THE WIND HITS HARDEST at night. It whistles. It jostles. It howls and grunts. Its sound is ferocious. In the mornings, you look weary eyed outside as the coffee maker makes its coffee, curious to see what the wind has carried away with it. It took me some time this morning to realize that the trampoline was not where it should be. It was perhaps a hundred yards from its usual location. And then, while my back was turned, the wind pushed it over and into the fields. When I went to retrieve it, folding down the branches of the thorny bushes with my feat, I felt its metallic heaviness in my hands. I had to roll it on its side like a wheel, but then the wind was catching in it, blowing it even farther, like a ship’s sail. It was true work to move that trampoline back to its place. There was heaving and ho-ing. When I did reach the starting point, I noticed the neighbors aluminum trash can had blown into our sandbox, and that the lid of the sandbox had been flipped upside down in place.
And so it went with white caps in the bays and sounds, and lunatic photographers on the beaches trying to image it up close without becoming tomorrow’s headline. There were fallen skeletal branches in the roads, and dry corn leaves blowing across the ways like tumbleweed. The cold gales bit into the bamboo groves, put the traffic lights to dance, tousled the hairs of the dead deer on the road sides. In the evening, I asked the East Marion shop seller if it was usually this windy out on the North Fork. She said that it is often this windy but that this year has been particularly windy. “It’s a narrow strip of land jutting out into the ocean,” she said, looking very serene and Novemberish and shrugging. “What can you do?”
THE SOUTH FORK is very close to the North Fork of Long Island. From Orient Beach State Park, you can look out over the moving waters and see its sands and trees, and sometimes you can see boats sailing along its coast. But one glimpse in the free, weekly Dan’s Papers will remind you of how very far away the South Fork is. Southampton resident Howard Stern is holding a birthday party. Amagansett’s Matthew Broderick is filming in New Mexico. East Hamptoner Alec Baldwin will be contributing money for a new children’s addition of the East Hampton Library. {And wouldn’t it be great if he had his own story hour?}
My fondness for Dan’s Papers‘ people column {“Montauk’s own Ralph Lauren …”} had given me the false impression that I operated within the same tier of existence as these notables, just because we happened to be within close physical proximity to each other. I even boasted about it as we drove north from Bridgehampton to the Children’s Museum of the East End. “Do you think they have a cafe there?” asked Epp. “OF COURSE!” I really did exclaim. “It’s the Children’s Museum of the East End! Don’t you think Paul McCartney needs access to a cappuccino when he takes his daughter there?!” “He has a young daughter?” “OF COURSE! Oh, man, you really need to read Dan’s Papers more often.”
The Children’s Museum of the East End is a fine place. Cozier and cheerier and more colorful than the Long Island Children’s Museum, with a touch of Stockholm’s Junibacken about it. I saw a pretty Shinnecock woman wearing feathers in her ears, and two Latin mamas speaking español, and a freckly lady calling out to her sons in a CNN-worthy American accent, “Giuseppe! Alessandro! Come here!” And yet Paul McCartney wasn’t there. Nor was his daughter. And there was no cafe serving frothy cappuccinos. Just some vending machines dispensing veggie sticks and organic milk.
IT SNOWED A BIT yesterday. Or sleeted. Or rained. Or something in between all three. Beyond our window, November served up varieties of frosty precipitation. It was greeted in different ways by the cafe goers around me. Some people said that it was colder than usual for this time of year. Others said, “I love winter. Bring it on.” And Greenport grows more remote and northern with each strong gust of wind. The sidewalks, rife with pedestrians into October, are now still and vacant. At 8 AM, I was the only person on Main Street, until a police officer walked by and wished me a boisterous, “Good morning!” The daylight is more subdued now, as are the colors in the trees. In this shadowy atmosphere, even the colors of the facades of the many Greek Revival and Victorian homes have acquired a powdered, pastel-like consistency. I like it. I am not built for the north, not built for the cold, but it doesn’t drain me of moisture, doesn’t blind me with sun. I liked it last year when we woke up north of Helsinki and saw the white on the ground. It consoled you, relieved you, perked you up after those dreary late autumn trips to Ikea where the air seemed musty and thick with darkness. The cold is unrelenting, unforgiving, ruthless. And yet it is satisfying to the eyes and the fingers and the soul in some monastic, masochistic way.
MY DAUGHTERS are learning about soldiers in school. The most I have been able to get out of them is that they are brave and that they risk their lives. My own ambivalence toward war-related holidays — Memorial Day, Veterans Day — comes not from a lack of empathy for America’s soldiers, but a deeper, more personal conflict.
There are interlocking pieces of this jigsaw puzzle. One of them is certainly Vietnam. I remember hearing from somebody, as a child, “Never trust the government with your life.” I also remember watching a documentary called Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. It was released in October 1987. There was one man, I remember, an amputee with a Purple Heart, who said, “I didn’t trade my leg for a medal.” Those were the Full Metal Jacket days. I was eight years old.
But here is the thing: a great many veterans have told me, as an adult, in private, that, “It was all a bunch of bullshit.” At a concert, I met a veteran from Afghanistan who told me of how they held up in some ruin with Taliban fighters all around him. He had scars on his legs from the bullets. And what did he say? “It was all a bunch of bullshit.” Another friend was in Vietnam, and when I asked him how he felt about it, he served me up the same exact line, “It was all a bunch of bullshit.” “Okay, then,” is all I could tell both men. “I’m still glad you got back in one piece.”
Which leads me back to the date, November 11, originally Armistice Day, the day the Great War, World War I, ended. Has any war been more discredited by its veterans than that war? From Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms to Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front to Cummings’ The Enormous Room to Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, the Great War is portrayed as mindless carnage waged by states with absurd politics. And when they wheeled Harry Patch, one the last survivors of that war, out to Passchendaele in 2007, he had this to say — “War is the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings.”
No one ever force-fed me these messages, but my ears were open enough to hear them. But my family was also different. My predecessors had a cosmic predilection to not find themselves in harm’s way. There was one war story that was handed down. The relative who hid in the cellar with the shotgun when the Virginia Home Guard came around to force him into the Confederate Army. This man was my grandmother’s grandmother’s father. The reason for this act of cowardice was because he didn’t own any slaves. He saw the Southern cause as the effort of the elite, slave-owning class to use poor, non-slave owning farmers like him to protect their interests and their status. And the lesson in that story to me, is that sometimes it takes courage to not be a soldier.
How I will explain this all to my girls, I will never know.
I WAS PROUD OF LOU REED. Some Jewish kid from Freeport redefines rock ‘n’ roll. A real, “What the?” Because, believe me, Freeport, Long Island, isn’t the most rock ‘n’ roll place. None of Long Island is very rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll came up from the south via the Mississippi, hit Chicago and then somehow meandered over to the industrial cities of Great Britain after the war, before it began expanding into the soulless suburbs of the country’s largest metropolis. And that’s where it entangled Lou Reed.
Later, it entangled me. I bought The Best of the Velvet Underground: Words and Music of Lou Reed on cassette when I was 15 years old. At first, I struggled to understand it. I had always loved psychedelia and so expected the same kind of thing from a “Sixties Band.” But this was a different kind of sound, the sound of New York City. There were no rolling California hills and foggy harbors and fantastic trips here. There were dirty subways and old stone churches blackened with soot and generations of Bowery Bums.
In The Atlantic, they say that Lou Reed’s devil-may-care attitude toward the music business and embrace of realism made him a godfather for our generation, that the torch was passed to us, or that we are all the sons of Lou. This is only partly accurate. Lou was but one of many inspirational thinkers who forged the way we see things. A few others I can rattle off in an instant include Mel Brooks, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor.
What tied them together? They were all social critics who made entertainment seem important, and whose disregard for social convention made their careers. Mel Brooks is a filmmaker. Carlin and Pryor were comedians. Lou Reed was a rock ‘n’ roll musician. Movies, comedy, music — it was supposed to be harmless stuff. And yet their fresh, candid perspectives bypassed the new politics and new gadgets and went straight into the veins and brains of young people. It stuck.
UNCLE RICK CAME TO VISIT the other day. He retold the tale of Uncle Frank’s last visit. Uncle Frank’s real name was Francesco Petrellis. In America, he was known as Frank Peters. I’m not sure if he ever reconciled these two identities. Uncle Frank was born in San Giorgio Albanese, an old village overlooking the Ionian Sea in the hills of Calabria. He emigrated with his family — including his younger sister, my grandfather’s mother Rose — to the New World in 1900. Old documents show him holding odd jobs and married to a woman of Hungarian extraction. They had no children. At some point, Uncle Frank moved to Florida. One day, though, in the early 1960s, there was a knock at my grandfather’s door. It was Uncle Frank! He had come to say that he was leaving. “And before he left, he gave my father a $500 bill,” Rick told me at our kitchen table. “Now, this was the Sixties, and a $500 bill was a lot — a lot — of money. I don’t know where he got it, but my guess is that he was on the run from the mob or something.”
My father’s cousin Nancy told me the same story. “I’ll never forget the day he showed up. And he was handing out money.”
After Uncle Frank left, nobody heard from him for some time, until word came that he had died in his birthplace. My grandmother still has the photograph of him laid out in his coffin with a bouquet of flowers on his chest. I’ve seen the photo. He looks at peace. When you turn it over, you can read that it was sent by a cousin named Cosimo Petrellis from Via La Croce, San Giorgio Albanese, Cosenza, Italy. It is dated June 1965.
ALDO IS A SICILIAN who makes coffee. He has white curly hair and is known to all by his first name. He has a last name, too, but this is unpronounceable and unnecessary. There are nice wooden tables — square, round, and rectangular — in his coffee house in Greenport. From the back windows, one can sip his hot drink and look at the boats in the harbor. People enter Aldo’s, people leave. Often they stay and have conversations. I listen to these conversations with interest. The women are usually complaining about something. If they are not, the men tease them by reminding them of the things they should be complaining about. The ladies behind the counter are from Guatemala. They are very friendly and make your coffee or tea or hot chocolate quickly. I have never heard them complain in English. In Aldo’s, one can hear Alan Lomax’s recordings of Italian folk music from his expeditions in the 1950s. This is the only place I have ever heard these songs outside of my own private music collection. Aldo and I must have similar taste. I usually order hot chocolate these days at Aldo’s while I work. How much coffee can one person really drink?
A short story of mine, “Pretty, Jittery Indian Girls,” was selected for inclusion in Writers Abroad’s 2013 anthology Foreign and Far Away. It’s the story of a lonely businessman who gets in big, big trouble when he meets and falls for a poor Native American woman he meets at a bus stop in North Vancouver. To me, it addresses the still complex relationships between Europeans and Native Americans and the fine line between pity and affection.
When I was in Italy, I felt as if I had come back home. The people looked like me, gestured like me, moved like me. They asked me questions in Italian, and I faked the answers as best I could. Strangers in restaurants pulled me aside like jovial uncles, “Hey, you’re pretty tall, let’s stand back to back.” I realized in Italy how easy it would be for me to become an Italian again. And I say the word “again,” even though I never was an Italian.
Or maybe I always was. In the convenience store in the East Village, the Bangladeshi cashiers refused to believe I was an American. “Where are you from, man?” “New York.” “You don’t speak like a New Yorker.” “Okay, {you got me} Long Island.” “No,” shakes head with a physician’s conviction. “You’re not from there.” “Okay, I’m Italian,” I told them if only they would be satisfied and let me leave. “Ah, yes, an Italian, that’s what you are!”
But the Estonian House on 34th Street was also home. Not even the house, or the flags, or even the people, but the sounds of the voices, the poetry of the words. Sometimes when I was traveling through the US or China, I’d have to call up Swedbank customer service, and the language would tickle me and soothe me and comfort me like the sweetest lullaby. “Tere päevast! Mida te soovite?” And I didn’t even want to respond because I was so enraptured by the audiofragrance of the meandering brook of an Estonian woman’s voice on the other end of the connection. “Please just keep on talking,” I had wanted to say, lost upon seas of American or Chinese voices. It was not my language and yet it was inside of me and had been filling me up for a very long time. It was not something that could be casually set aside with a plane trip or a change of address. But nobody from any of my other homes could know about this. It was a secret.
On most days you can see Shelter Island from the beaches nearby. To me, that is also home. One of my first memories is the clear water on the white stones and pebbles of the beach, and the fine sands on my feet. Just over there. It was 1982, or 1981 — some blurry year when I was still pulling big concepts together out of the moist and swirling chaos. Those big glistening bodies of water and familiar Algonquian names that only we can say. It pleases me that my littlest one will see those same stones and waters and feel those same sands and know those same strange words, and have in the back of her mind the same natural images that I do.
But will they be home? And when she returns to them, and people cheer and pat her on the back and say, “Welcome home! You must be so happy to be home!” will she feel in her insides that she is home and that all those other places were just other places she happened to pass through on her return?
“To have heroes is to be ridiculous. But to accept one’s ridiculousness is heroic.”
“I don’t know about her music, but I’d sure like to Björk her” – so said insensitive douche Garth Algar of Wayne’s World reviewing new videos in Wayne’s fake parents basement on TV circa 92 after the Big Film came out [party time/excellent] and everybody just had to see Mike Myers and Dana Carvey say, “We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy ” over and over and over again as they kiss Alice Cooper’s ring and Feed His Frankenstein … [Schwing!]
And there she is with the big dancing teddy bear and the moth in the porridge bowl — “Human behavioor, human behaviooouaaoor”— about us, we sad ship of souls chained to parents basement crying to heavens and beating our chests like filthy beasts of zoos beat our chests and look to the sky and say, “WHY US?” why did we have to be born American and suburban raised to be materialist traitors who don’t care about anything except big screen television sets and definitely have no interest in the fact that some Dementia from the Frozen North has invaded our lustconsciousness?
But critical friend sees me, catches me before MTV altar throne where Madame Dementia talks of a dress she made from a blanket [“I just [soft lilting, trilling voice] found it in a marrrket and I liked [clumsy lilt] how it felt in my fingerrrs’] and senses Nerd Friend’s awkward awestruck lust, “Oh, you just luvv her, don’t you?” says critic munching on reheated pizza “Hey, shut up!” ” “Ha, you can’t deny it, dude, it’s in your eyes, you’re in luvv with that freak show.” “Am not.” Björk sneezes and sniffles in interview. “Face it, you want to lick the snot right off of her nose!” “Oh, you’re disgusting,…” “Ha! You would, you know you would!” he leans in foul mocking sinister pepperoni breath.
“LICK THE SNOT RIGHT OFF HER NOSE.”
French Capital twenty years later, no wiser but older and ever snottier. The dark and blue lights of Le Cirque En Chantier, in Boulagne-Billancourt – or as they say it in the taxis here, Bew-yan-Bi-yan-Core – Old spectacled French African taxi driver – “Cela! Cela!” – “Ce la?” “Oui, cela.” One pont, two pont. He gestures firmly. Get out, pick a pont. Here we go … Paris metro My God – it was supposed to go like this Saint Michel-Notre Dame–>Javel–>Javel-Andre Citroen –> Saint Michel Angueil –>Les Sevres … and then over the bridgey bridge to Île Seguin where I skip down to Cirque en Chantier [where they host Cirque du Soileil shows] But of course I messed up there you know, out at Javel (with its deserted amusement park carousel ambiance) and then couldn’t find the connection, gawking around on street corners for signs, too chicken shit to accost Francophone dogwalkers, stuttering and puttering and freaking with printout ticket [Lick the Snot right Off her Nose] flapping in the wind and there’s a taxi but it’s empty because the French driver is probably getting his pain somewhere, maybe that boulangerie over there, warm yellow lights warmth, more snot from my nose, and there goes another but it’s full, and the show starts soon, 7.30 – half an hour, don’t tell me I came this far traveled this far from There to Here to see Her and NOW I AM GOING TO MISS IT BECAUSE I CAN’T UNDERSTAND THE F***ING PARIS METRO SYSTEM!
One pont, two pont. The pont to the back is gritty industrial shamble, the one above well lit with little hipster ants streaming across it: Les Audience! A mass pathetique like moi. The cold March snot on my glove, the stream of the legs over the bridge [for no average automobile can access Cirque en Chantier] which is why French African Taxi Man said “Voila! Cela! Cela!” gesturing to the white tents on yon othershore, white-lighted breast-like domes with protrusions and antennae into the sunset red and purple wreckage of a sky, those preciously urban tulips and chimneys, more steps and heartbeats and cold breath breathed, packs of the young and the hip swarm, we are them, yes, me too, big bunchy coats — and we boys are so deftly unshaven and the girls have their multicolored yarn-sourced tights … [and they are holding hands which means they are straight like me and I am so eläted because I was afraid I was gonna have to spend the night elbowing with Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Paul Gautier and all the other sunglasses-at-night-black-leather-clad-Nightmares-of-Fashion-future who have latched on to Madame Dementia with their haute couture shrimp cocktail elite diarrhea dribbling everywhere, and imaginary Lagerfeld’s leaning in asking, “Tell me honestly, what do you think of our new collection?” And I just have cry myself to sleep in embarrassment about my {shameful} Björk albums {and naked college dormroom poster} and explain {fervently and feverishly} to all of them how I really would lick the snot off of her nose, I would, I’d eat it all up] … and these lovingly hetero scum hipster gals have funky bundled hair and some are smoking, the smoky steamy air curls up and away and into the hills with their many-colored house lights and tiled roofs and welfare safety nets, I’m here in your hollow, Madame Europe, Here I am, here within your dusky belly, you fresh and natural and dirty freak show, Europe, European, just like her, the builder of bedrock, sawer of raw, built into cliffs. I am within you tonight, your suburban lost son, peeking out of that belly button window, and that sense of guilt dissipates, smooths back and vanishes as I step inside the circus tent.
“Police Say Obsessed Fan Sent Bomb Before Suicide” September 96, Florida’s finest pest controller Ricardo López (21) films himself mailing an acid-spraying letter bomb to Björk’s London home. Crafty pest man Lopez disguises his letter bomb as a book sent by Björk’s record label, Elektra. Pest Man originally wanted to inject the bomb with the HIV virus, but … What set Pest Man off was Goldie [Brit-Trip-Hop Guy with Golden Teeth] her then boyfriend, or that he was her boyfriend, [and thus unfaithful to Pest Man’s obsessive undying adoration]. [IMAGE: Ikon Magazine Cover, Dec. 95, Trashcan Mouth Goldie Sneers Like Mike Tyson With Arm Round Weary Eyed Björk [Who Has Seen It All, There Is No More To See], headline, “The Odd Couple”] The camera pans in on Lopez’s refridgerator door which is adorned with promotional photos of B’s cute little eskimo-viking-alien-inuit-princess-sealion-buttocks-Japanese-geisha-girl face and a stereo in the background plays a tinny “Come to me, I’ll take care of you, protect you …” The footage [come lay down] is shown later on show about stalkers, Pest Man [you don’t have to be afraid] López shaves head, applies face paint, and [I understand] commits suicide by shooting himself [but the show footage stills as he inserts gun into mouth so that the red does not splatter] [Scotland Yard intercepts poison package. Björk sends flowers and condolences to Pest Man’s family]
WITHIN the carnival tents of Cirque en Chantier are bars and rows of young and ancient humans of various racial and sexual orientations on benches guzzling fine wines and lively camraderie [who knew so many different kinds of people liked Madame Dementia?] and of course there is merchandise and merchandising, for this is a $how! – Who is willing to fork it over, eh, thirty €uro for a t-shirt, forty for a program? White and metal spacey furniture here and the many hanging TV screens with that faltering modest computeresque halting accent overcast, “Hel-lo-and-wel-come-to-Bio-phil-ia,” an image of her in that the big red wig of hers that she wears in the shows and on signs [And me so squeamishly ashamed to want to see her in it!] and then there is some kind of white mobile home on wheels with little TV windows and video of hip urban New York Cool Kids with floppy pants and long surfer dude hair, “Children play with Björk’s home-made instruments” a journalisty voice says– little electronic strings and buttons, one sees, like an iPad harpsichord crossed with an Atari … (see, Venus as a Girl gives back to the community) …
INSPIRATION COMES ON- I search pockets for writing implement to capture it all down and jot it all up because I am about to BURST with it, the lines are coming to me, rushing between my warm ears, but there is no pen within my pocket (though I fingernail scrape into its depths, what a fool to have left it behind!) DESPERATION ENSUES. What to do? Desperado wanders lonely, searches the floors, the toilets, even tries to steal one from a wine-purveying cashier, but he gives me the Evil French Eye [Oh, no yew don’t, yew pussy writer, yew!] and I put it right back with shaky hand because ROSY HUMILIATION I am a coward and an idiot who lacks the gravitas of Ms. Gudmundsdottir, who is not even afraid of the Chinese, [“Tibet! Tibet!” She cried at Shanghai show] Inside the blue inside inner circus ring, some church organ plays “Venus as a Boy” and “I’ve Seen It All” [There is no more to see] And I find, per chance, a blue ball point beneath my seat and then mobile buzzes with good news, “Don’t worry. She is already sleeping soundly and a lot better. Everything is okay. Good night!”
I’ve left my sick child to come here. She reached for me one last time in her red pajamas, the liquid dripping from her ears. “Daddy, am I still bleeding? I can’t hear!” And then the soothing sitter, “Don’t you worry a bit, go enjoy yourself, she’s on antibiotics now, she’s going to be fine by morning, no worries, you don’t need to change your plans don’t worry just one little bit.” “It’s not blood, honey, it’s just liquid, the doctor said it’s normal, all of this is normal. It’s supposed to be that way.” “But I can’t hear!” On the way home from the doctor’s in the afternoon snow flurries I had swallowed it, that it was stupid, that exhilarating moment when I entered in credit card digits and bought a ticket to a concert on the other side of the continent, a weak moment, a delusion that I could maintain some kind of inner personally fulfilling life away from the wives and doctors and sitters and ear drippings. [“You should have consulted me!” Imagine cross Kaja the wife in halfshame-halfshock that her [strange] husband would do something so weird – like why can’t he be like normal husbands and just watch sports?] “I’m sorry, I got carried away, she just had surgery so that she could sing and then she announced these shows in Paris … who knows when she will tour again? It could be two years. Maybe three.” [“Imagine that,” tsks disappointed Kaya, now in writing retreat in Egypt as feverish daughter drips out her ears]
AND YET when I tell her I must NOT go to show, because daughter is sick, [and because I was a fool to think I could have even gone in the first place, stupid stupid singer loving man] it’s KAJA who tells me that I must go, “I talked to Pernilla [former insurance house chief] and she says it’s a very weak case, that we could never get that money back {the mother in Egypt, father in France, tsk}. “How much did you pay?” “€80.” “Listen, you paid the money, you said you wanted to see your musical heroes, that you never know what could happen to them – poof – they disappear [like MCA of the Beastie Boys, I add] and you are left to live on in regret [yes, regret] that you never got the chance to see them and there is no quick insurance fixer upper for this problem and so little sick girl is left [shamefully] by Spartan father [who MUST go to Paris because he bought the tickets, to see some Icelandic witch sing about Viruses and Mutual Cores and Hidden Places and Human Behaviooor… Through the misty roads of this Other Demented Northern Land I drove with The Sugarcubes’ shimmering guitars glistening in the fog and off the silver reflectors of the orange construction highway cones DANGER then flew to Copenhagen and then on to graffitied Paris [“Don’t worry, enjoy yourself”] That’s how I went.
/ – dear friends, a few years ago doctors found a vocal polyp on me chords … i decided to go the natural way and for 4 years did stretches and tackled it with different foods and what not . then they discovered better technology and i got tempted into hi tech lazer stuff and i have to say , in my case anyway : surgery rocks ! i stayed quiet for 3 weeks and then started singing and definitely feel like my chords are as good as pre nodule ! it´s been very satisfying to sing all them clear notes again im sorry i had to cancel stuff earlier in the year , didnt want to talk about this until i knew for sure if it would work . so looking forward to singing for you in 2013 all the warmth ,björk. – /
AND THIS IS a church, the music box organ plays the rounds, [now it’s “Venus as a Boy”] Les Audience Hipsterrr settled into the many rows, [maybe some even paid €600 for the VIP pass with the promise that The Singeress *might* show up to drink champagne with them, *might*] but I have come a long way from There to Here to see Her, it is a pilgrimage of mine, not one to Saint Peter’s, but a pilgrimage to heroes and heroines to erode the wires and signals, the images and clips, to pass beyond applications into real flesh and sensation, here we congregate, those who are willing to spend €80 for inspiration and €30 for a t-shirt, for this is what they are selling us, all of the Shit-Eating Self-Centered Artists out there (me included) IN$PIRATION –> Money’ll give you toys to amuse yourself with ’til the end of your years, but Björk builds her own toys, that’s the difference, and yet money has ruled me, I starve my soul for money, spend that money on inspiration, making widgets for shadow-faced demons, stalk, lurk, starve, like the Vegan Food Absolutists starve themselves of animal proteins and vitamins to achieve pseudoreligious purity (and prove their chastity to themselves) so do we filet and skewer and barbeque our souls for biweekly renumeration. I am not the first to say these things, I know, but that’s even better because it only means that they are at least half true.
And now I can’t even think of these fool matters because there’s dozens of beautiful wimmin in shiny capes singing through the dark.
” ……i still cannot believe it : i saw MY IDOL live for the first time! It’s is such an incredible feeling…so powerful!
When i first saw her coming on stage during Thunderbolt i cried! It was so surreal! The voice was INCREDIBLE. During thunderbolt she hit an astounding high note that left me out of breath …” »
“… an applause to the choir when the girls came to the stage in the middle of the intro. As soon as they were there, i realised the pregnant-one was right in front of me! [The chorus] Oskasteinar – it worked to build the tension, at least for me, those girls are a force of nature. At the end of it, Miss B came on stage.
I was shocked, ecstatic. She’s so nice and (i hate to admit it) elfish live! She’s lovely You probably cannot see it from the photos, but the Iris Van Herpen dress is sparkly She also wore sparkly low-platform shoes! …”
THE ALL-ICELANDIC female chorus [for she has come with dozens of backing singers] makes it, really and it’s the blonde girl who faces our side of the rows of chairs and catches my eye with her single braided pagan braid, that single braid, this singing woman who sings with shyness, sways with shyness as she must, just a foot off the ground and then the other foot, the hip moves left then the other hip right [for that’s about the best a northern lady can do] the beauty and supple lusciousness of self consciousness, modesty in her sway while Baroness Red Wig Björk marches around in Freak Show cadence, May I [church organ chord] Can I [church organ chord] Or Have I Too Often Now {been} [church organ chord] Craving Miracles //
That red Aruba tree shaped chinstrapped wig, the flash of the teeth as the come down on the microphone [HARD], the stutter rumble step and crumple of electronic boulders falling everywhere – It’s her! In that tiny body! – I wish I could do it like she does it. Like an impotent man who yearns to screw, I wish to open my mouth and let her voice come out of my chest instead — Vincibus Eruptum! — yet nothing steps forward from these lips but a pathetic hushed croak [impotence] and I must pick up my little pen and scribble my dark thoughts down like a sad prisoner passing notes through the jail iron bars. I do think of My Björk Loving Ex Girlfriend here and how we went to Reykjavik and found Einar Orn’s phone number and guiltily called him from hotel landline phone to tell him how we loved his trumpet playing on “Stick Around for Joy,” and we said, “Don’t be shocked, Einar, we don’t want you to think we’re STALKERS or anything,” and Einar laughed, “Don’t you know that you can’t shock an Icelander ???” And later after we broke up and got back together she said, “You can sleep here tonight,” and Vespertine played through “Unison” and “let’s unite tonight, we shouldn’t fight” and my hands coming up with handfuls of her white flesh, in the midnight, all that warmth, majesty, just like those starry [emotional] nights with Kaja in [landscapes] Slovenia in those lofty alpine rooms on all of those sexy slovenly slopes.
Nearly the victim of a mailbomb from a crazed fan two years ago, Icelandic singer Björk was impacted recently by yet another stalking incident, this time involving her mother. A Spanish man, who has reportedly stalked the diva for four years, broke into Björk’s mother’s home last week when she was away and slept in her bed, ate her food and left threatening messages for the singer, who responded, “This is worse than the mailbomb… that the people I love are subjected to threats because of me is horrible… I feel very guilty…” adds “Only a heartless madman would finish all the Snack Pack pudding.”
” … not only she started singing, but then the Tesla Came out : i cried. One of the few time something so physical yet so spiritual brought me to tears…i’m usually more about crying at weddings
or sad stories. The voice was powerful and stubborn : she opposed intruments, choir, beats, anything : she was the queen and the master of it. She held high notes like never before, as you can see from that wonderful video on youtube.”
::“What were those pillow metallic Jamaican steel drum thingies the percussionist played (on “Virus” and “Possibly Maybe”)?”
::“It’s a hang drum.” Link [Classification: Percussion/ Hornbostel–Sachs classification: 111.24 (Percussion vessels)/ Inventor(s): Felix Rohner, Sabina Schärer/ Developed 2000] [IMAGE: {Björk percussionist} Manu Delago playing a first-generation hang]
::“The thunderbolt toy, suspended from the ceiling, fires off (electricity?) to accompany certain sounds?”
::“It’s a singing Tesla coil.” Like no duh … [electrical resonant transformer circuit invented by Nikola Tesla around 1891. It is used to produce high-voltage, high-frequency alternating-current electricity.]
::“And those pendulums?”
wikipedia links: “New musical instruments were specially developed for the album. A group of pendulums were put together, creating patterns with their moves, transmitting the movements of the Earth to the sound of a harp, making the song “Solstice” (and how they swing back and forth as the Red Wig mutters about universal things in the spotlight, but that happens much later in the show, yes …)
There is also the issue of the “Gameleste” As [shrimp cocktail-fed society man] New Yorker Critic relates on blog, “Incorporating gamelan-like bronze bars in a celeste housing, the gameleste is the work of the British percussionist” X … “and the Icelandic organ craftsman” Y [VIDEO: The Making of the Instrument] “‘Crystalline,'” Critic shares, is “one of two gameleste songs on the album, and can be heard here, in a video by Michel Gondry.” {VIDEO: golden honey droplets of light fertilize moon craters, and pulsing jellyfish of electronic networks whirlpool into eyes and the lady in the moon sings, as she does right now} Critic … “I’ve only just begun to explore the complex universe of Biophilia, which Björk first described to me a couple of years ago, at a Shun Lee dinner before Des Canyons aux étoiles at Alice Tully Hall.”
Tinkling, sparkling GAMELESTE [ipad astral water droplet gamelan celeste] in the Cirque, Red Wig calls, Icelandic gems respond [“Crystals grown like plants”/”listen how they grow”] There are stars and worms and viruses on the giant screens suspended [“In the core of the earth”], the words all of blood and nature [“CRYSTALLINE!” they respond, fierce, like daggers, “internalnebula-a-a-a-a” “CRYSTALLINE!” “rocksgrowingslower” “CRYSTALLINE!” “icanfeelclaustropho-bia-a-a-a-a”] … and the shiny caped chorus opens its echoing mouth and the towheaded girl [“It’s the sparkle you become”] sways like water, it’s all quite wet here in the Cirque but also hot, like blood itself, like the liquid in their lips [“when you conquer anxiety”] {Much applause and woo-ooo} The Singer, in dress resembling slippery shiny cat vomit (but also pixie-elf like!) answers the audience with: “merci beaucoup!” “merci biens” and “my french is horreebl” and the impotent writer scratches away that “art is the vehicle for an idea, or emotion, or both, we cannot tamper with the idea, no we must preserve its purity,” and rambles like he knows what he’s talking about until, “the vehicle can be altered, no, it MUST be altered, in order to ensure,” because Björk and her pendulums, hang drums, and tesla coils and GAMELESTE have gotten him all sexxed up and, “the successful delivery of the idea via spectacles, to which are opened receptacles,” and the final breakthrough, “I will do things better from now on, take it apart, reassemble it so that the message is clearer than ever of how I feel how this voice wells up inside me and must come out, the tongue escapes in different ways …”
” … one of my favorite performances. I don’t know if you have heard about Wagner’s theory about “total piece of art” which comprises music, dance and art: i found this in this performance.
HER DANCE MOVES WERE A B S U R D ! Me and the girl near me started to laugh with pleasure at her moving throughout the stage…
but then, during the last part: she gave it all: her steps were like TOTALLY coordinated with the beats, her voice was flawless and her yearning was touchable, and made me belong too.”
There is something to be said of the connection of the dots [on screens] the red and orange circles, the way the music snakes along and the [BEEP] the red circle enlarges and then the line that connects it to the [BOOP] green square widens until [BOP] it arrives. Who thinks of this stuff? Pathetic ridiculous people. I am one of them [“A pretty wife …”] An enormous room of homemade instruments, altars [“A cool car”], musicbox twinkling tectonic bass rumbling [“What more could you want?”][“Like a virus needs a body, a soft on tissue feeds on blood, someday I’ll find you, the urge is here …] And there she sways, modest braided girl, does she know that we are watching, does she like it? OR Are they watching us? More rolling about, tremors delirium, she sootens & smoulders like the Eyjafjallajökull Volcano itself, good ol’ Ey’llfuckyou Volcano.
July 04 (or was it June?) Manhattan rich guy hotel university alumni event [Says father before I embark on train, “Who knows, someone might offer you a job … “] [And the hors d’oevres “Hi, my name is David, I work for Goldman Sachs, what did you major in? …”] Sweaty face, clammy hands, peeled and crushed soul, soul juice oozing out under the toilet stall door …[“Alumni events ain’t my bag, baby”] Hiding in the tiled and mirrored john with view of toney Central Park and Gotham [and She lives somewhere down there, or so They say] then that big wave of OH FUCK this SELLOUT BULLSHIT washes over me until I tear off my tie and ride the subway downtown to hipster centrale Piano’s Bar for the East Village Medulla album release party, where I’m the sole suit there, but the heads don’t care and I don’t care … I just cannot be bothered to care … and she trills away in the Icelandic language interview with subtitles, trill, trill and we’re all very happy, every one of us embarrasing snot-licking pathetic music fans … trill
CIRQUE EN CHANTIER AGAIN, Paris, the tongue escapes from the lips and then draws/is drawn us back in. This is not SEX per se in the ferocious sound, but there is goodness, holiness, saintliness, natureness, nary a love song, only goodness in Ice Lady’s cavernousness. The werewolf inside me, my little pet volcano that some {pathetically} call “emotions” … Awakened, it claws to the surface [path into the light] claws scratch screamballs its way out [such is the violence of nature] and the Little Woman in the Red Strap-on Wig [that tiny body] in darkness opens her mouth too [as deep and puzzling as Gollum’s Cave] and BITES down into the sound, BITES INTO IT but from where does that sound come? Somewhere up through the floor and the mic, it comes out and gasses us all until we die and are resurrected by its lethal tenderness and chant along, stand, stomp, APPLAUD. I fear as we bang the floors for an encore, I fear for the risers that they will collapse and then the cacophony cosmogony subsides as the girls in the flashy capes in the lights arrive again and [with saintly deference, modesty] sing us into oblivion…
At last B says they have been waiting for this one, she tosses out a meaty treat to sate the girls’ hunger for thunder … Allt sem hann leiðir (Everything that he leads) allt sem hún fleygir (everything that she throws away) allt sem hún fleygir (everything that she throws away) náttúra! (nature!) ég get tekið (I’m able to take) ég tek við því (I receive it) Náttúra – ” the Icelandic Ladies mosh and roll around the stage while Venus as a Girl commands, ég get tekið ég get tekið Like rocks falling [yes] this is not the joy of sex to amuse you [but I still see you swaying blonde pagan modesty] this plus sex, plus sound, plus – that’s all this is, something plus, the substance itself, unrefined into words and distribution channels like “sex” or “concert” and “it.”
“… and when she ordered us to stand up my spine was aching for all the things i did in the last two days, but i did it anyway, obviously ! It was pure energy, let me tell you!
VOLCANIC!!! When she sang Declare Independence, I raised my arm and cheered [“raise your flag,” she incites catastrophe, “higher, higher”] But I was also sad because I knew it was almost over. And then, like the wind, she disappeared from my eyes.”
The encore, the departure, the post-orgiastic come down. Ice Ladies exit, go home to their dreams and whispers and €600 per guest parties, though the people do stand and shout and whistle and stomp because they want more, they will always want more of her, but they cannot have her all the time and so must settle for merchandise, for $20 CDs and €40 programs and €30 t-shirts. [“Can I get two of the red one in small?” “Small?” [Raised eyebrow, contemplating big man’s size] “Yes, they are for my daughters.” “€60 please” “Merci!”] The clear plastic bag swings from my pathetic fingers, the sharp-edged elbows and hipster flash flooding.
“She has given us all that she can give,” he scribbles [maddeningly] away, “and she will give no more nor ever needs to.” Then another maxim arrives in ink, something along the lines of, “To have heroes is to be ridiculous. But to accept one’s ridiculousness is heroic.”
north! 