Before Going to Bed: Something!

Welcome! The night is buzzing! Remember the item that you left in Chicago? Listen to the Wonderful Rainbow Man! That's me! Listen to the crickets! Roll your eyes. Wiggle your toes, say goodnight to the moon! Wiggle the moons' toes, spin the night! Remember the crickets that you left in Chicago. Roll the item, go to sleep!

Telling Stories Inside of A Small House within a House, In Chicago, 2009

Notes on the Project:

1. The performance was a part of Institute. http://www.i-n-s-t-i-t-u-t-e.org/index.html
2. House was set up in the living space of Julia Rich, Sarah Elliot and Zayne Armstrong.
3. Jesse came and sang with me. We shared a guitar, and the yellow House.
4. During the course of the performance we discovered that the house was Jesse's dreamspace.
5. David Cook, brother, was there and sang along sometimes.

Eating Oily Things In In-Between Spaces

Oh my gosh. I am eating the most disgusting mountain of onion rings at Gate C of the Denver airport. Didn't think I'd be back in Colorado so soon, but all of a sudden here I am. Fresh out of Chicago, a completely different person.

This is how I look in Chicago.

I have been having a few drinks. Bloody Mary's and Beers and things, you know. The overall effect is that I am greasily delighted with myself right now. Something rather sinister about my joy is that I've been reading Lolita for the last couple of hours and Humbert Humbert's salivating style has started to influence my innocence.
What do I mean by that? Let's leave it for now, and glory glory in the oil! ...and the bitter beer.


I am not sure, in fact I'm probably making this up (almost completely) but it seems that the drunk man sitting at the bar was the captain on my recent flight. He is talking about how the flight from Chicago to Denver was dangerously overweighted, and slurring every other word. Compatriot! I thank the jewel covered heavens (which may reside incidentally in Paradise--did you know!? See the following paragraph) that I am safe on the ground with my table of delights.

Oh speaking of delights (because I must!) There was an exceptionally delightful trip to a sweet shoppe last night (the second visit of my trip) whose menu taught me a whole new wing of poetry that is expressly based on the gorge-ousness of dessert. The menu was strewn with lines like "Heaven in Paradise (as if one is less than the other --but together they are pure exhalations of delicious ecstasy)" and "Whipped to your Fantasy and Bananas." An amazing fragment sentence describing the whipping cream topping a sundae --I guess --- but perhaps it's describing something else: a tropical island scene with frothy waves lashing sexy sun-drenched legs --"and Bananas!"( capitalized!).

Less sexy day at the beach, but utterly delightful

Our table collectively ordered two relatively modest sundaes (we forgo the George á la George $60, 70 scoops) entitled "Jumbo." The deserts came in large (and very plastic) white shells. It was as if some creamy and melting versions of the Venus de Milo had floated over to our table transforming us into the chubby Cherubs by association.

This whole meandering seems to deal exclusively with consumption, but there is yet an important element that must be mentioned. Each fabulous encounter with extra-necessary edibles takes place in a scene of the in-between.

The AIRPORT is Fantastically in between and Bananas!

People work here, but they work in a functioning nowhere. If a place is defined by the people interacting with it, the Airport is a face with features continually displaced, renegotiated, and confused. It's rough attempts to assert it's own identity through shops that summarize the city in which it sits (ex: the gift shop full of Obama and Mirrored Bean memorabilia in Chicago) are foiled at every turn. Every thing is too clean, too expensive, too expertly dressed. My beer is glaring at me ("Yes, you are too expensive, and much too well dressed even if you were brewed right here in Denver Colorado!").

I imply that dessert was also consumed in a non-space / in-between space. Which is untrue. But I was in something of an in-between space. Chicago exists more permanently for me than before, but only slightly. It is like a very nicely constructed movie set that might blow over now that I've gone. There's is more to this tipsy ramble. But I have a flight to catch.

To be continued...

Chicago as movie set, and all the actors.

I really like Chicago.

I think that I could be here for a long time. I was walking with Sarah and Zayne and Zayne said, "This is the sea of interestingly colored things" and he gestured grandly to a particularly dingy section of ground under the train tracks. It was a corner filled with lots of little stones, but there was also an unusual number of small brightly colored objects collected between the rocks. There was a blue lego, a red something, a pink balloon, "Oh! A rollerskate!" said Zayne picking up a tiny rollerskate, "wow!" I said," "Look! A dead rat!" said Sarah, and we looked, and there was a dead rat.

I loved that. It kind of freaked me out and I felt sorry for the rat, but I also loved it.

I took the train downtown this morning, and I looked out my window the whole time. I could devote a year to a project I'm thinking about. The project would be to systematically look out of windows in Chicago. I would also spend a lot of time waiting for, and riding on trains. I would look out of the windows of every train I rode on. It might be nice to take photographs, but looking at things would be the project.

Yesterday David took me to the art museum. A woman asked us if we were okay because we were laying on the floor harmonizing for a half an hour and we forgot where we were. It was great because as soon as we said we were rehearsing for an art project she seemed really relieved. I also sang in a library yesterday. That was another art project that David's roommate Megan was organizing. To get into the library you have to have a school ID but I told the security guard that I needed to participate in an art project, and she immediately let me in. Pretending to be an artist/Being an artist really does help you do things. Everyone should take advantage of this all of the time, and accidentaly become artists in the process.

My favorite sequence of events in Chicago so far involved eating (pizza) drinking (beer) and then eating (dessert) some more. It was so glutenous and beautiful. I understand what Virginia Woolf was talking about when she said that you need to be well fed in order to feel like you're going to heaven. I have been drinking a lot of coffee, but we are only going to drink tea tomorrow when I set up the tent and sings songs. Now I am going to go find a toy store.

C

Conversations About Joni Mitchell

Chicago reminds me of the idea I had of Chicago. The houses are very pointy. These are the kind of Americans who have upward mobility in mind, why else would so many identical arrows line the streets? The colors of the homes are very distinctive, which is very important because they are so close to each other.

My brother lives in an old warehouse. His room is two very small rooms, and he hangs his lamp on a nail in one room, and on an ankh in the other. "It's perfect because an ankh is a symbol of the sun" he told me. David has chickens, and a small black cat called "____." He has 3 roommates that all remind me of David.

I've met some of the people that I've been hearing about for four years. One of these is a professor named Matthew Goulish. He is exactly as wonderful as David describes him, except alive, so more wonderful. I attended one of his classes which I got to participate because a) "all twins are allowed to come to class" (-M.G.) and b) I'd read the book the month before, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It's a ghost story, but now, having been to class, I have a sneaking suspicion that it's actually abstinence porn like Twilight. I am not sure yet, so don't tell anyone that.

I have to finish building my tent, and writing songs to sing inside of it, because I keep inviting people to come to my tent and listen to my songs.

This trip has been punctuated very regularly with conversations about Joni Mitchell. She's like a clock.