Don't Hang Noodles On My Ears

Here are some English idiomatic expressions and what I believe to be their Russian equivalents. At least, these are my guesses. I'll have the real answers, if they differ from mine, in a bit. Venture your own guesses at Dave's blog.

Inappropriate Therapy Dream

Dreamt that I was in a therapy session, which was also a performance review, with my client and my supervisor. My client was my ex-girlfriend N. She reported to us that the therapy had been enjoyable and productive so far, to her surprise. Relieved at this news, I then proceeded to tell my client/ex that it was time for us to start talking about termination, since it's clear that I should no longer be her therapist. I was nervous about "breaking up" with her in this way, and she was a little upset, but nothing unmanageable.

After she left the office, my supervisor and I chatted lightly and she revealed that she had previously done therapy with N.'s current partner. She then showed me cards she'd received for her birthday, a card from my friend Mag with pressed, dried sunflowers in it, and a card from my friend B. with pressed, dried tulips in it. As many of you no doubt are aware, Mag and B. themselves are a long-ago broken up ex-couple. And, as you can imagine, neither of them know my supervisor in "real life."

Venture some interpretations, dear readers?

Vintage Bree: Nagel and Me

My fascination with the gaudy and über-'80s lithographs of Patrick Nagel started in about 1990 when I was known to frequent, frequently, a now-bygone coffee house in San Jose called The Phoenix. I've wanted to write about the Phoenix for years, and I may yet get around to an installment of Vintage Bree about the history of cafés-past in my life, but the thing that is germane to this story is that the upstairs of the Phoenix was lined with dozens of framed Nagel prints. The aesthetic of the café was generally more palatable than that, with minimal décor and ample seating, but for some reason, the upstairs was crowded with Nagels. This prompted B. and I to write a song about them called "Women on the Walls," in which we extolled the eerie omnipresence of Nagel's women in the café and imagined the highly dramatic stories of their lives. The song, earnest only in its minor chords, a total product of our collective early-twenties angst, became a camp classic among our friends for many years. It even utilized Berkeleyan principles (ripped naïvely from the Western philosophy class I was taking at the junior college at the time) in a refrain presenting the Women and then flippantly erasing them from consciousness with the bat of a heavily mascara'd eye. While the song remained a party trick for a number of years, it faded into obscurity just like other songs I'd written with friends from that era, many penned at the Phoenix, until B. and I had a rare opportunity to showcase it in public.

It was November of 1997, and Mag & Ana had organized Nagel Night at Trannyshack, the local irreverent underground drag club. The ode included many fabulous performers lip-synching to Eighties songs, arty send-ups of Nagel's portraits, and even a (very tasteful!) dramatic reenactment (lovingly rendered by our friend Dingo Chan) of Patrick Nagel's tragically ironic death scene (he had died in 1984 of a heart attack after doing 15 minutes of cardiovascular exercise in a charity event for the American Heart Association). Take a moment to absorb that last sentence, please.

B. and I, not in drag, nor Eighties pancake makeup, nor lip-synching, were a bit oddball in this clamour of oddness. It was the two of us on stage, with my acoustic guitar, singing this sort of hippy dirge in our very untrained voices. And now, at long last, for the first time ever at Toothpick Labeling, I present to you the original song, newly recorded in crystal clear digital!



It was quite a happening. But, dear readers, there is so much more to the story, if it can be believed! The very next day, a foggy November day it was, found me canvassing (I worked for the Peace Organization back then) in a modest neighborhood in Pacific Grove, a quaint seaside town just south of Monterey. It was my charge to find new supporters and renew the members of the Org that lived in the neighborhood. I was excited to speak with a gentleman that evening who had given $100 to the canvasser last year, and knocked fervidly at the door of his tiny bungalow apartment. The man of the house answered the door, a pale, gaunt, bespectacled guy, pleasant to talk to. As we discussed the current campaigns of the Organization from his doorway, I caught glimpses of the tiny apartment in the background. Every surface in the place was piled with papers and used dishes and scattered pieces of electronic equipment and half empty bottles of Zima and I'm sure lots of other stuff I can't remember or even fabricate for you now. The one thing that I remember with absolute clarity was perched on the coffee table among all this clutter: a white ceramic Nagel coffee mug.

I said, "Is that a Nagel coffee mug?" He replied with interest that it was, and asked me about my knowledge of Nagel. Right away I could tell that I had to keep my snooty "so bad it's good" attitude about Nagel in check. He regaled me with stories of his avid collecting and his admiration for the artwork of this master lithographer. I relayed to him the story of "Women On The Walls," and my experience of performing it in San Francisco the night before, and he was enthralled. Then, he showed me his Pride and Joy. Rolling up his shirt sleeve, he revealed one of Nagel's Women tattooed on his left bicep.

Full of awe at the synchronicity of the cosmos, I renewed his membership at $250.00 and walked off into the Monterey mist.

Today is Patrick Nagel's birthday. He would have been 63.

___________________________
Women On The Walls ©1990/2008 astrobarry & bree (with many thanks to Cisco for his engineering prowess and to B. for being there. For all of it.)

What's in a name?

I've been asked a bunch of times why this blog is called "Toothpick Labeling." I should really give credit where it's due finally and explain that it comes from a scene in the influential Richard Linklater film Slacker, in which a man ("Happy-Go-Lucky Guy") wanders into a diner and encounters an emotionally disturbed woman ("Traumatized Yacht Owner") muttering to herself:

TRAUMATIZED YACHT OWNER
...you should, you should, you, you should never traumatize a woman sexually--I should know, I'm a medical doctor. You should never, traumatize, you should never name things in order...

CRANKY COOK
Hey, cool it down over here.

The Happy-Go-Lucky Guy is perplexed by this all but just sits there. He quietly leans over to observe the lady until she once again focuses her attention on him.

TRAUMATIZED YACHT OWNER
...Toothpicks, toothpicks, toothpick labeling...

It's a bit of dialogue that has long captured my imagination, though admittedly, I'd always sort of glossed over the psychological import of this woman's damaged disposition. I'd rather been drawn by the obsessive quality of the concept of the labeling of toothpicks. How does one label a toothpick, anyway? It seems a brain-breaking exercise destined for failure. The idea of it reflects the myopic detail-orientation of a personal blog, at least one that I would author, and when it came time for me to begin my writings at Blogger after making my online journaling home at Diaryland for three years, it rose somehow from the deep reaches of my neocortex as a suitable name for the new venture. I think it's turned out to be rather apt.

Vintage Bree: The Cult Meeting

This is not a timely post, but the anecdote came up a while ago, and I realized I really needed to blog it. This prompts me to think about other classic Bree Lore that may be included in the blog over time. So let's call this the first installment of Vintage Bree.

So in the summer of 1994, AstroB, Lola, and I were trying to amuse ourselves in downtown Santa Cruz. We were walking around on a beautiful sunny day, some of us stoned, when we passed by the local library branch. A flyer posted on the bulletin board outside the library caught our attention. It said:
It was advertising a community meeting in which we would find out the fate of the human race! How could we not go?

We entered the meeting room at the library. It was packed with students and townies, maybe fifty or so, and at the front of the room was a panel of men and women, all around middle age, all white, all with shorn hair, most wearing fleece sweatshirts. They said they were the "Away Team" sent by their leaders, Ti and Do (pronounced "Doe," like "Doe, a deer") to educate us about how we could leave our "Earthly shells" and move on to the "Next Evolutionary Level Above Human."

I've given something away in that last link, but for those of you still scratching your heads, yes, we had stumbled upon a Heaven's Gate cult meeting three years before they would make headlines as the largest group suicide on U.S. soil. The shit they were talking about was weird, but it didn't occur to us, or apparently to anyone else in the meeting, that this was a suicide cult. There were definitely people there for the same reasons we were: to gawk, to be amused. And there were people who were dead serious and listened to the Away Team like they were speaking the direct word of God.

There was unfortunately at least one woman at that meeting who would go on to join Heaven's Gate and kill herself along with her fellow cult members at Rancho Santa Fe on March 26, 1997. Her name was Gail Maeder, a woman in her late twenties from Sag Harbor, New York. One of my friends in Santa Cruz had grown up with her.

One of the men we saw at the recruitment meeting in Santa Cruz who later took his own life in the group suicide.

So, back at the meeting at the Santa Cruz library, you can imagine the kinds of rumblings that were going on in the audience. The Away Team likened their leader, Marshall Applewhite to Moses and Jesus (though not to Mohammed). Not only that, they insisted that these religious prophets were direct representatives from the Next Level, sent to Earth to recruit humans in their time, just like Do was. I scrawled a note to B. – "Did 'the next level' send any representatives to Earth before the Judeo-Christian era? Or to Africa, the Far East, S. America, etc.?" We snickered. Apparently most of the world's population, the poorest people, incidentally, were not ready to evolve.

They kept going on about how when the comet Hale-Bopp arrived, we would know it's the time to depart our earthly existence aboard a great spaceship. They talked about what we would encounter when we got to the Level Above Human: there would be no war and no suffering. It was a realm beyond temporal and spatial reality as we knew it. It was beyond the realm of the sexual, and when we joined the Next Level, we would no longer need our bodies (a.k.a. our "earthly shells") or feel sexual desire (and, no, they didn't happen to mention that many of the male cult members had elected to castrate themselves, possibly an elaborate and ugly manifestation of Marshall Applewhite's shame about his own homosexuality.)

At this point in the talk, a woman stood up from the audience. She was someone I had encountered in town many times before, a local eccentric-with-a-capital-E named Elana Smith who went by the moniker "Clitora Cummings." Anyone who's lived in Santa Cruz in the last thirty years probably has a story about Clitora (you can meet her for yourself in this video interview). She stood up at the repetition of the mantra about the Next Level being a "non-sexual realm" and shouted to all who could hear, "Fuck this shit! I'm gonna go get LAID!" and, most appropriately, she stormed out of the room.

Maybe she saved some lives that day.

Crazy Spam

This one made me laugh out loud: Angelina Jolie set to destroy own vagina!

In other spam-related news, I keep getting these horrible ones that say, That's an ugly face you have there, Bree! Do advertizers really think I'm gonna click on a message that's insulting me?

Pot Makes You Dumb

Before DJ and I got stoned tonight, we were discussing Modernism vs. Postmodernism, shifting subjectivities, and the narrative of the detective and psychoanalytic theory.

Now we're playing the ghetto down-home country version of "jenga" and talking about 1970's French cartoon "The Barbapapas."

DJ points out that when at first we were talking about the construction of memory in a sociocultural way, now we are bringing it to the personal. Indeed, he says that the social and the personal are constituents of one another.

Words for B.M.

"Game Night" at E-Dawg's tonight. I just got home. It's 4:00 AM - no shitting.

Speaking of "shitting," we played the Parlour Game for hours this evening. The crowd at the party were prone to making pretty much everything about sex or bodily functions. The Parlour Game is simple, and usually I've played it with my family on our annual retreat in Monterey. It's a friendly game in which you sit in a circle of folks and take turns thinking of categories. A category is chosen, a 2-minute timer is set, and everyone brainstorms as many things as they can think of in said category. Let's say the category is "Tom Cruise movies" - we all have 2 minutes to come up with as many of 'em as possible, i.e. Top Gun, Rain Man, Risky Business, The Outsiders, Losin' It, etc. Scoring is similar to the game "Boggle"; you get a point for every unique answer, and answers you share with other players are crossed off your list. Anyway, as I was saying, I usually play this game with my family, so it tends to be a pretty much P.G. affair. This evening at E-Dawg's was a bit different. The first category someone picked was "sex toys" which ended up lasting like forty-five minutes in itself (we didn't time the first few rounds - just went around and around the circle for more answers.) Then when we started writing down answers in timed rounds, we did "Ways to say 'having sex'," "Euphemisms for masturbation," and the crowd pleaser, "Words for having a bowel movement." Favorites for that round were "laying pipe," and "voiding the colon." Um, yeah. When I next play the Parlour Game with the family, I'm gonna be so bored when categories like "Beatles songs" and "household appliances" come up.

I can't believe it's 4:30 AM.

Ambrosia of the Devil

The shit is dangerous, people. Dangerous! We made crêpes this weekend, and someone brought the chocolaty, nutty goodness, and I've been eating spoonfuls of it for the last three days. A brilliant way to kick off the holiday gluttony--I'll gain ten pounds by Thanksgiving.

In portliness,
Bree

TMBG

Saw They Might Be Giants at the Fillmore tonight with Astrid and DJ. It was my first time seeing them, but both of them have seen the band numerous times before, DJ claiming he's seen them "more than 15 but less than 20" times. I dunno how impressive the show was to DJ, ever the malcontent, but I thought they were pretty fantastic. Highlights were Ana Ng, Doctor Worm, and Mr. Me, complete with a bitchin' horn section. In some ways, their showmanship is rather carnivalesque, which totally fits them as a band. At one point, they did this shtick where they received "phone calls from the dead," putting a mic up against a projection screen showing a cartoon cemetery. The call they got was allegedly from television's Jerry Orbach, but as the skit progressed, the caller turned out to be a Jerry Orbach impersonator, also dead, mind you, but a charlatan nonetheless. Wacky wacky.

TMBG is yet another of those bands out there that I've always loved, but never got around to following closely or owning much of their stuff. I'm only really familiar with their first three albums (the self-titled album, Lincoln, and Flood); then I stopped paying attention. But they've got a seriously large oeuvre. I'm probably not going to delve much deeper at this late date, but I'm really happy to have seen them live finally. They are some good fun.

The Flying Meatball Incident

On Monday night, after a lovely Memorial Day party* chez Mr. & Mrs. C and baby Pez, Astrid and I biked home through the Mission and decided to get dinner at Emmy's Spaghetti Shack. Neither of us had ever been before, and it was totally worth the hype. It's not the most extraordinary food you'll ever eat, but they serve really tasty, fresh grub, inventive drinks, and the space itself is really cozy. You've gotta get there super early to get a table, though. We'd tried before, and the line was out the wazoo. Anyway, Astrid got the pea soup with mint (deelish), a lavender martini, and a salad with arugula and speck (which neither of us had ever heard of, but A. wisely surmised the German origin of the name of this lovely, smokey cured meat). I got the spaghetti and meatballs, 'cause I'd heard their meatballs rock. And it turns out they are mighty nice, indeed, packed with lots of fresh chopped onions and garlic, and the spaghetti comes topped with a rich, tangy marinara sauce and lots of freshly grated Parmesan and minced parsley.

As I'm trying to be more mindful these days of how much food I shove down the gullet, I had a decent amount of leftovers, which the hipster waitress kindly packed for me in a Chinese take-out box. We wrapped the bill and departed, making our way through the crowd and out to our bikes. Before unlocking, I realized I'd left the leftovers on the table, and went back in to fetch them. The hipster waitress said, "It happens all the time," as she wiped the box off, having retrieved it for me from the garbage. I figured that if I get E.coli, it's my own damned fault. I put the box in my bike basket and we set off for home.

Not two blocks away from the restaurant, Astrid and I made a left off of Mission, and I hit a pothole. The take-out box went flying, and as I looked behind me out the corner of my eye, I saw the leftover meatball pop out of the carton, arch through the air, and bounce onto the pavement. Guess I didn't need the extra calories or potential E.coli infection.

xo
Bree


*B and I were expecting a Memorial Day Barbeque, not just a "party" featuring tamales and seven-layer bean dip. Not that the tamales and dip and mojitos weren't excellent, but, y'know, where's the *beef*? Oh yeah, it flew off my bike.