lion.mouth

As Lisa Robert­son has said, I’m inter­ested in sincerity.

I’ve long since reached my sat­u­ra­tion point with irony. I’m sick of thin­ning my emo­tions with nuance, or cut­ting them with sar­casm. It’s why I fell in love with per­for­mance. Dra­mat­ics. Urgency. Tears. Rage. Love. Fate. Feel­ings. Per­for­mance may sound like the oppo­site of sin­cer­ity, but I think it has the power to refract and redou­ble our muted emo­tions. The result, for audi­ence and per­former alike, is some­thing more pro­por­tioned to life.

Robert­son con­tin­ues: “It’s usu­ally invoked as a sto­ical value, a holy human­ness. Moral and national weight attends it. I’m inter­ested in study­ing sin­cer­ity because I want and don’t want it. I mean, I want to be believed. But I also want to write through spaces that are utterly delu­sional. I need to be able to delude myself, for as long as it takes, as long as it takes to trans­late an emo­tion, a griev­ance, a pol­i­tics, an intox­i­ca­tion, to a site, an outside.”

This: “I need to be able to delude myself, for as long as it takes…to trans­late an emo­tion.” I am inter­ested in cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple to delude them­selves. And, maybe its me, but I felt it hap­pen the tini­est bit at a recent DoS gathering.

We planned an Evening of Inter­com Read­ings at the build­ing. The (sim­ple) idea being that lis­ten­ers would sit down­stairs in the venue while the reader sat upstairs and broad­cast their words over the inter­com sys­tem. Turns out that didn’t work, so we just sta­tioned a mic upstairs and used the PA sys­tem, instead. Still, the effect was some homely, undressed magic.

A small group sat in dim light and watched one another while a face­less, if famil­iar, voice boomed from above. We had poetry, black metal lyrics, young adult fic­tion, romance, a song, and some­one shared the sounds of eat­ing a cookie. The void left by the reader became a sort of stage that the rest half-consciously filled.

When it was my turn to read, my throat went dry. It was some­how more vul­ner­a­ble to have only my voice at my dis­posal. Deliv­er­ing some­thing mean­ing­ful, I felt the ten­sion of want­ing and not want­ing to believed. But the plain farce of the pre­sen­ta­tion dis­armed us. Our gen­uine attempts, mean­ings, sin­cer­ity: didn’t even get carded. It thrilled me more than I let on.

Thank­fully, a cool friend cap­tured parts of the event on video. Please enjoy.

It loved to hap­pen. from Alisha on Vimeo.

Because The Mack has Returned, and because my ongo­ing Romance project extends to my music library, and because I wanted an excuse to share a record­ing that’s embar­rass­ing by itself, I decided to make you a mix. I weeded out some deep, deep loves (think Keyshia and Gucci and Bey­once) to avoid repli­cat­ing LIST ONE, and indulged in some older, sweeter crooners.

I give you my hour-long ode to that immod­er­ate sto­ry­teller, Romance.

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1.But Not For Me, Alisha Adams sings George and Ira Gersh­win.

Orig­i­nally sung by Gin­ger Rogers in the musi­cal Girl Crazy (1930), but Judy Garland’s ver­sion is dear­est to my heart. I recorded this in the car while com­mut­ing between Santa Bar­bara and LA, so it sounds like crap. But I like it, okay?

2. Vision of Love, Mariah Carey

Sigh.

3. I’ll Never Be Alone Again, Evie Sands

Her voice is pure cream. Like a woman in armor singing an alter­nate ver­sion of Whiter Shade of Pale.

4. Past, Present, Future, The Shangri Las

The most ridicu­lous song from my favorite girl group of all time. “But don’t try to touch me, don’t try to touch me, cause that will never hap­pen again. Shall we dance?”

5. The Awak­en­ing, Kate Chopin

SPOILER ALERT! An excerpt from the end of the 1899 land­mark fem­i­nist novel. It’s “frank depic­tions of female sex­u­al­ity” tan­ta­lized me as a younger lady.

6. Like a Tat­too, Sade

“Sweet lies.” Per­haps the best sum­mary of what this Romance project is all about.

7. Blow­ing Up My Mind, The Exciters

This song has no nuance. Kinda like some short-lived romances of my own.

8. Eddie My Love, The Teen Queens

Actu­ally recorded by three dif­fer­ent girl groups, and all three ver­sions made the charts in 1956. Near dead­pan deliv­ery of clas­si­cally melo­dra­matic doo wop.

9. Two Part Inven­tion No. 14 in B-flat Major, Peter Serkin

“In 1968, shortly after mar­ry­ing and becom­ing a father, Peter Serkin decided to stop play­ing music alto­gether. In the win­ter of 1971, he, his wife, Wendy and baby daugh­ter Karina, moved to a small rural town in Mex­ico. About eight months later, on a Sun­day morn­ing, Serkin heard Bach being broad­cast over the radio from a neighbor’s house. As he lis­tened, he says, “It became clear to me that I should play.” He returned to the U. S. and began his musi­cal career anew.”

10. Stay With Me, Lor­raine Ellison

I didn’t really know about Miss Elli­son until recently! This song swells over and over, but always stops just short of los­ing con­trol. Her restraint is weirdly satisfying.

11. Sweet Nothin’s, Brenda Lee

Oh, Brenda. She’s like 12 here. The whis­per­ing sounds? Come on!

12. It Might As Well Be Spring, Astrud Gilberto

When you watch videos of her, she barely moves her mouth. She barely moves. It’s intimidating.

13. Noth­ing Even Mat­ters, Lau­ryn Hill

Lau­ryn Hill was an early source of my frus­tra­tion with lim­i­ta­tions. I will always be a 13 year old white girl blar­ing The Mise­d­u­ca­tion of Lau­ryn Hill in my mom’s minivan.

14. Dream a Lit­tle Dream, Lor­raine

This song is really fun to sing in your deep­est voice.

15. Anne of the Island, L.M. Mont­gomery

Anne of Green Gables sat­u­rated my ado­les­cence. This is the hilar­i­ously read end­ing to Anne of the Island, in which the painfully pro­tracted courtship of Anne and Gilbert is finally resolved.

16. When You Walk in the Room, Jackie de Shannon

This is another one of those love songs lack­ing nuance. Does any­one else find that charm­ing? Just me?

17. Come Back My Love, The Heart­break­ers

Men singing a cap­pella with a hard-to-define fem­i­nine vocal qual­ity. That’s the spirit.

18. Frauen­liebe Und-leben Op. 42 — Seit Ich Ihn Gese­hen, Lor­raine Hunt Lieberson

“This song is the first of eight songs of Robert Schumann’s Opus 42, ‘Frauen­liebe und Leben’, or ‘Woman’s Life and Love.’” Seit Ich Ihn Gese­hen trans­lates to Since Mine Eyes Have Seen Him.

19. Will You Love Me Tomor­row, The Shirelles

Favorite ver­sion of a favorite song.

20. Let’s Do It, Ella Fitzger­ald sings Cole Porter

Book­end­ing this mix with standards.

A Cou­ple of Quotes:

“If we wish to speak of it sub­stan­tively, we must make a sub­stan­tive of it by writ­ing it out thus with hyphens between all its words. Noth­ing but this can pos­si­bly name its del­i­cate idio­syn­crasy. And if we wish to feel that idio­syn­crasy we must repro­duce the thought as it was uttered, with every word fringed and the whole sen­tence bathed in that orig­i­nal halo of obscure rela­tions, which, like a hori­zon, then spread about its mean­ing.” –William James

“I’m a roman­tic; a sen­ti­men­tal per­son thinks things will last, a roman­tic per­son hopes against hope that they won’t.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Cou­ple of Theories:

In one, every­thing is clipped. Cured. Cap­tured and killed. The story is refined by a thou­sand retellings. Torn from the orig­i­nal giant and passed through suc­ces­sively smaller hands down smaller halls to the tini­est office with the tini­est edi­tor at a knife’s-edge desk. Glib myth. Pat per­sua­sion. A kiss.

In the other, we are after a panorama. Truth is not a point, an accu­racy, but an entirety. A ram­bling drunk. An accom­mo­dat­ing tan­gent. Begin­ning one sen­tence after another with, ‘Else­where…’ and ‘Mean­while…’ and ‘Also…’

In both, romance is com­manded by the impos­si­ble. It makes heights bear­able. We can’t extend our reach, but we can manip­u­late the dis­tance. One’s a stab, the other a flood. Angles on infinity.

A Cou­ple of Poems:

1.

A man at Good Will scared me
with Hello! He was tall
and honked like a blade
of grass between my thumbs.
Then one with weak eye­brows told me
he couldn’t reprice those ‘til tomor­row.
A warn­ing, like a crav­ing, meant to shame me,
and the yarn was taken out of sight.
All this put me in a bad mood
and I thought again about the ad; the one nam­ing
the lit­tle white gully of her chest, and
how she’d com­pli­mented his blank
–reply with the thing she liked
if this is you–
I left feel­ing my own bra fill
with sand. It was that kind of day,
when I had the idea, too late, of
answer­ing his blank
with a list of things
I’d tried to buy
but couldn’t.

2.
The neigh­bors moved in to walls of pri­mary blue.
I heard them ham­mer­ing
at night, heard them back up against a first gladness

while I was mak­ing a kind new word for you;
one that includes river, inlet,
trib­u­tary and stream: the whole ocean
abbre­vi­ated to an arm,
like a pruned limb under my side—

What has this to do with neigh­bors?
Oh, an arriv­ing love; a purchase.

Can any­thing besides bore­dom defeat romance? Stop me—boredom is just a love song sung in elim­i­na­tions, as hands love the hours with tucked thumbs and weather invents the charts’ devo­tion; What our eyes do to prose.

Intel­li­gence is roman­tic. I wrote that down but I also remem­bered. The oppo­site of what’s real is not fancy. Some­one else fin­ished that thought, beautifully.

My par­ents mailed me pic­tures of my dog in another woman’s jew­elry. I look at the pic­tures like a chal­lenge; I show them off.

How do you explain the insep­a­ra­ble num­ber of things with­out the impa­tience
of import? Bring it all to shore, as we do in sen­tences. This is a sen­tence. And some­one else, with a footnote.

I could start again, to shore; give up the index for a human traf­fic light.

What I mean is just that if the gates are really gone we’ve been more watch­ful than we thought: nar­row if not per­mis­sive, delib­er­ate if not care­ful. Not sure, let­ting any­thing amount to consent.

“When speak­ing Russ­ian, a self is felt but has no proper name.” But in Eng­lish we’re cow­boys: bri­dled romance car­ries us from con­text to noun.

We cup a land­scape for its porce­lain rim and trace it, only. This is the mean­ing of a palace of time, the sanc­tity of tub­ing down the river.

I am devoted, then, to a charged tedium, a slack inter­est. At The Office of Weary Sur­prises, I reg­u­late sum­mer tem­per­a­tures. When the clock says to, I lead com­pany exer­cises: stare and hum, stretch the truth, sad­dle up and weep.

Or, Fig­ures 1–10: notes from con­tin­ued study.

fig.1
Romance doesn’t hap­pen just any­where.
You are its nat­ural habi­tat, a life so won­der­fully con­fined.
Your time lim­ited, your scener­ies small, your sen­tences curbed.
For you, the right words are as good as air travel.

fig.2
Romance is a weed that crops in mem­ory and yields gar­lands.
It is half a heart parad­ing as the whole.
Not deceit, but a gen­er­ous, mag­ni­fied hon­esty.

fig.3
Romance is loaded.
It keeps piles of unguarded forg­eries.
Romance dumped the gold stan­dard and ran off with infla­tion.
It elopes with each new frac­tion of a cent.

fig.4
Romance can tell a story, but never a joke.
It’s a device that invents num­bers then loses count.

fig.5
It learns from arrows.
Thins to a line and hard­ens to a point.
Nar­rows enough to be held and drawn; to pierce.

fig.6
The Art of Let­ting Some­one In is pocked with secrets, so Romance with­holds some­thing, always.
It is a mine­field of dim­ples just below the horizon.

fig.7
Romance abstracts pos­si­bil­ity from the lump in your throat.
It invents, rehearses and refines a future with­out betray­ing intention.

fig.8
It is a most humane har­bin­ger, proph­esy­ing only in pri­vate.
And it serves div­ina­tions like delicacies.

fig.9
Romance needs what is given.
Its power is surprise.

fig.10
It’s a knack.
Draw tomor­row over today, then hook the past and bury it cen­ter: a belt of vaulted earth.