Monday, December 3, 2007

Monologue

The worst is the manager. On the first day he called me “Red” in that way they always do. I told him that that was my brother’s nickname, not mine. My name is Kay, I said. He laughed, and touched me shoulders, and neck. He was looking at my backside. I like them feisty, he said. That’s why Reds are my favorite. I didn’t say a word, because I had only just started. I can’t just quit a job, you understand. I can’t quit when I have just began. I may not have a lot of ambition, but I am stubborn as anything.

Maybe the manager was right about redheads, I don’t know. I only know myself.

I am wretched at this job, I really am. I can’t type fast enough for them. My shorthand is good enough, but I type slow and steady, and that isn’t any good. I can be popular and funny, I can be the life of a party. I don’t know if I can work. I have to work. I am one of the older children, so I have to work now, instead of go to school. Does anybody care about orphans at 22? I’m too old to be an Oliver Twist, object of pity. But I am too young for it to be fair.
Some of the men at the store don’t leer. Maybe red head and freckles isn’t their type. They don’t leer, but they talk down. They talk slowly to me, explaining what I did wrong in the worst sort of kind voices. I think, just because I don’t type fast enough for your liking, doesn’t mean I am slow in the head. I know I am smart. I did well at Pitt in my three years. I laughed, and flirted with boys plenty. Just like before. But I learned a lot of things, interesting things, maybe useful things. If I knew what I wanted to do with them.
I didn’t want to be a teacher or a nurse. I don’t particularly want to be a secretary, but I am good at shorthand. That might be my only money-making talent. I guess you could say I don’t have any ambition. No specific goal for my life. I went to college because father wanted me to. It would have been ungrateful to refuse. Lord knows what else I would have done. Stayed in Welland, I suppose. Maybe gotten a job like this one
I might marry and have children, of course. Never men like these, though. The men at the store don’t deserve me. Even if they cared to have me, they wouldn’t deserve me. I am not a child or a pinup. It’s been a long time since I felt like a human woman. At Pitt and back in Welland, the boys could be pals. We would laugh and flirt, but they could look me in the face.

The worst is the manager. Today he called me Red in that way the always do. Then he patted my backside. I wanted to slap him, but I can’t quite. It’s only been a few weeks. I may not have ambition, but I am stubborn as anything.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Child soldiers

I haven’t the slightest idea what should be done about child soldiers. Clearly, the worst of it is going on in Africa, and sometimes it seems like the more affluent places try to help Africa, the less it works. Not for any reason except for the assholes in charge, who until they are out of the way, will always be standing between the people who need help. And these are the people who take money and food for the intended recipients. People’s charity is wasted, and they just end up helping the last people they wish they were helping.

Why is this problem important? It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t a sociopath that if 250,000 children are being used as cannon fodder in twenty different countries, it’s a problem. We’re supposed to care when we hear about horrible things happening to people, especially children. It’s in our nature. However, it’s a long way from caring to doing something about it. I haven’t done anything about it, because I don’t know what to do, and because my silly life is a great distraction.

It feels vaguely pertinent that I was watching “Oliver!” earlier today. That’s a shiny version of a book about horrible poverty, and the Charles Dickens grimness is lightened by musical numbers. Still, the theme is one little boy, innocent (to say nothing of the other boys in Fagin’s gang, who have already lost their innocence) who is being pulled back and forth and being exploited by adults. Some of whom were exploited in their own lives, when they were young.
Regardless of political difference and argument, people should feel that there is something fearfully wrong with that. With Dickens days it was poverty, and with these current conflicts in Africa, it’s poverty and warfare. But most of all it’s people who can justify the horrors that they do to other people – smaller, weaker people, who should be protected by them, or at the very least, left alone and in peace.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Grandma Kay

Because my Grandma Kay will be 90 years old on December 26, because she’s feisty and sarcastic, and because she majored in Journalism at Pitt but was unable to complete her degree, I think I have the misguided notion of her as a would-be Martha Gellhorn, stifled by family tragedy and obligations. Part of this comes from my bewilderment as to how she ever married my Grandpa Bill. They seem to be polar opposites, and he’d be a hell of a difficult man to get along with. I haven’t the slightest idea about how they really feel towards one another.

For years I had the feeling that Grandma could have done more, and the stupid unenlightened world hindered her. That world, of women being firmly pointed towards the kitchen, is not an illusion. Grandma Kay tells me that she saw it. She remembers her teachers in school, and it dawns on her that they were men, or they were spinster women. Her three years at Pitt, she was taught my only male professors. She tells me this now, and she sounds surprised. She was born in 1917, on another planet, in my mind, but maybe she’s used to my world now. The idea that women had to be single to teach school, would that have been a bizarre thought, if she had stopped to think about it then? Or did something change in her mind, in all the decades since then?
Grandma says there were expectations in the world. Poor women, especially, they knew where they would end up. “Behind a counter at Woolworth’s”, then married, then children. Other women might be nurses, teachers, or…housewives. Of course they could always be housewives.

I don’t know what my Great Grandmother would have expected her daughter Kay to be. She died when Grandma was 12, and I try not to ask too many questions. Terrible age to lose a mother, but I somehow doubt there’s a good age.
As Grandma tells it, her father and older brother decided that she would go to college. She would live with her brother in Pittsburgh. Even a widower with eight children could manage that.
She doesn’t know what she would have done if they hadn’t said she was going to college. She would have stayed in Welland, Ontario and gotten a job, she supposes. It would have been ungrateful to refuse college, certainly. In highschool she was concerned with having fun, boys, popularity, what the other girls were doing… All the things that sound shallow and petty to me now. But they take on a wonderful and impossible quality of story, when I realize that they took place in the middle of the 1930s. Ten million lifetimes away from everything I know, or so it seems to me.

Once when Grandma was married and had most, or all of her children, she took her only daughter to the doctor. The doctor and my Grandma went to Pitt together. He told her, “I always thought you were going to end up being a journalist. How come you never pursued that?” “Because I didn’t have anything to say.” Now she tells me that she still thinks that’s true. He thought she had a talent in that area that she never thought she did.

Grandma did work, for decades of her life. She worked in that utterly stereotypical expected career of women of long ago. She was a secretary. She took a 23 year break between her time as a working woman, but she was always a secretary or an assistant of sorts. The ultimate female career, in the time of almost no female careers. She was not the stifled Martha Gellhorn that I sometimes imagine. But she tells me that she had no ambitions for a career, and maybe that’s true. Still, it was decided for her. Her brother and father sent her to college, and the death of her father made it necessary for her to drop out. The world implied that she could be a teacher, a nurse, a secretary or a housewife. The women who did something else were notable, strange exceptions to this rule.

My Grandma Kay has no notion of what she would have done, if she hadn’t been pushed along by outside forces.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Tony Buba films

1- Activist art is, by definition, people attempting to call attention to problems, injustices, or issues that they see as not getting enough attention. This could be any of a myriad of problems, and the methods for drawing attention to it vary as well. A community film festival, posters, graffiti, anything as long as it's outside of popular media. Some people might pay, or get consent to display their art, whereas graffiti artists general risk prosecution for their work.

The Guerrilla Girls ran an ad on New York buses, condemning the lack of female artists, but the excess of portrayals of nude women in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The anarcho-punk band collective, Crass, left anti-consumerist, anti war, and feminist graffiti stencils all over the London underground in the 70s and 80s.


2- By using film, instead of any of the other mediums he could have chosen, Tony Buba can show the whole world that is Braddock. Or at least, he can show people, real people, speaking, and looking, and as they are, with their real opinions and voices. If he had painted a picture, or even taken one, it could not have contained so much real information. A painting is an impression of one thing, that can often be interpreted in varied ways. Even a photo is just a tiny hint of real life, a moment. Whereas with a film about Braddock, it Buba wants to record real people's words with the whole city as a backdrop, there is no better medium for the task.


3- Buba's film is powerful because of its simplicity. He is not making any grand statements himself, and he is not trying to move you at all costs. He is just showing real Braddock and real Braddock people talking about the town. He shows some of the grim squalor around, and it's very effective, but he lets the people and the place speak for themselves. The film is like any number of documentaries, except that many of them tend to have a lot of narration, trying to sum up the whole of events in a few neat words. Buba is relying soley on the people and the place to tell their own story.

4- The "everyday" IS the story in Buba's films. Braddock is one of many towns that had a boom, and are now a shell of their former selves. The story Buda is telling is of the town, and its people. The various people and their stories, the words they use to tell their stories, and the town, often looking shabby and grim in the back round, are almost everything the viewer needs to get the point. A minimum of context, Braddock was something, and now it's this, is all that is needed to effective.

A town like Braddock is a piece of a bigger story; the downfall of towns after the industry that kept that booming is gone. But it also is its own story, which is what's less likely to be told, the story of one, small, getting smaller all the time, and will maybe never be as important to the world as it once was town. The people in it do not tend to be subjects of films, especially simply for living in Braddock.

It's not as if nobody but Buba would have ever thought to do this film, but it is a less likely subject. Buba obviously cared enough to make sure it got told.

5- If I were to make a film about a location, I think I would do something smaller than a whole town. In my family there are three buildings, old and important to us. I would do a film for my family about my family home, our cottage by Lake Erie, and my Grandmother's cabin in Montana. They are 70, 60, and 90 year old respectively. One side of my family or another has owned them for much of their existence, but not for all of it.

These buildings have had so many different people living and staying in them. People have died in them. Many happy vacations took place in them.

I would record their reasons for being built, why they were built the way they were, what they were used for, how they came into my family's ownership, and any of the strange tales I could find related to them. And all of this in relation to the bigger picture of the world outside -- what was happening at this time.

At this point, most of the living subjects to interview would be family members, but to get their stories and thoughts on film would be worthy for posterity. It would be for sake and theirs, really.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

The history and myth of my home and hill

On the top of a hill in the South Hills, 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh, PA, there is house that has been there longer than any of the others that line the gravel driveway. It is a big, brown, old, house with redwood siding. It doesn’t sit neat and square and small like some houses. It spreads its self out across the top of the hill, rectangles and ovals and squares stuck together.
The most conspicuous room has the terribly original moniker of “The Front Room.” It could also be called the First Room, or the Hunting Lodge, if my family had been more poetic, and perhaps more descriptive in its naming. The Front Room was built two years before the rest of the house in 1939, and it doesn’t entirely match. It rather looks as if the rest of the house grew out of it, like a plant growing from a seed. It is an oval shaped room, the floor covered in red tiles, and except for two doors and the stone fireplace, it is all windows. They are great big, old windows, very tall and hard to open. When people first see the room at night, they find the almost 360 degrees of windows ominous. Anything could be waiting out there, surrounding the house. But in daytime it is light and bright, with views of mostly just the woods and deer and turkeys.

The Front Room never made sense to me as a hunting lodge. The idea of a hunting lodge suggests something along the lines of my Grandmother’s Montana mountain cabin, but probably even more rugged. It should be made of logs with almost nothing decorative or pretty. Only practical things, and plenty of fur and skin and heads mounted on the wall. And I see it as dark and small inside, with a minimum of windows and glass. The Front Room has strong stones, and the windows are tougher than they look, but all that glass suggests decoration and architecture as art, instead of practicality and Your Hunting Convenience.

Mister William Hess, formerly of Germany, built our house on the hill. He probably oversaw the construction by contractors he knew and trusted, since he was a contractor for buildings in downtown Pittsbugh. Hess and his wife Corine once lived on Hazel Drive in Mount Lebanon . Not much is known about them, so it’s hard to say why they moved from there to the farm country. Maybe Hess just loved his deer hunting so much that he decided to make a life of it. It was definitely farm life—if more comfortable farm life than most. The barn now decrepit and used only for tools and old furniture, had chickens in it. There was a pump house to bring water from a spring up towards the house. The woods were smaller then, and there must have been amazing, almost panoramic view of the countryside. It’s the second or third highest spot in the county.

The truth of why the the Hesses moved, and what they did has become mostly lost. What is in its place in my mind, and in my family’s is mostly myth -- hearsay of the eccentric. When my father bought the house in 1988 he tried to find out the history of his new home and its builders. The Hesses died in the early 70s with no children to take over. Most of their belongings,( though not the house), were left to a nurse who took care of couple in their last days. That, and the family who lived in the house between the Hesses and us, meant that there were no documents or belongings in the house to help my father learn the history he wanted.
But he wanted to know more, my father; he is that type of person. So he found the Nurse, and called her on the phone. And she told him in enthusiastic, sure, tones about secret tunnels, buried gold, German paratroopers meeting in the barn, and an FBI raid on the house—Mr Hess had too may powerful radios for their liking. After all, he was a German during WWII.
Now, some of this was obviously impossible. There was no secret tunnel under the dinner table that led to the barn. The idea that Nazi paratroopers landed without anyone in history except this nurse knowing about it seems very implausible. But the gold. Oh, the gold.

I don’t remember the first time I heard about the hidden gold as a child. Sometimes it was just a lot of money, but usually it was very definitely gold. Regardless, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know and love the story. A legend of buried treasure in my own house, and it was probably buried by Nazis. Yes, I was sure as a child that the Hesses had been Nazis. The house was finished in the undeniably historically significant year of 1939. And it was built by a German man. Just because I have a German last name myself doesn’t mean I was immune to the wonderfully baseless accusations—near certainty, actually—that if Hess was German in WWII, he must have been a Nazi.

My friends were (and continue to be) delighted by the idea of buried Nazi Gold. Sometimes we even went searching for it. There were two key places in the house, both situated in and around the Front Room. The first was the small, rectangular, metal door on the outside of the house. The door said Coal on it and was forever sealed shut. A small, sealed, shut door—who could resist it? Of course the gold was there. And if it wasn’t there, it was under the odd tile. The Front Room floor is covered in plain red tile—except for one tile that is yellow with a design. Completely different from the other tiles, nothing matching at all, we all knew this was as important as the sealed coal shuttle. There wasn’t much to do about the tile as child, we could hardly dig up the floor, but we sometimes tried to open the coal shuttle; little, weak and with poor tools, we never got it open.

A mythic house—whose history my family only knows the bare facts of. I think it was a house to get away in, though. Hess loved his hunting life, maybe, and that was someplace to get to, but what if he was also getting away from something? The politics of the time are significant, as well as mythic. The Hesses moved in permanently in 1939. Europe was going to hell, and the biggest, baddest, aggressors were Hess’s home country. Maybe Mt Lebanon got awfully small after that, there might have been looks, whispers, paranoia. Who could blame a man for wanting to get away from that? To get to a place where he could breathe easy and hunt all the deer he wanted. And if you wanted to stay away from your few neighbors --- just farmers, too—you could do that.

Or that’s bullshit. My Grandmother always said that everyone knew nice Germans during the war – they were much less alien and strange than the Japanese. Nobody would hate you just for your German blood. Perhaps Hess only wanted to breathe easy and live the farm life, with politics not an issue.

Nevertheless, my childhood in the mythic, old place was certainly shaped by its stories and history. The woods were taller, and there were more houses in sight, by the time my parents moved us in o Christmas Eve, 1988. But it was still the country, and it was still a near polar opposite from the life we were leaving in Las Angeles. There was still a barn, and 12 acres of our own. This was the country, and I grew up a country girl. Even if compared to real country folk, we were just pretending, we were the real thing when it came to the suburbanite we knew. I knew which wild plants were edible, and I ran around with no shoes on.
We were famous, too. We were the family with the unique house. People were delighted and bewildered when they saw our hill. And it was often a novelty to me, too -- especially when I could see it through their eyes. The eyes of people who were usually from the suburbs, their homes built in the last 20 years (certainly not by Nazis), and their green lawns were a half acre at most. They had no myths of buried treasure, but we did. That made us more exotic even beyond our isolation.

Though I can hear cars from the hilltop, and I can see far more houses than I once could through the trees, it still has space and freedom and breathing room. If my parents never decide to sell the place, they will always have 12 acres of space. No matter if the rest of the county builds its self up to a futuristic metropolis, we will still have 12 acres of space to stop time and progress – if we choose that.

And dammit, I still believe we will find that gold someday. It’s there somewhere, hidden, buried, but there. Just like Hess’s loyalty to the fatherland in 1939.

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Thing

I am incredulous when people tell me that they no longer have their beloved childhood toys. Or even that they're packed away in a plastic bag, back of a closet, not seen for years at a time.

Perhaps I am overly sentimental, but I'm not in all ways. As far as childhood goes, I guess I am. Because I had a hell of a childhood. My childhood can probably beat up your childhood.

I'll tell you about Tobin. He's in my dorm room and everything, even if I don't technically "need" a beat up doll in my daily life.

I named toy Tobin in homage of my cousin of same name, when I was six, and he was two years younger. Human Tobin hates his namesake now, which amuses me. I think in the last few years, I finally became as well acquainted with human Tobin, as inanimate Tobin.

Toy Tobin and I have spent more time together in all, though. I took him everywhere for years of my childhood. But never did I ever play that he was my baby, and I was his mother. Tobin may be a baby, but he was much too busy attempting to survive Alaskan plane crashes, or trying to flee from political troubles in Europe, to ever be helpless. That was the kind of weird thing I played as a child.I had no interest in the "domestic", so it may seem strange that my favorite toy was a baby doll at all.

Most beloved objects come from other people. They were Grandma's, or Chuck gave it to me before he moved, or the British man I interviewed signed his book... Some item that proved or reminded me of something or someone important. Tobin is like all of my childhood, and its amazing games of pretend, condensed.

I bought Tobin in a thrift store when I was six years old. I remember the store, in Canonsburg, PA, but not why we were there that day. I was searching through an old baby crib filled with stuffed animals and dolls. And then I saw this baby doll, someone had already owned him no doubt, because his cloth body wasn't perfectly white. He was dressed in little checked shorts. Something about his plastic smile was terribly pleasing to me. I needed to have this doll, I knew that.

I asked my mother permission to buy him, and she gave it, though I can't picture that. I do remember approaching the counter, feeling apprehensive, as if maybe he would be out of my price range. The lady at the counter said Tobin cost a quarter, and I find it funny now that I must have been expecting a hefty price for this wonderful find. I was so relieved that I could afford him after all, with my very own money.

So for a quarter a childhood companion was bought. We spent years together, and Tobin got more beat up through our adventures. He's got marks on his cloth body where rips have been sewn up, and my dog as a puppy managed to chew off half his nose. He is the quintessential battered and beloved childhood toy, but he sits on my dorm room bed now, because his being anywhere else wouldn't ever occur to me.

Home

I'm home for the weekend, in theory. I think I still live here, 40 minutes from Chatham.

Someday I won't live here at all. It will either be only my beloved childhood home, where I sleep in my old bedroom on visits to my parents, or someone else will live here and I won't be able to come back at my own leisure. My house on the hill will most likely become someone else' home someday. But it will always be mine. Nineteen years of my life and what made me were spent here.

My parents have put the house on the market a few times. They price it high, so only someone who needs it will buy it, but whoever that may be, they have not come around yet. The 12 acres it sits on might appeal to a person with big pockets, who wants maybe their own hilltop, and a view of a corn field.

No matter who lives here in ten or twenty years, I wish the house its self would remain. But maybe it won't, and it certainly won't forever. Homes are torn down and changed it ways you could never imagine -- even in your lifetime.

My parents I visited Smelter Hill in Great Falls, Montana this summer. Where my mother spent her first 12 years-- the only ones with her father. For a while the EPA wouldn't even let you stand on the hill. Years of copper smelting put poison in the soil.

And all the houses are gone, my mother's as well. But she can still find her front steps. She thought she would live there forever, but she went on to live in New York, Chigaco, San Francisco, LA, and that hill in Pennsylvania. Some may not have been her home, some were just where she lived. Now my home is her home. Someday she will probably find another.

I will live in Alaska, Montana, Budapest, Zagreb. Maybe I will make homes there, and lives. But there is a first home, a childhood home, that never leaves your head or, dare I say it, your heart. No matter what happens to the land and the house, it shaped you in ways you will never fully be able to figure out.

****************************************************************

Smelter Hill

The dead hill is covered in yellow grass
Three archaeologists approach,
surprised that the entry is no longer barred
One lived when people lived, and was sent away
The archaeologists are here to see the remains
The lost city of anywhere’s walls cut the hill forever
Rusted metal fences like 60 year old spider webs
Protect the children long gone from the steep
The archaeologist sits down on her home steps
Down from the road that isn’t a road again
They lead to her great big house, seven siblings
That isn’t a house again. Yellow grass
The hill is covered in scrub trees
The walls of the lost city remain
The archaeologist climbs the hillside
Hand over foot up the dead waterwall
Such luxury this city had, her feet would once be wet
The dust kicked up in 100 degrees
It might still be in the soil, gray
There must be something in the soil
The reason for the tower and the men
The workers put the poison, in the soil
It’s ever so quiet, as the ruins fade
-This is where the wild cats lived
And this is where the children played
The pool was here, maybe here again
We weren’t supposed to go this way
But I did, the fort was here, and here again
Jimmy Cross lived here, keep off the father’s grass
The Christmas lights were red and green-
The rivers stays the same way past
As the ruins fade into the yellow grass
Scrub trees; they took away the shade
The archaeologist digs through the house that isn’t again
One curve of pipe the rain meant to fall through
Only a museum piece for the benefit of life continued
The archaeologist sits on her front steps
Take them down to hurry inside
To the house that isn’t a house again
And grows more alike the hill everyday
As the yellow grass grows taller and weaker
Higher and more like chaff
Scrub trees, the sun hammers down blows

Place

Using a blue pen, and real, honest to God paper, I am trying to think of words to write about "place", as I sit in the back of a run down van. With my friend Cassie driving us to West Virginia.

I'm smiling because ten-thousand movies will never ruin the perfect feeling here. The feeling that comes out of driving, and highway-worthy music playing good and loud.

I think of place, and I think of wanderlust. Especially at this given moment.

I have spent years, it started to get extra itchy when I was nine, wanting to be in some other place than where I was-- almost always home. London, San Francisco, Montana, Alaska, Croatia, Hungary, Nepal, Australia, Japan, Bosnia...someplace else I had either never been, or hadn't been enough. Where I was would only feel right, if I had the freedom to leave it and see the rest of the world.

It used to be only the locations themselves that called to me. I didn't like the journey. I would be stuck in the back of the car, no control over any part of the situation, maybe carsick, and no doubt waiting with the beautiful frustrating impatient of a child who really, really, really, can't wait to get there.

But then my friends grew up and got cars, and my whole life got a little freer.

Then one 3:30 AM night for the first time, my friend Bob said "pick a direction." And we drove and tried to get lost. We didn't get home until 8:30 in the morning, after finding a perfect, real, diner at exactly 6 am.

We did that many times, always in the early morning, when the world was ours.

And once we took a real road trip. We drove for three weeks from Pennsylvania, down through New Mexico, up through California, across to Montana, and home. Three weeks of seeing different highway, and different places.

Maybe the best part was the very first day, only minutes from home. It was a beautiful April day, and I couldn't stop grinning, because we weren't going to turn around in five hours, or five days. We had three weeks of different places to see, and three weeks of highway and music.

Bob and I ended up spending more time on our way somewhere than in any place in particular. But that was beautiful, the feeling of movement, different places every minute, passing by.

I still spend half my life longing for Budapest, London, Zagreb, and the Alaskan wilderness. But maybe more important now is my gut need to be on my way to someplace. Not there yet, just on the way, watching the road names and the highway signs change.