Ten days after the earthquake and six days after the aftershocks, she discovers it’s gone. She looks everywhere: the linen closet, the old bureau, below the kitchen sink, all the likely places. And then she thinks of the books that had fallen from the living shelf, the piles she made of them, and spends a fruitless afternoon opening and closing each one in search for it. In her despair, she searches the attic that no one atticks in, the new damage from the rumble of the ground: crevices that blossomed in the brick path, the uncertain slant of the driveway, an exposed tree root, a surprised roof shingle. The more she searches the less she remembers until she is only searching and the thing, whatever it was, is just a thing that she can’t find. And the search becomes its own search. This is ten days after the earthquake, six days after the aftershocks.
book business.
June 30, 2009Kafka is the shit:
“Absent-minded Window-gazing,” as translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
What are we to do with these spring days that are now fast coming on? Early this morning the sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against the latch of the casement.
The sun is already setting, but down below you see it lighting up the face of the little girl who strolls along looking about her, and at the same time you see her eclipsed by the shadow of the man behind overtaking her.
And then the man has passed by and the little girl’s face is quite bright.
another michael jackson post.
June 28, 2009N0te: This is my first and last post on Michael Jackson. I know the blog world is flooded with Jackson tributes and exposes. I’m writing to sort out some feelings and ideas. I’m nobody in all this, yall.
Strange discoveries occur on the 405 freeway. I was driving towards the Sepulveda Pass, trying to escape a strangely lethargic early afternoon traffic jam, the shimmer of LA shimmering. And KROQ on the radio. And listening to some old Nirvana song. And then the monotone of the DJ saying something that included “Michael Jackson” and “dead.” And the DJ saying, “huh.” Speechless. And me flipping the dial to find more music, a full seven seconds delayed before I registered the pieces I’d heard. Michael Jackson. Dead.
Huh?
Wasn’t I just listening to a really awful Kevin and Bean bit that made fun of Michael Jackson’s new workout program with Lou Ferrigno on the self-same KROQ corporate radio that now seemed to have no way of expressing sympathy except with “huh?”
Huh?
I tell you I didn’t believe it. I twiddled between radio stations, gleaning information as I drove. Michael Jackson is dead. He had a heart-attack. He’s in a coma at UCLA medical. It’s a hoax. It’s the truth. I wasn’t far from UCLA and could see the helicopters from my car — and then later, I could see the helicopters hovering over Holmby Hills as well as the Jackson estate in Encino with its simple black gate that I used to ogle as a child, whenever I was driven past. Maybe this explained the traffic jam. Maybe everyone in LA was milling around the Westside trying to figure out what happened. I’m telling you this because that is the primary emotion I associate with this whole event: shock.
I’m not sure what the true origin of this shock is. The suddenness, perhaps. Or maybe the extraordinary coincidence of Farrah Fawcett’s death earlier the same day. Or maybe because it was that Jackson was relatively young and had just been planning his comeback tour and had seemed to be a glimmer in our celebrity world again, cropping up in the corner, a comeback — again, a comeback — for the King of Pop. Or maybe it was that thing that celebrity does to you, makes you think you know these perfect strangers because they’ve appeared enough on your television screen, and you are tricked into believing that the grief is personal. Or maybe it’s because Jackson is one of the three pop icons of my childhood — standing between Madonna and Prince — and now he’s dead, and it’s like my childhood is dead, and who will die now?
These are all my shocks, you see.
Of course, I was a fan of Jackson’s music, especially his earlier stuff. I had all his albums and listened to Thriller until I wore out the tape, and I owned Bad on vinyl, man, and that vinyl was clear — the coolest album I’d ever seen. I tried to moonwalk with my friends. My dance recitals featured awkward gyrations to “The Way You Make Me Feel.” My aunt and I used to bop around in her funky-cool house way before she had kids, lip-synching “P.Y.T.” to the dog. I saw Captain EO in 3-D at Disneyland — twice. The first music videos I remember enjoying, way before I became a grungy, angsty preteen during the heyday of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, were Jackson videos, especially that epic of a video for “Smooth Criminal,” with its lyrics I couldn’t quite understand (who was Annie, and why wouldn’t she be OK?). Then later as I grew up and developed as a musician, I returned to his music as examples of truly innovative musicianship — Jesus, it was only two years ago that I mastered the bass line of “Billie Jean,” easily one of the funkiest bass lines in the history of bass lines. Plus I grew up in Los Angeles and can remember — dimly — when Michael Jackson lived here and his appearances closed down city streets and his house in Encino was on my daily ride home and I had my first experiences of celebrity as an Angelena: celebrity being omnipresent and functional, the gears of the city’s industry, and weird, too, because Michael Jackson was a figure more than he was a person to me. How could he live anywhere, especially behind that gate?
I guess that’s it. Michael Jackson was for me, and I’m guessing for my entire generation, my first celebrity. The celebrity, when you think about it. The one we recognized on tabloid covers at the grocery store that our mothers wouldn’t let us read, the one who made music and was also on television, the fashion icon, the dancer, the enigma with his ever-changing image and his shrinking nose and his jheri curls. And his Neverland Ranch and his high voice and the strangeness of him that seemed to invite instead of repel. When I say I’ve never lived in a world with Michael Jackson, it means that I’ve never lived in a world in which it wasn’t OK to have the authority to examine and dissect the private lives of public figures. Michael Jackson’s celebrity meant that he was ours, he belonged to us, and the ever-escalating pressure of that, his comebacks and his surgeries and whatever else, was ours to wield. We made Michael Jackson’s celebrity. His celebrity is a sort of modern Frankenstein, the product of our corrupted belief that if a figure is public then we have the right to examine every part of that figure’s life as if the figure is ours, a plaything, an object. Jackson’s celebrity kept giving us exactly what we wanted: sensation. Without it, could there be Brangelinas? Could there be Lindsay Lohans and Jon and Kate Gosselins? Could there even be Susan Boyles?
I don’t mean this as an indictment of Jackson’s life. He was an amazing pop star with a clearly troubled personal life. I don’t think that the criminal allegations against him take away from his brilliance as a musician and a performer — I don’t think one has anything to do with the other, in fact. And that’s the whole point. All this weekend, I’ve had conversations with people that fall into one of two categories. Either people are playing his records and singing his songs and bristling at any mention of his personal life, or people are wondering out loud why we should honor someone who has been twice accused of child molestation and who was, for lack of a better term, weird — the worst crime of all. I don’t want to fall into either category. I’m in shock. My primary emotion is not sympathy or indifference but guilt: I feel the way I felt when Princess Di was killed, as if in some secret, oblique way, I am responsible for the demise of the man or at least of the phenomenon that he was.
I don’t think I’m going anywhere with this. That was my Michael Jackson post. I hope he rests in peace though the media circus that has already erupted from his death suggests that at the very least, his celebrity won’t.
camera obscura.
June 16, 2009I have these deep down urges to drive far distances.
Today: am fighting the urge to take my car up into the high sierra. What would I do at Mammoth Lakes? Stare at the condos? I like hiking and live in southern California, where excellent trails abound. I don’t need to go up to the mountains. And what I really want to do is drive, drive, drive. I could go to Lee Vining! I could go to Bodie! I could cross into Nevada like a bandit!
1. It’s bad for the environment (needless consumption of fossil fuels).
2. It’s bad for my ass (sitting still and getting flat and wide).
3. It’s bad for my knees (all cramped up, like).
4. It’s bad for the car (extra mileage).
5. I have other things to do today.
And yet! And yet!
what else.
June 8, 2009Without students, a school is a lonely little place. Sure, the halls are quiet and I’m getting work done. But there’s no energy, no kerfuffle.
Let me rest this summer, and then bring on the kerfuffle.
never mind the nevermind.
June 7, 2009There’s a man on the corner, preternaturally creepy. He was a creep when he was five years old, this is his destiny. As if to make the inner creep explicit, he chooses to wear trench coats and parts his hair heavily down the middle. His smell, if you get too close (sometimes you do), is too sweet. Like bananas. He is a banana man.
He says, “I’ll turn you on, sonny, to something strong.”
You are tempted to respond because the words are familiar to you in some sort of deep and primal way. Only your friends are running ahead and shrieking and they have the money for the now’n'laters, and your mother told you not to anyway. I’ll turn you on, sonny, to something strong. Who said that? Who said that?
He says, “You want something special? I can turn you on.”
Really? Really?
He tells you his story. He’s from Nebraska. He calls himself a flatlander. He rode out across the country in a bus. When he was seven he saw his first miracle: Jesus Christ appearing to him above his bed one night and telling him to walk out into the snow toward the North Pole. Heaven is the North Pole, said Jesus. The creep says he mixed up Santa Claus and God all the time. “I came out west, I did the opposite,” says the creep. “I guess I’m in hell.”
The creep lives above the A&P. He has too many goldfish in not enough bowls. They swim around and around and bump into each other, silver and orange flashes, desperate to escape the confines of the bowl that they don’t know is there anyway except as a boundary. The way anyone understands a boundary, inside or outside it. The apartment smells fishy but still sweet, like the creep.
What are you doing here? What are you doing here?
The creep lights a cigarette and seems to be waiting for something. You have seven quarters in your pocket, all destined for a quart of milk. There is only half light, as if someone had split the sun in half. The cigarette smoke fills the room and hangs there. You can see it. You move in it, and there’s a path behind you.
Now that you think about it, the words he said — I’ll turn you on, sonny, to something strong — is from a song about being blinded in light, you remember it now, and you’re aware that you’re in the creep’s apartment and that he is not doing anything but smoking, and even that is enough to make you different forever. You are different forever. It has happened.
