Alli Marshall's Blog, page 5

Mood

I started making these collages to say something that I couldn’t write down. Beauty is marred, the perception of women is a false narrative, we live in a world that neither honors nor protects what it loves. In the many and loud and frequent calls to change the government by voting Republicans out, I can’t help but think about how heavily North Carolina is gerrymandered and that the Equal Rights Amendment still has not been ratified. So yes, I’ll vote. And no, I don’t believe all votes count equally. I wish I believed that, but I don’t.

Below are my digital collages (in order) of “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer, “Portrait of an Unknown Woman” by Ivan Kramskoi, “Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci” by Leonardo da Vinci, and “Pinkie” by Thomas Lawrence. The choice to use famous works by white male artists was intentional.

 

Click to view slideshow.

DUMPSTER FIRE

Pete was not a good friend, in that he was neither very good nor very much of a friend. He was the kind of kid who came over to your house and drank your cough syrup. He was the kind of kid whose parents never knew where he was and weren’t too worried about it.

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Photo from firedepartment.org

We met at All County Band, where I was third-chair flute and he was not in band at all, but was riding a contraband skateboard through the hallway. I was bored with John Phillips Sousa and the (marginally cooler alternative) Beverly Hills Cop theme song. I was over the competition of All County Band and the nervous knowing that I was only third-chair flute by some fluke. Not because I was good. I wasn’t good because I didn’t practice.

I was in a phase of not applying myself, which meant I did enough to skate by, and skating by meant being in the top percentile of my class but just barely. I was number ten of the top-ten. “Dumbest of the smart kids,” I liked to say. I made a habit of not studying. I memorized and took notes and never dared find out what I was capable of if I actually tried.

I was already leaning way from the straight and the narrow. Pete, some punk version of the Artful Dodger, looked like an option I had not previously considered.

Pete actively applied himself at not trying. He’d rerouted any scholarly energy into skipping school, stealing beer, and narrowly averting the police. Pete, I knew, the moment our eyes locked at All County Band, was my spirit animal. That is, if spirit animals came in pairs and one was good and one was evil. Pete was the evil one. But also the more fun one. The one with better band t-shirts. The one with a better record collection. A record collection he’d probably shop-lifted — he was that sort of spirit animal.

Most of our friendship (with air quotes) was Pete showing up at inopportune times. Family dinners. Getting a friend to drive him to my house then getting the car stuck in my driveway so my dad had to tow them out. Inviting me over to play records, then stealing my Sid Vicious album.

But with Pete I got to be The Girl With The Sid Vicious Album, which I preferred to The Girl Who Makes Third-Chair Flute In All County Band. With Pete, I could wear black nail polish and torn jeans. I could apply myself at not applying myself.

Plus, I was a year older and two inches taller and my parents still cared where I was. Not that I always told the truth about where I was, but they would have noticed if I didn’t make it home by dark. I had that over Pete. So when he called to see if I wanted to hang out behind the high school in Geneva I said yes.

And when Pete said “Let’s break into the pool,” I was like, “Uhm,” but luckily we couldn’t. Neither of us was motivated enough to apply ourselves at breaking and entering. So we just milled around, unwilling to admit that Hanging Out Behind The High School In Geneva was lame.

But then Pete had the brilliant idea to throw lit matches into the dumpster, one after the other. I laughed at first, but maybe ten matches in it seemed like Maybe Not The Best Idea. I said so. “God,” Pete sulked. “What do you think’s gonna happen?”

A tentative flame licked the metal lip of the dumpster. We were both impressed. It was soon joined by a more boisterous flame, and then a family of angry and determined flames. “Oh shit,” Pete said. He picked up his skateboard and took off running.

When you have a friend like Pete, a friend who is not such a great friend, a friend who drinks your cough syrup and annoys your dad, you are not altogether surprised when he sets a dumpster on fire and leaves you alone at the scene of the crime.

I called 911 from the payphone and waited a safe distance from the dumpster for the firetruck. “Did you set this?” the police asked. They came, too.

I said no. I said I was there for All County Band practice. I said I’d made third-chair flute but maybe next year I’d get first chair. “Fingers crossed,” I said and kept my fingers shoved into my pockets so the police couldn’t see my black nail polish.

The cop looked around for the real culprit. Clearly it wasn’t me. Even with my torn jeans. I still had too much of the stench of a smart kid. A flute-playing top-percentile kid. “Do your parents know where you are?” He finally asked.

I said yes. Earnestly. Wide-eyed. It was pretty much mostly not a lie.

I thought of Pete who was in the wind, Pete who still had matches. Pete whose parents maybe hadn’t remembered to worry about him that day. That week. I thought of all the dumpsters out there and how much Pete could destroy if he applied himself.

MARIAN APPARITION

Maybe it’s because he’s new to town but already on the rise, already with a convertible and plans for a salon of his own. That kind of fast fame is intoxicating.

Maybe it’s because he’s pretty. Soft-faced. Feminine. Maybe it’s for that reason that his mother gave him a girl’s name and not just any girl’s name but that of a virgin saint. He is no virgin saint but his name implies trustworthiness.

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So I take the ride when he offers it. Partly because I’m flattered. Even though I’m in a purple polo shirt and khakis — my uniform for the late shift at the front desk of a hotel — he’s noticed me. I think maybe it’s just because we have a mutual friend and he’s enacting some surrogate, brotherly protection. But I’m willing to entertain the flattery, that such a pretty man sees the me beyond the purple polo shirt. The me beyond the long hours and grad school homework. The me who reads Walt Whitman while watching “Star Trek.” The me who is bumbling through my twenties, through relationships, through writing poetry worthy of a masters degree.

Mostly it’s close to midnight and even though I only live a mile from the hotel, the walk home looms long. I say yes to the ride. He finishes his drink at the bar — I don’t know how many he’s had, but it’s only a mile, so what can go wrong? — and we walk to the garage together.

The convertible. Then the night air on my face. Fall — too cool out for the top down, but it’s thrilling. A heightened sense of being alive.

He misses the turn for my street and keeps driving. I’m not worried. Mostly curious. He says we’re going to his house for a drink and I think, sure. Because he’s lovely. Because he has a girl’s name. Because his mother saw his softness. Because I am lucky.

His house is a cabin — the musty old kind built in the 1920s that tourists and New York transplants find charming. Mostly the cabins are small and dark and the winter wind blows through the cracks in the chinking. But winter is still weeks off. Maybe a month or more. There’s red wine — maybe it’s whiskey — and a sloping sofa.

He looks out of place here. He’s from a warmer climate with thatched roofs and palm trees. He says he doesn’t own the cabin, it belongs to his girlfriend.

Girlfriend is a silly word. She’s older, owns a boutique, wears expensive dresses and severe shoes. But she’s away, he says. It’s fine. Come sit here. Leans back, arm along the back of the sofa, body open like “yes,” and “of course,” and “I’ll be patient but don’t keep me waiting.” The calm threat, the storm cloud gliding across his face.

I want to believe some bigger, rosier, romantic fiction. That I am seen and loved. That I am not in the clench of danger, that my wrong turns, bad choices, neediness have not led me here.

I want to say I don’t go to the sofa. That I perch on a nearby chair. Ladder-back, maybe. Leather ottoman. I don’t know. I’m ugly in my polo shirt, in my cropped hair, glasses that make me look owlish. I say I’m tired and I just want to get home.

He shrugs. Petulant. His pretty mouth curls unprettily. He says he doesn’t want to go back out. I can just stay there. He doesn’t say he’ll wait me out, that I can’t win the game.

Maybe he tries to kiss me. Maybe he pulls me to him. Maybe I hold very still, hoping he’ll tire of the game. Because it’s a game, right? This inexplicable wrong turn, this trickling of sand through an hourglass, this bad dream.

It’s 1998. I don’t have a cell phone. It’s miles back to downtown along a dark road with no sidewalk. Maybe I could get to the grocery store we passed on the drive and call my mother to pick me up. I could just walk and hope and not have to ever tell anyone what happened. Everything is maybe.

It would be good to have a deity in a time of need. A name to call out. A virgin saint. A vision on a cold night. A beacon, a sign, a map, a set of instructions.

A mantra, a rosary, a candle to light.

A battle axe, a broadsword, the power to shoot laser beams from my eyes or metal claws from the backs of my hands. Something.

He finally says whatever, let’s go. Stomps out to the convertible, noticeably swaying. I’ve run through the short mental list of my choices and whatever. He revs the engine, drives fast, angling hard around corners, trying to scare me. I hold the tears until I’m home.

Maybe I’m say sorry though I’m not sure why. Whatever.

Nothing happens except for the fear of what could have happened. Whatever. Nothing happens except for the chipping away of a sense of safety. Whatever, whatever, whatever.

What I don’t say is his name. When he gets his own salon, when he shows up at parties, when he’s walking through the world, when he’s around other women, when he keeps on being there, when he keeps on rising.

SANCERRE AND WICKER CHAIRS

You order Perrier in Paris because you can. Because everything else is wrong, but you can manage that one thing. An impossibly old man grips your wrist like he’s drowning. He tells you he once had an American lover. The day takes on carnival proportions.

[image error]You went to Paris to drink Sancerre (even though the French are bored with wine) while sitting in a wicker café chair on the sidewalk. You went to Paris to fall in love, to be seen in that particular light. What was supposed to be a moment suspended, a Mendelssohn overture, is instead an impossibly old man clawing at your arm and leaving marks.

When the rain breaks for five seconds you make a run for it. Coward. Paris is laughing at you. You can’t get close to the Eiffel Tower for the slow snake of tourists. You walk for miles to the Picasso museum only to learn that it’s closed for the next five years. You order a carafe of Sancerre but all the wicker chairs are taken.

You sleep in the fourteenth arrondissement, which sounds romantic, but you dream of work and bills and the singular anxiety of lost luggage. You’re tired in Père Lachaise Cemetery and think of laying down on the polished marble of Edith Piaf’s grave, curling against the crucified Christ.

You order food that comes wrapped in paper so you can eat while walking rather than dine alone.

The locks on the bridge over the Seine — so many that it’s someone’s job to periodically cut them off — are an unsolvable riddle. How is a padlock a romantic gesture and not a scare tactic?

But you are no one’s key, no one’s promise, no one’s lost love.

NOTES ON PROCESS, part 1

A.

My experience as an artist so far has been that I am led down various life paths, often related to the BIG LIFE ISSUES (marriage, career, friendships, family, health scares for myself or those close to me, minor and major tragedies, national and world events) and make art in response to those experiences. The art isn’t really planned beyond “I think I’m OK at writing, so I’ll study that, and since I’ve studied it a bit, I guess that’s my main media” or “I’m sick of words and need to try to express myself through some other art form so maybe I’ll play the ukulele because it only has four strings so how hard can it be?”

In short: Art Reflects Life.

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Members of Pussy Riot perform at Red Square, January 2012. Photo by Denis Sinyakov/Reuters

But now, in my mid-40s, I find myself wondering if the more meaningful creative path might be Life Reflects Art. Wherein the artist would choose an art form and follow that through its stations and to its conclusions — the education, the creative exploration, the accompanying intellectual, spiritual and perhaps even physical exploration. (The latter, e.g., “If I work out harder and build muscle can I incorporate flaying trapeze into my ukulele practice?” or, perhaps more realistically, “How can I embody this art form? How can I add physicality to my craft?”)

What if social and romantic relationships are called in or driven by the artwork? What if travel and career and house upkeep and grocery purchases are informed by the artwork? How many ways and how completely can Life Reflect Art?

As I write this I think, in this time of social and political turmoil, it’s important that Art Reflects Life. We — our country, our community, those of us who draw courage and sustenance from art — need to see others process injustice, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change and all the other woes and ills through artwork. Where would we be without Emma Goldman’s writing, Basquiat’s graffiti, Pussy Riot’s music, Saul Williams’ poetry and Bread and Puppet’s theater?

We need responsive art. I need responsive art. And I need to make responsive art — art as resistance, art as revolution, art as regeneration.

But I’m also coming to believe (or at least to explore the idea) that I need the intentionality and focus of Life Reflecting Art. I write this with no clear course to proceed, no map, no plan. Just the germ of an idea for a sharp right turn. Left turn. Whatever.

And perhaps in choosing that path one learns that the two sides of the paradigm ultimately prove to be a whole — a yin-yang of creative process. That is the hope if not the immediate hypothesis.

B.

NOTES FROM ARTIST TALK: Choreographer John Heginbotham and author/illustrator Maira Kalman on their collaborative work, Principals of Uncertainty

• Curate a museum

• NC/WNC rabbit myths?

• Leopard goddesss/shape-shifter —> Cherokee goddess? [Note: Wampus cat]

“After he started sketching her, he stood up, erased her, and walked out.” [Note: who am I quoting?]

• Fannie Lou Hamer, Democratic Convention, 1976.

• Costuming [Note: with doodle]

• Imposed limits by living in Asheville —> collaborators, venues

ART BOOK: textural, combo words and images, photo-copied material, book turns as you read it. [Note: did I mean the reader turns the book? Surely the book doesn’t turn itself.]

• Make video of extinction poem with Southern Belle garden party dress. Slash dress to shreds while reciting poem. [Note: How to practice this in advance?]

C.

In the beginning, you can fully be in your innate knowledge because it’s not clouded by learned knowledge or experience. Innate knowledge is our connection to lineage — the thread that binds us to those in our practice who have gone before, and those who will come after.

WISH YOU WERE HERE

After deleting 139 photos of my ex, my photo gallery looks like I’ve only ever vacationed by myself. I suppose that’s sort of true: Me leaning casually against Hadrian’s Wall; me at Edith Piaf’s grave; me, in an optical illusion, touching the top of the Temple of Kukulkan as if it’s miniature and I’m a giant.

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I can barely remember feeling hot that day, in Chichen Itza, or motion sick from the bus ride. I recall those details like an itinerary, like a packing list, like a fact that could also be a lie. Like a movie I once saw while sick with the flu that I later, inadvertently, adopted as a series of scenes from my own life. Memory is like that: Fallible, slippery.

Once I delete the photos of my former husband, he recedes farther into the mist. It’s possible that I really was alone at the Eiffel Tower, smiling as another tourist took my photo, smiling even though I was thinking he might steal my camera. This stranger. This person gifting me a memory that might be my memory or might be a still from French Kiss or Amélie or Midnight in Paris.

I remember all of those movies with more clarity and levity than I recall my own marred trip.

Maybe I was never married at all but was always going through life solo, packing suitcases according to my mood and not anyone else’s idea of what would be prudent. What would be logical. Extra scarves, no hiking shoes. Maybe I’ve always been at home in the quiet — the whistle of the wind at Hadrian’s Wall to keep me company. The mossy creep of sadness in Père Lachaise Cemetery. The sudden arrival of a stranger who offers to take my photo because I stand out in my aloneness, in this sea of couples. I am silent amid the chatter, the bickering. I am a fog horn in my quiet — an emergency siren.

The stranger says “Would you like me to —” and I stop trying to take a selfie with Rodin’s The Thinker slouching over my left shoulder. The stranger smiles encouragingly, eager for this job, wanting to make a mark upon my vacation. “I’m actually a photographer,” he says.

I hand over the camera and stand there, pretending. This is my life, this is what I do, this is how it feels.

Later, when I look at the photo, it’s askew. My eyes are closed. The head of The Thinker, my momentary date, is out of the frame. It seems right, it seems exactly the way I saw it in my mind’s eye.

SOMEWHERE A TOWN IS WAITING FOR YOU TO ARRIVE

I found a folder of 68 photos, from a 2015 trip to Ireland, on a forgotten SD card. Like finding an old role of film, it turned up some treasures and lots of questions. What is this shot even of? What was I feeling on this day? Who was I, three years ago? So this week’s post is a flash fiction on that theme.

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It’s not this town. And you’re glad, though this town is scenic, sprawling along a mineral-gray lake. The banks are mossy and the sky is pale blue and the hill beyond the village is artfully terraced by ancient people who carved civilization from the land with Iron Age tools. Maybe it as Bronze Age. You should know from all the museums but you don’t know.

You promised you would take decent notes. You promised you would write something brilliant from train windows or, if not then, later. But no one takes the train anymore and the buses are full of chattering tourists who are having more fun than you are. You mostly daydream of what your life would be like if you just got off at the next stop and walked away. You have a credit card and a lipstick. Isn’t that enough to erase your past, which feels weary and played out, and write a new story for yourself?

Yes, you think. In a cute village. In a yellow house, or maybe a blue house. You’ll meet a man who is a potter or a woodworker. Not a sheep farmer, though, because the stench of sheep would always be on his hands. Or you’ll meet a woman with clear blue eyes who can show you what herbs to take to heal the nagging, unnameable wound. She can show you heather when whole fields of it bloom purple. Because surely that is love: Not some Iron Age remnant of endocrine alchemy, some internal burbling and sheep-like need, but an external wonder. A sign. Acres of purple blossoms and your heart turned inside out by the sight of it and the old you made new right there, like an immaculate christening.

But maybe not in this town. Sure, it has a yellow house, but it has an air of gloom if you look closely. So there may not be the potter man or the blue-eyed woman. Love might still elude you. You might be left to the raw wind, the carved hills, the sheep and their endless hunger and the way they go on grazing forever — as if there is no town out there, awaiting their arrival.

On creativity, growth, and freshman orientation

It’s the time of year when kids go back to school and people on the precipice of adulthood go off the college — some for the first time. This year it seems like everyone I know is the parent of a 17- or 18-year-old who is starting college, so my social media feeds are full of photos of Move In Day(s).

It’s a rite of passage — one of many that I, a person without children, have not been through.

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Move-In Day, 1948 , from University of Mary Washington

Two things: 1) I barely recall being dropped off at college for the first time. I know my mom took me. I remember she had a perm at the time. There’s a photo of us somewhere and I’m wearing cargo pants. She might have been sad to leave me, but that’s not how I remember it.

So the going-off-to-college initiation is likely more impactful for parents, because the teenager’s life up to that point has been nothing but change, nothing but new experiences. It’s been school and life lessons and body morphing. College is of all of that (on steroids) with different scenery and less adult supervision.

It’s the parents who, after the college drop-off, go home to a weirdly empty house and have to figure out what the hell is supposed to give their lives meaning now. (At least this is how I, a childless person, imagine it.)

2) For people who don’t have children — even by choice — not experiencing those larger social landmarks that exist around raising kids is a bit like not being invited to a party. An expensive, pukey, annoying party, but a party nonetheless, and no one ever wants to be left off the guest list.

So I’ve been thinking about what, in my life, is the equivalent of the taking-a-kid-to-college rite of passage. What have I been nurturing and am now ready to send off into the world? What projects have come to fruition or are ready for a next phase? What parts of myself are at the end of teenage-hood and are ready to take those first steps into adulthood? What parts of myself would I gift with higher education, what would I entrust to outside teachers for further shaping and honing, what am I ready to introduce to the finishing school of advanced human experience?

When framed in the college-drop-off archetype, it feels right on time that I’m considering and planning how to grow my spoken-word collaborations into a one-person show. It’s both a move of claiming some autonomy and of submitting my ideas to the university of the universe. UniverSITY. Of taking stock of what I’ve learned so far and making a move that will further my education.

In a way, writing is always about sending ourselves off to higher education. It’s always about going back to school. Equal parts awkward, terrifying and thrilling. Hopefully the roommate will be cool, the food won’t suck, and after the initial dips and lurches of the emotional roller coaster, we’ll find ourselves climbing to a new altitude and glimpsing an image of our potential as artists. As humans. You know, before the ride careens wildly, terrifyingly, thrillingly onto the next rite of passage.

Asheville Percussion Festival 2018, photo by Jesse KittA...

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Asheville Percussion Festival 2018, photo by Jesse Kitt

Alli Marshall is a poet, fiction writer, and performer. She’s interested in moving writing beyond the page, seeking the golden in the mundane, finding the intersection of art and social justice, and reconnecting with mythology — both ancient and modern.

Learn more about Alli here.

The Eye of Hathor (video)

A performance from this year’s Asheville Percussion Festival. Soundscape by Bonnie Whiting, movement by Brandi Mizilca, words by me. It’s a poem about creative work and women’s work and the intersection of the two: the point at which an artist steps through fear to meet a challenge. (At least that’s what I think it’s about — but it’s totally open to interpretation.)

Video and audio by Joshua Messick, live soundboard audio mix by Steve Beatty and Edward Link at Diana Wortham Theatre in Asheville, video editing by Asheville Rhythm.