Butterbabe

I was part of a performance at Artomatic 411 this weekend. It was called Two Rebeccas: Endless Waiting. I'm posting highlights for peeps who have interest and for everyone who couldn't make it.

Into: Tribute to John Swaile.

John was a friend. A lovely man, a great poet and very cool. I read his poem, Nothing as Wonderful; Becca (Rebecca V. Wood) read her poem, Before the Viewing.

Nothing as Wonderful
by John Swaile

There's nothing as wonderful as waking up to the sound of rain,
or lying down next to a boy or girl who loves you.

That's what this poem is about.

Love and life and everything that comes in between.
And while there's nothing as wonderful as waking up,
or playing an instrument,
or reading a book,
or going outside and watching the sunset while sitting next to a boy or girl who loves you,
don't waste time or breath.

Do what you love to do now,
because later, there's nothing.
And as wonderful as waking up may be,
maybe it's better to make love,
or eat,
or listen to Charlie Parker
while sitting next to a boy or girl who loves you.

Don't expect to touch the sky with both hands,
and don't expect answers.
Just remember that's there's nothing as wonderful
as waking up next to a boy or girl who loves you.

Next, was a section about an ex I had (I call him "Morgan" in the essay) and about a poem Becca wrote that reminded me of him. I'm posting her poem, but not the ex essay. There are reasons.

The Ugly Man with no Pants
by Rebecca V. Wood

Your face is a mud-rutted vacant lot, strewn with old beer cans, broken glass,
Fast-food wrappers, and someone's discarded roadkill hair-weave,
Ripe for an onslaught of do-gooding earth children willing to take a chance
On stray bullets and lead dust strafing their tomato plants.

I have explained to my mother that after thirty-five, the dating pool
Is largely made up of two-and-three-time losers, assorted damaged goods,
And something even worse; The suspiciously mint-condition
Middle-aged single, all of whom are -furthermore -
Probably thinking the same thing about you.

And c'mon; Can you really make an air-tight case to the contrary?
I mean, are you really sure that you just accidentally married a bad man
And stayed with him for thirty-four years?
Are the bad genes really all on his side?
I've met Grandpa and Grandma remember, and God help us if they're our good half.

The more you fuck up, the more rules you come up with
That the rest of us have to follow, that will make our lives one long
Better Homes and Gardens photo-spread;
Don't wear earth tones, the make you look washed-out,
Don't make tea in luke-warm tap water, it won't brew,
Don't use check-cashing stores, they rip you off,
Don't heat things up in plastic containers, they give you cancer,
And for God's sake, never, ever put anything in the microwave
Not specifically labeled "micro-wave safe",
Or you'll be out a dollar's worth of soup & plastic,
And have to commit hari-kari for the shame and horror of it all!

Don't dream big or get excited about things,
Or you'll bring on disaster,
Never date more than two years above or below your age,
Avoid the broken ones, and under no circumstances admit that you
Are one of them.

Don't make mistakes, or your life will instantly transform
Into a permanent and irreversible Greek Tragedy; Don't ask me how, but things
Willl somehow get worse.
Commit suicide slowly through inaction,
Because anything you want to do is wrong, and you should aim to be
A meek and tidy, well-maintained mental patient
That I can be less ashamed of, oh my God, could anyone who sees me
As just a piece of ass be worse than this?

Come here and give me some hep-C and a cour-date, baby!
I need to do something to earn the punishment for once.
I need for somebody to see me.

Next, I did a tribute to Becca and her colorful stories. I am redacting some identifying names.

Wood Pussies
be Rebeca Golden

Ever hear the term "wood pussy?" It sounds like a masturbation aid popular amongst the Amish. Or maybe a good name for an all-lady death metal band. Woods and pussies are not similar. None of the Woods I know or have heard tell of are pussies in the anti-woman, boys locker room sense of the word. Nor are they skunks -- that's a real wood pussy, in fact. My friend, Rebecca Vivienne Wood (aka, Becca), comes from a long line of crazy, backwoods thieves, pimps and natural born killers. She's not a pussy. She's a badass bitch. And so are all her dead relatives, and one or two of the live ones.
Becca tells a lot of stories. The relative who poisoned himself trying to strip batteries for the component metals. The horse thief murdered by a nephew. I think. Details are muddy and it happened in Michigan in the 19th century. Something to do with horses and the Civil War and a whole town who despised the dead profiteer so deeply that no arrest followed the killing, nor did any trial. There might've been a parade, cakes baked in honor of the perpetrator. Maybe horses could be had on the cheap, maybe they cooked and ate the horse trader. It's muddy. It happened in Michigan.
In Germany, in the late 60s or thereabouts, Becca's dad threw men across German bars for sport. Papa Wood, 6-foot-8, shoes roughly the size of the lower peninsula, kicked ass but forgot to take names. He has other things on his mind. A German girlfriend, an American girlfriend, the conception of Rebecca Vivenne Wood in a quaint hotel. I imagine lederhosen were involved. The Ricola jingle as the sexy soundtrack. Alps in the background and legs in the air.
And then: Michigan. Always Michigan. Ann Arbor, where two completely disastrous people came together to raise their young and study the most dangerous trade of all: Library Science! Poor college students with a baby and a love of books and book accessories. Mrs. Becca's Dad, the former Debbie Jean Mitchell, told jokes to beat the band, despite the fact that her own childhood home, a pretty postcard place by Lake Michigan, contained an alcoholic railroad man and a woman who alternated between schizophrenia and Pentecostalism like some women do between white shoes and not-white, before and after Labor Day.
Debbie Jean is not anyone's lover. She's a mother who lives in Boring Green in a house with cats and books and quilts and cloth and family treasures hidden or discarded, to go to or to be taken from rightful and wrongful heirs.
Sometimes, Livvy visits. The second wood pussy in the Mitchell pile. She's a tall drink of strong water, Livvy Wood. Sweet-faced, whiskey-voiced, tough-talking, shit-kicking, take-no-prisoners -- she is a New Yorker and fuck you very much for noticing. She lives with a sweet guy, who Debbie Jean swears will help pick a nice nursing home. Nice, competent, perhaps not one of the places where they tie you to the furniture, or maybe one that does! So long as he gets a good price, eh? Nothing to good for Mrs. Wood, I say.
Wood pussies are a tough bunch. Born or made. Becca grew and prospered and studied and marched. Becca in the band, a horn strapped to her chest, stomping proudly down the field for the honor of Boring Green. Becca by the lake in Cleveland. Becca in Tampico. She saw la vigin there. She learned to eat the spices and habla the es-pag-nowl. She taught me to say a few things.
"Donde esta el bano, cabron?"
"Vaya a la chingata, cabron!"
"Necessitos sus fluidos seminales para que hacer flan."
"Yo tengo papel hygenico por mi culo muy merdioso."
"Mi esposo tiennes una pistola, cabron"

And I taught myself to say "Mi amiga Rebecca m'enseno esta espression." I leave "cabron" off the end of that one for the sake of plausible deniability.
There was one time involving mi culo and merda. I don't like to speak of it. I had the flu. I thought I might die. There was....leakage. Becca tended me and cleaned up and took me to a hospital. I thought I was having a stroke. I had the flu. She fed my cats when I broke my back. She put up with me when Morgan and I were off and on and on and off and on and finally, totally off. She helped me scrape cat shit out of carpet and elderly food out of the meat drawer of the world's scariest fridge -- not mine, I swear. We were cleaning a house for cash one broke-ass summer. I will say that when meat is 5 years old, even in the freezer, the time comes where you either throw it out or buy it shoes and send it to kindergarten. We went with the trash for that elderly roast. In the same house, after stumbling on (oh, wait -- it's not stumbling when the stuff is in the open, on every surface, rug and coffee table) a porn cache that would put the actual Internet to shame.
Becca helped me think of titles and plots to the films missing between two seminal classics: Big Black Gang Bang 2 and Big Black Gang Bang 16. It turns out, there's a twist ending! A tiny white woman gets fucked! In all of them. Of "I Fucked the Black Basketball Team," she said "I pity the dumb bitch who opted for the White Basketball Team." And I concurred.
There are dark times between Michigan and here, times in shelters, times spent with men who preferred to sleep with lizards. I don't like to imagine these times, because I hate seeing Becca sad. Her face falls like a cake if you stomp hard by the oven. Her bright blue eyes puff and swell. I am made of hugs and it still isn't enough.
Wood pussies aren't just for the Amish. They aren't coming to a scummy rock club near you. Woods aren't pussies. They are badass bitches -- even the men. Even the Woods by marriage, as the former Allie Hall , Becca's stepmother, can tell you. She ran over an uppity ex-boyfriend in a 600-pound wheelchair. She has chunks of people like you in her poo. I'm guessing -- I don't check it or anything. She made a social worker cry once. She is not to be messed with.
And neither is her stepdaughter. Despite the slings and arrows of outrageous motherfucking fortune, Rebecca V. Wood is not taking any crap from anyone. Not today. At least not today. She will claw and fight and stand her ground. She is a tough, battle-hardened warrior rockstar in a dress and high-heeled boots. Woodpussies aren't roadkill. Woodpussies are killer road warriors. Is this a love letter? Is it a poem? Is it a song? I like to think it's a comic book legend. Because I love you, woodpussy. Also? I will sell the movie rights.

Then, Becca read some poems inspired by her childhood memories:

Go Tell your Mommy she Wants You
by Rebecca V. Wood

Some nights the mother that I've forgetten, or never had
Seeps into my dreams, whispering lullabies,
Telling me things I never knew I knew, and for a few seconds,
I am safe and welcome here;
Who's a happy girl?
Who's a happy girl?

The woman I came out of is burning my old gradeschool art
While my uterus gives up the fight to keep refurbishing it'self
For a guest who never comes.
I said once at age five that I would run away when I grew up,
And she laughed, as do mothers who's story ends better.

In the world outside my skin, I look like somebody's mother,
Because I'm old and not too mean;
The girl with the pierced eyebrows at the busstop
Who's on the phone trying to talk her boyfriend
Into not lying in wait back at her trailer when she gets back
From the welfare department,
And the cat who abandoned her own kittens,
And comes crying to me to cuddle her
The way her own mother didn't.

I saved it all up for forty years,;
Nurtured nothing, not even myself,
Couldn't even keep a potted plant alive until after 35,
To have these little crumbs to give strangers I'll know
For minutes or hours,
Pets that aren't even mine.

I'm starting to see that the whole world wants its mommy,
And nobody knows where she's gone;
She's shooting up behind a dumpster
In the alley of our souls, while we
Try to piece her together from fragmented photos
Cut out of a magazine;
We are making her up
As we go along.

Reconciliation
by Rebecca V. Wood

Reconciliation

Don’t you remember, we lived in the palace,

Someday you’d be as beautiful as me.

If you wore your best dress and were very quiet,

I’d let you watch when the ladies came for tea.

How can I help what that awful huntsman told you?

Why did you have to run away and live here

In these stunted deviants’ miniature sty?

How can you refuse such a lonely old woman,

Bringing round a present to brighten up my day.

Just take a bite of the pretty red apple, all wrapped in tissue

Before I’m on my way.

I’ll make a coffin from the finest crystal

Just like Comrade Lenin’s, unfrosted by your breath,

So that the crowds can see my mirror image

Dream-self as white and immaculate as death.

Finally, we wrapped up with our parody of Toledo Alive. Toledo Alive is a hideous promo song for Toledo, popular on local TV in the 80s. It is, as Becca says "damning with faint praise." It looks alive....we thought we saw its chest move, that kind of thing. Becca wrote 98% of this. I came up with the line about poking it with a stick.

Toledo................Alive?

When they cut our life-support,
Nobody went to court;
Alive! Though the DNR was signed!

Tried the fogging-mirror trick,
Poked it with a long, sharp stick;
Alive...if the term's broad ly defined!

Alive!
No-one knows quite why,
Alive!
'Cause it just won't die,
Mike Bell wears assless chaps
And tries to plug our funding gaps!

Alive!
And despite our plight,
Alive!
At least we're not Detroit,
We'll let our gardens grow,
Tell Davis Besse we won't glow.

Alive Toledo,
We think it's still alive.
We're rocking Miserable City;
It only looks dead!

Okay, so I never get to write about anything other than 1) weight stuff 2) poverty and 3) local Toledo stuff for the local Toledo weekly that I slum it up with sometimes.

Here's something I wrote that's not going anywhere else. I think hamsters are damned important. Also, er, "urban".

“What’s the difference between a hamster and gerbil?” my boyfriend asked as I changed lanes doing about 80 miles an hour. We’d been talking about my latest obsession, the Kia Soul commercial where “urban” hamsters head-bob in unison to The Choice is Yours by the Black Sheep.

“Gerbils have a longer tail,” I said. “Also, they’d probably buy American.”

Ironically, this conversation about a Korean automaker and its spokesrodents happened on the Southfield Freeway near Detroit. As I zoomed by Ford’s world headquarters, a shiny glass building that dominates the highway, I pondered urban hamsters in baggy pants and hoodies. Hamsters who live on Hamsterdam Avenue and drive shiny new Kia Souls while their (strangely nude) non-Kia cohorts drive things like washing machines and cardboard boxes.

These anthropomorphic rapping rodents have a seriously macho quality. The female hamsters in the ad wear old-school cheerleader skirts. They have no tops to speak of. The urban paradise of the Kia hamster features everything a dude could possibly want: woman-free time with the boyz in the Kia, the all-male barbershop for relaxation, and topless cheerleaders at the roadside, waiting in lush anticipation for the first hoodied-ham-stud in a Kia Soul to pull over and open the shiny green passenger side door. As a feminist, I should find all of this kind of insulting. Instead, I envision my own suburban Kia fantasy.

The man and woman hamster ride silently. No music – sadly, not a bit of Black Sheep to lighten the mood in their pristine silver Soul. The Hamstress (despite having no facial expression of any kind) seems distressed. She fishes around in the I-used-to-be-a-plastic-bag recycled tote and seems relieved to discover that she has indeed remembered the Hamayonaise.

I can’t stop talking about this Kia commercial. I’ve also watched it online at least ten times. I find myself finishing thoughts with “Do, da, dippity,” imitating the cadence and accent of the Black Sheep frontman, despite the fact that I am the whitest woman on earth; I carried a Bermuda bag to school every single day for at least six months in the fifth grade.

Why are these hamsters so fascinating? Part of it is the animation and the catchy song. Created by David & Goliath, the Los Angeles ad agency also responsible for the Bacardi & Cola campaign, the ad is an intricately detailed mini masterpiece of cutting-edge computer animation and smart ideas. According to D&G’s chairman, David Angelo, the hamsters represent sameness, going around in circles, and only the Kia Soul can save us from the sad ubiquity of workaday middle class existence. The shiny green hamster car would deliver Emma Bovary to a young lover (exactly five minutes after she drops the kids at soccer practice, one presumes).

Not only have the ads tapped some sort of angsty, bourgeois zeitgeist, they’ve sold a lot of cars. According to a Kia dealer quoted in Fortune, “"Demand has definitely exceeded expectations. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time we've sold out.” Fortune also found that 80% of Kia dealers nationwide had sold out on the Soul.

As successful as this ad is and as much as I personally enjoy it, I wonder about the urbanness of those dancing hamsters. They live near Hamsterdam Avenue. They frequent a barbershop, where the neighborhood’s elderstatesrodents gather to gossip and soak up the culture. In their baggy pants and hoodies, these cunning urban rodents are clearly stand-ins for African Americans.

Are African Americans cool enough to sell Kias, but still somehow too threatening for ads? I wonder, though I like to think – because I pretty much watch this commercial on a loop and have talked it up to everyone who’ll listen to me for more than 30 seconds – that the hamsters are just cuter and cleverer than any human beings (regardless of race) could ever hope to be. Also, African Americans couldn’t drive a toaster or washing machine, and these bad “choices” kind of make the ad.

I will not apologize for loving the Kia hamsters. I will not buy a Soul, either; I’m driving my six-year-old (mostly) paid-for Saturn Ion til it explodes in a shower of bolts at the side of the road, just like Elwood’s police car in the Blues Brothers. I’m not in the market for a car, but I think the hamsters could sell me almost anything else. Like, for example, a Black Sheep song from 1991.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Artomatic 411

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Snowpcalypse Now

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Actual Linkage

Friday, January 28, 2011

Group-Off

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Limbo

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Hamsters!

Monday, December 6, 2010

Money Shot? NOT!!!

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