Sticky Fingers

 I was newly 18 when the Stones released Sticky Fingers.  Converted by the second track and totally romanced by Wild Horses, it was clear the album was going to take precedence on my little dormitory stereo in those innocent days before headphones.  Plus you could hear Brown Sugar and Bitch blasting across quadrangles everywhere.  Still, it was the cover that really obsessed me, the art student who had hung out at Max's with fake ID and visited the Warhol studio on several teenage occasions.  It was clever-- it was pop, it was tongue and cheek, and it was ultra sexy.  There were racy promo photos of Mick wearing nothing but the album placed just so across his hips.  

My Mom often used the expression 'sticky fingers' when she suspected one of us girls had raided her purse or the refrigerator.  Never me-- I was inclined otherwise... not a pilferer, nor a tattler.  In my first year of college I caught a roommate red-handed in my underwear drawer.  Confusing and a little creepy.  She cried and returned  a stash of 'borrowed' things, none of which were of much use to her.  It was her pathology, our Psych-major neighbor explained.  

After I had a baby I learned the true and literal meaning of sticky fingers.  They were everywhere... windows, appliances, stereos, bookshelves.  My little monster once 'mailed' a peanut butter sandwich in the VCR slot.  Nights were spent wiping things down-- after all, these things spread germs or grew bacteria, or whatever.  Babies put anything and everything in their mouth and then they transfer to their hands and paint the walls.  

The pandemic admonished us of the potential threat in human fingerprints; I have often thought back with nostalgia on those innocent baby-juice days as I learned to wipe off surfaces, doorknobs and other touchables.  Admittedly I'm not too fastidious.  But being alone here for extended hours and months, I've done a sort of unintentional categorical inventory of things.  I've discovered possessions, cds, albums, books-- old letters and photos-- rocks and minerals, souvenirs... things I recall with some vagueness.  Like an associative exercise, one thing leads me to another-- a Colin Blunstone album, a love-letter from a deceased drummer, a set of strings from some rockstar or other... I've never been one to actually catalogue;  I loaned so many books and albums over the years-- many never come back.  During recent months I've come upon these 'gaps' like a missing tooth... and I wonder, besides my own careless generosity, what visitor or overnight guest might have slipped something into a pocket, then let themselves quietly out while I was sleeping off an all-night gig.

My first husband felt entitled to my things in a charming sort of way.  After all, he is non-materialistic and would give anyone anything.  When I pulled out a vintage album on which he played, I found the vinyl had been lifted and a burned cd with a handwritten note left in its place.  But that was a focused appropriation.  In a way he 'owned' his work.  Here I'm missing Dylan-- Hendrix... Faulkner... Pynchon... baffling.  Sticky Fingers-- the actual zipper version-- appropriately (?)-- has been removed.  

My old neighbor used to come by every night and slip something into his pocket.  He took wine bottles from our local liquor store, too.  Sometimes he'd steal cookies and food.  When I'd question him, on the way out, he'd reply 'you don't need THAT'.  Much of his 'loot' were compact jazz box-sets he loved.  Slim and Slam.  Bud Powell.  He was a famous photographer and a great man who had entered the last stage of his life.   He was confused.  I was a little flattered that he wanted my things.  Go figure.  His fingers were literally sticky from the stolen cookies.  He left prints. 

Modern technology is clean and sterile.  No inky prints on our letters-- no rumpled paper and foodstains on manuscripts.  We are reminded, in the pandemic, that phones carry germs.  Everyone is sanitizing their hands to near-death.  When we voted, we were given our very own stylus/pen which went home with us.  God forbid anyone should exchange body fluids.  

I can't help thinking sex has suffered-- it's messy and sticky.  Obviously hook-ups and random meetings have been squelched although surely there is an underground culture of touching and physical intimacy.  For the rest of us, monogamy is favored.  I found it ironic that the Stones' 'mouth' logo which first appeared on the Sticky Fingers album is now being commonly used on a mask which inherently messages 'anti-tongue'.  We haven't seen many real smiles on the street... lipstick sales are understandably down-- cosmetic tooth procedures no longer prioritized.  

When I was about 15 I went to a concert and one of the musicians brushed my arm on the way out.  He gave me a wink, as though it was intentional.  I could swear I felt it, like a sort of warm glow, and did not wash that spot for a week until I was forced into a school swim.  Our Mom used to tell us how God touched every baby before birth just above its mouth and left that cleft mark.  There's a certain magical transference that happens when someone touches you... talks with their hands-- plays your guitar and leaves marks on it... shares some moment with you that leaves you with a physical souvenir.  

I miss my old neighbor... I miss my old sense of hospitality.  Christmas is here and very few people will see my tree which, after setting it up alone, left my hands fragrant and syrupy with its resin.  I miss my missing things... tonight I'd put Sway on my turntable if I still had it.  I can get it on youtube... not the same.  A few of my beloved decorations are not in the box-- more victims of my neighbor?  There were undoubtedly times when I'd take things down and give them away.  

We have all been a little sterilized by this pandemic.  We fear one another, we hesitate-- we wash and scrub and hold our breath.  We disguise ourselves and pretend maybe to be cleaner than we are.  Most of all I miss being 'touched' by someone-- a random meeting or conversation where you exchange and leave a sort of mark on someone.  These things do not happen with the same frequency.  I worry our culture is a little too digital and premeditated... less fleshy and flawed and mud-spattered.  White-washed and clean, smelling of disinfectant... do not forget how bloody are our beating hearts, how sticky the fingerprints of our childhood and parental memories, how fragile our souls which pass so easily through the layers of latex and surgical cloth and flesh.  

Tonight I looked again in vain for the Saturn/Jupiter conjunction.  It's up there, like most things, even though we can't see them.  Not touching, but putting on a little bi-millennial show for us--  reminding us that this too shall pass, this 2020 mess.... just about a moonlight mile on down the road.

Call It Sleep

When I was a teenager, I was sent on one of those student exchange experiments to Mexico.  On a train from Laredo to Mexico City, a handsome Andover boy who was on his way to a homestay in Guatemala crawled into my berth and we slept together... like grownups--- we were both scared I think and it made us feel like adults. He was preppy, not my type…  he'd followed me around at orientation but we were segregated in the bunkers.  It was so weird...I guess I was 15 and he was 16.    No sex-- just the intimacy of sleep.  But I remember... looking out the window at this strange desert and the night was cold and his arms around me in the thin wool blanket-- his name was Steve Pearson.  We never spoke. I felt like those pioneer girls must have felt with an arranged marriage-- the first night of a cheap honeymoon. 

Something so cinematic and archetypal about trains… the endless film reel of passing landscape, the rhythmic wheels on the track, the unbearable lonesome solo of sunset whistles.  I often dream of them, of trainsleep… of railroad bridges and tunnels and leaving home and waving goodbye to things you will never see again, secrets you will leave behind, love that you have moved away from, or that has moved away from you.  A cliche'd but poetic sense of distance.  

My niece is suffering from insomnia.  Insomnia, I tell her, is a state of mind.  It is the delusion that you must be sleeping when you are awake.  All of us sleep at some time; some of us are rebels and don't want to be regulated.  Read.  Poetry is good.  Try a train, I tell her… but she will undoubtedly be looking at her instagram and texting her friends instead of watching the moon rise over an endless black river.  

Train accidents seem horrific.  The long fragile chain of cars crashing one after the other seems almost more innocently violent than a car or plane crash.  One of the victims of the Metro North crash this week was the curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He had studied and written extensively about Vermeer--- the painter who understood white like no other.  I pray he was dreaming in a 17th century interior, wrapped in Vermeer-colored sheets, and was not frightened and suffocated to death, this man who dedicated his life to the subject of beauty and who threatened to leave his position if the Metropolitan Museum made even a single move to acquire even one piece from the bankrupt Detroit Institute of the Arts.  He looked a bit timeless and removed from another century; he'd said that he treasured the traditional trip back and forth from country to city on the train.  

Generally I go to bed at dawn, with no schedule, when the pull of fatigue overwhelms.  For me the sleep of winter is a deep, slow tunnel of Vermeer whites and far-off whistles.  I have given up on feverish passion and watched the fires of ambition burn off to glowing embers.  Insomnia is a thwarted love, a tossing and turning that no longer possesses me.  A sting of guilt or regret or a debt someone fears will be collected while we are vulnerable.  There is nothing more vulnerable than a person asleep; it is the very essence of innocence and trust.  Maybe this is my niece's problem; she has failed to lock her emotional door.  Things have happened to all of us while we slept.  Sometimes our predators insist we dreamed these nightmares; sometimes we have.  This is the stuff of fairytales and myths.  How many of those Greek gods visited beautiful human girls and made love to them while they slept, or turned them into creatures or stars.  

What always surprised me, reading my little books of myths and tales before I went to sleep, or reading the same ones to my little boy,  was why these gods-- who could have and could be anything they wanted-- were envious of men, with all our petty faults and our mortality.  They still wanted what we had, or they wanted to sleep with the women, or possess them, or father their children.  It made them human, or flawed, even though they were gods.  Our grass seemed greener than their paradise, and our snow whiter.  Or they craved our flaws, our dirt, our human pain and the funk of failure.  Our need for sleep.  

The night of the train crash, on the way home at 3 AM I came across a pool of fresh blood on a snowy bank.  Even by the mercury streetlight, I could see that it was human blood, not an innocent animal.  At first I felt weak… then something in me took over, and I began thinking about Adolph Gottlieb-- Sam Francis…Malevich.  The mind of an artist can be brutal.  But maybe that is the point.  Compassion is not always helpful.  We must make something of what is; we go on: sleep or no sleep, pain or no pain; snow or rain or bitter cold-- living our dream and dreaming our lives.

Bleeding Arts

If there is anyone out there who noticed the gap, it is not lack of desire or urgency but simply a crippling malwaritis of the keyboard which is not just annoying and hesitant but manifests itself like some form of Gutenberg Tourette's. Of course the $52 royalty check last month wasn't quite enough for a new machine, so even though it is a little funny and Masson-esque, and who would sue an anonymous blogger for a misstatement or obscenity... I was in self-imposed exile.

That said, a month of unexpressed mental entries have stained my brain like dark espresso and I am ornery as an old scribe with no ink. This is the sound of one finger typing. Several times on each key.

For Christmas, my next-door neighbors (our apartments are unfortunately contiguous along the entire length so there is little escape) have bought their pubescent Eric Clapton (Clapped-on?) only-child an entire drum kit with which to enhance his in-house little music heaven. All mothers know teen passions are oh-so-brief so I'm giving the little dork a month in which to disrespect his parents by rejecting the whole music thing altogether. I can even hear that it is one of those Best-Buy specials, not something you actually select at a percussion store. It sounds cheap and designed for cover-music only. The mother has given me a few sympathetic head-tilts in the mailroom, somewhere between apology and revenge, and I contain the urge to blurt out--- "It is nothing compared to your husband's rendition of Miles' All Blues---" over and over on their digital piano. Any seasoned musician prefers the sound of garbage trucks and sirens to the practice sessions of someone who has no musical aptitude whatsoever and even less ability to perceive this.
Guitar Center makes a major fortune from this population which is massive, daunting, and some are of course on the airwaves, banking piles, winning American Idol, Grammies, etc.

To cap it off, a 'painting' has been hung in my hallway, opposite the elevator, so there is no way to avoid seeing it when the door opens. It is actually a large square canvas slathered with shades of blue and green which would be otherwise inoffensive but something about the 'composition' and the technique... well, it makes the Miles Davis man seem almost talented.

I have finally put my finger on what really bothers me about Beyonce. I was in the gym, watching a screen of one of her group-dance videos, without the headphones--- and it was like these Amazon Victoria's Secret models--- but in overdrive. Sped up, jerking like they were poked. Remember the shimmy? That subtle thing Marilyn did, That little sexy move the Raylettes had--- Tina Turner was awesome, but she did move like she was on crack. Beyonce, though, takes it to another level. It's not a move, it's like a weapon. She's a pretty girl-- but it's all just so over-the-top, it makes me yawn. Absolutely zero on the sensuality for all the pelvic thrusts and booty-shakes. It's some crazy wonder-woman cartoon for Tae-bo, a calorie-burnfest, or the thing they put astronauts through before the launch....but no sex. Did you ever sleep with one of those guys who think women like a warrior-thrust in double-time on top of them? Go for it, JayZee.

Last night we had yet another 10-year old music prodigy sitting in, making the Stevie face, stringing the licks together in a 12-bar E blues, the parents cellphoning footage (I'd like to keep a face-bag on stage for these occasions), the tourists getting autographs from the little guys...while we on stage just plod along, trying to scrape some dignity from the beer-stained stage carpet which has borne its share of volume without complaint, unlike myself. These kids--- like the Idol contestants-- could fill a stadium--- 1000 stadiums. And their parents could fill another 5,000.

I remember a Christmas in the 1960's when I bought myself a Candy-Apple-red strat with my babysitting money--- $150. And my mother found it under my bed and made me take it back. 'This is for boys', she said, in that tone which you didn't mess with. It's my money, I wanted to say. I'm going to have a band and I'm going to be someone. I'm going to pierce my nose and get a tattoo and wear 1/4-inch black liner on my eyes and tight black pants to school. But I took the thing back and contented myself with the classical guitar and the flute and the Chopin and the new pink toeshoes and Hendrix on my little plastic record player. I burned and bled. Do I remind her that guitar now sells for $35,000? I do not.

What will happen to these kids and their stage parents, their wanted-to-be-Clapton fathers and wanted-to-be-Mrs.Clapton mothers? Will their kids learn to bleed and burn, not that it helps, not that it feels good to be middle-aged with 300 songs in some kind of tin can and one review from some UK paper saying it was brilliant? How pathetic am I, sitting in Starbucks with my tattered Roberto Bolano and listening to my indie-horror music, and the one finger ticking away precious minutes, wondering how I will ever find the means to help my dead friend's daughter make her fake-blood film, how I will ever record my blood and coffee-stained songs, how I will even e-mail-ask how much I can get in bartered studio time with a broken keyboard?

Jimi, you picked a good time to die. Dime store artists and musicians are as plentiful as tweets; the real ones are misplaced, overdosing, shivering...dying of dread. Bleeding. While the whole bloody culture eats itself to death here...doughnuts and Beyonce, burgers and fries, Michael Buble and the X Factor. Sarah Mclaughlin selling animal pathos while people beat their kids to death, disappointed TV contestants getting more public sympathy than a million earthquake victims.... Wall Street is rocking, bonuses are flowing like American sewage water.

Welcome to the future... the hangover of 2011.