Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest: RIP Lou Reed

As I age, the legions of celebrities who shaped the popular culture into which I was born will continue to die. Their deaths will increase in number and rapidity.

I never had the slightest idea that Lou Reed would be on this list. Yes, not even a foggy notion.

♦

I probably came late to worship at the altar of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, but I don’t really remember. I don’t have any monumental story to tell you about the first time I heard the album Loaded or anything.

When I was in high school, I didn’t know about cross-dressing or what a transvestite was. Take a Walk on the Wild Side was a radio standby throughout those years, nothing radical about it.

I wasn’t raised Catholic where you dress up and attend funerals on a regular basis; in fact, I was purposely shielded from death by my parents who believed that it was appropriate to do so and it would keep me safe. I never saw a dead body until my own father died when I was 23. My first viewing of an open casket was several years later.

After John Lennon was shot (I was a mere 17), the possibility of any of the other Beatles’ dying became real. Lennon’s death was hard, but we had each other, we had the legions turning out in Central Park singing Imagine to help us through, and, like I say, I was 17, on the cusp of the wildness ahead of me and full of disdain for the adult world I was about to enter into in some small measure. I was woefully unaware of the process I now know as “aging.” Not only that, but the Beatles’ zeitgeist jumped generations and genres of music. There was so much to love about them—who even remembers that they pushed boundaries and people’s buttons? Their music’s universal appeal wiped out the shock of their long hair; the bed-in; the Jesus statement (which was willfully and ignorantly taken out-of-context anyway). 

Lou Reed and the VU captured the sound that was still alive when I was a student at Kent State University in the early ’80s. Attending any art opening had the grit and recklessness the VU sang about in the ’60s. There were drugs, fags, lesbians, cross-dressers, punk bands, hair dye, glam, 1950s vintage; and we were all sexy, every last one of us; all of this before Grunge hit the scene. By the ’90s, I had gotten sober, bought a house, started to settle into my life with my man.

♦

I remember one particular thesis show where the artist had created huge, found-metal musical instruments and everyone who went through the exhibit spent the next 3 or 4 hours demolishing the sculptures by “playing” them with the flat, rusted metal strips left around on the floor next to each one.

I went to as many art openings as I could. I went for the free booze and the food and the scent of sex, but also to be on the edge of all of those real artists. I was an English major and didn’t have the stomach for that much radicalism or creativity. What I hear when I listen to the Velvet Underground is the sound of that time.

♦

I knew a guy, a friend of another guy, who said if you looked up the word cool in the dictionary, there would be a little picture of Lou Reed next to it. That’s how cool Lou Reed was. I always loved that.

♥

Lou Reed, your death belongs to my generation, too. Thanks for the trippy guitar, the sex and the drugs and the grit, the psychedelia, the poetry, your rich and soulful voice.

You were a light in the darkness because you didn’t deny the darkness and from that place you were one of its true voices.

Now if I could pick my favorite song, I’d post it for you right here. I’m dancing and singing along and you should be, too.

Beautiful, just beautiful:

Read Full Post »

old girl

In 1983, I was a sophomore living in the dorms at Kent State University.

Some time that year, we got the diagnosis that my father had colon cancer. Now that I come to write about it, I realize I don’t have many details. He had surgery to remove part of the colon and when they opened him up, they found that the cancer had metastasized to the liver.

My parents were living in Sylvania, Ohio at the time.

Some time in 1984 or ’85. Our good family friends in Southfield, Michigan, lent me a giant, dark-green Ford so that I could commute back and forth from Kent to Toledo while my father was dying. I spent the summer drunk, screwing a number of non-boyfriends, dancing to reggae bands upstairs at Mother’s Junction (above Ray’s), and going to see the Numbers Band at JB’s down.

I can’t remember what job I held. I do remember the heart-wrenching misery of driving to Toledo every Friday night and returning every Sunday. The long dark road, I-80, where deer/car collisions were a regular occurrence and the tail-end of the Appalachian range flattened completely by the time you’d reach Northwest Ohio. Some damn ugly land. I remember how everything in me screamed not to go. If I didn’t go home, would he not die?

Richfield, Ohio, Kita Lyons’ property. I had written in my book that this is July 13, 1985, 2 days shy of my 23rd birthday. One of the necklaces I’m wearing belonged to my Tante Nelli, but she died in May 1986. I wonder if she gave me some jewelry earlier than I remember.

My father died in August 1985.

I decided to make my pilgrimage the following year. My mother bought me a used, silver Toyota Corolla/Tercel, a model that they made for only a short time. I think it cost 4 thousand bucks. I have no memory of how many miles it had on it. I do remember going to someone’s house to check out the car, how their driveway looked, dark black asphalt. I would pay my mother back from my aunt’s estate when I received that money. My father’s only living sister, Nelli Landau. She died 9 months after him. I know it was a broken heart, for she loved my father and had no husband or children of her own.

I decided first to drive east. I would be staying mostly in youth hostels, but also had a few connections to stay with people I’d never met. Friends of friends. I miss that spirit. I miss it.

I am not sure any more all of the places I stopped. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I stayed in a governor’s mansion because my friend’s friends were the caretakers. The wife was a New England blue blood, going back several generations. She was a fiber artist, had a studio set up in the house.

They steamed mussels we picked up fresh from a little fish shack in town. I’d never eaten mussels before. I learned what a Widow’s Walk is. I toured the rose arbor in the back yard. The wife’s name was Sydney. This is how people name their children in New England.

One night, we drove past oceanfront mansions, stopped on the damp ocean beach, got high, and watched the sunset.

I next stopped in Cherryville, Maine, the famed place of an annual blueberry harvest which gathers hippies, loafers, stoners, and other back-to-nature types for seasonal farm work. Now I realize that there must be real migrant workers who go there, not just the educated white children of middle class families.

The hostel was really an old hippie commune. My first of so many things, again. I used an ATM machine in the quaint town. I got poison ivy (sumac?) on my legs. I stood in a circle with a couple dozen other people, stoned, holding hands, swaying, singing om om om. I learned what a Clivus is and determined that some day I would have one.

Maine, Bar Harbor, a little boat trip around some of the islands where I saw seals and puffins. The first time I heard the word shoal. Acadia where I walked on some barnacled rocks for a few hours, did nothing else, and left. I met a guy at the youth hostel. I remember eating a meal, walking around the town. Saying Bah Haba like the locals over and over, laughing, tschoke shops, lobster everything everywhere. I gave him a ride to the Greyhound station in Boston. A kiss in the rain. I didn’t even like him, but he was friendly. Dark hair, not too tall.

One very clear memory is of driving on the interstate in Massachusetts and the giant granite rocks on either side, with their trees and lichen, roots, gray and yellow stains. I think of it still when we go to Boston on I-90. I remember.

I started this post thinking about every car I’ve ever owned because my 2000 Toyota mini-van is up near 160K miles and creaky.

Let’s call this Installment One of Old Girl, the story of the first half of my cross-country trip after the death of my father.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hey, I’m not saying I like this, but I went to see them live a lot back in the day. The first video is kinda shaky to start, still good to see them looking good and playing after all these years.

Read Full Post »

dinosaur confessions

I still use a spiral-bound appointment book for keeping track of important dates and appointments

I take most of my writing notes in a notebook with a pen

I do not have an iPhone (Smartphone, Blackberry, etc) yet

as a family, we share one cell phone, an old-fashioned one without texting capabilities

I have never texted and no Twitter for me

I have been on Facebook for 4 years and think every change they’ve made since I joined has been a change for the worse

I have never printed a digital photo

I have never scanned a photo (but Hubby has done this for me)

I still own three 35mm cameras. One of them has film in it from 2 years ago. One, a Pentax, I’ve never used.

I still have fantasies of using my oldest camera, a camera my mother was given before she immigrated to the US in 1958. It is a simple and beautiful camera, a Retina, made in Germany (by Kodak in some roundabout way–follow the link). It doesn’t have a full range of f stops. It came with a hard-cover book for learning to use it. A hard cover, bound book. Can you believe it? The camera is all metal and a bit of leather. No plastic. It is fucking awesome to hold and to behold, to play with, to turn the dials on, to feel the clicks and grooves of metal-on-metal.

I used to use the Retina, even with its limited settings. It was my go-to camera for black-and-white photos. Beautiful. I miss it and I miss real black-and-white photos. I never mastered it as I wished because I switched to a (not so great) 35mm Minolta that did everything for me. I completely stopped using the manual settings even before I had kids. After kids, forget it.

I used to love to hand-crank the film in order to rewind it

Remember flash cubes? I love that.

My family never owned a Polaroid camera as far as I remember, but I confess, I did own a Kodak disc camera in high school.

I love the old black-and-white square photos from my childhood, the date right in the white border. Classy. God I love those.

In college, I took 3 semesters of film in the Art Department with the great instructor and filmmaker, Richard Myers. That was an amazing time. We would all smoke in class. Unfuckingbelievable.

In high school, we had a smoking area outside and we were allowed to smoke on school grounds (I think we needed to be 16 and have a permission slip).

My first cigarette was from a sample pack sitting on the edge of the built-in bookshelves in my father’s office. It was a pack of Kools. I went into the bathroom and watched myself smoke. I remember the cough and the headache, the menthol and the buzz.

Until college, I smoked Marlboro Greens. I eventually became a pack-a-day smoker. I quit smoking, cold turkey, at least 2 times (once for about 4 months, once for 8) until I quit for good many, many years ago. For a number of years before I quit, I had switched to Marlboro Light 100s.

I had smoking dreams for years after I quit. Those were very, very, very satisfying.

This reminds me that I also used to take a bottle of red wine to a lot of high school basketball and football games. I carried a large purse that could fit a whole bottle with ease, would down half a bottle in the bathroom stall and share the other half with my pal in the stall next door. Look, it’s not as glamorous as Larry Craig, but that was me, the budding alcoholic at 15. Where did I get the wine, you ask? Stolen (sometimes given to me by my mother if I was heading to a party, no jive) from my parents’ supply from a constant stock of cases.

I can’t believe I remember this shit.

Yes, thankfully I never had sex in a public bathroom. But did you see a movie called Captives with Tim Roth and Julia Ormond? Because that movie was not good, but it had the sexiest sex-in-a-bathroom scene that I have ever seen. The scenes between Tim Roth and Julia Ormond should convince any heterosexual woman that a man need not be good looking, tall, or have good teeth to be smolderingly sexy. Just try it. Tim Roth makes me melt. He deserves his own twinklysparkles‘ blog post.

I have never seen American Idol or Survivor, nor any of the current reality-dating shows, though I did see about 20 minutes of one once (these have been airing for about 10 years, right?). I have watched a little bit of Dancing With the Stars twice and I liked it.

I do love a good TV show, but I only watch on Netflicks.

Remember I said I would never tire of Led Zeppelin’s version of In My Time of Dying? Well, my kid played it in the car on the way to New Haven last week and guess what? It was once too many and I finally heard all of the silliness of Robert Plant’s singing in the third quarter (or is that the fourth fifth?) of the song (I still love the song and his pleading, but I had an epiphany).

I can tell that the labyrinthine pathways of neural connections in my brain don’t work like they used to. I don’t miss my sharper mind, but I can’t understand math or complicated instructions about mechanical things any more and that I don’t like.

When I took my One-to-One training section with Kevin, the blue-shirted Genius at the Apple store, he told me, “keep learning new things” when the subject of the elderly and technology came up.

Kevin was especially cute and kind, so I will take his advice and will try to learn Italian and fencing, African drumming and African dance. First, I have to get the damn taxes done, finish taking One-to-One classes for my Mac, continue to organize our finances, finish raising my kids (4-and-a-half more years ’til the little one is done with HS), apply for that new, less evil and less expensive credit card, continue my new exercise regimen, build my iron stores, make sure I don’t bleed for the next 6-8 months so help me god….

Read Full Post »

Aesthetics One-o-One

In college, I began as a nursing major, which lasted one year. The great benefit of having been in the School of Nursing was getting all of my science requirements out of the way; in addition, I clepped out of English 101 so that when I switched to “undecided,” I was able to take a slew of Art and Liberal Arts classes. I switched in my junior year to a double French/English major, and finally, just majored in English.

I took four philosophy classes, mostly because I liked the professor, a dynamic, intelligent, charismatic Greek man, Dr. Nenos Georgopolis. 4 classes with the same teacher; how crazy was I?

In any case, when I took Aesthetics, I wondered if beauty, you know, Beauty, was something that made one cry. Beauty defined as what makes me cry.

Of course, my professor dismissed my question, not in a condescending way, but in the way a professor of philosophy must. That is, that everything has an intellectual explanation and can be teased out into its reasons. I think we were reading Kant, but that means little to nothing to me now. I can’t remember any of what I might have read, only some of the people and the interactions in the classroom and the passion of my teacher.

I finally know that while not everything that makes me cry is beautiful, almost everything that makes me cry is beautiful. 29 fucking years after that class to figure this out?

I look for it everywhere and maybe I could give myself a break and stop worrying about my failings as a parent or whether my children have been instilled with good (enough) habits. I am not looking for rationalizations for being irresponsible, but if I could stop wasting mental energy on things I haven’t done or things I think I should be doing, ah, what a different life I could live.

Beauty, all my all.

I know that my current undying love for all things Tweedy might be a bit sickening to the lot of my readers, but I keep finding yummy stuff on youtube. It’s slowly dawning on me that my blog writing is basically just for me, another masturbatory activity, but for those of you who like to watch, I hope you keep showing up and telling me your stories.

Otherwise, fair warning to bow out about now if you haven’t already on yet another l-o-n-g post.

Here’s another couple for good songs, good solid songs and good solid singing and guitar playing. Tweedy, who ranks with the best of them, who is obviously in it for the long haul and isn’t just fucking around, who I think knows he’s been ignited with whatever it is that keeps pouring the light of beauty in and out of himself.

2 videos and then the lyrics to the second song, which are simple but lovely and interesting

This makes me sort of wish I could play the guitar:

I’m the Man Who Loves You

All I can see is black and white
And white and pink with blades of blue
That lay between the words I think on a page
I was meaning to send to
You I couldn’t tell if it’d bring my heart
The way I wanted when I started
Writing this letter to you

But if I could you know I would
Just hold your hand and you’d understand
I’m the man who loves you

All I can be is a busy sea
Of spinning wheels and hands that feel for
Stones to throw and feet that run but
Come back home
It made no difference
Ever known, it made no difference
Ever known to me

But if I could you know I would
Just hold your hand and you’d understand
I’m the man who loves you

All I can see is black and white
And white and pink with blades of blue
That lay between the words I think on a page
I was meaning to send to
You I couldn’t tell if it’d bring my heart
The way I wanted when I started
Writing this letter to you

But if I could you know I would
Just hold your hand and you’d understand

If I could you know I would
Just hold your hand and you’d understand

If I could you know I would
Just hold your hand and you’d understand

I’m the man who loves you
I’m the man who loves you
I’m the man who loves you
I’m the man who loves you

Read Full Post »

Addendum–trying to get closer to accurate

Oops. I’m being anal retentive, but I meant Right in Time as far as the Lucinda Williams song that I cited in the last Thankful Thursday.

Also, I think I exaggerated the whole thing about day light and sundown in the Ohio v. New England thing. Embellished maybe? I do think the sun is almost the same between the 2 places, but certainly not quite. Here’s another tidbit to add to my defense: a friend who moved from Connecticut to the Pioneer Valley said she’d never seen clouds sit like they do in the Valley, just hang and hover all day. Maybe the sun thing is a similar phenomenon.

That’s all. Off to see my friend, walk on campus to see what they have done to the May 4 Memorial, and to see some black squirrels.*

*I looked for links to Kent State’s website on the topic, but thought the better of linking. I encourage you to do your own information-gathering on that incredible time in America.

Read Full Post »

May 4, Kent State, and a poem

This is a date I never forget.

I went to Kent State University, several years after May 4. Kent was my home for 19 years, from 1981 to 2000. If there was a person who belonged to Kent, I did, not as much as the fac brats and natives, but close.

I belonged to Kent and Kent belonged to me.

Kent’s charms were well-known to me. I had a favorite bar (or two), a massive number of connections to people high and low. I did my time there, all of it. Drugs and boys, smoking, walking barefoot on the sidewalks in the rain, music and bars, art openings, poetry readings, Brady’s, film-making, Filmworks, parties where the porches nearly collapsed from the weight of people on them, professors, Kent Fest, May 4 Rally Day, Halloween.

Swimming naked at the quarry all summer long and getting a “quarry buzz” (we still don’t know what was in the water that gave us this). I got my first dog at a house in Brady Lake, with a “free puppy” sign; really trashy, the bitch mom was tied up and god knows how many litters they kept letting her have. Four puppies ran toward me and I chose the one who “got there first.” She was the best dog in the world, too, Kent born and bred. Towner’s Woods was ours. Mountain biking behind the railroad tracks where there is now a huge McMansion development.

I moved on to home-ownership, a house I used to walk by and dream about living in “if it ever goes up for sale, I hope it will be mine.” Dreams were manifest.

I got sober in Mogadore, right near Akron, OH, home of Dr. Bob. Let me tell you, those were some hardcore Big Book Thumpers. Had my home group two blocks from my house.

I ran a successful local business, got married. People I loved died when I lived in Kent.

My babies were born in that house, 1920s Craftsman-style, built-in oak bookshelves and flooring, high ceilings on the first floor, fireplace, solarium, glass door knobs, pulleys on the windows, plaster-and-lath construction, butterfly hinges. Not like this 1965-ranch I live in with hollow doors, low ceilings and not a lick of heart, imagination, or love.

I wrote this poem a couple of years ago when I visited Kent after several years of being away. It’s really more of a summer poem, but today is May 4 and all, so why not?

Pilgrimage

for Maj, Sheila, and Megan

Along I-86 in New York, I see more deer carcasses beside the road
than on the interstate in Massachusetts.

Roadkill in varying states of decay
all the way to Ohio.

I am a pilgrim and a stranger and I have forgotten the names of the streets that bore me

If I could dig my fingers deep into the flesh of a soft fruit,
I would find what I came for

I came to your door but you weren’t home

I was so shaken that I couldn’t leave a note, my hand uncooperative in the sharp July heat

I tried for a word or something more fundamental
like a rock or feather

But I left without a trace

Still, there are trails and cross-hatchings that mark my way

And in that place, before the life I know now,
you are the family that held me

My life is full enough, but I am grateful for how you shaped me

I carry it always, only maybe sometimes I forget the names of the streets

July 31, 2009

Read Full Post »