Margaret Cho

Present

January 25th, 2012

On the rented bike, a magnificent and majestic Harley-Davidson Sportster Low, with only three miles on it so far and the brand new shiny chrome catching the sunlight and beaming it back into the world in hard, blindingly brilliant rays, my emotions and opinions about motorcycling vary wildly from second to second.

When I am up in third gear, flying down an industrial street with few cars or pedestrians, just two other riders, one, the adept and skillfully sensitive teacher Luis, the other, the avid and keenly aware student Ryan, I scan my field of vision and I think 3 things -

1) What is happening in the street 12 to 1 seconds in front of me?

2) This is the best thing I have ever done.

3) I love the heads in the helmets in front and behind my gaze.

Whenever I have to stop, downshift and clutch and brake and put my boots, left then right on the ground and wait at the intersection, holding the heavy bike between my skinny legs, I think -

1) My hands and feet are inadequate.

2) This is the worst thing I have ever done.

3) I still love these hot bikers I am riding with and their straight backs and faces held high and looking where they are going – their bodies and bikes as one perfect and very fast being – and I love all motorcyclists I have seen and met thus far, and rejoice saying hi to them as we pass in the street and will gladly talk to any one person in possession of 2 or 3 wheels and an engine for hours about nothing else – yes I love all y’all, but I am never doing this again.

It gets even more extreme in the hills, cornering and leaning into the black diamond turns and curves that make up Griffith park, which reminds me ever of James Dean, Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood in “Rebel Without a Cause”. They shot that film up there, can you believe it? Right up on the top at the observatory. Yeah I know. Amazing. I think about how incredible they all are and also how dead they all are even though they should be alive right now and getting lifetime achievement awards and Kennedy Center honors and presenting at the Oscars, maybe even doing one arm pushups, being the face of what to look forward to with age and legend that lives on. Sadly they are not any of these. They each disappeared way too early in a hot flare of mystery and tragedy. But the bike didn’t claim them. It was respectively – car, knife and water. I’m gonna try to stay away from those three. I am gonna stay up, on this bike. No, I am not. At the next horse crossing, I am going to park this hog and hijack an old circus mare and clop home.

When I ride, I am in my body, which is rare. I am never in my body, having been chased out at an early age, but here, as part of this glorious mechanism and gyroscopic wonder, I am the proverbial ghost in the machine, and if I don’t stay in my body I will be separated from it, seriously. so I stay. I have to stay. I have to lean into this turn. I have to pull my not inconsiderable weight over to the side like a real racer, like steve mcqueen – who rode the best, who is also dead, however again, not by the bike, but from cancer.

I have to apply all the knowledge that I have in me and trust that its real and good and lives in my brain and my hands and feet and I don’t even need to think about it, I will just do it. The wisdom is there to catch me as sure as the wind is on my back. I am part of this thing, a big part, and I daresay I am not sure if I have ever been a part of anything this urgent, this important. I am this ride, and I have to be this ride only. No going nowhere. I am used to giving up, but here I can’t give up the ghost because if I do then I will be a ghost literally, so I stay here. I am here. I think this is the solution to a lifetime of ignoring the moment and what is in front of me. I think this is what I will do forever. Then I think there is no such thing as forever. There is only right now. I am riding right now. And now. And now. It’s always now on the bike. It has to be. Or else, you will become a then. How zen. It even rhymes.

What I noticed most about riding in the street is how many people who are driving cars actually aren’t there.

I look into their darkly tinted windows and I can see them texting, or possibly sexting, as they seem super involved in the tiny type of their conversation. If they aren’t texting/sexting, they are looking for deeply buried songs that aren’t in any particular playlist on their ipods or googling the name of a movie/medicine/shoe/diet that someone said was good.

They stare unbelieving at their GPS and look for addresses that seemingly don’t exist and not looking at you, who is existing leathery, loud and glinting in front of them.

There are weary moms turning around from the steering wheels of their fearsome SUVs and I see the backs of their heads yelling at children and they are holding the steering wheel with an elbow while the other hand goes in back presumably to break up a fight between siblings or to give a crying child something to really cry about.

There are people talking on the phone, laughing and negotiating and sharing good news and bad news and they are with their friend on the other end of the line probably in another car somewhere and neither are nowhere near where you are right now, in their path of travel. There are people applying makeup (even mascara!!) and emptying big coffee cups into their mouths and eating fast food, balancing fries and burgers on dashboards.

I have seen motherfuckers flossing. Their fucking back teeth. Molars and shit.

There are drivers doing infinite combinations of these activities and might be engaged in all of them at once, I have no idea. People are limitless in their ability to multitask and I can only give them each a fraction of a second because my eyes have to continue their search for dangers assessing everyone out here with me and I can’t dwell on just one.

Even if they are guilty of none of these crimes against automotive awareness, there are many just kind of dully and blankly staring forward with no life in their eyes. They are looking right at me as I am trying to assess whether they will turn left suddenly without signaling or not fully stop at the stop sign and they don’t see me at all. I am used to being invisible, which I have always fought, and so I am used to making myself seen and heard, sometimes forcing it, and this is essential when you are on the road on two wheels trying to navigate amongst four wheel vehicles which are exponentially larger than you and no one is paying attention.

I get scared because I feel like on the bike I am present and no one else is. I feel alone and without my tiny motorcycle club here with me I would actually be alone. Thank goodness for them.

All my gratitude to the Rider’s Edge and Harley-Davidson and Luis ‘tico’ Chacon, my fantastic teacher. you save lives. Mine and everyone else’s. Also great thanks to my fellow student and rider Ryan Kwanten. You look right handsome on that bike. Be careful everyone. Stay up.

Tags: Motorcycles
Posted in BLOG | 21 Comments »

Write To Me

January 24th, 2012

Please comment on my posts. I read them all, so be nice to me, as I am all kinds of sensitive, and really a bad word here will ruin my day and even week or month. Years have been wrecked by criticism and insults. I got the memory of an elephant but not the thick hide. I take it all real personal, and deep inside, so know that before you say what you are going to say. I’d like to know why you want to read my writing and what it makes you feel like and if you have anything to add. I may not answer every question or comment, but I truly will take it all into consideration.

If you feel like it, let other people know that this blog is worth reading, as I think it is, just as I enjoy writing it. I am trying to realize my writerly potential. It’s happening, or something is happening.

Tags: Writing
Posted in BLOG | 81 Comments »

SOA

January 20th, 2012

I absolutely love the “Sons of Anarchy”! I received the first three seasons on DVD for my birthday and so I swallow 3-4 episodes at a time as I cannot stop once I start. It’s thrilling and my lower back aches from all the backstabbing and I am fascinated by the tight plot twists and boot-cut drama. It lives in the magical universe of “The Shield”, another one of my all time favorite television shows, and since I never got to be on The Shield, I hope one day to get to do the Sons of Anarchy. Maybe I could even ride!

The Sons of Anarchy reminds me of the northern California gangs of my youth, but they didn’t have impressive custom bikes, they just rode the trains, although a few among them had shiny, roaringly loud El Caminos and Mustangs. These belonged to the older boys, men really, and the muscle cars usually didn’t last long as they were quickly impounded or sold to pay for bail bonds and lawyers as the owners were carted off to jail and then inevitably to prison.

They called themselves the WPODs, and the primitive rock-painting-like graffiti of these letters on walls all over the city would later be covered over with the sophisticated, swirling spray can murals taggers eventually learned to create, discovering that they too had a right to art. I didn’t know then that the letters came from a song by the tubes, and they stood for white punks on dope, and this was mostly true, although they weren’t technically punk, as they didn’t have Mohawks or piercings made with safety pins and they never went to see bands at the Mabuhay Gardens, San Francisco’s premier punk venue. They preferred laser light shows at the planetarium and the classic rock of Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and of course Black Sabbath.

They were always white, and mostly of irish descent, but not recent immigrants, as they didn’t regularly frequent the real irish bars of the Sunset and Richmond districts filled with authentic brogues and bitter beer and held no opinion or allegiance to Protestants or Catholics or Sinn Fein or the IRA or anything and they were too young to be in those establishments anyway. The dope of their moniker and choice was usually crank or what is now known as crystal meth, but then it was a heavily stepped-on early edition of the drug, so cut up with baby laxatives that everyone would fart up a storm at the mere appearance of a cloudy, stingy bag.

The Sunset District where I grew up was made up of these 4^th and 5^th generation Irish and 1^st generation Chinese /Korean /Vietnamese /Japanese /Filipino families. It was a faintly depressing and conservative neighborhood that was defensively lower middle class. The streets were mean but they were clean. The trains were on time but filled with hard looking kids, who weren’t bad really, just high, and bored, which was me, and is still me sometimes.

The WPODs were like sentinels or soldiers, as they had a uniform, and you would see them strutting around, keeping watch, proud as roosters, in their derby jackets – deep blacks and blues and sometimes steely grey and even an odd khaki brown in there for the wild card crazy one who liked to set off fireworks and could make pipe bombs with the collection of pyrotechnics squirreled away under his bed.

There was a distinctive double seam going across the back of the jacket, shoulder to shoulder, which I took to represent the horizon that marked the farthest border of the Sunset District, the painfully cold and windy Ocean Beach, whose dangerous undertow made going swimming absolutely suicidal. You needed to get your affairs in order and write a note to your loved ones before taking a dip in there. Everyone I knew who went in that water died. That is not an exaggeration.

To go with the jacket there were loosely slung Ben Davis slacks, the wide leg giving way to steel toe boots, laced hard and tight up the shaft, holding their skinny boy calves in a confining leather hook and eye embrace. They walked with confidence and dirty hair that framed beautiful but haunted cold weather faces, and in their glittering blue and green eyes I could tell they were still little boys who got scared and cried when they were alone.

We weren’t supposed to hang around with them but it happened. The WPODs were encouraged to stay with their ‘own kind’, but they never did, being unable to resist the gorgeous asian girls growing up next to them, with our shiny black hair and plump lush Dr Pepper Bonne Bell mouths. They’d wait outside your house smoking Marlboros and trying not to act or look like they were waiting outside your house, dreaming of a whiff of your Love’s Baby Soft or Jean Nate After Bath Splash. Their hopelessly ardent crushes betrayed their hoodlum exteriors.

I was well liked for my humor and resemblance to the 26 year old woman whose purse had been stolen on the N Judah, and at 12 I could convincingly buy kegs of beer with that swiped ID and my ageless poker face and grown woman body. The WPODs would leave odd trails of saliva on my Izod shirts as they didn’t know how to kiss but tried to seem like they knew everything about sex and so they’d suck on odd areas around my shoulders and chest like lampreys sticking to the side of a fishtank.

I got older and these boys got into worse and worse trouble and without warning became men who couldn’t do anything else but be in trouble. I left my neighborhood for comedy and showbusiness and better and brighter things and sometimes I would hear of the incarceration of one and the death of another and I’d think about the clean hopeful Ivory soap smell of their necks and how the derby jackets they wore held the cigarette smoke inside them so they always smelled like they were smoking even if they were not. Whenever anyone lights a Marlboro red around me I remember so much and so hard and so quickly and so vividly I feel like crying.

From www.fxnetworks.com - Sons of Anarchy

Tags: Childhood, San Francisco, Sons of Anarchy
Posted in BLOG | 8 Comments »

Sydney Morning Herald 1/9/2012

January 19th, 2012

Sydney Morning Herald 1/9/2012

Hot, sharp and unflinching, Margaret Cho owned the Opera House concert hall with her late-night Just For Laughs gig. The American-Korean comedian’s stand-up is audacious but its brilliance is wit, not simply shock value.

Tags: Australia, Sydney Morning Herald
Posted in PRESS | 1 Comment »

Crab Season

January 19th, 2012

Before reality television, I was aware of Dungeness crab season. The catches then didn’t seem so deadly (although I am sure they were – they just didn’t have cameras to document it) unless you accidently caught your finger in a set of snapping claws, but this thankfully never happened. When it would get really cold and foggy in San Francisco, my mother and I would go to the piers.

Back in the 70s, people went to Fisherman’s Wharf to actually get fish, crab in particular. We would go down to the slippery outdoor markets and my mother would buy a solid dozen writhingly alive deep blue Dungeness crabs, angry to be out of the water and cutting up the air with their scissor claws. They didn’t band them like lobster claws so if you got close enough you could get cut, but the danger of the Dungeness was part of the magic of them. I must have been about 7 or 8 years old but I felt ancient and alive and adult as I helped my mother pick out which crustaceans were going to die for my dinner.

I selected the ones with the fringiest legs, the featherlike hair that grew in whispery lines along the articulated limbs of the crab. To my young mind, this would indicate virility and strength, bigger meat from bigger muscles. My dad told me to get the ones that looked the maddest. I searched their stalk eyes for anger. They all seemed equally pissed off to me. I love the way that crabs look prehistoric and futuristically robotic at the same time. They are armored and they are packing and they need this because they are so sumptuous and delectable inside. The violent world that requires the hard shell and the weapon hands serves forth a delicious meal. Most things from the killing fields of the sea, the brutal ocean floor, taste really fucking good.

The live crabs would be paid for and then plunged into a rusty metal garbage can filled with boiling seawater for mere seconds. When they emerged from the cans, their color had changed to a deep orange red and they were wrapped steaming hot into white paper parcels. I would hold the parcels close to me and feel the warmth from the steam escaping from the crabs insides. I wondered if they were still somehow alive in there, as I let the fishy steam scent my small body in the car on the way home.

The kitchen table would be covered with Korean newspapers and my father laid out several hard rounds of sourdough bread with a refrigerator cold butter stick. The bread and the butter was almost as integral to the meal as the crab itself. You couldn’t have one without the other. The sourness of the bread and the mellow fat of the butter was the perfect compliment to the sweet nut taste of the crab. There was white wine too but I wasn’t interested in that. I am still not. I don’t like white wine, and my dislike is incongruous to my ladylike persona, I know.

There were instruments of extraction lined up next to the bread, surgery style. Nutcrackers stolen from the big bowl of walnuts that lived on the low table in front of the tv, kitchen scissors, a small fork with 3 tines instead of 4, fondue forks finding new life in the fish game, a chopstick here and there just for pushing out – now I forget what else, but I really think but there might have been tweezers in there. I don’t know if this is true, but I wouldn’t put it past my family. We didn’t have a lot of anything, so it was all about getting the most out of what we did have.

My parents would leave the legs and claws to me and I would pick out perfect pieces of crab meat, absolutely intact. This is just one of my strange and obtuse talents, shelling shellfish without flaws. I am so good at this, with my meticulous steady hand and coulda-been-born-swiss-precision – I have supreme concentration and I am in it to win it like I am cracking a safe. I should have a stethoscope, but I wouldn’t need it. I am that good. I showed this off once fairly recently at a fancy seafood bistro in Montreal where the pricey shellfish and champagne came on a tower of ice and polished silver. The other diners around me were breathless as I slipped the shell off of a stone crab claw with the ease of a showgirl stripping off an opera glove. I laid it in the middle of the table like a housecat setting down an offering. The meat was so shiny and red and the act was so impressive no one wanted to eat it so I had to.

My parents didn’t stop at the claws. They would break open the big hard crab body shells, opening the backs underneath the legs like they were changing the crab’s batteries. Brown green crab roe would spurt rudely from the cracks and my parents would suddenly turn primitive and start slurping the roe from out of the shells and I would get scared and stop eating. I still have nightmares about this. My parents then, really just young people, much younger than I am now, cracking crabs with superhuman immigrant strength to suck up the fishy gritty guts of the thing. Sometimes they would cut their mouths on the sharp shards of crab shell, the crustaceans small revenge, and the blood would mix with the roe and they would leave miniature red brown smiles of the mixture on their wineglasses. This is probably why I don’t like white wine, and I never developed a taste for that part of the crab. I leave that to the strong.

Tags: Childhood, Food, San Francisco
Posted in BLOG | 14 Comments »

No Blog Today

January 18th, 2012

MY WEBSITE IS ON STRIKE TODAY TO FIGHT #SOPA AND #PIPA. YOU CAN JOIN IN TOO:

SOPA/PIPA Blackout

Tags: PIPA, SOPA, SOPA Blackout
Posted in BLOG | 3 Comments »

Margaret Cho: Video on Wall Street Journal Speakeasy

January 16th, 2012

Margaret Cho: The Girl With the Genteel Tattoo

By Barbara Chai

Comedian and actress Margaret Cho stopped by the WSJ Studio to talk with Speakeasy’s Barbara Chai about her new DVD, the coming season on Lifetime’s “Drop Dead Diva,” and her freshly-inked tattoo.