O ROTTEN GOTHAM, part 5

edie windsor decided to hijack the dyke march right ahead of where we joined it. we'd been waiting at the plaza that gives onto a view of the 23rd street corner of the flatiron building for probably two hours when we finally saw the vanguard of the march slowly pushing south down 5th avenue, and when the march had finally pushed close enough for us to get a good look at the banner bearers, edie and her parade crew stepped in front of them with their rainbow flag for a photo op. i had a camera out so i obliged them (and my friends), despite of what i later decided i thought about the image of the wealthy widow surrounded by her media and police detail under a banner that had been stopping traffic without permission down a manhattan thoroughfare inciting onlookers to raise their fists. the front of the march passed us, and i don't know whether or not edie kept marching ahead of it. for my part, i felt much finer at the center of the throng behind a crude cardboard sign that was lamenting the recently invalidated parts of the voting rights act while also reminding the marchers that marriage equality didn't equal queer liberation. a school age girl on the shoulders of a woman marching a few yards ahead of me had a drawing of what looked like it might have been lady gaga as the tooth fairy stuck to her back with blue tape. the girl (at the almost certain behest of the woman carrying her, who was wearing a sign of her own in protest of the traditionalization of her family) had written "democrazy" above the fairy's head, which i noticed for the first time as we were marching past the new school. i could speculate on which of them had the better chances for winning grand champion of the weekend (and among those only edie had made an appearance at the march), but it was humbling and inspiring just to have the overwhelming sense that everyone would be showing their sacred cows. i was humbled, i was inspired, and i was proud. the sheer beauty of the march kept stopping traffic, and we all finally finished the slow putsch to the park. jd samson overheard us making plans to head to the stonewall in from the bench next to ours but decided not to follow us there. we all opted out away from a picture with the fountain in the sunset.

we only had one drink on christopher street, because everywhere was getting crowded and because we'd had quite a bit of protest prosecco. we'd also stopped somewhere on franklin for an afternoon refresher before we'd left brooklyn to meet the march. before that, we'd put ourselves in the mood and in the mindset for debating edie's inclusion among the dykes by sitting down with judy chicago and valerie hegarty at the brooklyn museum. and before that we'd been at brunch, where there might have been more sparkling wine. (it was the weekend, and one of us at least was on vacation.) a little baby queen had been sitting next to us telling his female companion about how a friend of his, at twenty-six, should really be thinking about settling down. he could, feasibly, be marrying a boyfriend soon if he made the effort. and he wouldn't want to be one of those guys in his thirties creeping at the bars. but we had a full schedule, so i didn't want to take the time to tell him that he definitely didn't have anything to worry about from those guys in their thirties. they weren't looking at anyone like him. i did, however, give him my ass as i squeezed out from between our tables. to put him at ease. then we left, in a huff of our own questionable privilege and dubious inclusion, but nonetheless with our fists in the air.

O ROTTEN GOTHAM, interlude

it happened to me first. "fuck a porch cat." verily. putting that food there is only encouraging the raccoons to do their dance. and up my leg. i wish i'd flagged down that cruiser to have the cops put it down, but then they would have found me drinking in the street.

O ROTTEN GOTHAM, part 4

the night before the morning on which i didn’t find an airbrushed tee shirt of a crying clown smoking a blunt at coney island, i went to the doctoral student’s place. he was still awake when i had finally made it on foot to bedford and dean from the wythe hotel (where i’d succeeded in making the portland transplant djing the rooftop party uncomfortable by my surprise appearance), and his relationship was still open at just past midnight that night. i don’t remember what he told me about what he’d done for pride weekend, but i do remember him telling me that he wasn’t teaching any classes over the summer. because he was studying for orals. then i remember there was some really great rimming. like i told the man himself after i’d looked over his bookshelves: i don’t know anything about poetry.

a couple of hours later, after i’d made my graceful (and classical japanese-ly poetic) exit, i stopped to ask a couple of girls on the street how many streets i had to go until i got to halsey, but they didn’t know. (they were out of towners too.) and the man on the bicycle riding slowly next to them trying to start up a conversation must not have known much of anything, because he obviously couldn’t read that one of the girl’s shirts was telling those of us back on bedford at two-thirty in the morning that she liked vagina. the other girl should have probably been given away by all of her rainbow swag.

the four of us must have seemed a funny little parade of our own to the no one paying attention until i spotted a couple of cops and walked ahead to have them tell me that i was already several blocks past my turn.

i hadn’t gone to the official parade earlier in the day because it had been time for everyone to finally make it to the beach. the last time i’d visited we’d all been too lazy, i think. so instead i’d just cut my lip on an oyster shell and let it bleed over two bottles of wine and a heaping sunday special plate of commiseration. this time, however, i was full committed, because i’d already trekked all over midtown to find myself a bathing suit that would be worthy of a hard femme towel fort. so we got on the train, got off the train, got some provisions and a terrible chocolate muffin, got back on the train, got off it, asked directions to the bus that was going to the gay beach, got directions, got on the bus, and got off the bus to see that you couldn’t even see the ocean from where the bus stopped at the beach because the weather was so bad. but when we were settled at the encampment we took of our clothes anyway. because we were at the gay pride beach party and we were going to have fun. the fuzzy tall guy who had given us directions to the bus stripped down too, but he and his friend were sitting too far away from the fort for me to fully appreciate him. i swam, and the ocean was rough but surprisingly uncold. i stumbled back up the beach, and the sparkling water back at the fort was perfect.

then i saw someone. i hadn’t tried to get in touch, even though i knew she was living in brooklyn, and it was probably unlikely that we’d just run into each other on the cloudy beach that day, but i wasn’t surprised that we did because we’d always just run into each other wherever we were whenever we happened to be in the same place, the last time at a bookstore on the other coast (maybe). before and after she’d gotten her graduate degree in poetry in missoula. (we’d never run into each other there because i’d never been to montana.)

she was one of the few topless queers at the party without a surgical scar. i told her that i was finally doing something about those old conversations, and she told me that she’d finally found someone to let her live in that empty place in the hasidic part of williamsburg that she’d been after. i should have gotten the address so that i could have gone to see her there before i had to leave on the chinatown bus, but i told myself that i didn’t need to just then because i’d probably talk to her again before we left the beach. but that wasn’t how it happened. and i don’t think that i’ll ever get her a copy of that spivak chapter on translation, probably so that we’d always have reason to keep running into each other. a buildup to dirty looks. for the moment, just eye rolling. the parade-goers could have their palatably planned families, and we, we would occupy this swathe of unwanted cloudy beach in our tiny swimsuits.

until the rain started. then we went back for the bus. and then we caught a second one instead of retracing our earlier steps via the train. but we should have dealt with the rain and waited for the express. the local was something else, and there was an announcement about the streets that had been closed in manhattan because of the parade. i didn’t want to hear about it, and i wanted the bus to go faster: not so much away from that beach, but definitely toward the promise of the evening, which wasn’t even anything very provocative. people like poetry, but this slut just wanted to get laid.

O ROTTEN GOTHAM, part 3

that monday morning i took the train to coney island. it wasn't a day for the beach, but i needed to go to get a tee shirt. the airbrushed one of a sad clown smoking a blunt that i'd seen on the venice boardwalk. the clown looked like jim morrison, and i'd get text written below his crying face that read "mcdonald rules." it would make the perfect gift -- even if she was expecting it. unexpectedly, however, i didn't find a single airbrush tee shirt stall. it wasn't a day for the beach, and touts at the carnival games on the ground between the cyclone and the wonder wheel were just starting to shout out across their empty alleys as i was heading back to the train station at two in the afternoon. ("try your luck!" and "bump your ass off!") i saw the sign counting down the seconds until the next fourth of july hot dog eating contest, and i ate a chili cheese dog at an affiliated counter that faced the beach. it had been raining intermittently since the morning, but the worst of it all was still the humidity. the local trains platform of the nostrand avenue station served by the a and the c hadn't smelled nearly as bad as it had over the weekend, but it still sweltered. on the q to coney island i shared a smile with a woman across the aisle who was also fanning herself in her seat. commiserations and desperations. at least we were getting out! too bad though that i couldn't get that shirt. there were places selling commemorative tees, but if they didn't have to do with hot dogs, then they were just more of the depreciated cultural capital of the borough, designed and pitched to the middlingest of the middlebrow (come for a hot dog but leaving now with a portable banner of breukelen kewl). i left with a coffee and a bag of dunkin' donuts.

i'd talk about killing time at the discount carts outside of the strand on broadway, or about buying lottery tickets at the newsstand where the man behind the counter sold me the magazine from the previous day's newspaper for just a dollar, or about how we won a little bit of money playing bingo scratch offs at the izakaya on st. mark's place after the coffee place we'd designated as our meeting spot was closed, but i've gotten distracted by these drag makeup tutorials on youtube. the show at fuel last night got me thinking. what better way to mark the prodigal summer of an f-list celebrity hobo? full circle to an airbrushed tee shirt of a crying jim morrison clown smoking a blunt. and we've already got a concept for our gowns -- as well as a business plan for selling vintage tee shirts at midwest street fairs. the vintage arcade (+ bar) wasn't open (and was far from being open) after we'd checked out the competition, so when we'd finished loitering in a nearby parking lot and the police copter started poking around, we did our best to get involved in a manhunt. then later we accessorized prostitution. and a stoned jim morrison clown wept. mcdonald rules.

WAY TO GO OHIO, part 15

it wasn't the afternoon that i spent in the upstairs office of the cat palace trying to take glamor shots of the cats (the three of the four whose fur matched the wig) that caused me to realize that i might need some time outside. it was the night that i started texting the photos. nearly alone and nearly disconnected, having eschewed all but the most necessary of the internet's nonsenses, i had somehow become the internet itself. say you wanna get in, and you're gonna get out... but don't. it's a trap. then, curiouser and curiouser, i leave, and i leave the keys behind me, but then i'm driving north on 71 into downtown later in the day, and somewhere in the rain near lou berliner park i'm overcome by an unquestionably happy wistfulness at the sight of the skyline. catch that outbound plane before love starts flying of its own free will. bah. "love? not much. trickery, yes, some." and those cats aren't going to use what they make from those photos to refund my ticket. lolz. greetings from everywhere and nowhere. regards, the internet.

SUMMER FUN SUN BUZZWORD BEACH COCONUT

"squirrel! ...don't eat THAT!" she bolted up from her chair beside the paper press and was screaming as she ran out of the house. but after she'd made it out the front door and onto the porch she might have been screaming mixed messages. "that isn't FOOD!" she shreiked as she pelted the squirrel in the mimosa tree with squirrel food. but there was the desired effect, and the beast dropped the rose. a neighbor tried to pass unnoticed along the sidewalk on the other side of the hedges, but i could see her through the big bay window that frames the rose bush under the mimosa tree as she quickened her pace. summertime, and the living is...distracted. and it tries to go unnoticed. meanwhile, all kinds of things are passing the cat palace by, but i haven't been paying much attention, whether i notice or not. i guess that robbie rogers can expect me in l.a. now. and i guess that everyone else can't expect much. distracted, i can't read books, because the theft of these stolen magazines needs justification. which happens in a chair on the lawn, on the opposite side of the walkway from the mimosa tree. i get sweaty, so i take off my pants. photographs. the neighborhood. later i'll get the pants back out of the freezer and press them so that they're perfect. i'll walk to the door of the bar imagining the looks, then i'll turn around, walk back to the palace, and carefully put my pants away. maybe i'll pick up a book. me, one hand, and the other one for anaïs nin. artists and models... goodbye, world! hello summer. pick me up at lax so that i don't have to take the bus to hollywood.

THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT

it might have been, but i got lazy in the evening after going to the exotic latino grill. so i didn't end up seeing "the unspeakable act" at the wexner center, even though i'd been planning to for a week. i'd just read the taxi, and when i happened to check the wexner center's film calendar i doubted that i'd ever have such a fresh and portentous opportunity to write something comparing two such distant works about a sister and a brother fucking. it might have been entertaining. but i think i might very well have been disappointed with the film, and not necessarily as a film but as a point of comparison, because from the preview i can't say that i'd expect the sister and the brother to get down to that "unspeakable act" (hunched shoulders, deadpan...the i word!), whereas the two in that taxi are going at it all day. then again, such a striking contrast might also have made the writing more interesting. as it is, it just might have been. that kroger got bought out of keystone light two days ahead of the end of its sale, and this cat really wants into this box of cobras. (they're probably dead by now, but i still don't want to have to deal with them.) that is, i already had enough to worry about while i was falling asleep from my burrito al pastor, and thinking about having to possibly ride through the rain to a disappointingly under attended and possibly just disappointing film was more than i felt like having to sleep on. plus, it might have been that i ended up pawning one of those typewriters after all to get my ticket. (i've been forced to splurge on milwaukee's best ice.) so all's well, i suppose. or it might have been. fuck. if it weren't for these cobras. she found them out. and what i'll probably have to do will continue to be unspeakable.

DISPATCH: PROPOSITION BIENNALE

"So, the Biennale is fancy, right? Every country sends an artist or two to represent its best creative minds. It's hosted in several places around the city, but primarily the ornamental gardens with these permanent buildings for each country.

1. Spain was first, of course. The magnificent art in their building was in the form of three piles of stupidity. Wood chips, dirt, bricks. BRILLIANT!

2. Belgium was actually great. I have been affectionately referring to the singular, huge piece in their building as "Meat Tree," which is pretty much what it sounds like: a huge, huge fallen tree sculpture made to look like it was cut from a thousand animals and held down with sand bags.

3. United States. Organized office supplies. A lot of string.

4. Israel. YES. Most impressive was a film of several people sculpting their own heads out of clay. These heads were monstrous and insane. One middle aged woman shaved her head, put the hair on her sculpture-self, put clay all over her actual face...and screamed into the microphone that she violently jammed into the clay head. SURPRISE TWIST! Everyone violently jammed a microphone somewhere into their self portraits! And they all moaned, cried, screamed, gurgled, whatever, into the microphone as the audio portion of their portraits -- in this film. THE OTHER video was of a fucking DJ remixing their moaning...endlessly. The third part was the actual sculptures, which were in some corner and absolutely not the point of the exhibit. And the final part was a giant fucking hole someone dug into the floor, and who knows why that was there.

5. The Etsy Pavilion, which is almost certainly not actually called that, was pretty great. Inside, a wealth of weird doll houses, a print of a fishsnailicorn, a huge mural that includes a skeleton flipping the bird, someone's sketch of their dad in drag, and some other shit I took pictures of.

Today and the next couple days are sort of the pre-party for this thing. It's all press passes and critics. Uma-Thurman-in-Pulp-Fiction haircuts with white linen tunics and big beaded necklaces, all of the mercilessly expensive glasses intentionally made to look cheap, all of the haute couture blazers in awkward sizes, all of the avant garde uncomfortable shoes, huge expensive cameras and film crews, self-important conversations about art left and right, exclusive promotional materials... AND YOURS TRULY AS THE REPRESENTATIVE FOR MIDWESTERN SLOBS WHO GET WEIRD IN HUMIDITY! I spent most of my time pulling out my weird little tourist camera and blocking the shots of the professional photographers for The Times or whomever. They loved that. But! Then it became clear that there were press packs! GUESS WHO DOESN'T NEED TO BUY EXPENSIVE ITALIAN SOUVENIRS ANYMORE!!! I went around scooping up all the swag bags and fliers and offending everyone by wanting their fancy goods for no reason. I have four tote bags with weird phrases on them so far, and I hope to get more.

The best part was actually leaving. A guy who looks like *****'s dad in a construction vest and ball cap silently hands you a tiny flyer with random letters on it. About fifty feet later, an identical man TAKES IT FROM YOU QUIETLY AND SPEEDILY AND BY FORCE IF NECESSARY. When you look back at them to try and understand what the fuck just happened, you can seen that the backs of their vests list the letters on the flier, one matching it, the other in the opposite order. My secret hope is that one of these men was actually *****'s dad. If so, dude, I am sorry your dad is so into rewarding people with material goods and then stealing away their brand new possessions almost instantly that he came to Italy to be an art about it. Growing up with that kind of values probably fucked you up pretty bad. (But seriously, that was the best, most simple, impressive, effective piece I've maybe ever seen. I watched them do this for a while, and the concept of give and take outside the gates of ALL OF THE PRIVILEGE and ALL OF THE FREE SHIT was fucking brilliant. People were really confused and annoyed, or conversely super entertained.

There was also an Indian guy lighting spaghetti noodles on fire and putting them in a row on the ground very, very carefully.

I found tiny, crustless tuna sandwiches with olives for two euros each, in a sort of cafeteria place that looked like a set for some kind of Pee Wee Herman nightmare. I ate three while I listened to some rich old lady talk about board meetings and traveling and charity events and lighthearted upper class problems about pretend stresses. I was really happy to see that her bajillion dollar white leather Prada jacket had some kind of red shit from the table all over the sleeve that was definitely going to stain it forever.

I came back to the apartment and almost immediately ate like twenty dried apricots in the bathtub, so I'm probably going to shit myself pretty soon."

recap.

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.

WAY TO GO OHIO, part 14

i joined my proud people in the discharge of their seasonal festival by driving shirtless across town in a vehicle full of yard maintenance equipment. as i reminisce about an evening drive over the broadway bridge in a pickup truck full of vintage gurney, the great skies of the midwest are preparing to reward us with thunderstorms. if there's going to be all this moisture in the air, it could at least come down and clean up the streets. i've been keeping this yellow hanky decorated with white pikachus handy to wipe my face, so all the boys in the neighborhood know that i want their pee.

OLD WORLD UNDERGROUND WHERE ARE YOU NOW? part 4; or, HOW TO PREDICT A RIOT

after the pre-party, dinner and digestifs, there wasn't any question that it was time to go out for a beer. and although a pint (or two) of anti-hero would probably have been better suited to the tenor of the weekend as it had begun (and had been planned to continue), the revolution taproom was well out of walking distance from downtown, and it probably would have been closed by the time we were able to make it there otherwise (if it weren't closed already). haymarket, however, wasn't too far, and our hope for its association with a bit of radical history had its own special appeal. too bad, unfortunately, that the pub and brewery seemed only to have been named for the neighborhood, the name of which didn't seem to connote much anymore. i flicked off a taxi. there was a wait if we wanted a table, but we could seat or stand ourselves anywhere we wanted in either of the bars. at the end of the hallway with the windows that give onto the brewing tanks there's a quote from brecht. "theater without beer is just a museum." go left to the bathrooms; the bar is to the right. and although there's a bookcase full of books on political economy and performance next to a battlement of mixing boards and other sound equipment, the people in the bar (and in the adjacent second dining room) are all acting in a different play. in which the high school cafeteria gets off work and goes for drinks, as the poet observed. so a single beer each was all of the show we could take.

in the morning, the race was run without event. or: there was the event itself, with more than a few of the participants running to wrigley field for boston, but there weren't any bombs. we screamed, drank our complimentary kefir smoothies, and left. myopic books appeared to have disappeared or relocated by the afternoon, so there were three dollar breakfast cocktails under the damien stop of the blue line. there was ladieswear and there were art books. the illustration for which the artist hadn't been paid was just out in the magazine that i wouldn't buy for twenty-five dollars. i might have stolen it if i hadn't respected the mission and the mainstay of quimby's. i did want it, because it probably won't see an issue two. but... or, then again, i'd probably just gone soft, like wicker park. and the bloody marys couldn't have been very strong, because after three i was still well on my way to lake view. powell's didn't have either of the books i had wanted, but, luckily, they'll always have something i want. when it was time to meet for dinner, i'd been lost for long enough that i felt completely renewed. some respite. some sweet potato fries, a feast of seitan, and a vegan milkshake. afterwards, the one of the book stores we'd planned to visit on broadway was closed, but all of the design firms turned coffee shops and coffee shops turned designer were still doing their things, the thing that everyone's doing. and if i hadn't been encouraged to make good on my talk about crashing the wedding, i probably would have just put myself to bed.

so i went back to the room to change instead. and in the time it took my hair to dry i picked up the party where we'd left it to chase our disappointment in haymarket. then i went to dance, but my heart wasn't it. the high school cafeteria off for the weekend and come to pat backs around the open bar. and i was too full for cake. but worse, when i left the ivy room to pick up the glitter trail (to the fun to which i should have acceded on my way to dinner) i couldn't find a trace of it anywhere. so i helped a kid from pilsen find his way to where his cousin's boyfriend was spinning instead. and then i smiled as i was leaving the restroom and said that i'd had enough to want any cocaine. with the glitter trail lost, the city was the freehold of the closeted judges and the horny nows. until someone threw a bomb. and the sirens screamed. and a taxi swerved. and i flicked it off. then the driver rolled down his window and complimented my suit, to which unexpected approbation i responded by stepping back up onto the curb and dropping my pants. curtains! then, out of his cab now, he handed me a beer. here's to hoping! because otherwise it's all just a museum.

AS I LAY DYING...

i, of course, chased my symptoms all over the internet, which led me, of course, to where that chase always leads. all alarmist paranoiac roads lead to hiv. and if the appearance of the canker sores wasn't an almost certain indication of autoimmune suppression, then at best they were the precursors to oral cancer. but when i finally gave myself over to the hysteria of self-diagnosis (i.e. gave in to the online machinations of the fly by night american medical establishment), i didn't even get tuberculosis. and for my (assuredly common) upper respiratory infection i didn't even get a prescription for any codeine cough syrup. my (admittedly effective) one hundred and three dollar placebo did, however, get me a bottle of something full of pseudoephedrine which, as has been generally indicated, can cause central nervous system depression in hyper-reactive individuals, and so even after i was finally up to a game i wasn't quite able to put together what the letters in front of me had to do with the scrabble board.

WATCHING THE CLOCK, part 5

last night was the last night that i could have watched christian marclay's "the clock" outside of the wexner center's regular hours, and today was the last day that i could see it at the wexner center at all. but the weather today was too nice not to picnic, and last night after my improvised, anticipatory tinto de verano i was just too lazy. a pass on the weekly paper and a pass on the quarterly review. some (improvised, anticipatory) passes at the boys. i've really just been watching the clock until the history channel airs its new travis fimmel underwear ad. his character's son has the coolest do. and now i'm doing it too. improvised, anticipatory cultural catabolism. and at that i remember that i'd almost forgotten about that demagogic leather bar film by the remarkably marketably closeted james franco that was playing this weekend at the cleveland international film festival -- and that, well, i really didn't make any effort to go.

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.

LLORA CUANDO TE PASE

i remember nothing of michael robinson's half of his (guided) q&a with fellow experimental filmmaker laida lertxundi and their wexner center guide other than his statement on karaoke as prayer. even if i hadn't the emotional wherewithal to process the significance of the guide's leading (and meandering) statements-as-questions on the filmmakers' use of music in their films, i still felt a deep sympathy for robinson's digressive statement (in response to the last question that the guide accepted from the audience) on acts of recitation in song wherein a singer is expected to act out the emotion of his medium. i hadn't recognized any of the cover songs in circle in the sand, and so i hadn't speculated on their significance. neither had i paid specific enough attention to the soundtracks of lertxundi's films to mistake one of the songs she'd used in one of them for a song by roy orbison and then to speculate on the significance of that artist's vocal range with the range of the films (as did a professor in the audience). there were probably tropes of experimental film making (and appreciation) that i didn't understand -- which is probably what's keeping me from articulating any greater or more significant speculations on either robinson's or lertxundi's presentations now. (and i speculated as much after the q&a to the phd candidate friend of mine who'd told me that this was an event that i shouldn't miss.) i couldn't, however, deny that i'd reacted to lertxundi's films -- or that tears could signify a wide range of...emotional states.

Su cine cuestiona la manera en que los deseos y expectativas del espectador responden de formas cinemáticas de narración de historias, y busca modos alternativos de vinculación de sonido y música con imágenes de hábitats naturales, situaciones construidas, y entornos cotidianos. Sus películas, filmadas en Los Ángeles y alrededores, crean una geografía paisajística que se transforma en estados afectivos.

[reaction] affected states. bettye swann singing "my heart is closed for the season" over a shot of the paradise motel showing its no vacancy sign, los angeles city hall reflected in a window. but remember: no hidden stories. why michael robinson didn't use the belinda carlisle song with which he chose to share the name of the film of his that was screened at the wexner center on monday is absolutely overt: he couldn't find a decent cover. but he did give us neil young via linda ronstadt: "there was a band playing in my head, and i felt like i could cry. i was thinking about what a friend had said; i was hoping it was a lie." still (or as a result, maybe) "all i can do is lock up my heart and get over you." and boy oh boy. you'd cry too if it happened. any other day, ms. lertxundi, but not that one. maybe it was an event not to miss, but the brutality of my sympathy for what i didn't even have the particular erudition to discuss with the rest of the crowd just made me want it off the fucking screen.

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.
  

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.

WATCHING THE CLOCK; parts 2 and 3

the goal was to be there at four when the gallery started its free thursday hours and watch as much of "the clock" as we could before it closed at eight o'clock. but, unfortunately, our stylist couldn't get us in until exactly then, and, admittedly, the confusion at the salon the day before had been half our fault. (when i was in the chair she said she had a surprise for me and took out some waxing strips to do my neck, but i suspect that she did it more to save time than as a courtesy. apparently we were all watching the clock that afternoon. i should have said something to stop her after the rash i'd gotten from my last waxing but i didn't. in the interest of time, perhaps.) then, after the both of us were finished, it made more sense for us to go pick up our third on the south side instead of having her meet us at the wexner center -- and then we were all hungry. so we didn't sit down in the screening room at the gallery until six forty-five, which, all things considered, wasn't that bad. on screen, the storefront shutters were going down and the people were sitting down to eat. (it would have probably been excruciating if we hadn't taken the extra time to have something ourselves.) nicolas cage was waking up to have a cigarette...maybe, although that might actually have been part of part one. unfortunately, maybe, it all blends together when you spread the twenty-four hours of "the clock" across so many more. then the kindly security woman kicked us out -- over-promptly at seven fifty-six. fortunately, it turns out that my second has a membership to the gallery which gets him free admission for both himself and a guest. but "the clock" had just been part of the plan for thursday, and anyway, that day it had turned out that we were three. plus, we still had time. and on saturday we had all night at the gallery, but as it turned out we were caught up in the game until midnight. then i can't say what happened for the following two hours -- or maybe i just won't -- but we didn't get to the gallery until two fifteen. (two thirty?) we made sure to eat (although and where all this time was katherine hepburn? was she there that night, or was that another time? or, maybe it was all three of them. from two fifteen (or two thirty) until four in the morning, watching "the clock" is strange. a sleepless night on screen is sympathetically consolatory, even for the knowledge that the people you're watching must be going through the same desperate circles and awful inquietudes as you've experienced in those sleepless nights of your own. more or less alone in the dark, you appreciate that you're not alone. then you're just happy for a cab.

and then three days later you're awake, sleepless, watching the clock, because even though you should think of the night as an opportunity -- that it's nice, for better or for worse, that right now all you have is time, and it's yours to do with however you please -- instead all you can do is watch the clock. then you're just happy for a xanax, and you accept your giving in because you remember that, at least, the least you can do for yourself is remember that, appropriately shot and edited, what's happening right now could be art.

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.

THE LIMITS OF SELF-CONTROL

the thing is, i haven’t seen that jarmusch movie. and the other thing is that I haven’t read siamese, which was the first volume in stig sæterbakken’s “s trilogy” and might, i suppose (had i read it), have somehow informed my reading of self-control, the second volume in sæterbakken’s (so-called) trilogy. as for that first thing, i stand by my title. it might sound clever to anyone who has actually seen the movie; and now that i’m reading the synopsis online, i’m seeing that the movie, like self-control, is also about a solitary man with communication troubles. good. there’s that.

as for that other thing, i welcome the challenge. maybe my thing could be writing about second volumes of scandinavian trilogies. (then again i’ve only seen “the girl who played with fire.”) after all – and except maybe among the more devoted fans of the ewoks – i think the consensus is that “the empire strikes back” was the finest of that particular series. in saying so, however, i don’t mean to imply the inferiority of siamese or volume three. i haven’t read the former, and the latter has yet to be translated into english. of course that doesn’t mean that i won’t read either or both, but as of this writing i’m only familiar with “s” number two, which was translated from the original norwegian by seán kinsella. (and as of this moment i’ve just taken the time to confirm that the titles of the books in norwegian also begin with that letter – although i wouldn’t say “s” because i don’t know how that’s read in that other language.) but they seem to say that the (so-called) trilogy is, as they say, loose. good. there’s also that. so now for a bit of self-control…

but the thing is that this book, it made it kind of hard for me to maintain. it’s not terribly long, and, structurally, it’s very well balanced. but i do have to say that reading it was painstaking. andreas feldt, the solitary protagonist of self-control manages to keep it together – or some semblance of “it” anyway – but he’s also pushing it for sure. his story is a narrative of constant psychological brinkmanship, in which he’s engaged with both himself and all of the people who engage him – who we should probably suspect are engaging themselves in the same way.  (i might have called this “everyone on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” except that it isn’t at all clever and has nothing to do with the title of the book – although that movie by almodóvar is one i’ve actually seen.) i mean, wasn’t breaking down at the café or anything, but as i was reading, self-control was definitely wearing away at my composure.

andreas feldt is a father, and in an uncomfortable conversation with his daughter he breaks the tension by lying and telling her that he and her mother are getting a divorce. she’s startled. he gives her the money she’s come for and she leaves. andreas feldt is a machinist, and after he finally speaks his mind to an incompetent superior, he allows the tone of his interaction with the man to be shifted when the man tells him that his wife is ill. andreas feldt has friends, and after he shuts down a supercilious line of conversation started by an old friend and coworker, he then regrets his skepticism and allows his friend to continue with his blowhardiness (although only by fixating on his urge to jump on top of his friend and bite his nose – an urge which he represses). andreas feldt pops off but then is quick to silence himself. he teeters in the air over the other side of the line but always pulls himself back. andreas feldt is either master or a moron as regards the execution of his self-control.

i could understand. okay. but for the sake of eventual articulation i decided to make a flow chart. a diagram, i thought at any rate, might be a nice outlet for my own distracted nervous energy. “self-control,” it starts. and it goes from there in progression with andreas’ pushing its limits. it moves to over-analysis, to anxiety…and to violence and nausea. it goes through anger and indifference but branches along the way into an interconnected web of bitter disillusion, identity confusion, rationalization and compulsiveness. “it was as if I had based my entire life on the kindness and consideration i could derive from my immediate surroundings, which comfort i now had to accept no longer existed,” andreas realizes after deciding that, huh, maybe he will leave his wife and his job. “i felt like a fool,” he says, “like someone whose development has been at a standstill since his youth and has never been corrected, who’s never been made aware of the grotesque disparity between reality and his perception of reality.” then andreas feldt is a man with a pocket full of bank notes who will show this more or less likeable young woman an okay time before leaving the café while she’s in the bathroom.

“and suddenly i became aware of how fast my mind was racing…from one thing to the other at a furious pace, without me being able to hold on to a single thought.” so i stopped with the flow chart because in the course of those realizations of andreas’ i realized that i was essentially just charting the development of a panic attack. and anyway, the progress of self-control was probably better mapped as a periodic function. an oscillation between indulgence and restraint, except that the function wasn’t regular because the peak of indulgence kept getting higher and each successive plunge of restraint was more abrupt. maybe. so maybe it wasn’t periodic at all. but maybe it would be possible to map an asymptote above those peaks to represent a limit, that limit of self-control past which the social fabric would start to unravel. my mind had been racing from one thing to the other and i focused it by forgetting the movies and thinking about math.

so let’s back up to the book. no more charting. i also liked the social fabric metaphor. it’s a good metaphor for self-control. staying within its limits means keeping hold of the golden thread that keeps you in participation. but, as andreas is well aware, “even the slightest misdemeanor or memory lapse and that golden thread of trust, which has been laboriously spun for so many years snaps right in two.” but sometimes you just have to let go. andreas has all those bills in his pocket and he’s at the restaurant where he goes before he goes to the café and meets the likeable girl. “i'd gotten halfway through my drink,” he says, “when i suddenly felt the need…or the obligation, rather…to do something grand, something completely unexpected…outrageous if need be…make a splash…whatever the cost.” so were self-control and self-control about austerity and abnegation or the opposite? the golden thread is fragile, sure, but in the end are we happier (freer?) if we do what we want and let it break? what, andreas, are you trying to say?

he says quite a bit, but I don’t think he actually says – or anyway not in so many words. whatever the social concern neuroticizing us, stig sæterbakken seems to be saying that our collective neurosis is as kafkaesque as ever. or maybe it’s even more complex than that. foucault! deleuze and guattari! COMPLEXES! and film theory? the limits of self-control. get it? are we practicing restraint or are we giving in to repression? maybe i just wanted to figure out a way to create a walk-on role for paz de la huerta…even though i couldn’t have put a name to her face until recently. but i’m taking a chance. to make a splash. outrageous if need be. even though i haven’t seen that jarmusch movie or read siamese. but then, “foolish, i thought, to imagine you can entrust yourself, your future, to a choice in that way.” take a break.

if it wasn’t quite like the place had changed totally, then it was like hours had passed since i’d gone to the toilet. now the café was almost completely full…it was dark outside and the windows were black. but maybe it was only because i’d instinctively held onto the impression i'd gotten of the place when i arrived there earlier in the evening, when it was still sparsely occupied and the room had a lot of daylight and activity outside it; maybe i'd been sitting trying to hold on to that atmosphere without noticing that it had gradually changed.

what was i saying? self-control. back to the book. some self-control. my silly charts. because i was finding it hard to maintain. a solitary man with communication troubles. because andreas’ story was reminding me of something else. because my agitation was over being reminded of my preoccupation with something else. paz de la huerta could play the likeable one’s drunk friend… or something else hidden way back from the limit of my self-control. but no, i didn’t say. that’s the thing.