Lip Service West, tonight at 50 Mason Social House in San Francisco. I’ll be reading a light-hearted non-fiction piece about women’s issues like Mormanism, appearance and the music industry. Other women will be reading about other topics, all as a fundraiser with proceeds going to a non-profit benefiting women. Win/win.
More info here: http://www.lipservicewest.com/
This past weekend was a strange one. I walk through life rather oblivious of things. I nod a lot and go, “Yea, sure! OK.” So, when I found myself convincing my friend Joe to use my room for a book film trailer, it didn’t strike me as odd. Even if the film was about junkies, and my room was to be a piss-in-the-sink hotel.
I’ve never been a heroin junkie, but I have lived in the Tenderloin in a piss-in-the-sink hotel. I figured, why not help a fellow writer and friend out and let him use my room in a nice quiet neighborhood of Oakland, instead of a hotel where, as Joe put it, “People might assume we were going to shoot porn.”
On a related note, last Saturday night Paul, who runs Bitchez Brew, invited me and some other local writers, including a friend of mine, Joel Landmine, to read our poems at Era ART Bar. It went well, was a lot of fun.
I introduced Joel to Joe at the last Lip Service West reading I attended, the one where Zarina Zabrisky, another local writer, was on fire and wowed the entire audience, and the one where Paul invited Joel and I to read at this past Bitchez Brew. Joe and Joel became Facebook friends.
Meanwhile, Joe was searching desperately for the best younger him to play a junkie in the film trailer for his upcoming book, Junkie Love. He posted about the trailer on Facebook, having learned Evil Ed from Fright Night was going to be a part of it, and Joel posts something like, “That guy’s really nice.” Joe sees an opportunity, and follows up with, “Hey, you look like a young me (a junkie), do you want to star in my film trailer?” To which Joel says, “Sure.” Joe doesn’t beat around the bush.
Some time goes by, and a thread starts on my Facebook, but gets sidelined by discussion of the best place to film this trailer. My bedroom gets volunteered.
Then, the night of the Bitchez Brew reading, Joe approaches me and asks if I want to play in the film trailer too. I shrug. “Sure,” I say.
(It strikes me that if I had gone through with my threat of deleting Facebook for good, none of this might have gone down.)
Sunday morning, Jamie DeWolf, the director, Joe and his wife Justine, and Joel arrive at my apartment. My roommates let them in, and thankfully I was awake, had a cup of french press coffee in my hand. I was up until 3am the previous night. It was now 9am, so I was still kind of like, “Duh.” We moved all my musical instruments out of the room and Joe and Jamie start making it look like a junkie den. Syringes, spoon with “tar” and cotton in it. The mattress is already on the floor, a sheet over the window, etc. I kept looking over and seeing Joe making little “heroin” balloons by my bookshelf.
Justine tells me she needs to make me look like a junkie, so she starts putting makeup on me. Joel by now looks like a bonafied junkie, bags under his eyes, pale complexion (he’s a skinny dude, with that James Dean kind of rough-around-the-edges look about him) and I give him a thumbs up. “Great job. You look like the perfect junkie.”
Then Jamie asks if I can take off my shirt, because he wants it to look authentic. So, soon I’m lying on one side of my bed, Joel on the other. I’m half naked (in a bra) with a blanket over me, Jamie filming, and Joe giving us directions on what to do. Insert lots of Boom Chica Bow-wow jokes about bedroom filming.
I didn’t know the script for the film before hand, which was probably good, because if I had thought about it too much, I might have freaked out. Basically, Joel is my junkie boyfriend in the film trailer. I’m sleeping. He wakes up, goes out to score dope, gets beat the hell up, comes back, then wakes me up. I kind of roll away, go “WTF,” with my facial expression, then spy the balloons he is handing me in his outstretched hand. I perk up. He smiles. I smile. Junkie Love. It’s pretty devastating, if you really think about it. There’s even one point in the film where we were filming in my bathroom with syringes and fake blood for a scene using my bathroom mirror.
We finish filming, go out and eat lunch, and they all head to the city to do a different scene. At this point, I’m actually starting to wake up. I walked through the rest of the day with kind of a blurry, heavy feeling going on. I went and hung out, talked with friends, but I couldn’t shake this raw, intense feeling in my chest. The feeling stayed with me the next day and is still lingering today.
I’m kind of an empath, and so there’s a part of me that is taking in the fact that Joe lived this life, and it’s a life many people live. He must be feeling pretty wack, watching his friends enact scenes from his past. The junkie life was a life I wanted to live as a teen, because I was an idiot, and a lot of my heroes in pop culture were junkies. But as revealed in a short non-fiction piece I’m writing, I was spared that road due to what must have been angels looking out for me. Instead, I just became a raging alcoholic by age 15. The junkies I traveled with at age 15 didn’t like to share, is what it boils down to.
Maybe I’m tripping because had it been different, that might have been my life. Or maybe I’m tripping because at 15 I was a street kid and me and my boyfriend’s two best friends were junkies, used to shoot up in front of us on a mattress in Golden Gate Park. I glamorized them. Now, at 31, I don’t glamorize that lifestyle at all, and re-enacting it was somewhat brutal. Things just seem to affect me much longer these days.
But I’m glad I could help. That was a good thing to be a part of, in my opinion, although I don’t know if I can ever actually WATCH that book trailer when it comes out. Me as a junkie ain’t pretty. See below.
Friday’s show at Actual Cafe in Oakland was great; It was amazing how it all came together.
I played with two new musician friends of mine who came through for me at the last minute and was blown away: They were both stellar performers. A lot of people I have recently met and think are neat showed up at the cafe; we had a good audience that ebbed and flowed throughout the night.
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In other news, my sister drew a picture of the Jinxes I was talking about the other day.
Like I said in my last post, jinxes are mystical weasel cat creatures who love to trip you up when you decide to invest in any particular plan. I rue the day the jinxes pop up…they’ve been all over the place recently. But they have an upside. When they arrive, I have to check in with my gut. They make me pay attention to what’s going on, consider if I’m on the right path.
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It’s all speeding up right now, the shift from old life to new, the change in living circumstances.
Somehow, even though everything is up in the air, I feel pretty steady. I truly believe everything is going to come together just right. My old life that wasn’t working, by some grace I can’t even fathom, is completely falling apart while a new life where I have friends who blow my mind, am in the center of a hub and can work on my art and be understood and not forced to change my very nature are coming together at the exact same time. It’s hard to straddle these two worlds: One that wasn’t working for me and was causing me duress, and one that seems so perfect I doubt it can even be real because I feel I don’t deserve it. And it still feels terrible, on a visceral level, to be leaving the familiarity of my previous life.
I lost about 15 pounds in a month from stress and lack of appetite, but at the same time, in spite of the anxieties and fears of not being taken care of I’ve felt peace beyond peace. I can’t wait to find a good healing space where I can get settled and start to process all of this upheaval.
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Another update: A reading I did for Lip Service West in January is now viewable online. I think it turned out well…it’s better to make a story about relapsing on Nyquil funny. Because it is funny. You’ll see. (Raaawr). I hate watching myself on video…it reminds me at 31, I look like I’m still 18. I guess that’s not a bad thing…
I’ll also be reading for Lip Service West again (a story about my life as a teenage gutter punk and the importance of my crusty hoodie) at Beast Crawl in two weeks. You won’t be disappointed.
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It’s all a waiting game at this point. Where I’ll live, where I’ll put all my stuff, how I’ll get my stuff at the apartment cleaned and moved (one day at a time).
I’m working hard today on letting go and trusting the universe.
I’ve been very sad and twisted (it’s only natural), but also very happy and feeling tapped into the slipstream again, which is great. If I trust that calm centered feeling inside that says I am doing all the right things and meeting all the right people, I feel OK. It’s those late night hours when my stomach’s all screwy and I’m facing my transitional reality that’s physically and mentally hard…those night hours when I question how everything is going to play out and start losing my faith.
Truth is, I just don’t know how things are going to turn out, but I believe the best possible outcome for me will transpire. Life is for learning, you stop learning when you’re dead and for so many months there I just couldn’t get out of my head. I’ve been reaching out to people struggling with issues I’ve faced in the past (i.e., trying to find support for their art, or trying to get clean and sober) and that seems to be helping a lot. The universe is suddenly sending them to me because I’m taking the steps to make myself available. Even simple stuff like saying the St. Francis prayer, which talks about making myself a person seeking to comfort rather than be comforted, give rather than to receive, is helpful to do every morning.
This blog is one thing I do for other people, and it’s paid back in spades, so I am going to pay more attention to it this week, and please, if you have any topics or struggles as an artist, writer or musician and you want me to approach those topics from my point of view, do share in the comments and I will use that for a blog subject.
I was in the kitchen the other day, and saw an ant scurrying down the wall, holding one of its fellow ants to carry back to wherever it came from.
Our apartment is cheaply built, and somewhat old, from around the ’50s or before, and looks kind of like a drive-in motel. In fact, people have gotten confused, or laughed, when they’ve seen it. “This is where you live?” they snort.
For some reason, in these old buildings, ants are constantly seeking dominion over our physical space, and are subject to be killed on sight.
My husband was standing near me, doing something else, and I called out, “Look, he’s trying to save his brother.”
Without missing a beat, Noel said, “They’re going to cannibalize him,” breaking through my temporary ant empathy lapse. This wasn’t an altruistic move on the ant’s part, he wasn’t carrying his soldier brother, damaged by war, back home to sit in a hospital bed and recover. He was taking the body back to the hive so that the other ants could feast on it. A lightbulb went off in my head, some creaky mechanism started turning, pondering the life cycle, and I squished them both.
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I was in a barber shop in Oakland yesterday, waiting amongst the men for my husband to get his hair cut. On a side table sat Charles Bukowski’s book of short stories, South of No North. I started reading it, because I can’t resist one of Bukowski’s plain white covers when I see it.
I opened to “You Can’t Write A Love Story,” a story about a writer who can’t write, is stuck. In his room, he starts arguing with some girl he picked up at the local bar about the writer’s life. She criticizes him, saying he makes less money than her grandmother. He tells her she doesn’t understand the feeling of needing to shed his crawling skin through writing, of being unable to do so. She accuses him of throwing a lot of parties for someone who hates people. Finally, he badgers her enough that she leaves, and the altercation is enough to start him writing again: he types out the story of what just occurred, word for word.
I love this story. It’s pithy portrayal of the mobius loop some writers subject themselves to, the constant seeking of snakes to bite them, the slow extraction of the venom, the healing through typed words, and then the seeking of the snake, again and again.
I skipped through a few others, and then read Dr. Nazi. This narrator is visiting some forty-something doctor. The doctor is physically falling apart, and after the narrator tells the doctor he’s suffering from the fact that he’s a nervous man, the doctor tells the narrator he was once a Nazi, and spends the appointment ranting about his wife and his divorce.
The narrator keeps going back, because a doctor is better than a shrink. At one point, the narrator rants about lines. People love to wait in lines, he says, everywhere, at the grocery store, at the bank. The lines drive him nuts, make him nervous. He can’t understand the happy faces of the grocery store clerks, waiting to work up to management positions, going home to smiling wives. Lines are the problem with our society, the narrator thinks, the thing that separates him from them, makes him an outsider. Doesn’t anyone else notice these lines? Don’t they drive anyone else nuts?
As he keeps going back to the doctor, he starts to wonder why he never gets to talk about his own problems. I’m the one paying this doctor, he thinks. And then he starts to realize that he is not the only one with problems as he observes people he comes across in his daily affairs. Everyone has problems. Everyone has pain.
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Sometimes, I get so focused and busy, it’s like I’m not paying attention, and the universe can’t talk to me because I’ve got my fingers plugging my ears. There’s something about noticing the world, not always sitting at the computer writing, or with a guitar, composing, but exploring surroundings, whether it’s an ant or a collection of gritty short stories.
Artists need space to observe the world around them and seek their inspiration. What does the ant seeking its home mean? What does it mean that I killed it? What does that say about me? What does it mean that after I spent the car ride over to the barber shop with my husband venting about the futility of the artistic life I opened right to Bukowski’s short story, “You Can’t Write a Love Story?”
Could mean nothing. Could mean something.
Someone else was equally afflicted by life. Other people balk at scripted space, crawl in their skin to get the words out. Ants are not necessarily altruistic. Come to your own conclusions. That’s your prerogative.
Pay attention.
Oh, and yes, in two days. Come. Lip Service West. Fundraiser. I am playing music at 8:00 pm. My friend Jafar Thorne will be playing bass. I was getting all nervous, and my husband, always my muse, reminded me that this isn’t about me. I’m playing music for the event. He’s right. It’s not about me. It’s about helping a really cool reading series keep being really cool (and free!). Ten bucks per ticket, funds go towards the series.
Memoirists. Confessional poets. Are they passe? Should they just give up? Why would anyone talk about theirselves? Why continue? Aren’t there enough visceral, personal experiences out there?
Yes. Yes, there are. But do I get tired of reading good ones? No. Never.
Sometimes, life, even good life, gets in the way.
Lately, I’ve been feeling like the world of writing and music is a giant web, with invisible threads I cannot see. But I keep submitting my work blindly, and once in a while, I find a thread. Sometimes, I find other webs, holding creatures similar to me.
Last night, when I read the first issue of PoV magazine, I was in awe. (Streets, Issue 1)
I’m always on the lookout for interesting people to interview here on The Stifled Artist for the weekly feature titled, Creative People Who Rock(because I’m brilliant at coming up with names for things).Mainly, I look for people who are defying the norm and engaging in their creative endeavors in spite of realities, like having day jobs or not receiving anything monetarily for their efforts. In a society that is increasingly finance driven in regards to how creative we are allowed to be, Ben and Chris are putting together a high-quality magazine to showcase the work of a wide variety of talented people, with no monetary consolation whatsoever. I can’t wait to read the first issue, and not just because my poems will be in it. It will also include work by a number of other talented people. You can read more about the lineup on the PoV news feed.
This week, for the Creative People Who Rock weekly feature, I’ve asked Joe Clifford, author of many published short stories and poems, the memoir Junkie Love and the blog Candy and Cigarettes, to answer a few questions. Continue reading
Through Underground Voices – which I discovered through a writing magazine at Barnes and Noble listing fifty indie places to publish your work – I found out about Joe Clifford, a local Bay Area writer and author of popular blog Candy and Cigarettes. I posted a comment saying, “Hi, I’m a writer, too, and I live in the Bay Area, too, mwahaha.” He wasn’t afraid, as he has faced scarier things than a fellow writer living in the same area as him, in fact, he then told me about the reading series he produces, called Lip Service West.
I submitted a true life story I happened to have in my archives, as these are what I write when I’m not masking true life stories as fiction. And now I’m reading it, tomorrow, in San Francisco. It all happened so quick, sorry I didn’t tell you sooner…I tend to downplay most public appearances.
I wanted to post a link to Lip Service West, and also share these videos. They are gritty. Be warned. Which gives you a picture of the kinds of stuff I address in my own writing, but with some different elements. Want to know what I’m going to share about from my life? Come! Listen. And hear the other fine writers who will be reading, all of whom I’m excited to hear, from reading their bios.
P.S. I just practiced my story on my husband and I did OK. It made him laugh and at the end he said, “That made me sad.” Mission accomplished!
Then I made my husband watch the following videos of readings by Joe Clifford and his friend, writer Tom Pitts, about days from their respective pasts, when they had different, shall I say, proclivities.
The hubbs was rapt, having once grappled such nefarious reaches himself. Looks like their mission was accomplished, too, at least in this tiny household in West County.
There are many other cool stories here, from last year’s readings. Check them out, and please, come to one of these readings. You won’t be bored, I promise.
And the moral of this story is: Reach out to other writers in your area. You never know what will happen.
