take me up to the top of the city.

through the haze of two martinis i walked with Amanda towards the Contemporary Art Museum this evening past. we were going to drive, originally, but i realized how completely ridiculous this was, considering how cool it was outside and the walk being only 10 minutes from the Craft Center. amazing, really, that i live and work within ten minutes of two world class museums.

there were two shows currently on view, one was Andrea Zittel's installation work, a show i couldn't have wrapped my head around in one viewing even if i was sober. it was just strange and crazy and kind of warped my sense of space. alternately antiseptic and warm and womb-like. i came in near the end of her lecture, and i was sore that i missed it.

the other show was Su-en Wong, a series of six paintings. i loved these, both in the precision of execution and the content. the subject of adolescent girls has always been one of morbid fascination for me; it interests me in a way that's both comforting and repulsive, as in: i was there, and i got out, and oh my god, how was i once like that.

all the girls in the paintings were weirdly sexualized, in both subtle and overt ways, but not in a way that made you think it was supposed to be for men to be titillated by. almost as if that sexual energy was directed towards each other, and not towards the viewer. very intriguing.

so, i happened to look at Wong's biography, noted the date of birth, and realized she was only seven years older than me. for all the marriage-house-babies shit i can kindly push away the looming timelines; for my art, i can't. the nagging whisper that was wondering why i hadn't conquered the world yet became a roar just then, as in: where is your solo show at the Contemporary Arts Museum. you spent the day playing on your wheel, making fucking pottery.

i have a kind of crazy, ruthless ambition. less the ruthless, but i'm working on that. i've actually reached the point of crazy that i'm going to apply to Yale for graduate school, just to say i tried for an ivy league. after that, world domination.

anyway...

i never, ever thought i would type these words, but...


Kate Bush has a new album coming out next week.




i first heard her in about 1998 or so. my Finnish penpal at the time, Tanya, made me a mixed tape of her songs, everything from The Kick Inside up to The Red Shoes (we sent each other a lot of mixed tapes...i wish i had kept more of them). it had most of the required listening on it, from Wuthering Heights to Breathing to Cloudbusting. a big Tori fan at the time, i was nervous and eager to hear she who was the grandmother of them all.

Kate Bush is just freaking insane. i listen to The Kick Inside and The Dreaming and i am amazed that a vision that mature and original came out of a 17 to 22 year old. some people just come out fully formed, i guess. and the music, it's from another place. that's the only way i can describe it. there is no way to source it. i can't sit down and say to someone who's never heard her music before, "Kate Bush's music is about ________." whereas someone like Tori, who i would consider nearly Kate's equal, you can say her music is about religion and the patriarchy and rape and being a woman. but Kate's music just seems to transcend all that, and i can't even describe how.

so you want to get into Kate Bush, do you? i would recommend The Hounds of Love from 1985. it's just this huge, sweeping soundscape. i really think it's head and shoulders above any of her other work.

lots of pussy.

it finally decided to be fall in Texas about two days ago. when i went to my car at 5:45 in the fucking morning yesterday, my car thermometer read 52 degrees. i've spent the last two nights shivering under the covers. apparently the houses here are built to easily disperse heat (i.e., no insulation evident), but they are also built to really let in the cold. off goes the air conditioning for another season, which is all the better, because now the sounds of the 59 overpass (a mere fifty feet away) can lull me to sleep.

so i've spent the last week or so in abject allergic misery, due mostly to the fact that i had volunteered to take care of Amanda's bastard of a cat during the week she was on vacation. Don Quixote is his name, because he attacks everything. but Amanda's taken to calling him El Gato Negro, or the black-hearted one.

every day i'd come in, something else would be destroyed. first he ripped open his bag of dry food and scattered it across the kitchen floor. then it was a small porcelain box, smashed on the floor, its jewelry contents scattered to the four corners of the apartment. then it was his litter bag torn apart and all over the bathroom floor. then, the day before Amanda came home, he got into her knitting yarn (which was in a sealed plastic box, incidentially). i found it tangled and scattered across the living room, as well as a box of clothing, which he had somehow managed to tear into.

and it wasn't like i was leaving for the whole day. i was there twice a day, every day, and each time i was there i tried to hang around and play with him for at least twenty minutes. he's a beautiful cat, with unusual markings. he looks like a brown and black tabby cat with white paint splashed on him, and he has a long, plumed tail. he's talkative, constantly mewing and trilling. and he's enormous. i can tell by the chunkiness of his build that, as big as he is, he's still not done growing.

but he's strange and excitable, gets frightened and distracted by the slighest thing, and has a tendency to bite and scratch and hates to be petted or rubbed. he acts like a person with ADHD.

i'm glad that chore is over, and Amanda made restitution in the form of two boxes of Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets.

in other cat news, at The Pink House, Pookie, Germaine's mother, finally emerged with her newest litter of kittens. they are tiny and wary of me, hissing silently every time i come near. one is calico like Pookie, and the other two are black and white spotted. i've taken to calling them Thing 1 and Thing 2. they are so tiny and sweet, and Germaine seems to be taking the role of big brother and babysitting while Pookie goes out galavanting (probably getting pregnant again, argh!). this morning as i was leaving to go to work i came upon all them on the front porch. Germaine was curled up, soundly asleep, with the three kittens piled on top of him.

the cult of adulthood.

last night or maybe the night before, i did partake of a little tiny bit of television via a barely working set of rabbit ears. one thing i could sort of make out was the new sitcom "How I Met Your Mother". as i watched, i thought to myself, finally a sitcom that's reflecting my reality. i guess i've made the choice demographic at last. the people i saw in sitcoms up until now always seemed older than me with concerns not quite my own. i can't describe what made me see something vaguely familiar in these people. maybe it was the post-college shock written all over their faces. as in,wow, what the hell happened, and that wasn't anything at all like i expected, and what the hell do i do now.

it's only natural that the current generation of young people compare themselves to the one that came before; the one that makes the most sense in the comparison is their parents' generation. and so i find myself doing the same thing from time to time, with my parents. if i was to follow their schedule, i would have already been married for two years, bought a house a year ago, and would've been had my first child (me, incidentially) within a year and a half. all of these things, these supposed mile markers of a supposed maturity, are completely and utterly unthinkable for me right now. and for many other people my age. almost no one in my wide and varying circle of friends is married, nobody has kids (or any real inclination to have them anytime soon), and no one certainly has enough money to even think about putting a down payment on a house. we're too busy tangling with low-paying jobs and student loans.

and so the baby boomers look down upon us and proclaim "slackers". what's wrong with us, we are 25, 27, 30, 32, with no house, no spouse, no patter of little feet. we are directionless and floating. sociologists are dispatched to study us and give us annoying hybrid appellations like "twixter". the older generation wrings their hands and wonder, where did we go wrong. why are our children moving back home? why did junior take six years to finish that bachelor's degree?

it was a hysterical point of view i almost bought until last week.

i was talking to one of the other artists-in-residence here at the Center. he's roughly my parents' age, and one day out of the blue he said to me, you know, your generation is so lucky, you have so many opportunities. when people my age got out of college, we found a job, we got married, bought a house and started having kids. it was just what we were expected to do, and so we did. there was no time to really explore what we wanted to do or who we were, because we were too busy doing what was expected of us. i guess i'm lucky in a way, he concluded, that i was laid off and allowed the chance to start over and do what i really want to do, to make art. and i just started at him, and it was like


oh.

i never thought of it like that.

the eternal optimist that he is, where me and most people saw slackers and a lack of direction, he saw opportunity and a chance for personal development. and it was like a thunderbolt out of the blue that i realized that it's futile to try to hold the previous generation as a comparison for us. times are different. finances are different. people are different. EVERYTHING is different.

the friends that, a generation ago, would have gotten married and started a family are putting it off to travel the world. to go to graduate school. to work at the dream job that needs their full attention. we have student loans weighing on us, so there's no way to buy a house now, maybe ever. there are no $30,000 little ranch homes like the one my parents bought in 1978. the only person i can even think of that bought a house is this one girl i went to Tyler with, and that was made possible only through a sizeable inheritance from her father.

there is a part of me that worries about these things, and there is a part that doesn't. there is part of me that wonders why the hell i can't meet anyone, and there's the part of me that doesn't want to because being in a serious relationship would greatly complicate the plans i have for myself over the next five years, i.e., moving hither and thither, going to graduate school, hopefully traveling a lot, maybe eventually finding a good teaching job. i couldn't afford to have that baggage, not right now. there's a part of me, a very loud part of me, that wants a house, a permanent place, RIGHT NOW, even though i know that isn't practical, and that it's a desire born mostly out of being utterly sick of moving constantly. and there's a very very small part that might want to procreate, but c'mon. are you kidding? i can't even cook for myself.

but i guess all this strum und drang is just the way things are. every generation worries about the state of the next, and there is a collective mutter of "those damn kids". i'm sure the baby boomers can understand this more than anyone. once upon a time they were all pot-smoking hippies with seemingly little direction. their parents looked on in despair, just as they do now. don't worry. we're going to figure it out, just doing it our way.

nice to hold when i'm tired.

so you know when a piece of music just hits you over the head, sends you just spinning into this other space, and when you finally emerge from the stratosphere you just aren't same anymore?

last thursday i was looking around Amazon to see if Laurie Anderson's United States of America was still available on cd (which it was), and i started reading the reviews of Strange Angels, which is one of the few albums of hers i don't have. i downloaded it and, almost as an afterthought stuck Antony and the Johnson's I Am A Bird Now onto my order. i had read the article in the New York TImes Magazine about him, and based on that, i was intrigued.

in the intervening week, it swallowed me whole. i did love Strange Angels, it was Laurie Anderson in all her quirkiness. but I Am A Bird Now was the one i could not put down if i tried. one play through, and after 35 short minutes, i was back at the beginning, wanting more, loving the first three songs, then two more, until i finally loved all of them in their strange, elegant, primitive beauty.

so imagine Nina Simone being reincarnated in the body of a gay six foot tall bald androgynous transvestite. he has it all there: that distinctive vibrato, the timing and delivery, but instead of Simone's force, there's just a delicateness to his voice, almost like it's wafting, floating maybe, about to smash and break into a thousand little pieces. and sadness, such sadness and loss and regret. most of the songs address his desire to be a woman, which sounds silly on paper, but is just captivating in a way that i can't quit explain. he sounds like a woman when he sings, "one day i'll grow and be a beautiful woman / one day i'll grow up and be a beautiful girl / but for today i am a child / for today i am a boy", but you know he's not, and that just makes it strangely sad, but with an undercurrent of hope, something that runs through the whole album. he's not whole, he's not where he wants to be, but he knows he'll get there.

it's an interesting and unusual perspective to equate being male with being a child, and to associate adulthood and maturity with women. not many people come from that place, and definitely not many men.

his piano work is the perfect complement to his voice. it actually reminds me a little of Cat Power in the simplicity and power of its delivery. there are some gospel touches that work really well. there's also a collection of guest appearances (Boy George, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright) that add rather than detract from the songs (a rare thing, i've found).

and now i must curse being in Houston for one moment, because last night he played Carnegie fucking Hall for twenty three fucking dollars a ticket. dammit.

i still haven't downloaded his other work, mostly thanks to a recent yarn bender on Ebay. sigh. i think it may be a good thing in the end. i need to absorb it all slowly, very slowly.

in three paragraphs or less.

oh, and i also wrote a snarky bio:

After many formative years of experimenting in terra cotta and stoneware, Bethany now dwells solely in the pristine world of porcelain, a high maintenance diva of a clay that, despite its finickiness, brings its rewards in a smooth, polished, transcluscent surface that can seem, at times, to be almost skin-like.

Several themes persist throughout Bethany’s work, the foremost of which is the influence of the human figure. After years of figure drawing and poring over anatomy books, she still finds it to be the most inspiring starting point for all of her work. Her current body of work uses the potters wheel to create cylinders that are then cut up into slabs and altered into different shapes.

Text and narrative also play an important role in Bethany’s work. The idea of a book, then, would be the next logical step. Furiously writing and illustrating little chapbooks since age 4, she took her first formal book arts class four years ago under the incomparable Sharyn O’Mara. Her books echo themes found in her ceramic work: anatomy, the figure, and use of a clean, white surface.

Bethany graduated with a BFA in Ceramics from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, a city she misses almost more than words can say.

****

writing is a very funny, singular thing for me. it seems to come from a very different place than the rest of my art, in a way i can't quite explain. i have to absolutely want to do it, or it will never happen (which is why i could never make a living doing it or produce much beyond the witty musings found here). if i try to force it, it ends up sounding boring and generally arduous: very point A to point B to point C, please get me there in the quickest fashion possible so it can be over with. but oh, when i hit it right, when i can turn a phrase or an idea just right, just beautifully, it feels fucking wonderful.

and i am a textbook example of the idea that if you do something enough, you will eventually be competent at it, perhaps even good or occasionally great. Jeanine has complimented what is written here a few times, and said she thinks i'm good writer, to which i would reply that i'm not really good writer, i just happen to be someone who's written a hell of a lot. mostly about myself, which probably doesn't count, anyway.

OMG!

as much as i hate it, i may have to break down and start blogging.

you have to understand, i've been keeping an online journal (which is what blogs were called before they were called blogs) since 1999. six years and about two months. which is longer than about 99% of the whiners and freaks out there in cyberspace saying things like

OMG! did you see the OC last nite?!?! [insert name] is sooooo hot! "hearts* *stars* *emoticons*

[insert dumb and possibly slightly illegal photos here]

it kind of sickens me, because for the longest time, when i sat down and wrote in this little space, i actually had an essay in my head, not just a "look at this link" or "here's a picture of my cute cat" kind of entry. i've avoided that from the beginning just because it's cheap and stupid and not that interesting, and now, besides, everyone else is doing it, so why the hell should i?

i digress.

my point is that, in an effort to please those who miss me terribly and wish to hear about my life here, entries may get slightly shorter and more anecdotal.


anecdote #1 is an observation. the weather finally cooled on Friday past. by cooler i mean it's only 75 and the humidity is mostly gone. this is the Texas fall, i guess, so i'm going to have to take it. i'm always amazed at how my head clears once the temperature drops. this makes me think that i'm not going to be long for this place.

anecdote #2 involves my very pleasant weekend in Austin. considering the hell it took to get there, i was more than happy to relax and shop at various antique places around the city. i got a necklace, a bracelet, a purse, Al's christmas present, a postcard for Malcolm, and a skinny black tie, which is something i've been looking for.

anecdote #3 is a rowdy little cheesesteak place/sports bar that i have found to watch the games from now on. nice to cheer on the Eagles with insane people surrounding me. screaming, crying, cheering, pounding of tables and smashing of beer bottles. it makes me miss my dad.