A text from a father to his adult daughter morphs into creative chaos
Dylan, my oldest child, moved to New York from Seattle just in time for the Covid Pandemic. Somehow Dylan managed to graduate Summa cum laude (tho too shy to openly admit it) from the New School in Manhattan in 2021 with a Masters in Creative Writing (Nonfiction). They gifted me with a copy of this book from one of their favorite authors. Ms. Zambreno’s writing moved and inspired me as well during those uncertain times. Damn, we still live in uncertain times.
Good Morning over there in New York, dear Elder Daughter, it’s Midnight here in Seattle…
Hey, I still wanna hear more about Moosie Moose Dog^^^ and it dawned on me as I read a little more of Kate Zambreno’s weird, yummiliciously quirky Screen Tests from 2019 and went back to gaze upon its pinkishly pale crimson book color the image there was a horse on the cover. A frickin’ horse! Was so cool to have Kate Z’s black ’n’ white foto of her jamming on a piano peeking thru a jagged, torn fake hole in the book. Cool in a discordian kinda way. Tonight close to midnight an idea dawned on me, damn, that ragged rip in the spacetime of a 2-dimensional image is really a cutout of a flat horse.
How many times have I peered at this cover? And not realized this? LOL! Perhaps looking hard past her cleavage as if it was merely what it was, a black gown, strapped, dressed for zany Zambreno performances. At least there weren’t any pictures of her baby rolling off the piano bench and falling to the floor to burst out with startled wails. Because her kids were human babies and not baby whales. Baby whales with tails to tell tales in cetacean code? So all these things flashed thru my pretzel brain supercharged with neurodivergence and strong black coffee before wondering if the cowboy on the horse was some weird ode to the Lone Ranger, to those iconic cowboys of old black ’n’ white cinema, or just a Mormon man who smoked cigarettes and drank Pepsi when not inside a church for Latter-Day Saints. But I always got LDS mixed up with LSD. So, was cute little Moose Dog really kidnapped in Seattle?