I wish that I could have one face, that people would be able to describe me off-handedly, that’s just Sarah, she has thin lips and delicate hands and brown eyes that stutter if you look at them too long. It’s just that every time my heart breaks I acquire another angle, like a scar that covers my whole body. When my tears dry, I dress to show it off and take it on the town. I want to see what kind of men are drawn to me, because this tells me the damage done.

You can only see my heart from one angle. In seventh grade a pack of girls discovered it and sent me home in tears. All night I stood in front of the mirror, turning this way and that, until I was sure that I could hide it from everyone. Since then nobody has seen it but me, and I can hardly find it anymore. Once I couldn’t find it for several hours and I thought I had lost it for good, and I started panicking until I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a TV screen and saw my heart staring back at me. I stood stock still, which hurt because my back was crooked and my neck started to ache, until I had committed it to memory.

Sometimes I wonder if I only had one angle when I was born. I imagine myself as a baby, my head limp, my mouth gaping and my fingernails so tiny and so perfect. My mother lifts me into her arms and cradles me into her bosom, and my skin is still raw from the shock of its first brush with dryness. My eyes are too young to focus but they search for her anyway, my gaze desperately slipping across her face. Finally, maybe, I catch a glimpse of her as she’s looking at me and she sees me wholly.  She frowns to herself, just a little one, and I crack like a mirror right down the middle.

Lacy crepes on the left; banana fritters on the right

It turns out that the Alemany farmer’s market has the best banana fritters I’ve ever eaten (pictured above, on the right).   The secret is the dough; it’s dark, thick like a cake donut, with a tantalizing ghost of spiciness lurking somewhere in the dough.  The bananas themselves are almost an afterthought; they practically melt away, leaving behind a softer texture and a nice tart sweetness.  These were Tara’s discovery, and she’s become a total addict.

The lacy crepes (on the left) are also pretty stellar.  The curry chicken with mint is surprisingly spicy, and it’s a nice balance between the different ingredients.

Both items are sold in the Malaysian Lacy Crepes booth, which is usually towards the west side of the market, nestled between the pupusas and Ritual Roasters.

Women come and jog with me, in ones and twos, but the air tastes glorious so I chase it and finally only one can keep up with me.  We race each other until we are panting, and her looks at me grow darker until she runs down a different path and now I race myself.  By now I feel the press of the road up against me, demanding more before it will release my feet.  With each stride it takes something from me, a bit of handsomeness here, a memory there, until I begin to wonder what there is left of me to take.  My heart is beating like a siren now.  All around me I can feel my skin grow wrinkled and brittle, and as my legs pump my ankles creak and my hips feel more and more fragile every time my feet hit the ground.  The wind blows over my head and takes great fistfuls of hair with it until only gray wisps are left around my temples.  My lungs ache, my side aches, my body aches but my heart is screaming faster.  Faster.  Faster.

(from my dream journal)

Let’s start with the action.  Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is an action movie, and its antagonists are fearsomely toothed and clawed or armed with spears and swords.  There’s a lot of running, dashing, leaping across chasms, swashbuckling, and general tomfoolery.  At the climax we have a thousands-meet-in-battle scene that probably used the same software developed for Lord of the Rings.  In between, though, and there’s a lot of in-between time, Alice feels like a much more personal movie, whimsical and grotesque in that charming Tim Burton way.

Perhaps the thing missing most from Alice is the spirit of the book on which it’s based.  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland dabbles in an off-putting sense of whimsy; characters range from bizarre to grotesque, and usually engage in equally strange activities.  The book operates on dream-logic and until the end, Alice herself maintains that half-detached half-involved state dreamers have, as if they’re never sure if they’re living the story or narrating it.  Though the Alice of the movie pays lip-service to this, we never get a sense of Wonderland as a place where anything can happen.  In the book, take a step, and you could be miles away or not have moved at all; the movie has a clear, consistent geography.  It’s as if by mapping Wonderland, they’ve taken the wonder out of it.  (Aside: it’s mentioned in the movie that the place is really called Underland, and was just misheard by a very young Alice.)

Fundamentally, the book is about the experience of living on the cusp of awareness.  To read it is to be seven years old and know that a baby can’t really turn into a pig but not be able to put your finger quite on why that shouldn’t be so.  The literary Alice reacts to the events in the books not by disbelief or commitment, but with acceptance and discomfort.  Clearly, she says, the rhyme doesn’t quite go “how doth the little crocodile…”, but how does it go?  Her ability to reason is not yet developed, so she greets this world not with a sense of wonder but a sense of caution.

Alice as an adult has the luxury of truly understanding what reality is and committing to it with a young person’s passion.  She pays lip service to the idea of  not knowing whether or not she’s in a dream, but aside from the strangeness on all sides, it never feels like a dream — the logic of Wonderland is remarkably consistent.  In the book, nobody really wanted anything from Alice.  She was after the white rabbit, of course, but the characters she met each had their own agenda and their own madness.  In the movie, they are unified in looking to her as their literal knight in literal shining armor.

So do go see Alice in Wonderland.  It’s a great whimsical action movie, with winning performances by both queens, Anne Hathaway as the flamboyantly elegant White Queen and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen by turns funny and sad despite being a living bobblehead doll, and Johnny Depp plays another of his increasingly overly-mannered oddballs.   I really enjoy him; lately he seems to be trying to single-handedly force acting into a post-realist era, an ultra-modern take on how people acted in the old silents.  The set design is everything you’d expect of Tim Burton doing an update on Disney, and there are hundreds of little callbacks (and not-so-little ones) to the book and movies that have adapted it in the past.

So confession: back when I was in college, I stole a beat from Four Tet.  The underlying drums to She Moves She became the best part of the best song I had written that wasn’t a direct rip-off of Interpol, which is by way of saying that Four Tet is really good.  His CD “Rounds” became a study-music staple and I’ve tried and failed to imitate his sense of music off-balance, melodies shattered and reconstructed.

This was the first chance I’ve had to see him, and what surprised me most was the straightforwardness of his music.  For a good solid hour and a half, a four on the floor beat alternately swallowed and propped up the cacophony of strange and otherworldly sounds.  His new stuff is already more dance-y than his older work, and tonight he mostly gave the capacity crowd what it craved, music to move to.

My favorite moment was a beautiful rendition of My Angel Rocks Back and Forth that ended the evening; it was haunting, strange, and bits of it are still ringing in my ears.