practice

By the time I kissed someone I liked, I was good at it. Pillows, posters of Peter Frampton, record albums with David Cassidy on their covers don’t kiss back, but you can press your lips against them with force or gentleness. You can make your mouth a powerhouse. Kiss your forearm, though, and you can imagine the give of another’s lips. Practice that. Kissing feels as good as being kissed. This is both.

This week, Rob Brezsny’s spiritual advice to those born under the sign of ADD (Libra, if you didn’t know) is to embrace quality over quantity. Sometimes—with the exception of having babies and infections—quality emerges from quantity.

Practice.

Practice isn’t a devil. It’s what separates the good from the great. I don’t need to prove anything, don't write about studies and such, but if I did, I would point to a particular book about what separates world-class performers from everybody else.

To become a better musician—whether you have natural talent or not—you work at it, and that means finding the time to practice. And practicing means doing. You play. You repeat the same song over and over until your wife or daughter or mother or dog wants to strangle you with your guitar strap or whack you on the head with the microphone.

If you’re a photographer, you take more pictures. You pose your dog, your daughter. You fidget with the lighting, her hair, his one floppy ear, the backdrop. You take the same picture 47 times until it’s exactly the picture you saw before you began.

Why do doctors practice medicine? Why do lawyers practice law?

If you’re a writer like I am, you write more: a story, a letter, a poem, sentences. You edit the words. You massage them. You fuck with them until they are sore and tired and smoking beside you on the bed.

On April 1st, because it was the start of National Poetry Month, I started practicing poetry again. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought like a poet for any length of time. I write nonfiction and advertising—in both my day work and my freelance life. The first can be poetic, but it doesn’t teach economy. The second is economical, but it’s rarely poetic.

Poems are not stories with random or even planned line breaks. They aren’t born like babies (though they are sometimes emotionally painful)—all perfect, if a little wet and icky. They would need more than to be cleaned up: chiseled, sculpted, molded, rearranged, cut, dissected, tortured. Even my happiest poems need to ache a little.

For the last ten days, I’ve written about a poem a day. I share them on Facebook but not publicly, in case there’s a chance I can torture them into a publishing opportunity. But it’s not, as some have surmised, about quantity. It’s about practice and discipline and the hard work of thinking in precise, power-packed words. They’re like astronaut food. They’re like the little sponges before they take on water and become bathtub dinosaurs.

The words I use in poems need to combine to form a drug. You need to blister a little while you read it. The last line should give you some euphoria. Or some despair. I want you to wonder when the next one will arrive. No, to crave it.

We don’t need to be the best at what we do. But we should always want to be better at doing it.

I never did kiss the real Peter Frampton or the real David Cassidy. I’m still practicing, but I think I’m ready.



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("Kissback Bob" CD manipulation by Steve Parke)

chain reaction: shop locally

Before you go shopping for that special gift for someone you love or like or are obligated to lavish with pretend affection, ask yourself, first, whether it will be truly special and, second, where your money might do you the most good. You’ll no doubt give some to Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, and you may have a significant portion of your purchases delivered to your door in boxes marked Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Target and Walmart will also catch you coming and going more times than you’d like to admit.

But the chains don’t need you like you need you.

If you can shop in your neighborhood—whether it’s for groceries or liquor or flowers—do it. If there’s a jewelry shop or a camera store or tiny burger joint near your house, buy something there. Because here’s what happens when you stay in your neck of the woods: your house retains its value.

It works like this: open, busy shops attract people, and people deter crime. Buildings are less likely to become vandalized and are more likely to become fixed immediately if they do. Bustling commercial areas in small neighborhoods make those neighborhoods appealing to potential home buyers, especially those with families. Your house—just up the street from a coffee shop, book store, hip happening hairdresser, hardware store, restaurant, pub, and fabulous boutique—retains its value—not only monetarily but personally. Your quality of life is vastly improved by community. (And remember Snowmageddon? It's a lot less dismal when you can walk to a place that's open because the owners walked there, too.)

I’ve heard before from people—even those with a good deal of disposable income—that they don’t get as great a “value” from shopping locally; that is, the books cost a little more. But when I buy a book at the Red Canoe, I visit with my neighbors and friends, chat with the owners, taste a sample of the newest muffin, and get a cup of coffee that’s roasted so locally I can smell it from my house. I learn the latest neighborhood news (and scuttlebutt, which is a little more fun). I am treated like a person, and that makes me feel good. I give my money to a friendly college student with good taste in music and a knack for making a killer sandwich. That, my friends, is value, and it radiates for blocks. It’s what the credit card company means by “priceless.”

If you’re not lucky enough to have a strip of independent stores in your neighborhood, come to mine. All up and down Harford Road you can find things that are truly special, one-of-a-kind items that no one else owns.


Studio C Jewelry & Gifts
410-444-7979
4337 B Harford Road
10-5 T-Sat., 10-3 Sun
like them on Facebook

Constance Scott makes gorgeous beaded and tin jewelry and accessories, and she carries some of the coolest stuff around: letter hooks; pearl pens; bottle stoppers with golf balls and antique door knobs; funky locally-created clothing (made by converting two items into a single unique top or skirt!); magnets; hats; soaps; a whole line of gorgeous serving items from Swirl; and so much more. How can you resist a $4 package of the strongest magnets in the world or fancy bookmarks that fit in your daughter's stocking? You can’t leave without finding something special for someone special.


The Red Canoe
410-444-4440
4337 Harford Road
7-5 T-Sat., 9-3 Sun.

Betty White may have put the fun back into talking about muffins, but Peter Selhorst put the fun back into eating them. They are the best muffins anywhere. If you want a sweet muffin, pick the cranberry chocolate chip or everyone’s favorite coffee cake muffin. Maybe you want a hot, crusty muffin, with spinach and cheese, gently heated and slathered with butter. (Dare I say "moist"?)

But Red Canoe is more than the sum of some of its muffins. It’s coffee and soups and sandwiches (try the Zacker—a grilled force of panini to be reckoned with). And, of course, it's books—for kids and grownups, with a huge selection of local authors' books. (Rumor has it that the Red Canoe carries a certain someone’s calendars, too.) Nicole and Peter support authors and artists as book-signing-party hosts, sellers, and wall-art displayers.


Koco’s Pub
410-426-3519
4301 Harford Road

For the universe’s best crab cakes, with all jumbo lump and rarely a speck of filler, it’s Koco’s. Joanna, the owner, once told me she used a loaf of bread per twenty pounds of crab. If you find a piece of it, save it; it’s a little like finding a pearl in an oyster. Koco’s is on my speed dial.


The Chop Shop
410-426-2300
4329 Harford Road

You need cool hair? Baby, she’s got cool hair. Visit Our Coiffed Lady of the Locks, Lisa Hawks, for hip happenin’ hairdos and trusty tresses that will make you the belle of any holiday ball. And you get some spicy shop talk, too.


Beth’s DIY
443-708-0786
4321 Harford Road

Hey, just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean you don’t need a key made or a window rescreened. Beth knows what she’s doing, and she can show you, too.



The Chameleon Café
410-254-2376
4341 Harford Road
5-9 T-Thurs, 5-10 Fri.-Sat.

Steak and lamb and scallops and vegetarian dishes and charcuterie—nothing in this restaurant is short of delightful. The space is sweet, and the food is as local and in season as it can possibly be. Brenda and Jeff Smith have created a heavenly foodie haven that’s been applauded by all the local magazines and newspapers. There’s even a prix fixe menu for those of us whose income is broken!


Lou’s Liquors
4516 Harford Road
410-426-5645

Lou’s has a good selection of craft beers (and the usual crap beers, for those who like that sort of thing), as well as big jugs of Manischewitz. It’s also great for Lotto, cigarettes, and shorties.


Up the Road

Further north up Harford Road, you can find other hunks of awesomesauce:
· Zeke's Coffee (4607 Harford Road) has those fabulous, roasted-right-here (in the alley between the Chameleon and Safeway) beans and lots of coffee-related merch;
· Lakein's Jewelers (5400 Harford Road) for watch repairs and sterling chains and an ear piercing (really? you'd let a teenager from Claire's pierce your kid's ears?);
· Clementine (5402 Harford Road) for the yummy sandwiches and meals and fancy cocktails (best: chicken salad with havarti and lemon jam);
· Hamilton Vacuum (5421 Harford Road—buy it here once or repair the ones you didn't buy here each year;
· Hamilton Arts Collective (5440 Harford Road), because art is essential, not optional;
· Big Bad Wolf's House of Barbecue (5713 Harford Road) for your big bad appetite for barbecue;
· Shockers Smoke Shop (7110 Harford Road), for all your bong needs;
· Fenwick Bakery (7219 Harford Road) for donuts, cake, and pie (my husband buys a dozen cinnamon bismarcks here every week!);
· a strip of antique shops;
· Mueller’s Delicatessen (7207 Harford Road), for German goodies;
· Dead Freddies (7209 Harford Road) to watch the game while eating their shrimp salad on pretzel bread—best I've ever had;
· Home Discount Tile Center (7350 Harford Road) (a little like a car dealership, but more colorful).

Get your Christmas tree at the fabulous Walther Gardens, 4715 Walther Avenue (and, in the summer, Baltimore's Best Snowball, with ice cream on the bottom, thick chocolate syrup in the middle, and marshmallow on top; shop in the greenhouse, too, for herbs, annuals, and veggie plants). Those people are so nice, and their dog is good.

Move over to Old Harford Road, and find cool stick candies, wreaths, and greens at Poor Boys. Then get your Christmas facial and brow pluck from the beautiful and divine Gina at Giuseppe's (also in my speed dial—2616 Taylor, 410-665-4490). Finally, because you're gonna need it after all that shopping, ask for some Resurrection at the Liquor Pump (8535 Old Harford Road, 410-668-1820), and tell owner Harry Mehta that Leslie the Beer Goddess sent you. It's one of the nicest liquor stores ever, with a huge variety of fancy craft beer. The place holds tastings, too, so look for them on Facebook.

You don't have to be rich to shop locally, but if you shop locally, you will be rich. It's in the cards. If you don't trust me, go have them read at this place at the corner of Overland and Harford, between your rockin' crab cake and your bitchin' hairdo.

yippie! hissssssss! hooray!

*note: this blog is messed up in Safari—don't know why!

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. ~Gertrude Stein

I navigated to my blog from a site about whether shaving makes hair grow back heavier. I had to prove to my husband that it doesn't, that it's merely an illusion because the hair becomes blunted at the ends and because it softens as it lengthens.

I spend a lot of time at the computer. Sometimes I'm looking up stupid stuff like that to tell my husband, who, without it, would probably still believe that hair grows faster after you cut it, or I look up lyrics, a news headline, the source of a quote. Other times, I'm writing or processing photos or chatting with friends, as if they are right in the next cubicle. Only I'm not exactly "working."

I am an artist. Saying that gives me the creeps; it scares me. Because artists, as you know, are unemployable, and it's sort of why I'm sitting here at the computer at 8:07 a.m. on a Thursday instead of getting ready for work.

In between sending out résumés and CVs for jobs like art director and English professor, which are sparse (which means the space between is long), I make stuff. I flit from the camera to the guitar to the manuscript like a butterfly, lingering a time over each thing until I'm satisfied I've sucked it dry, mined it for everything worth taking.

Because my employment frustration could easily occupy my day, I decided to give myself something to do, some artistic diversion to participate in when the laundry was done and the kitchen floor was swept. And that's how I came to win a photo challenge—Survivor: Flickr Island—with five very different photos. I made the best shots of my life. And when that was over last week, I joined a photo class with weekly assignments. Every day, I work a little more on the chapter for my book proposal. I send queries and write poems and songs. I flit.

Last week, I tapped into my home equity line of credit so that I could buy groceries. Because I am an artist.

Right now, I have nothing to do but write and look for work, yet I feel an overwhelming guilt when I try to fill the day with things other than vacuuming and laundry. I rarely pull out my guitar anymore, even for that quick few minutes in the early morning with my coffee. And when I forget my situation and buy a six-dollar t-shirt at Target, I have a panic attack. But when I use the computer for my avocations, it's free. And it's productive. And sometimes it turns into a gig—a photo publication credit in a real magazine (this shot, for the California version of Family), a book review, a portrait job for a friend.

And it feels good. Yesterday, at about 4:30, the wind kicked up outside and began to twirl the rusty pink garden ornament hanging from my Douglas fir. I took 32 stills of it as it swung in the breeze. I stitched them together to make an animated gif and liked it so much that I turned it into a movie. It took two hours, and my husband complained, even though he was gone most of the time, even though I'd stopped while he was walking the dogs to make his dinner salad, cut up veggies for Hendrix the Creature (my daughter's bearded dragon), and would pick up my daughter from soccer. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, he says. I'm always on the computer.

And I'm sure it's not good for me. It cuts down on my attention span and makes me agitated when I'm away from it, like an addiction. It makes me sit far too much. It keeps my house dirty. But it's also just about the only thing I do right now that feels good. I have a sense of accomplishment when I see something through from concept to construct. So even without pay, there's a reward.

While I was making my video, I added some music. And when it was finished, I decided it needed something else—the sound of wind, some whoooosh to run through it as it faded to black. And that's when it hit me that I needed some applause. I tacked it on the second half of the video so that it would linger through the fade to black. The applause made me giddy. Every time I hear the audience clapping, I feel as though they are clapping for this thing blowing in the breeze, this thing I made, and, by extension, for me.

My friend Jennifer asked: what if we had this in our heads all the time? Every time we did something right, the applause would start. Every time we did something we shouldn't—like eat a cookie—the audience would boo. Would it make us think more about the things we do every day?

And what if I'm sitting here on the computer, doing nothing, waiting for the stroke of genius to come? Would they cheer or jeer?

Would they cheer for proving my husband wrong about the hair? Or would they boo, because they thought he was right? Would they clap for me as I sit here this morning, writing an essay in my blog, practicing a craft for which I am sometimes handsomely paid? Or would they blow raspberries at the waste of time?

Would they applaud the laundry and the pile of dog hair swept out the door and the made beds and the chili dinner and the washed dishes but hiss when I pulled out the guitar?

Is it an audience of disappointed, overworked spouses or an audience of artists?

Does the audience have its priorities straight?