Sauvie
It’s pronounced Sauvie or Sauvie. In the places tourists go guns are deep fried potatoes with aji sauce. On the outskirts where we go to sad swap meets guns are guns. A man fingers his knife and comes on to Dena, a couple flirts uncomfortably, he cautions her about drinking soda. Asher Hartman seems like a very sensitive person and the plays don’t confound and surprise as much they are said to. They join the parade of churning alienation and its soundtrack of mental illness. Spectator-participants unsure of their roles, the parade moves in circles, queer and thickening. The Gawdawful theater cast are beautiful together, chosen kin who endear with their familyness. Jacqueline says I have a kind face to land on while she’s performing a toxic seething whiteness. The bike share program from nike is pronounced bike town or bike town. Portland appears amenable to pluralism. Their pod hall plazas with their warm light, laughing teenagers, $6 moussakas. The unbearable whiteness of green. It’s an accelerating time of electric scooters, precarious cyborg cabbies and antiseptic Airbnbs reminding us of our outsiderness. The auto locking doors, plastic potted plants, the laminated great gatsby font. Deco never knew it could be used for WiFi details in somber grey ikea’d vacation rentals. Debussy couldn’t have known about the millions of comments on the interpretations of his music. I’m reading a New Yorker piece on Prince by a co-writer candidate for a foreclosed biography in bathroom installments and editing a short film about San Francisco from an archive of Creative Commons. Life in shrinking intervals. I shared a social media poem about Salesforce and Andy Warhol and some internet friends invited me to screen it at their microcinema. I paired it with a short difficult film about a person becoming undone on market street. An unresolved piece still toxic with half-lives. The farmers market is wonderful. A small biennial with wall texts written by children. A video of migrants telling their migration stories. An Allora and Calzadilla video of an excavator fashioned with a large sonorous bell razing a GlaxoSmithKline pharmacology manufactory. There are 22 Kiarostami retrospectives happening right now and the one in Portland starts the day after we leave with the film we just missed at home in Berkeley. Dena stopped combing her hair. We’re finding our rhythms, growing our laugh lines and wearing matching Kung-fu sneakers. We held each other in turns, turning slowly in river, joined at the middle. The feeling is beyond words. Most mornings we look at our Facebook memories together. On This Day we both posted details from reading. Passages from Wittgenstein and Ponty poetically circling the ineffable.