from PICC (A Poet in Center City): #24

for Trish Webber 

It’s early 2004. Elizabeth died a year ago; I’ve cut ties with Joe Miller. Trish rewired my brain. It would be impossible to overstate how many ways my years with her altered my consciousness. Ms. Webber laid down a gauntlet to help me understand that I should be proud of my impulses towards the sublime. Yet, the gauntlets were often laid down while holding court for Tobi and I in her rooms in West Philly, righteously stoned on the kindest varieties of dope. That admixture— a penchant for form, or the sublime, in a lust-for-life kind of gal, and a blonde no less, was heady stuff. She was N, she was Jena, she was Kathy, she was everyone in my earlier life I ever cared about. And we’d spent a few years spending all our nights together— West Philly and Logan Square, back and forth. We broke up at the end of ’03, after two years, because, to make a long story short, her insanity was driving me insane. Also important for me to notice: Trish was a loved and hated kind of gal, as well. She was herself, she was unique, she was incisively about what she was incisively about. I had to see mirrored back to me, through Trish Webber, what I already knew: to be ensconced in a creative discipline, and to do it in a unique, distinctive way, has, of necessity, to make an individual as hated as they are loved. People don’t always like the real ones, the unique ones. Lots of seemingly creative types are faux, and would gladly have everyone stand in a line, subsume themselves. Uniqueness magnetizes, but also repulses. As does real artistic potency. Catapulted back into a present moment: I’m doing a reading in Northern Liberties for an online journal called Lunge. It’s not just me— there’s a bunch of bands playing, short films, and a team of technicians doing “ambient.” The crowd is a hundred-plus; it’s a gorgeous spring day; the mood is festive. The multi-media angle reminds me so much of Swinging London (my imagination of it, at least) that I get, as in ’99, an intense frisson. Philadelphia attracts celestial sunlight. It occurs to me that now might be the time to write the second chapter of This Charming Lab— that the moment might be germane for it. Meanwhile, Bill Rosenblum is producing an album for me. We’re recording at his pad at 11th and Webster— “Webster Street Studios.” The album was supposed to be just spoken-word; but we expanded and expanded until it looked like we would reach an album’s full of tunes. Bill imposes a Steve Albini ethos. Through Bill, I’m introduced to what the Highwire Gallery is, in the Gilbert Building on the PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) campus. I begin to put pieces together— this is where I could stage the sequel I’ve been considering. The curator is an erstwhile roadie for the Grateful Dead— Jim O’Rourke. He’s older— short, thin, intense, a redhead. The Highwire is a space to die for; several rooms, all with high ceilings, including one which looks like a cleared-out factory space. Still, the man-power is missing; Christopher works, but I need more running-buddies for this new “trip.” Simultaneously, I graduated magna cum laude from U of Penn and geared up for grad school, which would start low res in the Boston ‘burbs. Between Penn and hipster-ism, I was an absolute freak.