Sunday, July 27, 2003
Wicked Humbugs Have Turtles for Ears
I’ve felt off lately. I’ve been listening to Billy Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald… old Cole Porter standards and jazzy numbers with that muffled trumpet sound that gives my cat an ulcer whenever it bleats and moans from the stereo. It doesn’t matter how snappy the song, that music sounds sad to me. It must be nostalgia for a time I never experienced… it’s the same disease the Republicans suffer from, the desire to live fifty years in the past when both men and women wore hats, the dresses were designed by Erte and things had to be sparkly to catch your eye because the world was in black and white. That was before everything had been done… beat poetry was taken seriously and you could buy an original Picasso for ten cents and a doughnut (or rather, a pain au chocolat).
I would like to be a mixed race blues singer living in Paris ten years before the big war. I want to be a wild haired writer with nicotine stained fingers beating away at my typewriter (that sometimes looks like a giant insect) on the left bank. I’d like to originate a novel concept, like feminism… or gravity. I would like my misery to be the result of too much sex, rather than too little. I want to offend the status quo, and be seen as a visionary by the next generation. I’d like a gaggle of too clever bon vivants who all hang around and say witty things, that someday aspiring writers will long to emulate: “…our writer’s group will be just like the Seattle Wicked Humbugs…”
In summer, Seattle is full of t-shirt and baseball cap mannequins that pretend to be tourists. They take tours on the ‘Ducks’ amphibious open air busses that meander around downtown, playing ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane’ over their loudspeakers and encouraging the mannequins to blow duck calls at the natives. I must be a native now, because when I walk outside people in plaid shorts want me to take their picture and point them toward the Pike Place Market. I want to be acidic, point them to the scummy drug market and homeless pits instead of Pike Place; and to steal the really nice digital cameras… teach them that you can’t trust city folk just cause they’re white and clean.
