THE LOST WEEKEND

every room of the cat palace is filled with top notch stuff that i could pawn, including, in fact, a veritable visual chronology of the development of the typewriter. plus, the big old house with the big old everything and the precipitate servants' staircase that shoots you straight up from the cats' bowls in the kitchen to the hallway that gives onto their four second floor rooms, well, the block it's on has been run back up in the past several years, but it's only several blocks' walk to the pawn shops on main. not so far to have to carry, say, an old underwood. still working, friend! but i'm saved that ignominy and the more daunting excusing of it that there's no way i'd be able to excuse when the time came later, because the kroger in the brewery district has six packs of keystone light on sale for three ninety-nine through june two. that's four twenty-six with tax, which i know because that's the number on all the receipts in the pile. after night number three there's a man in the alley digging for cans, and he saves me another uncomfortable excuse by accepting my pile of those. the cat palace is haunted by an insomnia ghost, and the alley is haunted by her attendant early morning trysts. there's a line of variable thickness that winds its way around exultance, reverie and concentration, and its unpredictable course makes it difficult for me to make progress with foucault. luckily, i'm saved by the shelf of violette leduc in one of the cases in the room with the canopy bed. she comes with me when i'm chased by the ghost to the bath, then she attends the trysts. the cats get morphine or bathwater. i get more keystone light. on thursday evening it felt almost like fall was setting in early, but by tuesday morning the stick of summer had come back heavy over the rose bushes in the front garden. when was their scent more rarified? amber and lavender. the to the right, across the highway, there's the inviting ramshackle of what's still left run down in olde towne, which would be nice for a ramble, but not at night. take a book in the afternoon, maybe. to the left, the junior league grows peonies for all the vases on the block. past that, the topiary garden and the main library. frustratingly, they don't have a copy of charles jackson's book, and hindsight is making that look like the perfect read. hindsight, pathetically would-be. a typewriter through the window. no excuse, but i've got time until i'll have to make one, and i'll save it.

OLD WORLD UNDERGROUND WHERE ARE YOU NOW? part 3

at second glance, the lady at the drive through window at the starbucks on chili avenue in south rochester did not actually have a haircut that i like. but it was okay, and she'd done it herself -- which is to say that she'd stuck herself in rochester of her own volition, and although she didn't answer me when i asked her where she'd come there from, my bandmate answered our dykey barista la roux resoundingly when she asked us if we'd enjoyed the area. we made her an invitation to toronto, but she didn't take it.

i wondered, however, if she'd taken my debit card when we stopped at a perkins just past the border and i went in to use the toilet, not buy anything and realized it was gone. i might have noticed earlier if i'd tried to buy any of the postcards that i'd seen at the rest stop outside of niagara falls (our last minute run-in with rochester's last hope had been on our second coffee drive through, and the band was peeing a lot), but it's also possible that that's where i lost the card, in the parking lot when i remembered i'd wanted to take off my top layer before getting back behind the wheel. it might also have been at any of the toll booths along the highway in new york. but whatever, i'd just leave a credit card at the front desk of the hotel to cover the incidentals, and i'd call the bank after getting upstairs, where i would have already all but forgotten that barista.

toronto isn't the new york of canada, and i say so not to dispel any impressions that might be popularly held about the city, but because i found a comparison to be too simply multifariously made. new york is the new york of ontario, just like london is the london of spain, and although the tate and the reina sofia bear no comparison, london and madrid have them both, and both of them have the art gallery of ontario if they're willing to go to toronto. and although toronto may variously resemble both vancouver and chicago (which resemblances resemblances, for the record, aren't its unlikeness with new york), we only had twenty-four hours (during which we never went to the art gallery), and there simply wasn't time for making comparisons.

undeniably, however, toronto is a city of the sort that bears comparison with cities like new york, vancouver, chicago, madrid and london, and i say so only because of the glad day book store on yonge, which is where we decided to walk as we were walking east away from the thompson hotel toronto, the fashion and the gallery districts. there used to be a book store like the glad day on high street in columbus, until columbus decided to use what became its better gayborhood (i.e. nascent arts district) to try to become nothing more than becoming other cities. (ironically?) but fittingly, the glad day had sarah schulman's the gentrification of the mind on its featured display shelves, and everywhere else the shelves were filled with the sort of theory, photography, journalism, fiction and smut that used to distinguish an open book on high. toronto is a city like the rest of them, the likes of which haven't been seen in cities like columbus ever since those cities (ironically?) gave up on themselves and started trying to be like the rest of them.

there were other book stores i would have liked to have visited, but we only had (now less than) twenty-four hours, and before we could be concerned about being hungry we needed to be concerned with dressing ourselves for the rooftop bar and beyond (where the city would probably still have made sure that we had a good view of the cn tower). unfortunately, the queen didn't seem to have anything special prepared (although, granted, we didn't give her very much time). we didn't have much time for rest or freshening up back at the hotel, but we made what we could before going back out. and we hadn't made any inquiries into eateries in the area (or beyond), so we ended up sitting down in the bar at weslodge. (could she help us, the hostess had belatedly asked, and i'd told her that we were hungry, had seen a restaurant and so came inside.) the place wasn't bad, even if it was just a late, taxidermy-ed clyde common in custom leather tablet holsters for the wait staff. we had the beef tenderloin and the cornish hen. (i wasn't feeling the clams. they sounded okay, but...) and i might have preferred a roast chicken in little portugal, but at any rate i had the consolation of the conversation of those better heeled portuguese at the tables adjacent to ours and in the stools in front of the beards behind the bar.

what's else to say? touch down, look around, everyone's the same. but you know that dancers are disposed to fucking well. and so after we overpay for some bottles of steam whistle, bad service and a view included in the price of our room, i leave the band to enjoy the hotel and make my way to college and ossington. in the absence of the artist -- and without time to be concerned with finding bruce mcdonald and maureen medved, scott pilgrim or the arts districts so inspired -- i was happy for some fun. some easy vulnerability. courage and belonging, to the sticking point of an absconded community. and after the dances of three disco oracles and four hours of having fucked well, i left. o espirito santo on college. back to the hotel because we needed to check out in the morning, after which i only got one postcard written (all hail ms. toronto!), but we did eat arenas, because they're delicious and they're the new things to eat. then we were out. that was it. and toronto had been like any other city, although it was certainly not the new york of canada, nor the chicago, london, madrid or vancouver, bundle of high rise plate glass art galleries or not. but you play where the tour takes you. and who you are is who you'll be: the best haircuts, as they say, are taken.

HOW TO SURVIVE A Q&A

it wasn't exactly funny, as it's said, but it did turn out to be an interesting coincidence that, before we left his apartment to walk to the wexner center, the artist had been telling me about an article that he'd been asked to illustrate, an article for a new homo mag that was being edited by some so and so who had been involved with some thing or another, and about how the prospect of being involved with its publication of the magazine wasn't unappealing, but that the article itself was...well...he was sure that i wouldn't like it. and even though i told him that i'd rather read the whole thing alone, apart (if i ended up reading it at all), he insisted on reading me the first paragraph, a cavalcade of tired, offensive stereotypes about angry lesbians and screaming trannies (and it wasn't that the transgendered were necessarily wont to scream, but man, latinas sure are), and out of the cacophony of those angry, tired, offensive stereotypes, the angry, tired, offensive author was trying to make his voice heard. it would seem that the community has become over-queered. it's no longer special enough to be a (not EVEN so straight acting) gay white male. the artist grabbed another snippet: the world -- as it was represented by the staff and the clientele of the bar-restaurant where the author worked -- was apparently at war with "normalcy." it was time that people started paying some attention to the...culturally disenfranchised mainstream homosexual? apparently he had been pushed off the top of the heap. thud. ...oof. but it wasn't even funny. i agreed that i was sure that i didn't like it, and we left to walk to our movie.

on friday night, the wexner center was hosting wu tsang, who was being hosted to introduce and answer questions about wildness, his first feature length film, which the wexner center was screening in conjunction with its hosting of tsang as the first of two visiting filmmakers events on its film and video program for march. the documentary takes its name from a tuesday night art party that tsang and his friends threw between 2008 and 2010, a party which was thrown at a bar called the silver platter, a bar which had established a special reputation for being a place of safe congregation for central american transgender residents of the macarthur park neighborhood of los angeles. tsang, who "has self-identified as 'transfemenine' and 'transguy'" (the independent, 2/5/2013), was drawn to the bar because of its story and its reputation, and became a regular customer because he was drawn to the spirit of its community. the silver platter hosted (and still hosts) friday night fiestas latinas, the spirit and performances of which made tsang think that the silver platter might be a good venue for a dance party that would also serve as a vessel for queer(ish) performance and performance art. the ownership of the silver platter was down, tsang's friends were down, and tuesday nights were slow. so tsang and his friends started throwing a party, and the party got really popular. the ownership was happy with wildness because wildness made tuesdays at the silver platter a draw. the ladies of the silver platter weren't necessarily unhappy with wildness either, because it wasn't like they were ostracized or excluded from the new tuesday nights, even as wildness gained popularity, and even if they weren't exactly incorporated either.

wildness is narrated from the perspective of the silver platter (herself), voiced in the film by a transgender guatemalan actress, a motif which seems to have been chosen by tsang and his co-writer roya rastegar (who had seen a rough cut of a proto-wildness that tsang submitted to the tribeca film festival when rastegar was a programmer there) because, well, otherwise the documentary doesn't seem to know what it's about. as i watched it on friday evening, it alternately seemed that wildness could have been a documentary about its namesake party, or it could have been a documentary about the experience of an underserved queer community on the front lines (and probably losing end) of gentrification; but as a whole, wildness was sufficiently neither. there's party footage, but the story of the party in wildness is limited to its occurrence, its rise and its discontinuation after tsang found himself temporarily on the outs with one of the bars' owners over an issue of inheritance following the death of the brother of the original owner. the ladies of the silver platter are shown posing and performing and are heard speaking in voice overs, but the only of them fleshed out as a person (and wildness skirts reducing her to not much more than a personality at that) is the transgender woman in charge of the door. what to do? make the movie about the bar, which was -- granted, admittedly and of course -- where the art party and its followers crossed roads with the neighborhood transgender community. but then again, although the silver platter is the bar in wildness, it's self-narration culminates in its assumption of the character of an otherworldly anybar, through which [wistful upward sidelong gaze] the people, the communities they come and go, they drink, dance and dream...if these walls could talk...the waves of time...bright lights and big cuddle at macarthur park!

the thing is, wildness is the kind of film that gets making right now. if, arguably, a party like wildness probably took its opportunity to be discontinued more because queer(ish) hipster dance parties got co-opted by mainstream party culture (just before hipster androgyny hit the racks at mainstream retail outlets and three years after "hipster" ceased meaning anything other than a picture of a certain kind of partygoer in a certain kind of outfit) than because of personal (and personnel) complications at the bar where it was hosted, then (tribeca worthy) art films about trannies, hipsters, gentrification and immigrants are, along the same trajectory, just now coming into their cultural cachet. and don't get me wrong: i liked it. i think it's worth seeing (and i think you should see it). i wouldn't say that wildness is an important film, but i do think that its subjects are important to discourses (discursions) on contemporary queer identity and queer(ish) art (...parties). after the wexner center's screening of wildness (and after the subsequent q&a and reception with the director), the artist and i went back to his apartment, where he proceeded to dig up the issue of interview in which he remembered having seen a photograph of tsang after having seen the director in person. in his portrait, the artist is shown topless and arms akimbo -- highlighting the transguy's runway perfect breasts -- in a pair of high waisted shorts by american apparel and a pair of ankle strap heels by christian louboutin. i don't mean -- at all (...but at all) -- to argue in defense of "normalcy" (oof!). but i do mean to question the stunningly appalling sensationalization (and sensationally successful marketing) of those issues and identities with which a film like wildness takes issue and self-identifies.

no one (...but no one) should take the artist wu tsang to task for taking advantage of his art market moment. he's currently being shown at the whitney (after being featured in the 2012 biennial), and it's year old new york news that he's the artist "soon to be featured in every show in town" (galleristny.com, 2/14/2012). his whitney exhibition is coming to the wexner center in the spring. and i don't think that wu tsang is unaware of the cultural wave of time which has carried him to artistic prominence. ten or so minutes of wildness is devoted to the question of sam slovick, the freelance journalist whose "best tranny bar" contribution to la weekly's 2008 "best of l.a." issue caused the organizers of wildness to mount a online "fuck sam slovick" campaign in response to his aggressively transphobic depiction of their bar. "Finally!" the article begins, "A crossroads convergence of self-involved, art-damaged 20-something kids and Third World gender illusionists at a water hole whose geography transcends the expanse of Silver Lake proper." significantly, tsang doesn't try to defend his friends as far as they're depicted in wildness. if anything, the interviews with his party co-conspirators seem to reify their status as self-involved, art-damaged 20-somethings. one of them, accordingly draped in a black pleather vest and a tank top, questions how any of the ladies of the silver platter could possibly have considered the planners of wildness to be interlopers. as if there were somehow money or power behind him??? [cue unironic explosion of the hipster art party] 

i wonder, however, why the artist seems to feel the need to defend himself. he was asked, during the q&a that followed the screening of his film, why he'd not restarted wildness after he'd gotten himself back into the good graces of nora, the current owner of the silver platter. the thing was, he said, that he'd wanted to. it was that the other three were touring internationally as djs, and he'd had the editing of the film... i don't doubt that wu tsang feels an affinity with the trangender community of the silver platter and of macarthur park. i suspect that he even feels an obligation. but at the q&a that followed the screening of wildness at the wexner center on friday evening, he gave no conscionable explanation as to why he hasn't tried to reinstate any hip kid, grassroots activity around the silver platter since the beginning of his meteoric rise -- which, although it has drawn attention (and likely customers) to the bar, appears to have eclipsed his direct involvement with its community. a party is one thing. those of us who feel a certain compassionate intoxication at the visuals of the art party at the bar in wildness know exactly how queer(ish) performance and queer performance art parties come and go. they're meaningful to whom they were meaningful because of their certain ephemerality, because their ephemeral moment meant our youth (however self-involved and art-damaged). but what's the real story -- or at least the whole one -- behind the closing of the legal clinic that was founded by tsang et al. at the height of the party? without begrudging tsang his success or overestimating the power of the party to effect real social change, surely it isn't without justification to ask why the project of wildness seems to have had nothing real to do with promoting or protecting the agency of the ladies of the silver platter.

on saturday evening, the day after the wexner center hosted wu tsang, the new school in new york streamed "a conversation with david france and jim hubbard" as part of its series revisiting the aids crisis. i haven't seen either how to survive a plague or united in anger, but i tuned in online hoping to learn...something. about act up, about the experience, about the legend of art and activism. unfortunately (for me, anyway), the conversation was largely technical. and unfortunately, although both directors are in a position to reposition the aids crisis within the social history of the twentieth century (a position which i understand them both to understand), ironically, neither of them seemed to like the difficult questions either. when they were asked why people of color, women and the transgendered were underrepresented in the leadership of act up and in both of their films, neither director gave an unqualified answer, seemingly for fear that aspersions would be cast, not on their messages, but on their art. gallingly, gay african american moderator tony whitfield seemed embarrassed to have to serve the directors with the question. the best that either director did to address the issue (and i can't say which one it was because i'd stopped paying attention to the video stream at that point) was to say that the educated, privileged (and male) were the only ones with the means to be able to sacrifice the time and resources to the cause that they did. no one, i think, meant to indict either director -- his methods or his compatriots -- with any question, but a less defensive response would probably have gone a long way to ease the tension in the auditorium (and in the chat room) and to further conversation. maybe france and hubbard feel threatened by the war on normalcy. (not even funny?)

on saturday evening, during the q&a with france and hubbard at the new school in new york, i thought again about the q&a with wu tsang at the wexner center. in response to a question about...i forget. it was actually two questions, and the one that i remember was the one about a statement by tsang in wildness about how his chinese father's never having taught him chinese had left a void within him that he had filled (had facilitated filling) by establishing and building relationships, community. the other question must have had something to do with editing? i don't remember. but i do remember that in his response tsang brought up jonathan oppenheim, editor of paris is burning, and i remember the preemptive -- and emphatic -- statement that tsang proceeded to make to distance wildness from any comparison with that film. paris is burning -- that queer(ish) performance and performance art darling of the aughts -- a documentary about the ball culture of certain african american and latino gay and transgender communities in new york in the 1980s, has been criticized for its failure to interrogate white heterosexuality. that failure, critics say, has made it too easily palatable for privileged, white audiences. wildness is not the los angeles latina paris is burning of the 2000s. okay. but what jenny livingston (a privileged, white lesbian originally from beverly hills) did in 1990 with paris is burning is apparently something that neither david france nor jim hubbard seems (i haven't seen their films) to have been able to do in the second decade of century twenty-one: namely, to depict (at all) a minority queer experience in the decade which, for many intents and purposes, has underscored the popular american consensus on glbtq. i understand tsang's desire to insulate himself from certain criticism, but i wonder who he assumes his audience to be at the whitney, or at sxsw...or at tribeca. the comparison between wildness and paris is burning would, in fact, appear to be most apt in its description of the similarities between the criticism that the two films would draw. unfortunately, to the extent that tsang's film does speak for itself in its elucidation of the experience of the ladies of the silver platter, it doesn't speak to its director's ardent denials of what it's not. and at the wexner center on friday evening, the director didn't say anything else either.

i should have talked to tsang at the reception after the film and asked him to say something myself, one on one. but wu tsang, to his absolute credit, is someone with whom i didn't want to talk at a reception at the wexner center, but rather at a party like wildness, at a bar, on the street, somewhere more charged with our nostalgia for the milieu of the party. i did, however, ask him a question during his q&a. he'd actually started editing wildness as a media intern at the wexner center in 2010, which he'd disclosed during his introduction to his film (and his thanks for making it possible). so following on a question to which he'd responded with something about the community in l.a. i asked him to give us a sense of his picture of the community, as it were, in columbus, ohio. i'd hoped to indict his audience there at the wexner center, or maybe to have the director rail at me for my assumption that his audience there was of the privileged variety that would only see his film to feel good about bearing witness to the experience of people with whom they'd never deign to associate -- and afterwards return to their salaries, the theory of their graduate programs, to the gym and to the esthetician. tsang very tactfully refrained from a real response. his time in columbus had been cut short by the death of the owner of the silver platter and by concommitant questions about his party. no one should take wu tsang to task for his success as an artist, but i don't think that anyone in the know can deny that he knows his audience well -- and plays to it at the same time that he makes a point of swearing it off.

at the reception that followed the screening of wildness at the wexner center, i passed on my opportunity to talk to wu tsang. i could have talked to him about his experience with trying to sustain a free legal clinic for immigrants and trans people and passed whatever information i was able to get to my father, who has expressed his interest in founding an institution along those lines in columbus to his retirement. but as we were at the reception at the wexner center, i really just wanted to take his picture. he's stunning, he was impeccably put together, and there in the antechamber of the gallery he cut the perfect picture of the artist. and on friday evening at the wexner center, to my own discredit, i was principally concerned with matters of art. i didn't make the approach to get my photo because i hadn't brought my phone.

the question that lingers is if i'm happy with it. are we happy with it, the art that the gallery complex deigns to consider appropriate to our experience of the community, as it were, at our crossroads convergence of our self-involved, art-damaged selves, our gender illusions, the illusion of gender, its queer performance, performance art, activism, commercial queering, our war with normalcy and the rest of the world. rail and indict. q&a.
  

ROTHKO BEFORE ROTHKO; or, WAY TO GO OHIO, part 13

that first part isn't, however, really my title. i have to admit. the one who really came up with it was that art history phd candidate who showed us around the prado on that...memorable friday afternoon that the 2011/12 christmas saga spent in madrid. but regardless of his ability to give the show a memorable title, he wasn't going to be showing us around the rothko exhibition at the columbus museum of art when we finally got ourselves together to get together to see it on sunday -- which isn't to say that he didn't go (he came), it's just that twentieth century american art isn't his thing. and appearances aside (he was beside us in front of many of the paintings on display), i have to admit that it's not exactly my expertise either. i'd just been riding past the rothko banners on the front of the museum for a month, and that phd candidate had given the show an interesting epithet (even if it had been given to imply that the show wouldn't be that interesting). anyway, we went. it was something -- but not in the figurative sense. "rothko before rothko," which the museum is calling "mark rothko: the decisive decade 1940 -1950" went something like this:

The years 1940 – 1950 were crucial in the development of Mark Rothko’s universally recognizable mature color-field paintings. Fueled by the anxieties of the late 1930s and the years of WWII, in the 1940s, Rothko’s figurative imagery became increasingly symbolic and dream-like. By 1947, Rothko and his artist colleagues and friends such as Adolph Gottlieb were eliminating all elements of the human figure from their work. As a consequence, nonobjective compositions of indeterminate shape and colors emerged and filled the picture plane. Rothko finally landed upon a new way of painting — using blocks of color which for him contained a “breath of life” he found lacking in most figurative painting of the time.

and that, i suppose, is how we experienced it, although the universal significance of myth and the transformative power of color seemed to have overslept that day too. (i think that i spent more time reading placards than i did trying to read anything into the paintings.) still, it was nice to have gone. we talked about gorky (and i realized that we were talking about the other gorky), and then there was one of his paintings. there was a woman with a hat, but by a different fauve than the one you probably know. in the atrium, the museum was setting up for a wedding. i liked the screen printed and rhinestoned portraits of oprah and condoleezza near the staircase, and i liked the classically inspired, brooklyn sourced portrait of the local ignoble that's above the landing.

we went looking for the cafe and found a print of a photograph by diane arbus, the freakish surreality of which had been inoculated by its incorporation into a series of interactive exercises for children (which were in the hallway outside of the interactive area for children than might have displaced the old cafe since i'd last been to the museum). around the next corner, on the way back to the lobby, the adults have their chance to interact. the museum wants money, because it wants to get rid of the sculpture garden (and erstwhile outdoor cafe seating) to erect another wing. i didn't pay any attention to what the museum was going to put in the new wing post-erection because i was disappointed when the switch next to the scale model didn't turn anything on.

it doesn't matter, of course. if they make it, people will come. like the poster (sell those weddings!) of the bride and groom seated in front of a wall of too glaringly lit paintings says, "vibrant city vibrant collection." do you want to live in a vibrant city? then maybe you should make sure your museum has a vibrant collection. but even that doesn't matter. whatever part of its collection the museum decides to put in its new wing will be vibrant as a rule, because, of course, you live in a vibrant city. rothko! you probably ate dinner at a restaurant in a vibrant arts district on the saturday night before the sunday that brought you to the museum.

But while everyone agrees that “vibrancy” is the ultimate desideratum of urban life, no one seems to be exactly sure what cultural vibrancy is. In fact, the Municipal Art Society of New York recently held a panel discussion—excuse me, a “convening”—of foundation people to talk about “Measuring Vibrancy” (it seems “the impact of arts and cultural investments on neighborhoods ... is hard to quantify”). In retrospect, it would have been far better to convene such a gathering before all those foundation people persuaded the cities of the nation to blow millions setting up gallery districts and street fairs.

Even ArtPlace, the big vibrancy project of the NEA, the banks, and the foundations, is not entirely sure that vibrancy can be observed or quantified. That’s why the group is developing what it calls “Vibrancy Indicators”: “While we are not able to measure vibrancy directly,” the group’s website admits, “we believe that the measures we are assembling, taken together, will provide useful insights into the nature and location of especially vibrant places within cities.”

What are those measures? Unfortunately, at press time, they had not yet been announced. But a presentation of preliminary work on the “Vibrancy Indicators” did include this helpful directive: “Inform leaders of the connection between vibrancy and prosperity.” Got that? We aren’t sure what vibrancy is or whether or not it works, but part of the project is nevertheless “informing” people that it does. The meaninglessness of the phrase, like the absence of proof, does not deter the committed friend of the vibrant: if you know it’s the great good thing, you simply push ahead, moving all before you with your millions.

This is not the place to try to gauge the enormous, unaccountable power that foundations wield over American life—their agenda-setting clout in urban planning debates, for example, or the influence they hold over cashstrapped universities, or their symbiosis with public broadcasters NPR and PBS. Nor is this the forum to salute them for their many positive contributions to society.

My target here is not their power, but their vacuity. Our leadership class looks out over the trashed and looted landscape of the American city, and they solemnly declare that salvation lies in an almost meaningless buzzword—that if we chant that buzzword loud enough and often enough, our troubles are over.

of course, that's to say nothing of art itself (or the other stuff, like the owners of the bookstore that doesn't exist anymore in the arts district). but you can read the rest of thomas frank's article on cultural vibrancy (originally published at the baffler) alongside that article by adriana camarena on gentrification and food culture in the mission district of san francisco (originally published in n+1) in the current issue of utne. it just so happened that i had read it myself a couple of days before going to see "rothko before rothko," and that just so happened to make my sunday in columbus, ohio where, although the art museum wasn't charging admission, it was generally serving patrons who didn't need to spend their weekend days serving the likes of...ourselves (which, after a week of discussing the philosophy of humor as it pertained to the academy awards, did more than just do another nice trick).
  

It is time to acknowledge the truth: that our leaders have nothing to say, really, about any of this. They have nothing to suggest, really, to Cairo, Illinois, or St. Joseph, Missouri. They have no comment to make, really, about the depopulation of the countryside or the deindustrialization of the Midwest. They have nothing to offer, really, but the same suggestions as before, gussied up with a new set of clichés. They have no idea what to do for places or people that aren’t already successful or that have no prospects of ever becoming cool.

in the meantime, there's here and us, wherever and whoever that might be (and regardless of how awfully, self-deprecatingly salutary that may be or sound), and since, well, it's unfortunately all the same, maybe we should have something to say about it.

OLD WORLD UNDERGROUND WHERE ARE YOU NOW? part 2; or, WAY TO GO OHIO...SERIOUSLY, WAY TO GO

one of the two susans who occupy the beautiful 3rd (?) floor space at the rear of the building at 26 north 3rd street in downtown zanesville is working on one of her (primarily) appliqued, quilted and embellished fiber art pieces, and at the center of the panels of the piece (still yet to be quilted) is a big, black, volant, wool crow. so i interrupt her, because i want to ask while i remember. we'd been walking, he and i (he, the artist, and i, who, well, just like art and stuff), from downtown to destinations as yet unknown the night before, and we'd decided not to take the y-bridge because it was a shorter distance to where we thought we might be going via underwood street, which is state route 60 until it goes over the muskingham and becomes adair ave and state route 146, and the north banks of the not so world famous underwood-adair (60-146) bridge across the muskingham are overflowing (you might say) with giant trees. i couldn't tell what kind of trees they were that night because we hadn't gotten into zanesville until after eleven and it was dark. but i could tell that the trees were giant, and that they were dark too. actually, i hadn't been paying any attention to them at all until we had already started crossing the bridge and had made noise enough to wake up several hundred of the crows that had been roosting in the giant corona of branches of one of them. the crows scattered, and i jumped into a crouch behind the artist's back with my hands gripping his shoulders so as to brace and direct him as my shield. so we decided to talk more quietly, even for our amazement at realizing that the giant trees had been so dark because they were roosted with thousands of tens of thousands of crows. (the bridge was tall, and it was literally up to there with them.) because if we upset any more of them there was the chance that the sum of the drama might get the artist pushed over the railing and into the muskingham.

we walked, then, not in silence, but in whispers: aware, and in awe, but not quite frightened. we did walk almost frighteningly close to the birds in the treetops that were closest to the bridge, but none of them moved and no one fell. then we were on the other side of the river -- moved maybe, but thankfully not fallen -- and we turned right off of aiden (which actually doesn't turn into 146 until 60 turns right at maple) and onto linden. that's where the internet said the bars were, and those bars was where we were headed because the internet hadn't had anything to say about things that might be happening downtown at close to midnight. we passed the first two of them and passed on both. the third looked okay, but we passed on that one too because we wanted the first place we went to have, if possible, more people. surely zanesville must go out to bars...but maybe it didn't go out to the ones on linden on valentine's day? and that's how we ended up at the blue front cafe. it's just a half a block up and across the street from the third place we'd passed, and at least (our thinking went as we passed the window next to the door) it was crowded.

at the blue front cafe we ordered a couple of bud lights, and we might not have stayed for more than those first ones if we hadn't met lisa. lisa was with a friend at the jukebox. the kj (lisa told us later that there was karaoke at the blue front on thursdays) had stopped playing dj, and a man who had been sitting among some patrons at the bar when we came in was now behind it and was yelling for people to play some music, buy some drinks and have some fucking fun. i don't know if we spent enough time with lisa to decided if she was fun. she was definitely something else. and she was definitely looking for fun (although her friend, who was just as conspicuously stuffed into what little she had on in addition to her scanties, was apparently just looking for songs). but when lisa found out that we were into art and stuff our conversation (which up until that point had only been between lisa and the artist) changed course. our beers were almost gone and lisa wanted to buy us more. it was our choice, she said (chirpy baby voice), we could leave if we wanted. we didn't necessarily want to leave, but we didn't feel comfortable taking lisa's money. we did, though (take the money, that is), although we didn't end up feeling bad about it because lisa helped herself to a couple of bottles from the crate on the bar when the bartender had taken a couple of bottles himself and had ducked below the bar to restock a cooler. she put them up on a ledge on the wall where we were standing near the jukebox and only needed to ask us once, indicating the ones on the ledge (sideways, chirpy...drawl?), if she could have one of our beers.

that night at the blue front lisa was wearing a giant red bow in her hair that either did or did not perfectly match the intersection of the persona she was presenting and the one that we presumed upon her. otherwise she was wearing stretch pants and a zane state t-shirt. she's a student, and despite or because of her age she assumes that everyone else she meets is a student too (although maybe, to give her the benefit of a probably unreasonable doubt, that's only at twelve thirty on a thursday night). lisa is forty-seven years old, and she'd never stopped liking art (and stuff). she got her associate's degree from the art institute of pittsburgh in 1985 and then moved to columbus, where she stripped. then lisa probably stole the tv. now she's back in zanesville and back in school. she's going to transfer to franklin, and she's going to be your therapist. she just moved her painting studio into her bedroom so that she can wake up and just be, like, fwaaaahhhhh! but in zanesville you can only really make money doing commissions, she says (and does the artist know what those are?). someone asks you to draw their dog, and you're like, how do you want your dog drawn, you know? that's why she's going back to columbus. and she just moved her painting studio into her bedroom so that she can wake up and just be, like, fwaaaahhhhh! you know? she was incredulous that we would have come to zanesville just to see zanesville. we asked her what there was to do, and she told us to check out the mall.

she also told us that if we were looking for fun that night we should hang out with her friend, because her friend knew how to have fun. at the blue front i thought that she'd said his name was trevor, but when he shook our hands at the goat (across the street, the third bar from before), he introduced himself as matt. he wondered what we were doing in zanesville, and he was incredulous. he wondered where we were staying, and we told him the econo lodge downtown. he told us that he lived downtown, and we asked him what was happening there. everything happening downtown happened at the econo lodge, he said. but it turned out that he wasn't just a motel whore. the bar there was apparently where they did all the live music in town. neil patel had suggested it when he was checking us in, but we hadn't gone because we wanted to make it further than there before there was nowhere else to go. it was half an hour before last call when matt suggested that we join him et al. back at his place. nothing weird, he said. (but he said it really weird.) we asked him about the crows, and he told us that zanesville is just where the crows came home to roost. it's probably difficult being the only one in the village, but matt didn't make it too easy for us to want to follow him anywhere (and i should underscore that sentiment by saying that at that point we wondered if matt or someone else from the blue front might follow us if we walked back downtown alone).

but we walked back downtown alone. we passed the other two bars that we had passed on before, and then we passed through the intersection of linden and adair without turning, which took us past two other bars. we decided that the lone woman playing keno inside the first one must have had an in and kept walk. terry's was obviously already closed. we kept making our way, crisscrossing linden to make sure we kept walking on a sidewalk. the factory at the end of the avenue (an old grain mill?) didn't appear to be operational. the light on in the basement storage (?) room lit up piles of trash and detritus. the artist counseled me against kicking the charity of out potential horror story too hard in the mouth by going inside. so we just let the world famous y-bridge ease us over the confluence of the licking and the muskingham, past the canal -- where we didn't press the flashing green button that was begging us to push it -- and onto main street, where the sheriff was doing laps. romance.

in the morning, we woke up and then went back to sleep. we didn't make it to the econo lodge bar, and we weren't going to make it to breakfast. when we checked out at a minute before noon, neil patel (who lives in a suburb of columbus himself) asked us how we'd enjoyed our night. had we been to weasel boy? i'd told him the night before that after years of driving through it on interstate 70 and seeing the churches and the courthouse from the highway, i'd only ever thought to visit zanesville after finding out that the brewery there made a beer that i liked (after finding out that there was a brewery there, really). (it was a version of the truth.) excuses, excuses, and all of them welcome. i told neil that we hadn't really thought about going until today since the brewery would have been nearly closed by the time that we would have gotten there the night before. so we'd be going that day after it opened at four. and in the meantime we could enjoy the city, neil said, maybe go to the mall.

we went to muddy misers. it's on another bank of the muskingham, across the river to the southwest of downtown. the restaurant is zane grey themed. (the author wasn't the city's namesake, but he was descended from the zanes.) when heidi the waitress asked us where we were from and why we were visiting, we told her something of a mix between what we'd told lisa, matt and neil patel. she was incredulous. but weasel boy didn't open until four, she said, so maybe we could go to the mall.

we left muddy misers and went up the hill toward pioneer park instead. the view of the city from the very top of the hill was probably even better, but the one we got from where we couldn't drive the car any further wasn't bad. we thought that maybe the park was closed for the season, but then we saw that the pedestrian ingress to the side of the driveway was permanently fenced off. (maybe we would have had better luck staying on the other side of the river and trying putnam hill.) the flight of cement stairs that led up from the brick apartment building at the front of the hill ended in chain link. we three pointed around and went back down into town via the crumbling asphalt drive in front of the apartment building. halfway down i asked the artist to stop. it did look like the little pool of water might have been part of a decorative waterfall or a fountain at some point, but it didn't look like anyone had paid any attention to keeping it circulating for a while. someone had, however, put a dozen or so thumb sized gold koi into the two inches of water that had accumulated in the two foot indent that was still in the dirt. and someone must have put them there just that day? someone should have told us about that.

we drove the three miles of state route out to the mall, but neither of us wanted to go in, so we drove back into downtown.

it was good, though, that we went, because the way that we went back in took us right by the muskingham county welcome center. maybe someone there could tell us what to do with our next hour and a half. the snow that had started falling was rainy, and we weren't much for walking around and finding something for ourselves just then. unfortunately, the woman at the reception desk told us, most of the museums were closed. and the churches were hit or miss. they didn't have regular hours for tourists, and it wasn't really the season for going around and knocking on doors. we did, however, get a guide to downtown that briefly described the histories of each of them, and we got it because i asked about one church in particular. it's christopher columbus, the woman at the desk confirmed when i asked her about the facade of st. nicholas. and yes, he has his foot on that native american's neck. the church was much older than i'd thought, and it sounded like the ceramic tile mural had the inertia of history behind it. zanesville, after it was the state capital, came to be called the pottery capital of the world (until it wasn't), and there are big, painted urns all over town (some of whom look like women lurking behind entryway pillars and smoking as the sheriff passes by again in the middle of the night). the internet had also told us that downtown was home to an artists' colony, although neither i nor the artist knew exactly what that meant. but at the mention of it a man came out from a back office and gave us another guide, with a map. he'd just come from studio 202 and told us that the susans should still be there if we wanted to stop by.

when we got there, the one susan was down on the main floor talking to mike, and the other was up in the loft. we looked at the art. then mike left, but not before giving us directions to his old studio (he was in the process of moving) and telling us that he would put out his flag. the space at the rear of the building at 26 north 3rd street in downtown zanesville is beautiful, and the space at the front is being made into apartments. we got a tour. the late middle aged professional artists of the artists' colony are gradually taking over more and more of the unoccupied spaces downtown and turning them into places like studio 202. the city's first friday art event is getting more and more popular. they may not spend the night, but people from columbus (and maybe from pittsburgh) probably visit the city to shop the (expensive, pottery heavy) antique stores on main street all the time. it needs more than a little work, she had told us, but there's a four story building downtown on sale for twenty thousand -- in case we were looking to relocate. i wanted to know about the crows. but the susan working on that fiber art piece with the crow in the center of it didn't have anything in particular to say about them. the banks of the muskingham are, apparently, just where they come home to roost.

the snow had gotten snowier during our time in the studio, so we decided to make our visit to mike's brief. (but we should at least go to say goodbye, we figured, since he'd been nice enough to make a point of putting out a flag.) i was cautioned against taking photographs of his paintings when mike saw my phone in my hand, but i did get one picture of the old masonic temple across the street through a window of the studio and the snow. mike explained to us how he paints with asphalt. i learned, in many ways, about lability.

when we left mike's the snow was coming down even thicker and had accumulated even more, and downtown zanesville looked entirely different than the place into which we'd followed the y-bridge the night before. it was a few minutes past four o'clock, but we went to take another look at the muskingham county court house before we went back across the river to the brewery. it has public restrooms with outdoor access, and you only have to press the button to get out. the court house was the ohio capitol from the fall of 1810 until the spring of 1812, but against my experience of zanesville i prefer to imagine that its more interesting history has been the one that decided to take up matt on his invitation that night at the bar. maybe the sheriff has been involved too.

across the river at weasel boy we run into one of his friends from the night before. he says hello and pats me on the back. i have a growler filled of the bitter sable imperial black ipa. the view of downtown through the window of the taproom and the snow is dreamy, and we've decided to spend the first hour or so of happy hour there. the snow looks wet, and it will probably be easier to drive through on the highway after it's been driven over for a while. i think that we maybe should have tried harder to get to the mexican restaurant where lisa works, but i also think that maybe we shouldn't. then i think about what we'd done instead. the canal had been frozen when we'd driven across it last. those fish we'd seen on our way down from pioneer park had never had a chance.

CODEPENDENT THE BARBARIAN

whee! the members of team super awesome adventure princess know how to have a good time. well, they know how to try to make sure that the people around them have a good time, so when they all get together the times are more or less pretty okay. they talk about their separate adventures, and they commiserate. (they can commiserate.) and that's what they drove through the snow to do at the new rehab tavern in newly gentrifying franklinton (oh, the pathetic ironies...!), which turned out to be a pretty good place for super awesome commiseration and almost everything else -- save and except chicken wings. the nearly toothless woman with the winning smile who went way to far to try to give me the chair that was waiting for the friend she was expecting could probably have been on the team. at the very least she was a refreshingly welcome part of the cross-section of the city that was represented that night at rehab. i had dropped a pin, and the bat pod was there in...some dozens of minutes. elvira didn't want to take our quarters, so we played pool while we waited instead. when the team was all assembled we put ourselves on display at the table on the stage in the window, to watch the snow, we'll say, or to not be able to see the televisions so well maybe. but we did move down to the floor when there was space for all of us there, and that way no one needed to be at a table on a stool. we caught up, commiserated, rehashed the old adventures we'd shared, recommiserated, rehashed, recommiserated. our relationships needed work, but who's didn't? we needed, of course, to work on ourselves within our relationships, but that's always a thing. it would be a super awesome adventure! and, of course, we knew that without having to convene the meeting, but it had been a while since we'd all gotten together to commiserate. we all felt much better about our adventuring as a result. then we checked out of rehab and went to crash a party on the other side of downtown. because it isn't a party until you chase a cupcake sandwich with a sarsaparilla that a stranger spiked for you and the straight crashees get called hipster faggots by an angry wingman. that's right, ladies and gentlemen, we always aim to please. and then we wake up and remember that we were supposed to take some time to think about the boundaries we were going to set on the date we need to show up for in an hour. gonna have to rally the team back at rehab.

WAY TO GO OHIO, part 9

"columbus never came here, but when the city sleeps, what our dreamers discover is that we have always created our own collective inside joke, one still looking for a punch line, that begins with 'columbus never came here, but...' that's why our city," ... ...

so continues the wall at 88 east broad street. a visiting native who's been living in the pacific northwest for the past eight years asked me to drive him by the other day to see it. and there it was, except for the last part. but in the week or so of meantime the contest judges for the brooklyn born paraprosdokian have finally stopped extending deadlines, made a new selection, and have made the addition to the wall. who cares if the project was supposed to end in december? but that's it: does anyone care? it would certainly stand to argue that the city's identity crisis has already been spelled out -- without the predication of that final clause.

everyone goes to the pizza place in olde towne now, and someone waiting for a table remarks that the city must be recession proof at seeing the place so full on a thursday. aren't they saying the recession is over? and don't they say that the weekend starts early? which was the older news? the other paper will cease publication at the end of the month. "the other paper?" it's old news, no one reads it, although that's probably less to do with the cultural bent of the city and more with its acquisition in 2011 by the dispatch. there's a new sign in light bulb lettering at the bottom of the short north that's absolutely garish -- and nothing new. an oyster bar! they scream. they'd seen one when they'd visited that one city, and now there was one down the street. the urban influx generation's finally getting its proverbial wal-mart. and that's why the city... ...

the next deadline is january 16. have you put in your submission??

"HOW TO QUIT"

don't get me wrong: i'm not necessarily saying that i want to. at any rate, i think i've already missed my chance for meaningfully declaring any resolutions for the new year. but the party doesn't exactly stop exactly on january first, so it's possible, maybe, that i'd actually make my more meaningful resolutions now. but the party never really stops, does it? and one way or another we keep going. so resolved: to make whatever decisions are required of me with each slice of life that i'm served up -- one way or another.

i bought the current issue of n+1. i didn't buy it at the main-chicago newsstand, but that is where i first picked up a print copy and remembered having started to read "the intellectual situation" online (a different party). and i think that the magazine -- although i think that it will be happy as i continue to buy print copies -- would have me quit my fawning devotion to print. so be it. i can acknowledge the criticism. the slice of intellectual life served up by n+1 is almost always so delectably sympathetic. and maybe i should quit my fawning devotion to that...but, like i said, it's probably too late for that for now. so i'll keep going.

in the current issue of n+1 there's an essay by kristin dombek. it's called "how to quit." and that essay couches the author's ideas on her serial relationships with "drunks, drug addicts, sex addicts, compuslive gamblers, and/or people on or recovering from deep, life-threatening benders" within her experience of trying to hold on to bohemian williamsburg (and to one particular holdout building). "if the old building was real, this building is a steam-powered time machine. if the new neighborhood is real, this building is a dream, or a crypt. in other words, all this building makes me want to do is drink and fuck." ... "this building is a question about how you live after a tragic reversal, thrown back into history and wondering what can be recovered by returning to the scene." as for the author's compatriots, the people, "with a dead parent or two, bipolar or otherwise depressed people, musicians, writers, and/or pathological liars," she doesn't know when she meets them. "at some point, a week or two into the friendship or the affair, i find out, but by then i'm already hooked, because the things these people do to ensure they don't have to live in the straight world are wonderful." and the author and these people ride their time machines together.

or maybe it's the other way around, and the essay's picture of gentrification is meant to be its focus, and the author's interpersonal relationships are meant to frame or to highlight or to augur it. inasmuch as either could be the case i'm sympathetic. it's all, anyway, much larger than the specific slice of life. in fact, this particular slice of life turns out to be also about death, about letting things die.

this is one way to quit: wait until the bitter end, when you have done all you can to make the time machine keep working. you have learned its inner systems, improvised workarounds, carted in the water yourself, but it becomes harder to keep it alive than leave it. what they call hitting rock bottom. the final tragic reversal may be slow, boring, and horrible. the time machine has turned into a crypt, but it is not a crypt if you go inside with the body. if you must raise it from the dead again, know the power it has is your own: bend over it like a vampire, fire it up like dr. frankenstein. when you are able to stop, there will be a moment when you have to just walk out of the building. it's not that living will be the opposite of addiction now; there can be more life because you know how to stretch out time, more joy because you have practiced the art of reanimation. you are a professor of transformation; you just need new tools. there is no outside or inside to it, no opposition, no right way to go, just this new way of seeing.

at the head of the preceding paragraph: "it is important to know that there are things that end." when i thought to write this i thought that i was going to take it somewhere else. i was going to backward from that conclusion, quote dombek's description of the double bind of recovery and the addiction of the addict to the discussion of the double bind. then earlier: "in paradise lost, it's satan who thinks the mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heavan. he is, famously, the best character in the movie." then i thought i was going to go back to dombek's description of the ritual of her ministrations to her lovers. i would have given the entire long paragraph. "i do not say no, i do not say this is fucking ridiculous...don't die. stay with me. never leave." then i was going to bring in that sarah kane monologue from crave (to "tell you the truth when i really don't want to"). and the comparison, by nothing more than the juxtaposition of two paragraphs, would have been restrained but poignant. a silent augur. the capricious wild card chimera of love. but i think a different thought in the morning, in front of this much more boring table in this different light. i am resolved to stop here. it's important to know that there are things that end. so i won't go on -- with this -- even if the party does, one way or another, implicit. feet dragging an emboldened face into the new neighborhood. fire it up, dr. frankenstein! and cheers to the tail of the end, which is also the lingering trail of the beginning.

WAY TO GO OHIO, part 7; or, HASHTAG SIGNAGE, WE TWO RIVER CITY KINGS

i had called the number listed for the charley harper art studio, but the man who answered the phone wasn't at the reynard avenue address in finneytown with which that phone number had been given online. that was mr. harper's stuido, yes, the man said, but people who wanted to visit the studio were now visiting whatever it was that was at 1741 east kemper road, which is where we'd reached the man on the phone. but we could also visit one of the many locations of fabulous frames & art, one of which was definitely closer than kemper road if we were downtown. what was our goal, he asked; and i didn't know, so i had to pass the phone.

it had been raining since just before we'd gotten off the sidewalk on vine and gone into lavomatic, so when we'd left we'd decided to find somewhere else in the neighborhood to sit and wait out the end. so it was that i'd called the man on the phone from a sofa at the coffee emporium on east central parkway, and so it was that we'd had our goals questioned as the rain stopped and we went out to take a look at the rest of over the rhine. there seemed to have been ample monies made available for new business development in the new old neighborhood. but although the bombed out facades of the post-riot dmz still greatly outnumbered the trendy establishments of the revival entrepreneurs, the important question regarding the future of the community seemed to be whether such a small area could sustain so many closely clustered boutiques and stationers. easy come easy go? we said we'd have to think about the dress and left.

the american sign museum is in a new old warehouse adjacent to the neonworks of cincinnati on monmouth avenue east of interstate 75. it's closer to downtown than kemper, so we'd decided to go there before deciding on whether to pursue what we considered to be the most authentic charley harper (informed by the decision of the man on the phone to keep us in the dark). and anyway, the designer felt more his amateur sign historian self that day than he did in line with the professional demands of being an illustrator. that's what i joked, anyway, to the man at the reception desk when he asked how we'd heard about the museum. as for the designer himself, his goals were his own. i was just driving -- and the truth was that i knew the city better by bike.

it was two-thirty, but the man at the reception desk said we had time. tripadvisor had said that the museum closed at three, but that man, he told us we had until four. we could even join the tour being given by the founder, he said. but we had to be out by not too much after four, because that's when people from the wedding were coming to set up. after charging each of us the fifteen dollar entry fee (paid separately), he gave us each a tin, foldover "i <3 about="about" after="after" also="also" and="and" as="as" bad="bad" badge="badge" bathroom="bathroom" center="center" contents="contents" description="description" didn="didn" directions="directions" does="does" for="for" four.="four." gave="gave" giving="giving" he="he" his="his" i="i" inspecting="inspecting" justice="justice" me="me" mine="mine" museum="museum" nearly="nearly" no="no" now="now" of="of" old="old" p="p" pieces="pieces" realize="realize" said="said" scathing="scathing" schmaltzy="schmaltzy" seem="seem" showed="showed" signs="signs" something="something" t="t" the="the" them="them" then="then" to="to" until="until" us="us" wedding="wedding" when="when" which="which">
i started looking around, but i didn't really know what i was looking for. to be sure, the american sign museum wasn't just another haphazardly curated roadside collection of curiosities. way to go, ohio. and the amateur sign historian seemed impressed. "a really nice museum," he says, and that, "the space is perfect." (in one subsection of the warehouse conversion there are windows onto the neonworks.) neon. opal glass. vacuum molds. gold leaf. toolboxes and toolboxes of brushes. smalt. (schmaltz?) and half of it along an old -- half real, half simulated -- main street of painted storefronts and brick wall signs (and that of course filled with old metal and neon monstrosities from hojo and mcdonald's). a big old bear of a big bear sign is on top of the collection of signs still in their crates, which is in the same room as the satellite. and the whole lot documented in photographs and on placards. it's as much a nostalgia museum as anything else, both for designers and the rest of us (what are you now, the building formerly signed in tiki as kona lanes?); and in the last section of it we visit, a history of 3d letters, i sit down and wonder in writing where it is that we look for -- and where it is that we might find -- intrinsic value. why don't i ever let the designer see this notebook (all of it in the gold leaf beverly called "nice on the eyes")?

then we went, but we only got as far as the reception desk. this space, the man told the amateur historian, had just been inaugurated this year. the museum used to be downtown. since 1999? i'd stopped writing. the founder, the former editor of a trade publication for sign makers, had gotten a million dollars to let himself be gently pushed out of the family business. i asked about the electric bill. it must have been why the museum needed to host events. but the incandescent bulbs sucked more than the neon, the man said. huh. and i said that you don't see much outdoor neon in ohio, although it seems to be everywhere in the pacific northwest. then the man complimented vancouver and said that we should check out terry's. we'd passed it that morning on riverside, i said. then he said something or other about the museum's mission to restore (revive or revivify?) the old signage of all of the different neighborhoods of the city. i don't remember exactly. what i do know is that he mentioned northside, which, when we finally left the museum at just about four, is where we went.

it was relatively close. and the thing was, we'd been there the night before looking for food after just arriving in the city. but as the blonde, incredibly handsome faced but wart nosed man coming out of the northside tavern told us, there wasn't any place closer than clifton with anything good to eat at close to ten. now we were back, and the tavern was closed. unfortunately so was the serpent, and the beautifully midwestern line about trouser snakes in its online description had been a big part of our decision to head in that direction. way to go. we might have given it a try the night before when we'd been walking up and down hamilton -- food or no -- but we hadn't seen it. there's hardly any signage.

we had, however, been thinking about that dress, and after a couple of drinks at who cares wherever we wound our way back downtown. she'd said she wanted something sequined for the party. this wasn't exactly that, but we bought the poof sleeved, one shouldered, shimmery gold leopard mini dress anyway. for forty-five dollars, the question of intrinsic value wasn't even raised.

at noon the next day, at breakfast, all signs pointed to a good party. and better, there was enough left over to send us home with some. i accepted. and i loaded it all into the car before we left to reconvene at terry's before the two of us drove back to columbus. terry's turf club, verily the second american sign museum in cincinnati. and i would say that the place could make some serious money selling its impressive collection of old beer neon to new bars in the pacific northwest if it didn't seem to be doing such great business. the bigger signs on the adjacent knoll to the east aren't to miss either, and i took them in as her husband was leading us to his car so that we could take more extra beer from the cooler that he had in the back. (had he been santa clausing the entire afternoon?)

where is it that we look for intrinsic value? i looked up, and what i saw through the fog at the very top edge of the windshield was one of the new signs. but what happens in the parking lot of the tanger outlets stays in the parking lot of the tanger outlets, that is until we got back on the highway and drove away. back. again.

(she'd said she wanted something sequined for the party, 

DOUBLE DOUBLE; or, CONSCIENCE BURN...AND REAL ESTATE BUBBLE?

when the bars closed early sunday morning, there wasn't a single cab to be had anywhere on main street in vancouver. i mean, there were swarms of cabs, they just weren't for the having. flagging was pointless, not to mention the danger of approaching the curb (let alone leaving it) and getting closer to the aggressive flow of traffic. the only vehicles with their top lights lit up were ambulances, and although they weren't as numerous as the occupied cabs they were screaming past regularly in both directions collecting party casualties, some of whom might possibly have staggered themselves too close to an unavailable taxi and been hit as they were trying in vain to hail a ride. zombies.

most everyone was in costume. vancouver, they told me, loves halloween. or, rather, vancouver loves costumes, they told me, and halloween is an easy excuse to indulge. as for us, we had indulged the night before and so were the exception on the streets when we went out. i had never seen so many people on the sidewalks of...anywhere, really, who were in costume simply for the fact of the holiday and a saturday. the entire city all dressed up and, it seemed for the most part, with nowhere in particular to go. so they went places. to the places that were available to them to go. and unfortunately that meant a long lineup of costumes outside of "hot one inch action," which meant that we didn't get the opportunity to trade any limited edition buttons -- or even see which ones had been made for the event this year. true, it's what we'd been looking forward to throughout the long afternoon aftermath of our indulgence the night before (including throughout the overlong only one mop cleanup of the toast collective where the dance party had been), but we hadn't come prepared to wait in rain with the characters of "adventure time."

it's easily possible that the gallery had planned this year's action for halloween saturday in order to make itself a place to get dressed up and go. it's also possible that the event had just gotten big. since i'd last visited, the city had been dressing itself up. maybe dubiously, but indubitably. gastown had definitively annexed the part of the demilitarized zone to its east/southeast and solidified its borders around a moodily gleaming design and lifestyle district. with the bulwark of chinatown pushing back along the vector of the opposite diagonal, the dmz had been squeezed essentially flat, into a cross of sidewalks with the heart of its squirming, dispossessed body at the intersection of main and east hastings, its feet milling up and down both sides of the latter as the street made its way through strathcona. the safe injection site at 139 hastings street east marks the edge of the western front at the bottom of the downtown hill. even the rents at the remaining residence hotels must be skyrocketing (not to mention that their old neon would probably look fantastic against refurbished facades and that they were likely already the subject of speculation). the panhandlers who had made their way through the architects, diner-shoppers and post-hipster tattoo artists all the way up to water street were panhandling for fives. but anymore, it's not so much the social services crowd bleeding back against the redevelopment push as the reverse ingress of the well heeled and costumed onto the sidewalks of the main/hastings cross that illustrates the tide of the conflict. from in between the grocery cart pushers, the junkies and the fawn legged prostitutes in miniskirts: the unmistakable drag of the contemporary young professional.

i had been driven by it a number of times in the past but had never before made it inside of spartacus books, which is located at the bottom of the cross across from the avalon on hastings as it makes its way through strathcona. on this visit, however, i made a point of passing by on foot during decent weekday hours. and on that friday noon i was part of the ingress (indubitably if maybe also dubiously), coming as i was from near the east van cross at clark and great northern way snapping photos (although i never got around to getting a photo of the cross itself). the non-profit, volunteer staffed store has a surprisingly large selection of journals for its size, many of them (of course) canadian and many of them (of course) with an obvious leftward lean. but there are poetry and fiction journals too. that friday, the staff was reorganizing the bookshelves, but i still found a used copy of the psychogeography collection edited by will self for under eleven dollars. inexpensive enough, yes, but too big and too heavy to have to carry around all day and then later have to pack with all the others and carry around for the rest of my trip. so i bought a magnet and a button as souvenirs, the button a bit of a crossword puzzle showing the words "mend," "melee" and "vneck." something for my lapel for the weekend, and good thing, since we wouldn't be waiting in the rain for the one inch action the next night.

afterward i walked through strathcona and onto main street from behind the train station, then up the hill to spend the rest of my afternoon looking for something signature secondhand that would be all the more special for my having not bought it in the states. from past experience i'd considered c'est la vie to be my best bet, but the woman there didn't seem to want anything to do with customers that day. luckily, i'd already found a vintage tote at woo when i got there and didn't feel at all put out by her inattentiveness. anyway, there wasn't a thing in the scaled back men's section that i wanted. plus, i needed to stop...although that didn't stop me from getting something else from the fancy thrift store on cordova when i'd made it back down the hill and into gastown. mercifully, my bandmate confirmed the advisability of the purchase when i met her back at the flower shop. an old piano key belt was definitely something that someone in our group would wear (offstage). we'd just been talking about the development of our new project the previous afternoon as we were making deliveries in yaletown and on granville island. rosehip & wax flower was a serious group about unserious shit. or something in between that and the other way around. unsarcastic songs about the bitterness of first world problems. "it's the sherry again." that was going to be the hit.

 

but sorry. it's the sherry again (or the warm lucky beer chaser). my canadian person costume got an apathetic reception at the toast collective party, but people were drinking enough that at least one of them was willing to overlook my obviously american half-effort to compliment the elegance of my vomiting into the bushes before i headed face forward for my bandmate's couch. still, the general canadian eye was on other mid-fall american high jinks that morning -- or afternoon, in our case, when we finally made it to slickity jim's. the focus article in that saturday's globe and mail was on the election in ohio. "like us or not" was the message i decided to imbue, take and project, but as soon as i was finished with the article i drowned myself in the blurb about the forthcoming book of illustrations by rené gruau, which was set below an almost full page reproduction of an illustration (probably) from the book. dress-up!

we hadn't planned to dress for the occasion when we left for the button event later that evening, but by early the next morning my bandmate and i were changing. at a bus stop in front of the train station, just several blocks from east hastings on main, i was going barefoot. if there weren't any cabs to be had and we were going to have to walk, she wasn't going to have to walk in the heels of those boots. so she went as a clown in my shoes, and i went as a survivor of the zombie/"adventure time"/young professional apocalypse happening on the streets around us, stumbling and laughing through another end of the world. then our third, dressed in a toned down version of the train robber's getup that he'd worn the night before, ran off to steal us the cab with its top light on that was headed into the parking lot of the station across the street. and none too soon. in the short span of the walk to where the robber was holding the car, i knew that i would have had a difficult time making it back to mclean in my costume.

the cab that took me back to the station five hours later had been on duty since just after we'd gone to bed. the underage parties, he told me to my surprise, were the worst. and the driver had another eight hours to go on his shift. i didn't have much time before i needed to catch my bus back to seattle, but i wanted the coffee. so i left the station parking lot and went across the street to the tim hortons on terminal way. give me: coffee. two sugars, two creams. i'd saved just enough of my remaining cash after tipping the cabbie. i should have gotten that book at the radical bookstore, but i really didn't want to carry it. that morning, my backpack was especially heavy, and i had another bag waiting in portland -- plus whatever i added to the load once i got there. so i crammed my great white guilt into my new vintage tote bag and doubled down on my double double. there was room in the tote because i hadn't made it to the cbc shop. and that was fine, i thought, really a very petty worry; that and the customs officer at the border was going to give me trouble as i was.

    

WAY TO GO OHIO

let's say his name is kaylon. let's say that's his name because it is, and because i'd say that i doubt i would have come up with it on my own. and let's say that i went on a date with him, because i did, and that was because he'd asked me if i wanted to get a drink with him and given me his phone number within ten or so lines of opening a chat with me, which i found refreshing...or intriguing...or something that was charmingly enough out of the ordinary to pique my interest. also, he'd sent me a shirtless picture of himself immediately after his salutation and his compliment on my glasses, and his blurry torso (or whosever it was -- because i hadn't asked for any other pictures, and his profile picture was more of the same) wasn't bad. so i started exchanging texts with an idea that i'd conjured around a blurry picture of a not at all bad torso who lived near my friend's place in olde towne east. let's say his name is kaylon, because i'd say that there aren't any innocent to protect.

we made plans. ...and i showed up to them on time. and when he called, after almost an hour of my sitting alone with my beer next to the fire pit on the patio had passed, i told him that i was going to finish my drink and leave. that, no, he shouldn't come. did i think that he'd stood me up? i didn't care. and i told him that i was sure he had an explanation. but the truth was that i was annoyed, and i didn't think that a date with him was going to go very well after an hour of my stewing in my mounting annoyance, an hour that ended in an even more annoyingly stammering phone call (although i'm only telling that last bit just now). but he still wanted to come, he said, and he hoped that i would still be there; and i told that he probably shouldn't, but that i wasn't going to down the rest of my beer and run out of the tavern just to avoid him.

so he showed up. and i, i was texting my friend to tell her that i should already have ditched the date. and i motioned to him with my finger that i was busy. i should have left for the first time after he started arguing with me about not having called when i arrived. i'd sent him a text to tell him that i was on the patio, i told him, but if we were going to argue etiquette, i said, then i'd argue that making plans with someone for a specific time at a specific place means that you should show up there and then without having to be called. really. luckily, ben saved us from having to argue any further.

let's call him ben because that's his name, and he works across the street at yellow brick pizza. he'd been sitting by himself next to the fire pit and had asked if he could join our table. i'd told him that we were navigating a crisis, and he'd said that in that case then he should definitely help us and had pulled over a chair. after introducing himself, kaylon jumped on the opportunity to say (to ben) that he was a pastry chef and that people should forgive him for falling asleep and missing appointments because he had to be awake so early for work. i was, of course, enraptured by the charm of his passive aggression. then ben introduced himself to me and asked about the crisis, and i told him that things had already started to improve with his company and that i was so excited for what was about to happen that i wished i could be live blogging the progress of the resolution. he didn't seem to gather the reality of my sincerity -- and neither kaylon my sarcasm.

oh well. because ben had already started telling the story of his cast. he'd been at a big pagan festival in the woods. a lady had been giving him a hand job, then right as she whispered in his ear that she was queer she got scared away by a bear...and ben woke up with a broken foot. then he asked what we were up to, and i ruined it for myself by telling him that we were on a painfully awkward date, but that he had gone further than i could explain to better the situation. that's when he apologized and excused himself, and i regret not having followed suit.

kaylon said that maybe he could be better informed but that he wasn't political. (and he certainly was not 5'8".) so i had said that maybe it was better we changed the subject. i liked the place, obviously -- and i liked yellow brick across the street. but there were better ways to go about revitalizing a neighborhood than just clearing it out, moving higher rents in and installing retail and restaurants mimeographed off the coasts. but, he insisted, sometimes a city just had to do what it had to do. to make a neighborhood "nice." because did i know that this was once the nice part of town? and having lived there all of a year or so, he could tell me what the problems were. he didn't want to stereotype, he said, "but i think we both know what race it is." i suspected that it might be ours. and after turning away to bite my right shoulder for fifteen or twenty seconds, i stayed. there wasn't going to be much gotten from conversation, but i wanted to try for a clearer look at that torso. and as i felt absolutely compelled to confess to everyone i met the next morning, i subjugated my dignity to my dick, which ultimately just suffered more awkward ignominy before eventually taking its cold shower in the thunderstorm that broke as i finally found my way to walking away, completely ungratified. no innocent to protect.

way to go ohio. i still haven't read that article from the sunday magazine (perhaps in part because of an avoidance mechanism engendered by the city pictured on the cover), but apparently the state is doing relatively well...macroeconomically speaking. and it would be problematic to conflate the state of the state with the state of the city of columbus. by all appearances, however, the latter isn't doing so bad either. macroeconomically speaking. and people do seem to be proud of their city...and all the more so the more that the city does what the rest of them have done. but columbus doesn't seem interested at all in developing an indigenous movement of its own. late hipster irony is still coming into its day here, and that might actually be a good thing for the praise singers: an insular socius that nonetheless derives all of its cultural inspiration from the outside is easily rationalized deterministically. relatively well off, delightedly provincial, fashion neutral and socially conservative with an overt touch of latent racism. ladies and gentlemen, a portrait of the swing vote (shot, of course, using instagram).

on the side of a building at 88 east broad street, there's a sentence forming. "columbus never came here, but when the city sleeps, what our dreamers discover," it's started. and there's been a series of contests for residents to choose the words to follow the original five, which went up one by one beginning in the winter. the project is part of a larger one called "finding time," which was planned for downtown for 2012 as part of the celebrations for the city's bicentennial. i've no idea what the people of columbus discover when they dream. but it would appear that they need some help saying so themselves. and what columbus is being helped to say about itself couldn't have been better announced from over that (perfectly characteristic) downtown parking lot: the artist who conceived and is judging the project is in brooklyn. back to the blurry torsos.

HOW TO KICK A DEAD GIFT HORSE -- ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY; or, PROVERBS, CHAPTER 1.5

on the third day, i rested. god, as they say, didn't sleep with everyone in rome in a day, and he needed to take at least one for himself to admire his handiwork while rehydrating and watching television. (glory be to the extra long weekend.) but that didn't mean i couldn't eat. to the contrary: baby, as they say, gotta eat. first, however, baby had to finish up his all night interview with TED (spreading ideas and absolutely nothing else), which might have ended more promisingly had the light of morning not shown baby the abysmal quality of TED's books.

the saturday crossword maybe isn't the best for your rest day, but verb had it for free, and the morning was young. unfortunately, i'd spent nearly all of my battery getting my interview materials together amidst the hilarity of having depleted the last reserves of rum in caracas, and when it died i figured i shouldn't be incomunicado (as they say) with the other set of keys in case there was business needing doing that wasn't going to have any other way back into the apartment. an excuse to sideline the crossword with only three clues answered? perhaps...but i would take it with me. and i took my cup from verb too, to the apartment and then to the southern restaurant where i ordered a mug of coffee anyway because it made the doughnut cheaper. you do the math -- because i didn't. it was my rest day plan to chase all of the rum in caracas with all of the coffee in williamsburg until my kidneys forced me to drink all of the fizzy non-alcoholic campari something that we found at the cheese shop when she was buying ingredients for pesto later in the day. either way, that is, i was coming out ahead. a dollars worth of one, a cup of coffee's worth of another, as they say. and in the end, even with the extra breakfast sandwich that we got for the table to share, everyone came out pretty well, including our servers, including tip. if there's one thing worse than cool, it's expressed authenticity. (with age, no resignation to collective wisdom, as they say.) refreshingly, the cool southern place didn't claim to be authentic. and, even better, it was deliciously cheap.

one stop later at blue bottle (you know, that one place in new york that the coffee bar you're in reminds you of?), she and i didn't get much further with the puzzle, but we did have a good time staring at it until someone had the giant fucking balls to flaunt the less than day old amnesty of the torch passing and get in line at the bar wearing a powell's tee. unfortunately, big balls or cute dyke-y recent transplant cashier or not, no one was going to have his or her face sat on at that place this morning after that low blow.

so she and i went down to the pier. we weren't there for smorgasburg, but neither were we immediately hungry (and the guy who told me it wasn't to miss was also the one who told me that larry lawrence was the bar to go to, so, you know). plus, we could see all of the food carts from where we were sitting on some steps in the shade, and it wasn't hard to imagine what was on offer. the new white street food refugees had escaped the flames and gotten asylum before the torch passing proceedings and the enactment of the amnesty. bored again with the scene, we played hot lava monster, hopping shade patches as far as we could down the pier, at the end of which we were welcomed with a pretty view of the skyline of old new york. could that ever have been public housing? then, turning back, a view of the authentic loft living experience of new brooklyn. did she know about "flag wars"? i asked. she didn't, so i gave her a run down. but as we were hot lava monstering through authenticity town back towards the streets of walk-ups strung with the flag of puerto rico, i was thinking less about that movie than adriana camarena's article in this summer's issue of n+1. "street food" is about the changes taking place in the mission district of san francisco, but one of camarena's most poignant statements goes for anywhere and everything on the way from christopher street to the castro, over to the mission, and back again to williamsburg: "we think of gentrification principally in terms of real estate, race, and class, but i more often find that food is the thermometer reading the temperature of gentrification." food for thought, as they say.

or so i was thinking. and at my next interview, when he asked me if i was a foodie (because we'd been talking about the strudel he'd had at smorgasburg and i'd told him about the southern place and the pesto she'd made for late lunch), i asked him in turn why he thought we needed a baby word for being hungry. and, well, i don't think i got the job. and rightfully so, because it wasn't really the occasion for misplacing the acute guilt i was feeling over what camarena describes (and well and in depth) as her "class and identity contradictions." you'll have to just believe in mine. or, as they say, not. the point is, who am i to talk. breakfast was still fifteen dollars. and, i mean, i shut myself up eventually by stuffing my mouth full of clam pizza at fornino. but i was only quiet over dinner. because then i made us stop for ice cream. in my defense, however, it was my day of rest, and i needed it, and replenishment, if i was going to keep on talking the talk, as they say, the next morning when i was going to have to walk the dog and bitch about the flea market. yes, the food carts would be gone, but damn if white people didn't like buying other people's marked up trash, which will remain trash...until i can afford it... 

COFFEE TALK, YOU'RE SUCH A FAG (WARS)

it's in. "flag wars" is an eighty-six minute lesson in the contradictions of columbus, ohio. the 2003 documentary on the gentrification of olde towne east won a peabody award -- as well as the esteem of all of the queers who rented at video verite on mississippi avenue in portland after the surrounding neighborhood had been gentrified -- but nearly a decade later it doesn't even seem to have made it onto the radar map of the city where it was shot. it is -- and anywhere -- as the (increasingly drunker) real estate agent who is depicted as the flag bearer of the charge to move the homos into the neighborhood says: it's about money. and the african american homeowners who were left in the neighborhood after the white flight of the mid-twentieth century don't have it. in other words, they do own their big, old houses, but they can't pay to fix them up and make the neighborhood expensive again like the homos.

[a pause to appreciate the ironic timeliness of the release of "premium rush" as the trailer speeds past the cops on tv.]

a longer pause. because i'm thinking again about having heard that the drag shows at the gay bar on parsons (the one that was featured in "flag wars") are getting more and more popular with the fixed gear kids that hang out around impero and one line. columbus is progressive, they say, and i think that i probably would have agreed until a year ago. the capital is definitely the most progressive city in the state. but the city that once joined new york and san francisco in protest of the police invasion of the stonewall inn in 1969 appears still to be only the follower, but now not even occasionally in line with any radical minority. columbus, says a recent gay transplant from raleigh, is remarkably segregated. and of course it's no longer a question of gay. or, rather, it's the gays that have been the first wave anywhere (and the richer the better). and as "flag wars" does well to point out, it isn't as if neighborly concord is furthered by the anti-gay religious values often shared among the "indigenous" population of olde towne east. but maybe it's all been moot since "flag wars" got popular out of town(e)...and maybe it's just a matter of time (and gentrification) until the movie gets in with the cool crowd in its hometown. then again, for a city that is home to one of the top interdisciplinary art centers in the world, there persists a resistance to art at the fringe (and all that leaves is a bunch of mediocre middle west stuff).

but then there's also that one line i overhear at one line (and i'll admit that i would probably be at the new bakery on oak in olde towne east if they had decaf). yoga pants and louis vuitton asks the urban outfitted barista (complete with republic bicycle locked outside) which coffee bar in new york this reminds her of. "you know, that one in new york," she says before she wanders to the back of the place to wonder what the roaster is for. "i couldn't say," comes the response. "there are, like, hundreds of coffee bars in new york. it's a really progressive city." so excuse me. because apparently i'd confused my terms. good thing i'll have a chance coming up to visit and get back behind the curve. start spreading the news. it's in. that's why progress invented 4g. just don't ask who lived here before that.

it's time for a new cool, faggots. but it absolutely won't help if we tell each other where to look.