Thursday 30 April 2009: A Perfect Circle of Acquaintances and Friends

My dream dinner party of actors, commentators/politicians, musicians, and fictional characters, by color classification.

Wednesday 29 April 2009: 100 Days

Things I did during Mr. O’s first 100 days in office:

Washed pillowcases

Roasted potatoes

Went back where I came from

Walked on the greens of a golf course at dusk

Watched Step Brothers

Hoped the light was on our side

Tuesday 21 April 2009: Possible Mouth Breather

Flying to visit family this week. I’ll be back to you next Tuesday!

Monday 20 April 2009: Synecdoche, New York

On Friday I watched Synecdoche, New York. It must have perfumed something chemical off the screen and onto my skin, because I left the film with less identify and patience, feeling unraveled and wanting steam from a shower.

I hate and love the power a movie gains when it makes a whole world—a completely different and strange version of Pittsburgh or London. It’s like dreaming about a familiar place. And you can’t explain it, but in the dream your old house feels like another planet—the color, quality of light, weight of the room. Then you wake up and the feeling sticks.

Friday 17 April 2009: A list of lists

Things to do this weekend:

Walk hills in a brass knuckle pattern
Mash potatoes
Turn somebody beet red
Read A Circle of Quiet
Eat roasted chicken at Presse
Make a list of lists
Peel an apple so its skin is one long loop
Take communion
Sleep with the windows more open than shut
Pluck my eyebrows into little moons
Pass out popcorn from a floss string
Photograph people photographing people
Watch punks in the park play polo on bikes
Hold on to the rail
Think about iced mochas
Think about running the lake
Snoop for snails in the garden
Burrow into my husband’s back

Thursday 16 April 2009: Clue the Movie?

If I don’t see Clue the Movie every other year or so, I get this tingly feeling. My head starts handing, my hips stop bouncing when I step, and my left eye begins to cross. It’s like a vitamin, I swear.
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Wednesday 15 April 2009: Or-ee-Gun!

Tuesday 14 April 2009: The House Near Lemon Hill

There have got to be more lakes in Northern Indiana than pores on skin. So like a lot of people my grandparents bought a lake house, just off Lemon Hill near the Michigan-Indiana border. There was wicker everywhere and a creaky swing in a screened-in porch with fishing poles lining the wall. We’d sit whole watermelons to chill in an icey-cold brook that ran next to the house. Inside, there were Dixie cups in the bathrooms with vintage cartoons printed on the sleeve, stored inside closets filled with antique quilts and afghans.

I was conceived here, in this house in the late 70s, in what everybody called the George Washington room. That was thanks to its blue-and-white wallpaper playing out colonial scenes–tiny cannons next to scrolls held by men with powdered wigs. Looking over the lake, the room was small—there was the four poster, a night stand, and an old pump organ with a pink velvet backboard sitting above yellowed keys.

I spent a lot of summers at the lake growing up, so the place easily became an indispensable part of my identity. But knowing that I was actually made there sort of elevated the house in my head—especially after my grandparents moved away.

I’m traveling to Indiana to visit family soon. When I get there, I’ll ask my grandpa to drive me in his red truck to the lake. I’ll take my shoes off and walk down the brook to the front of the house. I’ll find the window of the George Washington room and think about beginnings, and growing older. And I’ll jump, being almost certain that I saw my kid self in the window, squinting out over the water.

Monday 13 April 2009: Broken Compound Hyphenated Adjectives

Over the last couple of weeks, micro-earthquakes have been happening all around Seattle. Earlier today, a 2.5 magnitude mini-quake occurred a few miles north of the city, digging down for 17 miles–a hairline fracture on a very long femur.

I missed Seattle’s 2001 Nisqually Quake. That February I was back in the flattest place on the planet, driving around state highways pretending corn silos were tiny mountains.

A friend who went through that quake was downtown, eating lunch outside when it hit. All of a sudden there were rolling, slender buildings shaking bits of glass all around her. The city was a huge Jenga puzzle, but miracle-on-miracle, no one died.

Friday 10 April 2009: Halo Eggs

Thursday 9 April 2009: Rum on my Wrists

Oh lord of lovely hula hands, be with naked, seasoned women at day spas. And be with young women with tattoos on their asses padding across the tile floor. Me, I’m trying not to think about tiny, invisible mushrooms that may very well be sprouting in the grout between tiles as I head towards the plunge pool.

I walk past a line of women tipping big soup bowls full of herbal tonic over their shoulders and heads–a natural vapor that’s got to make everybody somebody.

Wednesday 8 April 2009: Slept in Beds

I’ve been told to try all sorts of goose-chased remedies for my occasional insomnia; homespun cure-alls like sipping valerian root tea or wearing frozen cotton socks under thick wool ones before bed. I have my own peculiar methods of inducing sleepiness, too. Sometimes I imagine that my bed is a giant seven-layer cake. Each pillowcase, sheet, blanket and afghan oozes into a different flavor and color. Other times I think about all the beds I’ve slept in for more than a month’s time. I’ll picture a classroom globe, then zoom in and connect sleep cities with an unwinding ball of yarn, stopping to tie a knot at each of the places I’ve lived.

I start on the east coast, at an NYU dorm in Union Square with a vinyl mattress that must have been an inch thick. Next there’s that squeaky twin bed in the loft of an old theatre in Muncie, Indiana. The place smelled like must and wet brick and cost $187.50 a month. There’s my aunt’s walk-up in Chicago where we slept in a shagged room in the basement. And there’s the bed stuffed in the corner of an old brothel-turned-guesthouse on Lower Haight in San Francisco where I spent a summer. I used to spook myself before falling asleep, pretending to hear ghosts of burlesque dancers rattle the doorknob to my room.

Sometimes I skim over certain hotel rooms I’ve stayed in, ones that felt both like no-one-has-ever-slept and the-whole-world’s-slept here all at once. Which is very much how it feels to look at Nick Zinner’s photographs in Slept in Beds.

Evil Twin’s small batch, cult classic picture book Slept in Beds (2003) is a collection of travel images by Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) with prose by Zach Lipez. Zinner’s photographs of unmade beds from different hotels he stayed in on tour several years back fill the book’s 38 glossy pages. Twin sisters Stacy Wakefield and Amber Gayle pressed and bound a precious 1,000 copies of the title, and as a sweetly done detail they even snipped the last page of the book out of a bed sheet.

Zinner’s photographs serve as strange comfort for the insomniac. It’s like listening to the radio–most of the time the song is sallow, but sometimes it turns brilliant, becoming the very thing that connects us. Zinner does the same thing with his pictures. It’s the best sort of sleeping pill, seeing places after people rest.

(from Asthmatic Kitty’s sidebar)

Friday 3 April 2009: Bedheaded Birthday

Going on a little holiday for my birthday, and I’m very much hoping to catch up on some sleep. Be back with you next Wednesday, fresh from the land of milk and honey that is Oregon state.

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Thursday 2 April 2009: Overgrown

Ship for Fools detail, Gala Bent

Tonight, the frightening talent and truly true beauty of Gala Bent’s art (and Gala Bent proper)
can be found at 4Culture Gallery in Seattle, a part of First Thursday:

Gala Bent
Overgrown
April 2 – May 1, 2009

reception April 2, 2009, 6 – 8 p.m.

Gallery4Culture is delighted to present Overgrown, an exhibit of new drawings by Seattle artist Gala Bent. In a dozen or so works on paper, Bent has produced an enchanting primer on the role of imagination in our understanding of reality. With graphite and gouache, she transports the viewer into an imaginary world populated by benevolent creatures amidst swirling air, water and hair. In these works, visible and invisible meet one another and react. Bent’s work strives to address human’s yearning to know the natural world and to understand that which is invisible.

Wednesday 1 April 2009: Is This a Joke?

Cliff Mass reports on his excellent weather blog the sad truth about the very chilly Seattle weather we’re still in the middle of:

During the last month only 3 days have reached or exceeded the normal maximum temperature, while over half the days have had minima below the normal lows. We should have highs in the mid-50s now.

But chin up. Saturday looks like it’s going to be warm and sunny enough to pacify even frosty, rain-booted me.