meeting lovely writers at AWP & getting smashed with NASA

I went to an AWP convention (for the first time) in Denver late last week. You know, I've been a member of a few writing communities: Ann Arbor's (because of the University of Michigan) and Stanford's (because of the Stegner program), and in each community, I continually found myself flabbergasted at the camaraderie I experienced there between people who love words. AWP was like both of those programs--on crack. At 2 am on Friday night, I actually stood in the middle of a room (granted, it was a bar, I was thoroughly drunk, and many of my writer-friends from Michigan, Stanford, and the South were there) and happily thought, "These are my people."

On Friday morning, I was part of a panel on place in fiction, talked to a few black women writers (one from New Orleans: go Angele!), wandered around the book-fair and looked at beautiful literary journals, and then crawled back to my room, exhausted, to nap and doze to a movie about World War I. That evening, I ate surprisingly good Cajun/Creole food (in Denver!), drank beer, sat in a rooftop bar and talked smack with my Stegs, met the lovely folks from the University of Mississippi, and then was forced out by cops from the rooftop to the bar in the first floor of the hotel, where there was a flurry of networking and drinking going on, which is where I had my revelation.

You think I stopped there, don't you? Oh no, I didn't. After the cops cleaned us out of the first floor bar of the hotel, I walked with my friends to a hipster diner, which had run out of fries, and had breakfast. Then I ran back to my hotel, threw the rest of my crap in my bags, and hustled downstairs to catch my shuttle to the airport. My flight was at 6 am. I did a sort of jerky doze for 2 hours on the plane, since I'm terrified of flying and had only taken one Xanax, which means that every time we hit turbulence, I was convinced we were due for a crash-landing in the damn Rocky mountains. Once we landed in San Francisco, I drove home and went to sleep for four hours. I then rose, dressed, and barely made it to NASA's Bay Area party, Yuri's Night, which celebrates the voyage of the first human in space with multiple music performances, airshows, science projects, food, and models of rockets and airplanes, down in Mountain View.

Why did I do this, you're asking? It's because N.E.R.D. was performing. And 5:30 pm found me six people back, stage left. My only complaint is that the show was too short. Shae had mad energy, Fam's grill was blinding and he grinned hard when they performed a snippet of "Shots," Chad was cool as ice on the keyboards, and Pharrell, well Pharrell was obscure and nerdy and handsome and charismatic as ever. How obscure? He said, "I think NASA should be the White House," at the end of their performance. It wasn't until I'd watched the airshow, terrified, wandered into the hangar to listen to a DJ spin otherworldly beats on his turntables, then wandered into the larger hangar to sit in on two lectures about SETI and the search for habitable planets that I realized just what Pharrell meant by that comment...I think. Common came on later and rocked it: lots of freestyling, lots of hits, lots of energy, and he played for the entire hour, too. NASA knows how to throw a party! (I bet you never thought you'd read that sentence.) The only mildly upsetting part of the night (besides the fact that I could have taken a pic with Pharrell and Fam but didn't because I didn't have my damn camera) was how confused I was by the mix of folks who were there: I couldn't tell if the costumes that people were wearing were costumes, or if those were their regular clothes. It was as I was mesmerized by a tall, broad girl wearing pink panties and a green dinosaur's tail making out with her boyfriend in the DJ hangar that I realized that I was sorely under-dressed. I wish I had pictures for you, but because of the aforementioned missing camera, I don't. Ah well, this is what words are for, yes?

This means that I passed out last night and slept for around twelve hours. However, I've been up for around 8 hours now, coming down off my post-AWP, post-concert high by listening to Full Crate & Mar, two artists from Amsterdam who I've recently discovered. I've watched their "I Said" this video at least five times today, and I might watch it again just for the hell of it because it's so beautiful. Mar looks a little like Val Kilmer (and a lot like this guy at home I know), and this video looks like a really messy break up, but boy, the music is spectacular and when I watch the video, it feels like love. Enjoy.

Full Crate & Mar - I Said from Nalden on Vimeo.

(That said, I do wonder what I'd do if as my boyfriend was breaking up with me on a rooftop, his friend came over, put his hand in my face, and started shooting musical sparks out of his fingers. I'd probably look as bewildered and heartbroken as the girl at the end of the video.)