rebeccakuder

Wings

Sufjan Stevens, wearing them well
Sufjan Stevens, wearing them well

When I watch this video of Sufjan Stevens doing his song “Chicago” on Austin City Limits, so many things coalesce for me…semi-obvious things that my friends would recognize as important to me (theatrical performance, my recent interest in wearing wings in public) and also things that no one knows, things that float and soar in the interior of my psyche, blind, nameless things, unnamable things, things that make me do the creative work I do, things that keep my heart beating.

(Sufjan Stevens, young wispy man, young crackle-voice, young echo of Clive Owen…oh, how you would have had me swooning back in those younger years, oh, how you now have me swooning for other reasons, less stirred, more steady…)

Oh, you dark dreams of adolescence that soured as you were neglected, decades later return on such iridescent wings, wings made silently in the caves of my heart, refined and fortified over time, now landing you dreams effortlessly, carrying (still!) you old larval friends, now winged on impossibly transparent magic.  Bad metaphors don’t stand up but are somehow sustained by the sound of that old laughter, that trickster, Time.  And Breath.  And Sufjan Stevens sings:

I made a lot of mistakes

I made a lot of mistakes

I made a lot of mistakes

I made a lot of mistakes

“I love that song,” says my six-year-old daughter, who asked to watch the video on youtube, again.

(Me too, sweetie, thinks her mama, caught, deliciously, between the push and the pull of that trickster, Time.)

rebeccakuder

Storing it all up

From Frederick by Leo Lionni
From Frederick by Leo Lionni

(Cynics: Please stop reading this post now.)

Sometimes the gratitude I feel at how wonderful life can be seems impossibly grand, too big for my being to hold.  Today has been like that.  Just a regular old great day of easy and beautiful moments with friends and family.  Pancakes.  Bacon.  Coffee.  Tea.  Laughter.  Sunshine.  Children yelling from joy, clumping up and down stairs.  Lights.  Mud.  The best part is those moments is sometimes their recognition.  The wish to mentally store those feeling for the less lovely days when I need a reminder of how good life can be.  Days like today reminds me of Leo Lionni’s book, Frederick.

rebeccakuder

Hoarders (and my recurring dream)

These are not my beautiful bears.
These are not my beautiful bears.

I just read an interesting story about piece of history owned by a psychologist, Dr. Barry Lubetkin, who treats hoarders.  From this New York Times article:

“A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Lubetkin was idly trawling the Internet for information on Homer and Langley Collyer, urban hoarders known in the 1930s and ’40s as the Hermits of Harlem.

Elderly scions of an upper-class Manhattan family, the brothers had barricaded themselves in a sanctuary of clutter at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street.”

Turns out that Dr. Lubetkin owns the face of a clock that his father bought from the Collyers’ estate in 1947.  (If you have not heard of the Collyers–and I had not until today–they were Homer and Langley Collyer, who, according to the oracle Wikipedia, “were eventually found dead in the Harlem brownstone where they had lived, surrounded by over 140 tons of collected items that they had amassed over several decades.”)

All this reminds me of a recurring dream.  (There are two kinds of people in the world: people who recount their dreams to others, and people who cannot stand it when others recount dreams.  If you are from the second category, please stop reading now.)  My dream takes place in various settings, but the plot is always the same: I am looking around in a junk shop (or sometimes it’s an antique shop–there is a distinction, in life and in dream logic) and there, for sale, I see the Steiff and Schuco bears and various other toys (most often mohair stuffed animals) from my youth.  I always have to buy them back, and it always seems strangely unfair.  (And in a weird way, this recurring dream is one of the original germs that started me writing my novel, The Watery Girl.)

In real life, I still have those bears.  I used to think I wanted to be buried with them.  (I’m not kidding.)  Interestingly (to me), lately I’ve been thinking about the difference between collector and hoarder.  (There IS a difference, right?)  For years now, my bears have been in boxes with the furniture and clothing I collected (and often made) for them when I was a child.  Soon, I hope to realize the waking dream I have of setting up a dollhouse for them, so that I can look at them.  So that they will haunt my waking as well as my sleep.

(And it’s not a coincidence that I write this post on the day that, at her request, I moved my six-year-old daughter’s dollhouse and all its contents from her room to the attic.  She’s not ready to get rid of it yet, but she never plays with it, and wants more space in her room.  There is something here.  Something about generations, echoes, and ghosts…in finding this article about the clock face, and in my recurring dream plot, and in my writing this post today.  Something that I need to mind.)

rebeccakuder

“Wait, pretend that…”

none finer
none finer

I know it’s good practice for writing (and living!) to slow down and listen to children.  Their work (in my daughter’s case, drama and storytelling, the elements of theatre, almost every sentence beginning with “wait, pretend that…”) is as important to them as our work (making dinner, job stuff) is to us.  This morning, keeping up with my daughter’s work was aerobic, and impossible.  I was exhausted by the rapidity of the “wait, pretend that…”s coming from her mouth.  But then–for an instant–I was able to step back and realize something.  “Wait, pretend that…” is exactly what I want her to be doing.  It’s how I want her to be in the world.  It’s the stuff of childhood.  I never want to squash that spark.  I want to give it as much room and air and light as I can.  The collision of the “wait, pretend that…”s with the things I must do to get through the day defines a certain kind of tension, a tension that is maybe necessary for creating things (I tell myself).  And yet I wish that I could slow down enough to bask in her world of “wait, pretend that…”

And then I remember that I am a writer, and I have to “wait, pretend that…” if I want to do this work (that my soul calls upon me to do).

And then I hope that this tension will resolve itself into something beautiful.  (And I watch, in my home, as sometimes, it does.)

rebeccakuder

Even icons die

(Lou Reed rocked and took some trippy photos, too.)
(Lou Reed rocked and took some trippy photos, too.)

When my daughter was about two and a half, we were listening to Velvet Underground and Nico sing, “Sunday Morning” on a Sunday morning (as is often our practice.  And “I’m waiting for my man” was soundtrack to French toast and pancakes–whichever vessel we chose for the morning’s drug: maple syrup.  For a while, we would alternate between that album and the Fugs song “Nothing.”).  As a surprise, while my husband was out of the room, I coached my daughter to say “Lou Reed is an icon.”  (She said it right on cue and got the laugh I was hoping for.)  “Lou Reed is an icon” became a sweet little joke in our house, an illustration of how we adults were indoctrinating our child.  (I make no apology about this.)

When my husband came outside into the sunshine today and said that Lou Reed had died, I cried.  Of course I didn’t know Lou Reed, and at first it felt hyperbolic, crying, but it came from a sincere feeling of shock and loss.  (How can Lou Reed die?  Right, I know we all die, but how can that apply to Lou Reed?)  I hugged my husband.  He said I was going to make him cry.  I explained to my daughter why I was crying.  We had a good talk, defining the word icon.  We talked about some of our other icons.  Some are famous, some are not.  The constellation changes, and also doesn’t.

Lou Reed is an icon.

rebeccakuder

Much Ado About Something

In which Amy Acker (and others) rocked Joss Whedon's kitchen
In which Amy Acker (and others) rocked Joss Whedon’s kitchen

My five blog readers might recall that I don’t get to the movies often, not as often as I’d like to.  Since I became a mother in 2007, I’ve been averaging fewer than one movie theatre trip per year.  (The last one I saw, I believe, was Beasts of the Southern Wild.)

Last night I saw Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing.  As a long time fan of all things Joss, I was expecting a lot.  But this film surpassed my high hopes.  I anticipated a romp, and plenty of Jossy humor.  I got those things, but what elevated the experience beyond my hopes was how stylish the production was, and how much depth it had.  The light and darkness of the story, illuminated in black and white filmmaking, were equally present and resonant.  I am not a purist about Shakespeare, nor am I a scholar, so I can’t catalog the liberties taken.  This in mind, I don’t mind adaptations, but please, let them make sense, and let them work.  This one did, and did.  Joss took liberties–gender-bending, reading sex into places that it might not naturally have been, but it worked.  The wine-at-all-hours, casual glitz garden party was such an escape, such a vacation from my everyday life which contains real things like gravity that I can still feel it in my bones as if I was there, hanging with that wit and language and drink, plot-twisting alongside those indie-iconic actors.  One layer of decadence for this fan was seeing where Joss lives–the film was shot at his home.  One imagines the proto-productions when King J. and his friends got together to read some Shakespeare.  (She typed, and swooned…)

(Ten years hence, one asks, Branaugh who?  Okay, that was a cheap shot.  Apologies.  I liked that film, too.)

On a larger level, I love how this film might introduce Shakespeare to people who haven’t gotten there yet.  It makes the play accessible, but not in a dumbed-down way.  To my eye, it makes the play sexy and relevant.  A shiny hipster debauch, once more, with feeling.  We could do much worse!  See if it you can.

rebeccakuder

Layers of organization, and life

651px-Cissa_hypoleucor_concolor_qtl1
This kind of magpie

Organizing my readings for fall classes, I picked a file folder from the stack I reuse at home.  “Credit card info” was scratched out, and over it, written, in turquoise ink, “Tom Waits.”  That’s what it did last time.

Some questions.

How was my life ever that simple?  (And is it wrong to have a file folder entitled “Tom Waits”?)

(And what on earth did I file in that folder?  Why can’t I remember?)

(To quote Joan Didion, “What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?”)

rebeccakuder

“…don’t forget you’re alive.”

Joe Strummer. Nice hat.
Joe Strummer. Nice hat.

Last night, I  watched “The Future is Unwritten,” a documentary about the life of Joe Strummer.  I didn’t know much about Strummer beyond his music, and it was quite illuminating.  One thing that sticks with me was when he said:

“I don’t have any message except: Don’t forget you’re alive.”

(And all day, the words from Jon Langford’s “Oh No, Hank!” –from Nashville Radio–have been also going through my head: “He’s somewhere out there, happy and alive.”  It adds texture that the corn is actually as high as an elephant’s eye at the moment in my Ohio.)

From both legendary musical sources: Good message.  It strikes me that Strummer (and maybe punk rock, and Langford too, while we’re at it, who’s still somewhere out there, possibly happy and actually alive) is/was about nothing less than, essentially, reclaiming humanity.

rebeccakuder

Wishing for Wishbone Russian dressing

mmmm, childhood!
mmmm, childhood!

The other day, for some reason I remembered Wishbone Russian dressing, which was my favorite when I was a child.  Trying to recreate it, it occurred to me to use my friend Meui’s heavenly smoked paprika.  What resulted is not quite Wishbone Russian, but much better in some ways, and I’m still experimenting.

I used a regular teaspoon, not a teaspoon measure.  And you can make extra–it keeps well in the refrigerator.

(All measurements approximate.)
1 spoonful of smoked paprika from Pepper Forrest Spice Company
1/2 spoonful of honey
3 spoonfuls of rice vinegar
6 spoonfuls of olive oil
salt (to taste)
freshly ground black pepper (to taste)
With a fork, mix smoked paprika and honey and rice vinegar.  Add olive oil slowly, whirring with a fork until it emulsifies.  Add salt and pepper. Drizzle over salad greens and toss.

 (To go for the Wishbone Russian flavor, I keep thinking it might benefit from celery seed, which I do not have in my spice cupboard.  Or maybe I’ll use lemon juice instead of vinegar.  Or maybe add some fresh tomato juice.  Next time!)