Aesthetic Drift #26: Dr. Paglia Probes

12 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift

Dr. Paglia Probes — Pop, the Net and Alfred Hitchcock

by DMETRI KAKMI

In 1998 I was writing for SevenMag—a print and online publication dedicated to the singer Prince, of all things. One day the editor Vicki Shuttleworth asked who I wanted to interview. Camille Paglia was my immediate response. The feminist firebrand had burst onto the scene short of a decade earlier with her mammoth bestseller Sexual Personaeand I counted her among my idols. Moreover, her new book about Hitchcock’s The Birds had just been released, and that seemed as good a reason to talk to her as any.

Little over a month later, after to-ing and fro-ing with Paglia’s agent and time differences between Australia and North America, I stood with phone in trembling hand and nervously dialled Paglia’s home number in Philadelphia. They say you shouldn’t meet people you admire, and I was about to do just that. Would I regret it? No, I did not.

Among the first words Miss Motormouth said was, ‘I haven’t much time. I have to be at work in half an hour.’ And hour and a half later she was still talking full tilt before suddenly going, ‘Oh my goodness, look at the time. I gotta go,’ before slamming down the phone, leaving me stunned and feeling thoroughly pleased with what I had caught on tape.

SevenMag went offline several years ago, and it seems a shame this interview is no longer available for the curious reader. We present it here for your ardent pleasure.

Dmetri Kakmi, 3 July 2020

‘I talk very fast, I’m sure you’ll get enough material,’ was one of the first things Professor Camille Paglia said to me when I rang her Philadelphia home for this interview. I laughed and said, ‘Yes, I know.’But I knew nothing.

The essence of Camille Paglia is in her rapid-fire, high-velocity speech, with its guffaws, screams, high, derisive laughter, startling asides, sudden changes of thought in the middle of a sentence, a word even, and her ability to circumnavigate to her original thesis, twenty minutes later, seemingly without drawing a single breath. Her scope of reference is so panoramic, that a simple question propelled us into a galaxy of references to music, film, classical art, television shows, politics and education. A self-proclaimed television junkie and ‘rock ‘n’ roll intellectual’, she is the embodiment of the age of ‘information overload’ on two legs, and the owner of the sexiest, brassiest voice I’ve heard in many an age. She was a dazzling maw of words and ideas before which I was a mere prompter, quickly flinging in morsels to tempt her voracious intellect.

In this transcript of the interview she talks about pop culture, the Net, and her book on Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’.

Pop Culture

Dmetri Kakmi: Since you first appeared on the cultural scene, you’ve slowly been absorbed into pop culture. That’s rare for an academic. First of all, how did this happen and what are your feelings about it?

Camille Paglia: Well, the reason it happened is because I’m a total product of the 1960s generation. Pop culture, pop art, was the sensibility that burst onto the scene at that time … What has carried my work is that I’m not coming at popular culture from the point of view of those sterile European styles — the Frankfurt school or poststructuralism, which permeates postmodernism. I’m not looking at it from the superior vantage point of seeing what’s wrong with it — that it’s a product of some sort of evil, corrupt capitalist plot — all that kind of moralistic language that impugns popular culture. I’m coming from the point of view of an aficionado, of a fan, okay? That’s why I’m very angry, VERY angry as I now see all of these academics in the Ivy League in America all of a sudden — now that poststructuralism is disintegrating beneath their feet — okay, all of a sudden desperately trying to glom onto popular culture, knowing nothing about it, because you have to have lived with it for as many years as I have to understand it. All of a sudden now they’re running desperately after it, and they’re putting in their books picture of Michael Jackson … trying to catch up and they don’t know what they’re doing.

DK: They’re using the wrong language when they analyse pop culture, aren’t they?

CP: Absolutely! Completely, but not only that, I mean, in order to write about popular culture you must write about it with as great a sympathy, and as great an emotion as you would if you were studying any kind of a foreign culture. And so that the arrogance and the exploitation with which these academics, who are my age, all right, who are trying now to gain cache by sprinkling their work with icons from popular culture. I just can’t tell you how much I’m at war with this gross exploitation, that’s everywhere now. You know, the kind of ironic quotation of popular culture imagery … and you like have this detached irony and present everything in this kind of disconnected way with a kind of whimsical tone. I’m an absolute devotee of popular culture. I see it from the point of view of the mass audience. I don’t look down on it from some ivory tower. And this is what gives my work on popular culture the kind of resonance that people find with it.

DK: Are you concerned that young people are attaching themselves to pop culture and forgetting, or not even being aware of, what Harold Bloom would call the Western Canon of literature and art?

CP: I can see a problem with it, if indeed your whole world is nothing but popular culture, which I fear is so much the case for American youth these days. I’m very concerned about this because what, I think, gives my work power is that I’ve had a very conventional and conservative education in the old style public school … and then a very excellent college education as well. So this gives me the base of knowledge, of history, of literature and of art to be able to play with popular culture. Everything is the media here. We are just inundated with television. Television really is contemporary reality in America, which I like on one level. On the other hand, I can see the effects on the young that have had an appalling, bad education. They have no sense of history, they have no sense of geography. All they know is pop.

DK: Do you see any dangers with this kind of ahistoricism?

CP: Not only am I worried about the loss of contact with and familiarity with the great art of the past, I’m even more worried by the loss of a sense of time and of history, because I feel that a country, a culture fed only on popular culture, where everything is hallucinatory, that that is very ripe for fascism. The idea that fascists will know … we saw Hitler immediately giving Leni Reifenstahl a much bigger budget than she would have got in Hollywood as a woman. All it takes is a severe climatological shift of some sort, whether through an asteroid hitting the earth or through some change in the weather, which causes an economic destabilisation in the world. So I’m very worried that the entire mechanism of the Internet can be taken over, in a time when the people want a strong man, because that’s the thing. People don’t realise that fascism is a permanent threat, all you need is a breakdown of the economy and a breakdown of law and order … and so always there’s the danger of the people longing for a strong man to come, as they did for Hitler following the economic collapse in Germany, following World War 1.

The Net

DK: You owe some of your success and the spread of your ideas to the Internet. Do you think we’re using the Internet to its fullest capacity, or is it early days yet?

CP: This is so right because before people even knew the Internet, there was an underground thing going on, unbeknownst to me, in 1990-91, spreading my ideas underneath the radar screen, as it were, of the academic establishment and the major media establishment in America at the time. My picture was not on my first book [‘Sexual Personae’] and there was no publicity budget, but that book mysteriously sold and sold and sold. We couldn’t figure out what was selling it, okay? Well, soon I found out what it was.

I had been invited to give this lecture [MIT, 1991], because I had written this expose called ‘Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders’. A man came up to me and said, ‘Do you realise your ideas are all over the Well?’ And I said: ‘What is the Well?’and he said, ‘You don’t know what the Well is? Okay, we’ll send something to your university about it.’ And so one week later, arrived a big package with a print out, this long print out and I went around the office, ‘Look at this, look at this,’ I said to everyone. ‘What the heck is it? Someone in Boston is talking with someone in Tennessee who’s talking with someone in California and they’re all talking about me. What is this?’ Well, of course, the Well was one of the first examples of the Internet, okay. So, you see, I owe much to the Internet, now that I’m part of the Internet, also because my ideas are spread worldwide, from being on Salon magazine on the Internet.

DK: What is the future of the Internet?

CP: Well I consider myself the first Internet intellectual, okay? I consider myself the first rock ‘n’ roll intellectual, in that rock ‘n’ roll and television were the great, the original, art forms of my generation. However, I think the Internet is the medium of the young generation that is coming along. I feel that there is as great a gap and a chasm between my generation and these young people as there is, between me and, let’s say, Harold Bloom, my mentor, who has never been touched by television or rock ‘n’roll. And I mean he doesn’t view much television, which is amazing because television as a medium took over American culture in the 1950s, okay, so we’re talking about the major literary critic of the generation before me, Harold Bloom — here he is in the 1990s, okay, untouched by television and is still considering rock ‘n’ roll a barbaric form. It’s hard for me to understand that there are critics in this world, serious intellectuals, all right, who have not been touched in any way by rock ‘n’ roll, which has reformed my brain.

Similarly, just as there is a gap … between me and Harold Bloom, there is just such a chasm between me and the younger people coming along. Yes, I’m on the Internet, but my brain has not been formed by it in the way these young people’s brains have been formed by computers. These young people have had computers in their home already, okay, been fiddling around with it, and they feel at home with a computer. Now I use it, and it was easy for me to switch over because I was so used to looking at television, so to go from television to the computer screen is easy for me, okay. I enjoy it. However, what made it possible for me to become involved in the Internet was when all of sudden the Internet went from the DOS format into these beautiful graphics, where everything is like flashing graphics and colours and all these things, so I feel like I’m watching TV, okay.

I consider the logic with which the computer is constructed is quite different from the way I was trained. It’s not in the old Apollonian style … so I feel that the brain of the young people — we will not understand that for thirty years, not for forty years, not until they grow up and the works that they produce in art and literature and so on, will come out in a whole other way. So I think it is the future, I have great hopes for it in terms of international understanding, you know. To me it’s the ‘Star Trek’ future. Look, ‘Star Trek’ was prophesying, okay, [it] is the visionary thing of the future, when we move into outer space. This is the way I’m convinced that people on the earth will be communicating with people in other galaxies and so on.

Hitchcock and ‘The Birds’

DK: Hitchcock is the master of the cinematic narrative. He conveys a world of meaning purely through visuals, without relying on dialogue. He once said, ‘What appeals to the eye is universal; what appeals to the ear is local.’This can be said of your writing also.

CP: As I was doing this project on ‘The Birds’, for the British Film Institute, I found wonderful quotes from him, similar to what you just quoted, and they’re in my little book, where he says things like: ‘I don’t read novels. I’m a purely visual person.’ He has to see everything in visual terms. I realised that what comes from Hitchcock is that a lot is in mime, a lot is in choreography, and in body language, in facial expressions and so on. And I realised that this is something that he had from earliest years, Hitchcock’s silent films from the late 1920s and his obscure films from the early 1930s.

There’s a lot of wonderful writing on Hitchcock, but I have the advantage now of the VCR, so I’m able to take my print of ‘The Birds’, and I’m able to go over it in a way that no former writer on ‘The Birds’ has been able to do. I’m able to go over that film again and again and again and stop it, slow it, go over things, so I’m able to discover it now and in my little book on ‘The Birds’ now I’m able to find things in it that no one has noticed, that Hitchcock put in there. No one has seen them. They go by so fast when you’re watching the thing in the theatre, you know.

And everybody knows, of course, it’s been established for decades, that Hitchcock had everything planned ahead of time, everything on storyboards, everything in his mind. He’d cut the film already in his head and therefore often he was bored on the set because he was just having to go through what he had already imagined. He said again and again how his favourite part of movie-making was the six-month or the year-long period ahead of time, just sitting, drinking his brandy, in his room just refining, discussing things with the writers and discussing things with the art direction and so on.

At any rate, in ‘The Birds’, there is so much in there, little details that only when you are able to freeze frame it, as you can with a VCR, can you appreciate what he is doing — his sense of humour! I’m hailing him in my little book as the heir of the great British Romantic, Coleridge, the vision of nature as savage. He’s got a vision of [nature] that’s so vast and also his sense of style, his sense of fashion, that’s another thing which conventional and traditional feminism dismissed. Fashion, fashion industry, fashion magazines all corrupted, capitalist conspiracy, all sexist. And I hate that because I come at these things almost from a gay male point of view, which sees fashion as a great art form. So that one thing I also discovered in my research for this book on ‘The Birds’ is that I’d never realised the extent to which Hitchcock not only chose the costumes of his leading ladies, he went shopping with them! He actually went, for example, with Eva Marie Saint, I discovered, to find her fashions for ‘North By North West’. He went with her to Bergdoff’s and sat there and chose the clothing, he chose all the clothing for Tippi Hedren in ‘The Birds’, every single little thing … and Edith Head, the great designer, I found quotes from her which, you know, she is credited with the designs, but she said everything he chose and he told her what to design and so on. So these are the sorts of things, I never realised, this was part of what was attracting me to Hitchcock all along.

At any rate, I consider this little book on ‘The Birds’ the culmination of my career because to me it’s such an honour, the greatest honour I can think of to have the British Film Institute to ask me to write on ‘The Birds’, which is one of the great (obviously it was made in America) but Hitchcock is obviously a great British genius — his early career was in England. So he is one of the leading lights of modern British art and I just feel like everything I’ve ever learned about the history of art, everything is there, in my ability to read images and what body language means, and all these things which people have acknowledge.

DK: Two words: Tippi Hedren.

CP: Tippi Hedren has never got one good word anywhere in film criticism. The mass audience loved this movie, they liked Tippi Hedren, but the critics have been snobbish about her from the very start because they viewed as well ‘She’s not Grace Kelly,’ ‘Oh, she’s not Ingrid Bergman,’ ‘She’s not Eva Marie Saint.’ But Tippi Hedren has always suffered from the fact, ‘Marnie’ also was a flop, only the French critics said a good word about ‘Marnie’ all those years. So anyway, what I’m really loving about having this opportunity is that I’m lauding, Tippi Hedren’s performance, as well as Suzanne Pleshette’s performance, which has been very much ignored in ‘The Birds’. People have talked about the technical aspects but I didn’t find in my research for this book one single positive remark about Tippi Hedren anywhere in any in writing on ‘The Birds’ or ‘Marnie’. In fact, it’s fashionable to demean her and to insult her… So I think it’s about time that people realise she is the ultimate Hitchcock heroine.

DK: ‘The Birds’ was not popular with critics. Pauline Kael, for example, disliked it. Yet it’s reputation has grown over the years. What is the mystique of ‘The Birds’?

CP: Well over time, I realised that it had such an enormous impact on me, and that you can feel the influence of this film in my work, in ‘Sexual Personae’, for example, and that is this view of nature as this enormous unknowable force, much greater than human life, the power of nature, so much greater than that of civilisation, and that if nature turned on humanity it could crush everything to egg shells. This is why I despise poststructuralism so much, the school of Foucault, which denies nature exists, which edits nature out of its point of view, and I look at nature from the point of view of a pagan. I have a pre-Christian attitude towards nature. I don’t see any god above nature. I see nature as being the most powerful thing in all of human life and in the universe.

So ‘The Birds’ sees that, and not only that, I realised the fashion of it, the body language of it influenced me enormously. Gay men, drag queens often love that aspect of Tippi Hedren, she’s almost a kind of a drag. As it turned out she was a model and that was how Hitchcock discovered her, seeing her in a television commercial, so that I emphasise this. So that the very things that caused the critics to dismiss Tippi Hedren, her modelling quality, okay, is in fact what attracts me to her performance from the start.

DK: Did The Birds influence your work overall?

CP: I reveal in this book, that there are things in [‘The Birds’] which influence my theory of civilisation. For example, the great ‘jungle gym sequence’ where Tippi Hedren is sitting there smoking, smoking outside the school house while the crows are landing on the jungle gym, okay. Well that image of the jungle gym stayed with me for a very long time, and I say in this book that my theory of Apollonian form of structure, of civilisation, is coming from that jungle gym, I realise. Hitchcock himself understood, that’s why he had that jungle gym installed there on those grounds. There was no jungle gym, there was no playground at that school, at that authentic school house in the countryside, near Bodega Bay. That’s an authentic building, the school house, but he had the jungle gym constructed, that whole thing was in his mind. And so I don’t need Foucault to tell me about power, I don’t need him because I had Hitchcock, and any one with a brain in their head and part of popular culture would have been introduced to all of these things that are in poststructuralism — in fact every single thing that is in poststructuralism is in some way in the great foreign films. It’s in ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ all those theories about language and reality and time and relativity, it’s all there.

And the other thing is, I treat Hitchcock as a great surrealist. In my research, I found that indeed he was, as I was so glad to find, he acknowledged his influence by the great surrealist films of Bunuel and‘Un Chien Andalou’and Dali, and so I treat ‘The Birds’ as a great work of Surrealism — capital S Surrealism. I have a great instinct for surrealism. I have interpreted, for example, Rod Serling, the creator of ‘The Twilight Zone’, as a great Surrealist. I’m a Surrealist and I feel that Hitchcock has to be seen not as an entertainer but as the person …

DK: He’s a first rate artist.

CP: Well okay, absolutely, but the thing is in feminism in the last 20 years he has been dismissed as a misogynist. You have to realise how low his reputation is right now among feminists. It is an atrocity, it is an atrocity the way that he has been demeaned and defamed by these theorists among feminists. Feminist theory is universally condemning him, there’s hardly a woman who defends Hitchcock do you realise, coming out in the last 20 years. It’s outrageous! So that’s another thing I’m doing here, I’m saying feminism has been totally wrong with this. Hitchcock revered women, he worshipped women, he felt women were like goddesses and so on. And my God, Hitchcock is one of the major, major artists of the 20th century, in any field, to me, he’s one of the great geniuses of the 20th century and it is a shocking situation, indeed. We have young women being taught not to look at Picasso and not to look at Hitchcock. It’s ridiculous!

DK: Let’s talk cinematic violence. You’ve said that eruptions of violence in art show the buried paganism in Western culture, yet you abhor extreme violence in films. Are you squeamish or do you deplore it for aesthetic reasons?

CP: I think it is for aesthetic reasons. Take a film like ‘The Hunger’, for example, the vampire film with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. I feel that aesthetic, artistic errors are made there, that there is too much bloodshed and it makes one queasy. Whereas Hitchcock was a master of violence, he knew exactly how to present it in aesthetic terms so that there’s a kind of continuity of response, you respond to the beauty of him and you respond to the violence in him. That’s, of course, why the shower sequence is so famous. Because he goes out of his way, you never actually see the knife entering Janet Leigh’s body, of course, it’s all very distanced because it’s black and white film. You have a sense of the horror of it. The blood being washed down the drain, but again you don’t see the red of the blood it’s all black and white. It’s all very much distanced. And the same thing again in the scenes of the attacks of the birds.

You know the Greeks, in great tragedies, had a rule which is that you would narrate violence in messengers’ speeches and then you wouldn’t show it. It was considered vulgar, an artistic error to show it, so you would suddenly have the doors swing open at the very end and you would see a corpse laid out. Or at the end of Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler’, for example, you would hear her — ‘boom’ the gun goes off. You hear her blowing her brains out, you don’t see it. And I’m wondering to what extent have we gone too far when things are too much shown? Do we lose that kind of contemplative, metaphysical quality that art demands. I think that it’s a very, very fine line one has to tread there. Hellenistic art would say show violence, show bruising, show barbarism, show Laocoon being attacked by serpents. Whereas you would never see that in High Classic Greek art, where everything would be very much more removed and after the fact. It may be that we’re in a more Hellenistic period, which demands a bit more wallowing, let’s say, in blood and guts of violence. But I think it’s something an artist has to ask himself, or herself. How far should you go before you lose the artistic detachment that’s demanded … or think of all the great art that’s lasted.

‘The Birds’, by Camille Paglia, is released through the British Film Institute.

Originally published in Sevenmag, June, 1998.

Dmetri Kakmi is a writer and editor. His first book, Mother Land, was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia. His newest book is The Door and Other Uncanny Tales.

Aesthetic Drift #25: Miam Book Fair Goes Virtual Nov. 15-22

10 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift, Miami Book Fair

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MIAMI BOOK FAIR GOES VIRTUAL NOV. 15-22

For the first time in 37 years, Miami Dade College(MDC) will transform its iconic Miami Book Fair (MBF), a weeklong celebration of books and writers in downtown Miami, into a free virtual event from Nov. 15-22.

The virtual Fair is the continuation of a proactive effort to remain socially engaged, even as we practice physical distancing, per local and state guidelines. Since the onset of the pandemic, the Fair has remained connected to the world through a stream of interactive online events that include conversations with authors, the annual Miami Writers Institute; The Little Haiti Book Festival; and a Speak Up: Teen Creative Writing workshops, among others.

Nathan Englander and your humble host in The Confucius Institute at Miami Dade College, Miami Book Fair 2019.

“Transforming an event that has been exclusively in person for more than a generation has indeed been challenging, but the opportunity for growth through digital delivery of programs is also motivating for us,” said Lissette Mendez, MBF’s Programs Director. “Over 37 years, we have built a Miami Book Fair that represent diversity of subject matter, diversity of presenting authors and diversity of fair goers. We Have Built A Program That Introduces More Than 20,000 children each year to book and writers, instilling in each of them a love for reading that will support their educational pursuits. Our mission is to engage our community through inclusive, accessible, programs that promote reading and support writers. Though We Will Be Online, we will still be the Miami Book Fair, and we look forward to gathering in person, once again, when the conditions allow.”

This year’s growing list of more than 200 authors and moderators includes headliner Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor Margaret Atwood (“Dearly: New Poems,”“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Testaments”).

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

As in years past, the Fair will feature programs in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole representing fiction, politics, history, memoir, comics, poetry, among other genres, as well as an extensive program for children and teens. Signature programs, such as “Evenings With…”and the IberoAmerican and ReadCaribbean programs will return, and even the beloved Children’s Alley, dedicated to providing fun, learning activities for children, will have a digital home. In addition, the Fair will prominently showcase Florida authors.

The virtual Book Fair Marketplace will feature booksellers and other vendors, in place of the popular Street Fair weekend. And of course, you can order a copy of this year’s commemorative poster created by award winning children’s book author, illustrator, and creator of Disney’s animated series, The Replacements, Dan Santat.

Rita Dove at Miami Book Fair 2016.

A free and simple registration is all that will be required, and users will receive email notifications about programs and activities as they become available, plus practical tips on how to navigate the website, create a watchlist, and more. All MBF programs will be available on a schedule to be published prior to the start of the Fair. Although the Fair site will not be fully operational until programs are complete and ready for viewing, the registrations page is open. Audiences can sign up to get updates and program drop schedule at MiamiBookFairOnline.com

For more information visit www.miamibookfaironline.com. Follow the Miami Book Fair on social media @miamibookfair. #MiamiBookFair2020 #MBF2020 #MiamiBookFairOnline

Aesthetic Drift #25: Corona State of Mind

18 Monday May 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift, Essay

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Gustavo Guerra

Aesthetic Drift #25 by Gustavo Guerra

Corona State of Mind:

Reflections on the Pandemic from The Florida Department of Corrections

March 25, 2020.

The virus is spreading. Thousands of confirmed cases. Cemeteries are being overwhelmed. Italy. Spain. China. Iran. New York. Miami. All on lockdown. Just like us.
Anxieties about the outside world—especially my elderly parents—visit me at least once a day. The rest of my time is divided in adapting to the changes in my own life (washing my hands for twenty seconds 10-15 times a day, greeting people with elbow-bumps, holding my breath as I walk by prison staff) and agonizing about what is going to happen if someone gets infected on this compound.

There are no testing sites here. Institutional staff are not checked for a fever or questioned about flu-like symptoms when reporting to work. I’ve asked them. Yet, despite expert recommendations and municipal orders, they gather in groups of twos, fives, even tens to gossip and socialize to my dismay. Staff cannot realize we will not know they have infected residents until it is too late. In this setting, the virus will spread like—well, a virus.

Our medical facilities are not prepared to handle the magnitude of what I see on television very day. You might think that they will have to send us to an outside hospital, but consider the logistics. Every prisoner that goes to outside medical must be escorted by two correctional officers at all times. The institution’s available staff will be quickly depleted after seven or eight residents need medical attention. Then what will they do?
When men get sick here, it will be too late.

But, I worry about how this will affect me. Is that a little bit selfish? While society is concerned with having a job to return to when this is over, I am thinking about when volunteers will be allowed to return to the institution so I can continue my classes. People outside want to return to beaches and restaurants and movies theaters; I just want to lift the suspension of our gavel club (an affiliate of Toastmasters International). The suspension is one we self imposed because we felt the administration was not being proactive enough.

Three days ago two county correctional officers tested positive for Covid-19. The same day, our administration shut down all programs: chapel, education and library. They began to feed us quad by quad, forcing us to sit two to a table. Why? These men live in the same quad. They use the same phones, the same drinking fountain, the same showers.

I think segregating us by quad for all movement is an excellent idea. However, the effort is defeated when security gives residents the choice to either return to the dorm or go to the recreation yard until the compound has been fed. They enforce social distancing on men living together and then invite them to go to the recreation yard with the rest of the compound. They either don’t take it seriously, don’t care, or don’t get it. And this frightens me. These are the people in charge of my safety.

The irony is that there are activities I would continue to participate in given the chance, even considering the risks. I decry the Department of Corrections’ reactive nature while bemoaning the activities I have lost. It has only been three days and I miss my friends, my brothers. I cannot call them on the phone or write them an email like the public can. I miss the myriad activities we participated in together. God only knows when I will be able to see them and have an intelligent conversation about writing again.

The truth is that the activities I filled my schedule with had been carefully balanced to include personal growth, community involvement, and recreation: classes, clubs, executive committee meetings, newsletter creation, speaking engagements, writers’ groups, workshops, even planning and practicing for a licensed TEDx event that has now been canceled.

Finding purpose while serving a natural life sentence has been difficult. These activities gave me purpose. Being involved kept me positive and helped me maintain my sanity and subsequent sobriety. And the thought of a drawn-out quarantine frankly makes my blood pressure rise and brings tears to my eyes, even as I type this essay.

This whole pandemic scares me. I fear for my family. I fear for my friends. And I fear for my state of mind when this is finally over.

In the meantime, I continue to hold my breath when I am forced to walk by a gaggle of officers. I wash my hands and sing the ABCs until I finish (it’s a 20 second song). I read books and trade them off in the quad for another one. I watch and listen to the news and I worry. And at the end of the day, I write. Because writing allows me to regurgitate my anxieties on a blank page, thus helping me manage my fears. At least until the next newscast, which will feed this ever-present corona state of mind.

Gustavo Guerra is serving a natural life sentence in the Florida Department of Corrections. He has recently discovered a passion for writing as a result of participating in the volunteer-led Exchange for Change program. He can be found writing, complaining, or engulfed in a Dungeons and Dragons game.

Aesthetic Drift #24: On Steven Moffat’s Dracula

08 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift, Horror, Television

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Dracula, Netflix, Proverbs from Hell, Steven Moffat

Aesthetic Drift #24 by Michael W. Merriam

On Steven Moffat’s Dracula

I often resent television. I feel better compensated for my time when I listen to audio drama or read books. When I saw there was a new Dracula series on Netflix, I knew I’d only want to see it if somehow Steven Moffat had written it.

In Dracula, Bram Stoker gave the world a complex and cryptic masterpiece. The book is epistolary, a trunk full of letters and clues, and it’s only because it’s famous that we know it will amount to more than the sum of its parts. Though it has some clear plot points, many of its ideas are hard to detect, and much of what passes for its story are assumptions. The “story” inside it is something the reader must make up for himself. To read it is to re-invent it, on the fly.

Dracula

Steven Moffat’s stock in trade is re-invention. His genius is in not in stories, but in his take on them. The first scene of his Dracula re-writes the novel in a weirdly faithful way: the wooden stakes we see in Sister Agatha’s bag before she starts her interview, her hilarious false-interest in Dracula’s sex life, and her rant about God (similar to one given by a sister in Don DeLilo’s White Noise) make the script literate without being literary. This marks the divergence between the subversive and the simply dumb.

dracula netflix review

Moffat rarely settles for a cheap surprise, always holding out for true subversion that makes story twists satisfying. The subversions of this Dracula are so deft and pleasantly startling, the script feels like a promising early work, one left sitting in Moffat’s desk since before his exhaustion at the hands of Doctor Who. Even so, this new Dracula (while very good) is not quite intricate enough to demand a re-watch. As the novel was a bit of a puzzle, I found that disappointing.

The show’s only bad moments involve the villain’s wise-cracks, marred with anachronistic turns of phrase. It’s tempting to blame Gatiss’s writing, but the same dialogue-landmines were everywhere in Moffat’s Jekyll, so he must shares the blame. Quipping villains (traditionally) help us sympathize with the devil, and at their best they’re like one of William Blake’s Proverbs From Hell: “Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps.” Maybe a dim memory of that explains why critics still consider sympathetic villains a sign of excellent writing. That and some nostalgia for Byronic darkness might be why otherwise good writers cram wit into their villains’ mouths. Stoker would not have approved, since his novel’s theme was that mankind is already, by its nature, sympathetic to evil; Stoker’s art shows us why we shouldn’t be. This show abandons that theme, which is why it sometimes lacks daring.

Bram Stoker in 1906.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was written just as the first rays of 20th century prose threatened the deathless clichés of the 19th. In Dracula, handwritten letters are full of misunderstandings and pompous mistakes, while practical, typewritten ones actually help the good guys win. It’s a book about how an ancient monster was ultimately no match for incredible new wonders of the age, like telephones, and women who can type. When the good guys win, it’s less like David killing Goliath and more like War of the Worlds, where ultimately, the germs of our planet took the alien invaders down. Dracula was not a story of heroic victory, until the reader accepted that true heroism lay in careful, sharp perception. That insight drives the humor, horror, and surprises in the Gatiss / Moffat adaptation. It is absent from all others I’ve seen.

dracula Netflix

Deep faithfulness aside, the show betrays the book in exactly the right way, too: the show’s writing isn’t cryptic—it’s just clever in its exploration the original text. Together, these episodes provide a grandly entertaining vision of the novel. If nothing else, their Dracula is a good way to enjoy the depth and suggestiveness of the old story.

If you feel you’d rather watch something else on Netflix, let me remind you: there’s a library near your house, and you should go there instead.

Michael Merriam

Michael Merriam is a writer and game designer based in Orlando, Florida. His work has been featured in the LA Review of Books, Time Out, The New Yorker, and World Literature Today, among other publications. He is the co-founder of Partly Wicked, a blog that explores escape rooms and other cryptic immersive media, and he teaches Writing for Games at Full Sail University.

Aesthetic Drift #23: On Finally Reading The Outsiders

02 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift, Blog Post, Young Adult

≈ 1 Comment

Aesthetic Drift #23 by Stephen McClurg

On Finally Reading The Outsiders

One way I disappointed my high school students was by not reading one of their favorites: S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. One particular student, Caroline, frequently reminded me how guilty I should feel for not reading the book she loved.

I promised her some thoughts when I got around to it, which only took about a decade.

Hinton wrote The Outsiders when she was fifteen, and it’s quite an achievement considering the depth of characterization. Despite the characters’ flaws, I care about them. Overall, I think I would have liked the novel more when I was younger, but I was reading Stephen King or Clive Barker, and missed many of the books we’re supposed to read when we’re young, like this one, or Catcher in the Rye. Though I hazily remember the movie for The Outsiders, I was too busy watching stuff like ET or The Thing. Plus, the movie characters looked like the kids who wore cut-off jean jackets, sang John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Hurt So Good” on the bus, and smoked on the walk home—a walk that might or might not involve punching a nerd like me.

Caroline says she understands what I mean, and explains who she was when The Outsiders crossed her path: “I was in seventh grade, and it was just a huge part of those formative years that bridged over into early adulthood. It was a time when reality seemed more avoidable and that my dreams could still be unrealistic and easily obtained.”

While The Outsiders reminds me of neighborhood bullies, for Caroline the book is bound with her own youthful dreams, one of the topics of the novel itself, which the reader mostly experiences through the protagonist, Ponyboy. He says, “It seems like there’s gotta be someplace without greasers or Socs, with just people. Plain ordinary people.” He’s one of the greasers, who live on the East Sideof a mid-size city in Oklahoma, a blue collar part of town. The Socs live on the West Side and are upper-middle class.

For Ponyboy, I think the “plain ordinary people” relate to having his family back together out in a house in the country. His dreams–with the exception of wanting to bring his parents back to life—are quintessential American pastoral, with farms and horses, cakes and cattle:

“I wanted to be out of towns and away from excitement. I only wanted to lie on my back under a tree and read a book or draw a picture, and not worry about being jumped or carrying a blade or ending up married to some scatterbrained broad with no sense. The country would be like that, I thought dreamily. I would have a yellow cur dog, like I used to, and Sodapop could get Mickey Mouse back and ride in all the rodeos he wanted to, and Darry would lose that cold, hard look and be like he used to be, eight months ago, before Mom and Dad were killed. Since I was dreaming I brought Mom and Dad back to life…Mom could bake some more chocolate cakes and Dad would drive the pickup out early to feed the cattle. […] My mother was golden and beautiful” (48).

Ponyboy’s grief over the loss of his mother is central to the novel. In the previous passage, Ponyboy calls her “golden”—a descriptor in the book associated with Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and related to innocence and idealism in the novel. His mother is like Eve in an Eden that never existed, this dream garden of a farm and a family made whole again. Throughout the novel, Ponyboy attempts to shore up his adopted family of brothers and similarly troubled friends, the same way people today are likely to build a family or peer group through fandom.

Ultimately, I find the absence of women and the feminine frustrating, but one that makes sense in the novel.

But femininity doesn’t belong with the greasers social codes or either notion of being tough as described by Ponyboy. Tough has traditional masculine connotations: strength, courage, stoicism, etc. Tuff is something aesthetically pleasing or cool, like a Firebird Trans Am or a kickass jam. Given this, I wanted more scenes with Cherry Valance, a spirited girl and potential love interest for Ponyboy. Her appearance is all too brief, but she is more sophisticated, smarter, and quite possibly tougher than a few of the outsiders themselves.

Caroline had a different reaction when she first read the book: “Personally, I loved the lack of female characters because I was a melodramatic teenager and couldn’t stand the possibility of even fictional characters somehow taking away from my own feelings. When I found out Hinton was female, though, and that the characters were semi-autobiographical, I related to it even more. I, too, was drawn to misunderstood rebellious guys with shit tons of issues for me to capitalize on and solve. My dad was extremely strict, and I couldn’t hang out with a lot of my friends. So naturally, I rebelled more and eventually grew into quite a bad influence myself. ”

There’s a moment with these misunderstood rebellious guys that I find revealing and tender and is an example of Ponyboy’s concealed sensitivity. Ponyboy, while looking at one of his brothers says, “Asleep, he looked a lot younger than going-on-seventeen, but I had noticed that Johnny looked younger when he was asleep, too, so I figured everyone did. Maybe people are younger when they are asleep” (104). Most parents can probably relate to Ponyboy’s idea and I think it plays into these boys having to nurture each other. Small moments like this show that the guys are more than troublemakers.

I remember holding my children until they fell asleep and then watching them in their cribs. I still look at them in bed at night and in the morning. It’s hard not to see them younger, even as babies when they sleep. The outsider kids try to nurture each other in ways acceptable to their codes, while showing how they are still children fending for themselves in difficult situations. Caroline says, “It was invigorating to vicariously experience those emotions with the characters. That’s always been my favorite thing about literature and I’m relieved that’s remained the same since having to grow up.”As different readers, Caroline and I read that vulnerability in different ways, which is one of my favorite things about literature.

There’s another scene that shows the kids taking care of themselves like adults, but with the tastes of children. It’s funny and bittersweet. Ponyboy says, “All three of us like chocolate cake for breakfast. Mom had never allowed it with ham and eggs, but Darry let Soda and me talk him into it. We really didn’t have to twist his arm; Darry loves chocolate cake as much as we do. Sodapop always makes sure there’s some in the icebox every night and if there isn’t he cooks up one real quick. I like Darry’s cakes better; Sodapop always puts too much sugar in the icing. I don’t see how he stands jelly and eggs and chocolate cake all at once, but he seems to like it. Darry drinks black coffee, and Sodapop and I drink chocolate milk. We could have coffee if we wanted it, but we like chocolate milk. All three of us like chocolate stuff. Soda says if they ever make a chocolate cigarette I’ll have it made” (104-5). I can’t help thinking Ponyboy would have it made today with the vaping craze, but I like how it’s a scene of making breakfast and coffee, but everything gets infused with chocolate and sweets. My kids have badgered me daily for pancakes, sometimes even for dinner, knowing that we will likely have them on the weekend.

While I was reading, I kept pondering whether or not younger readers would identify with these characters. I approached the book considering it for classroom use, the old habit of a teacher. A prejudice towards YA books I have is thinking they are for someone else, not me. (What YA means as a genre or marketing tool is for another time.) I should just be asking if I felt something while reading the book. Was I moved? Did it make me think? Did I enjoy it? Yes. Yes. Kind of.

Caroline says she was invigorated by experiencing the lives of these characters; maybe I let too much of my own baggage get in the way. She also says, “I was still an oblivious kid when I read it, and I still had a lot of dreams and plans for my life. My priorities were having friends, looking cool, putting minimal effort into class, smoking cigarettes and getting the hell out of school. Unfortunately, life finally happened and my dreams currently are not being late on rent and my car insurance, finding a new apartment/moving when my lease ends in less than a month and to eventually finish school. Meanwhile, I’m a waitress and hooked on the cigarettes that I started smoking to look cool. My American Dream is holding on to the dreams I used to have and wishing I never had to grow up.”

What she says does sound like experiences in the book. We have dreams and goals and we would like them validated. We want family and friends, to be close to others, feel loved, feel appreciated. Ponyboy might give us a model for holding onto dreams and goals while making a life of what one has and the people around us, even if that life does not immediately—and may never—look like what we have imagined.

Maybe this ambivalent equilibrium is what Hinton achieves. If she leans too far into dreams and fantasy, the book becomes YA pulp and pap. Easy to eat, but no sustenance like the chocolate cigarettes Sodapop jokes about. If she leans too far the other way, past reality, the book becomes as monstrous as those little boys stranded on an island, who not only kill their only true, wise friend, but also kill what’s true and wise within themselves. The Outsidersis a very American novel and Ponyboy negotiates with the idea of the American Dream and the difficulties of being poor in an America full of dreaming. Ponyboy has to be tough, but he also chooses to be kind. Much like the American cognitive dissonance of dreams and disparities, he knows that nothing gold can stay, but fights to stay gold.

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Aesthetic Drift #22: Celestial 57

07 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift, Essay, Music

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Aesthetic Drift #22 by Chelsey Clammer

Celestial 57

The stars vibrated above me. Within me. Synchrony. At 2 a.m. I would walk back to my truck at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, having come from a concert, the music still clamoring along my bones. Late ’90s, downtown Austin, where my favorite band, Sister 7, played frequently—at one point, weekly.

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Looking up, crisp night air breezing into my skin, the post-show silence surrounding me, but Sister 7’s sounds still coursing through my body. Breathing in a lungful of exhilaration, I was completely sober but felt so high. Always in that walk back to my truck, always as I looked up at the Texas stars so big they felt graspable, always the anticipation for the next show that started steadily building within me with each step. Always all of that after every concert.

The band members of Sister 7, from left to right: Darrell Phillips, Sean Phillips, Patrice Pike, and Wayne Sutton.

It was about leather pants and feather boas. Inked art on skin that glistened with sweat. Bongo solos and scatting. A female lead singer in a dude-dominated rock genre. The sound of turning one syllable into a rhythmic melody, or a four-minute song into a twelve-minute jam session and loving every extra second of it. Being so young, yet feeling like a part of something so grand. Black Xs on our underage hands. It was about being freshly gay, being one of the front-row teenager baby dykes and budding feminists, body pressed against the stage, the sweat of desire dripping. Then, arms up to clap and punch the air because score! They’re playing your favorite song! Which isn’t that rare because all of the songs are your favorite song. But still. Arms triumphantly raised up in the air. It was about Superman tank tops and women with spikey, gender-busting haircuts. Voices screaming themselves hoarse, hollering a hell yeah to the band between each song. Knowing all the lyrics and singing along. Grabbing posters and snatching set lists after the encore. Becoming all flushed and being the blushing fangirl at the merch table while getting posters signed. Plus, innovative rhythms and kickass women. It was about feeling energy and connections vibrating through you.

Vibrating up to those stars.

Having just stepped out from massive amounts of energy contained in one space, the distance and breadth of the stars felt like they were soaking in that energy, then reflecting it back to me as I walked, as if the stars felt what each Sister 7 concert was like and they stood hovering above me, helping to remind me about the type of energy and connection that can be created with music and empowering crowds. Rhythms had guided my dancing body, and it was those stars that guided me into believing in something—that life was worth experiencing.

Sister 7 shows were celestial.

***

Celestial navigation isn’t anything new. Since the beginning of recorded history—and most likely even before then—stars have been used as a navigational tool. We humans have always looked to the stars as a way to move, to navigate ourselves through space. Stars as guides, we have created methods of calculation to measure our position in the world relative to these gorgeous celestial bodies. They tell us where we are, where we are going. We let the stars lead us, help us in our wayfinding.

Celestial means anything positioned in or relating to the sky. Means belonging to or relating to heaven.

Celestial also means supremely good.

***

The origins of Sister 7 stems from a street festival in Dallas in the early 1990s where high schoolers Patrice Pike and Wayne Sutton met and soon formed their own band. The singer and guitarist duo eventually met drummer Sean Phillips and bassist Darrell Phillips (the two are totally NOT related. Sean is a kinda geeky but awesome white dude and Darrell is a badass black guy with amazing dreadlocks who used to put his cigarette on the last fret of his base as he played, the strings holding it there for him). Together, these four musicians created a band called Little Sister. After relocating to Austin to be a part of its thriving music scene, Little Sister quickly transitioned from being an opening band to a headlining one with their invigorating and innovative sounds. After they put out their first record, “Little Sister,” in 1994, they discovered there were six other bands out there called Little Sister. So, being one of the seven Little Sister bands in existence, they renamed themselves Sister 7.

I went to my first Sister 7 concert when I was sixteen. This was after I cut my long curly hair because I thought lesbians had to have short hair, but before I found someone to claim as my girlfriend who could help me proclaim my sexuality. I felt socially awkward as I hid this part of me in my proverbial closet and needed someone to show me the kind of woman I could become, the kind of woman with confidence and a sense of freedom found with empowerment. But I was in the middle of Texas, attending a high school with 4,000 students—not one of them openly queer. What’s a young questioning girl to do?

Enter: fate.

My friend Rebecca’s mother took us to a show with her lesbian friends Tammy and some other dyke. It was my first time being around lesbians (to my knowledge) and I was intrigued.

The lead singer Patrice Pike was an out bisexual. Flocks of women of all genres of sexuality came to the show and I felt like I had found my tribe. Navigating teenagedom is hard enough. So much identity-latching and figuring. Navigating social pressures and expectations and feeling brave enough to test who you might want to be. Add a lesbian sexuality to that coming-of-age phase, and it can be hard to find your way. I was grasping for anything I might be able to identify with. Anything that spoke to me. That showed me I didn’t have to squeeze myself into the shape of a socially constructed woman I never felt like was me.

Then, there I was at a concert where the lead singer was female, had a killer voice, wore snake skin tight leather pants that looked both butch andplayfully femme, her sports bra showing, awesome tattoos caressing her shoulder and conveying something spiritual, a woman who presented such an invigorating mix of butch and femme, who danced and rocked out on stage rather than sitting modestly behind a mic, and all these women cheering her on and so—BAM! I saw what being an independent and passionate woman could look like.

I was hooked.

There was that something about Patrice and Sister 7 that made me feel more assured in my own skin. Maybe it was Patrice’s style. Maybe it was the awesome jams. Maybe it was spending time with in a feminist and queer-friendly community, whatever it was, when I got out of those shows and looked up into the 2 a.m. stars, I felt more like who I thought I could be.

My first experience didn’t actually involve stars or the walk back to my truck. Rebecca’s mom gave us a ride. I don’t remember much of that first show—they all kind of blend together in my mind as a capital-E Experience—just that Rebecca’s mom drove the wrong way down a one-way street and that, of the show itself, I loved it enough to go again the following Friday. And again. And again. The entire summer of 1999 spent doing this. And then three years of it. Shows at the Black Cat Lounge, Antone’s, The Steamboat, Momo’s, even Lilith Fair. Anywhere Patrice played and I was old enough to be allowed admittance, I was there. Her voice, a source of encouragement to keep finding myself, a type of guide that pointed to how life could be freeing if you followed your true self, if you could just figure out how to be you—no, scratch that. How to celebrateyou.

I don’t remember that first show because they became such a regular part of my life that it feels like they had become a part of me—a part of who I was—and like I had forever been going to the shows. No first or last, but an always.

I started listening to Sister 7 by the time they released their second album, This the Trip.

Neat fact:

There are actually 57 tracks on This the Trip. After the twelfth song, “Some Things Are Free,” there are 44, four-second silent clips and then a final, “secret” song. Why do this? Because that last track, that “secret song” is track number 57. And in the era of cd players, the digital display first shows how many tracks are on a cd. Start This the Trip, then end the album, and what you see is “57.” As in: “S7.” As in: “Sister 7.”

What this meant in mine and my friends’ lives: Pin numbers set as 5157 (Sis. 7); sports jerseys toting the self-picked number 57; screennames as cclammer5157 or kicker5157 or superwoman5157; a silver necklace sporting a 57 pendant, pick a number between 1 and 100 and it will be 57 every time.

Backside of the Sister 7 1997 album, This the Trip.

There are 6,000 stars visible to the naked eye. That’s 6,000 specks we look up at in amazement on any given night. For celestial navigation, the North Star is the main point by which we orient ourselves. But we need more than just a single star to tell us where we are. We need more stellar markers to make our position-making more accurate.

Published in 1958, the Nautical Almanac officially selected and identified a group of stars to be fixed navigational points. These stars were chosen based on their brightness, ease of identification, and their distribution across the celestial sphere. Chosen across a span of thirty-eight constellations, these celestial bodies that burn brighter than our sun have been used to create star charts that work as a source of orientation. Hold a star chart up to the sky, look at those selected stars, their arrangement, and you will see them reflected up there, their brightness pointing to your position.

Neat fact: the number of stars officially selected to help us navigate time and space is 57.

***

After I got a girlfriend and came out, I brought her to a Sister 7 show. Then I made some lesbian friends at school, and they came to a show. And then their friends came, too.

We were the front row baby dykes. The underagers who stood in line outside the venue hours before the show began so we could claim our front row positions. We were Chelsey and Courtney and Sabrina and Stacy and Amanda and Val and April and Lee and all the other young women whose faces we recognized from show after show. We waited through the opening bands, antsy but respectful, eyes darting around to see if Patrice had shown up yet—the woman we looked up to both literally as she would rock on stage above us, and figuratively as a role model. As a guide. We felt pulled toward Patrice and the jamming band, toward what she represented for us and what they created together. Exhilarating empowerment. The strength of a woman’s voice. A Sister 7 concert wasn’t watching a band perform. It was seeing the beatific energy humans—performers and listeners together—can co-create.

And so we hollered hard and clapped voraciously. Too young to drink, we let the music itself intoxicate us. We were high schoolers or recent grads. Retail workers and soccer players. We wore cargo pants and baggy shirts. Backwards baseball caps and Teva sandals. We stayed late, not caring about sleep or worried about what time we had to wake up the next morning to get to basketball practice. We were young feminists and LGBTQ-ers thirsty for an identity. A safe place. A collection of moments where we could wrap our arms around our girlfriends’ waists without looking over our shoulders. At Sister 7 shows, we were in heaven. They were a haven from what the world threw at us. We held onto each lyric that held meaning, music that gave us something to grasp, something to take with us, to become a part of who we were becoming.

At the end of every show, we walked back to our used cars and clunker trucks, drove back to our hollowed home lives, our confining families and restlessness at work or school, retreated back to the space where a community like this didn’t exist, but the anticipation for the next show gave us hope, something to hold onto.

Picture of Patrice Pike geekily taped into the author’s journal in 2001.

Like everything else in the natural world, stars are also born, they live a life, and then they die. The trajectory of star’s fate is dependent on how it keeps a balance in its core’s gravitational pull. Too much inward pull, and a star collapses. This sounds like a simple non-event, but when it’s a massive star that is collapsing, a huge eruption can occur. A supernova, it’s called. A stellar explosion so luminous that it shines brighter than an entire galaxy.

More than just a shooting star, a supernova is an event. And when these massive stars explode, they release gravitational potential energy. Everything around it persuaded into movement.

Because even when that core gravity collapses, when its pull weakens, it doesn’t disappears completely. Rather, the pull extends outward to infinity.

***

Sister 7 eventually disbanded in 2001 when one of the band members needed to follow a different career path. The disbanding was sad but the music continued. Not just in a nostalgic way like in our hearts or something, but in the music that Wayne and Patrice continued to play together as a duo, the record label they created, and the Sister 7 reunion concerts they’ve played throughout the years. Patrice’s music career also followed a less-conventional path for a little while. In 2006, she was a part of a supernova—Rock Star: Supernova, that is.

A contestant TV show of rock stars competing to score a record deal with Tommy Lee, each week on Rock Star: Supernova, singers would either get voted off or picked for another round. Then, it was practice practice practice, thrown in with some televised back stories and contestant drama.

I never would have considered Patrice as the kind of person to be on a reality TV show, but here’s the thing about her: I see her as a woman unafraid to stretch the boundaries of creativity, to try out something new for herself. From Austin jam band to singing a song with Tommy Lee on the drums that was viewed nation-wide, Patrice’s strength to continuously grow as a singer and creator is what has always inspired me. It’s about bravery and leap-taking. About pushing yourself in different ways to see how you evolve, how your shape and sound and pull towards different creative expressions oscillates and shifts.

I didn’t own a TV when the show was being aired, so I didn’t get to cheer her on each week as she steadily remained a contestant until a few rounds before the end. Now, I watch clips of Patrice on Rock Star: Supernova, and all I can think is, “That doesn’t seem like Patrice.” They are damn good performances, but that’s exactly it—for me, it seems like she’s performing. I hop over to live Sister 7 videos on YouTube and that’s when I watch the rock star that I experienced twenty years ago—Patrice is in her element. She’s a kickass woman on stage with a voice so powerfully raw and clear, that the sound rings up to the stars. Reality TV show or not, there is something celestial about Patrice, her performances, and her empowering energy that has forever rippled outward to her audience.

***

We are made of stars.

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Each star contains, creates, generates the chemical elements needed for life. Everything a universe necessitates for its own existence comes from stars. They contain the basic chemical units of who we are and how we got here. We know that stars are light years away and that they shine for billions of years. But what we’re still discovering is the interesting aspects of a star’s demise. A star on the verge of collapse has a magnetic field that’s strengthening. Whether a small star that eventually blinks out of existence or a massive supernova explosion, its chemical elements disperse throughout the universe, and will eventually create new stars.

All of this is to say that the energy and magnetism of those brilliant sources of light never fully die. They may collapse or explode in different ways, but the chemistry needed to create the universe remain. Everything is there like it always has been, vibrating. Pulsing with the new, re-created life, one with its own shape and energy. Stars cycle, shift, evolve. But the elements remain—continue.

We are made of stars.

***

It’s 2019 and I’m staying with the woman I was dating during the reign of Sister 7 in my life. We haven’t really talked much after we broke up eighteen years ago, but we’re friends now, thanks to social media. Her mom recently, suddenly, tragically died, and so I go to stay with her for a few days to keep her company and help to hold her grief.

When I arrive at the house she shared with her mother, I find a Master lock on her gate, a 4-digit combination needing to be entered. I call my ex.

“Hey. What’s the gate code?”

“You know what it is,” she says then hangs up and, duh, now I feel like an idiot. I twirl the numbers round, line them up properly. 5157. The lock opens.

Two decades later, Sister 7 is still a part of who we are and how we live in, how we navigate this world.

Patrice Pike playing at the Saxon Pub, in Austin, TX. April 25, 2019. Photo credit: Amanda Buffalo / Osage Buffalo Photography.

Along with the logistical aspects of celestial navigation, we have also always looked to the stars, to all those celestial bodies, as a type of spiritual guide. Astrology, the zodiac, moon phases, and planetary alignment are all ways we in which we try to chart out our fate by looking up.

We have also looked to the heavens in numerical ways. Angel numbers, for instance, are number sequences that carry divine guidance. These angel numbers refer to specific numerological meanings. Consider numbers as a type of divine science, where the digits each carry a specific vibrational meaning that reaches way beyond a simple quantity. Numbers as fate, as leaders in life, cosmic counsel, as opportunities, intuitiveness and opening ourselves up to divine numerological meanings.

When we repeatedly see a certain number, it means our angels are telling us to pause and ponder its meaning.

So of course I’m curious.

Angel number 57 means change, means persistence. It’s a number that is a combination of intuition and personal freedom.

57 means encouragement and hope.

***

It’s been nearly two decades since Sister 7 disbanded and thirteen years since I went to a reunion concert. And although Patrice has been doing shows with Wayne in Austin regularly all of this time, I’ve been chasing careers and academic degrees and girlfriends and boyfriends across the country, but have just re-landed in Austin.

It’s a Thursday night when my friend from way back when, Amanda, and I decide to go to a Patrice Pike show at the Saxon Pub.

Driving there, we are giddy as hell, excited because just the thought of Patrice brings back so many fantastic, visceral memories. We arrive at the venue a handful of minutes before Patrice starts. We’re no longer the baby dykes who get there early to grab good seats, but we sit in the back to just chill and listen. I’m no longer losing my voice from screaming loud, but rather sitting in the dark corner and knitting a tank top while hollering a “WHOOO!” and clapping between each song. And although I’m not sweating and pounding the stage with my palms (no one is doing that, actually, since it’s not that kind of show any more), I’m still smiling so much that my face hurts by the end of the set.

When the show’s over, Amanda and I go outside to smoke a cigarette, which is when I look up and see how brilliantly the stars are shining, like how they always did after Sister 7 shows. I’ve been looking at those stars for forever now. They have become something for me, helped me, in a way, to see how there was a world beyond the small, awkward microcosm of my home.

Still giddy as hell, Amanda and I linger outside the Saxon Pub, then decide we want to try and talk to Patrice—tell her our story of being those front row baby dykes and how much tonight’s concert was just as thrilling, even though the energy was different—and maybe even take a picture with her.

As we hang around a bit, looking through the door at everyone stopping Patrice to say something, I think back to a picture I took with Patrice. It was 2000 and she was hanging out in the audience during one of the opening bands as she occasionally did. I got up some guts, handed my camera to my girlfriend, tapped Patrice on the shoulder, and of course she wanted to take a picture with me. In the photo, my smile is wider than my face and one of the regulars in the background is wearing the hip cowboy hat style that Patrice established.

Patrice Pike and the author in the audience before a Sister 7 show at the Black Cat Lounge, circa 2000.

Amanda and I are still waiting, wondering how to approach Patrice when so many people are trying to talk to her. Then she makes her way to the merch table and we hop in the line that quickly forms, and as we wait some more, I remember that at one point, I too had a hip cowboy hat signed by all the band members. I had forgotten about that because with each move throughout the years, Sister 7 mementos drifted elsewhere, got lost, or—gasp—were thrown away. It’s what happens as we grow into being new people. Mementos—like friends, like band members, like stars—fade away, and new ones take their place. But the feel of what those mementos meant to us, what those friends, that music, and those stars gave us, never fully fades.

Finally, it’s our turn and my and Amanda’s energy immediately ramps up. We tell Patrice our story of being fans when we were just teenage baby dykes and then we buy a cd and get an autograph and our dialogue bounces back and forth like loose protons and Patrice is smiling and she gets it and I am probably making a total fan girl fool of myself, but my god this woman and her music and what all she represents for me is just excellent. Exhilarating. We end up not taking a picture because we forget to do it, but that’s okay. It won’t be needed to remember this night, this experience, this re-feeling of being a part of some source of empowering energy.

The stars’ grandiosity can really make a person sense their speck-like status in the world, but looking up at those stars after a Sister 7 concert—and now after this Patrice Pike solo show—I am reminded that I’m not just in this world, but a part of it.

Clammer Meadows photo 7-12 300dpi

Chelsey Clammer is the author of the award-winning essay collection, Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017) and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Hobart, Brevity, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Normal School and Black Warrior Review. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing and is a freelance editor. Her next collection of essays, Human Heartbeat Detected is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. www.chelseyclammer.com

Aesthetic Drift #21: I Am Wynwood

25 Thursday Apr 2019

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Juggerknot Theatre Company, Miami, Wynwood, Wynwood Stories

Aesthetic Drift #21 by Rose Lopez

I Am Wynwood: Juggerknot Theater Company’s Wynwood Stories

I’ve never been to the Wynwood Yard before, though I’ve heard about it. So when I go there the evening of April 18th to see Juggerknot Theatre Company’s Wynwood Stories, I’m not sure what to expect.

I know it will be an outdoor space, and I know there will be food trucks. I’ve also been told to “go to the box office” prior to the show. Before I get there, though, I’m wondering, Where in the Yard is there a theater?

Answer: it’s tucked away in a corner, just as you pass into the Yard. The box office is like an old shipping container-turned-office.

Wynwood Stories metrorail route

Beside it is a small, tented courtyard.

I give my name and am handed a tag to clip some place visible. The tag reads, “Route 2.” I am also given two tickets like the kind you use for raffles—a red one gets me Coconut Cartel Rum and a white one, Drake’s Organic Vodka. I am advised to use one before the show, and save the other for when I get inside. I go with rum, wishing I’d had time to eat dinner before I came.

While I sip my drink, I talk to a girl named Rolanda, a model and actress who joined Juggerknot last year during their Miami Motel Stories. She’s not acting in Wynwood Stories, she tells me. “I’m just getting my foot in the door.” Instead, she spends the time pre-show chatting with everyone in the courtyard.

I ask Rolanda about the route tags and Metrorail route map above the theater doors. “There are two routes,” she says, both on the Metrorail and in the show. She doesn’t want to give anything away (and neither do I), but depending on which route your tag says determines which “route” you’ll take through the show.

At its most basic, the show tells the stories of different people who have helped make Wynwood what it is today. “They’re all real, too,” Rolanda said. “Some of them are here tonight.”

My husband and I used to perform at a bar just south of Wynwood all the time. I think of the bar’s owner, an old friend I haven’t seen in years. The bar is closed now. I wonder if he’s one of the “stories”represented. I wonder if I’ll see him here tonight. (Incidentally, I do, after the show.)

There are no seats in the theater. The theater is actually an extension of the courtyard. We are split into groups based on the route number on our tags, and led from space to space: an industrial kitchen, a clothing factory, a bar, the inside of a woman’s home.

Each character talks to us in their own space and tells us their own story. We learn some of the people were here before Wynwood was bars and restaurants, art galleries, curated graffiti walls. The other people are the ones who brought all that stuff in. Either way, there’s a common theme: “Wynwood would not be what it is without me. I am Wynwood.”

Wynwood Stories Opening

If it weren’t for the earpieces each actor is wearing, I would forget these people talking to us and to one another are actors. In the woman’s home, she offers coffee and folds her laundry. “Do you mind helping me with these?” she asks, handing a pair of clean underwear across her kitchen table to one of the show-goers. It’s not like any theater I’ve ever been to.

And there’s high drama. At one point, when we’re all gathered in the main courtyard, I step back to avoid getting pummeled.

“The one thing you don’t do is you don’t write over someone else’s name,” one actor says. But, it’s not just recognition everyone’s fighting over. They’re worried about being erased. “There’s a thing called progress and a thing called change,” says another actor. “I’m hip,”says another. “I’m relevant.”

As everyone’s arguing I realize, these aren’t just Wynwood gripes. These are universal gripes. How do you move forward while acknowledging the past?

And we, the spectators, aren’t ‘out there’in the audience. We’re part of the story, too.

Wynwood Stories runs through May 4th, which is also the Wynwood Yard’s last weekend in the neighborhood. After that, they’ll be moving to Doral, and a high-rise will go in its place.

Rose Lopez

Rose Lopez is working toward her MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. She also contributes content for the Miami International Book Fair. Her first short story was published with Big Muddy earlier this year. She lives in Miami with her husband and two children.

Aesthetic Drift #20: Poetry in Pajamas

18 Thursday Apr 2019

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Aesthetic Drift #20 by Rose Lopez

O, Miami’s Poetry in Pajamas

As parents, my husband and I are constantly looking for things we can do with our kids. So when I first look over the calendar of events for the O, Miami Poetry Festival, I know right away we’ll check out their Poetry in Pajamas event at the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens on Friday, April 12th.

Poetry in Pajamas sign

We arrive a little late (another symptom of parenting) and pass ponds and kids and parents in pajamas playing cornhole and giant Jenga in the grass. Toward the back of the garden is a large Banyan. A small stage strung with Edison bulbs and a hand-painted sign is set up underneath the tree. To the right of the stage, a band plays; the woman sings about the joy of mangoes. (Later, I will realize the band is Afrobeta, a local duo described by the Miami New Times as “a match in disco-house heaven.”)

People have blankets and chairs set up on the lawn in front of the stage. My three-year-old is immediately drawn to a bubble machine. We will return to the bubbles many times over the course of the evening.

Annie and Bubbles

Afrobeta takes a seat, and two young boys stand on stage to emcee. They recite poems. “You probably know this poem,”the younger boy says, and points to his brother. “Sam wrote it!”It is about a whale.

Simon, Sam and Frankie

“Whose kids are these?”my husband wonders aloud. “They’re great.”

A woman standing nearby overhears. “They’re hers,”she says, pointing to another woman in a halo of bubbles.

The woman is Sara Kaplan, the creator of Poetry in Pajamas, now in its second year.“My boys used to write poems together in their bunks when they were younger,”she tells me. “They submitted them to O, Miami, and the event just kind of grew from there.”

At 7 o’clock, Kaplan’s boys, Sam, 10, and Simon, 7, open the mic to the kids in the crowd. Shel Silverstein is a popular source for the participants. Some kids read off their phones. One girl introduces her poem by saying, “I just wrote this ten minutes ago.”The poem is about the courage it takes to get onstage and read aloud.

Little Girl Recites Poetry

The extra incentive to participate in the open mic is entrance into a raffle to win a Poetry in Pajamas backpack. I am sorry my three-year-old can’t yet read, nor has she memorized any poems, because she loves backpacks. But many of the kids who do get on stage are not much older than my daughter.

Near the lawn, there’s a patio with food and vendors. Some kids are selling friendship bracelets they braid themselves. A young woman is offering free manicures to children. There’s a cart selling peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bowls of cereal. Another selling crepes. Different kinds of fruit-infused water are free. Wine and beer is up for sale to the adults.

Pups in Pajamas

Apart from poetry and bubbles, the kids in the garden are drawn to the natural environment. My three-year-old spends a good portion of the night begging quarters off my husband to stick in a machine for a handful of fish food. She tosses it into the ponds where there are huge koi and a turtle.

My nine-month-old crawls in the grass, tries to follow the bigger kids onto a large rock. By the end, she is coated in a fine dirt. She is not the only one.

Lily Gets Muddy

Much of the time, the poetry functions as ambient noise. But I love how homegrown everything feels, like a lemonade stand. There’s a wonderful organized chaos to the evening that makes me nostalgic. It’s the kind of good, clean fun I remember as a kid. It’s the kind of good, clean fun I hope my kids will remember when they’re older, and then write poems about.

The O, Miami Poetry Festival has poetry springing up all over Miami in April. Learn more here.

Rose Lopez

Aesthetic Drift #19: The Underdog Saga: An Afternoon of Poetry and Baseball

11 Thursday Apr 2019

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Aesthetic Drift #19 by Rose Lopez

The Underdog Saga: An Afternoon of Poetry and Baseball

April 6, 2019

In October 2017, my husband and I moved with our daughter from Germany back to Miami. We’d been gone from the city nearly seven years. But I have been following O, Miami since at least 2011. Back then the organization went by University of Wnywood. That year was also the inaugural year of their month-long poetry festival, held every year in April. This is the first year I’ve ever been able to attend. (Last year I was hugely pregnant with our second child.)

I take the baby, Lily, with me down to Coral Gables to watch the rematch of the Young Viejos versus the Old Poets, a baseball game at the Coral Gables War Memorial Youth Center.

The Young Viejos are Miami’s oldest-running community baseball team. The team is made up entirely of men over 65. (The City of Coral Gables website, which lists the team under their “Adult 50+ Services,”does not specify that the team is men’s-only, but there are no women playing on their team that I can see.) The team ordinarily plays twice a week.

The Old Poets and The Young Viejos

The Old Poets are O, Miami’s “ragtag”team, according to the organization’s managing director, Melody Santiago Cummings. “The last time we were on the field was last year,”she tells me. “And they slaughtered us,”she says of the Young Viejos.

The game is already underway when I arrive with Lily strapped to me in the baby carrier, and the Old Poets are at bat. There are three or four spectators in the stands beside the Young Viejos dugout, but the Old Poets stands are occupied only by sunlight. Lily and I have barely sat down when Cummings invites us into the dugout for shade.

Young Viejos Captain Glenn Terry in Old Poets Dugout Handing Out Cracker Jacks

I’ve just seen an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where the space station is being overrun by objects of the crew members’imaginations. One is a famous baseball player, Buck Bokai, who tells the space station’s commander, Benjamin Sisko, that no one has time for baseball anymore.

Even though I’ve chosen to sit among the Old Poets, I’m not cheering for a particular side. I’m there for love of poetry and baseball. I love rooting for the underdog, and I feel like literature and baseball fit that bill.

A Spectator Reads From a Book Before His At Bat

Each time a new batter comes to the plate, he or she reads or recites lines of poetry out to the field through a megaphone, which has “This Machine Kills Fascists”written along one side, a loving nod to Woody Guthrie. Sometimes the batters don’t have lines of their own to speak, so Cummings or another Old Poets player pulls pre-typed strips of poetry from a cardboard box near home plate to read for them. The lines are often about baseball or about Miami.

Both teams make some nice catches and hit some good balls. It’s clear, though, that the Young Viejos are more skilled than their Old Poet counterparts. I overhear one of the Old Poets saying to a teammate, “The important thing is it looked good,”after the teammate smacks a pitch into left field, only to be thrown out.

O, Miami Player at Bat

My favorites words spoken are from a Young Viejos player—Gonzalez, his shirt says—as he’s preparing to bat.“You can stay young forever,”he says. “Keep playing baseball.”After the game, I’ll see him ride away on his skateboard.

Players Shake Hands After the Game

The Young Viejos beat the Old Poets again, 14 to 9. Afterwards, I introduce myself to P. Scott Cunningham, O, Miami’s founder and executive director, as well as captain of the Old Poets. I’ve emailed him before about volunteering for the organization, but we’ve never met in person. I mention that it’s my first time at an O, Miami event and he laughs. “This is not a typical event,”he says. “But it kind of is typical, because it’s not typical.”

I ask him about the relationship between baseball and poetry. “Playing baseball and reading poetry are both very contemplative,”he says.

O, Miami Founder and Executive Director P. Scott Cunningham

I think this is true of writing as well as of watching baseball. They’re slow-moving processes.

As a kid, I played on a softball team. My coaches stuck me in right field because I wasn’t very good. I wasn’t very good because I’d get bored out there—not much happens in right field—and start daydreaming about diving to save a fly ball or hitting a home run over the fence. When a ball was finally hit my way, I’d be too distracted, and always ended up dropping the ball or watching it roll past my glove.

I think, too, of how I feel as a spectator. I hear the clean smack of a line drive ball fielded by a glove, or feel my belly swoop as a ball makes its arc to the outfield, and I still fantasize about hitting one over the fences. If I hadn’t had my daughter strapped to my chest, I might have asked for an at bat.

Each time I read something great, I feel the same way. Like picking up a pen and swinging at words until something connects. It’s why I’m there.

The O, Miami Poetry Festival has poetry springing up all over Miami in April. Learn more here.

Rose Lopez

Aesthetic Drift #18: O, Miami!

17 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift, O, Miami, Poetry

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Aesthetic Drift #18 by Freesia McKee

O, Miami!

When you move to a new city and tell strangers that you’re a poet, brace yourself for reactions like, “Do you actually make money?” and “I don’t really get poetry.” But when you tell strangers in Miami that you’re a poet, they tend to say, “Have you heard of O, Miami? Wait till April.”

O, Miami is a colossus of poetry in South Florida, famous for its unusual methods of getting verse into the hands of every Miamian during National Poetry Month. One of their many programs this year is “A Room of One’s Own: A Teeny Tiny Poetry Residency.”

A different poet took residence each day for a week in the Bridge Tender House, a windowed kiosk built in 1939 which stands in front of the Wolfsonian Museum on South Beach. Originally used as an office for bridge operators, the Tender House was moved to this stretch of sidewalk in the 1980s.

For our residencies, the museum staff outfitted the place like a 1940’s office with old photos, a vintage LIFE Magazine, wooden shelves, and all sorts of fun objects for poets to play with like fancy paper, sharp pencils, a Roget’s Thesaurus, and a typewriter. Poets were encouraged to write any kind of poems in any style. Ideally, we’d also interact with the steady stream of pedestrians.

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Since my residency fell on Friday the 13^th, I’d decided to hand out GOOD OMENS. I enlisted the help of my girlfriend Jade to distribute the omens and play a little live music.

Here’s what threw a wrench into the works: struggling with a cold, I completely lost my voice on the 12^th. I would need to distribute the omens without speaking.

The Tender House was full of creative energy. In addition to the vintage setup, the windows were filled with the poems of previous residents. They each took a different approach, some writing on envelopes, some using the typewriter. I felt at home.

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We got right to work. Not knowing how many Miamians would need an omen that day, I’d prepared some beforehand, which we painter-taped to the outside of the house. With the windows open, Jade started playing her saxophone and I sat in front of the typewriter to write fresh omens for the luck-hungry public.

The foot traffic in South Beach is perfect for a project like this. Someone walks by every four or five seconds. We ignored those who were engrossed in technology and focused on people who had the capacity to receive.

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Someone who took an omen asked if he could write one about “Trumpski,” but we said that sounded more like a bad omen, not a good one. Another group, interested in the sax, told us they felt like they were in New Orleans. We handed them omens. They didn’t seem particularly interested, but graciously accepted them anyway.

We distributed omens to tourists, locals, security guards, runners, dog walkers, fellow poets, beach-goers, people carrying many bags, friends, museum staff, and several sets of parents and children.

We communicated through the universal language of poetry in many dialects: French, Spanish, English, and rough hand signals. Jade did most of the talking. After heavily medicating myself with copious amounts of slippery elm tea, I even got my voice back (a little).

One person said that Friday the 13^th was her late mother’s favorite day. She lifted her good omen to us as if to “cheers” and said, “This is for her.”

Another told us about his “death app,” which reminds you five times a day to contemplate death. He said, “When you’re mad or jealous of someone, think about where they’ll be in 300 years. They’ll be dust. You’ll be dust, too! None of it matters! It’s great!” He showed us the most recent reminder, a Philip Larkin quote. Jade and I dually noted that we want to look into getting this app for ourselves.

We handed out close to 100 good omens. Before we left, we taped several unclaimed omens to the windows. Should you find yourself walking in South Beach over the next few weeks, I invite you to take a look.

When I was a kid, I dreamed of having a booth similar to Lucy’s “Psychiatric Help, 5 Cents” in Peanuts, except instead of therapy, I’d be giving the public “Information.” Who knew that all I had to do was become a poet?

I love the delicious possibility in public writing projects. Community poetics explodes the notion of creative writing as a solitary act. It’s always good for writers to meet our readers face-to-face, and projects like O, Miami’s afford us the opportunity to think outside the bookstore, bar, or art gallery. Poetry readers and writers are everywhere. Should we be so lucky to encounter each other on the sidewalk.

Thank you to all the poets of the week for filling the Tender House with creative energy. Special thanks to Heather Cook, the Wolfsonian, O, Miami, and to Jade. Your support of poetry is a good omen for all of us. To learn more about O, Miami, visit http://www.omiami.org/.

McKee head shot

Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, Huffington Post, and Sundress Press’s anthology Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity. Freesia lives in North Miami.