cybersheherazade

2002-11-09T09:19:00.000-08:00

from Reuters:

"FLORENCE, Italy (Reuters) - More than 450,000 anti-war protesters from across Europe marched through this Italian Renaissance city on Saturday, denouncing any U.S. plans to attack Iraq.

Authorities estimated more than 450,000 protesters were on the streets, and people were still streaming in from a fleet of buses and trains hired for the occasion.

Organizers said the crowd could swell to more than a million people, making it one of the biggest rallies ever seen in Italy.

"The atmosphere here is wonderful. Absolutely perfect. It shows that a new young left is emerging," said Stavos Valsamis, a 27-year-old Greek activist from Athens.

French farmer Jose Bove arrived on a tractor. Protesters clambered up scaffolding around arches near the city center to get a better view of the massed throngs.

Some 7,000 police were on call but security forces kept a low profile, with most held in reserve some distance from the seven-km (4.5 mile) rally route.

The rest of Florence was a ghost town with most shops in the art-rich historical center pulling down the shutters for fear of violence. The city's famed museums were open and offered free entry to the few tourists around.

"We no longer have any illusions about institutions like the United Nations and their ability to help humanity," said Alain Krivine, a far-left French politician. He was convinced the United States had already made up its mind to attack Iraq.

"Marches alone won't stop wars, but this is quite literally a first step," he said.

While Friday's U.N. resolution gives the Security Council a central role in assessing the new arms' inspection program for Iraq, it does not require the United States to seek council authorization for war in the case of violations. "

2002-11-08T09:14:00.000-08:00

Ever since reading Kathryn Harrison's The Seal Wife, I've been considering living somewhere icy-- where most of life is white, blue, gray and remote. Harrison's getting too good at bringing out pathos and meaning from suffering, silent women-- it's becoming a formula. But damn, can she render setting. So maybe that explains my fascination with this particular blog, Life in the Freezer , where naturalist Gillian Hadley writes about tagging seals in the Arctic. I keep wondering if, after Bush is through with the world, these seal taggers will be some of the only people left.

The day after the election I talked to a fellow activist on the phone and one of the first things he said was, "What do you know about Montreal?" Now that's really apocalyptic. I'm not moving to Canada. Maybe Ireland-- where things are green-white, green-gray, green-blue. I've actually bookmarked all this Irish emigration information, and it's freaking my M out. But that's the question-- do you stay and watch it go to hell, doing what little you can, or do you leave & hope to survive (body and soul) elsewhere? The elections on Tuesday are a dismal turn. Why am I always surprised when things get worse? I'm essentially a pessimist; isn't that supposed to be one of the perks of pessimism? That you're not surprised when everything goes to shit?

I had a nightmare-- really a morning-mare as it was the last dream I had yesterday morning, and I woke screaming. I dreamed that I lived in the home where I was born, of 1950's midwestern construction. But the house was now filled with anti-choice protesters who had with them the paraphernalia of their mission-- rosaries, baby dolls, pictures of fetuses on forks and in garbage cans, "saved baby pictures" of their own children, reduced to props. I could not get them out of my house, though I threatened them and ineptly belittled their god. I thought to call the police & then realized I would be arrested because I was not god-or-cop fearing enough. So I screamed myself awake, only to find a day much like the house in my dream-- filled and fueled with the wrong-headed and hateful.

In the late '80's I participated in many clinic defenses in the Bay Area. During that time, Operation Rescue was trying to shut down clinics which provided diverse health services for women, not just abortion. The protesters would harass women going in for routine pap smears, birth control or other check-ups as well as abortion, by taking their pictures and shouting "murderer," etc. at them. I would escort the women through their ranks to the clinic. Usually I think that people are reasonable, that even when there is no way we will ever agree, we can live together and make our separate arguments. But after doing clinic defense I realized this is not so. We were at war, and women were the enemy, not unlike the viscous witch hunts of the 17th century that decimated the female population of Europe. The protesters were the angry peasants and their clergy, full of righteous hatred. I believe they would have killed me and those working with me if only they could have gotten away with it. The clinic shootings and bombings affirmed this feeling. We were at war, and indeed still are.

I had just forgotten.

I have forgotten the power of ignorance and fear which has taken hold of this country. Nothing good can come of it.

Oil tankers off the coast file into the harbor, one after the other. Has the stockpiling begun? Something is happening here, an inevitable movement, a sea change momentous in proportion. But what this new world will be, I don't know. The Bush Administration is planning ahead, beyond this war, which they now have a green light from the UN to wage. They look beyond Sadam's inevitable bombing of his own oil fields, beyond the years it will take for the US to rebuild them in "our image," beyond the years of occupation which will facilitate this, beyond the recession/depression that will result in the inevitable inflation of oil prices this operation will produce. They are thinking, in Daddy Bush's words, of completing this "New World Order," starting in the oil fields of Iraq, ending where?

They claim this order will maintain the "American Way of Life," but as the brilliant Aryundahti Roy has put it, "the American way of life is simply not sustainable." And indeed when the Bush administration speaks of Americans, it does not consider all of us, but only a few who have put themselves above the law, above the rest of the world.

It is a lonely place. Somewhere, somehow there is the feeling that they cannot stay there while the rest of the planet suffers and dies. As they try, inevitably, to herd us to some dark hour, many resist. This is my only hope, that as this regime crumbles, that it not destroy us with it, and that when it is over there will be some left to build anew and live freely, with acceptance, creativity and love, which is not an American right, but our human birthright.

2002-10-25T12:23:00.000-07:00

Last week I was at an anti war vigil on the suburban shopping street in the wealthy area of Long Beach called Belmont Shore. Numbers at the vigil have been growing steadily each week, and standing there with over a hundred others, being greeted by the waves and honks from passing cars, you'd know that the majority of Americans are ambivalent about Bush's war, if not outright against it.

Last week something puzzling happened at the vigil. A woman on the passenger side of a tall white SUV stopped in front of the vigil-- she was the embodiment of the "soccer mom" stereotype: manicured simplicity, "natural" blonde highlights, beige makeup & clothing. She looked down from her perch in the vehicle and said to us: "Kill them all and let God sort them out." Her delivery was blank, emotionless. It was difficult to tell if irony was intended. Wasn't this the motivation of the terrorists who killed so many on September 11? But I have to assume she was serious-- simply because she was so dazed.

The phrase she used is old, attributed to Arnaud-Armaury, the Abbot of Citeaux, and advisor to the 13th century Albigensian Crusade, intended to purge southern France of the Cathari heretics. When Arnaud-Amaury was asked who should be killed, he said "Kill them all. God will know his own." The Crusade began in 1209 and ended 20 years later. On the first front, the town of Beziers, crusaders slaughtered nearly everyone. They killed the estimated 200 heretics, as well as 20,000 Catholics.

I'm sure she was unaware of this alliance she'd made. And it seemed to me, coming from her pale mouth, more a statement of angry despair, rather than a conviction that God could make order of this chaos, whether here or in the "beyond." Is this where we are now? To say that we've returned to the dark ages does Medieval culture a disservice, it seems. These are truly an apocalyptic times, and the threat of nuclear holocaust is with us, as it was in the 80's during the last gasp of the cold war as well as during the 60's Cuban missile crisis.
Yet what makes this crisis more apocalyptic is that it is fueled with the rhetoric of holy vengeance, and shadow fights shadow in a war without a clear enemy, in a war without end.

While I was tabling against the war at Cal State Long Beach, the Campus Crusade for Christ, the cult-like born again Christian recruiting group common on college campuses, had surrounded the Muslim student's booth. The Crusade's leaflet read "They honor me with there [sic] lips, but their hearts are far from me." How ironic-- they cannot see that their lies resemble the hypocracy of the Pharisees more than any others they may accuse. Beneath the heading of their flyer there is a two column chart which lines up Jesus Vs. Mohammad, much like the "Hot/Not" pieces on fads in fashion magazines. "Sinless-- Sinful", "Miracles...-- No Miracles..." etc-- Not unlike Falwell's claim that Mohammad was a terrorist, which let to a protest in India where several people were killed.

The more the warmongers demonize this Muslim "other," the closer they get to us. We must not forget that the US trained and funded the Mujadeen, and Osama Bin Laden, in their fight against the USSR in the 1980's. And the US supported Hussein while he gassed the Kurds in the '80's. Indeed, the US has sent Iraq some of the very same weapons that inspectors are now being sent to find. Jihad and Hussein's ruthless dictatorship were useful to US business and military interests then, and useful to those interests now-- in manufacturing an enemy that will replace the Cold War leviathan of the USSR and destabilize the region indefinitely.

And, in turn, this planned war will destabilize our country. We have our own "home grown" terrorists, and the most recent suspect, the east coast sniper, has taken the name Muhammad. He is a "penniless" Gulf War Army vet., trained at Fort Lewis, aka "sniper school". In an article from ABC News, Oct. 24, 2002, the snipers' role in current military strategy is explained: "They are part of the Army's first new medium-weight combat brigade, which includes a large complement of snipers trained to operate in urban areas..." It is clear that snipers will play a key role in the invasion of Iraq, which Defense Department leaks have stated will be centered in the cities this time. At a recent visit to Fort Lewis," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called Fort Lewis a 'central part' of the Army's effort to become more nimble and responsive." It is disorienting to find this among so many articles about the East Coast sniper who shot people as they shopped or filled their cars with gas. "In March, Lt. Victor Satterlund told The News Tribune newspaper in Tacoma that snipers' motto is "one shot, one kill,"..." (ABC News) In the context of the article, the snipers here are the Army trainees who will be sent to the next war, "Army officials have said most of the 3,600 soldiers in the base's medium-weight combat brigade are expected to be ready for deployment as early as January 2003." But the sniper trained for the last war, now home and still shooting, obviously also operated by this motto, and was trained well.

So can those dead of the sniper's bullets be considered victims of "friendly fire"? And the women murdered in Fort Bragg by their husbands, recently returned from serving in Afghanistan, are they "collateral damage"? Past wars are already haunting us, and this future war will come home in many ways. In any war the enemy combatant, the shadow, looks a hell of a lot like us.

2002-09-10T09:41:00.000-07:00

Which is the Ritts? Which is the Lang?

The first image is a photo of a dust bowl migrant from the depression era, taken by Dorothea Lang. The second image is from the September 9th issue of the New Yorker, from a Herb Ritts fashion photo spread. I'm sure you can tell the difference, but the audacity of this image is startling. That was the point, probably.

Through my more idealistic days in San Francisco I was very moved by Lang & Kollwitz's work, and they inspired my own printmaking. The fact that political conviction strikes me as nostalgia means I've caught the disease, too, apparently.

This disease of mediated disorientation is fully apparent in the Ritts' photo, where the models' combined ensemble, by Louis Vuitton, Junya Watanabe, Balenciaga and Dolce & Gabbana, is worth something over $10,000.

The copy reads like this: "Fashion has been looking over its shoulder again, and this season's collective gaze has landed on the 1930's, among other escapist moments. Designers have drawn from both the glitter and squalor of the age-- satin shoes and dungarees, gimlets and dry rot-- and the result is something like dust bowl glamour..."

OK, what exacty is dust bowl glamour? Something like-- gee whiz-- I wish I could suffer authentically. Or just look like I do. My stock portfolio's not worth as much, life's rough. Maybe I'll pay Watanabe a grand to give me something with holes in it, so my loss will be legitimized-- even enviable. Just like those poor people I've stepped over on my way to 5th avenue.

There is another photo in the spread-- delicious in its contradictions, but also somehow sickening. A girl's hands and legs-- that's all you really see of her-- hands crossed as if waiting, (dime a dance & nobody's even got a dime!), legs in stockings (by Fogal!) which are full of holes, one sewn up in a rough way resembling an autopsy suture with thick floss. The sequined hem of her dress shows. But the shoes-- like high heel tap-style shoes of crocodile and leopard-print pony skin tied with a satin ribbon, take center stage. At her feet a newspaper is crumpled. It reads "Extra! Chicago Clarion Stock ("Market" blocked by ankle) Crashes." It's that time again, apparently. There's no real allusion to corporate corruption, to impending war, and yet it looms in the photo, amplifying the shoes with this vertiginous sense of impending history.

The shoes, the photo-- who's fantasy is this, anyway? Suffering has some seductive power when contained in this vampiric way. This is nothing new, really-- John Galliano's "Hobo Chic" of 2000 featured models with matted hair strewn with paper, gowns ripped and decorated with junk. He claims to have been inspired by the homeless, destitute and insane which he witnessed while jogging along the Seine. These dresses-- worn by the sickening Courtney Love, among others, allude to the fin de siecle "Rag Balls" of the 19th century, where the rich would put on the "costumes" of the poor.

It's strange that we haven't moved any farther from the gala insensitivity of the Rag Ball-- and though we have more and more information-- the suffering of the world is not only on the next block, but also a mouse click away-- it seems there are now newer, more sophisticated methods of co-optation. What was once juxtaposition-- suffering and insensitivity, is now layered seamlessly over itself, so that we wonder if what's happening really is.

Next thing you know, Vogue will do a Crepes of Wrath spread, featuring party dresses, and a geezer Rumsfeld at Kate Moss' starvling tit. It's dark. Really. *Wink Wink*

2002-08-16T13:26:00.000-07:00

It's strange I would get a copy of the Dutch Gardens catalog when I don't even have a patch of grass to call my own. But I've always loved the names flowers are given, the stories around them in the Metamorphosis-- Oscar Wilde's descriptions of flowers. This catalogue is kind of amazing in that same way. I love reading the names and descriptions.

The Flower Record

Ivory Queen Allium
Dreamland Tulip
Arabian Mystery
Queen of the Night (a black tulip!)
Big Smile Tulip (vulvic!)
The Dog Tooth Violet ("Carefree!")
The Maureen
White Fire Parrot
Attila Tulip ("Big! Bold! Beautiful!")
Salome, Las Vegas and Juanita Daffodils
The Festiva Maxima Double Peony
Early Stardrift

2002-08-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

Today I've been considering this idea of throwing my completed novel into the sea. It's melodramatic, I know. But it's simple and perfect. The only thing is I've got copies of it on the hard drive, on the memory tower, on various floppies. I'd have to delete those first, and that just dampens the appeal of the ritual.

To be free of the fact of the book's existence-- and that it exists means I was (am?) a writer, that I believed in writing-- my own and other's. That is painful. I didn't know it would be so hard, heartbreaking. And I feel my writing has suffered from this awakening. The joy that was there on the page-- a kind of freewheeling daring, is gone. Kind of beaten out of it.

The whole destructive idea must be related to the fact that I can't open an issue of The New Yorker, or go into some awful chain bookstore, without seeing huge photos of Alice Sebold promoting her book. The photo of her is beautiful, she's in chiaroscuro, with dark lipstick. She looks just like a Russian ballet dancer.

I remember when it seemed like the book deal might fall through she was worried & I sent her these intensely worded emails saying how the book had to happen because it was important; she was an important writer. That all seems so stupid now, now that I won't even be able to read the book.

She told me she could not be my friend anymore because being with me reminded her too much of what it was like to be a failure.

Sometimes I think I will never get over that. I don't know why I give her so much power. Probably because I did respect her & believed in her. And for a short time she treated me like a dear friend. Sent me letters from MacDowell, etc.

While she was writing the book she said some character popped up, some "nice jewish boy" that the girl in the book gets to be with, someone kind. The girl in the book is dead, murdered-- narration from beyond the grave, you know. So she told me that that boy is based on M. That seemed weird at the time, but not so weird, as writers do that all the time. It's inevitable that we'll take things from the people around us. But now that bothers me, and I hope he was written out of it, and that there's not a trace of either one of us in the book, or in her mind anymore.

I hope someday I'll look back on that rejection and see it as silly, that somehow, somewhere, there will be vindication-- something like what she is enjoying now. That sometime I won't need to consider her as anything more than another well-reviewed writer, a stranger.

2002-08-04T09:24:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a dream, which was more of a nightmare. There was some general decree about the "browning" of the populace, and overpopulation in general, so women were forcibly put on birth control pills. I remember in the dream going from house to house in this neighborhood in someplace that looked like New Orleans to see if other women were complying with this, but no one would talk to me.

I refused to take the pills and was shipped off on a train with other women who were presumed pregnant. We were put in someplace that looked like a cross between a wearhouse and an old high school-- maybe a bit like the school in Dario Argento's Susperia--. We were given drugs to help us forget what was going on, and though I struggled to find a way not to swallow the stuff, eventually I started to forget. Maybe it was in the food, I thought.

But I "came to" in the dream, wandering the building. They had told us that once we had our babies (though I wasn't pregnant) they would be adopted. But I wandered into this vast storehouse filled with row upon row of dead babies who'd all been poisoned or gassed or something-- they were all extremely pale and their small faces somehow webbed over.

I woke up from this, shaken, and when I finally was able to get to sleep, the dream continued. I was in exile somewhere-- it looked like a cross between Dublin and Portland or Seattle. I lived in the basement of a hotel and had nothing. I'd lost everything while at the camp. My job was to somehow monitor this huge weather forecasting device via email, and I was always reading numbers, which meant different kinds of rain to some guy over the internet. The machine was huge, black and rotating. One day I woke up and saw piles of bodies outside, covered in blankets in front of what looked like a pizza place. I took the elevator up and two blonde girls in their bathing suits were giggling. They were on vacation. I walked through the gift shop filled with glittery clothes, like show girl outfits, and once outside, the bodies were no longer there. The sun was coming out and the buildings began to turn, revealing the interior designs, much like the cross-sectioning of doll houses, many faux Rococo, others neo-Colonial. It was a good show, and I imagined what it might be like to live in one of them.

2002-08-01T10:33:00.000-07:00

This is an amazing site--The Journal of Aesthetics & Protestmoving, inspiring & beautiful. It makes wonder why I gave up on my idealism & commitment to activism when I left San Francisco.

2002-07-22T13:57:00.000-07:00

Julia Lynn Presley, October 23, 1968-August 12, 1999

Julia has been dead for almost three years now. No one knows why she isn't alive today. After three years her death still seems shockingly absurd and meaningless. I can't hear the Beatles' "Julia" without thinking of her absence.

I first saw her in the "Self-Help" section of Borders while I worked there, feeling the hours cave in one at a time at the information booth. She was there with Rinoti, and they were ripping apart the various titles aimed at self-hating women-- stuff like "The Rules," "Soul Mates", etc. They were both so clever and beautiful, wickedly so, and I couldn't take my eyes off them. I'd just moved to Long Beach, and didn't know that they were, in fact, my neighbors.

She wanted so to escape her terrible marriage. As we became friends, I could see it, that she was trapped there, and was plotting a way to leave. So when her husband called me the next morning to tell me Julia was "gone" and wouldn't be going out dancing as we'd planned, I thought she'd left him and was relieved. But as he repeated it I realized she was gone for good, that she had died, and immediately I was angry that this was the way she'd escaped, and he, alcoholic, possessive and oblivious to her pain, was still around to call me.

She had this biting sense of humor-- a take no prisoners approach to ridiculing the world. We would joke about how when we tried to buy our wedding dresses the sales people basically said we were too fat to get married. That the dress thing would be impossible for us-- how dare we be happy. But she made me laugh about it-- as if the joke were on the rest of the world, and we, the fat girls, were the ones who could really see the bullshit for what it was. She was powerful and made me feel powerful, too.

She would say, finish your novel because I need something good to read. And I finished it.

After her death I went to Europe. She'd loaned me her tour guides just days before, saying how she was going to go again, how she loved England. So every cemetery I went to in England--how lovely they were, how perfect-- and the whole force of my body called out her name, almost as a reflex, as something I did without thinking. It seemed impossible that she would not be there, here, anymore.

Any detailed news of her death I've gotten from Rinoti. She told me that in the ambulance Julia had said she couldn't breathe, and then she said she was afraid to die. This is something I can't live with, picturing her scared and not ready. I haven't figured out how to live with this.

Julia had a pretty red Jetta with a black interior, and it suited her perfectly. It wasn't until after her death that I began to think of it as a kind of get-away car, and it made me sad to see it parked out front of their house, unused. A few days after her death I had a dream I was driving her Jetta. In my waking life I don't drive, but when I drive in my dreams it's usually a Mr. Toad kind of affair, but not this time-- I was behind the wheel and in control. She was beside me in the passenger seat. I said, "Julia-- you're dead." as if she'd dyed her hair, as if it were a casual observation. She thought this was hilarious, and said that's why she didn't need the car anymore, and that I could have it, that she wanted me to drive it.

I told this dream to my husband and he took it literally, saying something like-- "P. will never let you have the car. He'll sell it." This response seems absurd, except for the fact that her dream had stunned us profoundly, and the dream seemed to make more sense than the reality we'd been living in the wake of her death. I knew in the dream she was telling me something, and I haven't had the courage to heed it-- unless, of course, the dream means more than a prompting to learn to drive. If the dream means something like "Go-- be what you've seen in me!" Then I have, slowly, little by little. I've kept writing, I've promised to go back to England even if I have to go by myself. I've tried to be as brave as she was.

2002-07-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

There was a time in my life when I was praised for my memory. It seemed that I could remember things as a child that I should not have remembered-- like the house of my infancy, of which there are no pictures. I still have those memories, though they are mostly about light and little else. Sometimes objects, for instance, the colored candles, red, yellow and the avocado green so popular in the late '60's, which my mother would burn and then fold the top outward while the wax was hot, so that they took on the shape of strange mushrooms. Perhaps she found this idea in a women's magazine? I'd rather think she did it on some sculptural impulse, liking the feel of the hot wax's mutability in her hands.

There were the long panel paintings in the hall that dwarfed me, painted with a palette knife on canvas so they took on the feel of scabbed flesh. They were painted by a woman who suicided.

Beige walls, always evening.

But my earliest memory, though I know it is mine, seems to belong to anyone. I am on a blanket of some sort with bunnies or bears-- some cartoonish, marshmallowy creature, the name and nature of which I don't know at the time. It's blue, though of course I also lack the name for this. I am on the grass, and it is green, though green without a name is brighter, because it is new. And there is light, a bright, happy sunlight. The memory of this light, and its purity, reassures me that the early 1970's were not as yellowed as they appear, given that most of my memories of the time have been informed by photographs and films-- which seem translated in differing shades of taupe. And it also tells me that happiness becomes more difficult with age. In the memory, I am with my grandmother. She sits beside me, my father's mother, who is dead now. She wishes me well, and it is a simple thing. I can feel it. Because it is simple, it is the first wish of another that I remember, though no doubt my mother and father loved me first, it's her love that I remember most solidly, because it is not mixed with hope and fear, as I imagine the love of my parents to be.

Now that I am older, I forget all sorts of things-- the names of friends in high school, the names of teachers. Books or movies and whether I've really read or seen them. Recently, I found a journal I kept at the end of my teens with a list of lovers' names. Even with the names, it was difficult to remember some of them-- why they'd been considered worthy to be written there, or what we'd done together-- why I even thought it important to keep track. I'd like to think it was some impulse anticipating loss, a safeguard against the inevitable mental house cleaning. But it was probably a kind of scoring, the equivalent of little marks above the bed post, or, even, of a prisoner counting days, counting men, counting on being old enough to be free of that burden--to love, to really be wanted-- some day.

2002-07-02T16:02:00.000-07:00

In the convent of San Marco in Florence, in cell number three, there is a painting of the Annunciation by Fra Angelico. This convent, now a museum of Fra Angelico's frescos, made a huge impact on me and I've been thinking about his Annunciation, the only bloodless painting in the place-- which was filled with frescos, one in each cell, where the monks would spend their time praying. Most images of the passion seem puncuated with a flourish of blood-- fresh, streaming down, spattered over the fine pastel surface of the fresco with the furtive intensity of grafitti. These were paintings for meditation, and I imagine witnessing the pain and bloodletting was a way to tap the source, almost literally.

But the annunciation is not like this-- the two meeting-- Mary and the angel, full of decorum, speak without language, without suffering. Their faces share a kind of symetry and one might think, in a Jungian way, they are indeed two elements of the same being.

When I was in art school learning to paint, I was trying to paint a pair of angelic wings. My teacher, Karen Carson, thought my meringue white wings were banal-- she insisted I paint something more "glamorous to fly around on." And she lent me this amazing coffee table book of the Museo de San Marco. There I saw what she meant-- the wings were orderly, eyed and motley, almost fairy-like.

But what also captivated me was the barren architecture of the background, the arches which seemed of an interior space-- a womb-like stage set where the most essential dramas were to take place. I spent the rest of the semester trying to paint this kind of space, unsuccessfully.

The angel, of course, is male. But his skirts contain one golden vulvic fold that belies the true nature of a message such as the one he bears-- it is a feminine message-- one of vocation, calling, creation.

Mary, the somber listener, averts her gaze, prayer book in hand. She was a reader! Reading the as yet unwritten, as all those who are inspired do. We all have our annunciations, but whether we listen or not, that's another thing. And whether we have the courage or not to follow the calling, that's another thing still.

2002-07-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

The big news is M got a job-- benefits, the works. A real job. Which means I'm freed up-- I can write again. I'm dying to write again. It's been way too long. It's almost overwhelming to consider that I may actually have my days to myself now. Time to start back on the novel. (Though which of the abandoned three it will be is unclear now.) No doubt I will be able to finish it by summer.

New pics up on the spookydoll site, including Lemster kitten pictures!

I've been checking out Fiona Smyth's amazing website . I loved her estrogen fueled phantasmagoria of a comic, Nocturnal Emissions. It's cool to see her recent paintings which look more like abject body landscapes, sans the almond eyed kitties & naughty saints one expects to see in her stuff.

I aslo found this super cute source for washable menstrual pads, Urban Armour. I haven't ordered anything from them yet-- as I pretty much have all I need from Many Moons. But their site is worth exploring-- they also sell the Keeper menstrual cup, which has really made my life much easier. It's much more convenient and healthier than tampons. Their pads have super cute silk screens-- one even has a Smyth design, which is just too cool! They also sell underwear in a great size range with super cute silk screens. They sew the stuff themselves-- no sweatshop labor!

I've been listening to a lot of Angel in Heavy Syrup. They are an all-woman Japanese psychadelic rock band. Supreme magic carpet ride to fairyland! I mean that in the best way.

Last week I went to Milk at the Echo to see Nomy Lamm and Spider (a.k.a Suicide Cola) in the Fat Sluts tour. They blew me away with their sincere intenisity-- they can really belt it out! Nomy Lamm plays accordian and sings like she's in some amazing riot grrrrl version of a Kurt Weil musical. And Suicide Cola played her cutting version of the star spangled banner & her DIY guitar. Once again, it all seemed lost on the Silver Lake hipster crowd. We talked to them afterward & were saying how weird LA is, and how powerful their message was in this context-- it's almost illegal to be fat down in So. Cal. I was so powerful to see talented women being themselves, their bodies, in their own way insisting our bodies are not liabilities, the shapes they take are integral to who we are.

We spoke to one woman there (who we'd seen at the hideous Disco Wreck the week before). She's starting up a psychobilly night in August at the garage. She was this amazingly beautiful woman with a Gibson Girl face-- classically beautiful-- her skin glowing, her mousy hair pomaded in to a perfect bad boy pompadour, one cigarette tucked behind her ear-- a tight white men's underwearshirt. She had a swagger to match it all-- a total heart-throb androgyne. She said the Fat Sluts were too dark for her. I felt like saying, that's when you know it's working! But I didn't say much, as she and M were exchanging psychobilly trivia with absolute fervor.

Tonight I made my famous spaghetti sauce in the crock pot. (it's vegan!) Lainie has inspired me to include recipes in my blog-- I'm always looking for good vegan recipes, so I thought if others are, too, I'd include some of mine.

Amazing(ly easy) Spaghetti Sauce-- Makes 6-8 generous servings
1 lg onion
2-5 cloves of garlic (the more the better), chopped
1 28 oz. can of organic diced tomatoes
1 14 oz can of organic tomato sauce
1 can of black olives, pitted, sliced in half
1 can of green olives, pitted, sliced in half (only use canned green olives-- not the salty martini ones in jars! Santa Barbara Organic Olives are super-yummy)
10 button mushrooms, sliced
1 tblspn brown rice syrup
1 tblspn liquid aminos
optional: green or red pepper, browned gimme lean sausage or TVP "sloppy joe".

Saute the onions, salting them to make them "sweat," in the pot on the stove burner until they are transparent. (Brown the Gimme Lean Sausage with the onions at this point if you're using it). Add the chopped garlic and then saute the garlic for just a few moments-- when you can smell the garlic becoming fragrant, that's usually enough time. You don't want to brown the garlic, cause that will make it bitter. Then transfer the pot to the crock hot plate and add the Tomatoes, sauce, sliced mushrooms, syrup, liquid aminos (& peppers if you have them). Cook on high for about four hours. In the last hour of cooking, add the sliced olives and let them heat through with the sauce. Top cooked spaghetti & tell me that's not the best sauce you've ever had!

If anyone has any good recipes which use regular bulk TVP flakes, I'd love to hear them. I've tried the TVP balls in the farm cookbook and they just didn't turn out. I'm not really sure what to do with the stuff.

2002-07-01T18:37:00.000-07:00

It's in the air-- can you feel it? Something powerful, invisible, tracking. Part of the acasic records-- that ethereal fluid diffused in space, audible, containing the memory of all that has passed. It's at your back; it knows you, though you may not know it, yet. The vague return of deja vu: that's it, whispering to you of past futures. It's where I am now, heightened.

2002-07-01T16:43:00.000-07:00

I've just installed a new comment system on the blog. Let's see if it works...

2002-06-24T10:39:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm still groggy from the benedryl I took last night-- my drug of choice. Ha. Woke up to M reading the emails and pointing out a particularly rude one for me from an ebay deadbeat. It was was too early for that and now I'm just rumpled. We've been married how long, and still he doesn't remember it's got to be coffee first, then irritating news of the day? So I've lowered our shared work chair in petty revenge.

Last night I had this dream that I was in the P building courtyard at the college, the one my classroom overlooks. It was ill lit, and dark out, but the students were milling about, even though it seemed like the middle of the night. Strewn across the court was the debris from broken pinatas-- cheap little erasers shaped like boys, but, get this-- they were packaged in such a way that they were standing in line to use a urinal. I thought this was amazing and pocketed it-- likewise a rubber mouse pad shaped like a frog eating a rabbit. There was one glitter coated rosebud in the middle of the courtyard that I was going to pick up, but then I was distracted by this guy I used to work with at Borders named Mark-- he's the guy that wants to do a louge act at this cheezy gay bar up the street, the Paradise. He wants to raffle off interviews and claims the bar *needs * his act because that baby grand they have is just going to waste. What was he doing in my dream, anyway.

Last night we went to see Mary Woronov read from her novel in the gorgeous red light of the Parlour Club.The surrealist narrative she began with-- drunk narrator in a supermarket shopping was pretty brilliant. But then it devolved into this realist memoir, which was good, but just not as engaging. She took turns reading with this other woman-- don't remember her name- who read from this generic boomer memoir about being a Prof. on the East Coast, getting high and having sex with students, stealing gravestones from babies and trying to figure out why no one knows who Elaine DeKooning is. She had this ultra tired delivery which was obviously practiced, but really hard to listen to.

But the highlight of the evening had to be the performance of The Fat Sluts-- Nomy Lamm and Suicide Cola, fresh from Olympia. One girl dressed in a slip and athletic socks (one covering her prosthesis), played the acordian and sang as if her life depended on it. The other, with these amazing cat eyes all glisteny and outlined in black, "Hedonist" tatooed in Helvetica on her arm, was the soulful one. She put on this 70's aerobics tape that gradually got faster and did these aerobic dance steps in all her Rubenesque glory & unweildy platforms. It was a subversive spectacle, actually-- she was so poker faced about it. But it was the wrong crowd-- too many stylish people who look like they just got back from the gym. Too close to home! They were probably thinking "doesn't she know high impact aerobics aren't going to help her burn fat? She's clearly working outside of her target zone, etc." It was a complete indictment of our robotic relationship with our bodies, the robotic self hatred women especially are subjected to. And then she played this scathing version of the star spangled banner, over this poem of dread written by a 14 year old. Again, this too was lost on the audience, and as they played lots of gay men left to talk outside, but many rudely stayed and talked loudly during the performance. At one point M turned around and told two (in peasant tops no less) to be quiet, and they turned around and cattily replied, "And who are you?" Sorry to be bitter, but that seems to be the affronted question Los Angeles itself continues to ask. I guess LA just isn't ready for amazing fat girls and their accordians. They're playing at the Echo tonight. I hope we can catch them.

2002-06-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

Going a little crazy these days, as everything feels up in the air. I have no time to get anything done, now that teaching has started again for the summer, and M is home all the time. It's impossible to write and I'm getting that soul-cramping feeling I get when I haven't written in a while, like I'm all stuffed up and jammed with the mediocrity around me in the mediated landscape. I keep thinking this will end when M gets a job and I will have the days to myself to work again. Though, as the rejection letters collect in a little pile in the corner (just got a nice little 2" x 2" form from Paris Review [insert maniacal French laughter here]), writing itself seems daunting. But the prospect of not writing seems more tormenting still. Basically, I'm reaching this point where something needs to change.

The good news is M does have a job lead, but that means buying a suit, etc. And then I know I will miss him during the day. *Sigh*.

We got back from visiting Portland about a week ago, and I'm still adjusting. It's weird how it just felt like HOME there, and M and I just resolved to move, but then when we got back there was a job lead for him here. We have good friends here, so it will be good to stay, but still, somewhere, I'm disappointed. It's just so much more human up there-- reminds me of SF in the late '80's when I lived there-- lots of crusty hippie types-- a feminist vibe in the air. Definite absence of the insane body consciousness of So.Cal. Basically, I am not a troll up there. And bookstores-- bookstores! Zine stores, feminst lit stores, Powell's small press section, etc., etc. And people watching at Fellini's & Satyricon. Dreads Everywhere. Hefeweisen w/ lemon. Definite absence of the "sky's the limit" ambition found here in LA. I could keep going on and on.

We were supposed to have this ex-student of mine over for dinner yesterday, but he couldn't make it because he had to help some friend kick heroin! Now that's an excuse-- he's such a drama monger. I swear the only way to get him to come by is to threaten suicide. He is pretty amusing though. And is one of those people who seem immediately familiar, as if you've known them before, somehow.

2002-06-09T09:33:00.000-07:00

Just woke from a strange stress dream about a note from Andrew Tonkovitch. So weird. I mean, I haven't thought about him in maybe a year. I dreamt I got this little memo from him in the mail, and it was actually written on one of those officious little "while you were away" notes, but it also looked like a prescription, which is more accurate to his last correspondence with me. But in the dream I couldn't make out the hand writing, and I was reading it to M. and it mentioned hiding behind Judith's signature (our old teacher) and that I must not want Die Cast Garden to be very well known.

It's funny, a few years ago he became the editor of the Santa Monica Review. While Lee Montgomery was editor they published me in this amazing anthology called Absolute Disaster-- actually the same book that launched Aimee Bender's career. Lee liked my work, and Andrew did, too. Or so I thought. Once when he saw me read at Beyond Baroque he said something about me being a "genius." So anyway, as soon as he becomes editor, I actually had some poems at the journal in submission limbo already. He sends them back saying he's decided not to publish poetry anymore, because he knows nothing about poetry. First warning sign. But he asks me for fiction, and I assume he's read my fiction in SMR before, and must like it. At the same time I was starting this reading group on Bloomsday to get through Ulyssess, since I was going to Dublin that fall and wanted to get through all of Joyce that I could before the trip to Ireland. So I invited him and he said something to the effect that he would rather die. This I didn't understand. Being a fiction editor and not wanting to read Joyce: OK, maybe slightly understandable. But being vehemently, proudly against it-- warning sign #2. So anyway, I send him this story which I think is one of my best and he rejects it, asking for another. OK, I have others, in fact I had one I had finished which I thought was really a breakthrough story, and may actually be the best I'd written. I send it and soon after I get this two page rejection letter from him where he basically makes an ass of himself, saying he doesn't know what these stories have to do with narrative, and they are sloppy and he's reluctant to ask for more. Nice. I mean, the story previously in the SMR anthology was much less linear, much less "realist" than what I sent him. I kind of feel like he never read my story his magazine had published before, because he would have known my stories are not linear (that's the only way I can read his definition of "narrative", because to me, narrative is anthing with a beginning and an end). A letter like that burns bridges, which is not a good idea in this business. He still sends me two copies of the SMR every time they come out. Like I want to read them after that. I mean, if they still published poetry, I might consider reading it, maybe. It's kind of like Ozzy Osbourne said (can't believe I'm quoting him!) in Decline of Western Civlization 2, you have to be nice to people on the way up, because you meet them on the way down, too. Of course, in the literary world, especiallly for us poets, the ups and downs are more like bumps in a long, long road. This sick kind of Faustian ambition belongs solely to fiction writers who think somewhere, somehow in their deepest, darkest shameful dreams, they will be an Oprah pick.

Speaking of Oprah pick, A few months after got the rejection from Andrew, I got a ten page letter from Alice Sebold, who had made an appearance on Oprah to discuss surviving her rape. When I would dish to her about writing workshops and conferences, etc. she'd always want names and under the pressure I sometimes couldn't come up with them. In a very Freudian way, I would just blank out while talking to her. She kept insisting I "didn't play this game very well" and if you are supposed to play by her rules then it's true, I just don't. And if these are the rules of the game-- that you select your friends based on some hollow definition of "success," then I really don't want to play. In the ten page letter she was telling me that my novel she just finished reading was abusive to the reader, basically, and that I needed to brush up on fiction techniques a la John Gardener. She took out quotes from my novel and afterward said things like "Do you actually expect people to keep reading after you write something like this?" After reading half of her letter, I actually didn't finish the whole thing. She kept punctuating her rant with things like "I am not an asshole." and "I just want to give you a good read." I asked M to read it in case there was something good at the end. There wasn't. I told him I just wanted to throw it away (why did I feel obligated to keep it?) and he said, yeah-- throw it away.

And of course she ended our brief but intense friendship in a silent fucked up way. I emailed her months later, politely asking for a reason why she was not even speaking to me, and that we were bound to see each other walking downt the street (we live a mile apart), or at a party here or there (I've since avoided any party she might attend, actually) and couldn't we at least talk a little, so when we do see each other it might be a mildly happy occasion rather than dreadfully awkward? And she emailed me back, basically saying something like now that she and Glen had made it, it was too painful to see me struggle, because I reminded her too much of herself when she was a failure. Nice. And she can't be friends with someone whose writing she doesn't like. Very Nice.

Even though this was two years ago, can you tell it's still traumatized me?
I haven't sent out my fiction since then. Can you believe it? I really need to get back on the horse. But to be honest, that was such a double whammy, I sort of gave up hope altogether of anyone really reading my fiction and liking it enough to publish it. I've kept writing, though-- but the whole business aspect, sending it out, finding sympathetic editors, or, harder-- interesting journals-- it just doesn't seem worth it.

One thing I've learned though, in the short time I've been an editor myself at DSR and DCG, is you can't really afford to alienate writers, and must always be as generous as you can while still being honest. Anything more than "no, thank you" is just ego-motivated, and, frankly, useless to the writer. I mean, it's important to have this humility in front of our aesthetic choices. That doesn't mean you'll take anything, or be bullied, but if you don't think it's right for your journal, etc. it might be right for someone else's, and that's just fine. I mean, in my editing work I've seen lots of insanely bad stuff, and you just want to say to the writer, "why not take up knitting instead?" but you don't-- that's not really your job as an editor. I feel like Alice & Andrew treated me like one of those mediocrities, and if there's one thing I am not, it's one of them.

There was one occasion for the recent issue of DCG where I tried to suggest revisions for a peice and the writer kind of flew off the handle & was pissed. I should have known, because he was already dictating to me where I should put this piece and what images should go with it, etc as soon as he submitted it. Total control freak. And his piece was vaguely sexist & homophobic, and I was really stressed about taking it, because the author was a friend of one of the other editors. I was so relieved when I actually regected it, but even though he was a complete asshole to me in his emails, making fun of the editing suggestions I'd made and saying how he was really unhappy about everything, I managed to reject him politely. I never, ever want to work with him again, but it's a kharmic thing, you know? The minute you do something like Alice & Andrew did to me, you create this evil worm thing that's going to come back some time and bite you in the ass. The ironic thing is I truly believe they think they've already been bitten, and like some sadistic coach, they'd patronized me, saying see this ugly thing that's bitten me in the ass? Well now it's time for it to bite you. God, I hope I am never that way. To anyone-- even if they deserve it.

2002-06-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

First Lemmy, and now the blog is spazzing. Here is the end of my last post. I meant to say I'm really excited because we're going to use some of Joey's work for the next Paraphyiscis issue of Die Cast Garden

Now I'm totally jonesing to get painting again. I'd love to get a studio downtown here in LB. I hear the rent is pretty cheap for office/studio spaces. But I wouldn't want to do it alone. I don't know if Joey would be into it, but that would be perfect, because I think we'd work well together & not get on each other's nerves. Anyway... it all seems so up in the air now, because we don't know if we'll be here in the fall, or where we'll be. It's funny, just six months ago I really wanted to leave,and now that it seems we probably will, I think of all these reasons to stay. It's kind of overwhelming, because all my future plans seem to involve people and things down here, and nothing anywhere else, because that anywhere is is totally amorphous.

2002-06-08T09:31:00.000-07:00

Writing, writing, writing and Lemmy comes, walks over the keyboard and deletes everything. What a critic.

I'm currently in the throes of the gorefest that is my period. West Coast feminism aside, I've come to see it as this vivid time, as a reminder that I'm alive. I actually look forward to it. Plus, things have gotten better since I've been using flannel washable pads & this rubber cup called the keeper (actually women have been using it since WWII-- it's amazingly convenient and so better than dioxin processed tampons.) If anyone is interested in this stuff, Many Moonshas a lot of info & they sell the stuff.

When I lived in SF I was in love with this guy who had a few problems. He actually had what I think was a conversion disorder, but I'm no psychiatrist. We would eat at this fancy Italian place that I could never afford on my librarian assisant wage & then go back to his hideously cluttered studio next to the fed building and, well... So anyway, as he started to get better physically, he was working out all the time & met this blonde girl at the gym. She and I, it seemed to me, were fighting for his soul. I won for a time. But I remember once he brought her with to the Italian cafe, (grrr) and they tediously discussed their runs (around some rooftop track) while I ate "carbo-loaded" pasta and sulked. But then she started saying how she hated her period and wanted me to agree that periods were a huge bother. "I love my period!" I said a little to loudly, so diners put down their forks and stared. "Love bleeding--" and I kept going, I don't remember what else I said to that effect. She kept trying to get me to change my mind, and I kept going on, claiming the abject renewal as my own. But he was clearly intrigued by my position, my embrace of my body. I had won. Thank god those days are over! But as I kept talking I was also convincing myself, and it was this utter relief to finally claim that "curse." Living in SF during the late '80s-early '90's was like that. Freeing and full of revelation. Of course, that SF is gone now, sadly.

Last night I actually had a dream about going back there! I was sitting on top of a cable car, going over a street that looked a little like Potrero Hill-- you know, the post card vista that credits roll over in sitcoms. But each house was separate from the next-- the rail road victorians now had their sides exposed-- flat, unadorned, ugly with lawns in between, little sprinkler-riveted lawns. In the dream I blamed it on the dot commers, thinking they'd brought their utterly suburban ambitions to the city and ruined it. But in the dream, the SF light was the same-- gorgeous, bright and clean. Perfect light for a painter. I basked in it, on top of the street car, which was more like a London double decker bus, actually. I still wanted to move there and in the dream was deciding on it. And then I woke up in a puddle of blood.

The other day M & I were over at Joey's looking through his endless piles of vintage, which was so fun. Actually it reminds me of this dream I have where I find a box full of vintage costume jewelry and I'm really excited and can't wait to look through it, and of course something always happens-- a yeti, or some shadow of doom, prevents me from scrounging. But being at Joey's was kind of like this real-life dream. So now I have all this amazing vintage to sell on ebay (& actually a few things for myself.) But one thing was re-affirmed: 50's dresses are evil. Unlike modern clothes, where the "boob check" is always enough to see if something fits-- 50's clothes require the cruel waist check. The boob check can be done with a modicum of veiled pride, but the waist check never can. These dresses always intinially trick me by fitting (for once!) my bust, but then the waist is hopeless, because I'm not girdled to the point of dyspepsia. Alas. But there was one dress-- no way I'm getting in it, but I was pink velvet studded with rhinestones--- completely hand made, which actually had a velvet & rhinestone BUSTLE. It's insanely vulvic. I love it. I wish I could think of something to do with it. Make something out of it.

That brings me to this other thing, and that is that Joey is this amazing artist. He showed us his paintings and sketchbooks and they are totally inspiring. He really should do something about that-- get them into some kind of slides, etc. to try to get a gallery. He has this owl obsession that's played itself out in amazing ways. His sketchbooks are inspiring, too-- kind of like beardsley meets gorey meets sanrio meets cornell. We're going to use some for the next

2002-06-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

Sitting here with Lemmy lounging in my lap, purring away. He's always mellow until M. gets up and then he turns into this total spaz, vibing off M's energy (even though M is kind of crabby in the am). He's taken to lumping up any towel left on the bathroom floor and depositing it in his litterbox. I know, sounds like a complex operation for a cat, but still, I know he's doing it just to be weird! The big news is I went and splurged and got myself a domain name-- It's spookydoll.com & the site is pretty much complete. Pictures of Dolls, some links & pictures from Joey's gay pride party. I didn't have any convenient way to get the photos to Joey & Lissa, so I decided just to post them on the site. This is what happens when I have no papers to grade & no alone time to write! I churn out websites. But it's damn fun. Joey checked out the site & brought over this amazing book on old dolls-- the wax dolls are crazy.

Joey, M, Deanna & I went to Mannequin last night. I guess I won't be seeing Deanna for a while-- she got a new job on a dig site-- 12 hour days! Digging in the dirt! Needless to say there will be little dancing during the dig.

Some guy who worked for Camel Death, Inc. gave us a pack of cigarettes in this mesh bag, along with a lighter and some Castanets!?! Deanna got the cigs & lighter. I got the castanets-- they're kind of fun in an earth goddess way, but at the same time feeling kind of bad that I immediately took them out and started playing them, just like the marketers had intended. Well, almost just like that-- I mean, I didn't light up first. Isn't it hard to smoke and play castanets at the same time? Some woman kept coming up to me, trying to get me to give them up because she was going on some women's retreat this weekend and "needed as many as possible". She was kind of cute; I should have asked her how badly she wanted them-- but I never think of that stuff until much later. I'm the worst flirt.

It was a different crowd completely last night-- all these people I didn't know. Mostly new lesbians, which is cool. Deanna was happy about that! But the music was just not that great, and when they did play a decent song, they either faded it out early, or the CD was skipping which is just a bummer.

Meanwhile, there was this six foot tall woman in red tights and platforms (making her even taller), and she was completely drunk, doing this lap dance kind of thing on this guy who looked a bit like the lead singer from Simple Minds. He was all cool and non-commital about it-- maybe a bit embarrassed, drinking his beer and looking away from her as she straddled his lap. They left together and I thought someone should have called her a cab. But then I saw him come back in and thought, oh, he did, that's great. But no-- she came back, too, and was more subdued, but still obviously after him. She could hardly stand up, she was so out of it. What are you supposed to do in a situation like that? Just hope the guy she's chosen is OK? Just hope she's chosen the guy, and hasn't been sinisterly chosen by him? Just hope the gods are smiling on her? It's these little errors-- the extra few drinks, the rampant desire-- that turn into big problems-- you'd hope everyone would learn as they survive their youth-- but she was too old not to have learned. It's weird to just be there, watching it & in a way to see some remote part of myself in her.

2002-06-04T07:39:00.000-07:00

My insulting name is Odious and unpleasant child Shitbags!
What's yours?

tee hee.

2002-06-03T14:19:00.000-07:00

Last night M & I went to the Parlour Club to see Brian Baltin read. Not really a big surprise that nobody showed up. Brian was looking healthy, though we were all amazed that it had been almost two years since we'd seen each other. He's recovered from the horrid attack he incurred while in NYC-- he was beat up and left unconscious on the street by his attackers. He seems to be doing OK, though.

The first time I met Brian we read together at Beyond Baroque for some zine thing. He was the only good writer there. He gave me his zine, and his work is kind of steam of consciousness, gay porn, mixed with taste-maker collectible (records, furniture, etc. ) type blurbs. It's very cool, but he's exhausting. I don't think he really likes women, but it's hard to know. I wore the most sick-making femme dress I could-- 70's bright pink polyester with chiffon (vulva) ruffles & chiffon (vulva) rose pinned at the waist, just to kind of, well, be a little punk rock in return. Femme power!

The weirdest thing, though, is he read two pieces and in both his sex partner was named Garrick. This is the name of an ex-boyfriend of mine who he had a crush on. It was kind of creepy. I haven't seen this ex in over seven years, and never really hope to-- the break up was bad because, well, dammit-- I fell in love with M, and if you know M, you know I couldn't let him pass me by, so, essentially Garrick had to go. But one time I was with Baltin at Ripples when he lived in LBC, too. We were at the drag show there, I think. He starts talking about Teresa, a used-to-be mutual friend, who had this "amazingly hot Latin friend named Garrick." Uh. Teresa only has one Latino friend named Garrick. That Garrick. When I told Brian I lived with Garrick for 4 years, he was a little freaked, because he though he was gay. A lot of people thougth he was gay.

So anyway, There were only four people at the reading-- M., me, some wedding DJ friend of Brian's and Andrew, the guy who puts the readings on. So the four of us are listening to Baltin-- one could never say his stuff is boring! But three bloody marys to the wind, hearing Garrick's name over and over in these gay sexscapades was weird. Kind of icky. I was glad I was in my pink ruffles, as they were some strange comfort to counteract the all the phallic stuff going on.

The cool thing is that M, Mr. Cute Social Guy that he is, struck up a conversation with Andrew, the curator of the reading series, and to make a long story short, maybe I'll read there in the fall. It's such a pretty space. Everything looks better under red lights. And their jukebox is good-- Bjork, Portishead, Hole, Patti Smith, Cocteau Twins-- lots of women vocalists, which is cool. Femme Power.

Gave Mike a haircut. Now he looks like John Balance from Coil. All shaved on the sides and long wavy black on top. He's a retro '80's hottie.

Ran into Tim (of Jean & ..... fame) at Ameoba. He was buying some Fairport Convention-- the sly one. He has the best glasses & smile. We tried to get him to go to the Parlour Club with us, but he had some potluck at the Gaytonia to prepare for. I'm not joking, he lives in a place called The Gaytonia.

Mike woke up in the middle of the night & couldn't get back to sleep. He said he wasn't feeling well, but I think it was because he was obsessed with the Derek Jarman Caravaggio auction on ebay that was going off in the middle of the night. He won the video & book because the guy spelled Caravaggio wrong in the listing! He was able to sleep after seeing he'd won it. Now that's devotion. Then I couldn't sleep & grabbed a copy of the New Yorker, only to become obsorbed in an upsetting article about Hussien's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. Profoundly disturbing.

I think I've recovered from the Garrick repetition upset, but it was an unfun bundle of emotions that I had to sort through in a semi-hung over haze.

2002-06-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I blogged. Things really descended on me in May. I had all these finals to grade, and also had to layout the 1983 issue of Die Cast Garden. It was an insane amount of work, but I'm actually pleased with it. It looks so much better than the last one which always kind of bugged me as being incomplete, aesthetically, somehow.

And, horray, I've already had a student complain about his grade to me. He was obviously in a huff when he sent the email and forgot the spoonfull of sugar, or whatever you are supposed to use when you are trying to convince someone to change their mind. What's worse than the stupid ones who don't really want to learn and just want a bigger paycheck with their new AA, are the ones who think they are "A" students, no matter what kind of work they do, and present you with this warped logic that you can't give them a "B" because they are "A" students. Bah. The cool thing is that many of the students wrote breakthrough papers, using interesting sources they'd discoverd and incorporating them in creative ways-- like one student found these feminist books on the history of feminine body modification-- footbinding, implants, and used it to talk about Andersen's Little Mermaid. And this other student wrote about Jack & the Beanstalk being and allegory of a male rite of passage-- he called it "Does the Size of the Beanstalk Really Matter?" Pretty cool! Sometimes I'm really proud of my students.

Last night we ventured up to Pasadena to see Kelly's work in this group show at the Armory. It was a kid friendly piece, an installation. Immeadiately, upon walking into the place, you have to walk over this glass covered martian livingroom installation. It was kind of vertiginous and set my nerves on edge. Being that it was around 9pm, the kids that were still left in the place were squirrelly. So we walk into the main gallery and there's a stairwell full of velcro, and all these kids throwing velcro balls at each other. And there was Dave, (also of Feather Early fame) totally in the fracas, with an armfull of velcro balls, wearing his customary bandana and growing his beard to Grizzley Adams proportions. He's trying to find a denim suit for his brother's wedding. He's out of control! Such a bear. I love it. The cool thing is that he said we could have the 1983 site party at Harmony Gallery. Now we've just got to plan it somehow-- yikes. But kind of exciting. I wish I could do the website for his gallery. That gallery needs a website! But I think Dara's doing it.

Anyway, kids are running amok throughout the place and I have this sinking feeling that I'm a bad person. That I just can't hang with all this "magically innocent" creativity that these children are supposedly embodying. Everybody had these benevolent smiles. I guess the kids were behaving, somewhat, but when I was little we were never supposed to run around a gallery or museum. And now it's not only OK, it's encouraged. Though, upstairs there was a faculty exhibition, and there was this large chandelier sculpture, but the crystals were actually bags of what looked like silicone, and they were shaped like breast implants. Kids kept running by and slapping them, to see if they could destroy it somehow-- of course, many were knocked off. Creepy, but kind of cool that they set to work on that one. Kelly had these strings of lights that the kids arranged and rearranged. She wanted it in an inclosed room, which would have been cool, because then she could have controlled the lighting, but for some reason they gave her the stairs. She seemed frazzled by the end of the evening.

We were suppposed to meet everybody at the Short Stop (I'm not too keen on that place now-- they play too much hip hop and the silverlake well-to-do-hipster vibe is a bit much.) Well, we took a wrong turn on the freeway and ended up in Northridge, then tried to get home, and then entire 710 (or 405? I don't know) was closed because of "police activity" so we were in traffic for hours, watching people drive their urban assault vehicles on the shoulder to try to get ahead of the rest. Pretty horrid.

Then M & I got on this real-estate rant, maybe traffic indused, of how our landlord is raising our rent almost every month, and how a kind of rent hysteria has hit Long Beach and we're being pushed out, downwardly mobile as we are. We're pretty sure we're being pushed out of California altogether, but that may be OK.

2002-05-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I think I'm getting sick-- I'm all tired and parched with an itchy throat. How did this happen? Last month I was sick for weeks. I take vitamins, eat all these salads... Why???

I have two piles of papers that must be graded by Thursday. How will I ever muster the stregth to teach tonight, especially after grading all day? No Fun. It's going to be an echinachea and red pen day.

On a good note, I just got Lainie's interview for the 1983 issue of Die Cast Garden. She just rocks-- totally inspiring and fiercely productive.

Ok, now to the soul-stealing papers. (Seems like it's time for a new job, huh? Or at least a little break).

2002-05-06T10:10:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I think I'm ironing this whole blog thing out-- you can just type HTML into your post. So maybe I am a little slow, but I'm getting it. Next stop.. monkeying with the template. But I'll save that for later.

On Saturday we went to the vintage clothing expo in Santa Monica because my friend Joey had a booth there and got us in free. Check out the website for his store Geez Louise Vintage. (see-- I'm using the power of HTML in my blog!!) Actually, I designed that site. It was such a blast to do. When I grow up I want to be a web designer.

Anyway, the expo was mildly interesting, but filled with overpriced collectable vintage. Not really wearable stuff. And I felt like every vendor whose wares I rumaged knew I had NO MONEY. Sad. In fact, I did break down and buy one beaded 50's choker, and another fab celluloid necklace with a black heart and speckled leaves on a pink celluiod chain. That woman's prices were reasonable, but as I paid her she kept saying how she keeps her prices down because she knows young people don't have a lot of money, and it's young people who have been her best customers.

Now, what to make of this? I was kinda flattered she considered me a "young person," because teaching will take that feeling right out of you and make you just feel like a senior in cronesville. At UCI when I taught there we used to joke about it. You get older but the students, year after year, are always 18. Dorian Gray students! At the JC it's not so bad, especially teaching night classes, as the students are often my age or older. But that presents its own problems. Try failing a 45 year old woman with grown children because, really, she can't read very well and every one else has passed her on, so now she arrives in your research and argument class, expecting to be able to fake it yet again.

So that was a teaching tangent. The second thing that the vintage vendor implied was that I didn't have much money. I mean-- does it really show that badly? I suppose so.

But the worst thing about the vintage show was how discouraged I was. I love vintage stuff, not only is it cooler, but it's good to use the things that have already been produced. And I mean *use* them, not put them in a case. I think that's the thing about the whole "collector" aspect, is it just gives me the creeps. It seems to fight mortality in this vampiric way-- if objects are saved from use and ruin, somehow we will be, too-- that it will count for something later, either in life or after. I don't believe that-- let the museums take care of that, and the rest of us use up the emphemera of the 20th century.

I'm sure that those vendors at least doubled their prices for the show-- and there were some LA costume designer types loading up boxes-- thousands of dollars worth of stuff. So in comparison, me hovering indecisively over a $30 necklace does mark me as "not much money." But I see that even Salvation Army (who have really homophobic policies, anyway) has caught this fever and consistently asks too much for its wares. Now, when it's cheaper to go to Target and get mass-produced, slave labor goods than it is to buy vintage or just plain used stuff-- we're in trouble.

The other update of note was last night we went to the Parlor Club to hear Ron Athey read. If you don't know of his work, he's visionary. Check out his site. He's putting together a new performance based on his life with his schitzophrenic mother. I think he's just performed it in Amsterdam, but the LA performances haven't been arranged yet. I've seen him perform twice, both times utter life changing. But his performance at Beyond Baroque for the Kathy Acker memorial was completely unforgettable. He came out dressed in this amazing black gown, like a Glenda the Good Witch Death Goddess-- his eyes sparkling with rhinestones (and the thing is, he's incredibly manly-- so this was a total transformation.) His lips were then peirced in such a way that they were turned outward, so he was transformed into this sex-doll silent thing. But there was no blood, until the needles were taken out and then the blood came like this forgiving, knowing path down his face. It was such a wonderful tribute to Acker, who turned sex and the body inside out to get to that very same trickle of life. It was the kind of catharsis I rarely feel, and it was profound.

He read last night about his performance process and said that he channels the same power he used when speaking in tongues in church as a boy when he had to speak to this "tall god". Yes, I completely sense this, and as far as I know, he's the only person who is harnessing spiritual ritual in this way. I spoke to him at Beyond Baroque after the performance and his lips wer amanzingly unmarked-- truly as if he were a magician of some sort. He was so kind an genuine, very charismatic and gracious.

But I also spoke to him last night and I was totally awkward. I'm good in writing, but in person, especially with some one I admire so profoundly, I turn into this Little Miss Nobody. I think what I said to him was pretty blathering, but he was still very gracious to me. I asked him if he got my email that I had sent-- so stupid of me-- how would he know without a context? Then I told him that I was an online editor and would like him to send us work, I asked him if he remembered Rick K., an old aquaintance of his. He didn't, but he still listened, and then Lydia Lunch, that queen of whine, escorted him away to read. But at moments like that I feel I have nothing at all to offer but my own sincerity, and maybe that's not enough, an that makes me sad.

OK, and can I just say that Lydia Lunch looked really bad? And not because she's getting old, as we all are, but she just looked tired, and conventional, like a bargain basement Barbara Stiesand-- that blond stringy dye job! Now I know I'm being catty, but of course she relied on her old crabby-girl-cynicism, complaining about Mother's Day and how she couldn't train straight guys to pull pearls from their asses.

I will probably further the humiliation of my exchange with Mr. Athey by writing to him again, reminding him of our meeting and sending on the URLs. I feel like a schmoozer, but I really, really would like to publish his work. And I would like him to know he's made a difference in my life.

2002-05-04T07:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I met one of my past students at the Museum in town. I haven't been there in years, even though it's right down the street, and I've always felt guilty that I don't go there more often. Everybody's been raving about the new cafe there and it is pretty-- overlooking the water. And there's a courtyard with a fountain where you can catch the breeze off the ocean. The kind of public space that should be occupied, but wasn't save two tourists taking photos. The cafe was beautiful, too-- of hard wood with large picture windows overlooking the ocean. Everyone there seemed to be a retiree lunching. It must have been the hour.

Now I know why I don't go there much-- they had ceramics from the permanent collection, 18th century pewter serving wear, and spumoni-colored landscape paintings of Topanga Canyon. Not really my thing.

But Nora and I got all caffinated and had this absorbing talk about everything from computers to babies to selling scavanged stuff online. She actually sells books online and has been doing really well at it. It's cool to be around some one else who is also trying to bail on the fossil fuel monoculture, cause it's hard, especially in Southern California! It's like learning to live all over again, deprogramming consumer messages, claiming your time as your own again. I'm trying to remind myself that the price tag on something isn't just money-- there's a larger price paid somewhere else for the sweatshop labor, the environmental destruction, etc. Not to mention that that money is also time, time that could be spent on other things. I try to ask myself how I've been able to live this long without it, if the thing is so great? And I try to remind myself that there's stuff out there used, already made, that I can get from a thrift store and that will do.

Actually, I'd seen Nora and Doreen riding their bikes down my street earlier in the day. They'd been going to a yard sale to forage for books. They use their bikes for neighborhood trips. I'm trying to get M to get one so we can do the same. I have this crazy old sparkly green girly schwinn that it just sooo cool. But the breaks sqeek so loudly-- they scare small children. Must find someone who knows how to fix the thing.

It's a great feeling to have people come into your life who inspire you and teach you how to live in a more productive way.

2002-05-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

Had nightmares last night-- something about me teaching a group of people out in a suburban park like the one I used to play in in Illinois where I grew up. (That park is now a corporate parking structure.) I think I was teaching them "hands on" murder mystery writing. But the thing is, I this had this old cadillac and its trunk was full of two corpses dredged from a lake, decomposing. To kind of bring the lesson home I openned the trunk and the smell of the unrecognizable corpses was just awful. (Did I mention I'd been grading their equally unrecognizable annotated bibliographies earlier that day?)

And then, that dream wasn't so disturbing that I didn't think I could divert myself and get back to sleep. But as I was half in sleep I had an auditory hallucination not unlike the auditory hallucinations I had when they gave me too much corticosteriods in the hospital ten years ago. I mean, if anyone has felt this (and don't tell me, "yeah, when I was tripping this time on acid..." it's NOT the same) it's totally bizarre, because it's a voice that's definitely outside of you, but somehow is intimate with you. However, it's full of ill will as well. So last night this voice, a high pitched man's voice, unctuous with knowing and hatred, said my name, called me. This was disturbing enough to transform the entire bedroom into some alien place. I thought of the rapist from the neigboring wealthy neighborhood and how he's been crawling in windows at night. I wasn't afraid he's crawl into our place, just that that might be happening somewhere as I lay there, and the evil was palpable.

Poor M, I woke him up just to dispell the vibe, even though it was 3 am, and I knew he had to get up at six to go to work (To deal with more crazies and depressed persons in the locked ward). He told me in half-sleep to go visit the cat. That did help, actually. As I watched Lemmy drink water from the faucet I began to relax a bit.

It didn't occur to me until this morning that this dream might have been about teaching. After I got home last night I felt particularly depressed. Half of my students in both classes didn't show up because a draft was due. And then a few students who did show up were whiny. This is not College-- this is some kind of play skool for adults. I've failed to teach or motivate the Unwilling, and I've failed to inspire or earn the respect of the ones who belong there, because, I am an overblown disciplinary grammarian (Anything else, I loose half the class, but in being that I loose the class I want to keep). I'm fighting burn-out. There's such a high turnover for part-timers, and there's no institutional back up to help you deal with this sinking ship feeling. You just sink, alone, and they loose another teacher. As they told me at my *last* part time gig, "there's a line of people waiting to take your place."

On a lighter note. Lemmy is definitely going through a phase of some sort. I'm all scratched up, and he never scratches me. He's taken to sitting in front of M's shelves of vinyl and pulling out the records one by one with his paws, so they fall all over the floor. There are some records I wouldn't mind if he chewed up-- for instance-- this "Have Moisey" record with a doodle of a noodly wolf on it playing a noodly guitar. There's a song on that record about digesting spaghetti which M plays just to annoy me. I say, go for that one. But yesterday he was going for the Sandy Denny, and that's just uncool.

2002-04-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

With my cat slumbering noisily in my lap and waking at odd intervals to nuzzle and drool into my armpit, I write in a post vodka-addled haze. We went to Bats last night, aka Release the Bats *said with a kind of maniacal booming voice*.

They played a Birthday song and that was basically the high point of the evening, music-wise, though they also played the Chameleons, which was a good thing. Whenever I hear The Birthday Party, I think of my friend Drucilla Blood. (I have to figure out how to link to other sites and Blogs. I mean, easier than going and coding in the template.) She made me all these tapes of Nick Cave and The Birthday Party, among others, when we were in high school. She's this amazing writer and inspiring Mom, too.

But as a side note, this student of mine went to the Ukraine on business (don't ask me, 'cause I don't know) and brought me back a pirated CD set of all of Nick Cave's recordings, including The Birthday Party. Plus the disc has lyric sheets and pictures, and their all packaged with Cyrillic writing, which makes it so incredibly cool.

Ok, back to last night. You don't want to know what I was wearing last night. It's always unimaginative. But M, however, always looks amazing. Yesterday he found this HUGH necklace with a wild cat's head formed with nacreous shells. So he wore that with his lurex sweater, velvet pants, blue eyeshadow and clove lipsitck. *Be still my heart*.

I always feel like a big faker when I go to goth clubs, basically because I'm unwilling to wear platforms or shave my eyebrows, though I can admire that look. There's no other place in Southern California where you can go to a night club and see all women of different shapes and sizes, wearing these amazing gowns, looking like wicked queens. Though I could do without the whole plastic skull element, it can be inspiring aethetic-wise. For instance, there's my friend Joey Cadaver, who showed up wearing this lace cocktail dress from the '30's, the same dress he was wearing when I first met him, except now it's even less of a dress, just shreds webbed about his pretty body. And then he had this skirt he made with things hanging off it-- er, um, taxidermy parts; for instance some crabbled claw he dutifully stuck in my cleavage. The flirt. And he was also wearing his bottle-green lace-up stilleto boots-- the kind of shoes you can only wear after a few drinks to null the pain. And there was, of course, Butcher Baby who whas wearing some rayon kimono type robe and a hernia corset culled from ebay and dyed red to match. And there were a group of rubenesque girls in the pool room who were wearing '80's goth-- big poet shirts, gauzy dresses, etc, their makeup so perfect they looked like dolls.

The reason I show up there month after month, besides cataloguing the outfits everybody's in, is to get this feeling of gleeful doom, that same feeling I get when reading a William Gibson novel. It's when the music and the people standing around or dancing in their spellbound, pretentious way, all conspire to bring about the end of present time and begin to usher in some other, altered time. I guess that's why everybody goes to clubs. Either that or to get laid. But, alas, that altered time thing didn't happen last night. Maybe next month.

2002-04-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

Woke from a benedryl dream some measurable panic. I'd been trying to get back to my house, which looked like the ramshackle trailer I lived in as an undergrad, the same one that should have been condemned. But somehow the place had been barricaded in the dream and those inside were quarintined, or curfewed. This very tall man in dreads and elaborate armor, an R & B recording star of some sort, had decided to help me, but first he had to get dressed. He tried on costume after costume and I waited for him. A crocodile skin great coat, pewter leather jumpsuit, etc, and others I can't remember. The whole time I'm in a panic, wondering when I'll get home, or if I ever will. Everyone around me seemed fine. We were in some place that looked like the french quarter in New Orleans. They were actually having patio parties, drinking wine, unworried and even slightly bemused by my hysteria. How I despised them!

No doubt dreams like these (and also the sub-dream of that one, at a sushi place run by a Tony Orlando & Dawn type trio, with rabbits running about on the table. M complains to a buxom bleached blonde waitress that people give him a hard time about being too thin and then she crawls over me to sit in his lap and bury his face in her ample chest) had to do with a)the benedryl mentioned earlier b)Israel's invasion of Palestine and c)trying to teach research to the Unwillings.

In the lab last night, one student could not use a browser and I tried to help. Later, she kept clicking on a dead link over and over, getting a 404 error, saying that the thing was "broken". I was trying to show them how to determine the academic relevance of certain sites. I have the big projector going-- I just love seeing web sites blown up large-- and was taking them through this assesment process. The whole time I just felt like this big faker, since what I love about the internet is it defies this assessment-- it's such a wild public space, and there's so much stealing and re-contextualizing going on. But they don't care-- and the few that do are bored. As I tell the class about search engines and what a Universal Resource Locator is, the Flash designer in the corner, God love him, is cracking jokes and surfing up a storm with his bud, whose also brilliant and e-savy. I'm worried they may bring up some porn. And that I'll actually want to look at it. See how impossible?

And now it's getting harder to write as my cat, Lemmy, is falling asleep on me. Lemmy is named after the lead singer of Motorhead. M picked the name. I like to say he's named after Lemmy's endearing mole, though. When he was a kitten he would curl up in the nook of my collar bone. In fact, that's exactly what he did when I found him at the shelter-- curled up there and fell asleep. Now he's not a kitten anymore, but he loves to climb up my chest and bury his head in my armpit, usually when I'm trying to get something done on the computer. But he's got that snuffly pur that I just can't resist.

2002-04-25T12:59:00.000-07:00

At the promptings of Lainie, aka Drucilla Blood, I'm at the blog again.

No political rants today, but it's probably time for a hair update. I've taken the braids out about a month ago, but haven't combed it since. There's comfort in being a mess, really. I'm going back to some aesthetic I worked in the very early nineties, and somehow it's making sense. How nice to be free of all the hair potions and hot objects. I can't really say it's dreading, more like large matted clumps. I look like the human who's supposed to mate with Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. It's OK, I'll just wear it "up" to teach. It's tough being an authority figure. It'd be much better to be an action figure (fully posable, please).

I've been reading through the journal I wrote when I was 13, in prep for the 1983 issue of Die Cast Garden. The self-hatred there kind of bowled me over. I hope it's easier now for girls, but somehow I think it's not. I mean, with the Britney Spears belly-baring phenomenon and all that. It's amazing we navigate the contradictions of girl/womanhood and somehow come out whole. Or at least not completely fragmented.

Speaking of tough girl-breaks, I'm reading Nabokov's Lolita. It's insanely good. "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." Deliciously troubling, I'd say-- inordinately weird, as all good things are. I remember about ten years ago I couldn't get through it, it freaked me out. I didn't see the sass in Dolores. I was fixated on the rape and exploitation. But then, I was dealing with the whole thing of being stalked by and older man, so there you go.

I'm selling my clothes on ebay because I need money. Teaching part time at the Junior College doesn't do much, so I've become an e-peddler. Things I've worn are disseminating themselves across North America, to places with names like Coeur d' Alene and Flower Mound. (That's Hot. I want to live in Flower Mound).

Now I've got to turn my students on to the joy of research. And it is a joy, but try getting them to believe it. *Sigh* At least I have a few good students this semester who are inspired. They are the ones you teach for-- they're the ones who keep you going. I'm just greedy and for once would like a class, if not full of real students, at least half-full.

Did I mention I need to get away from the sun? The pressure to "feel good" is a bit relentless.

2002-03-04T22:26:00.000-08:00

Here I add my clutter to cyberspace.

Listening to the news tonight the black cloud descended. Thermo-bombs the US is testing in Afghanistan can make your ear drums explode, your eyes implode and then set you on fire. Our tax dollars pay sadists to invent the things. And I don't even want to talk about the Supreme Court giving the green light to the highway robbers @ Enron.

On a lighter note, there's always fake hair, and I've got a lot of it. Did my extensions a week or so ago. They are long platinum blonde braids. Weird to be a blonde again, going back to my traumatic late high school/early college years, but they are down my back this time. My scalp itches. The only drawback to the braids, which are so much easier to deal with than my normal hair. I'm jonesing for powder blue braids, but they will have to wait 'til the summer teaching load is over.

Now reading a lot of Shelley Jackson's stuff online & started Nicole Cooley's page turner, Judy Garland & Ginger Love