New Thing #373

Okay, let's start with the fact that some meatball named Joey Stenucci wrote the Mercury calling me a "C-list opportunist". I mean, really. I thought I was at least a B-list opportunist.

Then I crammed my brains out because the planners of the Celebrity Spelling Bee gave us all a study guide with 900 FRIGGIN' WORDS, a large majority of them in German, which should have been the first tip off that this would be a cruel Nazi event.

So I was already a nervous wreck when I hit the stage and was joined by the other contestants, one of whom is the 8th grade statewide champion. Noting his cell phone on his hip, I leaned over to him and told him he would need to put it away as there would be no texting during the bee.

"That's not my cell phone," he said. "I'm diabetic."

Yes, I tried to take insulin away from a diabetic child. In front of 700 people.

So is it any wonder I choked--yes, choked--on my VERY FIRST WORD: cravat. Chances are they gave it to me figuring the gay guy would know his fashion terms, but they underestimated my innate pretentiousness, in which case I gayed it up to "cravatte."

My only consolation was that my buddy Courtenay Hameister also bombed out in the first round, panicking on whether there's an extra n in "buccaneer." There isn't.



Naturally, we sat out the rest of the bee knowing how to spell EVERYTHING else, including all the sadistic Nazi words like springerle, realschule and pfeffernuss.

Now I know why I've never done a spelling bee before. My only other consolation is the event raised $195,000 for School House Supplies, the worthy cause which provides school supplies to kids who can't afford them. By torturing C-list opportunists.

New Thing #373

No time now to report on my HUMILIATING DEFEAT at last night's celebrity spelling bee. More later...

Mesmer Project #5

Check out who's the next fascinating person to be profiled by the Mesmer Project.

Thought for the Week 1/25/09

Just a week ago we learned that our mayor admitted to lying about a brief affair with an 18-year-old, the unfortunately named Beau Breedlove.

By Wednesday it looked certain he would resign.

By Friday it looked like he wouldn't.

Today he went back to work.

In between, thousands of people lobbied, ranted and rallied. Personally, I did things I didn't realize I was capable of doing. I think many of us did.

Throughout it all, one thought predominated in my mind: THERE IS ALWAYS A SOLUTION. It may not be the one you want. It may be Plan B or C or Z, but there is always a way to solve a problem.

I mention it now because there are so many problems to solve in our city--not just the relationships Sam needs to repair, but, also the challenges of running this place, which mirror the sucky Bush-inflicted situation we find ourselves in as a country. But if there's anything I've learned this week, though, it's the power of our ingenuity and determination.

Friday night hundreds of us stood in front of city hall and told Sam to "Get back to work." We should all do the same.

You must remember this...

...a kiss is just a kiss.

So says the unfortunately named Beau Breedlove in an interview with the Oregonian.

This complicates matters, to be certain, as I don't condone macking on underage gaylings, no matter how hot they are.


But I find it intriguing that he named his dog Lolita.

New Thing #372

When I woke up yesterday morning I didn't know that I would spend a frantic day doing the legwork to organize a a rally for Mayor Sam Adams at City Hall (check out the video), doing things I've never done before like pulling permits, finding a generator an hour before the rally, and writing a chant, a new genre for me.

But thanks to my new bff, blogger Hollie Teal, a thousand people descended on City Hall to tell the mayor to "GET BACK TO WORK." Hollie's got a hilarious photo essay about the backstage scramblings to make this thing work, especially about the World's Tiniest Stage:


And, because this is Portland, of course people dressed up. Like this guy:


And these. Why they came as gnomes I have no idea.


I was so excited by it all I was shaking for an hour afterwards. I'm cautiously optimistic that he won't resign, that we've helped turn the tide.

A special thanks to my beloved BoBo Wilson, who gave me a crash course in Sam's 100 Day Plan so I wouldn't sound like an idiot. And, of course, Jim Brunberg of Mississippi Studios, who made sure we could be heard and all the people who were heard: rocker Storm Large, pianist James Beaton, First Amendment lawyer Charlie Hinkle, columnist Dan Savage, businessman and activist Terry Bean, Oregon Ballet Theatre artistic director Christopher Stowell, restauranteuse Lisa Schroeder of Mother's and Mamma Mia and Handsome Dave the Zoobomber, who read a message from Portland's own Gus Van Sant.

New Thing #371

I do not meditate. I contemplate. I concentrate. I marinate, percolate and ruminate. Not to mention fornicate. But I'm not good at stilling my mind. Or my body.

But when I got a call from photographer Jeffrey Horvitz asking if I'd pose for a series on meditation, I figured it was time to give it a try. Here's the result.



And here's the crazy part: I was so focused on being still for the camera, that I had the briefest of out-of-body experiences. Just shot right out the top of my head.

Now if I can just get someone to photograph me every time, I could finally meditate.

You can check out some of Horvitz's other photos on his profile on Facebook.

Sam is Still My Mayor

Never have I done a commentary I've felt more strongly about or felt more grateful I had bully pulpit from which to say it.
Here's what I had to say.

For the latest on supporting Sam, check out here.

Sam's Beau Job

Okay, first off, here's your weekly introduction to our latest inspiring person in the Mesmer Project. After the revelations about our mayor, we could use some inspiration.

I've been seriously upset about this, and totally disoriented. The simple truth is often neither, but we can all agree that Sam fucked up big time. Or perhaps fucked down. Either way, his actions give new meaning to the term inaugural ball. Yes, he should have known that Breedlove's name is a noun, not a verb. But the calls for his resignation are way out of proportion.

Let me make this clear: THE MAN DID NOTHING ILLEGAL. Neither the sex nor the lie was against the law. Wrong? Yes. But as city council member Amanda Fritz said yesterday, “I’ve been a psychiatric nurse for twenty years and there’s not a person in this room who hasn’t made mistakes and lied to cover them up.” So everyone should put down their stones.

Personally, I think anyone over the age of 25 should put a velvet rope across the doorway of their bedrooms and follow what I think of the Studio 54 Rule: no one under 21 gets in. But we’re human. Elvis fell in love with Priscilla Presley when he was 24 and she was 14. When they consummated that relationship is an open question. Of course, Adams is the mayor of Portland and not the King of rock ‘n roll, but what I'm saying is that it's too easy to portray this relationship as predatory without looking at the specifics.

Three weeks after he turned 18, a hot gay boy got some summer lovin’ with a sexy, single older man. Of course, he could have joined the army instead and shot another man and that'd be okay. But, like so many of us at that age, he wanted to get laid. Often. And 42 goes into 18 just as easily as 18 goes into 42.

Personally, I'd love to hear from Beau Breedlove at this point, who moved on from Sam to another older man. If Beau wasn't bothered by the relationship, then the rest of us should shut our Puritan pie holes and get back to more important matters like gossiping about our neighbors.

For those who say they can't get over the lies, that Sam can never be trusted again, I say get real. He's the same man we elected, just one who fucked up. Or down. Or maybe sideways.

Sam himself said, "I don't think an apology is enough...I'm very ashamed. And humbled. And humiliated. And that's appropriate...I'm going to have to work to regain people's trust. I have a lot of work to do."

I say we give him the chance to do just that.

PS Regarding that other politician, you know the one who made history yesterday, here's what I had to say on the NPR website about his proposed arts policy. I'd be curious to know your thoughts on that matter, too, so please leave a comment there.

On today of all days

No sooner had I turned off the historic inauguration than I discovered our newly-elected openly gay mayor Sam Adams just admitted to lying about an affair with a hot 18-year-old, the unfortunately named Beau Breedlove.

I'm stunned. The old gay mayor just ain't what he used to be.

And I might as well be the first to point out that Byron Beck's picture shows the words "No Minors" over Beau's shoulder. As a fiction writer, I couldn't make this shit up.

Thought for the Week 1/18/09

IT'S NOT THE YEARS IN YOUR LIFE THAT COUNT, BUT THE LIFE IN YOUR YEARS.
Abraham Lincoln

I suppose it's a good thing that Lincoln felt this way, what with being murdered at 56 and all. And odd that this quote would come up on my random list on the day honoring Martin Luther King, dead at 39. Thirty-nine! He would have been 80 this year.

I worry about not having enough life in my years. You see, I spend a lot of time and energy striving in my work and that can make me alternatively anxious and depressed about how it's going. Then I get anxious that I'm not enjoying my life enough. Then I get depressed that I haven't.

So then I do something to make me feel alive in my life. Today's obsession is the notion that Obama is not actually the first African-American president. Apparently, there are five other presidents who may have had black ancestry: Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson.

Which led me down an internet rabbit hole to explore the supposed hidden homosexuality of two other presidents, as well as Abraham Lincoln.

Which makes me wonder why I care. I know it sounds salacious and unnecessary, but I'm really fascinated with knowing the truth, particularly if it was hidden.

But that makes me worry that I'm wasting my time thinking about whether dead presidents were black or gay. Or both. Because part of having life in my years is my work. And I already wasted enough time this morning when I forgot where I parked and had to wander three different garages until I finally found my car.

So back to work.

New Thing #370

"If you wear contacts and open the kiln, they'll melt to your eyes."

Thus began our lesson in fusing glass. Said kiln heats to 1400 degrees, but since our friends Will and Robert's basement was like a meat locker, I still managed to lean up against it for warmth. Go figure.

The lesson was their generous birthday gift for Floyd and it began with cutting the glass, something for which we had neither the talent nor the skill:



Then we laid it out:



Then we baked it (and by we I mean they), adding the vaguely obscene-sounding "frit balls" for texture. Then baked it again slumped over a mold, a process called--get this--"slumping."

Here's the final product, of which we are absurdly, disproportionately proud.



You'd think we'd gone to the beach and ground the sand into glass ourselves. That said, neither of us have any inclination to do it again. Cross it off the list. Done. Moving on...

Mesmer Project #3

Introducing another mesmerizing person at the Mesmer Project.

Thought for the Week 1/11/09

"YOU MUST BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD."
Ghandi


It should come as no surprise that I'm a big believer in creative visualization. One of the ways in which I do that is by assembling a notebook of images that inspire me, with a heavy emphasis on people cavorting about with abandon, as well as collages paying tribute to two of my role models, the visionary artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the creators of The Gates, among others, and that patron saint of ambition over talent, Jacqueline Susann. A few years ago, in one of my many efforts at self-improvement, I gathered 52 quotations that inspired me, randomly assigning them one to each week. I printed them out and put them in the notebook with the idea that I would look at one each week to keep me inspired.

I never did.

Fast forward to this year when I was thinking about what I wanted my 2009 blog to look like and I hit upon using those quotations as fodder for weekly postings, which feels more natural.

I mention this because an odd coincidence has happened three times now. Despite the fact that I gathered these randomly several years ago, when I sit down to look at the thought for the week, it's perfectly matched what's already been on my mind in the days prior. It's as if I knew what was coming and mentally prepared for it. I don't think there's anything particularly woo-woo about it. It seems to me that my subconscious mind has stored that list of quotations when I wrote it and is using them like a road map.

Which is a long way of saying that the thought for this week has already been on my mind. I turn 43 today and feel like I can't wait around for things to happen to me, that I simply need to proceed as if they will, to start being the person I always wanted to be. As I move into the probable second half of my life, I'm flooded with a sense of "if not now, when?"

It's for this reason that I admire Christo and Jeanne-Claude so much. Actually, I'm floored by the simple yet grand way in in which they make beautiful things that cause people to look at the world through new eyes. But I'm even more inspired by the way in which they live--how they operate as a team, how they pay for everything themselves off of the sale of artwork and not merchandise, how tirelessly they work.

Here's their answer to the question "How do you find inspiration and get past creative blocks?"

All our projects come from ideas out of our two hearts, and our two brains, (we never create works coming from other people's ideas).

We have completed 18 projects and have failed 37 projects. We could not get permission to create 37 projects, and we lost interest.

Those 37 failed works are in addition to the 18 we have completed. This means: 37 ideas we did not complete. After receiving refusals, we lost interest.

Since we create our works for ourselves (as all true artists do), once the idea is no longer in our hearts, there is no reason to do it.

Many of our 18 completed projects have been refused, more than once each, but we persisted because it was still in our hearts.

Some projects took many years of refusals until we could complete the project:

32 years for the Wrapped Trees 1966-98. 26 years for The Gates 1971-2005. 25 years for the Wrapped Reichstag 1971-95. 10 years for The Pont Neuf Wrapped 1975-85. 5 years for the Running Fence 1972-76, etc.

When could we ever had had a creative block ?


Words to live by.

New Thing #369

Trying a Segway has been on my list of new things for a year now, though I must confess I've done nothing to find one.

So I totally lucked out when one just happened to be waiting for me when I showed up to my heterosexual hairdresser. Turns out the client before me has a disability and uses one to get around. And was nice enough to let me take a spin around the salon.

It's gee-whiz super-cool in that's it's totally intuitive. All you do is shift your weight forward or back to make it go either direction. I've often wondered why they haven't caught on. It seems to me that people with disabilities who could stand would prefer to see others at eye level rather be a crotch-watcher.

So I asked my friend and robotics expert Daniel H. Wilson for his opinion. "It's because they look so dorky," he explained. "If they looked cool, like a Harley, everyone would want one."

Speaking of looking dorky or cool, here's the latest hair update with my roots growing in.


You decide.

Yet Another Reason to Love the Interweb

Because without the YouTube, how would we ever get to see 1960s protest songs performed while wearing bouffant wigs and spangly dresses?



This, of course, led me down an digital rabbit hole to discover Scopitones, a pre-cursor to music videos.

Like this demonstration of subtlety and good taste.



When I was a child, this is what I imagined adulthood would look like. I'm sort of disappointed it doesn't.

Mesmer Project #2

The second installment of the Mesmer Project is up. Take a look who's next.

Hope for us all

So I'm on my way up to teach at the Whidbey Island Writers' Workshop, crossing Puget Sound on the ferry. The day is steel gray and the sound is unsound, cresting silver and rocking the boat. So I'm the only one outside on deck enjoying the rough, temperamental beauty that is the Pacific Northwest.

As the ferry lurches, I turn and I see I've been joined by a kid of about sixteen--all floppy hair and skinny limbs--his face glowing in the excitement of the crossing.

"Pretty astonishing," I say.

"Yeah."

"This your first crossing?" I ask.

"No, I do it all the time," he says. "I live on Whidbey."

I already like this kid. I know instantly that he's the kind of person who takes the time to notice something spectacular on a routine journey. I glance down and note that he's carrying a copy of The Great Gatsby in his arms.

"How are you liking Gatsby?" I ask.

"I love it," he says, smiling. Sincere.

"Why?" I ask. "What do you love about it?"

He doesn't hesitate. "Fitzgerald's descriptions are so vivid. There's this scene where two windows are open and a breeze blows through and he describes the women on the couch as being buoyed up. It's amazing."

Later that night, I find the passage online and read it:

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rose-coloured space, fragiley bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The kid is right. It is amazing.

He and I talk of books for a few minutes more--about Huck Finn, Holden Caufield and Lenny and the rabbits. “After reading Of Mice and Men,” he says, “I can’t look at a single soft thing without thinking of poor Lenny. “ He says he loved The Old Man and the Sea and tried to read Ulysses. Ulysses! This kid is a junior in high school. On an island in Puget Sound.

We part as the boat continues to beat ceaselessly against the current, heading toward the island and the future.

And for the rest of the day I couldn't feel bad even if I tried.

Thought for the Week 1/4/09

"HE WHO CARVES HIMSELF TO SUIT OTHERS WILL SOON WHITTLE HIMSELF AWAY."

Well, I'm back in the cave working on my next book. Writing a book takes a ton of time. I mean, there are all these words. And not just any words. They have to make sense and whatnot.

So once again I have to risk disappointing other people by making my work a priority. I read somewhere that no one ever lies on their deathbed wishing they'd worked more, but I don't think that's necessarily true for artists. Of course, I don't know how I'd really react to a life-threatening illness, but I think I'd be pissed I didn't write more.

I also don't know whether someone lies or lays on their deathbed, though I do know using "their" for the singular is incorrect, but I use it because I really loathe "he/she." Not in the transgender way, of course. I have no problem with them. Find them quite fascinating actually. In fact, some trannies prefer the newly fashioned pronoun "ze" as an alternative to "he" or "she" and "zer" for "him" or "her."

I like the idea, but it still feels awkward to me. Better that all just wake up wake up one morning and start using it at the same time. Then we can say things like "No one ever lies on zer deathbed wishing ze'd worked more." Of course, I'd be inclined to speak the whole sentence in a French accent, which would certainly make me laugh all day. Yet another reason to try it.

There are other choices. Like "yo."

YO WHO CARVES YOSELF TO SUIT OTHERS WILL SOON WHITTLE YOSELF AWAY.

Sure, it's not sexist, but you sound like you're auditioning to play Mammy in Gone with the Wind.

Anyway, I meant to write about the meaning of this week's thought, not the grammar, but that's where my mind went and I've learned to follow it where it leads me. And not worry about what others think when I do.

Which is the point of this week's thought.

New Thing #368

It's either a testament to my trusting nature or my sheer stupidity that I sometimes accept invitations from strangers to do something new. Like New Year's Eve, for instance, when Floyd and I trekked out to East Nowhere to take part in a traditional Native American sweat lodge. It wasn't until we drove down the long, dark drive that it occurred to me that we might wake up in a bathtub of ice missing a kidney.

Instead, we discovered the Seven Shields intentional community, many of whom are Sun Dancers, which, as far as I can make out, means they dance around a tree in the summer and pierce themselves when they have visions.

Yeah, won't be doing that.

So I had a certain amount of apprehension regarding the sweat lodge, having been warned about how sickening the heat can be and how claustrophobic it can get sitting in total darkness in a low tent made of willow branches and coarse blankets.

What I didn't anticipate was affects of the dank, wet ground. So much so that, while we waited around the fire to start, we all did some Native American version of the hokey pokey, putting one foot in, one foot out. Finally, we crawled into the tipi and sat shivering while the firekeeper shoveled in glowing rocks that had been baking in the fire. These rocks heated up the lodge to steam room temperatures, which I loved. Nothing like a good schvitz. But I couldn't get comfortable sitting cross-legged, so I found myself lying down on my towel. On the dank, wet ground. It's possible I'm the only person to take part in a sweat lodge and be too cold.

That said, I did get some good meditation in while the group sang a dozen different traditional Native songs, giving new meaning to the phrase "Sweatin' to the Oldies." And, while Floyd and I did give up after a couple of hours, when we got home we noticed immediately how great our skin looked. Then we slept for eleven blissfully uninterrupted hours.

Which was the best way to ring in the new year.