Dance Interview White Nails Orlando Berlin at 7 am Day of the Dead I am Grown Up The Fundamental Problem Advent Ruminations Fear/Hair/Nihlism/Committment Epiphany Cut-Ups Waking Moments Kids Vivienne Staying

Dance Interview with Mad Kate [back to top]

Interview by Rachel Haines

1. Where are you from or where do you live currently?

I’m originally from Virginia, then I moved to San Francisco for the last nine years and now I live in Berlin, Germany

2. What gender, race, and sexual preference do you identify yourself with?

female, Caucasian, bisexual

3. How old are you?

26

4. How are you involved with dance? (are you a dancer, choreographer, teacher, etc.)

I am a dancer and I also choreograph my own dance-theatre-spoken word performances

5. How long have you been involved with dance? (at what age did you begin dancing?)

I started dancing at a young age; my parents put me in modern and ballet classes from the age of four or five on. I was taking dance classes regularly, however, only until the age of 11. From then on, I found ways to take classes on my own, from modern to African to Irish step-dancing, but I never trained in any one type of dance very rigorously.

6. How did you become involved with dance? or Why did you become involved?

I don’t remember ever not being a dancer, I always expressed interest in dancing from a very young age, wanting to be a ballet dancer or an actress or something like that … but at the same time, as I got older, I began to think of it as more of a love than as a profession. There were many years that I wasn’t taking classes or spending very much time on my love of dance. I started dancing professionally only about two years ago, when I started performing some of my spoken word in San Francisco and combining it with “performance art” theatre, using the elements of text, vocals, and movement (dance). As I got more comfortable as a performance artist, I also became more comfortable as a dancer. I moved to Berlin and I realized that I felt very comfortable improvising as a dancer, and so I started working in clubs in Berlin … dancing as a go-go dancer in nightclubs to electronic music … in a gothic bar doing a combination of go-go and performance dance to gothic and dark wave music … and also beginning to perform my “own style” of dance that I think of as dance theatre, because it always involves elements of costuming, character, and interaction with other people. I guess if I had to I would classify it as a mix of modern and contemporary street dance. I like to use electronic or new wave music.

7. Please describe your experiences as a dancer. What sort of types of dance have done? What did you like or not like about the different types of dance and your different experiences?

As far as classes, I’ve taken modern, ballet, tap, jazz, Pan-African, Salsa and Latin dance, Dunham Technique, capoeria, Irish step dancing, contact improv and alternative dance theatre. Professionally, I described above mostly what I’ve been doing. As I mentioned, I’m still not quite sure what I would call the type of dance that I’ve been performing lately on my own. I’ve enjoyed all of my dance experiences and all of the combinations of different classes that I’ve taken, especially African dance. I think that it’s important as a dancer to be exposed to a lot of different styles. I’ve also loved simply dancing on my own, out on my own, with friends, outside of a classroom situation. That’s probably when I have most connected with my body is outside of the classroom. It was a benefit to me to start early as a dancer … there are things that I learned as a little girl in ballet class that still come through even in the small, regular movements of my body, and other people often pick up on it. One of the reasons why I’ve always loved my experiences with dance is that I’ve just followed my heart and my gut and my body and let it lead me to where I wanted to be as a dancer. Dancing is probably the most natural thing my body does, so I find it really easy to let my body guide me … across dance classifications and beyond dancing professionally. On the other hand, I probably could have benefited from more discipline in one form of dance. I can’t say that I’ve really “trained hard” in any one form of dance, and if I had I might, at this point, be “further along” in my dancing career. But in truth that doesn’t matter all that much to me. My job as a dancer is to perform, along with my writing, an idea, a character, a feeling, and I am able to do that on my own, in my small ways and in my small performances here and there around Berlin.

8. What do you enjoy most about dancing and Why?

I think, as I mentioned above, what I enjoy most is the fact that dancing comes so naturally to me. I really don’t have to think about anything when I start to dance. All I have to do is listen to the music and let it tell me what it is my body should be doing. I just let go of my conscious ego and simply do what my body wants. That’s makes for a beautiful experience and often other people are able to see that energy radiating out of me, through my movements. I like it when others are able to recognize that energy … which is why, I suppose, I like to perform in front of people.

9. a- Do you feel your gender, race and/or sexual preference affects your role as a dancer? Why or why not?

I’m sure my gender affects my not my “role” as a dancer, but rather the way that I am interpreted by others. I can easily use my gender to perform a particular role if I so choose, for example, in my job as a go-go dancer, I often use very sexual movements to create something that I think of as “sexy.” As a bisexual, androgenous-looking, and in general, sexual person, I am very comfortable using sexuality on the stage, and I do think that my sexuality comes out of me somewhat subconsciously. Meaning that by believing I am attractive to both men and women, I am attractive to both men and women. On the other hand there are definitely situations where I realize that I am performing a more “traditionally” female role in front of lots of men … still, by not taking it entirely seriously myself, I don’t feel exploited by it. I work in a goth bar every Friday night and I climb up on the bar and I am the only dancer in the club while a bunch of people, mostly men, watch me. Although one thing that is notable to me is that men in Berlin are not nearly as openly aggressive as they are in the United States. Anyway, since I am somewhat androgenous looking, I know for sure that I am not attractive to all men, especially men that want really “straight-looking” women. But on the other hand, I’ve found that as long as I am into the music and listen to it and am genuinely enjoying the dance (which I do, almost all of the time), almost everyone there likes my dancing, whether or not they find it sexually attractive. I’ve gotten this a couple of times: “you’re not my type of woman but you know how to move.”

b- If so, how does your gender, race and/or sexual preference affects your role as a dancer?

I think that I explained that … My “role” as a dancer is to have fun and listen to my body. My sexuality comes out of that naturally. Other people are naturally attracted to an energy that is genuine and happy and free. As long as I stick to that, I am able to find like-minded people. When I’m dancing in a club, not professionally, but rather simply as a party-goer, I don’t wear a sign about who I am attracted to, but I think that my open sexuality expresses itself naturally through my dancing. I can also use movement to express when it is that I do not want someone to approach me.

10. a- As a dancer what types of power struggles or hierarchies have you faced or observed in the dance world?

As a go-go dancer, there is definite preference for female dancers, with the traditional role of the girl on the pole. On the other hand, I really do have to say that Berlin is a fairly sexually progressive place, and I find that here they are more open to male go-go dancers than they are elsewhere. The only other thing that comes to mind is simply how people sometimes perceive me when they see me go-go dancing and then try to talk to me afterwards … or when I tell them that I am a go-go dancer. They often think that I’m not smart or not that educated and that is simply not the case. I also had one really good reaction, however, from a woman that thought that any dancer who danced for people in a place like a bar or danced sexually on top of a bar could not possibly be enjoying herself … or would be naturally exploited. But after she saw me dance she recognized that is not the case for me.

b- If you have experienced this, why do you think that power struggles and hierarches exist in the dance world?

The dance world is just a microcosm of the larger world … and these power struggles and hierarchies exist there. Dance of course does utilize elements of sexuality, which is, I think, tied into power. But most professions utilize sexuality … although some would argue that dance does so more overtly. I’ve found that the same power struggles and hierarchies exist in academia and in a restaurant … two other places where I have worked. And sexuality also plays a role in both places. The trick for me is to be at peace with my own sexuality, my own body, and be as comfortable as I can in that body. The rest, in many ways, follows. As long as I stay in my body in a true way, no one, whether or not they are looking at me because they want to fuck me or not, can take that enjoyment away. Besides, for me personally, it doesn’t matter if my dancing does evoke pure feelings of sexuality or not … The point is, rather, to stay in my skin, make my voice heard, and keep my ground (most especially if I am in a dancing situation where my (male) boss is trying to pay me less than I am worth. I have to stand my ground in those situations.

11. Do you think that traditional dance (such as ballet) enforces or challenges traditional gender roles (masculinity- strong & active and feminity- passive)?

I think that it can do either, I suppose, but I guess for the most part I think that any dance, even “traditional” dance, challenges traditional gender roles, as long as both genders are invited to participate. The practice of feeling ones own body, and therefore one’s own sexuality, and listening to the rhythms of the music and letting the body follow … that in itself is a breakdown of the idea of gender role … because really listening to ourselves means we are not listening to the traditional gender roles required of us by the outside world to perform.

12. In your dance do you try to challenge traditional gender roles? If so how do you do so?

My look in itself challenges gender roles because I have a androgenous look. I like to use costume to also challenge my body and therefore how people view my body. I use sexuality, which could be argued as a “female” way of interacting with a crowd, but I don’t think of it as “traditional,” since I am “bisexual” in the way that I interact with a crowd.

13. a- Do you see yourself through your dance actively engaging with your audience with social awareness? (social awareness- raising issues important to you and important in society)

Yes, although it depends on what type of dance, the particular performance, etcetera … There are some performances that I do that involve a lot of dance theatre and spoken word. Since, as a writer I am specifically interested in sex and gender, I am often trying to perform to an audience with a particular goal, for example, talking about rape … or even just talking about alternative types of sexuality … However, I also perform in more traditional settings, as I mentioned, for example, on a go-go pole … in places such as these, I am not sure whether or not people regard me as a negative or positive image for women … but the bottom line is that I feel sexy, I have fun, and I am challenging my own sexuality. For me that is ultimately political.

b- If so, what types of issues are being raised through your dance?

Sometimes I perform with a musician who writes electro-punk songs that describe queer life, and so as a dancer I am able to “perform” queer sexuality, to the audience and with the audience. As a performance artist, I am always switching around gender “roles” with myself and with the other performers on stage with me. For a long time I wrote and performed about rape and about choosing and understanding one’s own sexuality. To do so I often involved aspects of sexuality into my performance, including nudity onstage… challenging and provoking people to react in a myriad of ways.

c- Even if you do not think that you raise social awareness through dance, do you think that it is important for dance to communicate important issues to the audience?

Absolutely. But I think that sometimes dancers and performers can try too hard … and sometimes miss the real heart of the matter.

14. Overall how is dance a part of your life? How has it impacted your life and in what ways has it impacted you?

I don’t know where to start with that. There is hardly any part of my life that hasn’t been touched my dance. It effects even the way that I move down the street or wait on tables as a waitress … I have been dancing all my life, I dance in my room, on the street, as a profession, and in class. I think that I always will. I hope that professional obligations to dance will never ever take away the pure enjoyment I feel in moving my body. I don’t think it will, as long as I remain true to listening to it.

White Nails [back to top]

14 October 2004

I’ve found that the best way to paint my nails and actually let them dry is by painting them and then sitting down at my computer for a good hour. Typing keeps them upright and moving and unencumbered. I appear to be unable not to multitask.

I just spent about an hour singing and making myself after-dinner hot chocolate (notice the multi-tasking), trying to come up with some vocals to this beautiful music I got a hold of. I answered an advertisement placed by a composer/musician in need of a vocalist. We talked over the phone and then today we met in person and spent the morning listening to his music. It reminds me of some of what I’ve heard at Hrair’s house, the ude, for instance, or however you spell that. So I was sort of instantly transfixed this morning, listening, cause it brought me back to California—or rather, a spiritual home not necessarily in California, but in the location of hearts and people.

I listen to the BBC everyday; it’s interesting to hear how the rest of the world feels about the U.S. election (pretty grim). I feel fairly informed listening to the BBC, it’s better than NPR anyway, but the commentators are almost as smug.

My life isn’t really any more or less interesting in San Francisco or Berlin or Iowa City, but being as Berlin is relatively so far away (though in our global post modern world is anything far away … sarcasm) it somehow seems more important to keep people informed as to what life is like, what I’m doing with myself (to legitimize why I’m so far away?? I’m not sure).

Right, well then (I learned that from the BBC). Since I last wrote a lot has happened here, though nothing big on the earning money front. I mean to say, I haven’t earned a cent. I’ve been on the prowl for something regular at a bar or restaurant, although that’s a bit sticky because of my lack of German skills. Still I feel confident that something will come my way. I do eat at home, or pack something, I’ve been good about that, or freeload off someone I meet. Okay, or spend like 1 Euro 50 on a dönner kebab. I’m trying to be a bit better about a normal writing schedule, waking up, making coffee and breakfast (hard roll and swiss cheese and ham) at home and then beginning to write, anything, distractedly, note-form, whatever, stream of consciousness. I’ve found that, like I’ve heard from so many writers, blocking out time to write and just writing actually does make the writing come. And even if it starts out disjointedly, I’ve been finding that I develop into a regular pattern by at maximum an hour. In the afternoon I bike over to Kreuzberg (an artsy, ethnically diverse district in East Berlin south of the area I live in), as of late, since I’ve been hanging out there a lot for various events or meetings with people or attempts to go to dance class.

I started hanging out with some people who run a performance space over in Kreuzberg. The first person I met was Krylon Superstar, a black drag queen dancer and performance artist who was performing at this crazy bar called White Trash located in Mitte (the “middle” district of Berlin). White Trash used to be a Chinese Restaurant but is now a bar and restaurant with rude tattooed bar tenders—mainly super hot women—and kitschy décor.

Meanwhile, Ayana asked if I had any interest in taking over the performance space when she leaves. It is 680 Euros and month, in the heart of Kreuzberg, and she and her boyfriend live there and run the bar, show art, and host performing artists and writers three to four nights a week. She said that they are able to live and eat and pay rent off of the profits. So I sort of flipped out and thought, yea, I could do this, and actually for the past four to five days I began negotiating seriously. It didn’t look possible to do it alone until Juan said he would actually come run it with me. We talked it out over the phone in a series of expensive and crazy and static-filled conversations.

But today, at the very last minute, another couple got chosen because could just take over the entire lease indefinitely because they already have German citizenship, etc … They are going to run a record label out of there. So there were a few days of real excitement and hardly sleeping a wink, lots of phone calls everywhere and dropping cash like mad on all the expenses to communicate with people here in Berlin—cell phones are so not cheap here. And as I said I no longer have a landline available in my house.

In any case, the excitement is over, I sit here in gloves and a hat in my cold bohemian apartment in Prenzl.berg (the east berlin district I live in)—no matter, I only pay 75 euros on my room. And all in all, I have a great deal, and it may be just better in the long run if I take it one step at a time and make more contacts and just try to do my own performances at the places already available, which are many. In fact I’ve already talked to this woman at White Trash who organizes a performance art night there.

Today I ordered coal—a half-ton of coal—to be delivered to my apartment so I can start lighting those coal fires and heating my house. I will be having a roommate soon too, so unfortunately that other super cheap room in my apartment is no longer available to YOU and I wish it were YOU and not “Paul from Dublin.” In any case, a roommate also means no big room to dance in and I have to keep down the noise and no strange photo shoots at four in the morning. But it’s worth the cash I suppose.

I’m trying to cast nets in a lot of different directions artistically, mostly because I have no history here and it feels easier to try new things, or relatively new things. I’m working on a photography project called something like, Both Sides of the lens: the studied and the studier. It doesn’t really have to be titled but that gives you an idea as to the theme. As for writing, I applied for a position to be a book critic at the Ex-Berliner, which is the main English language magazine here in Berlin. Who knows if I can get that gig, but we’ll see. My big news regarding writing is that I had an epiphany about my next book, which I’ve already been writing—all these scraps of essays I’ve been starting and adding to probably for years. The epiphany was that I developed a title and a conceptual plan for the book as a whole. I’m going to write a series of essays called Sex Matters—Why Sexual Politics Should Matter to You. I want to talk about sexual language and communication, or lack there-of, and how our inability to talk about sex and treat sex has diverse effects, into issues that would seem to be wholly unrelated. I want it to be geared towards people who don’t think of themselves as feminists and/or don’t feel like feminism and sexual politics are relevant to their lives, etc … I believe that even among activists, politicized professionals, and other academics outside of gender studies, sexual and feminist politics are often viewed as secondary to issues of race and class. Definitely less important than foreign policy and the economy. I want to be able to relate sexual politics to a wide variety of issues, like immigration, to electoral politics, and to personal politics … interpersonal relations.

I started thinking about relating sexual politics to immigration specifically when I wrote an article this summer about how women have a hard time proving political asylum based on an experience with rape (rape used as a tactic of war) because they don’t have the vocabulary to describe in detail the kind of persecution—as it is referred to—that they experienced when they are attempting to articulate their asylum declaration to an immigration officer or lawyer. I got to thinking about how even women in my close circles would feel uncomfortable describing in detail a sexual experience—any sexual experience, good or bad—and if women who are from a supposedly “sexually liberated” country can’t do it, then what about women who come from countries that aren’t “sexually liberated.”

Orlando [back to top]

24 October 2004, Sunday evening

Virginia Woolf’s inclusion of photography and portrait paintings in Orlando is fascinating to me because I have been doing so much thinking about the inclusion of photographs with a text, realizing that writing for me necessarily demands some other form of media, whether it be photography or performance. I’ve been thinking about the “author” as disembodied from her text. Further, what happens when we disallow the disembodiment? The inclusion of photographs alongside a text, especially photographs of the author her/his self, is a deliberate destruction, a deliberate transgression, or a pointing out of the power dynamic that exists when one presents “the body” of subject. The power dynamic between the photographer and the photographed was obvious to me during my independent project in Nicaragua, that relationship between the “researcher” and the “researched.” Such photography points to the inherent problem of women “researching” each other. But what about power do we also learn when the photographer, the photographed, and the author are one and the same? These are the kinds of questions that swim around in my brain. In part this is the reason why it is important to me to include photographs of myself, my body, as opposed to any other body, when writing about my body. Mine is not a theoretical body that would stand in place as a symbol of itself.

This is why I’m putting together a photography project that juxtaposes the “researched” with the researcher. The researcher researches, and exposes, sometimes literally, her subject, while she remains, in effect, unexposed. Yet she is the person rewarded for her efforts. Moreover, the woman exposed, especially when it is a literal exposure of her skin or her “sex,” is loathed or pitied. What exactly about this relationship should be critiqued? Is it the exposure itself? Or is it the risk that exposure somehow entails? What is the value of the body in being exposed or unexposed? What does one risk in exposure and why? How has the value or devalue of the body, as sexualized, become, in some way, artificially inflated?

I keep trying to come to some kind of conclusion about the value of the body as exposed versus unexposed. But I know that there is a “third” option, a resolution, that transgresses both—both exposed and unexposed. Specifically, what renders the body neither exposed nor unexposed, neither valuable nor valueless?

In any case, it is questions like these that brought me to notice Virginia Woolf’s inclusion of photographs and paintings in her book Orlando. I wonder what fueled her choice to put image to this “tender subject” of a person living as one sex and then another. It clearly adds to the parody of the fake biography.

And yet, ironically, Woolf states that she writes specifically for readers who have no need of photographs: “For though these are not matters on which a biographer can profitably enlarge it is plain enough to those who have done a reader’s part in making up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person; can hear in what we only whisper a living voice; can see, often when we say nothing about it, exactly what he looked like; know without a word to guide them precisely what he thought—and it is for readers such as these that we write—” (43).

Berlin at 7 am [back to top]

24 October 2004, Sunday evening

Berlin at 7 am is beautiful. Coming back to my apartment in the dawn light was—I was—in a state of euphoria, what with the stress I had placed on my body, and I came up the hill slowly, my bike squeaking. The bottom bracket is loose.

This morning 7 am I got back to my apartment and noticed, for the first time really noticed, the two birch trees by the U-Bahn tracks that run at the side of my apartment complex, and a green soccer ball stuck on the tracks, the gold leaves on the birch, the houses on the other side of the tracks. I have an existential moment looking across the tracks through the chain-link fence. The S-Bahn tracks do seem to serve as a divide between east and further east, namely, Pankow. Gentrification has already touched Prenzlauer Berg, but Pankow just to the east remains quite Eastern. It was not far from here, only a few blocks down at the end of my street, where the Berlin Wall was first torn down in 1989. And it is there, at the junction between the end of Kopenhagener Strasse, the edge of Mauer Park, and the crossing of two wide S-Bahn tracks, that one can find a climbing wall, like those you might see at REI in the States. But this one just looms there, oddly, jutting out from seemingly nowhere, no sports complex, no REI. I’ve seen people climbing on it. It seems to really mark the edge between what a capitalist might call “familiar,” but oddly familiar at that. Beyond the climbing wall are the tracks, spanned by gray pedestrian bridges in two separate directions, as though attempting to forge a very great divide. You might say something like, “Ah … that’s the rest of East Germany. So there it is.”

I saw Berlin at 7 am for the first time today. Now I’ll get to why, which is that last night I got a call from Wolfgang, the owner of White Trash Fast Food Restaurant and Bar. I had asked him previously for a job and he said he had none for me. But last night he called and said he needed someone last minute and could I please come in and try it out? It was Saturday night and I made plans but I knew I would be stupid not to go and work so I said yes. They gave me my own section and a white frilly apron. The place was packed—packed until 5 am. What I didn’t realize was that my shift would last from 9pm to 7 am.

Luckily the place doesn’t have any clocks and I needed the money so I was in the perfect position to be exploited. I agreed, somewhat innocently, to take the “late shift”, without knowing that no one gets kicked out Berliners are still buying drinks at 6:30 in the morning. I served burgers and fries and soup and salad until three in the morning, or was it four? I was a total dunce at the money—I had to add up tabs in my head and then make change on the spot and all the coins seemed to be the same size and color, especially as I was fishing in the dark for them through my kasse, a money wallet we wear on our belts at all times.

Of course there was the added dynamic of speaking German, which is almost secondary to the challenge of that night. Luckily the place is called “White Trash,” and I can get away with speaking half in German and half in English. I understood much of what people said to me, but its hard to unlearn the American phrases I say to customers as a waitress, like how ya’ll doin’? and what can I getcha? And Ev’thing ok?

We walked with “good tips,” apparently, according to the other waiters. That is, “good,” by Berlin standards—I earned 34 Euros in tips over the course of a ten hour shift. On the other hand, I got paid 10 Euros an hour—cash, right on the spot out of the cash register. So I wasn’t exactly complaining; I paid my rent in one night and then some. Or, I paid for half a ton of coal (125 Euros), depending on how you look at it.

It is interesting how quickly I find myself creating routine as a way of managing unfamiliar territory. I take a shower every day and run the water in the exact same way, because I don’t have much hot water and I can’t waste it. I use the same towel, hung on the same hook. I only wash my hair one day a week—Thursday. I make coffee for myself in the morning, with the exact same spoon and I measure out 6 scoops into a brown filter in a brown cone, and I run the water in the pan while I’m counting the scoops, because the water is extremely low pressure, so you have to do other things whilst waiting for it to run into the pan. I do not have a kettle. Then I light a match—first, light the match—then, I turn on the gas on the stove and light the gas, making sure that the match doesn’t go out. Then, while the water is heating, I take the milk out of the fridge and set the sugar bowl on the table, which I’ve covered with a china blue saucer. I rest the spoon on top of the saucer, so I know which spoon is the coffee spoon and I won’t have to wash it everyday. It is important to save water, and doing dishes takes so much time since the water runs slow and thin and it’s cold, besides. There’s no hot water in the kitchen faucet. Then I cut bread and put it on a large china blue plate and I put cheese and jam on the table, sometimes also a piece of ham. Then my water is boiled and I pour it through the cone and the filter and into a glass pitcher. Then I pour my coffee, throw the filter and coffee grounds in the compost bucket. Sit down. I sit down at the kitchen table—this alone is miraculous and unusual for me. I eat and drink and continue to listen to the BBC. When I’m done, which isn’t very much time later since I’m a compulsively fast eater, I wash the dishes immediately and wipe down the counter. Then I pour some juice into the glass pitcher (newly washed) and fill the rest with water. I pour some into a glass, take the pitcher with it, and then I go into my room, turn on my computer, and start to right on some topic, any topic.

Now I have to say, I really marvel at all this, because I am not like this is San Francisco. I cannot seem to get into the habit of anything at all there—and the result is sometimes total disaster! I mean I have absolutely no sense of ritual. It is only here where I develop them and practice them.

And it is amazing how these routines so quickly become adapted and part of one’s reality. For instance, the BBC has become such a staple part of my life. I love the questions and the reporter’s accents and I often find myself parodying them afterwards, laughing aloud to myself. They are almost as smug as NPR. For example this morning, when a BBC commentator was interviewing a Mongolian gentleman about the fact that the government has instated the requirement that all Mongolians have last names.

The commentator said something like, “Wasn’t it the communists who made you take away your surnames in the first place?” Then, without letting him answer, “Wouldn’t you say, in effect, the communists destroyed your cultural identity?!”

The questions were so leading, and there was clearly such a language barrier, that the man merely answered yes, and continued to speak about something different than what she was leading, specifically, how last names were originally created out of the location of one’s house in relation to natural landmarks.

The disjunction between these two sets of realities, the Mongolian’s and the commentator’s, was so clear that it made me laugh with hopelessness and hope. I think it relates to what I was getting at before about researcher and researched and the projection of one reality onto another, how impossible it is and yet still we do it, attempt to “empower” by projecting our own language into some other reality. And we do progress.

I’ve been feeling emotional today. I’m sitting in the Tiergarten, which is effectively the Golden Gate Park of Berlin. I’ve been writing here beside the canal in the warm autumn air. I’ve been crying at the littlest things today, like the fact that everyone has humanity. This morning the BBC commentator was lambasting the way American troops have little if any regard for Iraqi custom and manners, few skills at feeling people out with humble respect, silence and observation, and rather approach an unknown and scary situation with a macho and self-protective strut which actually does them a disservice. The reporter cited the example that when he had been riding in a tank with American troops, Iraqis were shouting, “Protect us! Assist us! Work with us!” but the troops didn’t understand them or care to translate, and rolled on with a self-righteous attitude, raising their rifles, acting like Rambo.

After lambasting them, however, this BBC commentator had the courtesy to say, or the presence of mind, that though his may be an overall impression of American troops, on an individual basis, his impression was contrary.

“I got to talk to one young man, Mike, who didn’t fit that macho description at all,” said the BBC commentator. “He showed me pictures of his wife and his son.” Which is when I started to cry, because I believe that one of the things that makes this world so complicated is that most people believe what they do is for good, for someone’s betterment, in whatever way. Most of us love someone and show love, have complex relationships and eagerness and a sense of adventure. In my mind’s eye, I can see these young guys and girls who no doubt approach their mission with the same hope and expectation the way any of us would approach some huge change in our lives. They must think, what we’re doing is right because we are right and good. We have these incredible bonds with our families, we believe in their futures. Yet! This sense of goodness and righteousness can manifest itself in such violence.

I marvel that we can all disagree so wholeheartedly about what is right and what is good.

I could say, I know these young men and women in Iraq. I am like them, in the sense that I have engaged in things I thought were right but were not, was eager and curious and naïve and later laughed at myself about it, or was ashamed. Tragically, the stakes in Iraq are so high, too high for error. Still, I believe the human error stems essentially from the same place whether the stakes are high or not.

And I think, and again it makes me cry to think, that I have the ability to sit here for hours and write. Not only that I have the time, but the sheer desire to do so, and that I have a few euros in my pocket that I got from last night. And that for the first time in the many occasions of traveling on my own, which I’ve done before for longer periods of time, I feel a sense of the rightness about being alone, an appreciation as opposed to the question of how soon I need to return, and that the forward motion I desired to have is really here and not a myth or a fabrication in my mind.

Just now I can hear the bells of the cathedral ringing, they are unusually beautiful and the tones darker than I remember cathedral bells being. I look up and realize that daylight is almost gone because I slept until 1:30 pm today and though I tried to rush out of the house I could not. There is this sense of urgency about me this afternoon that time would stand will and I could sort of … and again I want to cry thinking the line, “rage rage against the dying of the light” which are the words from Dylan Thomas that my father recited at his father’s funeral. And yet only the other day he said to me, when I said how much he had to live for and how he had at least thirty years of his life left, “Katie, the last thirty years of your life are hell.” I think how it might finally be time, and I have always known that I would do so, to sit down and right a good long letter to my father. Again, the thought of doing so makes tears come to my eyes, because I think how many women have such damaged and complicated relationships with their fathers.

The change of schedule, sleeping during the daylight hours, makes me feel in a trancelike mood, three cups of coffee keep me writing vigorously though the strangeness of the light and the time maintains my trance as though jetlagged still. Boats pass on the canal and I think of Orlando and his strange beauty with a kind of painful yearning, like that I experienced as a child. I believed I belonged in some other era and yearned for it so strongly that is sometimes hurt. I remember writing this as a child on autumn days like this one, and I realize that I have not experienced such weather since leaving the east coast for California.

Though I consistently see the young Katie inside me, I suppose one thing that is distinctly different about me now, Katie as older, is that I no longer have the same anger towards the lack of time. By lack of time I mean rather our irreverence to time; the way in which we spend so much time irreverent to what occurs around us, even to the deepest things we love most, like the changing of the light. At this time in my life I have arrived at an appreciation for irreverence and artifice. In fact I love irreverence and artifice: masks, costumes and performance; all of these irreverent to reality like light and time. And conversely, I also still love those things that lack artifice. To connect and then to disconnect, to be constantly at battle between the desire to connect and the desire to escape those connections, this, today, does not feel at conflict but rather I have arrived at some kind of resolution about it.

K

Day of the Dead [back to top]

1 november 2004

Day of the Dead. I read Orlando when I wake up this afternoon. I am overcome by the beauty of her words, of the construction of sentences, and her ideas. I am reminded how ahead of her time she is—or, is that what I mean? She brings so much clarity to me, I read her slowly, drinking in each word, wanting it not to end, wanting to understand each sentence, sometimes struggling to. And then, getting it—some strange nuance or reference and thinking once more how brilliant she is.

I needed something tonight, today, whatever time it was when I woke up. Someone’s arms around me, someone to snuggle with. I wanted to watch a movie and be a vegetable and I don’t have a TV or a DVD. I’m feeling sluggish and know that I need to write and read and keep working on my art—but I’ve been crippled by the amount that I worked this weekend. I panicked when I had no income, but as soon as I got a job, I realized how it only takes a few days of meaningless but hard work like waitressing to get in the way of the rest of your life! Plus, the drinking adds to it, which is difficult not to do when you work at a bar and all your fellow employees are offering you drinks every hour, at least. Granted, it was Halloween last night, but when you work for 13 hours, which I did, you can have like 10 shots, feel drunk but not too drunk, and kind of fuck with your head still at the same time. Today I feel like I’m coming down and my brain feels all dumb. It makes me want to quit drinking forever, like I’m gonna get real stupid soon.

My job at White Trash! White Trash is an old Chinese restaurant on Tor Strasse in Mitte with all of the kitsch still there and now gourmet burgers and soups and teriyaki chicken salads. The boss get drunk and shoot the shit with the customers while we work. He takes shots with us, jokes around and trashes the place, along with everyone else. Stays ‘til seven in the morning and smashes shot glasses on the floor laughing with glee. We’re not on a clock. There is no clock in the place, no computer, not even a cash register. Not a single receipt. We pay ourselves cash at the end of the night, right out of the cash box.

Last night the bar tender was a total bitch to me. I know that White Trash has this “I can be a bitch and get away with it” image but it doesn’t make me feel good to be a bitch or be bitched at. I suppose I could do it if I had to. In fact I wonder how much it will take me just to snap and lay it on some of those girls. But you know, I’ve already done that in my life. I spent the first 18 years of my life in a house where everyone yelled at each other all the time! I know how to do that! And I just don’t want to anymore.

I don’t understand the coldness I get from some Germans—I’ve gotten it more lately, and I wonder is it just about me not having the German skills to flirt my way out of it and be all charming? Are they pissed at me for not speaking more German? It got so frustrating last night that I really swore for about 5 hours that I was going to throw in the towel and move back to San Francisco. I figure, if I'm waiting tables anyway, I might as well do it where I love everyone. But then, I know that this experience is nothing like the one I would have in the United States.

Then, miraculously, everyone I know and like in Berlin came into White Trash and it ended up being a great dance party into the wee hours of the morning. It was so fucking crazy there all night I can’t even explain. Berlin is so fucking irreverent and so fucking chaotic. It’s out of control. Krylon Superstar was the Halloween MC, which means butt tricks and nudity. At the beginning of the night Wally and friends dragged in Autumn leaves and scattered them all over the floor, a big Halloween mess with pumpkin guts, too. We waded through it, and fought the crowds, to serve our burgers and fries and soups and salads.

Halloween in Berlin means scary, not that I’m a [ ], but a ho-[ ] thing that happens in the US. Halloween in Berlin is about gore and guts and grotesque costuming and makeup. And they do it and they do it well. White Trash had hired a make-up artist to make all of us employees look like we’d gotten run-over by a truck. My teeth were blackened out and I had major road-rash flesh wounds all over my shoulder. Shit! This one guy—he came in with all these needles pierced through his skin and household tools stuck through his ears. Real blood on his tank top spelled out something I can no longer remember. A private party for Redbull brought photographers and cameramen and Brits asking for beers and people running relay races through the restaurant, followed by cameramen. Me with a tray of brown tequila shots on my arm trying not to spill them. Some guy dressed as one of the seven dwarves with a huge fake penis stuck in his pants gave me this incredible necklace—a cat skull on a rope that he, when he 15, had dug out of a cat he found dead on the side of the road. It clearly had magical powers and I was told to give it back to him by the end of the night. He also gave me a crown of thorns, which I could keep. So by 7:30 in the morning, on top of my black veil I had this crown of thorns and my red and black makeup was dripping all down my face. I’m sure I looked like hell.

I fell in the turquoise and red Chinese fountain with Mella, a fallen golden angel up my ass, and leaned over and kissed her. It’s nice to be able to begin to have friends again that I can count as friends. I grabbed Tom, one of the few people I actually really like who works there, and got him to dance with me screaming, turn me, turn me! He didn’t understand my meaning because it doesn’t translate. That’s when the kid with the needles pretended to pass out and we all fell for it. My friend Brandon dressed in the tallest spiked heels came as “Lucinda,” and kissed me at the bar, telling me I was his favorite new person in town and that he was in love with me. Brandon is a gay fashion designer from NYC and from the start we really connected, heart to heart, like for the first time someone here was interested in my life and how it was going for me, and how hard its been, and what its like to really not know anyone and be an outsider. So I thank my stars for him.

I was the last waitress to stay cause I needed the money and I had nothing better to do. I cleaned off the tables and threw all the glass and the shit right on the floor. Carved pumpkins, candles melted down to pools of dripping wax. If it wasn’t already sloppy by then it got that way. One of the kitchen staff confessed to me on his way out how he’d sucked Brandon’s cock just to try it out, but he loved his girlfriend and he was straight.

6:30 in the morning we’re just waiting for everyone to finish their party. Noah, the bartender, and I want get out of there, but we can’t, so we do shots of Jagermeister. The strange thing is that my boss is the one holding us all up, cause it’s him and all his friends and maybe a few stragglers who won’t leave the place. He’s paying us to stay as their private service. When I left I kissed Wolfgang the German two-cheek way, and the expression on his face was a silly happy to have been kissed by me. I swear its bizarre-o world around here. I can’t even remember what normal life is like. Was it like this?

You know the best part about last night was riding home on my bike, alone. Seeing Berlin at 7:30 am all those school kids and mothers on the way to school. I stopped at a bakery and treated myself to a Danish; chocolate and vanilla creme. And the woman asked me, looking like I was, Was ist heute? [What is today?] I told her el dia de los muertos.

I got home and fell asleep, woke only five hours later but that was 1:30 in the afternoon. I got an itch to rearrange my room so now the bed isn’t blocking the French doors, and I can open them wide and there is this little railing with a place for plants. I can open the doors in the morning, stand there and look out, for the last few days of the warm spell. I like my place finally—feels like it’s mine now.

katie

I am Grown Up [back to top]

November 2004

… “I am grown up,” she thought, taking her taper. “I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones” … and she reviewed, as if it were an avenue of great edifices, the progress of her own self along her own past … She had been working on it for close to three hundred years now. It was time to make an end. Meanwhile she began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and thinking as she read, how very little she had changed all these years. She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as all boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons … In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above … Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking … Everything appeared in its tenderest form, yet, just as it seemed on the point of dissolution, some drop of silver sharpened it to animation. Thus it was that talk should be, thought Orlando (indulging in foolish reverie); that society should be, that friendship should be, that love should be. For, Heaven knows why, just as we have lost faith in human intercourse some random collocation of barns and trees or a haystack and a wagon presents us with so perfect a symbol of what is attainable that we begin the search again … And to find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind, gives food for thought … What she had come in search of—that is to say, life and a lover … What’s an ‘age’ indeed? What are ‘we’? … and their progress … seemed the groping of two blind ants, momentarily thrown together without interest or concern in common, across a blackened desert. She shivered. But here again was darkness. Her illusion revived. “How noble his brow is,” she thought … A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her through the body with his pen … For it would seem—her case proved it—that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver …

Orlando … stolen, rearranged and pieced back together

The Fundamental Problem of my Life [back to top]

“The Fundamental problem of my life.” The problem is the same, it’s just (re)presented in various symbols throughout my life. In Berlin, at this moment in time, it looks like this: You’ve got the UDK, the University of Art in Berlin, where last night I attended my first class in “media and culture” taught by a feminist art professor, Katarina Sieverding. This is the “academy” at its best, in my opinion, in the sense that students are encouraged to integrate critical theory into artistic practice. For example, Sieverding’s students are required to read theorists like Linda Williams, which creates, depending on how you look at it, a feminist backbone, or backdrop, or base to their art. This is what I sought at New College—a space for writing that was infused with a critical theory and political base. I wanted my writing to be placed, contextual, not floating.

But no matter the intention, the academy cannot get away from its ivory towers. It’s inherently “annoying.” It’s annoying because lots of privileged kids go there who dress like hipsters and say ironic things and produce political art about lives they have not exactly lived. With exceptions. Topics like “pornography” and “sex work,” or equally, “immigration,” “workers,” or “terrorists”—are en vogue, but one gets the sense that there is a divide between the studied and the studier that most often cannot be bridged. Whether or not that is a “problem” is another issue entirely, because I acknowledge the role that students have, throughout history, played in social change.

Secondly, and not distantly, you’ve got “Le’Space,” which is a venue where art is practiced, displayed, and performed. By art I’m talking about Art and by performance I’m talking about Performance. This is where the artists, who are making political art, show their art to other artists who are doing the same. They are educated, and international, speak English and German and French and Spanish.

Then, there’s places like White Trash and Barbie Deinhoff’s that cater to people like Dahlia Schweitzer, Team Plastique, Krylon Superstar, Brandon “Lucinda,” and all the rest of the strippers, whores, queers, freaks and maniacs whose lives are constantly in performance, both formally within “legitimate” venues and informally. These are performers not with a capital p … strippers, singers, drag queens and kings, dancers, prostitutes, porn-stars, waitresses, bartenders, all working hard for the money and performing at the same time; an image, a character, whatever you want from them.

These are the “legitimate” ones, if legitimacy means contact with the “real world.” These are the “studied” … they are the “en vogue sex worker.” I am writing this with a tone of skepticism and even cynicism, poking fun not at any of the participants, but at the entire structure that grants various forms of legitimacy. A structure that appoints victimhood and power to various rungs of a ladder. That affirms or doubts one’s ability to choose. But what is it to “be able to” choose?

Among this latter category of performers and artists, there are many who would like to move their art towards Art and their performance towards Performance. That is, ironic, witty, “intelligent” Performance. They desire this because, while they may be “the real deal,” their freaky art is generally not legitimized by the Art Crowd or their venues. They want full opera houses and newspaper headlines.

Where do I fit within this analysis? I would like to see myself as not fitting into any category, and the truth is I do span each category, and so do most people in one way or another. As a gogo dancer I am driven by the money, but secondarily by the quest for an image. As a dance theatre and spoken word performer I am driven by questions, What is the power in exposure/nonexposure. What is the allure of the body, what do we risk? What would subversive strip-tease look like? Do these questions see answers in the subconscious movements of my body or are they still locked inside my intellectual head? It is a head that crosses into an elitist world every night when I sit in front of my computer to tack out these questions, give them form.

I waffle between these worlds, where all the world is a performance, where all of life is bizarrely relativistic, where no one person adheres to one trajectory, or even one pocket of legitimacy or socioeconomic class or educational background. I am privileged to waffle, to be mobile, more than many are allows. Like you, I am trying to create my own legitimacy, trying to put my own art out there, yearning for more legitimacy, yearning to access all of these different pockets, trying to figure out what my soul feels the most, what feeds my soul the most. Billi, a stripper and dancer at White Trash is hiring me to do my first performance at her Tuesday performance art night, “Thylacine” at White Trash. Incidentally, a thylacine is a carnivorous marsupial of Australia, now believed to be extinct. I am going to perform “my body is a performance art piece.” It is a piece about the act of putting on clothes. It is in essence the reverse strip tease, but without the tease part. I put on my clothes while singing the text of the poem. What I’m wondering is, how will this be received at White Trash? Will it be too much, too intellectual, or too naked?

Today I teach a woman, 25 years old, how to make proper milk foam with an espresso machine. She is my boss and this is skill is the one thing for which she has given me respect. The rest of the time she yells at me about all of the mistakes I have made while working with her breathing down my neck at the stupid little café that is, ironically, called, “The New York Bagel Café,” located on Schonhauser Allee, Prenzlauer Berg, former East Berlin. Today I got yelled at for bringing two napkins—not one—to a customer. Then I got yelled at for putting six mandarins, not five, on the “California Chicken Sandwich,” which would never pass in California. Then I got yelled at for accidentally putting butter on one piece of white processed bread when that sandwich was only supposed to have barbeque sauce on it. So when I asked, at the end of my shift, if I could eat something, my boss said that I had to make a sandwich using the piece of Wonderbread that I messed up on. No, of course we didn’t throw that piece of bread out immediately. Waste not, want not: this is former East Berlin.

At least I am a German and I have some kind of innate understanding for this abhorrence of waste, even though, in a capitalist’s terms, she is quite extreme. I can laugh it off with the argument that her behavior is performance art. Consider the fact that this young woman, exactly my age, has been living in East Berlin her entire life, most of which took place while the Wall was still standing. Now she works for her mother in “The New York Bagel Café” making espresso drinks, formerly unfamiliar to her, for the new generation of cosmopolitan East-Berliners, post-Wall. She is probably pissed as hell that some American girl can just waltz in and work alongside her and then waltz right out again. And while I do have the mobility to leave the country if I chose, at this moment and in this circumstance of choosing to stay, I am left without choice as far as taking this job goes because I need the money so badly and I am depending on her employment of me. And what about her choices or lack thereof? I cannot say.

Later this evening I attend a modern dance class in a studio with hardwood floors and mirrors, and I find myself among a whole other set of young people, young people with artistic dreams, or, at the very least, eight spare euros to spend on a dance class. They are going to create “legitimate” art out of their efforts—will they not? Are they going to create “good” art? Are they going to create “subversive art”? Are they going to create something that looks pretty? Or is the young woman at the New York Bagel Café in fact creating more interesting art with every sour glance, with every slice of the meat slicer?

Advent Ruminations [back to top]

Third Sunday in Advent

I want to say a million things to you and do not know where to start. I am not sure, even, why it seems of such grave importance to relate anything at all. I’m an insomniac. Can’t sleep until 5 am. Then I can’t wake up. Screws are loose in my brain. It’s working overtime, but not creating enough. Paralysis strikes me. The letter I will write to Sophie Calle. The … zine. My … performances. Must ... write. I visit the coal cellar. Along the hallway are a series of wooden slated storage areas, slatted doors on each, one storage closet for each apartment. The slats block you from seeing in entirely, and yet the fact that you can see some of the blackness behind it, reminds us of the existence of space and the question of what fills it.

I saw the Sophie Calle Exhibit today and I am filled with fiery passion: both inspiration and frustration. Inspiration because I felt her so deeply that she strengthened my belief in myself. I do have a story to tell, after all, and what I am seeking to express has validity, has profundity, even, if I can, indeed, express it. Frustration because she has done it, and done it so well.

There is an installation called Exquisite Pain that documents the (89?) days before she is “dismissed” by a lover, over the phone. These days, during which she is traveling across Asia, are the “countdown to unhappiness.” She documents each day with a photograph or letter and has stamped each piece with a “countdown” number—but of course, these pieces have been labeled only after the events transpired, only after the countdown ended. During the countdown the events were events in themselves and not inextricably linked to some arbitrary date in the future. At that time the events were not yet “art.”

This is what Calle speaks to so perfectly: the arbitrariness of events, of days, of time. How no time appears to be happening as we live, until we attach some significance to it, learn to read it somehow. A day’s importance is only relative to the events we have chosen to shape our lives. The incredible trip is of little or no significance relative to the extreme pain of the loss of this lover.

In an adjacent room, Calle documents the subsequent 90+ days of recovery, “90 days to happiness.” Each day of recovery is an art project, a piece of writing and an accompanying photograph. She retells the events of that relationship as she remembers it: the story of the telegram from her lover telling her of some incident at the hospital. The phone call, telling her he had found someone else … the isolating hotel room, the red phone ... Then, back, into the past, the circumstances of their love affair, her life prior to him, bent, in the retelling of it, to the inevitable existence of him. Each day the story is retold, and, with each retelling, a kind of catharsis is happening, and an inclusion or exclusion of certain facts until the story slowly dissipates into this feeling of unworthiness ... my story is not worth telling, it is the same as any other. Finally, on the last day, Calle silences herself. She says ENOUGH. That is her final word on the subject of her obsession. Looking at that word “enough” I knew.

I knew that Calle had not necessarily taken 90 days to get over the lover, not necessarily reached acceptance, but rather she had reached self-disgust with the obsession. Because I know that telling ourselves “enough is enough” is not enough to stop the brain chatter. By making a monument to each day, she creates a physicality to the distance of the “day of pain”—reception of the phone call. And we come to understand, visually, the idea of obsession, the (re)creation of narrative and the passage of the stages of grief.

Says the brochure: “She sees her work as a means of survival. She invents her own games in order to “improve her life.” It is only in a second phase of their creation that her works enter the realm of art. For the viewers they are veritable mirrors in which they can recognize familiar emotions or even the realization of their fantasies.”

With obsessive observation of her own life (Calle has, for instance, hired private detectives to follow herself), she documents her life as it is happening; this art project … that … is occurring even as it is being fabricated. That is the point of what I call the fabricated love affair art project ... that we not only shape our pasts with narratives based on choice, but we shape our presents as well. We create art pieces out of our lives as they are happening, these monuments to our fabricated identities that we are absolutely terrified of abandoning.

Second Sunday in Advent

This morning I read about a little girl who placed an advertisement in her local paper at age 14 that declared, “I’m going to become an author when I grow up.”

So I might ask, is this a strange quality belonging only to writers, that they believe they are the masters of their own universes through the mere flick of their pen or the flick of a switch inside their brains?

“The fact is, I always felt like an outsider in school and in my town, a person who was, well, odd. I think this was both an inner and outer reality. Because I felt it, people sensed it and treated me accordingly.”

I’ve been thinking about being the master of my own universe, the masters of our own universes. And by this I am not talking about that old “the world is my oyster” or the American Dream thing, where we have the power to be whatever we want by working at it, step by step, day by day, carefully and diligently. I’m talking about a mental moment. I’m talking about deciding that something be true and then creating it so in that moment. In a sense I am talking about disconnecting entirely from our fears. Identifying what the fear is and then intentionally jumping into it. Little fears, like the fear of raising your hand to be a volunteer … and larger fears, like living in a house and having a husband and children and not being a waitress. Or really big fears, for instance recognizing that we are at once worthless and worthy. What happens when, in a mental moment we jump into the exact opposite philosophical position we once had. I’m not talking about linear or Hegelian development, I’m talking about the development that has no past other than the moment of its inception.

I’m talking about fabrication of “reality.” I’m talking about what I’ve been calling the fabricated love affair art project before I even knew what I was talking about. I’m talking about the decision to become an identity. I’m talking about the decision to create a story for ourselves out of the present. For example, to become an identity one has not been before, to be powerful, to become in love, to mourn, to not mourn, to love one’s family, to find one’s life partner, to have a great idea, to be cruel, to be terrible, to be empathetic, to be powerful, to be shy. To be an activist, to be an artist, to be an intellectual, to be a waitress. I’m talking about having authority over reality. I’m talking about the decision to “be” desirable, the decision to look someone in the eye, and choose what the relationship will be. Are you scared of them? Are they scared of you? Do they want you? Do they hate you? Is it possible merely to decide what the reality is whether or not the reality is that or not? Can you override all of the first clues and simply decide what the relationship will be? Can you create fictional stories using your present life and then make them so? I think so. We do it with the past. Can you start your life over? Can you start from the beginning and create an entirely new identity in the moment. I mean, can a business executive sit down and decide in a mental moment to become a waitress, in the sense of owning that identity.

I am not pregnant again. Each month when this happens I experience this strange confliction of sadness and elation. Similar, though you will think me silly perhaps for saying so, is my conflict over not being able to be a waitress. The conflict is this: I have a strong identity as a waitress—though I have been told, specifically and indirectly, that I should not. That it’s not a job to lust after. I am a waitress. I like waitressing culture. I am a waitress. It is not what I do. I am a waitress. It is what I do. It actually gets strengthened whenever anyone tells me “you’re not a waitress, Katie, you’re a writer, you’re an artist, you’re an intellectual.” To have my identity taken away presents an elation, the freedom of choice, the freedom to be anything. And yet it is terribly sad, to be ripped of an identity that I have put on, as each of us do, to get through the day.

There are people called “writers,” who get paid to tell stories. Some of us who are writing stories, I mean literally writing stories down, writers by profession, live lives that create great stories, and we live the stories in order to tell them, some of us to more or less extent. But honestly I don’t think its just “writers”—whoever they are—who do this. I think we all do. And what happens, when we really jump, when we really decide to forget all of the perceived or real boundaries stopping us from doing something? As Jrock so eloquently put it, what happens when we stop caring if our hair matches our outfit?

Fabricated art projects. The art project of life. Who’s in on it with me? Each of us are involved in the fabricated love affair art project called life, the love affair being with our identities and fears that to some extent we have chosen for ourselves, that can be learned and un learned, chosen and created. The fears involved with the identities we have chosen, with the identities we have not chosen but would like to own, with the identities that we are afraid to own. All of these complexities seem to belong in our art project.

What happens when we think of life as an art project, does it suddenly get less real? Or more so? Those “projects” could be the power of being taken over, of the power of desire, of attraction, of the power that the body symbolizes for us, perhaps some identification with the past, with a “fabricated” narrative of our past, of some story we have been told about those particular types of bodies, of their relevance to our lives. What about the male body, of the dick, or of the vagina, and the sexual significance each or either carries with it; all of the people we have fucked or not; our experiences of sexuality, looming or not. There is so much in the moment of body to body, of orb to orb, of art project to art project facing one another, the various fabrications each of us have designed for ourselves, our various universes you could say, colliding, as they always do.

Is it only “authors” who so strongly believe that their futures can be fabricated and they will follow; only writers who not only create stories about the past but about the future? Who are these writers? Bring them out, let me see them. Which one of you is a writer? And which one of you is not?

First Sunday in Advent

It is the first Sunday in Advent and I have been meaning to write about the word sacred; another thing still left undone. I attempt to launch into it. So here I am, waiting for my laundry to dry, and it’s true that there is something about the word sacred that struck me to begin writing, something about what I consider to be its misuse. And I started writing, trying to get to the bottom of it, this word sacred, to reclaim it.

I stare at my writing. Stop for a moment. Then I go back to reading Cubana, Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women and low and behold there in the text is the example I am looking for, just staring up at me as though it had been divinely planted there. “Maybe, without knowing it, I had been looking for a reader. Maritza seemed so interested, she encouraged me so much, that I couldn’t resist the temptation to show her those entries in spite of the fact that, until then, I’d considered my diary sacred and inviolable. I kept it hidden under my pillow.”

This—sacred coupled with diary and secret and hidden and inviolable—is exactly the kind of meaning of sacred I want to undo. I mean, I want to find a reader for the diary, I encourage her to do it, though she is just a fictional character and I am just a reader of this reading of the diary. There’s a myth, I think, that what is sacred shouldn’t be touched … that it should be kept “clean” and “pure” and whatever those things have come to mean as a result of the invention of soap and Puritanism and the Victorian age.

I think sacred means we should engage. Love is sacred; engage with it. Engage with your lover, above all communicate. Be direct. Take risks. Love isn’t clean or even-tempered. Let yourself go to the most vulnerable place, fight it out and then make up. Sex is sacred, engage with it. Try new positions, new people, push your limits, learn about your body, masturbate, fuck your boy/girl-friend in the ass. Let them fuck you in the ass. Have sex with your friends, make love to someone of your own gender, at least once. Forget everything you thought you knew about your sexuality and laws of attraction and then start over. At least once. Fear is sacred; engage with it. Go to the scariest places … pretend to be something “you are not” and then become it. Books are sacred … engage with them. I’ve had so many people tell me they would never think of writing on my manuscript. I know they think they are being reverent, but I secretly resent their behavior. Writing is meant to be engaged with, because it is sacred. Write in books, underline them, share them. Give them away. Tell the author what you think. What you really think. School them when they’re wrong. School me when I’m wrong—please. God is sacred, engage with God—engage with the divine. Meditate, spend time with yourself and the divine, your own divine within you. Music is sacred; engage with it. Listen to it live, fucking rage off the hook dance to it. If it takes drugs to engage, fine. But if drugs make you disengage, stay away. Be honest about it. Obsess about a song. Play it until the CD scratches, learn all the lyrics and sing them at the top of your lungs on public transportation. That’s Katie’s Spontaneous Manifesto II written at the Laundromat in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, while waiting for the clothes to dry. Engage with me. Tell me I’m wrong.

Fear / Hair / Nihilism / Committment [back to top]

6 january 2005, Thursday

Fear. These first few days of the New Year have been very introspective for me and, in the past two days, depressive. Whenever I begin to feel real depression this spirals into fear, which leads to more depression, and silence, and the need for escapism. My anxiety over whether Juan will be here on February 28th or February 29th (this is a perfect metaphor, since it does not exist) is so clearly a reflection of my own insecurities regarding myself professionally and my fears and my doubts … the invading doubt that anything will so passionately seize me with creative fury that my entire life will be catapulted into a new sphere and imbued with a surge of fresh energy. The fear that in fact my fear is not at all about professionalism but has much more to do with fear of depression itself, that in writing this I am admitting to the “fact”? that I don’t feel inspired as much as I did even two weeks ago, that colors don’t seem as rich as I’d like them to appear. Though even as I write I realize the errors of my positioning, and this scares me still more, because it appears that “it” takes me over, the fear itself, and this time I won’t be able to talk my way out of it. The fear that this would be what I would offer to Juan when he arrives and not the energy we both need, or that I would seek salvation from my own depression in the light of his energy, the fear I am not suited to any real commitment, the fear of the fear itself, that by articulating fear I reproduce it, manifest it, and make it larger. The fear that there is no place to escape to, that I have already learned the meaning of escape by coming to Berlin and there is no other place to go that will be different, in essence. The fear that coming to Berlin was essentially an act of escape and yet my demons of depression still follow me. The fear that I won’t be able to meet Juan physically with the energy I so badly want to give him or to people far away with whom I communicate and want to shine for, to accomplish something for, though you have glimpsed in me some of it I can’t seem to fully access it at this moment. I am an ocean of fear.

Hair. That is to say, change. I dyed my hair blue and black again and cut the pink almost entirely out so that it is not quite as prominent like a huge feather sticking out of my hair. Before Christmas I had three paid performances, the most exciting being the night I had to myself at Barbie Deinhoff’s, where I performed for about 25 minutes. I attempted the first three or four pieces of what I am beginning to conceive of as a one-woman show and Juan helped me immensely by organizing the music, DJ-ing, and working the door. I never realized until recently that constructing a one-woman show has been a subconscious wish of mine for a very long time, since seeing a young woman perform once at Colleen’s summer theatre camp when I was about 13 years old. She combined movement, song, character, and recorded voice (if I recall correctly, it was the voice of Anne Sexton) to express her experience in the world. The memory and inspiration of her performance flooded back to me as I began to think of how I could make my writing three dimensional. As I begin to delve into it, I realize that I am most interested in the problem of portraying those most intimate moments in our lives, like the moment of waking. What does it feel like to wake up in the morning?

I am interested in capturing the gray areas of experience, those that cannot necessarily be described categorically or with descriptive words of emotion. In this first performance, I explored the extremes of dance—oscillating between the idea of stripping/sex and ballet/love; these two “extremes” of dance, if one chooses to think of dance as linear spectrum, serve as a type of metaphor for life’s paradoxes. They symbolize the oscillation between control and loss of control, the oscillation between private and public, the oscillation between socialite and hermit. The oscillation between sleeping and waking. The oscillation between all and nothing; the two essentially being the same. Taken together they are a kind of conversation with the divine.

I re-watched Waking Life after my performance and was reminded of what the boy says at the end—that time is an illusion and, rather than living in time, we are living in an eternal moment. That moment is an eternal conversation with God, wherein which we are confronted with the question of accepting death. We say no to death each time; we continue to say no. This is the illusion of time. When we finally say “yes,” this is the end of time.

Nihilism. Despite re-watching this movie, despite reminding myself of the infinite now in which all is possible, I find myself feeling as though I have not done enough and that the changes that have occurred within the past year have not been drastic enough. Though rationally I know that these first few steps in performance have been an incredible step for me personally. This negativity is nothing but illusion and mental positioning. Though perhaps this is what pushes me to keep going, because nothing seems enough. I know that I felt depression touch me again during this past year, when I had felt somewhat untouched by it for about two years. And then, I fight it, I am in constant battle with it, though I have learned so many mechanisms to cope with it, or to fight against it. I assume this is true for so many people, but I have no point of reference other than myself and the people I know who are vocal about their depression. We are not particularly unique in our sufferings and for this very reason perhaps we are not particularly interested in uniting in our commonalities, this would destroy our very sense of self which seems to be created out of this uniqueness.

I am an obsessive recorder of myself, whether this be inside my head or on the page, and for this reason it is very easy for me to go back and look at how I recorded my past feelings. This is an interesting exercise because every time I feel that I have fallen into depression I look back and “discover” that in fact it were only two weeks ago and I felt the exact same way, and only two days previous I felt that the world were my oyster and imbued with the passion of life, that colors of my world were brilliant and that I were on the wings of freedom. But two weeks ago I considered, in my darkest writing, something like the axe in my hallway and the absolute inconsequence of life and death.

I protested the war in Iraq because I believe we can’t kill each other and claim to love one another but then a tsunami wipes out such a large number of people that I wonder if it has anything to do with the value of life or the numbers at all. I think perhaps it is this kind of thinking that could lead one to take part in suicide bombing, I mean, if one really could kill the evil of this world through suicide bombings why not do it, given that ultimately our singular lives are so meaningless.

I figure all of these thoughts are better to disclose than to keep hidden. These thoughts never seem to go away; I always hole up with these thoughts. Though I cannot remember the meaning of “always.” Paradoxically I am completely dynamic as a human and yet absolutely static at the very same time. Or the oscillations appear to be the same, or are they more severe, as I get older? I cannot remember. My memory has gotten worse. I mean, worse than it was before.

Commitment. My father said, “Do I dare to say that you sound happy?” when he found out that Juan and I had committed to each other indefinitely and that we had used the word marry, though marriage is probably not something we will do as such … It was interesting to me because I think that what he meant was that he was happy and my mother were happy to be able to use that vocabulary, though I find myself shy from the vocabulary of marriage because this is in essence not what I want to take part in. And it appeared funny that he had not said that to me the entire time in the past three years that I have been more happy in my life than ever. That I would have to fit into a prescribed box in order to appear happy to him, and yet I desired this, to fit into the box to make him realize my happiness, not that my decision to be with Juan has anything to do with making my father happy, but it is true that as soon as Juan and I had decided to be together, I did tell my father, because I knew that I would be rewarded with his happiness for me and still … somehow I felt unhappy at his reaction. Does this make sense. Can this make sense.


Epiphany [back to top]

19 February 2005

Walking in a blizzard down empty highway parallel to the old wall, four in the morning. This part is called the East Side Gallery: the mile or two of retained wall now covered in murals. The snow sticks to my leather jacket and the front of my green fishnets like moss grows on one side of a tree. That old Leonard Cohen feeling comes to mind, “you’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.” But as soon as I think it, I recognize its inaccuracy. I mean to say … the world is wide open, busted apart and nothing is frightening. I’m singing at the top of my lungs to ward off the cold and I'm going for naught. No one likes me and everyone likes me—that’s the feeling … no one contains me. I walk forward; no one knows where I am. I keep walking forward all alone, it’s four in the morning and I could just walk right off the edge. That’s the feeling. It’s real freedom and if it weren’t so beautiful it would be terrifying.

I look back at my life and it contains nothing but a mountain of love. The feeling of it is so profound that my body dances a flamenco dance it seems to know innately. My face is full of the joy of it. Even if I were to remember some instance of sadness it would instantly evaporate in the face of this mountain—this mountain is what I re-remember, forget and re-remember. How quickly we forget—from one angle or another—the unhappiness, or when we are unhappy—the happiness. Though for some reason it is always the joy that overpowers the dark, at least in my head. I often think even if I were to die today it would be enough, it would have been more than beautiful enough. This has been a reoccurring thought since the first time I fell in love when I was 16.

For some reason, (which baffles me in an existential way) I still find myself saying the all-encompassing statement I love life not only despite the cruelty and violence and pain but because of it. I’m not sure how other heads work, I know that I have constant run-ins with people who, if you asked them, would say, the world is mostly sad, or the world is mostly bad, or people are mostly evil. Its like we’re the inverse of each other, these people and I; virtually the same in many ways, like on the outside there is absolutely no difference between what we do from day to day, though we describe the world differently. And it is not that I don’t know the violence they’re referring to, just somehow the choice is different.

I have found myself twice now—I can scarcely believe it—defending the merits of American culture against the European backlash. Once was at a meeting of Amnesty International. I started going to Amnesty International meetings because I found an English-speaking chapter in Berlin and I thought it would be a means of staying politically active. Though I suppose I still have these tugs of doubt as to whether we do anything by writing the letters and yet, like the paragraph above—there is fault in everything and is it not better to engage than to simply be absent? I perked my ears when I heard the larger group talking about the women’s subgroup—they would be creating a quiz to be passed out on the street on International Women’s Day. The quiz questions will highlight the work of women who fight for women’s rights.

When they said they were looking for women to highlight, several women came to mind immediately. I showed up at the first subgroup meeting with a list of several women, most of them from the Bay Area, because that is my frame of reference. I suppose most of them are relatively unknown, but I believe that is precisely the point. I feel lucky to have seen them in my community—for example the many artists at the Mission Cultural Center making these alters and other installation pieces to bring attention to the women murdered and disappeared in Juarez, or Karen Musalo, the gender-based asylum lawyer at Hastings that we worked with through EBSC. Perhaps I have a skewed view of American culture by having lived in San Francisco for the past seven years, or because of whom I surround myself with, but does it really matter? It’s not as if these women don’t exist—they do! And if I have been lucky enough to see so many women and men doing incredible social justice work, should I not raise awareness that they exist?

First of all, the women’s subgroup met at the three bedroom live/work apartment of a felter—a woman who makes art and clothing out of felt—and her walls were covered to the max with artsty-farsty art and her coffee table was crowded with a lavish spread of bread and cheese and two kinds of tea and chocolates and a large bowl of tangerines. It looked really nice, but it was so bizarre to step into her world because it looks so different from most of what I’ve been exposed to so far here in Berlin. So after she had us take off our shoes and gave us each slippers and we made small talk and poured our tea and all these politenesses … I discover that no one could come up with women to honor! It was so ridiculous (and maddening!) listening to the members of the women’s group discuss how difficult it was to write quiz questions about a particular woman, or how hard it was to find a woman that was fighting for women’s rights specifically and not human rights in general. I sat there getting more frustrated by the moment, thinking of gender based political asylum advocates, anti-fgm activists, women’s studies professors, social workers, domestic violence counselors, rape crisis counselors, a whole range of lawyers, teachers, sex worker advocates, feminist writers, artists, public health workers. … the list goes on and on …

In times like this I find myself on shaky grounds with my own identity—do I fit more in a place of “theory,” like a university, or in a place of direct action, like “the art world” or “the nonprofit world.” Must I choose? If I don’t choose, what will I do with my life, etcetera? These kinds of tiring questions fill me. In any case, this world, this one of Amnesty International, this tone of voice, I know it so well, I grew up around it, I could navigate it, I could use their language, I could be successful within it.

One woman says, “well we have to make sure not to have such long sentences … our language must be … accessible …” another answers, “oh, yes, and it’s so difficult, you know, people like us just tend to make these long sentences … it’s like I can’t help it” … “yes we don’t want to alienate people by giving them quiz questions that are just too hard” … “no, we really don’t, perhaps we should start with a simple question, such as, for instance, what do Sandra Bullock and Mariah Carey have in common … you know, something people can really identify with.” And I’m thinking I know I live in a bubble and I’m out of touch with pop culture but … who are they (we) kidding?

And although I had provided a list of almost seven, albeit relatively unknown women, they seemed uninterested in any of them with the exception of the women’s groups active against the murders in Juarez—because they found out that Amnesty International already had an official brochure on the topic (therefore it was “legitimate”?). Then one of them said, jokingly, “yeah, we should honor an American that actually is politically left” … and everyone started laughing uproariously, as though that were a complete anomaly. Then one woman in the room sort of motioned towards me, like, oh … now don’t offend her, she’s an American. I was stone-faced, not because I was offended, I was just shocked. And suddenly felt that I’d been completely captured in a cultural gap.

I’m not angry about the misunderstanding … Follow this train of thought for a moment, but I actually think that we can’t operate with this “I’ll believe it when I see it” mantra, because our vision is far too limited, blocked beyond our control, and rather we must assume even when we do not see it … I mean to say, we must assume that within every hegemonic system of power and control there are sites of resistance, no matter how subtle; there are women constantly subverting the dominant paradigm even in these tiny ways—in Afghanistan, in Kenya, in Nicaragua. That is not to say systems of power that keep women subjugated shouldn’t be tackled overtly, but it is not only women at the top that have the power to subvert and it is not only women at the top that have a wide scope of vision. And sometimes they seem to have less scope.

I know that Americans have misunderstandings of Europeans as well, so I don’t even want to further any cultural stereotyping, other than to say that this moment reinforced what I might even call twinges of patriotism, a word I detest, and rebel against, but there was most certainly a sudden spurt of love and respect for the political activists that have informed my life as an American.

But more interesting than this for me personally is the realization—and I think I realize it more as I get older—there is something I love about Americana, even as I detest it … that is harder to describe exactly. Now, I would have to be careful who I said that to, especially here I would get laughed at, as though to say I love Americana I would mean, McDonalds and Coke and exploitation. No. But there is something about American culture that I love, and I would think perhaps it’s because I’ve joined the ranks of the ex-pat—but I felt this way before I left. When I say American culture I'm talking about an entire host of traditions, as it should be, since America is far larger than Europe, and cannot be generalized just as Europe cannot be generalized (why some Europeans can’t seem to understand this I don’t know … that L.A. is as different from San Francisco as London is from Paris).

In reality, and perhaps I’m going out on a limb to say this, I’m not just talking about all the things that are politically correct or trendy to have an appreciation for about Americana, or a Putomayo recording of (you know what I mean?)—bluegrass Appalachia, Midwestern farmers, Newyoricans, the Latino mission, Jewish orthodox communities—but also the gritty steel of highway overpasses, American “red state” Christianity, the ugly America and trendy America and fake plastic tits America, all these things that are artistically … not trendy. [I am thinking about this idea of artistic reclamation a lot lately, i.e., it’s popular to be an urban cowboy but not popular to be a gun-toting redneck with the confederate flag. I think at times this reclamation serves to smooth over or deny the contradictions or misbehavior of any one member of a “trendified” group] Somehow I have this love for all this shit that in reality I hate and fight against and want to change, maybe because of its artifice—like suburbia, big coolers and SUVs, L.A. traffic and plastic, McDonalds trash bags thrown out of the window of some 18 year old homophobic boys, like ignorant policemen. Aesthetically “they” create a texture. Emotionally “they” create an anger and a passion. Somehow even as I hate them they’re still manifestations of humanity that is more similar than different. On the face of it we all seem so different and yet underneath we all have joy in their lives, people we love, contradictions, moments of insanity, moments of clarity.

I suppose it’s slightly confusing, (or embarrassing to admit?) that I would love some ugliness, and yet at the same time there are a lot of different types of love for the ugly, and most certainly there is the reclamation of the ugly into the soft spots of our hearts and labeled camp or kitsch and then a whole host of alternative bands get their pictures taken with these artifacts of our ugliness captured in the backgrounds of their aloof expression looking in ten different directions … yes, there is something and it is not just me.

I look down at my very hands just now. I wake up at 8 am these days, even my body feels it naturally, and for the first time in my life since leaving high school, I wake up at eight am, get out of my bed, make breakfast, eat it and then start working. I sleep now at midnight, this entire month of February has been very regular for me, which means no more insomnia, not even depression, which is unusual because I always think of February as the month for depression. In any case I look down at my hands just now, they are covered in gloves, it is cold in my room. I wake up and it’s cold. I didn’t bother refilling the coal last night, I let it burn down, and now my room is cold. I am typing in gloves and a hat and three layers of sweatshirts. I would talk about the coal and the coal cellar and how it is killing me slowly, poisoning my entire body and I feel it at night when I sleep and I wake in the night with panic attacks of suffocating, how much I hate it and every time I go into the cellar I think how I must describe it to you, if I could, but each time I go to write I cannot do it justice … so I can only paint it over in sarcastic humor.

I look down at my gloves and I think what is it about aesthetic appreciation, this love of some kind image or look: what are these things, I mean, how and why do we decide we love some kind of aesthetic over another? Where do these kinds of trends arrive from (and of course it’s not just ads) and why do they change? Our hearts are so easily swayed—mine is anyway, from one aesthetic to another—I used to love Guatemalan printed fabric, for instance, and now I love it for existing, yet I personally detest it. What are these strange aesthetic loves, like the way I might say I loved that Russian Star Search “Evening at the Apollo” television show I saw at the restaurant in Brighton Beach with my girlfriends from high school. How do these items gain and lose and regain their various symbolisms? Can I say with this kind of whimsical love: Ah! I love those conservative rich people who buy huge houses in the Fairfax suburbs and voted for George Bush, god I just love something about them—they are the fabric of Americana just as I am.

If I just let myself step outside of it all for a single moment, I recognize the arbitrariness of what has been reclaimed aesthetically and at times it is nothing more than a momentary popularity contest, that gangsters and pimps should be venerated as the bad love of popular culture and conservative soccer moms should be so terribly unpopular within one set of culture … or that pop culture should momentarily lift up bohemian artists and Che Guevarra and Hunter S. but not homeless people or street prostitutes or this or that unknown poet or different kinds of homeless people are more or less “okay” to this or that other person … I suppose this is all to say that I think somehow I'm not sure that any one person is any different than any other. At least, we are all more similar than different. Then I think of Marguerite Duras when she says something like, “at this point I am done, I cannot go on, I’ve exhausted all possibilities ... all writing stops …” because judgment becomes so misguided, if nothing is really better than any other how do we decide where to put our energy?

Then I think, no, perhaps it is possible to walk this line where one works not from a place of judgment, rather works entirely from a place of love and follows love rather than hatred. But perhaps this is merely a point of view, “Way of seeing,” and while at once these are the most profound differences on the other hand they are the most subtle.

I look down at my hands. This, too, is what I’m talking about: this strange self-love of my ugliest parts, sometimes waking in the morning here, sometimes not waking but still awake. I am riding my bike across Berlin. The wind is fighting with me. It takes me nearly an hour to get home. I am fighting with it. There is wasteland to my left. I am going home. It is four-thirty in the morning. My makeup is smearing across my face, snow or rain or whatever it is sticks to my jacket. Feet are cold. I still have a ways to go. I could never ever give this up. These moments are the most precious, these alone moments that feel somehow reckless like I could disappear at any moment, get buried in snow, be picked up and killed, no one would know, these are the kinds of thoughts that scare family members and people who love you and yet I think, aren’t they distinctly human? Is it not distinctly human to become comfortably with the idea of one’s own death and less so with the idea of someone else’s?

As independents, when we forget about all the people we owe our lives to, when we do not have to worry if we scare our family members, we become really candid with ourselves, this kind of strange acceptance to want to step off the very edge of time and it strikes me how many morbid thoughts I've be having since coming to Berlin. I say this not to be frightening, but it is a very honest truth. How amazing that feeling is when no one at all knows where you are and no one sees you are walking along the Berlin Wall for miles and not a soul in the world has tabs on you or would know if you weren’t to return to your room that night as usual and lie in your bed and do it all the next day and I think … I always imagined myself living a long life and being an old lady in a garden who lives by the sea and distributes lupine seeds along the grassy cliffs … but what if instead I am destined rather to die tonight?

Is it “okay” to feel that perhaps that would be “okay,” or just as “okay” as any other scenario? I think this is close to something that perplexes leftist skeptics about Christianity—the idea of putting oneself in the hands of Christ and though I cannot entirely speak in the discourse of Christianity, there is something fundamentally important about the acceptance of life and death, there is a kind of reckless and profoundly beautiful aspect to “giving oneself entirely” to fate—one has, anyway—which is, in my eyes, not so dissimilar to martyring for any cause, Christian or not ... is not so very different than the recklessness of wanting to rid oneself of security and cut out of an previously organizing system of one’s life, into the woods, or away from one’s job, or to give oneself entirely to the night, or simply decide to step off the edge of the world. Though I hesitate to say that we are all the same—I get into trouble whenever I suggest this—I think we are more the same than different … and “Christian” discourse, “academic” discourse, “madman’s” discourse, the discourse of “reason” or “psychology” … these all at times seem much more similar than different though any one of the members of any one of these groups might tell me it’s blasphemous to say so …

… Or you might tell me so, and I hope that you do. Or you could say, merely, Katie, you have been saying the same thing this entire essay and I would say, I know, really I keep arriving at the same conclusions.

I look down at my hands. Sometimes I wake in the morning with this kind of recklessness. I feel recklessness that I relish but as soon as I write about it, of course the feeling dissipates and transforms. But you see it is a morning feeling where my gloves are ripped, the gloves I wear typing on this keyboard, unraveling, my legwarmers are ripped, my skirt is dirty my sweatshirt smells like smoke my shoes are pulling apart at the seams, my nails are broken and the polish is chipping and for some reason I love all of these things about myself much more than the idea of buying new clothes and surrounding myself with people who would require that I have to look clean and unripped and I wonder why exactly, what it is that I really like about it.

Maybe it is that clothing should reflect how it feels to go out in the world, like if someone were to ask, how does it feel to be female? and I would present them with a ripped glove and chipped painted fingernails and say, well it feels like this … well it feels like THIS right now, anyway ... I mean, just look at me! It feels like this, goddamn it! Or is clothing an expectation once one has learned and then they go out with a desire, that it would reflect a projection, the desire to attack life with a fervor with a vigor and I walk down the middle of the highway in a blizzard. Is this the same as that “conquering mountains” feeling—its urban counterpart? Is it that desire to put oneself in danger or to throw oneself at the pavement and lick the fucking cement—the trash of it, the very trash of urbanity and then I am back to: how is it that I could love it so very much even as I know how much evil it has done, we have done in our cities with our cities with our cement I don’t know but yet somehow I love it deeply. Still I want to lie in it and be next to the earth—the cement earth. That is what I wrote last year in a monologue and I still feel it distinctly.

Yesterday I biked past three young girls who were dressed entirely in pink and white, crossing the street under the cover of two white umbrellas. They were impeccably clean, and even more so against the gray of Berlin and the slowly revolving background of some Soviet monument. Blond, more pristinely clean than I can ever imagine being, not a single spot on their variations of baby pink sweaters, white blouses, little pink skirts, white pants little white shoes with pink laces, pink ribbons in their hair … they looked like some kind of German version of the quinceñera—a modern, pants-wearing, pop star sweet 15 or 16 and they gasped when they saw me coming, anticipating a flying mud puddle from my rusting red bicycle.

I wondered if they wondered what I love about being ripped and not clean, or what keeps them from wanting to be so, or whether they consider it one way or another. Or if rather there is no consideration about it because there is no other option other than this painfully complete control to maintain the cleanliness about their bodies and clothing. Where does that control come from, who creates it, when and do they rebel against it? And is it only I of the four of us that cares one way or the other?

Cherrie Moraga says this: “All writing is confession. Confession masked and revealed in the voices and faces of our characters. All is hunger. The longing to be fully known and still loved. The admission of our own inherent vulnerability, our weakness, our tenderness of skin, fragility of heart, our overwhelming desire to be relieved of the burden of ourselves in the body of another, to be forgiven of our ultimate aloneness in the mystical body of a god or the common work of a revolution.”

Those of us that do care—that we should be heard and expressed—are we all terribly narcissistic and negative and BAD and BAD and BAD? I like this word, BAD—I think I love it more because it is so vague (it’s that same kind of love of American culture I was talking about), and I will love it that much more today. I could say something like: I strive for vagueness but instead I strive for specificity. But why, exactly, why? Why exactly should I struggle for specificity, like why should I prefer being clean to dirty or dirty to clean?

I suppose what I’m getting at up to now in this essay is that life appears to be full of arbitrary choices: like how we dress our bodies, like what aesthetic we choose to love, like what we do professionally, like where we live, what discourse we speak, who we choose to identify with, whether we live or die. Arbitrary in relation to the rest of the history of the world.

Let me connect my stream of thought to something very grounded, which has to do with Juan moving here. I don’t think I’ve quite expressed how huge this is for me, how much the expectation of him has figured into my experience of life in the past six months, in short—I am clinically in love. I’m out of my gourd. I’m tragically happy. “I’m loony as a June bride.” It’s that same old problem of words again. With all the vocabulary I have sought to use to describe our relationship—commitment, partner, life partner, boyfriend, lover, husband, all of these kinds of words are so difficult to toss around when somehow what I really just want to express is: What a big deal it is for me that he is moving here, how strange it is to me that I could ever live with someone again because deciding to live on my own was so monumental for me. At the time I made that decision to leave was to stray from a path I might have thought I was on. But this is not like any path at all, it is forging something entirely different than I’ve ever known. I suppose there is no rhyme or reason to it and I can’t describe it exactly, it is not about settling, or retracting, or going backwards, or ceasing to grow. But probably you already know this.

I wonder if these phrases reflect my own misunderstanding of what it means to live with someone or have commitment with someone, maybe it is a function of growing older that I am finally able to understand that I don’t have to give up what I am, what I am growing into.

So maybe I've answered my own questions about why it is that I attempt to express myself to others—maybe it’s my downfall—I am seeking acknowledgement from others. Maybe someone will say, “you seek approval from others” in this negative tone of voice (the thought of it makes me laugh out loud) … in so many ways this admonishment doesn’t seem to match who it is that I am (I am so independent—laughter, sarcasm) … But perhaps that is it: I seek approval from others, I mirror myself with others … I am able to see myself only in mirrors. And, oh my god, it’s true, so often I forget who it is that I “am” or am not able to capture “it” at all: what it is to be me, what it is to be a girl or a woman or a mind or a loving being and anyway, am I?

I create my own mirrors. My writing is such a good example—these words are mirrors to see myself and to remember. My photography and self-portraiture reflect this obsessive need to see myself. Should the question of why it is that I write and live to write and save letters as mirrors interest me? Is it a function of the “disorder” itself?

Even in this very letter I have professed to love other people, but perhaps my writing reflects that in fact I do not know how to love in a selfless way.

I listened to beautiful music last night and washed my clothes in the kitchen sink. I listened to Bach’s Cello Suites played by Yo-yo Ma. Then I listened to Track 8 of Dylan’s World Gone Wrong on repeat about ten times and then I listened to Exile on Main Street three times through in entirety. It took a long time to do my laundry by hand.

My thoughts travel from Berlin to Managua, which perhaps spiritually are not so very far apart as they might seem at first glance. Perhaps connected because I could describe similarities in their political history, but more so having to do with laundry.

This was my latest money saving scheme—not to spend 6 euro on laundry at the Launderette but rather to wash my clothes by hand in the sink. It takes a kind of Zen concentration to do so since the water is so cold in the sink and already you’re standing there with a hat on your head. Sink load by sink load, there was something beautiful staring into the metal basin and listening to Bach’s cello suites. I thought about Nicaragua. Of course I remembered that the last time I had had washed like this was just this time of year five years ago. My host family and I washed our clothes and dishes and everything else in the outside sink, the pila. I remembered my host-mother making seafood soup and the image of her throwing all these live blue crabs in the water in the pila and then picking them out one by one and killing them with her knife before throwing them just like that into the soup pot … and further I remembered that the first time I heard yo-yo ma playing Bach’s cello suites was on Rose’s minidisk recorder when we shared a fading yellow paint room in a Cuban hotel. That was the same trip. So long ago. Not so long ago.

Hrair calls me. I am squeezing out the icy water from thinning socks and hanging them one by one on a laundry line I’ve rigged across my bedroom. He always calls at the right moments and as usual imparts me with new wisdom that I need to hear in that moment and love that reinvigorates me with strength, with humor, with the idea that I can go on. This is the first time that he calls that I do not burst out in tears. My entire mood is lifted into laughter and we tell each other how much we love each other and that is the moment that I put on the Stones and laugh out loud.

I tell him about the people here that I have met, finally, that I would call real friends. Friends with whom I sit for hours and talk candidly, without fear, without questioning their trust or their judgment. He might not know it, but Hrair is always a mirror for me, a mirror of myself. And -- I just realized this for the first time -- I think that whenever I talk to Hrair, I always know when I’m lying to myself. All of the lies that I try to hide even from my own eyes get brought to the surface, like talking to mirror, mirror on the wall … So I often find myself weeping or hysterically angry or drastically in love with life.

Pause.

I think I’ve said all I have to say. No—one thing more. I saw something last night on my bike in the snow more jarring than any of the strange images I’ve seen thus far. I had already wiped out once that night, splayed in full on the ice. A car waited patiently for me to pick myself up before circumnavigating the accident. Bruised, I rode carefully the last five miles of my journey. It was two in the morning. I was almost home. Then at the wide intersection of Prenzlauer Allee and Molle Strasse I saw the high wall of a cemetery, overgrown brick and ancient tombstones visible behind. And parked right there was an abandoned baby carriage—thank god, no baby, I checked—rapidly filling with snow. The traffic lights were blinking. My bike light had ceased to work. My toes were freezing, the next tram up Prenzlauer Allee wouldn’t arrive for 45 minutes.

K


Cut-ups [back to top]

May 2005

I haven’t felt much like writing lately; somehow I haven’t been able to get to that point of processing yet. Everything feels like cutups. I have finished fixing the sink, uninstalling the hot water heater from the wall (it didn’t work anyway), changing the faucet, finding out it will only screw in upside down, finding the right kind of sealing tape, five trips to the hardware store later … an upside down sink that works. I am the dancer in a gothic club now full of gothed-out teenagers, German bikers and skeletons on the walls. On Saturday Juan had his first Berlin fashion show, complete with all these other designers, paparazzi, and costume changes in the street.

Mostly these days I’ve been trying to get back into myself, I really fell outside of myself, or far too inside of myself, during those weeks that I was so sick with the flu. I’ve never felt so close to being insane, not in control of my head anymore. There is so much to say. I find myself wanting to relate it all in note form. Life hasn’t gone beyond notes into really understanding what it is that I want to say. Which is maybe a metaphor for larger questions in my life. I’ve been thinking that somehow there is this really big story I want to tell, but I don’t know what it is. I know some of the elements, but I don’t know what the story is yet. I know that it involves the way that the Berlin holocaust memorial—an expanse of concrete graves—looks when I ride past it on my bicycle. I know that it involves advertisement and representations of women—the woman on display at the photography shop blowing bubbles. It involves the aspect of the world getting smaller the farther I travel away from where I started, and the idea of forming communities, localized knowledge versus global knowledge being different kinds. I know it’s about power and speech and saying what I mean in the moment. I know that its about different types of performance and what we “wear” in the various ways we wear clothing. I know it’s about the conversations that stick in our brains.

I’m not sure why the gothic tragedy is so pervasive here especially in Berlin in the cooler months. At times I look around and things seem beyond surreal … Berlin is a city, a village, built on connections and friendships, almost Mafioso, the feeling, that stepping on the wrong person’s toes could be tragic … When I was alone here, I wondered, who can I trust being alone? Where and with whom can I ground myself as a point of normalcy? At moments I feel myself going further over the edge, that with only myself as a point of departure, I have no reference of what is real and normal and right and to some extent this is absolutely beautiful, because it forces me to throw the categories out the window altogether. On the other hand there are moments that my gut tells me something is scary or should be scary or things are slightly askew, and suddenly my mind twists Berlin into some kind of gothic city of dark and morbid hell, that it is coming for me, that the entire structure of it were built around mistrust and conspiracy and stepped upon feet.

I have never had these kinds of thoughts before, I have never been involved in a world that seems so tenuous, where life seems so tenuous, where trust seems so tenuous. And then there are the moments where the sun breaks through, where I feel real trust real love perhaps is forcing its way in, and still I put up a barrier not to trust too much, to be self-protective, because I have to, because I don’t want life to bite me in the ass. Because I don’t want the swirling surreal faces of the night to eat you alive. Why is it that I feel this morbid gothic world at my toes? Where does the world get away with suddenly spinning out of control?

Waking Moments [back to top]

May 2005

Thinking about the idea of nudity onstage, Juan makes a really good point that as long as I’m true to myself that’s the real test. It would be worse if I didn’t involve nudity in my pieces because my boyfriend told me he wouldn’t like it, or if someone from the audience got offended because they took their husband and they didn’t want their husband to see it, or because I was afraid that some woman would take it as offensive to women in general. So I am nude onstage and then let them say what they will say. And I am so tired of women being accused of being less than what they are because there was some kind of sexual insinuation involved, because I daresay that about half of my interactions in life have contained some element of sexuality—but why should that mean that I am less than intelligent or “legitimate”? Is there any kind of unadulterated state of interaction between one being to another? Is it possible to salvage those moments that contain some aspect of seeing one another—when we see each other for what we are, when we recognize, is it possible to salvage those moments even if they appear to be adulterated by something else?

This reminds me of how our personalities are compromised (depending on how we view them) by contradictory behavior. But is it possible to take each moment, or each comment as isolated, so that none of them have history or any kind of symbolism attached to them, so that we take each comment and each word and each moment as placed in one moment in time, apart from everything else.

Take for example the word fuck or the word cunt. Why is the use of such words a signifier that one person is less than intelligent? Why is getting naked the signifier of one being less than intelligent? When I know that for some people, who are seeing everything as sex and are afraid of that feeling and afraid of feeling that feeling of sexuality, trigger that feeling is scary—because somehow people feel that the performer is pandering to someone’s most base desires and using one’s most base talent (that of triggering sexuality in one another) and yet each of us always rely on our most base and basic skills when dealing with one another all the time, our eyes, the flash of our smile, how we deliver our words, how we hold our bodies. And we are not necessarily doing it consciously, with the intent to disarm others or with the desire to get something out of them or because we are “only” our cunt or our smile or our body language… our we instantly reduced to these other qualities because we use them, with anything other than sexuality? Even though one could argue that the flash of the smile is sexuality, too … am I instantly reduced to my cunt as soon as I show it? When I cover it people forget that I have one? How come? Why am I instantly reduced to some ignoramus (whatever that means) when I say the word fuck, why are people suddenly rendered to view me selectively as made up of nothing more than that vocabulary word or that body part? No one thinks of me as merely an elbow for showing my elbow. No one thinks of me as merely a brain when they look at my head? Or perhaps this is why we cover our heads with hair and when we shave them then people think we are nerdy ... no ... though I suppose baldness is a kind of signal of wisdom, of old age, of maturity? To expose one body part is to bring attention to it, to its function, as though it ruled all the other body parts?

Trapped in the artist world where you can only make art about each other and nothing is inspiring in each other and nothing seems new and exciting. So you have to get outside the art world to really see anything anymore. I met a man today who guessed at my age, attacked me with what it is that I am, told me gender politics are old and boring, told me power was uninteresting and then told me he wasn’t playing a power game with me. It was not all that different than any other interaction I’ve had in my life with men in power. It was not all that different and yet I struggle and struggle against believing that I am still living in a world that’s based on these clockwork interactions.

Conversations with my mother about dressing and how I dress. The advantage to these conversations is that my ideas about how I dress are granted some kind of theoretical backbone, whether or not my waking in the morning is deserving of such critical analysis—like whether or not I wake in the morning and think of Judith Butler before getting dressed, or whether or not I think, I am going to change society’s view of gender today when I get dressed, I’m going to gender fuck! One film maker I talked to said “what. .. you’re a 25, 26 year old girl with a little writing degree and what .. you think you’re so cutting edge, so righteous. …” and I said, I don’t think of myself as rebellious, I don’t think of myself as cutting edge, these are not how I think of myself. “oh? How do you think of yourself” he didn’t let me answer, he just kept talking, but I thought about it, like, how do I think of myself. and I thought of loving, self-reflective, vulnerable, sensitive… I don’t think of the way that I’ve ever dressed (and its undergone a myriad of changes) has ever been much “more” than a collection of appropriated and temporarily loved aesthetics. But then, is anyone’s dress much more than that … other than people who feel entirely trapped more by what they “can’t wear” (ripped stockings, tight clothing, horizontal stripes, clashing colors, ripped edges) than guided by emulating the images they would “like” to wear? But do any of us live lives completely divorced from fear, are any of our decisions ever completely divorced from some kind of deep deep fear? “My choices” are not solely and purely my own … in part because I am lazy, and to be dressed in the most purely “me” at a moment would be to put a huge emphasis on clothing every morning when I wake up and to sort of give one’s life to one thing, like the surface aesthetic of one’s image.

And this makes me think about how time is so … exhausting, that we could choose to spend all our time on one thing, just one little thing in our lives and never feel like we have perfected it. Like wouldn’t interpersonal relationships be so much richer, even, if we spent all of our time focusing on them, endless conversations to be had with our partners. I often feel this way with juan, that we could talk and talk and never be done, that we could spend all of our focus on each other, on improving the way that we relate, and yet we don’t have the time or the desire to make each other our only priority in our lives ... and we don’t have the time or the desire to make getting dressed in the morning our only priority when we wake up in the morning … and we don’t have the time or the desire to make cooking great food our only priority, and yet there is always the lesson learned that—wouldn’t it be so great if we could. Wouldn’t we be so much more spiritual if we spent all our time meditating. Wouldn’t we be so much more giving if we spent all of our waking moments giving.

Kids [back to top]

15 august 2005

Are there sometimes people in your life that you almost never talk about? The two children I teach English to are two people in my life that I seldom talk about with people back home. I come to their house once a week. I ride the S1 north to Oranienburg and get off at Frohnau. Then I walk down the cobblestone sidewalks down to their street and come through their gate. I walk up the front path and the front door is normally open. We don’t always have a plan. Most times we have no plan at all. We just play together. I am their English teacher and their friend, I hope. I hope I am their friend. The little girl is six and the little boy is 8 years old, but both of them seem much more mature than their age.

I’m not sure why I forget to talk about them, because they are one of my only constants through all of the changes that have occurred for me since coming to Berlin. Being their teacher was one of the ways that I got through the hardest financial times … lived on it for a while at only 50 euro a week. This teaching job was the first job I interviewed for, the first hectic cell phone call I dialed that made my phone card run out and left me screaming with frustration that cell phone calls are so expensive to make.

They are the family that donated their rugs to me, their vacuum cleaner, a beautiful table, and even made me a little cake and had some wine ready for me when I was alone in Berlin on my birthday. I decorated the Christmas tree with their kids and sang Christmas carols in German and English. I’ve sat with them over countless meals and laughed with them. This family has been a staple part of my life, so gentle and warm to me, yet I have forgotten to mention them.

It is not as thought they have not made an impression on me. Quite the opposite. They have changed me, or I have changed and they have facilitated the self-realization of that change. For one thing, I’ve never thought that I would be good playing with kids. I was always a kind of serious kid, and as a teenager I was even more serious, which made it difficult for me to play with kids, because I couldn’t let go of it and forget my adult self enough to just be there, with them. I’ve always been goofy with my peers, I’ve always been able to get to that place, but still children always scared me, almost, that I wouldn’t say or do the right thing. Somehow, in recent years, I’ve returned to that childhood place, at least enough to leave behind some of the control and come into my child self … which really isn’t coming into anything at all. It’s just about forgetting and losing my control and not thinking too much, enough to just listen and watch and be.

“My” kids and I perform together. We are constantly role-playing, we are constantly playing make believe, which is not so much performing as it is learning to stop editing myself, which as a writer is sometimes difficult, because I when I write, I always have time to edit, I always have time to correct myself, make myself sound more mature or more intelligent or more creative or more thoughtful than I really am when I just open my mouth. I can always stare at my words for an hour and choose them more carefully. But I’ve stopped doing that as much, I’ve stopped the editing, and I’m trying, pushing myself, or letting myself naturally come into speaking without thinking, playing without trying, performing without thinking, becoming the pirate or the princess or the fortune teller, without thinking too much. That’s when we go into our imaginary world and I forget the things that tend to distract me … like when I can go home, like whether or not I’ll be able to pay the rent, like whether or not I’m happy, like whether or not I want to stay in Berlin. These stupid things I find myself drifting off into, when really, I should be just concentrating—or not concentrating—on simply being with these kids.

The little boy and I played pirate today; he was invisible and I had to turn him into stone so that I could see him again. It was raining but he wanted to play outside anyway. He refused to wear a coat. I had blue and green tights on and we were both wearing great big blue galoshes that we borrowed from his mother. We made swords out of sticks and magic wands out of grass and magic feathers out of cardboard.

Before playing pirate I watched live videos with the little girl of when she was a baby and their family lived in the Pankow area of Berlin. It was strange, watching home videos with a child who lives in an age when “every” little kid has digital video of themselves as babies sitting on the family computer. We watched it in surreal pixilated computer time. It was surreal just as all of life in Berlin has been surreal, and I do not mean that lightly, I just cease to know how to explain it any longer. The fact of Berlin, quit simply, is surreal. Perhaps it is Berlin, perhaps it is the immigrant experience. But, it is. I have come into the lives of these members of this family, who are so much like me, so close to my age, really, almost my peers. They live in Berlin and the dad is a musician and plays for the one of the most distinguished orchestras in town. Plays the saxophone. The mother is an artist and doesn’t have to work. Their children will grow up truly bilingual and most certainly talented musically.

Some days the kids and I just turn on the Beetles and dance around the room. I cannot understand how it is that the little boy can open his mouth the way he does, it is though he is already training to be a rock star. Both he and the little girl are natural performers; they turn on the music and open their mouths wide and jump. What is somehow most endearing is that they almost always change into “performance” outfits … The girl into her ballet uniform and the boy into his hiphop red suit. Then they are ready to shout out “lucy in the sky with diamonds!” louder and with more gusto. I let go and encourage them, singing just as loudly, and we assume the part of guitarist or drummer or lead singer.

The little boy has a box of special collections. I love special collections because I too had my boxes. One drawer has broken off colored pencil tips. Another drawer has euros from different EU countries. Another drawer is for rubber bands. His face is small next to it. He shows me each drawer. Sometimes he leans against me naturally when he shows me his collections, and this gesture makes me feel happy because it is so unintentional, as though I am finally accepted enough to be touched in such an unintentional way. I am at an age that is least connected with family. I lived 18 years with family and I know that before too long I will be making another family; already Juan and I are creating our little two-person family. But for the most part this is a time most disconnected from family, and so it is nice to have these moments of inclusiveness that are symbolized in just the smallest touch.

The kids have a fish pond in a concrete hole in the backyard. There are ten goldfish in there: one of them belongs to the little girl; it has a black spot on its head. The other one is the little boy’s: it has a black spot just on the tail. His name is Leo. Their mom tried to put logs into the water as decoration but found out that they float and the kids jumped in to swim and balance on the logs. I saw a video of them jumping in naked. They were shouting at each other in German.

The little girl says to me, was heisst das when I use a word she doesn’t know. I can tell that she is improving because there are times when she constructs whole sentences in English, a bit broken, but still, constructing and filling in with newly learned words. She is not as shy as she used to be and it is rewarding to see her get better, to see her grow in her understanding of what I am saying to her. It is harder to teach the boy because he is so good at English already that at times I wonder how to challenge him short of sitting him down with an advanced English book. His parents don’t want me to do that kind of teaching, though, so we play. At times I think he gets away with not learning more complicated sentences simply because it’s easy to use the bare minimum. So I push him, I try to get him to speak to me about more complicated subjects, without him knowing that I’m trying to push him. And I know that when I try to do a better job and attempt to include myself more as an engaged teacher, concerned about actually teaching them better, I succeed, and it becomes even more rewarding.

Vivienne [back to top]

August 2005

I realize that to some extent I am very lost. I realize that to some extent I am very alone, I am very much a fish out of water, no matter where I am, because I am never content to be exactly where I am. As soon as I feel content I desire to stretch it again, driving those who love me absolutely mad. I realize that if I do not change I go crazy internally because I convince myself that change will never happen again. I realize that to some extent I am lost in my writing, that I produce nothing of value, that I am a failure, that I am not that talented in particular at anything, that I am fooling myself, that my ideas are not that original, that I am unable to keep up with contemporary ideas that are being published, because I do not read enough, that in fact history is coming out from under my feet and I am not there at the forefront of it at all, and I do not even know what that means. I realize that I do not know where I want to be living, that in some way it does not matter, because I will always find people that I love and I will always feel that I am not loved enough, or that I do not fit in enough, that I will seek refuge in my partner but will escape him or her for some stranger and that these interactions with strangers is what excites me somehow as does the touch of my lover I have known for years. I realize that I am all of these things and finding strength within myself feels at times so illusive and futile. I am scared of what my family thinks of me, or I am annoyed of it, and yet I cannot cut from them completely. I desire to do things but I do not always do what I want because I realize that we are not supposed to always do what we want but I cannot figure when the times are that we are supposed to do what we want and when are the times that we are supposed to be bigger than that.


4 October 2005

We wake up to our new room, we didn’t sleep the first night, boys shouting outside and our window open to let in the air and let out old spirits. We wake under the towering shadow of the fernsehturm, a giant space needle in our eye like a movie set of some false penthouse we could never afford. Here we are in the center of the city, in the center of old East Berlin and my desk faces a window, I can look out onto the offices of the BVG, the Bahn administration. We try to get marriage papers today, it is another goose chase, and we must go down that road but today we don’t feel like rushing everything too much, we have to try as we will to make it happen with time. I can’t make marriage papers a stressful affair, I lost steam on the housing and this is something too important and dear to my heart to waste time not enjoying through stress. I can feel my period oncoming and for several months I believe I have been less sick than I was before, that means, no more clear migraines, though there are times that it feels my brain does not work the same as it used to, and I wonder if it really has changed, if it is less sharp, if it is changing as I get older, if I am simply learning and growing at an exponential rate, or if I am damaged or crazy or dying. I want to sit on the floor and cut out my zine. This means stop writing right now! And start doing.

Last night dancing with a white mask over my face … I often forget to relay this aspect of my dancing, that I have become quite accustomed to dancing with very little range of vision. I love the fantasy of it, both of the gender and of the eyes and what lies within the eyes. I also love the anonymity that I am afforded as a dancer. It is magnificent what I can do with the mask on. Sometimes as I am dancing I begin to think to myself, how strange what it is that I am doing here on top of this bar. I look down the bar and some people are looking at me … but maybe not all, maybe many are talking. It is funny when they are simply talking and there I am, dancing. They don’t touch me, they hardly regard me at all. With the mask, I grab more of their attention and I also become more engaged because the anonymity mentally allows me to do more than I think I would without a mask. Although this is really about practice. I realize that the candor that a mask provides is achieved also simply through practice. I do not wear a mask when I go find someone to fuck, when I am in a surreal situation with someone, especially sexually, that could be so “strange” and yet is so “real.” I do not yet know how to describe all that I am feeling.

2 February 2006 Thursday morning, 3:00 or so

Should I be outraged? Should this bother me? “The perfect drink for date rape” the menu says at white trash. I mean after all that’s the point, its about white trash, we’re all supposed to know how wrong date rape is, and I think for the most part “we” do, I mean, Berliners that find themselves in the white trash restaurant. Its not a us sausage factory, you don’t have me necessarily rubbing themselves up against you, groping you unexpectedly. Or—is that a lie? White trash … is … a large old Irish restaurant located on schonhauser allee, not far from the base of the TV tower (fernsehturm). Its been “kitsched” out so that the fun of it is precisely in the irony, and the “postmodern” juxtapositions like tacky Chinese decorations with electric Jesus clocks and alcohol and coke heads that snort in the bathrooms hedonistic partiers that continue to stream into the restaurant until 7 am and will talk politics with their waitress at four in the morning or five or six, or what time is it, the one can’t tell … and tell her how much they hate George bush and why has she decided to come to Berlin. The time is irrelevant, no sunlight penetrates the red walls, the gold ornate columns, the messy bar, the broken bottles, I've never seen so many bottles in my life, I’ve never served so many drinks to one person in a night. Surely 8 double shots of whiskey would put someone over the edge and yet they still manage to get themselves home, by bicycle in twenty below weather (me and Juan) or by u-bahn. They are a quiet kind of people, in a way, I never see them overly emotional, yet they are purposely reckless and full of abandon and yet no, they are exacting and pointed. The DJ plays vintage country and rock n' roll, he is not a young hipster DJ, he is a man in his late forties with a balding head wearing a suit. The bartenders are strong women and men, most of them with tattoos, who doesn’t have one. They bark and you and you better learn how to bark back or they will eat you alive, or make you feel that they are about to. Hopi next door is in jail, the one who runs the “last cathedral” the bar that I dance at on Fridays and Saturdays and which happens to be just two doors down from white trash. An anarchist magazine published by the east European activists proclaims that some go-go dancers and burlesque dancers would say they their professions are the ultimate expression of their feminism, as least there are those out there, I personally go back and forth about it, what it means to be ultimately expressing of anything, how to make change, to be transgressive, although I would have to say that Berlin is one place where you don’t necessarily have so many people expressly speaking about their politics as they simply are living their politics out, setting an example, I suppose, to anyone who would like to watch. They are a quiet people in that respect. They ride their bicycles with their children on the back through traffic and turn out lights when their done using them and don’t use warm water in the sink to wash the dishes. They treat women with respect and don’t oogle them unnecessarily, or so it seems, or perhaps this is the circles I find myself in. there are plenty of examples of hard and strong women, they come to the last cathedral and root me on, after I get off the bar I sit next to them and talk about politics and how terrible the current unemployment rate is and how difficult to find a job. A spoke with a young gay artist and he wont get a job because its simply easier to live off the dole, and isn’t it? I would have to agree. Many of them seem to sit there and drink and drink and Hopi’s in jail. that the boss. Has he gone on urlaub I asked my other boss? Yes, on a long urlaub he says, but Tomek told me the truth, Tomek is the fire breather who makes fire and spins it while I dance. He hands me a stick of fire and I dance with the stick of fire as well, its all quite a show, a big production. Tomek told me he’s in jail but we don’t know when he comes out and we don’t much care. It hard living in the dark these days, Tomek and I live in the dark when we work. In the depths of the last cathedral bar and there under are the creature of the night “no tears for the creatures of the night. No tears.” Make-up and dark, beautiful creatures, and the sweetest you've ever met when you talk to them, they are ageless, they are exquisite gothic kids. Children of death, or of life, of striving, of limits, of wanting to take it to the borders, I am not sure. I’m fascinated by them, I find myself staring at them with childlike adoration, and it is strange, because they stare at me in the same way, I am the “dancer,” I am the one with the confidence and the grace and the sex to climb on the bar and to be the symbol of that sexuality. But it’s a lie, of course, all the costumes are a “lie.” No, not a lie, just that they are so irrelevant to what it is we actually are. I wonder how these women, they must be only 17 can look so grown, so in control, so guided and confident. I watch two girls making out and envy them, their conviction, their curiosity, their desire, and their beauty. I was never that at 17, at least not in those ways. Not so daring, not so confident with my strangeness, I thought the same of the gay punks I saw in the kopi squat, two colorful Mohawks kissing in front of me, teal and green. It surprised me again my stereotypes so misguided, as stereotypes are, that punks are gay somehow, and why would I think that when I know very well just how free punks are. I suppose I have become too accustomed to flamboyant gay men that are well dressed preps with always more money than I have a penchant for speed or cocaine or e or all three. Kopi squat is the basement you would never go into, brick lined and a punk band playing so loud you know you’ve lost your hearing from it, they are screaming and its 2 3 in the morning, no one seems to care, there is no bedtime, the beers are 1.50 and whose the authority around here, doesn’t seem to be any, no security guy, no one person in charge, no police rapping on the door, no one at all. The rest of the house stands above, its five floors of rooms and plants and shared kitchens this enormous monument to beauty of communal living . I long to be there fully, there is a part of me, at least, that longs to be there fully. I miss the daylight terribly. I miss waking up in the early morning, near the ocean, or in the rainforest, I think of Haiti, I miss it, I miss the heat. I miss the purpose of it, the endlessness of time, of being there alone and needing to soak in so many ideas for myself and wondering how I would possibly get it all done, read enough. Here time alludes me and it is always dark. It was nearly dark when we awoke today, three in the afternoon, that’s 15 Uhr. And we did our laundry it was already dark at 17 hours. We tried to visit our friend in the hospital but he was going to sleep already, then we went to pass out fliers, this is part of our job as hosting the night tomorrow night at king kong. There is no point in going to bed any earlier than we did last night, because we know that tomorrow night we will not be able to go to bed until the time we went to bed last night. We are simply not tired at 3 or 4. perhaps by five we will be tired and think about sleeping, perhaps a little less this time so we see the daylight for an hour or two. I long for this. I wish I could chase down the sun, go find it. Chase the sun to the end of the earth. I wonder, should this outrage us, the lack of sun, the time that alludes us, the endlessness of the gigs, of the work, of the pattern to the work. How do we ever get out of this pattern once we start? Or is this forever how it will be. Wait stop. Does this outrage us? Should it? Tits shaping our menus, pink tit menus with drinks on the back. Is this irony at its best? Hopi’s in jail. take another shot with us. Brown tequila with an orange and a spot of cinnamon on top. Call that guy, its 80 for a gig, it’s a private party perhaps. Would you like to perform on Friday, sound-check at 7 and then hang out, show at 12. We know it wont be until that late at least, who goes out before midnight anyway. We are tired and angry, no awake and upset, do you have long papers, we need long papers to roll the joint, they say, do you have a cigarette, want one? They are smoking and smoking and never stop. I tell you it never stops, my throat is so dry, fully through from the top to the very bottom, I can feel it scraping, I want another throat lozenge. We got them for free at the fashion show that was bored models looking so out of it, scuffed uninteresting, unspirited, walking through the fish tanks at the aquarium, the electric green eels’ eyes popping out at mine.

25 March 2006

I wake up disoriented and anxious. Something jerks me awake but it’s not my alarm clock. Its four thirty in the afternoon and I see that I’ve already missed the sun for the day, if there was any, since it’s gray and drizzly out my window. At least it’s warm enough that the snow broke. Its March 25 and I’m ready for the end of the winter. But I wouldn’t be that surprised to see more snow before the end of March, or April, even. Why am I down, asked Nora? I don’t know, it could be that I work nights and sleep days, but not always, but then, when I do, it feels so overwhelming and takes over, that it seems to be my entire life. But I don’t really think that’s it. I remember some of the first nights at the Trash when I felt so liberated to be working at five in the morning. I suppose it was the novelty of it, and that fact that although it was hellish work, the people weren’t all that bad, the music was good, and here I am, putting up chairs, cleaning tables, at five in the morning, chasing the last bottles and glasses back to their correct places, but I’m choosing this, for now, and I’m making this, for now, I’m making this happen for me. I suppose it was the fact that as an independent woman I had the nerve to make it happen in a strange and foreign place and here I was, about to walk out in the dawn light with 100 more euros to add to my savings. This morning, however, as I was placing chairs on tables, fear came over me, fear that I can’t do anything else. That in order to do anything else I would have to once again make an enormous life change. And if I did that, would Juan come with me? Would the things I know come with me, would my skills come with me, in a way that they could be retained? Sudden fear that I don’t know where all this is “going.” But then, that’s accompanied by a very real sense of security, paradoxically, that even though I don’t “know” where this is all going, I do feel that I still have to wait it out, that there is too much going on for it not to be “going.” And that at least the performing is making me happy enough to continue that, to keep going on that “path.” I resolved to do something about it. I resolved simply to work less at the white trash, only once a week. I keep once a week for posterity’s sake. I like “being a waitress at white trash.” I like it that people recognize me. I like it that people know I’m a performer and ask me when my next gig is, where they can come see me dance. People I don’t know, have never seen before. I like it that people think I’m so strong and crazy when I dance, falling backwards off tables, that I must be a man. But when they see me they are remarked by my femininity. The thing is, I’m not sad, I couldn’t be, I’m not depressed, I couldn’t be. I performing almost three or four times a week, these days … I’m constantly getting offers from people to do more gigs, and the fact that I’m saying it scares me that this could all be “temporary.” I hope not, and I mean that. The thing that depresses me at times is the fact that I shouldn’t be depressed and yet I “am.” I wake up in the mornings and I just feel a bit—depressed, sad, disoriented. I feel a bit trapped, not free the way that I was, not carefree. But then, Can I really attribute all of that to a relationship? Do I want to do that to myself? and if I do, does that mean that the only solution is out of the relationship, in which case I feel saddened and hopeless. And then I really feel, as well, what will become of me? Juan helps me develop so much as a performer. He is half of my performing life. I could do it alone, but it would look different. Am I prepared for that? But moreover, is that what I really want? Don’t I want to challenge myself what I thought I could do and be and actually make a partnership happen simultaneously with the feelings and strength of “freedom?” The answer is YES>

What is remarkable? Oh, Nora, that is was raining this morning on my way home at 8:00 on a Saturday. That morning workers were headed home slicked and showered, while others, like me, were crusty and blackened, smoky and huddled, ready for their beds. The Berlin skyline was gray—there is really no Berlin skyline. I detest this aspect of most cities, no views, no hills, no topography that is as noticeable as the bay area. I worry that “I” battle depression, and that although Juan met me in the highest upswing I’d ever had, that on the trajectory of my life, I will always be “battling” depression. I’ve made a resolution, however, to be happy. I am happy, after all. I am happy. I’ve gotta believe it. Or I’ve got to expose myself more, I’ve got to get hungrier for something else, I’ve got to expose my hunger to someone or someplace that will listen. Or? Don’t I have that? Am I blind to that? What is remarkable? Girls and boys bathroom doors swinging open and shut with drug takers and couples fucking. Is this the Max’s Diner, Kansas City, of the 21st Century? I hope so. Why the fuck not?

staying [back to top]

26 September 2005

It’s coming up to a year here in Berlin and the range of emotions and problems and mountains that I’ve crossed overwhelms me. Juan and I made the enormous decision not to take our return flights to the United States. I would like to say that we made this decision actively, as opposed to passively. I would like to say that we knew months in advance that we ere going to stay, and maybe some deep part of us did, but the truth is, we felt completely torn as to whether or not to return to the States.

The morning that our flights departed from Tegel airport, with neither of us strapped into our seatbelts rocketing into the air, I was dancing in Charlottenberg at a studio practicing for a production in Mainz, and Juan was silk-screening and sewing the prototypes of 25 shirt designs for Minus Records. Neither of us had much choice about staying or going unless we simply abandoned our projects and threw in the towel, as though Berlin were not real life and the future for us here were not charging ahead.

It’s funny how things go in circles, cycles completed, renewed, remade. The very first night I arrived in Berlin, Athena took me to a party at her apartment; the quintessential spacious East Berlin apartment with high ceilings and long windows and fading sixties wallpaper. All these hipster artists and DJs had set up turntables in the living room and were playing records and drinking Polish vodka. It is this very apartment, in fact, Athena’s very room, that Juan and I will now be moving into, one year later.

We would like to live on our own, but it’s been so difficult to obtain our own lease on an apartment. What we’ve discovered, after the trouble of tons of meetings and biking around all of Berlin searching for the perfect place, is that if you go through any kind of apartment advertised by a broker, they are going to ask for a mountain of paperwork, just like they do in the United States. All of this is surmountable, the only catch is, everything is in German: the paperwork, the phone appointments, all the brokers, all the everything. Of course, I do live in Germany, after all. It’s just that it’s so terribly frustrating to navigate a new language, no matter how much I’ve learned, and every little thing, every little bill that I have a question about and need to make a call to the company regarding, or worse—navigating the legal system to gain a Visa, every little turn feels like the largest mountain to climb because it’s not my mother tongue. That is not to say that I haven’t done it, done my best. Bullshitted like the best of them … filled in forms that I had no idea the meaning of ... Signed my name here and there and for the most part understood vaguely what was going on. Still, we were denied by at least two brokers.

That said, one of the richest parts of my experience here has been the privilege (and

difficulty) of being part of an immigrant community. This is something that I really could not have experienced in the United States, despite having worked with and advocated for immigrants to the United States for several years. One of the things that I’ve discovered is that English-speakers congregate together not necessarily because we can’t speak German or because our business is in English—on the contrary, much of our business has to be conducted in German. Rather, I think that communities unite around a common language because humor is key to survival in a strange and unfriendly community … and humor is often that which is first lost in translation. Though, I have to admit, that there are still some aspects of humor that are “lost in translation” between my many English-speaking friends (Polish, Australian, Spanish, English, New Zealander) because our pop cultural icons, archetypes and signifiers do differ greatly, despite TV, internet and other means of globalization.

The second thing I’ve discovered about our immigrant community is that we have, consciously or not, formed mythology around our new home. I find this to be especially interesting. I suppose there is part of me that has always known that immigrant communities in the United States also form their own mythology; it’s just that I wasn’t

privy to it, and I couldn’t really understand it because I couldn’t own it. Whereas here in

Berlin, I am able to take part in this mythology-making in a way that appears organic. What I mean is, it is not as though the members of our particular immigrant group get together and decide how we should “feel” about this place called Berlin … it is rather that each of us develop a very common story on our own and then we come together and compare and find ourselves miraculously agreeing about what we have discovered. This would imply that there is some degree of truth to what we have “discovered.”

Of course there is truth to it, but there is also a very lively act of myth creation—specifically the creation of reasons to move forward and to survive. This has less to do with truth than it does with a necessity to create justification for choosing to place

oneself within an environment that is generally harsh and unfair.

As for what this mythology consists of, I would say that the backbone of it is addiction. In other words, the draw of Berlin is that it is inherently addictive. It is a city of addiction. It is a city of alcoholism that will eat you alive. You could drink your troubles away, day and night; the bars never close and you’ll almost never be thrown out unless you make serious trouble. You could find any drug you desired and not have to worry much about the legal consequences, only the health risks—if you’re not self-destructive enough to care. You could find and pay for—or not pay for—any kind of sex you can imagine. There is an air of openness here that lends itself to anarchy, or an anarchy that lends itself to openness … each man and woman for herself, with the responsibility of carrying out one’s ones life to his or her desires ... live and let live, be and let be. This means that there is an emphasis on honesty, taking responsibility for one’s own wrongdoing, taking blame and paying, in one way or another, for what one “owes.” With this follows a community built on sharing and communal materials, passing on used furniture, clothing, and apartments, the elimination of waste, and the tendency to create jobs where there are “none,” i.e., an extensive informal economy. Artistic expression and experimentation is encouraged, and “bad” art is tolerated along with the “good,” which manages to swim its way to the top. The reality is that most of the people who find themselves attracted to such a place are misfits, independents, and generally crazy, with a propensity for addiction or laziness or depression or all of these … and, because they are misfits, they cannot always get along with one another. They sit around the lunch table and won’t talk … they hang out in after school detention singing their own tune, united only in rebellion.

Some have said that everyone who comes to Berlin is trying to escape something about their former reality yet inevitably runs head-on into it, reincarnated as some twisted and more dangerous version of its former self. The expression Be Real! is never uttered but it’s written on bathroom doors, and it’s interpreted as excuse to be rude when one feels like it, unhappy when one feels like it, and in general never hide feelings of misery. The upside is that people don’t tend to hold grudges even though some of them are getting their feelings hurt daily and meanwhile learning to grow a very tough skin. The mythology is that we love it, we can’t get enough of it, and indeed we can’t, because we

feel more free here than we ever have in our lives. All of us who have longed forever to be free, free, free have never felt so free, and the freedom itself becomes the addiction. So maybe that’s what “it” is about Berlin—it’s the freedom. So as soon as we go anywhere else we realize that it’s just not as free, and we feel a sense of unexplained elation at the thought of returning to Berlin, no matter how hard the struggle to make it.

Because although the cost of living has never been so low, the ability to work has never been so hard and we have never been so poor. We have also never been in a place that is so oriented around the acceptance of poverty and therefore the ability to make it despite that reality … meaning that most of us are broke, we can talk about it all day and never get tired of it, we can understand when the other hasn’t a euro that day or that week, and there is no requirement to own the latest this or that or to keep up with the Jones’s since, in our community at large, there just aren’t any Jones’s. In fact there is a definite anti-Jones sentiment and a commitment, almost an obsession, with being as alternative as possible. Alternative meaning that consumer culture is out, not only by trend but by necessity.

My feelings on this common mythology were reified after this weekend when I participated in a dance production/fashion show where each dancer wore an outfit made out of recycled materials designed by a Spanish artist who has lived in Berlin for 13 years. Formed from the materials one can find on the streets of Berlin … caution tape, metal wire, paper milch cartons, beer caps, old shoes, piping, each outfit was constructed as a symbol of Berlin and the significance of this particular designer’s relationship with Berlin. I wore two outfits. The first was made out of vacuum cleaners, symbolizing the way that Berlin sucks the energy completely out of your body—between being broke, not being legal, finding jobs and then losing them, trying to be an artist but getting caught up in the freedom and not creating, attempting to speak German but always and ever a bit too far from real communication, isolation from family and friends, not to mention the kind of alienation some of us have expressed that have been placed on them by friends and family that just do not understand the reason or meaning behind our strange migration … nor the reasons that we cannot come home … all of this stress and yet the masochistic drive to stay within it, the drive to succeed.

Our energy is slowly sucked from us, the drinking that flows like water and the drugs that if you are not careful will claim your life … all of this … and you find that you are not breathing, you have no health care, and your health is worse than ever. Then you leave, perhaps, for a single moment, and all of your energy rushes back and you run to

Berlin, back to the vacuum cleaner that will suck you and suck you and suck …

The second outfit is made of shoes, which is about the durability of one’s self, the idea of

self-preservation which may require the thickening of skin until it is like leather, the

soles and calluses we form on our feet and hands to survive the winter, the hauling of coal, the rudeness of strangers, the walls that are constructed in our paths, even by people we thought would be kind to us, and we walk on. I found it interesting that she embodied these two mythologies of Berlin in the outfits she gave me because these are exactly the mythology that I have spoken of with others, that we have made allusions to in our own art, or have at least spoken of, discussed, and there she owning that same mythology. Which gets back to what I was saying in the beginning, that somehow we find ourselves constructing the same stories, feeling the same things, as though there really is a Zeitgeist that each of us is able to put our fingers on and recognize, anyone who has experienced it. And this makes me wonder whether or not this is a mythology familiar to any immigrant experience, to any place, Berlin or the United States or Mexico or any new home … the kind of sadomasochism that must go into the decision to keep on in a place that one knows full well is unfriendly to them and yet – is not, not always unfriendly.

All of this certainly brings me to think about a much wider circle, larger than the one of moving into the same apartment that I saw the very first night that I arrived in Berlin (which, one could argue, makes perfect since, given the way that immigrant communities form bonds, form micro-communities and flats such as these stay in the family, as it were, and it wouldn’t take long to discover that there are only a few degrees of separation between me and any other immigrant to Berlin). This larger circle is that my father was an immigrant to the United States and his parents had to learn English as adults and never fully became bilingual (I have a distinct memory of “teaching” my grandmother English in the van at around age six) and the hardships they must have encountered, the kinds of misunderstandings and alienation experienced by their family, the toughness my father faced as a young boy learning English, though it should be said that he was “lucky” enough to have come at a young enough age so that he has no accent and is fully bilingual. The circle is that now I am going back to his childhood home, pulled there in fact not for any reason having to do with him, at least not in a direct way, that was not my reason for coming here, though I think, as Joe Frank says, we are all pulled along in life by forces beyond our own comprehension … and this may in fact be part of how the mythology gets formed. We must create, in retrospect, the reasons for those subconscious actions of ours … In any case, I was pulled to Berlin and here I have begun to hear a language I heard my father speaking with his parents and his brothers at a very young age and the way that the language sounds makes sense to a deep and subconscious part of myself and slowly, slowly, I pick it up again, because the very basic structure of it jives with me. So, without sounding too corny, I am returning to my “roots” by being here.

And Juan, whose family was an immigrant to the United States, is now an immigrant “again” in Europe and he is befriending so many Spanish friends who have made Berlin their home.

As ever, we are continuing to miss the community we had in the states. I am continuing to think of you daily, and to miss the ease of communication and the sense that nothing is lost in translation, that I am known in my many manifestations and over many many years. Please write and tell me how you are.

Lots of love

Katie