Dayshift: in the back room, the bass breaks behind the velvet curtain. Nails break and the ice rattles in its glass toward open lips. They warm in cold chairs, in terry robes, and in draped-blankets fuzzy with bright-eyed cartoons. The bass breaks at his voice before she fills with white smoke and purses red lips to grease the mirror. A happy birthday banner, half-fallen, skips further down the wall with each clicked step. Each letter its own page. The bass paints brown eyes black, and winks, and glides back out into the darkness.

In the back room the bass ate a burger with bacon and cheese and a slice of orange tomato. A sheet of lettuce tucked the meat tight into the bun. She discards limp strings of white onion on the side of her plate. She throws up in the black plastic bin by the door and cries that the bacon was raw when she knows it’s the vodka’s fault. In the flickered back room bass spits Listerine. And in the dark boom she confesses her morning bottle to a stranger over Chardonnay, and the bass breaks.

The tapping is enough to drive the spy planes away. We shout at the phone on her desk like it’s a lion. Our ankles twist and crack in unison and the spy planes forget what waves and salt and seals are and dive at their shadows mistaking them for enemies.

Dayshift: She sucks her sixth White Russian through a straw. She curls her feet beneath her body so everyone can fit together on the gray and neon couch. In the dark room the spy cameras train their glassy eyes on hers and she waves, and she breaks, and she breathes the white smoke, and she rises and glides across the soft floor. The bass breaks in the back room and is born in the darkness.

Read at Quiet Lighting, Cafe du Nord, May 2011.

See a live recording of the reading here.
 

I embarked on my next bender for every graduation, promotion, win, completion, or triumph. Birthdays and weddings and new apartments in San Francisco with working fireplaces and picture windows with crane-necked views of the Bay Bridge and the bay (happy housewarming).

When we tied the knot, we toasted with guests and shots of Black Maple Hill bourbon poured into square glasses printed with our initials. I celebrated with white and red wines, and club soda spiked with vodka or bourbon, through the midnight reception, until almost sunrise. We cheered and spilled and sang and shattered glasses and bendered because we were happy.

After a death, after the blood drains from behind your eyes and the world rushes past and is frozen at the same time, there are drinks. Numbing the exposed, while hugging the fresh pain close. Memories and tears cascade steady with each swig, the glass bottle bottom a story’s end. Pour a little out on the asphalt or the dirt.

Wit chases drinks. Now there is talking to strangers who are no longer strange. There is that song, that one song, and that thing that happened one time that you both think about a lot when your minds wander, when you are alone. And there is far, far less fidgeting, and arms uncross and hands gesture loudly. If you’ve panicked, you’ll know that feeling of tight-chest and pressed-against. And you’ll know that sweet booze is the deepest breath.

When new love is found or fake love is gone or decayed love falls away completely and our raw, wet selves are exposed, when we are lost or have discovered exactly what we are looking for—this is when we drink. When we must drink.

And sometimes there is nothing. There is the morning. Or the sunset, or the almost-sunrise. 12:34 or 5:13 or 7:06 and it is not-bright or too-bright or it is a dim room or it is not a room at all. There is an outside-your-fluttering-blinds where it’s not hot, or it is raining and there is thunder. Or it is one weird week of sticky Portland in December snow. Or there is fog, because it is San Francisco and there is always fog. Blinking away last night, or the last 10 hours of crisp-eyed-awake, or your last-seen 10 am, you press your neurons to spark and feel the day or night ahead and still there is nothing, except a bender.

There are always drinks. And after drinks possibilities rise like after-rain steam on sweaty sidewalks, from your warming body in the dark or the sun or the dim room with the blinking bright numbers. And you are alone or you are with someone who is so a part of you that you are basically one, one alone, or you are alone, alone, and don’t feel alone. The sweetest smoke spilling from the coldest fire that grows as you sip, and then you swig, spilling.

Read at Quiet Lighting, Public Works, January 2011.

See a live recording of the reading here.
 

“Don’t worry,” Debra Ginsberg mercifully interrupted. And we were off.

I attended Reunions this spring as a reporter. When I found out that the theme was “Reed & Write,” and that real live published alumni writers would descend on campus offering advice about how to be like them, I knew I had to go. After all, since I first learned to print sentences in stubby pencil on wide-ruled paper, I’ve fantasized about being a published writer. So far, following my senior thesis with creative writing professor Pete Rock, it’s been news stories and feature articles that I’ve gotten published, not short stories and novels. I figured I’d go back to school (admittedly, it hasn’t been that long) to get some advice.

On the first day, we pinned on our nametags and gathered in Eliot 314. We were warmly welcomed by the event organizers, then broken up into small workshop groups in our chosen genres: poetry, memoir, fiction, and drama. Participants had submitted work ahead of time, so their egos were already on the line; I had gotten in under the transom, on assignment, so hadn’t had to bare the soul of my work . . . yet.

I joined the fiction class given by memoirist (and recent debut novelist) Debra Ginsberg ’85. Before we moved in on the students’ stories, Ginsberg discussed the publishing industry. Apparently, getting one’s manuscript published is a bit like winning the lottery. There are five major publishers, and the rest of the so-called independent houses are really just “endless imprints” of the big five. Short story collections (my ambition and strong suit) are almost never picked up. Success in publishing comes from luck, connections, or both. The right manuscript in the right hands at the right time. Thesis karma. That kind of thing.

I knew I should be discouraged as I sat in the basement of Eliot and scrawled these cautionary words of wisdom in my notebook. My head should have been swimming with images of overwhelmed literary agents carrying my barely read manuscripts across cluttered offices, cackling as they tossed them into giant shredders. But the fun part about being a cynic is that you already expect the worst. And after all, someone gets the attention of those agents, right? So why couldn’t it be me?

The poetry lecture by Vern Rutsala ’56 on day two of Alumni College included a series of writing myths, each of which he wittily debunked. Among them was “writer’s block,” which he called a total lie. And a bad excuse. Not worth mentioning. Rutsala also said that, contrary to the opinion of some critics, M.F.A. programs are not diluting literature, they‘re improving it (so maybe I should apply to grad school?). And, despite what I’ve been lead to believe over the years by my peers, you do not have to have so-called “life experience” to be a good writer. Writing, said Rutsala, is re-writing; life can actually get in the way.

During the fiction writing lecture by novelist Janet Fitch ’78, she said something that really got to me: fiction is not about ideas, she said, it’s about what goes on between people. It was honestly a relief to hear that. I never have any ideas, but I love people, and I am fascinated by how we interact. This remark also got me thinking more about the difference between fiction and memoir, something that took further shape during a subsequent memoirist panel.

John Daniel ’70, Tamim Ansary ’70, and Debra Ginsberg sat at the front of the room. All are memoirists, but they have published very different collections of work. As I listened to them speak about the writing process, I began to realize that I am really a memoirist. It almost felt dirty to admit to myself, after claiming that what I’ve been writing all these years is fiction.

I guess I’ve always felt that I have no right to go on and on about myself and my POV, since my life is basically boring. I haven’t done anything sufficiently interesting or historically significant to tell others about in a memoir. But listening to the panel, remembering Vern Rutsala’s advice and Janet Fitch’s definition of fiction, made me realize that everyone has at least one story to tell.

Memoir isn’t about showing off your horrible, unique, or amazing life. It’s about shaping experiences and telling a story. And, as Debra Ginsberg put it, all five stories that exist in the world have already been told (and published). It’s the details that make them different.

Printed in Reed Magazine’s Summer 2007 issue.

Kim Smoltz, a really good sport and the lead singer of Van Halen tribute band Drop Dead Legs—and the sexy stems behind the name—also happens to be married to the band’s Eddie Van Halen (DDL lead guitarist Jimmy Smoltz). The couple lives in the Southwest ‘burbs with their 6-year-old daughter, Madison, where neighbors Michael Anthony (DDL’s bassist and Subway sandwich-shop franchiser Bill Popp in real life) and Alex Van Halen (drummer and death-metal fan Billy McNabb) are as readily available for rockin’ as they are for weekend barbecues.

While all four bandmates enjoy Van Halen enough, Jimmy Smoltz is the die-hard fan of the group. “My introduction to Van Halen was hearing ‘Eruption’ for the first time,” Jimmy explained when the five of us packed into a booth at the Twilight Café last Friday. “I started playing guitar when I was 8 years old…when Van Halen came out, I was in awe. I said, ‘I wanna do that someday.’”

But the members of Drop Dead Legs started out (in 2002) as an ‘80s cover band called No Excuse Rocks. By 2004, they were starting to get sick of it and realized they were really good at playing Van Halen. Besides Jimmy, no one was obsessed—it just seemed like a good fit. So they decided to try it out at the River Roadhouse in Milwaukie: “For the third set we would leave and change into Van Halen garb and play a set as a tribute band,” Jimmy recalled. “Then people started enjoying it so much, we said, ‘We thinking we can take this out as a separate entity.’”

Now, “We go up and it’s kind of like a party,” Popp explained over a bottle of Coors Light. “None of us know exactly what’s going to happen next. Jim will leap off the stage, and Kim just misses me with her high kicks.” Jimmy added, “We’re a show band, not a CD player onstage. And that’s what Van Halen is about; they’re about the show.” IN addition to rehearsing the full repertoire of Roth-era songs, Drop Dead Legs studies videos to learn signature moves and, of course, performs in costume. “I have to wear spandex,” Kim added. “That’s weird.”

Published December 2006.

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“Sometimes [Mena] will be mixing, and I’ll just be throwing in vocals or a capellas or spoken word,” explains Aizlynn, 29. “Or I could be playing just a drum track and she’ll be playing a melodic track. [We try] to feed off each other…to keep it simple but bangin’.” The women—who both have close to a decade of experience on rave and club circuits—met by chance when Aizlynn took over Mena’s weekly spot at Ohm while Mena was living in Hawaii. Once Mena moved back, the two quickly became good friends and starting playing music together.

But while they’ve got chemistry as a duo, Mena and Aizlynn can also make a room move with solo styles that are as distinctive as they are compatible. “I would definitely say that everything’s got a soul,” says Mena, 25, of her taste in house music. Alternately, Aizlynn says, “I like more pumpin,’ bangin,’ but really deep, smooth bass lines. I like it to go all over the place.” And while—as both explain—DJs rely on dancers, they both feel that their art goes deeper than just getting crowds to move. Aizlynn, a masseuse-in-training from Tennessee, continues, “I like a lot of spoken word. I [try] to inspire people to look deeper within themselves and forget about all the dumb, superficial shit that doesn’t matter…but at the same time, I like to drop super-sexy, carnal material, too.”

As it started to rain outside Pala before another tagging set, Mena expanded on Aizlynn’s words: “[House] is like another sense. There’s just something about it. You feel it or you don’t—and you know when you feel it.” And live, the girls feel it together; they thrive on each other’s energy, switching back and forth on the decks seamlessly. In fact, their connection was striking even as they chatted casually outside the club. “I’ll never turn down playing with Mena,” Aizlynn says. “But I definitely like to play by myself sometimes. You can take it on a journey with no breaks. It’s a journey when I play with her, too, but I’m only in control of half of it.”

Published March 2007.

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By day, Mercedes Modesta Herrada is a surgical pathology assistant. Working methodically in the lab, she cuts up body parts harvested from patients during surgery. By night, known simply as Mercedes, she works methodically behind two turntables to make dance-ready masses move. She enjoys the lab, she explains, because she enjoys helping people get better, but without the emotionally taxing work of dealing with patients. It’s in the club, Mercedes explains, where her emotional life takes place. It is also where she continues to help people.

Mainly she helps the crowd shake their booties with the smooth, funky, chuggy, stompy Chicago-bump she’s been dancing to since the sound found her. She tends to keep her set mellow, because she wants the crowd to dance and not get tired too quick, but she still plays hard. The bass lines are deep and strange and pulsing, with abstract sounds thrown in to keep the sound unique, but it never strays too far from the original house sound. If she wants her other house-obsessed friends and fans to get crazy at Ohm, where she usually hold court, she might drop some tracks she picked up at Platinum Records, or something she found digging at Everyday Music. “A lot of people tell me I look pissed off when I’m playing,” Mercedes says, “but I’m just super-serious about it.”

All the kids in the North Portland neighborhood where Mercedes grew up in the ‘80s had their radios tuned to 1480 KBMS, the hip-hop and R&B station that inspired them to choreograph their own moves and have dance-offs in the schoolyard. But Mercedes was surrounded by music even before that; first there was her father’s family, who embraced the traditions of their native Cuba, a culture steeped in music. Then there was Mom, with her feverish love of Motown, and Dad, a guitarist and huge Jimi Hendrix fan.

At 14, Mercedes started going out. “I used to go to this place called the City Nightclub. It was a queer nightclub, all ages. There was this guy Alex who used to play, and that was my first experience with DJing.” This, Mercedes told me between sips of beer, was where she first danced to house music. But is wasn’t until she heard Mark Farina (whom she will be opening for Friday at Ohm) and DJ Heather and Derrick Carter—with their funky R&B sound and weird, fuzzy acid elements dropped in—that she fell in love.

“Certain fusions of sound make me feel like crying—but not out of a sad place,” Mercedes says. “It’s something I could equate to love and heartbreak.”

Published October 2006.

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A blond woman and a young man in a hat are singing a duet: “I put your picture away/ Sat down and cried today/ I can’t look at you/ When I’m lyin’ next to her,” while the backup band jams on an inflatable blue guitar and a few middle-aged couples slow-dance. Thursday through Saturday, it’s karaoke night at the elfin, underground refuge that is Grandma’s (4515 SE 41st Ave., 774-1822). Surrounded by log-paneled walls and a décor of beaded old-lady purses, a wagon wheel and three portraits of Marilyn Monroe, my Reed friends and I have spend many, many nights drinking the big booth under the Last Supper-esque carved-wood scene—one of many carvings that adorn the walls. Grandma’s is your living room, but with really cheap happy-hour drinks; thick, tasty fries; pool; darts and Turkey Hunting USA. Most of all, it’s a place to sing and be sung along with by the friendliest crowd in town.

Published 2006.

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Rabi Kroesen’s online biography claims he was “raised by wild sheep in the foothills of the Himalayas.” And, oddly enough, there’s a little bit of truth in the statement: The 33-year-old house DJ did spend some of his formative years in said foothills. The son of “hippie parents” who adopted the Sikh religion when he was young, Ravi lived in a D.C.-area ashram (a spiritual commune) before being shipped off to boarding school in the Himalayas, where he spent seven years.

Considering his diverse upbringing, it’s no wonder Ravi now hosts an eclectic world-music monthly at gallery/lounge Pi-rem. But aside from holding it down behind the tables at Global Shakedown, Ravi has spun Chicago-influenced house and downtempo music at every major electronic club that’s existed in Portland over the past decade. He’s also been producing music for the past few years, and is now the promoter behind a house-centric weekly at Noir called Elbo Room.

It started on Halloween of 1995, when Ravi—a raver since rave’s genesis in the early ‘90s—bought his first set of tables. Twenty-one years old and back in the states, he decided it was time to step off the dance floors and, instead, try to make one move: “The music was changing, shifting, and I really didn’t like the direction that DJ-ing was going, as far as the people I was dancing to,” says Ravi, “so I decided to start DJ-ing myself.”

Now, Ravi proclaims, “House music meant the world to me,” adding, “It’s been a love-hate relationship now for 12 years and I have definitely thought about moving on to other things in life ‘case I’ve already spent a large part of my youth in clubs and bars and warehouses.” But all this time in clubs and warehouses has left Ravi with a wealth of stories. When asked about his worst experience behind the tables, he laughs and recounts an outdoor festival near Seattle where one “really high kid” from the previous DJ’s posse refused to leave the stage for Ravi’s set. The offender’s stubbornness ultimately resulted in an onstage brawl between the kid, another DJ and the event’s promoter.

“I was into the third or fourth record and I turned to grab another one, and all of a sudden the music stopped. I looked back, and the guy had the volume on the master of the mixer all the way down, and was on his cell phone. All the people that were dancing just stopped and stared at him,” explains Ravi. So did he get to finish his set? “Oh yeah,” Ravi says assuredly, “I played fine.”

Published June 2007.

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“It never got better than it did in Bugin-tsav,” Fastovsky says. “In a godforsaken swath of sand in the Gobi Desert, waiting patiently for 80 or so million years, was a clutch of dinosaur eggs with the embryos still tucked inside.”

The road to the Gobi has been a long one, literally and figuratively. Getting there is no easy task: from the University of Rhode Island (where Fastovsky teaches geosciences), he flies to Japan, catches the once-weekly Mongol Air flight to Ulan Baatar, then treks off-road through the desert for four days to reach the dig. The path to Fastovsky’s little corner of paleontology has also been roundabout. Once upon a time, he confesses, he thought geology was the most boring subject in the world.

Fastovsky has traveled across the world digging up dinosaurs and making discoveries. During one dig in Mexico, Fastovsky’s group unearthed a large collection of dinosaur fossils, stopped in time 189 million years ago and preserved Pompeii-style in the pyroclastic desposits of a volcano. A Mongolian trip led Fastovsky to disprove a Russian hypothesis that what had been believed to be ancient lakebeds, had actually been sand dunes and desert.

To hear him talk, it would seem Fastovsky spent as much time in his first two years at Reed doing practical jokes as he did studying biology. He and his brother, Robert Foster ’74, entered into a prank war as roommates in Winch, secretly wiring a dorm neighbor’s lights so they could be controlled from a switch in their closet. “My brother was very insistent that it be up to code,” Fastovsky remembers.

After taking a year off to travel and play music in Australia (Fastovsky still plays viola, even on paleontological expeditions), he completed Reed with what he calls a “superb science training.”

He went on to a master’s in paleontology at UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in geology at the University of Wisconsin. He returned to Reed last fall to give a biology talk sponsored by the Ellis Fund, “Catastrophic Extinction of the Dinosaurs at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary, 65 Million Years Ago.”

Fastovsky says he started out resistant to geology as a field—he nearly flunked a graduate course in the subject—until he realized that fossils were essential to studying animal evolution, and it was rocks that often held the keys to understanding the nature of the environment where ancient animals lived and died. “I became more convinced that geology actually held the answer to a lot of questions that we were trying to ask,” he explains.

These days, Fastovsky is busy studying 208-million-year-old paleo-environments, as well as the asteroid-impact scenario that he believes led to the dinosaurs’ ultimate extinction. “We find dinosaurs somewhere, and I’m hauled out to try to reconstruct the place where they were living,” Fastovsky explains. “I usually call myself a historian more than a scientist. I have a landscape in my head by the time I’m done studying a place—I love that. I’m actually visiting whole, ancient worlds.”

Printed in Reed Magazine’s Winter 2007 issue.

His penetrating rhymes—akin to a schizophrenic’s word-salad speech—paint an MC who’s as enamored with syllables as he is rich, metaphorical (there, I said it) imagery. Born Ian Bavitz, Rock speaks to those lost souls wandering dark subway tunnels, dosed up and hyperventilating; he’s a prophetic pied piper who chants about the plight of TV-entranced zombies over beats by such notable producers as EL-P and Blockhead.

On standout albums like 2000’s Float or its follow-up, Labor Days, such production paints an appropriately dark, dense dreamscape behind Rock’s eerie rhymes. But even though he’s articulating tragedies like working-class Americans watching their dreams move out of reach like dangling carrots, Aesop’s songs are far too danceable to come off as pedantic. And it’s that marriage of beats and words that makes many of the MC’s tracks near-apostolic. It begs to be said: Aesop rocks.

This piece appeared in Willamette Week’s MusicFestNW Guide, August 2007.

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