Masculin, féminin: the act of me

Hannah, you are out. You have been named.

It’s okay that you cried in front of your whole family during your uncle’s wedding photo, tears which probably appeared to be for no reason. It’s okay when you don’t cry for months because you’re tough and don’t want to put your female embodied emotions on display. You’re so tough, boys enjoy your company because you can hold your whiskey as well as any of them but those nights when you can’t, you are comforted by their displays of masculinity that signify the difference between you and them.

When you cut your hair and some people asked you if you lost any of your strength, you wonder why they are likening you to King Solomon. By cutting your hair, did you gain or lose femininity? When you shaved your entire head in high school, where you any more or less you by doing so? You realize that others view you on your outward appearance and are willing to adjust accordingly in reinventing yourself because no matter how hard you try, you the subject is part of your identity.

Your grandmother once wrote you, “Hannah, be you. Be you…intensely.” So you keep this in mind while performing self, remembering that it’s a man’s world but it’s nothing without you in it. You are the lead role in your life’s story. When you become disillusioned with civilization, remember you are part of it. Remember just as society places subjectivity on you, you do so on others. Remember that without an audience or being audienced, there is no you. But remember as long as you are you, do so with intensity.

On Music and Milieu

I am a note. I am singular. I am one of many. Alone, I seem insignificant. I am measured by time, relate to others around me and identify myself by initials and symbols. Those who come before and after me define my mood, my milieu, my significance. Within my defined space, I can be melodramatic, light and airy, or understated. Emotions are evoked by my presence or absence, whether by design or chance.

Located strategically, I am part of song but even alone, in silence, I exist. If I am taken out of context, I am still a note - I still disturb the air with sound. If my place changes or if am put in a different position, I will not become insignificant but instead my interactions will signify something different. Other’s perceptions of me are not universal. Distasteful to some, I am revered by others. Even as my creator chose me and positioned me in this space, I seek out and am sought out by others like me. Together, we create a whole whose melody changes with the space we occupy.

The time and space in which I am played is influential upon my meaning. Once I sounded my voice at what seemed to be an appropriate time, but even as the situation seemed necessary to one, it disturbed others. Take for instance, the love of classical music by one Alex DeLarge of A Clockwork Orange. The music he once loved and which embodied his feelings of free will - albeit violent in its materialization - changed its tone once the time and space in which it was heard was violent towards him. Even his appreciation for the lighthearted love song, “Singin’ in the Rain” turned sour as his milieu changed. What was once lovely to him was now a source of fear. His physical location and body had not changed, nor had the notes themselves, but it was the atmosphere which discernibly slipped from gratification to grief.

If you put me in another place, the symbols that define me do not change. Yet, the relationship between me and my surroundings transform my identity. Even in the far end of silence, there are notes. It may be a collection of notes - a collective silence - waiting for a moment to be recognized, signified. It may be a memory that holds a note for safekeeping to be reawakened in deliberate pleasure. It may be a time in which I am waiting to be played in the future, or a place in which to create new meaning and significance to the silence I am breaking.

Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes once said “the best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.” I echo every note that has come before me. I am a remnant of the formations that signify my individual presence in the very space that I form, shape, and even suggest thought and communication. I am a note. Alone, I am singular. With many, I am a song.

Consider This

I can't remember exactly what the assignment for this project was but whatever it was, by inspiration probably came from my second nephew, Noah, who was born a few months before and (obviously) NPR.



Photo by linh ngân, used under Creative Commons license.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/linhngan/

I have always wanted to stare the death of my youth in its face and now that I am looking down the barrel, I cannot recollect what it is that I had so much to say back then. Staring back at the faded pencil on the fragile nicotine-stained paper, I try to memorize what those smudged lines what once meant to me.

Those pages hold their place on my burdened bookshelves, full of words I have never read nor care to revisit. I keep books that I haven’t read and give away the ones that don’t mean a damn to me.

I want a bound book with my name on it. I want to be a novelist but I chastise myself for having no plot, no strategy in life. These handwritten musing hold little court for greatness; one needs an editor. Teenager sorrows are plenty and now as an adult, I feel my peers and I are all struggling for the next rung. Things have not changed so I leave those unread words for rainy days that have past and have yet to come.

If I wrote in red ink now, it’d be a pen and not my blood. It was good to be unaffected, but if only for a minute. I thought I was different, I thought I’d be no different, but even as so much I have not changed, I still view my contaminated world through an altered lens. I cannot cross out the mistakes in my life, there is no backspace, no CNRL+ALT+DEL in the real world. I cannot ‘photoshop’ the flaws out of my memory.

If I had to rewrite what I wrote then, I wonder what I would paraphrase about my past, my permutations, my permanence and my past. Would I be able to explain the frustration of my self? Would I card catalogue and cross-reference my miseries?

Kung Pao

There is a little Asian lady that lives in my apartment building. Sometimes in the mornings or the evenings I see a car picking her up or dropping her off from work. Sometimes I see her in her housecoat, smoking. As she smiles and gives a little wave to me, I wonder where she works and the particulars of her life. There are some Sundays I see a woman my age, most likely a daughter, drop her off in the middle of the afternoon. They unload utensils and big pots and I imagine her and her family folding sheets of wonton wrappers over steamy little meatballs and wonder what this tastes like. They speak to each other in a frantic dialect I can’t even begin to understand. There are no subtitles in real life, and even if there were my senses can’t comprehend the symbols that pour out of their mouths.

My stereotypical self thinks that she may work at a laundry and remember that I need to clean my scarf. Instead, I decide it’s more crucial to give my fish a bath. They are my babies and just as someone would talk to a cat or a small dog, I speak to them in the morning as I am dressing, promising them food when I get home from my own menial job and that if they would die, I would cry for them.

When I finally decided to clean their water (this is what I call giving them their bath), I am angry with them and my tears mix with the fresh water. If I were really a mother, I feel I wouldn’t be kind but rather rough with my offspring, crying tears with them because I am frustrated to have to look out for this small being when I can’t even take care of myself. I imagine my mother-ish self as the typical Jewish mother (even though I am not Jewish nor pay credence to any other religion), seemingly overbearing but in the end just wanting a better life than this fish bowl I’ve know all of my life.

My "sound opinion" Experience

I decided to brave the rain and the snow to attend the Sound Opinions College Tour's first stop at Columbia College and here are my notes:

1. The music industry is going through a seismic change (the guys say this happens about once every 100 years) so now is the time to reinvent positions within. While technological revolutions cause people to cry "foul," each turn tends to stick around. In the advent of recording, naysayers said the population would stop turning out for live music, but this did not turn out to be the case.

2. Because of these technological changes, there is an opportunity for the "musical middle class." Many great artists are the work by day, play by night variety e.g. Effigie's drummer is a prosecutor (citation needed) and the drummer for Wilco gives lessons to young hopefuls. While these guys have day jobs, they still bring in fans and audiences to their shows.

3. This being said, they do not rely on the "majors" to market and produce their work. Instead, they work smaller labels. While one major may rely on blockbuster artists to bring in revenue, many smaller labels can produce many "little" artists --> if each of these is equitable, it could prove to be profitable for the label.

4. Children + Ipods = Disposable Music: This may not be as bad as it sounds since more music can be heard this way. Yeah, yeah, these kids listen to Rhianna's "Umbrella" 15,000 times in a row, but they get tired of it and move on to the next biggest hit. If an artist is good enough on a little label, they could be the next biggest thing.

5. If you want your music to be heard, don't pass out those tired demo tapes but instead e-mail reviewers with a direct link to your single. It will be easily accessible and will grab his attention. For good measure, include an interesting story to accompany this song.

6. Don't expect the artist to do all the work, they're too busy making art. There will always be a need for a band manager to book, do accounting and the likes (hey, call me! i'm up for it!)

7. Speaking of art... there are always those die hard fans that will buy anything GG Allin pooped on e.g. if a member paints a picture, designs a clothing line, knits a scarf or stiches a quilt, it could equal revenue

8. And finally, give the piano man a tip. If you think his worth it, say so.

In Dreams

I often wake myself up in the middle of a dream because I am trying to control it too much and it feels like I am reading a book. A stranger in my dream is doing some sort of activity and I am writing her every move and beautiful prose of her thoughts. Anyone who is lauded for their writing says their trick is too keep a notebook by their bed and write down their good ideas if they have one in the middle of the night. I feel this takes too much energy. I’m trying to sleep, dammit, and if I’m going to get up to turn on the light, I may as well just go type it and give up any hope of sleeping. By the time this happens, that prose has disappeared and only incomplete, incoherent sentences remain.

When I am watching a movie about a writer, fictional or not, they are often alcoholic, suicidal, crazy or a combination of the three. I wonder if to be a famous, interesting writer I have to be the same and if I already am, then why have I not reached my star in the sky yet. Then I remember after my kind of psychosis follows apathy and laziness, the ability to write a complete sentence but no good ideas to write about.

On one particular night of self, I found myself watching what was probably my one hundred thousandth syndicated episode of the longest running television series in history. Tom Wolfe was making an animated cameo of himself, which was strange because earlier that day I had been telling my co-worker she’d enjoy his writing. When ever I watch this episode #384, I can’t help but to feel jealous of the downtrodden barkeeper’s poem, “Howling at a Concrete Moon.” I think it is better than anything I’ve ever written and his was meant to be funny.

There was I time I couldn’t sleep for weeks and in the pitiful minutes I lapsed in and out of consciousness, I would find myself with the overwhelming desire to check the floor by the door for a “dear Jane” letter to myself. If I were to write it what would it say? “I’m sorry but…” the letter would trail off because I would already know what I was thinking, feeling about this mess I’m in. The thing is, though, I don’t want to write a dear jane letter to myself. I want someone else to write it to me so I have an excuse to feel abandoned, to know the reason is it’s him, not me, who doesn’t have the desire to make this work, that my tortured writer’s soul has come between us.