Square One

As anyone following me on Twitter will be all too keenly aware, I’ve been listening to an awful lot of The National lately.

So, I’ll understand if no one believes me, that the title of this post actually didn’t start out as a reference to Daughters Of the SoHo Riots, a track from their 2005 release, Alligator. I will confess though: I just spent the last ten minutes at SongMeanings.net, reading through various folks’ speculations about just what in the hell that song is “really” about. I still don’t know (a video was pretty, although the opposite of illuminating), but it’s still a gorgeous song, and these lines are certainly resonant:

Everything I can remember
I remember wrong
How can anybody know
How they got to be this way…

And while it’s quite possible I’ve had this album in such heavy rotation, that the suggestion to write something involving “daughters” and “riots” was thereby embedded in my consciousness, the fact is I’ve been staring, for sixteen years now, at a very different piece of media involving daughters and one very literal riot. Namely, this one:

From the AP Caption:

Elvira Evers, who was 38 weeks pregnant when shot in the abdomen in the Los Angeles riots, has given birth by Cesarean section to Jessica. The bullet struck the baby in the abdomen.

When the LA riots happened, it was this particular image and news item, out of the enormous number I absorbed, that I found most difficult to shake. Knowing that this particular human being’s entrance into the world had been so literally, viscerally marked was something I couldn’t get over. I clipped the image from the newspaper, slipped it into a Mylar sleeve, and somehow, through a million moves and traumas in which I’ve lost the vast majority of my worldly possessions, I managed to hold onto it.

The original clipping remains on my office wall. Whenever I get stuck with my writing, thinking about my own difficult origins, or those of my own daughter, who came into the world in her own uniquely traumatic fashion in July of 1994, I look at young Jessica Evers. She’d be a teenager now, not much older than my girl, who starts high school next year.

And I wonder where she and her mama are today, and how they are doing.

Some teenagers would kill to go to a Lamb of God show - never mind the luxury of VIP access and such, since we’re friends of the band members, in particular, vocalist Randy Blythe (as discussed recently) and guitarist Mark Morton (whom my husband has known since the seventies, and I’ve known since 1990). Here’s my girl at her first (and thus far, only) such show:

Now, contrast that with the same teenager’s reaction to a Jonas Brothers’ show? No contest!

The funny thing? At the very event where the latter show occurred (Virginia’s State Fair, 2007) we also hung out for awhile with Randy, who gave our daughter some good-natured grief for her lack of enthusiasm for the metal genre.

Well, no one can say we’re not exposing the kids to a… variety of cultural experiences.

From my pal D. Randall Blythe:

I am sitting outside in Paris @ cafe Les Deux Magots (waaaaay Hemingway!) having an espresso and getting ready to walk over to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’ house, then on to where Joyce wrote a good part of Ulysses. There’s your geek stuff for the day. XO, DRB

Can I just say? How rad is it that one of my dearest friends in the world not only throws down as lead screamer for Richmond’s own Grammy-nominated metal band, but also gets me as the literature dork I am. (And who was also my very first regular reader, in this blog’s first incarnation, in 2003 or so.)

Love you, Randy. Have fun out there and get your butt back home to RVA safe and sound. (And note that I waited a full twenty-four hours before posting this. Wouldn’t have wanted you to get stalked by Parisian metal fans or whatever.)

The quality of television programming available as workout accompaniment at our local gym ranges from trite and inane to offensive and enraging. (For which reason I have learned not to go at the 7 PM hour. I always get stuck at the Lou Dobbs treadmill.) Which is why I bring my iPod along and groove to Spoon or Pavement (shut up) or Otep or the podcast for This American Life or or, if I’m feeling particularly aggro, Lamb of God. But I am an attention deficit-disordered person, so even if I have awesome things to listen to, I will end up watching the TV too, or indeed all of the TVs, my eyes flitting between the screens (all the while guffawing at closed captioning borkings, because I’m nerdy like that).

So it was that today, at an earlier hour than that to which I am accustomed to working out, I was positioned between two monitors that had on some lameass shitsucking crossword puzzle-themed gameshow (really? a gameshow centering around crossword puzzles? Like gameshows aren’t already so inherently fucking¹ stupid²?), and The 700 Club.

I gleaned from this experience two pieces of knowledge:

1. I can never be a contestant on Merv Griffin’s Crosswords. That is because, if I were asked the question, “What does a lady who has been tied to railroad tracks need?” my answer, despite knowing the word had four letters and began with an h, would not be “hero.” Rather, it would be “Why, a knife! First, to cut the ropes. Second, to cut the motherfucker who’d tied her to the tracks.”
2. On the 700 Club, when Pat Robertson is supposedly praying? It does not appear to me that he is praying. Rather, it seems he is straining to have a bowel movement. And/or is passing a kidney stone.

You’re welcome.

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¹ Cross-word puzzle enthusiasts of the world, I do not mean to diss you. Being a word geek, I get the attraction even if it ain’t my thing - but to debase that concept with a game show? That, my dears, is the phenomenon for which I mean to express my contempt.

² I would have elaborated here about the piece of crap garbage-chewing-and-regurgitating stupidity that is Deal or No Deal, which invades my home life with embarrassing regularity and against my wishes, but then it would have turned into a spiraling tangent about my eternal loathing for certain of my husband’s television watching habits, not least of which is My Big Redneck Wedding, and then I’d be all off-topic and shit.

Oh wait.

Fish Face, ca. 1987, originally uploaded by vmarinelli.

Hey folks. As you can tell, I’ve been a tad ambivalent about the blogging thing lately. (But not, as usual, about the twittering.) And since I have no dignity (and also because my asshole husband already put this photo up on Facebook), I provide it here, as an exhibit to the wonder that is youth.

As my notations to the image as hosted on Flickr (click through if desired) make clear, I really have no idea what prompted this particular makeup and costume situation. I can say that all the adults in the household were high as kites and engaged in a long, mad medley (a “jam session,” if this very phrase will not cause you to faint) comprised of such classics as Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue, Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, and Eric Clapton’s After Midnight. (Which, I am quite certain, it was. By several hours. And yes, probably on a school night.)

I also recall that I had a partner in this crime: my then-foster sister (a friend from school, whose mother was an even flakier hippie than mine, and thus had simply decided to move to the other side of the island without her), who was dressed and dolled up in an equivalently surreal manner, only I have no photographic evidence of this fact; you will just have to take my word for it.

I also know that when she and I came out of the bathroom, with the intention of seeing how much we could freak out the adults present (they tended to be rather unfreakable, so there was something of a high threshold to get over in that endeavor), that the medley had shifted to a rousing rendition of House of the Rising Sun. Which apparently is some ballad concerning a house of ill-repute.

Naturally, my mother would later seize upon the symbolism of this moment, in that I, her daughter (never mind her generally faultless foster-daughter), had, at the very moment she and her pals had been singing about whores, had come out allegedly dressed as a whore. (Though I’m sorry, but when I look at this picture, I think more “surrealist 1980s clown” than “whore”; plus, there is the detail that I was a bored teenager, who was making a fish face.) Then again, this was my whoredom-obsessed mother (for whom the end result of all equations fell along the lines of “daughter, you are a whore!”) whose perceptions and interpretations we are talking about.

Not that I’m bitter, because of course she has provided me with a lifelong stash of rich material to work with. (For example, the work in progress titled Tangled Up in a Whiter Shade of Pale Blue: The Random Years.) I am nothing if not blessed with (!@#$%^&*) material!

…in the lyrics to this song, and you have some sense of how my early-to-mid twenties went. (Lyrics are after the jump.) Also, please know that for the benefit of this post, I spent hours searching for some representative photographs of myself in the classic buzzcut of the era, which I would have happily scanned and reproduced here, but they are apparently buried in the detritus of more than fifteen years’ accumulated papers and pictures, scattered hither and yon. When I finally do track them down, I’ll gladly share.

Also, this post should not be construed as a condemnation of any among the varieties of feminism, nor is it a disavowal of my own experiences which are indirectly mirrored in the motif of this song. Rather, it’s just a glimpse back in time, and a gentle pondering of what (at 37) I can now credibly refer to as “my youth.”

(click on triangle to play song - hopefully it will work!)

[special thanks to Nat for the plugin recommendation.]

Did you enjoy that? Go here to buy the all-around brilliant album from the artist’s own site. Alternatively, you can buy just the song from Amazon or iTunes.

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(Continued)

Earlier today I could not get enough of listening to Bikini Kill’s 1994 album, Pussy Whipped. Specifically, I had to hear Rebel Girl over and over (I even stopped to tweet this fact), as well as Alien She, which includes these lyrics:

…She wants me
To put the pretty, pretty lipstick on
She wants me to be like her…
I want to kill her
But I’m afraid it might kill me
Feminist
Dyke whore
Pretty, pretty
Alien
And all I really wanted to know
Who was me and who is she
I guess I’ll never know…

For reasons that will be evident to some of my longtime readers (though I can’t refer you to past explanatory blog posts, which is just as well because all that material has gone back into the proverbial cauldron for its eventual repurposing), these lyrics are searingly relevant to me. Due, I will simply say, to a woman named Lee whom I met late in 1992, shortly after I’d left Olympia for Seattle (with a New York art colony sojourn between), and following which the course of my life was violently and inexorably altered - as indicated, perhaps most clearly, by my official status, with law enforcement in Washington state, as a “missing person” in the summer and autumn of 1993 (although police in two additional states, plus the FBI, also wound up tangentially involved).

And even if those particular lyrics weren’t so immediately relevant to my history, there is also the touchstone fact that I had been in Olympia at the same time Bikini Kill was emerging. The riot grrrl scene was an alternate universe against which my own was being played out; many nights in late 1990 and early 1991 had found me standing guard for my sociopath girlfriend, Amy, who, without the slightest sense of irony, was spraying graffiti around town protesting violence against women¹. (Note: she was not only a serial batterer of her lesbian partners - see her hometown’s newspaper for crap she would still be doing more than a decade later - she also claimed to have a juvenile record for attempted murder.)

So, while I stood guard (the alternative to which was: trust me, you wouldn’t want to know), Amy would be spraying Dead Men Don’t Rape across the facade of the furniture store downtown. Then we’d go around a corner and she’d be hoping to attack another surface with her hilariously inappropriate sloganeering (which I came to regard as her preemptive strike against the credibility of the women she’d battered and raped; by attaining, under false pretenses, her “folk hero” status among the radical feminists and lesbians in town), out of nowhere there’d be some fresh new graffiti up, saying only Bikini Kill. And we had no idea what the fuck Bikini Kill meant (only later learned it was a new punk band, which would go on to define the riot grrrl genre), we only knew they were taking up precious wall space and really kind of pissing Amy off.

Despite the radical life-interruption that was Amy, though, it was, most substantively, the prelude to what would follow, in Seattle, with Lee.

Which is why, perhaps, this morning I struggled for what seemed an eternity to wake from a certain, apparently chaotic dream, the meaning of which I could not discern until I had physically written it out, on paper (as is often the case with me; it’s like, with the action of pen on paper, puzzles can be put together in very clear ways, even when, at first, I had not known there was anything besides chaotic and, most likely, meaningless fragments in play).

To read the full-sized journal entry, click here, otherwise you may be able to make out the words as they appear below².

Nope - the past still isn’t dead.

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¹ The Olympian ran something or another in some crime or public complaint column about Amy’s exploits (not that anyone outside the lesbian community knew who was behind the graffiti); ironically, she’d had been an employee of the same newspaper when I met her in October of 1990. (Hey Olympian: check your HR records, if you have ‘em that far back. I can also tell you about the security guard she met there, with whom she committed robberies - or at least, so she was given to boasting while drunk.)

² Re-reading the bit about Pearl Jam’s song, Jeremy, coming on the radio as I was writing it, I think, inevitably, of where I once lived, on Jeremy Street, in a San Diego suburb, when I was thirteen. Then I go read the Wikipedia entry on that song, and I learn that one of the song’s inspirations was a disturbed junior high school student in San Diego. Um, wow.