In Which We Get Loud So He Knows It Is Serious

photo by carrie schneider

In Character

by STEPHANIE ECHEVESTE

I wear headphones tightly around my head, letting Jefferson Airplane explode, blocking out everything in a calm coolness, just to keep them from happening. Revelations can be scary and life-changing. Or they can be subtle and intriguing. Sometimes they are both.

I didn't change my seat; it just happened that he was sitting there to my right. Looking at me. Staring at me. Not in an earnest or creepy way, just looking intently at my face, at my features. I must have smiled because he suddenly started talking.

"Do you speak Spanish?" he said. I nodded, confused by the question but not worried enough to get up and move to the other side of the train car. I do speak Spanish, barely, so at first I just answered him in Spanish, but then he kept talking to me and I was too tired to listen and respond correctly. Instead I tried to locate my stop, held my purse and luggage tight as if to prove my security, but then quickly felt guilty in my solitude. He knows I am alone, I thought. He can tell by the way I am clenching my hands around the various straps, by the way I am staring straight ahead and trying to blend in, the way I am sitting on the edge of this subway seat without anyone else by my side.

"Where are you from?" he asked and I, having turned back to face straight ahead after I inadvertently smiled in his direction, turned to my right, then made a slight twist even further and asked "I'm sorry?" pointing my good ear, the left one, towards his mouth to better hear his voice. I don't know why I made the effort.

"Where are you from?" he repeated patiently, still staring intently, gently, at me. I thought about lying, but what difference did it make, I was leaving anyhow.

"San Francisco," I muttered, in a forced Spanish accent, suddenly conscious of his insistent gaze and, more embarrassingly, that my answer, judging by his facial expression, was incorrect, not the one he was looking for. I get this all the time. Most men I meet think I’m more exotic, more foreign, more interesting than I think I really am. And when – if– the men I fall in love with realize that I am actually that interesting, they get scared and run away.

My dental hygienist once told me my name wasn’t exotic enough for me. I asked him what kind of name would be exotic enough and he said Esmeralda. I thought about the Disney film featuring Esmeralda and felt unsettled. She is the one that I look most like, with her olive skin and her dark voluminous hair, her big bright eyes and her small stature. Her gypsy-ness. Is that what I am to people? They look at me and the only thing they can pull from popular media is a Disney character?

I am exotic-looking in that I am not white, nor am I easily identifiable. Every time I am on public transportation people ask me the ‘where are you from’ question. They don’t ask me because they want to know; they ask me because they want to confirm what they already think they know.

I am often claimed to be Indian, Brazilian, Persian, Middle Eastern, Columbian, or Italian. People have gotten angry at me for not submitting to their assumptions, saying things like “You are, you are from there! You have to be!”. They think they know where I came from, they think they’ve got my look all figured out.

He chuckled, and then said, through a big grin, "No, I mean where are you from?" He emphasized the word with a slight nod of his head as he said it.

"San Francisco," I said, with a bit more strength, clear American accent this time, trying to prevent the inevitable. He just looked deep into my eyes until he pulled out what he wanted to hear. Like a dirty little secret he already knew.

"Oh," I submitted, in an effort to end the exchange as quickly and painlessly as possible, "you mean, where are my ancestors from?" I supplied an easy path for a truthful response.

"Yes," he nodded, like a knowing sage, like a man who usually gets what he wants.

I paused for dramatic effect. "Mexico." This feels like a lie. I have only been to Mexico on vacation and service trips. I have no family there and don’t even know the areas of my ancestors.

photo by carrie schneider

The first time I went to Mexico was on vacation with a friend’s family of Mormons. I was one of many kids, but I was the only one whose passport the border patrol checked closely, both ways. The second time I went to Mexico, to a small island off of Cancun to clean the beaches and paint brightly colored murals at local schools, there were little girls constantly swarming around me. Braiding my hair, asking about my bathing suits and my lip gloss. I asked an advisor why they followed me around and he said clearly, “You are like their Barbie. You look like them, but you’re American. You have everything they want, but will never have: opportunity.”

I resumed looking at the tiny red dots, glowing brightly before they disappeared, swift and smooth, like our train car through the very places spelled out above each flare. Subways are like little spaceships, I thought, little tin cars riding through the galaxy. When will this end?

He didn't understand that I had ended the conversation, and instead asked me if I was married. I turned to him and said without expression, "No."

My stop was next and I impatiently sat, tensing up in anticipation of my escape. He asked for my phone number and I refused.

"Why?" he questioned, innocently.

"Because I live in San Francisco," was my lame response.

"So what," he said, "I'll call you, in San Fran, why not?"

I could not think of a good reason why not, so I just sat still and looked straight ahead, trying to force the red light to black out with my intense stare, more theatrically than faithfully. I thought about all the men that have asked me for my number. There have been many. Some have actually called. The ones I’ve dated are the ones I had to call first. Maybe this is a sign.

He asked me for a pen, so he could give me his number, and I said I didn't have one, even though I knew that I did. I always carry a pen in my purse, maybe subconsciously because I sometimes need it to write down the phone numbers of guys I meet who don’t insist on giving me their numbers.

I remember interning in college for an amazing woman who once told me that you should never propose to a man. She had proposed to her first husband; it did not end well. Only now do I fully understand what she meant. Don’t be the man in a relationship. Real men just cannot take it.

"I'm just a nice Jewish guy," he said and I figured he probably was. He asked me for my name and I lied. Generally, when lying about my name, I call myself Samantha. I use this name because it starts with the same letter as my real name and is approximately the same length; it is equally bland and doesn’t give anything away. It is also the same name as my favorite American Girl doll, whose books I read religiously. Though as a girl I was only given Josefina, the Hispanic one.

Of course, when I got off, he got off, I convinced myself that this must also be his stop, but I knew he was probably just following me. Despite my weak rebuff, he proceeded to carry my luggage down the four flights of stairs we had to take to get on the A, the only way I knew how to get to JFK. He was inescapable. He stopped on the platform when I stopped. I tried to believe that he must be going the same direction, to the airport, sans luggage.

And for a minute, or a fleeting moment rather, I thought about what would it be like to be married to this man. To softly kiss his yearning lips and rub his balding head. To have his children and come home to his embrace. It probably would feel the same as marrying any other man, give or take. Belonging to someone, being the wife of someone, being an adjunct member of a sanctioned ritual.

Out of habit, I pulled out my blackberry to check the time. His face lit up and he started to give me his number. I said, “Oh no no no.” Again he asked why not and I finally said what I should have said all along. "Because I don't want to talk to you."

I said it with a newfound confidence, loud enough for him to know I was serious and for people to turn and stare. His face melted of quick yet poignant contortions - first disappointment, then sadness, then anger. I just watched, standing my ground. I felt how I always do when I reject men, powerful and surprised at my power. Powerful because it is up to me to decide who I talk to and who I ignore, who I let into my life and who I tell to leave me alone. Not remorseful in the slightest, even if my declaration was long in coming. Even after I'd been handled, sought after, followed, fucked. Then, as quickly as it had begun, he disappeared into the crowded platform of strangers and I was left alone.

Stephanie Echeveste is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here and twitters here.  

Photos by Carrie Schneider. You can find her website here.

photo of the author by jason van horn

In Which The Flowers Trump the Paintings

Flora/Fauna

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

I was in California for the first time ever last week. All the predictable Bay Area-type things happened: redwood trees in Muir Woods dwarfed me, a homeless man sitting next to me on the bus stroked the furry trim on my winter coat, and I ate a salad whose varied lettuces hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in the back of a produce truck.

Going on vacation in a place where powdery sand beaches are not the point is a bit stressful because one feels the constant need to do "cultural" or at least "metropolitan" things. I felt this in San Francisco in the same way I did when I studied abroad. Culture seems less tenuous when in a strange city; it’s more tangible, almost like a substance one can mine, refine and imbibe.

And museums are the true cultural jewel box: you visit, you look, you absorb, you maybe take down some notes in a black leather notebook, and you leave with buzzy-tired legs and a feeling that you’ve done it – you’ve taken the culture like a vitamin, and now you’re free to spend the rest of the day watching month-old Conan reruns in the hotel room.

The de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park follows a fairly typical art museum template. The building is quite large, with a brushed metal exterior and an extremely subtle Andy Goldsworthy work outside. (It’s one continuous crack in the paving stones.) Across the park is the California Academy of Sciences building, whose grass-and-glass-covered domes and flashy signs for child-friendly exhibitions make the de Young’s exterior appear sober and reserved.

Inside the minimalist metal building is an observation tower, a subterranean coat check and about seven different bookstores. (I have never seen so many Exit Through the Gift Shop DVDs in one single location.) When I visited, the offerings were standard and pleasant: a traveling photography exhibition, an early 20th-century sculpture show, a Rothko here, a Rauschenberg there, African masks and Turkish textiles and that famous Wayne Thiebaud painting of three gumball machines.

I visited the de Young on the second day of their big annual event, the Bouquets to Art exhibition, in which florists from all over San Francisco create flower displays that ape certain artworks in the museum. I did not anticipate the sheer number of people present when I arrived at 11:30 am. The demographic was by and large ladies over the age of 65.

These particular ladies were splendid. All the usual septuagenarian lipstick shades: burgundy, cranberry, coral, mauve. Heavily embroidered coats, some fortified by plastic rain ponchos removed and recycled at the door. Ladies herded each other into large groups or promenaded around in duos, clutching each other at the elbows. It was charming. In the cavernous lobby, their chatter reverberated into a sort of high school cafeteria din.

I bought a ticket and maneuvered into the modern wing. Old ladies everywhere. The manner in which people were circulating through the exhibition was clear as soon as I came in: the lucky artworks that had been granted matching floral arrangements attracted most of the traffic, and paintings ignored by the artsy florists were spurned in kind by the museum-goers. The traffic swirled in tight circles around the flowers, like bees. From above it would have looked like Doppler radar footage of hurricanes.

The incredible thing was that none of the old ladies seemed to be looking at the original paintings and sculptures that the floral arrangers had used as their sources. I tried to look at the lookers, follow their gazes, see if they were studying the flowers and paintings simultaneously or one at a time, and found that they were gawking only at the blooms. I had thought Bouquets to Art would be a clever merging of art forms, a potent aesthetic convergence, a Yalta Conference of hallowed fine art and irreverent craft art, but mostly it was a chance for people to marvel at decorative botanical feats.

Something about the multitude of acid-bright blooms or the sheer size of the crowd induced a low-level mania in everyone. People were doing things that shouldn’t have been done in a museum: they squeezed between pedestals that were dangerously close to one another (one woman nearly upset an unstable Stephen de Staebler rock sculpture), they sniffed the flowers with passionate inhalations (the image of Happy the Snow White dwarf, suctioning a bouquet of goldenrods up his nostrils, came to mind), they got close enough to touch everything, they bumped past each other as if drugged and disoriented. This wasn’t Stendhal syndrome, the dizziness and confusion that one can feel in the presence of masterpieces; it was no different than the madness that occasionally possesses people in crowded subway cars. Spring fever, cabin fever.

Once I became aware of the old ladies’ abandoning of the unflowered paintings, I personified those paintings and pitied them. Shy, unaugmented by the apparently magical touch of the florists, they were literal wallflowers. I paid more attention to them, wiggled around the groups of fawning flower-lovers and looked at the unadorned art with adoring eyes.

There were Arthur Tress’s photos of San Francisco in 1964, all snapshots of Barry Goldwater supporters and beehived beach bums and girls holding signs that read “Ringo For President.” The 70-year-olds I saw in the museum would have been young and maybe even optimistic in ‘64 – if they were lifetime San Franciscans, they might have even been in those Tress photos of idealistic youths at the Republican National Convention. There was Irving Petlin’s "The Burning of Los Angeles", so large it took up an entire wall.

“That’s a big ‘un,” said one lady to another, pointing at the painting’s blaze of color as both women moved onto the next floral arrangement. Evidently no florist had volunteered to recreate the orange swirls with tiger lilies, the twisted, fleeing figures with tasteful branches of bamboo. In the next gallery, a prim and proper 19th-century portrait of a puffy young lady merited a flower arrangement equally reserved, stale daisies in neat rows.

The crush of people started to get ridiculous. A German woman turned around in the halted crowd and asked me if her backpack was unzipped. I said no, and I watched her turn back around and fiddle with the backpack’s straps, and then I made what some might see as a fatal mistake: I stopped looking at art and started looking at people. There were a number of striking, tall young women mulling about. They stood in pleasing contrast to the hordes of old women, all of them stooped and mincing. One blonde dame approached a fussy little portrait of a society woman (it had been donated by a Rockefeller), and the blonde’s coat, red and gold and black brocade, nearly matched the coat in the painting. The blonde looked at the painting, and she smiled with the easy recognition of someone looking into a mirror.

It had all gone to hell. I met one of my travel companions in the penumbra of the deserted African wing. We checked out the historical chair collection and picked out our favorites. The museum trip had dissolved into observations about old furniture: “That’s a nice red cushion.” “The Shakers had a very interesting skill set.”

We couldn’t figure out what had happened. Someone proposed that the old ladies were all SF natives who had already seen everything the de Young had to offer and thus didn’t need to go out of their way to appreciate the non-floral art. It was unanimously decided that we were the de Youngest people in the museum. The visit can be summed up by the five minutes I spent looking at Josiah McElhery’s "Model For Total Reflective Abstraction", a collection of globular objects sitting on a platform. The sculpture’s mirrored surfaces encouraged viewers to take in everything in the room: the art on the walls, the other people, the flowers, the flowers, the flowers. You look at art and all you see is something else.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Burlington. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Chelsea Handler. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Candy" - Lower Dens (mp3)

"Brains" - Lower Dens (mp3)

"Nova Anthem" - Lower Dens (mp3)

In Which We Behaviorally Condition Ourselves

Fancies

by JOANNA SWAN

B.F. Skinner used rats and electricity to prove it. Mothers use cajoling and dessert, with varying degrees of success. For me, the ambrosia of positive reinforcement was chicken pot pie and a clean plate. Now I cannot tell whether it was the polished plate or subsequent affirmation that brought pleasure; ultimately, whether pilloried or praised, being made an example of is rarely as rewarding as it is for those the exemplar serves to motivate.    

At age 9, by way of good parenting or vestigial puritanical roots or both, I had learned to clean my plate; as I polished off my chicken pot pie at the neighbors' while Brittany and Brooke mashed crumble-crust and peas into inedible mire, their mother noted how "Joanna finished her plate," the ellipses audibly suggestive in her voice - I was not cardholding member in the Picky Gang.

the authorUnpleasantness of acting as upstanding dining paragon to my playmates aside, my habits expanded to include not only clean-plate niceties, but also: a fondness for Sizzler and all-you-can-eat, a wish to try all boba tea flavors at Quickly (especially the unpronounceable ones), a small army of exotic herbs from the Co-Op's bulk section, a thirst for collection or aggregation or a comprehensive grasp of any sensation remaining to be archived and experienced.

Being into a lot of things, all at once, can have its perks but sometimes I wonder if I won't end up like Henry Darger with his ten-thousand page epic of weather reports; or like Anderson Cooper's mom, with her impressive collection of food dating from the post-War years. Life in the Bay Area exacerbates these fears, and not only because it's maybe the closest thing Northern California has to New York, or because trash queens and green gurus cohabitate with sybarites and socialites alike. 

It's more that there is this impregnable fount of sensory output, observable in varying degrees of Overwhelming – I could sit in this cafe, at this breakfast nook, on this fucking miniature pastel stool at the Tutti Frutti fro-yo, slowly digesting the ceaseless cascade around me, and synchronously witness the declension of all productive pursuits. The flaneuse par excellence, immobilized by her stimuli.

The busses in Berkeley are quiet. They are, like many surprisingly utopian singularities of the region, segueing towards some definition of sustainability – in this case, hydrogen fuel cell technology – and are satisfied to flit from stop to stop, ebullient like the hummingbird graphic plastered across their sides.  Punctuated with alarming frequency by the sirens of rescue vehicles and police cruisers, the streets in Berkeley are smooth and efficient, until they become the clogged traffic paroxysms found most often between the hours of 3 and 6 p.m. 

Berkeley's streets are not Oakland's streets, and the architecture around the latter's Lake Merritt in particular – a throwback to the Sixties' ranch-style, that Burt Bacharach of architecture (think mauve, sliding doors and plenty of carpeting) – seems on the whole as forgotten as its pavement, pock-marked with cracking maws that if ventured upon by bike lead to some serious coccygeal agony. Oakland is served by many of the same busses as is its northern neighbor. Yet its stops often seem more forlorn, bedecked with indescribable fabrics, soiled articles, and once, the words "dirty n-----" juxtaposed atop an ad featuring a very caucasian toddler and juvenile Golden Retriever. One day I found an unopened pack of unsalted butter near the stop at Franklin and 14th, and many fine comestibles resulted.

In a timely and germane piece on beautiful blogs, Sadie Stein observed that it is possible to fall "down the picturesque-vintage-design-craft rabbit hole and emerge three hours later, bleary-eyed and full of self-loathing." The Bay Area is almost like the physical manifestation of this terror-trip (incidentally, a search for "handmade" Etsy items spawns 40,000 from San Francisco alone) and as Stein notes, it might truly be possible to see "the next twenty years of your life go by" whilst engrossed in the Berklhemian brilliance of a Khitchari Kraut or tea-infused tofu.  

So free butter notwithstanding, baking is all but unnecessary, the finest no-knead home-bake dwarfed by Messieurs Miette, Arizmendi and Semifreddo. The Bay Area inspires and intimidates your senses: it feeds you new rice grains from terra untried; single-origin beans of cacao and coffee that tickle new fancies, and sometimes a hole in your pocket; the finest ferments of kombucha and injera; and a few tousle-haired boys on bikes with drip coffee and a Whole Foods distribution contract at the ready. In Chinatown, there are $2 curry tofu banh mi joints slowly colonized by young urban professionals and Yelpsters galore; and there is Tom's Bakery, whose reviews on that hallowed ratings website run Proustian in their charmed reminiscence: 

You could hear the machines churning and the must [sic] aroma of fresh fortune cookies being made.

As she walks further down 9th Street, she is met with a heavenly sweet smell that only Arizmendi's chocolate things could rival. She discovers a discreet little fortune cookie bakery that is open and making fortune cookies. For $3, a bag of delicious chocolate fortune cookies became her breakfast.

Located right behind my old church, we used to smell the cookies baking all the time. And then, we'd get hungry.

I saw their machines at work.  Smells delicious. 

One can still smell the cookie aroma and hear the machines churning inside.

The goods are fresh and you hear, smell, and see the cookies being made right there. 

Smell! See! Hear! All within one dingy, creaky factory on 9th and Harrison, the pot-holiest of rues.  How, then, to cultivate a Zen-like discipline in the face of such temptation?

They tell me that meditation allows one to train the brain to ignore life's annoyances: street traffic, dampness in the home, innumerable choices, potholes, and high energy bills. Perhaps I set my sights too high. Laziness or hopefulness or both preclude daily meditation though because more often than not, there is a counterbalance to the dolor. Unfortunate that the upside is as frighteningly overwhelming as the negatives it so helpfully nullifies.  

If it's true that hemlines follow history and fashion acts as benchmark, my mien has gone the way of Kate Bush, or the delphic Willie in Altman's Three Women and that means dark lips and long skirts and cable-knit sweaters with built-in belts and wool socks with brogues. Also, myriad scarves.  

More succinctly, this suggests that I'm dressing for dotage because the Kate Bush look is putatively that of an eccentric older woman, more likely than not one with a surplus of dreamcatchers, Tibetan spice mixes, and novelty beeswax candles under her silk obi belt. Since it's as far as I can see pretty unintentional I would guess that it's either some absurd subconscious drive to discourage ne'er-do-wells, a secret admiration for Ms. Bush and hipster sorceresses et al., or else a reflection of my daily distractions: innumerable bicycle boulevards to traverse, galleries to discover, vegan donuts with exorbitant prices and exotic glazes to salivate over, Occupy assemblies to join or impugn.  

Whether reflected in Baba Yaga dressing or no, sensory suffrances and joys alike have a guileful tendency to remind me of death.

Even if I were to make it a distinct goal to "taste every restaurant in Temescal" or "intimately acquaint myself with the finest jiaozi in Chinatown," I'd ineluctably grow in both years and corpulence before realizing said goals. I can finish the flaky pie on my plate; the east bayshore alone could demand a decadal investment at minimum. Given my relative youth, I'm curious as to whether those twice or thrice my age feel any less perturbed by what they're potentially missing out on, what they could be gaining from the cornucopian offerings of the world. Am I simply unsatisfied like Aesop's Fox, longing for his grapes, or the Raven for his cheese? Will there be a point in my true antiquity when the weight of my experiences counterpoises with those left unturned?  

I suspect there is little satisfaction to be found in surfeit of a metaphor. The desire to amass experiences both tangible and fleeting remains intact and in some absurd vestigial pointlessness is probably what powersed me through swaths of Red Baron pizza Friday nights immemorial. Age, I realize, becomes sole signatory to the attainment of greater experience, the hordes of knowledge and sensory titillation we seek: a pandora's box of a broader, tastier, and more brilliant palette, with wrinkles as inexorable partner in crime.

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Oakland. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She blogs here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about the girl scouts.

Jeff Koons "Easyfun-ethereal" paintings courtesy of the Guggenheim.

"Life in L.A." - Ariel Pink (mp3)

"Too Young' - Phoenix (mp3)

"A Real Woman" - Squarepusher (mp3)