Pussypower!

The Lykke Li show at 9:30 last night was one of those times I didn't want a camera. Such emotional hypnosis is pretty hard to capture, even if you and your galpal are looking fresh. Just not worth it. More worth it to try to do the reality screen-shot, which maybe we're forgetting how to do now that we have cameras on us almost constantly. So that's what I did--click, click, click--and now I have an indelible memory that was hand-crafted to selective perfection.

Four long billowy black curtains hung from the ceiling and a red fog covered the stage floor. A few white strobe lights initiated the hypnosis as the track from "Untitled" filled the speakers. The band came out in the dark and started up "Jerome." You knew she was about to come out in a black unitard and black flowy something. Sure enough, the drums signaled her arrival and there was her chin-tipped silhouette--come forth blonde raven sadness queen everyone's yelling, the tiny pubescents and their eager 6-foot boyfriends.

They played pretty much the entirety of Wounded Rhymes and "Little Bit," "Dance, Dance, Dance," from Youth Novels. Songs like "I Know Places," "Sadness Is a Blessing" crushed the soul, absolutely, to smithereens. She stalks around the stage with such authority and deep moaning pain and that face that breaks apart in front of a sold out crowd. You kind of feel worried for and intimidated by her. It's awesome. She interacts with the crowd, literally pulling forth our energy, alchemy for dark metals. It transcends the pleasure of one and becomes the connection of many, yes including the douchebags who you kind of wonder why they are there. So I tried to imagine them away (shit to gold folks) and connect the pyramid of interest amongst her and us. Her voice was even a little hoarse but I'd like to see my voice hold up against a world tour. Plus she uses such a more daring range in the new album, and I suspect she's following up with the goal to have a rougher female voice like latterday Joni Mitchell by keeping a healthy cigarette regimen. (Good thing those ladies made their impossibly high register albums early on, 'cause hearing Mitchell sing "Big Yellow Taxi" these days sounds more like a campfire than a songbird, no disrespect.)

The residual feeling is that of relief. LL has said in interviews she really is disappointed with where pop's gone. What she's accomplishing is a more artistic fusion: using the pop song form when it's appropriate, but not adhering to or dependent upon it for expression, departing pretty dramatically from it in songs with more abstract or overly despairing concepts...which is to say she has as much to contribute musically to her sound as she does lyrically and compositionally. She turns the focus inward, where art is most sincere than your daily marketing images. But when it comes out,it sounds the way it feels, but made new: into something pleasurable. We are saved from the vacuous monotony of "Partypartyparty let's all get wasted Friday Friday Friday partyinpartyin--yeah!" Pop has lost that nineties self-deprecating anthem of "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me, get funky with the Cheez Whiz," etc., in favor of and "I Whip My Hair Back (and Forth)" which is just the ultimate self-indulgent act...but seriously are women so deprived of examples of their innate virtues that we have Katy Perry and Ke$ha telling us the best we have to hope for is to get dressed up, drunk, and make everyone want us? Materialism is so out. Heart is in. And Lykke Li fuses her talent with her heartbreak, causing this sinewy, seductive dream haze or stormy wild woman. It's common, when she's onstage, for her to grab a drumstick and leap around a cymbal or two. Then she comes back to the mike with two in her hand and uses them to sing. If conversation is no easy thing for her, sexual expression is like breathing. And yet it's the heart she wants to seduce, I think that's probably not so clear to everyone. I feel a little protective of her actually. She rips open her own vulnerability for us to come and inspect--but it's really her courage we're looking at.

The main idea here, I guess folks, is that I have a raging girl crush on Lykke Li for her warrior bravery and stylish femininity: pure pussypower.

Therefore I hereby present the artist Lykke Li with the enviable Pseudo-Bi-Monthly Hot Fudge Sundae Pussypower Award, hip-pip!

Self-Damned and Drunk.

There is work to be done. That's as much as I know. The rest is a cacophony of advice, ideas, urgings, scoldings, useless reassurances, flattery, and dream dream dreams. The memory is the torturer of souls. Among other forehead-slapping memories in my newborn giraffe-stumblings through a smithereened economy, death rattling print industry, and retching, aching malaise is a summer at Tin House.

I spent long hours up at night after full days of workshops, screaming into the receiver of a phone containing the voice of a drunk and infantile man child who had only recently been the unspoken cause of a left-favoring limp. My bathroom stall conversations when he was attacked by hoods at his security job became the topic of one author's seminar on "Good Openings." Apparently, the eavesdrop is as good a method as any to begin to weave a tale, from as little information as, "Did you bleed? How many were there? If there had been more...God, you're lucky. If there had been any more, you would've really been in trouble." The author on her podium glanced up and winked at me in the auditorium. I felt used, but this time it wasn't a bad feeling.

There was my interview with the Editor-in-Chief's young and precocious ten year-old son for the conference newsletter in which, gushing, I asked if he'd be my conference boyfriend. The closing gala involved me creeping up into the Student Affairs "office," (which at Reed College is wall-matted with hyper-intellectual graffiti and newsclippings of anarchic student activity) to smoke a few joints with, among others, an apparent student who used me as a scapegoat that night for her hipster-hate diatribes. Then back to the bar to down a few more free-ish beers, and dance with aforementioned ten year-old son of the man who I hope will someday publish me, leaning down to execute a proper Twist, only realizing later my dress had slipped in the front, and perhaps explains why his parents were looking on in horror and amusement. I also seemed to have acquired a friend in who I thought was a flashy Bukowskian novelist but turned out to be a self-glorifying, not-as-funny-as-he-thinks, forty-something married gentleman who nevertheless made me the recurring muse of some candid photography, and wrote in my autograph book that in order to help me develop my voice, he would "beat, bludgeon, and--did I mention?--beat" me out of me. I'm continually haunted by his facebook requests.

Then also:

A girlfriend of mine worked at an artsy boutique hotel in a popular gay restauranted area of Washington, D.C. She made a killing at a full-time job as front desk agent, with front row seats to interact with the likes of Diplo In Armani and Jack White's crew of disaffected vampire punks. I wanted in. Unfortunately, after five separate interviews, I was shoved into their adjacent, extremely mismanaged yet celebrity-chefed Japanese restaurant. Hostessing there I learned the art of peeling coats off the elderly and addressing the politically significant, and likewise the value in matching coat to coat number. I also learned the true meaning of "boy's club." My bosses were male, gay, and at least one was extremely lecherous, charming with woman, but with men...a more wanton asshole I'll never meet. The chef, celebrity or no, had an inflated ego which protected him in his clandestine comments and lashings whenever I needed to conduct business in his area. The issue of my growing discomfort at being the object of such rough and violent sexual imagery while in my corporate-issued Club Monaco back-zippered lil' black number was overlooked and awkwardly unaddressed. On one particularly frustrating day, after being called "Blondie," and then told I "didn't know my place," I stood, fuming at my prison stand when a large man with a glass eye approached me. Arrangements were quickly fussed about between my managers, where this man would choose to sit. He chose a seat with the clearest view of me, and fixed his tattooed face on me. He limped, as if from sciatica, and wore, despite his apparent association with the President and other luminaries, overalls, with a ridiculous Jack Straw plaid shirt underneath. One overall was undone and draped over his pot belly. The GM offered him graciousness and charm as he sat, but he pulled her close and they whispered for a while with periodic glances my way. This, I was certain, would be the final clincher of my employment. I was, apparently, much too controversial with my elevated education and ideas of proper management. I knew I wouldn't last. What had I possibly done to raise this man's ire, though, I wondered? He motioned me forward once she had gone, and pulled me close so I could smell the whiskey. He slipped something in my hand. "I've been saving this for you," he whispered. I was creeped out. "Don't be creeped out," he said. "I've spent many years with the mystics of New Zealand, and I spent time collecting gifts for the people I would meet in Washington. I am going to see the President, Obama, an old friend of mine, to receive a medal of honor tomorrow. I want you to have this before I leave." He pressed something small, smooth and cold into my hand. It looked like a small piece of flint with markings. "This is a very special protective talisman," he told me, looking deep into my face. "It will protect you from the evils of men."

"So, it'll repel all the D.C. snobs?" I asked.

"No, no. From men. Bad men. It is for you. I didn't know who it was for when I found it, but then I saw you. It is for you. But you must wear it all the time. Promise me, or I will be worried about you."

And this:

An old friend texted me about coming to his art studio to be an extra in an indie film being filmed in the warehouse. It was the end of October, two days before my birthday. I had successfully escaped all the horribleness of my life in Washington and was clean-slate living in a brand new one-bedroom apartment all to myself and my cuddly tiger friend. My spidey sense was tingling. Baltimore is a city of loud, beer-and chicken-laden women and introspective, moon-eyed artist boys. I was feeling the seduction of possibility. Ego brimming, I showed up on set to join up with old college acquaintances who were also to be extras in this film no one knew the plot to. I checked in with wardrobe; after a requisite once-over, I was told I looked cute, but lose the white jacket or it'll wash out the camera. So I spent a freezing nine hours sitting on dusty warehouse floors in holding, just a tank top and miniskirt to mention. Buzzing, buzzing buzzing I was, and I felt like everyone else could feel it. I felt certain I'd be taking someone home, or perhaps...taking someone in. We danced in front of a fake band, following direction as to heightening frenzy and delirium. Could one make a career of this? Background dancing? And how cruel was the casualness with which I was beckoned to this, my dream of vanity and exposure and--and--and then, those eyes. And that gesture, and that flashlight to light my way back from the smoking balcony. And in and in and in.

We are self-prophecies, when will we realize?

Innocence as an expectation cannot survive, I think, once this self-prophecy starts spinning. Why have I been so surprised? Nothing of what was in the head does not somehow materialize--and yet every time feels like a club to the temple. Why should we be so off-guard? It is unbecoming, the assumption of innocence. Good Intent does not beget innocence, nor does mal-intent beget evil. I can't accept it. I've seen the most evil from the most lovable, and therefore I routinely distrust that old, rehearsed charisma. In the past, my acquiescence has been my defense, a death-by-agreement. But we can't agree to everything or surely we'd die.

Nor should we be slinging into the streets with all the grandiosity of a lion during zoopocalypse (the sudden, anarchist-initiated liberation of our city's fine captivities). This too is self-prophesying, as I frequently remind my paranoiac love object that a shotgun above the bed will-and-must be used, therefore forget zoopocalypse and wait for the inevitable: zombiepocalypse. (Or perhaps like the umbrella rule, having one prevents one from having to use it?)

I'm not sure how to answer myself. Probably I'll have to wait years and years to define my position in relation to the others. I have to craft it, that position, baffling and anguished and tremendously high, and it's the one thing I'm terrified I won't have the courage to do. I'm afraid of everything I've already prophesied into reality, of what it forced me to be in order to conquer it. Now a thirst left to dry out and crisp in the mouth, the burning, bleeding, throbbing opulence of ambition dashed dashed dashed and again--too soon? Too late?

Is there a talisman to defend against the imagination?

Go ahead and try--bid the scorpion not sting itself in dead freezing desert apathy, a shadow under dark sky amid sharp things.

Again, and again, and then.

And now--