she hearts guitars

When my daughter left the house this morning in her school uniform, she was carrying far too many things: a backpack, a hoodie, her lunch box, a 20-ounce water bottle dangling from the handle, a book, and a magazine. It wasn’t just any book, either; it was a heavy one, the sixth Harry Potter, which she reads voraciously. I looked at her, stuff in each hand, on her back, slung over her shoulder, and hanging off her head and thought how uncomfortable and bogged down she seemed. I wore a fanny pack exclusively for about twenty years (until I was robbed of it at gunpoint—another story) because I loathe carrying things. I wanted to relieve her of some less-necessary stuff, but it was all imperative.

The magazine leaving the house with her was the latest Musician’s Friend catalog, which we’d all given the slow once-over. Serena has read it again and again, always with vigor. On the first pass, she said, “Guess which guitar I want.” She’s been angling for an SG—Gibson, not Epiphone, because she’s a brand snob—but since we saw It Might Get Loud, she has eyes only for the double-neck. So I guessed right.

This morning, with all the stuff she carried, why did she add the burden of the catalog? “Because I like looking at guitars. I like dreaming about guitars,” she said, with the kind of fluttery-eyed ecstasy she used to reserve only for my cooking.

I think I’ve lost my daughter to rock and roll.

I am grateful that it’s only rock and roll (and I like it too). And though I know that in the not-distant-enough future, she could easily be making that face over a boy, I can see her on a Gretsch poster, hair and eyebrows ala Brooke Shields, with the caption: Nothing comes between me and my Hollow-body Electromatic.

Well, a mom can dream.

Serena’s first complete sentence, besides “Mommy, diaper, have it?” which she asked at the pediatrician’s office when he didn’t believe my fourteen-month-old child knew over 100 words (“OK, never mind, I believe you,” he said after the diaper sentence), was this: “Hi, boy, kiss you?” The first time she used it was in the Safeway, and she promptly chased the boy out of line, arms outstretched more like a zombie kissing machine than an awkward toddler.

My girl spent the rest of her first decade finding a way to hang with the boys. For the first five years, that meant eschewing Barbie dolls for Legos and trucks and creepy pirate-y toys with a billion pieces. For the next five, it meant never wearing a dress or her hair down. We had to shop in the boys’ department, or she wouldn’t wear it—even t-shirts with skulls.

But I feel the strong, strong wind of change. The other day, Serena got in the car and couldn’t wait to tell me that her math teacher had played them a Heart song—“Dog and Butterfly”—a song we both used to play and sing. Heart is Serena’s current favorite band—and not just because she likes the music but because a girl plays the acoustic intro to “Crazy on You,” and it’s hard. One of her best friends for nine years said, “Ew, what is that awful music?” She shot him the look of are-you-crazy-or-just-lame? and said, “It’s Heart!” at which time he rested his case. She just shook her head. “He doesn’t know anything,” she told me.

Music has always been a litmus test for couples, so it’s probably not uncommon, even for a ‘tween girl, to start clicking her tongue and rolling her eyes over some boy’s (or parent’s) unsophisticated, undereducated tastes. And I’m glad she’s made this her priority rather than, say, soccer, which she declared three years ago was her “life.” And rather than using her guitar to play the boys, she is more concerned with outplaying them.

I think that what surprised me was the look in her eyes. It’s going to be hard for my lasagna and stuffed peppers to share that look of rapture with pictures of fancy guitars, even when they look as hot as the new rainbow SG Zoot. Oh, baby!

But I'd rather she get that way over a guitar than a man, like her mom. Oh, baby!

fortune teller

Lest you think I'm playing countless rounds of Bejewelled Blitz and neglecting my writerly duties, I thought I'd make a quick appearance as sort of a placeholder while I wait for inspiration.

Recently on Facebook, I asked my friends, in a cryptic status message, for ten words. That is, I said something like, "Drop and give me ten." I got more than ten—some delicious, some nasty, some fun, and many difficult, multi-syllabic conversation stoppers: girdle, fleshy, concrete, sinuous, indolent, fender, milksop, tendril, coagulate, mellifluous, profligate, and vicissitude. I supplied the last two words, tea and misfortune. Here's the poem.

fortune teller

the psychic healer on the corner hitches her girdle
above the fleshy thigh part, spills a hidden wad of bills
to the concrete, then looks at us as she bends, a parade
of sinuous attendant parts folding and unfolding,
a slow dance with the indolent haze of day.
we like to stop our bikes there, feign attention to a fender
while we spy on the Reverend Sister Faye and her milksop
brother, with his mouthful of bobby pins for Faye’s tendrils
which he molds and coagulates against her bare shoulder,
and we can’t tell if the mellifluous calls from cars
are for the Sister or for him, prophet or profligate.
He claps at us to move along, as if the vicissitudes
of tarot and tea leaves were on us,
as if anyone's misfortune needed to be told.

poopularity contest

Pomp hides a multitude of flaws; circumstance garners lots of sympathy. So with trumpet flourishes and sad, mangled-but-fluffy cute puppehs, I announce that I'm in the running for a Baker Artist Artist Award, code name: dogfaceboy.

Before I realized that this was more a popularity contest, I spent a ridiculous number of hours yesterday uploading photos and mosaics. So please, if you find yourself with a spare fifteen minutes, vote for me. The registration process is daunting (of course). Don't check the box that says you're from Baltimore; you don't have to be a Baltimore resident to vote (only to be a nominee).

Thank you very much, my excellent friend.

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?

happy, challah daze

Before spirituality became contagious, like a yuppie sickness, I considered myself spiritual; that is, I worshipped nature and “frolicked in the autumn mist” and babbled about the sunsets and the sounds birds make. But maybe that’s not because of spirit.

I am religious in my habits: the way I make morning coffee, the way I postpone playtime until my work is finished, how I worship the four-o’clock beer. I adore tradition. Just before Easter break, I pick my Jewish daughter up from her Catholic school early enough that she misses mass, and we have a girls’ lunch—at the same place every year.

It’s Rosh Hashanah, and since I first learned in 2006 how to make homemade challah from my friend, Maya Sprague, I have made it my new holiday—challahday—tradition. I spend the day of our celebration—which is nothing more than a loud dinner with my loud family—baking. I listen to music (today, The Records** and Jim Carroll, which go together perfectly because I have loved them long and well). I take pictures of the dough and marvel at the yeast’s magic and curse the sticky strands that never braid the way I want them the first time.

I love the Jewish New Year because it’s exactly when a new year should be: the kids have settled back to school, I have settled back to writing, and the air has settled—both cool enough to be renewing and warm enough to coax a little red into the last tomatoes. I love that this holiday makes no pretenses, that it’s about sweetness and life. I love the tired joke about blowing the chauffer. I even love the whole phrase, l’shana tova tikatevu: may you be inscribed for a good year. That’s the loose translation. The longer version is, “May God write you down in his book for a good year.” Even though I don’t believe in a supreme being (unless you count Bob Schneider), I do believe in the righteousness of the Golden Rule, which, more than God, is the foundation of every religion on earth. The earliest version is the most beautiful and the most simple: “Do for one who may do for you, that you may cause him thus to do.”*

I don’t make resolutions on the Jewish New Year. This is about sloughing off the old skin and returning to the things that make me glow. And it all starts with the baking of the bread.



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Maya Sprague’s Challa, I Love You


ingredients

2 t sugar
2 pkg. yeast
2 C warm water (105-115°)


6 eggs, lightly beaten
2/3 C oil
4 t salt
4T sugar

8+ C flour

1 egg yolk mixed with a little water
2 T sesame or poppy seeds (opt.)

Note: I divide this recipe in half and make it in two separate bowls for two loaves. To one of the bowls of wet ingredients, I add ½ C raisins, 1/8 C cinnamon, and ¼ C honey. Braid the rolls separately.

instructions

1. Add sugar to warm water; sprinkle yeast on top; mix with fork. When mixture foams (about five minutes), it’s good to go.

2. Mix the eggs, oil, salt, and sugar. Add foaming yeast.

3. Add flour to wet mixture, one cup at a time, then turn out on a kneading surface dusted with flour.

4. Knead until dough can be handled without sticking, adding flour as needed. (I have never been patient enough to get to that point, so if you find yourself adding more and more flour, just stop and continue with step 5.)

5. Cover dough ball with a dish towel and set in a warm, draft-free place for two hours.

6. Punch dough. Braid. (See Maya's cool video, or braid in three strands.)

7. Put braids on an oiled stone or baking pan; cover, and leave to rise one hour.

8. Brush bread with egg yolk/water mixture. Moisten finger with egg, and press seeds into the challah for decoration (opt.).

8. Bake at 350° until a rap on the bread sounds hollow (about ½ hour to 45 minutes).


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*from "The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, 109 - 110 Translated by R.B. Parkinson. The original dates to 1970 to 1640 BCE and may be the earliest version ever written."

**Singer John Wicks has been doing fabulous things since he's been away from the Records. Check out Rotate; it's superb.

saving all the dates

We were welcomed to our new neighborhood sixteen years ago with cookies and cards and dog licks and sweet children's hugs. Within a year, we were married, and just about everyone on our block came to the wedding. I remember the little Roesner girls playing limbo and dancing under the tent on the lawn at the Waverly Historic Mansion. I have a photo of Abbey, barely ten, her body bent backward like a yogi.

Lindsay, her sister, was seven or eight then and loved children. She was born to babysit and was always taking care of the neighborhood kids. I will never forget the day I found out I was pregnant. I told her I'd be needing a babysitter soon, and she said OK. About half an hour later, there was a knock at my front door. It was Lindsay. "Miss Leslie," she asked shyly, "Do you mean you're having a baby?" She was overjoyed and checked on my pregnancy often. When I miscarried, she cried. And when I got pregnant again, I waited until I was showing to tell her. She became our best babysitter.

We have shared birthdays and graduations and summer vacations with the Roesner girls. We've been to their ballgames and their recitals and their many graduation parties. I taught them to make mosaics (they're good at it, too!) and bought them books and tools. Once, my husband brought out our black rat snake, and Abbey asked to hold it. The exact moment her father snapped the picture, the snake bit her chin. Abbey was so cool that she barely flinched. We don't have a copy of that photo, but it's on the bookcase at the Roesners' house. The girls are in our wedding album; their graduation pictures are on our refrigerator. Lindsay graduated from Towson University last year and is now a nurse. Abbey graduated from School for the Arts, then Juilliard, then danced with Baryshnikov; she has danced in Canada and New York and all over the world. I wrote about their parents in my book.

These girls are the products not of a village (or a country or a world) but of parents who loved and nurtured them. I stood by and did my job as a neighbor, which was to let them in when it was cold and they'd forgotten their keys; to share cake and steamed crabs and potato salad; to lend books and borrow onions; to approve bedroom colors and ogle artwork, to cheer and rejoice and weep with them. Even so, I can't help but think of them as my girls, as if I did anything more than love them.

Today, I got the Save the Date for Lindsay's wedding, and I am verklempt for her all over again.

where are those angels when you need them? at ladies rock camp.

I’ve been raising up my hands—drive another nail in
Just what God needs
one more victim.
~Tori Amos, “Crucify”

Many of us have this thing I call the Suck Voice. It doesn’t deserve capital letters, but it demands them. Sometimes you comply because you don’t have so much power. It has you by the gonads, so what can you do but cry uncle.

The Suck Voice is usually not the voice of reason. It’s the voice of fear. And fear is never right, but it’s always loud. Sometimes you think fear makes good sense; doesn’t it keep you away from spiders, deserted streets, fire? Not exactly. You stay away from spiders because they bite (and they are hideous). You stay away from deserted streets because someone could get away with a crime against you more easily there. And you stay away from fire because it burns, and burns are painful.

The Suck Voice has a specific goal. It comes out when you are afraid of failure. It keeps you from doing the things you really want to do by reminding you how fat you’ve gotten, how stupid you’ll look, how old you are, how hard people will laugh at you. It tells you, “Don’t bother. You SUCK.” So stop posting your shit photos to Flickr. Stop writing your crappy blog that no one reads anyway. Stop plunking the strings of your guitar and thinking you are playing it. And, damn it, don’t you dare go to Ladies Rock Camp.

On a day that I had my brain to myself—and, it would seem, an extra five hundred bucks—I enrolled for a three-day weekend in August. It's a grownup, abbreviated version of the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, held in two sessions every summer. On Friday, wannabe rockers can pick an instrument they know or have never played, get in a band, and write a song; on Sunday, they play it in a club.

All sorts of frantic guitarring began at that moment, as I sought out loud, rocking rhythms from bands like The Runaways, who I was always told had learned their instruments yesterday.* So when my husband told me the song I’d picked was too hard to learn quickly, I felt a little defeated. I signed up for some quickie lessons, but neither the teacher nor I knew what would help me. So I plugged the Strat into the basement amp and wailed on it a few days, touching the neck and the strings as if I were an alien encountering some fascinating, shiny object of mystery and allure.

And then I got on the bus.

Ladies Rock Camp was mostly what anyone would expect— some instrument lessons; some workshops like songwriting and, perhaps less expected, self-defense; some band practice; some guest musicians. The days began with affirmations that director Karla Schickele calls, “Rock Formations”; we gather in the cafeteria to remind ourselves, with powerful voices and arms, that “We Rock!” Until this very moment, I didn't get its importance. For lunch the first day, the 39 campers, several volunteers, and the few paid coordinators were serenaded by Felice Rosser, a tall, dark, bass-playing woman with braids and a voice as smooth and rich as hot cocoa.

After her performance, we all asked questions, including the excellent, "How do you play bass and sing at the same time?" My question was about the Suck Voice. Felice calls hers the Shadow, after the Jungian concept. Her answer was thoughtful, and I had the feeling she could have gone on about it, that it was something she wrestled to the ground regularly. On this day, she’d won. She was my angel.

On Saturday morning, my group of ten advanced guitarring ladies (advanced! yes, I was in the advanced group!) had an extended lesson, but the first half was spent on individual questions. I just wanted to jam, so I unplugged myself and took a walk. Felice was in the hallway. “It’s my Suck Voice friend," she said. "I’ve been thinking about you all night.”

We talked in the hallway for twenty minutes—about being too dark, too fat, too old, too lousy to do the things that make us feel good and how it is that we get our power back. To some extent, it involves being less judgmental of others. But it certainly involves being kinder to ourselves. We found ourselves remembering a poignant scene from a movie.

In What the Bleep do We Know?, some photos by Dr. Masaru Emoto are on exhibit in the subway. Emoto studied the messages from water by photographing water crystals under various spells. For instance, some drops were prayed for by priests; some were serenaded by Vivaldi and Mozart; others were given labels such as “love and gratitude.” The crystals are beautiful, like snowflakes. But one sample of water, labeled, “you make me sick,” is brown and murky—a water you wouldn’t want to even think exists, much less drink. You’re sad for that water, even though you know all this is impossible.

At that moment in the movie, the moment Felice and I are discussing, a stranger walks up to star Marlee Matlin and says, “If a thought could do that to water, imagine what a thought could do to you.” New-age hooey or not, I cried hard. Our negative thoughts rule us! They condition our responses. They set us up for every failure!

Felice told me that part of grappling with the suck voice means believing that you have something important to say. Whatever way we are compelled to speak—with words, with music, with art, with science, with stillness—is valid and important.

Because what happens to us when we don't suffocate those jealous, rude, bitter voices? We muddy our souls. We become jealous, rude, and bitter. We regret. We resent.

“Every day, I crucify myself.
And my heart is sick of being in chains.”

Yeah, that’s right. Hand me my wings. I rock.






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*For the record, I never believed that. Lita Ford should have placed in the top twenty of the best guitarists of all time; she's that good. The Runaways' songs only sound effortless. That's their magic.

"Suck Voice" illustration/photo by Jennifer König, who also rocks.