So messed up/I want you here.

Posted on 2013/12/02 by mindozo

annie_hall_1977_1024x768_309194 “How can you lie there and think of England/when you don’t even know who’s in the team?” — Billy Bragg

i know i claimed not to believe so much in the supernatural, but i guess i left out that i have a soft spot for ghosts. If i cross certain paths or perform a set of actions in a specific way, i am guaranteed a visit. i realize it sounds like complete bullshit, but i can’t jaywalk without Roland Barthes’s ghost flashing up between me and the street. He just pops up. The most handsome traffic cop you’ve ever seen. “Are you sure about this?” his face, coated in comic disdain, vaguely warns me. One eyebrow slightly raised, his image from that ubiquitous author photo floating up right there on Houston or Delancey or whatever street is forcing me to stop for a second. Suddenly he is simply there in his tie and V-neck sweater. Sometimes he brings his cigarette. i wink a quick, “Thanks, Roland!” and step back on the curb as the cinematic unfold repeats itself: In 1980, in March, Roland Barthes stepped off a sidewalk and into a laundry van and died in the hospital a month later. He was known to have been frustrated by early, poor reviews of Camera Lucida and to have been severely shaken by his mother’s death: “I’m not in mourning. I’m suffering” (from his Journal of Mourning). The ultimately quite “writerly” death of one of the 20th century’s great literary theorists is, rather significantly, forever open to interpretation: accident/suicide? Maybe it’s my way of displacing the real horror of NYC traffic or something, but this is what jaywalking is locked into for me:
Also relevant, the essay that outlined this distinction between readerly and writerly texts was actually called the “Death of the Author”: The goal of a literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. Yes, i know, it sounds Marxist-Feminist-Brechtian–wasn’t that your chant? But that’s okay. i don’t mind when the boom stays in the picture or a puppet’s strings go glittering for a second–making the story glow all spidery and exposed and…possible. Making something out of a snippet or a song or even a kiss. Making up stories about the spooky, glamorous orphan photograph on the wall because they were curious enough to rescue the negative hiding in the couch. Weaving these pieces into my own tiny stories–little boutonnieres of memory. Choosing/not choosing as an organizing principle. Ghosts? Yeah, i’m a believer.
Is this what memories are, then? Ghosts that develop like photographs and stick firmly to a place: sliding up each and every time you crisscross back over their paths? At least some of them are also made of melancholia–a kind of emotional gatekeeping that is more dimensional than mere memories. Even knowing all of this, when i woke up and sat on the edge of the couch, a few days after you’d left, i hadn’t expected you to be right there again in the chair next to me. You slid over and put my head on your lap when i lifted up for you, and somehow took my hand under the table at the same second i reached for yours during lunch. Outside, the weather had finally turned bitter. The sensation of the extreme cold not feeling so different from the burn of summer in the tropics–galvanizing and clean. i walked to the end of the block, listening all the way to our nervous, elated rambling. You told me, again, that the world is the size we make it. With that proposal ringing in my ears, i smacked right into us kissing in the street. i didn’t have to turn around one last time before descending the subway stairs to see you looking back at the same moment i looked up for you. i saw it anyway. And the handsome young man in a blue striped button down was still playing his cello on the platform on the other side of the tracks.The math is simple–I can add 5 or 6 hours to the time on my watch–but it does nothing for me. What difference does it make if i know what time it is there? What i have are these ghosts looped to the ground outside of the pizza shop between 1st and Avenue A where we kissed goodbye, the doorframe you crossed and locked eyes with me for the first time. I step through it almost every day. Trying to distract myself, i went to the Met last week to stare at the Balthus paintings. i especially like the ones where you can see evidence of him having ‘squared the canvas’, little grids visible through the paint, for scale. One painting’s tag reads: “Squaring of the canvas is visible throughout, especially noticeable in the curtain at left and the nightstand at right.” (The Toilette, Balthus. 1957) i know the story, but i am grateful for the reminder that even realism is a calculated illusion, as his paintings–shameless testimonies to the erotic that sometimes render the cat pulling at the end of the string, and sometimes leave the frame empty–make visible. i also know there is no formula for veracity and that time can truly fuck with space. i know a hawk from a handsaw over here, and i know that the ghosts go away when the promise they’re meant to mark comes back to life.

It was good what we did yesterday.

Posted on 2013/10/30 by mindozo

Every time i blow dry my hair, i remember a friend telling me that she would read in the morning while completing this boring, almost embarrassing task. At the time, it was something i never did, and i thought of her confession as an odd, potentially impossible, affectation. Then my hair got so long that drying it became a necessary part of my morning routine, and since i don’t like to look in the mirror while i’m doing it, i started reading, too. The duration is long enough to be tedious but not really long enough for any real narrative engagement, so i try to either read tiny chunks of something very dense (poetry, literary theory) or long, quick bits of something very simply written (newspapers, adolescent fiction). A few days ago, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a blowdryer on my lap, i scanned the closest pile of reading material, and pulled Empire of Signs within reach.

My copy is dog-eared and i started skipping to outlined passages from previous readings. i came back to this one: “Thus, in Japanese, the proliferation of functional suffixes and the complexity of enclitics suppose that the subject advances into utterance through certain precautions, repetitions, delays, and insistances whose final volume (we can no longer speak of a single line of words) turns the subject, precisely, into a great envelope of empty speech, and not that dense kernel which is supposed to direct our sentences, from outside and above, so that what seems to us an excess of subjectivity (Japanese, it is said, articulates impressions, not affidavits) is much more a way of diluting, of hemorrhaging the subject in a fragmented, particled language diffracted to emptiness.”

This is one of the few good jokes in Lost in Translation. Bill Murray growing increasingly frustrated because the translation is so much shorter than the preceding exchange. He thinks he is being cheated, of course. Barthes, on the other hand–also unable to speak or read the language–imagined something else of this crucially extensive…punctuation. In the alternate possibilities of hemorrhaging, leaky, bleeding subjects and something called functional suffixes, he read the elimination of some of the shame of having to singularly assert oneself. With its practice of folding the obtruding “I,” a process that is as focused on the how of saying as it is on what is being said, Barthes imagined a language without the anchoring of Western metanarratives that might actually offer different possibilities of subjectivity. Of exchange. Of association. A careful intimacy bound into its pittering and “unnecessarily” padded entrances and exits. The soft scaffolding of context. Of nostalgia. Of what came before wrapped into every ending.

i know the season is pulling on me, but i keep thinking about New Orleans. Driving. Holding hands and roaming broken sidewalks. i went to the Met and looked at the mummies and their jewelry again. Sleeping on the floor. Waking up in the black light with my Dad when i was too young to remember. What Jonas used to call “blue dark.” The way drying grass smells and cutting down cattails on the side of the road with the Buck Knife he always had tucked into his bag. Goldenrod and those yellow berries that grow under palmetto bushes. Bleached jeans orange pine needles so thick we used them as a blanket. Every night, riding back under the red tunnel of the Williamsburg Bridge, i thought, soft red cold metal costumes cages velvet pretty torii, and wondered which side then was meant to be the sacred ground. i wasn’t planning on bringing you flowers, but something was making sense as i drew one stem, stared at it for a moment, drew another, bound it around the first. i am still learning the names, and i realized later on that i’d been wrong about the name for one of the tiny ones. i was listening to the girls as they prepared for yet another wedding. One held up a yellow sprig and pronounced, “tansy,” and someone said that would be a cute name for a child and then the one holding the flower instructed us that there is a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay about the tansy flower, and we talked about Millay’s habit of gardening naked, and i told myself to remember to look up the poem. Here you go:

“My Heart, Being Hungry”

It may be/When my heart is dull/
Having attained its girth/
I shall not find so beautiful/
The meagre shapes of earth/
Nor linger in the rain to mark/
The smell of tansy through the dark

i didn’t like jazz/i didn’t like funk

Posted on 2013/09/17 by mindozo

memory is just hips that swing
like a clock
the past projects fantastic scenes
tic/toc tic/toc tic/toc
fuck the clock!
― Patti Smith, “Babel”

Ghost Dance. Chinese lanterns. Opium Wars. Wild strawberries. Cinnamon stick triangles blowing in the window. Walking into a thrift store on Grand Street on a Sunday morning. Alone, with a coffee. The girl behind the desk is bundled in a hooded sweatshirt. She’s got a record player on the desk playing Tattoo You. So, i stay. And i remember a story you told me the last time i saw you, about being upstate and tired and fucked up and it was dark outside and you sat down next to a girl who was playing a record on a picnic table. The moon was shining and you were by a river and you told her, “Look, I don’t want to talk to you. i just want to sit here and listen to this.” i wish i could remember which record it was. That’s totally something i would remember.

“Little T & A” comes on and i realize, embarrassed, that i’m singing out loud. My Mom used to sing this to me when i was little–just the chorus line. She can’t possibly have known what song it came from, but it worked some kind of magic anyhow. Sleeping on the beach in the back of their truck. Fishing for shrimp on the dock with a bright light and a net. Ponytail fern. Snapdragons. Flashlights. Tents pitched on a bottom bunk. Air conditioning. Palmettos. That old sewing machine she kept her make-up in. And yes, carrot flowers. Greyhound Bus. Headphones. A very pretty copy of the Catcher in the Rye from that decent used book store you guys had. i wish this place sold chandeliers. Something made out of driftwood and sea glass meant to slip into the top of a teepee and to run on campfire light. It seems like the kind of place that would have something like that. Here’s an old memory: yours, not mine–you riding around in a van all night with some band you guys were on tour with. You happened to be in Gainesville, and they kept a cassette tape of Tattoo You on repeat. Of course you were into the Stones, and were excited that they were, too. Maybe confused then by the album choice but not now. And it was such a good night.

The wallpaper on my desktop is a picture of Patti Smith wearing an obviously handmade t-shirt that says, “Fuck the Clock.” She’s so skinny. And her outfit is perfect. She’s holding a microphone and her eyes are closed. There’s a guy standing in the crowd–he could really be you. i originally kept it as a motto for my dissertation. Not because i’m taking forever, although of course i am, but because it suggests weird life narratives, kids. The other day i was reading the “invisible jukebox” column with Christina Carter in The Wire, enchanted by the description of her in a house filled with poetry books and her strange history, but then i woke up a little and thought about what she was saying about time, and i thought: maybe that’s what the t-shirt was always about? And this basement room and everything in boxes again and the shirt i finally bought with holes in it and the structural intervention that music necessarily stitches in time all felt something like relief. Making time. Stress on the first word. Making time. Stress on the second word. Okay. So, morning glories. Tusk. Cedar. Stars. Little Suzy.

Well the Devil made me do it the first time. The second time i done it on my own.

Posted on 2013/08/13 by mindozo

A garden lined in railroad ties. Mint taking over pansies and petunias, and zinnias i could have used as parasols. A little cement mushroom my Mom found on the side of the road and later snuggled next to the wild strawberries. Apricot roses and elephant ears. A Staghorn fern pinned to the Bay tree out back, and a grape arbor linked by a clothesline to the barn. An afternoon with Mom spent driving Dad’s blue Chevy out to the edge of town and filling up the bed with manure. For the garden. A room with a wooden birdcage holding quietly chatty finches, spider plants, and the record player. It occurs to me that my parents had good taste; or, i am remembering it as what is basically my taste now. And this is how, like waking up, i play back the parts like flipping through pictures of other people’s libraries. So many parts that most days my little room and easy memory–bent on letting everything in–argue about whether their future is junkyard or player piano. The problem, as always, is that i like junkyards. i like them on their own terms and i am genuinely content to wander and collect, but luckily i am also a sucker for the whizzing, possessive state of production. The question that actually worries me is more specific: how does one who whose stays bind her backwards move forward? A kind of generation that is very attached to the “re” in reproduction. Nothing new in order to make something new. A productive investment in returns. i am not a curmudgeon, in fact i have a tendency to move far too quickly. This is more about sorting for favorites before they fall, for the last time, through the net.

In her poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich writes: “I am having to do this, not like Cousteau with his, assiduous team, aboard the sun-flooded schooner, but here alone.” Alone/together: who can tell, really? There is the very real insurmountable distance of the couple, and the also relevant impact made by the group. The shorthand is community, but family applies here, too. How we behave in “private” is shaped by these larger interactions that take place in vastly different ways for anyone. And then there is the gigantic drag of the social. Chuck D: “No we’re not the same/cause we don’t know the game.” Fuck. It’s just a fact. It’s a different process when you have Cousteau’s little submarine shark to protect you from predation. Nonetheless, some of us keep diving. i saw Goonies. i know there’s treasure down there somewhere. i know we will be more than the 2 of Cups. And here is Godard whispering in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her — lines dried and pressed in my memory fixed like sheets of wax paper like ‘dead flowers’ in my veins like the way your face changes when you find my face, finally, grinning huge at you in the crowd:

“But since social relations are always ambiguous, since thought divides as much as it unites, since words unite or isolate by what they express or omit, since an immense gulf separates my subjective awareness from the objective truth I represent for other, since I constantly blame myself, though I feel innocent, since every event transforms my daily life, since I constantly fail to communicate, since each failure makes me aware of solitude, since I cannot escape crushing objectivity or isolating subjectivity, since I cannot rise to the state of being, or fall into nothingness, I must listen, I must look around more than ever, The world, my kin, my twin.”

My kin, my twin. Marjorie Blanche Cardozo, my green-eyed, redheaded and freckled paternal grandmother, was a reader. My grandparents had a wall of books between the guest room and their bedroom. A quiet, dark hall in an otherwise consistently rambunctious household that i liked to linger in front of on my way to the bathroom. Grams would sometimes read me stories at the end of the hall, in front of the books, and quite often i chose her tattered copy of Little Black Sambo. There is an undoing i feel compelled to do with this memory. The tigers turning into butter like memories turning into words, but with the parallax attempt of reflexivity. Of fixing and footnoting. Tagging the memories with the information i could have used then, and am compelled to spend my time collecting now. Other memories are cut flowers on the table. i pick them up, breathe them in, and arrange and re-arrange them. Sure i pull off some of the leaves and trim the stems to allow them to absorb more water, but i need them to be seen, somehow. Minding the time, binding these little fascicles, i throw these ikebana for the heart: pine, palmetto, rose, dahlia, tears, hands, ghost, hope, chrysanthemum flower.

i know what you’re trying to be.

Posted on 2013/07/20 by mindozo

“As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next–as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet.”— Michel Foucault

When i worked at the hair salon, there was what i would later learn to call a very ‘well-curated’ flower shop next door. Thinking about it now, i understand the store as having been quite remarkable, but Gainesville used to be that way. (Goerings, anyone?) i would stop in regularly and agonize over tiny bouquets of things that changed my understanding of what qualified as a flower. i don’t remember ever having been helped by anyone but the owner, who let it show that she was really too busy for my low-income excitement, but she was also accommodating and oddly chatty. That she did the flowers for my first wedding, which happened before i ever worked at the salon, might matter in a minute. She was short, pretty, businesslike, and very much in charge. She and her husband were regulars at the restaurant where i waited tables, and i watched their dynamic. His shyness was more endearing than painful, and i read her tolerance of him as some interesting tender side she did not betray in his absence. The details are hazy here, but my memory is that they took tango lessons together–a shared passion around which vacations were planned.

i walked in one day for flowers, and everything in the store was on sale. i bought two ramshackle wooden chairs gorgeously spattered in peeling layers of paint for $10 each–one of which i still keep. By then i had become a regular, and she must have known that i had chosen not to stay the course of my own marriage. With no tint of discomfort, she told me that she was closing the store and leaving town. She had met someone and fallen in love. Another dancer, somewhere in the Southwest, and she was leaving.

When we were small, there were a few phrases and names that one of us only had to chant in a silly way and my brothers and i would lose it. For a while, i remember “Mr. Bojangles” being one of them. Maybe we’d caught the hook on some commercial for a Greatest Hits compilation available only through a special TV offer because i don’t remember anyone actually playing the song otherwise. Maybe we just thought it was a funny name for a chicken place. Because it is so hot, and even my cotton sheets seem electric, lately i can’t sleep. This is an absurd circumstance for a narcoleptic, but at least i have more time to read. Last week i re-read Marianne Faithfull’s autobiography, and for no direct reason i can locate, kept humming “Mr. Bojangles.” Finally i downloaded a few versions and goddamn, it is sad. When Nina Simone drags out “throughout the South,” you know he was fucked. None of the bad bitch charge you get from listening to Marianne narrate junkie time and glory days–just flat-out nameless bustedness. Maybe as kids we had some sense of the bottom line this name like jumping jacks was supposed to ward off, and like tiny elves we chanted it to banish the possibility of such a fate. We might have actually managed to ward off that particular spell, but botched it in that dangerous way children and amateurs can when they flirt with magic, because other enchantments do indeed linger.

i understand that some of us are galvanized by leaving, but my stomach dropped when the florist, so enlivened and sure, told me her plans. i thought straightaway of her husband–what would happen to him? What would happen to her when that question occurred to her, much further down the line? An odd concern coming from me, but sometimes i feel responsible for strangers in ways i am not capable of in my own relations. The old, ‘other people’s lives seem more interesting/innocent’ pickle. Either way, all this messing around is not for everyone. Building nothing out of something is really, really not for the weak of heart. Someone recently told me about having read an article or an essay in which a number of octogenarians were asked what they wished they’d done differently, and the most common answer was that they would have taken more risks. i was too tired to listen on the multiple frequencies this confession wrapped in an anecdote required, but it worked just the same. Before i knew it we were taking a risk that i would have agreed to story or no, but just for a second i’d thought: there must be another word for what we keep digging for.

Well let’s dance.

Posted on 2013/06/26 by mindozo

“Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect change to come from outside, to concentrate on the task of meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather than going out and finding it.”
–Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

i like being towed. i suppose it’s not for everyone. It’s a leap of faith, like sex and drugs and other initially unearned decisions weirdly rooted in some degree of trust. Of course it’s also the lazy position, but in the most engaged of ways. On a motorcycle it would be a ride, but on a bicycle it is very much a tow. The first time i tried it i was in the second grade, on the back of my neighbor’s ten speed. i wound up on crutches for a month. i was trying to rest my foot on a tiny ridge coming out of the center of the tire when my right foot slipped between the spokes. The boy towing me didn’t notice. He kept peddling, and as the tire moved forward my leg went down and around and i hit the dirt road hard. In Japan i spent some very romantic autumn afternoons sat on the back rack of a cruiser, safely winding around downtown Osaka. In perhaps a not too peculiar turn, i was finally taught how to be towed properly during grad school. The possibility of agency was taking such a beating in my readings that the collaborative effort of a good tow was an easy alternative to solipsism. Once you consent to a tow, you can’t get nervous and you need to be somewhat concentrated on what’s happening: roll with the turns and be ready for the stops. The sensation of being ‘in tow’ or, even better, the subversion of a powerful ‘undertow’ is not out of line here, either. The ride–are you really on it? It doesn’t matter if you’re pushing or pulling but, if your thoughts begin to stray, you aren’t the only one who’s going to get hurt. Most people don’t have the confident skill or even the desire to properly pull off a good tow, but there is something older sibling cool and after school and gregarious about the skill that is a total plus.

Presuming that you have one, what would i know about you if i ever had a peek at your room? Is it yours or do you share it? Are the walls bare? Covered in anonymous art? Collaged with precious memorabilia? Is your bed incidental or cozy? Books? Is it possible to listen to music with another human? Pet(s)? Piles? This sort of boudoir as terroir game is fun, because none of us ends at our skin. Thinking about place is one way of trying to be honest about our relationship to what we could call community, knowing it is not the correct word, but meaning something pretty close to what that word is generally taken to suggest. Plain prose cheats, so i am cheating with the wrong thing as a way of trying to invoke the right one. It’s my way, but not cheating is simply another kind of cheating, and if you’re still reading you are probably the kind of person who knows exactly what i’m talking about. Maybe transmission is a better word. A bicycle doesn’t have one; a tow demands one. Transmission, reception. Even if you’re flying down Wythe on the back of a fixed gear, the mechanism is somehow still taking place.

i recognize that mystical air.

Posted on 2013/05/22 by mindozo

“So here I am heading out into the cold winds of the canyon streets, walking down and across avenue c toward my home with the smell and taste of him wrapped around my neck and jaw like a scarf.”
David Wojnarowicz — Close to the Knives

My birthday card came a day early from my Dad yesterday afternoon, and like most interactions with my parents, it both (happily) momentarily grounded me and (confoundingly) underlined how far i have reeled from anything my family might still recognize as normality (success). My mother recently called me “eccentric,” and a few years ago my Dad referred to me being “wild” as though it were an obvious fact. That my birth certificate lists my middle name as Sunshine is only a very tame exhibit A in what i at least would describe as a somewhat unconventional childhood EVEN in the poor South EVEN in the Eighties. The day that never came, the time one of my parents sat me down and confessed to being proud that at least one of his or her children had gotten it and was living according to what we were shown as kids, somehow still shocks me by its absence. Learn to love me? Assemble the ways? Let’s just say they are never going to tell me there’s a lack of real spice in my life. My Dad told me years ago that he thought one of his children was smarter than the others, and it was not me. God, has the world changed? i read the lines on the front of the very pretty, serious, card from Dad: “Daughter, you are unique…,” and i bite my lip and swear i’m not trying to stress anyone out. i’m alright, Dad. Surprised to still be on my own. And yes, last night, and yesterday on the train, and the other morning on the kitchen table, i dreamt that someone…

i’ve stopped trying to figure out why it’s quite possible that i maybe…can’t take what i need and just leave, but i do know that i had been feeling black on the inside for a very long time before i came across the fact that Morrissey and i share a birthday. It’s today, in fact: May 22. The first day of Gemini. i started listening to the Smiths when i was in high school. My oldest brother had the shit luck of being in the first Gulf War, and he would send home requests for cds and i would go the Record Bar? Specs? at the Oaks Mall and pick them out and off they would go to Kurdistan with a Tupperware container full of Mom’s fudge. The cover of Meat is Murder made it the obvious choice, but i wasn’t a vegetarian, yet, and so the Queen is Dead came first. The rest followed in a sequence determined by what i could find in cassette form. Strangeways, then Louder Than Bombs. Somehow the first album, The Smiths, my favorite if i was made to choose, came to me last, and i was a freshman in college by then. That grown man shrieking, “I need advice. I need advice.”

Much later, i flippantly said to a boyfriend that we didn’t understand each other because he’d never listened to much Morrissey, and it didn’t go over too well. i was referring to that graceful realization that teenage nihilism can quickly change from boredom to an investment in “politics” that seems to occur to so many Morrissey devotees, but it just sounded like an unfair comparison to ex-boyfriends. The Stones may have opened many a sartorial door to masculinity, but the Smiths shifted the subculture again. Queering hadn’t yet become the verb it is now, but in retrospect the music is so unbelievably queer. What i simply read at the time as semi-gothic romanticism turned out to be apiece of a much larger parcel. The homosociality the music made possible amongst straight boys, often coupled with Straight Edge politics, full blown Anglophilia, and vintage bicycles, bled into a kind of queerness and a politicization of the personal we hadn’t even realized was unusual, and i’ve never really adjusted very well to its absence. Likewise, the suits, the football, the gang and crime references, the student bullying, the pedophilia, the serial killers, the misogyny, the Mick Ronson guitar–all of it was a cohesive reminder of just how gay masculinity had been all along.

As it turns out, the queerest tattoo i have is for David Wojnarowicz rather than Morrissey, but a David Wojnarowicz tattoo always seemed like a very Morrissey thing to me, anyhow. Midway between the wrist and elbow of my right arm, it is a burning house with a heart around it. i wait tables, so this is something customers quiz me on. All the time. “Do you mind if i ask about your tattoo?” they’ll say, with weird grins. i don’t mind, because the answer is easy and doesn’t cost me anything. i used to be really into David Wojnarowicz, i say, and blank faces usually end the conversation right there. Wojnarowicz was true thorn in the side Ruffian Realness–complete with national health/birth control glasses, minus the jangly guitar and the gladioli. With this birthday, i’m now officially older than he was when he died of AIDS in 1992, which somehow makes the tattoo mean differently to me.

i was assigned an essay by Wojnarowicz for a class i took with Amitava Kumar before i ever saw any of his visual art. Sitting in the back of the classroom, i felt my cheeks burn as i read the first paragraph: “So my heritage is a calculated fuck on some faraway sun-filled bed while the curtains are being sucked in and out of an open window by a passing breeze.” i wasn’t working at the Feminist bookstore yet, and i hadn’t really read any queer theory. i hadn’t started reading or writing about sex, but i had listened to a LOT of Morrissey. Here was this first line of the first chapter of a memoir, connecting, in total friction, the dots. The sneering concision and repulsiveness of “calculated fuck”–what i would later learn how to call “heteronormativity” but already knew intuitively would, not then, not never, be for me. My face was still hot, i’d felt this before: the extremely rare pleasure of recognition.

A cold sweat hot-headed believer.

Posted on 2013/05/14 by mindozo

“Just as a single cocoon contains a thousand yards of silk, I can unreel a thousand miles from my memory of this one misstep….Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by this, i think. Like water flushing a wound, to prevent it from closing.” Karen Russell — “Reeling for the Empire”

Unlike my companion, when we walked outside into an uncomfortable drizzle after having basically crouched in something not unlike yoga poses for over two hours, sandwiched into the couchy broken seats at the IFC in a room packed with the kind of cinephiles who know exactly when to chuckle at earnestness, i had not been bored throughout Olivier Assayas’s new film, Something in the Air (Apres Mai). i also wasn’t unsure of whether i’d “liked” it or not. Like all of the other sixty-year-olds in the room, i was happily familiar with the romantic/political texts the film unblushingly cites and the arguments they detonated. Mao, May 1968, Situationism. Gasoline. Theory “vs” Practice. The personal. The political. Sexual liberation. Women as the secretaries of the labor movement. i spent at least a decade smugly hashing out these arguments in classrooms, first as a student and then as a teacher. In one scene, a radical Italian agitprop collective screens an impassioned documentary of some proletarian struggle somewhere to glowing applause until someone in the audience yells to the filmmakers, “Shouldn’t revolutionary film employ revolutionary syntax?” Like flowers archived between sheets of waxed paper or an encaustic painting, the hot, gauzy nostalgic/autobiographical diegetic film world asking the question is something quite other than the binary the question begs, and the director’s knack for embedding perfectly timed meta-bombs such as this one endow its adolescent regrets with lifeshattering relevance.
Do you ever forget about Bowie’s mismatched eyes? He’s such a thorough part of my backpages that i never really pull his albums out anymore, but when i see a photo of him i am still taken aback. A fistfight (over a girl) with his best friend left him with an indelible cosmetic marker: his left pupil remains permanently open. Right? i snuck over to see Elizabeth Peyton’s new paintings before they disappeared last week. The first time i saw her work, it was like striking up a conversation with a total stranger who happens to know some of your favorite but estranged old friends. Sure, she is instantly vetted, but she also reanimates an orbit you were beginning to think you might have imagined. Peyton’s tiny confessionals expose her devotion to a kind of hero i visit my shrink once a week to try to learn how to let go of: other iterations of the characters from Assayas’s film. In color palettes only a lover could summon, Jarvis Cocker, Pete Doherty, David Bowie, Johnny Rotten, Kurt Cobain, Keith Richards are joltingly reflected as if their uncommon, undeniable, unexpected beauties were her own private secrets.

After May. After Feminism. After grad school. After, i don’t know, the Stones and everything that could possibly mean. After Gainesville. After the day you came to get me and i didn’t come. But remember, like a magnetic field, after has at least two poles. After you, yes, but even now, even today, i am still after the charge left by those days, convinced that they are gigantically relevant.

Some of these days, and it wont be long/
Gonna drive back down where you once belonged/
In the back of a dream car twenty foot long/
Don’t cry my sweet, don’t break my heart/
Doing all right, but you gotta get smart/
Wish upon, wish upon, day upon day, I believe oh lord/
I believe all the way/
Come get up my baby/
Run for the shadows, run for the shadows/
Run for the shadows in these golden years

When Butterfly rocked his light blue suede Pumas.

Posted on 2013/04/30 by mindozo

Is there a private
revolution not worth attention? Since
my cup’s not smaller. Since a cat encircles
my legs. Since I get all human on the couch….
–Samuel Amadon

For the first time in my life, i wasn’t doing so well in school. Weekend binge drinking had ambled into a disappointing but moony introduction to sex, and before i knew it i was about to cross another first off my list. Poster children for the “gateway drug” theory we’d read about in our required Life Management Class, my two best friends and i were flopped in bed, staring at a ceiling mapped in glow-in-the-dark stars, waiting for the acid to kick in. The ugliest guy we’d ever seen had sold us some weed earlier that evening, throwing five tabs of acid in for free. i had spent most of my early childhood walking in and out of the tiny numbness of contact highs brought on by the nightly marijuana plume blanketing our “living” room, but i’d never intentionally tried to smoke anything. In other words, i was already nervous of the grass, but acid was completely out of my league. Repulsive, naive associations came to me, and, for a second, they were as convincing as a little red devil appearing in a puff of smoke on my left shoulder might have been. The metalhead from my AP history class who had the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Johnny Got His Gun on permanent rotation, cig breaks in the woods behind the portables, Trapper Keepers emblazoned with hand-drawn band art, tie-dye, androgynes: these things were acid. i was not acid.

i wanted to know what the goth girls were doing on nights like this? i imagined they were drinking tea and smoking clove cigarettes and pulling on yet another lace petticoat as they read T.S. Eliot to each other and combed their long, silky, magenta pigtails. Sick of Saturdays at the beach and bikinis and mini skirts, i secretly idolized their tiny coats that buttoned all the way up to the chin and i just knew they hated orange juice from the carton and sweat pants and Sam and Libby ballet flats as much as i did, even though i was still shopping at Contrampo Casuals. Those girls were on my mind as i palmed the tab of acid, but i knew i would never be like them. My favorite book was the Scarlet Letter and i still liked hip hop. And yeah, i liked the dirty look in my occasional boyfriend’s eyes when he sat down next to me at the campfire behind the abandoned house and passed me a diet Cherry 7up and vodka. When he drove me home from school, the only thing we ever listened to was Don’t Be Cruel, (That’d be the Bobby Brown iteration–not Elvis). i just assumed i was lucky that it wasn’t the Steve Miller Band or Bob Marley–a capitulation so dissatisfying that music has forever become the delicate, punishing, yardstick i wield in my private life. Someone who was otherwise perfect once joked that our split on art school vs rock n roll would probably be the end of us one day, which i immediately dismissed, but his words did conjure a sick prophecy basically along those lines. i’ve left others for much smaller infractions, but how can it not matter? Like tepid sex, it only gets worse.

After what actually had been a lifetime of hoping that a clean toilet or good grades would finally give me the unwavering parental support i craved, i had found a different path to validation. i was also discovering that i liked secrets and trouble, exclusive pacts and passwords. i relished lost time. My best friend and i each had a shoebox full of passed notes hidden at home under our beds. Pages of notes scribbled quickly as we pretended to conjugate verbs or take down new assignments–and i wonder why i still don’t know how to ask the porter to bring up a few more buckets of ice after having taken four years of Spanish in high school. Notes folded up like Turkish wedding rings–secret patterns no one else could reset or unlock. We loved each other like magnets: with the intensity only latchkey kids could summon. Years later, i would find other sisters of the moon–sometimes they were boyfriends or co-workers, sometimes they were books.

Having no idea how acid was supposed to work, we were convinced that he’d given us duds when, five minutes after having taken it, nothing happened. We all fell asleep, and some time later, we all woke back up. Giggling. Understanding for the first time what glow-in-the-dark stars were actually for.

I don’t know where you got those clothes/but you can take them off if it’ll make you feel better.

Posted on 2013/04/26 by mindozo

“Wrestling to contain your flames, in your pink wool knitted dress.”
–Ted Hughes

What is the opposite of vertigo? Not looking away? Balance or steadiness? Sure, but maybe that is not exactly the right question. Yesterday i was walking across the Pulaski Bridge, and it is a drawbridge, and just as i topped the place where its two halves meet, a huge semi gave the bridge the shivers. They traveled up my legs and tingled my spine, and i lurched forward a little, caught my breath, and coughed out a smart-assed giggle. (Peep show). i can’t say for sure, but i am pretty sure that what i want to describe is not the “death drive.” i do net the queer “spangled butterflies” of vertigo (Beckett). i feel the audacious roil in my tummy when i reach my head over for peeks at the water, bracing myself with the railings, not at all sure that i won’t go flying over the edge at any second. i have no desire to jump, but i probably wouldn’t say no to a parachute or a magnifying glass.