CRog

today was a big day. Its been almost a year since Alex and I tied the knot at LAX, and now a year and 8,000 dollars later we were up at 6am and on our way to an appointment with an immigration officer to prove we got married cause we love each other. Alex wore green pants.

I played the night before, done by 2am, home and in bed by three, I was hating this morning, but the sunrise made up for it. (My fuzzy photo doesn’t do it justice, but you get the idea.)

that’s the building where people go to get a green card. Its now 7am and that’s the line of people who are trying to legally work in this country. Its not easy.

In case you didn’t know, Green Card does not = citizenship. It just allows you to be taxed every year and to safely make those random trips to Tijuana or what have you.

If you want to be a citizen you have to first get a green card and then in 10 years you can apply to be a citizen, which basically means you can vote.

most people in line looked Asian, Mexican or Central American. Its been hard for us: Alex not being able to legally work for a year, covering the expenses of lawyer, gov filing fees, accountant fees and payments to the IRS (as I said totalling 8k), but you better believe its a lot harder for most of these people who…

A. probably have more on the line when it comes to the need to legally work in the US and B. are gonna be grilled a lot more in the interview and possibly denied a green card cause they’re not white.

Sad but true. Let’s hope BS like this changes with a new president at the helm. (Obama. Obama. Obama.)

So after a lot of explanations and questions like, “Are you now or ever have been in anyway affiliated with a communist group,” they approved alex for a temporary work permit i.e., green card. In two years we go back and apply for a permanent work card. Wow.

So, we still have to wait for the card to come in the mail before we can take our celebratory trip to Tijuana, but there is one place we’re going tonight… Margaritaville! (couldn’t resist)

Xo,
CR

Kissing.jpg, originally uploaded by ChristineRenee.net.

Here are the photos from our trip to Marfa two weekends ago. Please enjoy, we did.

Love,
Christine Renee

no photos of our marfa trip, still. but the people in el paso found the charger and can send it to me. Instead I will share pics from the film Giant which was made in Marfa a long long time ago.

DAY TWO

We heard last call from across the street at the Thuderbird bar, so it must have been around 2am when we passed out, but I was wide awake at 5am.
The sun was in the process of rising, the air was cool, there was a train that passed near by. I woke Alex and we laid in bed holding each other listening to the train’s whistle.

It entered the room very softly and then filled the space with a gentle expansion. I think it was a “G” or an “F” and it wrapped its self around us cradling and peaceful.

Alex wasn’t as excited about waking up just then for a 3 mile run and a sunrise viewing. So I got up and tried to do some yoga and then just put my shoes on and went out for a jog.

It was 5:45 am. One of the things I love about jogging is that it gets you outside. In the last year I’ve been lucky enough to jog in Nicaragua, Miami, Texas, Mexico, California, Paris and New York. I go alone and I go where-ever my instinct tells me to go for 30 minutes, and when I do I see so much I would never see otherwise.

On this run I saw  animals of all kinds. A cotton tail, a skunk, a bunch of birds, a deer, an antelope, dogs and cats. And they weren’t afraid of me. They let me come right up to them all and say hello.

I discovered the Chianti foundation and read a plaque that said Marfa began as a chemical warfare testing ground and later became a holding place for German POWs during and after WWII. Isn’t that nice? All the military BS was shut down in 1946 and I guess that’s when a Texan art community started to move in.

The people here, their houses and the junk in their yards, they are characters. Each house has such a strong personality but they aren’t loud. They are content and complacent. This is not a cookie cutter suburban Texan town. People here are different and they’re cool with that.

So am I. In fact, when I knew it was time to leave Austin I toyed with the idea of moving here or New York. I have no regrets about NYC especially because you never know, Marfa might still happen.

TWIN PEAKS Alex and I just finished watching the entire series. We were trying to do one episode a night before sleeping. We became obsessed and here between Marfa and Alpine is a hill with two peaks on it called Twin Peaks. David would call this evidence of the Unified Field.

We had breakfast at Alice’s Café and discovered there is a town wide garage sale going on. “37 households participating” and you had to go to the chamber’s of commerce to pick up a garage sale guide that listed the names of those people participating, their address and a general description of what they were selling.

We went to one. The three Texas ladies sitting in lawn-chairs in a garage near the Hotel Piasano greeting us, “Well, come on in. Don’t be shy. Take a look, there’s bound to be something for you.”

Recently some cheesey French guy in LA said in a thick accent, “I heard Texan women are the best American women.” I had to agree. More so when I was younger, before the Internet and the current nomadic state of our culture when people moved and traveled so much less than they do now, there was a certain look and demeanor that defined a Texas woman.

But if you had asked me to describe THE Texan woman last Monday I would have said tall, blond, blue eyes… something somewhat generic. But seeing these women reminded me of what it really means to be Texan and female.

They are strong, confident, calm, quick witted and funny. Their eyes sparkle blue and white and luminous and as they get older they develop grooves and deep lines around them from all the laughing they’ve done and will continue to do.

Daughter of two army brats, I am first generation Texas, but I’ll take it.

We asked about cowboy boots for alex and the three women gave us the hot tip to go to Kathy’s Konsignment in Alpine. We got a little lost and distracted by a playpen of free puppies in front of a church rummage sale where we were encouraged to stuff a bag or a box with whatever we could for $.50.

There we found Alex two cowboy boots, one pair was a Lucahesse for what in the end was something like $.05 for the lot of them.

Then we met Nora, the woman who works at Kathy’s. She’s in her 70s maybe and is so beautiful, friendly, so texas. We walked into the store and she said to me, “Isn’t a beautiful day? Its so beautiful makes you want to walk a country mile.”

Alex and I tried hard to find something we could buy there. A beautiful shop but nothing that suited us this time. And we spent probably 45 minutes there talking to Nora. She had stories of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson from the days when they filmed Giant at the Hotel Piasano, and stories of the men from all over the world who came to that area to hang glide. She called them gliders. You can just see this sweet woman as a young bride in a 1950s country dress with two kids charming the pants off of these guys.

By the time we were ready to go she’d invited us to her house to stay anytime and we really hope she can come to our wedding.

(PHOTOS to come. There are some great ones, but due to technical difficulties like leaving the camera battery charger in an El Paso Best Western I am unable to show you at this time.)

Friday morning on a few hours of sleep we woke up and made the finishing touches on our room, cleaning up for Mikey B flying in from Austin to stay at the Hippy in the Hood house. Alex and I are on our way to Marfa TX and will miss Mikey. We’re going to Texas for a few days before we fly to New York.

Onward to Marfa! A magical place, a place where I felt we should be officially married. Its also day four of our fast. Just looking at bottled juice and fruit make me full. I want nothing. It’s our normal tradition to have a martini in the airport bar of all the airports Alex and I have been in, but not this time.

Marfa has no airports so we land in El Paso and suddenly we’re in texas. There are people in digital desert camo everywhere, trainees and soldiers from a near by Fort Bliss.

Its a different a world here, America proper. A different dimension. You can read the paper, listen to the news but there is no substitute for meeting the people who are living this reality we all as Americans some how contribute too. There is a war going on.

We drive off in a rental and are so light headed from lack of sleep and not eating for four days that we’re positively giddy. We pass a hugely masculine Don Quixote statue marking the airport entrance and I swerve out in the streets of this flat, dry land.

And sense I don’t really care that I’m gliding from lane to lane I decided better that we break this fast and come back to earth even if we do it at a Subway in Love’s.

Which is what we do, a salad with tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers, oregano, oil, vinegar and a beer. We’re on vacation.

ON our way to Marfa we pass the famous Prada store. It’s actually a store replica that will never function as a store but will permanently display shoes and handbags from the spring 2005 collection. Its pretty awesome, and Alex and I decided it was the perfect place to take a leak.

Three hours from El Paso we are now pulling into Marfa. The population here is 2121 (6) and there’s a big beautiful sign in a purple, midnight blue with a tired cowboy on horseback that reads “Marfa. The Way the West Was.” Welcome home.

Our next stop was at Cheapo’s liquor store, and from there we descended down a spiral of drunk debauchery. We’ve booth been so busy and with different schedules that I think we were craving some sort of dramatic break from this pattern and we let each other have it. I can’t even remember what we were fighting about but it felt sooo good to fight.

We went to your standard upper-middle class “fancy” restaurant and had a rum martini before sitting down to dinner. Then ordered an appetizer of beets and oranges. By the time the second course came, putanesca and arugala salad, I wasn’t hungry cause I was so mad at Alex.

I remember (as opposed to a lot of moments about that night I don’t remember) looking at him and thinking, “oh my god we’re getting married, wait we are married, wait what the fuck is going on? What are we fighting about?” Finally one of us grabbed the uneaten salad and threw it at the other. Our first food fight.

I left the restaurant crying and there was a trail of green mashed chlorophyll in my wake. Alex ran after me finding me in a field of large cacti rumbling around in the gravel telling him to leave me alone. Then I said, “give me the keys,” and I got in the car and started to drive off, but I stopped to pick him up, of course.

He opened the car door, and I said, “Where’s the wine? Go back and get the wine.” And we looked in each other’s eyes and started laughing.

We drove one block to our hotel, the Thunderbird, took off our clothes and dove into a neon green pool of water naked and silent under the stars of Texas.

waterproof super heros 

There is a reason you choose the people that surround you.

One of the slightly mundane reasons Alex is the man for me is that he gets things done that I have a tendency to put off, like getting ready to surf this summer.

He found a guy in some suburb east of pasadena who sells new, name-brand suits at close to $100 bucks, depending on the suit, out of his garage (I’ll post his info asap).

we saw a deer there 

and a teddy bear 

When we got back home we found the landlord had done a bit more decorating. He’s really into couches right now.

guess the installation was inspired by the fact that we gave our 30 days notice! on to laurel canyon, American-rock-lore capitol of… America

this sign was on one of the couches “We have MATCHING 3 seat convertable couch to bed.” The he leaves his number. P.s. this is really how I dress when I don’t feel like a salad, when I don’t feel like dressing.

then we went to the Standard Hotel Downtown and I played a rooftop sunset gig. I love those.

Back in LA things keep moving, all my close ones going through major transitions, me too, from the 4 into the caos of 5 and looking forward to 6.

Just trying to nurture my sensitivity and roll with it.

Themes of the wheel and circles all around me.

Photos:

A. Mom and Dad’s recent renewal of vows: 30 years!

B. Sunset in LA yesterday. A huge black cloud of soot and smoke hung over the city causing rain and then an amazing sunset. I drove around looking for a place to get Monika Smog Checked. She didn’t pass.

C. taking a bath to chill out. Half washed off mud pack clearing the smut.

There was Iceland, there was Morocco, there was Guatemala and there was up state New York.

There was talk of a tour, or of chartering a yacht and going to a select number of spots on the coast of Brazil, North America and Europe and then, finally then… there was Marfa.

Donald Judd, Desert, Mysterious Lights, fear of Alien Abductions, Cute Hotels, Swimming Pools and not so far away stars.

Alex’s family and mine, our friends far and not so near… coming together, taking over the town and celebrating the power of knot tying.

We think, this is where we will be married:

Thursday was a new moon, and as i’ve said I feel like my time of self discovery is over and its time for action…

CR, Kate and Melie on May 18, 2005 at Marquee NYC

But my girlfriend Kate is coming to San Francisco. She’s starting a new life here, opening the first branch of the Laughing Lotus Yoga studio and it was important to her that her ladies be with her while she apartment hunts.

So Christine Finlee and I drove up the 101. Finlee is the woman who organized the after party for the “Dream” post. More on that latter.

We got into town and when to the Wild Side West, one of Finlee’s favorite ladies’ bars. Motley Crew’s “Girls Girls Girls” was playing when we walked in and a the only guy in the bar was reading a Playboy Mag and mumbling to himself.

The ladies were big and butch and pleasantly content with the fact that we weren’t slamming them down. It was cool if we wanted to hang. Peggy Lee came on the juke box and someone sang the entire song in an operetta voice.

We went to Finlee’s friend’s house who incidentally lives with Annie Sprinkle. Anne’s just gotten done with her third, the yellow wedding. She’s staging seven weddings, one for each chakra in an appropriate local, the green wedding for example while be in Hawaii. Its performance is called, the love art lab. Plastic orange things, orange taffeta, orange sparkles, 10 TVs, an awesome blue BMW bike and other goodies about their garage.

Then we picked Kate up in Oakland, had a drink at Bobby’s Owl Tree, and sushi at Ryko’s next door with her old friends, Danny who’s in love with a sexy animal trainer and some day might try Ayahuasca and big Dave who mostly has a killer dance floor spin.

so much to do that day. your mind is running without you and there is simply that moment when you arrive, at the place, a see through building and iron birds. and then, you’ve mounted the car, crossed the bridge, trusted yourself and you’ve arrived, like two children learning what it is to fart. Nothing is the same after that.

Confession: It’s true. I admit it.

So now, let me catch you up.

The thursday after Doug L. and Chris Milo came for FOOD PARTy III, I met Chris at a bar or club called the Social. From what I understand, it was founded by four of Hollwood’s finest, Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, Lon Chaney and Rudolph Valentino. If you grew up in LA, it was also the cool hang-out, YMCA style for a couple of years.

So, I met Chris there, was given the VIP tour and asked to see the possibilities of me and them. I was enthralled with a woman there, who couldn’t play pool but swore she knew
how to ride a bike. She was beautiful but beyond beauty.

was it a MacKaye’s or McKai’s? porn release party? I’m confussed. photo of Ian by pat.

Our entourage of Chris, Kathryn, the beauty and her man Sean Patrick, ended up at the Beauty Bar. It was Ian MacKaye’s or Eon McKai’s? porn release party, I was told this by an overconfident male who couldn’t believe that I didn’t care.

The OCM told me his name was Double King Dick Dong, so I asked him for his card, “Really? That’s what they call you? Do you have a card?” You know, trying to be LA here, and how funny would ‘Double King Dick Dong’ be on a card?

Long story short, I entertained him longer than normal, to be polite, and finally, leaned in and said, “Look man, its really time for you to leave. It’s not funny now.” And he did.

I drove home, this amazing wind storm was blowing through LA. I was in downtown, it was 2am and I was listening to Olivia Newton John, and I felt it.

So, the next morning, Friday. I drive Alex to a place in da Valley. For the next three days, while Orlan is out of town, he’s going to edit an HD feature. The circle is closing in. The rumors are true, this kind of work is quick and easy money no matter how you look at it.

Afterwards I drive from the 405 t0 Wilshire. From the ocean through Beverly Hills shoppers to the arts district. It was such a crazy trip. Los Angeles, the end of western civilization, it shows its colors in its longevity.

Christine Renee and Doug Chrismas. The future?

I’m driving this way with a purpose. I’m dropping off a resume at Ace Gallery to become their new PR/ Event Coordinator. I’ve worked hard at this piece of paper. It summarizes all I’ve “done” in New York the last five years. It meant a lot to put that on one sheet.

You know, the whole time in New York, it is one event, one drama, one thing after the other. So to try to summarize it, and corporatize it on one sheet of paper, was quite a challenge.

Meanwhile, Alex’s visa is running out. And I’m a girl of tradition. I don’t want to leave him, but I’m not quite there to be a bride, aren’t I supposed to be in opalescent chiffon and in a castle with 13 fairies floating around?

But that morning, before dropping him in the valley, we went to Pasadena and met with a lawyer. She had nothing good to say but there was a turtle in her office.

That day Thomas (Rub and Tug) gets in touch, actually he got in touch the night before.

We’re both felling the heaviness of a city behind a green door and vow to change everything on Saturday.

I descend into the valley, and pick Alex up.

Friday? I jogged at the high-school track near by.

Saturday, I descend, Alex is still working on that Gilles Rosier film I leave him and join Doug Lee and Thomas out at a Russian bar on Santa Monica. I walk in, is crowded. I’m uncomfortable. Doug has helped me, painstakingly to get there. Now I’m there or here and now what?

The DJ is playing shit 80s blurred with White Stripes and I’m open minded, its shit. But… there are some interesting looking men, and I’m not looking but they make doing nothing more fun. Thomas tries to hook me up with someone who is the brother of a famous skate border. I remind him I am engaged. He desn’t seem to notice.

The bar closes at two, and we all wonder where to go, so there’s a house party. In the parking lot waiting for valet I point out a girls shoes, they’re good, and that’s rare here. Thomas says she’s so New York ten years ago, the A.R.E. Weapons days, and apologies for his honesty. But I agree, and see no reason to be sorry.

We go to someone’s house, up the hill. Kid Millionare and an entourage walk by as T and Doug and I are disscusing death. I preted not to recognize Kid, but we know each other, and I question my actions.

alife, new york

The party sucks, and the guy keeps his sneakers in his freezer, no shit. So we leave, for the house of Kevin’s. Thomas and I make shadow people on a fake wall that pretended to be a rock formation. It was really concrete and chicken wire.

On to the house, Mahalo, we must de-shoe our selves.

Mexico, Korea, Brit-dom, Jews, Christians, music and the future. Doug made sure I got home safe, Thank You, Doug.

Sunday, the next morning, Alex off to Valley world. I text Thomas… “Breakfast?” yes he says and he comes and picks me up. He’s never been in a gang neighborhood before, I clean to show growth. He plays Satie on our piano. We embark then on a quest, for food. And we find the Valley of Pinatas.

From there is the past coming in waves. we relive it, and its good. over corn and Moby Dick.

Monday, Compton or the courthouse at LAX? LAX i say, of course, All my time with him has been about departure and arrival, planes and transference.

So we go, pretending it doesn’t mean anything, and that’s the reality. He tries to get sentimental, and I tell him to stop it, and then I can’t help it. Fuck!!

So we get a liscences, and go to the Proud Bird to wait for the paper work and drink a bottle of champange in the midsts of a graveyard and the presences of a current.

We go back to the courthouse and are scanned again, no drugs, no weapons. The woman on the sixth floor admires my ring, I admire hers, a turtle.

We go further, a place in the neighborhood with fish and mariachis and pass out watching that Mel Gibson film about Christ.

We are robbbed the next morning, Tuesday. My CDs, the make-up i got with Edda and the gold budha my mom sent, not the radio.

I do what I can. I do what I can to piece it together. I have a gig, a “try-out” at the Standard hotel the next day. My CDs are the most current, emotionally current, music I have with me and someone sold them for crack. That’s what i get for leaving the doors open in South Central.

So I feel a tiny bit down, I wonder how am I going to tell my parents I’m getting about it all because we have to, while they are in St. Lucia renewing their wedding vows.

The next day, Wednesday at 5:50am my time, I call my folks who are supposed to be in the Puerto Rican airport in San Juan. I know it well. I have to tell them.

I drop Alex off at Orlan’s. I pull out of her driveway in a particular “New York” style. A cop pulls me over. I’d just gotten off the phone with another lawyer, and with a new price of how much “marriage” costs. I’m fucking over it, really.

He goes through the whole thing, criticizes my Texas drivers’ license, and since we we’re just robbed, I has no insurance papers on me which in California this would amount to a 2000 fine… I just spilled it… it was all true, that this moving violation would severely screw me up right now and here’s why, and he let me go.

One thing I know, don’t fuck with police in New Jersey and California and this time I was lucky.

I got home, my parents called me from PR. I told them the news. It went better than expected. Way better.

Right after. Aloe a friend of my landlord’s shows up and begins clearing the middle room for Vivianan and her boyfriend.

They’re italian, and in the true italian style, they show up, unpack for 30 mins, and then open a bottle of wine and smoke a cigarette.

I’ve got to go, to this audition at the Standard, so we do one toast and I’m on my way.

Traffic sucks and I arrive 15 mins late. A no-no in LA. But it works out. They love the set and I’m in on the gig…

the rest? Alex and I came home and danced to Viviana’s boyfriend’s music. He doesn’t speak english, just Italian, but you know… turns out he has great taste and we danced.