Author (#23)May 2007 Archives

The silhouettes are blurring and it's now evening. The city is illuminated in the distance. No matter the turmoil, there is always a beautiful pudding on the horizon at sunset here, now it is a simmered bruise in the past going into the future.

As the sun set, I was dancing in front of my windows to the Secret Museum of the Air's Bali program. Now I have a thimble of wine from Chile and I put on a dress to be by myself. I have a new home and it's a celebration, there are 9 windows here and my quilt is on the wall. It warmed me from Norway to Michoacan this year. It's tattered and delicate. It makes me remember.

I wrapped in it and walked into a corner store in Brussels, a little more than a year ago. I was arrested in Norway a year ago. I was in jail a whole day. I did not have my blanket and it was so cold and rainy. One jailer offered me a blanket and I indignantly refused, and I shivered and shivered until I asked for another. The mean lady cop said, "This is not a hotel!" and gave me a styrofoam container of canned corn and milk. A pregnant cop squatted in my cell and made me sign something I did not understand, and it gave me hours more of trouble. They said I would go to prison camp and then flown home and banned from Europe. Finally after a flood of tears and fear, a man I never met before negotiated my release, and Karl's too. Strangers drove me to the venue, and Karl was released and there, and we were on stage in minutes.

I have made music recently. It sounds like a whisper from far away, under a shell in the ocean, picked up by the ear of an insect and then through a brass bell speaker and amplified through the cracks of Mount Kinness and pushed into the roots of a special mountaintop flower that calls for the lost bees with the mouth in its bud, that's where Inca Ore is coming from.

I have let the spirit that makes my music exist a little farther from me lately. I am cultivating it always, and it is like a fruit tree, it is heavy from my nuturing and the roots bother my feet and the branches nudge at my inner ears, the fruits threaten to fall off and rot. I begin to harvest them and make music and arrange these letters into words. Sometimes it takes a whole day just to juice the fruit a little, sometimes I have to have my oats and run in the streets and search for treasures and then read and then eat again and then stretch and then dance and then admire the darkening sky with my cultivated sensitivity, and then finally I can create.

I was away for days. I went into a car and drove to the Palm Desert. Along the way I met the gentlest policewoman, and I saw dolphins jump at Carpenteria, and the men and women picking the strawberries, and finally I was there, at Coachella, to serve 60,000 people beer. I worked 15 hour days and slept in a tent in the desert. There were no bathrooms near the employee camping and we pissed near the site next to a bizarre desert lagoon. We were camped in between the VIP sushi staff and the security guards and police. One night at dawn I woke and had to piss, and I made my way to the lagoon, darting coma-drunk security guards lurking in between cars. One had a tattoo on his belly that said FUCK A BITCH. I got so mad about baring my ass at that imprivate morning moment that I threw my period pad on the ground. Then I felt guilty for a day thinking of the Mexican man or woman who would have to pick it up.

I got to use the VIP bathrooms while I worked. Bathrooms were very important at this event, because they were shared by so many drunk people, and the many hours of work and sweat made the need more urgent. Bathrooms were the ultimate sign of status.

I did not deal with the people very much as a bartender, instead I was assigned to count tips. My coworkers served thousands of beers with 30 other people. I was hunched over thousands and thousands of dollar bills and counting, hiding under a refrigerated semi truck until VIP sewage started to back up into the grass there.

The VIP bathrooms were deluxe, air conditioned and with soap and long lines into the night. Everybody was on coke, grating their jaws and flaunting bulimia with wan eyes.

Women turned their backs to me in the bathroom line when I said I was working there, opening their mouths to expose their drying teeth. I focused on the Mexican women in those moments, scurrying around and cleaning the bathrooms while the porn starlets and celebrity companions pouted and posed in the mirror. I had a moment's break when Bjork played and I felt such ecstacy, tears even. The festival was a carnival of castrated, impotent feminity, bullied and flattened into a pellet of dubious sexiness, and Bjork was so real. She shimmied and grunted and danced with no sexual innuendo.

And Bjork is a mother too!
And a communicator of new shapes of humanity, a believer in the imagination's future!
A warm woman life raft who wants to float us away from the insincere schemes of deriviative and nostaligic music!
A painted bird that has ornamental shields in her feathers that eternally deflect the kidney stones of haters!

I don't like all of her music, but I like her so much that I like it, I have to like it. It was a beautiful rescue from that bleak crisis: am I a woman, am I a musician, by these definitions, I am not. In that VIP place, it seemed like Sex and the City was the most relevant feminine moment of our generation. It seemed like music was just a function of the sexiness stratas. I did not feel like a musician or a woman then, I felt like a drone in an alien land, a creature with a head like a broken sunflower who would be one of the few survivors when Bjork flooded the VIP with a tsunami of breast milk and made the women make the impossible suicidal decision between saving their own lives or the integrity of their handbags as the milk rose.

The last day of the festival I saw Konono No. 1, and I ran through the crowd screaming until I was in the front row for Konono and then I just yelled YAY! over and over until my 15 minute break was up and I ran back screaming and laughing and began counting again.

Now Coachella is all over, the fake grass is yellowed and flattened after the impact of 60,000 people. Again I imagine the Mexican people, doing the dirty work as usual, cleaning that abnormal and wicked desert oasis. Picking up 10 billion water bottles and my period pad and scrubbing the flooded awful bathrooms. I remembered seeing the Mexicans in the fields on the drive down to the Palm Desert. Every strawberry we eat is at one time in a Mexican man, woman or child's thumb and forefinger. I remembered the women cleaning the bathrooms, acting as the servants of the world's most unforgiving women, who are eternally starved, cranky and freakishly preoccupied with food. The morning after I arrived home from Coachella, I was thinking about the majesty of Mexico, and the people who leave Mexico to scrub the surfaces and wash the windows of unattainable structures.

Then I heard people, lots of people, they were coming closer. I climbed onto my roof and watched a 2-mile long line of people marching on International Boulevard for May Day, and for amnesty for illegal immigrants. It made me so happy, the sun polished the entire hour, and I talked to my mother and father and my lover brought me strawberries and I laid on the floor and pondered the same old things: the perverse beauty of the climax of everything, the sour waiting breath of the dragons of tradgedy, the daily death and recuscitation of all things meaningful, my proud poverty, the inner fruit tree of my artistry growing, it needs a pruning, it's nudging my fingers to unlock and deliver the words.

I am very grateful for what I have.
I am so happy for the library!
I have a purring copper heater in my room that is trusty!
My houseplants are green and healthy!
Meghan calls, and we talk and it makes me very happy!
Michael's laughs a lot and goes under the bridge and plays drums!
I dance all alone and am much less serious than when I was 8 years old!
Maybe we will babysit Gregory!
I will never be invited to play Coachella!
The Norweigans let me out of jail!
BLESS ME!
Ginger tea, the BART train, pine incense, books and music, good friends, my pots and pans, my bathroom and bathtub, my yellow teeth and cavities!
Bless me!