tenderComrade

2011 best live music

2012-01-08T19:38:00.008-05:00

My hip, Hemingway-reading great-grandfather Pop White (a shrewd farmer who vaunted his success by buying a new car every year of the Depression), and, we suspect, his son my uptight grandfather (nicknamed "The Sponge" for his genius at freeloading) saw burlesque shows at the Trocadero Theater in Philadelphia; my father and I see concerts there now, making me the fourth generation of my family to attend this establishment. The Troc was the venue for the best concert I saw in 2011, the Civil Wars: the sound was perfect, and, strangely, when the audience sang along (the house was full of fans) they sounded great. Not usually the case with singing fans at shows. The Civil Wars show was a great night at my favorite venue, thank you Civil Wars, singing fans, and my camerado, whose idea it was to go.

After the Civil Wars I might put Lucinda Williams and Teddy Thompson at a tie. Lucinda Williams is a favorite of my Dad's; he's seen her 12 times. This year was my 2nd. Although Williams is a song-writing goddess and sings like a barfly sibyl uttering uncanny prophecies just as she's slipping off her barstool, she doesn't get under my skin like she gets under my Dad's. I think she's his ideal woman, and who could blame him? Her concert was stunning--she roved through every outpost of human experience, and did two of my favorite of her songs: Honeybee and Unsuffer Me--the latter the most powerful rendition of a song I've seen since Annie Lennox did Cold with such unnerving candor she caused an audience to spontaneously rise to its feet.
Lucinda Williams also covered Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth, showing great taste, and dedicated it to Occupy, also showing excellent taste. My Dad, my Dad's girlfriend, and my camerado and I all dug this show immensely.

Teddy Thompson opened for KD Lang; he's such a great singer and song-writer but seems to be holding back. With that voice and his song-writing skills he could take over the world with a single power-ballad, and be another Adele. But his aesthetic is one of restraint. At one point Teddy Thompson let out an incredibly long, full-throated note that made the audience gasp. It was unique in his set. He was an interesting contrast to KD Lang, who followed him, and showed off her exquisite bellowing till I was numbed to it. She has a glorious voice. The audience lost their minds when KD Lang started doing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah,but I wasn't persuaded that the world needs another version of this song. Still, I like it that she performed this weird song, about religious and sexual and other forms of rapture--with its icy sadomasochistic currents--for the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympics: That was an admirably perverse choice. KD Lang's new song I Confess is great, very funny and sexy, and we liked her band, and the audience was the queerest I've ever been in. A fun night out at the magnificent Kimmel Center, with my camerado, who also suggested this one.

Again with my Dad, it was a thrill to see Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the dazed hippie genius of country music, at World Cafe. I had seen him once before, performing in a park, with his son. This time, the audience was dead, checked-out, except for one young hippie who stood up front doing annoying interpretive dances to each song, entranced by his own acid trails. Jimmie Dale and his band, the Wronglers, must have a strange impression of Philadelphia audiences. I love Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and was excited to buy a poster and get his autograph. His version of In the Pines, on the "Heirloom Music" album, may be my favorite version of this song, which is my Amazing Grace.

Back to the Trocadero, my biggest concert disappointment of 2011 was Peter Murphy with She Wants Revenge. I am not blaming Peter Murphy: he was fantastic, Liza Minnelli could not have had more vitality. I think of Peter Murphy as a cool, aloof type, but he put on a show. I've always liked him, but when I saw how game he was to go all out for his fans, it made me love him. Murphy did Marlene Dietrich's Favorite Poem--I hoped he might! and an acoustic version of Bela Lugosi's Dead, which is something you wait your whole life for. (Next time, I hope, Crystal Wrists). However, the sound at the Troc was terrible; we were closest to the stage in the first balcony--and the Troc is a small venue--but Peter Murphy sounded like he was at the bottom of a swimming pool; I could not make out a word. It was a long night. The openers, She Wants Revenge, were mesmerizing the first time I saw them (at the TLA), but they seemed subdued at the Troc, tired or disappointed--they kept their coats on like folks who stop by your house but really can't stay. Coupled with the bad sound, this made for a weak show. However, based on how great they were the first time I saw them, I would see She Wants Revenge again.

I also saw Joan Baez, who is very cool, though perhaps not cool enough to drive all the way to Glenside for. I went mainly to hang out with my Dad. But Joan Baez told a memorable story that made the trip worth it: about being a very young woman sent to wake Martin Luther King with a song (he was due for a speaking engagement). She's an excellent mimic, and very funny; her imitation of a drowsy MLK was so spot-on, it was like being there with her; time vanished.

TS Elliot measured his life out with coffee spoons; I guess I'm measuring mine out with theater and concerts. In January I get that midnight feeling--excited, a little frightened, awestruck. I'm perched on a hill, on a heaped-up mass of time, at the old year's midnight. Winter and autumn slope away behind me, the remaining winter and spring slope into darkness ahead of me. In this mood I write my posts about the best live performances from the year that's ended, which is how I learn what I really thought of them.

passengers

2011-12-04T12:22:00.002-05:00

After work, we take the train from Philly to Ambler to see my dad, who is a charismatic nurseryman in Montgomery County.

(Walking around Doylestown, he showed me trees he planted in his 20s, and told of bygone revels where acid tabs floated in wine bottles floating around all-night lawn parties).

My camerado and I get on at Market East station with some books and half a pecan pie for my dad. The seats are packed with commuters; I see two together, free only because a woman has parked herself on the aisle and covered the remaining seats with a bag and backpack. I ask if we can sit there, she pauses her phone conversation, stands with an air of resentment, and indicates we may scoot in. I do so, but this has already taken so long and been so awkward that my camerado has taken the solo seat behind us.

I looked forward to this journey with him, so now I'm resenting this woman who took up three seats on a packed commuter train and prevented me from sitting next to someone who's only, you know, my soulmate. The woman resumes her phone conversation, conducting it in a language that to my ears sounds African. My resentment shrivels like a slug in salt. Everyone has a journey, and no immigrant has an easy journey.

The woman talks through two stations, and gets off the train. Of her entire conversation, only one sentence, folded casually into the surrounding African cadences, is in English:

everything you have will be destroyed

We have a great dinner in Ambler with my dad. He tells unbelievable stories about our family, raves about the pecan pie we made, and reminds me of the time we saw two whooping cranes with their (sole) offspring in a grassy river bed along the Gulf Coast, which, incredibly, I had forgotten. On the way back from Ambler in the empty train, I tell my camerado about what the woman from Africa said on the phone. His eyes grow large.

"That's really ominous," he says.

"I know!" I say.

"It sounds like something you would make up in one of those stories you write."

edward gorey buys me ices

2011-11-11T00:21:00.004-05:00

This pupil of Edward Gorey will not resist visiting his house whenever he's on Cape Cod. I had just enough time to tour the Gorey museum while on a food run--it was my turn to cook for my friend's Cape Cod writer's week--but stopped to look at the Edward Gorey shop first (along with Goreyolatry, I'm mad for T-shirts). I picked out a shirt but couldn't use my debit card because my bank decided I might have stolen it from myself while on vacation. My, apparently, Gormenghast-like bank transferred me from department to department while I explained again and again that I was still me, albeit in a different state. When my bank thawed my debit card--after an hour and a half on the phone--I bought my shirt but had no time to see the museum. Ten hungry writers awaited dinner.

The staff of the Gorey house had witnessed me pacing the green across the street, on my phone, pleading with my bank, and were sorry I couldn't stay to see the museum. The assistant director of the museum wrote a letter asking if a branch of my bank would buy me a sundae to make up for my lost afternoon.

On the way back to my friend's house, I stopped at a bank branch to show the letter. The bank manager didn't think it was funny at all, but I did get a sundae, courtesy of my bank, and Edward Gorey.

jane is the girl of the hour

2011-10-26T09:33:00.014-04:00

Brad and Angelina can't have been photographed more than Jane and her bridegroom were last weekend. My camerado and I went up to our friend's wedding in Northern Tier Pa, to the small town where the groom's parents live. Jane's parents live one town over; her cousins went to school with the groom's siblings, and though the families have known each other for years, the bride and groom only met two years ago--at the funeral of a man who was a friend to both families. So he was the invisible guest this weekend.

(Wiktionary says guest and ghost are etymologically related, if only hypothetically.)

The bridesmaids were supposed to be, according to Jane, sexy, in tiny bowler hats, fishnets, and short cocktail dresses (in autumnal colors). Only one bridesmaid, an athletic Christian girl, wore a really short skirt--a Christian who is willing to look like a tart for her friend's wedding is the kind of Christian we need more of, even if she doesn't remember meeting me (I think because we were both so heavily focused on disliking Jane's erstwhile boyfriend the day we met).

I got to be a bridesman, in black pants, purple shirt, olive suspenders, and the shiny patent-leather Chucks I wore in my cousin's wedding. (Reader, I have been in ten weddings: ring bearer x1, reader x2, bridesman x2, groomsman x3, violinist x1, best man x1.) The bride's aunts lobbied hard for me to wear a tiny bowler hat like the bridesmaids, and if you know how obsessed I am with my hair, you will understand how very funny I found this.

It was the weekend of my camerado's birthday, and we thought we would accomplish some hiking of the Northern Tier and lolling around--but we were enlisted to help first with the bridal shower, and then with the preparations for the ceremony, which was in a tent in the groom's parents' back yard. The preparations were intense--a group effort that gave us all a sense of having personally made the wedding happen. After the reception, the wedding party and lingering guests had a marshmallow roast on the back patio; I savored those marshmallows, feeling that they were well-deserved, and that their warm, gooey, celestially-white sweetness was the substance of our high-flying hopes for the bride and groom, our euphoria that the day had gone so beautifully, and our joy at being there.

When I say the preparations were intense, I'm referring to scenes like one below, where you see the groom building a bridge from his parents' back yard to the parking lot behind their house (adjacent to the municipal building):

Spanning a gully, the bridge allowed guests to park in the lot. That this was a DIY wedding made it one of the better ones I've been to. If we're the people who will support this couple in life, we may as well be mustered up front, on the first day of their marriage, in a sacramental--which to say, physical, and connecting way.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1: 27). So: pitch in, be a pal, don't let the world make you too much of a cynic, and voila! you have all the religion you need. Sacramental. I still like James.

The camerado and I helped set up the tables, and generally followed orders, and got lunch at a sandwich place where we eavesdropped on locals who were gossiping about us: An outdoor wedding! on a chilly October weekend!

After lunch we got duded up and went to the inn where the bride and bridesmaids were dressing, and Jane gave me a hip flask; I always wanted my own hip flask. An aunt gave me a ride to the ceremony and joked again that I should be made to wear a tiny bowler, I'm laughing as I type this. My job in the wedding was to walk the moms in--steering around the poles that held up the tent--and then stand there. The bride and groom got through it all without blubbering. Laudable.

See the groom's checked tie? Unlike the bride's team with our Bob Fosse idiom, the groom and his guys had an 80's theme, complete with Converse sneakers: this bodes well. There was mead (!) at the reception, and hot apple cider; Jane's friends are cool and her relatives welcome me as one of their own. A melange of Christians, hippies, and Christian hippies, Jane's family is much like mine, so I show up and immediately understand the cultural topography.

Jane also has smart, beautiful cousins on both sides who would murder for her:

Sunday morning we packed up, and had breakfast at Jane's parents' house, and hit the road, taking local routes so we could see my beloved natal state in greater detail. Pennsylvania is a sideways rectangle, like a tasteful, soothing painting of a bucolic scene in a doctor's waiting room, or an ant farm. As we progressed from town to town I had the sense of slowly dropping from a great height, finally coming to rest on the Delaware Valley's coastal plain. I saw many towns I had never seen before, but nevertheless loved, as part of my home state. This animal devotion to place is baffling to the rational part of my brain. Is this patriotism? Or something like it? I should love Pennsylvania less because--after having helped hoist ten of my friends and relatives into the privileges and protections of marriage--I can't marry here. But strangely, I find I love my state no less for this failing, significant as it is.

So let me say that when all are free to marry in Pennsylvania, I will love my home state that much more.

two pathways

2011-08-17T18:05:00.013-04:00

A friend of mine has a Cape Cod house, and hosts a writer's week every summer. Everyone picks a spot on the property to work; above you see one of my favorites. A bayberry tree obscures the entrance to this path; a cedar partly blocks the other end. The two trees become defining authorities of this space. I couldn't get a good shot of the bayberry, but you see the cedar standing to the right of the opening at the path's far end.

Here it is a little closer:

And see that rock, surfacing in the path, like a cetacean's back? My semi-busted lawn chair--and notebook--and the pens that will spill from my pocket--orbit its gravity. You need something to tell you where you are, and this rock says, You are here. Lying low, it seems mellow and unassuming. But don't be fooled. This rock is also saying Me and my chums have been giving New England farmers a hard time since the first plow showed up here.

So: this stately path, with the bayberry tree and cedar at either end, and the rock in the middle, leading so graciously from the back of the house toward the water (into which the dock rotted years ago) was cut by my friend's father. But my friend's mother carved paths of her own through the woods to the side of the house, when she was a child--before she ever met the man she would marry--

and these other, older paths have an entirely different character.

Though small, the woods on the side of the house seem like a borderless wild. Crows in spindly pines lend a note of menace. The paths that meander here form a loose triangle--a triangle that spawns other paths at its corners, prompting me to imagine a forest of decorous, localized infinities.

This is the kind of wood where Alice might forget her name, till startled into memory by a panicked fawn.

The crisscrossing paths can take you through the woods--if that's what you want--but they seem more designed to take you into them. Following the lines of this triangle through the trees, branching off toward the water or the lawn, and then swinging back in toward the center, I feel like a child myself. The paths teach me to wander. The woman who made them is old now--but the brisk intelligence of her childhood lingers here.

If you could be here long enough, and be still enough, and be in the right frame of mind, you might be permitted to see--

--who knows? I don't stay to find out--I like remember the imaginative possibilities of childhood--not be subsumed by them. As a child I stepped intrepidly into fairy rings--those mushroom circles that are supposed to be doorways into other places--hoping to be swept into magical realms. But as an adult I remember how many fairy legends involve placating fairies, or warding them off entirely.

My feeling toward the other realm, if there is one, may be best summed up by Robert Frost. Good fences make good neighbors.

(The farther you are from the pagan world, the easier it is to romanticize it.)

At the end of the main path--the one will take you through, instead of into, if you choose it-- three stones stand. The stones define the end of the path, becoming an ellipsis that separates the shady woods from the bright, dusty road. The stones have so much personality--I took more photos of them than I normally take of my relatives.

They remind me of three spinster aunties--spinsters in the ancient sense of that word--who might nudge you forward-- encourage you along--and then quietly remind you when you had gone too far.

a purloined letter

2011-08-10T09:06:00.010-04:00

When I was 12 or so my mother and I were invited to visit my grandmother's cousin and his wife at their beachfront house in Ocean City, NJ. He had been successful in business, and was heir to the sandy good looks of the most genetically fortunate strain of my family, as well as our Civil War ancestor's venerable and imposing name.

(A venerable and imposing name did not save our Civil War ancestor from dying young, sick, and broke).

I was prepared to be impressed with my third cousin and his wife. She had been a bookseller and had beautiful volumes in the house, which she showed me (Oscar Wilde!). She also complained to my mother that it was "hard to find good help these days," which struck me as cliche even then, and an odd complaint to share with a single working mother who could afford a day trip to the shore, but not an overnight stay, and not, surely, beachfront property or "help..."

I pocketed the monogrammed napkin that had my third cousin's initial on it, amazed that such a thing could exist. Was I really in this beautiful place? Was I really related to these beautiful people?

I remember a night walk on the beach; the waves making their ruckus, the stars close, and insistent.

Toward the end of our evening we gathered in the sunken living room to watch a memorial video from our cousins' world cruise. "Sayanora, Singapore-a," was the refrain of the treacly choir at the finale of the video. The endlessly repeated melody burned itself into my memory, and I can sing it still.

I think we had a nice evening.

On the way home in the car, my mother sang "Sayanora, we sing-a poor-a."

I laughed--but also marveled at my monogrammed napkin, with its single, architecturally imposing capitol letter.

tennessee summer 2011

2011-07-21T09:22:00.017-04:00

We felt after Christmas that we hadn't spent enough time with our niece, so we scheduled some niece time for the summer. She's seven, and a master at being goofy, finding fun things to do, and making stuff up. The dessert you see above--vanilla frozen yogurt, white chocolate chips, and marshmallows--is her invention: It's called a Ghost. I love ghosts and I love new foods so I was excited to try one. It was OK.

We also got to see my in-laws; it's rare to like both; I'm lucky. Topics I share with my mother-in-law include travel, plants, and Hemingway. Topics I share with my father-in-law are nutrition, local history, and thrift. Both are lively and interesting.

What would I have done if they had been dull?

I would have been very patient and nice. My father-in-law took us, the niece, and my brother-in-law to see this waterfall. The waterfall has the honor of being my camerado's screensaver, so when I saw it, I thought, Hello screensaver.

The waterfall was adjacent to a campsite with a conference center. My father-in-law treated us to lunch in the cafeteria, where I beheld a natural wonder that impressed me just as much as the waterfall.

Anything in the south that is unfamiliar to me I assume is typical of the south, so these incredibly high meringue peaks on the banana pudding made me think, Incredibly high meringue peaks on banana pudding is a storied Southern tradition. But when my camerado and his brother marveled at the high peaks, I appreciated what a rare thing it was to see them.

They reminded me of the Nome King in the Oz books.

The day was rainy and because the most talkative person in the car (my father-in-law, lively, see above) was busy driving, this was a quiet, contemplative outing for all of us. The large, plush, smooth-riding car hushed sound. As we drove around the campground, my camerado and his brother murmured about the places they had played, and I kept tripping down time corridors of my own.

The cafeteria took me right back to the Boy Scout camps and Christian retreat centers of my childhood.

On the way back it fell to me to entertain the niece, who wanted pictures of royals. I had to draw the Queen, the Diana, the recent Kate, and William. Drawing them all inside a satisfied dragon seemed a good solution, but the niece was inexorable. So I discovered a new talent, and you may find me at the Jersey shore drawing royals in pastel on the boardwalk. In return, I made the niece learn the name of the flower in Kate's bouquet that has the same name as the Prince: Sweet William. I had seen it in my brother-in-law's garden.

We also took the niece to a legendary toy store that I thought was overrated (I like the one in Franklin, TN), and the Nashville Zoo, which I thought was good, and to Kung Fu Panda II with its sissy villain.

We aren't home enough to have a dog of our own, so it was great to stay with some dogs.

Murphy's one desire is to fetch a tennis ball. I aspire to this kind of single-minded purpose.

I shouldn't praise my own photo, but I like this picture: could John Singer Sargent have depicted one of his privileged thoroughbreds with greater poise or sophistication? Last night we saw The Cherry Orchard simulcast from London--this dog, Lola reminds me of Madame Renevsky, a creature of affection, living only in the moment.

Mr. Meow, a neighbor of my mother-in-law. He watches the house when she's away.

One night we walked around Nashville when this crazy sunset unfurled. The light was strange, golden and heavy, like I imagine light in Italy might be. We walked on the campus of a university with gazebos, and statues to decipher. Prospective first-years roamed around with and without their parents--entering that protracted American twilight between childhood and independence.
We've been much more exotic places than Nashville this summer (New England!), but I really enjoyed this trip. Not everyone gets to step sideways into a new family in adulthood; the one I've found myself in is friendly, smart, and fun. We said goodbye after breakfast at the Pancake Pantry, and my father-in-law put his arm around me and said, "You're the third son I didn't have." He'd asked my thoughts on dinosaur extinction over the meal (asteroid seems a safe bet), and for this I liked him even more. A family's borders are never stable; they take on new territories, and relinquish others. It's mysterious, like plate tectonics; the ground moves beneath you, you go with it.

alapocas: hike 12 of 2011: pawpaw trees and brandywine blue gneiss

2011-07-07T12:54:00.007-04:00

My camerado chose this hike from the book of hikes that we are beginning to realize we will not finish this year, though that had been our goal. Alapocas Run State park is a lovely wild place in Wilmington Delaware, situated by a freeway, similar to Tinicum Marsh in Philly.

The parkland was set aside by William Poole Bancroft for the people of Delaware. W.P.B was the son of Joseph Bancroft, who seems to have made the family money, and the brother of Samuel Bancroft, whose collection of PreRaphealite art is the largest in the United States. I've never been able to keep the Bancrofts or the DuPonts straight, but I feel I owe it to the philanthropists of Delaware to try.

We liked this hike. It began as a quiet, pleasant walk through riparian woods.

(These fungi resemble the bonnet-wearing oysters in Disney's Alice in Wonderland--my first, instantly addicting taste of the surreal.)

The trail led us up a rise into a pawpaw forest. I had never seen so many, and had the sense of being somewhere very exotic and new. Look how the leaves fan out at the ends of the pawpaw branches:

Very graceful. The pawpaw is the largest fruit native to North America--I envision a day when everyone has a pawpaw tree in the yard, having finally realized how thrifty and ecologically shrewd it is to grow low-maintenance foodstuffs at home. This may be unrealistic: I know only two people who have tried pawpaw, and neither liked it.

But I need to taste it myself. Pawpaw is the only species of its genus found outside the tropics; our hiking book said breadfruit was a relative, but I think the author confused pawpaw with papaya. Wrong again, book! Like Jango Fett, pawpaws reproduce by cloning (which I may try, so be warned), and is the host plant for the zebra swallowtail butterfly (which we did not see).

The trail led to the base of these cliffs. They are blue gneiss, which I had pictured as lush cobalt and marbled, but blue gneiss, it seems, is battleship gray unless freshly broken. Still, this view was impressive, and I was able to imagine these cliffs veiled by a waterfall, through which a glistening tarzan might step.

We got lost on the way back, and emerged from the park, hot and weary, in a suburb, where, we surmised, many Native Americans must reside--because the sign for the development is crowned with a beautiful silhouette of an Indian shooting an arrow.

Or, at least, it seems likely that Indians are given a nice discount on homes here.

We'd been invited to Peter's house for dinner (Peter and his wife gave my camerado the hiking book that started this whole thing), and were supposed to bring beer--but found none in Delaware and were too tired to stop in Philly. We showed up at Peter's door and explained--he said, Well actually, I am very disappointed.

So we borrowed Peter's dog and walked to the liquor store to keep our end of the bargain, which, after all, is only fair.

Dinner was outstanding, as it always is at Peter's house.

hike 11 of 2011, how we survived the Pine Barrens Batona Trail

2011-06-10T12:38:00.011-04:00

I've loved the Pine Barrens since I was a kid. I have happy memories of coming to the Pinelands to pick blueberries, visit ruins, look for slag iron, and swim and canoe in the cedar water, which we would invariably compare to root beer--its brown color is from iron in the soil and cedar tannins.

The soil is so sandy only certain plants thrive here, and the trees tend to be shrimpy, like pitch pines, or the blackjack oak above. The shrub layer is an ocean of blueberries. Their snowdrop flowers bloomed for us when we visited:

The hike our book recommended began at the Carranza memorial, paid for by Mexican schoolchildren to commemorate a dashing young Mexican aviator who crashed in the pines coming home from a goodwill mission in 1928. You know I love elegies and am ever eager to grieve, so the memorial appealed to me. There is still a ceremony here every year with the local American Legion post and the New York and Philadelphia Mexican consulates.

The memorial was hard to find! We backtracked and asked directions in a small town we passed through. Our hiking book once again proved its ineptitude by averring that the memorial would be hidden from the road by trees: It was clearly visible, confirming our contempt for the book. Other discrepancies arose on this hike; we wondered again if the authors of hiking books actually hike their own hikes...

The Pine Barrens is the most exotic biome we've visited in our year of hiking, and our most wretched hike. Although I have a fascination for Pinelands history, culture, and ecology, this hike was overpoweringly monotonous. South Jersey is coastal plain, so the landscape was flat as an ironing board, and because the Barrens' peculiar soil limits the diversity of species that grow here, we saw the same flora over and over again. By canoe, the barrens are thrillingly varied and picturesque, but hiking them as we did was like being forced to listen to your favorite song for four hours straight.

Beautiful, right? But the unrelieved monotony of the terrain, combined with absolute windless stillness and thick humidity--and an abundance of ticks (we pulled four off us on the trail and five more at home) made Batona the only actually hellish hike we've done this year. I found myself meditating vividly on, almost inhabiting the Borges essay about literary hells--and understanding for the first time how our pioneer ancestors could have regarded all wilderness as desolate wastes fit only for devils--and lunatics.

(This may be the place to confess that my horror of Lyme disease may be disproportionate to the actual risk... but I'm working on it.)

We would have turned back, but the book--the perfidious book--promised a spectacular view from a fire tower if we made it to the turn-around. Would anyone, I wondered, put up a memorial to me on the trail if I died of boredom on it? And if they did, could it be a dramatic, morose, and gothicky ruin like in this Caspar David Freidrich painting:

Start saving your pennies!

The Batona Trail is maintained by the Batona Club--Batona being an acronym for Back To Nature. Because they thought up an appealing acronym for themselves, and because the Batona Trail is the most clearly and intelligently blazed trail we've hiked this year, I felt very affectionate toward the Batona Club as we hiked, despite my other miseries. I imagined Batona Club members marching to our rescue with humongous foaming mugs of locally brewed root beer, robustly singing Batona hiking songs, all bearded, of course, and in lederhosen.

Then, because the blazes on the trail are hot pink, the lederhosen became hot pink.

This reverie preserved my sanity as we neared our destination. There was a slight breeze, blueberry bushes gave way to ferns, and the trail rose up a slope. I saw a blueberry bee--a favorite--and then, the fire tower:

The fire tower was the only place we saw invasive species on this hike: Asian white mulberries, empress tree, tree of hell, and multiflora rose--because, I'm guessing, these species thrive along edges and in disturbed areas, and the seeds probably hitchhiked in with the wise sages who scrawled poetry and philosophy, zen koans, and words of existential encouragement in marker all over the fire tower.

So, we saw the view.

Now you've seen it too, and will never have to do this hike. I stood on the fire tower, sticky, tired, uncomfortable, and vaguely angry, and noticed a trio of groundhogs browsing the ferns below. From our height, it was difficult to tell their size, so I had to eliminate some other mammal possibilities before settling on groundhogs. Because muskrats had been a contender, my camerado and I discussed possible meanings of the song Muskrat Love by Captain and Tenneile, ultimately deciding that the song had no esoteric secrets. We watched the groundhogs from the silence of the tower and I realized that the trio of groundhogs had wholly dispelled my ill-humor.

Thanks to the groundhogs, who, we've learned, have the ability to impart a Yoda-like calm to troubled wayfarers, I faced the walk back with a composed mind. My camerado, however, had reached the end of his patience and now found himself maddened by the repetitive flatness of the hike and the soggy air, becoming increasingly frustrated as we approached our car. This is the only hike in the book we agreed to never hike again.

That said--for the record--the fauna did not let us down. We saw: a fence lizard (with gray markings exactly the color of lichen), black swallowtail butterflies, a green sweat bee--staggeringly vibrant, and the astonishing caterpillar hunter beetle in the photo above. (Caterpillar hunter is a deliberately introduced exotic, and one that, like the honeybee, no one seems to resent). Our passing flushed a black bird with orange markings from the shrub--a Baltimore Oriole...? We also saw more adorable blueberry bees and the homes of ground-nesting bees. The Pine Barrens, specifically Batsto Village, is the earliest day trip I can remember, and for this and a thousand other reasons our infernal hike will not color my feelings about the Pinelands--but we'll likely never visit again in summer unless in a canoe, preferably with a bearded, lederhosen-clad gondolier, and trios of singing muskrats along the banks.

tenth hike of 2011: pennypack ecological restoration trust, best hike yet (?), plus, Swedenborgians!

2011-06-02T10:14:00.004-04:00

Possibly my favorite of the new plants I've learned this year: the may apple, whose homespun-sounding name does not betray its strange and potent nature--one of its aliases is American mandrake, which suits it better. Each may apple makes one paired set of fruits that taste, I think, a little like pomegranate seeds, and should not be eaten in large quantities; the may apple contains podophyllotoxin in all its parts, a poison which can overcome cancer and venereal disease; and--one of my native plant enthusiast friends told me--a grove of may apples is actually one organism, each stem emanating from an ancient root that can live for centuries. The may apple is the only plant of its genus in the Americas; its closest cousins live in China, Tibet, and the mysterious, Yeti-haunted Himalayas.

(To me they look like symbols of the true, occult sun that alchemists believed burned with philosophical fire.)

Since the first of the year we've been making our way through a mediocre hiking book, 50 Greatest Hikes of the Delaware Valley (I change the name every time I reference it, so I can malign it freely), and I think we agreed that the Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust is our favorite so far--though we've been so many great places this year, it's tough to pick one!

The Pennypack creek is an historic mill creek that begins in Montgomery County PA and ends 22 miles downstream in Northeast Philly. We saw downstream Pennypack with our friend the Duchess in April, and last week, at the end of a spell of mellow, cool, rainy, English weather, did upstream Pennypack--

My hiking companion and camerado loves streams, so this was a great hike for him. I was particularly excited to see the managed meadows of the Pennypack Trust; land in the Delaware Valley yearns to be oak hickory forest, so meadows are rare here:

I'm fascinated by manipulated landscapes that exist in cooperation with nature. In the creation of a natural, but anthropogenic place, a meadow maker performs a task that would otherwise be the work of fire--he becomes fire's proxy. Meadow makers actively sculpt the land, passively farm it, and offer hospitality to meadow birds and insects.

There was also a perfect pond, where we heard green frogs calling:

and lush riparian woods, where we saw bladdernut:

and a rustic Swedenborgian kiosk:

It's good to know there are Swedenborgians around; Swedenborg influenced some of my favorite minds: Yeats, Borges, Jung, and Blake--there's a Rushmore for you--and my mother, who was always just heterodox enough to make the other evangelicals nervous.

I wish she could have seen this idyllic Swedenborgian garden, she would have thought it was cool. We did!

After our hike, we went to Earth Bread Brewery in Mount Airy to celebrate our tenth hike, because we went there after hike #1, in the bleak midwinter.

a moment to err, an eternity to regret

2011-05-20T12:49:00.004-04:00

All true, and only a reprobate could dispute it. But who will warn these earnest souls that hell's deepest chasms are lined with poor spellers who failed to proofread?

(from Mardi Gras)

hike 9.5: the high line nyc, emmylou harris, dylan, and desire

2011-05-12T12:33:00.001-04:00

We went to New York to hike the High Line and hear Emmylou Harris. This hike doesn't count toward our year of hikes as it isn't from The Book of 50 Local Hikes We Are Sworn to Complete Before 2012. So I'm calling it, hike 9.5.

My camerado read an article about the High Line Park last fall and has wanted to hike it ever since. The High Line was an abandoned elevated train spur in Chelsea. Some parts of it were demolished as trucks became the main means of transporting goods; what was left was colonized by drought-hardy grasses and trees (I'd love to look at a species survey). Some inspired locals fought to save the remaining sections and make them into a public park. It's a great story--a couple of people with an idea saved a wild (feral?) place and made it into something that's used by everyone--locals, tourists--we saw school kids eating their lunches in one area when we visited, and even a fashion photo shoot:

The High Line was originally designed to get hazardous trains off streets, and threaded through the center of blocks so it wouldn't block light to the streets. I loved the way its route took us in and out of buildings, so we could feel light and temperature change as we walked. There are art installations in the tunnels, some of which could only be appreciated if you read the explanatory labels. In theory, I'm not sure how I feel about that, but, we did like the art.

We got the sense that the High Line was good for the neighborhood, because we could look over the side of the park and see outdoor cafes sprouting in its shadow. Our hike ended in an enchanted grove of birches.

Birches are a theme of this post, as a courtyard of birches in moody light was the backdrop for the live interview we saw at the New York Times building with Emmylou Harris (our bus was late; we were relieved to get good seats!). I've seen EH more than any other artist: with my camerado at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, by myself at the Tower (with Elvis Costello), with my Dad at the Keswick (Concert for a Landmine Free World), and at the Keswick again with both of my folks (the only concert I saw with them both). An Emmylou Harris album was the last my mother listened to--she enjoyed it with astonishing vigor; it was great to see someone so ill and facing such dire prospects still able to enjoy good music so fully.

Emmylou Harris, as always, looked amazing--I like her retro-country goth aesthetic. The interviewer kept bringing up the supposed hymnlike quality of her music, a comparison she didn't quite know what to do with--though she was polite and a pro. She talked a lot about her dog rescue, and about various collaborators, some I hadn't heard of. The most interesting topic for me was EH's discussion of making the Desire album with Dylan--my favorite Dylan album. I love all the exotic adventuring of Desire --it's very colorful and Byronic--and I love the spontaneous quality of EH's singing. She reverses a lyric in One More Cup of Coffee, and there are times when she and Dylan come in at different times; it's very fresh and immediate. I wondered if Dylan recorded a rehearsal and used it so the album would not sound perfected and sterile--but the effect may be less contrived than I imagined. EH described how the music was thrust at her when she entered the studio, she was directed to a stool, and was expected to start singing immediately. Dylan elbowed her when it was time for her to come in! which explains the unrehearsed quality!
I always imagined Dylan deliberately chose EH for the way her voice can sound ethereal one moment and harsh the next, as Desire is both an earthy and otherworldly album. But according to EH, it was Dylan's producer who selected her, based on Dylan's asking him to "get me a girl singer."
That a brilliant album came from such a haphazard process EH attributed to Dylan's genius, which is as good an explanation as any.

hike 9: valley forge schuylkill river trail

2011-05-04T23:50:00.005-04:00

For our ninth hike we went back to Valley Forge, and hiked the river trail through a magical floodplain forest. We took the friends who gave us The Book of 50 Greater-Philly Hikes, which we are sworn to complete before 2012 (we are behind by several hikes, so it's looking unlikely). Our hope is to get all of our friends to join us for at least one hike this year.

Our friends who gave us The Book are originally mid-westerners, so they make a lot of eye-contact and are really polite. I brought them some rotten yams for their compost once and they complimented me on what nice compost it would make. You see them above with my camerado, whom I met at the same time that they met each other.

Bluebells were the star of this hike: the Old World doesn't have a monopoly on bluebell woods, we have our own: Mertensia virginica. (European bluebells are darker and droopier, looking haunted and world-weary; ours are brighter and stick straight out like trumpets). The abundant bluebells you see in these pictures were a highlight of this hike, along with the ancient maples that grew on either side of the trail: I have never seen such immense, primordial maples.

That one has a nice mature Toxicodendron radicans growing up it. As lovely as this path was in the spring, it must be magical in snow.

Our friend Peter believes in otherworldly beings and we have an ongoing discussion in which he tries to overcome my doubt. The topic arose again because these woods had a real fairy-tale vibe to them.

Our debate about the likelihood of seeing faeries on this hike was interrupted by some rustling and incredibly high-pitched squeaking, which I alone of our party was able to hear. I think we had come upon the nests of some deer mice--we saw two race for cover but they moved so fast it was tough to say for sure what they were. I listened on line here and verified that the sound I heard was deer mouse-ish. I'm guessing I heard distress calls of their young, if that's possible. If some people can hear at more rarefied frequencies then maybe some perceive spiritual or otherworldly phenomena at more rarefied frequencies.

(My doubt is practical; I don't question the existence of a spirit world, just whether anything can be definitively known about it, or gained from investigating it. Yeats's investigations led him only into a morass of images, and Madame Blavatsky, the most celebrated medium of her century, said it was pointless to consult the spirits, because "the spirits lie.")

Immediately after our encounter with the deer mice (from which we escaped without hantavirus or lyme), we came upon this spiritually-minded character:

Jack-in-the-pulpit. I have a memory of seeing these and being fascinated by them as a child, but I think that was only in a book, so this may be the first I've seen them for real, that I remember. I was very excited. Beyond that, I've lost my notes for this hike, so can only report that Peter identified some warblers, and I saw more ephemerals struggling through mats of invasive lesser celandine, and also learned to identify bladdernut.

And, I'd like to figure out who made this:

8th Philly hike of 2011, Pennypack; snakes, flowers, kingfishers, understory; Equus

2011-04-14T15:43:00.015-04:00

A screaming woman alerted us to the presence of this snake. We were at Pennypack Park with a friend I like to call The Duchess. The screaming woman stood on a slope between two paths, holding a small child by the hand. We stood on the upper path while a man dragged a teenage girl toward the lower path. At first I thought the teenager was making all the noise; it didn't sound like it was coming from an adult.

When I realized a snake was involved, I became concerned. Snakes get hurt in scenarios like this.

The Duchess and I walked down the slope to the woman. She complained that there were millions of snakes pouring from a hole on the slope. How could she get to her family on the lower path? I told her to return to the upper path, and follow it to where it met the lower path, and all could be safely reunited. (The juncture was visible from where we stood). The man on the lower path continued to grip the teenage girl by the wrist, as if afraid she might lunge for the snakes like some death-starved Cleopatra.

The woman turned and walked up the slope with the child. The Duchess and I looked for the snakes. I didn't know the Duchess would be as excited to see snakes as I am; like everything in nature, friendship is always becoming. Two garter snakes rippled over the leaf litter in opposite directions like water drops on a car window. I like garter snakes; they fool fish by mimicking the movement of grass, and some males seduce other males by producing female pheromones--to steal warmth, to distract rivals from mating opportunities, and, maybe just for kicks.

(At this time of year snakes wake from their winter slumbers in hibernacula on south-facing slopes, so avoid these if you are phobic.)

This was perhaps our richest hike yet for native species. A fellow student in a class I am taking is coaching me on spring ephemerals, plants that bloom before the canopy leafs out. Thanks to her, I saw loads, including the trout lilies you see above, and

blood root,

may apples,

spring beauty,

and toothwort. I had read that the deer are so controlled in Pennypack that there is actually an understory in parts of the park. Still, I was astonished when we walked into a grove of what I think was witch hazel or maybe green ash--clouds of yellow buds in every direction. Beautiful. We looked for barn swallows around a bridge where The Book (of fifty Philly-area hikes we are sworn to complete before the year is out) predicted we might see them; we didn't, but the Duchess spotted their nests. She explained her love of beech--the bark reminds her of elephant skin. My camerado, a creek fan, was pleased by the creek. We heard the bold rapping of woodpeckers. Best of all (for me), my obsession with the color blue was stimulated by the sight of two kingfishers. One flew up the stream and perched, turning its unmistakable profile toward us--a thrill--this is only the second time I've seen this species in the wild.

(The first time was with my dad, and that doesn't totally count--creatures flock to him as to St. Francis or Snow White).

How tempted I was to take this blue rock! I'm trying to i.d. it, but can only formulate lame theories. Blueschist is my working hypothesis, but this rock seems harder, like a quartzite.

Pennypack is in the far northeast section of the city, but according to The Book of Philly Hikes and my on-line reading, it is teeming with wildlife. I hope to go back at dusk and look for owls (great horned and screech), grey foxes, and weasels. We also did not have time for me to investigate many logs for salamander eggs, because we had to get the Duchess back to her castle, and we wanted to see the EgoPo/Philadelphia Artist's Collective reading of Equus.

I thought I would write at length here about Equus, but have only sour things to say about this play, which raises intriguing questions and finds answers that are simplistic to the point of wrong. Alan's parents are entirely to blame for his problems and tweaking Alan's relationship to his personal religion so he can get along in the world would be completely terrible. I had a hard time believing Alan and his shrink were as brilliant as other characters said they were when Alan's religion seems a bit slapdash and Dr. Dysart is so easily thrown by Alan's probing him about his sex life. I read some reviews of the recent revival and original production of Equus; one reviewer praised Peter Shaffer for returning ritual to theater. I thought that was a good point: the reading I saw had Shaffer's words and solid acting, but I could not have felt the power of Shaffer's bold pagan imagery without seeing a full production. Maybe I would have been as seduced as the audience of the 1970s version.

This got me thinking that the ideal production of Equus would be a ballet, with red streamers for horse blood, no dialog, and a nice homoerotic pas de deux between Alan and Dysart (Equus is like the movie of Fight Club, a completely gay artifact that nowhere states its gayness). The music could be by the Doors, or Neil Young, or, I don't know, Stravinsky.

At any rate, we continue to be fans of EgoPo and Philly Artist's Collective, and are excited about the former's Golem and Dybbuk, and the latter's Marivaux in 2012.

valley forge, 7th hike of 2011; monuments to monuments; danny boyle's frankenstein

2011-04-06T14:14:00.012-04:00

Back on track with the hiking, which will please my dad. WHAT'S GOING ON SON? he asked me recently. ARE YOU GUYS SLACKING OFF? (We swore that before the year was out we would complete all fifty hikes in a Philly-area hiking book my camerado got for his birthday--and we're a few hikes behind). Our highlights of Valley Forge were finding a turkey feather and hearing spring peepers, which to me sound just like the spacey atmospheric sound effects in original series Star Trek. We also enjoyed seeing a small monument the masons put up to commemorate their restoration of the National Memorial Arch. We hope a smaller monument will one day be erected to commemorate the restoration of the small monument that commemorates the restoration of the National Memorial Arch, till a trail of ever-tinier monuments spirals over the rolling hills of Valley Forge like dominos. We found some cool ruins and wondered if they were an open-air theater built for the bicentennial and then left to rot:

See the deer on the right? The whole tableau suggested a post-apocalyptic scene in which we were strapping survivalists striding through the remnants of civilization looking for dinner, bows on our backs. My natural science goal for this hike was to learn to identify chestnut oak just by the bark--a modest goal, but I didn't have time to prepare more ambitious ones. I had hustled to Bryn Mawr Film Institute earlier in the day to see the simulcast of the National Theater's Frankenstein directed by Danny Boyle. As the creature, Benedict Cumberbach was preternaturally powerful, but also weightless as a dancer or ghost--a William Blake or Henry Fuseli drawing come to life. Here's Fuseli's Hamlet pere et fils:

Cumberbach really did move and gesture with the strange, hypertrophic grace of a figure from the lunatic/classicist art of the time Frankenstein was written--and his performance was a miracle of power, lyricism, crudity, hope, and pain. The flaw in this Frankenstein was in the writing: the creature is so sensitive and enlightened, the murders seem out of character. Each time the plot starts ramping itself toward tragedy I can see more reasonable, plausible paths fork away from it, and wonder why these characters don't talk their problems out. If I was baffled at times by the creature's choices, I found nearly every choice Victor makes in the play unbelievable. It all made me want to reread the book--I was a little younger than its author last time I opened it.

UPDATE: my camerado informs me that we will have to rehike this week's hike, as we went nowhere near the parts of Valley Forge the book we are working from recommended. It's a good idea, because I'd like to read up on the history of Valley Forge--but--we are a good four hikes behind schedule aready... Will our year end as it began, with us scrambling around in the snow to complete our mission?

be your own gay

2011-03-30T22:36:00.014-04:00

If you regard one group as more sexually potent and more musical than you, and another as smarter and destined for greater success than you, and another as more innately fabulous than you, you have eviscerated yourself, and decked others with your amputated organs.

Stereotyping limits the stereotypist, much as idolatry limits the idolater.

Remember our Lord. Didn't Jesus warn against looking to others to be our guides, priests, and experts? Call no man father, he said, and The kingdom of heaven lies within you (a statement I still find one of the more radical and intriguing he made).

Some of you have told me that when you need to make something pretty, or fun, or lively, you pay my people homage by saying you need to "gay it up." I appreciate this, but you shouldn't undercut your own potential by paying unmerited homage to me. I couldn't gay up my own house--my partner's mom is gaying it for us.

(She's an interior designer).

Stereotyping the gays as authorities on making things pretty and throwing parties and being fabulous robs you, straight person, of the ability to make things pretty and throw parties and be fabulous. You have the power to transform your life into a carnation covered rainbow Pride float with disco-syncing drag queens and vogueing speedo boys.

That's why I want you to print these words and carry them in your wallet between your Hooters MasterCard and Dane Cook concert ticket stub.
Straight person, this post is your fabulousity permission slip.
Be your own gay. The ruby slippers are on your feet.
The kingdom of fabulousity lies within you.
.
.
.

hearing owls, seeing a cottonmouth, another New Orleans milestone

2011-03-23T13:35:00.008-04:00

My dad suggested we should look for barred owls on the bayou; I love owls and wetlands, so I went; my brother drove. My brother has lived in New Orleans long enough to drive like a local, which is to say, like an absinthe-fueled Verlaine might drive while alternately screaming at and reconciling with Rimbaud.

Bare trees at the gates of the park sported round mistletoe `fros and black vultures--I'm accustomed to turkey vultures so these guys look wonderfully exotic and wrong to me. We heard barred owls hooting their Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all? call and a single long high note that my dad, after decades of concerts, could not hear. (I use earplugs at concerts, or stuff chewing gum in my ears--which will probably cause other, weirder problems later in life).

We didn't see the owls, but I was satisfied to hear them in the wild. We saw a great egret in flight, a red shouldered hawk, two white ibis, three immature bald eagles, a bat, a night heron (though I'm not sure I caught it)... and... are you ready? a cottonmouth! (Agkistrodon piscivorus) which I spotted! My dad is so brilliant at spotting wildlife I often wonder what cool things I'm missing when he's not with me on a hike. I was honored when he said You have a good eye son.

That was the second significant milestone of the New Orleans trip. (The first was liking a band at the same time as my brother, who usually sheds bands before I've heard of them).

The cottonmouth was at most twenty inches, with an arrow-shaped head and black scales. It rustled through dead leaves before launching itself into the water. To swim, it threw the curves of its body from side to side with the purposeful abandon of a hootchie coochie dancer, while holding its head and neck above water as primly as any reformed libertine.

Above, a young cypress growing straight out of the swamp. The soft, feathery foliage of the cypress is a wonder. My brother said local idiots cut off the cypress knees to make art, killing the trees.

Dark fell just as we reached the end of the trail and had to turn around. The black water reflected an upside down crescent moon, spilling all its luck into the swamp. The owls hooted, and toads rattled like maracas. I could barely see my brother ahead and my father behind me. We were halfway to the car when fireflies came out--higher, brighter, yellower, and flashing faster than the ones I'm used to in the north. A spectacular finale.

mardi gras 2011: some costumes; a Daft Punk milestone; my anima, Christina Rossetti

2011-03-17T15:44:00.006-04:00

Where was I last week? and why didn't I update my blog? I went to New Orleans to meet up with my dad, to see my brother and sister-in-law, her son, and my niece--and to savor Ash Wednesday.

Evidently there's some kind of perfunctory pre-repentance revelry that occurs in the weeks leading up to Ash Wednesday, called Mardi Gras. The locals pronounce it mmmmoddi grah, lingering on the m, omitting that first r altogether, and barely uttering the last syllable, giving the word a doppler effect, so that it buzzes by your head like a bee. I love it.

On Monday I saw the Orpheus parade and the grotesque commerce of beads and body parts on Bourbon Street; on Tuesday I saw the Zulu parade in the morning and walked around looking at costumes all evening. These photos are from Tuesday, "Mardi Gras Day."

My brother has lived in New Orleans a decade and has seen it all, so he was a good sport to walk me around. We walked miles around the city: I have never seen a party this huge. Unlike Philadelphia's Mummer's parade, in which one parade has many crews, in New Orleans each crew has its own parade, making it a massive, multi-day event that no one person can witness in its entirety.

I've read books and seen movies about New Orleans but came away from this trip (my second) disappointed in all of them. None do the city justice.

These ladies were the Supremes; my brother knew one of them. As I followed my brother through the city, an older man in a sheer leotard, partied-out and stiff, hobbled two blocks ahead of us. I assumed he was heading home. We never outdistanced him and never saw his front, and so can't even verify that he had a front. We saw much more of his back than we would have wished to see, as he became our unwitting Virgil.

My brother and I parted after we saw the Daft Punk guy above. He went home and I went to meet a friend. Before we parted I asked him if he liked Daft Punk and he said yes. This was one of three significant milestones of this trip for me. My brother has always been more politically aware, more committed to animal rights, and cooler than I am. I discover a band as he's discarding it. I suspect he thinks I'm a bit of a square, which I am. If you could see my anima, she looks like Max Beerbohm's caricature of Christina Rossetti:

That my brother and I might like the same band at the same time made me feel very cool.

our sixth hike 2011: Tinicum, thorns, muskrats, I-95, and hattifatteners

2011-03-03T23:47:00.008-05:00

So I said we'd be scouting for paw-paws and Brandywine blue gneiss this week, but instead of heading west into Wyeth country, we went south into Tinicum Marsh. We had planned to see the friends who gave us THE BOOK (of fifty Philly-area hikes we are sworn to complete before 2012), and when their plans changed, so did ours. They opted for a day of home improvement over Longwood Gardens, so we met them in West Philly, and stayed closer to home ourselves.

Tinicum has a giant circular trail that would be very hard to get lost on, so I brought my compass to practice using it. It's also home to the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, which despite being a close neighbor to I-95--

--is a good place to see wildlife. Wild turkeys browsed behind the education center, a great blue heron stepped through the marsh, I think I saw an eagle, and we were excited to see muskrat lodges:

which the initiated may use to foretell the length and severity of a winter. Muskrats, otters, minks, bats, bobcats--the now-rarer mammals of this area seem as exotic and marvelous as unicorns to me--a sentiment my ancestors and some living people would probably find ludicrous. But how many changes can something--say, a geographic region--undergo before it's no longer the thing it was?

(Like the old joke about the man who has Sir Walter Raleigh's ax, though it's had six new handles and five new blades since the original owner.)

We watched the great blue heron for a while as it stepped so deliberately through the grasses, holding its beak precisely level. And though deer ought to be banal, the sunlight on the ones who bounded over the path before us made them golden--electric--strange. Red-winged blackbirds chattered in a tree; we watched for the flash of red on the males when they moved, and our patience was rewarded by a pair of downy woodpeckers. The female woodpecker left the tree and began tap-tap-tapping on reeds. I think I saw a red bellied woodpecker too.

We also saw some creatures I don't think are native to this area, hattifatteners:

Right, so those are native tree plantings, but--seeing these ghostly shapes lurching toward the water took me back to my childhood reading of Tove Jannson's Tales from Moominvalley, in which the mute, staring hattifatteners migrate to a secret island to worship a barometer and commune with lightning. The force and originality of Jannson's imagery is embossed so deeply on my imagination that decades after reading her book, in another life, in a freshwater tidal marsh with a boyfriend a compass and a camera, I can be pulled into a state of wonder at the profound weirdness of hattifatteners.

(I've been reading the post-Tolkein existential fantasist Micheal Moorcock, to understand his mystique and the draw he has for many readers, and writers like Neil Gaimen and Michael Chabon--but as I photographed the blue sheaths of the native tree plantings at Tinicum I realized:

Tove Jannson is my Michael Moorcock!)

Inscrutable, herdbound, driven, and dull, hattifatteners are the Scientologists of the Moominvalley.

Tinicum is a well-used park. All sorts of people were walking with all sorts of dogs--from pit bulls to small things who look uncomfortable outside of a purse. (We heard two kids playing on a heap of dirt, and laughed when one said I'm destroying more of your territory than you're destroying of mine). The Cusano Environmental Education Center has a museum that's just the right size, with information on native species, invasives, how Indians used the marsh, and the history of the refuge. The Education Center is also a showcase of sustainable and recycled materials; I've visited over several years and it's useful to see how they've held up and what the staff thinks of them.

At the end of our hike we noticed a sign for honey locusts, a native tree we tried to find at Ridley Creek, but were baffled by our guidebook. The photo at the top of this post is new red thorns of a Tinicum honey locust.

We are excited to have learned another tree.

longwood gardens (not actually a hike)

2011-02-24T14:43:00.001-05:00

No hike this week; we hosted my mother-in-law and took her to Longwood, a stupendous public garden west of Philly: check out this map of the conservatory. The carnivorous plants would have delighted the Addams family, and we liked the silvery succulents and the bonsai. While my camerado and his mum toured the DuPont house I went to see the new treehouses--the rustic materials and setting contrasted nicely with the grace and sophistication of the designs. Many arboretums are adding treehouses. HOORAY FOR TREEHOUSES!

Longwood also added a serpentine corridor to the conservatory--with a living wall:

I had read about living walls but this is the first I'd seen in person.

The museums and gardens of the Delaware Valley were a haven and an education for me growing up. It's great to see one growing in smart ways, while respecting its heritage.

Longwood has been significant to my family: wc elebrated the second anniversary of my mom's transplant there, and, for some reason, went after my cousin's funeral--I guess because we didn't know what else to do. While my newly-abbreviated family and I were looking at the view from the Italian garden, a girl I was seeing at the time put her arm around me and whispered, I'm bored, can we leave?

The Italian garden looks a little stark this time of year, I took the picture above the first time my camerado and I went to Longwood--he was quickly surfeited with the formal gardens and wanted to see the woods and meadow--a choice I found baffling at the time, because you can see woods and meadows anywhere.

I've seen a lot of woods and meadows with him since that time and can attest that no two are alike. We'll be back in Chester County for our next hike, where we hope to see some paw-paw trees and Brandywine blue gneiss.

fifth hike 2011: Cape May NJ

2011-02-16T17:29:00.000-05:00

After some exhausting hikes in the snow, our hike this week was refreshingly easy. There was no snow in Cape May; we walked the beach, read the text in the museum about Indians, birds, and WWII, and crept around a nature preserve looking for wildlife. I had anticipated osprey but we were too early, and it was too windy for the other raptors I'd hoped for. Instead, we saw a lot of humongous Mute Swans--flying--violently beating the air when taking off--waddling to the edge of the water like arthritic old people at the beach--then launching themselves onto the water's surface with princely grace. It's hard to resent Mute Swans for being an invasive species when they look like royal emigres from a Grimm's fairy tale--but eurocentric nostalgia can't obscure the fact that Mute Swans are multiplying like tribbles, and are bad for native wildlife, and probably should be eaten.

A Great Blue Heron flew across our path; though this is not such an uncommon bird, it's thrilling to see one in flight. I grabbed my camerado and said look, he grabbed me--as if the bird might eat us--and said what is it, what is it? He had never seen one. Huge, and primordial, with its strong neck folded back on itself like one of Henry James's sentences, the Great Blue was my highlight of this hike.

Cape May Point State Park has great interpretive signs; we learned to identify shadbush and mockernut, and practiced the persimmon-identifying skills we gained at Ridley Creek. We met an older guy with serene blue eyes and a smooth-but-textured voice like Tony Bennett, who coached us on distinguishing Black Vultures from Turkey Vultures (the former have shorter tails and white on the tips of their wings). It was clear that birding is this man's bliss. I regret not taking his picture.

We walked the park's blue trail and then walked the beach. I feel slightly embarrassed I did not know Cape May had so much incredible WWII history.

After the walk on the beach my better half was so cold and wind-battered, we decided to cut the last third of the hike, which would have been the Migratory Bird Refuge. Unlike us to ditch, as we are normally such berserkers. (My parents and I hiked the Refuge once and saw a waning sun ignite the breeding plumage of a male kestrel--unforgettable).

Downtown Cape May, off-season, at dusk, reminded me of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. The light was strange and gray, people struggled against the wind, the pedestrian mall had a pre-apocalyptic feel. We ate in a pub and checked out the candy store--great almond macaroons--and walked through a deserted indoor shopping area where a solitary vender kept a lonely vigil with her wares.

Then we drove to the end of Beach Avenue and got a kick out of watching the sun set over the ocean... on the east coast... My camerado says this was one of his highlights of the hike.

We both like the shore off-peak, but plan to return to Cape May during the prime birding season to see the raptors and butterflies with the friends who gave us the book that sparked our year of hiking.

2011 hikes three and four: Rancocas State Park in NJ, Ridley Creek State Park in PA

2011-02-11T10:06:00.001-05:00

Our goal: to hike all fifty hikes in Best Hikes around Philadelphia by the end of 2011. Hiking in winter makes it hard to identify some of the flora described in the book, and we didn't see the gneiss at Ridley Creek because it was covered in snow. But our consolation is sights like the ice patterns above (Rancocas) and the unexpected greens that can thrive near water in winter:

That's Ridley Creek--verdure like that is a feast for the eyes this time of year. But before we get to Ridley, I'll give a truthful account of our adventure at Rancocas State Park in New Jersey--and a revelation of my blogging perfidy. Reader, will you forgive me for glossing over a significant detail of our first hike, from sheer vanity? We went to the Wissahickon to inaugurate our year of hiking, and I admitted then that we ran out of daylight, but did not recount the harrowing final leg of our truncated hike, in darkness, along the narrow shoulder of Bells Mill Road. We resolved then to note the time of sunset while planning a hike, and leave our itinerary with a friend. That night, in the stony margin of a busy road, my camerado said I should be candid about our hiking errors on this page, so that our development into competent hikers could be charted. I argued against candor then, but now I think he was right. Whether she learns from our errors or laughs at them, the reader will be served. What other purpose can a writer have?

Still, the reader's credulity will be strained to learn that we made the same mistake two hikes later at Rancocas... due to a series of delays--leading to another hurried and uncertain end to our hike there--

.

There's less margin for error hiking in winter--snow slows you, and it's harder to see where trails cross or fork. The section of Rancocas that has the bird sanctuary is fairly well-blazed, but the section with the Renape Indian reservation is wilder, and because the sun was setting, we cut out a section of the hike, and were unable to pick up the trail the book recommended on the way back. We decided against hiking back along the road, because, again, there was no shoulder. Instead, we retraced our steps; though this was a less risky option than guessing at the trail the book recommended, it was tricky nonetheless. Rain had fallen on the snow and refrozen it, glazing the snow with ice, so we slid a little with every step. And, it was getting dark.

At moments like this, I ask myself, Are we crazy?

The answer is probably yes, crazy or foolish, or both. I console my pride with a favorite motto from a favorite writer, Isak Dinesin:

Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.

To sail is necessary, to live is not necessary. Something drives you to explore and discover, ready or not, smart or foolish. I lost a laptop and part of a tooth last summer in West Philly because I had to take a walk, and didn't want the dodginess of my surroundings to enforce a sedentary evening. I tend to chalk my wanderlust up to my ancestry, but this may be lazy thinking--it isn't only Europeans who insist on bashing around the world claiming and classifying things--though it's fair to say we have a marked proclivity for it. I need look only to my two most immediate ancestors to see the roots of this impulse in me. My father, a nurseryman, has been in all 50 states and is ticking off the continents; my mother, a schoolteacher, decided to go to Europe when she was dying, and, not surprisingly, collapsed, and spent ten days in a hospital before being flown back to the USA with two Swedish travel nurses, and me, exhausted, beside myself with the stress of it, and taking pictures the whole time.

Our next--fourth--hike of the year was Ridley Creek State Park and I prepared like mad, having learned at last that hiking rewards the prepared--like anything else in life. I checked the map in the book against the map on the Ridley Creek website, found two discrepancies and marked them, read up on the flora and geology the book promised, emailed our itinerary to our friend Peter, double-checked the directions to the park, and packed a second set of batteries for my flashlight. Were my preparations perfect? No--I still hadn't dug my compass and whistle out of the basement, for example, or boned up on my first aid skills, or done any number of things I sincerely intend to do... But we were better prepared, started earlier, ended when it was still light, and had a much nicer time.

Ridley Creek was well-blazed, and in many places grand--as the picture above only partly shows. (The deer have thoughtfully removed the understory and shrub layers and left the landscape pleasingly stark). None of my photos from Ridley do justice to its slopes and rises, or to the creek itself, which was dark, lively, stony, and picturesque. (I learned that creeks are my hiking companion's favorite landscape feature.)

Our guidebook directed us on and off several different trails, and was simultaneously complex and vague, and failed to warn us that the white trail has a tricky side loop that can be very ambiguous if you're not expecting it, and, in short, was so difficult and unrewarding to use that a member of our party suggested that its proper place was an incinerator. We resolved from that point on to continue hiking the parks the book recommended, but to choose our own trails and use maps provided at park offices or on line. We were on the white trail having just crossed Sandy Flash Drive where it parallels a stream--and at the bottom of page 25 of Best Hikes around Philadelphia--when we had our final argument with the book (should any future hikers of Ridley Creek wish to pause and remember our frustration at that point in their hike).

After that, we decided to follow the white trail the rest of the way, and cut over to the blue trail only at the end. Our route was beautiful at every turn, and provided one dramatic view from a high elevation late in the hike, and some trollish rock forms. We were able to identify the persimmon trees the book promised by means of their dark, grid-patterned bark, but couldn't find the honey locusts--a cool native tree with thorns so severe they can be used as nails.

I told my dad of our frustration with the book and he said "Yeah, guidebooks are always wrong," and told of traveling fifty miles from New Orleans to a park a book promised would be there, when it was actually an additional sixty miles down the road. So I felt better. He's threatening to give us a copy of Best Hikes around Central Pa. so we "have something to do next year."

Next hike: Cape May!

Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.

the rest of the best theater 2010

2011-01-27T12:16:00.000-05:00

I promised here I would finish my post on the best (mostly Philly) theater we saw in `10, and I'm a man of my word. This covers mainly queer-themed theater; I didn't plan to segregate, it just turned out that way--making this a kind of civil-union-y, seperate-but-nearly-equal post.

Philly's Mauckingbird Theater Company does new plays with queer themes, and queers--or excavates the essential queerness of--classic plays. Midsummer Night's Dream is a play I ordinarily avoid: Lysander, Helena, Hermia, and Demetrius are the meanest, dullest, and whiniest of Shakespeare's lovers. But Mauckingbird's production overcame this to a large extent in making the loving pairs same-sex--I was able to sympathize more with them when the marriages they were being forced into contradicted their fundamental natures. That Mauckingbird cast actual (Temple) college students as the lovers helped also, as they looked so young their callowness was more understandable. I wished I could have watched this production with a copy of the text before me, as there were many lines which, in a queer context, became funnier, or more poignant, or offered commentary on our current civil rights struggle that seemed not forced, but somehow natural and inevitable. This play was a good choice, but all of Shakespeare is game for queering; his passages of same-sex desire are scattered on the surface of the plays like garnets in our city parks, you don't have to excavate for them. (Think of the awkward tenderness of Hamlet's "too much of this" scene with Horatio, or Iago's unconsciously revealing fiction about Cassio's sleep-talking:

And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry, “O sweet creature!” and then kiss me hard,
As if he pluck'd up kisses by the roots,
That grew upon my lips; then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sigh'd and kiss'd; and then
Cried, “Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!”

But, too much of this.)

Though Shakespeare queers easily, I also approve of queering plays that seem heterosexual to the core as a way of addressing our scarcity as characters in literary history. You can't change the past, but it's noble to try.

The mechanicals in Mauckingbird's Dream stole the show, as they often do. It's unfair to the other characters that Shakespeare gives the mechanicals all the funniest lines, and somehow makes their desire to put on a good show for the Duke's wedding seem the most truly heartfelt goal of any character in the play. Danielle Pinnock as Nick Bottom was unbelievably funny, and I was impressed that, as insane, eccentric, and outsized as her performance was, it was never hammy. We adored her, and the other mechanicals were the most innocent, goofy, and appealingly queer ensemble I could imagine in these roles.

That was Mauckingbird's first Shakespeare; the company also went in a new direction with two one-actor shows about great queer writers: we missed the one about Capote but saw The Threshing Floor, about James Baldwin. I tend to doubt one-person shows, I don't always believe that they are theater and suspect them of being an awkward hybrid of a play and an informative lecture. When I find myself worrying about the physical and emotional strains this way of working must place on the lone actor it's a sure sign that the play itself has not engaged me. However, James Ijames's script and performance in Threshing Floor gave a satisfyingly rounded picture of Baldwin's life, and his evocation of other characters was terrific--giving the illusion of a full cast of personalities around Baldwin. The device of beginning the play as the journey of a graduate student going to see Baldwin was a great way to defuse the weirdness of being asked to believe that I am seeing Emily Dickinson! or PT Barnum! or Mark Twain! when the curtain goes up. If I've ever seen a one-person show that felt like a play and did ample justice to its subject, this was it--I hope there are further productions of The Threshing Floor.

The last great queer show we saw was Sanctuary, by Brian Sanders' JUNK. We don't normally see dance, but had heard great things about this company. Actually, when people talk about Brian Sanders' JUNK they get a look in their eyes like they're about to have a seizure, or a UFO has just landed behind where you're standing. So we figured we should go.

Sure enough, we were glad we went. Our favorite part was a male pas de deux choreographed to Duran Duran's The Chauffeur, performed in the two-dimensional space limned by a long, narrow trough of water. The two men alternately lifted, and were lifted by the other, their movements so fluid I could never tell when one transitioned from carrying to being carried. For me the dance embodied the way that same-sex relationships can be profoundly equal--you immediately escape any expectation of hierarchical roles, do not feel the need to ironically subvert paradigms of hierarchical roles, and are cut off from the burden of the history of hierarchical roles. Virginia Woolf's phrase for female relationships, the love of friends, and Walt Whitman's phrase for male relationships, the love of comrades, express the innately democratic nature of same-sex relationships--an idea developed at length in Richard D. Mohr's Gay Ideas (though his focus is almost exclusively on male pairs). Have I ever seen a performance as authentically, essentially queer, as Sanctuary? Either I'm having a seizure or there's a UFO hovering behind you.

I guess Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at Philadelphia Theatre Company counts as queer, since Ma has a girlfriend. We thought the whole cast was perfect--even when August Wilson gave them reams of exposition, they made it work. I have a strong bias for smaller theater companies who have no fixed home, finding that the bigger the theater, the worse the show--but Ma Rainey's at PTC disproved my bias.

One last show, and not an (especially) queer one: We ended the year, literally, by seeing the Berserker Residents' Very Merry Xmas Carol Holiday Adventure Show at Theater Horizon on New Year's Eve. The show was very funny, and we got to throw snowballs at the villain, and I won a T-shirt! so it was worth the trip to Norristown--even though the train on the way back was packed with antiseptic yuppie clones who had actually dressed up for New Year's Eve. (We recovered by going to our favorite pub and seeing in 2011 with our friend the tango instructor). I'm going to toss out the prediction that Very Merry Xmas Carol Holiday Adventure Show will become a classic. We love the Berserker Residents! (Annihilation Point is the funniest show I've ever seen).

In the corners of the internet I frequent I overhear complaints about the lack of queer characters in movies, the lack of out-actors portraying LGBT characters in movies, and the frequently stereotyped or tragic roles when we are represented in movies. This is terrible, and it should change. It's as natural to complain about the state of cinema as it is heroic to advocate and work for change. But it's also eminently sensible and satisfying to support the inspired work of your local theater companies.

second hike of 2011: parvin state park, or, where donald lost his boot

2011-01-21T10:25:00.000-05:00

My scout troop went camping every month regardless of the weather: I still think "Be Prepared" is a great motto to face life with. For our second hike of 2011 (our goal is to hike all fifty hikes in Best Hikes around Philadelphia) my camerado and I went to NJ's Parvin State Park, a spot I have fond memories of from scouting days.

My most significant Parvin memory is the beach that ate Donald's boot: I ran into one of my fellow scouts recently and he thought the beach had eaten both boots; clearly, this event is burned into both of our minds, even if details differ. Donald was a quiet, popular kid who looked like Mario Lanza. His entrapment in quicksand was hilarious to us, and he bore our efforts to free him with good humor till the adults caught up and sprang into action, shaming our equanimity, and terrifying Donald--I can still see Donald's panicked face as the adults wrenched him from the hungry sand. Afterward, I became determined to retrieve Donald's boot and was baffled that the adults were so willing to sacrifice it to the lake bed's appetite.

This time, we stayed off the sand and kept our boots. The glories of the hike were:

Streams weaving through snow-burdened hollies.

The greenest, greenest duckweed! (No pictures, it came out looking like pond scum). Duckweed is endearing for being the smallest flowering plant and also one of the most nutritious. I'm not singular in being pleased by Lemnaceae, there's a website called The charms of duckweed.

The strange music of trees resting their weight on each other, and sounding like cricket wings, but several octaves lower. This is something you hear every now and then on a hike, but for some reason these woods were full of overly chummy trees making eerie tree-music together

The branch with which I started this post, which arched our path and hosted a forest of fungus so vivid, varied, and intricate it puts James Cameron's "Pandora" to shame:

The only frustration of this hike was the book, which said to go left from the office, though the arrow on the map in the book points right. We went left and I became frustrated that the trails did not follow the route laid out in the book (my amigo, to his credit, faced it like a buddha). We shortened our exploration of the wilder side of the park because the book and the terrain were in such disagreement we were afraid we might get lost. Later we caught the discrepancy between the text and the map and realized we probably should have trusted the map. Next time we'll pick up an independent map at the office or on the internet... and I need to see if there's a working compass in the house...

"Be Prepared" may be a vanishing point for me--a place to aim for whether or not it can truly be reached, or even exists.

We dined here, the Kountry Kitchen:

On Sunday nights you can still bring a pot to the Kountry Kitchen and have it filled it with chicken dumplings for take-out. You could do this in Mullica Hill, NJ, at one time, but I think that place is gone--so this may be a dying custom, which seems a shame (but nice for the chickens). We overheard one woman coming in for her dumplings and saying, in response to something said to her, Oh no, I'm no women's libber! but we did not hear the context. Her sentence has become a wind-up toy for my brain: I have followed it into many ponderings.

My camerado had the dumplings, which he said were great. The rice pudding I had tasted almost exactly like my dear old Granny made.

first hike of 2011: the poetic Wissahickon

2011-01-14T18:15:00.001-05:00

Before 2011 is over, we plan to hike all fifty hikes in a book of Best Hikes around Philadelphia, which my camerado got for his birthday in October. He sees this as preparation for us hiking the Appalachian Trail. Each week he solemnly cuts the pages of the hike we've chosen from the book and slides them into the waterproof trail bags he got from the same cool friends who gave him the book.

Check out this intrepid January insect who came up from the creek to bless our venture:

We chose the Wissahickon creek for our first hike because it is the sacred spine of romantic Philadelphia outdoorsiness, beloved by centuries of writers, and particularly significant to the Philadelphia Gothic tradition--and also so we could meet our friend the Duchess for breakfast at Cafette in nearby Chestnut Hill. Reader, that Cafette breakfast powered me through a five hour hike, and I only had to break out the dark chocolate toward the end.

(The Duchess had some funny family stories to tell from the holidays.)

Highlights of the hike were:

Groves of beech trees--these guys hold their leaves through the winter (seen above) to protect new leaf buds. The color is indescribable.

Getting off Forbidden Drive and up onto the slopes above the creek. (Normally we would just stick to Forbidden Drive, which hugs the creek, and is plenty beautiful, but well-traveled, and less of an adventure).

Seeing this guy up close:

This chief is looking westward, where the Lenape (except for the ones who went underground) were forcibly relocated, by intimidation and fraud. I'm used to seeing him from the bottom of the gorge. Not sure if interesting is the best word, but it's interesting how romantic nostalgia for the local Indians followed so fast on the extirpation of the local Indians.

Lowlights of the hike were:

A grove of rare Umbrella Magnolias the book promised, which sounded fabulously exotic and Dr. Suess-y, but were in the end, merely rare and looking somewhat stranded in the understory.
Running out of daylight: Future winter hikes will be shorter, and certain people who get carried away with the photo-snapping (also known as me) will have to martial their time better.

Exhausted, and, er, dehydrated... because we didn't bring water... we finished our adventure at Earth Bread Brewery in Mt. Airy, and had the white pizza, and rocher for a much-deserved dessert, and my amigo thought the house draft was outstanding.

UPDATE 4-17-11: See that picture I ended this post with? We thought the winged bark was so cool, and wondered what this shrub was--we learned it's burning bush--an invasive that's crowding out native understory plants.

best live performances 2010, music and theater

2011-01-06T22:11:00.000-05:00

For live music, the 2010 highlights were Sufjan Stevens, of course, and Richard Thompson at the Philly Folk Fest. I wished Richard Thompson had played twice as long. It was also a thrill to see the Cowboy Junkies at the Scottish Rite auditorium (that's the ceiling above). I've been a Junkies fan for a long time--I always liked their bassist, so it was magical to watch him live, and no one can quite do what Margo Timmons does with a song. I caught Roseanne Cash at the Folk Fest one year and wasn't moved, but thought the recent "List" album was great, so we saw her too.

It was an OK year for concerts, though not as good as 2009.

As for theater, we saw stunning stuff. New York's Elevator Repair Company and our own Philadelphia Artists' Collective were my favorites.

Elevator Repair Company did an adaptation of Hemingway's Sun Also Rises called The Select, using all or most of the text from the novel. We saw this as part of the Philly Fringe. The production was exhilarating and I felt as though Elevator Repair Company had put not just all of the novel but all of life on the stage in three hours. Lucy Taylor's performance as the ur-flapper Brett Ashley was uncanny. She didn't look exactly like I would picture this character, and her wardrobe was random thrift shop gleanings, but relying on her voice and movement she made a character that was unfailingly convincing. Is she a jazz-age party girl in real life? The evocation of Carnival was also viscerally convincing--I was overwhelmed by the sudden violence of the entire company jumping up in the middle of a scene, possessed by dance. The bravura of Elevator Repair Company is impressive; they make some left-field choices on a slight budget and pull it off. This kind of confidence and vision makes the theater of huge casts and large mechanical sets look antediluvian, or just unnecessary. I could see these guys doing a Les Miserables in a phone booth that would rival the one you saw with your mom.

Philadelphia Theater Collective is a new company I caught on to this year. Their Life is a Dream was my other favorite production of 2010 and it wasn't even a production, but a reading that took place in the haunted spaces of an old church that now houses the Broad Street Ministry. This was also part of the Philly Fringe. PTC knows how to host an evening. The reading was accompanied by period music by Piffaro. After the first act we all got pomegranate juice with fresh mint (or flower petals? I can't remember). The actors led us to a different space in the church for a candlelit second act that closed with a monologue brilliantly delivered by Sean Lally, sans book. When the play ended, two of PTC's cofounders carried out a table spread with a feast--for the audience! But I was too overwhelmed by the piece to stay and mingle much. Even now I don't know that I can do justice to my feelings about hearing Calderon's play for the first time, except to say that I'm grateful that my first meeting with it was a reading done with smarts, soul, and humor. Life is a Dream expresses everything that I might say about this mortal coil were I, say, a genius dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age.

I also saw the PAC reading of Troilus and Cressida at the Constitution Center in the spring. This was a great opportunity to hear some of our favorite actors give an intelligent and lively reading to a rarely-performed Shakespeare play (that I hadn't read). Thematically I thought Troilus was darker than any of the major tragedies, even Lear. Focusing on a world more than on individual characters, it was like a thoroughly curdled Measure for Measure. In Troilus Shakespeare presents two armies of talky, charismatic bastards who can be commended only for wit and drive. Evil, depressing fun.

After hearing two terrific PAC readings I was a fan, and was pleased and lucky to get the last available seat for the last night of their first full production, Duchess of Malfi. But I was reminded that I dislike John Webster's play, in which we watch the titular Duchess suffer, and suffer, and suffer, and die (though she gets a beautiful scene where she haunts her widower in the form of an echo). Still, as is always the case with this company, the cast was great--I particularly liked the actor who played Bosola, the philosophical but unrepentant and ultimately unredeemed hitman. Damon Bonetti as the chief villain, Ferdinand, provided my favorite theatrical moment of the year during one of his mad scenes, when he accuses his brother, a cardinal, of lechery. Blazing with mania, Bonetti's look was a dissonant chord, mingling contempt, horror, and prurience. Thinking of this moment, I understand why mad scenes were so compelling for Renaissance audiences, and am reminded of how rare it is for a filmed performance to get into your marrow in this way.

It's a measure of how much great theater we saw this year that I am too sleepy to finish this post! So the great queer theater we saw in 2010 will have to wait--I was saving it for last but will have to make it a post of its own.

daruma says make a wish!

2010-12-31T11:42:00.000-05:00

Make a wish on this daruma. Bookmark this page. When the wish comes true, return here and color in daruma's other eye with a Sharpie® marker. The original daruma was a monk from the south of India, or maybe Persia, known as Bodhidharma, and also known as "the blue-eyed barbarian." Consider a blue marker.

(Also: there's a legend that Bodhidharma cut off his eyelids in frustration after falling asleep during meditation. The eyelids became tea plants--an aid to wakefulness. Have some eyelid tea while thinking of your wish.)

I associate darumas with vocation, maybe because the one I have is from an ambitious business major friend who brought it back from Japan. He now has an office in NYC's Woolworth building! (The original of the daruma above is from Essene cafe and market in Philly, which has an abundance of organic produce. I don't know whose wish is ground into the ink of its right eye, but it hasn't come true yet).

Check out an inaccurate daruma I made for a friend. My wish for everyone this year, as Robert Frost says in his poem Mud Time, is that your vocation and avocation will become one, as your "two eyes make one in sight."

mistletoe makes witchy hands

2010-12-24T00:15:00.000-05:00

Mistletoe can cause these growths in trees it parasitizes. They are commonly called "witches brooms." I think they look like grasping witchy hands. A little Christmas duende for you from tender comrade, taken on Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia.

the temple of martha graham cracker

2010-12-16T14:02:00.000-05:00

Who's that lady? It's Martha Graham Cracker! We saw Martha's show at L'Etage last week so it seemed a good time to post my photos from her appearance at the art museum in the spring, which was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, along with the Doves show at the Trocadero, rain falling in sheets over Welsh hills, the trees of British Columbia's coastal temperate rainforest, and a rhinoceros shooting cylinders of hay-sutured rhino poop from its cannonical ass. How could a lone entertainer compare with these wonders and marvels? As her first-act closer, Martha Graham Cracker mounted the museum steps in towering heels singing Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me better than its author, Elton John, better even than The Who's brass-lunged Roger Daltrey.

Or just as good. I associate drag artists with disco and r&b hits that are thin and sugary as the glaze on a Dunkin' Donuts cruller, so I love it that Martha's a rock diva; when she changes key mid-syllable in Love Will Keep Us Together, it's raw, hungry, and fearsome as a lion's roar.

How happy Martha's mostly-straight audience looks! I am trying to work out why her following is so heterosexual. What do they get out of this? What do any of us get out of this? I was raised with a deeply Protestant suspicion of the culture of celebrities and entertainers, so I feel like an anthropologist in this crowd, Indy in the Temple of Doom. Is Martha's exceptional, cross-over appeal related to that tendency of transvestite and gender-straddling personas in cultures around the world to naturally step into roles as priests and shamans? She does seem goddess-like in person. (Though that may be just that she's so tall.)

At her L'Etage show last Thursday Martha opened by telling the audience she wanted to make love to each and every one of us, individually, or en masse, and it was possible to believe not only that she might want to, but that she could. Isn't that what we want from a goddess, love, more than protection, favor, fertility, or victory, just love? Whether Venus, Astarte, or Mary, it's wonderful to imagine that the most fabulous person in the galaxy might love us back. Someone said the approbation offered to celebrities is sublimated self-esteem we might more profitably have paid to ourselves (who was that?)--but the impulse to worship is a hard one to quench. The Martha Graham Cracker Cabaret lets us honor and enjoy that impulse within a protected sphere of irony, and sheer silliness. Is this why I tend to see Martha at Christmas? Our gods may want us to sacrifice Isaac for them, but they'll make do with the ram.

old new synogogue, Prague

2010-12-09T09:30:00.000-05:00

For the last day of the Festival of Lights, here's the Old New Synagogue of Prague. As a kid in 7th grade, reading a horror comic about the Golem, I did not imagine that this was a real place, or that I might go there. (The clay Golem sleeps in the attic, concealed within a trove of papers inscribed with the name of the Almighty, waiting for the day when someone restores the word emet, truth, to his forehead).

Exploring the neighborhood of the Josefov overwhelmed my avid tourism--I'm a tourist the way other people are Marxists or Anabaptists--replacing my seething curiosity with a kind of radio silence. The preservation of this neighborhood is one of the darkest ironies of human history.

I could write one of my usual elegies here, but this day is about deliverance, or resilience--depending on your metaphysical orientation--so, just in case carving words into clay really does have the power to vivify, today I'll leave the last word to resilience.

waiting for Krampus at the Christmas Village

2010-12-03T22:17:00.000-05:00

We went to the Christmas Village at City Hall and had roasted hazelnuts and a nice conversation with a merchant who was also a Sufi mystic, and author of a book called Journey Through Ten Thousand Veils. The mystic, divining my pessimistic view of human nature, urged me not to grumble, but to replace what is bad with what is better--which she said was a paraphrase from Islamic scripture. I resisted enlightenment--it may be better to light a single candle, but it is easier and sometimes truer to curse darkness. Still, I was nearly persuaded by the mystic's demeanor, which was serene and powerful. I have to entertain the notion that some creeds may be more than just self-delusion when I meet someone who genuinely appears to have risen above angst, by means of belief--

But then I remind myself that personality is powerful, and charisma alone should not persuade a curmudgeon from his saturnine outlook. When will the good forces in the universe desist from sending their emissaries of light after me?

I kept scanning the Christmas Village for Krampus, Santa's European companion and diabolical shadow, who is becoming my favorite part of the Yuletide. (Our local, Pennsylvania Dutch Krampus is Belsnickel, who needs a better publicist). Rattling his chains at the pious, flicking his tail at sentimentality, and birching the extravagant, Krampus is the antidote for the more sickening aspects of the season. This helpful video explains Krampus with a song, this one will give you nightmares, and in this one the Krampi are mainly interested in birching strapping guys...

(Some of the shots in that last Krampus clip suggest a "running of the Krampus," similar to what happens in Pamplona with the bulls. This would be a great tradition for Philadelphia to adopt, and if something like that takes off, you heard it here first.)

The Christmas Village made us feel like we were at a real christkindlmarkt, and I plan to go again--despite the lack of a Krampus sighting, and not being able to get so much as a Krampus ornament. (Krampus's day is December 5th, so Sunday may be a good day to return). I plan to console myself with wearing a Krampus T-shirt as part of my annual quest to find a little of the true, ancient, dark, spooky Yuletide duende--most of which, in the U.S. at least, gets squashed beneath one of Santa's immense buttocks.

Though, now that I think of it, a Krampus shirt may be unnecessary if you keep the spirit of Krampus alive in your heart all year.

a cranberry sweet potato marshmallow muffin recipe to make you thankful

2010-11-25T12:12:00.000-05:00

Not feeling thankful? I invented a muffin to cure you. With spices, cranberries, and marshmallow yams, this muffin embodies thanksgiving dinner (but without the turkey, because that would be disgusting).

(Also, don't be fooled by the marshmallows, this is a true, wholegrain, healthful muffin you can take hiking, not one of your cupcakes-in-muffin's-clothing muffins.)

The dry ingredients are two and three quarter cups of King Arthur's white whole wheat flour, half a cup of sugar, 5 tsp of baking powder, 2 tsp cinnamon, 2 tsp ginger, and 1 tsp each of clove and nutmeg.

Wet ingredients are half a stick of butter (4 tbsp), two lightly beaten eggs, 4 tbsp canola, and half a cup of whatever milk is on hand including rice or soy.

You'll also need one yam which should be partially baked, or microwaved 3 to 4 minutes till it's yielding but not squishy. Dice the yam. I microwaved the cranberries half a minute but wonder if this is necessary. Mix the berries and diced yam into the batter, stick the marshmallows on top. The mini marshmallows need no preparation, being perfect just as they are.

Last step before baking: Just to make sure the heavy, whole wheat dough rises I proof one packet of Hodgson Mill yeast, let it bubble for five minutes, then pound and knead it into the dough just like I was making pizza. Is this step necessary? Maybe not if I had aluminum-free double-acting baking powder on hand, but I only had the regular baking powder and wasn't taking any chances.

Bake them 20 to 25 minutes at 350 degrees, and you will cure the most implacable ingrate.

toward a new swishiness

2010-11-16T11:45:00.000-05:00

Conformity is more respected than difference, and male is more respected than female, so when we describe a man as swishy he takes on connotations of frivolousness, weakness, and moral idiocy.

This is unjust all round, but let's focus on the swishy man.

I refrained from describing someone as swishy recently, because I worried it was insulting. This troubles me: swishy should be complimentary. This man's swish had sweetness and bite, and was bracing, like a good artisanal ginger ale.

I learned that swishy is onomatopoeic in origin, expressing the sound of ostentatiously stylish clothes in motion. (I thought it specifically denoted a man with a mincing walk, probably because an art history professor with a mincing walk was the first man I heard described as swishy).

Swishy, mincing, lisping: Why is sibilance a marker for effeminate male queerness in our culture? Loads of other consonant sounds could be equally queer. Do they feel left out?

And couldn't the sibilance of swishy be as easily associated with dashing, or swashbuckling (also onomatopoeic in origin)? We often run across the smart, swishy man of action, and are charmed, and we hear him on NPR in the person of the accomplished correspondent and parkour-enthusiast Ari Shapiro... but in the narratives of our culture, we can only look to the heroes of Ellen Kushner's ahead-of-their-time Riverside novels for a smart, swishy hero, and...

and...?

(Jack Sparrow doesn't count, being, so far as we know, straight, and not entirely on the level.)

Fictional liberators Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel veiled their swash behind a facade of swish, but I dream of a day when swish is understood to connote smarts, celerity, competence, and heroism.

the exquisite demurrals of Sufjan Stevens flee before jubilant resolve at Philly's Academy of Music

2010-11-11T13:56:00.000-05:00

Sufjan Stevens is absent in photos the way Garbo or Matthew Barney are absent in photos. In his music he hesitates before the threshold of action or grieves the aftermath of action and depicts robust action only through DayGlo surrogates like Superman, Santa, or zombies.

But last night at our cavernous Academy of Music, Sufjan Stevens warned that his focus would be less the end of time or the dawn of time and more the middle of time: where we are, right now, here. He was gabby and sassy, and busy with important, lyrical hand signals that suggested semaphore for poetic aliens.

Then he put on a big flashy rock and roll science fiction stage show that had me thinking of Bowie, the Flaming Lips, and Tron.

Some will torture the question of whether this was ironic. Let me settle the matter. It was ironic. It was not ironic. I choose to think of Sufjan Stevens as that type of artist who is most sincere in irony, most ironic in sincerity. Like Mel Brooks. We know that the things we love are ridiculous.

I may have more to say about this as I figure it all out. I have been listening to Sufjan Steven's symphonic tribute to the Brooklyn-Queens expressway The BQE and did not realize he put out an album of bombastic synth pop last month, The Age of Adz. I love bombastic synth pop and I love Sufjan Stevens, so you must imagine me numb with excitement, almost unable to appreciate the enormity of the advent of this album--like Mary Magdelene meeting the resurrected Christ in the graveyard, and insisting that he must be the groundskeeper.

the trouble with zombies

2010-11-04T13:51:00.000-04:00

What a cute zombie! I am posting him because he was my favorite zombie at Eastern State Penitentiary's Terror Behind the Walls last year. I stopped by this year, and though I did not see him, I thought I heard his high musical giggle--like lunatic panpipes. If all zombies could be as smooth-skinned and towheaded as this one, I might welcome the invasion.

But zombies, though I enjoy you, and have been fascinated to see you become more popular, I have a caveat or two.

Or three. The trouble with zombies is threefold.

ONE: You have effectively upstaged Frankenstein's monster as the archetypal reanimated corpse! Vampires and werewolves are holding their own, but I swear you zombies have edged Mary Shelley's melancholy flat-topped green guy off the halloween paper plate.

TWO: Zombies have lost their mystique! The deep weirdness and pseudo-ethnographic patina you guys had in the days of White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie has been worn away by familiarity and sheer numbers. Careful, zombies! Do not squander your chic!

THREE: Zombie methodology is fundamentally misguided! Animated corpses stumbling around with limbs flailing, this is scary? If you want to unnerve someone, zombies of the world, don't move at all.

Bram Stoker said the dead travel fast, and he meant it for menace--but the most disquieting quality the dead can have is surely not motion, but stillness.

welcome to the mortal coil

2010-10-27T17:39:00.003-04:00

His alarm went off, he was showered and half dressed before he realized... it was quarter to five in the morning. I told him to back to go sleep, forget the bus, I would drive him to town.

I let him off near his office, parked the van in my old neighborhood and fell asleep, then got up and went to my favorite barbershop so I could look my best for World Fantasy Con this weekend.

My barber is too shy to talk of his (male) amours when others are in the shop; I'm grateful we're by ourselves. I ask him about the bear cub who looks after his dogs--is there anything between them?

"No," he says. And then whispers: "Drama."

Falling leaves and roads silvered with rain make for a dangerous drive; on the way to see my playwriting teacher for coffee and notes on my play, I see a shattered windshield, a head resting on a steering wheel, police standing helplessly by. The drivers ahead of me slow for a chunk of human flesh to chew on their journey.

At the coffee shop, the barrista has just learned, today, that the baby she is expecting is bringing a friend. My playwriting teacher asks if there are twins in her family.

"No," says the barrista, still more dazed than happy.

My teacher tells me about her trip to New York to get a play produced. As is often the case, her thoughts on the writing life, and life in general, are more mature and developed versions of my own recent inchoate thoughts. I tell her it was destiny I should be in town today, and find that, between the haircut, and our conversation, I feel more at ease going into the weekend.

On my way back, all trace of the accident has been cleared away. I'm angry that people stopped to gawk. The dead are so wholly naked; if nothing else we owe them privacy.

I decide to post my best photo, the leaping Live8 kid, and write something profound about the preciousness and brevity of life, maybe contrasting the photo with Samuel Beckett's phrase:

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

I realize it won't come together, it will be ridiculous.

At home, I find that--despite the haste and chaos of his departure this morning--my compadre made the bed.

It looks, as always, beautiful, and if there's no meaning, that's meaning enough.

Later tonight, my father will call with the news that I'm an uncle.

Rocky Horror, original, and Glee album version

2010-10-22T09:40:00.000-04:00

The film of a stage play, made with the original cast, is already a record of a living thing vanished--or, vanishing as we watch it, as if the film itself is the unraveling thread of a live experience. The only movie I can think of as suffused with nostalgia for itself as Rocky Horror is Casablanca: both were plays, both are vitrines of tropes from older films, both have characters who suffer over treasured (if, of course, non-existent) past experiences. In his brief interlude between suspended animation and death, Rocky Horror's Eddie wants to know"whatever happened to Saturday night?" while his killer and ex-boyfriend Frank asks the same about Fay Wray, or Steve Reeves, or any of the myriad of burned-out stars who represent his own lost capacity for feeling--much as Rick in Casablanca will always have Paris, though he will never have--and never did have--Paris--except when remembering it in a song.

The greatest tragedy is when theory outstrips performance, Leonardo said, but it's more tragic still when performance outstrips life--when life is upstaged not by actual memories but virtual memories of passively received cultural experiences. We meet, and will meet till we die, that man who regales us with memories of films that excited him and bygone TV shows he remembers and invites us (horrible!) to (re)(live) with him. A culture with entertainment as good and ubiquitous as ours will inevitably produce citizens so spellbound by narrative that they cannot grip life--but these are the least fortunate of monsters. Dickens's Miss Havisham, monstrous as she is, would be more monstrous if memories of a romantic film ensnared her, instead of memories of actual romance.

Havisham of Havishams, ravishment by solitary cultural experiences is Frank-N-Furter's downfall in Rocky Horror--and our own downfall, if we watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show anywhere but in a theater, with friends. Frank's castle is stuffed with past and potential future lovers, but no one can compete with Frank's memories of his favorite films. Though Frank's empire of sex and virtual memory is threatened, he can't turn his face from the past long enough to save it. Riff Raff, Frank's ex and underling--we are all Frank's exes and underlings--defeats Frank only because Riff Raff's bond with his sister/bride Magenta keeps him hooked to present sweetness--even if the world Riff Raff and Magenta share is also, largely, a remembered one--of distant homeworlds and outmoded dance fads. Enervating as it is, the film implies, the incest of Riff Raff and Magenta's shared world proves less enervating than the auto-erotic cultural necrophilia of Frank-N-Furter.

The only characters in Rocky Horror who escape death or the time trip back to the burned-out homeworld (which is a more lingering death) are the innocent bisexuals, Brad and Janet, for whom memory is meaningless, who look only to what's ahead--and who, devoid of culture, can never be ensnared by it (unless romance novels and televised sporting events lurk in their future). In the stage version of Rocky Horror, Rocky--the engineered creature who has evolved into a handsome hero type--escapes with Brad and Janet, and this is fitting. Rocky stands for Brad and Janet's once-hidden desires, which are more pan- and poly- than they dared imagine--and also more wholesome! Perfect, golden Rocky is so wholesome he's dull, but that's as it should be. Rocky is Frank's dream, his lost and nearly-found innocence; if Frank's dreams couldn't save him, they liberate Brad and Janet. That's nice for all of us: the happy ending Brad and Janet find in Rocky Horror is invincible, They can never again be contained by narrative, or any closet: they are out. I think this is why the Rocky Horror sequel, Shock Treatment, fizzled: Brad and Janet have found the way through the labyrinth, for good.

The power of Rocky Horror lies in the viewer's wish that his memories could have been as exciting as Riff-Raff's... You can never do Riff-Raff's favorite dance, the Time Warp, for the first time, you can only ever do it again: the Time Warp negates virginity. The illusion, the cheat, works only if there is something real behind it--which is, of course, the original musical, with the cast that (mainly) returned for the film. I have the soundtrack of the Glee Rocky Horror episode, and it's terrific: a plastinated version of the original that is just as good and maybe better: some of these kids were fans. Glee's Brad and Janet are a funnier, more demented version of the all-American boy and girl, Chris Colfer burrows straight into the heart of Riff Raff, and Naya Rivera's Late Night Double Feature is perfection.

(My only beef is the, bizarrely, heterosexualized Sweet Transvestite number: decadent and enticing as non-alcoholic jello shots offered by a Christian sorority girl.)

For Glee creator Ryan Murphy's planned feature film Rocky Horror remake to be successful, or even better than the original (which *he whispers* is sometimes boring) it should be invested with fresh memories, i.e, the new Rocky Horror Picture Show feature film remake will work best if it is a remake of its own Rocky Horror (live stage) Show.

In which case--if the slick, candied decadence and humor of Rocky Horror Glee Show cast album is any indication--it may be poisonously memorable.

more street art from Philly

2010-10-13T22:23:00.000-04:00

The street art above can be seen at the mouth of an alleyway running the length of Center City Philadelphia. I love that it implies a story, and a dramatic one; for me all art is narrative anyway.

defying Dr. Johnson, street artists donate sacred joy and monsters

2010-10-08T12:53:00.000-04:00

I tend to agree with Samuel Johnson's No man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money, so why do I admire street artists? Philadelphia is rich in warm, humane, funny, and clever street art--my favorite example is the bike-rack cozy knitted with the words LOOK UP, spurring the viewer to discover a knitted monster concealed in a tree just above.

(Everyone who sees this laughs with joy: if humor is one of my personal sacraments, this unknown street artist is a priest.)

The free monster art you see above (and below) surprised me in Prague. I like the humor and the challenge of it: If a toothy monster can stop hurting animals, couldn't we all?

milestones

2010-10-01T01:19:00.000-04:00

If I tell you my yoga instructor is named Tree you will make assumptions about both of us that may be untrue. Tree is as practical and levelheaded as anyone I know, and I am an indifferent yogi. Above see Tree at his recent-ish birthday, courtesy of my Flicker page.

Two friends of mine turned fifty this year, and my beloved (great) aunt turned ninety!

Here is my nonagenarian aunt with my first published book:

You can see that she is a German girl. When I visit her, she tells me the story of how she met her husband, and if I am clean shaven, takes my hands in hers and says:

Oh Andrew, thank you for not having a beard.

Anne Rice in a Mexican restaurant in Philly

2010-09-23T12:16:00.000-04:00

Last summer, exhausted from the heat and a very cool but all-consuming job, I wandered into a Mexican place on South Street and was refreshed by the sight of the adorable-yet-sinister Anne Rice, whom I have always liked.

Anne is the figurehead of my resolve to post one cool photo here each week, and turn this into a proper photo blog.

homage to William Carlos Williams

2010-05-19T12:34:00.000-04:00

so much depends upon

green, red, yellow, blue, and pink balloons

tied to the food pavilion

at the Old Pine Presbyterian flea market

preservationists

2010-05-15T11:30:00.002-04:00

When I was a little boy my stepdad's grandmother was an ancient lady who had lived in the city all her life. Her cut-glass vase and stained glass lamp became a part of our household. We were all amazed that every tooth she had ever had remained in her head; she had preserved them, she said, with a nightly application of peroxide. I can still picture this steely old lady in her nightgown rubbing peroxide on her teeth in steady defiance of time and decay.

This lady and her Swiss husband gave me the nickname Little Diplomat because I said agreeable things when I came to visit. I still find an agreeable word as good as a gift when visiting relatives, and am on good terms with all of mine. So I too have been a kind of preservationist.

Last night I dreamed this lady and I walked through the city together at a good pace; she showed a polite interest in my dark prognostications about coming fuel and food shortages due to peak oil and warming. When I woke I wondered why I should dream about my stepdad's grandmother after not having seen or thought of her in many years. I realized she was telling me: Preparation is better than worry. With diligence and foresight the buildings of this city will stand on these streets as my teeth stand in my silent skull.

four from Muir

2010-04-22T23:29:00.001-04:00

We went hiking in the Muir Woods. It amazes me that you can drive a half hour from San Francisco and be in an old growth forest.

It's always exciting to be in a forest that's never been logged. Where I'm from, you don't get to use the word primeval as often as you'd like.

We heard a terrific ranger talk about how this patch of coast redwoods was narrowly saved by an 11th hour intervention from Theodore Roosevelt. A water company had wanted to build a dam upstream and flood the valley.

Just another example of activist government hampering the free market...

The coolest fact we learned about Sequoia sempervirens is that an entire grove may spring from the root system of a single parent tree, and may be considered a single organism.

I was resisting the temptation to post a long shot of some redwoods as it is impossible to get a sense of the scale, but I find I can't resist, so here is one anyway:

he and his cousin bond over wondrous shiny Chuck Taylors for the latter's wedding

2010-04-10T16:53:00.000-04:00

Black and shiny as a hornet's ass, these converse sneakers are what we will be wearing in my New Jersey cousin's wedding one month from now.

yoda contemplative garden

2010-04-08T11:48:00.001-04:00

The Presidio isn't just a limp movie from the '90s starring Sean Connery. Situated on a wedge of land that juts into the San Francisco Bay, it was originally a garrison of the Spanish empire, before passing to Mexico, and then to the USA, and, in the idealized future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, to Starfleet Academy. It ceased operations as a US military base in 1994. We walked around the Presidio, looking for the remnants of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition buildings and George Lucas's headquarters.

We couldn't get to the former, but found the latter, and admired the statues of the inventors of television and the zoetrope, and of Yoda, seen above. No, I didn't photoshop that. Yoda really does preside over a tranquil oasis of contemplation in San Francisco, and thanks to the largesse of George Lucas, you can visit him there.

what I learned from my California writing retreat

2010-03-30T02:48:00.001-04:00

I learned that if I buy a tricycle on craigslist, the owner of this irate dog will totally, fuckin,' make it fit me.

I learned that there are more vintage cars in Santa Cruz than any place I have ever been.

And many of them are trucks, and many of them still have their original paint.

I learned that some taco shops will let you bring a dog inside. (Dog courtesy of my hosts).

I learned that you can get these gear-shaped steampunk doughnuts at a 24 hour doughnut shop called Ferrel's that even has wi-fi.

I learned that New Jersey isn't the only place with weird roadside attractions.

And that just when you expect a threatening character to emerge from the beat-up trailer behind said roadside attraction, one will.

But if you show no fear aforementioned character may share what he knows of the roadside attraction, leaving you unharmed but not significantly enlightened.

I also learned that if you have the opportunity for a writing holiday in California, don't submit to markets with quick turnaround: checking email becomes a distraction. And if you intend to plot a new play and novel, don't bog down editing old stuff.

AND that getting away from all distractions, and focusing exclusively on writing (with breaks for hiking around) is a great way to accelerate progress on your writing goals and remind yourself what you're capable of when you put writing first.

first flower of spring

2010-03-17T13:31:00.001-04:00

Saw this March 4th in a friend's garden--neither of us knew what it was. Maybe evening primrose?

ann marie's miracle car

2010-03-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

Dwight is a friend of mine who runs the frame shop in Birnam Wood. He has written some Sherlock Holmes novels, a memoir, and a book on theology, and also built this great bed for my perennials while I move. We were on the way to the diner and talking about Dwight's new novel when I saw this vintage Ford Galaxie parked alongside a gingerbready Victorian house.

I love vintage cars. I asked Dwight if he minded if I pulled over to photograph the Galaxie.
He said not at all. By some freakish stroke of luck, the owner had just pulled up in a more recent model car. I took her to be in her sixties. I asked if I could photograph the Galaxie and she said sure--and --would I like to start it up?

Would I? You bet I would!

But I wasn't able to start it, even with the owner, whom we'll call Anne Marie--after the Elvis song--coaching me to give it a little gas. She said she would get in and start it up for me because she knew the feel of it.

She also said that she had bought this car new in the late 1950s, and had kept it running all this time. She was 98, she said, and had been born in 1918.

Dwight pointed out later that makes her only 92. Sad that our elderly should be so given to mendacity and braggadocio...

Dwight gave some input as the car was reluctant to start.

I took this picture at the exact moment the car started.

Sweet, sweet greenhouse gasses!

Seriously, it was a thrill when the car started.

After the triumph with the car, Anne Marie asked if we wanted to see her dog, too.

We did. I think she said it was a Norwich Terrier.

Meeting Anne Marie and her dog, (and her son and grandson), and taking a (stationary) ride in her car was a great start to the week--one of those rare, magical confluences that go a long way toward balancing the grief life likes to dole out. I am eager to persuade myself that there are enough good and pleasant things in the world to balance the dismal things.

But of course, there are no scales large enough to contain the misery and joy in the world, even for purely subjective research purposes.

R2D2, my one war toy

2010-02-18T15:03:00.000-05:00

We were strange evangelicals, taking heat from friends and pastors for being pro-choice. I did not realize till after I drifted from the church the degree to which we were viewed with suspicion for being the only evangelical family who was cool with abortion.

My mother's aversion to what she called "war toys" was another way in which we deviated from the evangelical norm. Many followers of Jesus are, oddly, quite comfortable with being citizens of a bellicose nation. Not us.

As a result, I had no GI Joe or even Star Wars toys as a child. It was important that I understand that war is not play. The one exception that snuck through the pacifist force field around my family was the diligent, dogged R2D2 you see above. R2D2 was my favorite Star Wars character; this one was made by a distant relative that I'm not sure I've actually ever met.

As the only material culture from the Star Wars universe to enter my world, you can imagine how fond I am of my ceramic R2D2.

steampunk pride

2010-02-18T14:40:00.000-05:00

We met Ash at a party and were impressed by this show of steampunk pride.

soundtracks for snow

2010-02-07T15:49:00.001-05:00

If snow must come, at least we can have snow-appropriate music to make it seem festive and exotic. Bjork's Homogenic is one of those albums that seems all one piece, like a song cycle. Being Icelandic, Bjork knows something of snow, I guess. I love Sting's album of John Dowland songs (though I hate Sting's muttered readings from Dowland's letters; their inclusion seems pedantic and destroys the album's flow). The Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir has the quiet staccato of snow hitting a window--and the Carter Family, is, of course, the real old-timey music for nights sealed away in the cabin.

We live two doors down from a spirited liberal my camerado calls The Oldest Living Rebel. I have written about him here. This year he gave me a new year's blessing that was as grand and comprehensive as anything a biblical patriarch could have come up with. We shovel him out when it snows; this time I listened to the Podcastle story Goblin Lullaby by Jim C. Hines.

Podcastle is becoming my constant companion.

shepherd's pie, borscht, chocolate pecan pie, recipes for snowed-in vegetarians

2010-02-07T13:48:00.000-05:00

The snow inspired me to make some food. That's shepherd's pie above, which is not supposed to be in a pie crust, but I vaguely remember my grandmother making it that way. I love how things change in memory. Invariably, they become more interesting.

I used this recipe for the shepherd's pie, and put it in a pastry shell. Recipe books and the internet give me the sense that making a pie crust is a terrifying undertaking, with potential disaster lurking at every turn. I use the recipe on the back of the Arrowhead Mills whole wheat pastry flour bag, but with slightly less canola oil. Then I daub oil on the exposed part of the crust so it doesn't become hard when I bake it. Perfect every time.

The only changes I made to the recipe linked above are that I substituted SmartGround ™ veggie protein crumbles for actual animal parts, and chased the fake beef around a pan with one shallot and some apple cider vinegar. I partly mashed the potatoes with some gooey roasted garlic, and cut up the potato skins and left them in for vitamins and texture. Impatience, thrift, or moral objections led me to omit the onions, flour, milk, beefstock, and all spices except salt and pepper. As a result, the shepherd's pie was bland the first night, but after mellowing in the refrigerator overnight it tasted perfect today.

(I put butter in the potatoes, but if you are a vegan you could omit that).

Then, since my camerado is a Southern boy I made him a chocolate pecan pie. All the recipes online used corn syrup, which seemed revolting. I looked at some vegan blogs to see what they would use instead of corn syrup--not that corn is animal-derived, but I tend to think of vegans as too health-conscious to pour corn syrup into themselves and the people they love.

The two vegan blogs I checked admitted that they had adapted their recipe for chocolate pecan pie from Martha Stewart, so I deduced that Martha is the blogosphere's go-to gal for chocolate pecan pie.

The Martha Stewart recipe also called for a cup and a half of corn syrup, so, disgusted and irate, I improvised a replacement of a half cup each of brown rice syrup, canola oil, and maple syrup. This seemed marginally less health-destroying. (Brown rice syrup is a slow sugar). Martha said not to beat the eggs but I did anyway, because I read that part after the beatings took place. This was a happy accident, as it fluffed up the oil/syrup/chocolate/egg mix, with the result that the pecans floated on top of a light chocolate meringue, and toasted nicely, instead of sinking through sticky chocolate gunk to rest on the bottom. (Martha Stewart was accused of sticking pecans on top of her pie for the photo by one of the vegan bloggers I consulted).

I omitted the sugar and we did not miss it. A half cup of maple syrup and a half cup of brown rice syrup is enough sweetener. Next time I will use unsweetened chocolate chips--and will not melt all of them, but leave some intact for texture.

That's borscht. My borscht is so far from authentic that it's almost ludicrous to call it borscht, but the word is so satisfying I can't relinquish it. True borscht is watery and tainted with meat stock, onions, tomatoes, and who knows what other horrors. Mine is four beets, three green apples, and the juice of three or four lemons, plus honey and 1 teaspoon of allspice. The point of it is not to get in the way of the hearty, warming, energizing goodness of beets.

I cook the beets, then cut them up, then cook them some more, and mash them--but I do not cook or mash them excessively. I want them to have their essential beetness. The recipe I use is from an Australian health guru named Dr. Sandra Cabot. It calls for five tablespoons of honey, which may be more than it needs, plus chicken stock and egg yolks, which I omit. Beets are hearty enough without them.

rittenhouse square, philadelphia

2010-01-30T12:49:00.000-05:00

William Penn laid out four parks in his original plan for the city (the smaller Center Square, where City Hall is now, makes a fifth). Above you see Rittenhouse Square, which has a bit of an old money vibe, but is nevertheless a hangout for every possible demographic and is one of the healthiest urban spaces I've ever seen. (My father claims it was the heart of hippiedom back in his youth, with Sansom Street acting as the hippie boulevard leading toward it).

The white Christmas lights in Rittenhouse were just taken down, so I've posted this picture as a kind of backward glance--took it a few weeks ago. I think the uber-tasteful white lights are chosen for this park so that the sensibilities of the remaining old money WASPS needn't be offended by colors.

But if you are coming into the city from New Jersey, you will see that the jubilant and riotous green and orange Christmas lights are up in Franklin Square for you still.

bridget riley quote

2010-01-27T22:28:00.001-05:00

kgb bar fantastic fiction reading 1-20-10

2010-01-23T10:02:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday writer/actor Chris Braak and I took the Chinatown bus from Philly to attend the monthly KGB Bar reading series, Fantastic Fiction. I ran into a couple of my teachers from Clarion San Diego, and some writers I admire, and a blogger who is a treasure. The ambiance and the sophisticated characters made me feel like I was inside a Degas painting.

Above you see Chris with a manhattan. Chris performed one of the parts in the reading of my play, Christendom, earlier this month. In the background is Liz Gorinsky from Tor. When I emailed Chris to identify the other woman he wrote:

That is Helen Pilinovsky. She is a gemologist, and formerly a professor of folklore.

KGB Bar is the Folies Bergere of the speck fick set.

fanboy weekend: Philadelphia Stories, Pine Wolf, and Tony Lawton's "Heresy"

2010-01-18T08:43:00.001-05:00

The purpose of this weekend was to be a fanboy and support my friends and relatives who are doing creative stuff around the Delaware Valley, land of my ancestors.

Above you see my uncle, the Pine Wolf. He is a Chicago blues musician from South Jersey. Behind him is my cousin on drums.

Pine Wolf got a great crowd:

I could barely get around the room to take pictures. (The darkness of the room and the highly active subjects were no match for my budding photography skills, so you are not getting the usual widescreen photos).

Pine Wolf's daughter is the blond in that picture of the crowd. She is one of the Wolfettes who sing solos and backup with the Pack.

There she is with her dad, singing Ain't Nobody's Business. Pine Wolf introduced the song by saying that it encapsulated his daughter's approach to life. Her singing rocked, as always.

She's also in a band with her brother that I would classify as emo, but they are on hiatus. They still get stopped by fans in New Jersey shopping malls, which means they are more famous than I am.

For now.

Here is a picture of an ancestor I share with the Pine Wolves:

That's Richard, the original Pine Wolf. He enlisted to fight for the Union when he was a bit too old for it, and is the first evangelical in my family--having became convicted by the spirit in the middle of the night, dragged his bewildered wife out of bed to pray with him, and chopped down the sign for the tavern he owned. (A tavern stands on that site to this day; the original was torn down a few years ago). Richard became a preacher, and my family is still religious. The white bosom behind him in the picture belongs to his daughter, my great-great grandmother Anna Frances. If Anna Frances was in a band I cannot say, but, an early widow, I'm sure she was acquainted with the blues.

I invoke the primordial Pine Wolf as a segue to Tony Lawton's one-man show, Heresy--which was Sunday night. I first saw it in the fall as part of the Philadelphia Fringe.

Not all fundamentalists are hypocrites. A few really go all out with their fundamentalism, which is a great way to learn the limits of an ethos, and harm yourself, and others. I discovered this when I exhausted my own faith. Pine Wolf, the Pack, and many of my relatives are still in the fold. In Heresy, Tony Lawton discusses his wholehearted embrace of living according to strict Catholic principles, and the failure of these principles to organize anything remotely like a sane, integrated, healthy life for him. At the climax of the play he reaches back into his childhood to find an authentically Christlike, but non-religious character, a young coach he had. He places this guy alongside one of the weirder and more beautiful New Testament stories for a dramatic climax that is really a knock out.

You should see it if it comes back.

My final stop on my weekend fanboy tour was the Philadelphia Stories reading, to hear Jonathan Scovner. His essay Bunker is his first publication so it seemed momentous. Bunker is a day in the life of the financial crisis, told from a cubicle in an office where half the staff will be fired in one day. A transcript of an actual day in the life of Scovner. I've read one Saul Bellow-esque story by Jonathan that I thought was terrific, so you may be hearing from this dude.

lifting up the sun

2010-01-02T01:37:00.000-05:00

My favorite statue in my favorite park--I think of the Flaming Lips lyric every time I pass it:

Though they were sad, they lifted up the sun.

These two don't look particularly sad though, and I'm far from sad myself. I had hoped to write something profound about friendship here as the year begins, but find no words better than: "The hour passes, friendship abides." I am grateful for my friends.

stopping by the Japanese House on a snowy morning

2009-12-30T17:14:00.000-05:00

After dropping my camerado off at the airport and before delivering a holiday snow slug to a friend in West Philly, I stopped by Shofuso, the Japanese House and Garden in Fairmount Park.

It was dawn: colder than a warlock's perineum. I couldn't warm up the rest of the day after taking these photos--I was under a spell of coldness.

I thought the dawn light on the snow would be beautiful, but it's just sort of okay. I was too early. My favorite time to see Shofuso is the Cherry Blossom Festival. A few years ago we saw some Elegant Gothic Lolitas and Aristocrats there, which completely fascinated Matt, and which I thought were pretty cool, too. The martial arts demonstrations and the Taiko Drum and Dance were great. Also: my former scoutmaster and his wife were selling and demonstrating kites, which strikes me as a great way to spend your retirement!

This year Sakura Sunday is April 11. It's not too early to start thinking about cherry blossoms! Pay the admission to Shofuso so you can tour the grounds, search for a large but mysteriously hidden stone sage, walk the paths, and meet the fish. Inside, new paintings by Hiroshi Senju on the paper sliding walls evoke frozen cascades and inspire silent rapture. Then get coffee and apple cake at the nearby Ohio House, one of the few structures left in Fairmount Park from the 1876 Centennial Exhibition.

2009's best concerts

2009-12-27T01:13:00.001-05:00

The best photo I have of any concert this year is the shot you see above: that's the debonair Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips on the far left, and those are his soulful eyes on the screen behind him. I have compared the Lips to William Blake and the Who on this page so it pains me to say that this concert was bad. The Lips were off their game, and the confetti and theatrics seemed empty and sad. My dad is my concert buddy and I told him we should go to this and it would be great. The Lips at the Electric Factory during the Yoshimi tour is one of my best concerts ever. This time, my dad and his girlfriend stuck around as long as they could stand it and then split. It was painful. I felt like I had taken my dad to see Gallagher.

The new album is good, though. The apocalyptic party mania of the last three albums has dissipated, leaving a landscape of dull tyranny with the faint scent of betrayal on the wind. An Antonioni kind of album.

Anyway, I saw four truly amazing concerts this year. The first was:

THE DOVES at the Trocadero:

I know almost nothing about this band, except they are from the UK and two of the trio are fraternal twins. I bought their album The Last Broadcast after hearing it in a pub. The singer started dropping choruses late in the concert; eventually his voice gave out and he went behind the drum kit and the drummer went to the mike. The drummer's voice sounded identical to the singer's. It was eerie, like some weird feat of self-willed ventriloquism or a heartfelt imitation. Or do they just sound alike? The drummer sings a few songs on the albums and I don't think he ordinarily sounds like the singer at all.

The Dove's encore was There Goes the Fear, which I thought was one of the lighter weight songs on Last Broadcast, but was stunning live. Evidently this was a hit in the UK. The entire house became euphoric. I was so overwhelmed with positive feelings I did not shush the happy singing drunk next to me! The Doves played with Fear's video as a backdrop--the video is a collage of existing footage that manages to tell the story of an anxious man who finds peace and happiness only as the world is ending. The Troc felt like it was about to lift off like Charlie's Great Glass Elevator.

Strange, exhilarating moments like this are the reason I attend concerts.

That's the Bob Dylan show at Temple University. People imagine Dylan will sound like his parodists. Only sometimes does he sound like his parodists. Dylan hit at least every third note when I saw him, and sounded earthy and powerful. His storytelling is fantastic; he isolates unnamed emotional states and encapsulates them in a song, like a better Poe. He is to REM as Ben Kenobi is to Luke. If you can't inure yourself to Dylan's voice, you should try harder, or read the prophets: Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, with Ecclesiastes thrown in. Dylan goes all the strange dark places the prophets go, and the beautiful places, and the surreal places. He has the grim wisdom of the prophets.

My family at the Dylan concert. I'm stage-managing the photograph, having put my camera in the hands of a semi-buzzed Dylan fan and already regretting it--as the man has sprinted away from us as if we are pachyderms and will not fit in the frame if he is nearer than twenty yards. When my aunt saw this picture, she said You're getting bossy in your old age. I said, Shut up!

Bob Dylan was good, but was not one of the top concerts of the year. Sorry Bob! My next two great concerts of 2009 are:

THE DECEMBERISTS and THE LOW ANTHEM at the Philly Folk Fest:

I saw the Decemberists and Low Anthem the same weekend. The Decemberists rocked like you hope and dream rock legends could rock (instead of being overproduced and bombastic). All kinds of mythological heavy metal folk art spooled through my brain as the Decemberists played. But why were they on in the afternoon? Why weren't they the headliners?

The Low Anthem is the only band I've seen twice this year: I sat in the swelter of the Folk Fest and saw them by myself in August, then dragged my dad and my camerado to see them last month when they opened for Josh Ritter at the TLA. Everyone should see the Low Anthem live. They are by turns surreal and sad, and can also rock out. They are all talented multi-instrumentalists, and cute baby Dylans. What I've heard of their lyrics suggests some seriously smart literary minds are lurking behind those sexy desperado mustaches.

My final amazing concert of the year is:

BLIND PILOT at World Cafe Live:

Driving up to see my camerado in Vermont this summer I heard Go On, Say It on the radio; it grabbed me with its urgent yet reticent lyrics. There's a self-possession to this song, an Emily Dickinson self-possession that may be stable and content, or rushing toward breakdown, or both at once. Blind Pilot's album is brilliant and moving, if at times glum. Live they were astounding: Every song was stirring, even startling in its force and freshness. The singer has an appealing way of closing his eyes and rising on his toes as if certain notes are airborne and he must poise himself to inhale them at just the right moment.

We were also awed by the trumpet player.

The crowd pleaded and pleaded for more songs. Blind Pilot played through their material, and had no songs for an encore. So they did a cover of MGMT's original, weird, harsh, and exquisite Kids, from last year. The Blind Pilot set was so lovely I had tears in my eyes at times, and when they launched into Kids I was overwhelmed. You go to concerts for these glorious, privileged moments: When they come they are sometimes more than you could have imagined--more than you can bear.

Blind Pilot's Kids was uncanny--sublime--alongside the Dove's encore, one of my best concert moments of the year.

keeping the weird in christmas

2009-12-25T12:21:00.001-05:00

One of the things I like about Christmas is the hysteria. It's a bombastic, Phil Specter wall-of-sound kind of holiday--determined to flood your every sense--the manic phase of the year.

The pictures in this post come from the Pitman Grove, in Pitman NJ--where, three generations ago, my family had a summer home. Now people live there all year round. We always talk about moving back there. My grandmother was dreaming of it till she died.

Pitman was founded as a Methodist summer retreat--I am the great x 3 grandson of the Pitman patriarch whose birthday is being celebrated in this picture:

I'm a Philly boy, though, so even if I feel very warmly toward this town, I won't be buying back the family cottage.

The Pitman Grove is the home of the Hagerty family, who own a few houses adjacent to each other, and put up a spectacular holiday garden every year. It wanders through yards and creeps into sheds, infesting every square foot with Christmas madness.

I go see it every year when I cross the bridge to see my relatives. It's impressive. My favorite part of the Hagerty display is the shed, which I think I remember seeing and being fascinated by as a kid. It's filled with a miniature city of elves, dwarves, and angels, with villages and bridges and tall masted ships that proclaim Jesus and warn against drug use:

But who needs drugs?

I am reassured as I tour the Hagerty Christmas garden, that we are no different from our Viking and Saxon and Celtic ancestors, lighting the woods of Northern Europe to keep away the terrible darkness. Only now we have electricity, and our gods have names like Snoopy and Sponge Bob.

weirding Christmas with snow slugs and Martha Graham Cracker

2009-12-20T23:17:00.000-05:00

The official start of this year's weird Christmas season was Thursday a week ago when I saw a jockey climb onto the back of Philly's beloved 6'5" drag queen Martha Graham Cracker. That was so weird I was actually speechless. It was my first time at Martha's show and I felt like I was seeing some legendary evening of entertainment unfold before me. I kept thinking how Orson Welles raved about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis when they were a live act in Vegas. It was that good.

Regulars said Martha wasn't at her best, which means, she gets better? I'm definitely coming back. Martha did a cover of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" that was actually enjoyable, and that's a first.

Seeing Martha was a great way to start getting my Christmas weird-on. I'm not crazy about the holidays, but decided a few years ago to seize the reindeer by the antlers and remake Christmas into something I would actually enjoy. This means bringing back some traditions that have a savor of the old pagan darkness, burning things, and generally getting creative and DIY.

What you see at the top of the post are this year's snow slugs, which are an adaptation of the Easter slugs my mother used to make. The slug cakes started when a local bakery made an Easter rabbit cake that bore an inadvertent resemblance to a slug. The bakery got new owners and discontinued the cake, so my mother started making her own Easter slugs. Here she is clowning around wearing the Easter slug's eyes:

She discovered you can make your own slug cake by using one layer cake pan, cutting the finished cake in two and sticking the halves back to back.

That's her method on the right; in back is a smaller, proto-slug I made from a loaf pan this year. You can do it either way depending on what hardware you have around and what size slug you want to make. I shaved off the pointy edges of both slug bodies and fed them to my camerado. Then I iced the slugs and stuck coconut all over them, and added raisin mouths, carrot noses, and malt ball eyes.

Without its nose, the holiday slug bears a resemblance to a rat creature from one of my favorite comics. Jeff Smith's Bone. Compare and contrast:

(Bone rocks! It mixes epic fantasy with Li'l Abner style hillbilly weirdness!)

The holiday slug cakes are very popular with my New Jersey cousins:

I eat the slug cake with my New Jersey cousins, and we smash the Christmas pig (which, when I think of it, is also one of my mom's innovations). With my Pennsylvania cousins I burn plum pudding, and, this year, glögg, which is a flammable Swedish beverage with Heavy Metal umlauts that my aunt is learning to make.

Next year I want to burn a Yule Goa t, but I don't think I can get it together in time for this year.

Here's last year's snow slug--the very first! --swaddled in plastic wrap like Laura Palmer's body in Twin Peaks.

Watch the salt, please!

remember and be sad

2009-12-19T17:05:00.000-05:00

My friend is a furious yardsaler, always dredging up treasures. Recently she found me a poetry anthology.

I opened it to a poem by Christina Rossetti, which I post here for anyone who grieves a loss at this time of year--

Or who has an elegiac temperament, like me.

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember when no more, day by day,
You tell me of our future that you plann'd;
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile,
Then that you should remember and be sad.

Christina Rossetti

weirding christmas with flaming plum pudding

2009-12-16T01:09:00.000-05:00

Plum pudding should really be called Pudding Made From Rubbish You Had Lying Around Anyway, because traditionally it's just dried-up stuff, crumbs, animal parts, and booze.

A year's end, let's-clean-the-kitchen-by-making-a-pudding pudding.

I made my first flaming plum pudding last year using this recipe by Cait Johnson, but I substituted apricots and lemon-flavored prunes for the citron and currants, walnuts for almonds, and Baileys and rum instead of Guinness.

I had never steamed a pudding, so I improvised by setting my pudding mold (a mixing bowl) in the bottom of a large soup pot on top of some apple corers. It worked! I was so excited when my pudding congealed, I felt like Victor Frankenstein!

The finished product was the medium-sandy color of construction site mud, but tasted terrific. I was pleasantly surprised. Not that it mattered, because the chief purpose in making this pudding was to find a safe and appropriate outlet for my seasonal pyromania.

Word to the wise: I had to pour a LOT of brandy on the pudding to get a good flame going when I lit it. The alcohol flame was a beautiful holy ghostly Pentecost blue flame that made everyone present feel quite magical and Hogwartsy.

Before I found Cait's I looked at a lot of other plum pudding recipes on line. One was a traditional English one with the menacing advice "It should not be suffered to stop boiling," which sounds like something you would overhear at an Inquisition. My favorite recipe was the unintentionally hilarious "Professor Plum's no-suet plum pudding," which contained this catchall explanation/disclaimer:

This does not have the suet but note that it has a lot of butter. Also, I do not have the recipe for Zabaglione Sauce but I am pretty sure the main ingredient is egg yolks. Because of the omission of all the citron and candied fruits, I don't think it will really have the traditional flavor, but it might actually go over better with kids who don't like those 'yucky green things' (candied citron). The use of bourbon is certainly not English but might appeal to Southerners. I have not tried this one at all.

After reading "Professor" Plum's disclaimer, it would be fairly impossible to criticize him regardless of how the pudding turned out.

I will attempt to repeat last year's success this year, but with some improvements, like, a more inspiring shape, frosted sugar or hard sauce, and a sprig of holly. Look forward to photos. I don't have any photos from last year, so I decorated this post with some disturbing images of the kitchen of my old place near Rittenhouse Square.

That's it from the outside. Hovel-y!

And from the inside:

My friend Jane called this the "Mad Max" kitchen, and was certain that if opened the back door she would see a post-apocalyptic wasteland outside. Jane's Dad, who is one of those really fun, party Dads, called it the "Fight Club" kitchen.

Happy Root Beer Day, "Root" as steampunk beverage

2009-12-02T02:07:00.000-05:00

Are you having a good International Root Beer Day? We are. This is Root, which imagines what root beer might have evolved into if Philadelphia pharmacist Charles Hires hadn't stripped the alcohol from it and marketed it as a temperance drink at the Centennial Exhibition. The way the story goes, colonists adopted root tea from the Indians, and fermented it a bit, making root beer. Imagine if Charles Hires had marketed his root beer to sinners and hellraisers instead of teetotalers and we might have had Root all our lives, and been the better for it, may my Methodist ancestors forgive me for saying so.

The picture above will school you in Root's ingredients, and lovely ingredients they are. I'm particularly impressed with the addition of smoky tea; that was a good choice. Having birch bark in Root is nice too, but spurs me to pedantry. Sassafras was once the chief ingredient in root beer, but is no longer, as sassafras root has been shown to cause heinous ailments over time. So if Root lacks sassafras, but contains birch, might it be regarded more accurately as a variant of birch beer than of root beer?

But let's not quibble. Instead, let's consider Root a harmonious marriage of two locally beloved beverages.

Because the makers of Root reengineered the past to produce an artifact from an alternate 19th century, I think Root qualifies as a steampunk beverage--by which I mean, it is not preexisting, like tea or phosphates or egg creams, but specifically created as the product of retrospective speculation. Is it the first?

Thaddeus Squire's glasses

2009-12-01T14:49:00.000-05:00

Yes, his name really is Thaddeus Squire and these are really his glasses. Thaddeus is the impresario behind Peregrine Arts, which produced Philadelphia's first Hidden City Festiva l last spring. Check out Hidden City's beautiful and colorful 2009 report, which still has that new report smell. Hidden City Philadelphia paired little-known but significant and sometimes crumbling historic sites with artists and performers. It was great for the sites, for the artists, for the community--and for me! Woody Allen cannot love New York and Fellini cannot love Rome as much as I love Philadelphia.

I worked for Hidden City and got to know Thaddeus and his glasses a little then. Thaddeus claims he has never bought a pair of new frames in his life, but has always worn antiques and hand-me-downs. He takes advantage of the custom fitting services at Marchese Opticians on the Main Line. Above you see two pairs from his desk drawer and one I borrowed from his cherubic face for this photo. Clockwise from the top:

1880s, nickel, purchased from a South Street antiquarian.
1960s, formerly owned by a Philadelphia philanthropist, who, according to legend, was wearing them when her caricature was drawn by the great Hirschfeld.
1920s, "three piece," i.e., just a nose and arms; purchased at a synagogue bazaar in the Bella Vista neighborhood.

Thaddeus also owns a pair from the 1790s, and a pair of 19th century "Chinese Coachman" glasses, which he says are made of shiny brass and enormous. From Thaddeus's description, the Chinese Coachman glasses sound pleasingly steampunk, but Thaddeus does not know why they are called that and neither does the internet.

Whenever I talk to Thaddeus I come away with a broader and more holistic view of the arts than I normally have in my little paddock on the fiction farm. When I showed him the book of flash fiction I'm in, he became fascinated and gave an impromptu discourse about current miniaturizing trends across disciplines and continents. Thaddeus is a far-sighted guy, a visionary; it is fitting that the glasses he sees the world through are art objects that contain narratives.

keep your head

2009-11-28T13:56:00.000-05:00

I had a terrific temporary job that ended recently. It required me to run around a carefully guarded black train car at night under black light. The job also involved zombies. When asked, my two favorite zombies were:

The Giggle Man, so called for his demented laugh of glee, which sounded like pan-pipes played by a psychotic faun.

A woman in a tattered ballgown who could menace people in English or Spanish. The Jackie O of zombies.

My role in all this mayhem was a modest one. Here are some shots from the closing party, which had an Alice in Wonderland theme (for my department).

I am the White Rabbit. See my ears? I am flanked by the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse. The Dormouse got me reading M.R. James ghost stories. Most of my pix from that night did not come out. Here we are again.

We went to Tritone after the party and when people asked told them we worked for an Alice in Wonderland themed male strip club. That is not even close to true, but funny.

Here's the watch I made for the White Rabbit:

Keep your head!

the man who forgot to rock

2009-11-24T12:49:00.000-05:00

I had become the Man who Forgot to Rock, and to remedy this situation, visited my favorite used CD shops and bought Green Day's American Idiot, and what you see above. Those are from "Long in the Tooth" on Sansom Street.

Are Green Day as despised as they were in the nineties? I like them. American Idiot is menacing and caustic, and it rocks, and it's topical without being preachy. Plus I love anything with a savor of narrative, and this seems to be a rock opera or concept album with recurring characters.

(Because I'm thrifty, and not clever or bold enough to steal music I am always late to buy stuff, waiting till I see it at the used CD shop).

Streetcore was also a good investment. I guess there is a bit of dead wood on it, like a bloated live version of A Message to You, Rudy, but All in a Day is a lot of fun and Strummer's cover of Bob Marley's Redemption Song is lovely. The album has an open, rangy, collage-like feel, which must be at least partly because other people had to finish it up after Strummer died.

What can you say about the Pogues?

I generally drift toward heady, moony music like Andrew Bird, Sufjan Stevens, and Grizzly Bear:

That's Grizzly Bear at the Electric Factory. Lovely vocals, very spooky. I've seen a ton of great concerts this year so I guess I'll be posting my year's best soon.

World Fantasy Con, dawn redwood porn

2009-11-04T14:00:00.000-05:00

Above is the bark of a dawn redwood, a tree which qualifies as a living fossil, like the coelacanth, in that it was considered extinct and only discovered in the last century by a Professor Zhan Wang--more on him later. The dawn redwoods on the campus of San Jose State, and San Jose's terrific collection of contemporary art, were two of the best parts of being in San Jose to attend the Last Drink Bird Head book release party.

For those unfamiliar with World Fantasy Con, one publisher told me it is the Frankfurt Book Fair of the genre world. This was my first--a great time to reconnect with Clarion teachers and fellow students, see people I send or might send stories to, make friends, carouse, and discover new writers. The first Outer Alliance World Fantasy Con dinner took place in the lobby bar on Friday; I hope this becomes an annual tradition.

Some new (to me) writers I heard read are Jesse Bullington and Saladin Ahmed--their readings were funny and smart--and W. H. Pugmire, who read a sonnet at midnight on Halloween that brought down the house. (The Bullington reading was his first ever, I think, which is exciting). My friend Kater Cheek read a story she wrote at our Clarion.

I have to post these signs on the doors to the vendor room, which I think are an homage to Magritte (?):

Friends have pictured Halloween at World Fantasy Con as a wild revel of costumes and disguises like the Masque of the Red Death, but almost no one dressed up--except for some steampunk fashionistas who crashed the con to serve tea and exotic 19th century snacks and show off their couture. I was more grateful for the tea than I can say.

I knew that the genre world was friendly and welcoming, but was not prepared for such extraordinary hospitality as I received at WFC. The guys who ran the con suite really took care of us and the parties were great--I consider myself a partyologist and can tell when a party is particularly well-planned.

Because I had such a nice time, this post must be very boring, so how about some more dawn redwood porn:

The ancestors of this dawn redwood were discovered in China in the 40s by Zhan Wang, a naturalist, conservationist, and inspired teacher of dendrology and forestry. Here's a quote from the pdf. I just linked to; it will give you a sense of Zhan's Indiana Jones-like panache:

The Central Forestry Experiment Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry appointed Zhan as the Forest Administrator of the newly founded Forestry Survey Department in 1943; he worked in that position until 1945. In this post, he led the first field expedition team to explore the forest resources of Shennongjia, Hubei (Hupei) Province in southwest China–known to the scientific community as a remote, dangerous and mysterious area (Liu, 1993). The trip was triggered by stories that the Shennongjia landscape may have hosted the ”Wild Man,” a legendary humanoid primate. Zhan’s report clearly rejected this hypothesis, but, meanwhile, concluded that the area is very rich in species and more complex than any other part of China. Today, this region is viewed as a "hot spot" of plant diversity.

There are dawn redwood fossils in North Dakota dating from the Miocene. To have them growing in North America again is quite a comeback. Thanks, Zhan!

(At the time of my writing this, Zhan Wang has no wikipedia! I tried all the alternate spellings. The person who writes and posts an acceptable first draft Zhan article will receive a stuffed penguin in the mail from me.)

These redwoods are the only photos I have from the con that are decent. They are a photogenic species. Hope you dig.

the spookiest place in Philadelphia

2009-10-31T20:09:00.000-04:00

Eastern State Penitentiary is a great example of good intentions gone to hell. The Quakers believed that if law breakers were given enough time in solitary they could commune with their inward light and it would heal them. Charles Dickens visited the penitentiary when he came to Philadelphia and thought the Quakers were out of their minds. He was right, of course--many of their inmates went mad. This is a rare example of the Quakers being wrong about anything. When they went wrong, wow.

I was a production assistant for an independent film that shot at cool crumbling historic sites all over Philly. The film was never released and for that we can all be grateful-- unless you admire the much-maligned nazi sluts from outer space genre.

One of the sites we shot was Eastern State. This was the first time I was inside the (intentionally) frightful fortress walls of the place.

This was before Eastern State was stabilized and opened for the public. The ghosts had the run of the place. I do not consider myself particularly sensitive to the spirit world but I have not been in any location that gave me such a terrible feeling of hopelessness and despair. It is possible that this feeling was nothing more than my febrile imagination dwelling on what I know of the history in the presence of this architecture of confinement.

Even so, I know a terrific ghost anecdote from an actor friend of mine that took place during the performance of a play at the penitentiary. One of the cast was down a corridor listening for his cue. He felt a hand slap down on his shoulder and brushed it off, thinking someone was telling him it was time for his entrance. He realized he was alone. After the play the other actors asked him why he had come on so early and thrown off the scene.

The prison is now one of the best-interpreted historic sites in the area. There's a terrific audio tour narrated by Steve Buscemi with input from some of the inmates and guards.

Here's Al Capone's cell:

And I'll leave you with one of the terrific art installations you can see when you visit. The day tour is great, and the haunted house--Terror Behind the Walls--has been rated top in the nation. Happy Halloween!

daruma for Jane

2009-10-21T10:45:00.000-04:00

A daruma is traditionally given to little boys in Japan, though increasingly there are "princess" darumas for little girls. What you see above is a bastard Western version of a daruma that I made from a Mini Munny. Look at the image on the screen below to see a bona fide daruma:

Next to it is the Mini Munny--here just a doughy homunculus awaiting an identity, which it will receive in a tickley encounter with some dry erase markers from the white board in my kitchen.

Since a daruma is just supposed to be a head only, I should have ripped the body off and thrown it away to make the daruma more accurate to itself and to the occasion of my geographic separation from my friend Jane. She is moving away--losing her is like losing a part of myself, or several parts of myself. An elbow, ear, and prostate, for example. Think how that would feel!

Mini Munny dolls come with a surprise accessory--Jane opened that and enjoyed the virgin surprise. It was glasses! Synchronicity at work!

When you get a daruma, you are supposed to color in one eye while thinking hard about a wish. When the wish comes true you color in the other eye. There are a lot of darumas out there with no depth perception. If Goonies had been made in Japan, the whiny kid who wanted his wish back would have been fiercely erasing the eye of a daruma instead of kicking coins around the bottom of a wishing well.

When you think of it, the angry, wish-kicking boy at the bottom of a well is a pretty good metaphor for our civilization. But the well would have to be an oil well, to symbolize our oily foods, oil-dependent transport, and oleaginous entertainments. I drive a car, so I am in the same metaphorical well I have placed everyone else in.

With its body and movable arms, Jane's is an action daruma. Possibly the first. Perverting one Asian tradition has whetted my appetite, so I may make a sand mandala next and affix it to the ground with spray glue. Death to impermanence!

Seriously, I hate impermanence and resist the notion that accepting it is good for me. It's healthy and natural to rage against any dying of any light. In Japan, if your wish doesn't come true, you may take your one-eyed daruma to a temple to be burned, in a ceremonial surrender of your wish. But, American for better or worse, I will not surrender my wishes without a fight--or at least a long, adamantine sulk.

I wrote "daruma" on the back of Jane's, as you can see above, so she would remember what it was--memory being our final grace against impermanence. If I were a kabbalist, the name on the daruma would animate it to do Jane's bidding--kicking down obstacles and scooping up wishes in its giant doughy arms.

rose hips and a witch in the family

2009-10-18T13:49:00.000-04:00

I had always thought of my grandfather's second wife as a kind of a morose beatnik--she wore black and got my grandfather to put on turtlenecks and grow a goatee and did up his house in a Roger Corman Spanish medieval style with huge metal lanterns and a real halberd leaning against the mantel. All that might have suggested a darkness of spirit beyond mere goth affectations but we mistook it for ambiance.

It was only after the divorce that Vera's occult interests surfaced--in the form of a curse or threatened curse on my family. It would be neat to know more details of this--what tradition did she employ--did she do it herself or hire an expert? Technically none of us believe in curses but I know more than one of my grandfather's descendants has been a little spooked by it. In this Vera chose an excellent revenge. Real or not, I am thinking of her and her curse today. It is always better to deal with negative emotions in a constructive and open way, but if Vera foresaw the way her maleficence would embed itself in my family's consciousness she was comforted. To that I say, good on you, old girl.

It was from witchy granny Vera that I learned that roses have hips. She took rose hip supplements among a host of other botanical tinctures. This morning I walked into the back garden of the house where my camerado stays when he's in the city, and saw a bobbing bough of roses and hips above my head. The rose hips looked delicious, like crab apples, so, curious, I took a bite.

And spat it out. Though the texture was pleasantly appley--a rose is an apple's cousin--I think rose hips aren't in season yet. Maybe after the frost? The one I sampled tasted like an unripe tomato; the juice was unapologetically bitter and I understood why many believe rose hips to be poison. Because they are loaded with nutrients and abundant in gardens it would be nice to learn how to prepare rose hips. I found a recipe for rose hip mead here and for rose hip jam here.

sycamores give me wood

2009-10-08T01:02:00.001-04:00

Jay Z said that being conceived under a sycamore tree made him a more sicker MC. I learned recently that sycamores themselves are sick--but not in a way that enables them to rhyme cleverly. Our native sycamores caught an exotic fungus from a Eurasian cousin; it usually doesn't kill them, but shortens their growing season. So the sycamore is always the first tree to turn in the autumn.

The aisle of sycamores above is the glory of the Ben Franklin Parkway--which was supposed to be Philadelphia's Champs Elysees but thanks to the invention of the automobile and a tragic lack of vision is mainly an expressway connecting Broad Street to Route 76. Still, it's great to walk through this grove and look at the light on the bark and listen to the wind in the leaves. It makes me feel like my approach to the library is a hallowed walkway to Parnassus.

(The misuse of the Parkway is ongoing--in addition to the parking lot on Eakin's Oval and the recent statue of a fictional boxer adored by idiots there is a another residential tower being planned--this one at the intersection of the Parkway and 22nd).

My dad is a landscaper; he told me recently that because sycamores stand taller than other species people once planted them near springs. I marveled that our ancestors would bother to leave signposts in the landscape that were useful only after their deaths. He said that when he was a boy he knew a ninety year old man who planted an orchard. Although the word virtue has been abused to death by conservatives I would identify that kind of civic-minded foresight a virtue.

More on my mania for sycamores here.

copper heart, or, the perils of cruising

2009-10-05T18:12:00.000-04:00

This Dudley Masonic watch belongs to a neighbor of mine. If you think Lucky Charms comes in cool shapes, check out the gears on this. Clockwise from the top, they're a trowel, a Bible, compasses, a square, a level, and a slipper (click on the picture to see the details better). William Wallace Dudley lived up the road in Lancaster, Pa., and started making his patented masonic watches when he was 69. Five years later he was bankrupted by the rise of the wristwatch and had to take a job with a rival manufacturer. Now his watches go for five grand; if you have that kind of change lying around I can put you in touch with the owner of this one.

The watch is to illustrate the first paragraph of my recently-published story, Copper Heart. It's my notion of a queer steampunk working class Poe, viz:

On a night when the city was flogged by rain, when spring dawned like an invader, when all of Philadelphia cowered before the onslaught of March, Lester Clay was seized by agents of the Bureau of Affectional Rectitude and taken into custody. Lester knew better than to be out after curfew, knew better than to be fishing for cod-—as he called it--given the recent spate of ordinances against public lewdness and homosexualist conduct of all flavors. But he had emerged onto Richmond Street after a double shift at the iron works cold, sweat-sodden, and spent, to behold a red haired beauty bright as a hurricane lamp in the storm, just standing on Richmond. Lester knew that if he went back to the boardinghouse he would be out in the downpour looking for the boy before twenty minutes had passed. The youth loitered in the rufescent glow of an apothecary’s doorway, and the moment Lester took a step toward him, lit off into undulating curtains of rain. Wasn’t it always the red-haired ones who could stir, not only Lester’s sex, but the sclerotic heart within him? And this one had something no other had—-a warm, mesmeric glow, as if the boy’s thick chest hid some cunningly wrought secret, investing him with an occult incandescence.

Heavens! What happens next? Something racy, I'll wager. Find out here.

permaculture at Woodford Mansion

2009-10-03T23:22:00.000-04:00

I followed the signs from West River Drive through Fairmount Park to the recycling center for free mulch. On my way back I found myself at Woodford Mansion, one of Fairmount Park's historic houses. Woodford has a collection of colonial era furniture that is unusually large and varied--worth seeing even if that's not your thing.

I had been here in the spring for a job took me to a lot of the lesser known historic sites in the area, and was excited to learn that the Philly Orchard Project had started a permaculture garden on the grounds.

Permaculture can be defined a few different ways--some very capacious, others more practical. I would describe it as a method of farming that requires minimal effort and offers maximum yield. A permaculture gardener starts her garden at her doorstep, relies on perennial plants that return unaided, and designs her home and yard so that time and climate become her servants.

When I visited Woodford in the spring, the curator told me there was a plan to expand the garden to double what had just been put in. Exciting! Here's the plant list for Phase I:

And here's the layout:

I adore the signs they've put up with some of the species. For an information fiend like me, this is dope:

I think it was in the book 1491 that I read that the reason there is such a high percentage of fruit and nut bearing trees per acre in the South American rain forest is because indigenous people cultivated their environment by selecting for those trees. My dream is to buy a property somewhere and plant a luscious food jungle all around my house. I look longingly at the many vacant lots on the north side of the city and imagine the good food that could be grown there. It's encouraging there are people in town who are excited about permaculture.

Two more pictures:

That's a gooseberry. When I was little I thought gooseberry tart was possibly the funniest phrase in the English language.

And this green feathery cloud is what asparagus becomes when you let it run riot:

i am curious steampunk

2009-10-02T09:34:00.000-04:00

I asked the photographer Nadya Lev if I could reproduce this beautiful photo here; Nadia is a progenitor of Coilhouse, which I dare not look at too often lest I lose many hours. Rather than attempt to describe the magazine I'll link you to their mission statement. I've been hanging on to Nadya's steampunk hunk for a while not sure when I should premiere him. He seemed too suave and sleek a thing for my little scrapbook.

Today's the day! Polluto's Steampunk Orange issue is now available. My story, "Copper Heart," is a queer mash-up of Clockwork Orange with Poe's "Berenice." I love the cover art for this. Obsessed with imagery here, so I get very excited when something I'm in looks pretty:

Of all the new genres that have arisen in the past few decades steampunk is the only one I've attempted to write in. I make free with old surrealist, gothic, and magical realist tropes in my writing, but when I write in the steampunk genre I become a rule-follower. More established genres seem a bit more resilient, I don't imagine that they'll be harmed if I use them roughly. A budding genre requires more delicacy.

You don't want to be the guy who slaughtered steampunk.

The definition of steampunk I rely on is the one given on Jeff VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days blog by guest blogger Catherynne M. Valente. It's given in the form of an admonition. Here's a sample:

If you’re going to go prowling for tophatted villains at night, seek out the pure stuff, the real, filthy, ugly, euphoric sludge at the bottom of a spoon, because that’s the Victorian era, that’s steam power, that’s a world shredding itself to death on the spindle of industry, hoping to wake up to a prince in a hundred years.

I'm sure my pre-Raphealite heroes would find it odd and unsettling that I'm interested in all the early-industrial imagery that so horrified them that they constructed a life and an aesthetic in opposition to it.

Maybe good steampunk is steampunk that honors and shares that horror.

moving the garden, or, look down and laugh

2009-09-30T18:36:00.000-04:00

It's been a terrifically gloomy week, perfect for being outside and moving plants.

I love it.

My friend Dwight lives over in Dunsinane; I've been transplanting my garden to his property from the Birnam Wood house as I prepare to move.

I asked if I could put them on his property and he built this fantastic ark for my plants. I'm amazed and quite moved that he would go to so much trouble.

Taking down the clematis vine has always been a rite of autumn. This is the last time I'll take it down at the Birnam Wood house!

I have a good friend who writes a gardening blog in the DC area, and I can tell you a funny secret about her. When she was little she pronounced clematis "clitoris."

That's lamb's ear, lavender, sage, and something I can't identify, ready for the ride to Dwight's.

I planted most of the garden, my mother planted some, my father planted others. Some are gifts from friends. The one on top in the picture below was planted by my mother and I don't know what it is.

Is it baby's breath? One plant that I've been most concerned about is this miniature rosebush, given by a close friend of the family:

The woman who gave us this helped tend my mom in her illnesses, often staying at the house late into the night.

Insert your favorite quote from The Little Prince here:

__________________________________________________________________

I have a neighbor I love, a fierce old liberal with a Willie Nelson style hippie look. He calls me babe. My own grandfathers were austere and stern so it feels like some glorious luxury to have this sweet old radical nearby.

I planted the periwinkle vine above because I'm obsessed with the color blue, but I told my neighbor I regretted it. One day when we're dead the people who live here will curse us for letting this vine run rampant over the hillside, I told him.

Then I'll look down and laugh, he said.

Last Drink Bird Head, of course!

2009-09-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

Birds have been a fraught subject in my family. We are all birders, yet our history with these animals is littered with tragic or embarrassing episodes. My father backed his truck over our duck, Jesus, and his own pet crow was shot off a fencepost by a random stranger in a pick-up. My grandmother kept a deceased parrot in the freezer for years, meaning to have it stuffed; my grandfather accidentally shredded his beloved pet rooster with his tractor.

A thin, cold, sardonic man, Pop-pop expressed more emotion over Diego's death than any of us had seen from him in a lifetime.

In my life as an environmental educator, I have been bitten by all the species mentioned above, as well as by a barred owl and a vulture (though in both cases I was wearing a leather glove).

It is my hope that having a story in the Last Drink Bird Head anthology will inaugurate a new era of forgiveness and understanding between my kin and class Aves.

The original idea for this anthology came from a mildly disturbing piece of surrealist art done by a friend of the editor, Jeff VanderMeer. Jeff wrote the first Last Drink Bird Head story, then decided that more Last Drink Bird Head stories must be written. The assignment, which I received by email from Jeff, a teacher of mine at Clarion, was to write a story about Last Drink Bird Head in under 500 words.

You know. Last Drink Bird Head.

There are a number of reasons why this anthology rocks. Here are a few:

Writers I love, like Matthew Cheney, Jeffrey Ford, Ellen Kushner, Caleb Wilson, Desirina Boskovich, Kari O'Connor, and Ramsey Shehadeh are represented here.

The design is by John Coulthart, whose blog, feuilleton, is one of my favorites.

The proceeds go to ProLiteracy.

The world needs more surrealism.

Last Drink Bird Head is available here. My story is "The Accomplished Birder's Guide to Overcoming Rejection."

Longhouse

2009-09-19T14:36:00.001-04:00

This is the longhouse I stayed in on Vancouver Island. Just uploaded this from Flickr for the sole purpose of testing the size of photos I can get from that site, vs. what I get from my hard drive.

The other men in the longhouse snored so ferociously that one night I became convinced a bear had entered. Vancouver Island is possibly the most beautiful place I've ever been. Eagles are as plentiful there as the pigeons I share the city with.

the greatest black cherry soda?

2008-07-14T14:57:00.000-04:00

I love obscure sodas from small companies. Black cherry soda was a special treat in my family.
Recently, I did a study to find the best black cherry soda. To qualify, it had to be from a small company, bottled in glass, contain real cherry, and taste good.

I also gave special preference to local companies. You see the winner above, Boylan's black cherry soda, with one of its buddies, Boylan's seltzer. Boylan's is bottled in New Jersey.

Mika - Love Today - live at Coachella 2007 (okeastron)

2008-05-01T22:20:00.001-04:00

I discovered Mika by listening to the London Times Sounds podcast, which may be a good way to learn about new music--though it isn't interesting at all if you already know the artist. Pete Pahides is a terrible interviewer. I suspect that's the point, though-- the Times Sounds Podcast is really a sort of postmodern, Colbert Report style joke on fatuous interviewers...

Anyway, I love this song by Mika.

obama

2008-02-03T23:31:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm officially obsessed.

I promised myself I wouldn't check his poll numbers this weekend.

But I failed.

DREAM OPERATOR

2007-11-18T02:30:00.001-05:00

David Byrne's 1986 film True Stories is absurd and satirical-- but there's more to it than that. It's sad and haunting too-- and genuinely fond of its subjects.

In this scene, a woman-- Kay Culver-- sings a song to accompany a fashion show. She has petrified hair and Fox News makeup, and wears a prim Nancy Reagan dress that is way too old for her. Still, she can carry a tune, and her voice is sweet. Her song, Dream Operator has a catchy melody; the lyrics are pretty-- if in a candied, Thomas Kinkade kind of way. "Shopping is a feeling," Kay says rapturously. Later she sings "Let the children do the shopping." Kay's song builds to a climax that is both grandiose and authentically grand.

When I drive through landscapes of strip malls and McMansions, I find these places artificial and horrific. But there's a stark, surreal beauty to them too-- and to the people who live there, those places are home sweet home; the Culvers are entitled to no less. If ecosystems must be spoiled to green their lawns, animals tortured to fill their refrigerators, and soldiers killed to keep them free, they can accept and even defend that.

Why shouldn't the Kay Culvers of this world have their dreams? It's likely too difficult for them to face the fact that their lives are wasteful and destructive-- unfair to expect them to concede that animals and the poor pay the price for their luxuries. A revolutionary hates all Culvers, and doesn't mind killing them-- but a reformer has to find a way to talk to them-- and a saint or an artist must love them. The artist's task is hard, but the saint's is harder. It's easier to love in fiction. With no pretensions to sainthood, I can love Kay Culver from afar.

2007-10-08T12:10:00.000-04:00

From The Way of Ignorance (2004) by Wendell Berry:

I have no large solution to offer. There is, as maybe we all have noticed, a conspicuous shortage of large-scale corrections for problems that have large-scale causes. Our damages to watersheds and ecosystems will have to be corrected one farm, one forest, one acre at a time. The aftermath of a bombing has to be dealt with one corpse, one wound at a time. And so the first temptation to avoid is the call for some sort of revolution. To imagine that destructive power might be made harmless by gathering enough power to destroy it is of course perfectly futile. William Butler Yeats said as much in his poem “The Great Day”:

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

Arrogance cannot be cured by greater arrogance, or ignorance by greater ignorance. To counter the ignorant use of knowledge and power we have, I am afraid, only a proper humility, and this is laughable. But it is only partly laughable. In his political pastoral “Build Soil,” as if responding to Yeats, Robert Frost has one of his rustics say,

I bid you to a one-man revolution—
The only revolution that is coming.

early autumn Sunday morning in Philadelphia

2007-09-23T15:54:00.000-04:00

It was about a year ago this weekend Jane and I took a little road trip out to Germantown, to attend the service at Germantown Mennonite. I go a couple times a year.

I walked through Center City to find my car, and photographed the alley above.

We got to Germantown and saw these great flowers:

I am crazy about the color blue so these flowers really got me going.

The Mennonites do all a-capella singing in four part harmony. There is no choir. Germantown Mennonite meets in an old Meetinghouse with a wood floor, so the sound is great. Beautiful but also plain and authentic.

After church Jane and I went to Mugshots, a cafe in Manayunk. The sky over Manayunk was really blue.

It was a good day for blue.

I wore my Uncle Albert's mohair jacket. It has so much personality. Like it spent so much time hanging around with my uncle it picked up some of his humor and style. Here it is in the cafe:

I love this time of year, when you can feel summer losing its grip, and fall coming in.

Thomas Merton on the US: missing our great chance

2007-09-23T15:44:00.000-04:00

I have a book of excerpts from Thomas Merton's journals. Today I found this riff on the United States, including a great, horrible metaphor. The passage is as apt today as it was when Merton wrote it, sadly.

I fear the ignorance and power of the United States. And the fact that it has suddenly become one of the most decadent societies on the face of the earth. The body of a great, dead, candied child. Yet not dead: full of immense, uncontrolled power. Crazy.

If somebody doesn’t understand the United States pretty soon—and communicate some of that understanding to the United States—the results will be terrible. It is no accident that the United States endowed the world with the Bomb.

The mixture of immaturity, size, apparent indulgence and depravity, with occasional spasms of guilt, power, self-hate, pugnacity, lapsing into wildness and then apathy, hopped-up and wild-eyed, inarticulate and wanting to be popular. You need a doctor, Uncle!

The exasperation of the other nations of the world who know the United States thinks them jealous—for what they don’t want and yet fascinates them. Exasperation that such fools should momentarily be kings of the world. Exasperation at them for missing their great chance—this everyone finds unforgivable, including America itself.

Blade Runner mortals at Comic Con

2007-09-16T14:33:00.001-04:00

Android alert, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

One of the wonders of my San Diego adventure this summer was attending Comic Con, the biggest comic book and sci-fi/fantasy convention in the world. The SD convention center had booths with amazing rare books, and I met two of my favorite comic artists, Joe Phillips and Mike Mignola. I think I saw Brian Froud but was too awed to approach him.

My camera was broken so the Comic Con photos you see in this post and the two that follow are from Flickr!, which offers multifarious points of view not controlled by big media. I love Flickr! It feeds my image addiction without enslaving me to consumerism.

The crowd of Blade Runner fans above was possibly the most miraculous thing I saw at Comic Con. Like the film they idolize, these fans stand at the nexus of hipness and nerddom. They are obsessed and geeky, yet magnetic and beautiful. Blade Runner is such a lovely film, it has the power to unite subcultures.

The Blade Runners at the Con were three times as numerous as the group you see in the photo. I was coming down the escalator when I saw them, assembled to honor the 25th anniversary of the film. The men were genuinely handsome, and the women were beautiful. I looked and looked, astonished that so many of them lived up to my expectation of what the perfect android characters of the film should be.

Unlike Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, Darryl Hannah, and Joanna Cassidy-- forever preserved in cinema-- these mortal fans will change. Few will remember the glamor they gave off as they stood at the base of the escalator in the San Diego convention center. This thought satisfied my taste for the elegiac, and gave me a pleasing melancholy buzz as I walked past them.

Kater's notebooks

2007-09-09T21:29:00.001-04:00

Kater Cheek is a writer I was at Clarion with. At critiques, I started noticing Kater drawing in her notebook. Then I noticed that her drawings were really good. I especially liked some images of crows in flight she was doing one day.

It turns out that in addition to being a very skillful writer, Kater has an unstoppable ambition to master every conceivable medium in the visual arts. She has a really cool website where she shows her creations.

The more I got to know Kater, the more interesting things I learned about her. She has written a ton of books, and she can build habitable buildings from bread. She is married to a Morris Dancer. Here is what she said when I asked if I could post images of her journals:

Glad you like the art journal. There are actually two. My sister and I have been working on them for over a year now, we take turns doing stuff in each other’s books.

On her website, Kater explains more about the journal pages:

I used copies of the notes I took at Clarion for the background, and the brown paper are tea-stained scraps of two short stories I wrote.

The title of the piece is Rewriting: An Armful of Tomatoes. My analogy is that carrying an armful of tomatoes is like trying to write a good second draft; how do you get more without losing what you’ve got?

The fox is drawn in colored pencil. Why a fox? I like foxes, and they’re easy to draw.

This is another page from Kater's journal. On the right is her self-portrait as the Wicked Queen from Snow White. At Clarion, Kater and I became known as dark lords of deadpan and black humor. This pleased me, but of course, I savor approbation of any kind.

One of the inspiring things about Clarion was getting to know some creative people, people who not only make cool art, but live in novel and creative ways.

Madeline L’Engle

2007-09-08T22:22:00.000-04:00

Madeline L’Engle has always been there for me. Her space/time fantasies, her memoirs, and her book on faith and art—these have been resources for me throughout my life. If I decide to be a Christian of any kind, she is the sort I would want to be. She was frank about her doubts and frustrations, and even in old age spared no fire for what she called the “fundalets.”

I got to meet her once. I waited in a line, and by the time I got to the front she looked really tired. Last week I was organizing some stuff and came across a 3” by 5” card of the notes I took from her talk.

The first thing on my card is the maxim she branded onto my mind that day. “We owe our readers the best book we can possibly write.” Maybe it’s self-evident. L’Engle’s son-in-law once remarked that she tended to state the obvious as if it were a profound insight. But sometimes the obvious must be stated. (Rebecca West said “The tragedy of man is that he cannot learn complex truths, and forgets simple ones.”)

According to my 3” by 5” card, L’Engle also said:

“Fairy tale is the blueprint of the human soul.”

“Anthropomorphism helps us to know ourselves.”

“Intellect and intuition must work together.”

“Stay a child forever and grow up.”

And, she criticized “people who think truth and fact are the same thing,” saying:

“Truth can transcend fact."

L’Engle understood understood how to live a good life, and how to create community for herself. She understood that relationships are horribly difficult but worth it. She understood that science and faith are not naturally at war, until we force them to be. These things I grasp. But there are things L’Engle understood about God that I am not able to grasp—things that my mentor, Obi-Wan-- the gay Christian sage who has done so much for me—also understands. I don’t know how to resolve faith and doubt, how to allow God to be mysterious. I am determined to square the divine with reason, and if I can’t, I don’t think I can have God at all. I’d like to be a mystic, but I am still a modern.

Because my dialog with Madeline L’Engle is open ended, I don’t feel as though she's lost to me. Our conversation isn’t finished.

two are better than one

2007-09-02T00:20:00.002-04:00

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work:
If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up!
Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone?
Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves.
A cord of three strands is not easily broken.

Ecclesiastes 4 v 9-12

I had thought all of that was original to Solomon, or whoever wrote Ecclesiastes-- that most existential of all bible books. I was surprised while reading Gilgamesh, to come upon these fragments in the context of the love of Gilgamesh and Enkidu:

A slippery path is not feared by two people who help each other.
A three-ply rope cannot be cut.

The Babylonian epic Gilgamesh predates Ecclesiastes. It is interesting to think of these germs of wisdom being passed around the ancient world, from one culture to the next-- more interesting than mistaking ancient clichés for the unique wisdom of God...

Ancient idiom or divine utterance, it doesn't matter. Phrases like this endure because we live the truth in them.

Trent Reznor, The Perfect Drug

2007-09-01T21:16:00.001-04:00

My favorite video, for now. If you don't know already, it will be fun to guess what beloved book illustrator this video cribs imagery from.