Tuesday, September 6, 2011
A change of plans
I have decided to self-publish this novel as an ebook through Smashwords. Please visit my smashwords site where you can purchase the complete novel now, or - if you must - you can wait until it is available on your favorite ebook site (which will hopefully be sometime this week). The first 100 readers that purchase the ebook can use the coupon code KH55P, which will save you 80% off of the already reasonable price of 4.99. Enjoy!
Monday, April 5, 2010
Chapter Nine
One afternoon after lunch, having walked Anthony Lawrence to his room, Lucy found herself alone in the hallway with the passage to the attic studio in her periphery. She sensed movement there that wasn’t there, like the mild hallucinations that come from lack of sleep – a manifestation of her subconscious trying to resolve her distracting curiosity. She ambled over to the stairway, listening for any approaching footstep, and peeked around the corner. The stairs were straight and dim – the only lights there were small lamps that curved out from over five framed pictures along the right wall to illuminate them gently from above.
Lucy bit her lip like a stereotypical suspense movie heroine and debated whether she should venture up. Alexander wasn’t home – he and Tracy had driven Linny to her plastic surgeon in L. A., and would most likely stay overnight – Lucy had seen Linny’s Mercedes convertible dart away toward the gate with a woman passenger, woman backseat, and man driving – but she had the same fear children get when, despite their care, they expect their parents to discover their indiscretion through their supernatural parental means. And so, like many, she eased herself into her snooping incrementally. First she stepped up to view the closest framed picture: a monotype print of swirling green with red and yellow blended in around the edges, titled Happy Meal #2 at the bottom left, and with JEK 4/97 bottom right, both in pencil. Then Lucy moved on to the next print, Molotov Bitch 3/97 – a red swirling fire fist against deep blue, and then the next, Liquid Diamonds 4//97 – ocean teal with yellow waves, and of course a dress-shaped patch of lilac lower-middle-right, where she realized that all of the print titles corresponded to song titles; to the next, Protection 4/97 – a color wheel of open hands around a pink fetal center, and finally to the last one, a print of bright sky blue and verdant green that whirlpooled in, losing shine and distinction into a center of blackness with a tiny (she had to lean in to see it) spot of white. It was entitled Retreating 5/97, and she knew that it expressed her song perfectly – certainly much better than the single cover art: a photo of her looking wide-eyed and doe startled. Lucy was transfixed by the white, and investigating it by lowering her station point to the picture-plane base, under the spot blinding accent light reflection, saw that the spot wasn’t with made white ink but an intentional void of clean paper. This meant that she as viewer was looking out at brightness from the abyss, that she could grasp the rich colors and pull herself out. She told herself to remember to ask Alexander for a copy of it, but then realized this would reveal her snooping, and, sighing, dismissed it.
Two more steps and Lucy found herself before the door and hesitated, she asked herself to what extent she was willing to continue, and concluded a little bit further. She reached out and tried the doorknob, turning it slowly, silently, so that she had to push the door to tell if it had opened the catch.
It had, and the door swung inward. The room was illuminated, and Lucy was somehow suddenly emboldened to say out loud, “Shame on you, Alexander, going away and leaving the lights on,” in a mocking, victorious tone. The attic opened up grandly to the right and slightly to the left in front of her, and seemed to run the length of the house, creating an enormous open space. The ceiling followed the angle of the roof toward the front of the home, twelve feet high at its lowest point.
Though there was a superabundance of open space, the room didn’t feel at all empty. Three large groupings of furniture lay spread out along the hardwood floor. The first, at right, was a deep leather couch set against the wall, two oversized matching easy chairs facing it with a coffee table between. A neat stack of sheets and a blanket sat on one arm of the couch, a pillow on the other, and Lucy guessed that this was where Alexander slept while she occupied his room. She walked over and noticed that camouflaged in the blanket was a cat by its head raising at her approach. The cat allowed Lucy to pet it, and examine its tag to learn that its name was Chamfer. She sat upon the couch, then lay down and turned on each side, finally sitting up and concluding that he was sufficiently comfortable sleeping here. The coffee table had a glass case at center showcasing a set of books, and she leaned forward to see that it was an old, probably original edition of Les Miserables: ten tomes in all, gilt-striped dark-blue leather with a raised band of red encasing the author and title. On top of the table were the books Nam June Paik, and S M L XL.
The couch served as the division between towering wall cases of several thousand CDs to the right, and books to the left, organized by the genres of horror, science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels and Manga. Lucy looked instinctually, and found her sequence of discs, not finding them at first because they were listed under the L of Lucy instead of the usual F of Faas, bookended between L7 and Luscious Jackson (instead of between Everything But the Girl and Faith No More). They were all there, including the same Japanese version Marty had, as well as the Limited Edition of Waxing, with the bonus live EP. Then she looked up Teagan, going right to T, which looked equally superfluous, down to the redundant second disc of the Australian and New Zealand Tour edition of Under the Pink, rattles the limited Rapunzel’s Escape bracelet in its box, even taking out a couple of bootlegs to look over enviously. Perusing the shelf of box sets (“goodness Bjork has a lot!”) she also marvels over the rare Athena and Me box EP, with Teagan’s visage imprinted in the wood case.
Satisfied, she walked over to the second furniture grouping: a large, multileveled desk as its nucleus. The right half of the desk was devoted to the computer: folders of disc media, a small row of instruction manuals and reference books, a complicated looking joystick with a dozen buttons, video conference camera, empty laptop dock, digital camera dock, flatbed scanner, idly humming printer, and a tall CPU: black, with a glass window showing its innards under a cold blue cathode light; matching black backlit keyboard and blue optical mouse. Lucy thought that the computer was pretty silly – like The Fast and the Furious version of a CPU. A 50-inch Plasma TV mounted on the wall served as monitor. The left half of the desk was devoted to paper: two shelves held thick stacks of basic college-lined paper and bright white heavyweight stationary; five large black binders collected papers, labeled: Notes, Collage, Fragments, Ideas, and Current. Center on the left wing, the desk’s only writing surface, was a black leather organizer, cracked at the binding edges from overfilling – closed, but unzipped – and a cup filled with identical Schaeffer fountain pens in cobalt blue, matching the computer’s light. Three round blue and black multimedia speakers sat about the desk, with four more mounted on thin black aluminum-tube floor-stands at a height where your head would be sitting in the black leather executive command chair.
Without opening the organizer, Lucy thumbed through the index tabs: individual calendar month tabs, multicolored address sheet alphabetical tabs with two to three letters each; then handwritten through clear, colored tabs: Notes, Writing, and Art.
The left side of the desk stuck out straight from the wall and against its back was a set of wood file drawers. Not all were marked, but of those that were she noticed Shorts 1 and Shorts 2, Experiments, and a drawer for each of Josh Karaczewski’s novels. On the wall were framed originals of the cover art, and atop the cabinets were the books themselves, in various editions and translations.
Lucy laughed and said, “Ah ha! He really is Josh Karaczewski,” and laughed again, proud to have conclusively solved the home’s mystery.
She looked over toward the third furniture grouping and from that angle noticed that the studio turned and continued right, probably over the East Wing. She walked over and explored the grouping, which consisted primarily of an enormous armoire, and a pair of heavily blanketed printmaking presses, one with its matting stains black to gray, the other’s stains multicolored.
She pulled on the two armoire doors which parted easily despite their immense size. Inside she found six long, flat drawers labeled Watercolors, Drawings, and Prints in pairs of Two, written all in capitol letters, Lucy noticed, the way architects enjoy; above the drawers several slots lay with thick stacks of wide white, off-white, and black papers; a row of black leather-bound sketchbooks; and all the paraphernalia required to keep a modest college art program progressing: chalk and oil pastels, colored pencils, the full gamut of H to B pencils, stick and compressed charcoal, charcoal pencils, Mars Staedtler erasers, bundt sticks and other wedge-shaped color spreading and shading tools, jars of brightly shining ink, flat and rounded-head dip pens; all materials piled into their own respective wooden bins which were in themselves very attractive red and brown woods with distinct dovetailed jointing; white plastic watercolor kits sealed against moisture loss with muddy, dried, color mixing tops, the classically notched round paint mixing palettes with thumb hole, two wood boxes like carpenter’s tool boxes – one for oil tubes and the other for acrylics, and vases of flat and rounded tip badger-hair brushes of all shapes and sizes.
Lucy didn’t know if she had any aptitude for visual art, she was never one to doodle, hasn’t held a colored pen or paintbrush since early elementary school, and since she left high school after her freshman year, chasing her musical pursuits, extricating from her memories, she was never induced by a graduate requirement to attend an art class. The ceramics/sculpture had appealed only for the modern woman equivalent sewing circle aspect, but surrounded by these sleek magic wands of art-making, and all those colors’ sentient humming for deliverance, she felt a tickle from the base of her neck down to her tailbone of inventive curiosity.
She closed the immense armoire doors, then passed by a workbench topped with slotted wood slats, thin nails, rubber hammers and staple-guns for constructing canvas frames; a five-gallon bucket of gesso under bench; giant-sized shears pegged up beside a tall roll of canvas like a minimalist rug.
She turned the corner to find a wall inset, with an undoored opening, but before entering, turned back to the studio space and reflected on the discovery and creation of worlds that occurred here, new universes gleaned and formed from the magic of ink and imagination, gilded with the infinite material combinations of art.
But the lure of the next, tantalizing possibility, bubbled over and Lucy continued her trespassing, moving to the opening that led to a dark, narrow passage going left along half the length of the floor, doubled back on itself to go back again the floor’s bisected length, small red squares the only light along the baseboard and at its cessation finding that this switchback’s purpose was to keep unwanted light from entering the darkroom that appeared up at the passage’s end.
The darkroom consisted of two print developers and a light box at left, a shelf above with boxes of filters, masking and burning tools of various shapes, several sizes of matting plates; an island with a swing-armed paper cutter on top, boxes of Ilford and Agfa photo papers in varying sizes on inset shelves down the sides; and along the right a large sink and six square steel basins, shallowly filled with developing and fixative fluids and water, each basin with a faucet at bottom front that would drain their contents into an angled trough which sloped down slightly to the sink. Left of the sink was a short counter with a rack of plastic film winders and steel developing canisters, a film case opener like a coke bottle-top popper on the wall next to a clock with three timers and phosphorescent hands. Above the sink from the ceiling hung a ring with clips around its circumference, weighted clips waiting to nip the film negative’s feet and keep them from curling.
For Lucy the room, with its dim red light that lent its color to everything, felt like a cave. But, though Lucy had an understandable aversion to dark enclosed rooms, this space didn’t make her feel anxious. Gently whirring vents took the edge off the tangy chemical smell of the developing fluids, but more so it was the knowledge that this was Alexander’s cavern that made what should have been a claustrophobic room for her into an almost cozy place. And for the first time, there in that place of artistic reproduction of balanced compositions, a tangible idea developed, the cryptic tickling sensation begun at the armoire blooming into a defined form from the blankness, that here was something specific besides music that could occupy her life. She imagined having access, with Alexander’s gentle instruction to the plethora of art materials and media, and felt a new and mysterious, anxious desire to explore other methods of creation.
Another passageway opened on the opposite side as the first, and after a long dreamy pause Lucy took it. This opened to a wider hallway, shocking bright after the miserly darkroom hall lights, from a row of high windows on the left wall where Lucy could see part of the ceramics/sculpture hut meadow (but none of the hut itself). There was a door on the right, which to her dismay she found locked, and one center at the hall’s end with a blue and purple glass block inlaid which turned and opened.
Lucy expected the room to be anything but what it revealed itself to be: a bedroom. Fully furnished with a mission style bed and foot bench, bedside tables of three wood triangles on thin tubular steel legs tiering down and out in diminishing size, pair of wide waist-high dressers, and a pair of contemporary wood chairs with thinly padded seat and back and separate footstools before a modest fireplace (perhaps only large enough to roast a chicken on it’s grate), and its accoutrements. An unmade bed, empty glass with fingerprints around the rim, the recent issue of Granta with a tasseled bookmark tucked two-thirds of the way through upon the headboard, framed photograph of a beautiful brunette alone on the left bedside table, all bespoke occupation, and as a flash she thought that Alexander had lied to her about having to sleep on the couch, but then with a chastising reassurance to Alexander’s fidelity she realized that someone else must live here – someone who wanted it to stay entirely secret that they visited or resided here. She was puzzled why someone would require that absolute secrecy, especially here in Alexander’s home; but also felt a thrill that she alone among the guests knew this. Lucy felt torn between the temptation to snoop around and discover their identity, and to allow them to retain their privacy. She opted for the later.
There were two other doors in the room, and Lucy tried the closer one around the bed on the far left, cautiously poking her head in to see a closet: men’s and women’s clothes hanging on a u-shaped pole; and a connecting bathroom where the locked hallway door would open to, full with a sky lit whirlpool bath, dual glass bowl sinks, the same blue and purple of the door glass, glass block walk-in shower that seemed to open up onto a balcony – she couldn’t tell for sure peering through the glass, and she didn’t want to trap herself inside going in to investigate like some dim-witted sitcom character, waiting nervously for hours until a nude prospective showerer entered to a mutual embarrassed shrieking.
She exited back into the bedroom and went to the second door, which she could already see through the red open shears of the windows led to a courtyard.
Clearing the doorway she realized that she had reached the end of the home, and the courtyard where she stood must be on top of her, and Alexander’s room (she flushed like a school-girl when she thought of it in those terms). The courtyard was round and simple. Along the bedroom wall were four Adirondack chairs, two on each side of the door, with small Spanish-mosaic accent tables between and large potted flower arrangements outside of the chair groups. Ringed around the courtyard were more of the large pots, varying from flowers to variegated coleus’s to flowering herbs to succulents in separate self-sustained groupings. Edging the courtyard was a short wall with trimmed hedges forming parapets broken only by the turret at the far left where a number of short Spanish-tile-faced steps led up, and an opening to its right with a round stone staircase stepping down. Lucy walked around the left side, glancing at each pot’s collection, then took the short steps up to see that they led to a Jacuzzi and a spectacular panoramic view all the way out to the oil derricks, the middle one in view seemingly perched on light itself in the sun’s reflection; her attitude toward the derricks had mellowed so that she now hardly minded seeing them on her horizon. “Shit,” she found herself saying in wonder.
After she had taken a good look she hopped down and continued around, glancing down the stone stairway and asking herself to look for the door that must lead to this passage when she got back to her and Alexander’s (flush) room. She strolled till she hit a bistro set with iron chairs and mosaic table, then walked toward the center of the courtyard. The floor itself was polished concrete, with a curve of water about six inches deep and six inches wide that spiraled to a shallow pool at center, and looking more closely at the water saw that in many places the floor was transparent, offering a watery view down to her bedroom, and explaining her ceiling’s unique design (a minute’s watching assured her that the room’s heighth and constantly flowing water would obscure any voyeur’s detail). At the center she heavily debated whether she should remove her sandals and dip her feet in, but thought better of leaving a wet trail of footsteps.
Moving back toward the room Lucy noticed a path to the left and approached it. The path skirted the outdoor shower area she had suspected, like a mini stone turret, five or so feet high with two high crowned shower heads at thirds on the half circle. Peaking around the shower area she saw that the path does continue around along the studio, turning left into green blue that Lucy was excited to think may be a rooftop garden, but the way was too exposed and her courage finally failed her, so she returned inside.
Quickly she threaded her way back through the bedroom, hallway, and darkroom – along the trail of crumbs of interest – into the studio near to the door she initially entered. Immediately to the left of the doorway was a fully equipped kitchen space: a definite loft kitchen with pantry, refrigerator, counter with cupboards, sink, oven range and hood, undercounter dishwasher and cupboard mounted microwave all on one wall, and a long island serving as cutting board, extra counter space, and table, with four chairs along the outside edge. Right of the kitchen was an open door; peeking in she saw it was a basic half-bathroom, four shuttered windows on the far wall with three more monotype prints (President Garfield – 3/97, Isobel-Deodato Remix – 3/07, and Crystal Clear (Beer) – 5/07), recent issues of PC Gamer, Details, and Stereo & Vision stacked on the toilet’s back.
To the right of the kitchen and bathroom was a short, wide hallway leading to a door and the area, Lucy surmised, where she had first glimpsed Alexander on the day of her arrival. She started toward the door, then paused and instead was drawn to the kitchen’s refrigerator, opening the fridge side and taking inventory. It was stocked with an inordinate amount of sauces and condiments to her mind: four kinds of mustard, six varieties of jams, jellies, and preserves, apple butter, pumpkin butter, two kinds of chutneys, three kinds of cracker spreads; more towards the rear that she didn’t delve into because their excavation would require removing too many jars.
On the door amongst cans of Mountain Dew and Vons Select Cherry Cola an unfamiliar bottle of beer caught her eye. She picked one up and read the label: Buffalo Bill’s Pumpkin Ale. Over the fridge door there was a brilliant flash from the door past the bathroom. Had she had the luxurious time they have in the movies she would have exclaimed, “Shit!” right there on the spot and tip-toed exaggeratedly and comically out – perhaps being caught for the viewer to feel empathically mortified. Instead she yanked the fridge door closed with the rattle and clank of colliding bottles and the door sealing with its own startled gasp, then bolted through the staircase door, each step a loud rasping scrape across the wood floor, a quick shriek from the door on its hinges, and Lucy stopped on the threshold, suddenly, trying to hear if she was pursued over the high idling of her heart, flooding her ears with a throbbing stampede of blood; gently, slowly releasing the doorknob so that it made only the slightest mechanical click as it caught. After a few seconds she thought she distinguished measured steps treading away – no pursuit – and she slipped downstairs to hurry off to her room, where she thought she might try the bottle of ale still in her hand to relax from her near capture.
Lucy bit her lip like a stereotypical suspense movie heroine and debated whether she should venture up. Alexander wasn’t home – he and Tracy had driven Linny to her plastic surgeon in L. A., and would most likely stay overnight – Lucy had seen Linny’s Mercedes convertible dart away toward the gate with a woman passenger, woman backseat, and man driving – but she had the same fear children get when, despite their care, they expect their parents to discover their indiscretion through their supernatural parental means. And so, like many, she eased herself into her snooping incrementally. First she stepped up to view the closest framed picture: a monotype print of swirling green with red and yellow blended in around the edges, titled Happy Meal #2 at the bottom left, and with JEK 4/97 bottom right, both in pencil. Then Lucy moved on to the next print, Molotov Bitch 3/97 – a red swirling fire fist against deep blue, and then the next, Liquid Diamonds 4//97 – ocean teal with yellow waves, and of course a dress-shaped patch of lilac lower-middle-right, where she realized that all of the print titles corresponded to song titles; to the next, Protection 4/97 – a color wheel of open hands around a pink fetal center, and finally to the last one, a print of bright sky blue and verdant green that whirlpooled in, losing shine and distinction into a center of blackness with a tiny (she had to lean in to see it) spot of white. It was entitled Retreating 5/97, and she knew that it expressed her song perfectly – certainly much better than the single cover art: a photo of her looking wide-eyed and doe startled. Lucy was transfixed by the white, and investigating it by lowering her station point to the picture-plane base, under the spot blinding accent light reflection, saw that the spot wasn’t with made white ink but an intentional void of clean paper. This meant that she as viewer was looking out at brightness from the abyss, that she could grasp the rich colors and pull herself out. She told herself to remember to ask Alexander for a copy of it, but then realized this would reveal her snooping, and, sighing, dismissed it.
Two more steps and Lucy found herself before the door and hesitated, she asked herself to what extent she was willing to continue, and concluded a little bit further. She reached out and tried the doorknob, turning it slowly, silently, so that she had to push the door to tell if it had opened the catch.
It had, and the door swung inward. The room was illuminated, and Lucy was somehow suddenly emboldened to say out loud, “Shame on you, Alexander, going away and leaving the lights on,” in a mocking, victorious tone. The attic opened up grandly to the right and slightly to the left in front of her, and seemed to run the length of the house, creating an enormous open space. The ceiling followed the angle of the roof toward the front of the home, twelve feet high at its lowest point.
Though there was a superabundance of open space, the room didn’t feel at all empty. Three large groupings of furniture lay spread out along the hardwood floor. The first, at right, was a deep leather couch set against the wall, two oversized matching easy chairs facing it with a coffee table between. A neat stack of sheets and a blanket sat on one arm of the couch, a pillow on the other, and Lucy guessed that this was where Alexander slept while she occupied his room. She walked over and noticed that camouflaged in the blanket was a cat by its head raising at her approach. The cat allowed Lucy to pet it, and examine its tag to learn that its name was Chamfer. She sat upon the couch, then lay down and turned on each side, finally sitting up and concluding that he was sufficiently comfortable sleeping here. The coffee table had a glass case at center showcasing a set of books, and she leaned forward to see that it was an old, probably original edition of Les Miserables: ten tomes in all, gilt-striped dark-blue leather with a raised band of red encasing the author and title. On top of the table were the books Nam June Paik, and S M L XL.
The couch served as the division between towering wall cases of several thousand CDs to the right, and books to the left, organized by the genres of horror, science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels and Manga. Lucy looked instinctually, and found her sequence of discs, not finding them at first because they were listed under the L of Lucy instead of the usual F of Faas, bookended between L7 and Luscious Jackson (instead of between Everything But the Girl and Faith No More). They were all there, including the same Japanese version Marty had, as well as the Limited Edition of Waxing, with the bonus live EP. Then she looked up Teagan, going right to T, which looked equally superfluous, down to the redundant second disc of the Australian and New Zealand Tour edition of Under the Pink, rattles the limited Rapunzel’s Escape bracelet in its box, even taking out a couple of bootlegs to look over enviously. Perusing the shelf of box sets (“goodness Bjork has a lot!”) she also marvels over the rare Athena and Me box EP, with Teagan’s visage imprinted in the wood case.
Satisfied, she walked over to the second furniture grouping: a large, multileveled desk as its nucleus. The right half of the desk was devoted to the computer: folders of disc media, a small row of instruction manuals and reference books, a complicated looking joystick with a dozen buttons, video conference camera, empty laptop dock, digital camera dock, flatbed scanner, idly humming printer, and a tall CPU: black, with a glass window showing its innards under a cold blue cathode light; matching black backlit keyboard and blue optical mouse. Lucy thought that the computer was pretty silly – like The Fast and the Furious version of a CPU. A 50-inch Plasma TV mounted on the wall served as monitor. The left half of the desk was devoted to paper: two shelves held thick stacks of basic college-lined paper and bright white heavyweight stationary; five large black binders collected papers, labeled: Notes, Collage, Fragments, Ideas, and Current. Center on the left wing, the desk’s only writing surface, was a black leather organizer, cracked at the binding edges from overfilling – closed, but unzipped – and a cup filled with identical Schaeffer fountain pens in cobalt blue, matching the computer’s light. Three round blue and black multimedia speakers sat about the desk, with four more mounted on thin black aluminum-tube floor-stands at a height where your head would be sitting in the black leather executive command chair.
Without opening the organizer, Lucy thumbed through the index tabs: individual calendar month tabs, multicolored address sheet alphabetical tabs with two to three letters each; then handwritten through clear, colored tabs: Notes, Writing, and Art.
The left side of the desk stuck out straight from the wall and against its back was a set of wood file drawers. Not all were marked, but of those that were she noticed Shorts 1 and Shorts 2, Experiments, and a drawer for each of Josh Karaczewski’s novels. On the wall were framed originals of the cover art, and atop the cabinets were the books themselves, in various editions and translations.
Lucy laughed and said, “Ah ha! He really is Josh Karaczewski,” and laughed again, proud to have conclusively solved the home’s mystery.
She looked over toward the third furniture grouping and from that angle noticed that the studio turned and continued right, probably over the East Wing. She walked over and explored the grouping, which consisted primarily of an enormous armoire, and a pair of heavily blanketed printmaking presses, one with its matting stains black to gray, the other’s stains multicolored.
She pulled on the two armoire doors which parted easily despite their immense size. Inside she found six long, flat drawers labeled Watercolors, Drawings, and Prints in pairs of Two, written all in capitol letters, Lucy noticed, the way architects enjoy; above the drawers several slots lay with thick stacks of wide white, off-white, and black papers; a row of black leather-bound sketchbooks; and all the paraphernalia required to keep a modest college art program progressing: chalk and oil pastels, colored pencils, the full gamut of H to B pencils, stick and compressed charcoal, charcoal pencils, Mars Staedtler erasers, bundt sticks and other wedge-shaped color spreading and shading tools, jars of brightly shining ink, flat and rounded-head dip pens; all materials piled into their own respective wooden bins which were in themselves very attractive red and brown woods with distinct dovetailed jointing; white plastic watercolor kits sealed against moisture loss with muddy, dried, color mixing tops, the classically notched round paint mixing palettes with thumb hole, two wood boxes like carpenter’s tool boxes – one for oil tubes and the other for acrylics, and vases of flat and rounded tip badger-hair brushes of all shapes and sizes.
Lucy didn’t know if she had any aptitude for visual art, she was never one to doodle, hasn’t held a colored pen or paintbrush since early elementary school, and since she left high school after her freshman year, chasing her musical pursuits, extricating from her memories, she was never induced by a graduate requirement to attend an art class. The ceramics/sculpture had appealed only for the modern woman equivalent sewing circle aspect, but surrounded by these sleek magic wands of art-making, and all those colors’ sentient humming for deliverance, she felt a tickle from the base of her neck down to her tailbone of inventive curiosity.
She closed the immense armoire doors, then passed by a workbench topped with slotted wood slats, thin nails, rubber hammers and staple-guns for constructing canvas frames; a five-gallon bucket of gesso under bench; giant-sized shears pegged up beside a tall roll of canvas like a minimalist rug.
She turned the corner to find a wall inset, with an undoored opening, but before entering, turned back to the studio space and reflected on the discovery and creation of worlds that occurred here, new universes gleaned and formed from the magic of ink and imagination, gilded with the infinite material combinations of art.
But the lure of the next, tantalizing possibility, bubbled over and Lucy continued her trespassing, moving to the opening that led to a dark, narrow passage going left along half the length of the floor, doubled back on itself to go back again the floor’s bisected length, small red squares the only light along the baseboard and at its cessation finding that this switchback’s purpose was to keep unwanted light from entering the darkroom that appeared up at the passage’s end.
The darkroom consisted of two print developers and a light box at left, a shelf above with boxes of filters, masking and burning tools of various shapes, several sizes of matting plates; an island with a swing-armed paper cutter on top, boxes of Ilford and Agfa photo papers in varying sizes on inset shelves down the sides; and along the right a large sink and six square steel basins, shallowly filled with developing and fixative fluids and water, each basin with a faucet at bottom front that would drain their contents into an angled trough which sloped down slightly to the sink. Left of the sink was a short counter with a rack of plastic film winders and steel developing canisters, a film case opener like a coke bottle-top popper on the wall next to a clock with three timers and phosphorescent hands. Above the sink from the ceiling hung a ring with clips around its circumference, weighted clips waiting to nip the film negative’s feet and keep them from curling.
For Lucy the room, with its dim red light that lent its color to everything, felt like a cave. But, though Lucy had an understandable aversion to dark enclosed rooms, this space didn’t make her feel anxious. Gently whirring vents took the edge off the tangy chemical smell of the developing fluids, but more so it was the knowledge that this was Alexander’s cavern that made what should have been a claustrophobic room for her into an almost cozy place. And for the first time, there in that place of artistic reproduction of balanced compositions, a tangible idea developed, the cryptic tickling sensation begun at the armoire blooming into a defined form from the blankness, that here was something specific besides music that could occupy her life. She imagined having access, with Alexander’s gentle instruction to the plethora of art materials and media, and felt a new and mysterious, anxious desire to explore other methods of creation.
Another passageway opened on the opposite side as the first, and after a long dreamy pause Lucy took it. This opened to a wider hallway, shocking bright after the miserly darkroom hall lights, from a row of high windows on the left wall where Lucy could see part of the ceramics/sculpture hut meadow (but none of the hut itself). There was a door on the right, which to her dismay she found locked, and one center at the hall’s end with a blue and purple glass block inlaid which turned and opened.
Lucy expected the room to be anything but what it revealed itself to be: a bedroom. Fully furnished with a mission style bed and foot bench, bedside tables of three wood triangles on thin tubular steel legs tiering down and out in diminishing size, pair of wide waist-high dressers, and a pair of contemporary wood chairs with thinly padded seat and back and separate footstools before a modest fireplace (perhaps only large enough to roast a chicken on it’s grate), and its accoutrements. An unmade bed, empty glass with fingerprints around the rim, the recent issue of Granta with a tasseled bookmark tucked two-thirds of the way through upon the headboard, framed photograph of a beautiful brunette alone on the left bedside table, all bespoke occupation, and as a flash she thought that Alexander had lied to her about having to sleep on the couch, but then with a chastising reassurance to Alexander’s fidelity she realized that someone else must live here – someone who wanted it to stay entirely secret that they visited or resided here. She was puzzled why someone would require that absolute secrecy, especially here in Alexander’s home; but also felt a thrill that she alone among the guests knew this. Lucy felt torn between the temptation to snoop around and discover their identity, and to allow them to retain their privacy. She opted for the later.
There were two other doors in the room, and Lucy tried the closer one around the bed on the far left, cautiously poking her head in to see a closet: men’s and women’s clothes hanging on a u-shaped pole; and a connecting bathroom where the locked hallway door would open to, full with a sky lit whirlpool bath, dual glass bowl sinks, the same blue and purple of the door glass, glass block walk-in shower that seemed to open up onto a balcony – she couldn’t tell for sure peering through the glass, and she didn’t want to trap herself inside going in to investigate like some dim-witted sitcom character, waiting nervously for hours until a nude prospective showerer entered to a mutual embarrassed shrieking.
She exited back into the bedroom and went to the second door, which she could already see through the red open shears of the windows led to a courtyard.
Clearing the doorway she realized that she had reached the end of the home, and the courtyard where she stood must be on top of her, and Alexander’s room (she flushed like a school-girl when she thought of it in those terms). The courtyard was round and simple. Along the bedroom wall were four Adirondack chairs, two on each side of the door, with small Spanish-mosaic accent tables between and large potted flower arrangements outside of the chair groups. Ringed around the courtyard were more of the large pots, varying from flowers to variegated coleus’s to flowering herbs to succulents in separate self-sustained groupings. Edging the courtyard was a short wall with trimmed hedges forming parapets broken only by the turret at the far left where a number of short Spanish-tile-faced steps led up, and an opening to its right with a round stone staircase stepping down. Lucy walked around the left side, glancing at each pot’s collection, then took the short steps up to see that they led to a Jacuzzi and a spectacular panoramic view all the way out to the oil derricks, the middle one in view seemingly perched on light itself in the sun’s reflection; her attitude toward the derricks had mellowed so that she now hardly minded seeing them on her horizon. “Shit,” she found herself saying in wonder.
After she had taken a good look she hopped down and continued around, glancing down the stone stairway and asking herself to look for the door that must lead to this passage when she got back to her and Alexander’s (flush) room. She strolled till she hit a bistro set with iron chairs and mosaic table, then walked toward the center of the courtyard. The floor itself was polished concrete, with a curve of water about six inches deep and six inches wide that spiraled to a shallow pool at center, and looking more closely at the water saw that in many places the floor was transparent, offering a watery view down to her bedroom, and explaining her ceiling’s unique design (a minute’s watching assured her that the room’s heighth and constantly flowing water would obscure any voyeur’s detail). At the center she heavily debated whether she should remove her sandals and dip her feet in, but thought better of leaving a wet trail of footsteps.
Moving back toward the room Lucy noticed a path to the left and approached it. The path skirted the outdoor shower area she had suspected, like a mini stone turret, five or so feet high with two high crowned shower heads at thirds on the half circle. Peaking around the shower area she saw that the path does continue around along the studio, turning left into green blue that Lucy was excited to think may be a rooftop garden, but the way was too exposed and her courage finally failed her, so she returned inside.
Quickly she threaded her way back through the bedroom, hallway, and darkroom – along the trail of crumbs of interest – into the studio near to the door she initially entered. Immediately to the left of the doorway was a fully equipped kitchen space: a definite loft kitchen with pantry, refrigerator, counter with cupboards, sink, oven range and hood, undercounter dishwasher and cupboard mounted microwave all on one wall, and a long island serving as cutting board, extra counter space, and table, with four chairs along the outside edge. Right of the kitchen was an open door; peeking in she saw it was a basic half-bathroom, four shuttered windows on the far wall with three more monotype prints (President Garfield – 3/97, Isobel-Deodato Remix – 3/07, and Crystal Clear (Beer) – 5/07), recent issues of PC Gamer, Details, and Stereo & Vision stacked on the toilet’s back.
To the right of the kitchen and bathroom was a short, wide hallway leading to a door and the area, Lucy surmised, where she had first glimpsed Alexander on the day of her arrival. She started toward the door, then paused and instead was drawn to the kitchen’s refrigerator, opening the fridge side and taking inventory. It was stocked with an inordinate amount of sauces and condiments to her mind: four kinds of mustard, six varieties of jams, jellies, and preserves, apple butter, pumpkin butter, two kinds of chutneys, three kinds of cracker spreads; more towards the rear that she didn’t delve into because their excavation would require removing too many jars.
On the door amongst cans of Mountain Dew and Vons Select Cherry Cola an unfamiliar bottle of beer caught her eye. She picked one up and read the label: Buffalo Bill’s Pumpkin Ale. Over the fridge door there was a brilliant flash from the door past the bathroom. Had she had the luxurious time they have in the movies she would have exclaimed, “Shit!” right there on the spot and tip-toed exaggeratedly and comically out – perhaps being caught for the viewer to feel empathically mortified. Instead she yanked the fridge door closed with the rattle and clank of colliding bottles and the door sealing with its own startled gasp, then bolted through the staircase door, each step a loud rasping scrape across the wood floor, a quick shriek from the door on its hinges, and Lucy stopped on the threshold, suddenly, trying to hear if she was pursued over the high idling of her heart, flooding her ears with a throbbing stampede of blood; gently, slowly releasing the doorknob so that it made only the slightest mechanical click as it caught. After a few seconds she thought she distinguished measured steps treading away – no pursuit – and she slipped downstairs to hurry off to her room, where she thought she might try the bottle of ale still in her hand to relax from her near capture.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Chapter Eight
Acting upon Alexander’s advice, a few days after their talk on the subject of music Lucy sought Liam out in the White Room, which he shared with Perry. A soft knock, and then a loud knock brought a distant, “Enter!” and she obliged.
Now, Lucy wouldn’t label herself a Trekker (or Trekkie), but she had enjoyed the odd episode insomniacally, so the first analogy that came upon beholding the room was that it was victim to a Borg infestation,1 for while Perry’s side held a neatly arranged collection of percussion instruments – variegated woods and drumskins in shiny chrome stands; the curve and swell of hollow chambers, a five-gallon bucket full of various drumsticks and brushes, a made bed, headphones on the nightstand with the cord coiled under in a quoyle, and other tidy touches, Liam’s side was the hard functional edges of electronic equipment: black and gray, surrounded by precarious towers of CDs, a wall of blue milk crates holding a few thousand essential records, everywhere connected by wires in rat’s nests or tripwire traps. The one thing Lucy noticed curiously absent from the room was a member of ON; neither was there anyone in the dark, ajar bathroom at the back right of the room.
Though she felt lame saying it, still she called, “Hello?– Anybody there?” into the obvious emptiness.
“Come on through,” came the answer through the open window with music she had initially assumed to be coming from somewhere in the room. As Lucy approached the window she realized that the idea of a window here, in a room surrounded by home but with an unmistakable natural light and outdoor scent coming through, was wrong. At the window she saw three built-in steps leading up and through to five steps leading down, and was enchanted to find there a private grove.
Several windows opened out with identical stairs, wrought-iron railings, the glass of the windows swinging fully out and fitting into shutters that fastened back into the wall. Above, along the second floor rooms matching windows opened to individual balconies of intricately detailed iron in New Orleans style. Between windows there grew an assortment of flowering trees: wisteria, bougainvillea, roses, more flowers that should have been out of season where she recognized lilac; all contributed to a profusion of crimson, dusky purple, white, and deep green leaves, fanning up and clinging to the stone wall and iron. coffee ferns hung and sword ferns sat beside small tables on the balconies. Finches shot into and out of the false wall of leaves so fast you winced anticipating the little bird crunch against stone that never came; hummingbirds dipped their slender probes into their choice of blown glass and copper feeders or digressed to partake of a ground-grown flower, before darting up and over the clean line of the wall’s crest. And at center of the rectangular courtyard a walnut tree proudly sat, bowing laden arms to shade a ring of chairs and stools where Johnny, Leather, Crispin, Perry, Thom, and Liam sat jamming on their respective instruments acoustically (except Liam, or course, for there doesn’t yet exist an acoustic laptop, unless you make a convincing argument for the abacus, or relegate the undeserving machine to Perry’s sphere of instrumentilization).
Lucy walked over to the group. As she got there and received her Hey, how’re you doin?’s Perry popped up, handed her the Balinese drum he had been playing, and jogged over to a small brick oven, a red cube fronted with an iron door and a small chimney cheerfully puffing at its back, threw on an oven glove, and pulled out a tray of newly roasted walnuts that he placed on top. Beside the oven huddled two covered aluminum bins: one of walnuts waiting to be roasted, and the other with empty shells for kindling. Perry closed the oven door and returned to claim his drum. “You wanna join in?” he asked.
“I got an old Casio you can play,” Liam offered.
“No thanks – I was hoping rather for words.”
“Ask what you may. Any wisdom our humble fellowship has to impart will be yours,” Johnny said, punctuating his speech with a bluesy guitar phrase.
“It’s just that I’ve been wholly on the listening end of music for a while now, and want to get a feel for how the biz’ is going today,” Lucy asked, lowering herself into a spare stool.
“There hasn’t been a significant change – that’s the problem,” Thom said.
“Only if you don’t like the way things are,” Liam rebutted.
“Like it or not I’d like to know how to change it,” Leather said.
“But your issue is more with the group dynamic than with the industry,” Lucy said, as leading as a question, to Leather.
“But that’s all connected, isn’t it?” Crispin asked. “The question of rights and who’s got the say.”
“Wait – are you talking about rights to the music or rights to the musician?” Lucy asked. “Cause I thought I had that all figured out.”
Leather answered, “My issue is that regardless of who writes the lyrics and who was a founding member it should be a democracy. If I get kicked out of the band it’ll be by Athena, cause she was the one that put the group together and writes all of the lyrics. She’s the dictator. I know Katana and Shrew won’t want me to go, but don’t feel they have any say. And even though I wrote out the bass part they can bring any broad in to play it.”
“The problem is that everything needs to be in writing from the start,” Johnny said gently.
“I know – it’s just that I’m not a fucking lawyer – I just play bass – that’s all I want to do.”
“One hundred twenty-seven,” Johnny whispered.
“Shit! Don’t say it – I know – one hundred twenty-eight,” Leather grumbled.
“That’s it – we’re talking about art, man! Artists. We don’t need suits telling us how to do it, and certainly not how to create and realize it!” Thom said.
“That’s the game,” Liam said. “That’s the challenge: appease the suits – make your fans – and keep as much truth in it as you can.”
“But it’s got to be pure to be of any value – and you know I’m not talking about money.”
“But money means eventual emancipation after you’ve laid down your fan-base, and made your name. Money means more extensive marketing and touring. It means while the suits are counting their loot they won’t notice when you slip some art by them.”
“Execs can’t all be inherently anti-art,” Lucy said.
“Pro or anti-art it doesn’t matter with our stockholder first American music mentality,” Thom said.
Lucy looked around the group for further comment, her eyes clasping upon Perry first.
“Don’t look at me – I’m cool with whatever as long as I don’t have to get a real job,” he said standing, and walking over to check the walnuts. He returned with a small tray, legs unfolded from it’s base, that held small bowls of chocolate sauce, honey, and several salt and sugar based spice mixes, balanced on one hand, the walnuts rustling and clicking against each other in a shallow bowl on the other, and the kindling bucket swinging from the walnut arm wrist. “Note the extensive food service technician training I’d rather not further develop,” he said, placing them in the middle of the group.
They dug in. Though there was both a nutcracker and a small silver hammer the roasting left the nutshells brittle enough that their musician’s fingers could easily Godfather them open.
“So what’s the deal with you guys? Is it really just the question of ‘To sell out or not to sell out?’” Lucy asked. “Isn’t that a little old?”
“Yeah,” Thom, “but the unfortunate thing about the democracy Leather wants so much is that the parties never agree.”
“And I will give it up that though I’m the naturalized citizen I get an equal vote.” Liam said with a nod toward Thom, who nodded back a respectful acknowledgement.
“See, you guys seem to have a good rapport – why are you guys here? – at Alexander’s I mean.”
“You should’ve seen us before,” Thom said, “And most of that was on me, I admit. They always teach you that bullshit that you got to fight for your art above all else – so that’s what I did. Problem was I was fighting my own team – dividing us to a more extreme polarity – so that when we did get back out there we weren’t united.”
“And you’re the swing vote?” Lucy asked Crispin, who had been unnaturally engrossed with his walnuts during the discussion. His eyelids fluttered under the attention he was given.
“Yeah, but I don’t want to talk about it – let’s get back to the indie vs. major question,” he answered. Lucy didn’t envy his position.
“All right – now I’ve only been majors and I’ve never felt like a sellout. My words stayed the same – all they did was help on the notes – suggested instruments to add or subtract, constructive criticism,” she said.
“Yeah! We can’t go in thinking everyone with an idea about how we should sound is an adversary. We can find someone in the biz for the music, for us. It can be symbiotic, we can find that fifth wheel,” Liam insisted.
“But what if he turns out to be a fifth columnist?” Thom countered. “Name for me a major that maintained the it that brought them to the majors when they got there.”
“Radiohead.” Liam offered.
“That’s different – that’s Britain – I’m talking here, where we’re gonna play.”
“Green Day.”
“What, The Clash Jr?”
“You can’t tell me you haven’t outgrown that argument.”
“Okay, but now, see, Green Day is one of the bands I would use as a cautionary tale. I mean, Welcome to Paradise, right there. When they rerecorded it from Kerplunk! to Dookie it lost all of its vitality, all its insistence. The Kerplunk! Paradise was irony straight outta the garage and sweaty, vibrant shows at the Gilman; Dookie Paradise was looking back from the arena, from the hills – from Paradise! You know what happened at the arena: they got pelted with mud.”
“American Idiot.”
“From proud to be an American idiot to American Idiot. I used to be you and now I’m big enough to lecture you.”
“That’s progression, man. Natural evolution.”
“Maybe; but it took, what, three, four albums to get there?”
“And here we end up, again,” Crispin said, and I won’t be the one to decide it for us all!”
“Fuck it – just sell out and be over it,” they heard from above. They inclined their gazes to see Kord on one of the upstairs balconies. He was leaning back, one arm along the railing, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers – he taps a cylinder of ash to crash and disintegrate into the ceramic ashtray June had molded for him – the other arm hovering over a full binder, with pen pinched between those fingers, swinging back and forth like a toy trapeze artist. “What do you all know anyway? Look at me – a self-proclaimed militant indie gone Hollywood; major labels: same thing. I figure, why not give up a bit of control to make it so easy on yourself? It’s not like I’m some kind of auteur – look at my last couple of flicks: ruthless critics and diminishing box-office. I mean, what the fuck do we know anyway? Why shouldn’t we have a team of producers and execs with ideas, man? As I am I’ve got nothing but support: my friends, my family; but – fuck, man – what’s that good of that if shit is what they support? Indie film, alternative music: same thing.” Thus thoroughly vented, Kord’s pen returned to its downright position and resumed its short sprints across the binder paper, in an attitude as if he had never provided his commentary for their conversation.
The group lowered their attention back to each other. Lucy swallowed her walnut and said, “One thing I can tell you about the majors is that they’re into their timetables. That’s what killed me with Waxing: on Waning I had my inspiration and three years to tighten and revise it all – so much growth, and so much is culled, so that your first album is already a greatest hits compilation of your music. Then it’s released, and I’ve got nine months to come up with a whole new album before the label considers me too forgotten in the public’s eye to put any substantial money behind – which is complete bullshit cause if you like a musician you’ll like ‘em in a year, two years, whenever; forever. Nine months to find at least a dozen things to talk about, that I feel I have the authority to talk about; with music. Amid touring and public appearances, interviewing and other crap obligations.
“You’ve been conspicuously quiet, Johnny,” Lucy finished her baby rant and refocused the attention. “As a Major major, what’s your take?”
“I’ll tell ya. But it’s different cause it’s just me now. See, I put everything together exactly as I want it: every word, note, instrument, sample. I take my master, make a few copies for some choice compatriots, then store it away with the other pure masters, send a copy to the label and let them change whatever they need to release it successfully. I retain my artistry and my business.”
“But your name is on that – people think that that is all you!” Liam said.
“What, Johnny Midnight? That’s just image. It’s not me.”
“But then you go out all over the world and perform those, those…” Thom groped for his analogy, “amputated, and artificially prosthetic-icized songs!”
“Again, that’s under the guise of Johnny Midnight, and as performer, which doesn’t necessitate that I be the sole creator of the work to perform it. In this respect I guess I’m some quasi-actor/musician, and how many actors get that luxury of engendering and raising what they perform through adolescence?”
“So, then, you’d say the release of the songs to the producers is the release into adulthood?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah, but still I retain that pure master, forever locked up all to myself as the art that I alone created, remaining in perpetual childhood. And anyways, Art doesn’t have to be shared to remain Art.”
The statement was irrefutable without pondering. But, instead, after some nodded and others constricted their faces in thought and there was a half-minute’s pause, Lucy instead asked, “So, what’s new in music.”
Nothings all around save for Liam, who, after the sibilance faded, said, “The old genres are pretty stagnant – the new bands sound like the love children of the old bands. The only significant music of the new century – the Zeroes – has been mash-ups.”
Aw come on now and such from all around save for Lucy, who asked, “Mash-ups?”
“They’re kitsch,” Johnny derided – it seemed the consensus among the rest.
“They return fun as a concept to music. They remove all pretenses.”
“But it’s just recycling other people’s songs. They don’t create anything,” Thom argued.
“Sure they do – they’re the collage artists of music; found art. The Grey Album is as relevant as any gallery installation.”
Eah, the other guys said dismissingly, not conceding, but without anything else to refute him.
“So, in your expert opinions, is there a place for me in music today?” Lucy asked.
“Sure,” Johnny said.
“Of course,” Thom said. “Just because there’s nothing importantly new doesn’t mean we should give up the classic genres.”
“When Rock & Roll came around people didn’t stop listening to Jazz,” Crispin offered.
“Music is great because it endures so,” Perry added.
“Inclusively. People still listen to Polka for Goddess’ sake,” Liam said.
“Rock on,” Leather finished.
“Thanks guys – it’s good to hear that,” Lucy said. She placed her fingers in her mouth and sucked the walnut augmentations there off. While the miraculous southern Santa Barbara light retained its constancy over the course of the group’s conversation, keeping the tall two-storied secret grove in a perpetual gloaming, as if orange cellophane covered the space’s sky opening, to
Lucy the world seemed suddenly brighter.
1 To the proudly ignorant Anti-Trekker, let me simply explain that the Borg are a malignant society that assimilates cultures and technology by infesting it with themselves (not exactly the way that America does it – for the Borg works as a collective); the infection is represented visually by the pleasant, sterile, interior design of the starship being overcome by cold, gray, chaotic growths and lesions of tubes and wires without aesthetic.
Now, Lucy wouldn’t label herself a Trekker (or Trekkie), but she had enjoyed the odd episode insomniacally, so the first analogy that came upon beholding the room was that it was victim to a Borg infestation,1 for while Perry’s side held a neatly arranged collection of percussion instruments – variegated woods and drumskins in shiny chrome stands; the curve and swell of hollow chambers, a five-gallon bucket full of various drumsticks and brushes, a made bed, headphones on the nightstand with the cord coiled under in a quoyle, and other tidy touches, Liam’s side was the hard functional edges of electronic equipment: black and gray, surrounded by precarious towers of CDs, a wall of blue milk crates holding a few thousand essential records, everywhere connected by wires in rat’s nests or tripwire traps. The one thing Lucy noticed curiously absent from the room was a member of ON; neither was there anyone in the dark, ajar bathroom at the back right of the room.
Though she felt lame saying it, still she called, “Hello?– Anybody there?” into the obvious emptiness.
“Come on through,” came the answer through the open window with music she had initially assumed to be coming from somewhere in the room. As Lucy approached the window she realized that the idea of a window here, in a room surrounded by home but with an unmistakable natural light and outdoor scent coming through, was wrong. At the window she saw three built-in steps leading up and through to five steps leading down, and was enchanted to find there a private grove.
Several windows opened out with identical stairs, wrought-iron railings, the glass of the windows swinging fully out and fitting into shutters that fastened back into the wall. Above, along the second floor rooms matching windows opened to individual balconies of intricately detailed iron in New Orleans style. Between windows there grew an assortment of flowering trees: wisteria, bougainvillea, roses, more flowers that should have been out of season where she recognized lilac; all contributed to a profusion of crimson, dusky purple, white, and deep green leaves, fanning up and clinging to the stone wall and iron. coffee ferns hung and sword ferns sat beside small tables on the balconies. Finches shot into and out of the false wall of leaves so fast you winced anticipating the little bird crunch against stone that never came; hummingbirds dipped their slender probes into their choice of blown glass and copper feeders or digressed to partake of a ground-grown flower, before darting up and over the clean line of the wall’s crest. And at center of the rectangular courtyard a walnut tree proudly sat, bowing laden arms to shade a ring of chairs and stools where Johnny, Leather, Crispin, Perry, Thom, and Liam sat jamming on their respective instruments acoustically (except Liam, or course, for there doesn’t yet exist an acoustic laptop, unless you make a convincing argument for the abacus, or relegate the undeserving machine to Perry’s sphere of instrumentilization).
Lucy walked over to the group. As she got there and received her Hey, how’re you doin?’s Perry popped up, handed her the Balinese drum he had been playing, and jogged over to a small brick oven, a red cube fronted with an iron door and a small chimney cheerfully puffing at its back, threw on an oven glove, and pulled out a tray of newly roasted walnuts that he placed on top. Beside the oven huddled two covered aluminum bins: one of walnuts waiting to be roasted, and the other with empty shells for kindling. Perry closed the oven door and returned to claim his drum. “You wanna join in?” he asked.
“I got an old Casio you can play,” Liam offered.
“No thanks – I was hoping rather for words.”
“Ask what you may. Any wisdom our humble fellowship has to impart will be yours,” Johnny said, punctuating his speech with a bluesy guitar phrase.
“It’s just that I’ve been wholly on the listening end of music for a while now, and want to get a feel for how the biz’ is going today,” Lucy asked, lowering herself into a spare stool.
“There hasn’t been a significant change – that’s the problem,” Thom said.
“Only if you don’t like the way things are,” Liam rebutted.
“Like it or not I’d like to know how to change it,” Leather said.
“But your issue is more with the group dynamic than with the industry,” Lucy said, as leading as a question, to Leather.
“But that’s all connected, isn’t it?” Crispin asked. “The question of rights and who’s got the say.”
“Wait – are you talking about rights to the music or rights to the musician?” Lucy asked. “Cause I thought I had that all figured out.”
Leather answered, “My issue is that regardless of who writes the lyrics and who was a founding member it should be a democracy. If I get kicked out of the band it’ll be by Athena, cause she was the one that put the group together and writes all of the lyrics. She’s the dictator. I know Katana and Shrew won’t want me to go, but don’t feel they have any say. And even though I wrote out the bass part they can bring any broad in to play it.”
“The problem is that everything needs to be in writing from the start,” Johnny said gently.
“I know – it’s just that I’m not a fucking lawyer – I just play bass – that’s all I want to do.”
“One hundred twenty-seven,” Johnny whispered.
“Shit! Don’t say it – I know – one hundred twenty-eight,” Leather grumbled.
“That’s it – we’re talking about art, man! Artists. We don’t need suits telling us how to do it, and certainly not how to create and realize it!” Thom said.
“That’s the game,” Liam said. “That’s the challenge: appease the suits – make your fans – and keep as much truth in it as you can.”
“But it’s got to be pure to be of any value – and you know I’m not talking about money.”
“But money means eventual emancipation after you’ve laid down your fan-base, and made your name. Money means more extensive marketing and touring. It means while the suits are counting their loot they won’t notice when you slip some art by them.”
“Execs can’t all be inherently anti-art,” Lucy said.
“Pro or anti-art it doesn’t matter with our stockholder first American music mentality,” Thom said.
Lucy looked around the group for further comment, her eyes clasping upon Perry first.
“Don’t look at me – I’m cool with whatever as long as I don’t have to get a real job,” he said standing, and walking over to check the walnuts. He returned with a small tray, legs unfolded from it’s base, that held small bowls of chocolate sauce, honey, and several salt and sugar based spice mixes, balanced on one hand, the walnuts rustling and clicking against each other in a shallow bowl on the other, and the kindling bucket swinging from the walnut arm wrist. “Note the extensive food service technician training I’d rather not further develop,” he said, placing them in the middle of the group.
They dug in. Though there was both a nutcracker and a small silver hammer the roasting left the nutshells brittle enough that their musician’s fingers could easily Godfather them open.
“So what’s the deal with you guys? Is it really just the question of ‘To sell out or not to sell out?’” Lucy asked. “Isn’t that a little old?”
“Yeah,” Thom, “but the unfortunate thing about the democracy Leather wants so much is that the parties never agree.”
“And I will give it up that though I’m the naturalized citizen I get an equal vote.” Liam said with a nod toward Thom, who nodded back a respectful acknowledgement.
“See, you guys seem to have a good rapport – why are you guys here? – at Alexander’s I mean.”
“You should’ve seen us before,” Thom said, “And most of that was on me, I admit. They always teach you that bullshit that you got to fight for your art above all else – so that’s what I did. Problem was I was fighting my own team – dividing us to a more extreme polarity – so that when we did get back out there we weren’t united.”
“And you’re the swing vote?” Lucy asked Crispin, who had been unnaturally engrossed with his walnuts during the discussion. His eyelids fluttered under the attention he was given.
“Yeah, but I don’t want to talk about it – let’s get back to the indie vs. major question,” he answered. Lucy didn’t envy his position.
“All right – now I’ve only been majors and I’ve never felt like a sellout. My words stayed the same – all they did was help on the notes – suggested instruments to add or subtract, constructive criticism,” she said.
“Yeah! We can’t go in thinking everyone with an idea about how we should sound is an adversary. We can find someone in the biz for the music, for us. It can be symbiotic, we can find that fifth wheel,” Liam insisted.
“But what if he turns out to be a fifth columnist?” Thom countered. “Name for me a major that maintained the it that brought them to the majors when they got there.”
“Radiohead.” Liam offered.
“That’s different – that’s Britain – I’m talking here, where we’re gonna play.”
“Green Day.”
“What, The Clash Jr?”
“You can’t tell me you haven’t outgrown that argument.”
“Okay, but now, see, Green Day is one of the bands I would use as a cautionary tale. I mean, Welcome to Paradise, right there. When they rerecorded it from Kerplunk! to Dookie it lost all of its vitality, all its insistence. The Kerplunk! Paradise was irony straight outta the garage and sweaty, vibrant shows at the Gilman; Dookie Paradise was looking back from the arena, from the hills – from Paradise! You know what happened at the arena: they got pelted with mud.”
“American Idiot.”
“From proud to be an American idiot to American Idiot. I used to be you and now I’m big enough to lecture you.”
“That’s progression, man. Natural evolution.”
“Maybe; but it took, what, three, four albums to get there?”
“And here we end up, again,” Crispin said, and I won’t be the one to decide it for us all!”
“Fuck it – just sell out and be over it,” they heard from above. They inclined their gazes to see Kord on one of the upstairs balconies. He was leaning back, one arm along the railing, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers – he taps a cylinder of ash to crash and disintegrate into the ceramic ashtray June had molded for him – the other arm hovering over a full binder, with pen pinched between those fingers, swinging back and forth like a toy trapeze artist. “What do you all know anyway? Look at me – a self-proclaimed militant indie gone Hollywood; major labels: same thing. I figure, why not give up a bit of control to make it so easy on yourself? It’s not like I’m some kind of auteur – look at my last couple of flicks: ruthless critics and diminishing box-office. I mean, what the fuck do we know anyway? Why shouldn’t we have a team of producers and execs with ideas, man? As I am I’ve got nothing but support: my friends, my family; but – fuck, man – what’s that good of that if shit is what they support? Indie film, alternative music: same thing.” Thus thoroughly vented, Kord’s pen returned to its downright position and resumed its short sprints across the binder paper, in an attitude as if he had never provided his commentary for their conversation.
The group lowered their attention back to each other. Lucy swallowed her walnut and said, “One thing I can tell you about the majors is that they’re into their timetables. That’s what killed me with Waxing: on Waning I had my inspiration and three years to tighten and revise it all – so much growth, and so much is culled, so that your first album is already a greatest hits compilation of your music. Then it’s released, and I’ve got nine months to come up with a whole new album before the label considers me too forgotten in the public’s eye to put any substantial money behind – which is complete bullshit cause if you like a musician you’ll like ‘em in a year, two years, whenever; forever. Nine months to find at least a dozen things to talk about, that I feel I have the authority to talk about; with music. Amid touring and public appearances, interviewing and other crap obligations.
“You’ve been conspicuously quiet, Johnny,” Lucy finished her baby rant and refocused the attention. “As a Major major, what’s your take?”
“I’ll tell ya. But it’s different cause it’s just me now. See, I put everything together exactly as I want it: every word, note, instrument, sample. I take my master, make a few copies for some choice compatriots, then store it away with the other pure masters, send a copy to the label and let them change whatever they need to release it successfully. I retain my artistry and my business.”
“But your name is on that – people think that that is all you!” Liam said.
“What, Johnny Midnight? That’s just image. It’s not me.”
“But then you go out all over the world and perform those, those…” Thom groped for his analogy, “amputated, and artificially prosthetic-icized songs!”
“Again, that’s under the guise of Johnny Midnight, and as performer, which doesn’t necessitate that I be the sole creator of the work to perform it. In this respect I guess I’m some quasi-actor/musician, and how many actors get that luxury of engendering and raising what they perform through adolescence?”
“So, then, you’d say the release of the songs to the producers is the release into adulthood?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah, but still I retain that pure master, forever locked up all to myself as the art that I alone created, remaining in perpetual childhood. And anyways, Art doesn’t have to be shared to remain Art.”
The statement was irrefutable without pondering. But, instead, after some nodded and others constricted their faces in thought and there was a half-minute’s pause, Lucy instead asked, “So, what’s new in music.”
Nothings all around save for Liam, who, after the sibilance faded, said, “The old genres are pretty stagnant – the new bands sound like the love children of the old bands. The only significant music of the new century – the Zeroes – has been mash-ups.”
Aw come on now and such from all around save for Lucy, who asked, “Mash-ups?”
“They’re kitsch,” Johnny derided – it seemed the consensus among the rest.
“They return fun as a concept to music. They remove all pretenses.”
“But it’s just recycling other people’s songs. They don’t create anything,” Thom argued.
“Sure they do – they’re the collage artists of music; found art. The Grey Album is as relevant as any gallery installation.”
Eah, the other guys said dismissingly, not conceding, but without anything else to refute him.
“So, in your expert opinions, is there a place for me in music today?” Lucy asked.
“Sure,” Johnny said.
“Of course,” Thom said. “Just because there’s nothing importantly new doesn’t mean we should give up the classic genres.”
“When Rock & Roll came around people didn’t stop listening to Jazz,” Crispin offered.
“Music is great because it endures so,” Perry added.
“Inclusively. People still listen to Polka for Goddess’ sake,” Liam said.
“Rock on,” Leather finished.
“Thanks guys – it’s good to hear that,” Lucy said. She placed her fingers in her mouth and sucked the walnut augmentations there off. While the miraculous southern Santa Barbara light retained its constancy over the course of the group’s conversation, keeping the tall two-storied secret grove in a perpetual gloaming, as if orange cellophane covered the space’s sky opening, to
Lucy the world seemed suddenly brighter.
1 To the proudly ignorant Anti-Trekker, let me simply explain that the Borg are a malignant society that assimilates cultures and technology by infesting it with themselves (not exactly the way that America does it – for the Borg works as a collective); the infection is represented visually by the pleasant, sterile, interior design of the starship being overcome by cold, gray, chaotic growths and lesions of tubes and wires without aesthetic.
Transcript 2: On Interior Design
“Hey Alexander. Alexander!”
“Hey Lucy. Sorry; here, let me pause this.”
“What was that?”
“Zaireeka by The Flaming Lips. It’s a pretty cool concept piece. What they did: they made four different albums at the same time, which are supposed to be played from four different sources concurrently.”
“Wow.”
“What I did was have Liam transfer all four into one multichannel mix – you’ve heard about all that of course?”
“Of course.”
“That way the multi-channel mix would simulate the intended experience without the hassle of four separate sources.”
“Mmm…technology at work.”
“Are you going to remaster your old stuff into multichannel?”
“Old stuff?! Gasp! No, just kidding. Maybe if my new stuff turns out successful my label will want to re-release the catalogue. My label prefers using the DVD-A cause its parent company is involved in developing it – but, really, I’m just a broad and her piano, maybe some drums, some upright bass – I don’t see how surround sound is going to make it any more interesting.”
“Part of the multichannel deal is better fidelity, more depth to the sound – a truer sound.”
“But do people really need to know that the bass player stifled a sneeze during Heroine?”
“I’m sure they can edit it out now but as a fan I would say, yes, that sneeze is essential to the experience. Speaking of music – how’s yours going?”
“It’s not. I’m coming along unsurprisingly slow on the one for the Spicers – The Children’s Resurrection one – but I won’t be surprised when they reject it. That’ll be fun, getting rejected by children. I don’t even sound like me – you know when a singer writes a song that sounds like someone else trying to sound like that singer? It’s not even that good.”
“Ah…”
“Seriously, if you heard it you’d kick me out of your home immediately.”
“Ha ha. So Lucy what is it you love about music?”
“What is this, Almost Famous?”
“Hmpf – it’s definitely Untitled – only if I can be your band-aide.”
“Well, I don’t know….do you have a cool band-aide name?”
“I don’t know. How about…Arky-Tech.”
“Gag. Murphy…Murphy…? Smurfy!”
“Yeah, no.”
“Murphy. Something Irish? Gaelic! Gaelicker.”
“You want a band-aide called Gay-Licker? Quit dodging the question, eh?”
“Alright, alright – but I’m gonna think of your band-aide name soon. So what do I love about music? Besides that it made me all kinds of money? Well…what is there not to like about music? It’s universal – but so differently realized by every culture. It can change your mood – it can deepen your mood. That, and it’s pretty damn fun to make. Do you play anything?”
“I played trumpet in high school Jazz Band, but I didn’t keep it up after. I was never very good – I didn’t practice a lot.”
“My goodness – I’ve found something you don’t do!”
“Well…”
“Ha ha – alright, same question: what do you love about music?”
“I believe in having a soundtrack to life, that you can direct your experiences by the accompanying music. There’s something that bookmarks it then to time and place. Like, say, Cake’s first two albums say College, Santa Barbara – spring and summer. Rufus Wainright’s first album says autumn in Boston – but his Want One says winter, San Francisco. Sugarcubes and Dandy Warhols say sunny summer morning already smelling of cocoa-butter on 17 downhill toward Santa Cruz; Morcheeba and Portishead say afternoon, salt-crusted, driving home. That’s what I love most.”
“So now, desert island – you can take ten albums – I’ll give you my two for free.”
“Alright, um…Chemical Brothers: Dig your own hole. Bjork’s Debut. Teagan’s Broken Hotel. Um…Miles Davis: Kind of Blue and Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald on Porgy and Bess. Oh, Gorecki’s Third. Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual.”
“Mmm…that’s a good one. Those guys were quite influential to me, actually.
“Really? I would never have guessed.”
“Not so much their music – though I do enjoy it. But they were the first group I heard that made me conscious that not all song lyrics have to rhyme. That was epiphanic – even if I haven’t always prescribed to it.”
“Interesting. They were my favorite band in high school. They were my U2.”
“Teagan was mine – though it was supposed to be Joni Mitchell, right?”
"Yeah. How many is that?”
“One two three four – seven.”
“Okay, three more…Radiohead: OK Computer. Beck’s Mutations. Um, do I get an MP3 compilation as ten?”
“No, the whole point isn’t what you’d take but what you can sacrifice. Do you go for the safe albums with lots of good songs or the crap album with one amazing song? I see you’ve mixed your genres a bit: jazz, classical, electronica, alternative; and you definitely stuck with personal favorites over critical acclaim. That’s good. Now – your last pick?”
“Argh – alright, um…oh wait! Duh! Juliana Hatfield’s Become What You Are. I drove my poor first college roommate nuts playing that over and over. Whew – that was stressful! So, lady, what’re your ten?”
“Teagan’s full length albums pre-My Hive minus Languidspace and Reform School Queen – that’s six. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. Ben Folds Five’s Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. Madonna’s Immaculate Collection – for something to dance around to. Rufus Wainright’s first album, and Beethoven’s Seventh.”
“Wow – really?– that doesn’t bring you back into the, er…moment?”
“No. Only my songs can do that – not Teagan’s You, Me and It and not Fiona Apple’s Sullen Girl and certainly not the Seventh. That would be like blaming the music for what happened, when the music was only an innocent bystander. More than that the Seventh was the companionable whisper from the next cell – anonymous, but concerned, brimming with empathetic orchestrations, that said, ‘Hold on! I know you’re stuck in the evil, dark Allegretto, and it’s dire and you more than wish that when he comes it will go off like a shotgun shell and spare you the forthcoming misery – but persevere Lucy! – it will end, you will be released. Your Presto and Allegro con brio are coming soon. It proved a slight distraction during a horrendous time, and for that Ludwig has my eternal love.”
“None of my picks is that rooted to one specific event. I don’t think you can choose that – it’s just up to circumstance.”
“No, I think you can, like, what about the song you danced to at your wedding?”
“Okay, yeah, that’s true.”
“What was your song?”
“I only have eyes for you.”
“Mmm, that’s a good one.”
“What song are you gonna dance to?”
“Something we can really dance to – none of that slow sappy shit. How about Land of a Thousand Dances?”
“Hah. Bust a Move?”
“You Can’t Touch This?”
“The Humpty Dance?”
"What?”
“You don’t know The Humpty Dance? Digital Underground? You missed out. They did the second greatest song ever ejaculated onto disc, Freaks of the Industry.”
“The first?”
“I’ll do ya, by Whale.”
“I’ll have to look them up later.”
“Alright. No, I know, you can do the Jungle Brothers remix of Song About My Bitch.”
“Hah.”
“I’ve always wanted to ask you: where did that song come from?”
“Well, obviously from the clitoris. But no, really, it was only a revenge song for my father. He thought he had a right to be critical of my public persona – especially the Promise-cuous video, but also my very public relationship with the model from that video. He saw ‘Model’ in print and assumed that he was just a witless pretty boy, so I kinda just fed him his own poison, undiluted.”
“Unadulterated.”
“Exactly. Do I need to say that I had fun with it?”
“And your dad didn’t.”
“No – ha ha – he didn’t. But he had to learn that it takes more than twenty-three chromosomes to have a say in your kid’s life.”
“The Spicers would agree with you there. So, what do you think about today’s music? Who do you like?”
“I like all the new stuff from the old artists – except Bjork: I just can’t get behind her experimental stuff; and post-sellout Liz Phair. But new artists? No one stands out yet. I’ve been more interested in discovering ones I had missed, like Poe. Your collection’s been good for that.”
“I feel the same way. Liam said something really pertinent about that. He said that instead of calling it The New Century we should be calling it The Zeroes – that there’s nothing new going on now; that that which we think is new is only something enough have forgotten about to seem new again. I mean rap and electronica are the last great music forms, but they’re already graduated from college and are now just out looking for a job.”
“Have you noticed that they’re bringing all out old toys back? I went to pick up a birthday gift for my five year old cousin and it gave me déjà vu! Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, G. I. Joe – they’re all back. I think everybody ran out of ideas and are bringing the tried and true back out of desperation.”
“More ‘tired and true’…Is that how it is now? Going back to the music biz that is? Cause, I mean, Liam is right there on the edge of it, but what do I know anyway about it all? – I still like all the old stuff that I’m supposed to bleed out of my system before I can move on – but I just don’t like much of the new stuff coming out now. I remember back in high school when grunge was spreading like patchouli smoke from Seattle and I knew that it was Me and I mocked the people that didn’t get it: all the folks from the sixties scene that would rather stick with Hendrix, and the eighties rockers who thought Guns N’ Roses was the future. I knew it was slipping right by them, and now I’m being slipped. Shit, up in San Francisco this radio station, Live 105, is doing their annual Not So Silent Night concert and this is the first year that I haven’t cared about a single band on the ticket.”
“Oh no – I’m counting on it holding out for me. I haven’t been in the mix for a long time but I gotta believe that there will always be a place for a girl and her piano. But then, like, my old road manager is touring a band that probably wasn’t allowed to listen to me when I came out because of the Parental Advisory sticker.”
“I really felt that electronica would be the great unifying force between genres, cause you could have rap or alternative rock vocals over a techno beat and retain the distinctiveness of their respective genres. But instead there’s all this homogenized punk-pop, watered down bling-bling shit selling. What they’re not saying is a better commentary of the times.”
“Or they’re simply talking over us, ignoring us – not worrying about being cross-generational. Watching MTV Cribs, they certainly don’t need our money.”
“That is true. Just the gripe of an abandoned listener. For a real opinion you should talk to Liam.”
“Yeah, I probably should. Johnny too, I’m sure.”
“I guess for an opinion on what sells, he’d be a good guide. An inside to the majors.”
“I’m hoping that won’t matter since there hasn’t been a significant restructuring at my label since I’ve been away. Here’s hoping they still think there’s a market for us old folks.”
“Definitely.”
“Hey Lucy. Sorry; here, let me pause this.”
“What was that?”
“Zaireeka by The Flaming Lips. It’s a pretty cool concept piece. What they did: they made four different albums at the same time, which are supposed to be played from four different sources concurrently.”
“Wow.”
“What I did was have Liam transfer all four into one multichannel mix – you’ve heard about all that of course?”
“Of course.”
“That way the multi-channel mix would simulate the intended experience without the hassle of four separate sources.”
“Mmm…technology at work.”
“Are you going to remaster your old stuff into multichannel?”
“Old stuff?! Gasp! No, just kidding. Maybe if my new stuff turns out successful my label will want to re-release the catalogue. My label prefers using the DVD-A cause its parent company is involved in developing it – but, really, I’m just a broad and her piano, maybe some drums, some upright bass – I don’t see how surround sound is going to make it any more interesting.”
“Part of the multichannel deal is better fidelity, more depth to the sound – a truer sound.”
“But do people really need to know that the bass player stifled a sneeze during Heroine?”
“I’m sure they can edit it out now but as a fan I would say, yes, that sneeze is essential to the experience. Speaking of music – how’s yours going?”
“It’s not. I’m coming along unsurprisingly slow on the one for the Spicers – The Children’s Resurrection one – but I won’t be surprised when they reject it. That’ll be fun, getting rejected by children. I don’t even sound like me – you know when a singer writes a song that sounds like someone else trying to sound like that singer? It’s not even that good.”
“Ah…”
“Seriously, if you heard it you’d kick me out of your home immediately.”
“Ha ha. So Lucy what is it you love about music?”
“What is this, Almost Famous?”
“Hmpf – it’s definitely Untitled – only if I can be your band-aide.”
“Well, I don’t know….do you have a cool band-aide name?”
“I don’t know. How about…Arky-Tech.”
“Gag. Murphy…Murphy…? Smurfy!”
“Yeah, no.”
“Murphy. Something Irish? Gaelic! Gaelicker.”
“You want a band-aide called Gay-Licker? Quit dodging the question, eh?”
“Alright, alright – but I’m gonna think of your band-aide name soon. So what do I love about music? Besides that it made me all kinds of money? Well…what is there not to like about music? It’s universal – but so differently realized by every culture. It can change your mood – it can deepen your mood. That, and it’s pretty damn fun to make. Do you play anything?”
“I played trumpet in high school Jazz Band, but I didn’t keep it up after. I was never very good – I didn’t practice a lot.”
“My goodness – I’ve found something you don’t do!”
“Well…”
“Ha ha – alright, same question: what do you love about music?”
“I believe in having a soundtrack to life, that you can direct your experiences by the accompanying music. There’s something that bookmarks it then to time and place. Like, say, Cake’s first two albums say College, Santa Barbara – spring and summer. Rufus Wainright’s first album says autumn in Boston – but his Want One says winter, San Francisco. Sugarcubes and Dandy Warhols say sunny summer morning already smelling of cocoa-butter on 17 downhill toward Santa Cruz; Morcheeba and Portishead say afternoon, salt-crusted, driving home. That’s what I love most.”
“So now, desert island – you can take ten albums – I’ll give you my two for free.”
“Alright, um…Chemical Brothers: Dig your own hole. Bjork’s Debut. Teagan’s Broken Hotel. Um…Miles Davis: Kind of Blue and Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald on Porgy and Bess. Oh, Gorecki’s Third. Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual.”
“Mmm…that’s a good one. Those guys were quite influential to me, actually.
“Really? I would never have guessed.”
“Not so much their music – though I do enjoy it. But they were the first group I heard that made me conscious that not all song lyrics have to rhyme. That was epiphanic – even if I haven’t always prescribed to it.”
“Interesting. They were my favorite band in high school. They were my U2.”
“Teagan was mine – though it was supposed to be Joni Mitchell, right?”
"Yeah. How many is that?”
“One two three four – seven.”
“Okay, three more…Radiohead: OK Computer. Beck’s Mutations. Um, do I get an MP3 compilation as ten?”
“No, the whole point isn’t what you’d take but what you can sacrifice. Do you go for the safe albums with lots of good songs or the crap album with one amazing song? I see you’ve mixed your genres a bit: jazz, classical, electronica, alternative; and you definitely stuck with personal favorites over critical acclaim. That’s good. Now – your last pick?”
“Argh – alright, um…oh wait! Duh! Juliana Hatfield’s Become What You Are. I drove my poor first college roommate nuts playing that over and over. Whew – that was stressful! So, lady, what’re your ten?”
“Teagan’s full length albums pre-My Hive minus Languidspace and Reform School Queen – that’s six. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. Ben Folds Five’s Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. Madonna’s Immaculate Collection – for something to dance around to. Rufus Wainright’s first album, and Beethoven’s Seventh.”
“Wow – really?– that doesn’t bring you back into the, er…moment?”
“No. Only my songs can do that – not Teagan’s You, Me and It and not Fiona Apple’s Sullen Girl and certainly not the Seventh. That would be like blaming the music for what happened, when the music was only an innocent bystander. More than that the Seventh was the companionable whisper from the next cell – anonymous, but concerned, brimming with empathetic orchestrations, that said, ‘Hold on! I know you’re stuck in the evil, dark Allegretto, and it’s dire and you more than wish that when he comes it will go off like a shotgun shell and spare you the forthcoming misery – but persevere Lucy! – it will end, you will be released. Your Presto and Allegro con brio are coming soon. It proved a slight distraction during a horrendous time, and for that Ludwig has my eternal love.”
“None of my picks is that rooted to one specific event. I don’t think you can choose that – it’s just up to circumstance.”
“No, I think you can, like, what about the song you danced to at your wedding?”
“Okay, yeah, that’s true.”
“What was your song?”
“I only have eyes for you.”
“Mmm, that’s a good one.”
“What song are you gonna dance to?”
“Something we can really dance to – none of that slow sappy shit. How about Land of a Thousand Dances?”
“Hah. Bust a Move?”
“You Can’t Touch This?”
“The Humpty Dance?”
"What?”
“You don’t know The Humpty Dance? Digital Underground? You missed out. They did the second greatest song ever ejaculated onto disc, Freaks of the Industry.”
“The first?”
“I’ll do ya, by Whale.”
“I’ll have to look them up later.”
“Alright. No, I know, you can do the Jungle Brothers remix of Song About My Bitch.”
“Hah.”
“I’ve always wanted to ask you: where did that song come from?”
“Well, obviously from the clitoris. But no, really, it was only a revenge song for my father. He thought he had a right to be critical of my public persona – especially the Promise-cuous video, but also my very public relationship with the model from that video. He saw ‘Model’ in print and assumed that he was just a witless pretty boy, so I kinda just fed him his own poison, undiluted.”
“Unadulterated.”
“Exactly. Do I need to say that I had fun with it?”
“And your dad didn’t.”
“No – ha ha – he didn’t. But he had to learn that it takes more than twenty-three chromosomes to have a say in your kid’s life.”
“The Spicers would agree with you there. So, what do you think about today’s music? Who do you like?”
“I like all the new stuff from the old artists – except Bjork: I just can’t get behind her experimental stuff; and post-sellout Liz Phair. But new artists? No one stands out yet. I’ve been more interested in discovering ones I had missed, like Poe. Your collection’s been good for that.”
“I feel the same way. Liam said something really pertinent about that. He said that instead of calling it The New Century we should be calling it The Zeroes – that there’s nothing new going on now; that that which we think is new is only something enough have forgotten about to seem new again. I mean rap and electronica are the last great music forms, but they’re already graduated from college and are now just out looking for a job.”
“Have you noticed that they’re bringing all out old toys back? I went to pick up a birthday gift for my five year old cousin and it gave me déjà vu! Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, G. I. Joe – they’re all back. I think everybody ran out of ideas and are bringing the tried and true back out of desperation.”
“More ‘tired and true’…Is that how it is now? Going back to the music biz that is? Cause, I mean, Liam is right there on the edge of it, but what do I know anyway about it all? – I still like all the old stuff that I’m supposed to bleed out of my system before I can move on – but I just don’t like much of the new stuff coming out now. I remember back in high school when grunge was spreading like patchouli smoke from Seattle and I knew that it was Me and I mocked the people that didn’t get it: all the folks from the sixties scene that would rather stick with Hendrix, and the eighties rockers who thought Guns N’ Roses was the future. I knew it was slipping right by them, and now I’m being slipped. Shit, up in San Francisco this radio station, Live 105, is doing their annual Not So Silent Night concert and this is the first year that I haven’t cared about a single band on the ticket.”
“Oh no – I’m counting on it holding out for me. I haven’t been in the mix for a long time but I gotta believe that there will always be a place for a girl and her piano. But then, like, my old road manager is touring a band that probably wasn’t allowed to listen to me when I came out because of the Parental Advisory sticker.”
“I really felt that electronica would be the great unifying force between genres, cause you could have rap or alternative rock vocals over a techno beat and retain the distinctiveness of their respective genres. But instead there’s all this homogenized punk-pop, watered down bling-bling shit selling. What they’re not saying is a better commentary of the times.”
“Or they’re simply talking over us, ignoring us – not worrying about being cross-generational. Watching MTV Cribs, they certainly don’t need our money.”
“That is true. Just the gripe of an abandoned listener. For a real opinion you should talk to Liam.”
“Yeah, I probably should. Johnny too, I’m sure.”
“I guess for an opinion on what sells, he’d be a good guide. An inside to the majors.”
“I’m hoping that won’t matter since there hasn’t been a significant restructuring at my label since I’ve been away. Here’s hoping they still think there’s a market for us old folks.”
“Definitely.”
Chapter Seven
Early dawn and the world is in grayscale. The woods are so unusually taciturn and the fog lays so dense and sentient, a cavalcade of allied spirits under the tips of the tallest trees, the trunks at the edge of allowed sight grown from shadow, that our hero would have thought he had strayed through a nightmare, only he is running too fast for a nightmare and the veins on the leaves and the graduations on the bark are too detailed for dream – for the architect of dream only knows function, circulation, and structure – with no eye for materials. The birds and squirrels that made their home in this grove are silent and still, alert in their high perches – not straying to the ground.
The fog parts suddenly, a veil swung aside for the quickened passage of our hero. He runs, crouching low through the trees as fast as he can while remaining silent. In his hands he grips a bow with arrow notched, the string lightly tensed, held so that the arrow’s point is to the ground, flowing by a few inches above it. The lack of wind further obscures the man’s passage, but also gives no olfactory clue to his prey’s position.
The sudden low rumble of whispered grunts brings him to a halt. He breathes evenly through his mouth and turns his head slowly to track the whispering source. Stopped and bent as he is with his dark gray pants and deep green long sleeved shirt in this fog he would appear to be bush or part of a fallen tree until approached very closely. When he believes he has grasped their direction he moves in quick spurts tree-to-tree toward them.
He is proficient in his pursuit: not a twig is snapped, not a leaf or nettle is crackled into shards, not a branch rips its claws across his clothes; his quiver packed carefully with loose cloth rags so that the arrows won’t rattle against each other.
And then, clearing a tree, two large gray shapes appear amorphous through the fog. Quick as thought and instinct allows he pulls the bowstring back and looses an arrow, pivots behind a tree, pulling another arrow from his quiver and notching it back in one movement, revolves around the tree’s other side and lets the shaft loose at the second dark shape. Knowing there will be another orc in the group he sprints forward, readying another arrow. He passes the first two, not slowing to confirm how they were hit. What was at first all silence is now the sharp, harsh, persistent scrape of full running, the accelerating war-drum of blood in the ears, and roar of disturbed air.
There, ahead, he overtakes the last orc as it materializes in the heavy mist and lets his arrow fly on the run. It lands on a shoulder and he quickly sends another that hits squarely in the torso.
Alexander said, “Whew,” wiped his brow on a sleeve, and slung the bow over his unquivered shoulder. He stretched his fingers out and cracked the knuckles, stiff from the damp cold, and tight sustained grips on bow-hilt and bowstring. The forest relaxed, slowed its breathing, and its inhabitants set out on the business of the day calling to one another with the night’s gossip.
Alexander retrieved his arrows from the three full-sized targets, modeled and costumed after the orcs from The Lord of the Rings, especially proud of a head shot on the first one – not exactly in-between the rubber-mask-covered-straw-filled burlap orc’s eyes, but still he felt fairly impressed.
---
Lucy’s spoonful of Cream-of-Wheat, augmented with brown sugar, cinnamon, butter and milk, and lent a savory weight from the herb-infused evaporating dew of the kitchen garden, slipped off her spoon, splashing wet shrapnel onto her bare knees, when six-feet four-inches of sweaty Alexander blocked her morning-sun, sitting outside on the kitchen steps, a bow and quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder.
Her expression, with upturned eyes, was question enough for Alexander to explain, “Sometimes your basic work-out just won’t do.”
Lucy was a quick girl on the quips, but before she could settle on one Clive burst through the door and sang, “Hooray for Morningwood!” forth to the outside world, an impressive tentpole propped in his Burbury plaid pajama pants.
Lucy has always respected the transparency of crassness; with men like Clive there’s nothing scary hidden, making him imminently more trustworthy, and lest nerve wracking to be around, then, say, your friend’s husband who always looks at you a bit oddly, who you can never tell may try and jump you when he gives you a ride home; and so she held her commentary on Alexander’s choice of exercise and offered a second verse, “Even if you have no one to fuck you know you could!”
Lucy’s answer to Clive’s lusty call amplified the delight in his bawdy song, “Bring on the blondes and redheads, I’m ready to get AAAGH!” the last word not sung but shrieked, and obviously not his intended sentiment, as at that moment Lucy whacked the apex of his distended pants with her spoon. It wasn’t done maliciously: Lucy actually thought the prodigious extension was exaggerated by a flannel enshrouded banana. “Damn, Clive,” she said, her tone an amalgam of surprise and wonder. Lucy gathered her bowl and assaulting spoon, Alexander cuffed Clive on the shoulder, and the two went sinkward and showerward, respectively, leaving Colin leaning upon the wall to keep himself from collapsing into a fetal ball, grinding the heel of his hand into his stomach, echoing his prior statement, “Ah, ah,” in painful repetition.
The fog parts suddenly, a veil swung aside for the quickened passage of our hero. He runs, crouching low through the trees as fast as he can while remaining silent. In his hands he grips a bow with arrow notched, the string lightly tensed, held so that the arrow’s point is to the ground, flowing by a few inches above it. The lack of wind further obscures the man’s passage, but also gives no olfactory clue to his prey’s position.
The sudden low rumble of whispered grunts brings him to a halt. He breathes evenly through his mouth and turns his head slowly to track the whispering source. Stopped and bent as he is with his dark gray pants and deep green long sleeved shirt in this fog he would appear to be bush or part of a fallen tree until approached very closely. When he believes he has grasped their direction he moves in quick spurts tree-to-tree toward them.
He is proficient in his pursuit: not a twig is snapped, not a leaf or nettle is crackled into shards, not a branch rips its claws across his clothes; his quiver packed carefully with loose cloth rags so that the arrows won’t rattle against each other.
And then, clearing a tree, two large gray shapes appear amorphous through the fog. Quick as thought and instinct allows he pulls the bowstring back and looses an arrow, pivots behind a tree, pulling another arrow from his quiver and notching it back in one movement, revolves around the tree’s other side and lets the shaft loose at the second dark shape. Knowing there will be another orc in the group he sprints forward, readying another arrow. He passes the first two, not slowing to confirm how they were hit. What was at first all silence is now the sharp, harsh, persistent scrape of full running, the accelerating war-drum of blood in the ears, and roar of disturbed air.
There, ahead, he overtakes the last orc as it materializes in the heavy mist and lets his arrow fly on the run. It lands on a shoulder and he quickly sends another that hits squarely in the torso.
Alexander said, “Whew,” wiped his brow on a sleeve, and slung the bow over his unquivered shoulder. He stretched his fingers out and cracked the knuckles, stiff from the damp cold, and tight sustained grips on bow-hilt and bowstring. The forest relaxed, slowed its breathing, and its inhabitants set out on the business of the day calling to one another with the night’s gossip.
Alexander retrieved his arrows from the three full-sized targets, modeled and costumed after the orcs from The Lord of the Rings, especially proud of a head shot on the first one – not exactly in-between the rubber-mask-covered-straw-filled burlap orc’s eyes, but still he felt fairly impressed.
---
Lucy’s spoonful of Cream-of-Wheat, augmented with brown sugar, cinnamon, butter and milk, and lent a savory weight from the herb-infused evaporating dew of the kitchen garden, slipped off her spoon, splashing wet shrapnel onto her bare knees, when six-feet four-inches of sweaty Alexander blocked her morning-sun, sitting outside on the kitchen steps, a bow and quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder.
Her expression, with upturned eyes, was question enough for Alexander to explain, “Sometimes your basic work-out just won’t do.”
Lucy was a quick girl on the quips, but before she could settle on one Clive burst through the door and sang, “Hooray for Morningwood!” forth to the outside world, an impressive tentpole propped in his Burbury plaid pajama pants.
Lucy has always respected the transparency of crassness; with men like Clive there’s nothing scary hidden, making him imminently more trustworthy, and lest nerve wracking to be around, then, say, your friend’s husband who always looks at you a bit oddly, who you can never tell may try and jump you when he gives you a ride home; and so she held her commentary on Alexander’s choice of exercise and offered a second verse, “Even if you have no one to fuck you know you could!”
Lucy’s answer to Clive’s lusty call amplified the delight in his bawdy song, “Bring on the blondes and redheads, I’m ready to get AAAGH!” the last word not sung but shrieked, and obviously not his intended sentiment, as at that moment Lucy whacked the apex of his distended pants with her spoon. It wasn’t done maliciously: Lucy actually thought the prodigious extension was exaggerated by a flannel enshrouded banana. “Damn, Clive,” she said, her tone an amalgam of surprise and wonder. Lucy gathered her bowl and assaulting spoon, Alexander cuffed Clive on the shoulder, and the two went sinkward and showerward, respectively, leaving Colin leaning upon the wall to keep himself from collapsing into a fetal ball, grinding the heel of his hand into his stomach, echoing his prior statement, “Ah, ah,” in painful repetition.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Chapter Six
One bright midmorning Lucy sat, trying to write The Children’s Insurrection song lyrics, starting with riff variations on Gollum’s Song. She got as far as the third line, “Where once was love,” but thought, jokingly, disparaging it from her frustrating lack of ideas, slow flexing of her emaciated songwriting muscle, “Love is fucking gone, Gollum,” which got so wedged in her mind she couldn’t uncork it for something better to effervesce out, and realized that it was entirely too pleasant outside to stay in and try to work, so she dressed herself in shorts, tank-top, and sandals and made her way outside through the gym exit. The path around the house presenting itself so humble and courteous there she took it, rounding the long circular wall of her room, and smaller circle of a turret she hadn’t known was attached to the end of the long curve like a Venus of Willendorf breast emerging from belly. She saw a trail diverge off from the circumambulating path into the East Woods and followed it. There were casual voices ahead through the trees – ladies’ voices – that she soon saw were coming from what must be the ceramics/sculpture hut.
The structure lay astride the trees in a bright ovoid clearing. It was constructed entirely of glass and iron in a rough circle, with a wide awning that faced toward the open center of the clearing like the bill of a baseball cap, where leveled tree stumps served as work pedestals – most with lightly-colored stone atop. Caught in sunlight, Lucy expected the hut’s interior to be hot as an arboretum, but stepping through the open threshold found it wonderfully cool. Along each vertical window extrusion were tiny nozzles that sprayed a cool mist into the space, which a powerful fan mounted center of the dome circulated, taking the hot, spent air up and out through hydraulically opened windows on the ceiling.
Four women hunkered at their work, dispersed around the room, gossiping from the pigeon sound of it. Sandra Jillian Palladio crouched over a pottery wheel making a squat vase; her former long-time co-star Karly Douglas sat on the wheel next to her attempting a bowl; June Sherbesman-Scott stood at a high table couching a small mound of grayish-brown clay, a small finger bowl of now slurry beside her; and Marisol sat on a high stool by a matching table glazing a set of plates in a bright rust orange with a mustardy yellow design at center. Sandra Jillian was the first to notice Lucy’s presence. “Hey there, Lucy,” she greeted her.
“Morning ladies,” Lucy replied. “Look at all of you in here being crafty.”
Which prompted June to sing, “She’s crafty!” à la Beastie Boys.
“Hi, I’m Lucy,” Lucy said to Karly as an introduction, and approached her.
“Good to meet you – Jilly told me you were staying here,” Karly brought a hand up to shake, then remembered that it was covered in wet clay and flinched it back, a laugh, a flash of her muddy palm, and shrug serving as explanation.
“So what’s news?” Lucy asked to enter the conversation, pulling a stool out for herself, across from Marisol.
“We were discussing my media issues,” Marisol answered.
“Refresh my memory,” Lucy asked, through she generally ignores the media and has no idea at all.
“Well, essentially my producer on Eisenstein in Mexico wanted to get rid of his wife, but he had a pre-nup that only paid out if he initiated the divorce. So he faked an affair with me, thinking she’d leave him. Instead, she got rabid and called all the tabloids saying I was a homewrecker.”
“That fucker,” Lucy commented.
“That’s exactly what I said!” Karly exclaimed.
“And so I came here to hide and wait until it gets forgotten – but every week that fuckin’ wife of his gets something else printed and I gotta start that hourglass of the public’s attention all over again.”
“But how did you respond to it?” Lucy asked.
In unison Sandra Jillian, Karly, and Marisol said, “No no no – you can never respond.”
And then Sandra Jillian clarified, “Any response or defense is seen as an admission of guilt in the media’s eyes.”
“You need to just say ‘that bitch is crazy and I wouldn’t go near her lyin’ fuck husband anyway.’”
Again a group consensus no no no. With Karly this as elaborator, “Cause, see, the media would play it like, ‘Marisol strikes back at spurned lover and scorned wife,’ and they would find or contrive some photo of the two of them together that would prove her guilt in the public’s eye, regardless of whatever she said.”
“So you can’t do anything – you just have to wait,” Lucy stated, incredulous.
“Well, there is one thing I could do if I had no dignity – we were just talking about it when you came in. The studio just offered me the chance to work again if I make a public apology to his wife,” the venom thick in Marisol’s voice.
“Wait, wait, they’re stopping you from working over this?!”
“Official ostracism – temporary as a muggle’s short-term memory, but across the board.”
“Shit,” Lucy felt the frustration build up as kinetic energy and had to get up and pace it off. “Whew – I couldn’t do it – I would dig my own grave before I could stop myself.”
“The music industry doesn’t work this way?” June asked, rolling half of her clay out flat with a reassigned wooden kitchen rolling pin to about a half-inch thickness.
“Oh no. First off, generally we pick our own producers,” Karly and June give a jealous whistle, “and if the artist is doing well they’re pretty much untouchable. But then I suspect our producer’s roles are a lot different: our performances serve as our audition so there’s no casting couch situation – at least none that yield deals; I’m sure there are plenty of empty-promising unscrupulous producers, but the label’s aren’t going to put any money behind someone just cause they put out.” Lucy paused, then asked, “That isn’t just a myth in your industry, right? Do you think that still goes on?”
A great sigh all around and Sandra Jillian answered for them, “Yes and it’s so obvious when those ladies come on set. Kim was always the first to spot them – she would point to each extra and say, ‘Couch, couch, family, walk-on, couch, couch.’ She called it her Slutty-Sense.” Karly gave a wide smile at this, but then a weight entered her face, like her bones, by some alchemical process, turned suddenly to metal, her eyes moistening; Sandra Jillian, seeing this, put her head on Karly’s shoulder and snuggled into her a bit. Lucy cocked her head at this, searching for a motive, and Sandra Jillian answered her question, “We’re still a little broken up about not being around each other all the time.”
Then Lucy asked, “Okay ladies, the truth here, have any of you been offered the couch? Or ridden it?”
June spoke up quickly, “Oooh, Oooh, I have! I fucked the director!” and everyone shook the windows with laughing. “I’ve gotten some pretty good parts out of it too.”
After her laughing had subsided sufficiently Sandra Jillian said, “I had one producer try – he started unzipping his pants and I literally ran. I wasn’t even past his secretary’s desk when I heard him calling for the next girl.”
“He probably didn’t even bother zipping up,” a dash of sarcastic Tabasco Marisol added. The other ladies grunted their agreement with this asshole-ic assumption.
The door to the hut opened and Lauren blew in, saying, “Ladies,” as greeting. With one arm she carried a pillow and with the other a laptop.
The group returned greetings. Lauren placed her skirt-protecting dust-cushion over the stool beside Marisol, and asked her, “I signed up – can you look? I just can’t.”
Marisol kept Lauren squirming and biting her thumb for a minute before declaring, “All they’ve got is a see-thru, two upskirts, and a blurry oops.” Marisol handed the laptop back to Lauren and resumed her glazing.
“Anybody want me to look them up on this site?” Lauren said, her visual contrast and sound color returning with the verdict that there were no significant nude pics or videos of her on the Celebrity porn paysite open on her laptop.
“They won’t have anything new,” Marisol said, “But go ahead and check.”
Lauren typed a flurry and said, “All screencaps: four from Bandito, and three from Picasso’s Women. I’m surprised there’s no vidcaps. Anyone else?”
“Why not,” June allowed.
“How do you spell your maiden name?” Lauren asked, and after she was guided letter by letter informed June, “Nothing.”
“Really? Should I be offended that they don’t have the Playboy pics there?” June asked; the group took it rhetorically and only answered with a chuckle.
Not waiting for further approval, Lauren looked up the rest of the ladies and gave her report, “Sandra Jillian: just some bra-and-panties. Kristen: wow, four vidcaps and a 15 screencap gallery: all Sex and the City. Lucy: one vidcap they insist is a sexy non-nude. Boring, Miss Faas!”
“Sorry,” Lucy replied, facetiously humbled.
The silence that followed this brought the sharp, ringing sound of hammered chisel on stone from outside of the hut, echoing off the tightly packed trees edging and forming the clearing. Feeling that the conversation had reached an end, Lucy said, “Well, I’ll stop being a distraction from your work, and your pornography” backing herself toward the rear door.
“It was nice meeting you,” Karly said; the rest simply said, “Bye, Lucy.”
Before she cleared the door she heard June ask, mostly to herself, “Why the fuck am I making him an ashtray?”
Out of the hut and under the wide brim of awning it was instantly warmer, but not unbearably so, for a sufficient, slight breeze blew through the meadow from the north.
Linny was the one chiseling – really rearing back and striking the chisel head for it was real marble she was carving. Leather was sitting cross-legged, on one of the many tree stumps that served as pedestals, the cauldron of her belly, brewing her nascency potion, perched in her lap, sketching Tracy onto a block of white, gray-veined alabaster, who posed for her on the last stump of the grouping, the only one in sunlight,. It took a second to register that the wind teased and sun glowed figure of Tracy was completely nude.
Though Lucy had breasts, of course, she still wasn’t used to seeing some when she was simply out for a stroll. She was embarrassed further when she couldn’t help fixating on them, first prying her attention away with a voyeuristic shame; then instantly reflecting that the glance showed Lucy the most fantastic breasts she had never imagined possible – even surgically – and her gaze returned for contemplation; “here indeed is the mother fruit, fruit of the knowledge of good,” the thought came strange, sudden, and so formed she thought she must have been recalling some poem or lyric, then again she wrenched her eyes away, this time thinking that her stare had been too long, too obviously focused, to damning; then finally, after thoroughly chastising herself as a prude, she relaxed and tried her best to appear nonchalant, like she was used to encountering such mammary grandeur.
“Okay, could you turn again, please,” Leather asked, rotating her marked up stone to the next of its hexad faces.
Tracy popped up, giving Lucy a full frontal, quickly twisted back and forth in a stretch, saw her and said, “Hi Lucy” in the carefree tone Lucy was trying to innervate, presenting then penetrating Lucy’s gauze of false aplomb, then returned to her previous posture, now in profile. Leather and Linny also turned from their work to greet Lucy.
“I wish I had a sexy accent like Marisol,” Lucy said, contriving a subject. “It would be cool, being bilingual.”
“I speak two languages,” Leather said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yup: English and Foul.”
“Ha. But Marisol doesn’t get charged a buck every time she speaks Spanish,” Tracy commented.
“But the only real reason to speak another language is to curse at people without their knowing what you’re saying about them,” Linny added.
Lucy watched Leather sketch Tracy onto the rock for a few minutes, and then asked, “I never caught what band you play for, Leather,” forgetting she had.
“The Sheena-na-gigs – bass.”
“No shit? That’s fantastic. Check this out,” Lucy said, pulling a necklace from under her shirt to show a Sheena-na-gig pewter pendant.
“Right on,” Leather approved, “Where did you get that?”
“Teagan Andrews sent it to me after she listened to my first album. I think she got it in Ireland, or Britain – she lives over there, so…” Lucy said as explanation.
“I want to see,” Tracy said, and Lucy walked over to show her, momentarily unsure about the etiquette of personal space when the other is naked, unsure about her sexuality because of a boiling desire to place a finger upon Tracy’s sun warmed skin, unsure about her name or where she was, and was midway into chastising herself again when Tracy simply grasped the necklace and tugged Lucy closer to her so that she could inspect the pendant properly, close enough that Lucy could smell her. Whether by perfume or lotion, Tracy smelled like wildflowers – nothing exotic, just beautiful and free, as if Tracy herself was blooming there in the late morning sun. Lucy got a contact high from her proximity to Tracy, and finally understood how drunken college girls could decide to experiment. “I like it,” Tracy said finally, with a chuckle.
“Can I?” Linny asked, and Lucy stumbled over to her. Linny looked at it, then did a slight double take and looked closer. “Euww,” she concluded, to which Leather and Tracy laughed. “Why?” was the only question she could formulate.
“She’s a Celtic…Goddess, right?” Lucy started.
“Sort of,” Leather confirmed, “She’s a fertility Goddess of sorts. Farmers would put her on their barns to ensure a good harvest. Many of the churches have her mounted on them too. Some just considered her a mad old lady, though.”
“Beats the hell out of When I Am An Old Woman I Will Wear Purple, doesn’t it?” Lucy said.
“When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Expose My Vagina,” Tracy offered as a title.
“Euww,” Linny echoed her previous statement, “And why did Teagan send you this?”
“She’s a senior member in a club we’re both members of, and after the success of my first album she sent it with some big-sisterly advice. She wrote, ‘A strong show of your sexuality can serve as sword and shield, depending on how you choose to wield it.’”
The ladies pondered and nodded as their only comment.
Lucy watched as Leather tried to scoot closer to her stone, and almost tipping it over with her inflating belly, mutter a growl of frustration. “How far along are you?” Lucy asked.
“Six months. I can’t imagine how I can get three months of bigger,” Leather replied in wondrous trepidation.
“Are you between tours?”
“Yeah – thank Goddess. Athena and Katana are working on the new stuff now – otherwise I might’ve been replaced – I’m not an original member, so…” she paused and then continued, “I may still be if I’m not ready to tour after recording – that should only be like three months after my due date.”
“Whew,” Lucy said, trying to evoke a genuine empathy. “And Johnny?”
“Well, Johnny is Absynthe – he does everything. He’s got a group of usual suspects he pieces together for a touring band that’s just sitting around waiting for him, or doing studio work, or other projects – whatever. He’s set for whatever he wants to do.”
“He can watch from the floor with the baby in a Snugli,” Tracy added, perhaps ironically. It was hard to tell with Tracy.
“Oh Goddess! – they hardly forgave me for having relations with a man in the first place – they’re so militantly feminist – they’d write me off altogether if I wanted to take a man on tour with them.”
“Fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t,” Lucy concluded.
“My only hope is that the baby’ll charm Johnny into staying home with her full time.”
“What’re the chances of that?” Lucy asked
“Her? – It’s gonna be a girl? Linny asked simultaneously.
“Yup – a little Leather Jr.,” to Linny, then answered Lucy with, “Well, historically what is the success rate of the father being charmed into staying home for the mother?”
“Euww,” the other ladies acknowledged in unified wisdom.
“Okay, Tracy – I’ve got what I need for now. Thanks,” Leather said, stretching her lower back, pressing a palm into the stiff muscles, strained from the extra baby weight and sitting hunched over her stone on the unbacked stool.
Tracy reached down for the pile of clothes, but Linny stopped her, saying, “Tracy, wait a sec.”
Linny put her hammer and chisel down and walked over to stand in front of her. “May I?” she asked.
“Be my guest,” Tracy said with a curious expression that wasn’t quite a smile.
Linny crouched until her face was level with Tracy’s breasts, crabwalked around to see the right profile, then over to the left profile, and then stood up straight again, her eyes never leaving those prophetic orbs; Tracy’s eyes never leaving Linny’s exterior, which is showing the concentrated gaze of a professional golfer eying the green for a long, crucial, putt; Tracy’s face shining with more and more pensive amusement, reflected, though quizzically, in Leather and Lucy’s expressions. A question passed over Linny’s face like a cloud’s shadow and she brought her hands out tentatively, asking, “And could I?”
“Go ahead,” Tracy answered. Linny placed her hands on the sides of Tracy’s breasts and pressed inward, moved her hands under and lifted each individually, then together; brings her hands over the front, spreading her fingers as wide as she could and gently squeezing. She removed her hands, and asked, “Can I see them with your blouse on?”
Without answering, Tracy picks her blouse out of the pile and slips it over her head. It is a simple cotton tank in burgundy, low cut with spaghetti straps. Without asking for permission this time she pulled the blouse taut, then released; tugged it down, measuring the amount of cleavage – valley of the glow of nourishment – then pressed them up and apart to simulate the effect of a brassiere.
All the while Tracy sat, still bare from the waist down, legs crossed demurely, with the patience of a natural teacher.
Lucy considered making a joke about being turned on by all this (the thought in her head because Tracy had turned her on – the joke therefore serving as a steam valve), but stopped when she saw Linny’s serious aspect, her lips squirming in silent debate.
Finally Linny removed her hands, looked at them for a flash as if she had just woken from a sleepwalk to find them thus gropingly engaged, stood up straight, and she asked, “Would you be willing to come in with me to my plastic surgeon?”
“You’ll make your surgeon cry you bring in a real pair like that,” Leather said.
“He’ll throw away his scalpel when he sees how nature’s got him beat,” Lucy added, nervously, though she couldn’t articulate why.
“No,” Linny answered with the measured cadence of resolution, “He’ll have the challenge of his career.”
“So you’re going to do it,” Tracy said, straightening her panties.
“Yeah. I have to,” Linny stated, a finality wrought of long internal debate.
Tracy stood straight in her panties and blouse with an air of authority, looked Linny in the eye quickly; gauged, then nodded and said, “Sure. I’ll come with you.”
“Thanks,” Linny said, then repeated, “Thanks,” and returned to her sculpture. She picked up her hammer and chisel, considered her stone for a while, eyes blank of the sculpture as if she were instead staring into another dimension, then lowered her arms, returned her tools to the tool cart against the hut wall and walked off in the direction of the home.
Tracy zipped up her pants and sighed a master’s disappointed, desperation sigh at Linny’s departure. Lucy sat down on the nearest stool. When Linny had disappeared through the trees Lucy looked around and saw a tarp-draped sculpture on the last pedestal by the tree’s edge. The wind picked up, sending a helix of spent leaves across the meadow, and Lucy asked against the rustling, lone sound, “Whose sculpture is that?”
Leather shrugged, and Tracy suggested, “I think it’s Alexander’s.”
Lucy walked over and half circled the mystery. She removed several stones holding the tarp down, and then lifted it off, several years of accumulated leaves and browned blossoms falling across her legs. The sculpture is the bust of a woman: the chiseling finished, and stopped mid-
rasping, a fine web of crosshatched white grooves over her face, rougher over the hair.
“I think it’s of his wife,” Tracy said, which piqued Leather’s interest to look over.
“Hmm…” Lucy considered, “Maybe – but in the picture I saw of her she had short hair.” The sculpture’s lady had long hair of curved straight ridges in an inverse wave over her shoulders,
“Guess that doesn’t mean anything though. It could just be a stylistic thing.”
“Yeah, or she just changed it,” Leather stated in an obviously tone.
“A lucky lady, she was,” Tracy said, coming over beside Lucy to look at the sculpture.
“Yeah?” Lucy asked her.
“Oh yeah,” Tracy answered, petrous as if already alabaster bound.Lucy ran her hand over the sculpture, from the rough lines of her hair, to the smooth face, and considered what Tracy has said, and how she said it.
The structure lay astride the trees in a bright ovoid clearing. It was constructed entirely of glass and iron in a rough circle, with a wide awning that faced toward the open center of the clearing like the bill of a baseball cap, where leveled tree stumps served as work pedestals – most with lightly-colored stone atop. Caught in sunlight, Lucy expected the hut’s interior to be hot as an arboretum, but stepping through the open threshold found it wonderfully cool. Along each vertical window extrusion were tiny nozzles that sprayed a cool mist into the space, which a powerful fan mounted center of the dome circulated, taking the hot, spent air up and out through hydraulically opened windows on the ceiling.
Four women hunkered at their work, dispersed around the room, gossiping from the pigeon sound of it. Sandra Jillian Palladio crouched over a pottery wheel making a squat vase; her former long-time co-star Karly Douglas sat on the wheel next to her attempting a bowl; June Sherbesman-Scott stood at a high table couching a small mound of grayish-brown clay, a small finger bowl of now slurry beside her; and Marisol sat on a high stool by a matching table glazing a set of plates in a bright rust orange with a mustardy yellow design at center. Sandra Jillian was the first to notice Lucy’s presence. “Hey there, Lucy,” she greeted her.
“Morning ladies,” Lucy replied. “Look at all of you in here being crafty.”
Which prompted June to sing, “She’s crafty!” à la Beastie Boys.
“Hi, I’m Lucy,” Lucy said to Karly as an introduction, and approached her.
“Good to meet you – Jilly told me you were staying here,” Karly brought a hand up to shake, then remembered that it was covered in wet clay and flinched it back, a laugh, a flash of her muddy palm, and shrug serving as explanation.
“So what’s news?” Lucy asked to enter the conversation, pulling a stool out for herself, across from Marisol.
“We were discussing my media issues,” Marisol answered.
“Refresh my memory,” Lucy asked, through she generally ignores the media and has no idea at all.
“Well, essentially my producer on Eisenstein in Mexico wanted to get rid of his wife, but he had a pre-nup that only paid out if he initiated the divorce. So he faked an affair with me, thinking she’d leave him. Instead, she got rabid and called all the tabloids saying I was a homewrecker.”
“That fucker,” Lucy commented.
“That’s exactly what I said!” Karly exclaimed.
“And so I came here to hide and wait until it gets forgotten – but every week that fuckin’ wife of his gets something else printed and I gotta start that hourglass of the public’s attention all over again.”
“But how did you respond to it?” Lucy asked.
In unison Sandra Jillian, Karly, and Marisol said, “No no no – you can never respond.”
And then Sandra Jillian clarified, “Any response or defense is seen as an admission of guilt in the media’s eyes.”
“You need to just say ‘that bitch is crazy and I wouldn’t go near her lyin’ fuck husband anyway.’”
Again a group consensus no no no. With Karly this as elaborator, “Cause, see, the media would play it like, ‘Marisol strikes back at spurned lover and scorned wife,’ and they would find or contrive some photo of the two of them together that would prove her guilt in the public’s eye, regardless of whatever she said.”
“So you can’t do anything – you just have to wait,” Lucy stated, incredulous.
“Well, there is one thing I could do if I had no dignity – we were just talking about it when you came in. The studio just offered me the chance to work again if I make a public apology to his wife,” the venom thick in Marisol’s voice.
“Wait, wait, they’re stopping you from working over this?!”
“Official ostracism – temporary as a muggle’s short-term memory, but across the board.”
“Shit,” Lucy felt the frustration build up as kinetic energy and had to get up and pace it off. “Whew – I couldn’t do it – I would dig my own grave before I could stop myself.”
“The music industry doesn’t work this way?” June asked, rolling half of her clay out flat with a reassigned wooden kitchen rolling pin to about a half-inch thickness.
“Oh no. First off, generally we pick our own producers,” Karly and June give a jealous whistle, “and if the artist is doing well they’re pretty much untouchable. But then I suspect our producer’s roles are a lot different: our performances serve as our audition so there’s no casting couch situation – at least none that yield deals; I’m sure there are plenty of empty-promising unscrupulous producers, but the label’s aren’t going to put any money behind someone just cause they put out.” Lucy paused, then asked, “That isn’t just a myth in your industry, right? Do you think that still goes on?”
A great sigh all around and Sandra Jillian answered for them, “Yes and it’s so obvious when those ladies come on set. Kim was always the first to spot them – she would point to each extra and say, ‘Couch, couch, family, walk-on, couch, couch.’ She called it her Slutty-Sense.” Karly gave a wide smile at this, but then a weight entered her face, like her bones, by some alchemical process, turned suddenly to metal, her eyes moistening; Sandra Jillian, seeing this, put her head on Karly’s shoulder and snuggled into her a bit. Lucy cocked her head at this, searching for a motive, and Sandra Jillian answered her question, “We’re still a little broken up about not being around each other all the time.”
Then Lucy asked, “Okay ladies, the truth here, have any of you been offered the couch? Or ridden it?”
June spoke up quickly, “Oooh, Oooh, I have! I fucked the director!” and everyone shook the windows with laughing. “I’ve gotten some pretty good parts out of it too.”
After her laughing had subsided sufficiently Sandra Jillian said, “I had one producer try – he started unzipping his pants and I literally ran. I wasn’t even past his secretary’s desk when I heard him calling for the next girl.”
“He probably didn’t even bother zipping up,” a dash of sarcastic Tabasco Marisol added. The other ladies grunted their agreement with this asshole-ic assumption.
The door to the hut opened and Lauren blew in, saying, “Ladies,” as greeting. With one arm she carried a pillow and with the other a laptop.
The group returned greetings. Lauren placed her skirt-protecting dust-cushion over the stool beside Marisol, and asked her, “I signed up – can you look? I just can’t.”
Marisol kept Lauren squirming and biting her thumb for a minute before declaring, “All they’ve got is a see-thru, two upskirts, and a blurry oops.” Marisol handed the laptop back to Lauren and resumed her glazing.
“Anybody want me to look them up on this site?” Lauren said, her visual contrast and sound color returning with the verdict that there were no significant nude pics or videos of her on the Celebrity porn paysite open on her laptop.
“They won’t have anything new,” Marisol said, “But go ahead and check.”
Lauren typed a flurry and said, “All screencaps: four from Bandito, and three from Picasso’s Women. I’m surprised there’s no vidcaps. Anyone else?”
“Why not,” June allowed.
“How do you spell your maiden name?” Lauren asked, and after she was guided letter by letter informed June, “Nothing.”
“Really? Should I be offended that they don’t have the Playboy pics there?” June asked; the group took it rhetorically and only answered with a chuckle.
Not waiting for further approval, Lauren looked up the rest of the ladies and gave her report, “Sandra Jillian: just some bra-and-panties. Kristen: wow, four vidcaps and a 15 screencap gallery: all Sex and the City. Lucy: one vidcap they insist is a sexy non-nude. Boring, Miss Faas!”
“Sorry,” Lucy replied, facetiously humbled.
The silence that followed this brought the sharp, ringing sound of hammered chisel on stone from outside of the hut, echoing off the tightly packed trees edging and forming the clearing. Feeling that the conversation had reached an end, Lucy said, “Well, I’ll stop being a distraction from your work, and your pornography” backing herself toward the rear door.
“It was nice meeting you,” Karly said; the rest simply said, “Bye, Lucy.”
Before she cleared the door she heard June ask, mostly to herself, “Why the fuck am I making him an ashtray?”
Out of the hut and under the wide brim of awning it was instantly warmer, but not unbearably so, for a sufficient, slight breeze blew through the meadow from the north.
Linny was the one chiseling – really rearing back and striking the chisel head for it was real marble she was carving. Leather was sitting cross-legged, on one of the many tree stumps that served as pedestals, the cauldron of her belly, brewing her nascency potion, perched in her lap, sketching Tracy onto a block of white, gray-veined alabaster, who posed for her on the last stump of the grouping, the only one in sunlight,. It took a second to register that the wind teased and sun glowed figure of Tracy was completely nude.
Though Lucy had breasts, of course, she still wasn’t used to seeing some when she was simply out for a stroll. She was embarrassed further when she couldn’t help fixating on them, first prying her attention away with a voyeuristic shame; then instantly reflecting that the glance showed Lucy the most fantastic breasts she had never imagined possible – even surgically – and her gaze returned for contemplation; “here indeed is the mother fruit, fruit of the knowledge of good,” the thought came strange, sudden, and so formed she thought she must have been recalling some poem or lyric, then again she wrenched her eyes away, this time thinking that her stare had been too long, too obviously focused, to damning; then finally, after thoroughly chastising herself as a prude, she relaxed and tried her best to appear nonchalant, like she was used to encountering such mammary grandeur.
“Okay, could you turn again, please,” Leather asked, rotating her marked up stone to the next of its hexad faces.
Tracy popped up, giving Lucy a full frontal, quickly twisted back and forth in a stretch, saw her and said, “Hi Lucy” in the carefree tone Lucy was trying to innervate, presenting then penetrating Lucy’s gauze of false aplomb, then returned to her previous posture, now in profile. Leather and Linny also turned from their work to greet Lucy.
“I wish I had a sexy accent like Marisol,” Lucy said, contriving a subject. “It would be cool, being bilingual.”
“I speak two languages,” Leather said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yup: English and Foul.”
“Ha. But Marisol doesn’t get charged a buck every time she speaks Spanish,” Tracy commented.
“But the only real reason to speak another language is to curse at people without their knowing what you’re saying about them,” Linny added.
Lucy watched Leather sketch Tracy onto the rock for a few minutes, and then asked, “I never caught what band you play for, Leather,” forgetting she had.
“The Sheena-na-gigs – bass.”
“No shit? That’s fantastic. Check this out,” Lucy said, pulling a necklace from under her shirt to show a Sheena-na-gig pewter pendant.
“Right on,” Leather approved, “Where did you get that?”
“Teagan Andrews sent it to me after she listened to my first album. I think she got it in Ireland, or Britain – she lives over there, so…” Lucy said as explanation.
“I want to see,” Tracy said, and Lucy walked over to show her, momentarily unsure about the etiquette of personal space when the other is naked, unsure about her sexuality because of a boiling desire to place a finger upon Tracy’s sun warmed skin, unsure about her name or where she was, and was midway into chastising herself again when Tracy simply grasped the necklace and tugged Lucy closer to her so that she could inspect the pendant properly, close enough that Lucy could smell her. Whether by perfume or lotion, Tracy smelled like wildflowers – nothing exotic, just beautiful and free, as if Tracy herself was blooming there in the late morning sun. Lucy got a contact high from her proximity to Tracy, and finally understood how drunken college girls could decide to experiment. “I like it,” Tracy said finally, with a chuckle.
“Can I?” Linny asked, and Lucy stumbled over to her. Linny looked at it, then did a slight double take and looked closer. “Euww,” she concluded, to which Leather and Tracy laughed. “Why?” was the only question she could formulate.
“She’s a Celtic…Goddess, right?” Lucy started.
“Sort of,” Leather confirmed, “She’s a fertility Goddess of sorts. Farmers would put her on their barns to ensure a good harvest. Many of the churches have her mounted on them too. Some just considered her a mad old lady, though.”
“Beats the hell out of When I Am An Old Woman I Will Wear Purple, doesn’t it?” Lucy said.
“When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Expose My Vagina,” Tracy offered as a title.
“Euww,” Linny echoed her previous statement, “And why did Teagan send you this?”
“She’s a senior member in a club we’re both members of, and after the success of my first album she sent it with some big-sisterly advice. She wrote, ‘A strong show of your sexuality can serve as sword and shield, depending on how you choose to wield it.’”
The ladies pondered and nodded as their only comment.
Lucy watched as Leather tried to scoot closer to her stone, and almost tipping it over with her inflating belly, mutter a growl of frustration. “How far along are you?” Lucy asked.
“Six months. I can’t imagine how I can get three months of bigger,” Leather replied in wondrous trepidation.
“Are you between tours?”
“Yeah – thank Goddess. Athena and Katana are working on the new stuff now – otherwise I might’ve been replaced – I’m not an original member, so…” she paused and then continued, “I may still be if I’m not ready to tour after recording – that should only be like three months after my due date.”
“Whew,” Lucy said, trying to evoke a genuine empathy. “And Johnny?”
“Well, Johnny is Absynthe – he does everything. He’s got a group of usual suspects he pieces together for a touring band that’s just sitting around waiting for him, or doing studio work, or other projects – whatever. He’s set for whatever he wants to do.”
“He can watch from the floor with the baby in a Snugli,” Tracy added, perhaps ironically. It was hard to tell with Tracy.
“Oh Goddess! – they hardly forgave me for having relations with a man in the first place – they’re so militantly feminist – they’d write me off altogether if I wanted to take a man on tour with them.”
“Fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t,” Lucy concluded.
“My only hope is that the baby’ll charm Johnny into staying home with her full time.”
“What’re the chances of that?” Lucy asked
“Her? – It’s gonna be a girl? Linny asked simultaneously.
“Yup – a little Leather Jr.,” to Linny, then answered Lucy with, “Well, historically what is the success rate of the father being charmed into staying home for the mother?”
“Euww,” the other ladies acknowledged in unified wisdom.
“Okay, Tracy – I’ve got what I need for now. Thanks,” Leather said, stretching her lower back, pressing a palm into the stiff muscles, strained from the extra baby weight and sitting hunched over her stone on the unbacked stool.
Tracy reached down for the pile of clothes, but Linny stopped her, saying, “Tracy, wait a sec.”
Linny put her hammer and chisel down and walked over to stand in front of her. “May I?” she asked.
“Be my guest,” Tracy said with a curious expression that wasn’t quite a smile.
Linny crouched until her face was level with Tracy’s breasts, crabwalked around to see the right profile, then over to the left profile, and then stood up straight again, her eyes never leaving those prophetic orbs; Tracy’s eyes never leaving Linny’s exterior, which is showing the concentrated gaze of a professional golfer eying the green for a long, crucial, putt; Tracy’s face shining with more and more pensive amusement, reflected, though quizzically, in Leather and Lucy’s expressions. A question passed over Linny’s face like a cloud’s shadow and she brought her hands out tentatively, asking, “And could I?”
“Go ahead,” Tracy answered. Linny placed her hands on the sides of Tracy’s breasts and pressed inward, moved her hands under and lifted each individually, then together; brings her hands over the front, spreading her fingers as wide as she could and gently squeezing. She removed her hands, and asked, “Can I see them with your blouse on?”
Without answering, Tracy picks her blouse out of the pile and slips it over her head. It is a simple cotton tank in burgundy, low cut with spaghetti straps. Without asking for permission this time she pulled the blouse taut, then released; tugged it down, measuring the amount of cleavage – valley of the glow of nourishment – then pressed them up and apart to simulate the effect of a brassiere.
All the while Tracy sat, still bare from the waist down, legs crossed demurely, with the patience of a natural teacher.
Lucy considered making a joke about being turned on by all this (the thought in her head because Tracy had turned her on – the joke therefore serving as a steam valve), but stopped when she saw Linny’s serious aspect, her lips squirming in silent debate.
Finally Linny removed her hands, looked at them for a flash as if she had just woken from a sleepwalk to find them thus gropingly engaged, stood up straight, and she asked, “Would you be willing to come in with me to my plastic surgeon?”
“You’ll make your surgeon cry you bring in a real pair like that,” Leather said.
“He’ll throw away his scalpel when he sees how nature’s got him beat,” Lucy added, nervously, though she couldn’t articulate why.
“No,” Linny answered with the measured cadence of resolution, “He’ll have the challenge of his career.”
“So you’re going to do it,” Tracy said, straightening her panties.
“Yeah. I have to,” Linny stated, a finality wrought of long internal debate.
Tracy stood straight in her panties and blouse with an air of authority, looked Linny in the eye quickly; gauged, then nodded and said, “Sure. I’ll come with you.”
“Thanks,” Linny said, then repeated, “Thanks,” and returned to her sculpture. She picked up her hammer and chisel, considered her stone for a while, eyes blank of the sculpture as if she were instead staring into another dimension, then lowered her arms, returned her tools to the tool cart against the hut wall and walked off in the direction of the home.
Tracy zipped up her pants and sighed a master’s disappointed, desperation sigh at Linny’s departure. Lucy sat down on the nearest stool. When Linny had disappeared through the trees Lucy looked around and saw a tarp-draped sculpture on the last pedestal by the tree’s edge. The wind picked up, sending a helix of spent leaves across the meadow, and Lucy asked against the rustling, lone sound, “Whose sculpture is that?”
Leather shrugged, and Tracy suggested, “I think it’s Alexander’s.”
Lucy walked over and half circled the mystery. She removed several stones holding the tarp down, and then lifted it off, several years of accumulated leaves and browned blossoms falling across her legs. The sculpture is the bust of a woman: the chiseling finished, and stopped mid-
rasping, a fine web of crosshatched white grooves over her face, rougher over the hair.
“I think it’s of his wife,” Tracy said, which piqued Leather’s interest to look over.
“Hmm…” Lucy considered, “Maybe – but in the picture I saw of her she had short hair.” The sculpture’s lady had long hair of curved straight ridges in an inverse wave over her shoulders,
“Guess that doesn’t mean anything though. It could just be a stylistic thing.”
“Yeah, or she just changed it,” Leather stated in an obviously tone.
“A lucky lady, she was,” Tracy said, coming over beside Lucy to look at the sculpture.
“Yeah?” Lucy asked her.
“Oh yeah,” Tracy answered, petrous as if already alabaster bound.Lucy ran her hand over the sculpture, from the rough lines of her hair, to the smooth face, and considered what Tracy has said, and how she said it.
Transcript 1: Conceptual Planning
“Hey Lucy.”
“Hey.”
“I keep forgetting to ask you, do you need any help finding a church or synagogue or mosque or temple or other place of worship? May I ask what, if any, religion you follow?”
“Christian. I was raised Baptist, but I haven’t settled on a denomination to frequent. Though, I guess if I want to be a celeb now I either have to be Kabbalist or Scientologist or Buddhist. What is the deal with all of those celebs now?”
“Buddhism for a bit of serenity in their crazy lives – also, big with those who felt oppressed by the media and public, that they can learn to peacefully endure, free their obsessive minds for better topics. But mostly I think it’s just to appear cool. Kabbalism and Scientology I think are just bandwagon trendy now – though I’ve had no interest in looking them up so I can’t tell for certain what the draw is. What Christian denominations stand out then?”
“I like bits and pieces of each. I like the pageantry and beauty of Catholicism but I don’t like their ‘All Catholic or Nothing’ philosophies – I don’t think anyone should be excluded from communing. I like the passion of Baptists, but don’t always want to be engaged. Stuff like that. But, I don’t know. What churches are around?”
“There’s always Montecito Convenient, just down the roads.”
“Convenient?”
“Covenant, actually. We called it Convenient, cause we could walk there from Westmont.”
“Cause for a second there I thought it was a converted 7-11.”
“Yeah, no.”
“Well, what one to you attend.”
“I don’t go to church anymore.”
“Really”
“Yup. Not for a long time.”
“Hmm…I just thought, well, usually people that say grace before meals are of the regular church-going persuasion.”
“You know, I’ve never really enjoyed going to church. I’ve never liked the music or the singing, or the sermons. Too much of the sermons are simple biblical commentary that tries to emotionalize the text. I mean, I read the bible – I know what it says and believe enough in it to call myself a Christian – I don’t need someone to explain it to me, or convert me. At best I would hear a story that would intensify a point – but never illuminate. If I found a place that had better music, and focused on stories and testimonials then perhaps I’d attend. But the closest I’ve found so far is Glide Memorial in San Francisco, and that’s a ways to go on a Sunday.”
“I went there once! It was fabulous. There’s nothing like singing hymns next to a transsexual hooker.”
“That’s a big thing too with me. The major reason I don’t go to your basic everyday church is that I can’t stand Christians. There is no religion on earth more ignorant of what their faith should be than Christians. Christianity was initially special because it welcomed everyone, and focused on the whores and thieves just as strongly as the goat-herders and poor. It spoke for those who would hear but accepted all, and judged no one. Christians nowadays are more interested in getting into the right afterlife-party by distancing themselves from the very people they should be succoring. You think if that transsexual hooker wandered into a Middle-American church they’d give him or her or it a plate of cookies and cup of punch and say, “Welcome, we’re here if you need help, we’re here if you want to learn about Jesus. For now, just welcome, we’re glad you’re here, enjoy your snacks”? They’d cast him or her or it out in fear that the great boogeyman Satan was trying to get them! Was infiltrating their midst. Then wash their hands and congratulate each other on doing God’s Work.”
“It doesn’t even have to be a transsexual: imagine Anthony Lawrence in, like Heavenbound, Wyoming. ‘Get thee behind me Satan!’”
“‘Beelzebub!’”
“Little old ladies diving out of the way of the lightening bolts they expect to hit as he crosses the threshold.”
“The minister using the confusion as an opportunity to grope the acolyte.”
“That’s another thing: with the track record of the church how can they expect anyone to affiliate themselves with it? Crusades, inquisitions, the genocide of Native Peoples, witch-hunts, pedophile priests, silence in the face of the Holocaust! The profound contempt for the heathen unconverted; and probably most damning, all the denial they throw around, skirting an admission of guilt or responsibility, cloaking themselves in infallibility like children playing dress-up in their father’s clothes. Religious fervor has got to be one of the all-time greatest killers.”
“Well – you’re not really selling me on the idea of checking out local churches.” “No – you know there are some great congregations around with exceptional pastors and reverends leading – it’s just not my thing.”
“How long has it been since you’ve gone?”
“I stopped just after my wife died – so, seven years.”
“So, really you haven’t kept up enough to know what you’re talking about. They could have completely cleaned up their act, made their confessions and absolutions and everything – but you Christians, so ignorant of what your faith should be…”
“Ha ha, and put together a proper band – so yeah, it’s slimly possible that you’re right.
“So maybe you can personally show me around to a few and de-ignorant-ize yourself.”
“Let me think of how to explain this…Okay, This is how I see it: Petricia’s side of the family – before we were married – would every year go to a gawd-awful Thanksgiving dinner at some relative’s house – I think it was her aunt’s house – but anyway, it was so bad they would have to go home and eat a real meal afterwards – but they went every year – and happily – just to have that time to visit with her Grandma. That was enough. Then when she died, they stopped going altogether. That’s how church was to me with Petricia – that’s the best way I can describe it, honestly – I would much rather have stayed home with her and watched Rick Steves, or Location Location Location, but church was where she was and where she wanted me to be and so it was where I went. Now, I stay home and fantasize about Kirsten Allsop, and talk to God on my own time.”
“You and your British chicks. It’s a show about houses for Goddess’s sake! – that’s what you say here, right? Goddess? – how can you fantasize about that?”
“I imagine she’s showing me a house and says, ‘This would be the most fabulous room to shag in,’ and then I say, “Oh yeah? I don’t see it,” and she says, “Well, let me just show you…”
“Ha ha – okay, but I must say I find it disturbingly unpatriotic that you don’t fantasize about any of us American girls.”
“Well now you’re getting into American Patriotism which is a religion into itself – whose crusades and inquisitions and witch hunts and persecutions and abhorrent contempt for everyone Not-American while remaining ludicrously ignorant of what their ideals and actions should reflect or what their leaders are doing in their name…”
“The Cult of Americanism.”
“The worst in known history; one that I definitely don’t want to be affiliated with. Certainly more threatening than Atheists and Evolutionists: they’re just silly, and so mostly harmless.”
“None of that newfangled science for you, eh?”
“I believe in evolution as a process, but I believe there’s a plan behind it that requires a planner. Scientific evolution requires mutation, which are generally something happening that shouldn’t have – so are you going to tell me that all this is due to billions upon billions of mistakes that all managed to balance out somehow? I find it incredulous that scientists can marvel at the complexity and precision of the human and believe it to be a product of accidents. Especially emotion. If the purposes of the animal are survival and procreation: there is nothing more detrimental to the concepts of survival and procreation than emotion.”
“Don’t I know it!”
“You want a good example? In South America, I believe, there is this flower where the pistol, or whatever they call the thing where all the pollination happens, is curved perfectly to leave pollen on the backs of these accommodating bats, who spread it around. So I’m supposed to believe that luck would have it that this plant developed a nectar that just happened to appeal to this bat, and luckily, all by accident, its shape corresponded exactly to this bat to deposit the very substance required to propagate itself.”
“Ah, nature.”
“Right. Mother Nature: the coward’s God – God to all those who don’t like The God, or are lookin’ to shirk judgment. I love how they can deny the existence of a creator but insist that ‘Nature has a plan’. But sure I dig American girls: I really dig Morgan Webb…”
“What? – Who? – ah forget it – another esoteric chick…”
“I could set you up with Adam Sessler, or Kevin Perreira; they would make you laugh…”
“Yeah, right. Well, maybe you can just start going to church for me now.”
“Hmm…perhaps I will take you around to confirm my suspicions, or…”
“De-ignorant-ize.”
“Yeah – that – myself. No other promises.”“Alright.”
“Hey.”
“I keep forgetting to ask you, do you need any help finding a church or synagogue or mosque or temple or other place of worship? May I ask what, if any, religion you follow?”
“Christian. I was raised Baptist, but I haven’t settled on a denomination to frequent. Though, I guess if I want to be a celeb now I either have to be Kabbalist or Scientologist or Buddhist. What is the deal with all of those celebs now?”
“Buddhism for a bit of serenity in their crazy lives – also, big with those who felt oppressed by the media and public, that they can learn to peacefully endure, free their obsessive minds for better topics. But mostly I think it’s just to appear cool. Kabbalism and Scientology I think are just bandwagon trendy now – though I’ve had no interest in looking them up so I can’t tell for certain what the draw is. What Christian denominations stand out then?”
“I like bits and pieces of each. I like the pageantry and beauty of Catholicism but I don’t like their ‘All Catholic or Nothing’ philosophies – I don’t think anyone should be excluded from communing. I like the passion of Baptists, but don’t always want to be engaged. Stuff like that. But, I don’t know. What churches are around?”
“There’s always Montecito Convenient, just down the roads.”
“Convenient?”
“Covenant, actually. We called it Convenient, cause we could walk there from Westmont.”
“Cause for a second there I thought it was a converted 7-11.”
“Yeah, no.”
“Well, what one to you attend.”
“I don’t go to church anymore.”
“Really”
“Yup. Not for a long time.”
“Hmm…I just thought, well, usually people that say grace before meals are of the regular church-going persuasion.”
“You know, I’ve never really enjoyed going to church. I’ve never liked the music or the singing, or the sermons. Too much of the sermons are simple biblical commentary that tries to emotionalize the text. I mean, I read the bible – I know what it says and believe enough in it to call myself a Christian – I don’t need someone to explain it to me, or convert me. At best I would hear a story that would intensify a point – but never illuminate. If I found a place that had better music, and focused on stories and testimonials then perhaps I’d attend. But the closest I’ve found so far is Glide Memorial in San Francisco, and that’s a ways to go on a Sunday.”
“I went there once! It was fabulous. There’s nothing like singing hymns next to a transsexual hooker.”
“That’s a big thing too with me. The major reason I don’t go to your basic everyday church is that I can’t stand Christians. There is no religion on earth more ignorant of what their faith should be than Christians. Christianity was initially special because it welcomed everyone, and focused on the whores and thieves just as strongly as the goat-herders and poor. It spoke for those who would hear but accepted all, and judged no one. Christians nowadays are more interested in getting into the right afterlife-party by distancing themselves from the very people they should be succoring. You think if that transsexual hooker wandered into a Middle-American church they’d give him or her or it a plate of cookies and cup of punch and say, “Welcome, we’re here if you need help, we’re here if you want to learn about Jesus. For now, just welcome, we’re glad you’re here, enjoy your snacks”? They’d cast him or her or it out in fear that the great boogeyman Satan was trying to get them! Was infiltrating their midst. Then wash their hands and congratulate each other on doing God’s Work.”
“It doesn’t even have to be a transsexual: imagine Anthony Lawrence in, like Heavenbound, Wyoming. ‘Get thee behind me Satan!’”
“‘Beelzebub!’”
“Little old ladies diving out of the way of the lightening bolts they expect to hit as he crosses the threshold.”
“The minister using the confusion as an opportunity to grope the acolyte.”
“That’s another thing: with the track record of the church how can they expect anyone to affiliate themselves with it? Crusades, inquisitions, the genocide of Native Peoples, witch-hunts, pedophile priests, silence in the face of the Holocaust! The profound contempt for the heathen unconverted; and probably most damning, all the denial they throw around, skirting an admission of guilt or responsibility, cloaking themselves in infallibility like children playing dress-up in their father’s clothes. Religious fervor has got to be one of the all-time greatest killers.”
“Well – you’re not really selling me on the idea of checking out local churches.” “No – you know there are some great congregations around with exceptional pastors and reverends leading – it’s just not my thing.”
“How long has it been since you’ve gone?”
“I stopped just after my wife died – so, seven years.”
“So, really you haven’t kept up enough to know what you’re talking about. They could have completely cleaned up their act, made their confessions and absolutions and everything – but you Christians, so ignorant of what your faith should be…”
“Ha ha, and put together a proper band – so yeah, it’s slimly possible that you’re right.
“So maybe you can personally show me around to a few and de-ignorant-ize yourself.”
“Let me think of how to explain this…Okay, This is how I see it: Petricia’s side of the family – before we were married – would every year go to a gawd-awful Thanksgiving dinner at some relative’s house – I think it was her aunt’s house – but anyway, it was so bad they would have to go home and eat a real meal afterwards – but they went every year – and happily – just to have that time to visit with her Grandma. That was enough. Then when she died, they stopped going altogether. That’s how church was to me with Petricia – that’s the best way I can describe it, honestly – I would much rather have stayed home with her and watched Rick Steves, or Location Location Location, but church was where she was and where she wanted me to be and so it was where I went. Now, I stay home and fantasize about Kirsten Allsop, and talk to God on my own time.”
“You and your British chicks. It’s a show about houses for Goddess’s sake! – that’s what you say here, right? Goddess? – how can you fantasize about that?”
“I imagine she’s showing me a house and says, ‘This would be the most fabulous room to shag in,’ and then I say, “Oh yeah? I don’t see it,” and she says, “Well, let me just show you…”
“Ha ha – okay, but I must say I find it disturbingly unpatriotic that you don’t fantasize about any of us American girls.”
“Well now you’re getting into American Patriotism which is a religion into itself – whose crusades and inquisitions and witch hunts and persecutions and abhorrent contempt for everyone Not-American while remaining ludicrously ignorant of what their ideals and actions should reflect or what their leaders are doing in their name…”
“The Cult of Americanism.”
“The worst in known history; one that I definitely don’t want to be affiliated with. Certainly more threatening than Atheists and Evolutionists: they’re just silly, and so mostly harmless.”
“None of that newfangled science for you, eh?”
“I believe in evolution as a process, but I believe there’s a plan behind it that requires a planner. Scientific evolution requires mutation, which are generally something happening that shouldn’t have – so are you going to tell me that all this is due to billions upon billions of mistakes that all managed to balance out somehow? I find it incredulous that scientists can marvel at the complexity and precision of the human and believe it to be a product of accidents. Especially emotion. If the purposes of the animal are survival and procreation: there is nothing more detrimental to the concepts of survival and procreation than emotion.”
“Don’t I know it!”
“You want a good example? In South America, I believe, there is this flower where the pistol, or whatever they call the thing where all the pollination happens, is curved perfectly to leave pollen on the backs of these accommodating bats, who spread it around. So I’m supposed to believe that luck would have it that this plant developed a nectar that just happened to appeal to this bat, and luckily, all by accident, its shape corresponded exactly to this bat to deposit the very substance required to propagate itself.”
“Ah, nature.”
“Right. Mother Nature: the coward’s God – God to all those who don’t like The God, or are lookin’ to shirk judgment. I love how they can deny the existence of a creator but insist that ‘Nature has a plan’. But sure I dig American girls: I really dig Morgan Webb…”
“What? – Who? – ah forget it – another esoteric chick…”
“I could set you up with Adam Sessler, or Kevin Perreira; they would make you laugh…”
“Yeah, right. Well, maybe you can just start going to church for me now.”
“Hmm…perhaps I will take you around to confirm my suspicions, or…”
“De-ignorant-ize.”
“Yeah – that – myself. No other promises.”“Alright.”
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