Reporting from...

Amsterdam.

A little rain shower just moved quickly through and we're ready for Sunday, part two.

We did a lot of shopping today, gifts mostly... a few for me and many for people in our other cities. The daytime sky is not as poetic as the Parisian one, but the night sky is sublime... so I'm on a blue kick. Got a Lapis Lazuli ring at the Sunday flea market. And a clutch purse, but that's brown, orange and red floral print upholstery fabric... with tiny pink flowers on one side, too. With a little luck, we'll catch a canal tour this evening. Hope the clouds clear.

All of my web browsers are slowly switching to Dutch, so I'm going to get back to real life. I posted a few photos here... stay tuned for the video(s).

Shakin' Loose

At last!

I knew there was a good reason I was sleepless tonight. Just finished chatting with my little sis, my favorite sister... though she hasn't been my favorite for months now, not since she told me she was going to see Depeche Mode in August at the Hollywood Bowl--coolest of all LA venues--with SOMEONE ELSE! But now he can't go, so I'm in! I do hope Dave Gahan wears his leather pants!

And that's not all that's super cool tonight. I've finally begun my stint as, get this, the Creative Writing Program Director for WICE--a continuing education institute here in Paris--and our first course is all but on the books for this fall. This responsibility is the main reason why I didn't go home last month, but I'll make good use of my time since I also have a great lead on a job a language school. Thank you, Ellen Fujioka--my little go getter friend! I might have to go see her psychic while I'm in Long Beach.

I'll also be sitting in for David Barnes at The Other Writers' Group at Shakespeare & Co on July 11th and 18th. Come if you can... five copies of a work in progress, or just listen to the fine writing that others bring in. We can always use fresh eyes and ears.

Other great things that have happened in recent months: This spring I had the honor of working with Cecilia Woloch again to organize her Paris Poetry Workshop--click to see the video I made. Cecilia has such a great group of friends and poets every year. The themes of place, image, and collaboration always make for a very rewarding experience, so if you ever need a(nother) reason to come to Paris, I can highly recommend this week-long workshop. This year we also did photography with Jennifer Huxta, the Montparnasse Cemetery with Heather Hartley, a day in the country with Jeffrey Green--read French Spirits!--and an afternoon of collage poetry with Jen K. Dick. We finished up the week with a participants' reading at S&C, then dinner--Au Chien Qui Fume, where else?! The highlight of my week was reading my recently anthologized tribute to Alan Ginsberg's "Howl"--it's called "Wail"--at a reading we organized at Berkeley Books. There was thunderous applause and the owner of the bookstore complimented me on my bravery... They didn't put me in the "Woman as Freedom Figter" section for nothing! I left him a copy to read and/or sell, but if you can't stop in there, buy it here! The anthology is called Not a Muse, a global anthology of post-feminist poetry published by Haven Books in Hong Kong.

Then... I had my 39th birthday. He took me on a dinner cruise on the Bateaux Mouches--not even overrated. Can't believe it's taken us four years to finally do it! He even muscled us up to a table at the front of the boat, which made for a lovely video ;) Miles Davis' Blue In Green made the perfect soundtrack, even the title, given the colors of that evening. The clouds cleared when night fell, and then it was over.

But not my birthday! It went on all weekend long 'cause he took me to Amsterdam the next day. We just showed up at the train station and boarded the next train, wandered around town for two hours looking for a hotel that would allow Filou to stay, too. Then I got sick. Boooo... So, we're going back tomorrow/today. Seriously, does it get any better?! Ok. Depeche Mode at The Hollywood Bowl is pretty damn good.

Oh yeah, and this week Filou turned two. Of course we had a little party... and two of my MFA gal pals came! Thank you, Filou, for the great excuse to open up the Old El Paso Burrito Kit. He even got to lick his Raspberry Charlotte birthday cake. Oh yeah, and I made a video to celebrate his first two years. See it here.

I guess that just about catches you all up. 5am... time to go take my bath and head for Gare du Nord. See you soon!

New Moon on Monday

Or rather, Tuesday morning

The night before last, my insomnia was further complicated by the most jarring nightmare(s) I can remember. My growing frustrations with our small, top-floor apartment were clearly the inspiration behind the heart stopping energy of the dreams that forced me awake at 4:30... after only one REM cycle of sleep. Rustic charm aside, the sloping roof lines, wood beams, and dormer windows are bad Feng Shui, clearly--all that enclosure and weight, the angles, the sag of the ancient walls and ceilings. The drawers of our dresser have to be wedged closed or they slide open toward the decline of the floors, clothes exposed. Don't get me started on the terrible stairs.

But the dream was, as most dreams are, a mix of lives and epochs--past and present colliding in illogic--faces that are, according to some psychoanalysts, all representations only of the dreamer's self. I tried after each startled waking to go back to sleep only to fall back into the dream, until finally, too afraid to keep trying, I got up, turned on my favorite lamp, and wrote it all down... or at least as much as I could lasso in words:

Way, way, way too scary in my head to go back to sleep. What the hell? Not quite this apartment, not this town. And my old neighbor Paula lives across the hall. She and her friend are feeling it, too--strange and scary energy. Each time we try to light a lamp, it blows, until eventually there are none left to light. Even the communal corridor is reduced to a darkened spiral. The friend asks me if I noticed the spots on the carpet. "No. I mean, just now, yes, but they weren't there before." Large, bird-shit white spots that come into focus and fade with our mounting fear.

When we run outside--to find a hotel and some solitude--there are a few kids, maybe ten to sixteen-years old, throwing things at my windows. Rocks? We sort of chase them off but end up back inside. The TV works. (I can't remember the images.)

We call the landlord, [our real-life Italian slumlord,] because we smell, not smoke exactly, but something like it... something almost electrical. He's annoyed and dismissive, reminds us that last time he came there was nothing. The apartment is our responsibility. We can't talk sense to him and hang up. There are cats. One of mine is black and freaking out. I guess I don't have another, but Paula has at least four--mostly black and one white--that chase and swirl in and out the front door, up and down the stairs after mine. When I gather her up she scratches and claws but I don't let her go, close the door on the others.

We all climb into bed together and begin to feel things in there with us, but see nothing. Something lifts me into the air against the ceiling. I can't scream. I can't even talk. I am struck dumb. My mind spins like a vortex has opened.

Throughout the dream I am dialing and dialing, speed-dialing M on my cell phone, but I never reach him. There is an interference, the intangible energy that fucks with us. It keeps cutting the connection short of any response.

When I turned out the light, I stood at the window watching the Seine. Usually smooth as glass at such hours, its surface looked more like TV snow in olive green--agitated, confused, spots of calm beaten back by the glitter and shimmy that hadn't even sense enough to run west toward the sea. I wrote one last paragraph in the moonless dark:

If I re-enter this dream I will fight. We will not think ourselves crazy for all that we feel. We are among the living with loved ones, each other, all present in the darkest night. We will summon our dead if we must. We will take back the night until it is no longer dark, for we, too, are forces of nature.

Ps) Then, blaming the universe, I slept until nine, nightmare free.

Birthday

Grace Bernice Allen 1913-2003


Oh... I am soooo way behind on my blogging. So much to tell you. But today I am thinking of my grandma--my dad's mom--because it's her birthday. That also means that the six-year anniversary of her death is sometime in the next week or so. I make it a point not to remember that date, but it's hard to forget that she seemed to wait until just after her birthday to give in to the thick forgetting that had been taking her slowly from us for years. Had she just turned 90? For some reason, I was thinking she was 93.

Last year, my uncle did the same, gave in to his cancer right around this time of year. Again, I don't remember, or want to remember, the date. It's strange to miss someone you didn't see but once a year or so, but it happens. My uncle was my grandma's sweet boy. They both died in Havasu City, Arizona, which I guess is as good a place to die as anywhere. But this is a blog about her birthday.

Every year I forget exactly which day is my grandma's birthday because two of my best friends from Jr. high/high school have birthdays on the other two days between the 20th and the 22nd... I don't talk to them anymore either, but they're not dead, at least not that I know of. I miss them, but not like I miss my grandma. I'm pretty sure today is her day. In fact, I'm positive. (Called my dad anyway, just to be sure. He still carries these dates in his wallet.)

I like to think she's watching over me, watching me live this sublime life in a country she never dreamed about. At least I don't think she did. I don't think she ever traveled outside of the U.S. Maybe on a cruise, the one she took with my grandpa... not my grandpa, her husband who died when I was two. No, a couple of years later she started hangin' out with my other grandpa, my mom's dad. (Alhambra was a very close community ;) He would come over to her house and we would sit around the kitchen table "working the puzzle" as she called it. She loved that word scramble puzzle in the paper, I don't know which paper. Now, the kitchen table is in my back yard in Long Beach rusting in the mild weather. Her tea cups are in my bookshelf. I miss my stuff.

Mostly, I miss her, a lot. I guess I always will. The missing doesn't even seem to evolve, at least not since getting over the initial shock of her physical absence. I want to climb into her hospital bed again, smell her old skin, feel its crepe under my fingers. Better yet, I want to climb into her bed in Alhambra, keep her warm, listen to her snoring. I want to go to Newberry's with her, then Bob's Big Boy for spaghetti and chili and a hot fudge sunday.

Happy birthday, Grandma.

Wednesday Morning Walk

Our quartier...

Before he leaves for work, we go out "en famille" to our local boulangerie. He has fresh-squeezed orange juice and only a bite of his croissant. They aren't quite as light and flaky since the place changed hands a few months ago, and today they are slightly over cooked. Even Filou leaves the crispy crust on the sidewalk, eats only the buttery bites I tear off the top for him. The foam on my cappuccino is creamy and dense like I like it. When I ask for a second sugar, the blond sever pulls one from the pocket in her apron. She speaks English, but not to me.

The Labrador who sits every morning in front of the restaurant across the narrow street from the boulangerie leaves a big dump in the gutter two doors down, wipes his derriere on the pavement, and comes running to "greet" Filou before he has a chance to piss on the Lab's lamppost. Filou doesn't like dogs, swings wide across the sidewalk, pretending to ignore them until he can't anymore, wraps his leash around my legs or those of passers by as he scurries to escape... then sniffs the air in their wakes, watches them being led away.

Lots of suits and briefcases hurry to and from Les Halles, chatting into cell phones about their whereabouts, when they'll arrive, their rendezvous. (How do you make that word plural?) I wipe the orange-juice mustache from my man's bristly lip and leave him at the entrance to the RER, watch as he slips into the flow of people moving down the escalator and into the labyrinth of stores not yet open. We--Filou and I--cross the exterior patios all freshly washed of the night's piss and everything else. The carousel is empty. The mirrored arches reflect the sky in fragments.

A dad in day-off jeans and a tee shirt rumpled like his hair holds his little girl as they kiss Mommy goodbye at the entrance to the Metro on Rue Rambuteau. Maybe he doesn't have a job. A tanned man in pinstripes asks me the way to the Rue du Louvre and I show him, hoping I'm not mistaken. I am, but only a little. (It doesn't run parallel to Rue du Rivoli but intersects it just past the Bourse de Commerce.) At least now he's headed in the right direction. He's carrying nothing.

I pick up a parcel at the post office at Place Sainte Opportune. The sign on the door says no dogs--a symbol with a red circle and a line through it--but the receptionist is happy to see my cutie, lets me come in anyway... "a votre service," she says respectfully whenever anyone thanks her. It takes the clerk a few minutes to track down my box. His neatly pressed dress shirt and slacks are eggplant and khaki, respectively.

The street sweepers in grass green synthetics, heavy black boots, and neon vests, run water from municipal spouts in the gutters then brush the cigarette butts into the sewers with their brooms. The plastic bristles, all bent and frayed at the ends, match the vests--a pleasing ensemble with the trash cans dotting the curbs. Filou jumps over the little streams like a show horse.

The slight woman who works for her brother-in-law at the creperie just downstairs from our apartment smokes a cigarette at the threshold of the tabac on the Quai de la Megisserie. Her hair used to be so thin that I wonder if maybe she had cancer. This morning, it's pulled back and she's smiley and bright. She isn't always.

There's no school on Wednesdays, which means I won't hear the recess ruckus out my kitchen window today from the primary school around the corner. I often think I'll go to Tuileries and sit and watch the child's play--their chase on the dirt paths, their sail boats floating in the fountain. I never have, at least not on a Wednesday.

By noon, protesters arrive at the Hotel de Ville chanting along with the drum and the guy with the megaphone. I can't see them for the new-green leaves on the trees. Later, hopefully, music will float from the windows at the back of the Theatre du Chatelet... Piano, some stringed instruments, and a woman's operatic voice in curling notes tempered by the passing cars, delivery trucks with plants-a-plenty for the local vendors, not-too-distant sirens at intervals just long enough for me to regather my thoughts and spill them here, in pieces.

Put the Moms in Charge!

He IS a feminist! Hooray!

Yesterday, Obama held one of his in-but mostly-famous town hall meetings with a group of 100 students in Istanbul, Turkey. The last question had something to do with Israeli-Palestinian relations and burried in his long winded response was this little pearl: "If we just put the mothers in charge, things would get resolved." Not surprisingly, this feminist concept was couched in the supposedly feminine language of qualifiers: "Sometimes, maybe, I think, etc," but clear away all that mealy mouth crap and you've got what I think is a very progressive ideal that applies to A LOT more than Israel and Palestine.

Sunday

Finally! April in Paris!

A few weeks ago, we discovered a great little market near our apartment. We've only lived here for a year and a half, after all ;) As with most things, it was just a question of being in the right place at the right time. Until now, we've gone to the Saturday marchee in the Marais or on Sundays we would take the metro to Bastille or even La Motte Piquet, our old haunt. Now, we just walk across the trellised garden at Les Halles. Someone was picking the tulips last night... can't really blame them.



Les Halles is a series of glass walls--a sort of shopping mall--which wraps around a park with grassy areas and smaller gardens like this little beauty with topiary elephants to welcome you...



... Closed today, it seems to be one of a couple of tiny water parks that make up the larger garden. And there in the background is Saint Eustache, an impressive touch of Gothic at the northwest corner of this oldest marketplace in Paris.


Though we made a vow--just last night--to eat at home more often, I insisted on a cafe creme before we started down the block-long row of canopies to choose our fruits and vegetables for the week. I don't have a coffee habit, but I do love the French version, especially when the weather's nice enough to sit outside... a perfect spot to sit and watch the shoppers come...



The back of the church is sooty and neglected compared to the rest, which is currently being renovated... like so much of this city, all the time.






We bought fresh butter, eggs and Camembert, plus strawberries, tangerines, avocados, bananas, kiwis, tomatoes, and a gorgeous salad mix.


... and I bought a little bag of these tiny Easter eggs, which I'm eating right now!


The shell is familiar, but the inside is like nothing I've ever tasted before--crystalized sugar with a tiny, liquid pool in the center. Each color has its own flavor. Once in a great while, some color tastes of licorice... I haven't yet figured out which one, but it's a bit out of place with all the fruity goodness of the others.

They match the colors in the garden that we saw on our walk home... so many bulbs popping up in all the flower beds, all the flowering trees in bloom. Ahhhhh, April in Paris. There really is nothing like it, but we'll have to wear our scarves for a couple more weeks... the French saying goes something like "Wear more than a string in spring," except they say April instead of spring because in French it rhymes with string.

This picture is my favorite one in a long time... of course with all the videos I've been making I haven't had much time for photographs. I think they make the blog so much more entertaining. What do you think?






This tree is already loosing its flowers... It must be related to the Magnolia.

It won't be long before people are shedding their winter layers, too.





The dome beyond the trees...



That's the Chamber of Commerce. But who cares?! Look at the trees! Some haven't even sprung their first leaves yet?! Isn't it divine, the way the sun slants through the branches... all the greens and pinks and the robin's egg blue of the sky?! This afternoon, if the sun doesn't disappear into clouds, the grass will be covered with picnic'ers with wine and cheese... and children kicking soccer balls and chasing each other around... the trees. But at the moment--it's 4:00 now--the clouds seem to be winning. Truth be told, I wouldn't mind a little rain.