Nothing like a one-way aeroplane ticket to California!
I'm hanging out in Santa Cruz, recovering from the most amazing wedding EVER in Yosemite. I mean, I loved my weddings -- both to the same man, a year apart, one guru-blessed, one rabbi-legalized. But this affair was quite special.
Hostessed by the Martha Stewart of hippie/deadhead world and the taper extraordinaire of our whole scene, it was a dragonfly extravaganza of love, respect, bliss, happiness, and joy. What a bash! With the best waterfalls Yosemite has had in years. And plenty of crazy hippies mixing it up with Yonder Mountain String Band and Hot Buttered Rum String Band playing music for the aforementioned bride and groom. You can't complain about a gig like that!
Come to think of it, maybe I'll stop complaining. About everything. Why not? With so much love in the world, what's the point in being cranky?
Glad to be outta NYC and hanging in the redwoods - can'tcha tell?
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Don't pet the animals: they bite
Note to self: stopping by the tail end of the Motorcycle Club's evening meeting, after they've adjourned to Fillmore's (the Local 3 watering hole) is a set up for chaos. And I have an Outlaw Biker's toothmark on my middle finger to prove it!
Thought the gentleman wanted to kiss my hand, and then he started gnawing on me!! With my husband and our best man standing right next to us!!! Oh the company I keep, and the boundaries I lack. Another lipstick notch for Agnes the Airhead, my new persona for dealing with that "smart girl who doesn't think" side of things.
Apparently the peace offering is a tattoo, according to the men's subsequent negotiations as I raised a rugby-player's balls-out protest about the welt on my knuckle. But we'll be away during "the convention" this weekend at the Roseland Ballroom, so I'll have to wait until June to get inked.
It's funnier than it probably sounds.
Thought the gentleman wanted to kiss my hand, and then he started gnawing on me!! With my husband and our best man standing right next to us!!! Oh the company I keep, and the boundaries I lack. Another lipstick notch for Agnes the Airhead, my new persona for dealing with that "smart girl who doesn't think" side of things.
Apparently the peace offering is a tattoo, according to the men's subsequent negotiations as I raised a rugby-player's balls-out protest about the welt on my knuckle. But we'll be away during "the convention" this weekend at the Roseland Ballroom, so I'll have to wait until June to get inked.
It's funnier than it probably sounds.
Friday, May 06, 2005
Yom HaShoah - Remembrance of the Holocaust
We live in a part of Queens where the observance of Jewish holy days are noticeable, even if you are goyim and/or don't have an eye on the calendar. I hadn't been too deep into the public fray when I posted yesterday morning. And after running errands and noticing some religiously minded men out and about, I came home to check out the many web-sites helpful to intellectually curious people, like me - someone who "married in" to The Tribe, but whose spouse is decidedly assimilationist and unplugged from the shul long ago.
5/5/5 was also the Day of Remembrance this year -- it shifts according to the lunar-based Jewish calendar -- and follows so close between the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of the Dachau death camp (April 29, 1945) and the surrender of the Germans to Allied Forces and VE Day (May 8, 1945) as to make this historian notice the synchronicity in her mental file. (See also the provocation of a new Deutsche papa to my new bloggishness!)
Dachau, the first of the death camps established, initially for political prisoners, is a place I have visited. It is not far outside Munich, and in 1988, after a semester abroad at the School for Irish Studies in Dublin, a small group of us travelling on the continent sojourned out to pay our respects. It was December, cold and gray, and quite possibly the day after Pan Am 103 went down over Lockerbie Scotland with 50+ study-abroad juniors like ourselves travelling home for Christmas; a friend from Pennsylvania, Scott Saunders, perished in that bombing.
Modern traumas notwithstanding, the historical weight of visiting one of the Kamps is not to be underestimated. The psychic shock of being in such a place was overwhelming. After just a few minutes of walking the grounds, I began to hear my name echoing. Not quite in my head, but in the sound of pebbles underfoot, and in the wind, and from a far away place. Rachel, mother of the tribe, Jacob's beloved. Rachel of Ramah, crying for her children, unconsolable. Rachel, my daughter. Rachel, my sister. Rachel! Ruchel! Ruchelah!!!
At age 20.5, walking the grounds of Dachau, unkowingly untethered from familiar reality, the membrane between conscious awareness and the collective Unconscious had grown thin.
I sought out sacred ground to quell the spirits. To a temple with an eternal flame, but the gates were closed. To an ecumenical, United Nations-ish memorial, but it was cold and forbidding, not much solace. And then, blessedly, to a Carmelite convent church, on the edge of the grounds, which I stumbled into half-mad with grief and the uncontrolled channelling of psychic pain that was mine and not mine and everyone's at the same "time." You walk through an old guard tower into the monastic grounds, and the transition, for me, was perceptible. As if angels had folded their wings around me and I could breathe again, surrounded by air made purer with prayer and sacrifices of a different order.
As the great soul Elie Wiesel points out in an interview about the controversial religious sites at Auschwitz, in fact Dachau was a KZ for all sorts of dissenters, and many Jewish prisoners were sent further East to their deaths. But I did not grasp that distinction at the time. And still, the unevolved human capacity for genocide remains a terror for us all regardless of caste, creed, ethnicity, or political belief.
What, of all this, might our new German pope, whose faith took its formation in the cauldron of such a war, bring from it to bear on the future of this world?
5/5/5 was also the Day of Remembrance this year -- it shifts according to the lunar-based Jewish calendar -- and follows so close between the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of the Dachau death camp (April 29, 1945) and the surrender of the Germans to Allied Forces and VE Day (May 8, 1945) as to make this historian notice the synchronicity in her mental file. (See also the provocation of a new Deutsche papa to my new bloggishness!)
Dachau, the first of the death camps established, initially for political prisoners, is a place I have visited. It is not far outside Munich, and in 1988, after a semester abroad at the School for Irish Studies in Dublin, a small group of us travelling on the continent sojourned out to pay our respects. It was December, cold and gray, and quite possibly the day after Pan Am 103 went down over Lockerbie Scotland with 50+ study-abroad juniors like ourselves travelling home for Christmas; a friend from Pennsylvania, Scott Saunders, perished in that bombing.
Modern traumas notwithstanding, the historical weight of visiting one of the Kamps is not to be underestimated. The psychic shock of being in such a place was overwhelming. After just a few minutes of walking the grounds, I began to hear my name echoing. Not quite in my head, but in the sound of pebbles underfoot, and in the wind, and from a far away place. Rachel, mother of the tribe, Jacob's beloved. Rachel of Ramah, crying for her children, unconsolable. Rachel, my daughter. Rachel, my sister. Rachel! Ruchel! Ruchelah!!!
At age 20.5, walking the grounds of Dachau, unkowingly untethered from familiar reality, the membrane between conscious awareness and the collective Unconscious had grown thin.
I sought out sacred ground to quell the spirits. To a temple with an eternal flame, but the gates were closed. To an ecumenical, United Nations-ish memorial, but it was cold and forbidding, not much solace. And then, blessedly, to a Carmelite convent church, on the edge of the grounds, which I stumbled into half-mad with grief and the uncontrolled channelling of psychic pain that was mine and not mine and everyone's at the same "time." You walk through an old guard tower into the monastic grounds, and the transition, for me, was perceptible. As if angels had folded their wings around me and I could breathe again, surrounded by air made purer with prayer and sacrifices of a different order.
As the great soul Elie Wiesel points out in an interview about the controversial religious sites at Auschwitz, in fact Dachau was a KZ for all sorts of dissenters, and many Jewish prisoners were sent further East to their deaths. But I did not grasp that distinction at the time. And still, the unevolved human capacity for genocide remains a terror for us all regardless of caste, creed, ethnicity, or political belief.
What, of all this, might our new German pope, whose faith took its formation in the cauldron of such a war, bring from it to bear on the future of this world?
Monday, May 02, 2005
Why I didn't go see Dylan at the Beacon
It was a rainy night.
We took a taxi to your mother's home
She went to Florida and left you
With your father's gun alone
Upon her small white bed
I fell into a dream
You sat up all the night and watched me
To see, who in the world I might be
-- Joni Mitchell, "Rainy Night House," from Ladies of the Canyon (April 1970)
Up until 3 a.m the night before, being all buttery in Joyzee, my morning plans to trek up to the Amherst-Williams Women's Rugby Footbal Club showdown fizzled. I wrote much of the day, and then fell asleep before Jeff got home from a hard day's work at the airport. He never even checked the bedroom to see if I was home, and set about relaxing with a Hoegaarden's & limon, found himself watching The Last Waltz and realized, hey, why am I watching Bob Dylan on tv when he's live, in town, up at the Beacon Theater?
The Beacon, as diehard NYC music fans know, is one of the last places in town where you can almost always find a way in the door. They often sell standing room only tickets at the door, and since it was a rainy night, my man figured the ticket would be an easy one.
It was at this point, as the music from the room next door began to louden in anticipation of his evening plans, that I roused myself from a nap, stumbling into the hall rubbing the snoozies out of my eyes. Although he was happy to see me, the surprised but gruff tone "What the fuck are you doing home?" made us both laugh.
So, now he had a date. Or so he thought. He pled, he wheedled, he tried out the "you're a sixties historian and he's the Bard of the Era" line on me. But there was no budging. I'd been in Minneapolis too long, and heard too many bad reports of mumbled shows and mediocre music to deal with the scene at the Beacon. I preferred my joyous memories of the Government Mule show there on 12/30/04 to the anticipation of a somewhat stressful jockeying for position night. Solo, Jeff, or I for that matter, can ease our way around and through the crowds at a music show, making friends, finding soulmates, dancing with the spirit. As a pair, however, we are a little slower, a little harder to fit into the crevices between people, and more than preoccupied with how happy the other person is at any given moment. Codependent indeed.
Moreover, all my usual joy-joining suspects were either at Jazzfest, down in Philly at a strangely venued Ratdog at the Electric Factory gig, or on their way to Bryn Mawr for a Hot Buttered Rum meltdown. And the thought of jostling my way into the Dylan crowd was just too much after the beautiful energy of the night before at Mexicali Blues.
So we had a very mature, married-couple conversation, off he went to the Forest Hills train station, and home I stayed to read and write and write and read and organize and journal and enjoy my Joni Mitchell fix.
I will always love Lisa Law's photographs of a young Bob when they were all living down in L.A. But I save my sponteneity for musical energy that vitalizes me, not enervates.
And besides, I still haven't figured out who I might be. It was a good night for that journey.
We took a taxi to your mother's home
She went to Florida and left you
With your father's gun alone
Upon her small white bed
I fell into a dream
You sat up all the night and watched me
To see, who in the world I might be
-- Joni Mitchell, "Rainy Night House," from Ladies of the Canyon (April 1970)
Up until 3 a.m the night before, being all buttery in Joyzee, my morning plans to trek up to the Amherst-Williams Women's Rugby Footbal Club showdown fizzled. I wrote much of the day, and then fell asleep before Jeff got home from a hard day's work at the airport. He never even checked the bedroom to see if I was home, and set about relaxing with a Hoegaarden's & limon, found himself watching The Last Waltz and realized, hey, why am I watching Bob Dylan on tv when he's live, in town, up at the Beacon Theater?
The Beacon, as diehard NYC music fans know, is one of the last places in town where you can almost always find a way in the door. They often sell standing room only tickets at the door, and since it was a rainy night, my man figured the ticket would be an easy one.
It was at this point, as the music from the room next door began to louden in anticipation of his evening plans, that I roused myself from a nap, stumbling into the hall rubbing the snoozies out of my eyes. Although he was happy to see me, the surprised but gruff tone "What the fuck are you doing home?" made us both laugh.
So, now he had a date. Or so he thought. He pled, he wheedled, he tried out the "you're a sixties historian and he's the Bard of the Era" line on me. But there was no budging. I'd been in Minneapolis too long, and heard too many bad reports of mumbled shows and mediocre music to deal with the scene at the Beacon. I preferred my joyous memories of the Government Mule show there on 12/30/04 to the anticipation of a somewhat stressful jockeying for position night. Solo, Jeff, or I for that matter, can ease our way around and through the crowds at a music show, making friends, finding soulmates, dancing with the spirit. As a pair, however, we are a little slower, a little harder to fit into the crevices between people, and more than preoccupied with how happy the other person is at any given moment. Codependent indeed.
Moreover, all my usual joy-joining suspects were either at Jazzfest, down in Philly at a strangely venued Ratdog at the Electric Factory gig, or on their way to Bryn Mawr for a Hot Buttered Rum meltdown. And the thought of jostling my way into the Dylan crowd was just too much after the beautiful energy of the night before at Mexicali Blues.
So we had a very mature, married-couple conversation, off he went to the Forest Hills train station, and home I stayed to read and write and write and read and organize and journal and enjoy my Joni Mitchell fix.
I will always love Lisa Law's photographs of a young Bob when they were all living down in L.A. But I save my sponteneity for musical energy that vitalizes me, not enervates.
And besides, I still haven't figured out who I might be. It was a good night for that journey.
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