neat:
25 Pieces of Awesome Literary Street Art
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Found some old summer photos. This is a picture of me and the person I spend a good deal of time with at the kitchen table. We’ve solved most of the world’s problems with meandering conversation and caffeinated beverages. Sometimes wine is involved. We try to do what David F Wallace says better: “The real important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
I realize I’m a touch late to see this—it was named Best Blog by the Village Voice in 2010—but this is a cool project. Writer girl made a list of 100 people she had never met and proceeded to interview each one. She writes these honest little sketches that unveil usually unseen worlds. Like she’s some 21st century explorer. It’s one of those ideas that makes you wish you’d thought of it first. Enjoy!
Pitchin’ from Bobst
The beginning of a miserable pitch I wrote, in which I failed to pitch anything except some weird and ethereal idea. What is it about? Who cares? Can it sink its neon talons into a news hook and ride to the sky?
“What turns my crank about cycling?”
“Feeling self-sufficient and empowered. I am my own g**d*** engine!”
—from Grease Rag Ride & Wretch, a women, trans, and femme Minneapolis-based bike collective
When I wrote grants for Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I saw a lot of handmade bikes. Well, handmade isn’t quite the word. They were more like re-tooled, welded, spray-painted black contraptions. Kids in pageboy caps and hoodies rode to our ten-minute play festival or indie rock opera on double-frame, big-wheel, or otherwise remastered, fixed-gear bikes, looking like shoddy neo-Victorian circus performers.
It fit, because Bedlam was founded in 1996 by three theater artists who had, after 11 years performing in a crumbly storefront around the corner, leased a massive space, formerly a Mexican restaurant, that enabled them to create exactly the kind of art to attract your average, 20-something, neo-Victorian tramp.
Despite my direct involvement with the theater, and probably because of my maroon-hued, back-length, plastic hair extensions, the bike people and I were not friends. They slunk in the side door, twenty minutes late to that night’s play, pulling cans of cheap beer from their messenger bags. I watched them from the ticket counter, which doubled as a bar, or from the arm of the 35-year-old brother of the co-director’s brother, who also was not my friend.
He took me out but disliked my age, 19, which made him feel awkward about ordering alcohol at a restaurant. I felt the neo-Victorians took issue with my extensions. I bought them with a meager tax rebate to mask a hideous haircut.
It had been shorn into a stylish pixie, and then grew unevenly, starting with the sideburns and nape, into a Davy Crockett cap. Really, a mullet. Unruly pieces poked from beneath the plastic like crab grass. The whole ensemble was encumbered further by an inch-long fringe, whose length I severed with dull kitchen sheers in the dim light of my attic apartment.
No, it was neither of those things. It was symbol of the act: an attempt to mask a beauty foul. In other words, I was acting my femininity. And blushing flowers, the neo-Victorians were not. Even the females emitted a certain aggressive, frozen pizza and pissing contests, male aroma. They’d have doused their heads in Manic Panic, waited for it to turn Electric Flamingo pink, teased in a wad of pomade, and called it a day.
But I, with the shy-thing, the old guy-thing, and the hair hat-thing, was not so bold, and therefore, watched from afar.
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Scott Carrier is a narrative master. If I could, I’d hook his stories into an IV and let them drip into my veins. I’d boil them with some baking soda, as Bartender Ben told me how he did. My reaction to that detail was physical. Something like retching. Yes, I remember. I recoiled. Ran out the door.
Carrier’s narratives though. Here’s what you do. Stick em on a spoon. Hollow a piece of aluminum. Put a flame over the substance. Inhale the vapor. Let them infect you. And instead of blight-addiction-poison, you’ll be totally purified. Enlightened. New.
The last stanza of Prisoner of Zion made me think of the poem “May I Feel” by e. e. cummings:
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she
His version (which is of course deepened by context) goes like this:
A master stood at the edge of a cliff.
“Jump,” the master said.
“But I’ll fall,” said the student.
“Jump,” the master said.
So the student jumped.
And he flew.
Sometimes I miss Ukraine. This photo is case-in-point. Funny pictures with goofy kids who zip themselves into suitcases. I just got an email from my former neighbors. It was filled with pictures. The kids are growing up and I’m missing everything. But maybe that’s the point. As I wrote in a letter yesterday, “You share this moment or series of encounters and then it’s gone. It’ll never be the same. But conversely, that’s what gave it power and meaning in the first place.” Maybe it’s travel. Maybe it’s life. Maybe I’ve finally aged enough to have perspective. Time to spit out, as my man T.S. Eliot says, “the butt-ends of my days and ways.” Maybe it’s that.
Check out this link to read things like: “Looks like he was dipped in glue and pushed around a barbershop floor.” Ha ha ha. Online dating profiles are funny. So are the N+1 interns. Witty little buggers.
…distractable…
This cracked me up. It’s a teacher talking about his kids. Resonates with me as I click at the interwebs for something to explore in person.
“I’m a bit surprised…by the number of students who readily identify themselves as “attention deficit.” If such a disorder exists, as I’m inclined to think it does, I’m glad there are medicines to treat it, although hearing someone say “I’ve got ADD” in a culture of such vast distractedness is a bit like having a fellow passenger on an ocean liner tell you that she feels afloat. Who doesn’t?”
On my Minnesotan escape:
#1. Dad and I went on a 27-mile bike ride. It was on a restored railroad tressel that overlooked a bunch of nature. It took us 90 minutes. Forty minutes in, my calves hollered. “Give us a break!”
But I didn’t. A little while later they forgot their bellyaching and found their rhythm and felt like they could cycle for days. It was the first time I’d experienced runner’s high.
Well, not the first-first. The first-first time was last April in a cheap hot yoga studio in Brooklyn. The walls were cedar, the temperature over 100, and the instructor, a sadist. She forbade us from wiping our sweat. It dripped into our eyes.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” she hissed, pacing her insect-thin body around the room. She looked like one of those string-swallowing, compulsive meditating types.
“You don’t look like you’re enjoying the pose. Do it again! How hard can it be?”
Afterwards I stumbled out of the studio, cross-eyed and wobbly, suddenly noticing the budding trees. They fairly buzzed like neon signs. I felt like a teenager stoner. Give me a pack of male pals and a pizza-reeking concert tee, and I’d have fit right in. An hour later, after devouring a pile of eggs and spiced tofu, I could’ve done ten more downward dogs.
The bike ride high was less delusional—thanks to hydration—but similarly powerful. It reminded me of climbing Mount Hoverla, whose descent was littered with broken vodka bottles.
