Otherworldly Music

Microw, a flash fiction supplement to Full of Crow Press and Distribution, published one of my stories.  Following the summer theme of “Home,” the story is titled “A Myth Much Prettier than Home” and peeks into the creation of the Sole Portal Builder in Marine Territory as he whips up a portal to home for Monsieur Atticus … but perhaps a “home” that can never be re-experienced.  Check it out:  http://www.fullofcrow.com/contentfiles/MICROW7Summer2012.pdf.

I’m embarrassed to have forgotten the musical inspiration for this piece.  I’m currently swimming in beautiful tunes by Tamaryn, Saint LouLou, and Foreign Cinema, so I’ll publish some new pieces soon.

Aside: a crow flew into our house recently and flew around, terrified, until D picked it up and took it outside where it pretended to be dead for a few moments, then flew away furiously.  That was the Summer Solstice.  Very symbolic, don’t you think?  I also think the crow gave our indoor cats fleas, but nevermind.  Nature is beautiful, though not always ….convenient.

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I. We will live in rare fortune; we will not be the ones asleep.

She dances, her black-painted toenails dipping in white silk, spitting.
We are as angels carved into mausoleum pillars, observing.

Someone says they think this was once called voodoo. Oh! Yes, it must be, with gods as divorced from their history as we are. They respond to fragments of their own memory, and we respond to their beauty.

She steals the tapestries–now decomposing–and weaves them anew. What they once meant, we do not care, because memory is fallible, history is yet another tale, and so we watch. We, too, will build with the pieces to create what shines for us.

————–
II. We would never ask to live a coherent life.

A cathedral ceiling full of fog,
a pane of glass reflecting white skin over the city
and into a dark cranial space.
Thin bones, thin clothes,
and a handful of pastel green hair.
Cigarette butts on an antique table
no one cares about.

You had your whiskey. You had your pills, whatever they were.
Fog on your face.

Do you feel like we’ve lived through too many youths?
They’re piling up on the door and
shattering against each other,
ever-shortening pieces I use
for collage.
With my eyes closed,
I make art
that’s only visible in the next decade
or
when I’m out of my head.

(Pictureplane–Real is a Feeling, Grimes remix)

The song above is a Pictureplane track remixed by Grimes and made infinitely more spooky than the original.  I really love this song and thank the artist for making it available for free download.

Readers might benefit from a bit of explanation about this abstract piece. My experience living in the San Francisco Bay Area has made me think a lot about hipsters.  Around here, “hipster” is kind of a dirty word, as this article by The Guardian’s Alex Rayner discusses.  No one wants to admit to being a hipster (even if they are) and I’ve done my share of hipster bashing.  I can’t help it–the ill-fitting clothes and poor hygiene make me want to smack someone.  Hipsters are commonly derided as being a non-culture that cannibalizes the beautiful and sacred parts of other cultures and subcultures, discarding all the meaning of an item and using it instead for fashion/image purposes. The popularity of Native American ”inspired” garb (think “anorexic white chicks in war bonnets“) is one example.  On a more casual note, if you want to piss off a devloted old-school goth, ask them what they think about “nu-goth” fashion.  Hilarity really does ensue.

I’m trying to consider hipsters with a bit more kindness, though. The more sincere ones are not sitting around chortling with glee as they rub their hands/pseudopods together and saying, “Yes, yes, we shall make a mockery of all that is sacred!”   They’re a symptom of a shallow mainstream culture, trying desperately to find meaning while working around a profound ignorance they’re only dimly aware of.  If no one encourages them to look within for meaning, rather than without, then their artform becomes a collage of what already exists, because that’s the material they know to work with.  And sometimes those collages are pretty clever.  Other times, they’re tedious and worn out.

I imagine what my life would be like if I were raised by narcissistic 80s yuppie stereotypes.  Would I be some 19-year-old kid rebelling against the shallowness of that prescribed culture?  Would I grab onto to anything with a hint of “something more than this,” but know only how to hack it apart and force it into my world?

***

In the spirit of things, I was trying to find a stereotypical photo of a nu-goth-style hipster.  All dark tones, grainy resolution, messy hair and vapid expression, etc.  Surprisingly, Flickr Creative Commons failed me, and I wasn’t about to post some random person’s photo.  I figured it couldn’t be that hard to replicate, so here’s me lookin’ all American Apparel, just for you!

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The microbial children squealed delightedly as the otter submarine torpedoed through the river. Older members of the bacterial colony were perhaps more sedate, but no less enthused with the practiced tumbles and breakneck twirls of their new host. Most of them couldn’t recall when they’d last been on a pleasure cruise rather than a mission. The Colony Elders had mulled it carefully, eventually approving the expedition on grounds that the community had suffered so much recently from chemical ravages and fierce herbal destroyers. The war had been misery for all, but especially those who had faced the genocide of the xenophobic White Blood Cell Armies.

But the Colony had expected the fierce reaction of the WBCA and everyone, even the children, was prepared. They’d sacrificed individual after individual as part of the greater strategy of takeover, reproducing even when resources were low and morale flattened. All Colonials upheld the sacred mission of their Colony: No Waste. Each of them existed to use biological resources that would otherwise go to waste in senseless, foolish beasts. They were stewards of the natural world, and wanderers who would go wherever they were needed.

They’d won the battle called Martha, though she didn’t know it yet. As customary, they’d retreated momentarily out of respect for the defeated. The elders had performed the Division and Passing ceremoney but instead of the Eighty Days of Silence, the elders suggested a pleasure cruise to celebrate the impending end of the Long War of Martha Millenson.

The underwater world swished through the otter’s fur, brilliant blues and greens illuminated by the midday sun. The children shrieked to see massive fish mauled by the still more massive teeth of the otter, and the adults watched contentedly, enjoying the show of light and shape.

“Will we live here now?” asked a little one, hopeful and trembling.

“No, we’ll go back to Martha soon,” someone said.

“But I like the otter! And anyway, Martha hates us!”

“Why is that bad?” said an Elder. The child had no answer, and settled at the massive eye portal to watch and consider this. As every Colonial child learns eventually, first to its shame and then to its credit, hatred is a sign of a job well done and bio-matter elegantly used.

(Inspired by Robyn Hitchcock’s “I Often Dream of Trains”)

——

This was a pretty weird OWM, I admit.  I was thinking about being sick and what it might be like from the bacteria’s perspective.  I’m sure they don’t just sit around rubbing their pseudopods together in fervent delight at making me ill.  If they have a sense of purpose, what would it be?  Surely it would be more than “Woo-hoo, we be makin’ humans feel like crap!”

Poor Martha.  She can rest assured that if she keels over dead, at least the little bastards will be homeless again.

I’m actually not a fan of Robyn Hitchcock ordinarily, but this song has a strange otherworldly feel to it–the kind of feeling I associate with being feverish in a pleasant place.  The world is charming with flowers blooming outside your window or people swimming by on a shining summer day, and you’re wobbling on your feet and walking on the ocean floor.

Great little drawing, isn’t it?  It is by deviantARTist *J-C, who kindly let me use it.   I love otters.  Recently I saw one in the Monterey Bay, a mama sea otter swimming with her baby on her belly.

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When I was fourteen, I asked my mom about hippies.

“Mom, were you a hippie in the sixties?”

She didn’t look up from her needlepoint. “What? Of course not.”

“But I thought everyone in the sixties was a hippie,” I said.

She glanced at me, arching her eyebrow. “No, everyone in the sixties was not a hippie. Don’t ask your father a question like that, ok?”

“Did you wear tie-dye?”

“No.”

“Did you like the Beatles?”

“Only when they were mop-tops. I didn’t like what they did later on, especially when that Yoko Ono” (she wrinkled her nose) “showed up and they all grew their hair long and started taking drugs.”

I had no idea who Yoko Ono was, but he/she/it sounded intriguing. “Were your friends hippies?”

She paused in her stitching. “Why are you asking all these questions about hippies?”

“We’re studying the Cultural Revolution in my History class.” I stared at my practical mother in her polyester pantsuit and envisioned her in a patchwork skirt and a wreath of flowers on her head, dancing barefoot in the mud, just like in the documentary we’d watched in class. I watched her needle pull thread through the fabric in the cross-stitching hoop. Perhaps she would have embroidered her bell-bottomed jeans …

“Well, I knew a few Flower Children. They’re different. They never wanted to hurt anyone,” she explained. “They were gentle and loved nature. They believed in love, not like those drug addicts that came later.”

“What happened to the Flower Children?” I asked.

She shrugged. “They grew up, I guess.”

I was silent then, wondering if flowers and love were of no interest to old people.

***

Another question, one that Mom can’t answer, occurred to me today, many years after the Summer of Love faded into the long Autumn of Survival: What names were worshiped then but languish unknown and excluded from today’s teen dreams? Who started it all and died in obscurity? Because it’s probably their ghosts I’m seeing on here on Haight Street, and only artificial tulpas of youthful Grace Slick, now white-haired and plump. Across from me, a mural of Janis Joplin looms over a group of kids in filthy jeans with rope-leashed pit bulls. No flowers in their hair, though a couple have Grandmother’s love beads and imitations of Uncle’s mohawk. They pass around cigarettes, and vodka in Coke bottles. Their vices are cheaper than drugs, which kill the dream more slowly.

America’s collective memory of teen dreams is crammed like an attic, full of ruffled shirts, ‘49 Fords, ramshackle rooms in unwashed bohemia, syringes and rolling papers, leather journals stinking of cigarettes, neon Ganeshes, combat boots under lace, and endless worn sleeping bags on concrete. And in San Francisco, where the grime is layered on streets, I could find, if I was inclined to chip away at it, the remains of flowers much older than I am–organic matter mixed with bum piss and exhaust, composting in concrete cracks.

—————-

The musical inspiration for this came from a kid playing guitar outside the cafe I was in.  Since he wandered off, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite new San Francisco bands, Foreign Cinema.

Photo by Mr. Skeleton.

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The new Otherworldly Music site design has been up for a few months, but I neglected to mention it or the new digital download store. Click the “Get the Music” link above to purchase MP3s all in one convenient spot. I’m still trying to figure out how I want to link to songs that don’t have digital distribution.

There is another sneaky aspect of this post: I’m testing the RSS feed. Leave a comment if you see this in your feed, ok? Everything should be fixed now that I’ve migrated to WordPress. I love you, WordPress.

Site design and maintenance all finished–now, I write! I’ve moved to California and have new strange and varied inspirations. The music scene out here is wonderful.

Photo “Fog on the Golden Gate Bridge” by Chris Willis.

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Mountain leaves and palindromes; the girl could not create one from the other. “I give up,” she said, bowing her head to the old man. “All my answers are wrong. I don’t know how they are alike.”

He grunted and shrugged. “Keep walking,” he told her, “and you’ll see.”  He quietly shut the door without even a final nod, and she knew it was useless to knock. The door would not open to her again.

She walked. No one missed her when she left.  As she walked she turned her scarred face in greeting to the clear sky, letting her village grew tiny behind her. Its bright noise dwindled; the children shouting, women chattering at the marketplace, and carts rolling over the stone roads all grew faint and then silent. The sun rose above her, and once she leaned against a cliff wall to eat a bit of potato from her provisions. Her fingers toyed with the small piece of chalk at the bottom of her bag. She straightened and withdrew the chalk, writing a poem on the rough rock as neatly as she could, as the ancient wild sages had done. She knew that time would dissolve it.  Like all things, it was vivid for a day, then fading back to sand and dust. It was a palindrome, in a way, riding the same path backwards and forwards.

The sun grew low on the horizon. She gathered meadow grass into a bed and started a small fire. Like the swipe of a sponge on watercolor, her sweat smeared the dirt on her hands. She imagined the droplets rolling down the mountains as she labored. Her old green coat stank now not with must, but with her unwashed scent and smoke.

She lay on her back, counting constellations and listening to the rushing stream.  Perhaps by now her mother had noticed her absence, but would say nothing to her father, who would not care about a missing daughter too ugly to marry off or sell. The moon and stars saw only the land below them, all creatures blending into the whole of the earth.

The fire warmed her and she let her eyes close. She knew she’d die in the coat she wore, but one battered green coat can hold many years in its pockets.

***
I found this little piece I wrote a couple of years ago and sadly, I don’t recall which song went with it. My new goal is to make it to August without anyone dying.  I could make a little grave yard here of all the people who have died on my blog.  I think that makes me a horrible, horrible murderer.  I will reform, I promise.

Photo “Takayama” by Katclay

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