Colin and the 9-11 Reading

I've been doing what I do when I lose someone I love: putting their name in the search in the folder of my journals (which I've been writing digitally since, I don't know, the turn of the century) and seeing what I come up with about them. I found an entry I'd written on September 12, 2009. The day after a reading that Tom Spanbauer had put together (I believe) in remembrance of 9-11. 

By then, I had been a member of Tom's Dangerous Writers class for four years. I'm not sure how long Colin Farstad had been a member, less than I. I think this may have been Colin's first public reading of his work (alongside Tom and Dangerous Writers Kevin Meyer and Elizabeth Taylor). It was at Powell's on Hawthorne, which was a big deal for a new writer, and all four had written original essays, about 9-11, for the event.

Here are a few chunks from my journal, chronicling the event (and for context, I had read at a different reading recently, and I reference it in my comments).

First in the journal there was a section I'd headed: Random quick blips from yesterday. In no certain order.

Last night after the reading when Tom told me that the way he was able to keep himself from crying, reading his piece, was looking at the old man in the front row and pretending that man was his father and he was going to laugh at him for crying. I said, “Wow, that’s so,” and paused just a moment, “twisted.” His smile went from big to bigger, and I told him the emotions he showed just made the reading that much better for us.

 

Colin at the podium. That spread of books on the shelves behind him. Big Colin smile. He’s been so excited about this and saying things like, every time I go over the railroad tracks, or see 11:11 on the clock, or, or, or – I have to close my eyes and make a wish. Afraid it wouldn’t happen after all. But it did.

 

Before the reading, telling Colin how he’d told me, before my reading, his way of being nervous earlier in the day before his performances (Closureyes) but then, getting up to show time, coming to a calm. Telling him how that helped me not be nervous for my reading and hoping the reminder would be good for him too.

That last segment is a little hard to follow. What I was saying is that when I had been nervous about reading my own work in an earlier event, Colin had told me that when he performed with his band Closureyes, he always got nervous early in the day but by the time he went on, the nerves would be gone. That comment had helped me feel less nervous about getting up to read, and so I hoped that telling him so, before his own reading, would help him not be nervous too.

OK, so here's another chunk, later in the journal entry, when I had stopped jotting random moments and was writing out the event as it had unfolded:

Colin [read] third. He probably read slower than he usually reads in class – yes, I think he did. But he was a bit fast and he has that way of mushing his words together. Made some lines hard to catch. Me, I kind of like that he read like he reads, that Colin way, but it’s too bad that you missed things. Like the cool way he dissected and inverted the god is in the details thing.

Some bits of his piece: Kissing without kissing. Letting the girl smoke in the apartment. Taking comfort in the human touch (that was said twice, I think, and was the last line of the piece). The story I tell over drinks and cigarettes. Shoulder to shoulder, cavemen around the campfire. Knee to knee on the couch (with his roommates watching the TV).

Colin got to introduce Tom. Well, not introduce, but call him up. Tom spoke as he always does. That soft blue powder voice, the hesitations and the places where that voice stumbles – all of it charming.

I wish I had Colin's 9-11 essay to read again now. To get the context for the lines I pulled out, the kissing without kissing, the cavemen around the campfire. To remind myself what I meant when I said that Colin "dissected and inverted the god-is-in-the-details thing." (Hyphens added because I've learned some about punctuation since 2009.) Mostly, though, I'm just happy that I thought to write down some of the moments of an event in Colin's life that obviously meant a lot to him. And happy to have been there in the audience for it.

And happy that I've always had that impulse to snap pictures even when I've never had the aptitude for it. 

The readers preparing before the start of the event.

Colin receiving his applause.

songstory night

SongStory was the first lit event I've ever produced.  Such an interesting, different experience from being in a reading without coordinating it. One of the things I noticed as I sat watching the show unfold Wednesday night was a sense of... can I say ownership? How about wishful ownership - like it was my right to pretend I owned each one of those performances, those readings, those tremendous stories.

[photo courtesy colin farstad]

I couldn't have asked for a better night - a big crowd and no last minute crises. Someday Lounge is an excellent venue. They can pack a lot of people in there but it's really intimate with low lighting and little candles on the tables and a balcony for more seating. Here's the red curtain waiting for the show to start, before all the readers had made it to their seats down front.

 Emcee Stephen O'Donnell.

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

How lucky am I to have a husband who would offer to take care of all the intros for me so I could keep my mind on my own reading and on the rest of the coordination of the event? I wrote up the initial intros but Stephen did a lot of work expanding on them and making them his own. He makes a great master of ceremonies with his lovely speaking voice and charm - plus, note the sexy sweater vest.

First up was Bradley K. Rosen, reading an excerpt from his novel The Bunkie Spills. It was fun to listen to the slow build of laughter as people realized his narrator was talking about making music with one's urine stream. Bunkie speaks surprisingly beautifully and music-savvy about pee...

First off, you got to be open to it. You got to open your ears up real wide and you have to open up your imagination so it can hear all them notes coming into your ear canals and you can imagine a fanfare of clarinets and violins and bells and whistles and drums and trombones and tambourines and trumpets. All them tonal essentialities of a symphony. You can get all them different tones out of your urinactic stream by concentrating real hard and moving it from the middle of the toilet water and out to the edges of the bowl and around and back again. You can use your hips if you want. A gyration of sorts. A slow groove. Like you was fucking a butterfly.

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

 I liked going from the mangled poetry of Brad's narrator to the sumptuous poetry of Lidia Yuknavitch. She read from The Chronology of Water. I didn't know what she was going to read until she started reading, but I'd been hoping she'd choose this piece. It's beautifully layered and intensely sexy.

One night he put a blanket on the floor and told me to wait and when he came back he was a big 10 years younger than me beautiful man carrying a cello.

"Jesus," I said. "You play cello?"

He played Bach. The sixth suite.

I cried. Possibly the puniest sentence I've ever written.

I cried for the force and strength of his body brought to the brink of tender in his fingers straddling the strings. I cried for the violence of hitting as it fell away into the tremor of holding a note. I cried for the man of him - the size and shape of my father - the brutality of muscle and artistic drive - brought to the cusp of such beauty. Bach. But mostly I cried because I could feel something. All over my body. Like my skin suddenly had nerve endings and synaptic firings and ... pulse.

[Oh my dear lord.]

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

When Courtenay Hameister got up on stage, she pointed to me in the audience and said, thanks a lot for making me follow Lidia Yuknavitch. I thought to myself, yeah, I sure as hell wasn't going to follow her. [Producer gets to arrange the program so that she opens the second half so she doesn't have to directly follow any of her fabulous readers. Producer is smart that way.] Then Courtenay launched into her essay "My Sister's Husky Too" and killed.

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

Courtenay always kills, with whatever she does. I read her essay in full before the event, and it was so great just in my little head - but combined with Courtenay's impeccable timing and delivery on stage it was even better.

I was glad we’d agreed to play New Year’s Eve, as it gave me something to do. I’ve never dated much because as a rule, I hate people, so my New Year’s Eves are generally not the grown-up proms they are for some. My favorite New Year’s EVER was playing dirty scrabble with five drunken word nerds who almost came to fisticuffs over whether the word “poon” was acceptable. (Side note: it IS.)

Additionally, I’d been dumped a few months prior by a really attractive, sweet sociopath and the breakup had lead me to eat some things. So as I was putting on my holiday bustier before the show, I noticed that the fancy silver hook-and-eye closures were straining a little harder than they used to do their job. It didn’t help that the other backup singer was a size two, and we often dressed alike. Her bustier made her look like Kiera Knightley in Pride and Prejudice. Mine made me look like an 18th century barmaid trying to smuggle a passel of puppies home to her kids. 

So as we stood in the echoey gym bathroom in front of the mirrors, I felt a lot like my awkward 16 year-old self, but now I didn’t have that whole “You’ve got the rest of your life ahead of you” thing going for me.

During intermission, Cymbalman arrived at the entrance to Someday. I wish I had a picture or two of the audience playing him as he wandered through the place. I know people were taking pictures, but none have come my way yet. I love to stand back and just watch people. Some are totally shy about it, afraid to take the mallets from his hands, afraid to give more than a soft ching-ching or two to the cymbals all over his body. Others really let him have it.

Stephen was not only emcee for the evening but Cymbalman-rangler too, escorting him up the stairs since those tiny eye holes in his eye cymbals don't leave him much room for peripheral vision - and then Cymbalman did a bit of percussive performance on stage.


Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!




Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!

Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!



[cymbalman photos courtesy leann o'rourke. psychedelic colors courtesy me having fun with paint shop pro. except for the first shot. that purple is just the lights.]

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

I was the first reader after Cymbalman had his bow. I think it's fitting that I followed him because I think of Cymbalman as a clown - in the best sense of the word - and the essay I read was all about my decision to become a circus clown - and the overblown childhood strivings that led me there. My strivings were always grand and timid at the same time, and when I discovered the anonymity of clownhood, I'd found my calling. I see this in Cymbalman too - not only his anonymity but his combination of cacophony and quiet.

[photo courtesy lidia yuknavitch]

Alone in the house, my bedroom door locked, I sat on the edge of the bed in an endless rhythm of strum, each chord a smash of sound with the click of the plastic pick hitting the strings. My cockatiel, Punkin, sitting and sharpening his beak on the wood of my antique washstand, started a quick-paced chirp, low in his throat, along with my music. Of course he wasn’t in tune and he wasn’t in rhythm, but as long as I kept strumming, he kept chirping. I decided this could be some exotic, foreign instrument, like when George Harrison introduced the Beatles to the sitar.

I like this picture Lidia took of me. The combination of lights and iPhone make me look like a faceless yellow phantom, some character from an old movie about the future, complete with some sort of beam of light shooting down onto my head from the mother ship.


Next up was Vanessa Veselka, reading a funny, edgy, very moving piece called "Flora in Pregnancy," which had a landing that left me a little breathless. Listening from my seat, I was glad I hadn't followed her either.

My midwife says I should look at my pregnancy as an opportunity to get closer to my women friends. But I figure they’ve had their chance. Ten years of punk shows, basement parties, and having sex with all the same people should have been enough to break the ice.

                         

“Don’t you have any female friends?” asked my midwife.

            

 “None I’d let near a child.”

[both photos courtesy leann o'rourke]

 Vanessa has a delicious rock 'n roll way of reading, all casual with the mic in one hand and pages in the other. I wish I could put these two pictures of her together and make a flip book.

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

Kevin Sampsell closed the show, reading from A Common Pornography. I was kind of delighted to hear him read about his own youthful strivings for musical grandeur - so similar to mine. Both of us read about recording our own music - in the bathroom where the echo was better. Although between the two of us, only Kevin was innovative enough to add percussion to his recordings by banging on the toilet seat.

Our first "album" of punk rock songs was recorded on a cassette player in his bedroom and bathroom. Just Terry and me. We decided to call ourselves Neon Vomit. He was good at creating some heavy riffs based on my smallest suggestions (usually just me saying, Can you do something like this - and then imitating a guitar part with my clenched mouth) and then I would yell the lyrics in my best Rollins imitation. There were no drums but sometimes we would bang on the toilet seat for percussion.

The grand finale of the evening was Kevin using our old relic of a boom box and his own relic cassettes to play some actual Neon Vomit recordings - not only that, but he gave the best lip synch performance ever, rocking out all over the stage as his teenager self. It was hilarious and awesome.

[photo courtesy b. frayn masters]

I want to say thanks again to all the readers, to Someday Lounge, to Bob Priest and March Music Moderne. To Stephen for being emcee and helping coordinate. Thanks, too, to Leann O'Rourke for taking some great pictures of the event.

March Music  Moderne is going on all through March with an outrageous lineup of musical events. Check out their calendar here.

[photo courtesy me]

[one more picture for good measure. emcee stephen contemplating the boutonniere he made from the lost cymbalman feathers he found lying in the someday lounge green room after the night was over...]