anti:freeze

rough notes (toward an essay I'm writing for a friend)

Radio Frequency Identification. Just for today, I like the sound of it. I like the idea of identity transmitted through the air - a little black box for when I plunge into the river, disappear from the bus stop, hike into the desert and never return. Imagine RFID chips ground into a powder, a dust, a sparkling glitter, brushed over my eyelids and cheeks. Would you know, finally, that I am jealous of the desert? Jealous of the ground you walk on?

Or imagine them as hard chips of ice, crunched between my teeth, shrill pains shooting through sensitive bone, the shards melting as they slide past my swollen tonsils. As dirt: crammed beneath my fingernails, snagged in broken hair cuticles.

If you tuned into my frequency, you would know that I walked all morning along the waterfront before I realized spring would not change anything. That it is two weeks until the day Ashley died. That this time last year, no doctor would slice my cancer away - not without insurance, and not without payment upfront. That my surgery finally happened on the day President Bush ordered bombs dropped on Iraq. That yesterday, I wasted three hours watching people walk in and out of the side door of a downtown cafe. That I did the same thing the day before. And the day before. That I finally made it through winter without a breakdown, but I am not so sure about summer.

Just for today, I like the sound of you listening in. What would you say as I lie down beneath the Burnside Bridge, watching water reflections dance on the underside of the span? Would you tune into my frequency at all, if you could?

If you're hungry for some free music, check out the brilliant, dazzling, gorgeous, spectacular Natalie LeBrecht. Natalie and I used to raise hell in the halls of the art history building at U of Iowa, and now she's run off to New York to hit it big.

(If you're reading this Natalie, I promise it won't be long before I join you).

I. In the lobby of the lawyer's office, Wednesday morning:

Today's newspaper tells the story of a woman who set fire to a house, kidnapped a ten-day-old infant from inside, and raised the baby as her own for six years. Meanwhile, authorities presumed the baby burned to death. The body must have been incinerated, police said. Bone fragments were all that was left. This is exactly what the kidnapper planned. If the baby was dead, it was not a missing person. No missing person, no kidnapping.

The baby's mother, however, had questions. Why was the crib empty when she ran into the nursery? Why was the window pushed open?

Fast forward to January 2004. This mother attends a birthday party, where she immediately recognizes her long-lost daughter among the toddlers. She leans down and pretends to pry bubble gum from the girl's hair, yanking a handful of DNA for the forensics lab.

And the DNA matches. And in that insant, her dead child becomes a missing child.

I am impressed by the mother's presence of mind - that she could press her fingertips into the scalp, yank the hair by its root, remembering the tiny bones in the nursery, the empty crib, the body no one ever found.

The receptionist stands up to stretch, notices the newspaper. "Amazing story."

"I wonder how she knew," I say.

She nods her head. "Mothers just know."

I fold the paper and lay it down on the table, checking my watch. Conversations like this make me nervous. Waiting rooms make me nervous.

The receptionist picks up her coffee mug and sips slowly, staring out the window. "There are no secrets. Not anymore. Not with all that technology out there."

There are no secrets.

Later, I think about the little girl, how she let a stranger tug hair from her scalp, how she never asked to see the bubble gum.

II. In the cafe, watching people walk in and out of the door, Wednesday afternoon:

Did you know that most RFID tags have no batteries? Probing radio signals provide the power, the charge, the spark that brings them to life. In other words, they are charged by the interest that is shown in them.

So what happens when the secrets are all leaked? When you listen in on all my worst days? When I can't hide the lipstick in my pocket, or the torn dollar bill in my wallet, the shrinking measurements of my clothing? When there is nothing left to probe? No need for a new signal, a new spark? Do we all become missing people, now that we can be found?

Please, please, please read The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry by Rafael Campo. I am devouring it for the second time this weekend, and once again, I am amazed by its tenderness and brilliance.

Also read: The Desire to Heal: A Dcotor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry (which, by the way, was called The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire in the hardback edition - interesting shift in nuance and meaning). And do not forget his poetry, especially Diva.

Sigh. My ridiculous, adolescent crush on this man only gets worse with every read.

And I thought I was obsessed with Moleskine notebooks ... The folks at Moleskinerie have elevated notebook love from mere fetish to life necessity. (Or is that the other way around?)

more rough notes (toward an essay I am writing for a friend)

other notes here, here and here.

Last night, I learned that scientists are mixing lanthanide metal oxide ions with glass, and from this, creating almost-invisible beads. No two beads are alike. When exposed to ultraviolet light, their lanthanide glows in 100 billion unique combinations - like bar codes. These beads can be mixed into ink, spread invisibly across money and letters and political pamphlets, stuck like pollen inside the rough alphabet of your signature.

I picture the beads as microscopic eight balls. The magic kind, with the fortune-telling dice inside. I imagine them stuck between teeth or strung like a necklace around the inside of my neck. I imagine you tossing whole fistfuls onto the pool table.

I think of your tattoo, like a bar code for the coroner, when no dental records are found, no matches in the fingerprint system, no identifcation cards or housekeys strewn in the grass. Who needs the beads when we already have skin? When the tattoo is already unique? How many layers of identity do we need?

I have been learning about geographic profiling. Some initial notes:

In geographic profiling, jeopardy surfaces represent the areas in which a known serial criminal is most likely living. The idea is that you can pinpoint a perpetrator's neighborhood based on the various locations of his crimes - the bars where his victims were picked up, the parks and highways where bodies were left behind. Profilers plot body dump sites and victim encounters on a map, drawing circles to generate Venn diagrams. The killer sleeps where the circles overlap.

How can you plot the movements of a madman? Murderers move just like the rest of us - forced onto the most convenient sidewalks and streets, rushed through the downtown grid, tempted into cafes and restaurants. Work schedules, transportation, education, and class all generate different movement patterns. And certain areas provoke certain behaviors. Imagine the moods and desires sparked by empty parking lots, narrow sidewalks, crumbling warehouses, and shopping malls. While places do not create crime, they can direct it. Geographic profiling, it turns out, requires a deep understanding of psychogeography.

But what about the victims? What enticed them into particular bars or alleyways? Were they wandering far from home? There is no way to calculate their movement patterns, no way to pinpoint their neighborhoods, from the places their bodies are found.

And this, to me, is the ultimate metaphor for loss: when your location plots a point for someone else, when your map is not your own.

If you want to learn about No!Art and the Aesthetics of Doom, visit A is for Apiculate today. No!Art is one of the most interesting - and most ignored - art movements of the 20th century, so I am thrilled to see it featured on Alan Murdock's site.

For more information, go:
here and here.

Does anyone else feel this? And like me, are you noticing it now more than ever?

unfinished ramp, meant for a highway that was never constructed

I come here to escape the perfect geometry of the downtown grid, to revel in a different sense of this city - as process, as living being, with moods and desires, unrealized dreams, pathologies. Here is a ramp the city never completed, for a highway plan that fell through. Does the bridge feel a phantom exit ramp? Does it long for a truck to crash through the fence and fly out over the river bank?

This ramp even looks like living tissue - a bone or limb in cross section. There are scars and wounds like this all over the city, clues for an autopsy.

phantom exit ramps at night, shot using a long exposure with the lomo

In my essays, I have described these phantom ramps as wicked and irresistable.

and in the daytime

My feet tingle with anticipation, urgency, potential energy. If I knew how to drive, I would speed toward the flimsy fence like an airplane at take-off. I would soar over the edge, plunge into the river. I would not slam the brakes.

If Franz Kline built bridges, he would have built the Steel Bridge:

Shot with the lomo, using long exposures, no flash.

sidewalk paint where a suicide counseling sign used to stand, Hawthorne Bridge

suicide remove definition one:

Portland is the city that works, the city with clean grids and perfect planning, the liveable city, the walkable city. So remove all signs to the contrary.

suicide remove definition two:

Suicide is sometimes a noun, as in: the man who hurls himself over the bridge railing, slits his wrists with a shaving razor, or swallows the bottle of sleeping pills. Example: There is no room for the suicide in this Pacific Northwest paradise. So remove him.

suicide remove definition three:

A campaign to stamp out suicide (but then, why remove the counseling sign?)

suicide remove definition four:

Time to put up a new sign. (Do suicide hotlines go out of business? Do they change their numbers?)

In any case, this is not what I want to see when I walk onto the bridge - my breath shallow, feet light, cheeks flushed and forehead chilled by cold sweat.

to the dead boy:

Has it really been four years since you died? Do the years pass as quickly beneath the cold ground? Are your lips still stitched? Your teeth planted firmly in their gums? How long does embalming last?

In today's news: a missing woman pulled from the river, just a few blocks from my apartment.

Today, when I pour honey onto the soil for you, I will think of the missing woman, now found.

And I will remember Tammy Zywicki, whose birthday was March 13th. She would have been 33. (And who knows? Maybe if she were alive, our paths would have finally intersected. Perhaps she and I would be friends.)

And I will think of the victims in Spain, who stepped onto the trains with sleepy eyes, just like my friends every morning and evening of every weekday.

The ides of March are now behind us. Are we finally on the cusp of a peaceful spring?

boat on the Willamette

lying in the grass, looking up at the tree blossoms, Waterfront Park

at night, the Morrison Bridge is transformed

my entry for photo friday

Every morning, I walk along the downtown waterfront. Earlier this week, I stopped to enjoy sunlight reflections on the underside of the Burnside Bridge. After a gray, rainy winter, it is reassuring to know that sunlight can reach even the most shadowed, hidden surfaces.

Sweet serendipity for the photo friday challenge.

And if you have noticed an obsession with bridges on this site, you are right. I am drawn to them because they terrify me. And I am currently working on a project called One Hundred Views, in which I write and photograph one hundred views of every bridge in this city (inspired by One Hundred Famous Views of Edo).

Thousands of people marched in downtown Portland for the International Day of Action. You can find my other pictures here, on my typepad site.

ice cleaner at the skating rink, Lloyd Center

Sometimes, I like to cut through Lloyd Center and watch people figure skate. I happened to walk past during a cleaning break last week, and I found myself hypnotized by the slow slide of the green machine. Out there on the cold ice, it looked exactly how I felt. And so does this picture.

This is the first time I have ever found emotional honesty inside a shopping mall.

As some of you already know, I have been working on the launch of my art and literary magazine, Invisible Insurrection. The first call for submissions is online now, so please visit the site and consider sending your writing, photography, and art. The theme for the first issue is Architecture, Technology, & Surveillance After 9-11.

September 11th and its impact on urban pathologies, artistic form, and aesthetic sensibilities has been something of an obsession for me (wrote my critical thesis for graduate school on this, called Form Zero: Creating in Cultural Crisis - Art After 9-11), so receiving submissions for this first issue has been cathartic. Interesting works have already arrived in my inbox, and I am overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and support so many people have shown.

Dewi Faulkner will be joining me as a co-editor, as will my husband, Alan Murdock (who will handle visual art). Some other amazing people have offered to contribute as well, so who knows? Maybe this will become something big.

photo friday challenge: neglect

For me, neglect is only evoked by its opposite. When I stand beneath the budding branches and realize what can be lost, then I know what neglect means.

purple cubes set into the sidewalk, downtown Portland

I do not trust these delicate, artsy grates. Are the purple cubes made of glass? Polished stone? Resin? How do they stay suspended in the crumbling concrete? Most days, I tip-toe around the edges, imagining the squares cracked and shattered after an earthquake, rattled out of their settings by the rough tires of a mountain bike, or slicked loose after winter rain.

Today, one of the cubes has dropped out, revealing a dark, hollow space beneath the sidewalk. All last week, it seemed tenuous and tender, like a loose baby tooth. I wanted to crawl across the grid and wiggle it free - a purple bicuspid to hide under my pillow.

I can't resist. I jump onto the grid and play imaginary hopscotch. No one notices.

On another sidewalk, several blocks away, an engraved brick reads by the skin of your teeth. I am taking this as a sign.

I was trapped in a stairwell.

The building was old, with dark baseboards, cracked plaster walls, and heavy wooden doors. It was hot - at least ninety degrees - and the air stung my nose, left a taste on the back of my tongue. Crushed aspirin and rose petals. Or skin ointment - the kind you rub on mysterious rashes.

There were three stories, but only two exits - one at street level, wired with a fire alarm, and one on the second story, with a faint, golden two painted above a serious deadbolt. I jiggled the knob. Loose, rusty. The deadbolt was locked. I decided to hotwire the alarm.

I pulled pliers from my messenger bag and pried open the metal alarm box. Suddenly, someone grabbed my wrist, pulled my arm behind my back. A shock sizzled through my bones. Phalanges, metacarpals, lunate, ulna, radius, humerus, clavicle. Marrow hot as lava, liquid, unstable.

From behind, a whisper in my ear: The truth is, no one really understands electricity.

And then I woke up.