Like A Hurricane

Last Saturday at Kevin's birthday party I hooked my MacBook Air up to the speakers on top of the hutch in the kitchen and played a mix of mp3s and Pandora.  As the party moved along, suddenly guests were on my computer, choosing songs, and then it was decided I didn't have good enough music, so guests searched YouTube videos and began playing them, and the rest of the evening was taken over with their YouTube DJing.  I felt more than a little violated by this, mostly because all these fingers and eyes were touching my computer.  Kevin and I share another laptop and a desk computer, but unless we're traveling together, not even Kevin touches this one.  I'm typing on it right now.

I've been thinking about the intimacy of our computers, or as Ariana Reines recently called hers, our "instruments."  When Eileen Myles was here in November she found herself without a laptop, so I lent her our 13-inch MacBook, which usually sits on the kitchen table.  When I got it back I discovered that Eileen didn't clear her trail.  Drafts of her writing dotted the desktop, and when I clicked Gmail and FaceBook, I went to her pages—my computer had saved her passwords.  And last week when I tried to log on to online banking, I went to her login page.  Her online banking ID is a riot, but of course I'm not going to repeat it here.  Eileen had infiltrated my space, and I enjoyed following her trail, it was like the ghost of Eileen was waving to me.  Valiantly, I logged her out of everything and resisted the urge to snoop.

When Lindsey Boldt was YouTube DJing she put on Sissy Nobby, who I instantly loved.  I spent a fair amount of time looking up Nobby as well as New Orleans bounce music.  (Sissy Nobby and I have two mutual FaceBook friends: Marcus Ewert and Billy Miller.)  The video I can't get out of my head is "Like A Hurricane":



I find this video to be both silly and profound, it's like it creates a new category:  the profoundly silly.  The butt bouncing looks so fun, like something babies would do because it feels so fucking good.  In post-Katrina New Orleans, to chant "Like A Hurricane" with such exultation is so complicated and kinky, I'm not sure how to position myself in relation to it, which is great, as all this bending over and ass-shaking is a big fuck-you to rationality, a delightful fuck-you.  Ass backwards.  Ass over teakettle.  It's impossible to watch this video and not think of Katrina and the havoc it wreaked; it's as if the dancers have felt the core of Katrina's destructive power, and returned to embrace that indiscriminate energy of upheaval, have absorbed it into their bodies.  The asses, jiggling so quickly, like humming birds, a pumping blur, aren't so much sexual as libidinal.  In them I see the throbbing essence of aliveness, and the marvelous obscenity of our tenacious clinging to life.  And I love the queerness of Sissy Nobby, whose gender-bending rap is known as Sissy Bounce, a term not without controversy.  According to queer rapper Katey Red, "Ain't no such thing as 'sissy bounce.  It’s bounce music. It’s just sissies that are doing it."  When women and queers get together and act nasty, as in "Like A Hurricane," it's an occasion for joy.

Here's a mini documentary about Sissy Bounce:

If He Changed My Name

In the car this evening, Nina Simone was singing, "I told Jesus it would be alright if he changed my name."  Her performance was stop-everything-and-just-listen perfection.  I'd never heard this song before and wondered if I were mishearing her, the words were so mysterious, like a koan.  What does it mean to have Jesus change your name?  Online Christian sites say it's about the totality of the conversion experience.  Makes sense, but even that's odd.  There are all these Westerners walking around with Hindi or Buddhist or Muslim new-names, but I'm not familiar with Christians doing this.  I was raised fundamentalist, and being "saved" was a big deal.  I still remember the words:  "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your one and only lord and savior?"  I'm taking mainstream Bible-thumpers, not Martha Marcy May Marlene-type cults.  I don't want a rational explanation for "If He Changed My Name."  Simone's vocalizations and the enigmatic narrative create a visceral response that analysis adds nothing to, dilutes even.

Here's some pictures from Kevin's birthday party. This is my favorite, which I post guiltily, as people don't look particularly good in it.  Note the green-sweatered person on the far left, who's bending backwards or levitating.  That's Margaret Tedesco, I believe.  She looks like she's pretending to be full-body baptized in a huge pool of water, like the Baptists in my town did.

Kevin blowing out the candles on his cake.














David Brazil looking wonderfully perverse, with his hand on Sara Larsen's ass.

David lent me The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.  I'm still trying to figure out how to approach it. Have been reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch to go to sleep at night. I keep thinking that Dick pre-imagined the web, the way one can get lost in browsing.  I'm sure that virtual social time would be way better with some Chew-Z.

I deleted what I wrote about Marie Calloway, not because I don't like what I wrote, but because I don't want to be part of that conversation.

Christmas Lights

Kevin's sister Maureen is visiting from New Jersey.  After dinner the three of us drove around searching for the most fabulous Christmas houses in San Francisco.  Here is a sampling of what we saw.  The first place we stopped at was a house on Castro Street, across from Davies Hospital, featuring a giant Santa.  We stopped at another house we didn't photograph, then drove on to the infamous Tom and Jerry house on 21st Street on Castro Hill.






Walking down the hill towards the house, panoramic view of the City in the background.  The shadowy figure in the foreground, on the right, is Kevin photographing the same scene.

A closer view of the 30-foot high Christmas tree.

A couple standing underneath the tree, with its giant bulbs and presents. 

There were many other people there, photographing the same things we were photographing, and I thought of the Most Photographed Barn in America, from Don DeLillo's White Noise:

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."


Kevin and Maureen sitting in the love seat placed beside the tree.

Looking up the crotches of life-size marionettes attached to the side of the garage.  The marionettes' legs and arms move up and down.  There were many moving parts to the display, including two toy trains, twirling Barbie dolls, and an intricate wheel/mandala that spins.

Finally, we headed over to kink.com, which has taken over the old Armory on 14th Street.  Here's a very inadequate picture of the lights draping the top of the building.  Note the festive American flag on the far left.  Kevin says kink.com's proud display of the American flag is controversial, particularly with some Veteran's organizations.  But I say, kink.com is a capitalist success story.  It has as much right to be proud of being American as anybody.

Everybody Knows

Since I returned to San Francisco Sunday night, festive social activities are already abounding.  Last night was unusually glamorous.  We went to a small dinner party in Berkeley hosted by Leah Levy (trustee of the Jay DeFeo Trust), that included her partner Bruce Wilcox, Ugo Rondinone, and John Giorno.  John has been involved in Tibetan Buddhism since the early 70s, studying for a time with the same teacher as the buddhist.  It's very likely he and the buddhist attended retreats and events together, but Giorno couldn't recall him.  It was a stimulating and playful evening.  Leah took us on a tour of her art collection, which includes some sweet pieces by DeFeo and David Ireland.

Mostly I wanted to write a bit about the Insert Blanc Press Benefit & Holiday Party we attended Saturday night.  It was held at Weekend Space gallery, on Hollywood Blvd, in Los Feliz.  The event was way better than it had a right to be.  I was steeling myself for the dull panic that a marathon poetry reading can bring on.  But host Mathew Timmons wisely broke the evening up into 4 sets, with a handful of readers in each, with smoking and drinking (and book buying) breaks in between, so the overall feeling of the evening was a swinging party interspersed with poetic entertainment.  The readings were excellent, and I got to hear a number of younger Los Angeles poets whom I wasn't familiar with.  Kevin and I helped Kate Durbin read from the second excerpt of her new chapbook E! Entertainment, for which we played Lauren and Whitney of the MTV reality series The Hills.  For the first excerpt Mark Wallace and Brian Stefans played Lauren and Whitney, acting out the mannerisms and facial expressions of the girls.  Mark and Brian put their hearts and souls into their roles, and were a hard act to follow.

Kevin was the final act.  The photo is of him singing a duet with Geneva Zhao (photo swiped from Erin Jourdan's Facebook page) of "Sweet Jane," with his amazing band behind him.  Geneva was a grad writing student at San Francisco State years ago, but I'd met her before that in the poetry scene.  It's always odd to have students in my classes who I know from the real world.  I fear they're going to think I'm a sham when they see me up there struggling to maintain it in front of a class; it's embarrassing to have them witnessing this role I find so problematic; I worry they will no long respect me in the real world, that they'll gossip about how ludicrous I am to the real world.  Geneva was only in one class of mine, if I remember correctly—Writers on Writing, a large lecture hall class where a different writer visits each week and gives a reading and answers questions.  The writers don't get paid for this, but everybody in the lecture hall has to buy their book.  The class was in fall 2001, and 9/11 hit before we barely got started.  Less than a week after the Twin Towers fell, our first reader, Daphne Gottlieb, arrived.  Daphne was shaky and frail.  Thrown into a crisis of meaning after the enormity of 9/11, she apologized for her writing.  Her naked vulnerability embodied all of our pangs of crisis, so her reading took on the aura of a religious rite.

Since Kevin needed to rehearse, we arrived at Weekend Space while the crew was still setting up the place.  Originally Kevin was supposed to sing only Nico's "Femme Fatale," but he and the band were so in synch they decided to add "Sweet Jane."  I looked up the lyrics on my iPhone, and Kevin and the band practiced the song twice, with Kevin singing the lyrics displayed on the teeny phone screen.  Since everybody was busy setting up the sound system and the refreshment tables, getting things just right, I was the only audience member.  As I sat in a folding chair, directly in front of him, Kevin sang the song to me, catching my eye, smiling tenderly.  It was so touching, just like a scene from a movie.  Julia Roberts would play me, her giant doe eyes watering.

Hotel Retreat, Day 10

Here's Kevin taking a nap.  I wanted to make him look like a landscape.  While just taking a shower I was thinking about Alistair, how even though he has a brutal teaching schedule that saps him of social energy, he gets up early every day and writes for an hour, and the book that he's slowly accruing sounds fascinating.  I won't go into details because he wants to keep that energy contained.  I got so little writing done this semester, I've been in a pervasive state of despair, even though the reading and note taking have been exhilarating.  I guess I'm talking in extremes today, despair, exhilaration.  Because of my growing craving to write, this blog has been the focal point of this residency, and it's not been easy to maintain day after day.  After the initial rush, there was lots of what the fuck could I possibly say today, and usually I wouldn't get to it until the end of a long day and I'd stay up too late, knowing I'd be exhausted the next morning, but I pushed on.  Lots of pleasure in that pushing through resistance.  In the shower I thought back to the connection of blog writing to "real" writing, which I discussed during the buddhist phase of this project, and this morning these posts suggested the equivalent of an artist's sketches, which can be lovely in their own right, who wouldn't like to own a sketch by a favorite artist, but there's this other realm of pushing things even further, where the real glory of producing exists.  Another grandiose word, glory.  I was also thinking about Thomas Merton, how his aloneness is a metaphor for our own for inescapable aloneness.  On a heroic scale he enacted what most of us dare not look at in ourselves.  There's a bit of the carnivalesque about that, the voyeurism of watching Kafka's hunger artist.  For a hermit, Merton's life was full of people—besides a string of visitors and invitations, he engaged in a massive correspondence.  What enormous power, to live in the woods in declared solitude and to have the world begging you for attention.  What's likeable about Merton is that he didn't shy away from the contradictions in that; they troubled him and he struggled against them.  He was very aware of the games involved in his social beingness.  The buddhist was very self aware as well, like he'd talk about his personality traits as if he were discussing another person over which he had no control of altering.  When he would refuse to talk to me when the astrological aspects of the day were bad, he'd declare, "I told you I was a superstitious person!"  This is a different quality of awareness than Merton's.  With Merton you never get the sense of a flat acceptance of his traits; even the need for solitude is constantly examined.  In the shower I remembered an ancient conversation where a fellow writer said to me, "I do these things to hurt people, and I know I should feel guilty. But I don't."  The tone with which this was said was almost breezy, and it was one of the creepiest things I ever heard, a reaction that Julia Kristeva examines so brilliantly in Powers of Horror, the abject being about crime, but specifically crystallizing around the criminal who smiles.  This is the calm before a busy night, where we'll see many friends, old and new.  We're especially excited to see Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace, who've been intermittent bleeps in our lives for years, delightful bleeps.  Just noticed I've switched into the "we."  I'd say that heralds the official ending of the Hotel Retreat.  Thank you all for reading.  Love.

Hotel Retreat, Day 9

Here's the pictograph on the baby changing station in the women's restroom of La Cabaña, the Mexican restaurant my colleague Alistair McCartney and I ended up at this evening.  The image represents how exhausted and spent I feel, all larval and blank.  This is not my last night in the hotel, but this is the end of my monkish retreat.  I pick up Kevin from LAX in an hour an a half and will be thrust back into shared space, the pervasive social of coupledom.  I'm looking forward to seeing him, of course.  Our cat Ted went to the vet hospital this morning for emergency surgery, a blocked urethra and kidney stones, so when I return I switch to cat nurse role, touching Ted tenderly.  I have always been his only one.

This is a picture of some seagulls I photographed on the beach, my shadow looming in the bright sun.  The squiggliness of the birds on a horizonless landscape reminds me of Yves Tanguy.

Alistair instructed me to take this picture of him.  He told me to post it on my Facebook page with the following caption:  "I picked up this stud on the beach and I took him back to my hotel room and I fucked him so hard I'm raw.  LOL."  At the of every teaching residency he and I devolve to potty humor, a co-decompression. 











I can't think of any other way to end this post other than seaweed.  There's no conclusion in this gelatinous spiral, which both frightens and entices.  My hands clench with the urge to squish squish squish.

Hotel Retreat, Day 8

I had the pleasure of hanging out with Bett Williams today, whom dedicated Belladodie readers will remember, lives in Santa Fe.  She's in the area, visiting family.  She picked me up late afternoon at my hotel in her father's car, and we drove to Venice, not because we really wanted to go to Venice, but because at that time of day it would take at least an hour to drive into any parts of LA we would have wanted to go.  Venice is close, we could take surface roads, and I know how to get there without a map.  We spent 6 hours together talking nonstop and wandering around, and it went by in a flash.  We both wished we had the luxury of the days-long road trip we took through the Southwest last January.  But walking around Venice reminded me of the road trip in that everything seemed a bit surreal and magical, as if we were stoned.

We started out by visiting Detox Market, which happened to be across the street on Abbot Kinney, where the car was parked.  They sold mostly tea, expensive natural skin care products, and chocolate.  The woman who ran it was snooty to us, a rather toxic presence for a place called Detox Market.  We found that in general when we went into upscale stores, they acted suspicious of us, like we were going to rob them.  It was disconcerting, as both of us usually can pass as bourgeois enough to be carrying credit cards just begging to be filled.  But, apparently not on Abbot Kinney.

We then meandered through the residential area to the beach.  The beach at sunset was more intense than we'd imagined, filled with street people, skateboarders, and many intoxicated men.  There was a gathering of people on a rising of ground, and we kept wondering why they were there, if it were some sort of meeting, an Occupy Venice movement, a party.  After we walked in one direction for ages, we turned around and headed back.  The people were still there, so we went over to them to see what was happening.  Just as we approached, a yellow school bus arrived, and we realized the people were in line, and it seemed they were being bussed to a shelter.  This was just a few blocks away from Abbot Kinney, where we were unfit to look at $30 pieces of jewelry.  The disparity was shocking.  On the boardwalk, Bett and I stopped in at a shop that sold "Native American" stuff.  There I took this sweet picture of Love and Hope.

We were hungry and opted for Mao's Kitchen, a popular Chinese restaurant a couple of blocks from the beach, but far enough away from Abbot Kinney to feel human.  It was delicious and comfy.  Then we wandered back to Abbot Kinney in search of tea and dessert.

Animal kitsch was popular in many window displays.  I love this rather scary deer.  It looks like it stumbled out of nature into the wrong world, similar to how Bett and I, emerging from the homeless world of the beach, felt upon reentering the stuffy privilege of Abbot Kinney.  Here's another set of window deer:

Would this display make you want these magenta clothes?  I can't imagine anybody but a cold-hearted person would buy them after seeing them worn by these cold-hearted deer.

This multi-stoned brigade of Buddhas, I took in a mystical bookstore, which was the friendliest store on Abbot Kinney, besides the place that sold marijuana brownies.  I'd never seen marijuana brownies sold in a store.  You need a medical marijuana card to purchase them.  Bett said she knew a woman who purchased a marijuana brownie and it had worms in it.  In the back of the mystical bookstore was a very thin woman giving a talk to a small group of people gathered round her in easy chairs.  They were listening intently.  She apparently was the author of the stack of books beside her, with "Soul" in the title.  She was wearing black skinny pants, and a rather complicated, expensive-looking white top.  She looked like an aging trophy wife.  When I heard her mention William Burroughs and yage, I started listening.  Bett and I stood there transfixed, as she launched into a series of stories about taking ayahuasca.  During one "trip," she had a vision of this huge challis above her head, and in the chalice were all these people she knew, and the chalice poured them into her crown chakra, and the chalice said to her, "We all are one."

Hotel Retreat, Day 7

After a busy day at school, giving my seminar, meeting with students, and catching the beginning of Rick Moody's reading, I met Stuart Krimko for dinner in the hip downtown part of Culver City, which is so far from the part I'm staying at, Stuart asked more than once, "Is that really still Culver City?"  Stuart and I had a great time when we were a threesome with Ariana Reines in San Francisco last month, but we had no idea if Stuart and Dodie alone would work.  When the waiter announced it was Wine Wednesday, meaning bottles of wine were half off, we both excitedly took it as a sign, for when we went out to dinner in San Francisco, it was Half Off Wine Tuesday.  We sipped some nice French wine that Stuart picked out and launched into a three and a half hour conversation, about art and writing, and whether we thought the self resided in the brain or elsewhere, Stuart attempted to explain Kierkegaard to me, we talked about in-laws, Long Island, sex, Ariana of course, we talked about work and love and relationships, Jesus as a cult leader, how kinky devotion is underrated these days.  Since Akasha, where we dined, is a classy place, they played quality Christmas music, a jazz version of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," etc.

There were these really weird shaped lights hanging from the exposed beamed ceiling.   My picture doesn't do them justice.  But I like how the eyes of the people in the foreground are glowing white, matching the dots of white light in the background.  My mind starts tripping out on some Children of the Damned/zombie scenario, where the dots of light in the background are controlling the trendy eaters in the foreground.  When their eyes glow white they turn homicidal, or something like that. 

Here's a picture of the parking garage across the street.  The section of Level 3 where I was parked was named Gilda.  And it had paintings of black-silhouetted people in evening clothes.  There's one woman in this picture, the waist down of her black gown between "Gilda" and "Level 3," the top of her body bent and extending across the ceiling.  Southern California is such a friendly, pleasure-loving place.

Hotel Retreat, Day 6

I'm so sick today I didn't feel connected enough to the external world to take any pictures.  This is a photo of the raw-ish buckwheat porridge I've been making every morning.  We get passes to the hotel breakfast buffet ($13.95 without coupon), but I've yet to try it.  My cereal looks like vomit, but it's delicious.  If you're ever in a hotel and lug along a travel blender, you can make it too.  You soak 3 coffee scoops of buckwheat groats overnight.  In the morning you rinse the buckwheat, then blend it, along with some currants (for sweetness), a pinch of salt, and lots of cinnamon, with hot water from the hotel coffee maker.  The hot water makes it warm, which I find soothing.  Then you add in a glob of raw almond butter and blend again.  I top it with chopped fruit and a sprinkle of sunflower seeds.  I know this is boring and geeky, and if I wasn't sick and had something better to talk about, I wouldn't bother you with it.

I'm having a hard time with being ill and holding it all together.  This is what I wrote to a friend this evening:

"Being sick is making me depressed and abject.  I feel like a hideous swollen monster who nobody likes.  So thanks for sending me an email where you act like you like me."

Pathetic.  But on the bright side, I'm lucky to have friends whom I can write such foolish things to.  I long for a mother to wipe my snotty nose.  Thinking about being sick as a child, how caring my mother was, lavishing on me a sweetness I didn't experience much of otherwise.  In our home there was a myth that I was a healthy, rugged child, when in fact I had recurring bouts of a kidney infection that can kill little girls.  I got all sorts of attention being sick and I didn't have to go to school for several weeks.  The problem was I loved school and it was boring having to lie around on the couch and eat food with no salt, and I got a shot of penicillin in the ass every week.  This is exactly the kind of episode where the child, loving all the attention, turns sickly forever, but maybe that only happens to middle class children.  My mother did not believe in "babying" me.  Life was rough and you dealt with it; there was no room in her world for a sensitive flower, which I was emotionally.  I once read in a Jungian book that the daughter sometimes embodies the shadow of the mother, and I was yes, yes, that's she and I.  Emotions are the enemy of the life is rough and you deal with it mentality.  As I got older I came to admire her strength.  Even when she was dying she was bossing me around, which is awesome, that spirit.

So this is where I'm at right now.  I wouldn't be writing this, except for some reason it's important to redo the 10-day hotel retreat series I did a year ago, a version of which is in the buddhist.  He was still very present in my consciousness last December.  Doing the series again is like erasing him.  And yes, it's not passed my notice that Thomas Merton is a sort of substitution for him.

Here's a bonus pic, the persimmon and apple I chopped up for my buckwheat gruel.

Hotel Retreat, Day 5

This is a diorama I assembled out of the pinecone I picked up the other day, the contents of my DayQuil/NyQuil LiquiCaps Combo Pack, and the green scrubby mitts I got at the Korean spa.  It reminds me of the corporate parks in Culver City, tall trees, majestic office buildings, and manicured lawns.  Yes, I have a cold.  I enacted my typical trajectory with it, in that yesterday I went to Whole Foods and got all this natural immune support stuff that never works, and now that I'm sneezing and snot is dripping all over the place I went to the drug store and got poisonous symptom suppressors.  Haven't taken any yet, as I want to get a bit more work done before I fog my brain with a NyQuil.  One of my colleagues got excited when he heard I had a cold.  "Get NyQuil," he exclaimed in an Australian accent. "I love NyQuil, you take it and you pass out and you sleep for hours."  I guess I am looking forward to that.

On Wednesday I'm teaching a two hour seminar on brand names in contemporary writing.  The research has been entertaining.  I've found out wondrous things, such as:  In 1955, when Ford Motor Company was developing the a new car, David Wallace, manager of marketing research, asked poet Marianne Moore for suggestions on what to name it.  Car names Marianne Moore came up with included "Resilient Bullet", "Ford Silver Sword", "Mongoose Civique", "Varsity Stroke", "Pastelogram", "Turcotinga", "Andante con Moto," and "Utopian Turtletop."  Edsel, which they chose, wasn't on her list.

I think I'll name by diorama "NyQuil Towers."

Hotel Retreat, Day 4

I don't know how well this photo "reads."  It's a detail from an artwork that's hanging in the hall, outside the room where my writing workshop is held.  It's an insect made out of silverware.  The background is recycled iron.  I love this little bug.  I think it's made from forks.  Insects are so good at survival, like didn't the cockroach survive the Ice Age?  This fork morphing into insect is also about survival and transformation and valuing the tiniest things, valuing the the outcast, the forsaken, the superfluous.  Hotel life makes me treasure what in my regular life might pass for garbage.  A large plastic bag.  Great!  It becomes a laundry bag to separate my dirty clothes from those who somehow survived the trip unsullied.  One time I scissored off the top of a plastic water bottle and turned it into a vase for some flowers.  Twists and rubber bands also bring joy.  Now I'm thinking of Ajit Chauhan, who is masterful at using the discarded in his art.  Last October, Kevin and Ajit did a show together at Sight School gallery in Oakland.  The exhibit was inspired by the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.  It was incredible and I was planning to write about it here, but life demands swallowed my writing energy.  Besides working with Kevin, Ajit also collaborated on a motorized piece with Kal Spelletich of Survival Research.  Kal was fun to hang out with.  He was so friendly and at ease with people, he reminded me of a large dog who didn't know the meaning of stranger.  Since the opening went on for 3 hours, I got to spend a lot of time talking with Ajit, and he discussed many of the pieces with me.  He had one piece loaded with those little square plastic things that are used instead of twisters to close loaves of mass-market bread.  Ajit said his roommate is an intense recycler, and she has a drawer full of these little squares, and looking at them all together, Ajit was impressed with their beauty.  To be open to the glory in things so cast aside, so disenfranchised most of us don't even register them—this is a form of grace.  If I were critiquing this blog entry in a workshop, I'd say, "Unpack this grace thing, Dodie."  My thoughts on the point are, indeed, muddled, but I guess it's that I'm suspecting that moments of intense spiritual awareness more often than not are humble; they're almost humiliating in their humbleness.  Maybe I think that because I'm so not a visionary.

I just called Kevin and asked him to email me this photo.  It's not the piece I'm writing about here, but if you look closely, there are a few of those bread wrapper squares punctuating the grid and string.  If I remember correctly, Ajit found the board with the grid paper attached it it, and the string is also recycled.  Looks like there's some paperclips attached as well.  Garbage in, art out.

Hotel Retreat, Day 3

Here's my yellow Chevy waiting for me outside Leaf Cuisine, a vegan/raw restaurant where I went to get some lunch to go for Sunday, which is a super busy day at school.  Since nights here are in the 40s, I left the food in the trunk and drove to the Olympia Day Spa, one of the many spas in Koreatown.  I was meeting poet Christine Wertheim.  There are 3 pools at this spa, a mildly hot one for the wimpy, a boil your skin off hot pool comprised of mugwort tea, and an icy cold pool.  When I first arrived and stuck a toe in the mugwort, it burned so bad, I was no fucking way.  Someone in the pool told me to go in the cold pool first.  So I hung out in the wimpy pool, dunked in the cold pool, hung out in the herbal steam room, dunked in the cold pool, then gingerly approached the steaming vat of mugwort, and it felt great, I could stay in it for extended periods of time.  Everybody is totally naked and lunging from one temperature extreme to another.  I'd gone here with Christine last June, so I was used to that part.

This time I booked a Milky Scrub, which is described as, "As you are basked in warm citrus milk, dry and dull skin is sloughed away with gentle strokes."  You like naked on a table covered with plastic, and a middle aged Korean woman wearing a black bra and black panties—old fashioned to-the-waist briefs—scrubs the shit out of you with these exfoliating mitts she wears.  She scrubs every part of you, including the crack of your ass and your inner thighs all the way up to the genitals.  She occasionally throws buckets of water over you, and ends with some creamy fluid that makes you rather slick. My scrubber was friendly and impersonal and I relaxed into it.  I am no longer Dodie, I thought, I am merely a slab of flesh whose dead flakes need to be sloughed off.  The treatment ends with a rather brutal shampoo which by then I totally enjoyed, this woman attacking my scalp with her strong fingers.

Thomas Merton's involvement with the student nurse began in a hospital, when he was recuperating from back surgery.  Margie gave him a bath.  Lying on the plastic table being professionally scrubbed in places where only a lover has touched, I thought of the indignity of being frail and having to rely on these anonymous others to prod and turn one's tender physicality.  Nurse Margie knew who Merton was; they could talk easily.  He could talk to her for hours, as he could with no one else.  I wondered if I were a celibate hermit and this Korean woman knew who I was, had read my writing, understood my world—would her ministrations seem caring to me, would I feel for once my humanity had truly been touched by this other, wonderful, angelic being?  Would I fall in love with her?  I began by lying face down, then on my back, then on each side.  When I was lying on my left side I saw a row of white gleaming bodies lying on plastic covered tables, each with a Korean women in black bra and briefs attending to it.

After the spa, Christine and I headed over to Beverly Soon Tofu Restaurant for Stone Pot Bibimbap, which we both love.  Here's Christine admiring the rustic wooden walls.

Hotel Retreat, Day 2

Christmas in Culver City.  Here's a reindeer in front of some birds of paradise on the Antioch campus.  I also saw a lovely white rose bush in its final gasp of flowering.  I plucked a velvety petal from the plant and carried it around for a couple of hours.  Walking to campus I passed some trees with pinecones scattered beneath them.  As I picked one up, I thought of my Jaycee Dugard pinecone necklace.  Jaycee was the woman who was kidnapped from her Lake Tahoe neighborhood at the age of 11 by pervert Phillip Garrido and his wife, and kept captive for 18 years, bearing two daughters by Garrido.  When he zapped her with a stun gun, the last thing she touched was a pinecone lying on the ground.  So, as a fundraiser for her foundation, she sells the pinecone necklace as a symbol of hope.  The 4-inch tall real pinecone sitting on my desk, I have no idea what it symbolizes.  I hadn't picked up a pinecone since I was like 10, so maybe it symbolizes my childlikeness.  When I had it at Antioch, a small bug crawled out of it, so maybe it symbolizes my willingness to live with something that may be infested.  It's lopsided, so maybe it symbolizes my ability to love the lopsided.

For the 10 days I'm at the residency I get to camp out in the office of a fulltime professor who's on break.  When I entered this residency's office, there were several issues of The Chronicle of Higher Education and other mail stacked up, the file cabinet was covered with dust, and the computer hard drive was missing. I stacked the mail in a corner and left a voicemail with the department about my lack of computer access.  Then I noticed the guy's plants.  They were all dried up and crotchety.  He's obviously been on leave, and he didn't make provision for the poor plants.  So I filled a pitcher with water and gave them all drinks and picked off the shriveled leaves.  A colleague, who was waiting to go to dinner through all this, said, "He must be a Buddhist," and she pointed to a "Buddha Loves You Too!" sticker on the side of the bookcase and a photo of a Buddha statue.  We made snotty jokes about how his Buddhist compassion must not extend to his houseplants.  Maybe watering the plants, for him, would be an example of the "idiot compassion" the buddhist would talk about.  Maybe he was teaching the plants a lesson about abstinence and attachment.  You only think you need water, you ravenous plants. 

I didn't mention my colleague's name because we were playing hooky from nighttime campus events and I don't want to bring her down with me.  Yes I'm aware that I missed the Friday night lasagna dinner and reading, no I will not reveal the name of my coconspirator.  The first time I was ever called a colleague it grossed me out.  It was when I had a visiting writer gig at Mills; I was at a party at Robert Hass', and this woman from the department introduced me to someone as her colleague, and I thought "Colleague!"  What a pretentious bitch.  I would have been okay with coworker.  I probably would have said, "X and I work together."  I wonder if the word colleague was invented so academics wouldn't have to associate with a proletariat word like "work."  Academics have secretaries who work; academics, on the other hand, have vocations, passion, they do it for the love of it. 

I just looked up the origin of playing hooky:  "Play hooky is probably derived from the Dutch term hoekje (spelen) 'hide-and-seek'. The Dutch word hoek means 'corner'—the boys in 17th-century New Amsterdam played this game around the corners of the street. Hide-and-seek was a different game back then—the players had to search for a hidden object."  

It's late and it's past a reasonable bedtime and I wish I could get up before dawn and watch the lunar eclipse, the huge red moon.  Those of you who do, I adore you.  This is for you—the Christmas reindeer at night, all lit up.  So magical!  I photographed it as my colleague and I were fleeing from campus and heading towards our hooky.   

Hotel Retreat Day 1

This is a photo of my rental car.  At Dollar, they don't assign a car to you.  All the cars in your price category are parked together and you pick out whichever one you want.  I grabbed this bright yellow Chevy so I could find the car easily in a parking lot.  Gray rental cars take so much effort, you have to pay all that attention to keep track of them.  My yellow car is a bright slash in a sea of gray and white cars.  You glance in its direction and it grabs you.

It's quarter to 11 on my first day of my 10 day hotel stay in Culver City.  I'm still unpacking and unearthly tired, having gotten only 4 hours of sleep last night.  I'm listening to "Miles Davis Radio" on Pandora.  They're currently playing Lester Young's "Prisoner of Love."  This is so fitting as I've been reading about Thomas Merton's late-in-life romance with a student nurse half his age.  Volume 6 of Merton's edited journal, which chronicles that period of his life, is called Learning to Love.  It's fascinating and unbearable to hear him go on and on and on and on about the depth of his love for Margie, alternately rationalizing it and guilt tripping over it. He kept his Trappist vows of chastity in that he and Margie never had sex-sex, but it sounds like they fooled around.  Merton's excesses remind me of my own excesses, remind me of the excesses of anybody who falls passionately in love, as if being in love were a form of possession, or a disease with predictable and inevitable stages—even though when you're in that state, you're sure what you're going through is unique to you and your muse.  Here's Alica Keys singing "Love is My Disease":



 I thought love would be my cure/ but now it's my disease

When the affair is found out and Merton is forbidden to see her (he does continue to see her a bit, even after forbidden not to), this fuels a new wave of love for now that the physical temptation is removed, Margie and his love for her can be idealized, and he can hold her image with him day and night, possess it.  Woman as divine muse.  I'm also reading John Howard Griffin's Follow the Ecstasy:  The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton.  The trauma of Merton's passion causes him to glide over a lot of details.  It's hard to tell what Margie's like and what actually transpired between them in some of these furtive meeings.  Griffin's book fills in gaps.  The sex life of repressed spiritual types continues to fascinate.   People in love always seem foolish, and the more dignified the persona, the more foolish they seem.  I look at Merton and I look at my blatherings about the buddhist, and I look at a dozen other books dealing with spiritual life I've read this past year and I wonder:  do any of us really know anything?  Would life be interesting without flaws?  According to Griffin, Merton didn't feel comfortable with the idealized version of himself that the world held, and he undercut it when he could.  I'm so tired I feel dull and rather animal, like I just want to roll around on the floor, stretch and scratch my back on the hotel carpet, which is dark blue with small, irregular beige dots.  Now Pandora is playing "All the Things You Are" by Charlie Parker, which, besides being great exit music, brings me back to the beloved enumerations in Merton's journal.  Margie you are all things Margie you cannot be all things I am a man of God I am a man of passion this human love is good this human love is bad they can take you away from me but they'll never touch my love this love I have for you is huge as the nature that surrounds me I look up at the moon and your love is there in the moon and the solitude of this dark night.

Muscle Memory

Today was my last class for the semester.  Really the semester should go on for another week and a half, but I'm rushing away early to fly to LA on Thursday to teach at Antioch's winter residency.  The December residency is always a shock, the brutal lack of transition.  Tomorrow I run errands and pack, and then I'm gone, off to a new world.  Yesterday, after our class potluck, we took the leftover food over to Occupy San Francisco State, which consists of maybe a dozen tents outside the student union building.  It was sweet.  They eagerly accepted all the great food and thanked us for contributing to the cause.  It was a difficult semester, I was teaching more than was comfortable for me, and there were, to be very vague, some compatibility issues.  But there were also many instances that touched me.  And some writing was done in my classes that really excited me.  This morning when I was getting ready to leave, I put on a dress I rarely wear, mostly because I don't like it that much, but I did wear it when the buddhist was here.  (I know, why would I wear a dress I didn't like when he was here?) I wasn't thinking about him when I was pulling the dress over my head, I was thinking, why does it take me so long to get dressed, I'm going to be late, and then my mind began chanting I hate him I hate him I hate him.  This was totally surprising.  I don't even think it's true; I don't hate him.  In fact, I don't think I hate anybody.  But there it was, this primal voice in my head, ranting.  In class one of the students talked about muscle memory, how in the yoga she does, as she holds the poses memories will flood her.  And this made her believe that yes, we do hold trauma in our bodies.

Speaking of the buddhist, I sent a copy of the buddhist, the book, to a local Zen roshi poet, and he emailed me about it today.  He said he couldn't put the book down, was sad when it ended.  I love the p.s. to his email:  "ps - is any of the stuff in the buddhist actually true?"  Oh my friend, let me tell you . . .

I haven't given any more readings, but the past week has been full.  Friday night Kevin and I went with Christopher Russell and Cameron Popham to see Carolee Schneemann at Eli Ridgeway Gallery.  An evening of films and videos and her briefly speaking and answering questions.  I went up and gushed and gave her a copy of the buddhist.  I told her she was in it, and that I had read at her retrospective at the Henry Gallery in Seattle.  She knew who I was!  She instructed me to autograph my book, and I stupidly signed it, "your fan."  The final section of clips were from Precarious, which was installed at the Henry in its full large screen multi-projectorhood.  The subject of Precarious is dancing in captivity.  The moment that broke everybody's heart was a clip from Sergei Eisensteins's Strike (from Googling I believe it's from Strike) of a dancing bear, a black and white clip, full of light and faded to softness, that felt painfully slow. I don't know if Schneemann slowed the footage down, but it felt slow, like movie syntax for lost memories, I've seen it in film after film, the childhood birthday party with the glowing candles, not quite slo-mo, but slower than real life, which, no matter how cheesy the movie, feels tragic.  But here it was real tragedy, the brutality and humiliation of a dancing bear.

After the films, Kevin and I went out for a drink with Cameron, who was visiting from Winnipeg.  Our mutual friend, poet Colin Smith, sent him to us.  In the picture to the left, Cameron is standing behind a postmodern Christmas tree in a hotel lobby.  "Pretend you're feeling the magic of Christmas," Kevin instructed.  Cameron was very patient when Kevin and I commented on how his accent doesn't sound Canadian.  Winnipeg, I learned, borders the U.S., and so people from there have a more Fargo accent than our friends in Vancouver and Toronto.  But Cameron's is more of a drawl, like he could have been from the South.  Cameron is a poet and a musician, and he entertained us with stories of touring with bands, driving around in a van, the hardcore/punk drummer blasting Kate Bush in the middle of the night.  We also talked about writing—Cameron's well informed about the contemporary poetry scene.  He's even read The Grand Piano.  All ten volumes!  At City Lights he bought Ariana Reines' Mercury, even though he'd never heard of her.  "You'll love it," I gushed.  He told us of poets and writers in Alberta who work in forest fire lookout towers.  He said they get lots of writing and art done in the towers.  There's such a wonderful dreamlike quality to this image, the artist alone in his micro-cabin, looming above the ordinary world, isolated from it, yet essential to its survival.  I want to go to sleep and dream of lookout towers night after night.

Kevin told me how, during the 50s, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac spent their summers working in fire lookouts.

There's even a picture book about it, Poets on the Peaks by John Suiter.

Last night Kevin and I went out to dinner with Kaplan Harris, a young scholar who writes about New Narrative, among other things.  I'd met Kaplan a few times, but always in large groups, often in auditoriums.  This was the first time I'd ever talked to him.  He's one of those scholars who has a passion for research and ideas.  His excitement was refreshing, contagious.  To better understand New Narrative, he's been reading back issues of the 70s gay literary journal Gay Sunshine, which he has found mind bending.  He said, for instance, he'd never again look at Joe Brainard's I Remember the same, having seen it published next to a photo of a naked guy with a huge cock.  Which got me to go on and on about how important it was to me when I was a young writer to be exposed to this aesthetic where sex and high culture were intertwined.  Kevin asked Kaplan if he could take a picture of him holding the drawing Raymond Pettibon did of a cock and balls—as I've reported here before, Kevin is doing a project where he's photographing a number of male artists and writers holding Raymond's genitals, many of them naked.  Somebody has to write about this some time, how so many of these naked artists and writers are straight, and they're posing (and helping to direct the posing) in homoerotic constructions.  I suggested that since Kaplan was into Gay Sunshine that Kevin photograph him in the restaurant's bathroom, beside the urinal—an important site of homoerotic desire.  The (fully clothed) pix came out great—if Kaplan ever gets tired of academia, I'm convinced he'd have a future in hustling—but I'm not allowed, due to privacy considerations, to post any of the cock and balls photos on my blog.  Kevin has promised his models that none of their pictures will appear on the internet, that these photos are meant for "gallery and high art" contexts.  And Belladodie is definitely and proudly low art.