PFORU

I’m very excited to share this video for the single “I Did Not Speak It” off my upcoming full-length “A Mouth May Grow” (out on Native Cat Recordings this spring). This was directed by Cooper Kenward and shot over two days in Big Sur. 

The villain only edging at the dream's awareness. First we became known to his witnesses and captives, who lived seated on row benches in giant messes built along the west side of the bridge, into the depressed tops of trees. Lost boys and girls for some other kind of Pan. They wore sloppy uniforms according to some unknown categorization of bodies, and had by then lost or forgotten or traded their names for safety or survival, so too the names of others they had known. They were made useless.

Some of us were captured and organized. We had not expected a real villain, only the uneasiness of walking hand in hand with dead things, and were surprised by the intrusion of genuine danger. A few of of us fell or leapt east over the side of the bridge, into virgin wood, preferring to be caught by branch or stone or earth. Those that survived the fall gave one another new names - ones we could stand to give up entirely, should we need to - and kept the old ones in safe places secret even to ourselves, to be rediscovered once the danger had passed.

The forest was full of strange cervid creatures, doe-faced, wiry, but with strong, grasping hands and feet for climbing. By watching them we learned how to escape dogs and the nameless and even sometimes the villain, when he began truly to take part in the dream.

We became scratched and tired and hungry, and though there was some animal food to be found and worked or fought for, we were still mostly human people and had not forgotten human trappings. We lost some bodies to the great treetop houses in the west, and determined not to lose any more. We climbed our way east, through many miles of forest, light catching on new growth, on slow showers of pine needle and pine dust, on us. At last we came to a road, and remembered more viscerally things like the RV and the strip mall and antibiotic ointment. We found a small development there, gas and food and small goods and a great big parking lot, and while we crept into the buildings and around the cars, like children creeping obviously into adult spaces, we found that we had not escaped anything. We were too frightened to steal medicine for our wounds, and when we came out of the shops, heads low and ashamed, we saw our great enemy lounging everywhere, as though he resided there, and we - captured without chase or any expenditure of effort.

And we all died, trying to cross the road dividing us and the forest, and the friend who had died once before did not get back up and follow us into the trees.

But were treated as bathers in the water

How the spirit came and covered us in mud

as if to make a womb of it and carried us down to the very bottom

It could not hold me for I knew the cause with which I came,

but the babe it took

unspeaking.

And when you die in the river and recover only yourself on the shore, you may set yourself a mission: I dove into all the northern pools and not one would return to me the child, though all waters be one.

So I come to you, black water beneath the ice. I have knowledge of your name and of my claim to a babe. I draw you from the water by the green thread of the lily you cannot bear to choke, and you come smiling out of the deep. You will ferry me as others ferried me down but together we will find the babe and make it bare itself to us.

And it does. I am wheezing on the shore, I have clung to your dark breasts and your slick legs and swallowed the sleet of the pool and not been tempted overmuch by my own death as it occurs to me time and again. Your body is sleek and fat against mine, your few folds produce a thousand green threads. They weave of themselves a basked which opens like an eye. You return what's owed to me, little black fists erupting from sepal petals. The baby is as sleek and black as you are, crowned for a moment in weeds. And it is just a babe.

For this room (about 6x8), and access to the common spaces (black mold in the bathroom, creepy landlord “temporarily” living in the garage) I paid $350 a month, not including utilities. My flatmates and I were enrolled at a small, gated liberal arts school up the street, and during the first couple weeks one of them spent 5 minutes staying low in her car at the closest gas station, waiting out a shooting. Neither the gun violence nor the creepy landlord really deterred me from finding the sun room charming, or feeling lucky for having found an inhabitable space on short notice, and I probably would have stayed out my lease had my health not deteriorated so rapidly (read up on mold here, if you have questions about your own inexplicable decline). I only spent one semester at school – I couldn’t justify the frankly outrageous expense of a BA, and I was eager to start making, working – but it took me a lot longer to stop living in places like that.

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The East Bay was a womb for me. It was a little generous with its splinters, spores, and thefts, but a womb nonetheless. When I arrived my art was only an inkling, a sort of inborn itch so far unscratchable, and I myself felt no more tangible than it. It was the first place that taught me anything about home and how it shores you up, and how many pleasures you may take in your simple vectors. When you find your places and your people each point of convergence is a warming light, and with enough time you can really back up and see them blinking softly in or out of existence: how parts of yourself live only in the attic venue that no longer exists, one evening walk home from BART, the coffee shop in the cursed retail space, and all the bands that broke from stress or sex or tech or just growing old. Other parts you build there and then take with you. And then again, sometimes you get lost in those places, or lose someone.

I had a good amount of family there to begin with, and a found a great deal more. A lot of that family lived and worked and played in marginal or occasionally magical spaces: rooms exposed to the scant California rain, roomy hatchbacks, rooms made of particle board and twelve types of paint, schoolbuses, shacks, shared rooms, and no kind of room at all, sometimes, for those down on their luck. Some did this by choice and many more by lack thereof, and most were very painfully aware of the hazard this posed to their welfare.

When faced with a tragedy like the Ghostship fire, in which so many of us lost friends and loved ones and family both born and found, and which has captured the attention of global media, it seems impossible to avoid conflict between one person’s real grief and another’s million mile projection thereof, with one person’s outrage and another’s condescension. Such tragedies should and must be avoided, but they cannot be, if we refuse to acknowledge the climate we’ve created for them.

That fire is a fire waiting to happen in so many spaces we love. I can’t count the number of shows I’ve attended or played in venues with one rickety exit and walls made of found or salvaged materials. I did not attend these shows because I’m reckless or high: I’m a totally sober, over-stimulated neurotic, and at times my anxiety prevents me from leaving the house. I attended these shows because there are so few places to see good art, and there are few things in this world that save me as I am saved in the wake of something truly shattering. These moments are worth braving crowds, knowing the risk of injury we always face leaving our homes. I know people who go to these places because they feel unsafe anywhere else, when gender and color and candor and age are all still so policed. People live in these places because the average apartment rent within the city of of Oakland, CA is $2778. One bedroom apartments in Oakland rent for $2420 a month on average and two bedroom apartment rents average $3075 (rentjungle). People die in these places partly because there is nowhere else to go.

I like to think of art as a good-faith attempt to meet the world. We don’t always succeed in communicating, but we’re trying, which is more than we can say for commerce. Some spend a couple hundred grand getting an arts degree for which they’ll likely be derided, and others could never hope to have the luck to finish high school and go to city college. They work 50 hours a week and paint instead of sleeping, or live in warehouses and get to work and paint and sleep. The message is not that artists are fancy, special people who deserve to work less. The message is that entire new languages are lost to an increasingly stratified economy. It withers what we do have, and it utterly destroys what we don’t yet know. We write that cities are “sterilized” by gentrification and by greed because that is the most appropriate language to use when the creative act is continually, almost ritually, aborted.

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Once, my ex was mugged at gunpoint while walking to my place from MacArthur BART. He was relieved of his wallet and phone, but was allowed to keep his camera and the birthday present he had wrapped for me, unopened. I suppose you could interpret that in a variety of different ways, but to me it said something about the difference between what that person holding the gun might actually have valued, and what they might have believed to be worth stealing. They’re not always the same thing.

My thrice hand-me-down car was stolen three times in a month from in front of my last Oakland residence. I eventually found it on a Sunday night in an industrial lot near the coliseum, inoperable, beat to hell with a baseball bat, and before I could get it towed it had been stolen again, probably stripped for its parts. I understood part of that anger, and that desperation. When we moved, it was because our landlady wanted to rent our apartment for 3000/mo (we’d barely been able to pay the 2400 she’d been asking for the three bedroom). Thefts and violent crime were pretty common in our neighborhood, but we loved our place, and our neighbors, and our simple vectors. And we were lucky, by comparison. We’d be okay.

We sweep tents off the streets in time for the Superbowl, and deprive those of us with the least of the last few things they have. Every time I come back to the bay I’m struck by how many of our people are begging for a night of safety or a way to self-medicate at highway off-ramps and busy intersections. I would not be surprised if any one of them had the potential to reach me and you from a stage or a canvas or a page, but we make them reach for the barest of hopes instead.

This problem of inequity is one we’re facing everywhere, to greater or lesser extent, and people who flee the Bay Area’s economic crisis will find it alive in other cities all over the country. This problem isn’t going to be solved by a crackdown on unpermitted live/work spaces, and it’s also not going to be solved by grants and subsidies for artists (though we do desperately need those). The problem is in our institutions, and in our culture, and it’s rooted deep.

If you’re a homeowner, and you can afford to, offer your spaces for less than market rate and rent to folks you can like and trust. Market rate is not the true value of your home. The value is in the shelter it provides, and the community it can create. Many people who are reliable renters at one rate could not hope to be at another. This is not a reflection of their respectability, but a reflection of our lopsided economy.

If you can offer your services at a sliding scale, or do pro bono work, do. Everyone needs health care. Everybody is a stroke of very bad luck away from homelessness, and these days poverty is criminalized. Offer your legal aid, your mechanical genius, the spoils of your kitchen. Offer your expertise. Teaching someone gives them opportunities they might not otherwise have.

Understand that while we still work within this system, your artists are rendering services to you. Creative labor is labor, too. We cannot nourish without being nourished.

Open yourself to conversation with those you don’t yet understand. Make eye contact. Ask questions! Other people will have better and bigger ideas for how to help. 

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In the last half year I’ve mostly felt raw and emergent, moving from one well loved substance to another less familiar. What I mean to reference is the thing in which we’re walking daily, what holds us: the contours of our most beloved voices, and the wash of sound against which we pit them; each route inscribed in our bodies that writes itself out again without request, or even permission; light in the late seasons, which we cannot describe, but which we know without boundary to be different from spring light or late light anywhere else.

In one story I am stripped from these things, and in another I divest myself of them deliberately and swim out into some good divide. Either way, news radio occasionally brings me to tears, and goodbyes continue to be difficult. I pack what I need and some of what I don’t, which is how people seem to go about being people in general – it’s only that moving out of state makes all your treasure and all your dead weight much heavier and more obvious.

I’d like to speak more clearly on it when I’ve had a period of better sleep, and at least a day or two during which I’m called to make no real decisions. I’ll be driving the ten hours to Portland on Sunday, after which I will allow myself half a week to conk out before I go about the business of building a new life.

In the meantime, here are notes from different coasts:

1. a moment at Rockaway, after my companion and I have lapsed into silence (a thing we’re still learning). I am unaccustomed to watching the sun set against the sea, rather than into it. There is a lot of wind, and the waves break all show: white and often but with no real force. I’ve banished the little spectre of possible New York and replaced it with the solid things for which I actually came: the patient body beside me, and all of my aggressive miles on pavement. My happiness is premonitory happiness, somehow both fed and tempered by a westward ticket, already purchased. 

2. between water and a wet place. Muddy Hollow this year has been more dust than mud, but the estero at high tide is a mirror barely hinting at a maze. My mother and I follow one another as far as we can on the narrow spit between beach and marsh, through spiny grass and the fog seeping inland. When we’ve tired ourselves, and trudged onto the beach to watch the birds swarm and settle on repeat, and faded in and out of earshot often enough, we walk back the same way. By then the pacific has receded into itself, the mirror turned to pale creases in a deep red body, pregnant with salt.

3. Brooklyn, and a looking glass split and rooted. I think of Ymir and what strange things might have been born had they planted not his bones but only the likeness of them. I (not I) appear and disperse in slats of hard light. It’s easy to imagine each to have made its own, separate decision: one sleeps with the city mumbling around her; one is in constant, breathless transit; here I shelve my tools and make myself into one for wiser hands to wield; here I take up my song, and am braced by its impulse. Something astonishing occurs: I tire of looking at myself. There is the earth and its garment.

Mateo and I are playing some Northwest dates with Katherine McDonald (Honeydunes) next week. We’d love to see you there!

Ashland (Thursday, March 19th) https://www.facebook.com/events/1614118998801477/

Portland (Saturday, March 21st) https://www.facebook.com/events/1067731389910662/