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Sep. 4th, 2005 12:02 pmMegan said something very wise last night at Kali's party. "You know, I have a lot more sympathy for how the Midwest was being during 9/11 now." I don't think I need to explain that. But now we know what it's like to be on the outside of this all consuming thing, that feels extraordinarily personal to us and also has nothing to do with us - I mean, no more than anyone else on the outside who is stuck wondering all sorts of terrible things about our country, giving what we can and trying to stave off grieving for our own personal mythology as long as possible, because it seems trivial, as much as it is also a desperately needed release.
I got home at 3:30am with a pounding headache and I found out Rhenquist had died. I am exhausted.
Anne Rice has something in today's New York Times. It's simple and non-spectacular and has some interesting facts and good points (pretty much all of which I've already seen people on LJ make, often more eloquently). In the scheme of writing about New Orleans and this disaster, this tragedy, this thing we've not yet found a single adequate gut-punching word for, it's not particularly important. Certainly, I'm sure there are many people with even less patience than me for a crazy white woman explaining the history of black New Orleans right now.
I keep thinking about the strangest things in all this -- being curled up on Michael's bed in San Francisco. It's about four in the afternoon and I'm wearing a leather blazer and black skirt, all civilized goth, and reading The Vampire Lestat. I'm about 26 I guess, but I feel like I'm twelve because that book is comfort food and stuffed animals for me, especially in that moment. I know all such crap makes him nuts and he comments on it once, briefly and on the ankh I'm wearing, briefly, one night in a bar. Someone else compliments me on it when he's in the bathroom and when he comes back, I think there is great pleasure in spending that evening together in that bar as if we know each other so much less well than we do; I don't tell him about the compliment, but I smirk all evening. It's a relief. The man who designed the necklace is the friend who killed himself in February.
At some point FEMA did some study or other about the three worst case disaster scenarios in the U.S. -- one was a terrorist attack on New York, one was exactly what has happened in New Orleans, and one was a major San Francisco earthquake. If I lived in San Francisco, I'd want to get the fuck out about now, I'm just saying.
I've only been to New Orleans once, alone, on business. I stayed at that fucking Double Tree hotel right at the edge of the French Quarter, near that mall that is on fire. It was my first trip alone really anywhere, I wandered the streets at night, alone, thinking that every foolish thing that had mattered to me when I was twelve was real and if destiny did actually await people, did actually beckon with thin, white and luminous hands towards something better than this awful, ordinary mortal life where people are cruel, questioning, inelegant and innately dissaproving of every emotion another displays that doesn't serve them, then that destiny was here, there, in New Orleans. One night, I got home at 2am, after watching men beckon to me from second floor bars on Quarter side streets to find the hotel air conditioning had broken down. I wound up watching The Lost Boys on cable and writing Michael a letter. About a month before the end of whatever it is we were doing, so many years later, I was helping him clean his apartment and found the letter, unopened. I was angry but mostly laughed. More than anything I was tired.
It is hard to explain how places matter to you when the story is so common, the connection so tenuous and the fantasies so childish. But when I think of New Orleans I think of reading The Vampire Lestat in the near dark of my room as a child, of stopping, nearly every page, to lift my chin and gaze unfocused at a world where maybe all the things that had always been described as the worst parts of my nature were in fact possibly the best. And while I'm not much of a goth, never lived in New Orleans and dream infrequently of vampires these days, it is in the pages of books set there that I learnt ambition, that I first understood I could be deadly serious about myself and also crack myself up at the absurdity of everything and my place, however meagre, within it. It is how I've wound up with a closet full of historically inspired clothes that I can somehow wear to work and maybe it is through these books that I both first wanted to be an actor, and found the courage to be one twenty years later.
Now in my thirties, when I think of The Vampire Chronicles, which I've not successfully cracked open in years, despite intermitant efforts, I actually think of Armand. I'm not sure when he became my favourite character or the most instructive to me, but this boy who wasn't, who wanted to be a true believer in so many things over and over and has his foolish little faith shattered so often only to smile, tired, content and usually alone in the end, stays with me. He's a quiet grief in my mind, and just as when I was twelve Lestat convinced me I was not the most horrible person in the world for being emotional, Armand convinces me that there's not much wrong with feeling deeply alone and also deeply loved, that there's a life to be made in that, however atypical or however merely confined to the nuances in my head, and that maybe there isn't too much shame in having a long list trailing behind you of things you wanted to be true, and wanted to give yourself up to more than anything, ever, really this time. When I want to be ashamed of my own story he reminds me somehow to just be simple instead; it's just history, and we should all be proud to have enough of a life that things get both lent out and left behind on its way.
So Anne Rice has this innocuous piece in the times: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/opinion/04rice.html and I sobbed for a long time this morning, wrote this, and will now get on with stuff like laundry and rehearsals and work and figuring out what I can manage to do for this wound that isn't mine, except in that I am American, and now here we all are again as the world changes brutally because of all the ways in which it didn't when it should have long before this moment and the water.
I got home at 3:30am with a pounding headache and I found out Rhenquist had died. I am exhausted.
Anne Rice has something in today's New York Times. It's simple and non-spectacular and has some interesting facts and good points (pretty much all of which I've already seen people on LJ make, often more eloquently). In the scheme of writing about New Orleans and this disaster, this tragedy, this thing we've not yet found a single adequate gut-punching word for, it's not particularly important. Certainly, I'm sure there are many people with even less patience than me for a crazy white woman explaining the history of black New Orleans right now.
I keep thinking about the strangest things in all this -- being curled up on Michael's bed in San Francisco. It's about four in the afternoon and I'm wearing a leather blazer and black skirt, all civilized goth, and reading The Vampire Lestat. I'm about 26 I guess, but I feel like I'm twelve because that book is comfort food and stuffed animals for me, especially in that moment. I know all such crap makes him nuts and he comments on it once, briefly and on the ankh I'm wearing, briefly, one night in a bar. Someone else compliments me on it when he's in the bathroom and when he comes back, I think there is great pleasure in spending that evening together in that bar as if we know each other so much less well than we do; I don't tell him about the compliment, but I smirk all evening. It's a relief. The man who designed the necklace is the friend who killed himself in February.
At some point FEMA did some study or other about the three worst case disaster scenarios in the U.S. -- one was a terrorist attack on New York, one was exactly what has happened in New Orleans, and one was a major San Francisco earthquake. If I lived in San Francisco, I'd want to get the fuck out about now, I'm just saying.
I've only been to New Orleans once, alone, on business. I stayed at that fucking Double Tree hotel right at the edge of the French Quarter, near that mall that is on fire. It was my first trip alone really anywhere, I wandered the streets at night, alone, thinking that every foolish thing that had mattered to me when I was twelve was real and if destiny did actually await people, did actually beckon with thin, white and luminous hands towards something better than this awful, ordinary mortal life where people are cruel, questioning, inelegant and innately dissaproving of every emotion another displays that doesn't serve them, then that destiny was here, there, in New Orleans. One night, I got home at 2am, after watching men beckon to me from second floor bars on Quarter side streets to find the hotel air conditioning had broken down. I wound up watching The Lost Boys on cable and writing Michael a letter. About a month before the end of whatever it is we were doing, so many years later, I was helping him clean his apartment and found the letter, unopened. I was angry but mostly laughed. More than anything I was tired.
It is hard to explain how places matter to you when the story is so common, the connection so tenuous and the fantasies so childish. But when I think of New Orleans I think of reading The Vampire Lestat in the near dark of my room as a child, of stopping, nearly every page, to lift my chin and gaze unfocused at a world where maybe all the things that had always been described as the worst parts of my nature were in fact possibly the best. And while I'm not much of a goth, never lived in New Orleans and dream infrequently of vampires these days, it is in the pages of books set there that I learnt ambition, that I first understood I could be deadly serious about myself and also crack myself up at the absurdity of everything and my place, however meagre, within it. It is how I've wound up with a closet full of historically inspired clothes that I can somehow wear to work and maybe it is through these books that I both first wanted to be an actor, and found the courage to be one twenty years later.
Now in my thirties, when I think of The Vampire Chronicles, which I've not successfully cracked open in years, despite intermitant efforts, I actually think of Armand. I'm not sure when he became my favourite character or the most instructive to me, but this boy who wasn't, who wanted to be a true believer in so many things over and over and has his foolish little faith shattered so often only to smile, tired, content and usually alone in the end, stays with me. He's a quiet grief in my mind, and just as when I was twelve Lestat convinced me I was not the most horrible person in the world for being emotional, Armand convinces me that there's not much wrong with feeling deeply alone and also deeply loved, that there's a life to be made in that, however atypical or however merely confined to the nuances in my head, and that maybe there isn't too much shame in having a long list trailing behind you of things you wanted to be true, and wanted to give yourself up to more than anything, ever, really this time. When I want to be ashamed of my own story he reminds me somehow to just be simple instead; it's just history, and we should all be proud to have enough of a life that things get both lent out and left behind on its way.
So Anne Rice has this innocuous piece in the times: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/opinion/04rice.html and I sobbed for a long time this morning, wrote this, and will now get on with stuff like laundry and rehearsals and work and figuring out what I can manage to do for this wound that isn't mine, except in that I am American, and now here we all are again as the world changes brutally because of all the ways in which it didn't when it should have long before this moment and the water.
