited then. I longed for an expanded outlook, but I was more or less trapped in Oberwalgern until I’d finished school.

My parents’ outlook was limited. They’d lived there since they were children, constantly celebrating the calm and quiet of the town. I would get annoyed with their conservative remarks about migrant workers and immigration. I would then get annoyed with myself for even being angry with them. They were both very kind to my strange looking friends, about my choice of haircut, and left me to myself regarding my studies. Really, they did everything one could ask from parents. They left me to myself. I was very lucky. I could see that things stood differently with Hermione-- that she held onto deep-lying conflicts with her surroundings, that she’d always be defending herself from something, that she was always ready to fight.

Object Number 78:
An Atelier to the God of Iron

Large ammunition case containing
One piece iron ore
One rusted axe head
Shears (sheep shears unbracketed)
One metal sprocket
One small motor
One paper clip
Forceps
One railroad spike
A quantity of iron nails
Fishhooks
A spoon, knife and fork
One clamp
One Zippo
One typeset lowercase “a”

Each object is wrapped and connected with a piece of twine cord and each object is covered in a layer of felt.

No, don’t worry about it, I make the frames for wear. Hermione’s friend had just thrown six of his paintings onto the dirty green tile in the center of the square. They’d hit with a loud smack.

I was bending over to pick them up. We bumped heads.

I apologized.

“No way dude, it happens all the time. I’m a clumsy motherfucker. I’m just lucky that this shit is tough as nails.

Hermione was showing me off to her friends. Jack had been selling his papercuttings in the square for the past year, in hopes of buying a house so he could in turn fly off to Madagascar.

Yeah, I find most of this shit in dumpsters. Piles of it. You know most people would see piles of garbage. Rotten wood riddled with rusty nails. They make hardy frames. Even the paper, old lottery scratch off tickets from Boston. I’d find garbage cans full of them outside of convenience stores. They’re just the right size. And the paper has the right texture for cutting.

I was staring distractedly at a small print of barefoot angels flying, stretching and merging into each other.

How fucking weird is that. I fucking dig shit out of dumpsters and sell it back to them. Some people think it’s quaint, but man I gotta tell you America is totally fucked. I spent the past November living in a Schwar village in Equador. That shit totally changes your perspective.

I could only nod quietly. Hermione had told me that her friend Jack was beautiful, odd and would talk my ear off if I wasn’t careful. His art, she said, was more real than hers, but I never understood when she would make statements like that. “He’s real in a way that my work could never be. Well, at least some of it. He’s a lot less pretentious than I am. I keep saying he and I. I really mean his work and my work.”

It’s nice to meet you Jack. Hermione speaks very highly of you.

“Aww, you, he said as he punched Hermione on the arm. Get out of town. You’ve seen some of her notebooks right? I mean, goddamn. She’d done papercuttings for a while. I thought she was out to ruin me. I spent like tens years learning how to get a hand to look like a hand and the first thing she cuts is a woman transforming into a swan out of a cereal box with a pair of rusty nail scissors. God it was amazing.”

“Fuck you Jack, don’t say that stuff,” she said with a smile on her face.

“Yeah, you know it’s true. Don’t deny it.”

“Yeah, so I cut paper. I don’t have the pretense to call myself an artist. I just make things. Hopefully people’ll like them and buy them. Most of the time they cut themselves and the scissors move like they’re guided by something else. Well the ones that I’m fondest of, the ones with preliminary drawings involve a different process. That’s the work stuff.

Hermione was watching a child feed pidgeons and the gutterpunks pawing at each other.

“How does that work?” I asked. Do you just do something like automatic drawing?

“Automatic drawing is a bunch of hokum made up by some bored Europeans. I just cut out the forms. Really I just hold the scissors and something else guides me.”

“What’s the something else then?”

“Well,” Jack scratched his neckline with his pinky, “my gods.” I didn’t know if Hermione was watching me then or if I had only imagined her eyes on me looking for some sort of reaction.

“Do you believe in God?” she asked as she stared at the river.

“Yes. No. Well not really. I don’t have much occasion to think about it. I suppose if God existed it would be a surprise to me.”

“A good surprise?”

“No. Just a surprise. Unexpected perhaps is the best word. Do you?”

“Do I believe in God? I’m not sure but I think about it a lot. Not as much as I used to. I don’t believe in the Holy Ghost, but sometimes I get this big odd feeling sitting in nature. Often alone I get a queer feeling that there’s something more than the objects around us-- that there’s a meaning and a being. It’s weird. When I was younger, young young younger I was a total atheist. I used to laugh at people who would talk about God, you know, think they were stupid and that they’d found comfort in some lie that they’d concocted for themselves. But not anymore. Well, not so much anymore.”

I fell quiet. It was so delicate, that moment. I had thought that Hermione was hard, full of criticism and resolute in her view of the world being the determinate one. The quiet element of her, her belief and half faith had taken me by surprise.

At night alone here, I can hear the traffic in the street, the cars, the bus shaking the house. All the sounds of the street filter through the kitchen window. A dog howls somewhere. Someone is sweeping a porch down the street. A ship moos in the harbor. I turn in the bed and the sheets are cool on her side.

“I used to be confused about it when people would talk to me when I was behind the counter.”

“About what??”

“Have you ever worked behind a counter?”

“No. only at the village bakery. It was a small job. I’d imagine yours is more glamorous.”

“You’ve never come in during my shift?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s slow. People have a lot of problems and it annoys me the hell outta me, but I still like them… Nobody ever hesitates to tell you every moment of their day. It’s like you’re their prisoner completely. It makes communication more difficult. I guess I tend to be anti-social as a result. I don’t like a lot of small talk I find it exhausting.

“I don’t have that problem so much in my work. Usually I’m completely at task on moving a large package around or something like this.”

“It’s very hard for me to hang out in the café like I used to before. I end up picking up little things staying longer than I should.”

H’s Diary

Life has always taken place in a tulmult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.

remember remember remember

that sex is not a promise

the body in union as one

the body in miraculous mystery

when i sleep with him i am with the all male all masculine

him man boy inside of me

remember men don’t think the same.

“Sometimes I wonder.”

“What?”

“Wonder if it will be like falling asleep and those dreams that follow. Those strange illusions where one finds oneself both not himself yet resembling himself in those dream actions.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When you die. Actually when I will die again. Crossing over. I wonder if I will die differently, if it will be darkness alone or if I will become some other creature. If years will be like minutes or if I will become a man again…” he trailed off.

“Well, why wouldn’t it just be like the first time?”

“It was both a confusion and perfectly boring. I simply remember the rain, a noise like a canon but one hundred times louder, and my fear of injury.”

I stirred my coffee and gave Boudreaux a leaf of lettuce.

“So it was as if I woke from a late night in society. My body cramped a little. I stretched out—my very first movement—and my body’s change had made itself dreadfully apparent. My arm were tendonous sinews. My skin was hard and crusty. It took some time to acquaint myself with my own new skin, as you can imagine.

I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there. It was simply as if I woke one day not quite right. After some contemplation I realized that I had in fact died, or perhaps some accident occurred whereby I switched bodies. Perhaps some crawfish soul occupied my former body for a time. I think upon it quite often. I find myself in an odd position, given over to introspection. I think that I am most completely given over to contemplation. I have managed to come to an understanding about this world, this current space and moment in which we communicate, Rainer. It’s not as easy for me as you would imagine. My understanding is pretty limited, as I am currently in a glass bowl and have no real power of locomotion. I haven’t felt the toasty comfort of the heath nor been stirred by exhilarating conversation for some time. I miss my favorite ale and familiar benches in my collegiate pub. I’d imagine all of those are gone now, those props and stages I had grown so fond of.

I had the habit of reading a great deal, an activity I can seldom enjoy with my current sensory apparatus. I am ill-equipped to be a man. My body seems to know what to do on its own. I’m not conscious of cleaning my antennae and scraping off the dead bits of shell; the body has its own mind that I know nothing of. It is the time that affects me greatest. Time passes in a completely inexorable fashion. I imagine that I’m at bottom of the ocean or on the surface of some far off rocky planet watching humanity, seeing actions, knowing the effects of those actions, deeds and consequences as one, but not quite knowing meaning. Like watching a clock and knowing that the bird will burst through its door and cuckoo when the hands draw to the hour. Totally impotent, like some tiny godhead.”

“Rainer, you will realize that things have gone too far, that you’ve lost control of yourself. You’ll be carried through on a great momentum. Too late. You know you’ll have to leave, but really you’ll stay until you’re made to leave. You won’t understand what I’m talking about until much later. This isn’t a parlor-trick, but a warning. No, you don’t understand, but I suppose I felt that I should tell you anyway. I’ll make things easier on you: you’ll spill that cup of water on Hermione’s vanity top, in the process the ink text will become too obscure and serpentine to read. It’s not particularly important that you believe me, what I’m saying to you at this moment. I’m not making claims or playing games with divination. I’m merely found myself in a peculiar situation, in situ. I suppose one might thin God had made some sort of mistake. I blame my being here on some tiny malfunction in the machinery of this world, if you can believe such a thing.”

I think he sighed then and mumbled, “Everything is beautiful. Everything is very plain. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

Boudreaux would shift from haughty condescension to vulnerability. He was moodier than I most of the time. Usually I was too self-involved to make much of it or really notice. I suppose he was jealous, me being a man and him having lost that. Who could blame him? I knew he was capable of reading my thoughts, I assume that he was being extremely tactful during our conversations. Or at least I hope that his access to my brain was limited to those parts I wanted him to see.

“Did you talk to Hermione much?”

“Not at all” Boudreaux replied.

“Didn’t you want to?”

“I had tried to, but it seemed my efforts were in vain. She would talk to me like a pet. She would lay her troubles upon me, acting as if I could never hear or understand her. That was the tenor of our exchanges. I never had access to her thoughts as I do with you Rainer.” He paused. “She was very modern, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, I think so. Even for our standards. She was her own woman, very smart.”

“She was very much like a man, but I liked that.”

“I guess so.” I tried to understand where he was coming from, though I couldn’t make out how Hermione was like a man, or why exactly Boudreaux would regard that so strongly in her. Hermione was very much her own person.

Hermione’s Diary

I had been wondering if it should look more polished. The boards were rotting in places. The paint had begun to peel off the rougher spots of the salvaged wood. But I was already there and in costume and the only thing I had to remember was to play the piano.

This is a low low place fore me. Why was I playing in a bar full of smoke and drunks? Who were these people? God were they laughing at me in my bear hat? At least it was better than nothing. Maybe. Than a crowd of staring blank faces.

Wait, was it really like that? In part I think.

The event had to continue until its termination and it had already begun. That was the way it had always been—once started, no matter what—the event had to continue until it was finished. So be it.

Audiences are hard.

Bars are hard especial if you have a relationship to bars that is sometimes conflicted.

The bear hat was warm and I was sweating into the sheer slip I was wearing. No one was laughing. No one was dancing. They just stared but what else could they do. I guess that’s what we’re trained for, to watch not interactivity.

So her I am curled up in bed again and he is not here. The HE. I will call him that even though he is his own, but he is still a part of the greater theory. That one day you will meet the one special one that will love you like a mother, or perhaps like a father that was not involved in his own life. Like an infant again. And then you’re lead to be greater somehow through your love.

I wish it would come. I wish that it could be uncomplicated and pure but it is never like that really. No life is really never like that. I suppose that’s okay. You just have to make yourself vulnerable and scared and then you remember all those other times that love has called your name then jerked you around. Then you have to ignore that demon and put on happiness like a new suit.

Yes, that’s the way it is. And then you get hurt some and wonder why you bothered. And then you wonder if you ever really knew that person at all, or were just kidnapped by the mystic and beautiful sensation of someone new and utterly remarkable and beautiful in every way. I suppose it never stays like that. Nothing can ever be new and beautiful forever. After a while it all becomes familiar and tired and predictable, doesn’t it?

We are all complicated people. It is terribly easy to love Boudreaux because he is only a creature and can only ever be a creature uncomplicated and unfettered by the lives we live. It is a terribly stupid thing to be fond of a crawfish. But he is certainly reliable and that can’t be said about a lot of friends and lovers.

I like you and you like me. It’s a good feeling to find loverdom. I don’t know if it’s grand. Let’s drink heavily from the same lead cup. Go out together and sleep drunk all day long.

I like the way it feels because a love that’s left too long can fester and become toxic.

New new new. The nights get cold and there is not enough news in my life.

On the phone, or rather not on the phone because it did not ring and he did not call me again tonight.

I could hear that he does not love me the same way I love him.

So I will set out not thinking about him, trying to let him go.

Am I doing it to hurt him?

Or because I do not wasn’t to be a servant to myself?

I walked home today. It was Coliseum St after the rain. The sun was shining. It was mid-afternoon, sometime between noon and two, the corner of Coliseum and St. Andrew. The air smelled like clove and cinnamon. The smell of wet tree bark was like clove I think. The yellow leaves had fallen over the sidewalk coating the black gray cement with a layer of light gold.

I thought to myself, I must capture this! Put it in my pocket and show it to everyone I know during some northern blizzard. If I could paint this moment later, the smell of the afternoon after a morning full of rain and cold. The warmth of the day and the subtleness of those wet leaves plastered against the sidewalk.

The yellow shined like golden coins. Music-- strains of someone practicing clarinet from inside the Rose Apartments down the street. Stevie Nicks’s gravely voice sang to me, floating out from another window.

I thought—this moment is beautiful and some how true to me.

I knew that I was changing, that some old part of me was realizing a new part of myself.

Instructions for today

Gather the dead grasses of the field and build a nest for yourself. Sleep in it all day and sneak out into the night to find yourself.

The alcohol of women and men

The alcohol of conversation--\

I don’t want to think of it

The motivation and ambition.

What does it mean – the talking up.

A cigarette that juts at a calculated

Angle indicating ease

Or provocation

I won’t have it.

I’m always drinking. I’m so thirsty.

I woke up. It was five forty-five in the afternoon. Damned show. How are my kitchen floors so cold. Kitchen and bathroom. They make my feet feel like ice. The eggs boiled and I ate toast with margarine and apricot jam.

If I just get it done I will not feel like a madwoman. I will not be hungry for it. Remember when you wanted this so badly you?! To be obligated and real, remember? Well there you have it fancy pants. God, I’m still tired and I have so much more to do and plan.

Comments from exiting German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder

2005-07-02T02:51:00.000-07:00

"Mrs Merkel", he said. "At the moment with your [high] opinion polls you appear like a magnificent-looking soufflé in the oven. We'll see in the final three weeks [of the campaign], when the voters prick it, what's left of this splendour. I can't wait."

We are doomed to rewrite our forgotten stories

2005-07-02T00:06:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if this happens to other people. Actually I'm almost certain that it happens to only a very small responsible, impulsive, but forgetful segment of the population.

I was reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, actually a mere minutes ago, when I was truck with the memory of two stories that I had lost somewhere. Perhaps they were eaten by a computer. Perhaps I printed them and abandonned them, who knows, but the point is that I don't know where they are and they have quite possibly disappeared forever. The other thing that is wuite bad is that I distinctly remember thinking that they were good, and I tend to be right about these sort of judgements regarding my work. I must put together the scraps like a memory detective because I haven't completely given up on them and will eventually in my loneliness return to them some weekend evening.

Okay.

"The Diamond Man, the Glimmer Man"
This story was based on a dream vision I had, overwhelmingly cinematic in the action adventure suspense genre. There was a man, a secret agent of some sort looking for gems or some object. The code words were "The diamond man the glimmer man." He had somehow been led to a large suburban mall, well lit. 1st person pov. Something goes wrong with the plan. His contact is a club kid, a girl wearing white Euro-trash platform shoes and a brightly colored bob. Something has gone wrong, when he says the trigger words she gives him a strange look. Chase ensues, a purse of gems falls and is retrieved in the scuffle. He loses them.

"Oranges"
Multiple pov apartment scene from the view points of a couple fucking on a couch, the couch, a citrus fruit on their kitchen table, and two kids watching them from the street through their window.

"He She Phoebe Jacques"
Takes place after a Phoebe has sex with Jacques and he is taking a shower (without her)because she has bled on him and her couch. She feels dejected and a little ashamed then angry. She's sitting on the kitchen counter in her panties and she starts looking at a postcard of Brigitte Bardot on his fridge. Phoebe is not a blonde and not French, note. She starts talking to the postcard, gets angry, paints her body with Nutella stripes like war paint and burns the photo on the stove burner.

There was another spy story with secret messages being slipped into mouths, secret capsules hidden in molars. I can't remember it very well.

Then there was the one about Elyse and the dentist. Catholic school girl, erotic ideation for dentist, teeth pulling, snapping noises. LAter hit in the head with a volleyball and called period mouth by her entire class.

"Cowboys and Aliens"
Possibly the worst story I have ever written. Girl in weird suburb, sacrifices herself to aliens in front of a barn for a community that will never know about it/give a fuck. Hurrah!

I suppose I should rewrite them. Sigh...

add two more notches to the bedpost

2005-06-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

I read Secret Knowledge by David Hockney and Silk by Barrico all courtesy of the NOPL. Yippee!

Also, the new Batman movie is a philosophy undergraduate's wet-dream,

not "quintessence" but "contemporary"

2005-06-17T10:41:00.000-07:00

I helped this lady write a description and find the right words... She sounded fancy and told me that she could tell how young I was.

Her: Are you in school?
Me: Er, I'm a public librarian.
Her: That doesn't mean you can't be in school.
Me: That's true.

Fashion History

Take a fashionable walk back in time -- before computers were the main tools of artists in print media -- and view the hand-rendered visions of haute couture by fashion illustrator Bunny Scherzer.

A display of her advertising illustrations will be on view in the lobby of the Jewish Community Center (5342 St. Charles Ave.) April 18 through May 7, with a reception with the artist scheduled from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. opening day. Visitors can walk though the exhibit from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.

Scherzer moved from New York to New Orleans in 1955 to create a fashion image for D.H. Holmes, and opened her own studio 10 years later. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Town and Country, Women's Wear Daily, Southern Accents, Veranda and Holiday as well as two books published by Prentice Hall Inc.

a poem about a household appliance

2005-06-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

A steam cleaner
dreams of eating mouth-
fuls of carpet.

Texts

2005-06-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

Here are the texts for the signs that I left in the bywater. They were in total 5, I believe, brown corregated cardboard marked with black conte crayon and my green symbol.

When this you see remember me. (Chartres and Louisa)
Love loves to love love. (Burgundy and Piety abouts)
Yearn. (Press St tracks)
Someone in the city misses you. (Chartres by Dr. Bob's)
Smoke and mirrors. (across from Channel Zero)

cyberized, while only slightly shaded

2005-06-11T15:21:00.000-07:00

I hurray. Austin's put the necessary programs in my little box (the new laptop my mum and da sent as an x-mas present). Huzzah! I still need to figure out how to get some stuff done and the saddest bit is that I don't have wireless in my house but I don't think that that would be the best idea really. I'm as distracted as a bee on mesc as it is and really all I have to deal with in my apt is my radio, books, food and futon.

Gawd effing damn it, why is my bike cursed! The seat's been stolen and truth be told I wish I could drop kick it off of Monkey Hill (nola's highest point of elevation: a manmade hill in the Audobahn Zoo). Oh Pancake Widower, my most favoritest bike and trusty steed. Why did that stupid dipshit drunk driver in the Quarter hit me and her. Couldn't he have hit a stamp or used kleenex, not me on my bike the best bike in the universe? So really, I've had to repair my bike a lot and now I've had to take it to Michael's bike store and then none of the seat posts fit and i curse the day those little (presumptive) brats who stole my bike seat were born. Grr.

Okay. So I'm calming down a bit and would like everyone to know that not everything is a total drag, it's just that I'm going to have my pyramid and consequently am a little bit more aggressive than I should be. I will attempt to calm down and think happier thoughts and maybe get excited about those things instead of letting my uterus champion the helm.

I've finished my gigantic had drawing/painting. I've even found a place for it but I have some minor tasks to complete before I can hang it up. The steps might be a bit simpler to understand:

1. Buy some acrylic clear coat spray paint, googles & ventilator.
2. Spray n dry.
3. Nail it to the side of that abandonned barn by Tchoupotoulous

urmmm
more later.

2005-06-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

Use your sketchbook as a visual work journal, a place to record your thoughts about you, your life and school.

· Challenge yourself

· Ask for help when needed

Homework 1: Make a title page with different pictures of shoes. Now annotate them saying which shoes you like and why? What do other types of shoes say about a person? For examples slippers or sandals compared to boots or high heels. What can you find out about a person by their shoes? Write your opinion in your sketchbook with arrows pointing to parts of the shoe.

Learning objectives:

- to examine how a shoe is made

- to understand the influence of fashion, culture, and practicality with shoe design.

Helpful hints: Use the Internet, catalogues and own photos. Maybe choose a theme e.g. sporting shoes or two contrasting themes e.g. functional to fashion.

Homework 2: Do an observational drawing in pencil of a collection of shoes that you have at home. The composition is up to you e.g. a line of shoes in a neat row; or a mismatch of odd pairs of shoes; or an unorganised pile of shoes. Use tonal shading.

Learning objectives:

- to develop drawing skills

- to develop awareness of the important and significance of composition.

Helpful hints: fill the page, and don’t be worried if it some of the shoes go off the page, this can often be more interesting.

Homework 3:Design or make a box for your clay shoe. You could use a real shoebox or make a wild shape and transfer your design onto it. Think about how you can relate it to your shoe design.

Learning objectives:

- to think creatively on presentation

- to know how to develop an idea for another means

Helpful hints: Think about an environment for your clay shoe, if its based on an animal where would it live?

Homework 4:Design some futuristic shoes that will be worn in 200 years time. Write a short paragraph explaining the reason for their style. Either shade or paint them.

Verschiedene Ubersetzung

2005-06-08T18:42:00.000-07:00

There are assorted articles about Z'Otz: one from Where Y'at about the old store my favorite , and this more recent one . Jesus Christ resurrected here. Wonderful, so maybe miracles are only a latte away and all of us struggling scam artists (my fellow employees) can sweet talk some clams into that big blue tip jar.

Mack and Chesley are opening another on Decatur. Jack's been ripping up the carpet there and he tells me that it's bigger than a high school gymnasium. I'm excited and will probably guilt myself into helping them out just a little bit because I am a big sucker and they're family anyway...

Oh poor Jack he lost his wallet after we went out for Chinese. Darnation. It's odd how we're paired: someone stole my bicycle seat yesterday.

I am currently applying to join the Peace Corps. The ideal destination? The sunny shores of Romanian... To further explore my eastern European fantasies. I have found myself in an odd situation; it is something like a dream. I realized, somewhere, perhaps talking with Chase, that I could do whatever I wanted. That ultimately if I didn't want to do something, that I didn't have to... and that if I wanted something, some weird element in my life to materialize that I could make that something happen.

I've just finished reading Richard Brautigan's An Unfortunate Woman. Strange, my friends are traveling away. Possibly indefinitely. Sprechen Sie Brian has flown to Deutschland. Claire and Chase are with Big Bang and I might possibly reunite with them at Mutant Fest in Oregon. Thomas is moving to Asheville. June and Johnny are already in Cali but only for a bit. Genghis and Issa are moving back to Minneapolis. Sigh. Gloom. Brood. I guess that Stanley (clairvoyant morose newt co-habitant) and I will have to hold down the fort in expectation that they will return to visit.

Um, yes.

Thunderstorms.

Are you a gastropod?

2005-06-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

You have big, rough tongue
right inside your mouth.
Use it to rip pieces
off leaves and
eat them.

reminder

2005-06-03T16:00:00.000-07:00

hot:http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/

institutional desserts

2005-06-03T01:34:00.000-07:00

banana pudding
artificially flavored nilla wafers
delicious
lie like a bag of socks in my tummy.

In response to the oystershell

2005-06-01T19:40:00.000-07:00

In order to avoid being brained by a piece of falling masonry or decapitated by the rotary blade of a helicopter I will finish this short list of questions as posed by one M^2.

1. Total size of music files on my computer: 0 mb. It's new and used mainly for writing and correspondence.

2. The last CD I bought was: I don't really buy them so much, but people do tend to make copies for me. I guess the last one was Autechre's Untitled at the merch table in Twiropa.

3. Song playing right now on my iFruit: Mark, these questions are horrible.

4. Five songs that (continue to) mean a lot to me (1 per artist): Umm... Ermm... I tend to spend my time trying to forget a lot of songs, really there are a lot. And in terms of that sort of thing I'm very credulous, or at least impressionable. I like ABBA and commercial jingles and the songs that kids shriek at the top of their lungs while wrestling unfortunate housecats. I enjoy the spectacular, that being said:

1. Though I don't know if they're songs per se I'm really in love with the Ramakien and the Thai national anthem.

For those interested, according to Sir Hubert Perry, in Evolution of the Art of Music, classical Thai music has a unique musi-cal scale system:

“It is not now pentatonic, though supposed to be derived originally from the Javanese system. The scale consists of seven notes, which should by right be exactly equidistant from one another; that is, each step is a little less than a semitone and three-quarters. So that they have neither a perfect fourth nor a true fifth in their system, and both their thirds and sixths are between major and minor; and not a single note between a starting note and its octave agrees with any of the notes of the European scale. . . . Their sense of the right relations of the notes of the scale are so highly developed that their musicians can tell by ear directly a note which is not true to their singular theory. Moreover, with this scale, they have developed a kind of musical art in the highest degree complicated and extensive.”

So the Ramakien is way to complicated to explain here, but is perhaps the most often performed/replicated/invoked story in the history of the Thai nation. I wouldn't even call it opera, since it would last 720 hours. Really the story is performed in segments and they are specific to passages in the greater story. I had the opportunity to see some Khon drama when I was in Thailand and a wee little girl and the entire experience presaged adult psychedelic experiences. I don't speak Thai and barely did at the time... but I can still remember the sound of the narration, the odd pitch of the voices that seemed to waver and sustain tone, the glittering costumes and golden chariots. That must have been over ten years ago, really. Oh man, I just remembered that there was a huge potluck afterward too.

Please please look up the Ramakien on google. Hanuman is my boyfriend. I used to stare at reproductions of the murals at the temple of the Emerald Buddha in my bedroom in Schaumburg, Illinois.

The Thai National Anthem reminds me of my mother. She'd listen to Thai radio broadcasts on the internet, every one began with it.

2. Kronos Quartet, George Crumb "Black Angels": I remeber seeing them perform one of the movements to this piece when I was twelve in the Prairie Center for the Arts. I was completely euphoric, since this piece is utterly kick ass and my then 13 year old boyfriend was trying to feel me up. He was a total ass, but I was seeing stars. I mean, as a celloist and a person who listens to music this piece, this experience completely changed how I would approach my instrument years later and the conceptions, or rather learned misconceptions, I had about quartet/classical music. I effing love New Music and I love the Kronos Quartet for coming to Schaumburg, Ill and consistantly fighting the good fight.

3. "Four" Aphex Twin off of Richard D James: Pretty much the first electronic composition I listened to that combined pop, dance and new music sensibilities. Not your typical booty bass, dancebeat-focused electronic music. I'd loved Kraftwerk since the age of 14, but at the same time they never really made sense, never really seemed to send my into another state. I can't believe I heard it on the radio. Also in Schaumburg.

4. A Cage for John Cage/ John Cage "In a Landscape": Holy shit, so I was in Vienna alone at the age of 16 or 17 for two months and that visit pretty much informs the rest of my life and art. (This is also why my parents are unbelievably cool, yet probably insane) I was walking around by myself, going to every contemporary art space that I could locate on the map, discovering Fluxus and the Viennese Actionists, looking at Nitsch and Schwarzkogler and Beuys and Ono all day long, drinking a lot of applejuice and eating a hellvalot of ham and cheese sandwiches with ketchup since I didn't understand any German.

Anyway there's this piece by some artist who I've lost the name of. It's in the Kunsthalle I think. A really odd building that resembles a cross between dumpster and a warehouse, plus it's navy blue and yellow. It's a tiny shack in the middle of the gallery made out of lead. I go inside and the only thing you can hear is static which slowly melts into the sound of waves crashing. Inside there's a single electric bulb with a metal screen over it. And I'm standing in a room made of lead listening and suddenly I'm not even aware of myself, but just the light and the noise.

Anyway that turns me on to John Cage, who I've never heard of before. "In a Landscape" is so plaintive and simple. I recommend the Stephen Drury.

enough already!

that which constitutes busyness in the where withal

2005-05-31T15:01:00.000-07:00

Summer is rainy season here, I forgot.

The Pine Street Croquet Society met on Sunday. The assignments are as listed:
1. a poem about a character in a place
2. villanelle
3. poem in the voice of a household appliance
4. visual art that incorporates text
and my specific assignment to finish five pages of Hermione's diary for section 2 of my nov.

Though the assignments are a little more specific and school like, at some point I would like the Pine Street Croquet Society to evolve into this seemless unit of creative action... but you know... so I will no doubt post these into the future.

lurv

excerpts from some victorian children's story book

2005-05-29T23:37:00.000-07:00

how to care for goldfish.

nothing in the way of games will supercede croquet in favor.

A Bird Riddle

Do you know a little bird
That in mourning shades is dressed:
Black and white upon his wings,
black and white upon his head;
Underneath, a bit of white
On his pretty throat and breast;
While above upon his nape,
Gleams a shining bow of read?

Answer-- The Downy Woodpecker

Brunch: Carnival of the Flesh

2005-05-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

This Sunday marks the final of the El Radio Fantastique brunches I think. I'm feeling embarrassingly sensitive about the prospect of not performing with the band until fall, and a little jealous of my transient friends who are leaving the city. Heaven knows why sensible people would choose to leave this paradaisical tropical swamp city when the weather has just started to warm up. Warm up, ie, was 94 degrees yesterday.

In the summer all the circus clowns pack their bags and leave town. There is something terribly sad about New Orleans in the summer. I think it is because everything is a little more desperate because of the weather and humidity. And everyone looks a little bit more worn-out, frizzy haired, ubiquitous armpit stains.

Last night the band had a show with Crooks and Nannies. It was really lovely to have seen them with mics and amplification. I'd seen Walt and the kids street performing in New York, but Laurent's washtub bass is lovely and Walt's fiddling really ornaments a tune, and it was really really great to hear the band together. We played at Bossa Nova on Frenchman. There were some lights there... I'm not sure what happened but one minute I was playing tambourine then the next I had completely lost my beat and green lights were flashing in my eyes.

So that's that. I'm going to bring the hi-buck bread from La Boulangerie. I miss the weird balcony chats I would have with Johnny and June earlier in the fall when Courtney was around...

***
Summer is the time for projects and I will see them through.

1. I'm gonna give birth to this novel even if it fucking kills me.
2. There are plans for Lucifer Morningstar and some people in Miss O's house.
3. Film.
4. A traveling expedition to the Northwest, possibly?
5. Plans to visit Yai in Thailand, god I miss my granny so much it's horrible.
6. Hope that the kids that leave town come back.

Unexpectedly bittersweet... hmm...

2005-05-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

Can you taste the tension between the pink and the white?
Red bleeds rust then turns into dust.

Can you smell it? What does it smell like? I want you to tell me. I want you to say it out loud.

The Circus of Tiny Invisibility

2005-05-22T17:22:00.001-07:00

Last night I was working on an eight foot drawing. I found a smashing piece of cardboard and gessoed it with some housepaint.

I've just seem a documentary about Werner Herzog by Les Blank.

Do you trust in your own dreams?

New York artifact 2: diary excerpts pt 1

2005-05-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

Chadmo:
"So ends the exciting conclusion."
"That's not my butt."
"Sara and I and a bunch of other people were sleeping at the rim of the crater and we all woke up with the same dream."

...

There are seven of us, compact as peanuts in a the shell of the van:
Walt
Olivia
Jay
Chadmo
Johnny
June
Me

...

I was remembering my bed
as the trees darkened into the blurred highway sky.

...

Wafflehouse, crossword puzzle spreads itself out as the margarine spreads itself over my instant grits, eggs and esophaugus.

Chadmo: When I went on tour with the flying circus we planned to hit the Wafflehouses in ever state. I loves some wafflehouse.

June: These hashbrowns are like noodles.

Covered
smothered
chunked.

...

Being on the road is like not quite being free quite yet. It is almost a place but between places. I was waiting to breathe when I finally got out of the city.

Where will I move to next? Where and when will I grow up?
I've got the feeling that it's time to go very soon maybe. The town is making my life go backward, why is that?

In my apartment the bathroom floor is crumbling out from beneath me, the toilet won't flush. That schizophrenic dog is yelping and needy babies are being cursed at below my window.

...

I came crashing down the stairs
heels slamming sternly as a school marms
How many times can you wake a girl up
at 7 am on a Sunday after
drinking and making love all night
and not expect it?
Get out of my hallway you don't even live here.
you need to leave now.

...

Why doesn't it work?
There are two angelas
one angela's name is angela kaewsuriya
the other is angela roberts
one comes from mum the other from da.
Angela K is the one that is most female
R is the most critical.

K & R are straddling something
and it is not working. it was hard
a little bit earlier but it is gone.
Where does it go to?
How can it summon them and then disappear?

...
North Carolina is green and the foliage is woodsy and American, lacking that destructive jungle overgrowth of home.

There is a cat named Julio who has no vocal cords and will attack. There is a man who touches poison ivy to be closer to it and his name is Steve.
...

5/9 Monday 6-7 pm ish

We've arrived in New York! Brooklyn on the corner of Flushing and Classin in a warehouse/studio called Rubulad. A man with a beard named jay-Sun/ No. 8 let us in. He was exceptionally cheerful and sweet. We've set up tents that belong to the house on the roof. I can see sprawling graffittis on the roofs and chimneys of the adjacent buildings.

Melissa the old bass player, the first bass player, moved to Brooklyn earlier in the year. It's hard to believe that I've been with El Radio Fantastique since November last year.
...

I ended up falling asleep in a giant construction. He was giving me a serious foot and back massage. The Ice Cave-- made of plywood and foam and white sheets and cushions. It was like a child's playroom cum hamster/rodent pet maze.
...

back from new york, an artifact (1)

2005-05-18T08:42:00.000-07:00

May 15 (3 days ago)
hi angie,

I just came back from my brother's daughter's baptism (my niece's). catholic, therefore fun. sending you some pictures. also went to nietzsche's grave on the way.

humble. do you have a baby already? they are so small, really confusing. what is the deal with the marriage offer? I have promised tom tykwer to marry him because he was so upset about the huge bitch franka potente dumping his ass. let me how you're doing.

love
Olaf

(0 minutes ago)Olaf,

you would not believe my recent history, so I must tell you and hope that you will believe it. I've just come back from New York. My first visit ever, a week of wonder, I tell you. I am hopelessly in love with Brooklyn, though I have choosen not to have Brooklyn's baby. To give birth to an entire borrough would destroy my body and good looks.

Did I mention I was in a band to you? ever? We went on tour through North Carolina and then up to New York. Thankfully I was receiving vacation pay, because we about broke even-ish (my decadent taste be damned). I did however meet some lovely people in the odd art studio/warehouse/party space we stayed at, and I am now in love with one of them secretly. Don't tell anyone though.

Baptism. Catholic. Nietzsche. hmmm... Catholic?

Yes. Babies are remarkably small, dumb, helpless and cute. They are so fucking cute that you haven't got a chance of resisting them. I don't know how many times I've been all "Fuck babies, they are so totally lame and played out!" and then been captured (ensnared!) by their gurgling, drippy drooling sweetness. I end up holding them and baby talking etc. They melt my robot heart. In that regard I have recently been surrounded by charming urchins, as my friends Paul and Helen now have a 7 monther. And all of my nice coffee regulars have little tykes as well. So I am constantly hypnotized by googly eyes and diapered bottoms. Don't think I'm getting soft though. I am saving my genetic information for the ages and will have my ova dunked in liquid
nitrogen and jettisoned into outerspace.

About marrying you. I am always asking you to marry me and you always think I am playing some sort of joke on you. I know you want to stay single for Gwen Stefani and Franka, but don't be such an ice princess. Seriously though, think of the fabulous adventures in store. We could be like Paul and Jane Bowles. Or like June and Henry Miller. Okay perhaps that was not so serious. But sincerely, you are a dear friend of mine and I am extremely fond of you and I think that a civil union would benefit us mutually in terms of citizenship status. I am sure that you have tons of foine American fillies breaking down your door at night, so I will not be hurt at all if you say no way jose. Anyway, it's pretty much the same deal as that night I asked you to marry me at O'Henry's over the bean dip appetizer. Remember?

So perhaps we can share New York stories. I suppose that I am beginning to understand why you were obsessed with the Yankees. Or rather hate the Red Socks, excuse me, since the entire city seems to be fixated on that barbaric distinctly American sport. What ever happened to the glorious days of croquet and badminton?

okay okay,
lurve
angela

ps write back soon!
pss have you managed to secure employ yet you transient muh-fugger? (I mean it with love)

2005-04-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

So the other day I was talking to my neighbor Issa about the random dudes that hangout on our stoop. I live on Amelia and Magazine next to Jennie's grocery, for all you stalkers out there. Anyway, my building is on the cover of a Dirty Dozen Brass Band cd and can be singularly distinguished by the large "NO LOITERING" sign. My neighbor was telling me that he'd been smelling crack smoke in the hallway lately and was starting to get annoyed with the random old dudes that were always on our stoop and never getting out of the way for us to walk up our effing stairs.

Issa is from Minneapolis and by far one of the most blissed out mellow sweeties that I've met in this city. I guess he hasn't been infected by the jaded New Orleans-fuck-this-town- and-its -economic- sink -holes-everything's-broken-and -I- can't-escape-from-it -ness that I have been kicking around as of late. He's been a bit pissed with them shaking him down for change. They don't ever try to panhandle me, but that's because I'm a total bitch to them most of the time.

Here's Issa:

random dudes: Hey how you doin, you gettin back from work?
Issa: Oh, yeah. You know, it's a really nice day. Yup. How you doin'? etc etc

Here's me:

Random dudes: Hey how you doin, you gettin back from work?
Me: You're going to clean up this mess, right?

the exhalted paradise of a naive few

2005-04-27T16:19:00.000-07:00

WEEEEeeehh-haw. Greetings from Angela/Marguerite Wahrscheinlich/Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabelle Land! A strange and mystical place where pidgeons greet you in the hallway after a 13 hour day of work, where there are no televisions, and only the briefest excerpts of information are transmitted through half-asleep fragments of NPR's Morning Edition.

Aparently some train crashed somewhere and some conservative dude nobody's heard of tried to create anxiety about the judicial nomination procedure via the right to filibuster. America, God effing bless it! Or else! Meanwhile the front page of the Times-Picayune tells me that the New Orleans Public School system is no longer salient. Hee-haw. It looks like seven schoolsa re in jeopardy of closing including some in my neighborhood.

Huzzah and hossanah.

Sometimes I wonder if the Deep South is like the rest of the world, or just a weird amplification or it, a sort of hyperreality alternate-world of a place where everything is broken.

to the end of never

2005-04-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

I've been having trouble getting my shit together. Hmmm... The novel needs to be worked on more. I suppose that that project might be improved if I had a desk or office of some sort. At least that's what I tell myself, so if you know any grad students that will let me sneak into their office afterhours so that I can use their computer and the singular isolation of a windowless room... then hey.

Last night I went to a crawfish boil with the band. I really am growing ever fonder of everyone in the band the more we see each other. Colin, Chadmo, Jay, Walt, June n Johnny. They're all really wonderful people to spend time with. In some odd way being in a band is like being married, though in this situation it seems like an arranged marriage in some oriental clime. We're all a little bit stuck with each other, and terribly pissy when things don't work out, but there's this sort of understanding that we don't really get frustrated with each other despite the badness of certain situations. Everyone is terribly civil and beautifully kind and very sympathetic.

That being said our show at Brasil opening for the Yard Dogs Traveling Road Show on Thursday left a little to be desired. We didn't have a sound check, people were waiting, everything that could go wrong technically went wrong. Afterward we were all a little sad and frustrated. It was like bad lovemaking, you know, everyone was a bit sheepish and unhappy afterward. I could go into the details, but that stuff tends to be pretty boring.

The Yard Dogs were so good. It hurt on my insides it was so good. My brain was buzzing the entire time, you know that feeling, where the talent of those people around you is so frankly astounding that your attention is constantly being diverted and stimulated at the same time. Comedically wonderfully, burlesque as it was meant to be.

yums.

warning warning attack of the surveys: i apologize but i found this amusing

2005-04-17T03:28:00.000-07:00

my hipster diagnonsis. I recieved the "Tortured Intellectual" rating. I'm a rock and roller! Okay here's some text. Perhaps we can all create a reasonably obscure cliche to pigeonhole our personalities. Hurray!

"You're sensitive, you're emotional, and you wonder why everyone else in the world exists on a different plane. You cannot eat, breathe, or sleep without analyzing each action to death. You're usually sombre, depressed, lethargic, but you can be nearly glad from time to time. You wear whatever you can find on your cluttered bedroom floor. You carry books, notepads, reading glasses with you wherever you go. You have friends, but only a few who truly get where you're coming from. You frequent coffee shops, libraries, and the less crowded bars. You're obsessed with past people, past ideas, past lives. You wish you could die and be reborn as Jack Kerouac."

Yeah, Jack Kerouac = so not cool. Try Anais Nin suckers.

Okay so I have a BA in Philosophy and English Lit, whatever. Speaking of which:

You scored as Existentialism. Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of your life.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
“It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
--Jean-Paul Sartre

“It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.”
--Blaise Pascal

gawdamn

2005-04-17T03:19:00.000-07:00

Fucking cunts! I've left the only part of the nawf that I haven't posted at home on my other computer. Shit fuck.

okay, for your momentary delectation, this should stave you off, hungry slaves.

Proposal

Angela Roberts

Radio Play: The Disappearance of Dr. Rathbone Basilton, political scientist

Eminent political scientist Rathbone Basilton has disappeared. The circumstances surrounding his disappearance are a mystery to both his personal and professional acquaintances. However at the time of his death Dr. Basilton was known to be almost entirely consumed with his research concerning a set of documents (immediately classified, seized and cataloged by a government agency referred to only as “the saucers”) regarding an incident X.

Through a series of flashbacks and conversations his assistant Harry Fenderstock and his grocer Ernestine are able to discover the nature of Dr. Basilton’s research. From his notes and diary entries they determine that Dr. Basilton was in the midst of reconstructing a device referred to as the “the sun machine.”

While attempting to uncover the true purpose of “the sun machine” Harry Fenderstock and Ernestine stumble upon a secret chamber in the doctor’s laboratory. They find Dr. Basilton subsisting entirely on instant coffee and canned sardines in the final stages of constructing his sun machine. After an initial struggle, subsequent confusion, and final reconciliation, Ernestine and Harry Fenderstock agree to help Dr. Basilton finish constructing his sun machine.

As they put the finishing touches upon the sun machine, Dr. Basilton explains that he had been forced to flee the saucers to a secret underground laboratory to complete his political science experiments. In doing so he had been forced feign madness and spread a false paper trail regarding the true nature of his research. Dr Basilton reveals the sun machine’s true function as a combination brainwashing device, time machine, and astral projector. The sun machine, depending on which presets are set allow [text missing-- hahaha, ed.].

More later my darlings.

nawf part 2

2005-04-02T14:46:00.000-08:00

We sat staring at the boats trudging down the Mississippi river. The air was still warm though the sun was only a faint glow peeking over the river. Hermione and I had split a bottle of Merlot she’d tucked in her picnic basket. She said:
I picked Depeche Mode, mainly because everyone knows them and they had such a role in my youth. A lot of bedroom radio listening late at night and writing in my diary.
Do you have a favorite?
Maybe. “Question of Time” or “Shake the Disease.” I like the poppy beats. You?
“Stripped.” It’s grim, but I always identified with the song lyrically. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time which might explain why. A girlfriend had made a mix tape for me. It was after a Pogues song.
So were you into the anti-media culture lyrics? At the time?
To some degree. I found a lot of things frustrating in my life at the time. I had a pretty insular childhood, so I was generally upset about everything.
Really?
Yup.
That doesn’t strike me as too much like you.
Why is that? What do you mean?
I guess you seem really well-adjusted. You know, disturbingly well-adjusted.
I laughed. Thanks I guess.

My childhood was an uneventful period overall, though not entirely unpleasant. I grew up in a village of five hundred. The village laid in between two historic university towns in the middle of the Hessian farmland. I would open my front door into the wheat fields that bordered the forest. My parents were well-to-do, supportive both economically and personally. I remember my father videotaping my first concert with my high school punk band Crud at the EFZ, the local community center.
I was frustrated as a teenager, but no any more than anyone else. I wasn’t so happy-go-lucky. I could never muster up the rock and roll bravado that so many of the other kids had to go drinking at the regional festivals. I was too self-conscious. It all felt too provincial to me. Frustratingly quaint compared to Frankfurt and all of the modern cities I’d visited then. I longed for an expanded outlook, but I was more or less trapped in Oberwalgern until I’d finished school.
My parents’ outlook was limited. They’d lived there since they were children, constantly celebrating the calm and quiet of the town. I would get annoyed with their conservative remarks about migrant workers and immigration. I would get annoyed with myself for even being angry with them. They were both very kind to my strange looking friends, about my choice of haircut, and left me to myself regarding my studies. Really, they did everything one could ask from parents. They left me to myself . I was very lucky. I could see that things stood differently with Hermione-- that she held onto deep-lying conflicts with her surroundings, that she’d always be defending herself from something, that she was always ready to fight.

Object Number 78:
An Atelier to the God of Iron

Large ammunition case containing
One piece iron ore
One rusted axe head
Shears (sheep shears unbracketed)
One metal sprocket
One small motor
One paper clip
Forceps
One railroad spike
A quantity of iron nails
Fishhooks
A spoon, knife and fork
One clamp
One zippo
One typeset lowercase “a”

Each object is wrapped and connected with a piece of twine cord and each object is covered in a layer of felt.

an update of sorts

2005-03-30T13:27:00.000-08:00

Now reading: The Fluxus Reader edited by Ken Friedman.

I was at Z'Otz this morning, working the morning shift, when Jay and Olivia dropped a new copy of the A Particularly Vicious Rumor cd at the shop. I like it very much and am terribly tickled that Jay is playing with me in El Radio. And that Walt the violinst plays in Crooks and Nannies, Jay plays in Crroks and Nannies. Chadmo's in a few bands too. I like the interconnectedness of the bands and artists and general weirdos that live in New Orleans. We play shows with Ratty & PVR pretty often.

Oh what is this mystery called love...?

2005-03-28T18:32:00.000-08:00

When we love our friends it's not the same as loving a lover. And when we love our lovers it is seldom as easy as loving a friend.

Love and liking are sometimes the same thing, but then they are sometimes different.

If you are a woman (a woman like me that is) loving another woman is different from loving a man.

And kissing a man is different then kissing a woman, but both are beautiful. Kissing a woman is like touching something very soft and small like a scrap of rabbit fur or a flower's petals, kissing a man is like coffee and a cigarette in the morning. But sometimes opposite.

Kissing a friend is different than kissing a lover.

And thinking of kissing a lover is looking out a window and thinking about all of those things outside the window when you are trapped inside.

*

And it is all very very hard, yes it is.

**

I find, and this is about me because I am almost completely self-absorbed, but if you're reading this you probably already know that and probably don't mind because you, reader, are probably at least a little bit self-interested too, so any way--- I find that when I am with a lover I'm engulfed in this sense of mystery that is completely elusive and mystical and fiendish and constructed. I think it comes from all of the years of English literature and reading too many tawdry books at a young age. I get interested in lovers like one might try to figure out a painting or a favorite poem or a character. And it's consuming and weird. Not entirely appropriate, a little obsessive. Shameful and childish, you know?

I was reading this passage in Vice Versa about how Frank O'Hara preferred to be with men. Apparently his comment was something to the effect that he could just be with a man, but with women it was different. That they were after more of him and he didn't want to give those elements of his self up. I suppose I'm like that. Not like Frank O'Hara, but like those women that wanted more.

I guess I'm curious and that I like to poke around the insides and run around looking under staircases and finding things. It's very hard to do that to yourself. It's also very hard for me to harrass myself like the way I harrass the people I like, you know, throwing chiclets against windows pains at 1 am, tickling feet, sneaking parsley onto plates, being silly. It's very hard to be silly alone.

Hmm...
end transmission.

drama in the diarama

2005-03-25T02:11:00.000-08:00

bbbreak up time.
cause you know that breaking up is easy to do, what they say about love, you know, it just ain't true.

there you go.

yeah. fuck that.

oh you guilty little paramecium

2005-03-25T02:06:00.000-08:00

hey

2005-03-23T19:51:00.000-08:00

come to my show tonight. really.

i mean it. please.

pietasm '05: the aftermath

2005-03-23T19:38:00.000-08:00

It must needs be done, ye,

The Pierats walked away with the prize for their stunning Key Lime Pie, though I must say that the competition was close and the pies were all quite good. I will attempt to recapture the tenor of my note, though the original scoresheets from the event were destroyed lest one find them and go mad.

Here they are

1. not yer Granny's coconot cream rum mud pie

Okay, so this pie was pretty good and had a lot of elements going on. It was pretty ambitious, coconut cream, merangue topping, brownie/black bottom rum crust. The flavors were melding, it was really lovely, but it failed to deliver on consistency. It was pretty much an icebox pie that was begining to liquefy.

2. Key lime pie

If you like key lime pie this was probably your deal. The flavor of this pie was like... if you had a metal teenage daughter and agreed to go to her band's first gig at the Dixie Taverne, and it's Monday night and you've just gotten out of work and then her band starts playing something and she's screaming about how life is a piece of shit and she's going to burn the house down and there's some guy slam dancing next to you and he's just elbowed you in the teeth.

3. Lulabelle:

This pie was cover with fresh raspberries and pansies. The crust was fantastic and studded with bits of pistachio. The filling was perfect, but saddly meshed oddly with the custard filling. Otherwise utterly perfect in every way as a dessert pie. Not too sweet not too bland. Lovely.

This pie is wonderful, but unfortunately this pie is like the upstanding and beautiful girlfriend whose heart will softly be broken when she realizes that I have secretly been sneaking out to make it with the Maytag Blue tart. I will feel bad but dive on midnight highways and split a bottles of cheap booze with the Maytag Blue tart. Lulabelle, she'll wake up alone wondering where I am. I want to be better for the Lulabelle pie, I'll make promises I can't keep, tell her I'll get a better job and we'll move away from this stupid town...

4. blueberry lemon chess pie
5. sweet potatoe pie

I will not comment upon 5&6.

6. Maytag Blue and Asian Pear:
Sister Brother secret lover... Even remembering this pie approaches pornography. This pie is like ripping your clothes off in the middle of the forest, running naked and screaming obscenities and prayer for so long and so hard that your throat becomes hoarse.

SHOW ALERT SHOW ALERT!

2005-03-23T15:28:00.000-08:00

Dear people who read this,

I apologize for my forwardness (and the bold print) and hope that I have not offended you, but I'm going to be playing my cello tonight and singing and generally making a fool of myself. If you have plans, drop them and head out to...

Eldon's Shoebox
3055 Royal St
8 pm-ish

in the Bywater, New Orleans. Sort of by the Country Club and Markey's Bar past the Press Street tracks.

Be there or B^2!

Also, Ms. Roberts and her whimsical cello will be featured with those roustabouts ("dissolute French sailors and Victorian ragdolls" -- The Gambit Weekly) about the town...
EL RADIO FANTASTIQUE!!!
with bipolaroid at One Eyed Jacks on this Friday the 25th. 9-ish!

Exclamation point!

pietasm '05: high time for pie time

2005-03-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

awww dude,
I am totally judging a pie contest at Cafe Brasil tonight. Right the fuck on.

In case you're wondering, here are some pie-related facts that qualify me for the position:

1. I was raised in Phillipsburg, Ohio until the age of eight. Phillipsburg was a pretty unassuming place. My outstanding memories of it include the large cornfield that butted up against our front yard and the long country roads that linked the village to the rest of the world. Union, Englewood, Verona and Greenville were part of the small cluster of rural communities neighboring Phillipsburg. Union, Ohio happened to be home to a rather large religious-agrarian community related similar to the Mennonites. My mother and father said called them the Bretheran, though I'm not sure what they called themselves. The community ran a rather large butcher and sweet shop that my parents were extremely fond of. I can still remember the smell of the sugar cookies and the sour earthy odor of blood mixed together, that scent so distinct to the flourescent-lit shop where I would get my favorite chipped ham.

They made gooseberry pies, strawberry rhubarb. At the time my taste wasn't sophisticated enough to appreciate them. I went mainly for the peach and pecan...

2. They don't have pies in Thailand, but there's this stuff called canome geep, and some of them have really good crusts. No. Really good.

3. Employed in foods since the age of sixteen.

4.The legendary sweet-tooth. I spend most of my income on ridiculously fancy frou-frou sweets, drinks and savories. I tend to be label conscious, but omnivorous regarding food stuffs that meet the qualifications. Horchata, the ginger cake and tiny pies sold at cornerstore counters, church fundraiser sweets, Albertson's generic brand maple cookies, they all go into the giant masher. MASH!

In case anyone wanted to know the post office in the CBD (the one with the fascistic eagles) has a snackshop that sells homemade tiny pies. And there's a really good sweet shop by Magazine and State called Delice. The Vietnamese woman behind the counter makes a nice carmely crust. And the praline cheesecake is pretty foooiine. Yums.

My name is Albert, like Camus

2005-03-16T18:25:00.000-08:00

I like how GW's speech uses the ole high school debate team tactic of luring them in with a completely in appropriate quote from an impotant sounding European intellectual.

Excerpts from Gary Leupp's article in Counterpunch

We know there are many obstacles, and we know the road is long. Albert Camus said that, "Freedom is a long-distance race." We're in that race for the duration -- and there is reason for optimism. Oppression is not the wave of the future; it is the desperate tactic of a few backward-looking men. Democratic nations grow in strength because they reward and respect the creative gifts of their people. And freedom is the direction of history, because freedom is the permanent hope of humanity.

George W. Bush, Brussels, February 22, 2005

It's just painful to hear and see a smirking Bush invoking Albert Camus, the French writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, from a podium in Belgium. No doubt the speechwriter thought, "Okay, the prez will be in Brussels, surrounded by Old Europe elites. He'll state, forgivingly, that our disagreements with Europe are all in the past. But he'll lecture the Europeans about how the war on Iraq that they've opposed so strenuously is all about freedom, and not as they suspect about empire-building. The European snobs read literature. So we'll include this Camus quote to show that Bush reads too, and he respects even great French authors who favor freedom. How conciliatory!"

more
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp02262005.html

Oh, by the way I totally stole this from Z'Otz regular Mark's blog. I found is hauntingly uncanny, since The Stranger was totally my bible from ages 13-17.

i wish i could just go home and lay on the couch, smoke a j and listen to dub music

2005-03-16T17:31:00.000-08:00

I was looking around on the internet at the Boss RC20XL Loop Station Pedal (w/ 16 minute sampling length). Drool drool.

It was suggested earlier to me that I buy one to perform with in the future. I was playing a cd of some of the audio bricollage/experimental accoustical music that I'd worked on. Really it's been a bit.

I'd worked on the music for Thomas's film showing at the Sidearm with Walt and Paul Cowgirl.

I think the last time I performed was on the street with Claire and that must've been in January. Before that I performed my cello with Claire's saw in Houston in December and the same act at Z'Otz grand opening in November.

Before that I performed at my former place of employment on Julia Street. I spent a great deal of time preparing it, taking note about the traffic on Lee Circle, the sound of the highway and the pigeons. Cars honking under the overpass, and the sound of the traffic up on Lee's monument, how far off and distant it was. Anyway I'd created a just intonation/semi-tone piece. I'd been into a lot of Harry Partch at the time (yeah, I know). It didn't go well. Everyone was drunk. I felt like a total novelty act. People were more interested in watching my bow and the color of my cello than anything I had actually been playing. That must've been in May. I'd sworn never to play in public again after that. Some good I am at keeping my proud oathes.

The first time I performed in public here after the big move was at the Dada Ball in March abouts.

Encyclopedia Britannica style

2005-03-12T17:51:00.000-08:00

I just had a memory, in the library yard.

In Berlin. Some punks, talking, are sitting in an open backyard area surrounded by concrete apartment buildings. It's early afternoon. Angela and Martin are a young couple wandering around the city. It's a beautiful day during an unusually warm summer.

Angela: WOw look at the mural Martin. We should go in there and talk to those people sittig there about it. It looks pretty wonderful. I wonder if this is their courtyard?

Martin: You can't just walk into someone's courtyard Angela. It's a part of their living space, not just some park.

Angela: But I want to pet their dog... it would be really cool.

Books I've read while on the desk at Latter

2005-03-09T19:23:00.000-08:00

The Hero has 1,000 Faces, Campbell.
The Art of Love, Erich Froehm.
The Tattooed Girl, Joyce Carol Oates.
Frida, the most recent biography: I've completely forgotten the biographer's name.
Frida Kahlo's journal.
Man and His Symbols, Jung and company.
A Series of Unfortunate Events, the first and second books, Lemony Snickett.
The Sensitive Man and Other Essays, Anaies Nin; purchased from the Sunday table in front of the El Matador.
Celestial Railroad and Other Short Stories, Hawthorne: a few, not all of them.

I've still got to get into the Artaud paperback that I checked out. And the Villon that I borrowed from the Z'Otz library. I've read a great deal of ee cummings as well. His influence on my own writing is soon to be rivaling Stein's in the future, ie extremely obtrusive recognizable stylization.

2.

I stapled up some of my "graffitti" project in the Quarter today. "Graffitti" meaning not graffitti in the literal sense, since a) I'm a civil servant and therefore would never ever be involved in anything that would tarnish my reputation as a representative of the City of New Orleans & b) all of it is absolutely transient and I'm sure that any legit graffittists would laugh me out of town.

I went to Kinkos and xeroxed some of my older inks and journal entries. Originally I had wanted to post paper like Moose had. His work is a really striking combination of text and image. He really incorporates the texture/distortion & grittiness of typewritten text and reproduced photo to its utmost expressive effect. Plus his poems are really accessible and totally effing awesome. And mine are a little more dramatic and personal and I'm not sure I'm completely out of the closet with a lot of them even though I should be. (you're a writer, like duh, get over yerself finally). So I ended up making quite a few flyer sized things and stapling them in the Decatur/Frenchman St area.

They're a bit secret, which I like. And public art, which I like too.

ar

Curse of the Subway Sandwich

2005-03-09T18:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday night I was puking like it was going outta style. Et tu Subway veggie patty?

my wish list

2005-03-07T17:17:00.000-08:00

These books are ever so lovely and it is my intention to gobble them up completely.

Ernst, Max. The Hundred Headless Woman
" Une Semaine de Boute
" A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Up the Veil

Saetty, W. The Cosmic Bicycle
" Time Zone

However the total is completely out of my price range, in terms of spoiling oneself.
I should save up my clams and travel.
(want want want)

right in the ways and the rules of the world

2005-03-07T13:49:00.000-08:00

On art and humour

I proclaim, today, that the inability to laugh at oneself and in general poke fun at oneself is an inherent personality flaw. Meaning, namely, that if you're unable to distance yourself from your image and divorce self from image you're obviously some way puffed up sociopath that has O'd on ego.

Just a thought, a fragment. I think that the ability to make fun of oneself, to not take oneself to seriously, is completely charming and attractive and genuine. Life is absurd, and the poking and laughing and love of craft and creativity are all unified and fundamental to existence.

Johnny says we're all retards, fags and nerds. I like that.

the sweet olive trees will take us away

2005-03-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

dear top secret diary,

Newsflash!

Thomas Little is sleeping in my house, but I believe that he will shortly be moving into Mo Howlpop's house in the Marigny/Bywater area. I'll miss him. But I'm currently more than a little upset that there is no hot water in my house. I have to take showers at my neighbors. Big hugs and kisses to Issa and Genghis for letting me intrude upon them upteen zillion times.

I slept through the things I was supposed to do last night. I have to hang out with Austin and Leila big time. I missed the TUL show at Polynesian Joes. I was oddly tired from practicing with Johnny and hanging out all day. I get into fairly bad habits, like sitting a long time. It makes me feel antsy and weird.

Not writing makes me feel antsy and weird. Not drawing too. Not riding my bike, which I've been not doing for a bit. Naet naought knot. Hopefully since the weather's begun to clear up again I can hop back onto my bitchen ride and jet to various destinations around town. Then I won't have to worry about the softish bits forming around my thighs, middle, and boobs area. i just wish that my exterior was as hard and imposing as my ice cold heart, you know? Is that so much to ask?

I want my computer to work. The impase is to either reinstall programs in my old one or to wait until I get my new one. I don't think my parents will ever get around to sending me their Christmas present anytime soon, but oh well. At least I know that it will be pretty cool when I recieve it.

more
later

roaring only snoring

2005-02-28T15:33:00.000-08:00

dear me oh my,

Last night I dreamed I was in a movie theater with Leila and that we had to clean a great deal of it, in particular the bathroom. It was extremely unpeasant, at least in the dream. Thomas Little, experimental animator, is staying in my apartment until he finds a job and a place of his own. Hopefully he'll find a pleasant gig so he can get some scratch and find an apartment of his own. Thomas and I were sleeping together (don't get any fresh ideas perverts, we're just friends and I don't want to besmirch Thomas' artfag rep) he told me I was talking in my sleep...

On Tickling and Massages and Kissing

2005-02-19T10:58:00.000-08:00

Notes from (me) on On Kissing,Tickling and Being Bored by Adam Phillips.

These violent delights have violent ends,
And in their triumph die like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume.

Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet

He mooches around in his mind for more to say, but to his own surprise he is blank, so I offer him a suggestion: "When people kiss they've stopped talking. If her kisses were words, what would the be saying to you?" "You really can't love someone that you don't love kissing," he replies as though oblivious to my question. (93)

Freud: narcissistic inetent, desire to kiss ones own mouth, the mouth as a seeker, and the kiss as inevitably unsatisfactory, but also an end in itself.

hmmm...

books

2005-01-26T19:25:00.000-08:00

So I've been reading a bit lately. Playing cello with El Radio Fantastique, trying to write lyrics and music for Lucifer Morningstar, cleaning my new apartment.

I'm nearing the end of Geoff Raydel's 253 which has impressed me so far. Monday I read a few of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales. I've also been looking at some of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories. Most recently "The Dunwich Horror." Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers was really fantastic, but I'm very fond of Spiegelman, also on Monday. I look forward to getting into Jung's Man an his Symbols and finishing Pynchon's Vineland. The other day I was at Keller during the filming of All the King's Men at Latter and I got to have a look at Borroughs's correspondence with Ginsberg and Keruouac. It was pretty entertaining stuff. I felt like I was listening in on a conversation between people I knew.

Maybe The Dream of Poliphili next.

marguerite marguerite ida and helena annabelle

2005-01-26T19:00:00.000-08:00

On the outside I look like a normal sexually mature adult female. On the inside I'm seething with rage.

I guess... I've reached a very odd point. I don't mind my jobs, but I do mind the routine. I've worked the morning shift since late October. It's gotten to the point where I can identify everyone that comes in for coffee during my shift.

paragraph.

Milton Latter died twenty days after his 23rd birthday, on April 27th, 1945. The coincidence of the numbers 2, 3, and 7 is disarming. Here I am. My 24th birthday is slowly approaching/ slouching toward me. Fortunately 2 and 3 aren't my numbers. If anything they're 1 and 8, if you go for that sort of thing.

I don't. I just like fabricating fictions.

He's got a plaque on the wall, brass to be exact, Milton Latter. And the library memorializes him, though it seems like there wasn't so much to memorialize. He was only 23 when he died in Okinawa. Was it worth it? You're not so much dying for a cause, but for a peculiar and distinct historical moment.

One American veteran described the onslaught: "While on Okinawa, the marines and soldiers were going through their crucible of hell brought on by rain, heat, poison snakes, mosquitoes...the stench of human feces and rotting human flesh filled with maggots...."
Leo Drake, United States Navy (retired), to Megan Tzeng, Ohio, January 9, 2000, E-mail in the hand of Megan Tzeng, Cleveland.

In his portrait he looks like some one who might order coffee from me in the morning. He's still got that soft layer of youth on his cheeks, but shadows are beginning to peek on the corners of his mouth and under his eyes. He'd probably come into Z'Otz a little groggy, wearing jeans, the shirt he'd slept in and a rumpled blazer. He'd order a dark roast, or maybe a single Americano, to go. We wouldn't say much to each other. I can see him fumbling with his change crumpled bills falling onto the counter, murmuring thank you, rubbing his face while throwing a dollar in my tip jar. Maybe he'd change his mind and grab a cookie at the last minute, then wonder why he'd gotten it as he was walking home.

Milton Latter would be 82 making his way toward 83 this year.

N'awfel

2005-01-19T19:45:00.000-08:00

Individuals whose affairs have reached an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less of a solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and moderate expectation of good.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables.

My girlfriend Hermione is dead, I think. I’ve made an exhaustive collection of notes. Taken small articles of her from her room, attempting to construct the relationship between her and her things. Anything that I could pull from them would leave me more satisfied than the three months of memories and the simple resolution that we were over. So I write in the cheap notebook I purchased from the corner store, as I take an extended vacation, or prolonged unexcused absence depending on how you see it, from the gallery that I work at. This is not the story of my life, but an attempt at a full biography and explanation of every moment that we spent together.
When I sit back and think about her, I’d like it to be a flood of images, something like a film or a dream. I’d like Hermione to be a place I can visit, somewhere I can be completely surrounded by every moment I’d been with her. I want her to be a world unto herself. If I could somehow capture every aspect of her simultaneously and call them into being for me at once I would be completely content. As it is, my memory fails me. It falters and trips at times. There were moments in our short relationship when I was certain she loved me. However at other times it’s very hard to remember the more specific details, the evidence that proves the bond we had to each other. There is the postcard she sent me from a short trip Pascagoula: “I am very muchly looking forward to seeing you again Rainer. I miss you.” The other side was decorated with an image of a pizza made out of rice crispies treats and fruit loops. I ask myself if she meant it, or if that was what one was expected to write to a lover while away on vacation. Often I resign myself to believe it means nothing at all, that the closing of this letter was an arbitrary whim written in the space of less than two minutes.
My memories of Hermione are not very clear. I remember her in flashes. I never see her entirely at once as I’d like. One can stand in front of a painting or piece of art and be swallowed by it. When I first saw the Friedrich exhibit at the Alte Nationalgalerie, during a short vacation after I made my Abitur at eighteen, I stood in front of The Sea of Ice following the angles of the ice floes that jutted from the water. The eeriness of the empty landscape seemed to accentuate the museum’s smell of dust and paint. An odd feeling of vertigo mixed with headache passed over me. When I looked at the painting I somehow lost myself in the peculiar loneliness of the sea. For a while afterward I researched Friedrich on my own. It became a kind of hobby figuring out the clues he left in his paintings. I think one can remember a painting or a photograph completely. I can close my eyes and recall the essential parts of the image: the composition, contrasts, and perhaps some of the less subtle aspects of light play. Art has always been a flat thing that I can pull before me. Even quite some time after seeing a piece, I remember an image very clearly. Hermione is much more difficult. It’s hard to remember exactly how she looked. Even when I was with her I would find myself surprised each time I saw her. Her face had a specificity, a clarity and sharpness that I could never keep with me. The photos I have of her lack the strangeness of her presence. They seemed to reduce her being to a single expression. Photographs are not true to the moment. I fear, though, one day I will only have her photographs. Memories and photos will become the same when I forget her. It will happen eventually. Her smile in a snapshot will become the content of a happy memory as I forget the complex and melancholy details of the situation.
I remember clearest her most striking elements. Physically, Hermione was short, shorter than me, though she was not terribly short in terms of other women. Her head reached to my chest. I distinctly remember the way her head would knock against me when she hugged me. Her hairpins would occasionally poke through my shirt. I had to lean down to kiss her. She stood on her toes while slinging her arms around my neck. Her balance was drunken. She wasn’t terribly graceful, but she had an unconscious charm. That was what was so winning about her; her complete abandon and utter lack of concern for sophistication.
Her hair was red like a beet. She dyed it, but I never saw her dye it. Photographs fail to capture the way the sun shone on it. It was violet at times, but redder at others. She had bangs that were cut to lie flatly on her forehead. I would run my fingers through her hair in the morning when she leaned into me sleeping. Her hair smelled like fruit punch.
The soap she used always left her smelling vaguely sweet like almonds, or marzipan. After her showers she would sit on the bed on top of a towel waiting for her hair to dry. I often kissed her neck trying to find the source of her marzipan smell. It was much milder than her shampoo, but for some reason it did not fade like the scent of her hair would during the day. I would catch hints of almond on my sheets after she had slept over. It lingered on my sweaters after she wore them. There are times now when I think I catch it in some article of clothing, or on a pillowcase, but it is so faint that it might very well be some ghost of my imagination.
When we were in bed, while she slept, I would stare at her hands. Her arms were flung over her head like a dancer’s in mid-leap. Her hands would land over my pillow. The nails were uneven, rather dirty. They would twitch. I would kiss them, but she never felt it. Or at least she pretended to be asleep if she did. She looked rather strange when she slept. I do not think that she was particularly beautiful sleeping. I think she looked like some sort of animal like a cat or a puppy. I was always tempted to wake her up when I watched her sleep. Her foreignness in sleep disturbed me a little. I would kiss her cheek or stroke her arm. She would murmur something and open her eyes. Her eyes were bright green in between blue and gray, a yellowish ring encircled her pupils. When she opened her eyes in the morning I was always surprised by their intensity. The moment she opened her eyes in the morning she became immediate. It was as if a great distance had been traveled from where she was in sleep to waking next to me.
Her accent was stereotypically French, despite her incredible vocabulary. It was very endearing. I’ve always been bad at remembering the pronunciation of English sound clusters. I have to repeat myself rather often. She made fun, very gently, of my accent when I said her name. Your atcches err too aard, she would always tell me. I would laugh.
Before she died, we’d been arguing. It had been a week of terrible misunderstandings and confusion. Her accent got thicker when she was angry or nervous. She would say one thing, I would misinterpret it and respond perhaps more extremely than I should have. Hermione would ride off on her bike, pissed-off, usually saying she would call me when she felt like talking again. I became quiet. Our arguments would happen too quickly for me to sort out my words and feelings. Tension made me even more confused about what she expected me to do. I was never sure if she preferred yelling to silence, but I could never yell at her. Hermione would ride off somewhere, perhaps around the city or next to the river, very quickly. I was too proud and stupid to ever tell her that it hurt to see her leave angry. I would hide my crying as I walked home kicking cans, small stones, parking meters, lampposts, etc.
The content of the arguments is not very memorable. One of us would say something that would annoy the other; one of us would get upset. She would accuse me of being too proud. I would tell her that she shouldn’t be so judgmental. She would call me cold. I would tell her that she was sensitive only concerning her own emotions. The arguments were never about anything, but they were so powerful as to obliterate all of my other feelings for her. I was convinced that she forgot any fondness for me the moment we started an exchange. In these moments all of the closeness of a previous morning or evening was destroyed. Often it was as if we were completely different people in each moment. I’m not being extravagant when I say it was hell. The arguments made no difference at all to whatever it was that we had been talking about, but they made all the difference between us.
I remember our last argument very strongly. We had gone to bed upset in her apartment. She was not so angry that she couldn’t stand being with me, but she lay on the other side of the bed with her back facing toward me. Hermione woke earlier than I did, which happened very rarely. I heard the door slam in a dream and woke up alone several hours later to the familiar interior of her apartment. The wide bed we usually shared was cold that morning. My hand rested on the pillow where her head should have been. I knew that I’d upset her again somehow. I looked around for a note, but could not find one on the refrigerator. Leaving notes on the refrigerator door had been a habit we’d developed with each other. Both of us kept messy bedrooms. Hers was a hybrid of study and sleeping area. Bookshelves full of papers, books and notebooks lined the wall. Every writing surface had a pile of papers collecting on top of it. Finding a single note in the midst of all of her things was impossible. She’d given me an extra key a month before to feed her pet crawfish. Eventually we decided to give each other copies of our keys out of convenience. We alternated staying over every time one of us had a day off.
I pulled my clothes off of her floor and left her apartment around nine am. It was an unseasonably warm day for January. The sky was bright blue and white. I was too embarrassed to walk past the kitsch shops on Magazine Street and wait like an idiot for the city bus while an entire Saturday morning cavalcade of shoppers inspected me. I walked around aimlessly; staring at the pavement and wondering how long the ugly stretch of arguing we’d stumbled into would last. I cursed myself for having ruined another one of my mornings off. I would’ve liked to have gone to breakfast with her, or bought some rolls from the bakery down the street. We could have had some coffee that morning. If we had woken up and had coffee together, things would have worked out all right the rest of the day I think.
I stumbled past the glittering homes of the rich. Their shrubs were very well tended, but that didn’t prevent me from spitting on them. A dog barked. I remember my feet crushing the dry brown leaves on the sidewalks. I saw what I thought was one odd large bird, wounded and struggling on the sidewalk. I leaned in to see if I could help it, but two sparrows flew off in separate directions.
I had supposed that she wouldn’t call me at all that day. The ride home on the streetcar was rather typical. Eventually I sat in my room reading the Hawthorne novel that Hermione had lent me earlier that month. I left some messages on her answering machine and felt like a fool for doing even that much. She never bothered to answer my calls. I measured out the nights in tequila from the corner shop. A week later her friend Anja called and told me she had died Saturday morning buying pastries. Apparently it took some time for the police to contact her parents and friends. I hadn’t gone back to her apartment because I hadn’t wanted to bother her.

Diagram

From the information the hospital and her friends gave me I’ve managed to reconstruct the events:
1. Hermione buys croissants and puts them in her bike basket.
2. Hermione rides back toward her apartment.
3. Car A parks in front of bookstore on Magazine.
4. Hermione is still riding her bike down Magazine Street, where she lives, which is both riddled with potholes and is wide enough for only two mid-sized vehicles.
5. Truck B is some distance behind Hermione.
6. Car A opens driver side door without looking in side view mirror into Hermione’s path.
7. Hermione attempts to swerve out of the way, but she is too close to make it.
8. Hermione is thrown from her bike to the left, the direction her bike was steered toward in order to avoid collision with Car A, and hits her head upon impact with street.
9. Truck B applies brake, but does not come to rest until it has passed over Hermione’s neck and shoulder.
10. Hermione dies instantly.

When I learned she was dead, this may seem odd, but I wanted very much to hug her. I wanted to pull her up from the place of death and tell her that I was sorry that we’d been arguing so much recently, and that it was a terrible thing that had happened to us. What changes take place between a man and a woman to make us argue as we did? I wanted to hold her and tell her that she didn’t need to die, that sooner or later things would work out. That we would have gotten over whatever it was that was bothering us.
I somehow would not believe she was dead. Perhaps Anja was preparing another performance piece, some sort of audio instillation about death and playing tricks on dopes like me. I sat on my couch and looked out the window of my bedroom that provided an uninteresting view of a palm tree and the side of my neighbor’s house. I think about six hours later it dawned on me that I should call work and tell them that I wasn’t coming in. I don’t remember exactly what the content of the call was, but I think I managed to spit out something like, I’m not coming in today my girlfriend is dead. I don’t remember how I dealt with it exactly. It’s hard to recall the fine points of pain after it has passed, but I do remember crying, a call to my mother, and several long walks that ended nowhere in particular.
Eventually I found my way back to her apartment during my wandering. I stood in front of the iron gate wondering if I should enter, and under what pretext it would be appropriate for me to enter. Part of me wondered if her apartment was unchanged since the last moments we had seen each other, or if people had come in searching for evidence of some sort of misdeed. I wanted to see her room again, to smell the way her house smelled and somehow call on all the fond memories that had taken place here. I unlocked the door and stepped into her empty apartment.
It was exactly as it had been when I left. It felt strangely like all those times I’d come to check on her apartment and feed her fish while she was gone, except there was no expectation of her return, none of the happy expectation of seeing her again. Outside I heard the birds calling and the sound of cars on the road. These were familiar noises to me, I remember all those days that the birds calling each other would wake me up next to her and I would stare at her sleeping next to me.
What I did in her apartment is embarrassing for me to talk about. I sat in her bed and touched a hair on her pillow, one of her long red violet hairs that I would never see again. I fell into her pillow and tried to find her scent in it. I cried without reservation. I crawled under her covers and held her pillow tightly against me. It was terrible to know that she was gone, that she had stepped out the door and disappeared a week ago. At some point I fell asleep.

Folks, readers, my future self reading this later, if you exist I must apologize for starting things off on a sentimental note, but what else can one talk about, and how can one talk, after death? My telling of the events may put you off, but I must record the exact depth and intensity of these vulnerable and perhaps too personal moments in order for me to understand how and why I feel as I do now, a month after the events. I must be completely honest and say guiltily, that I did steal the soap from her shower as a memento of sorts. The soap, with its familiar soapy almondy smell is too dear for me to ever use now. Even as I write this very sentence I am aware of the soap’s weight against my leg. Though the habit is mysterious to me, it always ends up in my right pocket. It comforts me greatly, but I am vaguely uncomfortable that it may be symptomatic of an unhealthy attachment.

Boudreaux
Hermione told me once that Boudreaux was the most charming pet that she had ever had. It was very hard for me to understand how that could be true. He was a muddy brown and red crawfish, with large wiggling black eye stems. His body had some odd looking parasites on part of his shell. Anytime anyone other than Hermione came near him he would raise his claws at them and begin snapping them open and shut furiously while bubbles dribbled from his clacking mandibles.
Hermione had found him at a party around Mardi Gras in a crawfish boil. As she told it, she was standing next to a kiddy pool full of live crawfish drinking a PBR and talking to some guy she’d met about fast food technology when something in the pool caught her eye. Hermione walked away from the conversation toward the pool and saw Boudreaux. In an instant she knew there was something very particular about that crawfish. She pulled him from the pool and placed him in an empty beer cup. When she first told me the story, I laughed and asked her how much she had been drinking that night. She insisted that she had only had one beer that night. Oddly enough I believed her, since Boudreaux had never pinched her and seemed to act like a crazy animal around everyone but her.
She told me that at that moment she knew that she could never eat meat again, and looking at Boudreaux in his large glass bowl helped her solve personal problems. Hermione spoiled him completely. He ate well. As Hermione ate she would drop a small of amount her scraps into the bowl for him. Their diet consisted of shared pastas with cream sauces, fresh rolls, baby greens. She insisted that he was especially fond of fresh tropical fruit, though I never understood how a creature with a natural diet of swamp sludge could exhibit a specific fondness for mangoes and bananas.
Often she would tickle his sides. Boudreaux would lean into her fingers and roll around. See, look, he likes it, she would giggle as I stood some distance away. Other times Hermione would take him out of his bowl and let him crawl on the palms of her hands, or would play tug of war with him with a chopstick. I was ever jealous of the attention Hermione lavished on the disgusting creature, wishing she would tickle me instead.

I was aware of Boudreaux’s icy gaze returning mine as I stared into his crawfish castle. Hermione had constructed a monstrous and odd home for him on her kitchen table. His house was a huge glass mixing bowl occupied by a castle, a sunken ship, miniature treasure chest and a tiny plaster skeleton. The mixing bowl, she insisted, replicated Boudreaux’s swamp home. Looking at him while we ate our meals had always made me feel uneasy. Now that I had the long awaited opportunity to toss him out the window, flush him down the toilet, or boil him alive and eat him, I felt oddly attached to the swamp monster Hermione had spent so much time spoiling.
Boudreaux and I stood locked in a staring contest. The results were disappointing. I was still tired from my crying and too short nap. Boudreaux had no eyelids. I became dizzy, and still have trouble remembering what exactly occurred. It was something like hypnosis I imagine.
Please forgive your humble narrator for lapses in memory on such a serious occasion. I imagine that the news of her death had caused me a great deal of stress. Stress that might manifest itself in bodily pains, loss of appetite, a disturbance of sleeping patterns, and change in mood, and might also make itself known in visual or audio hallucination. That is how I account for my brief conversations with Boudreaux, why they occurred and how they occurred. Rather than simply dismissing myself as a madman and running from the house in terror I stayed to chat with him. I was too tired to think of any other option.
“So we find ourselves alone together at last. The fact presents itself finally, you hate me and I hate you. Though our mutual animosity will put a strain on our conversations, I think that we can agree to behave according to the boundaries that Hermione established, out of mutual respect.” Boudreaux’s voice was husky and dry; it had the tone of a wise grandfather. It was stern and spoke with the authority of experience. The words were slow and clear, pronounced with confidence and determination. His voice had the very real quality of speech, however I am now certain that we were communicating telepathically.
I had no idea how to respond, or if it was appropriate for me to ignore the voice in my head hoping for it to disappear.
“I expected you to be shocked, seeing as you never struck me as terribly bright in your conversations with Hermione. She was much too good for you, by the way, but no doubt you had the same prejudices regarding her fondness for me.” He paused thoughtfully, “Tell me Rainer, are you familiar with the transmigration of the soul? I’m speaking of that esoteric notion often associated with Hindoo and Eastern philosophies. Though Hermione often entertained me with conversation, I have been greatly isolated from the auspices of human conversation and the society of man for too long I fear. I no longer know the philosophical spirit of the times. She was quite familiar with the concept which explains my current, unenviable state of affairs.”
I nodded, and stuttered my response in German mixed with English as the crawfish continued his self-important lecture.
“Through no fault of my own, after my death I found my spirit inhabiting the body of a small crustacean. It is no doubt a strange destiny, to be trapped in this dirty and inappropriate shell, watching the mundane sequence of events that constitute human life pass before me like a play performed by my mistress.” Boudreaux coughed dryly. “One achieves an odd state of removal, separated as I am from the authenticity of human interaction. But by no means do I mean disrespect: I was singularly touched by Hermione’s company.”
“Watching her rise from bed, like primitive Venus, naked, hair wild, was a ne’er thought achievable life moment for me at one time. I was studying philosophy at Bowdoin, with an interest in pursuing law, too occupied with my scholarship to be interrupted with personal relationships. In life my name was Phineas T. Bradshaw, it feels so odd to pronounce the name that was once so ingrained in my existence. Slated to graduate into 1825, during an ill-fated walk in the Maine woods I was struck by lightning while seeking shelter under a near-by fir tree.”
He paused thoughtfully, and hesitatingly whispered, “I died deprived of the more gentle aspects of the fair sex, being exceedingly shy and inexperienced in their company. At which point I must express how marvelous it was to watch the two of you freely make sport with your bodies with almost daily regularity. The oriental and creative positions, kneeling on the divan, sprawled over the kitchen chair, leaning against the bookshelves. Frankly amazing… I must confess that often I would imagine myself in your place as you made love to Hermione. But what woman would ever be with a crawfish…? None, certainly.”
The conversation grew increasingly more uncomfortable as he ceaselessly recited the details of his long gone life, the limitations of his current embodiment and lovingly recollecting the particulars of my “white hot” nights with Hermione. I had been looking forward to some quiet time in her apartment, sorting out my thoughts, taking back some of the things I had leant her, saving personal items from the trash heap. The crawfish continued talking without any deference to whether I was paying attention or not. Flushing him down the toilet, despite his amazing powers of communication became a greater temptation as his rambling monologue showed no signs of fatigue.
“What a curious position I found myself in, one could hardly believe…”
“Shut up,” I stuttered.
“Yes, Rainer.” He muttered. “Predictable, I see how you power over me becomes readily apparent…”
“No, you don’t understand. I need you to be quiet. Nothing is easy to understand now. Of course being trapped in a crustacean body is a difficult place to occupy. So yes,” I was talking non-sense. It was hard for me to think of a response to Boudreaux’s invasive, yet incredibly articulate and polite, line of conversation. I felt bad for him. Obviously being stuck in a crawfish shell was humiliating. I would have readily discussed all of the complications and the tragedy of his situation if he hadn’t been such a jerk. Cutting him off mid-sentence was not kind of me, but I had no idea how to stop his awful talking.

I think that at some time or another we’ve all had fantasies about stopping time and traveling in reverse through it, to an earlier more pristine state. While we inevitably dismiss them as immature and fantastical sentiments, I constantly find myself wishing that I could travel back in time before the conversation with Boudreaux. If anything clearly designated mental illness or tragedy, it was my conversations with Boudreaux. I am of the opinion that normal people do not speak with crawfish. Quite frequently, to my own dismay, I engage in conversations with my briny friend, most end in bitter arguments. This was the first example of such, perhaps one of the more mild ones.
I don’t know what to do with the information Boudreaux gives me. He admits, quite regularly, that self-preservation is his foremost motivation. Therefore, it will always be to his advantage to lie to me, or deceive me with colorful and self-aggrandizing stories of his youth. Our conversations lead to mutual annoyance, hatred, the basest shows of frustration. I have threatened to boil him more than once and regularly imprison him in the refrigerator for the sake of a moment of quiet introspection. I’m not sure if he plays games with me, or genuinely believes that we share a connection that transcends the immediate situation.
“I’m sorry I lost my temper, I’ve been under a great deal of stress since she died,” I admitted to the air and the crawfish.
“So you actually believe that she is dead then?” he asked with an audible sneer in his voice. His question had a terrible force, an impact like a ton of bricks crashing into my solar plexus. The tone of his voice was defiant and proud. Hermione was dead to me, though I had not seen the body nor spoken with the police. Boudreaux’s question disturbed me, yet renewed a sense of hope within me. Hermione alive and well, Rainer the victim of a simple misunderstanding regarding the circumstances of a very serious, but non-lethal car accident!
I could envision it, Rainer the dashing gent kneeling at her bedside with a bouquet of red roses, petals smooth as velvet. Hermione, bound-up in a cast barely conscious, muttering my name in her coma/fever dreams. I, dashing Rainer looking Valentino-esque, swearing my love to her forever, and awakening her with passionate kiss.
“You’re a fool Rainer,” Boudreaux said. My fantasies were interrupted by the crawfish’s crusty voice. “You were so blindly infatuated with her that you never stopped to notice that she had begun to loathe your very essence. Your arguments were ludicrous. You obviously did not respect her art, or her friends. She was ashamed of you, ashamed that you throw yourself to her with a total lack of self-analysis. Saying that you loved her without taking the time to know her.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked uncertain of his remarks.
“You are an idiot Rainer. I will never be able to make the truth clear to you, you’re obsessed with controlling a situation you never had control of in the first place.”
Shortly following his remarks, I placed Boudreaux, crawfish castle and all, in the refrigerator very carefully. Having no intention of harming him, I made sure to sprinkle a few pieces of lettuce in his bowl, before I stuffed him in the crisper.

Diagram #2

Hermione plans to leave me, discussing options with her friends and Boudreaux.
Hermione synthesizes an argument with me, and then leaves the house the next morning at an early hour in order to disappear/avoid conflict.
Hermione stays with a friend, either in town or out of state, until I commit suicide/forget about her.
Dressed in their best clothing, they all drink wine and laugh during my funeral.

The probability of diagram number two having truth value seems a stretch to me. I’m not sure that Hermione would orchestrate such a bizarre plan to avoid me. It would have been simpler put the phone off the hook, or have one of her friends tell me that she didn’t want to see me any more if she was thoroughly interested in avoiding me forever. However Boudreaux’s uncannily specific knowledge of our conflicts haunted me. I had never properly understood Hermione’s art, her life ambitions, or her obnoxious artsy friends. I could not be completely certain that I was not a victim of her aesthetic sensibilities.
Art and life were one entity, she always claimed. One had to think artistically, constantly questioning acts and speech, looking for the structures of power, sexism, and the political agendas that lay underneath the surfaces of everyday interaction. I never understood what she meant, though I would attentively listen to her explain the theories and philosophies that captivated her. It was difficult to concentrate; I would space-out quite frequently and find myself paying more attention to the cadences of her voice than her examination of French philosophers and American cinema.
Her draftsmanship was concise. Her ink and pencil work was crisp and clean. She worked with oils occasionally, and her control of the media as well as her sense of color impressed me greatly. In terms of craft, I can say without personal bias that her work was magnificent. She would sketch as a hobby, a way to relax after work and keep her hands busy while drinking and listening to the radio. I envied her abilities and often told her so. She would laugh and shrug, sipping more wine as free jazz blared in the background.
Hermione was not a photographer, nor was she a cinematographer. She had not received any specific literary training while at the university. It disturbed me that she dedicated herself to art that did not exhibit the purest aspects of her talent. I was not sure what to make of her various creative projects, which ranged from mundane and easily accomplished to expensive, time-consuming and bizarre. She finished them after a great deal of work and complaining, according to her self imposed schedules and deadlines, seldom ever late. Before she died, Hermione had been in the process of completing several action pieces. She had written an instruction manual and “acts” on small squares of brown paper grocery bag. Her plan was bind then into a book, then perform them in an instillation at a local gallery over a period of several weeks. She never bound them. I haven’t been able to locate the complete text since her death. I wonder if she took it with her the day she disappeared, or left it at a friend’s house. They seemed clinical. I experienced a sense of violation reading scripts and anger with her for making strangers the victims of her ideology. The scripts had a taste for deceit and sadism that I found inconsistent with her sweetness.

A Script for Action Number Sixty-Two

Construct a box, or use an old shoe box. Condition it to show signs of age and wear.
Fill the box with smooth stones, dried leaves or flowers, twigs, or shiny pieces of glass. Any objects will do, however they must evoke a sense of place.
Place a photograph of a couple in the box after obscuring the face of one of the subjects, or damaging the photograph in a visible manner. One may also choose to place strands of hair, fingernail clippings, or wisps of cloth in the box.
Give the box to a stranger after pretending to have happened upon it in a public place. Watch and document reactions.

Hermione’s apartment holds secrets, too many to investigate in an unmethodical manner. Her single-bedroom apartment is laid out in manner similar to the shotgun duplex I live in, except that hers shares a wall with the supply room of a drapery store that faces the street (DIAGRAM/FLOOR PLAN). The space cost her approximately five hundred dollars a month, slightly less than my apartment. I am not completely sure how she could afford living there, though I suppose that she saved money somehow. Hermione worked as a waitress at the Rorotorium, an odd café under the Mississippi River Bridge that kept irregular hours, usually opening sometime after nine pm. Her tips must have made up for her part-time hours.
The parlor, adjacent to the kitchen, contains her dinner table (red) and six mismatched chairs. The walls are decorated with her sketches, her friends’ drawings, and unfinished bits of stories. She had a profound interest for found objects and handwritten or homemade flyers, such that an entire wall was reserved for hanging the things that Hermione and her friends had found in the city. Her taste often puzzled me, especially concerning the papers she rescued from the kiosks, electrical poles, and bus stops around the city. The ephemera ranged from ads looking for roommates and lost dog signs to handwritten plays and children’s drawings on the backs of placemats.
I grabbed the flyer off of her wall. It was slightly smaller than a postcard. One side had an ink drawing of three hands and an orange printed on it. The etching evinced an eye for detail, the fingers tapered and lengthened around the ruddy surface of the orange and descended into tarry blackness. It was an advertisement for the show where we had first met.

December 6 – February 4, 2k.
Pop Surrealism
Opening Reception
Saturday, December 6, 6 – 9 pm.

Born 197x, in Belfonte, Pennsylvania; lives and works in New Orleans.

It was a group exhibit. The CAC was down the street from my gallery on Julia Street. Marry McGee and Yoshitomo Nara had been getting a lot of coverage in the usual glossy New York art journals. I had never really identified with the mix of cartoon and fine art, they weren’t particularly to my taste though it seemed like the next urban art phenomena. Anyway, I had to go to represent the gallery.
Hermione’s pieces were seemingly literal translations of the show’s theme. Three pieces were on display: a video and sound piece, a sculpture, and a large mixed media piece. Her work occupied the entire first floor. The pamphlet from the show explained that the work was from her Night Songs for the So-Called Space Age series, a greater attempt to mix the visual arts with pop music and youth culture.
I’d come into the show early, at six exactly. People were seldom punctual, typically the gallery set came in an hour later. The busy nerves of the CAC’s attendants buzzed around the bar and caterers. I slipped through the heavy glass and steel doors without notice. I appeared to be the first guest.

The more I look
The more I see
The more I feel

Hermione Rosenwinkel.
Justin Wilke, videographer. 200x

After snagging a bench on my pant leg, cursing myself and tripping in the dark, I sat down on a plastic bench as a motion sensor in the wall sent the video into cue.
The wall was flooded with the black and white image of a young woman’s face submerged in water. Her hair was dark, floating upward in the water and bobbing in some invisible current. Eyes closed as if sleeping. There was no change in her expression. It was unclear if she was asleep, holding her breath, or dead.
The room had been quiet when I entered it, but I became aware of the sound of water lapping at a very low pitch, very gently. The waves had a murky, soft sound that shifted into muted piano noises. On the screen a cloud of dark inky liquid snaked slowly through the water. The piano loop was still barely audible; old honky-tonk and out of tune but at the same time baroque. Minor thirds I think. The cloud over the woman’s face clouded over her face in a dense darkness almost like smoke. In the film’s last moments a voice whispered, in a controlled and almost monotone voice:

Come here, kiss me now,
Come here kiss me now.
Come here, touch me, kiss me,
Touch me now, touch me, touch me.

The dark cloud had completely engulfed her face. The video had faded into black, until I too was surrounded by the darkness.
As I got out of the bench and turned to leave I bumped into a small person in the dark. It took me some time to realize that the video had finished and, indeed, someone had been standing behind me asking a question.

“Did you like it? I think you’re the first to see it tonight.”
“Blargh wah! Ahh. Sorry I didn’t see you. Sorry.” Brilliant first words, I know.
“Yeah. It’s dark, sorry.” She flipped a switch on the wall. The lights came on and I was staring into the opened eyes of the face from the video. Her face was heart-shaped, dark red bob framing her pointed cat-like chin. She was wearing an odd dress, white, it looked like it was made of feathers and it was covered with gigantic red cloth flowers.
“Oh I was a little confused. Same voice, you know,” She laughed at my comment. She was always laughing. “Yes. Very mysterious. I haven’t seen the rest of the project. I mean the greater context. I don’t know her work very well.”
“Oh, her? Hermione?” She cocked an eyebrow.
“I haven’t listened to Depeche Mode in a while either which doesn’t help I think. One of my high school friends had a copy of Violator. I think I’d dubbed a tape of it. I used to go to industrial clubs when I was younger. I suppose that’s where I place Depeche Mode, I guess. I didn’t properly understand the lyrics, but the synths were very catchy.” She laughed then too.
I wonder if she was nervous then, that time when we first met, pretending not to be herself, not admitting out right that she was more than a model in her own video. Was her laughter excitement about her first show, or as she laughing at me? I know that later she would agonize over her pieces, I would see her mood suddenly shift from pleasant to strained talking about her work with me and her friends. Hermione was never satisfied, or perhaps more correctly, she was always dissatisfied with herself.
I never understood how she could be so confident with others, but so insecure in her abilities. I would see her cry and sulk if she thought she’d been snubbed in a review, and become completely enraged if she heard someone make a flippant remark about her performance art while sitting in her café. This first conversation was so like but unlike her at the same time: cocky, self-deprecating, ironic. There was sadness behind her weird humor. Her laughter halted a little too quickly, became quiet while her eyes struggled to escape my gaze.
“I liked them a lot when I was the same age. At the time I thought the lyrics were very deep stuff, emotional. Of course it never struck me as odd that they sang so many songs about fifteen year old girls. I thought it was a personal touch at the time.
“I’m a bit tired of them now. I had to listen to their songs so many times. Over and over again.”
As we spoke people trickled through the CAC’s doors. The galleries outside began to hum with conversation, punctuated by the occasional obnoxious laugh. Why were people always laughing at gallery openings? Always that single loud self-satisfied laugh. Meanwhile, Hermione having not yet introduced herself to me, suggested we get a drink at the bar.
“I should put the light out. I think if I stay here all night I’ll get paranoid seeing my giant head in the water. They have a really large space upstairs. I thought there would be more instillations. I guess I’m the show’s token video artist,” she said with a laugh as she turned out the light. “It seems like every museum has only one video installed at a time.”
“I’m more familiar with the similar large black painting phenomena.”
“Yeah, I think it’s a more modern version of the black painting. Or more post-modern maybe. I don’t know. I like them though, but I always wonder if you gathered them all up, if you could have some kinda all giant black canvas museum. Maybe you could wear all black and it would be like camouflage. If it were in New York you’d be constantly accidentally bumping into people trying to get a closer look at the canvases.” She grabbed a plastic cup of some pink bubbling stuff for me and herself.
“What is this exactly?” I asked.
“Pink Zinf.”
“Pink Sniff?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
A crowd had gathered in the main gallery. People were chattering about a thousand things, vacations, spouses’ passport status, and exhibitions on the coast. I saw my gallery director across the room in Donna Karan black talking with her husband.
“I suppose we should both mingle some. I don’t want to be rude.” She said with some discomfort as she wiped her nose.
“I have to do the same for my gallery.” I paused, “Is your name Hermione then?”
“Yes, that’s me stranger.”
“I’m Rainer. I work at Elizabeth’s gallery. Sufjan Pedersen.”
She shook my hand and walked into the crowd. I should’ve gotten her phone number, or suggedted that we get together soon. Only later would I realize that so much of our future meetings would be entirely owed to chance meetings that were the result of Hermione’s cleverness.

I think of the blackness now, the casual dismissive comment about modernist painting that meant nothing, just a cheap joke at the expense of a sentiment to complicated to articulate. As I look back on it our pretension was a reaction to our mutual discomfort.
So we laughed and made jokes about nothing at all then. I wonder if it could’ve another way. Did the conversation determine the making light of all things dear to us? Was our interaction a series of self-conscious admissions veiled in irony, could it have been more than that if we tried for truth – to somehow reach out her essence rather than commit myself to the choreography of loathing, self-deprecation, and an endless stream of word plays, insults and veiled truths?
The blackness that crept like slow fog and coiled around her head like a serpent, did the blackness rise from her? Was it that stuff that crawls under our beds at night just before we go to sleep? Was it the darkness of death in us, the haunting shroud of her own mortality, our own mortality? The ether of thought swamping around our minds?
Or was she dead already, wasn’t that the point, that we were all dead parcels that maintained the illusions of life and being – had we been symbolically paralyzed by our own finiteness?
What did she mean—what did her art mean? I would ask her at times, late at night as we lay in bed talking:
I like to think about it in themes. I try not to think about it as a literal translation. I organize the motifs and symbols in my head. It’s like going for a ride to the supermarket but ending up on the other side of town looking at the river. Not ending up where you thought you would but liking it. Finding it strange but familiar.
I would listen half asleep, never quite understanding her answers, or if they were even answers.
She scoffed at other people’s self-importance, but at the same time there was an undercurrent of seriousness that belied the pop.
Thinking on blackness one encountered only the unresponsive darkness. I find myself, the sound of my own breathing and the answerless void.
A Script for Action #31
The Adding and Subtracting Game

Locate a subject, preferably a casual acquaintance.
Add a gift or letter, content undetermined.
Note reactions. This requires the subject to be followed. May require a group effort for surveillance. The level of surveillance may vary in intensity from mild to obsessive.
Subtract, take something, whether it be obviously sentimental, dear, cheap or expensive. The material value of the subject must not over-determine the value of the object taken. Ideally a letter, notebook, phone or address book, novel or favored article of clothing.
Note response. Be careful not to be caught.
Add. Return object to subject, claiming to have found it.
Continue the game, either adding or subtracting with discretion.

Herm, who were the games for? Were these ever acted upon or were they waiting to be made real? Did you play the game with me ever?

An Excerpt from Hermione’s Diary

Thirteen. I was leaving France. I don’t remember it but do remember it well, feeling dejected. Pop had decided that it would be more profitable for him to act as a consultant in America, or at least that was the reason he had given at the time. Pop had taken his new wife, my new mom, really just Charlene, to visit our village. She never really formally lived with us, however she stayed over for short bursts quite frequently. Just on holidays and summers, as evidenced by the ever-present supply of Veuve Cliquot in the cellar and the used orange juicer on the table August-long.
I suppose that the incident had escaped me until recently. I was waiting for Sybil at the bus stop when I saw the fur shop and the graffiti dripping from its window. Giant red X’s were spray painted across the windows like dripping bloody crosses.
I remember I had seen the bruises on Orianne’s hips, ass and shoulders those few days after the spring holiday. She was a quiet little thing. Small and blond like a tiny doll, very quiet, very shy, and she would talk to me when we ran in the woods around the convent. I knew she hadn’t had a fall, that she hadn’t ever been with any of the boys in town. I knew her father had done it to her. She’d never liked him. It clicked together in my head. I’d never liked the way he grabbed her arm when they were together. It was like the touch, seeing it, had told me the entire story.
Mr. Michelbach was the furrier. What an appropriate profession, selling the skins of all those little animals to other stronger animals that could afford to have someone else do their dirty work. I held it in me until the winter holiday. I remember that it was cold out, but I hadn’t worn a thick jacket.
I had the bucket of paint and a bucket of stones. The paint was white not red. It was snowing.
I don’t remember how it sounded, the glass breaking. Or if it was very fast or very slow. The furs were white and syrupy looking afterward. I’d filled the linings with rocks and sand.
As I left, I could here the alarm sound. When I got home I crawled under the covers and had a good night’s sleep.
Later I read the newspaper reports with surprise. The snow covered up my tracks. Some Arab boys got blamed for it later. Typical.

Yesterday afternoon Ronika rang my buzzer. I answered the door in some awful pants that I’d been wearing for the past three days and an old t-shirt. Baseball bat leaned over my shoulder.
“Herr Rainer I wanna go to the store,” she said in a voice between whining and commanding, in the sort of voice only a thirteen year old could possess.
“Yeah, let’s go.” I found myself pulled away from the writing desk, from the notes I’d gathered and the polaroids I’d glued to the wall.
“Hey Rayyy—ner c’mon.” She was insistent.
“Nice shoes,” she said. I’d put on a brown and a black. “The dirty porno beard has got to go. That’s just nasty.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay. Thank you, comments noted.”
“Are you living like a caveman now? You’re like a vampire. Maybe your people are always pale, huh?”
“Ha-ha Ronika.”
So I endured her insults as I grabbed my keys. I was tired and slightly wobbly. I wondered if there was a way I could avoid going out with her. Some excuse I could find to crawl back in bed at four in the afternoon on a Wednesday. I put the bat back into the umbrella stand.
“You know you gotta stop doing that.”
“What?”
“Answering the door with a baseball bat. People are gonna think you’re crazy.”
The Wednesday afternoon habit, where Ronika would come over and make fun of my clothing, make me buy her junk food and would open my beer and never finish drinking it, began one week after I had moved in. Feeling somewhat out of place I brought over a Käseküchen, something from a box of mix that my mother had sent me from home, shortly afterward Ronika came over Wednesday afternoons after school. Her mother insisted that I would be a good influence and teacher her about foreign cultures. Since that time I have become a babysitter/tutor for the bubblegum popping New Orleans public middle school student, attracting a number of unpleasant looks when we walked together in the neighborhood.
On more than one occasion walking together, I’d be wearing the bedraggled thrift store suit that I wore to work while Ronika wore her two sizes too small school uniform. The kids that saw us would point and call out at us, calling me her sugar daddy business man, calling her bunny bread. I had no idea what any of it meant until she told me. Ronika let loose a stream of foul insults and shut them up instantly. The adults gave us an odd mixture of icy glares and, disturbingly, knowing winks.
“Rainer I want olives.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“The good ones, from Langenstein’s.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll show you, okay.”
The olives were imported from Spain. The pits were stuffed with almond. They swam in garlic brine, flavored with French herbs. Moments after I bought them for her Ronika popped the top and inverted the jar, draining the liquid onto the frying afternoon pavement.
“Are you sure you don’t want some water?”
“No way.” She continued smacking on olives, eventually finishing the entire jar before we got home. Typically she’d ask me questions about living abroad versus at home, girl-boy problems, and other questions that I usually didn’t have the answers to. Generally she’d play it cool, pulling flowers off plants or ripping the grass out of someone’s lawn, then she’d slip one of her famous questions into the conversation. I’d fumble, and come up with some ridiculous response, pretending to be confident.
“Why are you wearing that baseball cap, it’s weird. Not like you.”
It was Hermione’s. “Yeah, yeah. You have some sort of problem with the Cubs? They try hard.”
“I don’t know. Your clothes seem weirder that usual.”
“I haven’t been doing my laundry.”
“Your girlfriend dump you?”
“Something like that.”
“Are you depressed or something?”
“Sometimes I get like that.” Green olives. Shreds of them fell from between her lips, onto the sidewalk, onto her shoes. She was talking with her mouth full. It didn’t bother me, not so much as her mother. We were casual.
I was quiet.
“Yeah. I guess that’s like that. When Ariyell found out Tim Simmons was going with Dauphine she pretended not to like him, but you could tell that she did. That she liked him even though she said he looked like a frog and his nose was too big, but she was always talking about him anyway.” She looked at me. “You could tell me about it if it made you feel better. But I guess guys are different, huh?”
Guys are different. Maybe I should have told Ronika, but I hadn’t planned to have this conversation with her. In fact, I had no reason to bore or confound her with the weird secrets of adult romances. Who was I to burden her with my rambling? I didn’t presume to be interesting, but some part of me wanted to tell her, to lay my story out before her and hear her naïve advice. There was something so wholesome about our lazy chats, her seriousness and the manner in which she maintained the professional interview quality of our walks, her grudging belief that I had ever been like her or her age. I wanted the comfort of confession but hesitated.
“Yeah, I guess we should get something to drink. It’s hot.”

“I found that on the Champs-Elysee the last time I went to Paris. The visit was pretty bad, but I think there’s something really special about the poster. Every time I see it, I feel more cheerful. I can’t help but laugh.”
Framed with bar napkins and obscene doodles, there, pasted to her kitchen wall, was a poster of the Eiffel Tower covered with street graffiti. The poster itself looked like a reproduction from the files of a historical archive, but instead the tower had been made to gush liquid into a gigantic and poorly drawn, very hairy, vagina.
I remember that first visit to her house. It was a Wednesday. I was waiting for the bus just after work when she whizzed past on her bicycle. I was leaning against a trashcan reading a manual about painting restoration, solvents and technique. She rode back, sheepishly. Somehow after a few minutes of chit-chat she had already gotten me to agree to walk home with her for an hour in the June sun to have tea and cookies at her place. I’d wanted to take the bus, it seemed too impossibly hot to walk home in the afternoon sun. In reality it was. I feel as if a sort of haze had poured over me, and subsequently the memories themselves had taken on a dreamlike filter.
She rode by and rang her bike bell at me. I’m not sure if this is absolutely true, but I do seem to remember her emitting a wolf whistle in my general direction. After a few minutes of talking she had invited me over to her house for tea, proposing that we drink the tea that she had stashed in a plastic bag in her bike basket. I suspected something.
“It’s rather special,” she said with a smirk.
“Why?”
“Because it costs $180 a pound. Some random customer at the Roratorium gave it to me. I guess he thought I liked teas because I would recommend him different sorts.”
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Do you like teas?” I asked.
“Not particularly,” she said after some hesitation.
I can’t remember if her tea tasted good or bad. We drank it unsweetened. She had bought a gallon of spring water from the corner store. The leaves were loose and green. After the tea had steeped for five minutes the leaves looked like dandelion greens, or some sort of undersea foliage. Hermione declared it to be totally extraordinary. I was distracted by the bits of stem and leaves adhering to the sides of my teacup and occasionally my lips.
Her kitchen was a mess. She seemed completely unselfconscious about having me there, though to this day I’m not sure why. It seemed like after she learned how clean I kept my apartment, she became ashamed of her house. The cookies had been sitting on a plate on her table, really I can’t be sure how long. We ate a mixture of shortbreads and lemon tarts, she apologized for their staleness, but we both ate a large quantity of them gleefully.
Of course she had given me a tour of her house, my first tour of the house. It remained largely unchanged. At the time I had thought it was a bit cramped. Her kitchen had counters butting out of every corner. Some were covered with scraps of desiccated slivers of vegetable, crumbs and coffee rings. The table had a net of rings faded onto its dark uneven surface. A largish counter ran from next to her refrigerator to the opposite wall. She had constructed the table, her work bench from a door she had found in the trash and sanded smooth. Tiny butts of pencils, wood shavings and crumpled bits of paper were spread across it. There were also a few globs of plastic that had melted onto the table whose source I could not identify. There were scraps of wood and paper piled alongside her kitchen walls, piles of clothing and shoes huddling on her bedroom floors. Everything had collected in claustrophobic excess; no matter where I looked I had the feeling of distraction, stimulation and curiosity.
She never apologized for the mess, I liked that. The dirty dishes on the table were loudly scooped up and tossed into a sink teetering with more soiled china.
“Hold up. Do you want some water too?”
“Yes,” I said.
She filled what looked like and empty mayonnaise jar with tap water and plopped it on the table.
“Yeah, so my house is kinda messy, but I like it that way. Do you keep a clean house? I think it makes my nervous to live in a place that’s uncozy.”
“My house is perhaps more bare.”
“Why is that?” she asked. I imagine she was perplexed. Every inch of her wall was paper with a photo or come sort of flyer. Christmas lights were strewn like vines around the inside of her house. There was a collection of plants in various stages of desiccation and leafiness on the countertops.
“I suppose that I never had anything catch my eye. Really I’m very boring when it comes to collecting things. You know, I keep photographs in photo albums. I don’t have too many things since I’ve moved. I never bothered to make things as personal. I really like it here. It reminds me of a lot of rooms that they had in the group living situation in my college dormitory.”
“Was that long ago?”
“Maybe two or three years ago. The university system is different in Germany.”
“Yes. I’m vaguely familiar with the European university system.”
“I’m uncomfortably familiar with the European university system. I was thinking of finishing the terminal degree in art history, either here or there.”
“Terminal is such an odd word.”
“Yes, the doctorate is and odd and terminal thing. I suppose that that’s how I found myself here, not pursuing the terminal degree. Taking a bit of time off, or really running away to be truthful. My advisor knew someone that knew some one else, so that’s how I received this job really. Really, how I’m here talking to you. In a way it’s very arbitrary. I’m glad to be here, but it’s very random. In a way the decision made itself for me and I simply followed through.”
“No regrets, right?”
“Certainly not, but it’s very typical of me, to find myself here as a sort of accident.”
“When did you come here?”
“Something like three months ago.”
“Have you made many friends?” She asked. I sipped some water. The tea was beginning to boil and in a way I felt as if I was beginning to boil as well. I hoped that my answers weren’t too disappointing. Her life seemed so visibly full of social connections and meaning tied to this place, to the people here. Actually I had not made a lot of friends. The gallery was a mess but there was enough money flowing in and out to keep me busy planning shipments and keeping track of invitations and patrons. They were a burgeoning institution in the city, but as a transplant I never felt tied to it. I still try on occasion to feel elated about larger sales and well-attended shows at the gallery, but usually the effort is pretty pathetic and too self-conscious of my own lack of feeling to ever really convince myself that I had any personal involvement with my job.
“Yes, some here and there. I get along very well with my neighbors. My job keeps me occupied.”
“Do you like it?”
“In a way, yes.”
“I never liked working in galleries. I guess I’m pretty happy with tending bar at the Roratorium. It’s a gig, and I can work on my covert art activities. You know. Sales are the hard work. It makes me anxious, the thought of selling my things to strangers. I feel like I’m not good enough, but I feel angry too. Trying to convince people that you’re worth their time. You know. It’s better to sell directly too, not through a gallery, but how often do you get lucky enough to find people to sell you work too. I hate that in the end that it’s all about money. I’m not very good with worrying about money. It makes me crazy. Makes me paranoid.” She shook her head, “But you have to live, you need to pay rent. My parents were rich so I’ve always been a little uncomfortable talking about it, thinking about it, no making enough of it, wanting to make more of it then hating myself for thinking about it so much.”
The kettle was screaming. She poured water into ceramic teapot that was asymmetrical, with a gleaming syrupy glaze on it. To this day her things will always fascinate me, their seeming randomness and delicacy.
“Try these,” she said as she placed a heaping plateful of cookies in the middle of the table. “My neighbor gave me the recipe. A lot full of whipping cream was about to spoil at the café, so I made it into butter. I had to combine it with some cold butter to get the texture right. It was crazy, the cream smelled so good, but a lot of it ended up flying out the mixing bowl as I was beating it.”
The cookies were still cold from the inside of her freezer. The texture was somewhere in between a dry shortbread and an oatmeal cookie.

I wonder if she ever slept with anyone else, while she was with me. I know she would never do it to be mean-spirited or as revenge. I never wanted to tie her down to me. It sounds cliché, but she was such a free-spirit. I wonder if she would think to tell me if she did. If she would do it out of curiosity, or boredom with me, with us. I mean, would she struggle with telling me or go through with it as a matter of course? We were from very different places. I can’t help but think that I was a disappointment, my conventionality. It hurts to think about it, her in bed with someone else one night then in my bed another.
She was very attractive. I don’t doubt that she would’ve been approached by men. Hermione was so beautiful.

“Hello, Sufjan Pederson. This is Rainer.”
“Hello, yes.” The voice was a little gruff, but distinctly female. “I was calling to inquire about piece I saw the other day.”
“Yes, do you know the name of the artist, or perhaps what sort of content the piece refers to?”
“Yes, I was calling in regard to a rhinoceros.”
“A rhinoceros?”
“Yes. I would like to buy one rhinoceros.”
“Well, at the moment we don’t have any representational art, so perhaps you’re mistaking us for some other gallery.”
“No, no. I want to buy a rhinoceros.”
“The large gray animal?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Oh.”
“So? Is it a deal? How much will it cost?”
“Well, I’m afraid we don’t have any of those either.”
“No rhinoceros?”
“No.”
“So this conversation has been a total waste of my time then.”
“Yes, I suppose you could think of it that way.”
“Well, I’m very disappointed to say the least.”
“That’s too bad.”

The night after we had slept together for the first time, we walked through my door and out into the awaiting neighborhood. I watched her wrestle with her bike a little as she stepped over the threshold. In truth we looked in bad shape. My hair was a mess. Her clothes were wrinkled from being crumpled on my floor over night. The mockingbirds were singing loudly and the sun was painfully bright. As luck would have it my neighbors were sitting on the stoop. Ronika, Dee-dee and her youngest sister Chantel were sitting on one step, bocking our exit.
“Hey Rainer, how are you doin?”
“Oh, fine,” I mumbled, suddenly aware of our state of disgrace.
“Is she your sister?” Chantel asked.
“This is Hermione…”
“He’s my half-brother,” she answered jubilantly. “Isn’t that right bra?” She said as she slapped my back.
“Yeah, sure.” I had no idea what she was getting me into.
“He was adopted. My father adopted him when he was a teenager. He was troubled. That’s what the foster agency said about him. But my father always wanted a boy. My mom was too old and didn’t want to have anymore kids. My dad’s mistress didn’t want to ruin her figure either.”
“What’s a mistress?”
“Okay. Hermione and I have to go now. I’m sure we’ll have more opportunities in the future to talk to y’all later. Shouldn’t you be in school Ronika?”
“No. It’s Columbus Day.”
“Yeah great. Well, we have to go.”

“Hi, Rainer, this is Elizabeth from the gallery. I’m just calling to catch up with you. Donna’s probably going to be in later tonight. Are you going to be taking the rest of the day off? If I’m not here give me a call on my cell phone, okay? Talk to you later.”
“Hi Rainer, this is Elizabeth again. Look’s like we’re gonna be playing phone tag for a little while here. Could you give me a call as soon as you get in?”
“Rainer, it looks like we’re having trouble getting in touch with each other. I had a look at the log, and it seems like you’re on the schedule for today and the rest of the week. If something’s come up, could you please leave a message for me in the gallery, or give me a call on my cell? Thanks.”

I’m having trouble concentrating. I’ve been shifting between Hermione’s house and mine for I’m not sure how long now. I’ve found it difficult to get the laundry done, but no one’s around to complain about how wrinkled my clothes have become.
Boudreaux and I have reached an understanding, oddly. He doesn’t seem to bait me as much, though he hasn’t resolved to let me alone completely. I’d like to think that he enjoys my company, as much as he loudly disdains it, and that, ultimately, he prefers it to his loneliness. In a way I feel the same way about him. It’s as if he and I are united in a strange way. That only Boudreaux can understand my attachment to Hermione, having witnessed so much of our private interaction, having seen us unguarded with no one else around.
I find myself sitting at her kitchen table when I’m trying to sort everything out. Usually I’ll make little notes, while looking through the various stacks of papers that had accumulated in shoeboxes, trunks, and dusty file cabinets allover her apartment. On this occasion, I’d found an unlabeled notebook, filled with drawings and daily entries about the city. It was a more recent artifact. Though most of the entries were undated, they chronicled a six month period from around the time when she first moved to the city.
I’d been pouring over a doodle of a vase of flowers. Vaguely reminiscent of Odilon Redon and perhaps a little Egon Schiele. Was it done with a Sharpie fine point? The ink didn’t seem to have the characteristic blue-yellow distortion of that pen I’d seen her use so frequently. What pen had she been using at the time, perhaps another make that was more expensive and of a finer quality? Or was it an everyday Uniball?
I’d been in the midst of noting the finer points of her line work when my thoughts were interrupted by a very loud rock band playing happy birthday songs next door. It must have been around eight or nine in the evening. I wasn’t sure if they were drunk, practicing, or merely inept. I’d tried to get back to my work, but the garage-style covers of sixties classics and the yowling voice of the singer continued to jar me from my work.
Perhaps I should have politely asked them to stop playing so I could return to my research, but I opted to make an omelet instead.

Do you think that I enjoy this? Sitting here, wallowing in the pit I’ve dug for myself? Do you think I enjoy it? Hermione, where are you? Tell me what you’re doing. Why don’t you call me anymore? Do you think I’d be a coward to call you again?

Excerpt from Hermione’s diary

No, no, body, body, so sexing arresting world a walk war for.
Restless restless one one.
Five fire flower bee.
Figure five for four.

So love so live, walking down the street, thinking like a balloon, things floating sparking off like electricity. I will reach out into the blue cells of air, a thousand mega volts bursting and burling frictionless into the atoms of the air and universe, cleaving them smoother than a hot knife through butter.

Bursting forever.

Remember the ones that kissed with their eyes closed. Remember the ones that kissed with them open.

In a way losing can be beautiful. We just live in a culture of winning, but goddamn if it can’t be terrific to float away.

One gets the feeling that it is a matter of time before things blossom. I can feel the period before the storm. Maybe something good will happen & I’ll shake off all of the blues around me.

When I had my first period for the first time, I had only the vaguest notion of what was going on. I was at boarding school. It must have been Connecticut then, right after we moved. I’d spend the summers with father.
I guess it was my first semester at boarding school. I remember feeling tired during my trigonometry and algebra maths class. Sort of worn out. I went to the bathroom and there it was—a sort of darkish stain. I expected it to be red like blood, the way it looks in paintings and movies, unmistakably liquid and flowing stuff, but it wasn’t.

I’m tired Boudreaux.
I would say that I too am somewhat fatigued.
I was facing away from Boudreaux, cutting up green onions. We had gotten into the habit of bickering with each other, like an old couple that had ate breakfast at the same table, staring at each other every morning for what seemed like our entire lives. We had our gaps of silence and our moment of conflict, to be followed again by periods of unspecific silence.
Rainer, I’m a little concerned about your health and good spirits. Of which I’ve noticed a profound decline.
Spare me your pity, Boudreaux.
No, Rainer, I mean it sincerely.
I was silent.
It is currently a very early hour of the morning. You’ve been cooking for the last hour, more food than you and I could possibly eat.
Oh, yeah. I had completely forgotten what I was doing. The potatoes had began to soften and the frozen peas were warming up. The curry potato omelet had always been a favorite. I should’ve put the eggs out earlier, to get them up to room temperature.
Rainer, what are you doing?
The onions are bothering my eyes.
You should retire. You are obviously in need of rest.
I am a little tired.
Rainer, why are you wearing Hermione’s robe?

Monkey, monkey!
Yes, Ermine?
Do you like my robe?
Mmm… Yes, but I think that I need to take a closer look

I said as I pulled her toward me
And slipped the robe
Hypnotic multi-hued discs
From her pale shoulders.

I pretended to examine it for some moments before I wrapped my arms around her waist and wrestled her all giggling and kissed to the floor.

Z'Otz and Bells and Blues and Everything Else

2005-01-19T19:22:00.000-08:00

I don't know why it is, but every evening when I come home and see the 54 year old man, who I will now refer to as Smitty, I feel like I am about to slip into a disassociated fit of utter rage.

Part of me wonders when it became appropriate, because it is certainly not, to have a grown stranger sleeping in my staircase.

I've worked with the homeless, many of my friends have been or are currently homeless, and this man occupies a category of shelterlessness that is entirely difficult for me to understand.

If his "friends", my neighbors, were indeed his friends why don't they just have him sleep in their houses. Instead of sleeping in the staircase, on the stairs, curled up in the corner in the cold. And if Smitty's so reliable and harmless than why won't they put him up. It's totally bullshit: I've got a family, if it were just me and him blah blah. Why you gonna put him out on the streets etc etc. If they care about him so much why don't they put him up on cold nights? What hypocrites! And the worst sorts, oh yeah you're selfish because you're concerned about you're personal welfare, poor Smitty, meanwhile I'll go home to my family and predictable living situation. Fuck that!

Coming home to a stranger in the shadows is not a phenomena I want to be warmed up to.

He's always drunk. I don't fucking know him. He's not my responsibility. I've got to stick up for myself cause there ain't no-one else.

Sedna is telling me I need to approach things differently. She's always telling me that I need to be a hard and intact self. She also tells me that it's better for people to be afraid of me than to try and fit in to the neighborhood somehow. She also tells me that the whole easy-going well-intentioned neighborhood vibe is concealment for personal irresponsibility.

MOTHERFUCKING FUCK!

Let us rock with the cherry-scented hope of a new day.

2005-01-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

I'm meeting with the band tonight. Hopefully I can have some time to hang-out with Johnny and Walt. Maybe we'll put together some new songs. I've been writing some lyrics for Lucifer Morningstar. I don't think I'll be ready until at least the end of the month. I've been trying to convince and heavy-handedly drop the hint to some fellow musicians. Maybe Austin and I can write some beats at least.

El Radio Fantastique will be performing on the 19th of January at the Dragon's Den with Ratty Scurvics. I'm not sure if it will be the Invisible Gambling Jews or Singularity.

We're also going to be playing the 31st of January at One Eyed Jacks with A Particularly Vicious Rumor and Ratty again. It will be like a Houston reunion, but with more people and less traveling. I'm really looking forward to that show. A real stage and real lighting, very glamorous. Hopefully with a bit more space than the Circle Bar.

From The New York Times' Book Review

2005-01-10T15:26:00.000-08:00

from Darin Strauss's review of Sightseeing, stories by Rattawut Lapcharoensap:

Here's the problem with Write what you know: What too many aspiring writers know, it turns out, is that a suburban American adolescence causes vague feelings of sadness -- especially when one's formative years include a dying grandparent or housepet. A way to avoid such tedium is to write what you don't know, to labor toward peculiarity. The risk there is that your well-researched make-belive might come off as exactly that: a fake. It's the lucky writer whose story is familiar to himself and exotic to his readers.

The Rules

2005-01-06T17:37:00.000-08:00

After reciting and explaining them several times, I have taken it upon myself to incise these snipppets of advice upon my literary internet "web log" as it were. In reflection I tend to break them, to the effect of my personal woe, see also one I will refer to as [...], ahem, for the purpose of anonymity. Oh well.

1. Never sleep with an arsehole.
2. Be careful where you become a regular.
18. Never comment upon someone elses food while they are eating it.

The Others:
sort of vague things that pop into my head on more than one occasion...
- If you forget to say please at least say thank-you.
- People shoudn't forget the favors that you've done for them. If they do, they really weren't worth your time in the first place, and you should discontinue associating with them.
- Always tip generously.
- Only jerks raise their voices at friends. Don't be a jerk.
- You can't bend other people to your will.

2 B Continued. . . ?

The First Posting of the New Year

2005-01-06T17:23:00.000-08:00

It was a fabulous occasion let me tell you. [Text obscured] resembled Vincent Van Gogh in coloring and sentiment. His [...] was as delicate as a freshly opened rose on the occassion of [...] upon the sofa bed. Neighbors were said to remark [...].

La-leil-li-ah came to visit the other day. I hope that she moves to the city soon. We can go to sushi happy hour at the drop of a hat. It would be wonderful if she did not live too far away. As it is, the plan is to make my house more hospitable. My new house is vested with potential. You know the old saying, new house new life new liver.

tsunami

2004-12-29T19:41:00.000-08:00

Everyday I look at The New York Times and it looks terrible. I've been looking at Doctors Without Borders and Mercy Corps. I suppose that I'll have a look at all tomorrow at Zotz. I wish I wasn't poor I wish I had more money that I could throw at problems.

I've been complaining a lot. I suppose it's because I have to work so much. My free time is spread pretty thin.

Still moving. ARGGrggg.

Sade to his wife [November, 1783], Letter Number 83.

2004-12-29T19:21:00.000-08:00

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fools indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and if it were, I'd not do so.

ohne titel

2004-12-27T17:38:00.000-08:00

i hope that my relatives are okay.

the land of the unicorns: there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas.

2004-12-25T08:13:00.000-08:00

I've been moving quite a bit.

Last night I had a dream that I was working in a gigantic sex toy shop that sold videos and what not. I remember that a lot of people were getting down on me, or thinking that the shop was some kind of joke. I freaked out and started yelling that perversity had a function and that if they didn't want to participate in it, that it was their problem and that the should stay at home. The cash register was really hard to operate and I had to type in these huge item descriptions.

I suppose that this will either be my last day of moving, or my second to last day of moving. yippee, I guess. I'll spend a great deal of time unpacking. I know that. My apartment looks like a 1970's children's playroom. It's about the same size as the last. I hope to entertain many future guests. That would be nice.

I think I've entered into some minor Hickory St related drama. It doesn't make much sense to me, in general the Hickory St dynamic never made much sense to me. I drove Jack (rue) home afte receiving a really pathetic call at 4.00 am. He was waiting for a streetcar in the 30 degree weather for the past hour or so and I'd just gotten in and was trying to find something to read before I went to sleep. So I drove him home and I fell asleep in his room. Now Seth's mad at me for some reason I can't figure out (not figuring out Seth is rawther par for course), but I suppose if people want to be malcontent they'll find reasons to be... and generally when ever people are angry it has more to do with temperament and an entire context of life events than it has to do with anything one person has done to them immediately. Therefore, if people want to be unhappy and hard-hearted they'll make themselves the victim of entirely fictitious grandiose situations that would not trouble, nor really exist for more well-adjusted mellow people.

I suppose I could've phrased it more eloquently. Of course I'm saying this like it never happens to me, like I'm somehow above being a moody bastard, which is certainly not the case. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we contribute to the conflicts that we are victim to. That we can either choose to respond like responsible, self-realised baddasses in a rational way or we can feel sorry for ourselves and cry like children about how awful everyone and everything is.

Philsophical? Too early I guess.

Amelia & Magazine

2004-12-21T18:43:00.000-08:00

My change of address has become official. I am moving to Amelia and Magazine. Right on the corner there. The Apartment is pretty cozy, but cheap. Hopefully I can save money for scheming and dreaming. I had a talk with my neighbor the other day. He, his name is Genghis, seems pretty cool. His face is all fucked up from a bike accident. I'll repeat our conversation here in the future.

I went to the librarian party tonight. Man, I love cheap wine and macaroni. I'll repeat that story in the future too, see comment above.

I'll be entering phase two of packing up my house tonight. I've just recently finished moving several boxes of books and some plates. I imagine that art supplies and car parts will follow shortly. Then clothes and major appliances and pieces of furniture. Yuck.

Shortly shorty.
bye bye.

Dear Diary, why am I a fatty?

2004-12-20T16:37:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I know I'm not a fatty, but I've just been feeling shitty since I've been working a lot and haven't been writing my bike as much as usual. I FEEL AWWWWFUULLL.

thank you.

Eyeballs, do your dirty work!

2004-12-18T00:36:00.000-08:00

Dear Diary,

Why do I feel as if my eyeballs will liquify with hatred today? Why can't I feel pretty again?

SO anyway I get home and get my relax on, ie post-practice with El Radio Fantastique and hund out a bit with Ellie while reading a bit of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at the Downtown store, to have my neighbor inform me that David (see previous entries) my Landlady's unsightly son/the building manager has gone into my apartment without my permission while I was out. Fan-fucking-tastic! This makes 3 times! hurray for homocidal wrath!

Gawd bless Wes in his good neighbordom, may many lessons be learned from his prompt and curteous behavior. If there is one thing that I will miss about that house it will be Wes' intense psycho-analytic New England Continental philosopher vibe.

Concerning my Landlady and her son, may their souls fry in the blazing fires of hell, like oozing pustules and eggyolks and carpenter ants crawling in eye sockets etc. Here are things passed through my mind, possible scenarios relating to the contents of my apartment and perusal thereof.

1. the sniffing of personal articles.
2. inspection of personal paperwork.
3. general non-specific nosiness.
4. inspection of dirty things, ie garbage, fridge, hairball collection, ash tray, soiled under-linens (see #1).
5. photographic documentation of apartment and contents.
6. Touching of personal objects (see also nos. 1 & 4)
7. Reading of top secret diaries.
8. Molesting my cache/money boodle.
9. Exportation of sundry personal articles.

On a happier note, I am going to live on Magazine St. Mr. Edwards of Edwards Shoe Repair is gonna be my new landlord! I'm going to drop off the deposit today. Haha! Now to move out as quickly and descretely as possible. And pee everywhere.

On that note I propose a poll, shall I persue legal action against the Insidious New Orleans Property holders. In the spirit of those so-called "reality" televised serials, which I am informed have captured the popular imagination as of late, please vote yes or no, where upon I will act upon the decision voiced most angrily by rule of mob.

a perfect accident involving a tree, fig, and physician

2004-12-13T18:51:00.000-08:00

Have you heard the one about the boy, the frog and the whorehouse?

I am terribly tired. I had a dream two nights ago. In the dream I smacked Mr. Papercuts across the face during an argument.

[It was one of those incredibly vivid dreams, no doubt influenced by the libido-killing, stress-reducing supplements I've been injesting on a fairly regular basis. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I run out. That tiny bottle cost me $13 and I drank it up like a sailor in port at a rum pub. ]

So in the dream a bunch of other less striking stuff transpired. Stanley was there. His aquarium was full of tiny shrimp and very small fish. I take that as a sort of esp telepathic communique that he is happy with his clean cage and likes the idea of moving out. I like that Stanley, for those who have not had the pleasure, my pet newt of several years, has started appearing in my dreams. Maybe he's my spirit animal.

As a result of the actions in my dream, I realized that I should spill my guts to him, that the frustration and anxiety of whatever the whatever we were engaging in had begun to trespass into my dreamscape and that frankly I should sack up and tell him that I was fond of him. Fond meaning, to clarify the subtle nuances of the English for those in the audience, like like. As in:

Do you like me?
No, I mean like like me.

Do you like me? Check one.
() Yes. ()Yes.

So it was embarrassing and I am finally a gross chicken. Maybe now I can get it over with. Boys are smelly and gross and entirely composed of excess hair, farts and other noisome smells, and jarring angles that are unpleasant to the eye. Anyway, I don't need anyone around to impede my independence, though it would be nice to have the occassional person around to keep the the bed warm and drink tea with. You know, someone to make you breakfast in the morning, or to make breakfast for.

...

Gaaaawdd, how uttering abysmal and pathetic.

...
Maybe after I finish my nawfle. Or at least after I revise my poems and give them to oblivian. That's the ticket. It sounds so ambitious. I'm not trying to shovel meaning into my yawning vaccuum of a soul.

I went to an Eastern European party and Angel and Pandora's. I wish that it hadn't been a school night. I'm still feeling a little sleep dep. I would have liked to have drank a bit more. I could do that tonight, alone, muh hwa hwa.

Central City

2004-12-12T15:54:00.000-08:00

the to-do list

sub 1. find a new abode, hopefully a second floor large-ish single in a dilapidated apartment in Central City. Mmm...

1. Carefully place objects in boxes.
2. Remove boxes to new abode.

I finished reading The Photographer's Sweetheart this morning.

When will I ever complete my nawfle? I am the worst Angela ever. Even worse than the one from that Tony Danza show. Why do I suck?

brick du thon

2004-12-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

It's disarming how quickly I fall out of the habit, you know, of getting to a computer, etc.

My tonsil is doing that thing were it swells and produces a horrible tasting fluid. Hey kids, gross out teachers and parents wih my revolting zombie tonsil. Now available with alien slime.

Leila Leila, I want to find us a nice cheap house with windows and limited interactions with the criminal element.

Nawfle = still not finished. I am a piece of shit in that regard. I'm gonna have to find some schedule wherein I can kick its arse into shape.

Currently written from the insides of Oak Z'Otz.

What drink shall I have?
Damn.

Who wants to come with me to Jaques Imos on the 16th?
Date? I demand at least a kiss in return.

on my desicated empty wasp shell of a heart

2004-11-26T11:39:00.000-08:00

I triple-dipple promise that I will make an attempt to write more regularly.

Notes to the wise/updates:

1. Employed as morning shifter at the Oak St Z'otz Monday thru Thursday.
2. Went from Houston to play an ill-attended show at the Super Happy Funland. It was really lovely, despite all the driving.
3. Working part time at the Latter Memorial NOPL. Public librarianship = not difficult, really.
4. Turkey day, fell asleep after eating a shitload of food at the Maple Leaf Bar.
5. Had a booty call with someone I shall refer to as Mr. C. It was really remarkable, the sex of it. Mmm... fantastic. But very odd and somewhat disturbing that pleasure can be so divorced from its own source. Mr. C is really a quite nice guy, but we make each other claw the fucking walls.

more later, for real.

kyrie ellision

2004-11-02T17:33:00.000-08:00

oh my, I can't believe that it's v-day already. Well, to tell the truth I've been a bit swamped. I missed Halloween. I've had a week off. Everything's scrambled up. It's alright.

Now I've got to finish a novel. Or really begin it. I'm going to e-publish what I've got so far. Part of me wants to conserve my writing for that project alone. So...

Working at Zotz is truly wonderful. I want to have Doug McQueen do a show there, and Thomas Little as well. His animation-work is truly wonderful.

yes. Enough of that though. Time for a loss of self.

if you're feeling secular

2004-10-27T14:26:00.000-07:00

ARg. It's still Wednesday. I'm at the gallery again. I am slightly nervous about the amount of drawing I have to do by Friday night. Oh yeah, here's the information, though I know that only two or three people read this ever.

Friday, October 29th, 2004
Books 2 Prisoners Benefit Art Show and Party
The Country Club
634 Louisa 10pm

dj assfault will play. Andy Allen the cajun asian chef will represent. also nudy swimming. I'm stoked.

If you love me, you will buy my postcards. The cock will crow twice before you betray me. haha. No really, buy my postcards. I'm also gonna be trying to get rid of some of my audio projects. Huzzah!

Saddly my bike is still smashed. No doubt my body will be ruined as a result. I must contact my crazy landlady's son David to have him fetch my spare bike from the attic. Actually, I do like David quite a bit, don't let my dismissive tone fool you. He has a kind heart behind the racial slurs that he abuses and his limited world view.

I ran into Jack (alton kennedy) the other night. It was really nice to see him again. The whole love triangle thing is making him crazy, but he's a grown man and he knows how to conduct himself. Mmm... drinking from the well of misery.

Oh the world, the world and everything in it. It's all so fucking grand.

jayzus fucking keyriced

2004-10-27T02:25:00.000-07:00

Note, your humble narrator must be excused for her current state of topsy turvy-ness. Recent events have thrust her into a tumultuous uproar of events. Have we hope for this mortal coil? More obsucre historiofictional language? Nah-yah.

So anyway on Sunday some douchebag hit and ran my arse while I was minding my own gawddamn business, sportin around town on my sweet ride, the late Pancake Widower II, perhaps the most placid and gentle of bicycles. She wasn't an overly ambitious machine, really only a Kmart aluminium framed cruiser hybrid. Really practical, really lovely.

Lucky me, not to end up a reddish splat on Chartres and Gov Nicholls. I can be all surly about it now, but in all sincerity it bothers me. I'll try not to think about it. I don't really want to think about it, how many people would leave someone in the street to die. It's horrible stuff. You know, the whole blackness of the human heart bit.

i recovered. I missed work at the gallery yesterday. It was a boo-boo but they seemed very understanding. Suspiciously understanding if you ask my opinion. If you're one to suspect that is.

I ended up carrying my busted bike through town. Bicepts and back a-aching.

The library is hiring. Part of me wants the job, another part of me realizes that it's not about the job at all, but about stability and education and other sorts of petit borgeuse expectations from my family and former instructors. Fuggit. Anyway I go in for an interview on Friday. I really would my rather work at Zotz. At least for the next year or so. I suppose I have my own reasons. hmmm...

okay aoky
ar

the hangman's beautiful daughter

2004-10-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

The minotaur cannot dream because his horns get in the way.

I'm worried. I should seek Claire out and practice with her for the possible Zotz gig we're having in the future. I've just finished singing, well practicing singing in the totally empty gallery. It's odd. To get to the higher notes it's really not about forcing the tones out of your throat. You have to be sensitive to the way the muscles and globs of flesh moving around in the back of your throat... really mindful of manipulating them in certain ways. I've been trying to piece together an arrangement of "dear margeurite", this really slow electronic noise thing that I wrote 2 or 3 years ago, for cello. Pretty much just thinking about how to transfer the really cheezy keyboard distortion into cello.

Ug. I should finish those drawings by the 27th or 28th for the Books 2 Prisoners fundraiser at the Country Club. I'm doing several postcards for the event. It should be about 15, I've finished 4 so far. Perhaps I'll do ten instead. My gawd, it's going to be fantastic. Andy Allen is going to be catering part of it. I anticipate skinny dipping. Hurray!

more later. I've got the blossoms of a headache. Must find rolling papers for my tabbacky.

hey you, scabby legs non s'equitorial

2004-10-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

It's terrible true. My legs are riddled with the chew marks. Like a braid-headed mnemonite bumpkin, well at least that's what some boy gently teased me with. A snake handling school marm?

Anyway, news front, I am at the gallery, which is perhaps the only time that I ever have to update this clunker, and to be around the interweb.

It makes me feel odd, to be sitting here in front of Larry's shrine. Or rather Dexter's shrine to Larry. I had always felt sad for Dexter, that he would lose his lover when they were both so young. But I had never thought about Larry. I suppose that it will always be his gallery, and that perhaps a little bit of decorum is demanded in respect for his unfinished project.

I will not talk about a certain minxy-eyed boy from bean-town who makes paper cutouts that resemble lace skeletons. Nope. Not happening at all.

This coffe gives me a bellyache. I have terrible B.O. On the way to the gallery on my bike a boy on a motorscooter sed, hey, you're hot. Then he proceeded to put-put by me and tell my that his name was James and that he was a Libra.

On Camp
The bells of St. Patrick's toll. The building looks as if it were entirely built of clay (designed by architect James Gallier sr.). Say a novena today. I will never understand how kind people can be made to be unkind. That is the greatest crime of them all. Say a novena. I remember when Tony and Erich were in the car, we were driving through the Vienna woods looking down at the city. I asked Tony if he was spiritual, or believed in God. He said yes, that he was still Catholic, but that he was angry with the church. Noon mass. And Erich mentioned the latest papal edict at the time, that any government that condoned homosexuality sanctum sanctum sanctum was commiting a crime against the church.
The road was darkening. It was twilight. Vendors were selling Eierschwammerel from their carts. We were riding on a mountainside in the poshest part of Vienna, almost, a little Sausalito-like. And I thought fuckfuckfuck what kind of church raises you up, takes you from the moment of birth and sees you through initiation and rites of passage, what kind of culture is that, in Austria, the Viennese who are so refined, kind, and coloquial yet cosmopolitan, what kind of life is it to be sold out like that. To be cast aside. How could anybody do that to anybody.

Oh sweet heaven

2004-10-22T09:47:00.000-07:00

My last post was deleted. Boo-erns to the Zotz computers, but...

Long live Francis Pop Gailiunas-Hill. We celebrate the day of your birth.