not kabuki

This was very arrogant. I once walked into Liminal gallery in Oakland and saw Gnarnia and spit Jaegermeister in his face. I sat down and was offered truffles and filled glasses and listened to a snake-eyed man talk about his fortunes in flea marketing. He pulled out a block of hash that looked like tea and ink. A 20-year-old girl whispered in my ear for a half an hour, “Please kiss me, please kiss me. Come on, let’s just kiss,” but I would not give in to her. “Why won’t you kiss me?” she asked after a half hour of coaxing and I walked away to the bathroom. Even after an hour, she smiled and was not discouraged, just gently persistent. Gnarnia laughed at me because I became so flustered and uncomfortable about her effortless flirting stamina that I put my palms to my temples and asked her to stop, but I didn’t leave. “I’m sorry, I have to leave, you’re driving me crazy,” I finally said, not giving a kiss and barely touching her on her arm. She returned the touch on my arm with warmth and an availability that was not nervous or needy, just wicked and fun. This girl had hungry eyes. As cumbersome and uncomfortable as teenage passion antics are, they are so much closer to the essence of what art and life need to be: exuberantly vulnerable, available, magical, fresh.
About a week later, I was at Lobot on Oakland to see Sunn and Wolf Eyes and Jackie and Nate and I hid in a crotch of the elaborate wooden labryinth they had perilously built in the center of the space. I used my scarf to make a canopy and we drifted away while Sunn played so powerfully loud that it massaged my organs. You could not speak because the vibrations were seismic and we started talking with our hands, not in finger sentences, just absurd movement. Index finger to palm, fist to fist, wrist to forehead. When Wolf Eyes played I got so excited that I got tangled in the rope spiderweb basketing the band and some man whispered in my ear, “Climb the spiderweb!” but I could easily ignore that.
It’s nice to mine for jewels in mind memory corridors. Vholtz, an improv bruise and beer band I played in with Rob, Randy Lee, George Chen and Nick, played one night at Grandma’s House in a pitch that was just cardiac arrest-inspiring. The whole show put me in a buggy of hallucination, especially when Rob and I were creepy crawling around and making weird magics. I stopped playing with Vholtz about 15 minutes into our set because I was sweating turpentine and some pornographer was creeping on me when I was performing. So I went up to the balcony of Grandma’s and watched the rest of the band finish the set, astonished that I had just been a part of that strobe-lit cave romp. It was just insane, “Too much heat!” the Chinese doctor would scold. Then after the show ended everybody went upstairs for a dance party and I ended up doing improv in the empty room with a couple of people, singing out kinks and just being very natural and speaking in tounges. I remember thinking, “This is so surreal, so good, this will never be recorded and I will never remember this.” But that’s what an online journal is for, and if I hadn’t just written this, I would have never remembered the 20-minute conversation I had with Randy Lee about Japanese dance or when Rob and Joanne wrestled with a wheelchair at 4 am. The End.