Principessa Interludes

The Truth of the Blog via Cat Power

So I just have to emerge from my larval state to say something. However caractérielle she may be in public performances, that Chan Marshall aka Cat Power is something of a genius. I’ve been playing this little, well actually really very, very long song of hers almost in a loop since I landed an ipod around Christmas and ended up putting “Willie Deadwilder” on it for company here in this luxury hotel. (You can hear the first several bars of it here, before it goes on in all its brilliantly minimal variations for the rest of the song). It was shortly after the late afternoon breakfast I ordered from room service that I had this revelation. I wasn’t hoping for too much from this long song: it’s being sold as a “bonus” to a DVD of Chan “Singing the Trees” that so far hasn’t done much besides put me to sleep while I was suffering from jet lag. But then as I was chewing on a scone, I heard the lyric that caught my ear and allowed me to ease into the whole thing. “This,” sings Chan somewhere around 13 minutes and 30 seconds, “is a four hour song/ And it will go on and on/ A moment in time and traveling on/ Even if it is too long/ I don’t care/ I love to share/ I love to sing along/ I know you do, too/ Feelin’ the same way/ So come along/ And sing your song/ It’s all that you have to do.” So Chan wants us to fade in and out with her, and hopes that we’ll sing our own songs, and she thinks that this is all we have to do. It’s all that’s there for us to do, and it’s the only thing we have to do – I love that little slide around what “you have to do.” And it occurred to me that nestled in this “four hour song” is a thought that touches on the truth about blogging: I mean, our blogs, and I know you think that my more or less unread long-winded pages are a particularly apt instance of this, “go on and on.” And I think any of us who write them do often feel like we’re just babbling into the void. Audience response is a little hit-and-miss, we’re digging for significance in our train-train quotidien even though most days it just seems like there’s nothing much there, not the real event that we write for, just more words in relation to other words, more about me, and then I did this, and then I would have loved for you to have been there, but you weren’t, and then I did this other thing… but then there is something as we ramble out our projects that does every once in a while happen, and it’s then that we bloggers, like Chan, can conclude by singing that “We have got so much.” That line touched the Principessa, since I delivered my own thoughts about the moments when too much is just what you want. There I was, listening, no longer chewing my scone to hear Chan, with the shift of one little word – from “too” to “so” before much – hit what I was trying to get at on the nose. You keep singing, girl, and any of you other ladies and gentlemen out there feelin’ sad and blue, and you might end up able to sing that – which is, like that great and kooky singing lady said so, so much.

Passing on the word

For any of you people out there hankering to know more about the body in which Principessa inhabits a meager corner most days, Wilma has just founded his webworld here and has some recent news about that body. I'll be reigning again, but for the moment I've taken Marlene's example and have holed up in a luxury hotel. I'm living on credit, but, hey, we all need recreation every once in a while.

Yellowed Celluloid

Sometimes, in this Great Fransh Metropolis which I call home, I get the strange feeling that some of us are stuck in a film noir. But it’s not Preminger, or Jean-Pierre Miéville, with their amazing black and white light. No, because part of it stems from the feeling that we’re on that weird celluloid from the 70’s that hasn’t aged very well: even with digital restoration, the color has a slightly pall taint to it, just like the skin of the actors has that nicotine stained layer of crust. It’s kind of the equivalent to the scratch you used to hear on old copies of movies, except that it’s making your retina itch. This thought came to my mind on public transport yesterday where a much bigger Principessa than yours truly said “Pardon” and squeezed in between my little hiney’s seat and the window, filling up more space than really existed at that particular point with her hips and big puffy jacket. I had been hoping to read about Arafat’s then still only imminent death, but gave up in the five o’clock rush and lack of space. It was then that a small man with the aforementioned stained skin somehow made his way into the seat opposite the big puffy jacket where he was reading a newspaper supplement about the history of Palestine. His cell phone rang three times before he answered it and, after thanking the person on the other end of the line several times for calling, repeated just as many times that he would call that person back on Monday. “Merci,” he kept saying, “merci, je vous rappellerai lundi.” No details as to why he would call back, kind of like a minimalist or existentialist novel, just the bare facts that can only lead the wandering mind of a Principessa to wonder what, besides a reinvention of an aesthetic that only survives on Fransh cable TV, motivates this little man’s plot.

In Memoriam: Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004

The screen upon which you read me today is a veil. It makes it impossible to see you, though it also makes me wonder if I ever do. Sometimes I think of you reading me, see your eyes smile or wince, look away and wonder. Do I ever, though, see you? Sometimes, later on, when I see you, when I’m lucky, I see you smile. But then, your eyes aren’t on this screen. They see me.

Not sure today if it’s the veil or the tears that keep me in the blurry. Hard to make out. What I do know is that when I die—as I will and so you, too—I hope to have said a sentence as merely just, to linger with you a little longer, as the one in italics and quotes that concluded the front page of Le Monde’s supplement for Jacques Derrida on the sad occasion of his death. “Je me vois mort coupé de vous en vos mémoires que j’aime.” “I see myself dead cut from you in your memories that I love.”

Who in the world will hold the place that he did, on so many pages and so many screens, subject to so much ridicule and so much beauty? He held the place for others. Is there really no space now for us, for the others, to take place? Take it. Yes, I mean you, I’m talking to you. Take place. It’s yours. Ours.

Nous sommes tous des clandestins

Oh, dearest ones, I know it's been a long time since I've blogged in your direction, and I just know you've been missing me. Truth is, I've been missing myself over the past week doing all that shit we all have to do that fills our days and piles up our lives. But here, better late than never, are my more and less rambling thoughts on one of the more significant cultural events I attended during my London venture.

Do not, loving subjects of mine near New York with a little extra dough and even a slight penchant for the stage, miss out on what should be, if the world has even half a second of decency left in it, one of the theatrical events of the fall. And I would imagine there'll be some hype, and in this case you can believe it. I’m speaking of Democracy, Michael Frayn’s hit West End play in London. First, warm thanks go out to Pepper, our finger on the pulse of contemporary drama, for insisting that Frayn is worth the effort. When he told me to read him, he was speaking of Copenhagen, and he had to argue against the initial vibe you get about Frayn’s work: oh my god, how in the world could you write and expect people to be interested in a play about a mysterious post-mortem conversation between two of the founders of quantum physics? Frayn does seem to have a little Shakespearean itch about the apparently least likely characters. He delves into contemporary and recent history to dig out the public stuff of drama, however far from drama and mired in bureaucracy and hard-core science its subjects seem to be. While Copenhagen explored the relation between Werner Heisenberg, the man who was supposed to but didn’t develop Germany’s A-bomb, and his mentor Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum physics, under the watchful eye of Bohr’s wife Margrethe, the basic set-up of Democracy puts Willy Brandt, elected Chancellor of West Germany in 1969, on center stage, surrounded by noisy minions in suits from his Social Democrat party. Brandt is famous for beginning the process of reconciliation with East Germany—which means he’s famous for doing a lot of work that ended up looking unnecessary once it ended up being done by people on the ground at the fall of the Berlin Wall. And it turns out that he did all his work under the watchful eye of Gunther Guillaume, his devoted personal assistant and spy for the East German Stasi. If center stage is Brandt and his minions, the play gets all of its tension from the almost constant presence stage right of Guillaume’s East German contact, Arno Kretschmann, who sits at a table in the shadows. The narration of Brandt’s rise and fall comes from the “traitor” Guillaume, who on stage often ends up straddling the line that divides the West, a duplex office full of light and papers to be filed, from the East, a metallic table and balcony crammed into the corner of the stage. Click below for my of my long-winded critique...

London Calling

Yours truly has just been on a whirlwind ride through the streets of London, taking in the sites, drinking beer, seeing old tricks, shopping, and eating fish and chips—all in the valiant company of Titi de Paris who, as in many things, was at the root of this venture. You see, he’s not really from Paris, but from Marseille, quartier nord, and when you live there you apparently get used to fighting for your existence. When this gets translated to our just as parsimoniously moneyed but almost bourgeois existence, this can end up meaning a free ticket to London. Almost a year ago, Eurostar failed to inform us that our train back to gay Paris was cancelled, then promised us a free ticket, then reneged on the offer, but didn’t realize that in doing so they would have to deal with an irate and scornful Frenchman on the other end of the line for days on end. At some point they had to give in, and gave us the free ticket we just rode on. It's quite a ride and quite a long post, so I'll break it off here for those who are weak at heart

Perfectibly intelligent

OK. So I might be overdoing the reigning bit, but tonight I’ve got an itch to do it again. This particular principessa standing here before you, well, uh, rolling down your screen, has a bit of an obsessive streak.

My friend Pepper and I were chatting at his kitchen table in San Francisco several way too long months ago now, and together we somehow came up with this very strange image of the way my mind works: it was somewhere in between a rec room and a roller-skating rink, lots of people whizzing by in bad clothes and something like me trying to note them as they went by before they were gone forever. The basic idea was that it – my mind that is – is hard to manage, and our mutual sympathy was going out to Titi de Paris, the man I mostly live with who was in Paris at the time, for his loving patience for these whizzers-by even though they sometimes step on his toes or just take up too much space. When I reign, I pour, like I said in the last blog, and it’s because those rollers-by are just too much and sometimes too much is just what you want, but a lot of the time it’s just overwhelming. I'm trying to save the stage for the moments when too much is just what you want.

Like today, I was having coffee, which was actually a beer for me, with my friend Manchester Kev, and I was bemoaning the fact that yesterday was one of those dreadful days when too much was just awful. Trying, not able, trying again haunted by the fact that I wasn't able the first time, nor the tenth - a fairly familiar state known as "writer's block" that is one of my occupational hazards. So anyway, not writing was, well, not writing, and then the phone rang. Guy I tricked with a month or so ago now, calling for the second time in a week or so because he was "in the neighborhood." (Actually he said not far, pas loin )"Perfectly intelligent," I say to Manchester Kev, but because he had just been riffing on Rousseau and perfectibility, "Perfectibly intelligent" seemed even better and Manchester Kev agreed. And what got my goat was that precisely because this guy was perfectibly intelligent, it would have been a good moment for me NOT to work, but instead to have a drink, or a blowjob, or a coffee, with the guy in question. This was exactly what I needed. But no, like the week before, I said "gotta work" and returned with renewed shame to my writer's block. Perfectibly intelligent myself, I won't miss that man the next time he comes around, though there'll be more that'll slip me by, especially if I think in a rec room.

Time-warp

So, dears, now that we know there's a theater here and that I can clear my throat and ride out the feedback, we're stuck in a temporal conundrum. For this is, of course, also a "blog" - you know, the place where your vague or close acquaintances let loose their spindly fingers and let you know what’s on their mind, where they process a day, make a point, marquer le coup, as they say in one of my too few other languages, and goodness knows we’ve got enough coups to mark in this criminally mis-managed “post 9/11 world.” Mismanaged, I might add, in large part because it’s not Miss Managed (that’s a nod to my old friend, the Spinster, you can check out her set at Spinsterhood Is Powerful) But as you know from my first post, I am on a stage, stuck up here for eternity winking occasionally at the passing sexy techie to register any important-but-otherwise-unlikely-to be-noticed blips on the temporal horizon that I share out there in the world with you people. You’ll hear from me whenever I get that sovereign little itch to reign, and then don’t you worry – I’ll end up reigning. Pouring reign.

Throat-clearing

Thump...thump...thump. (Or at least I guess that's the way you'd write the word for the sound of my fingers tapping the microphone.) "Testing, testing" - then an awful screech because the sexy techie I picked up last week in a sex club might have done lovely things for me down there, where, you know, but, despite his claim to great and vast technological expertise beyond human plumbing in the realms of sound canalizations, I'm fearing, on this, the night of my debut, that he really doesn't know how to work an equalizer for shit -- I freak out in mouth-wide silence and then sigh and smile as the screech wanes away, the smile on the techie's face suddenly brings back good already ancient memories, and now I begin to reign. There's a theater, here, dears, and I'll try not to abuse it, but just don't forget I'm on stage.