bitterfig

My brother-in-law Dean’s concert on the 23^rd was really excellent.  It was at Davenports, a piano bar on Milwaukee Ave. in my old hood Wicker Park

 

This was the first time I’d really heard him sing except for two songs-- “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “Spooky” (you know the one… “Love is kind of crazy with a spooky little girl like you.”)-- he performed at the wedding reception when he and my sister got married in November of 2001. 

 

I was really impressed.  He not only has a great voice; he’s also an incredibly expressive singer.  I actually found myself tearing up a couple of times during his show.  Music can do that to me.  I almost never cry over movies (or books, or television shows) unless I’m already really upset about something but sad songs absolutely kill me.  I remember when I was a little kid absolutely weeping over things like “Puff the Magic Dragon”, “Eleanor Rigby” and Kenny Rogers’ “I Wish that I could Hurt that Way Again”. 

 

Of course Dean’s too good a showman to go with too much depressing material and the bulk of his set was more upbeat songs but even these often included a degree of bitter melancholy.  Dean loves vocal pop and he’s really good at picking songs that sound cheerful but have a bite to their lyrics—stuff like “Angel Eyes” with its world weary refrain of “the drinks and the laughs are on me”.  

 

The first half of his set was stripped down, just Dean and a pianist.  The second half was mostly material from the CD he’s been working on for the last decade or so—a collection of songs about cities called King of the Road.  This time he was accompanied by his producer, who I can’t help thinking leans a little towards over production.  Some of his arrangements take the focus off Dean’s voice.  Still, I was really pleased with his rendition of “By the Time I Got to Phoenix” which is probably my favorite Burt Bacharach song. 

 

There were quite a few people I knew at the show-- parents from my niece and nephews’ school (which it was a fund raiser for), Dean’s family and some of his friends including Nick, who I had a disastrous one night stand with when I first came to Chicago after which he completely blew me off.  Malicious little bitch that I am I was pleased to note that he was looking bloated, middle-aged and burned out.  I found him not at all attractive.

 

Not that I was feeling very attractive myself even though I was all dressed up in my fishnets stockings and a black and red slip dress.  I was actually thinking that my huge fleshly legs probably looked ridiculous in the stockings but then during intermission Dean’s Aunt came up and said “You’re a very beautiful woman” which was completely unexpected and really made me feel good. 

 

During the show, I did order a glass of wine.  I only ended up drinking about half of it.  That was enough to make me feel relaxed but not too much so.   It was my first time drinking since last July and I feel like I handled it pretty well.

The program cover for Dean's concert-- the photo is by my sister Vienna

Dear me.

 

I’ve always been very lucky in that I’m one of the few members of my family who doesn’t suffer from seasonal allergies on a regular basis.  However there must be something in bloom right now that’s getting to me because for the last couple of weeks I’ve been having sinus trouble and itchy, watery eyes.  These symptoms can be taken care of with a small dose of over the counter allergy medicine but unfortunately even the minimal dosage of these little pink pills more or less puts me to sleep. 

 

When I am awake, I’ve been very lethargic and my brain hasn’t quite been functioning.  Still, I’ve managed to make it to work.  My goal is to get through at least the next paycheck (which will be three weeks) without missing a day.  That doesn’t seem like a lot but I don’t think I’ve managed to do it since March.   

 

I’ve got some fairly exciting things coming up in the next few days.  Tomorrow night I’m going to a class on spiritual healing that one of my co-workers (teammates in official store lingo) is giving.  While I’m very skeptical about the actual benefits of healing of this sort, it’s a long standing interest of mine.  Once upon a time I actually practice Reiki however bitter little anti-heroine that I am I quickly became disillusioned by all the self-delusion, phoniness, faux piety and general human failings that tend to go hand in hand with any kind of spiritual practice.  Still, I remain fascinated by the idea of somehow being able to heal by magic or will.  In stories I’m often drawn to healers.  Leetha from Elfquest is an early instance of this, Eli Sunday the (most likely false) faith-healer in There Will Be Blood probably the most recent example. 

 

On Friday, my brother-in-law Dean is going to be singing at a piano bar in Wicker Park I think he used to sing in public fairly often when he and my sister were first going out but then he shifted his energies to making a CD the production of which has been dragging on for years.  The only time I’ve ever heard him sing was at the wedding when he and my sister got married which was in 2001.  The concert is a benefit for my nephew’s school and the tickets are $50 but since I’m family I’ll be able to get in free. 

 

Because Dean deals horror/monster movie memorabilia most people expect his musical tastes to run towards Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie but actually he doesn’t like that kind of music at all.  He prefers retro crooners and vocal standards.  Singers like Sinatra, Tom Jones, Dean Martin, Burt Bacharach, Jack Jones, and Andy Williams are his big inspiration. 

 

I wasn’t able to trade shifts on the day of the concert so I’ll have to go straight from work, which is a bit of a drag,  but it should be fun. 

I’ve been reading Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which is essentially a biblical style mythology/history of Middle Earth.   It’s proving slow going on account of all the unfamiliar words—names of characters, races, and places.  Because of my learning disability I’ve never been able to “sound things out.”  Since I can’t do this my method of reading is based around recognizing common words and patterns of letters.  Words that I haven’t encounter before are pretty much lost on me so I have to repeatedly go back to figure out exactly what or who is being referred to. 

 

Not surprisingly I find myself being distracted by books that are, simply, easier to read. 

 

Last week I polished off A Ruby in the Smoke and A Shadow in the North, the first two (of four) Sally Lockhart Mysteries by notorious corruptor of children and enemy of the faithful Phillip Pullman (I’ll get into that in a later post).  While this series isn’t quite on the same level as Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy it was quite enjoyable.  They’re atmosphere heavy Victorian thrillers with plucky orphans, smart mouthed office boys, opium dens, illusionists, evil industrialists (Blake supposedly is a great influence of Pullman’s and I can tell when he describes the dark satanic mills of a factory  that makes weapons in A Shadow in the North) and murderers who go around cutting people’s throats.  They have well drawn characters and a bit of wry satire and social commentary thrown in as well. 

 

My holiday weekend reading was Laurie Lindeen’s memoir Petal Pusher, which recounts her days as a member of the early 1990’s all-girl indie band Zuzu’s Petals.  I was actually a fan of Zuzu’s Petals back in the day.  I still have a cassette of their first album “When No One’s Looking” kicking around somewhere and I’ll occasionally find myself quoting random snatches of their lyrics “God calls on the telephone, she has a temper…”  “Wish I may, wish I might find what I’m wishing for…” “Cinderella, you’re dreaming.  Wake up your conscience is screaming…” “Aye carrumba and I surrender and I guess it’s got something to do with my gender…”  So when I stumbled upon Petal Pusher at the Bucktown library I couldn’t believe my luck. 

 

Reading the cover blurb, I was rather shocked to learn that Lindeen has multiple sclerosis, a disease that I find especially baffling and frightening.  Also that she’s married to Westerberg from the Replacements which doesn’t mean a lot to me.  I was obsessive about indie and punk rock for many years but I only ever paid attention to the women.  As a result I’m intimately familiar with many obscure bands while there are Gods and giants I’ve never listened to.

 

Excited as I was to read Petal Pusher I ended up having pretty mixed feelings about the book.  It seemed sort of sloppily written, jumping between past, present and future through a sort of free-association that I couldn’t always follow.  Also it seemed like there were huge areas of her life Lindeen really didn’t want to go into.  Having MS was something she repeatedly states she didn’t want to think about and therefore seems to sort of side step the subject of living with her disease in favor of a lot of antidotes about life on the road and gossip about the Madison, WI and Minneapolis, MI rock scenes that seem sort of petty in comparison.  There were some good bits but overall I never got a sense that being a musician or a member of Zuzu’s Petals was something that was fulfilling to her and I honestly found myself wondering why she bothered.  I was kind of disappointed.

 

I found myself really disturbed by the section of the memoir where Lindeen describes having an abortion, particularly at the end of the scene where she writes about being picked up by her band mate who will be in the same situation in a few months.  Part of what bothers me is knowing that these are educated women in their late 20’s.  It seems like there are so many options available to them that they shouldn’t have to be having abortions.  Because as much as I support legalized abortion and the right to choice I’ve never been able to go along with the “it’s just a piece of tissue” argument.  I hate the idea of anyone having to go through something like that…  Maybe I’m just particularly sensitive about this issue right now because last week I gave a co-worker, a 20-year old girl, a ride and somehow she ended up telling me about how she’d had an abortion in June.  She works in a supermarket, lives with her parents, has taken a couple of college classes… It’s almost like Sophie’s Choice, you can have a child or you can have a future.  No one should have to make that kind of a decision.    

 

I never want to be in a position where I have to make that choice.  I’ve never been pregnant and if I can help it I’m never going to be. When I was with my ex-boyfriend I remember it was an area of contention between us that I used birth-control.  He was Catholic (though obviously selective in his morality as he was divorced and had two children by a woman he had never been married too, plus having non-marital sex with me plus being a liar) and considered it wrong that I was on the pill.  He was always telling me I was neurotic and that he’d never known any women who were as uptight about using birth control as I was.  He may have been partially right.  I have a lot of issues regarding bodily integrity and view becoming pregnant in a sort of David Cronenbergian manner.  Still, I don’t really see how it’s possible not to take something like birth control really seriously considering the consequences.  I know I can’t be a mother, I simply don’t have the resources emotionally or financially and the idea of having an abortion just seems very devastating to me. 

For someone who’s supposed to be watching their spending I’ve gone to way too many movies over the past couple days.  Eastern Promises on Thursday then on Sunday after I finished work on a whim I rode my bike to Landmark Century Cinema and caught a showing of Across the Universe.

 

Across the Universe is a musical about the 1960’s where the characters sing Beatles songs.  It’s gotten horrible reviews and the preview I saw several weeks ago kind of made me wince.  Still, I wanted to see it because I consider director Julie Taymor an audacious and original talent and I’ve really enjoyed her previous films Frida and Titus.  Plus I have a secret love of musicals. 

( Cut for spoilers )

For some reason I can not begin to fathom I was paid on September 29, then one week later (October 5) got a pay check for one week.  I will get my next check on September 19.  I can’t figure out if this is a good thing (getting a check after only one week) or a bad thing (living two weeks on a one week paycheck—though of course I still had part of the last paycheck left over.)  Either way it messes up my budgeting, which I have a certain way that doesn’t account for random one week pay periods.

 

On Friday I went to Andersonville (a neighborhood quite a ways to the northeast of where I live) to meet with one of the editors of a website interested in local journalism.  They’d contacted me back in August and I submitted a piece to them last month, an article about the Bucktown Arts Festival adapted from my journal.  They seemed interested in having me do more stuff for them but I sort of wanted to find out more about the site and what they were looking for just because it seemed rather sports heavy and also because with my two jobs I’m probably not going to be able to do articles very often. 

 

I got an idea of what the website is after—community based journalism about events that aren’t really being covered by larger news sources.  The editor said that it would be okay for me to write for them where I could, that they wouldn’t require weekly pieces or anything like that.  It’s okay to only write for them when something I’m interested in comes up and I have the time

 

They don’t pay, so I really don’t have the luxury of going out of my way to cover things for them but I would like to do some writing for the site.  It’s a good excuse to talk to people and since a lot of my co-workers at the market are artists, musicians or activists of various kinds it could also give me an opportunity to help them out with a bit of publicity. 

 

The meeting went well, but directly before it I had a rather upsetting (at least to me) incident.  The editor I was meeting was going to be out of the office and couldn’t get back till 3:30 p.m. and because the buzzer was broken he asked me to meet him outside.  I showed up early as usual and was standing by the door reading Mishama and minding my own business when a woman dragging along a huge suitcase came up and started talking at me. 

 

I really would have preferred to have kept reading my nice little book about fascism and homosexuality but I thought it would be simple common courtesy, one human being to another, to at least acknowledge this woman was standing there talking and not just tune her out or tell her to please fuck off.  So she spent about five minutes going on about how she was an educated woman and a word processing specialist and her sister and a EKG machine and how she was in an intensive outpatient program.  Eventually she finally got to the part where she asked for money.  I didn’t have any cash on me so I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any cash.”  She snapped back, “I’m sorry you wasted my time.”   So much for human courtesy, I guess the proper etiquette would have been to ignore her or tell her to go away. 

 

The office where I had my meeting was right next to the Andersonville Brown Elephant.  Brown Elephant’s are a series of thrift shops in Chicago run by the Howard Brown Heath Center, a GLBT health organization, so after my meeting I went in and looked around.  I didn’t really find anything I liked.  There was a book of zodiac images by the retro hipster artist Shag I wouldn’t have minded getting but it was fifty cents and the credit card limit was $10 and I really wasn’t lying when I told the lady I didn’t have any cash.  When I was there, it was mostly quite but when I was about to leave this old Billy Bragg song “Richard” started playing really loud. 

 

This is a song that fascinated me when I was in college because it seems to precise and detailed, as if it must be talking about an actual situation but I never could figure out what that situation was.  Like an overheard fragment of conversation, a window into someone’s life but you have no idea what you’re looking at.  I remember I actually wrote a story based on this song, trying to create a context for the lyrics. 

 

Hearing it again, echoing in the warehouse space of the Brown Elephant was a sort of odd experience.  It was so familiar and yet it’s been years since I’d listened to it.  I’d always been so focused on the lyrics I never realized that Billy Bragg does a lot of really strange things with his voice during the song, there are some very odd vocal inflections going on not to mention harsh guitar riffs.  Still, it’s the lyrics that really get to me.  My favorite lines-- “You helped me make this bed, but you won’t help me sleep in it.”  “Our Titanic love affair sails on the morning tide.” and “Do you think I only love you ‘cuz you sleep with other boys?” 

 

 

Maybe because I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again last week, when I heard the song this time the line about sleeping with other boys sort of reminded me of how Joel thinks that Clementine is unfaithful and promiscuous.  She denies it and both times I’ve watched the film I found myself believing her.  It always seemed to me like part of his fantasy of her as someone free in ways he will never be and also as someone he can be resentful towards.