Nebunele.com

Hey, photos from our poker fundraiser on leap day are here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/foolissa/NebunelePokerNightFeb2908

It was a smashing success. Thank you everybody who helped make it happen, and those who came and made it fun!

I also went and saw a show with Bret on Thursday night called Hey Girl! It pulsed with all these intense, dreamlike images and expensive electric props, and it was supposed to address issues of the feminine image, I think. It wasn’t very good–as Bret pointed out after the show, it seemed to be stuck in the most shallow and obvious symbols and images, and failed to explore anything in a particularly involved way. It succeeded very well in pushing visceral buttons cheaply, though–a loud sound, a compelling trio of images, a violent, disturbing scene–and so it wrenched the gut in a sort of delightfully satisfying way, but without providing much real insight.

That said, there were some moments in it that took my breath away. At one point, there was an incredibly tight and bright green laser beam shooting directly into the ear of the main performer as she cocked her head, and words were projected on the back wall of the stage, one at a time, slowly at first and then faster and faster, pausing occasionally for a split second, apparently random but occasionally easy to make connections between. I was amazed at the ability of the brain to pick up so many of those words as they went flashing by so fast I could barely see them, but they made impressions anyway. I was overwhelmed with the sensation of mental tickling, my mouth was open, I felt like I was in the Matrix learning some new crazy mental skill, I was astonished. There was another beautiful moment at the very beginning when the woman emerged naked from a pile of flesh-colored, dripping goo (silicon? something crazy that oozed off the table in glops for the entire rest of the performance). An electric sword that burned whatever touched it, so that when the woman covered it in a folded-up sheet, a stripe was burned all the way through it so that when she picked it up and unfolded it there was a perfect, brown X on it, and she wore it like a cape while talking about the beheaded queens. Perfect circles everywhere. The black woman’s body being coated by the white woman in silver paint so that she danced with the lights off and we saw the glowing body in the near-dark and nothing else. These things and more filled me with wonder.

So when you have a joyful experience, even if the thing that produced it was not what you would call great art, how do you react? I decided in the moment of the curtain call that I’d much rather live in a world where I respond to my delight than to my critical mind, and I gave the clunky piece a standing ovation. Later, I felt slightly guilty for doing so. Should I really inflate the value of that piece of theatre by publicly lauding it, potentially increasing its value in the minds of the theatregoers around me and increasing the likelihood that mediocre theatre will be praised as exceptional? Am I contributing to a sort of creeping complacence around theatre, allowing it to die an ugly death because I don’t hold it to high standards that would demand better art?

But…I can’t choose sitting down with my dour critic’s mind, refusing to applaud when the child in me really wants to. And as a producer of theatre, I know how much pain and hope goes into even a terrible show, and surely my genuine joy can’t really be hurting anything?

Oh, I don’t know. What do you guys think? To deliver the unwarranted praise and be happy about it? Or to maintain a rigorous critical mind and, full of integrity, reserve my standing ovation for the rare piece that really changes everything?

Baffled by the ethics of having an opinion,
Alissa

I had the super-cool opportunity to go to Olympia to hang out in the state capitol on Thursday. There was a bill up for debate in the state House and the Senate about renewing a hotel/motel tax that’s been a large source of arts funding in King County for the last decade or two, and a call to action in the nonprofit community sent us all scurrying down there to show up in support of the bill (which the hotels and motels, quite understandably, would like to die a nice quiet death.) Anyway, the experience of sitting in the legislative session was surprisingly awesome. I have this general notion of legislative politicians as being the doofy sum of their dorky/dumbed-down campaigns, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that in fact, our state government is run by people who seem reasonably competent and intelligent! Who knew? For each bill that was up for debate, the chairwoman called up testimony for and against, and then the representatives would ask perceptive and well-informed questions of those there to debate the bill. There was a woman sitting at the side of the room whose nameplate had the title “research analyst” and it appeared to be her job to answer all the informational questions about the content of the bills themselves. I kind of want her job! Actually, Mom, this would be an awesome job for you. She was there to know all the bills inside and out, anticipate and research circumstantial questions (”is one of the proposed sites of effect on the Indian reservation?”) and explain the information to the lawmakers in the room who don’t have time to research all that. Holy moses! What power!

The other nice thing was that the architecture of the capitol building (and the corporations building/office of the Secretary of State) was lofty and grand and white-marbled and gold-lettered and columned and beautiful. I know it’s naive, I know it is, but I walked in and felt a sense of greatness and accomplishment, and pride in what we flawed humans have made of ourselves despite enormous logistical difficulty. I mean, our government is messed-up and bureaucratic and inefficient and full of compromise, and is responsible for many horrible things, but at least it functions, and some stuff does get done. That’s not trivial when you’re representing millions of people who all disagree about what, exactly, should be done, and how. I felt, wandering under those high ceilings across those impeccably clean white marble floors, a bit like I feel when I walk into a cathedral–I may not agree with everything that goes on here, but god damn this reverent setting gives me hope and a sense of faith.

Crossing the campus of the capitol, though, Bret and I had to laugh at the old oak trees growing next to the pedestrian path. They all sported huge, unwieldy branches that would certainly have broken and crashed onto the sidewalk or overbalanced the trees themselves had they not been held up by serious and elaborate metal-and-concrete scaffoldings, permanently installed. How like a bureaucracy.

Rubbernecking with the best of ‘em,
Alissa

When I was a kid, my friend Chrissy had a big lemon tree in her back yard. We had all the games about eating them without making faces, etc., down pat, but our favorite thing to do was get a ripe one, cut it into wedges, smother it with sugar, and eat it like an orange.

And that’s what I am doing right now with my little LA-born lemon. I cut it into tiny wedges. There’s lemon juice and sugar muddled all over the plate and my fingers, and my tongue is starting to smart from all the acid, halfway through. It reminds me of being eight years old. It reminds me of being twenty-one and drinking my first Lemon Drop. It reminds me of southern California sunshine, on this dreary Seattle chilly-wind Wednesday. It is an excellent way to put off the work I should be doing right now. It’s making my tummy feel unstable on the inside…but I love it, I can take it, sunny sunny vitamin C tearing my insides apart. Prana! Life! Fuel me, burn me, make me sharp and biting, make me fast, curdle the milk that was in the latte I had this morning, turn me inside out! Oh lemon. Oh, lemon.

Sweetly sour,
Alissa

Today I received a small box in the mail. Its contents were

1) a small lemon wrapped in a paper towel

2) a handwritten note on folded-up arty brown-and-gold paper.

It was sent by my friend Juniper, who wrote me a series of engaging and whimsical letters called “Dispatches from the Southland” a few years ago. She is the best letter-writer I know. In fact, in addition to the various missives I have actually received from her, there is one other letter she’s been writing me since…1996? that I have never seen most of. For a while, she claimed she was going to send it to me when it was finished, but I think the gig is up and I’ve finally figured out it will never be finished. She took pity on me and has been posting some of it lately on a blog called “Dear Alissa” (link on the sidebar if you’re curious. She’ll probably hate me for directing people to it. But it’s good! Be warned: she’s also been posting chapters from her novel there, which is also good, but agonizingly incomplete.)

Anyway. Back when she was writing me the Dispatches, she had developed hope about her recently-planted lemon tree. It had never borne fruit, but was starting to form flowers. But the lemons failed to materialize that year.

Now there are finally lemons! And since I was sort of peripherally involved in (well, at least kind of witnessing) the birth of the Lemon-Watching, she has decided to send me one. She wants to know what I am going to use it for.

This is a lemon with history! What should I do with it? How can I best use this lemon to glorify the name of the best letter-writer with whom I have had the pleasure of acquaintance and receipt of missives from, despite the shoddy frequency with which I returned them? I am accepting ideas for the next…one day. I want to use it while it’s still fresh.

About the lemon: It is bigger than a ping-pong ball, but smaller than a tennis ball. It is almost perfectly round, instead of lemon-shaped. Its skin is very smooth, not rough like grocery-store lemons, and it doesn’t smell very strongly at all. It is bright yellow, nearly gold on one side. As I understand it, it is the second lemon ever produced by a young tree in Los Angeles since it was planted three years ago in its current home. It glows a little on my dark wood-finished desk. It is too yellow to look quite like a full moon. There is a little inverted dimple on it, directly opposite from the place it was separated from the stem (which is faint green.) It weighs about the same amount as the pair of scissors I used to open the box that contained it. It will not be good forever.

Ok, so in order to combat the doubts cast on my Nerdliness by my embarrassing Nerd Score, I find it necessary to display some kind of Nerdly credentia. This should do it.

View my page on Nerdfighters

So much energy into gaining speed down the runway, engines grinding and swearing and panting and hollering, heavy effortful pushing that focuses so much on that drive forward, this heavy bird trying to run fast. And then—a flap drops, light—and we are airborne. Inside, people yawn and do crossword puzzles and meanwhile we are FLYING. Flying. Those Wright brothers and whoever else—I mean, holy cow, here’s something we can’t do and they freaking DID it! Left the ground. Not coming back. Freedom. Like fantasy. Man’s wanted to fly since he saw a bird. Hard to think that at that moment Evolution didn’t look up and go, with a satisfied nod, “My work here is done.” And what I think in the upward-rush-downward-press of that moment of liftoff is “I love, I love, I love. I love, and I am leaving the earth.” I want sex then, something naked and free and thrilling and hard. Flight! Think of it! We are all so jaded, we passengers. But the pilots know. Oh, they know the miracle and they hold it quiet in themselves while everything else goes on, the world, people running about. The pilots take people and put them in the sky. They know what it is they do. And then they bring us gently down again. And we, we put our magazines away and jumble inefficiently out the tiny exit, nodding at them as we fish out our cell phones. I will never get over this modern world. When I die and meet all those people in the afterlife who must be in such high demand I will hunt down Da Vinci and pull him aside and confide in him in a voice husky with emotion, a hoarse whisper because I won’t be able to manage a full voice, and I will say to him, “Leonardo,” I’ll say, “when I was in life, I FLEW.” And he will meet my eyes gravely, and the awe in mine will make his twinkle, and he will understand and be glad.

I am disappointed. It turns out I am only a mid-level nerd. Juniper, where’d you learn to be so nerdy?

Hey look! Pics from the show!

http://picasaweb.google.com/foolissa/MedeaKnowsBest200702

Wheeee!

The Frost poem sat comfortably in the front of my mind this morning as I wandered out into the redwoods at the back of my parents’ property, thinking of the imminent death of my grandfather. The young woods back there are fairy-tale-storybook beautiful, and in the morning sunlight, bejeweled with the billions of droplets generated by the last week’s drizzle, they are a magical kingdom.

I was blessed with an almost unfairly happy childhood here in Humboldt County, California. I was sustained by jolts of remarkable bliss, even ecstasy, so that even as a child I noticed and wondered at the profundity of my joy. I formed a theory that somehow the happy-chemicals in my brain were responding to some sort of unusual always-on stimulus, and figured I was biologically lucky to have such an excess of well-being. And of course I lived in a loving home in a beautiful part of the world, with enough money and enough time, and was successful in school and made good friends, and I’m sure all these things conspired to make me as bizarrely happy as I was.

As an adult on my own in the urban landscape of Seattle, with ups and downs that seem more within the range of normal human experience, with heartbreak and stress and angst and worry and loneliness and depression along with the fun and the joy and the love, I occasionally hark back to my pre-adolescent days of peace and enthusiasm and wonder what changed. On darker days, I think that all the gunk of life, all the baggage of failure and self-doubt and broken hearts that are the normal obstacles in a wearying adult life have so silted over and corroded my natural capacity for joy that it is irretrievable. That never again will I be capable of experiencing the simple, almost spiritual happiness of my childhood. That being grown-up means being necessarily complex and corrupted.

Except—I just took a 10-minute walk in the woods of my childhood. And the very first moment I stepped outside into the dewy, shining morning, peering into the sunlit mist of the shady redwood forest carpeted with ferns, the old joy bubbled up again instantly. And gradually, like a developing photograph, all the human-made follies of thought: that life can be bad or broken or free of wonder; that anybody is evil; that there are irrevocable mistakes that make life worse forever; that I am unworthy of success; that success is even important; all these follies faded and became transparent and were revealed as the filmy, substance-less constructs that they are. And like soap bubbles, they popped. And I was alone in the quiet woods of my childhood, realizing: it was not that I was innocent or un-jaded or free from the cares of the world that made me so happy here. It was that I had the great good fortune to occupy this magical place, these powerful woods of peace, and allowed them to have their effect on me.

I love Seattle, and I love the urban lifestyle, and I suspect I will be a city-dweller for most of the rest of my life. But it is good to remember that I was born a creature of the forest, and if I don’t return occasionally for a solitary moment in the trees, I will waste away into a terrible existence full of irrelevant cares. It is so easy, living in the city, to forget how little all those stressful things matter. For just a moment, taking in a redwood tree, it is obvious that we will live and die and the earth will go on, and my most massive strivings will melt back into the earth and out of memory, and that I lived at all will matter much more than all the things that filled my life. I cannot help but be part of the cycle. My most important work is being done already, without my lifting a finger. I’m okay. And the earth is turning along majestically. Damn, but we are lucky beings.

With gratitude and joy,
Alissa