Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 15 Read online

  At the edge of the hill country, a girl was sitting at the top of a telephone pole and screaming into the wind.

  "Hey,” Serena called up to her. “What are you doing up there?"

  "I'm hiding,” the girl shouted back.

  "Why are you hiding?"

  "Because I'm in trouble. I got myself into trouble, and now I'm ruined. And all because I fell in love and lost my head."

  Serena pondered. If the girl had lost her head, then why was she wearing one? Was this head perhaps a borrowed head on loan from a friend? Whatever the case, Serena had the perfect solution. Employing the stumps of her wrists, she unscrewed her head and pitched it up to the ruined girl. The girl caught it and immediately wished that she hadn't. Serena staggered on up the road—without a thought in her head or a head to think it with.

  Climbing the road into the hill country, Serena passed an isolated clump of birch trees. Lurking among the trees was a thin man in a white suit. There wasn't much left of Serena, but she still had her body. The thin man decided that he wanted it. He jumped from the trees, tore off her nightgown, and took it. Then he burned the nightgown.

  There seemed to be nothing left of Serena but her old gray shawl, which lay discarded on the dusty road. The shawl picked itself up, brushed itself off, and continued up the road, having nothing better to do. It thought it was all alone in the world.

  But in fact it was carrying Serena's soul. Serena's soul had fled her body and gathered itself together into a speck as small as dust. Then it had hidden itself in a strand of the shawl's wool.

  The shawl mumbled and dragged its fringe in the mud. The wind blew through its holes. It slumped to the earth beside a pile of horseshit and sighed deeply.

  "Why so glum?” asked the pile of horse shit, which was glad to have some company.

  "My mistress has deserted me,” answered the shawl.

  "Why did your mistress do that?"

  "She gave herself away until nothing was left of her."

  "How did she manage to do that?"

  "By doing favors for people. A boy whose heart was broken. A woman whose feet were killing her. Two men who could use a hand. A girl who'd lost her head. A man that wanted her body."

  "Broken heart?” said the pile of horse shit. “Homicidal feet? Pardon my asking, but was your mistress a fool?"

  Hearing this insult, Serena's soul stirred within the gray wool of the shawl. She leapt from the shawl, landed on the road, and expanded to the size of a woman. And there she stood, as naked as a jaybird.

  "I was a fool,” Serena's soul told the horse shit. “But I wonder, Good Sir, if you would consent to do a great service for a fool. Please come with me, if you would. I have a use for you."

  Serena's soul wrapped up the horse shit in her shawl, slung it over her shoulder, and hiked back toward town. She soon came to the grove of birches where the thin man in the white suit lurked. She threw big wet lumps of horse shit at him and hit him smack in the face. “Wheee,” shouted the flying turds.

  Then Serena sang her famous shit throwing song, the same song we'll be singing in the processional. Let's sing it once more, girls, just for practice.

  * * * *

  I swallowed your horseshit.

  It came out my ears.

  Now you can eat mine.

  I am fed up to here.

  Take back your horseshit,

  You scum-sucking crook,

  And give back my body.

  Give back what you took.

  * * * *

  Very nice. Where was I? Oh yes.

  Serena's soul walked across the badlands with her shawl and her sack of shit. Before too long she came to the girl on the telephone pole. She pelted the girl with phenomenal accuracy and sang the song again. Naturally the girl returned Serena's head. The soul found the ditch diggers. More throwing of shit, more singing of the song. The soul reclaimed her hands. Then she tracked down the fat boy and the old woman with bad feet.

  Serena marched into town, triumphantly reunited. She took back her house from the mice. She visited her neighbors and took back her household things. Shit flew in all directions. By nightfall Serena's family was more or less back to normal.

  On the following day, Serena began to bake sweet cakes in the shape of herself, just like these here. (Don't nibble, Carmela. Those are for the poor.) Serena baked piles and piles of her delicious Serena cakes and sold them in the market square at a steady clip. Each time she sold a cake to a customer, she would sing her famous cake song.

  * * * *

  Cannibals you always were,

  And cannibals you be.

  So eat this in my image.

  For you'll have no more slices of me.

  * * * *

  Which is of course the song that we'll be singing after the processional, when we distribute the cakes.

  Girls? Your attention please. Is everyone ready now? Does everyone have her box of cakes? Does everyone have her sack of horse shit? Excellent.

  Let's join the processional.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  My First Lover

  It was me that found the secret hideout, half—seen behind a nest of ferns, ripening mushrooms.

  A secret weaver's shed. You loomed in the corner, a great clacking shadow. Safety-pin seamstress, short-handed, I mended the telltale tears you earned scrambling in. We picked dandelions, rushes, bitter greens, to eat and to dye with. Your mordant wit fixed colors safe. The heat in there was close.

  But, then, what was it you dropped running?

  We snuck out to retrieve it. Voices wavered out of the air, a violet became a raised arm's shadow.

  Skeins looping everywhere: oozy greens, sweated yellows, badly carded (by me), tongue-rough.

  You were sweet and I was sucking a lump of sugar.

  Heat lightning, real, I swear, snaked out and fingered you and where did you go? What did you leave on me?

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Secret Histories of Household Objects

  The adjustable wrench longs to grip the pitted surface of the pipes under the sink.

  The can opener is in love with the corkscrew.

  The microwave hates you. I'm too good for her, it is thinking when you burn the popcorn again.

  The shadow world of suburbia, they lie in cabinets, under tables, in piles in the garage.

  They love, they hate, they are angry, hopeful, sad.

  Some are dusty, some shiny with use. They live their little lives. They try to ignore you.

  So when you fall down the stairs, spare a thought for that one loose nail striving toward the sunlight.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  It Tastes Bitter

  They arrested the woman who threw her pear core on the ground in the winter garden. Sign says

  No Littering, Lady. A brown cardinalon the sign picturesquely.

  Thirty minutes in a car is a long time for someone with ants in their pants.

  Night's falling. Traffic signs slide by like eels but nothing changes.

  Up a one-way stair, smelling of leather and spilled wine. All the way to the top. It goes all the way.

  You are what you eat. I'm a bowl of soup, I'm bread, I'm water, I ate the whole pear, including the seeds.

  Body held like a slingshot.

  She thought they'd make her eat it, but they are more baroque in their invention.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Jon Langford, All the Fame of Lofty Deeds

  (bloodshotrecords.com)

  Chicago-based, Welsh-born singer, songwriter, artist (he also produced and did the art for this CD) Jon Langford's second solo album is what might be called, whisper it, a concept album. However there are no fairies tripping the light fantastic in this glorious collection of country punk tunes. It's a reflective (if that word might be used in describing music as lively as this) and excoriating look at the music industry, reminiscent of the ‘80s film Breaking Glass. Langford's ragged and instantly recognizable voi
ce recounts the tale of a country singer who lives to regret signing with a major label. The jaunty rhythms jar against the dark topics: in “Nashville Radio” (released as a single and also on the Making Singles, Drinking Doubles compilation) Langford begs for prescriptions, gets thrown out of the Grand Old Opry, and eventually does a Hank Williams. Later, in the incredibly catchy “Over the Cliff,” Langford, “sick of all the yawning, the bitching and the bawling,” decides the best way forward is out. In just under half an hour Langford—who's also in The Mekons, the Waco Brothers, and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts (present on a couple of tracks)—builds us up and knocks us down. There aren't any encores for the villains of the piece, us, the ever-hungry audience. Instead we're left begging for more.

  * * * *

  Jon Rauhouse, Jon Rauhouse's Steel Guitar Rodeo: Featuring Tommy Connell

  (bloodshotrecords.com)

  Steel guitarist Jon Rauhouse is fast on his way to becoming a somewhat unexpected but bona fide star. He's toured and played with Kelly Hogan, Neko Case, Sally Timms, Calexico, Giant Sand, and the Waco Brothers, and now many of them play turn about and guest on his second solo album. Rauhouse makes a good case for instrumental albums, but there are also vocals enough (8 of 18 tracks) to satisfy those looking for more than just a surfing soundtrack. Rauhouse plays pedal steel, Hawaiian, and regular guitar as well as banjo, and even sings on a couple of tracks. His voice is okay, but his guitar playing is wonderful: dextrous, playful, loose, and transporting. It's the 1950s, it's the 1970s, it's 2004—but way more relaxed than usual. His main collaborator is Tommy Connell, but rounding out this everyone-who's-anyone-in-alt.country fest are Jennie Benford from Jim and Jennie and the Pine Tops, Giant Sands's Howie Gelb, Kevin O'Donnell, Andy Hopkins, Carolyn Mark, and others.

  * * * *

  Friends of Dean Martinez, Random Harvest

  (narnackrecords.com)

  The Friends of Dean Martinez have been around a long time for a side project. But then the whole Giant Sand thing is all about sharing and doing different things, and besides can any band really be defined as a side project if this is their ninth album in ten years? I didn't think so. Random Harvest sounds heavily influenced by film soundtracks. The title track, although not the longest (that would be “Dusk,” at 11:44), has some epic Spaghetti Western aspirations. Based around the steel guitar but incorporating everything from subtle classical guitar to some serious power chords that wouldn't go amiss on an Iron Maiden album, this album is not for the impatient listener. It is, however, very rewarding if you give it the attention it deserves. Recommended for driving or biking.

  * * * *

  Johnny Cash is dead. R.I.P. We procured the 5-CD boxed set from the library. If he's dead, is it okay to copy it? Do we care about copyright that much? Damn, what a fantastic collection. Mojo, the music mag for old music, did a CD of Cash covers and some of them are good, but still, none of them are Cash. So. R.I.P. Johnny, we'll see you later, wherever you are.

  * * * *

  The Fawns, Smiling (thefawns.com) is an addictive poppy album likely appreciable by fans of the Rosebuds, Blondie, the Cardigans, and Catatonia.

  * * * *

  Sunday paper in the UK come with compilation CDs, a couple of which (a Franz Ferdinand EP and a What's Happening in Sottish Pop) we were lucky enough to be given. Come on NYTimes et al, get on the ball! One fave: Aberfeldy's “Heliopolis by Night."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THE WELL-DRESSED WOLF:

  a rhetorical journey through his wardrobe in fairy-tale

  Written by Lawrence Schimel

  Illustrated by Sara Rojo

  * * * *

  * * * *

  What a magnificent creature is the wolf! Look at the way his velvet-smooth pelt shifts over lean muscles, like the sliding of shadows across the ground as a cloud passes in front of the moon. Shadow-like the wolf stalks across the night, but the wolf is anything but substanceless. The wolf represents power. And danger. Just look at the wolves of fairy tales, always lurking on the edges of the story, ready to snatch unwary children.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  The storybook wolf is always assumed to be male. Maybe it's the wolf's predatory nature that gives this assumption, where we associate hunting and power with masculine. Or perhaps it's the fact that most marchen seem to be morally instructive to girls: wait for your prince to save you, don't talk to strangers, be respectful of your elders, and so on, and a male presence (in the form of the wolf) is more useful for extrapolating to real life encounters.... It may simply be that Western culture seems to have divided animal-representations of sexuality as follows: fox=female and wolf=male.

  If one were to visit the storybook wolf in his den, it would be no surprise to find his closet full of James Dean black leather jackets, clean white T-shirts, and sharply pressed denim jeans.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  But that's not what wolves actually wear in fairy tales. Instead of living up to his bad boy image, the storybook wolf, when he wears anything at all, winds up cross-dressing. And not even in something sexy! Instead of red leather mini-skirts (the female equivalent of badboy biker jackets?) the storybook wolf winds up wearing granny's flannel nightgown and bonnet, fuzzy slippers instead of high heels. What does this all mean?

  * * * *

  * * * *

  On the one hand, the wolf's dressing up is a disguise. He's trying to hide his dangerous nature with the most innocent-seeming façade he can think of, to lure the innocent ewe or the young girl with her red cape into his clutches. There is nonetheless something sexual that can be seen in this predatory nature, for appetites can as easily be applied to sexuality as to physical hunger, and does not this fateful scene, in the case of Little Red Riding Hood, take place in a bedroom? Does this cross-dressing merely underscore the wolf's dangerousness: he is so deviant, he will even indulge in this? Or perhaps we should look to the Brothers Grimm themselves, who spent their days gossiping with housewives, to account for this prurient interest in transvestism. What would Freud have to say?

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Not unsurprisingly, it is always the lone wolf who winds up cross-dressing—or who winds up in stories, for that matter. The wolf is a pack animal, one of many shadows in the ever-shifting fabric of the night.

  Is the wolf's cross-dressing an attempt to establish his individuality? Or is it rather, bereft of a pack, the lone wolf's desire to fit in, to be part of the crowd, anonymous. Why else, in one of the few tales where the wolves wear clothes, does he put on the fleece of the animal that most-commonly represents a lack of individuality, the generic, fitting in?

  * * * *

  * * * *

  And where does the sheepskin come from? In Little Red Riding Hood, we know he is putting on the grandmother's clothes, after having eaten her. But his sheiling coat? Does the wolf steal it from the farmer? Does he go shopping for it? The whole point of the story is that he can't get near the sheep in the first place, which is why he invents this subterfuge. If he's already got a sheep at hand to take the skin from, the whole enterprise becomes redundant and his meal is already at hand. And if he does kill a sheep to get its pelt, how does he get the blood-stains out, to avoid alarming the flock he intends to join. Sheep are not killed when they are shorn for their wool, but given that the wolf steals wool from the farmer, what does he stick it on to make his sheepskin? The stories are vague on all these important questions, and obviously their editor should have returned the manuscript for rewriting.)

  * * * *

  * * * *

  In both stories, the climax comes at the moment of undressing, of true natures being revealed. But isn't that always the case with men? Once the civilized clothes are removed, what's left is the hairy, primal beast. But what is nudity to the wolf? Unclothed, the wolf is still dressed in his own fur.

  Does it reflect a moral judgment, for having dared to cross the gender divide, that the wolf meets with death in bot
h tales? (Of course, the wolf in fairy tales almost always gets a short shrift, is it any wonder they're becoming endangered?)

  * * * *

  * * * *

  And what if our central premise is wrong and the storybook wolf is actually female? Of course, even trying to posit this question leads more credence to the male wolf, since a female would've chosen more flattering outfits.

  (Could it be more obvious that these tales were written/recorded by straight white men?) But rereading these stories with a female wolf, how does the subtext change? Would they have different endings? Would a female wolf clash with a young girl heroine, the way the Queen is jealous of Snow White's beauty? If we change Little Red Riding Hood to a boy, would a female wolf become a nurturing figure, like the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus? That's all we have time for this afternoon. Next session, we'll investigate the tailor as hero in fairy tales.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Dear Aunt Gwenda

  The Post-Election Depressed, Non-Timely, You'd Better Be Thankful Anyway, Doom & Gloom Edition

  As you'll see demonstrated here, Dear Aunt Gwenda makes no promise of providing answers in a time frame that is of help to you, the question-asker. But why does everything always have to be about you anyway? That's what I thought, big britches.

  I plan to enter this compendium of advice into one big sacred text, which I will leave somewhere both hidden and handy following the impending economic collapse of the United States. It will be found years from now and people will use it to learn to read again. And to hope.

  So get over yourself. We're making history here. First question:

  * * * *

  Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

  The state in which I live (NY) is thought to be a sure victory for Kerry. That's great, but I feel left out—how can I do my part to encourage regime change in DC?