Wilma's Webworld

Patti still wants to write a book

Well, this was a lovely and resonant way to procrastinate still further the late start to my workaday.

Enjoy.

Nouvelle Star: Do I quit watching now?

OK, I have a whole weekend in Berlin for this to get my head around, but I don't even know how to begin doing that for this format. It sure was fun, though, but I think it was more than that, too. Monstrous fun, no doubt, but I'll try and quit boring you with that one.

But I did just want to say for whatever anglophone reader who crosses this page and lives in France and just watched the extremely tragique cut to 10 from 13 on La Nouvelle Star: aren't you just a little bit PISSED OFF?! And doesn't it scare you that in this country of France, which is just getting ready to have presidential elections, ALL FOUR of the candidates who were not chosen by the paying texto-sending customers of the show were people of color?!?! One of them sang like shit tonight, but each of the three others was fucking fantastic. The jury got to save one of the candidates. And I'm a faggot who likes Marianne James, as I said before, but now I'm also a non-voting citizen of some yet to be defined place that likes her, too, since she fucking called the French racist to their noses. "Funny how much color we have on the faces of these brilliant singers." Or something to that effect. She also mocked the television station that pays her: the show's hostess kept telling the jury to hurry up, and MJ's comment was "What, for some commercials? It's not like you're getting ready to broadcast any Marguerite Duras." I love MJ. But, boy, I sure am disturbed about the idea of living under a quasi-fascist in a country with a television public that votes like they did tonight. Titi thinks that the jury, who had given high ratings to three of the people left out by the public, should just up and quit. That could do that, or they could inflict live  and violent non-physical punishment next week on candidates who didn't deserve to make the cut. That would make for better spectacle, for sure.

Ephémères

All day long, all I’ve had to do is think about one of the scenes of the new play up at the Théâtre du Soleil and I run the risk of losing it. I just spent three and a half hours there in delightful company last night watching part 1. The first question on the way out the door was “So how are we going to make it to part 2?” Unfortunately, Titi de Paris just called to find out it’s all sold out. But they’re gonna do it again in 2008. We’ll be there that time around for a six or seven hour “intégrale” to refresh our memory about the first part and get in on the second. And I doubt we’ll even see the time go by.

It’s extremely hard to talk about what Les Ephémères is up to. In part because one of the things it doesn’t do is tell stories. There are characters, and most of the time the actors playing them are on more or less small, round, mobile stages: bubbles of worlds that the actors move onto and off of as the stages shift at the hands of other actors kneeling on the ground, scuffling around like crabs and then watching, attentively, what’s going on in front of them to know when to start turning, when to start turning faster, when to slow down, when to move the stage off-stage, as these mobile stages respond to the people moving on and around them, and to the other stages in its vicinity. There’s lots of motion in this play. There are, also, some words. Mostly, though, there are situations, with actors playing characters dealing with them. An old man who can’t sleep, whose wife joins his bubble to try and get him to go to bed. A phone call from someone who doesn’t speak, but who gets told that if it’s him, Laurent I think was his name, that he should know that everyone there loves him and thinks of him often. At which point enters another bubble, a door – and I realize now that the scenes often work that way: a “main” stage on one mobile stage, while the door to that space is on another mobile stage, and the space between the stages is more or less distant according to the availability of that main stage. Behind the door is Laurent, screaming that he needs money, that it’s for medicine, while grandpa crouches and grandma, flustered, runs to the shelter of the main stage, threatening to call the cops. You can imagine that the door is turning quickly under the pressure of all of this action, all this emotion.

For example.

A Hint from "The Animal Side"

This weekend I put this off for later and stayed in on Sunday and read this instead. Beckett, as is well known, can wait, especially since the exhibit is here until the end of June. I couldn't quite emerge from the animal side to get myself out the door. After reading Bailly's Le versant animal, with of course more than an occasional eye on Lulu-cat, I did end up making my way to the gym. It's nice to work the muscles on a Sunday: my guess is that the gym queens worked theirs on Saturday for their nights out, so the weight-machine room is, in comparison to the over-flowing cardio room, entirely negotiable. I haven't quite figured out the cruising thing at the gym, but Sunday I got a little inkling of how it works. And then today, with Bailly still vaguely on my mind, as I was crossing the cardio room, I saw two men on rowing machines, and I was sure that one was looking at me just like a squirrel, the other perhaps some kinda beaver. Animal eyes, at any rate, and so there we were.

Bailly says lovely things like the following that I've translated and that make me want to keep moving and thinking and help me to realize that my anxiety about "getting things down" might just not be for our day and age:

 

Political Tears at The Lives of Others

Lulucat woke me up way too early Saturday morning. We all went to bed early Friday night. No sex last night. And it had been a bit of an issue. Titi de Paris had gone to work in the provinces for the day: his train had left at 7 or so from the Gare Montparnasse – not, as the Fransh say, the door next door – and I was feeling ambivalent about our sexual ritual. So when Titi de Paris went into crisis because a slice of super-juicy pear had fallen to the floor after ricocheting off his shirt – Calvin Klein s’il vous plait, but still, just a teeny bit of an overreaction to such a little incident – I abandoned all hope of being entered into, but not without a little overreaction crisis of my own. None of this stopped us from getting to sleep, luckily. I only made it through ten or so pages of Hugo’s Notre Dame, shamefully ill chosen passages of which are on my syllabus for Tuesday, before fading off, and Titi de Paris shortly followed me to the restful netherworld.

The sun was not even totally up when Lulu started prancing over her sleeping daddies. With an occasional meow just to make sure we noticed. After an entirely unaccountable amount of time, I snapped into sitting posture with a “Goddammit Lulucat!” and jolted out of bed to go shove all the books on the little shelf of one of the nooks where she hides when the atmosphere is tense right on her cat ass. She took shelter in the dirty clothes hamper and I made tea. 8:30 am on a Saturday. Sitting at my computer reading useless things, miffed that Israel’s latest provocation in Jerusalem did not get so much as a headline in the NY Times, while the US accusation that Iraqi resistance arms were coming from Iran (yes, so, yet again, WWIII is here and being waged under our refined consumer noses), I ended up thinking that I might well need something smart to chew on as much as I needed dick. So though Titi de Paris, as we were hitting our early sack, had promised to offer his services in the afternoon of today, I ended up getting him out of bed at 10 not for sex, but so that we could go to market together much earlier than usual – Christelle, the fruit and vegetable vendor noticed, telling us we were “en avance” – and get our asses to the movies. We went to see Das Leben der Andere.

Good choice. (“Go, Wilma. Go, Wilma.”) Because this movie rocks.

Yoko and Cat

Ohmigod. Listen to that. And especially listen to them singing together. They sort of don't -- quite sing together. But they play off each other just right. Her piano, and her responses. And apparently Yoko's album is gonna be called Yes, I'm a Witch. Which can only please the genetian in us. Can't wait for the album.

London Calling, Take Three

So it was yet another London weekend, even if, to judge from the news, all the “action” seemed to be happening around Paris. (Pretty good links to things much better than the NYTimes’s heinous coverage of the events today can be found here en anglais and a pretty decent interview en français here ). I’ve taught this morning, Lulu-Cat is curled up on my lap for a nap after having gnawed her annoyance out on our skin last night in sneaky attacks, the sun keeps coming and going, and I’m pooped. I’ve said this before, but London does that to you.

I’m pooped enough not to try and blog about my cultchahrully eventful weekend in one fell swoop. You’ll get it in installments, beginning with my Thursday afternoon and evening.

So Thursday I arrived at Waterloo at about 1:30 in the afternoon. Formerly Manchester and currently London Kev sped up to meet me as I was rolling my post-Eurostar cigarette just outside the sliding doors of the train station. He was bearing the East End and currently US-touring Fox’s flat keys, where I was able to camp for the weekend. Apparently I’m enough at home on Wilmot Street for my half-sleep to have led me to believe that Lulu-Cat was likely to come and join me in bed on Thursday night. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sufjan Stevens Live in Paris

So the first thing I noticed about Sufjan as he walked on stage in his cheerleading outfit (“It’s really weird,” said he at some point of the evening, “how what you wear affects who you think you are,”) is that he is totally and endearingly cute. But then as I started to ponder that cuteness, what surprised me is that part of it came from a little bit of a sneer on his face. Or maybe it was a smirk. But really I think it was a sneer, and it took me a little while to realize that what was so strange about this sneer is that it was generous. Smiles can be generous, sneers generally can’t. But somehow his sneer as he and the Illinoise makers spelled out the name of Peoria or of Jacksonville or of Decatur with a “Ready… and… okay…” was welcoming: come along with us, it seemed to suggest, and let’s send up all this American kitsch and do what is perhaps the most American of all activities, let’s just hang out and wait and see what happens. This seemed to be the kind of attitude that accompanied the upbeat songs of “Come on Feel the Illinoise!” And it seems to tap into something universal lurking behind something so ubiquitously global: “America” is everywhere, and everyone, even in France, is attached to it in some way. Generously sneering cheers to places that suffer as they keep the world’s idea of America up and running somehow gathers “us” together in a way that does us good.

Loving Margery Kemp

Why has it taken me so long to open Margery Kemp? People I know and love must have raved about it at some point. Why did I not heed their ecstasy? It’s having the same effect on me that reading James and Genet did, and does: I open the book and feel my face turn stony with concentration, and after a few sentences of warm-up—these are after all demanding writers—the stone cracks, and I feel this beatific smile come to my lips.

Yesterday, I was at Café Chéri(e), one of my neighborhood haunts. I was sitting under the awning on an Indian summer late afternoon with Margery closed on the table. The stoniness on my face yesterday as I opened it was in part because of concentration, but also because a pigeon who had nestled into the place where the awning gets rolled up above my head did exactly what you’re always afraid those evil rat-birds will do. I heard and felt the plop on my favorite piece of American Apparel. It was a good excuse for some banter with the cute waiter, though, and, at any rate, when you read all that Margery endured and learned to love, it tends to bestow a blissful and gratuitous recognition upon all your little bleus.

What do I have to do to be able to someday write something like this?

Go see and hear CocoRosie play in a town near you...

I was going to put off writing this post until another day, but since I have some readers in New York (you are reading me, New York, right ? come on, now, put those hands in the air!!) this is a very urgent and timely matter. CocoRosie are playing SOB’s on September 16. DO NOT MISS THIS SHOW! Titi de Paris and I almost missed it here in Paris, and knowing now what we got to hear and see, it would have been a shame. And as for my San Francisco readers, they’re going to be at the Palace of Fine Arts on September 20, WITH ANTONY who has a beautiful few lines to sing in “Beautiful Boys,” a hymn to Genet: “All those beautiful boys/ Pimps and queens and criminal queers/ All those beautiful boys/ Tattoos of ships and tattoos of tears.”

I had no idea how all their crazy animal noises would fare live, but they fare really well. Like Antony, these CocoRosie chicks are even crazier live than they are in a recording. Sierra, the sister with the raucously rough voice, jams on her computerized pad, and, at least for the Paris show, they also had help on the noise and rhythm section from someone who I think must be Jana Hunter and great backup from a French rapper named Spleen. Among the many reasons not to miss them: they have infectious fun, La Cigale was packed to the rafters; they have crazy visuals; at times their blues is so dead-on it can move you to tears (“Somebody’s baby boy ain’t coming home tonight…”); they have a really great song, not on the albums, that they jammed with last night about how everybody wants to go to Japan but really we should all just hold hands; the ethos of the show seems to be constantly careening toward disaster and is saved pretty much every time when the people on stage abandon themselves to how much fun they have together. In short, you’ll have fun, too. I promise.