Three Kids in a Trench Coat

This week, I've been working on a poem that I think is about impostor syndrome (not to be confused with Capgras delusion, in which a person believes that a loved one has been replaced with a stranger, though there's a poem in there, too).

In this poem, three kids in a trench coat get away with some stuff -- like stealing pies from windowsills and buying cigarettes -- because, well, they're three kids in a trench coat and no one's really paying attention.

Unlike those with impostor syndrome, the three kids in a trench coat are totally happy with themselves as they teeter about, chasing their fedora in the wind. Many artists, writers, and others, though, feel like three kids in a trench coat who've lost their fake mustache and are going to get caught at any moment and called out for pretending to be what they are not.

I have impostor syndrome more often than I'd like to admit -- that feeling that while maybe I've lucked out or worked hard on occasion, I'm not a real writer, artist, or other in the sense that my betters are.

Good news? I've read that those who really should have impostor syndrome rarely do. Of course, those of us with impostor syndrome probably think we're the exceptions to that rule. And certainly there are those who are both totally authentic and 100% confident.

So: Three cheers (one for each kid) for impostors! Keep working hard, keep lucking out, and keep reminding yourself that you deserve every happiness, every success.

And I like that trench coat on you, mustache or no. Let's go steal a pie.

-- Catherine Coan, 11/30/18

Precious Cargo

From my desk, I can see the coastal curve of Malibu. Today, it's barely visible through an eerie brown haze. 

Hundreds of thousands of acres -- including almost 100,000 in Malibu -- have burned around Los Angeles for the past week. Images on the news -- an otherworldly wall of smoke sweeping evacuees down Pacific Coast Highway, a lone horse hitched to a lifeguard tower against a red sky -- sink the heart. The human death toll is at 48. And all day and night, firefighters, police, EMTs, and just regular people keep going back in to get others out.

A few days before my first office hours at the Marion Davies Guest House at Annenberg Community Beach House, I got a voicemail from Naomi Okuyama, Cultural Affairs Supervisor: A letter had arrived for me. 

It's funny how remarkable a letter is, these days -- a handwritten one even more so. So remarkable that it wouldn't just be slipped under the door with my other mail. There isn't any other mail. 

I was pretty sure who'd sent it. I asked Naomi if the envelope had super-neat, kind of chubby printing. It did. 

J, a dear friend since college -- writer, actor, physician, teacher, husband, father -- has sent me a postcard or letter several times a year since about 1990. Sometimes the missives are literary, sometimes humanitarian, sometimes absurd, sometimes transcendent, often all of the above. What a fine thing, don't you think? Even finer when you consider that I am totally delighted by every missive but rarely write back because I'm a big jerk and my handwriting is terrible. 

In this letter, J shared with me Sea Prayer (Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, 2018) by Khaled Hosseni, author of The Kite Runner. Sea Prayer is a short work of first-person poetic fiction in the form of a letter from a father to a son. Hosseni was inspired by Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, a toddler who in 2015, along with most of his family, drowned while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Lebanon to Greece. Images on the news -- of the boy's body face-down on a Turkish beach, of a police officer carrying him away -- were heartbreaking, infuriating, unforgettable, yet too easy to flip past because, after all, that's somewhere else. And everything everywhere is falling apart.

Sea Prayer's language is simple and direct as it moves between awe, adoration, and plea. It is about indifference, power, love, and hope:

...all I can think tonight is

how deep the sea,

and how vast, how indifferent.

How powerless I am to protect you from it.

...Because you,

you are precious cargo, Marwan,

the most precious there ever was.

I pray the sea knows this.

Inshallah.

How I pray the sea knows this.

When self-sufficiency, human kindness, and even human cruelty is dwarfed by nature, we negotiate. With the divine, with ourselves. In the face of indifference, when we are at our most powerless, love drives us -- even non-believers like me -- to risk and to pray. 

We're all here. There isn't somewhere else. 

Thanks, J. I wrote you back.

-- Catherine Coan, 11/14/18

Rhymin' and Stealin'

Brooklyn toile by Michael Diamond

On "Rhymin' and Stealin'," the opening track of the Beastie Boys' License To Ill (1986), the band samples Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks." It's perfect -- ominous and celebratory, struck through with a fat needle. This loop came from an Adam Yauch (MCA) experiment wherein he literally looped tape -- from a two-reel player around a chair and back -- in his apartment.

I learned this detail last night, seeing the remaining two Beasties, Mike Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), with their long-time collaborator Michael Schwartz (Mix Master Mike, who played that loop, scratches and all) on their tour for the delightfully thick new Beastie Boys Book at the Ricardo Montalbán Theater in Hollywood.

The Beastie Boys are my favorite band. I've loved them since high school. I still have Paul's Boutique (1989) on vinyl. I wore out at least two License To Ills on cassette, hurtling my dad's 3/4-ton Dodge pickup down Montana back roads. I saw them in Washington state at Lollapalooza (where my best friend lost half her boot in the mud), then a few other venues I pretty much remember, in the '90s. When I sold my CDs, theirs were among the first albums I purchased on iTunes. They were my soundtrack for college road trips and my beats of choice for after-party dance-offs. They've accompanied me on hundreds of grown-up slogs along the 405. And in my dotage, they join me for ferocious bouts of elliptical and dusting. Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz last night, sharing stories from their lives and careers, were joyous and heartbreaking. Adam Yauch died in 2012. His presence and absence are palpable.

These guys were and are incredibly talented, across genres and disciplines. On top of making and producing music, they act, direct, write, helm podcasts, even design wallpaper.

Speaking of stuff you stick on other stuff: The term "collage" comes from the French coller, "to glue." Collage, sometimes called "assemblage," is my favorite form -- visual, auditory, and written -- to witness and to work in. The Beastie Boys revolutionized sound collage via sampling in their music: Their curated layers of sound are beautiful, indebted, original, and fun. Sometimes they give props; sometimes they just catalyze joy in the communal experience of art. They Rauschenberg. They move me. Sometimes to tears, sometimes to dance like a 48-year-old white woman with a tricky back probably shouldn't.

Today as I work in my office at the Marion Davies Guest House, I'm grateful. To be alive, to be writing, to be supported in my work, to be witnessing the work of other artists. We are all collaging, consciously or unconsciously, all of the time. And we are all collage, fragments that make new sense vibing with and juxtaposed against other fragments.

As MCA writes in "Something's Got To Give" (Check Your Head, 1992): Someday, we shall all be one.



-- Catherine Coan, 11/05/18

PS: If you, too, love artists who work across genres and disciplines, please join me Tuesday, November 27, at 6:30 pm at Annenberg Community Beach House as I moderate a conversation between collage-y artists and writers Sheree Winslow, Mathieu Cailler, Leslie Wood-Brown, and Cindy Rinne.