Linksy Bits: Ann Wilson's Dress, et al.
Women of rock, my Pisces aunt, and the delicious side of missing someone.
Last weekend I was in Cleveland for a little worky thing. I won a major award, it was great. As part of the conference, we got to tour the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Often, I tell people that I don’t have that music gene, the one that allows you to recall band names and song titles of even the very things you are listening to in the moment. I have many skills, but it gets crowded in the old head house and some things must go.
But, as an American woman, of course music has shaped me. As a girl of the 80’s, how can I not get the feels for the George Michael CHOOSE LIFE t-shirt? The Pink Floyd installation reminded me of the first time I smoked pot and seeing the handwritten lyrics for First We Take Manhattan, written in Mr. Leonard Cohen’s own hand, was something.
As I wandered the exhibit, I got to the Revolutionary Women in Music area and I can admit to you guys: I got a little teary. Hormones, right?
I didn’t expect it, but every corner I turned there was someone who had written or sang something that nicked my soul. I recalled the undeniable fierce love that I had for the punk-era Go-Go’s when I saw their album cover waterski outfit. I walked past Tracy Chapman, Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl drum kit, Ann Wilson’s leather dress that immediately streams the Barracuda riff in your own Heart. Barracuda, the ultimate long-living revenge song, has been cranked to 11 many times in my life.
Later that night I was recounting the visit on the phone with Giant Baby (who is a bear), saying how funny it was that I teared up.
“You’ve always had an affinity for artifacts,” he said to me.
Of course he’s right. Those items are part of the story, the intersectional story of mine and theirs. They are time markers, tactile illustrations, and of course I believe they are imbued with certain magics, because I am woo.
This thought played in my mind the next day while I sat in seminars about the oh-so-helpful-and-inevitable AI solutions coming to the world of publishing. I was thinking about how we keep getting drawn into the ether and that maybe paper can help root us when I got a text from my cousin.
My Tante Ulla had died.
She was the next youngest sister of my mother’s set of four: The Sisty Uglers they called themselves when they cackled with glee during the holidays.
Ursula, but to us Ulla, was an enigma of a woman and the ultimate no-shit-taker. A registered nurse, she never married or had kids, but she loved up on the children of her sisters, sometimes with a death-hug that threatened to suffocate you in her very ample bosom. You had to let her.
She and my mother, the oldest, would fight like sisters even in their later years, Ulla would get ticked when my mom, Gitte, would tell a story from their past, “Gittchen, you’re telling it wrong! I was not like that!” Such a Pisces to my mom’s Aquarius.
My entire life, visiting her and the other Tantes and cousins in Michigan every summer of my childhood, I never got to see where she lived. She never let any of us into her apartment, so it became a legendary place in my head: were there stacks of hoarded newspapers, was it spit-spot clean like a nurses station, was she a secret artist with glorious undiscovered self-portrait paintings, were there journals that might unlock some of her secrets?
Artifacts.
She was stubborn and fiery, but she always sent birthday cards with $20 even though she was struggling on a fixed income. When I got home from the trip I immediately went into my den and found the box where I keep them, every card she sent with her loopy German script reaching out and loving me from the island of her life.
Paper, rooting me to the earth.
WHAT TO READ/WATCH/LISTEN/COOK FOR WHEN it’s a long weekend and you have to stock up on beers and links.
» Gen X! Please mix up a Zima, send an evite, and gather your friends for a showing of BRATS on Hulu June 13th. Blaine (that’s not a name, it’s a major appliance) meets up with his old pals in the Brat Pack of the 80’s. MUST WATCH but Dale Beaverman can stay away.
» Sorry, also for the X’ers, but also any Tim Burton fans: Beetlejuice …. Beetlejuice … Be
» Oh why not let’s do one more: An Oral History of Four Weddings and a Funeral
» I feel SUPER VINDICATED with this NYT article about how long eggs really last. (gifted)
» Hello are you the contrarian who brings something funky to the Memorial Day potluck picnic? Hi me too here’s Apple Sage Gouda Pie.
» Also, if you are an inky virgin, please please please show up to your summer picnic with a whole sleeve of fake tattoos.
WHAT TO LISTEN TO FOR WHEN you want to luxuriate in the missing of someone. Because sometimes, there’s something delicious about absence in the sense that longing can only happen when there is someone good enough to miss. Like a craving. Laying awake on a late summer night, with the breeze shuffling the curtains and the frogs singing in the marsh, you indulge that little bit of heartbreak that comes from not knowing exactly where that person is right now, mixed with the rich anticipation of what might follow when you will get to see them again. This is the playlist for that night.
Have a nice looooooooooong weekend friends, ferment in the goodness! I really hope you do not run into any Backfeifengesicht!
Sigh. Cheers to Tante Ulla❤️