The Fat Lady Sang and Other Things
(I wrote and posted this last Sunday, and then decided to take it down, after a little rumination I have decided to let it stand as is, for whatever reason the past burbled up, and my reflections on it hold true after several days of thought....)
(second update -- I am taking out the incendiary bits - I am ill equiped to deal with the fall out -- maybe someday, but not now)
1) I haven't had TV in the house since just after September 11, 2001. Where as a freshly laid off, poor girl it came down to food or CNN. Saucer eyed or starve, I chose to be practical.
I still have a TV and a DVD player and friends with cable, Very Important Friends, but I really haven't seen commercial television in years, which is beside the point, because in the void there are the internets and more importantly, the far reaching opinions of the critics, the professional to the armchair, and what I love about TV even more than watching it is reading about it.
I have only seen two episodes of the Sopranos aside tonight's finale, with that in mind I sat down to watch how it would end -- in a hail of bullets, a reign of violence, a definitive end. It was mind blowing, for it's sheer simplicity, for it's negligable quotidien, we just fucking go on. And whatever justice the universe chooses to extract it won't be wrapped in a blood soaked ribbon for the blood thirsty viewers to suck on with their saucer TV eyes. Fucking brilliant. What an indictment on us. We had all girded ourselves for a sort of romanesque (ahem HBO) bloodlettling and what we get is a girl who is having trouble parallel parking while her family dives into onion rings in an old school american diner.... the tension is yours, the tension is theirs. We all get, though we all forget, that fate turns on a dime. So eat drink make merry and all that yada yada bada bing.
2) Hating on the Haight
40th anniversary of the summer of love and the Haight Street fair.... I wake up at seven on a sunday to the music of of a wall of porta-potties being banked against the wall of my building, and even with the windows fastly sealed shut the horror of that nose hair singeing, cloying chemical sweet stench wafts through the cracks in the bricks to assault my senses just as I am rousing myself from the precariousness of my dreamland jaunts. And my jaunts these days are long and complicated, it takes me a while to shed the gossamer binds that fall across my eyeline like the fine hairs I am always swiping away whenever the breeze is slight.
I admit to loving it when it is early and everyone is setting up shop, there is an air of put-upon conviviality that I'd like to think smacks of old school carnie -- and I see other locals, wandering down the middle of the street, coffee in hand, weaving a little as the vendors pay us no heed. This morning and not for the first time, I wished I had a pair of roller skates, just to fly down Haight Street in the early morning amid the bustle of preparation for the onslaught of noise hairy hippies and too many meats cooking on too many stands and the amatures out in all their sorry glory to puke on corners and get busted buying an ounce of oregano.
Usually I flee early, as it happened this year, I had nowhere to be until 3pm. So I read, and I listened. To the Hare Krishnas, just outside my window, and the bands and the voices -- they are still strong, though slurred and strident. And I liked it. I liked being shut up in my home with half an ear cocked to the world and the rest devoted to my reading, I liked being unseen in the middle of it all, with no stranger's body trespassing into my realm of space. I get territorial real quick about space, you don't want to bump into me unless I am feeling benevolent which is hardly never. I'll adapt and make peace if I must, but I do not like to move in a crowd, at all.
3) I forgot the third.
Oh, well sure. The Engineer emailed out of the blue on Friday - to check in, after I had explicitly requested that he not contact me. I asked P what the hell he wanted and she somewhat ambiguously councellled me to think like a man, since I am not one, I have difficulty embracing the concept. I asked only that he let me be, I can only presume that he'd like to keep to fingers in the metaphoric pot since they certainly aren't in me. Infact my green streak has him three fingers deep in someone else, he did say, " I like her a lot". What is a semi-sophisticated girl to parse? Does the internets has any advice? (that said I have reams, positive reams, perhaps dissertation reams to say about lolcats and linguistics and the already codified grammar, but the internets move fast my friends and our world edges ever closer to that intellectual vortex - form of a whirlpool, and I am not so sure that our compadres didn't feel the same in 1936, but with less immediacy, therefore better pondered.) but that's a long digression and I'd have to put on my smart hat, when late on a Sunday, short of a warm body in my bed I'll probably wend my way through the maze that is free market porn, even that is a mighty effort.
I'll just dream of the fat lady, how she sang her last in private and hit that note that shatters glass with only her mirror as witness and then another dawn broke to business as usual.... But she knows, or does she? I am inclined to think that Tony and Carmella soldier on, they can't break from the criminal, they continue to justify with the limninal, the children will drive on complicated defense mechanisms, just like the rest of America, to varying degrees of coping and criminality. But then again, who am I to judge. Me and my priceless wellbeing, it begs the question, just how far would you go, whom would you sell and whom would you kill. This from the woman who captures spiders to put outside, this from the woman who last fired a bebe gun in 1987, this from a woman who knows the purring insidiousness of a certain kind of demeaning violence, but doesn't know that kind - and I ask myself, are you talking cinematic violence, because that is the only kind of violence you can articulate, can you not articulate rape (deleted, deleted, deleted)
And if you want to catch me I'll be the accidental phoenix at the incidental truckstop, you know the one with the maroon booths, somewhere in the neverland hinterland of everybody else's dream of california, you know the one, the one with the old timey salad bar and the baco bits on the hottest stretch of I-5, someone's idea of a fiefdom forever unconquered on the side of the interstate, someone's dying orchard, someone's dying dream. We pay enough attention to the price fo gas in these oil starved towns and that is all, no culture to fathom but the local wendy's and nobody wants a square hamburger no matter how hungry.....
(I wrote and posted this last Sunday, and then decided to take it down, after a little rumination I have decided to let it stand as is, for whatever reason the past burbled up, and my reflections on it hold true after several days of thought....)
(second update -- I am taking out the incendiary bits - I am ill equiped to deal with the fall out -- maybe someday, but not now)
1) I haven't had TV in the house since just after September 11, 2001. Where as a freshly laid off, poor girl it came down to food or CNN. Saucer eyed or starve, I chose to be practical.
I still have a TV and a DVD player and friends with cable, Very Important Friends, but I really haven't seen commercial television in years, which is beside the point, because in the void there are the internets and more importantly, the far reaching opinions of the critics, the professional to the armchair, and what I love about TV even more than watching it is reading about it.
I have only seen two episodes of the Sopranos aside tonight's finale, with that in mind I sat down to watch how it would end -- in a hail of bullets, a reign of violence, a definitive end. It was mind blowing, for it's sheer simplicity, for it's negligable quotidien, we just fucking go on. And whatever justice the universe chooses to extract it won't be wrapped in a blood soaked ribbon for the blood thirsty viewers to suck on with their saucer TV eyes. Fucking brilliant. What an indictment on us. We had all girded ourselves for a sort of romanesque (ahem HBO) bloodlettling and what we get is a girl who is having trouble parallel parking while her family dives into onion rings in an old school american diner.... the tension is yours, the tension is theirs. We all get, though we all forget, that fate turns on a dime. So eat drink make merry and all that yada yada bada bing.
2) Hating on the Haight
40th anniversary of the summer of love and the Haight Street fair.... I wake up at seven on a sunday to the music of of a wall of porta-potties being banked against the wall of my building, and even with the windows fastly sealed shut the horror of that nose hair singeing, cloying chemical sweet stench wafts through the cracks in the bricks to assault my senses just as I am rousing myself from the precariousness of my dreamland jaunts. And my jaunts these days are long and complicated, it takes me a while to shed the gossamer binds that fall across my eyeline like the fine hairs I am always swiping away whenever the breeze is slight.
I admit to loving it when it is early and everyone is setting up shop, there is an air of put-upon conviviality that I'd like to think smacks of old school carnie -- and I see other locals, wandering down the middle of the street, coffee in hand, weaving a little as the vendors pay us no heed. This morning and not for the first time, I wished I had a pair of roller skates, just to fly down Haight Street in the early morning amid the bustle of preparation for the onslaught of noise hairy hippies and too many meats cooking on too many stands and the amatures out in all their sorry glory to puke on corners and get busted buying an ounce of oregano.
Usually I flee early, as it happened this year, I had nowhere to be until 3pm. So I read, and I listened. To the Hare Krishnas, just outside my window, and the bands and the voices -- they are still strong, though slurred and strident. And I liked it. I liked being shut up in my home with half an ear cocked to the world and the rest devoted to my reading, I liked being unseen in the middle of it all, with no stranger's body trespassing into my realm of space. I get territorial real quick about space, you don't want to bump into me unless I am feeling benevolent which is hardly never. I'll adapt and make peace if I must, but I do not like to move in a crowd, at all.
3) I forgot the third.
Oh, well sure. The Engineer emailed out of the blue on Friday - to check in, after I had explicitly requested that he not contact me. I asked P what the hell he wanted and she somewhat ambiguously councellled me to think like a man, since I am not one, I have difficulty embracing the concept. I asked only that he let me be, I can only presume that he'd like to keep to fingers in the metaphoric pot since they certainly aren't in me. Infact my green streak has him three fingers deep in someone else, he did say, " I like her a lot". What is a semi-sophisticated girl to parse? Does the internets has any advice? (that said I have reams, positive reams, perhaps dissertation reams to say about lolcats and linguistics and the already codified grammar, but the internets move fast my friends and our world edges ever closer to that intellectual vortex - form of a whirlpool, and I am not so sure that our compadres didn't feel the same in 1936, but with less immediacy, therefore better pondered.) but that's a long digression and I'd have to put on my smart hat, when late on a Sunday, short of a warm body in my bed I'll probably wend my way through the maze that is free market porn, even that is a mighty effort.
I'll just dream of the fat lady, how she sang her last in private and hit that note that shatters glass with only her mirror as witness and then another dawn broke to business as usual.... But she knows, or does she? I am inclined to think that Tony and Carmella soldier on, they can't break from the criminal, they continue to justify with the limninal, the children will drive on complicated defense mechanisms, just like the rest of America, to varying degrees of coping and criminality. But then again, who am I to judge. Me and my priceless wellbeing, it begs the question, just how far would you go, whom would you sell and whom would you kill. This from the woman who captures spiders to put outside, this from the woman who last fired a bebe gun in 1987, this from a woman who knows the purring insidiousness of a certain kind of demeaning violence, but doesn't know that kind - and I ask myself, are you talking cinematic violence, because that is the only kind of violence you can articulate, can you not articulate rape (deleted, deleted, deleted)
And if you want to catch me I'll be the accidental phoenix at the incidental truckstop, you know the one with the maroon booths, somewhere in the neverland hinterland of everybody else's dream of california, you know the one, the one with the old timey salad bar and the baco bits on the hottest stretch of I-5, someone's idea of a fiefdom forever unconquered on the side of the interstate, someone's dying orchard, someone's dying dream. We pay enough attention to the price fo gas in these oil starved towns and that is all, no culture to fathom but the local wendy's and nobody wants a square hamburger no matter how hungry.....
posted by emma at
10:37 PM
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