Burro of Information & Culture

Sat Oct 31

2009-11-02T23:45:00.004-05:00

Overcast afternoon + halloween + coffee at Ethiopian joint.

Salvadorans ran the kitchen at the Ethiopian restaurant on Telegraph where I worked one summer in college. It's shuttered now.

Later in the evening waiting for our clothes to dry and S. to arrive for a late dinner, reading Richard Wright's haikus:

How lonely it is:
A rattling freight train has left
Fields of croaking frogs.

The Radio at 4 a.m.

2009-10-16T22:00:00.006-04:00

From 1979 to 1982 there was a show on pirate radio that could be heard on Sundays from 3 am to 4 am in Richmond and El Cerrito and spasmodically on the car radios of drivers along the Berkeley and Oakland border. The show was called “Numbchucks” and featured interviews with subterranean writers, filmmakers, first-edition book dealers, organic farmers, and former boxers.

The most riveting segment on each program was when the host, who went by the name of Smedley Yi, opened up the phone line to callers. There was ever only one caller, who Yi referred stubbornly to as “caller” as though to cloak the man in the possibility of multitudes.

Yi and the caller had an antagonistic relationship from the beginning, according to long-time listeners. The caller would come out swinging about some position Yi had staked minutes earlier about Octavia Butler or Nam June Paik. Their voices would puff their chests out, then duck and weave looking for a weak spot.

When Yi reached a pitch of exasperation with the caller, as he often did, he would interrupt and insist that they needed to go to a commercial break. Then he would swiftly cut to himself aggrandizing about a regional brand of potato snack or delivering a hushed public service announcement about what to do in the event of an earthquake. He was most adamant about spare batteries, which seemed irresponsibly magnified beyond keeping a reserve of bottled water, for example.

Is there anything as simultaneously intimate and remote as the voices of a live call-in radio show in the early hours of the morning when you are awake? Are they not saving your life?

The show eventually went off the air. But five years later, reports came in that Yi was once again on the airwaves, roughly in earshot of the same coordinates, but on Wednesdays from 4 am to 4:30 am. Also, he was calling himself something else and the format had changed. Each segment involved his calling an 888 sex line and asking for a maid, or a professor of Eastern Religion. The segment would follow their stomach worm conversation, which was about 30/70 sexual.

The show was called “Numbchucks.”

I used to wait in another room, listening to the voice of my husband talk to other people as he made his way toward me. I would make no effort to move or otherwise make myself known. I could say I wanted to anticipate him with every one of my senses. Or I could say the truth, which was that I wanted to be found.

Reading House of the Sleeping Beauties

2009-10-12T21:20:00.004-04:00

I was reading Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties in bed. An old man visits a secret brothel that specializes in girls who are heavily drugged so old men who have lost their virility, but not their lust or longing for young minxes, can fondle them freely as they sleep.

Beside me, he said he was tired; his lower back hurt.

Repeatedly the old man flirts with the idea of violating the house rules by forcing himself on one of the unknowing virgins, naked and milky beneath the blanket in that room swathed in crimson velvet.

He even imagines strangling one, and wonders if that act of violence would be enough to wake her.

I ran my hand down his front and pressed my breasts against his back. He rolled on top of me and spread my legs.

On the old man’s second visit the proprietress says the girl he will have that evening is more experienced than the others. The old man speculates that perhaps the girl had long ago stopped thinking of the men who lay beside her, and leave their impressions on the sheets in the morning.

Kawabata writes, Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.

In the end, the most the old man does is place his finger in the half-opened mouth of a slumbering girl. He wipes the paint from her lips on the strands of her hair, and docilely swallows the two white pills the proprietress offers each night to sink him into his own oblivion.

I thought you said you were tired.

I was. Then why did you touch me?

Because you said you were tired.

What are you, one of those sleep fuckers?

Subtitles, Shartlesville

2009-09-21T22:08:00.008-04:00

We moved a lot in those days. I’d walk the streets pretending to be a deaf-mute. But no one ever tested for me, except a kid behind a bodega counter who asked me if I was stupid.

The first time after we did it, she leaned back and said, “I could’ve used a little more teeth with that.”

Another thing she’d do: ask me, “Do you mean that subjectively or objectively?”

Who gives a shit. It’s what I know to be true.

“If lonely, read Lonely People Magazine, 10 cents, PP Box 178, New Haven, CT”

“Mr. Lonely Man, Join the Chicago Friendship Club for results. Hundreds of ladies belong. If sincere, enclose stamped envelope, 3928 Broadway, Chicago IL”

“100 Ways of Kissing Girls, Illustrated, 30 cents, American Sales Co. Springfield, IL

A little advice from me to you: Don't be afraid of beauty but stay away from nostalgia and you'll be good.

Maybe I’m not the thickest book on the shelf. But in my defense I was never above anything. I was always right there.

Walking to Meet Abe and Mark for Lunch in Hell's Kitchen

2009-09-15T23:23:00.005-04:00

For years I’ve stood sentry

My profile by night

Brute threat and as false:

Perhaps you find it odd that a statue

Should speak to you now

As a dog. It’s new

For me too:

Clock of pumps

Loosie shuffler

Spilled oranges, newspaper sop

Little girl who named me:

Nicked and debauched

As I am

Dumb as a 2-liter bottle of RC Cola

None the wiser, no

None so careless

as the protected

as the loved

Subtitles, Sept

2009-09-11T21:33:00.012-04:00

I'll take that lamp that lights a room like the sun scallops the sea

I'll take those jewels, eyes swallowing the narrow face of no one's house cat

I'll smoke the dope that makes me tremble w/o sauce

I"ll buy the political theory that evaporates from inside a board game hourglass

Forget about my type. Kick his ass

I'll take the blanket textured like sand caught in the heat of your neck

I’ll take the night, capsize it to cover you

I’ll take that lamp that cools a room like the moon wingtips the sea

I'll give you double for that wabi sabi undergarment/Monday afternoon

One day you'll give me that long Satyricon stare which is why I practice writing dialogue

Little Shipwrecks

2009-08-09T23:27:00.004-04:00

Little shipwrecks hunched at the bar, diamond in the nostril of night

The check casher’s eyes blink like digital clocks + camphor

I was forgetting to “feel better”

I was ready to tell you everything, like so much cold chowder in weeping parlors

Left my glove in the ashtray of your narrow pelvis, a ruse to earn your confidence

ESL will have to do at this hour + the candied instrumental

of a military dirge strung from the soft underbelly of a fungus

Let me put it this way, tenderly

a rotten yolk passed between two mouths

The Limits of Reading Over Sound

2009-08-06T07:36:00.005-04:00

B. says a young couple in their 20s – he thinks Korean – moved next door to him a few weeks ago. Every night between 11 and midnight, he hears them having extremely loud sex.

At first he thought it might be titillating. But it quickly became clear it was “FOB sex.”

“Ever seen Japanese porn?”

“Oh, you mean it’s like” – I emit a series of staccato, high-pitched, mewling cries.

“Yeah. Except really loud. It’s not hot. Sounds like she’s in pain or being raped. He’s completely silent but at the end he always makes this sound: ‘Uh. Uuuuugh.’”

“When I lived on Spring Street my neighbor had really loud sex with his girlfriend. She was really loud too: ‘UuuuuuuUUUuuuuggggghh.’”

It was the longest syllable in the world.

Typee

2009-08-05T13:50:00.003-04:00

Bought a 1923 Everyman Library's edition of Typee for 48 cents from the discount bin at the Strand. Just started reading it.

Why Melville is the shit:

"This item of information was imparted to us by a most extraordinary individual, a genuine South Sea vagabond, who came alongside of us in a whale-boat as soon as we entered the bay, and, by the aid of some benevolent persons at the gang-way, was assisted on board, for our visitor was in that interesting stage of intoxication when a man is amiable and helpless. Although he was utterly unable to stand erect, or to navigate his body across the deck, he still magnanimously proffered his services to pilot the ship to a good and secure anchorage.

Our captain, however, rather distrusted his ability in this respect, and refused to recognize his claim to the character he assumed; but our gentleman was determined to play his part, for, by dint of much scrambling he succeeded in getting into the weather-quarter boat, where he steadied himself by holding onto a shroud, and then commenced issuing his commands with amazing volubility and very peculiar gestures."

Glenwood Power Station Mash Up 3

2009-07-23T23:12:00.008-04:00

Does that make me a parasite, then, that you are instrumental to my joy?

Naru exceeds Calvino's imagination.

The jazz drummer says he is an artist, not an entertainer because it is the artist's job to wake people up. And entertaiment? Sometimes you need to sleep.

Say you are occupied, never conquered.

Glenwood Power Station Mash Up 2

2009-07-23T23:00:00.010-04:00

Earth is a squat, said the South African musician between sets at Weeksville.

I don't know if I believe this yet, was my way of introducing an utterance that I had not written through first.

Is it the same with you as with songs?

The renowned artist was a fraud. But it wasn't his fault. It was the people who celebrated him.

Diets are the purification rites of the damned.

I'll relive today if you're in it this time.

Glenwood Power Station Mash Up 1

2009-07-23T22:50:00.007-04:00

Innocence lost: The moment a child looks to you, to see if you will witness her cry.

Fear: superstition without the belief in luck.

We're not through yet. I haven't wounded you there, or there.

Speak less frequently if you wish to be heard.

Some towns feel like isolated incidents.

Objective: manufacture more serenity.

Notes from the Red Door Tour

2009-07-18T12:06:00.013-04:00

On Sunday I joined the Red Door Tour in Chinatown. The group met on the corner of Allen and East Broadway, in front of an empty lot where a Chinese grocery store had recently burned to the ground. The clapboard barricades advertised a Japanese vampire movie.

The tour guide was a squat, though not inelegant Chinese woman who balanced a pair of imitation Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses on the upper register of her perm.

You may not be able to tell from the modest exteriors of these homes, the tour guide said as we paused before a triptych of effusive garbage cans. But the inhabitants of these red door apartments have experienced glorious strokes of luck over the years.

“Five people in this house won the immigration services’ Green Card lottery. Unbelievable! They call themselves the ‘Green Five’ and meet once a year at the Red Lobster in Times Square to celebrate their good fortune.”

“A woman on the second floor of this apartment gave birth to three sons, each of whom went to Harvard and did not major in liberal arts.”

“Red is lucky – where does it come from? It is a story that can be traced back to ancient times.

“A young scholar in love with a beautiful courtesan spent day after day composing what he hoped would be the most beautiful love poem in the world. He hoped to present it to her on a scroll of paper tinctured with dew drops and peach blossoms and tied with a braid of his own hair. For two months, he had been whittling the proper metaphor for the curve of her eyebrows.

Through a hole in the wall, the courtesan spied on his impotent labors with mounting turbulence, flipping her silk handkerchief back and forth like a dolphin at a marine amusement park."

“A monkey watched all this unfold atop his perch in a persimmon tree. He found the goings-on so comical that he began rocking back and forth on the branch with laughter, the force of which shook him loose from the tree. Yet the monkey, being a monkey, greedily refused to release the fruit from his hands as he hurtled to the ground. He absorbed the impact entirely with his ass and scampered away unscathed, his bottom reddened.

“‘What a lucky monkey am I! he screeched, causing the scholar’s brush to ricochet across the rice paper and the courtesan to bite down on her tongue, drawing blood.”

“Of course I can speak solely to the luck of those whose legends were told. There are countless others whose private fortunes and joys can only be imagined. Perhaps two lovers possessed of a byzantine sexual fetish found one another without the guidance of the Internet. Or a troublesome cyst that had lodged in the center of a man’s back for nearly half his life burst without incident.”

“Some red door houses, like this one, have Dark Luck. You may delight that your children speak so fluently, indeed, thoughtlessly, in English, only to have them lance you with their canceled sitcom barbs, skulls perpetually clamped between earphones. Or say your husband wins 10 dollars from his first Instant Scratch-off Game. He spends the next 20 years scratching that itch like a skin disease.”

“It won’t do you any good, kissing it and rubbing it like that. This isn’t some Irish stone or African American tree stump. The Chinese believe you have to enter your luck, inhabit it. Feng shui: maybe you’ve heard of it?

“You are asking yourself if such a person called ‘Poop Dick’ exists. He does. Why he was called that when he lived here as a boy doesn’t concern us. Most likely he was either too tiny or too fat; possibly he smelled bad.

“Some of us are born leaning forward like hood ornaments, our ears flattened back with the wind. Others are scrawled on the backs of envelopes or born with wings of lead.”

“To answer your question, yes, I lived in a red door walk-up for many years.

“I am not one for philosophy. If you’ve found that thing to love, you are lucky. It doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a purpose. You will know what it is by your fidelity to it."

“Is it my great fortune now, to be standing here with you sharing the great history and culture of the Chinese people? If it is not, what is it?”

A Friend of a Friend

2009-07-12T08:44:00.008-04:00

A friend of a friend swallowed a boiling dumpling and died of throat disease
A friend of a friend lived with three other women in a house in Baltimore that rented for $200
A friend of a friend took a bottle of Prell to bed, groaned all night, thinking it was liquor
A friend of a friend is always in some hapless shit
Backstroke in good luck or stretched out on the devil’s work bench

A friend of a friend’s penis tapered like an anteater’s nose but that was no problem
A friend of a friend fizzed momentarily in a motel jacuzzi with a serial killer
A friend of a friend perished in Jonestown
But another friend of a friend joined a cult that grows organic vegetables, no big deal
A friend of a friend rolled over and smothered their sleeping infant
A friend of a friend counted to three and the bullet just grazed his left cheek
A friend of a friend lost her scalp to farm equipment, now wears a wig
A friend of a friend is rewriting the dictionary with their true meanings

A friend of a friend stroked out, went from blonde to brunette overnight
A friend of a friend married another friend of a friend and made babies
A friend of a friend huffing on the stairs realized he was a ‘frail elderly’
A friend of a friend put everything he owned on craigslist then vanished
Terrible things! Wonderful things! Things made real in this life
By the friends of friends, those monstrous, worldly beings

A Medical Procedure

2009-07-02T09:12:00.000-04:00

After some deliberation, I decide to have my head surgically removed, even though the procedure is not covered by my insurance plan.

At my first public outing with my new look, public reactions range from stunned silence to aggressive indifference.

A woman I know vaguely from weary laps around social circles nibbles on her greasy samosa and compliments me on my summer get-up.

I discover that, even without a head, it is still possible to nod with rapt interest at what someone else is saying. I use my hands to indicate my sympathies, shock, dismay – a full canopy of emotions under which we both seek shelter from the awkwardness of staring vacantly in a corner.

Two drawbacks: One, I can’t laugh, which I make up for by slapping my knee and rocking my upper body backwards in my chair. Two, I can’t kiss, but I find that lightly pressing and twisting the recipient’s lips together between my thumb and index finger is an acceptable substitute.

In Fact

2009-06-19T07:27:00.007-04:00

The children’s book author is a bitter ass
The ingénue polishes her ten-year plan
We put the money in but none came out

Funny man is a shambling wreckage
Beautiful flower, poisonous gills
Goofy cub bites unprovoked

Extraordinary flavors burst from the humble turd-root
Feelings shoulder past numbness
Hey, that stooge is a lot smarter than we thought

CEO schedules tie-up and paddle
Tiny tyrant turns out easy to appease
Tearful devotion in fact perishable

The Eight Bigs

2009-06-15T22:35:00.001-04:00

H. calls me. He is agitated, his voice jumping on one foot.

He says he realized he has acquired six of the “Eight Bigs”: A color TV; a camera; a telephone; a refrigerator; a DVD player; and a set of furniture.

The only things he is missing now is a car and a washing machine. And he is not sure he needs a washing machine, given the laundry facilities in his building. He says he is thinking of switching the washing machine out for a wife as the eighth “big.” If he should be fortunate enough to acquire a washing machine later in life, he’ll go back to the traditional list. He says his wife will never know the difference.

In June

2009-06-14T13:07:00.003-04:00

J. is mortified by the reflexive fatuity with which he associates everything he encounters with some aspect of pop culture. That is, it is as though he is unable to experience anything in its purity, in the exactness of the moment, without mediating it through a system manufactured for television viewing, pop culture at its most degraded and insistent.

W. avoided movies for years because he said he didn’t like the feeling of having his emotions manipulated.

I welcome the assault, a relief from the central narrative, as it were.

But insofar as our own universe become impoverished by comparison, the chicken thawing in a bowl of water in the sink at home when we have just witnessed the resistance fighter share a heel of bread with a smudged, speechless orphan.

J. and I were talking about this after stumbling across the Boathouse in Central Park. It was my first time there, yet as we crossed the threshold into the dining room overlooking the lake and the bank of small wooden boats, I recognized it immediately from a rerun I had seen of “Sex and City,” the one where the heroine and her paramour fall into the water.

So was I robbed somehow, of my experience, by seeing it on television? It would not have been the same if I had read about the Boathouse in a book. Seeing does the greatest damage.

There is nothing that hasn’t been already been seen by someone. On the Internet we can see most things before we experience it, to decide whether or not it is “worth it.” A special effort must be made to avoid knowledge of a particular place, as with the sex of a fetus.

Seeing can be undone by thrusting ourselves upon the landscape.

The Boathouse, then, locked in my mind with a conversation with J. about the tyranny of memory: we don’t choose it; memory chooses us. And so we might title this piece, “In Praise of Repression”: our ability to submerge memory, hold its face down in a bucket of water, torturer reversed.

A less salubrious and more accurate analogy: forcing a balloon to assume a new shape, which results in the swift outgrowth of a frog throat, an angry eruption from an unexpected extremity.

I thought about this a few days later, face down at the Tui Na joint on Mott Street as a Chinese woman mounted me and dug her knees into my buttocks.

What's Wrong?

2009-06-01T23:20:00.004-04:00

The question you ask is, “What’s wrong?” Or, “Is anything wrong?”

How a person answers this question is the “tell” for whether he or she suffers from a fear of rejection, a fear of abandonment, or a fear of feeling worthless.

D. learned this at a seminar taught by a Vietnamese monk, which feels more legitimate somehow, than if it were taught by a white person at the Learning Annex.

We are looking at his notes, which include his drawings of three human outlines that look like depressed Keith Haring figures or sock monkeys with the stuffing leaked out of them. Each figure is decorated with concentric circles marked differently, A for abandonment, R for rejection and W for worthlessness. There is one figure with a mental condition that spells out RAW.

I’ve been asked this question several times now. The second time I answered, “With who?”

Pico Iyer once characterized the difference between Californians and New Yorkers as “being” and “doing.”

Watching TV is doing nothing.

If you read too much, that, too, after awhile, can feel like another form of consuming without producing.

In my twenties I had a greater capacity for “hanging out,” which, in retrospect, seems even more impressive seeing as how I don’t drink.

The W Type, one who fears feeling worthless, imagines doing something is the solution.

A cultural portmanteau series we call “The Asian American Experience.”

Later, standing in line at the market for cat food, I find a frayed slip from a fortune cookie that I’ve been carrying in my wallet for what, a year:

“Idleness is the holiday of fools.”

Dream: Polka Dots

2009-04-28T14:08:00.002-04:00

Last night I dreamt I encountered my ex and a friend who had turned into cats.

My ex was sporting a pair of Beckettian burlap pantaloons. Both of them had colored the tops of their heads and flanks with yellow and red polka dots. They were coming back from a Halloween parade.

Making small talk, I asked my ex, Were you the only…pets there?

As the words left my mouth I realized the term “pet” might be perceived as belittling but it was too late.

Subtitles with Chez Bryan Ong

2009-04-19T11:02:00.007-04:00

There are people who like to sing.

And there are people who like to dance.

There are people who will do both, singing and dancing. There are people who like watching singing and dancing, but not together, as in a Broadway show.

There are forms of singing and dancing that have slipped out of style, past any hope of retro-revival, but not so far gone that anthropologists have begun looking into it.

I like things when they are half-way gone. I like the recording of a song.

Subtitles with Chez Bryan Ong

2009-04-19T10:44:00.003-04:00

I don’t miss him. I just miss how often I used to laugh.

The problem was this: He didn’t know what he was a monument to.

Titles of my next two books

2009-04-07T21:16:00.005-04:00

Walking around the new neighborhood. Came across this tiny restaurant and had some mediocre lamb soup noodles therein. A young white guy came in after me and started talking in Chinese to the clearly delighted shopowner. It was pretty simple stuff, but his tone was pretty good. There should be a phrase to describe the exquisite agony of observing a white person speak your mother tongue better than you do.

Another instance when Chinese comprehension would have been useful.

The interior proved equally mysterious.

So long, 37 Spring St

2009-04-07T20:49:00.002-04:00

Dream: The National

2009-03-20T08:43:00.003-04:00

I had been working late all week, this part was true. I called him to ask if he wanted to have dinner. He said, Yes, meet me at “The National.”

It was just a block up from the restaurant where I was. We were talking about meeting tomorrow. I got a bill from the waitress for $103, for charges unrelated to food. I asked her about The National. She smiled and nodded approvingly. They have live music there, she said. The chef stopped by and also praised it. He referred to it as a spot.

There was a pause in the conversation. The waitress looked me and up and down as though seeing me for the first time. The O of her mouth hung suspended as words arranged themselves, glass origami.

There is…an unspoken dress code, she said finally.