Caroline's First Turn

So, last week, on Tuesday we inaugurated Obama and on Friday Caroline took her first turn on stage. Obama declaimed a sober and sobering speech, which didn’t stop any of us from getting giddy about, for example, Aretha’s hat, weepy at what it means when Aretha sings “Land where my fathers died,” cranky about how over-determined – my word, like you say, although it is borrowed – is this handsome and potentially great man’s load and how little margin for maneuver it would seem he’s going to claim for him- and ourselves, and happy at the reality of people dancing in the streets, singing with each other to praise him. Caroline – you know this, as no doubt do many of any people who read this site – is me in a dress. Her turn on stage was a brazen attempt at “La Javanaise,” one of the most well loved songs in the popular French repertoire, at a little self-labeled “boite des frissons” in the capital for a night in honor of the quintessential dirty old man with incredibly chiseled lyrics, Serge Gainsbourg. The audience knew the chorus, and they are the kind of audience who can’t help themselves from singing along. This might have been a good thing, because apparently, they were having trouble hearing the incredibly chiseled lyrics of which I miraculously did not flub a one. (It may be one of the most well loved songs in the repertoire, but nobody I’ve run across yet knows the lyrics to the stanzas, just the chorus.) Which is a good thing that’s also too bad considering nobody could hear them. This is a technical problem that may find solutions. The other queens have been known to complain about the insufficiency of the microphone set-up at said “boite des frissons.” But I think it was, as Mistress of the house Madame Hervé said right after the show, “that you didn’t sing loud enough! Nobody could hear you!”

Madame Hervé is a notoriously hard nut. My girlfriend Julie Guirlande told me afterwards as we were jiggling in our boy drag on the dancefloor that you just have to let whatever she says flow over you like water, but certainly not to let on that she might be getting to you. It took all Saturday for it to become water. Before she told me I hadn’t sung loud enough, Madame Hervé had already called me to order because I’d been out of the dressing room before the show. This is in large part because the dressing room measures all of about 15 square feet and involves no more than a curtain that sections off a sliver of dancefloor space right next to the stage. Iow, you want to get out of there. But apparently, staying in the dressing room before the show is a house rule that nobody had told me about. My girlfriend Melissa sheepishly apologized for not having said something. The other girls who’ve had a little more experience know that you can go out of the dressing room without incurring Madame Hervé’s wrath, but only if you’ve brought another dress to wear. Preferably with another wig. That’s what Jacqueline Genoux did. And then she had to come back to the tiny dressing room to put the elaborate feather-construction down the back of her second dress. Melissa had the same elaborate feather-construction to put on because they were doing a really funny duo together. The elaborate feather-construction involved a stick from which sprouted three feathered prongs. Which meant that wherever you were in the tiny dressing-room space, there were feathers under your nose. So there I was sitting in my dress waiting my turn on stage fighting with the feathers, trying to remember the terribly chiseled lyrics that I sometimes forget, vaguely hearing Taillefine do “Elisa,” Julie Guirlande do “La Madrague,” Lady Zoa do an incredibly vigorous “Pull Marine;” before it was my turn.

In her boy drag after the show, Julie Guirlande also underlined how nice Madame Hervé’s introduction of the “petite nouvelle” who would be me was. She asked everybody to give the “petite nouvelle” who would be me a warm round of applause. Which they did. And I haven’t mentioned it yet, but, in case you can't tell in the above picture, I was really pretty. And, like a big girl, I had done almost all of my makeup myself. But the whole thing really felt like a catastrophe. Madame Hervé did get to me. People couldn’t hear what I was saying. I had a whole bevy of supporters, like, among the most important, B, who had canceled a night out elsewhere to come be adorable and supportive with his adorable new “petit” P and with E, B’s office mate and fellow Thursday afternoon cake-partaker. While I was out working the crowd in restricted pre-show territory, B saw me and put up his fingers like I was a vampire. I think he has issues with the whole gender trouble thing. Or at least with my whole gender trouble. After all, he did fall for me as a topping boy in leather with a beard. And that is actually one of the things I’m having trouble getting my head around. I mean, myself in make-up really tends to fuck with people’s minds, and there is a whole elaborate distance that settles in between me in makeup and, for example, the people with whom I had just a couple of hours earlier been drinking wine while trying to find a bimbo’s song that I could sing for the next Folle Académie night at the Tango. There is a whole choreography of how to negotiate that distance and make it work for me and for them that I’m only just now becoming aware of. And apparently people really don’t recognize me. Which seems very strange to me, because, strangely enough, I do. I mean, when I look in the mirror while I’m doing the make-up, it’s just as strange as when I look at myself in the mirror without make-up. It’s all strange when you’re staring at yourself in a mirror.

My friend N was there. Once I’d taken off my makeup and dress, I went out for a cigarette with Lady Zoa and N came out, too. N has this idea that I don’t give enough of myself away, and he saw what felt to me like Caroline’s catastrophe as yet another incidence of that. And he said I had something of Romy Schneider about me. Which is a useful reference. N rattles on a lot. And as he was rattling on, Lady Zoa turned to me and said, “If this is a friend, you need to get some new ones.” She was wrong. Because N was more or less right, even if it didn’t sound exactly like he was being supportive. Because like I said to my shrink yesterday on the couch, I felt like it was a catastophe because it wasn’t. Because Caroline doesn’t yet know how to let the catastophe that is her mother and father rolled into one show through her yet. (The height of my outrageous ambition here is Antony singing through his fear of the middle place.) I thought it would be enough to put on a dress for that catastophe to be obvious. It’s not. I have to learn how to spend myself in a dress so that people can hear the catastophe that is breaking me up and giving my body (its hands, its legs, its voice) its rhythm.

We had long, raucous, rhythmic, sex the night after that. In our leather drag. At some point, I told T that his was the name of my expenditure. Which is a little differently intense than being married. It calls up other things to be named.

no i meant like nina simone's 8:46 fantastic "west wind" that her friend miriam makeba asked her to sing. i mean, whoa. holy fuck. so don't be worried.
the sun is coming up right now.

Breathing in the New Year

So you said I need to breathe a little bit more. Or at least to try to a little bit. To see what happens. So that’s what I’m going to do today. While I get some of my shit together, vaccum the apartment, figure out where my work is for the next several weeks, months. Some things just are not going to take the whole year. Which is nice to have. Some projects to make good on right at the start of the year of the ox. Ox. You.

You said, I think, that my stacatto was a little too intense. Or hard to take. I forget your exact wording because I was on my way to the Boileroom bar for water. Like I told my shrink, it was nice to have the distraction of the need for water because I had trouble taking the comment head on. It’s funny because way back when I was just starting to get set up writing you, I worried about the stacatto. That it was too much. Too hard to read. At some point I quit worrying about it and called it “my style.” Your comment made me start worrying again. Which, so long as I can keep writing to you, is no doubt just as well. If it crippled me into silence it would be a problem. But let’s not let that worry cripple us. It can just make us aware. Because, really, here I am writing you again. And I’ll keep coming back. I think we’ve established that by now. Let’s keep coming back.

It’s a question of pace. And also of walking around with someone. Which is one way of saying what we do here. Where there is no path except the one we make by walking. On your side of the ocean, the Animal Collective’s new album is out. There’s a song on it I’ve quoted here before. They’re not calling it “Bearhug” anymore. If I’m not mistaken it must be called “Brother Sport.” Pitchfork says it’s one of the centerpieces of their new album, but that those “obvious peaks would have less resonance if not for the more subtle moments.” Can’t wait to hear those more subtle moments. The album supposedly drops at the beginning of next week here in Euroland. And then T and I are going to go hear them that Friday. In “Brother Sport” they scream out about how “I want to walk around with you.” It’s funny because there was a series of three of four sessions of analysis where I kept citing songs. And that was one of them that came up. Most of them were Antony. But “Brother Sport,” too. And I said I guessed it moved me because there were so many people around in my life that I wanted to walk around with. Which is so much better than what I imagine the opposite would be like. Not wanting to walk around with anyone. But which brings its own amount of pain with it. People you know you want to walk around with but can’t. I was working too much when it came up. So there was that problem. And then so many of you are so far away. So there was that pain of wanting what I couldn’t have. “Jesus,” I said during that session, or another. “All this music that keeps coming up.”

Your entry helps, but can we get a playlist for the Patti show? So much of it is a happy blur to me. I spent most of the concert bobbing along ever so happily with my arms over T’s shoulders pinching his tits and singing the words to the songs I knew. Happy to be there alongside you and the others hearing Patti sing and say what we needed to hear. That is at least a little bit of her undoubtable magic. She says what you need to hear.

Like, I really needed to hear her say, and to hear you repeat in my ear, do not be afraid. Especially when, as my mother has repeated to me several times when we talk about financial news, “This is just the kind of thing that your father was so afraid of.”

I think that for the new year and now that I’m back in Paris and was around people who helped me think, I have two questions that I’m not going to be afraid of asking here and now. The first is: What child? Which I like in particular today because, as I was getting around to letting it formulate into a question, trying to figure out which question exactly it would be, the effort had me singing that Christmas song, “What Child Is This.” Hearing its distorted syntax that would play with my mind as a child. Hearing some of that childhood come back. Asking about the child. I like it, too, because if you insert a comma, it becomes a different and perhaps even more apropos question: “What, Child?” And of course because Kiki’s covered it, caught on that album that was playing on Huron street this last time around.

The second question has to do with the pacing I started off with for this entry. I told you I’m translating some Berlin bits to be published sometime soon here. And there are a couple of translating projects in the wings. The question is related to translation. But it’s also related to what I need to figure out how to say to the world. What bears repeating? By which I mean, what to I need to say again, with more breaths? What haven’t you and lots of others incomparably like you and me heard? What do we need to hear?

And this by way of B. A little gentleness in a world of brutes indeed. Savage and tender. You know the score. Now let’s make sure everyone does. We've got work to do. Remember.