moohalo

I went to Maui for a week with Ji and Adriana. We saw a lot of these:

According to the Shepherd of Hana, aka Uncle Jesse, rainbows are NBD. "I see them every day. What's really cool are moonbows. You can put your hand through them."

Also, we did a lot of this:

And then I came home to this guy:


Roaches are a rare thing in my apartment. Clearly, he was straggler from Lei's week of hard-partying in my absence.

More later...

detritus

A couple of months ago, Chris bought a truck. Last weekend, he crammed its shell full of camping gear, sparing only enough room for Nico and a few succulents. Joel offered himself as co-pilot for the nearly 3,000-mile drive east, where C will spend the next two years at grad school.

A few things I inherited:

Beer: 1 can of La Playa, 1 bottle of San Miguel, 1 bottle of Red Stripe

1 bottle of Jagermeister

1 bottle of Pamplemousse Rose Perrier

Assorted frozen foods including (but not limited to): cheese blintzes, chocolate soy ice cream sandwiches, TJs vegetable gyoza potstickers, eggplant & zucchini, a bag of frozen corn, mini croissants

1 ice pack

1 Bikini Kill cassette tape

1 Crass cassette tape (a gift for Dicky)

1 broom
1 dust pan
1 roll of bubble wrap

Assorted cleaning products
1 bottle of hydrogen peroxide
1 bottle of isopropyl rubbing alcohol
6 light bulbs (of varying shapes, sizes and wattage)

a pile of recycling (which remains near my front door, awaiting transfer to its temporary resting place in the blue bins outside my apartment)

houseplants: 1 mother-in-law's tongue, 1 Euphorbia Obesa, 1 purple shamrock (grown from a cutting I'd given Chris as a housewarming gift when he moved back to L.A.).
1 Echo Park Time Travel Mart mug

countless strands of dog hair

Chris spent his last night in L.A. at my apartment, and when I woke Sunday morning, he'd already picked up Joel. I could hear them bounding up and down the stairs, loading up the truck. I didn't want to watch, so I hid in my room for a while, and when I sensed they were nearing the end, I made my way downstairs, into the unwelcome sunlight. The truck was parked in front of my building and they were making the final adjustments. My neighbor -- a middle-aged black woman to whom I had never said more than "Hello" -- was taking photographs, trailing Chris and Joel, their arms laden with boxes and crates, like she was some kind of moving day paparazzi.

She turned to me.

"I'll get you the pictures later. You'll want to remember this day."

Which is funny because I've already forgotten the moment his truck pulled away.

kitchen drive

Dicky's work challenges me. In last year, much of it has become performance-based, which is to say that his participation (e.g. projecting slides, playing recorded sound, etc.) has become part of the work. He'll usually leave some elements to chance, rendering each performance unique.

Generally, these performances are long. If he's projecting film, it's not edited. The camera is handheld and sometimes it's out of focus. If he's projecting slides, there are a lot of them, projected for varying durations. The images are often scenes that I find unpleasant: Phoenecian landscapes, the meeting of desert and concrete. If a score accompanies, it is tape-recorded and tinny, projected from a single speaker cassette player, and it often sounds like noise: random sounds, snippets of conversation, rustling, breathing, etc.

Everything about it is defiantly analog. It's raw and without technical sophistication. It tests my patience, and that's part of the point, but it doesn't make the experience any less uncomfortable.

A recent six-hour performance featured the re-creation of a roadtrip in someone's kitchen on a Monday afternoon. I wasn't there. Dicky sat at the kitchen table, projecting slides, drinking coffee, playing his score, making conversation with those who had come to watch and who had become, unwittingly, his roadtrip companions. Some of the images were from trips we'd taken together -- of note, our annual holiday ride to Phoenix, on the I-10 across the most bleak stretches of the Sonoran Desert. I hate that six-hour drive, but I appreciate his rendition of it. Particularly in the form of a six-minute clip where INXS kicks in toward the end.

two days

July 3:

The yellow dress was a mistake, I think. Biking from Hollywood to downtown on the hottest day of summer so far, it showed every streak of perspiration. When we stopped for iced coffee, I asked Chris if I looked dewy or sweat-soaked.

"A little bit of both?"

He was being kind. We sat under an umbrella and wiped the sweat from our brows with paper napkins.

The dress was a parasail, catching the wind and billowing around me as I rode toward the museum. I tried to contain the skirt with the grip of my legs, but I wasn't always successful, the white of my thighs flashing at oncoming traffic.

At MOCA, I heard my recorded voice come through a single speaker, childish, played on a cassette tape as Dicky projected the accompanying slides onto a screen. We only caught the tail-end of his performance, and I'd walked into the room just in time to hear myself. The images and recording were from Big Family Day a month prior. I remembered following him around the museum that day, frustrated because he seemed to be running away from me, camera and tape recorder in hand.

"What are you doing?" I'd asked.

"Creating documents."

His response had annoyed me because it seemed like ambiguous art-speak, but now it struck me as quite literal.

On this day, the museum was filled with experimental music. In the courtyard, Liam was making noise by touching dry ice to triangles.

Hours later, I was on a rooftop on the edge of downtown, drinking Modelo and Jim Beam. The heat and the alcohol were bringing out the best and the worst in all of us. We told stories from our childhoods and some of us became children. There was crying and hair-pulling. A girl punched a boy. Someone grabbed my head and tried to kiss me as I stood very still, lips clenched, as he pressed his face against mine. When he tried a second time, I pushed him away, saying "NO."

On the plant-covered rooftop, mosquitoes buzzed beneath the yellow dress, sucking on my thighs. Above us, fireworks burst and faded.

July 4:

I love a good fireworks show, and I can't remember the last 4th of July I didn't watch one, but when Dicky suggested an 8 p.m. showing of Tree of Life, it seemed like the right idea.

The film was flawed, but when it worked, it was wonderful, evoking certain feelings from childhood I'd forgotten. It also made me deeply sad to confront the reality of never again experiencing things for the first time.

I'm not planning to have children. As I've grown older, I have a hard time identifying with kids despite willfully living much of my life like one. The film made me recall what it actually felt like to be a child -- not just pretending at it. The truth is that kids intimidate me, and I wonder if it's because I envy them.

After the movie, Dicky and I wandered aimlessly around Hollywood, discussing the film and how it made us feel -- in the language we lacked as children. A single white firework went off above our heads, and I was reminded of a 4th of July years ago. It may have been 2004, and from the roof of the San Francisco Art Institute, we watched fireworks explode over the bay, the bridge. The fog rendered their shapes invisible, so they merely lit up the clouds -- red, then green, then blue -- a Technicolor storm.

On the Walk of Fame, a black woman sat in a plastic chair wearing only a bright yellow bathing suit. As I stared, taking in her outfit, I tripped in my three-inch platform sandals. Then I decided she had the right idea -- the night was an oven.

muscle memory

It is my instinct to always pay for valet. I believe that my time is valuable and should not be squandered driving in circles. An even worse of use of my time? Driving in circles, annoyed. That said, I will hesitate before valeting because I hate my car. I hate my car so much that I do not wish it upon anyone -- even a valet attendant. So I will usually drive in circles for five minutes, annoyed, before acquiescing to the thing my heart of hearts desired all along.

On Friday night, I valeted the Bookmobile in West Hollywood (for obvious reasons if you've ever tried to park in West Hollywood on a Friday night). When I retrieved my car, I became flummoxed because I could not get the gearshift out of park. I kept trying to force the stick until I eventually sprained my thumb -- an old derby injury, aggravated. Finally, I had to call over the valet attendant, saying, "I don't know what you guys did to my car, but I can't get it out of park." The attendant reached inside and turned the key, igniting the engine. This fixed the problem. I drove to Echo Park, thumb and ego aching.

I played derby for the first time in seven months last night, landing on that bad thumb once again. I skated with my former teammate Crystal Deth in Wreck League -- the recreational leg of LADD. I was a little nervous going in -- seven months off-skates is an eon in Derby Time. But I surprised myself by seemingly picking up where I'd left off: still pretty fast, able to take a hit (many, actually), recover from a fall quickly. My agility and lateral movement didn't seem compromised.

It was bittersweet. I had a blast skating, and it was reassuring to discover that I could still hold my own after a considerable break, but I left practice with a welt on my thigh and an angry thumb. A couple of times during the night, I felt my left arm tingle following a fall. This is really the worst thing that seven years of derby has done to my body: a compressed nerve that runs from my neck down the length of my arm. I still wake up in the middle of the night, my arm completely numb, hand clenched. It's been better since I've stopped playing, but it's still with me.

Practice used to be my favorite part of derby. I was always a more consistent skater in practice than in games because nerves too often got the better of me. During my last season, I felt like I'd plateaued, and practice became a chore. When the only thing I looked forward to was skating in a bout, I knew I was done. So, it was nice to have that old feeling back last night -- of playing a game, for fun, with friends. I just wish it didn't come at such a cost to my body. I'm still thinking about going back next week though.

I have a strong, flexible back. I realize now what a critical role this must've played in my longevity as a derby skater, and in particular, my ability to always bounce right back after the worst of hits. Backbends are one of my strengths in yoga, and I surprised myself by dropping into full camel pose during a class on Saturday. I think now of my mother's back, her spine grossly curved and rounded from scoliosis that went untreated during childhood. Now in her twilight years, her internal organs have shifted.

In other news, during a hike in Chantry Flats on Sunday, I discovered an orchid in full bloom. We found it on our way back down the mountain. We'd missed it on our way up, or perhaps it wasn't there before. At the top of the mountain, we removed the cover to a water tank, which may or may not have been the gates of hell.

good ideas

I also listened to Franzen's Kenyon College Commencement address twice last weekend.

beautiful noise

I attended Big Family Day at MOCA last weekend, and the highlight was my friend Liam's Styrophone Orchestra (Liam is an experimental musician, his instrument of choice being styrofoam). Every participant was handed a styrofoam cooler and a drumstick, which we used to "bow" the cooler.

Liam gives instructions to the musicians.

The cacophony begins.

Adriana gets bossy.

Shit gets punk.

What surprised me most about this event was the lack of boredom. I expected the kids to get sick of playing their Styrophones, but nearly everyone kept going until their instruments were obliterated. I don't know if it's more or less surprising that the same thing applied to the adults. We played our hearts out, chunks of styrofoam flying into the air all around us like a blizzard. As we experimented with the range of sounds we could draw from our Styrophones, the expression on most everyone's face was bliss.

At home later that night, after eating the most satisfying bowl of udon at a Little Tokyo cafe, I sat on my sofa with Adriana and Liam, watching Planet Earth: Ice Worlds, and happily picked styrofoam from my hair.