I love my country, but I fear your mother · 12 May 2012, 15:39
With practice one naturally gets good at something: either running or hiding; either cooking or washing the dishes; either plumbing or climbing the shelf to the water shutoff. I am pleased to be able to say, after a few soggy days, that my climbing skills are transferring nicely to the task of getting in and out of the hull of the boat. The boat!
The boat in her current configuration – well, just look here: here’s a picture from a few days ago. She’s mostly a hull and a lot of straps and ropes, and we clamber around inside with our hard hats on all adventure-playground. It’s kind of like slacklining in steel-toes, one-handed, with welders and grinders and stuff. I feel pretty hardcore about it.
Two weeks ago I did my first boat-related work – I spent five days casting ballast, melting crumpled wads of scrap lead in a wood-fired furnace and pouring it into a bolted sheet-steel mold. This bare description doesn’t begin to do justice to the sweaty business – the clobbering sound of the woodpile falling at my feet, the roar of the air compressor hose stoking the furnace, the whomp of flashover as every log in the furnace catches at once, the sweet reek of the lead1, the silky liquid burble of the impurities coming to the surface (lead is so heavy, of course, that nearly everything floats in it – water2, paint, nails), the bright silvery lead gushing out of the pipe and into the mold and, incidentally, spattering all over the yard. (How do you say “Superfund” in Norwegian?).
But this week I started on the boat itself, the body of the thing, and while I’ve had a grand time up til now with the casting and the plumbing and the planting of potatoes3, ahhhh yes, this is why I’m here. This week we reinforced much of the inside of the keel with aluminum plates. Next week we finish with the top plates in the bow end, put in the last of the bow ribs, and start on the deck. I am unspeakably excited. (Boat words!: the boat is a Colin Archer double-ender from a 1908 design drawn up as a rescue boat for the Norwegian coast – we’re building her 40ft long in aluminum, and junk-rigged. I suspect half the rationale behind the aluminum and the junk rigging is that they infuriate traditionalists.)
Speaking of learning things: I am getting better at building fires, something which I have always valued and sucked at in equal measure. The air compressor bellows is of great help when things are already going, but how to get it to start? Many former Boy Scouts of my acquaintance, when loftily taking charge of some pathetic smoldering pile or other, have credited certain secrets unimparted to the Distaff Scouts. “It’s Scout Water,” said Jonny when I asked him: that is, a Pepsi Max bottle full of kerosene.4 I’m onto you, chaps.
Speaking of learning more things: I have been doing construction using the metric system! Has anyone told you how nice the metric system is? It is so nice! You can add and subtract and multiply and divide with ease! Try it today!
We had a short-term visitor last week who spent a lot of time baiting me about being American.5 I am often the first to slag off the States – we have some problems, and being bigger than many places, we have room for big ones – but when confronted with ignorant6 sentiments like “I think it would be better if all Americans went to the moon” and “we would not have global warming except for Americans,” I feel like I need to go to bat for the home team7. I made American-style breakfast for dinner the night our visitor left – potatoes, biscuits, eggs – and we’ve been listening to a lot of hip-hop and Bruce Springsteen. These are the things that make me want to put my cap on my heart. O beautiful for home fries, for “Born in the USA”! Ain’t no future in your frontin!
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1. I wore a mask, of course, but the fumes do worm their way in anyhow.
2. A little water in the crucible boils instantly – lead is liquid at about 380 degrees C, according to the thermometer diagram in our Welder’s Handbook, which also, ominously, lists the melting point of “the human body.” (N.B. less than lead.) A wet object dropped into the crucible ejects small geysers of lead all over the yard. Fortunately lead cools very quickly – a big glob landed on my head once, but aside from having to have a clump of my hair cut out, I am none the worse for it.
3. Another secret: the secret ingredient in Pepsi Max is also kerosene.
4. The growing season up here is absurdly short, and when it’s time to plant, everything else stops – boatbuilding, days off, and sleep. We are less constrained than the neighbors – we’re not trying to make a living at it – but all hands were still on deck when the time came, though we kept it to a union eight hours per day. According to family legend, great-grandpa Carl was digging potatoes in Sweden one day, got frustrated, stuck his shovel in the ground and came to America – one wonders if he and Great-Grandma Ida, who also emigrated from a Swedish farm, would be touched or exasperated to hear that their descendant is back in Scandinavia grubbing tubers.
5. Actually, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between trolling and language problems – but I think it’s a fair bet that at least some of the friction was intentionally introduced. A tip for the Don Juan(ita)s out there: asking a lady you barely know if she wants to take a shower with you is a pretty effective way to ensure you will never get to know her well enough that she might say yes.
6. Eventually the whole conversation became so absurd I couldn’t even get mad. Americans invented the sewing machine? But this Singer’s manual is in Swedish! Therefore it is impossible.
7. A bunt, at least.
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reading: Alice Kaplan French Lessons, George Dibbern Quest, Norris Church Mailer A Ticket to the Circus, Foxfires 1, 2, 7, 8 and 9
eating: eggs, bread, cauliflower, carrots, cabbage, turnips, potatoes, honey, lingonberries
looking at: the hills getting green, the lambs bouncing, the potatoes sprouting under the ground
listening to: Faun Fables Mother Twilight, which is somehow the perfect music for here and now
making: a 40-foot lapstrake aluminum double-ended junk-rigged motherfucking Colin Archer sailboat
— Hannah Mae
Hvordan har du det? Bare bra. · 22 April 2012, 04:26
This morning I found a chicken in the outhouse, which sounds like the beginning of some sort of joke1 but is the honest to god truth.
In case you’re curious, she was just roosting in the corner, so both of us went about our businesses and that was that. In case you’re curious, I’m not in New York City anymore. I am in Norway – which is nearly an anagram for New York, but somewhat different. From the warm kitchen table where I’m typing this, the little hills fall away down toward the creek, then rise again up to the neighboring farm, which looks much like this one: white pointy farmhouse, red pointy farm buildings. The snow is melting, again – everyone is waiting for the spring, which showed up early and then left again, but is supposed to come back any minute now. The lambs down the road are ready to be born, the potatoes are ready to be planted, the wild raspberries are ready to leaf out, and I am ready to work on the boat.
I got to the farm a few days ago, and our main project in that time has been to re-pipe the winter bathroom2. Honestly I’ve found this just as delightful as boatbuilding – neither I nor Johny, the main cheese of the farm, know much about plumbing, so we’re figuring it out together, and my soldering skills are coming back full force, and Norwegian solder somehow (mysteriously, appropriately) smells like burning fir trees, so I’ve been huffing the hell out of some fumes, which is doubtless causing the brain cell death/peaceful feeling I’ve been full of the last few days, or maybe I just like it here.
I got a text from my dad as I was taking off that said “you’re a brave woman.” Of course that makes me fluff my feathers a little, but I’m not sure how brave I am, comparatively. My ancestors all went the other way across the Atlantic, in much more perilous times, and much more permanently: great-grandma Ida went back to Sweden only once, great-grandpa Carl never did. I’ve been back and forth five times now and I’m not even 35. How did they leave, knowing they’d probably never see their friends and family again? Extreme duress? A belief in reunion in the afterlife? I already miss certain people so much it feels like dying, not to be melodramatic or anything, and all I have is a piddly one-way ticket. Buck up, Freya, and get in the longship already.3
Meantime it is all Little House on the Prairie over here, what with the carrying water and the melting snow. (And the… space heaters?) For a minute I was confounded as to how to take a bucket shower without freezing to death doing it outside, and then I remembered how we used to bathe indoors in Olde Times, like with two buckets, or a bucket and a basin. Presto, private warm bath! And I can imagine I look like those slender nymphs bathing in garrets in Renoir or Degas drawings, and nobody can say I don’t, because we don’t have mirrors either. (Like some curséd fairytale princess, I become visible to myself only after dark, when I can look at my reflection in the windows. Suits me fine; I didn’t much bring Owtfits and I already know I’m all smudgy.)
I am writing this in the small warm kitchen, waiting for my macaroni to cook. I could tell you I’m being civilized and making proper macaroni and cheese, but I’m not, even though I have all the ingredients – makaroni, smør, hvetemel, melk, ost. Instead I’m draining the macaroni into the snow like a Viking (plumbing is for those fancy fools down in Rome), eating it with butter and pepper4, and going to bed.
But hey, you probably need dinner too, and I have gotten so many friends addicted to this recipe that it’s only fair to share it now that they, and you, don’t have me around to make it for you. Dun dun dun dunnnnn, my mama’s
MAC AND CHEESE
serves 2-5, depending on how hungry everyone is, and whether the group includes my niece
a couple cups dry macaroni
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup milk, or 3/4 c milk and 1/4 c beer, or half and half and beer – whatever you have, as long as it adds up to a cup and is mostly milk
a bunch of cheese, grated or crumbled (like, at least a cup, probably more)5
salt and pepper
whatever else you want to throw in (hot dogs, mushrooms, frozen peas if you want me to disown you)
Put some water on to boil, and when it boils, put in the macaroni. Stir. Now start the rest of the recipe and the timing should be just about perfect.
In another pot – ideally one big enough to hold the sauce and all the macaroni as well – melt the butter over medium heat. When it’s melted, throw in the flour and stir. Keep stirring. The mix will eventually get sort of tan-colored and will smell a little toasty. That means the starch is coming out of the flour to thicken your sauce. Congratulations, you made a roux! Julia Child was right! French cooking ain’t no thang!
Now pour in the milk. The flour and butter will coagulate and look all lumpy and greasy. Don’t sweat it. Keep stirring. The milk will warm up, the flour/butter bits will melt back into it, and then – o wonders of food chemistry! – everything will thicken up, kind of almost all at once, and become a lovely creamy sauce. Check that out! That’s a white sauce, and you can make all kinds of things with it, from French haute cuisine to dumpster specials – if you barely have any food in the house at all, but you have a little milk and butter and flour, whip up this sauce and put whatever flavorings you have in it (garlic powder? green onions? soy sauce? wilty mushrooms? sherry? mustard?) and whatever you dress with it is almost guaranteed to be delicious.
Once the sauce thickens, take it off the burner, drain the macaroni – you’ve been keeping an eye on the macaroni, right? – and pour it into the sauce, then put in the cheese. Stir thoroughly – the heat of the noodles and sauce should melt the cheese, but you can put it back on low heat if you need to. Pepper, salt, et voila! The admiration of 2-5 friends is yours! Now teach them how to make it, so they can make it for you.
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1. the punchline would involve the word “two-holer”
2. which is in the barn, and features festive snowflakes blowing through the gaps between the boards when the weather obliges
3. of course, some of the famously brave were less nervy than we think. It only took four days for the first Norse settler of Iceland to get there, and Thoreau went to his mom’s house for dinner all the time.
4. aw, hell no, that’s too much pepper
5. some notes on cheese: the classic is cheddar, of course, and if you go this way, don’t go screwing around with mild. Sharp or extra-sharp or I’ll never speak to you again. Otherwise, experiment away! Mozzarella comes out very stringy, as do gouda (try smoked, oh bless me) and havarti, but they all taste fantastic. Hard cheeses, such as parmesan or romano, will take more stirring unless you grate them very fine. Blues are fantastic but if you use a strong one, like gorgonzola, start with less than a cup unless your cheese balls are, like, enormous.
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reading: a million books on my new e-reader – Susie Bright Big Sex Little Death, Mary Roach Bonk, Peter Carey My Life As a Fake
eating: makaroni, bread, great piles of ost
looking at: the rain melting the last of the snow
listening to: Norwegian radio
making: a million solder joints in everything
— Hannah Mae
to begin with the etymology of wraith, or, why am I the one always packing up my stuff? · 1 April 2012, 07:17
I’ve marked many of life’s larger transitions in the bath. San Francisco earthquake of 1989? I was in the bath. (I was also not in San Francisco, but never mind.) Fall of the Berlin Wall? In the bath. As time has passed, I’ve begun to do it intentionally: in 2005 I finished my last-ever art school project, handed it in, drove home at 1am across the Bay Bridge (swerving back and forth across all five lanes, bellowing along to Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World”1), grabbed a bottle of bourbon and turned on the hot water.
And now? Now, my friends, it is bathtime again.
To recap, I left San Francisco last October for a couple months of visiting, doing projects and soul-searching. Came back around New Years with the intention of leaving again soon, started having a good time, and as soon as I started talking about staying a little longer, WHAM down came the pianos on top of my head, every interesting prospect evaporating, every promising new friendship dying on the vine, no no no! Well okay then. So I started looking for a direction out again, found some awesome things to do, packed up all my stuff and put it on a truck to my parents’ house in Seattle, and now here I am, hanging out with the fams and working on art and getting ready to move to Norway.
Yeah, really!
I mean, kind of really. There’s this awesome permaculture farm/boatbuilding project a couple hours north of Oslo, and I wrote them a mash note and they said sure, come help out. Then there’s also a performance art/collective living experiment in Italy, a nascent anarchist community center floating in Copenhagen harbor, an art castle in the German countryside, and another boat project near Berlin. So, you know, I got options. Like Heisenberg’s electron, it is impossible to discover both my location and my velocity.
I’m not sure how cut out I am for the farming/boating life, as I’ve never had the opportunity to try it out – but farming and boating sure loom large in my running-away-from-home daydreams, and now that I’ve run away from home, I may as well do something cool with it.2 And I think I’ll be just fine – I’ve spent most of the last three weeks in Colorado, chez my brother and sister-in-law and niece, doing construction projects around their house with my dad, and I am full of the delicious tiredness of purposeful work and building strength. (I usually think of myself as being in decent shape, but apparently certain construction muscles are not worked by my standard fitness regimen of biking, dancing and sex. If you can incorporate a ratchet set into any of those, why, good on ya, mate.)
So! If you would like to keep up with the latest happenings, or merely have some visuals to help you imagining your pantsless correspondent freezing in the pines3, you can see the place on the map here (do zoom in! the detail is… kind of creepy, actually) – check out the weather right here – peep the project here – watch my Flickr stream for photos – and do return to this here blague for the usual irregularly spaced, accidentally informative updates.
Remember how we were learning German awhile ago? Yeah well now we are learning… well, Swedish, actually. More on that later. For now, the word of today is borta, which means “away,” as in “away from home.”
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1. ...and not getting a ticket! Fools and drunks, eh? (Not that I was drunk, as that perhaps implies. Hi Mom!)
2. Truth be told, I miss the hell out of some San Francisco these days, and I’ve been promising myself I’ll go back someday. Which is funny after I spent nearly fourteen years there swearing I was on my way out the door. Ha-ha-hilarious.
3. Or whatever kind of trees they have up there. I’ll tell you in three weeks!
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reading: Kendall Hailey, The Day I Became an Autodidact
eating: my dad’s excellent cooking
listening to: Fun., Some Nights (minus “It Gets Better”), on repeat
looking at: Red Fang, “Wires”; my dream girls in “Bitches in Bookshops”
making: drawings with powdered graphite, glitter and fluorescent paints
— Hannah Mae
Rest In Peace · 28 March 2012, 08:29
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the ones who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear
- Adrienne Rich, “Diving Into the Wreck”
— Hannah Mae
If you want to be seen by everyone, wanna be in the dream and have some fun · 21 March 2012, 23:13
Ladies and gentlemen, meine Damen und Herren, xanımlar və cənablar, hyvät naiset ja herrat, etcetera etcetera! EUROVISION SEASON HAS BEGUN.
In case you have not yet had the pleasure, Eurovision is a completely bonkers sort-of-pan-European scientific program to produce the most howlingly awesomely hilarious pop music in the world.1 It is kind of like the Earworm World Cup. This year’s finals are in Baku, as Azerbaijan won last year, and the contest slogan, as always, is “Are You Fucking Kidding Me?”
Ha ha, no really, the slogan is “Are You Fucking Kidding Me? You’ve Got to Be Kidding Me! Ohhhh Ho Ho Hee Hee Hee Haaaaa Ha Ha Ha Seriously Come See This Shit Right Now!”
I am sorry, the slogan is really “Light your fire!” In Olympics-y writing (newstyle Olympics, not Mexico City ’68). Imagine a whole Olympics made up only of opening ceremonies. But, like, drunk.
Important facts about Eurovision this year, the sum total of which just reduced my brother and I to snorting helpless giggles:
+ the home team is fielding a song called “When the Music Dies.” (May 22nd, 24th and 26th?) (Alas for jokes, this song would be completely at home on American pop radio, except for her telltale pronunciation of “everysing.”)
+ Denmark’s entry is called “Should’ve Known Better“ (than to wear your costume from that “Love Boat” party in public).
+ Russia is sending a team of small-town grandmothers, singing the beautiful traditional Russian polyphonic song “Party For Everybody.” Backed up, in the linked video, by what appears to be a large revolving washer-dryer.
+ San Marino has fallen afoul of the anti-commercial rule with their track “Facebook Uh Oh Oh.” The theory has been floated that they’re throwing the game because the winner has to host the next contest, and San Marino is too small.
+ Turkey’s entry, Can Bonomo singing “Love Me Back,” is the long-sought fusion of Bollywood, Vikings, “Oliver!,” armies of gypsies, a guitarist who looks like Slash, and a line which I believe is “my ship is made from wood, she’s searching for your bay.”
+ Montenegro’s champion is a fellow called Rambo Amadeus, singing “Euro Neuro,” traveling the continent with his donkey and rhyming dictionary.
+ Not to be outdone, Austria are sending a rap group? called Trackshittaz, in case you have been waiting for Mitteleuropa’s official answer to “Baby Got Back.” Or “Tron.”
+ No I swear to god I am telling you the truth.
My all-time favorite Eurovision celebrity is 2007 Ukraine entry Verka Serduchka, who I’ve mentioned previously but who deserves another listen. She’s the drag alter ego of comedian Andriy Danylko, a sort of turbo-disco-babushka with cracked-out-in-the-craft-store style – like Leslie Hall and Lady Gaga pounding vodka and huffing nail polish, or vice-versa.
I could go on, but as with all great artists, Serduchka’s oeuvre is its own best description: try the plate-kicking “Gop Gop!“ (if I ever get married, I want a reception just like this), the somewhat plotful “Gorilka“ (guest starring two basketballs), a tribute to “Dolce & Gabbana“ that would probably reduce Domenico and Stefano to tears – or start with her Eurovision entry, “Dancing Lasha Tumbai“ (you’ll want sunglasses, and maybe earplugs?) and just follow the related links right down the bedazzled rabbit hole.
One of those related links includes Verka Serduchka in the “Top 10 Worst Eurovision Songs of All Time.” All I can say to the compiler of that is, Are You Fucking Kidding Me? You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me.
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1. For a more in-depth introduction, please see Mr. Anthony Lane of the New Yorker, whose 2010 piece “Only Mr. God Knows Why” provides many useful Eurovision facts in his inimitable style. Make sure you’re not eating large chunks of food when you read it; I can’t be there to heimlich out everybody’s sandwich.
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reading: Mieville still
eating: raw kale salad like my life depended on it
listening to: well duh
looking at: I can’t anymore, I’m blinded
making: concrete disappear!
— Hannah Mae