I'm a horrible sister; I don't call nearly often enough.

 * * *

"How ARE you?"

"Great! But I've lost Mom." Mom, visiting Ireland for the week.

"You lost Mom?"

"She went off ahead of me."

It doesn't entirely surprise me. I imagine Mom traipsing the side streets of Cork, bending forward to peek into the windows of shops, pointing at soda bread. Stopping to listen to a street performer playing a song she doesn't realize is actually Dylan, taking the long way back to the hotel to marvel at old buildings and old men wearing old caps down by the water to keep their old ears warm. Oblivious to her name being called behind her along the way.

Our mother, she's got no strings.

"Can you call back in a half an hour once I've found her?"

I heat up some soup, drum my fingernails, wait half an hour and call back. The first time there's no answer. For a moment of held breath, I imagine a stolen purse, a chase scene, international intrigue, a bang on the head and sudden amnesia, a windowless van full of masked men. I dial again.

"I found her. She went to the police station, like a good girl."

"Oh thank god." My sister knows that we are unnatural worriers.

"She was holding candy." My sister knows how to make a story better.

By now they're building a fire in her little Irish home; down the line I can hear everyone laughing in the background. There they are, all together, telling stories that have sat untold for too long. For a moment, I say nothing just so I can be a part of that room. The crackle of logs is lost to satellite static. Fairies dangling from antenna wires.

"You know you need to call me again so we can have a big talk."

I know, sister; I know. You're far away, you have stories to tell, and I don't call nearly often enough.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

One of the things that you notice almost immediately in the jungle are the birds; so many different sounds coming from so many different directions. Are they communicating to each other? What are they saying? Does each variation serve a purpose? Why are there repetitions? Is there a pattern or is that just your imagination?

The slow climb up the spiraling interior of the Guggenheim felt disorienting. Had we been in this spot before? Was the music changing? Why are there repetitions? A speaker next to my ear burst forth with some sort of high-pitched noises; I winced like an old lady encountering stairs, but then braved my way upwards. I've not always been the biggest fan of performance art, but I've always tried to be open-minded.

1. Transverse Temporal Gyrus: "For the Guggenheim's 50th Anniversary, the band Animal Collective has collaborated with artist Danny Perez on a site-specific performance piece that will transform the museum's rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment."
2. Transverse Temporal Gyrus: the part of the brain that processes auditory information.

We listened, we drank, we climbed. Are the walls closing in? As we neared the top, I noticed my beer was nearly empty. "We drank our way to the top," I said, and looked down.

Oh. Down.

The walls of the inner balcony of the rotunda are just at waist height; we both had this instant horrible feeling that it was the perfect height to cause one to lean a little bit too far into the center, fall, fall, fall onto the scary rabbit men in robes below.

(The stuff of nightmares, no?)

The sensation of vertigo is not something new to visits to the Guggenheim. Everybody gets it. The slowly spinning climb, peering over the edge, watching the walls spiral up as the floor falls away from you. What was new for me was the sensation not of falling, but of floating. Near the top of the climb, I steadied myself with my elbows on the ledge, moved my center of gravity to my heels, and stared for a while into the lights below. I was above it all.

There was something familiar about all this.

Flip the calendar back a month. (Really, imagine it. I love old movies that show the passage of time by ripping pages from a calendar.) At Sundance, in what could only be described as a fit of bourbon-induced masochism, we subjected ourselves to the singular experience of an 8:30am screening of Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void (described a bit unfairly by Reuters as "virtually unwatchable"). The colors—bright blues and pinks, harsh whites (the "dead-white" that Frank Lloyd Wright so loathed) and yet an ever-permeating darkness—were identical. The sensation of floating above the action, of being perched in the air like the recently dead—the very same.

Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void. Solomon R. Guggenheim's Contemplating the Void.

Two voids converged, contemplated, and entered.

I can see how people let themselves be disappointed. The band wasn't performing live (though we were made aware of this when we bought our tickets). It was three hours of noise and light (which is what a lot of movies are anyway). But the woman who took the elevator to the top to get a beer, and then insisted to her boyfriend that they head back down to catch a cab? Really?

The longer you sit awake in bed listening at night, the more you hear.

Over time, if you gave it time, it started to feel a little bit more interesting. Things became more significant, more surreal. And I don't even think I was trying that hard. A couple of tables draped with black tablecloths and lit by candles halfway up the rotunda for an earlier charity event didn't seem to be part of the show, but simply by being present, cast with pink light, they suddenly were. The security guard rubbing her temples, the people dangling expectantly over the walls—they became part of it too. Even the woman on the corner of 88th and Madison cutting through the line before we were even inside, painted eyebrows raised high, asking "what's this FOR?"—the memory of that question became part of it too.

Art (and I'm completely aware that, dear lord, I'm about to make a sweeping, obvious, and potentially pretentious statement about Art) is about the entire experience.

It seemed that some in the rotunda were focusing all of their energies on the men on the platforms below. Do something, they commanded them with their minds. Perform, they seemed to say. ENTERTAIN us. But if you looked away from the unmoving be-costumed men below and looked around at everyone watching, illuminated by Perez's pinks and blues, this collective expectation building inside the void—the whole thing suddenly made a lot more sense.

Yet the cuts in the walls slowly emptied of people. Plastic beer cups left behind on the sloping floor like ghosts. It was becoming the void again.

The images seemed to be looping, then just as we were thinking about leaving, something new would appear. Little blue lights twinkling across the faces of those who remained. "We haven't seen this one yet." And again we leaned back in.

As time passes it is our hope that you will wonder if you are hearing songs or patterns or maybe simply hearing more.

Then, toward the end of the night, a moment of silence broke through the forest of noise. The music cut out, and, as if exploding with expectation, an army of kids in tribal face paint let up a junglistic howl into the rotunda. Across the way, I saw Danny Perez smile from behind the engineer's desk.

Those kids. (Kids! Yes! Born in the nineties, I swear.) The ones in animal masks, the ones waving their hands through the air like they were swimming. The ones who traveled in packs. They filled the void with their excitement, with their willingness to follow the single, final, underlined instruction at the bottom of our entry tickets: "have fun!"

They got it, those kids. They understood the full experience, the importance of not just standing still and expecting it to come to you. The itching desire to let yourself get dizzy, to fill the void with noise.

To lean back in and float.

(I'm coming at this not as the world's hugest Animal Collective fan. If you want that kind of perspective on the event, hop on over to Hipster Runoff. They LOVE them some Animal Collective. Thanks to Brandon for bringing to our attention something he could experience vicariously through us.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

***

When the wet rain falls heavy on my coat, I go underground. Hibernate; eavesdrop. F Train, Saturday night. A man sitting across from me calls out names like fairytale lands to the woman at his side. I tip an ear away from my book.

"Kiawah Island. Oakmont. Pebble Beach. Pinehurst. Riviera."

These sound like magical places. Warm places.

Seven years ago we saw an alligator while riding our bikes down a path in Kiawah Island. Two men in chinos pointing some numbered iron at it as it scurried back into its algae-filled pond, each man with a hand in his pocket, white teeth, good hair, an image out of a catalog. A fantasy catalog with reptile props. Lizard bags carried by lizards! Svelt snakes wrapped around the necks of belles in boas! I see the thick catalog now in full color, fifties illustrations, a section at the back for camping equipment: iguanas carrying windup radios, tin pans for turtles, tight-knit nets for catching salamanders. We scooted our bikes further along the path, under great old oaks and loblolly pines. I imagined the alligator scurrying after me, nipping at my tires.

"St. Andrews." A golf course, of course. "Torrey Pines. Turnberry. Wentworth. Wolf Creek."

Here on the subway those warm and sunny places feel so distant. I imagine shading my eyes from the sun and digging my toes into sand as I blow into my hands and watch the couple sitting across from me sinking into their downy coats.

"Hazeltine National," she says, choosing one.

"Tiger Woods?"

She nods as she applies her foundation from a compact with a smudged mirror. He hands her the PS3. Has to look good to play video games.

"Mr. Woods it is."

I play games like this too. I choose my warm place, fiddle with the settings in my brain. A, B, up arrow, right arrow. The top of a pyramid in Palenque. A table under a broad umbrella at Moscenicka Draga. The rough cement blocks that served as the last shady spot at the public pool in Ohio, where you'd place a wet hand and watch the mark quickly disappear. A swimming hole amidst tall grass in the rolling hills of the Latvian countryside, mud squelching betwixt toes.

I close my eyes and go there. Out of the subway I march through the cold, determined to make it through to the next round. Let's agree it must be warmer there.

(SB, you are partly responsible. And inspirational.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

Brief Scenes From Our Marriage
Giving our household a run for our money. (Related: The most recent episodes of Wiffle and Hubbin have somehow ended up on Tumblr.)

I read just about every word in these during my bedazzled youth. Now it's the covers I love.
Right now, the sun is setting over Central Park and I can't help but think that the color of the buildings beyond the trees and the clouds and the sky would make a perfect sixties sci-fi magazine cover. Roger Ebert offers us some examples of his favorites.

Joy Formidable - Cradle
Side one track one on the mix for my next road trip. (via Maura)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.