dancing with zelda bijou

2012-01-27T04:03:00.000-08:00

persephone must have silent feet, for
as she lit out of her dark room last night,
hall-chamber-hall, cold tile and all she knew
wearing the last flowers of september

to risk this rain so much like spring is bold
small girl, no small thing the underworld

but

come spring, she will divide herself in two
unlikely color, brush away bare arms
the last doubt for sun that day-
in one shiver, it is done

In Praise of Another Earth

2012-01-10T21:27:00.000-08:00

Hiding in its orbit among the other "celestial offerings" in 2011 celluloid, and on the surface consisting of the science fiction premise that another earth has appeared suddenly within our solar system, Another Earth has a parallel, other film existing alongside it, that is circumspect to the foibles and randomness of human choice and interactions. Second chances, second loves, a better twin looking curiously into the sky wondering "if..." are the makings of a quiet masterpiece.

A first effort (ironically, also a twin, as the young writer was simultaneously writing The Sound of My Voice when she penned Another Earth) by Brit Marling, the screenplay drips with the delicate prose and utterly personal (if not a little self indulgent, appropos to the writers' age and experience) portrayal of the possibility of youth cut short by a single bad choice.

What if.

Rhoda is all full of herself, her acceptance to MIT, and about a liter of hooch when she takes the wheel of her family's SUV on her way back from a party, feels her face in the wind and is distracted by the night air, the discovery of the hidden planet and the feeling of freedom, of possiblity, when she drives into a car that sits at a red light, holding the family of a celebrated composer, played by the always wonderfully real William Mapother. In that one moment, they both lose everything. The composer loses his family (though he survives after a long coma), his career and his drive to write music (or do anything except take pills and wallow in his loss from his couch). Rhoda loses her future as an MIT astrophysicist, and every ounce of belief in herself.

After serving a four year prison sentence for the multiple manslaughter, Rhoda finds herself in a life she certainly never imagined, and by all appearances has not forgiven herself for causing the tragedy. By this time, a australian accented billionaire has decided to launch a trip to "earth 2" and Rhoda's search for herself - her other self - begins.

The acting isn't so much acting as it is breathing. You can't see the work. Marling is a natural, Mapother (see In the Bedroom again if you missed it the first time)gives his usual raw, painfully accurate and patient best, and the supporting cast does their damn job and stays willfully within the fabric of the story. It is well cast, well edited, well lit, well done. The direction (and co authoring) by Mike Cahill is transparent. This is no Blair Witch foibling around with the steady-cam - ie it's not dated. It's timeless.

"do you think THEY call themselves 'earth 2?' "

The search for self, for reconciliation, for forgiveness, and ultimately, for meaning are explored through the imagination of a talented new writer whose star is rising. Please, for the love of all things simple and pure, I hope she continues to make only small, beautiful, independent films.

It's late, I'm feeling romantic, and my memory fades as I write this, but see this one. If you count my twin, four thumbs up.

Holiday train

2011-12-21T05:26:00.001-08:00

They meet in the same train car every morning for a quick debate, and every afternoon for a beer and a cackle. Three men, two women. Today they are exchanging gifts. A toy version of the mustang he always wanted but kids are in college so there's no cash for that; a little tree ornament that is also a shot glass. A t-shirt, a notepad with ironic messages at the top, a hat.

"we're going to breakfast, right? Oh please tell me we're still going to breakfast!" there is an overlap of voices, gravelly with twenty years of commuting and having quit smoking together. Odd memories of the interstitial parts of life. How so-and-so got their name: odd story, let me tell you. "she doesn't NEED a man..she's 82 years old!" She had the best. She had my father! Why does she want more?

Let me tell you.

They will never meet each other's families - may have not shared cell numbers. But they KNOW each others' families. Love and misunderstanding, like group therapy but without the pathetic veil of "safety." someone might get hurt. Opinions sting. But not for more than the time spanning two train rides.

These relationships would have worked just as well 100 years ago. Would that all relationships be as reliable as trains. It's painful not knowing until the next day - "hey what happened to you yesterday?" Daughter in the emergency room. Traffic was Terrible - accident on the beltway. I just had a hard time getting moving this morning. They worry, but in that perfunctory way you worry about acquaintances. Maybe a little more. Enough to buy gifts. Enough to have breakfast and share stories, and do a great deal of speculating on the controversies that don't survive past the train ride. Look over the year, brag about bonuses and kids.

I am envious-

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:MARC 419

for goodness' sake

2011-06-15T19:17:00.000-07:00

I sat next to a charming man named Richard tonight at dinner, at a symposium on greening historic communities. He’s in his mid seventies or thereabouts, has been married for around forty years, and has four sons, all of whom are successful, in completely diverse careers, and love each other, and their parents, whom as adults, they treat as friends. I asked him somewhat awkwardly what has made his marriage work after all these years. I really had to know. Being in a young marriage, and for the second time, I have concerns. I worry, will it work this time? It’s hard, everyone knows that in theory, but you don’t get much from canned psychology and friends, who won’t admit to anything because you’re too close.

Getting advice on love from strangers always seems best. So I asked him this question after the conversation had revealed that we’re both of a liberal persuasion, have similar world views and both think that Michele Bachmann is a disingenuous, frightening megalomaniac with designs on being Vice President to Mitt Romney. He got my jokes, and patted me on the shoulder. He said a few very useful things, but started with, “you know what happened? when we first met, we lived together. After about five years, my wife said she wanted to get married. I wasn’t ready. She said she wanted the commitment. So when I wouldn’t commit, she left. I was terribly disappointed. Knowing she could just leave at any time made me really pay attention to her, what she was saying, and really listen. It made me an attentive husband.”

The subtlety that is so hard to portray after the fact is that he wasn’t cowed in some way or threatened, he wasn’t attentive out of insecurity, but out of the pleasure of doing it. He realized this woman knew what she wanted and meant business. If he was a part of her life, he’d be able to be a party to her greatness. “She left and went and bought a house.” By herself. In 1972. She is an attorney, and after some years of marriage, went back to graduate school to become a clinical psychologist, and she’s a novelist. He couldn’t let her go. A woman that strong was worth committing to. He was intrigued by her , and maintains that that foundation of individuality is what made it work. He went on; I could see tears forming. I had to steel myself; it was touching how much this man loves his wife.

You don’t hear much about that these days. You hear about jackasses, mostly, politicians and celebrities, (polebrities?) who really don’t deserve to be married. I would have more hope if I knew that Richard was more common. That he’s a type, and that I will over time see that I married that type. I think I will. I think I already do, but he’s also got forty years of retrospective, it’s happened over time, the goodness, the will power. The deliberateness of loving someone for a very, very long time.

Other things that make marriage work in the long term according to Richard’s experience are a common aesthetic and a sense of adventure about it, and communication without fear. “not the brutal brutal truth, but the un-doctored truth, with some gesture toward each other’s feelings.” Tell me the whole truth, but do it in a nice, gentle, respectful way that fosters trust. That’s not easy. That’s what makes marriage hard. It also, I’d like to believe, makes it worthwhile.

Beyond The Pale

2011-06-01T05:42:00.001-07:00

I confess, it was the "hot body" contest she entered at a sleazy bar, nary a hip shake after her daughter was murdered in cold blood and dumped in a Florida marsh, that damned her in my mind.

I try to put myself there, an attempt to imagine the woodsman she would have us believe was sent forth to cut out the heart of snow white - how cruel, and at best indifferent, to the mother in her, the mother in me that howls at the idea of anyone laying a finger on my one and only. I cannot deeply go there. It's too much.

Caylee was, by definition, defenseless. The difference of course (if you will leap into the fairy tale analogy for a moment) is that the queen had no daughter, and she had her realm to protect - and snow white had come of age. It was a war between age and beauty. Control and freedom. It's a huge motive for escape, absolution, murder even. War.

Knowing that that battle wages in each of us, however deeply buried or fully resolved is useful knowledge. Self awareness. Something can be done. Thete are outlets. We all learn to cope, and often thanks to the little ones, enjoy reliving youth vicariously with the benefit of experience. We can chuckle at it all. Some even go at it alone, and they are twice the heroines.

And then there are the other mothers.

At war with aging, with the shackles of responsibility, with "lost years," with themselves-
Perhaps wanting once again to be queen of the realm with no little trouble maker in tow, no consequences, and no cover at the door, free drinks for the ladies-

When I think of dancing with abandon, I don't think of spring break debauchery. I think of three year old girls. They love to take off their clothes and run around, tease everyone and giggle at the dog staring at them with a mildly worried expression from across the room. They love life, trying on dresses, making mischief and dancing with abandon.

What exactly was this woman missing?

Having just read The Psychopath Test I do wonder. Fairy tales are full of psychopaths. Reminders to not lie, to enjoy youth and springtime and beware the stranger offering sweets. But there are no useful parables here. Just a woman that refuses herself to grow up, and the little girl that now never will.

No more bedtime stories for Caylee.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Somewhere other than The sunshine state

I don't want to live on the moon

2011-04-09T05:51:00.001-07:00

I have to believe that things will get better for everyone.

I was up at 7 this morning mopping the kitchen floor, listening to my daughter giggle at sesame street - the few minutes of the day that, with sticky banana hands, she will tolerate being strapped in a chair. The episode changed mercilessly to Aaron Neville and Ernie singing "I don't want to live on the moon" and without any warning of this haunting, I was transported to some early spring day in the late 70s, when I might have heard it for the first time, sung by someone else. It was ok to wear red pants and a green shirt. Crayons were probably toxic. And I didn't understand why my mom would cry when she heard certain songs, standing in the middle of the kitchen. Mopping. I think my parents' generation had lost something then, maybe everyone loses it, from time to time. Maybe it's having children that make this time travel possible. The tremendous feeling of loss and simultaneous fullness you can get living in times like these can be overwhelming. I don't want to live on the moon. I don't want to fill a mansion with things. I want to live on earth, at home - I think that's what the song means. I'd like to visit some neat places, but I want to live at home. For everyone I know, life is harder right now. In one case, Eviction-notice hard. But if you are lucky to still own your own dirt, you can still grow things from nothing but seeds on a window sill. Though it may seem impossible now, like this shitty time will not pass, it will, and I know it. I can feel it - it's only a moment away. So I'm taking care of things at home, keeping it straight. Crying along to the Cat Stevens station I just set up on Pandora. Tending to seedlings. Laughing at my daughter laughing. Getting ready for the day things turn around. They will.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:My kitchen floor

May I suggest

2011-03-23T06:51:00.001-07:00

Rediscovering Twin Cinema by the New Pornographers

Rocking my commute, and my world. I don't even feel silly for wearing this enormous raincoat on what will be a rainless day. I think.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:On the Amtrak headed for Union

Old Traditional

2011-03-16T18:13:00.000-07:00

She ripped her way out of the dress, borrowed from Mrs. Monroe. Everything was borrowed from Mrs. Monroe until she herself was Mrs. Monroe. The restaurant would call for Artie to fetch the fur. She shouldn't have left it, she could have sold it. "Stupid," she thought to herself, deciding to make a late trip back to retrieve it. It was worth four hundred dollars, a third of her father's yearly salary as a college professor. She finds a one of his mother's traveling suits and steps out the back door, brown from head to toe and marching.

Long, hurried walk to the Avenue. Drunken streetcar sooty mess the son-of-a-no-good- what in heaven's name am I going to do if he sees me coming back in...Too much time to think on the trip back to the restaurant, she piles a shoulder into Theo before he can turn to open the door for her, out of habit. He steps back instead and lights a cigarillo.

"Really," she says to herself, bowing her head through the bar to the coat check, "The trick is to not have desires, or be numb to them. If I have my hair just so, and wear this dress, he will want to hold my hand. If I use irony effectively, he will want to kiss me. Be smart, and it will get me some small gold thing to wear. There was a cold progression to it. She thinks she's too emotional to pull this off.

c(ath)arly simon

2011-03-16T17:51:00.000-07:00

You walked into the party
Like you were walking onto a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf, it was apricot
You had one eye on the mirror
As you watched yourself gavotte
And all the girls dreamed that they'd be your partner

You're so vain
You probably think this blog is about you
You're so vain, you're so vain
I'll bet you think this blog is about you
Don't you?

Oh, you had me several years ago
When I was still quite naive
Well, you said that we made such a pretty pair
And that you would never leave
But you gave away the things you loved
And one of them was me
I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee

You're so vain
You probably think this blog is about you
You're so vain, you're so vain
I'll bet you think this blog is about you
Don't you?

Well, I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse, naturally, won
Then you flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun
Well, you're where you should be all the time
And when you're not, you're with some underworld spy
Or the wife of a close friend

You're so vain
You probably think this blog is about you
You're so vain, you're so vain
I'll bet you think this blog is about you
Don't you?

to tell you the truth

2010-11-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

Hurting someone else's feelings is not a professional ethics violation.

in communicado

2010-11-10T12:03:00.000-08:00

I'm Tweetarded. Sure, I get the concept, it's 140 characters, your absolute minimum thoughts on just about anything you happen to be doing or want to share with your "followers." Let's put aside the realization of every person's superego that they are worthy of having followers; that's a different and more disturbing topic. What I don't get (aside from the hash signs) and what is probably one hundredfold over-done in the ancient tomes of the "blogosphere", is sharing minimum anything. Ironically, what I work on relates to what are known as "the worst buildings allowed by law" as they are, in fact, "code minimum," but in the core of that work lies something so much greater - buildings not falling down on people. Buildings not sucking 75% of the electricity we consume in this country. Buildings, at the very least, not failing. If there could be anything 'greater' about tweeting, it is certainly the fact that it is ultimately about mass communication. We tweet as part of my organization's "presence" (and occasionally, we have staff wetweets on tweeting) and I suppose I must, like most in the knowledge-worker force, bend to that reality and get all hash-signed up in there. But if I must, I'll do so with as little regard to meaning as the medium implies. Please, if you tweet about love, stop.

Patriosymbinostalgafrass

2010-07-05T07:30:00.001-07:00

The 4th of July parade that wasn't. Is it a parade if the high school band director and program have been cut? Like so many small towns that rely on levies and the conservative not-in-my back yard set who deny them to maintain certain "optional" programs like art and music, in Sunbury the music has stopped. No band in the bandstand, a less than half-full glass of American lemonade sweats in the July sun. And yet the crowd still stops moving, hands on failing hearts, to witness the anthem, the one piece of music that will endure this sad reminder that small towns have been all but executed by the jingoistic "let capitolism work" lowest of the lowest common denominator. Small towns are all but mythology. Maybe the 260 million dollar lotto winner from this corner of Midwest will save the music. At least that's what would happen if this were a movie. But it's not.

-- Post From My iPhone

Location:Sunbury Ohio

Our Victorian preoccupation

2010-04-22T07:00:00.001-07:00

I haven't seen many wristwatches lately, though I think Republicans wear them. In DC at least, Cell phones have become pocket watches, and their plastic and silicon are checked and stroked with as much finesse and care as an engraved gilded heirloom.

I see their ancestors on Antiques Roadshow and I consider gentlemen talking into them with proper diction and great purpose on Lafayette Square. Squirrels were introduced recently to delight and entertain them, but there is urgent business to attend to all alone talking into a gold fronticepiece! It would be ridiculous if it weren't true. They're all mad, mad I say!

Unfortunately though the gesture of time checking on an elegant gadget has returned, the manners that went with the age have disappeared. I've left home, left my baby and on this train have just blown my nose into one of her socks- perhaps there are some people who would still offer handkerchiefs to ladies, if there were still ladies to receive them. I glance around and of course everyone is so absorbed in their pocket watches, no one is appalled at me for soiling a baby sock. Maybe they wouldn't notice a breast pump. Now there's a preoccupation.

-- Post From My iPhone

Loginesia

2009-11-24T07:52:00.000-08:00

I googled it. It doesn't exist. And now it's mine. Here's my stab at an Oxford's definition, if I can get this thing to catch on.

Loginesia /ˈlɔgˌɪniʒə/
1. Complete or partial loss of memory of website login username and password information. 2. Having a large number of unrelated usernames and passwords such that an individual becomes incapable of remembering them. 3. An independent virtual state consisting primarily of internet-related detritus, files or data recorded or written in versions of software no longer in common use, and multiple digital photographs that are not intended for print. (see 'Photoblivion')

That's mine too.

Beware of Fraud on Facebook

2009-08-20T04:58:00.000-07:00

This is NOT a conversation between me and my friend Matthew. It is a conversation between me and someone claiming to be my friend Matthew. Luckily I'm of the generation that still calls mothers at the crack of dawn to verify the location of their sons.

But in all seriousness, please be aware of this fraud tactic. I'll be contacting the FTC and InterPol today.

Matthew
Need's Urgent Assistance!about an hour ago
Clear Chat History
7:03amMatthew
hey there
How are u doing?
7:03amZB
hi matthew. it's early! I'm just fine. how are you?
7:03amMatthew
Am not good
7:03amZB
what's wrong
?
7:04amMatthew
Im in some kind of deep mess right now
7:04amZB
how so?
7:04amMatthew
Im stranded in London
I got mugged at a gun point last night
7:04amZB
holy shit?
where are you?
specifically?
7:04amMatthew
All cash,credit card and phone was stolen
7:04amZB
did you go to the police?
7:05amMatthew
Im in a public Library
7:05amZB
what credit cards do you need to notify?
7:05amMatthew
i have reported to the local cops here.Investigation is going on
7:06amZB
who do you need called?
7:06amMatthew
I really need your urgent assitance
Thank God i still have my Life and passport
7:06amZB
sure - how can I help?
7:07amZB
The US embassy is helping me with my return flight home
My return flight leaves in few hour but having trouble sorting out the hotel bills
7:07amZB
what hotel are you staying at?
7:08amMatthew
Wondering if you could loan me some few $$$ to pay the hotel bills and take a cab to the Airport
I will def refund you when i return home
Would you loan me some cash?
7:08amZB
what's the quickest way to do that, western union? it might be easier if I call the hotel with a credit card
and then western union some cash
7:09amMatthew
you can wired it to me via western union
7:09amZB
can you go to the hotel so I can call you there and help sort that part out?
7:09amMatthew
Do you know any western union outlet around?
7:09amZB
where are you in london?
7:09amMatthew
Kentish town
7:09amZB
what hotel?
7:09amMatthew
You can wired the money to my full name as written on my passport
I checked in with cash...
7:10amZB
what hotel?
7:10amMatthew
Sector Inn...
7:11amZB
can you go back there so we can talk?
7:11amMatthew
Would you call the hotel Manager on my behalf?
I have limited time here
7:11amZB
Yes, I can do that - are you going back there before the airport?
7:12amMatthew
I cant go back to the hotel now..I need to return with cash Jessyca
How much can you spare me with right now?
7:14amMatthew
????
7:14amZB
hold on a sec
7:14amMatthew
ok
7:14amZB
I'm on the phone with your mom
who is certain you're in mississippi
and that you're reporting to teach today.
want to tell me who the hell this is really?

See recent report on CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/05/facebook.impostors/index.html

the (little) devil in the details

2009-08-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

In Praise of
The Second Nine Months by Vicki Glembocki

At about 5 months along in my own pregnancy, I read The Second Nine Months with a bit of trepidation but with great recommendation from a friend of the author’s who insisted that I would enjoy it. I did. The trepidation had come not from worrying that it would be too negative or sarcastic, or whiny and insufferable as “Operating Instructions,” (the voice of which smacks of bitterness from not having a partner with whom to venture into parenthood among other meanderings about drugs and religious hooey) but out of a fear of my own feelings. I get annoyed at the neediness of the dog, how will I ever be a mother? It is the unabashed, unapologetic look at self doubt that makes The Second Nine Months a success – not in delivering us a new trend in baby-and-pregnancy-related books (though it will likely result in a string of copycats).

I have a brutally honest friend who announced early in her first pregnancy that she thought the whole thing was gross – including the idea of having an infant – and while at the time I confused her portrayal of motherhood as a bit cold and unemotional, what I missed in the statement was the very emotion in it, the questions in herself she’s willing to face, and the strength to say, “it’s not complicated, or it is, but the fact that I’m straightforward with myself about it is not.” She’s right, it’s gross. Not admitting it is more gross. Not being able to speak the truth can literally make one sick and further – for what I’d like to think is the urbane woman – makes us slaves to the marketing empire that is salivating for us to drop our precious load on the economy, oddly, making us “consumers” while really we are producers.

Pregnancy makes you do weird things, like steal fruit from business breakfast buffets and google “why men find pregnant women so hot.” It makes you fierce and wilting a the same time. It conjures up all sorts of strange nightmares that progress with the pregnancy, of deformed babies and a deformed self image, coupled with a growing realization that while it may all be worth it in the end, the poopy parts might also have to be as good as it gets. It’s also a vibrant, pulsating time when you feel like there’s a beam of light on you wherever you go, a fecund image of life, family, sex and of loving a parasite. It’s confusing.

What I take most from Second Nine Months is that I know that deep, irrational love, the kind I feel for the first time with my future spouse and father of my child, and what I expect to feel for my child, comes with the capability to hate, a dark repose and broiling anger for the whole mess, the whole lot, and anyone that would dare step in my way as I couple with it. The balance between the two makes for a complicated woman, a light and darkness that defines us all, and a worthwhile life.

Thank you, Vicki. I will almost certainly give it a second read. If I have time. Which I have a feeling I will not. But I’ll want to.

PS
The one thing I would change if I could in the story? Wouldda sent that email and then FIRED her ass.
Millenials...

o kentucky

2009-07-05T18:36:00.000-07:00

Recently I went to a Louisville Bats game at Slugger Field. The opposing team was somewhat irrelevant – let’s call it Bats v Gnats. I was impressed by the diligence of the seat steward, guarding the “diamond club” seats, all ten of them, with pride though the entire section lay empty. I sat at the periphery, the lone fan in my section, near first base. It was also called the “first base club” which I connect with Louisville’s air of innocence. The kissing and hands-on-top-of-blouse section, as it were. When a young barista offered me a “hot passion,” pronounced “pay-shun” I felt the blush push up past my cheeks and through my scalp. Kentucky people are deliberately slow, not to stave off heat or the shadow of oppression as in your deep southern states, but to make sure you know they’re trying really, really hard to please you. They talk like bourbon here, and it makes you want to confess all your secrets and be done with it.

If I looked deeper, if I moved my clothes and my life here (which includes a significant other that looks and talks like he should be here anyway) and settled into a neighborhood outside the candy fleur de lis shell, I do wonder what I would find. Kentucky is at once rich and destitute, a crossroads where horse people meet piss poor. There is a fantasy of wealth in Louisville and a romance that is shocking for a town in a state that borders Indiana, so far my least favorite state in the union – I lived in Valparaiso and no one had ever heard of Mardi Gras – something tells me they know about Mardi Gras in Louisville. In my experience, what lies across the border is in the boring belt. Kentucky, the rolling, pretty bluegrass south, is so far away from the beer gut that is most of the middle of the country. Taking in Kentucky one does not guzzle. One sips.

There are tremendous problems here, just as in the middle and the sides and the bottom and top of our country. There are pockets of poverty and ugliness, there are uneducated, abusive people, there is racism and intolerance, there is probably a serious issue with evolution and terrible corruption. That just makes it normal. There are piles of coal on the river. I could overlook those. Because it’s gorgeous here and the accents just kill me. The architecture is solid. There’s a serious take on preservation, a growing interest in sustainability, and an established dedication to stay local and buy American. People smile here, and there has been little reason to smile lately. I will admit I am still clueless about the complexities of life in this state. But I leave wanting to know more.

When I was thirteen I had a mysterious encounter under the blazing hot New Braunfels sun. There was a black bottom reservoir, a green eyed bathingbesuited boy a few years older than me (and about a foot taller) and an opportunity. We had this silly and polite adolescent-intellectual conversation under a tree for an hour, and I took his picture doing a swan dive into the deep water. I never saw him again but I will always be able to recall with great accuracy the romantic buzz I had for the rest of that muggy Texas summer. He had this funny southern accent I didn’t recognize and touched my hair and cheek sweetly and kissed me goodbye, first base nowhere in sight.

Kentucky sorta makes me feel that way.

led by strangers

2009-05-05T06:25:00.000-07:00

well, I wouldn't want to stand there and wait for a conductor.

He was so patient, seeming to look at a point just off my shoulder as I reached him in line, a steady stream of besuited ants marching by him and out the train door.
- one woman, the one that sat next to me and spoke staccato
words in a language I did not recognize, stepped off, turned around and
said, "does he need help?" and then before I could advise, disappeared.

"I only see one conductor and he's way down at the first car [helping
people who are perfectly capable of getting out of the train all by their
big-boy selves...] - why don't I take you where you need to go" I said hopefully to him, above the din and shuffle.

"aren't you nice. thank you" he offered and we stepped over the threshold, a gap that I normally
ignore completely, but of which today I made a verbal presentation. "we're stepping over now" I said eagerly and when our right feet hit the platform in unison, he took hold of the heel of my hand and launched down the ramp to the station with more conviction than me. His command of the space - limitless to him and bound to me by hundreds of bodies and obstacles, caught me off guard and I momentarily hesitated - he was leading me, for a moment, and then I rebounded to finish the job as I thought I should.

This could be my realizing that I take too much for granted - vision, among other natural 'gifts' but I'll refrain, and it would be untrue. Mostly in those moments I had with him, I thought about whether or not he could do things better than me, like smell and feel. If it's annoying waiting on arms to hitch rides, and if he could tell by my voice that I am a nice person - and an idea for a love story. Certainly he can't tell his gentle grip on the heel of my hand and great purpose with which he took his steps made me think about falling in love without seeing someone. No, you can't tell that from a walk and a chat about the daily commute - so banal and chatty a chat about the acronyms that follow us like stray dogs through our days in DC.

No I'd have to tell him that, I suppose. And many other things that none of us care to see in each other.

there is no car magnet to describe it.

2008-11-06T07:52:00.000-08:00

You want family values? Let's let our new president teach by example.
Not the canned love we've become accustomed to in our politicians, but a real blushing passion-
for his wife, daughters, and country. This is the first family of fables, something
we've only seen in the on-screen heroics of hollywood presidents, the good ones.
This is all so spookily familiar, a final sigh exorcising the last curses
of the Kennedys, one nation-wide recollection of our sweeter past that may not have really
existed- the one in our daydreams that is sepia toned and never, ever angry in church.
Never, ever in front of the children.
And what we've got, pulled up on that big screen is the larger than life character, not the celebrity.
A good man. Doing good things. How refreshing.

P.S.
Your flag decal won't get you into heaven any more.

edible sentiment

2008-10-17T19:51:00.001-07:00

I don't dislike Paul Newman's take on marital fidelity as much as I want to steal it while carefully avoiding the woman-as-meat metaphor. It is simple in it's purpose, to illustrate the great secret that is, I assume after fifty years with his wife, a great marriage. He said, "why go out for burgers when you have steak at home?" Truly.

It is so much easier to go on about people that don't mean anything to you. I am speaking of stories I have taken down with great amusement as if I were taking a dictation from Georges Sand. Oh the too-clever musings of a will-never-be. The problem is, or rather, the "opportunity" is that when I sit to do this now, my thoughts are remarkably clean. You. And thus everything seems filthy. The words that were born in the mash of erotic potatoes that seem to surround a relationship early on - the bulbous and attention-getting and looking vaguely like the indiscretions of past presidents, and for the most part somewhat uninventive and tasteless – those starchy dear ones are not there any more. The common burgers, the philandering fries. So I must move on from idle reporting, and the silly pursuit of ordinary hot potatoes. I simply cannot bear the lowly roots when I am faced with the possibility of poetry.

I'm looking into a tea of temperance, the lines on your face, and your unique take on godlessness. And cucumber water. I was indulgent, but limited. And now I'm rare wordless filet mignon in some ludicrous herbed sauce. I am a pound of butter and a gallon of fresh juice. I am culinary and clean, but decadent nonetheless - the finish of a fine pinot and your relentless check mate. You've made my love wholesome, and as I gag on that word, I will say as well that it is goodness on a wide spectrum, played out in a come to dinner bell of multi-tonal loveliness across the field of this new life – including the craggy cat's meow and red kettle air raid on a crisp October morning. That smoke tendril I hate and love. Remorselessly wearing aprons and giving myself over to your steady and kind rule over the kitchen. That bread knife fiasco. Being the baker – I'm an early riser anyway. Well just for old time's sake, here's a curse on you for making me happy and ruining my idle nonsense. For making me lose my apetite for fast food. But not for dining on dreams and if necessary to put dinner on the table, with second rate knives. And not for caring enough for me that I may dine on love and occassionally grilled cheese and tomato soup, which you will somehow make into a gourmet meal. I am fearfully but hopefully tasked now with writing a real love story.

unfreedom

2008-10-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

My dear brilliant daughter I hope that you are hiding your intelligence, your creativity, your natural ability with numbers and your sense of direction. I hope that you are saving them under a clever veil of government sanction ditziness so that they not be culled by a society that has no place for their vessel, lovely you. You are not a Regular. You are not an Elite. You are my Magnolia. Never mind if you've been renamed Long Mauve Truck, and are the assistant to the vice chancellor of knitting beer coozies - you are the shining flower of my genes and your father's genes (I will explain the difference between God and Biology in subsequent letters), Hopefully you are, by the age of 12 or so when you find this, capable of hiding your talents so that you are not imprisoned, or altered, and understand that you are not defined by being "one or the other." Act Regular. Be extraordinary.

and reuse this as something. It was a tree.

your mother

giving lemons to a sourpuss is fruitless

2008-07-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

I can forget, momentarily, that young female business travelers are on occasion mistreated for not having a bunchy leather pillow stuffed with cash in their pocket, propped up structurally by an "it's ok, I'm on a business trip" flying man-buttress. Nor will I dwell on the fraying of my last nerve by the evil that are petroleum-laced cosmetics, staining with one nefarious "pook" my otherwise virginal white cotton summer dress, moments before the criminally placed hairdryer falls into the sink, cord still coiled like a southern black snake on a young pine, waiting to strike me.

But freaking Berkeley has lemons, on trees. And someone just smiled and gave me salt. And maybe the ghosts of the Claremont will break the life-long paranormal boycott on me. I'll bet Oppenheimer was here, the brush and sway of gentle St. John on his mind and a curse to the pink California horizon just flirting with a shape, "o...." And I'll bet those lemon-tree owners don't appreciate their lemons like I would, rosemary and olive oil, some coquette vinagrette that it is physically impossible to mess up.

I'm plucking that lemon tomorrow. That makes me a no-account sourpuss lemonnapper.

So be it.

vernal view

2008-04-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

I do not mind sitting backward
sticks blur and pink blooms wisp
by in my single seat not by the others

I saw a subterranean march early spring -
little soldiers with lapel pins their weapons.
We hold the little secrets of ourselves
like treasured playing cards

And in the springtime they are so wet and full
in our quick hands dirt and creosote and birdsong -

But by crisp sudden autumn,
they blow away, the childhood leaves
turn vermillion and are gone

social justice and a hot breakfast

2008-01-25T06:02:00.001-08:00

"You're looking very warm today;"
the sweet low twang of a southern man's voice
floated over the scrambled eggs and sausage
in the breakfast buffet. I said,
"I have to bundle up like nanook to be comfortable,"
matching vowels with him.
"I know that's right. Are you from the south?" he asked, I paused-

"Louisiana and southeastern Texas..and it doesn't get this cold there."
I wasn't sure why he wanted to know, but then came the verbal missive
on New Orleans, the humanitarian work out of Grand Lake his group
had done, the ongoing crisis, the old cypress guards of the fleur de lis
crumbling under the dismissive wave
of administrative orders.

It is not unreasonable to get nostalgic around this time.
Mardi Gras is around the corner. The displaced look for warmth in
each other.

He said, "you been back home
lately?" Home, I think about Home.

and he's right, Louisiana has always felt like home -
they say, where your bare feet first patter, that's the place that
matters, and to me - so deeply in my skin I feel it, I touch my chapped
winter hands together and think about the miracle in missing humidity-
he and I are suddenly in some space together, speak in the same voice,
and in that moment I feel a purple, green and gold emblazoned thanksgiving,
and when he says, "I'll get this one, you just do it for someone else
soon," I could just take off my hat and walk confidently
out into the bitter DC cold.

but ohio is normal

2008-01-10T13:18:00.000-08:00

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving

The little white handwritten placards above our heads say “SOB” “MRB” and “CUM” The kid next to me has never heard the term “dear John letter.” He is blond and friendly, from Pittsburgh, and speaking with a broad man would like everyone to know that he charges an enormous hourly rate to make his commute worthwhile. I only know my stop, and will perhaps not know it well. Cumberland is where I hope to be let off, perhaps I will bribe the conductor with my beer, which I thankfully thought to buy in Union Station. It’s a toss-up if I or any of us will be released into the fall night by the conductor; when he talks his voice is full of cotton, his thoughts are sloe gin. We are headed for Chicago, and this is the strangest of routes. At first told to be seated upstairs in the sleek double decker, our little band was reprimanded en masse as the train embarked on its rocking trajectory, that the car was a “deadhead” and that we were to move, by an attendant who was troubled to put together a sentence, or make eye contact. There is a man in our mini-car who does this every day. Every day, 150 miles. Every day, he greets the crew, he puffs up with satisfaction that he knows them by name and by bad habit, by terminology and baggage and perfunctory rule-mandering. There is a young deaf man in the seat ahead, and he is better off not to hear this confederacy of plucky comrades. I don’t think we’ll ever get to Cumberland, and I imagine if we do, I will step off the train and see Studebakers. A woman comes in mildly amused by the gerbil habitat nature of our little car, and offers reservations in the dining car. I take mine for 6:30. It’s a bizarre ride, but
the sunset is all peaches and blue foamy November, a warm Tuesday for this time of year, and we’ve come to know each other chugging along, and I risk my ticket off this odd machine by drinking up.

new orleans notebook

2007-10-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

Jackson Square was so freshly scrubbed it reminded me of a time I sat rear to ground and
chalk in hand chut-chut-chuting at an old roof slate for play, squinting at the sun
and a caliope played, some sad sweet tune- an echo I'd wake up to one morning,
thirty years later. how'd you get here? I could talk but it was before I cared to,
and things stick in you
like when you first put flour to oil to make a roux.

I wouldn't know this had Joette not told me, they used to pick up the trash with mules on
Prieur and it could very well be that way again, mules and prayers, cars and curses
it is so damn hard to get around now, but no hurry still.

An old chef told me in bright clean October, if I took my shoes off and walked around barefoot here,
nowhere else would ever feel like home. I remember scraping around shoeless in the early fall sun on stone and
grass, hands red and yellow and dusty, I saw the clown faces everyone did that sort of thing then - and I'd never be seven like my sister, and this old square was a big enough world.

the view from platform E

2007-10-11T19:18:00.000-07:00

mingled at the castle, swirled around princes of industry
or just one bright business in particular-
the newest one where everyone wins
and realized no one would approach my chardonnay or my
prayer like stare
that one does to ones' electronic bonnet- to say "I'm busy"
ran down cool bluster to miss the red line just by a breath
and found I'd been tagged with a price on my hair
everyone has one

and then
the beige maw of union station opened up to me
and in two minutes I had a ticket and a possibility
this woman who sat next to me, she had just met the
president's father, don't you know it, she speaks some other language
that I can't understand, but whispers anyway
and with my bottle of water, young men in suits untied
bobbing forward and back staring with black pools
where blue used to be
staring and me and they are so slight and smart
in periphery
buy expensive beer and sometimes a pretzel

I'm going home now
where the heel stops short of the platform and
just as you fall in, a kind conductor offers
"miss, you forgot your sweater"

texas blues

2007-10-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

Three and a half pounds of shrimp as big as your head for sixteen dollars. Texas blue crabs nip and I nip back, who knew there were crab tongs? Guilt tugs at me. they're too pretty to eat. I grew up on the Texas gulf coast, the part just shy of Louisiana, hot sauce with every meal the yearly threat of wind and water at your door and the promise of tiny black springtime frogs in a saturated emerald lawn. Childhood summers were covered by a green shroud; couldn't see any other color except for bark brown that you tag breathlessly with mud boots and herds of crickets your only witness.

Playing "outside or in, pick one!" was good until 9 pm and then suddenly sweaters, though it was 85 degrees and hot hot on the playground. The first day of school brought the excitement of pencil smell and playground pebbles in my knees. Why did construction paper not come in blonde? You have yellow hair when you cut it out that way-

Found Allison under a sappy white pine crying, no friends quite yet and there I was hands smelling like cyprus. It's twenty-five years later, ya'll and I look into her daughter's new almond eyes and mine cannot hold back the Texas Blues.

bizarre love triangle

2007-08-02T05:42:00.000-07:00

Come out to see the play Rudy Doo by George Tilson,
performed at the Spotlighter's Theater in Baltimore (817 St. Paul Street)
playing the 17th and 18th Aug at 8 pm, Aug 19th at 2 pm, Aug 23rd,
24th, and 25th at 8 pm, and Aug 26th at 2 pm.

see The Baltimore Playwright Festival's website for more details:

BPF

slice of mandolin

2007-07-23T18:31:00.000-07:00

strum thing- bent over a pie and a song
sometimes a poem is just a poem
other times, a word a besplintered, forlorn-
wooden spoon for a good while, sit and smile

all leavened and leveled and ready to file.

who's in nebraska?

2007-06-25T18:10:00.000-07:00

The work of the thing - I suppose, could be part revisionist history,
part badly-gone affair of the heart, part super-nov(ell)a, part brown
sugar melting in the pantry. Perhaps summer is the time to air out
the underroos.

Bruce Springsteen's album by the same name is brilliant. Asbury Park
(pictured) what a mysery, and a mystery. It is not, however, a placeless
place, and could very well come back.

we're going streaking.

2007-06-22T06:38:00.000-07:00

Below find the text from an article on today's Baltimore Sun
regarding naked hiking on the first day of summer. It is more
cautionary than judgemental, which I appreciate. More on nudity
some other time. I'd rather go frolick than sit in front of my
computer screen.
______________________________________________________

Naked ambition of hikers on the Appalachian
By Abigail Tucker
Baltimore Sun Reporter
Originally published June 22, 2007
Along the Appalachian Trail // Dave Odorisio unzipped his tent flap yesterday, peered out and stretched; a halo of gnats quickly formed around his tousled head. It was just another morning on Maryland's leg of the Appalachian Trail. But this particular morning, the 25-year-old hiker had an important decision to make: Namely, would he get dressed today?
Hike Naked Day marks the summer solstice on the 2,000-plus mile trail and gives the boldest adventurers a chance to walk -- not to mention scale boulders and gain summits -- on the wild side. The bad news for us is that the solstice falls at the time when backpackers are passing en masse through the Maryland area. These thru-hikers, trudging from the trail head in Georgia to its finish in Maine (a journey that typically starts in early spring and ends in late summer), are the most likely to shed their smelly regalia for the solstice ritual, making the 41 miles of in-state trail potentially perilous for Girl Scout troops or day hikers whose tour buses have paused there briefly on the way to historic battlefields.

The good news is that, although the nude hikers' flesh may be as brilliantly white as the blazes that mark the trail, they make themselves quite scarce.

It didn't take long for Odorisio to decide no, he definitely would not let the sun shine below the timberline, as it were. The morning was chilly, and the bugs were out for blood.

Besides, in the next tent over, 24-year-old Ian Russ of Chicago was yelling: "You better not hike naked! I've got my 11-year-old brother with me!"

Even setting aside the obvious examples, there are many strange activities that can be undertaken sans clothes. Naked bull roasts and naked chili cook-offs. Naked scuba-diving and naked sky-diving. Nude Texas hold 'em tournaments, beach cleanups, 5K runs, blues concerts and "shine 'n' buff" car shows. But naked mountain climbing ranks among the more hazardous options.

Think of poor Pus Gut, who hiked naked a few years back. All thru-hikers who attempt to complete the trail are given nicknames, but Pus Gut truly earned his, said Todd Berezuk, who works at the Outfitter at Harpers Ferry, a hiking equipment store near the Maryland segment. Suffering a fit of modesty in the midst of his solstice celebration, the young hiker attempted to fashion himself an undergarment out of leaves he found growing along the trail.

Poison ivy? He wasn't quite that dumb. It was poison sumac.

"His stomach was blistered, inflamed, broken out completely," said Berezuk, also a nursing student, who examined him when he came into the store. "So everyone called him Pus Gut."

Rather than devising natural-fiber loincloths, many trekkers prefer to "just keep a bandana handy" on the heavily traveled trail, said Al Preston, an assistant manager of Western Maryland's South Mountain State Park, which the trail runs through.

"I really don't know why they do it to begin with," Preston added. No one really does. "It's been passed down. When I got here in '92, I was warned that on the first day of summer people hike naked. And they do." Technically, it's against park rules, Preston says, but on the solstice officials "tend to grin" -- and bear it.

Of course, it depends on which park you're in. Stark-naked hikers who don't make it as far north as Maryland on the longest day of the year may encounter patrolmen to the south who are less tolerant of the holiday. Bare hindquarters are given no quarter at Virginia's George Washington and Jefferson National Forest, according to Woody Lipps, a patrol captain there who is not afraid to fine the naked. Penalties range from $75 to $5,000 or six months in jail, he said.

"Once someone called and asked if we would look the other way if they hiked naked to the Cascades on Hike Naked Day," Lipps said. "If you are in a public area nude, you are going to get a ticket."

However, Lipps admitted that tracking down nudes on the move is neither an enviable nor an easy task.

"It's like a needle in a haystack," he said. "How are you going to find one naked person in 1.8 million acres? You could hide a hundred naked people out there."

No one knows exactly how many hikers participate in the informal holiday, said Laurie Potteiger, information services manager for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Actually, "we really try to pretend that it doesn't exist," she said. The activity violates the sanctity of the trail and often disturbs other nature-lovers. Besides, because of all that extra exposed skin, the naked "are much more at risk for Lyme's disease," she said.

Not to mention for sunburn, snapping turtle bites and pack-strap chafing that even Body Glide, a special lubricant favored by thru-hikers, can't prevent. And "southbounders" doing the trail in reverse better not even think about it, hikers say, because it's still blackfly season up north.

And yet, despite these dangers, the day of nakedness seems an integral part of the trail's kooky culture, which revolves around reducing one's possessions to the bare necessities until a whole life can be crammed in a backpack. To many of the travelers bound for the trail's end at Mount Katahdin, the naked hiker seems to truly embody the principal of stripping down, and everyone seems to hope he exists, even if they've never met him.

Six hours after dawn on Hike Naked Day, no one had passed by Maryland's Dahlgren Backpackers' Campground less than half-dressed -- not even 23-year-old Scott Ames of Massachusetts, though his trail name, Quarter Moon, sounded promising.

"Too many roads in Maryland" was Quarter Moon's excuse.

One librarian from Queens, N.Y., saw the adventure's appeal. Michelle Ray, 30, had posed as a life model for art students during her college days, and she was still contemplating hiking naked herself. "God forbid I run into a pack of Boy Scouts and scar them for life," she said. "A naked librarian? They don't need to see that."

Leaving other hikers with such a startling memory might violate the thru-hiker's vow to "leave no trace" behind in the wilderness.

And yet, Ray said, it could honestly be worth it.

abigail.tucker@baltsun.com
For information about the Appalachian Trail, visit appalachiantrail.org.

2007-06-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

I would match up the evils of the self-righteous over-tanned and under-fed American ‘edges’ to god-fearing fatties in the middle any day. Sure, the average Michigan quick-n-shopper will probably be a blissfully unaware iceberg lettuce eating moron, but how is that any worse than the other side of the magazine rack, where the Paris Hiltons of the world can’t survive a single day in the joint and it is, ironically, “in God’s Hands” – a battle cry normally heard in the middle of the country – and any more meaningful? Unlikely. The truth is that most Americans are neither, and they probably think the coffee is bad too. But Starbucks ain’t any better, it’s just on the other end of the spectrum, where they burn it BEFORE they brew it. The 'average' overfed and under-read American is certainly a sad example of one of the many permutations of American life – and being fat in a part of the country where the food isn’t good anyway? Downright depressing (there certainly are well-cultured happy fat people in Europe – where you’d be hard pressed to criticize them in the same way for eating too much world-class prociutto) – BUT not necessarily a recipe for disaster. Certainly not the exact case in New Orleans, one of the fattest places in the country. When has fatness ever warded off investments? If it’s anything, it’s the rusty cars, and the better quality of life on the north side of the lake. There are fat people in Canada, too. Sure, going into the wrong diner can mean burnt coffee. But to suggest that Michigan just suffers from poor or nonexistent marketing? This is short sighted. Today’s mudflap girls could be tomorrow’s hot new thing on the catwalks of New York City. Wouldn’t be the first time the snobby east or west appropriated ‘trucker’ chic and made a mint, ala Ashton Kutcher. The travesty is that no one in depressed Michigan would benefit from the "largesse."

doh!

2007-06-03T15:10:00.000-07:00

When yeast refuses to eat the nice organic sugar you carefully put out for it, you get slices of what I will refer to as, architecturally speaking, “walls of wheat.” I could tilt them into place and landscape behind them. It is plenty good with a pound of butter, but I was hoping for some bubbles in the crumb.

It’s a rainy Sunday so instead of building a garden wall, I have baked two loaves of the densest white since Dan Quayle. Maybe I would have had better luck making “potatoe” bread. I could carefully construct a ‘Mr. Potato Bread’ perhaps, with whom I will discuss my lifestyle choices. I anticipate a hefty shelf half-life for this bread-friend. I might just get the band saw out and make 420,000 2-atom wide slices of melba toast…

Just eating it seems trite.

I sure would like to be better at this, and a hundred other things. How could a neolithic tradition be so simple and so difficult at the same time? Certainly scone baking druids and Egyptian boulangers were pulling their plated hair out simultaneously miffed and puzzed at the unpredictability of this persnickety pastime. Or…or! The unknown is what makes it beautiful.

saying grace

2007-05-18T05:35:00.001-07:00

Grace comes from the latin Gratia, or Gratus, “pleasing.” If you please or are pleased, something graceful is going on, hopefully, on the other end. Perhaps grace is a mirror for good deeds. Maybe you are witnessing grace in someone, but they do not know it- clandestine grace? This is tricky. Some puritanical notion dictates that it’s more worthwhile somehow if it is not celebrated, or even acknowledged. Throw out the religious connotation for the sake of finding grace without prejudice, and it conjures images of dancers, perhaps, and certainly the assumption that with it along comes that scene-stealer, beauty. So quickly the mind wanders to physical grace, and then down the slippery slope to vanity. But there is something about being thankful that goes beyond the dogmatic or the divine.
I think entire communities search for it but end up confused, and just tie hymnal ribbons on various things, in effect removing the grace from the place, or the memory in mind. Grace can be identified, perhaps, where it is absent.

burning in a stream bed

2007-05-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

that blood-drum that might be a spector train
out of habit, swishing til sunrise in the hall
(for nothing to do with eternity)
loco-motive and calculated so you think

it's just your own pulse silly
or a mill or a waterfall or an errant drunken bee
(and love will do this to you anyway why the hell are you even asking me?)

foot cracking a branch and my voice startled me
I laughed out loud, one ha! that every bough is a mercy seat
every cardinal a sentinel and my palm even looks at me with great instruction
it-will-do-this-to-you so please walk in the mud if you can

the pleats of a skirt that take every bit of grimace to un-pleat
regrettable verses, and well worked hands
tearing down each pastry thin promise
in order to be more real than the wrinkles

it is no matter in the folds of a good bed
or so she said-
it is so different walking this way with you.

sweet demon north carolina

2007-05-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

Any decent bluegrass tune will profess that the Blue Ridge is lovely and sinister, a sinewy spine of mist and prehistorically proportioned rhododendron, little whitewashed cottages perched lonely and dark on hillsides that seem otherwise empty save a path of bruised grass - perhaps the owners are long gone, or standing sentinel in a trout stream.

This is a lonely place, a soul-and-soil rich place. If you are in it, you are on train tracks, purposeful steps and a worried brow facing away from the hoot-hoot that you think you might hear, a rumble and a slow, slow tobacco burn in your chest. You are drenched, you are lost, you are going in circles and out of your mind. So far away from the spoon playing and foot stomping caricature you thought you knew. Easy orphan.

fortunate fruit related incident caught on film

2007-05-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

the borrowed stitch

2007-05-01T18:55:00.000-07:00

I met a man struggling with an addiction, though I did not know it at the time
he was so astute at keeping it dear to him.
I meant no harm in my ignorance, but
I felt harmful in my un-knowing.
I felt, in a word, responsible.
I think perhaps to
know even for an instant someone's plight is perhaps
more intimate than knowing
delight with them.
I could have kissed him having just met
with less shame than when I looked away
the instant he said, "because."

We are all peculiar, too.

We are suddenly stitched to each other's sleeves,
staring at our elbows and wondering
how we will give back our very personal spaces,
how did his glance not know my glance
was radiant black and no more than feather fine
somewhere I searched my thoughts
to make sense of the senseless
and went on my way, some excuse or bill to pay.
so nice to make your acquaintance

rusted roses

2007-04-21T18:34:00.000-07:00

dancing with yourself

2007-04-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

would turn away, girl
if she knew any better
give epaulement and
disbelief for tomorrow

shrug off the sorrow
come about, ankles in rain
and turn to face the refrain

after all that measuring
coup de pied, go or stay
mark-ed by mellow disdain

the pleasures of cafe quotidien

2007-04-11T05:40:00.000-07:00

There are many in New York, certainly.
There are many in novels. If you know
Hemingway's 'Garden of Eden' they can even form
the basis for a couple hundred pages of bohemian activity
and mediterranean abandon. Le Gamin, where this photo
was taken, is in the West Village, and it is no exception
to the rule that a standard issue french cafe is dastardly
in its romanticism. Jules in the East Village is wonderful as well,
a subterranean (yet somehow, sunny) reminder of the
French Resistance and that languid "counter" culture can be found,
and that jazz trumpet can come out of a mouth with no
instrument.

I'm sitting at the moment in Metropolitan Cafe in Federal Hill,
proof that Baltimore has its little secrets too, and certainly
Bob Dylan on the iPod plugged in behind the bar only adds that
American 'je ne sais quoi' that perhaps I was missing while enjoying
the Frenchness of the Village.

There would be some who would say, "stay! stay and enjoy your cafe!"

Wake up on a sunny little brick street,
Eat your oatmeal, write about love.
Baltimore is magic. Stay with us and discover us,
and notice how we're a little slower, a little sweeter-
and you are welcome to have your paper and your
coffee as long as you'd like.

well now I refuse to say "hon."
and I reserve the right to jump on the train, where all the best thinking is done,
and if I can't find my red beans and my louisiana lassitude one day
Well no matter how at home I feel in this little cafe,
I'll just have to keep looking for my own quotidien.

spring on good luck road

2007-04-07T14:50:00.000-07:00

some bud, somewhere
we tried the parkway
and passed good luck road
only to find we could have stayed home and had tea
cherry blossom bust

Is the ritual cluster fuck a crucial part of seeing the
cherry blossoms in DC? Doesn't it just make it so
authentically American to not be able to get there?

We got over it and we drove instead to Alexandria,
and we had a lovely dinner with Erin and things
were smooth, and I thought that I could witness
my own tree in two weeks, that they are blooming all over,
that I don't need the vista of the carefully sprayed national
treasures and the cold white monuments to take in the sex of spring.

falling in love with strangers

2007-03-23T03:56:00.000-07:00

I think of the well-known experimental clock, the beam of light on the train, as if it is in the lap of the girl next to me – perhaps some fantastic new iRelativity device that the pretty brunette can manipulate, or ignore peacefully in her lap. How perfect an up and down motion. We are all versions of this bouncing light in the train, repeating ourselves peacefully as our thoughts churn like old wheels, or tap on computers and think we’re being spontaneous, but we are not, in our metal moving box – we’re all on the same clock. I think of the man in the field, glancing up to see the zigzag in his slower experience – the billion waving wheat shafts and his own damnable or praiseworthy missteps that slow him and change us from simple up and down to downright noticeable, cutting his field. He looks up and sees our train, and the light clock of our faster life looks like an oddly sewn sleeve. The clocks at the stations are all together too, and might keep me in that buttoned up state, but they too are not our clocks, and the old hands render a twist in me, and I see the people on the platform in slower motion, for an instant as we take off, they are stopped altogether. What if I fell in love at first sight with a man on the old platform in Wilmington? My hand would slap the glass – slap my own reflection, really, and having noticed that I am different, slip back into my seat. I feel so observable. I'm a little pissed.

The row homes as we leave Baltimore, before we break into the lovely surprise of the open bay and the boats and the big houses and lace bridges, are unkind. They are too narrow, and one cannot breathe with the quickness of their beats as the colors mark them in time from the train window. I break again from the light in the girl’s lap and think, this is the time that stands between us all, what makes unexpected misunderstanding between friends, marks modern motion and gadgets as progress, charts pockets of poverty and makes it possible for expressions like ‘field measurements’ to make sense. I think, how funny if you didn’t know what that meant– and it were possible to measure all the wheat in a field, build it virtually in a computer, animate the strands and make them wave infinitely, too perfectly real, in a movie, playing on a laptop computer resting innocently on the legs of the girl next to me. Of course, it's been done, and in this moment I am undone by it, and out of time.

watching clocks from a train

2007-03-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

/ lyrics "all her favorite fruit" camper van beethoven /

I drive alone, home from work
And I always think of her
Late at night I call her
But I never say a word
And I can see her squeeze the phone between her chin and shoulder
And I can almost smell her breath faint with a sweet scent of decay
She serves him mashed potatoes
And she serves him peppered steak, with corn
Pulls her dress up over her head
Lets it fall to the floor
And does she ever whisper in his ear all her favorite fruit
And all the most exotic places they are cultivated
And I'd like to take her there, rather than this train
And if I weren't a civil servant, I'd have a place in the colonies
We'd play croquet behind white-washed walls and drink our tea at four
Within intervention's distance of the embassy
The midday air grows thicker with the heat
And drifts towards the line of trees
When negroes blink their eyes, they sink into siesta
And we are rotting like a fruit underneath a rusting roof
We dream our dreams and sing our songs of the fecundity
Of life and love

behave or this giant baby will eat you

2007-03-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park is an art museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, founded in 1950. It focused on modern and contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on American sculpture. In addition to an indoor gallery, studio art school, and function spaces, the museum includes an 35-acre park with approximately 75 outdoor sculptures and installations; these include a small but important permanent collection (including works by Sol LeWitt, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Alexander Liberman, and Nam June Paik), prominent works on loan, and rotating installations of new work.

[wikipedia info provided by the magic of cut and paste]

wilmington, delaware: straight up architecture

2007-02-28T18:14:00.000-08:00

What you don't see in this picture are the quaint streets of old
Wilmington, a few short blocks away and in the shadow of this
and all the other recent building bustle of one of American's least known
little cities (pop around 72,000) There are condos. There are theaters. Yes, there
are banks. And cool-ass european curtain-wall design? Why the heck not!?

If you're driving through Delaware, which we do a whole lot in this
region, check out this building, where 95 makes a little dip into town - an
architectural sweet spot in an otherwise forgettable drive along the
corridor from New York to D.C.

Also remarkable: Newark (no, the other one) - WHO NEW ARK?!
University of Delaware...you know those college towns.. this is
a cute one. Good food especially if you'd like to avoid a cinnebon
at the Flying J.

2007-02-21T16:50:00.000-08:00

I trace the circumference of a teacup
with the finger that is sometime a nose
and in time to say enough
some how
her little quick
sees a bird and remembers
those sweet cat battles
war on wasps
and the silent somewhere tears are kept

in sorrow I nod to her
and she nods
and she blinks in her alright, dear friend
and comforts me once more
without question

lovely green eyed queen of curiosity
a little grey, and I am now the wiser
flickers to her quiet end

zelda
1996-2007

want for winter

2007-02-13T05:23:00.000-08:00

eyeing errant flakes with suspicion
and a warming contrast between a tepid heart and
full lace, frozen esctacy
for those who might ski

in a moment the cat might flick a paw at snow
then sway in tender rumble for the passing hours
on a radiator

and I smile at what winter wants for me

oh who cares when you've got the beastie boys and a load of laundry

2007-02-05T18:38:00.000-08:00

sometimes there are little messes and doll collections

2007-02-04T19:37:00.000-08:00

Garland Lily had black shoulder length hair, capped teeth and a mustache that needed bleaching. She was tired and overwhelmed by managing her life, a pyramid scheme, and a broken lamp. At the moment she had too many clients in the dining room. She let me in the big red door. I was wearing a lace chemise from the night before and sporting pasta sauce on my chin, the remnants of a handful of stolen spaghetti from a vendor that swore she couldn’t sell me a plate because it wouldn’t be hot, and that hot plates had to be ordered twenty four hours in advance. A few fraternity brothers walked by wondering where I was from and if I was a freshman. “Are you new?” I asked a cute tall one with brown hair and wide green eyes. “Yes, well, I just transferred here.” Tulane and its steam heated university center was just a few blocks away but I had to get cleaned up. I was late for my first meeting with Graham after having been gone for over a month. Garland led me up a narrow stair and in a few sunny moments I was surrounded by an attic full of china dolls. I thought it strange I had always pegged her as a kewpie enthusiast, and here were all these rosy cheeked cherubs indicating otherwise. “Do you need soap?” she asked, thoughtfully. “Cause all I got’s a little rose water and this tea tree oil moist towelette.” I took the little packet from her and started to unbutton the soiled silk.

noname girl in jelly shoes

2007-01-23T19:16:00.001-08:00

I understand, I think, intuitively.
What makes me stop at the end of the day and
have a bath and a beer, and not mind the little things
I remember from childhood.
Like wooden spoons and unhappiness.
For there was laughter too
and a green summertime canopy in a swampy Texas bayou town
dinosaur flats and jelly shoes

Sometimes the best memories are kept
in crayons and wafts of mosquito spray
before deet was any problem and camp counselors could hug you

I remember.

2007-01-22T18:37:00.000-08:00

There is this moment, or some lucid place
that resonates with us, a secret chord
The wolf-tone is thus accidentally played
the quiet in my mind takes every word
When I don't play, with words and moments here
The world falls into place and takes me there

Impossible, a thousand voices strong
Yet in the din I hear the clearest tone

all my notes on (aunthenticity) in (most) architecture - there are exceptions to my rules

2007-01-17T17:44:00.000-08:00

Architecture at its simplest is shelter from the weather. A tent, a simple roof structure on posts, a house, a town hall, an entire village shelter and support people physically and emotionally.

Authenticity in terms of architecture exists where there is an honest use of materials, and a simple architectural response to the natural environment. I believe that beauty, in this context, at least as it is perceived emotionally, equals truthfulness. This authentic beauty has nothing value-added beyond a pure response to program, the needs of the inhabitant, and a response to the demands of the climate and site conditions. The house, in this pure state has no unnecessary decoration. This is not to say that there is no decoration, but each element comes from somewhere very specific, a physical representation of an emotional need or desire of the inhabitants, cultural element, or an exaggeration of a structural element in order to express hierarchy. This definition changes by building type; a house is not a cathedral, their structure separating at a certain level into different species.

The grotesqueness of the typical suburban house does not lie in one element alone; it is an assault of size, proportion, dysfunctional floor plan and a dishonest use of materials that evoke a negative response, when compared to an “honest” structure. Authentic beauty is, in a poetic sense, indescribable. One knows it in the emotional response of the body with little or no design training. Thousands of years of study of the human body, its proportions and characteristics are the foundation for the understanding of much of this beauty (golden section, the classical orders) The reason a structure is considered “timeless” is probably tied to this empirical understanding of the human relationship to shelter, and, one step further, the basic human desire for protection, order, and agency.

This is not an argument for classicism.

There is a hierarchy, in this sense, to architectural style: form does not only follow function, but the function of the house on the street, the street in the town, etc. moving up in scale, and also growing in a similar vector out from the proportions of the body, to the needs of an individual, a family, the community, etc.

The ordering that nature provides also has an effect on ‘style’ this way: A- frame houses make sense where there is snow. Flat roofs make no sense in the deep south. Porches and big windows are for cross ventilation. There exists a physical necessity for each design decision.

Vernacular architecture is not decoratively historicist – it takes the region’s attributes, mainly topography and weather, and translates a reaction to those elements into form. Each region has an architectural language, that, when combined with commodity of space, proximity and ordering of structures and the usefulness to the people who dwell there, creates a sense of belonging and harmony for that region – at least, in a purely architectural sense. Nothing that is not beautiful or useful, or definitive of the culture from which it is derived.

Much of sustainable architecture is based on this concept – it can be maintained easily and will last over the centuries because it reacts to its environment in an honest way. The advent of air conditioning and the reliance on the automobile changed all that. Flat roofs in hot, humid climates, sprawling houses and internal shopping malls are all a result of that. At any scale, the house, the town, etc, if this sort of ‘planning for shelter’ doesn’t happen organically, one can sense it in the body, in the tension of the interactions among people in these places, and the lack of authenticity is apparent.

The ability to have and shape a ‘place of one’s own’ is, from the very first primitive structures is a basic human need and on the scale of the town, city, etc, a matter of peace and prosperity. Self government, communication, controlling one’s own destiny and feeling sheltered by the protective roof of a community are part of what fill successful places with grace.

Certain spaces have a natural inclination toward certain identities. What marks an entrance, what says “hearth” and the ordering of rooms around life style and comfort are all part of what forms emotional connections between places and their inhabitants. Emotion is a physical manifestation, and the body in a room or a plaza or a garden, the way it is guided by architectural gestures, will often determine whether or not the body will register positive emotions in that space. People naturally attempt to order their physical environments in a pleasing way, and this control over personal and public spaces is a crucial part of the success of those places.

When individuals or families have shelter, can modify it to suit their specific family or individual culture, and are secure in their ability to protect those decisions about their self-created environments, those environments become places, barring other psychological barriers, joy-filled places. They are embodied with values. Individualization and the physical expression of personal values into a space is essential for creating the well being associated with home. At its most stripped down, control over one’s environment, and the ability to adapt an environment to one’s needs whether its furniture arranging or the size of a room, the number of people in a dwelling or having a shade tree nearby, will always have an intrinsic effect on the perception of “place.”

lautrec at CVS

2007-01-12T21:19:00.000-08:00

One languid Saturday in May I was reading and dozing on my porch, having just read the part in Tropic of Cancer where Miller goes on pat and smug, albeit sentimentally about the noble and ignoble Germaine, the “happy whore” he frequented in Paris. I smacked the book down, uncomfortable and needing to stretch, and headed out to take a run. I stopped at a CVS for a bottle of water, where I saw her. I bounced out of the store clutching my Evian bottle and a prescription for Allegra, and observed her in quiet disbelief, feigning indifference.

She stumbled out of a beaten up red Toyota and stopped in the middle of the parking lot, facing me as I stood transfixed at my car door, to curse and fumble with something in her jean-skirt pocket. As she struggled I saw a pink feather on her thigh, and before I could say to myself, “that’s funny, Mardi Gras was three months ago,” her occupation occurred to me. I was standing in a neighborhood that had proven the capacity to sport half million dollar homes and prostitutes, so I mustered in myself a measure of gravitas before proceeding to think she was, a priori, out of place.

She had bothered to find a matching pink feather for her dirty hair, and visions of Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge barged into my consciousness. These ladies, when I notice them, are typically plump at the middle and have incredibly thin stick-like legs. My lady had a round face and hunched shoulders that formed a hull to hide joyless breasts. She had no gentle curve at the waist, only cruel folds of skin, and stilt-like legs, though she was no more than five and a half feet tall. She was certainly not the lovely and resilient dancing girl in the hot pulse of a nineteenth century Parisian club, rendered timeless by an impression in paint. But those feathers got to me. They were familiar. I had seen them in a gutter in New Orleans, and in Paris, glowing and weightless on a canvas.

I wondered where it all went wrong for her, and wanted to approach the car and face her client with my college education and smooth skin, confront him with my clear eyes. From where I stood he seemed to be preoccupied with something in the back seat, and at second glance at his mistress of the moment, I decided that he was perhaps the one in greater peril.

I looked down at my running outfit, my pink iPod strapped to my arm like my very own feather, and I thought about how every time I ran on my favorite trail, violent thoughts flickering in the space right behind my vision. My ‘just in case’ mental imaging. My gestures were improbably swift in response to an ambush, or the odd whistle. I suspected every man I passed that looked at me twice, jogging and sweating. I knew that listening to Gwen Stefani so loud might render me unaware if someone actually came at me from behind. But her voice filled me with anger and possibility. You hear stories growing up, and certainly now, one feels suddenly vulnerable at the mention of random violence in a neighborhood rumored to be safe.

I routinely ignored this voice of reason all women have. It calmly reminded me – “it’s just a matter of time.” But I was a fierce pink ninja, ready to take on thirteen of the most serious padded-sword carrying live-action-role-players that Patapsco could render, or one very ordinary rapist. I realized suddenly that I was looking twice at this woman in the CVS lot.

Who did she think of “taking on?” I regarded the bottle of water it took thousands of miles of ocean for me to taste, and I thought what a disservice Lautrec did to prostitutes painting their rouge and cancan, posters advertising a misconception about these women that made its way so far into our collective consciousness that this poor lush thought to put a pink feather on her thigh and in her hair, making it her signal. I didn’t see Henry Miller’s happy whore in the gay burst of color. I told myself, in search of comfort, that it could also be a hallmark of defiance. Maybe she was in complete control after all. How loud would she play her music that night? I wondered, and left the encounter to go marching right onto that trail blazing a pink signal of my own.

one time before I go

2007-01-07T07:48:00.000-08:00

sundays are all cleaning house and zydeco
pain perdu and coffee in this odd indian summer
red beans stinking up a storm
of memories of having been slow
some old where with someone

read it and weep.

Christmas in Baltimore

2006-12-25T08:08:00.000-08:00

they just don't make party dresses like they used to

2006-12-09T14:24:00.000-08:00

happy birthday carri

driving somewhere you can touch

2006-11-28T16:58:00.000-08:00

We needed gas.
Pulled over in Louisiana, it was a busy little overpass.
I looked up, and in disbelief saw the sign, little chamber
buttons and sure enough, the name of the place where I
was born, Denham Springs.

I could not abide the coincidence. I had seen miles of Mississippi
and the overhangs necessary in the South to not bake but let in
the evangeline breezes.

Sunset fire in Baltimore. This was no random stop-
So I asked the clerk in the quick-n-shop
"do you mind if I ask you a question."
"sure" she said
"well," I said with as much tenderness as I could,
"I was born here. And I don't know anything about this place.
can you tell me in one or two sentences what it's like?"

She thought. For a good spell. Enough time for me to size
her up. A teenager. "It sucks" I was sure I'd hear. But no!

"It's just like the Andy Griffith Show. With more busybodies."

I stood transfixed. Hot damn.

"... And an antique row that used to be Main Street.
And there's the high school
there down the road, and the junior high over there. Shoot, my
Dad and I had the same chemistry teacher, and they still talk. It's
a miracle. Cause he burned all his tables in the lab..."

Welcome back.

polka dot

2006-11-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

Show me your polka face.

Blob's Park

Nope, not kidding. Please do make your way
over to Blob's Park one fall evening
to enjoy Polka and German fare.

We happened to have been there the night a 15-time
grammy award winning hop-til-you-drop polka band
took the stage. We had many pitchers of Heifeweitzen
and even more sausage- so much in fact that I must troll
the web for the NAME of this band and write a proper
review, with photos. Until then- grab your partner.

a cold comfort

2006-11-04T05:39:00.000-08:00

I am thankful for the presence of the cold current at the kitchen door
for now I bake with abandon at three in the afternoon
the bread
the pies
the promises
and only crack a window, and a smile at the clever efficiency of it-
venting the excess heat from this hearth if there were any left over
from my hands, all flour dust flurries and marks on a red apron
full of yes.
I am so thankful for November.

learning how to fall

2006-11-02T15:49:00.000-08:00

happy halloween

2006-10-31T16:06:00.000-08:00

"I'm a secret agent man. In polka dots."

BEST LINE of the night - I only wish I had more
candy for the tiny little man of mystery, for making
me smile.

Our neighborhood is beautiful, diverse, and full of
kids that "take one" and say thank you, smile and
wave at me through the french doors. I saw an astronaut,
carmen miranda, elmo, the scream guy, and various princesses,
fairies and dinosaurs. But no witches, mummies or frankensteins.

Perhaps in our day different sorts of characters elicit fear..

On to sweet November.

polka dot

2006-10-30T16:47:00.000-08:00

Show me your polka face.

Blob's Park

what wine pairs with twinkies?

2006-10-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

It is no secret in certain circles that at one notorious
office Christmas Party I received a Twinkie Making Kit
during the secret santa exchange, and that the culprit
responsible for this heinous gift kept her identity
a secret until through a diligent process of
elimination I was able to find her out, and promise revenge.
And it turns out, revenge is sweet.

I had forgotten how fake-angry I was until Carri's
daughter Eva pulled out the lady-fingeresque bake
pan from one of my cabinets along with the little
half-twinkie-half-cowboy plastic figurine/twinkie
storage device and said "whassiss?" Whassis, indeed.
Whassisdoinginmykitchenstill? The recipe booklet
fell out of the cabinet. I picked it up, expecting:

Ingredients
Enriched Wheat Flour - enriched with ferrous sulphate (iron)
B vitamins:
Niacin
Thiamine mononitrate [B1]
Riboflavin [B12] and
Folic acid
Sugar
Corn syrup
Water
High fructose corn syrup
Vegetable and/or animal shortening containing one or more of
Partially hydrogenated soybean
cottonseed or Canola oil
lard and
beef fat
Dextrose
Whole eggs
Contains 2% or less of:
Modified corn starch
Cellulose gum
Whey
Leavenings:
Sodium acid pyrophosphate
Baking soda
Monocalcium phosphate
Salt
Cornstarch
Corn flour
Corn syrup solids
Mono and diglycerides
Soy lecithin
Polysorbate 60
Dextrin
Calcium caseinate
Sodium stearol lactylate
Wheat gluten
calcium sulfate
Natural and artificial flavors:
Caramel color
Sorbic acid (to retain freshness)
Color added (yellow 5, red 40)

But instead, "flour, sugar, eggs, milk, baking powder."
Seriously? We had to try this. Of course, the recipe is
not THE recipe, so we were making twinkie-shaped
yellow cake, but it was fun to pretend.
Turns out I converted my baking supplies to
organic a while back, so as an added insult to Hostess,
they turned out to be Organic Twinkies, and we made
a chocolate sauce instead of the white...stuff.

This made me think: "I'll bet Hostess does this in
the next year or so. Cause everyone else is."
Even Wal-Mart is "going organic". As if.

Twinkie-making made for a nice evening.
We (the adults of course) drank a nice
Cabernet and had a good giggle about the whole thing.
In fact, the evening was so pleasant that I
consider my grievances aired and will not, in fact,
place a tofu and spinach- filled whole wheat version
of this otherwise harmless (ok, not harmless..)
treat outside the door of the sarcastic ms. claus.
This does not, however, preclude the best re-gifter
ever. And there are many culinary options to be had
in the aisles of Toys-R-Us. Many options indeed.

Oh this thing doesn't really work. I just felt like I was violating the poor thing.

Zelda and Eva wait patiently for dessert to be served.

embracing pink

2006-10-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

I was walking through cross street market and saw them.
The pale pinks, the deep rosy tones, the scarlet, which I passed on-
buying red roses for oneself is...well I don't like them anyway..

Pink is important in the second or third week of April, when the
cherry tree out front blooms, sighs, and sheds its rosey robe like
a burlesque queen. I walk under the heavy boughs and marvel at
the tissue paper sensuality in that particular shade of blush.

And speaking of blushing. Very important in many arenas: when one
blurts out an indescretion, admits a mistake, or realizes, upon a glance, or
an almost imperceptible brush of pink-laden limbs, that one has fallen in love.

And then there's the "four-cheek blush." As seen on babies, and "polar bear" swimmers.

And besides all that, pink makes me feel 'sportif.' Thank you, pink.

Something to Consider:

"Here is the crux of the problem, the single greatest obstacle to American literature today: guilt. Guilt leads to the idea that all writing is self-indulgence. Writers, feeling guilty for not doing real work, that mysterious activity, turn in shame to the notion of writing as "craft." "Craft" solicits from them constipated "vignettes" – as if to say: "Well, yes, it's bad, but at least there isn't too much of it." ~Elif Batuman

consider n+1

the last of the summer peaches

2006-10-10T17:15:00.000-07:00

no by-the-side-of-the-road strawberry stands for me
no sir
all-ferocious peach off the tree
juice down my chin and down to the bayou
barefoot on gravel
right before the bitterness sets in
and never frozen
and always in august
sticky sweet first kiss
and the fuzz stings a little
on my cheek

in the kitchen

2006-10-09T15:53:00.000-07:00

In the kitchen
You prepare life
drinks
dinner
breakfast
scones and laughter
In the kitchen
no matter how wide or narrow
You can cram everyone in there
and they'll smile and drink wine
until it is done
and the belly aches
from laughter
not that apricot cream cheese
or even the bean dip
no matter how gassy it gets in there
from loose buttons and metaphors
what we all share
love is that meal-

When she was little she had little jars
in which she collected the beans from
bean bag chairs.

authentic stripes

2006-10-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

authenticity is tricky.
a cat has no choice - nothing inauthentic about eating, bathing, and sleeping-
blending into the carpet.
but when we stop to ponder, there's the rub, and it's uncomfortable.
often against the fur. ick. an uncomfortable truth.

ponder, in the cool breeze of early fall, the difference between
living an honest life, and living an authentic life-

everyone on the count of three!

2006-09-26T17:29:00.000-07:00

Tonight, on a run with my trainer Amy I had a unique encounter – or, rather, a couple of unique encounters. We were making our way up Federal Hill and were met by a group of youngish people, one of whom thought it would be precious to lollygag behind us making sounds like a monkey. Monkey sounds. Seriously convincing monkey sounds. He kept after us for about a block, until he was tired, presumably – of acting like a monkey. Who wouldn’t be? It’s quite a workout waving around like that, oo—ooing and ah-ahing.

On the way down the hill, as we passed two men standing beside their crusty blue TAY-ota pickup, one of them decided it would be a grand idea to show us his junk. Not the junk in the back of the truck, folks. The dropping of drawers, not from an old chiffarobe in the back of the truck but from guy #2’s incomprehensibly gleeful shimmying hips was timed precisely as we passed. Truthfully, I didn’t see anything (typical middle aged white guy, no rhythm) – just felt the telltale “whoosh!” of denim as I passed, and, briefly, his smile. He smiled a Cheshire grin, like a mischievous three year old engaged in the same sort of activity, only creepier and with a glint in his eye that could only come from someone who gets his jollies from brushes with the indecent-exposure law. I laughed through a sudden onset of gastrointestinal discomfort and Amy and I exchanged nervous glances. It is not, in fact, a full moon tonight. But there was a full moon in Federal Hill.

authentic gotham

2006-09-20T19:52:00.000-07:00

I was transfixed by the view from the back of the train. I'd never chosen the last car. I felt as the first videographer - am I watching my very life slip away down the tracks, my eyes could not hold onto the thread of changing light that
trailed away from me. Les images qui bougent... I can understand how the locomotive was a terrifying technology. The idea of speeding up life was so new at one time, and now we have gone from rocketing our bodies through space to the impossible speed of the disembodied
persona - and something named after an innocent wild fruit has replaced pen and paper, telephone, and certainly time otherwise spent processing the billion pieces of infomation our brains take in each day. Gotham has arrived, but not so romantic as we'd all hoped.

"oh, you're there, I thought I'd get your machine and leave a message." Your machine. Everyone used to have one, the thing that captures voices in the ether - no longer exists either. Machines are now as transparent as skin. As I float along at 110 miles per hour, I think, "this could be faster" and all my slow particles beg to return to stillness.

holding breath and hands

2006-09-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

9.11.2006

I am thankful to speak in my own voice today, to move it around my body, to convince or cajole or support or comfort, to say nothing in particular. From my train window this evening, I see a brilliant sun-painted façade, and purple anemone wisps in an otherwise clear early fall day. This September 11th is more significant an anniversary than every other September 11th only due to our collective experience of learning to count in multiples of five. Year five doesn’t hurt any less than year four, or year six. But it is the five, the ten, the twenty, the twenty five that we mark with heavier hearts, and even heavier marketing, in the name of our collective American Pain. Lest we forget, the media shall remind us, “now more than ever.” What did stick out to me was that this particular September 11th was a meteorological gem. Temperature in the sixties, a light wind, a not-so-toxic smell, a fine mist from the fountains at Columbus Circle, and a very similar crisp atmosphere to the September 11th five years ago. I lamented not having time for a walk in Central Park. Perhaps someone thought the same thing, with more purpose, and abandon, back then - and went to gaze into the lush canopy. A day before looking up meant something horrific had occurred.

In acting class, we work on breathing. Really breathing. Of course, while speaking complicated text – and for forty seconds on one sustained breath. One can seem suspended in time, above the need to breathe, perhaps. When I was small I would hold my breathe under the tub water and pretend that I could just stay there all day, if I wanted to. The trivia of it seems at once profound and ridiculous to me, considering what happened to breath and to voices and to all that render those involuntary and voluntary acts into the beautiful complexities of nearly three thousand human lives. Their parents and children and spouses and neighbors all held their breath that day. When I watch the documentary images, a child’s little hand counts off in my head.. one-two-three-four-five years ago. Five? Can you count to one hundred in fives? Five years, perhaps, is just long enough. You know you could stay a little longer, if you wanted to. But eventually you have to come up for air.

all the songs to know by heart

2006-09-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

Sheryl Crow and John Mayer played Nissan Pavillion on Sunday the 3rd.
There was a buzz in the air, and it wasn't over whether or not Jessica
Simpson was going to make a surprise appearance and duet with her
new beau, although we spoke of it in hushed voices, hoping it would not
happen while expressing a certain morbid curiosity regarding the possibility.

Sheryl had an anti-war message to transmit, and it was neither
too wimpy nor too aggressive for my taste. Just right, Sheryl.
She mentioned her battle with cancer. No bitter diatribe about ance-Lay...
She was so.. peaceful. A kind Sheryl. Not angry at the world,
just calmly resolute about her place in it - maybe befuddled
a bit at the choices made by the powers that be- but
calmly, soothingly resolute.

And she rocked. Rocked well. Rocked on.. and she closed with ZED ZEPPELIN..and
after this very fine show, on behalf of her peacefulness,
I was ready to wrestle Ann Coulter to the ground and give her
a big zerbert.. So whatever subtle political magic she's weaving,
it worked, and worked well. At least on me.

It was that kind of show.

But that's not all. Even though I don't routinely listen to her on my
pink iPod, (yes, the color matters) I found myself singing along. The
proof of her staying power as an artist was not only in the nearly full
house (and it's a pretty damn big house..) but in the fact that I and so
many other single voices in the mass - not all diehard fans -
knew the words to her ballads, her folky tunes, her delighful poprocks.
Heartache, forgiveness, compassion,
gettin' drunk at ten o'clock in the morning - and at least 5 of my top
10 values for surviving in this insanity we're calling the
American Way of Life these days... well, it was all there, and the words
came, and we all sang these melodies together. She gave props to the
crowd. "Who's in the yard!? hey y'all, we like y'all alot why don't y'all
quit your jobs and come on tour with us?"

Oh girl. Just as soon as I get done beatin' up on Ann Coulter.

fall finally fall

2006-09-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

But seriously.

Was this the stickiest summer ever on the East Coast?

I've been ready for fall since... spring.

Yea fall!

Or rather, yea Ernesto. It's not really fall.

But yea fall!

More soon..

when to stop dancing

2006-08-28T18:52:00.000-07:00

I picked up the canvas bag. It says, "bolsa del mercado"
on the side, and my sister's name is written in an early
eighties purple paint pen, bubbly letters, on the strap.
They spill out, in one pale peachy pink scratched up
broken and wistful "humpf!" they hit the wood floor.
I hear some taps. I had tried to muffle the tapping by
banging and darning and softening the puckered
bottom one inch near the toe with water. They smell bad.
Real bad. Sweat that's older than my 9 year old sister, and
with as much to say.

Point shoes. They do you no good on the street.
One grand battement to the face and they're a weapon.
But somehow, with much ado about being strong and supple,
they're silent and you're flying. And getting caught up
on that tip in a pirouette or an arabesque feels better than
just about anything. And at 32, I've finally got some comparisons
to make. When it was good, It really was THAT good.

My contemporaries are retiring, or thinking about it.
They're going to college, maybe grad school. Some left when
I did, and have only the memory of long summer classes and some
hey-days in college and one last stab of the feet into these damn
satin promises, that we wanted so badly at ten, then eleven..

In your thirties, it just feels a little ridiculous.

Point shoes are part of the reason I was mystified by ballet.
In the early eighties, the sun had not yet set on the superstars
of that golden era, we didn't know about the cocaine and the
surgeries and the anorexia and the mayhem, and every little
girl wanted to put on a pair and pique', or hurt herself
trying. The frequency with which these too-shiny hard slippers
had to be purchased would rival any shoe spree on Sex & The City.
They're expensive, they break in the matter of a few classes, and
each pair had to be jury-rigged 'just-so' for each foot, each dancer,
which was a ritual that took time, bloodied fingers, and made me feel
...different than other girls. And we know how important
that is to a teenager.

I still dance. Out of joy, out of desperation, at weddings, in
my living room (hey neighbors!) to classical music, to jazz,
to swing, to brass hop, to crickets.
Now, I dance on architecture. As much as possible.
When I can, I dance naked. Preferably in a valley, in the rain,
and with abandon. Ok I don't have many opportunites
to do that. But once is better than never. Watch out Colorado.

Do I give up the shoes? Of course. Will I ever stop getting caught
doing grand jetes in front of random mirrors in public? Never.

Promise.

leave room for chocolate cake

2006-08-27T10:43:00.000-07:00

Hopefully I won't go straight to h*ll for sharing this, y'all.

2 1/2 cups cake flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup butter
2 1/2 cups brown sugar
3 eggs + 1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup milk
6 T cocoa

blend brown sugar and butter together
blend eggs & vanilla in
blend powders together in separate bowl

alternate powders and milk
blend until creamy
makes 3 9" circle pans (greased well & coated with flour)
bake 350 for 30 to 35 minutes, check at 15 minutes

Frosting (you're making a layer cake, kittens..)

1 lb powdered sugar (around 4 cups..)
1 stick butter
enough dutched cocoa to plaster a wall

Beat the stick of butter
Add the sugar
Add the cocoa until you can't take it anymore - should be
spreadable... Add a little milk if it's too thick. Just a little!
and a teeny, tiny bit of salt, about 1/8 tsp. Make sure it's
not too runny..

Let the cakes cool, set the first one down on your favorite plate, and
schmear away...

one foot in the bayou

2006-08-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

There are moments when one gets caught up
in the kind of nostalgia that calls for an afternoon
of porch cleaning and brass-hop listening,
red beans in a pot and teary-eyed memory.
It is Sunday, and I terribly miss the fair and decadent,
unacceptably humid and charming city that we
called home for six years.

And what is there? November will bring an opportunity
to visit for the first time in too long, and find out.
I imagine, that with every passing day, and with the
promise of a cool cleansing fall, New Orleans will
continue to be reborn. I look forward to finding out,
even if it means just a small slice. If it's a languid Sunday,
filled with the old smells and sounds, we might
just have to come get our clothes and stay awhile, as they say.

'she got one foot in new york city,
one foot in the bayou'
-File'

close to the bone

2006-08-14T18:20:00.000-07:00

Anyone going to see World Trade Center?
Are we ready for this?

tea with zelda bijou

2006-08-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

I highly recommend Sarah and Desmond's Organic Cafe in Ellicott City, Maryland if you're in the
area. Good food, nice atmosphere; and, at least while I was there - WiFi (probably from a neighboring
network...)

Zelda Bijou my African Queen

"Hello Ruby Hobby Newbie. How are you booby cat?" I chirp as I walk through the front door.
"hey girl, killed some stuff today." I hear Zelda’s voice as a thirty-something African-American woman, my earthbound angel and voice of reason. She’s brown and beautiful and striped like the grass cats of the African veldt, and she knows about me. She knows about my last nerve, the one that needs to be calmed down after a day of bosses and clients and misunderstanding. The nerve that needs healing, the one we all have. I can see it in her liquid eyes, she's licked the frying pan from breakfast, eaten some bugs and thrown up $15 worth of organic cat food under the piano bench. It’s all good.

She wakes me up twice a week for a physical. She makes her silent entry into the bedroom, and pads lightly on my back with one paw. Wake up, sleeping-huge-hairless-food-giver. I turn over and greet her with a scratch on the head. If I don’t, I get a backrub under the shoulder blades. “Goooood Kitty.” Today, I turn. She starts at my hips, gesturing at my organs, finding the energy, and works her way up to my breasts. She lingered this day, making biscuits, her delicate pads were concerned, and she grumbled and purred, sitting at my waist. You are not well. Where do you hurt? She nudged, and insisted. Tears came, she was right. My heart ached, and I cried for her tenderness to say my name and reassure. I wanted so badly to know why I hurt, to find a salve, to pet my Zelda on the head and change my life. Cats know this.

flanked

2006-08-05T18:58:00.000-07:00

Who flanks you? Who is at your side,
at the ready, honest and willing to
divine words when none will come,
or celebrate with you when they flow freely?

Andria, the founder of Flanked (www.flanked.org)
used prize money from an award (unheard of!!!)
to start this conference, a diverse group of women,
a fabulous group of writers who
have inspired and moved, cajoled and
conjured together this weekend..

And so I carefully glance around now
for who does, and who will flank me.

Our literary guest speaker tonight was Tayari Jones, author of Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling.
Phenomenal..

august

2006-07-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

August is upon us, one last muggy, sweaty
handshake from summer. Lately my discussions
among friends and family have been about change.
Hoping the season will change one day sooner,
the disturbing events overseas, and the changes in our lives.
As you look hopefully at the promise of a cool September,
new jobs, new fascinations, new love-
Paths open up, but doubt can provide a cruel false shade -
for those of you afraid to make the step you're contemplating,
remind yourself that it's better to move forward when it's hot
and muggy. If you stay back in the shadow thinking it's safer
and cooler, you're just going to get eaten alive by augustine mosquitos.

bringing it all home

2006-07-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

my niece, mackenzie, who I hear looks alot like her aunt.
I've seen her 'slightly evil' eye and have come to terms with my
own genetic predisposition for using the mysterious power of the brown eyes.
Summers in Baltimore, I can just see it now.
So much to relay... and cultivate. World domination will be the biproduct.
I have found her.. and will call her... mini me! Just kidding, Corinn. Sort of.

On the road to my parent's place in Lenhartsville, PA.
I may need a separate blog just to touch on the richness of
this landscape. It's always a welcome contrast to the bustle
of our region. Of course, there are problems there too.

we came home to a hit and run - and are taking the hint from
the universe, that after 20 proud years of service, the jeep is
ready for greener pastures. only we will ever know the favor in
disguise.

a thousand points of light street

2006-07-18T18:06:00.000-07:00

The old part of federal hill makes me think of an alley cat,
missing some teeth but so charming you sort of want to
take it home with you. Today I take a bit of my new surroundings
with me, in the sweltering heat, as a promise to keep moving
forward, sometimes worn down, but as spry and worldly as ever.
The cobbles and bricks and crumbling details are kind to
look at, like old smiling faces.

The buildings are low and narrow, set apart from the street by
sidewalks that take you with them, bumping along and friendly-
I stumble and am at the foot of a cafe where I'll have a cheap
omelette and sweet tea.

Where have you been these eight years, Baltimore? I am finally
charmed....(oh, and I found a kick*ss little gym a block a way
from my office)

donald trump: not a pinhead for today

2006-07-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

NB: open commenting should be active without a blogger id -
email me if you aren't able to post comments.
____________________________________________

While I don't agree with the tone and content of much of what
Donald Trump says (especially that letter to Martha Stewart -
friends should be honest, not cruel..) sometimes the man
impresses me. On behalf of other Preservation Magazine
readers and members of the National Trust, Donald is officially
(at least for today) not a pinhead.

Trump Article

The interview, by Salvatore Deluca, highlights the work done by Trump to the
Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach, specifies Trump's assertion that
it is cheaper to reuse an existing structure than to demolish
and rebuild from scratch, and defines his interest in preservation.
He laments the loss New York Landmarks, including the Ziegfeld Theater.

On the work of preservationists, Trump said, "I have a great respect
for the job they do. They really do have the interest of the country
in mind. So I made a contribution, and it will not be my last."

It's important when moguls want to help. As much as we may
envy and despise their lifestyles, or wish they were our grandpa,
it's important to ENCOURAGE this sort of behavior. I would have
thought that he'd the the demolish and rebuild kinda guy. I'm glad
that assumption was wrong.

If every piece of usable architecture was renovated in this country,
(I'm sure there's an institute that's looked into the actual number)
We wouldn't need to build anything for a looooooong time. There
would still be construction jobs, loans, development... the machine
would continue to churn, no doubt. What we wouldn't have so much
of is what we see in Baltimore's Inner Harbor. We were at a brunch
today discussing the potential buyers for the thousands of units popping
up along the water - they go for millions. Who will live in them? Baltimore
is not New York. What do these people do for a living? I read somewhere
that they might be New Yorkers - but having just experienced Brooklyn,
I'd rather live there or a dozen other places on the water there, if I'm into
spending millions anyway..

So who are these people? Does anyone know? Does Donald Trump have
any idea what the hell is going on down here? Maybe I should write to him
and ask. Since I'm a new fan and all.

bastille day cafe

2006-07-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

Monet's impression (ha!) of the rue montorgueil, 1878

I'm enjoying my Bastille Day in a cafe called Bluehouse.
For those in Baltimore, it's on Fleet Street. Go there, buy
stuff.. I can't finish this gigantically huge mocha. Big eyes,
small bladder.

caterpillar love

2006-07-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

above the paw on the left. a caterpillar rears up in fierce display-
daisy parries and flirts tremendously.

why won't you love my paw fuzzy beast? I won't eat you, but I'll
bat you to death and walk away slightly disgusted..

walking to Tellula - Lyon Park / Arlington,VA

pocket-house...so cute you want to-
dance a jig on the porch? I think the owner
of the truck would definitely mind. Pass.

crazy weed. whose leaves look like... weed.

Del Ray / Alexandria, VA must remind me of bluegrass.
Waiting for Erin.. who thought sneaking up on me was
still possible while yacking on her cell phone.

changes, choices

2006-07-12T18:24:00.000-07:00

I still don't know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
Every time I thought I'd got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I've never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I'm much too fast to take that test

Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time

I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence and
So the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through

Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Changes
Don't tell t hem to grow up and out of it
Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Changes
Where's your shame
You've left us up to our necks in it
Time may change me
But you can't trace time

Strange fascination, fascinating me
Changes are taking the pace I'm going through

Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Changes
Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers
Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Changes
Pretty soon you're gonna get a little older
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
I said that time may change me
But I can't trace time

(david bowie, quite obviously..)

at the waters' edge. thinking. deciding.
tomorrow is an important day.

and now for something completely different

2006-07-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

in the spirit of real whimsy,
there is always more room on my plate for dancing on architecture.
morphosis is a no-brainer, but send me your suggestions for
scale-figure 'challenges.' If I can get there, I'll oblige and write
a review.

here there and everywhere

2006-07-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

What surprises me about coming home, other than the palatial
feel of what I thought was a pretty modest house we have, is that
it is "home, also." Home is, forgive the cliche, where the heart is,
and I left a little bit of mine in New York. No worries, plenty to
go around. Coming home to Baltimore was an embrace from a dream
at three in the morning.

Having the opportunity to see one's home with fresh eyes is a gift-
Textures are more apparent, the garden more welcoming, the bed
impossibly comfortable. And life goes on. So much to do.

I don't know if one of you looked 114 times or I really have had that
much interest, but it doesn't stop with manhattan. It starts. So check
once in a while, and write - let me know how you are, what you're doing,
where you're going too.

sunset over manhattan

2006-07-06T20:39:00.000-07:00

The sun is setting on my time here in New York.
I'll be back. Until then, I'm not going to cheapen the
experience by calling it fun. There were moments of
fun. But it was hard work, mostly. I've been forced to reckon with
the desire and the anguish of acting, at least a little. I faced some
terrible demons and some surprising strengths. I've met and bonded
with a group of talented young people, and had the priviledge of
working with some of the best acting coaches on the planet. I have
less of a 'now or never' feeling about the whole thing. New York, not
unlike Paris, will always feel a little like coming home. Because it's
home to everyone.

apple store

2006-07-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

the west village is for lovers

2006-07-02T21:54:00.000-07:00

TRY to find a more beautiful place than the west village
at this very moment- just at the end of a rain storm,
at sunset, it was glowing with possibility.

The 'way west village' is a tree-lined, quiet collection of houses that have been
houses since the 19th century, and are still houses. Even the breezes are polite
and soft. On a summer Sunday evening the churches expand with music,
and the cafes are full of debates among friends and tearful arguments between lovers.
It is well past nine and the restaurants along Hudson near the lush little Abingdon Square are still seating.
There are decadent pastries and coffee at Tartine on Eleventh St. and a canopy that keeps out the rain just past
the ankles. The air is misty.

"Hello?" the gentle voice of a West African breaks open the curtain of rain. It's soft and rude at the same
time, pleading for a quarter. The thin French proprietress wearing a green t-shirt and indignation appears
out of nowhere on the cafe stoop and crosses herself. "I have told you a thousand times you may not
harass our customers. I tell you this week after week. Now go or I will call the Police." His persistence is
impressive. "can I have a glass of water?" "No!" she says with her feet, which turn to the door.

victorian brooklyn

2006-07-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

And example of victorian detail in Brooklyn Heights.

If you squint it's like lace, not a dissimilar concept..
I also see art nouveau, Guimard's metro canopies..
Crystal Palace. It's nice to see architects taking
risks.

little cafes are on every corner. you can bet if it's French,
so is the proprietor..the world cup was still on; the Tour de
France started yesterday; we were wondering if the French
places will have to get 2 tvs..

Valerie, a classmate of mine, just ate Stefan's
canary - or is it the other way around? We ate
at Alma on Columbia in Brooklyn. View of lower
manhattan, fabulous mojitos...

try this at home

2006-06-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

Robin was suffering. She was in the second day of a nasty sinus infection
and we had just received our new scene assignments. So she has an important scene coming up and she can’t be all ‘stuffy.’ I make a sad suggestion that I might be able to fill a prescription for antibiotics if I make a few calls, and then I thought of another solution. A saline solution… “now, this is going to hurt but it will totally make you feel better.” Robin looked curious. Her head cocked like a bird. “Did you just say SNORT salt water?”

I spirited a handful of salt packets from the café across the street under heavy surveillance and certain that I was about to be apprehended by the female ninjas that work behind the counter. My crime went unnoticed and we started to make our way back to our building. Robin stopped dead in her tracks and said, “do you see what I see?” I looked up to see a small yellow stream coming out of the driver’s side of a cab. The stream didn’t appear to be attached to anything, which made it seem that the cab itself was peeing on the sidewalk.

Upstairs in the girl’s room I measured water into Robin’s Nalgene like Marie Curie. “Zee salt vater vil make you feel much better.” Totally unaware that there was a very tall blond accented model in the bathroom stall, accompanied by two other well dressed skeletons, I started to explain the procedure. I offered to do it once for her, just as had been done for my benefit when I learned to snort like my career depended on it. We’d have a bond forever from this experience. I promised. “oh God Jessyca, look at your face!” Robin cried. My expression with the first snort was that of constipation and utter disgust. I cried a little. The excess solution spewed forth like Old Faithful. I felt so ineffective as a teacher. Robin took it like a champ. Twice. I was impressed. The models looked curious and we thought about pushing it on them; as good as snorting salt water was making Robin feel, seeing models snort salt water would make her feel even better.
We’d call it “flow” and tell them that everyone was doing it. Alas, it was time for Voiceover class.

Robin sat opposite me on the floor sequestering herself and giving me the best view of her sinuses. We traded off objects, pretending to stuff them up our noses. chapstick, a water bottle, actual contact lens solution, pens, a camera, and her coup d’etat, a tampon, which nearly got me thrown out of class; I couldn’t stop convulsing with laughter. Best sinus infection ever.

on we trod

2006-06-28T21:06:00.000-07:00

A very nice break for dinner with my
cousin Jonathan. We laughed, we cried,
we compared cell phones. Thanks man.

I found Robin at "FoodWorks" looking for something to
make herself feel better... she has a sinus infection... and
aha! it occurred to me that I knew a solution.
A saline solution.
1. cup a little warm salt water in your hand
2. snort like lindsay lohan..
3. tilt your head back, then let it drain out a little and blow.
4. hey, it's natural to want to blow.
5. repeat. don't swallow. Robin swallowed. I told her not to. Gross!

thanks to AO for your help with my first time.

We just had a close encounter with three models who were in our
building for a casting call, who looked curious, like maybe it was
something they needed to consider. I had to resist the urge to
taunt them into the very sexy world of saline solution snorting.
I thought we could call it "Flow"

Scene study class with Jay Goldenberg - his best quote for the
day was "my cell phone is messed up and my pimple hurts."
The man is a genius, I swear.

a walk in the west

2006-06-27T05:15:00.000-07:00

the week ends the week begins

2006-06-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

There is a revolution at revolution books on Friday.
Or maybe just a little protest between friends.
This is right by the school, a reminder that
New Yorkers give a crap.

Carri arrives. We are standing in the same space under the
departures marquee, a universe away by cell phone. Here I am!

We dine with a view on Friday - and then Saturday on to
the pressing issue of shopping. We're on a mission, and it
involves some unusual possibilities.

Did I just get caught playing with a gong?
Heavy steel sewing scissors that could slice bone.
$1.25

Carri looks for the perfect silver plated cat.
The raised paw is a blessing. The strange pen
shaped like a carp down to the lifeless eyes is a necessity.
There are birdcages for mechanical birds, nonsense, and soap from france, or China.
Saffron beauty everywhere, and fluttering, colorful things.

IT'S RAINING IN SOHO.

It's raining in soho. Hard. We search for bijoux.
We find bijoux, and a surly shopkeeper that will not
allow photographs. Out on a limb for my blog, I say
"why not?" "because these are OUR things." he says, and looks away.
Are they not about to be mine? I buy a necklace and he looks embarrassed.

I contemplate the REAL spy, who could buy one of
everything and copy it without the benefit of this
fuzzy photograph.

We went into the women-owned adult toy store called "babeland"
right after the bijoux, but I was too mesmerized to snap photos.
Who were the lucky ass architects that did THIS interior?

BABELAND/soho

Yeah, you try not smiling after a store like that.
Chocolate seems like a FABULOUS idea.

I give thanks for the chocolate I am
about to receive. It's a stop at Vosges, and
my favorites are the hot pepper and dark chocolate
truffles called "red fire" - accompanied by a similarly
flavored spicy hot chocolate drink.

It's a nearly religious experience.

GRACE CHURCH

No, we're not here to repent for what we just saw and ate.

But it's impossible not to be contemplative
in a setting like this.

I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift,
the baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof,
you saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty
in the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne, she cut your hair,
and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Maybe I have been here before, I know this room;
I have walked this floor, I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch, love is not a victory march,
it's a cold and its a broken Hallelujah

There was a time you let me know whats really going on below,
but now you never show it to me, do you? (and)
Remember when I moved in you; the holy dark was moving too,
and every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Maybe there's a God above, and all I ever learned from love
was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
And its not a cry you can hear at night, its not somebody
who's seen the light, its a cold and its a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah

[leonard cohen] sorry leonard.

Thank you for the silence Grace Church.
I'm listening, closely.

THE FARMER'S MARKET AT UNION SQUARE

Bluegrass.... can't seem to get away from the stuff.

Bluegrass Faces.

Out for drinks in the neighborhood.

A departure breakfast at "Bar Tabac" which could absolutely be
in Provence somewhere.

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Trying to capture whimsy this weekend.

Catching the train back to b-more.
Thank you for the laughs and the feeling of home.

shmacting

2006-06-22T21:45:00.000-07:00

Email me your captions.

mask exercise

2006-06-20T17:37:00.001-07:00

The mask is an articulation of the subconscious mind. The 'image' of the mask,
not to be confused with 'character' or 'personality' amplifies this voice, this breathing
thing. It is made of carved wood and smooth lacquer, eye holes, and a space where a
mouth will be. Gazing at the white expressionless maw, the hands thumb the ridges, it is the arc of a
bleached bone, there is a drum thud in the sternum, and desire.

The first impression is a surprise. Use two hands. Never let the mask touch the floor.
The other five are pink, and submissive, comical. This mask is white, and powerful.
The compulsion to dominate this group comes out of nowhere, is overwhelming, makes
the sound just come, a low rumble, a growl. They listen and fall in.

The men are easy. The gibberish spoken in the work with the masks is high pitched with them;
the women so low. They are not men now, just greater distances between floor, hands, and mask image, but
they become something else. Everyone moves and plays, converses and discovers.
It is terrifying to control this way while so utterly out of control. And we are told to go deeper.
The small frame is filled with heat and the thump thump thump of this role.
Though a game, this is not false power. One should always be aware of masks.

the week in review

2006-06-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

I could have been here a week or a month. The acting classes involve
exercises and work that I didn't know existed, so it's all pure
discovery, and I've got a delightfully steep learning curve right now.
They are about the whole person, and acting is, I am realizing, much
more than "living honestly under imaginary circumstances." I only
thought I had been stretched before. Being able to look into
someone's eyes and see someone else entirely, or know I have known
them my whole life when we've just met, or demand something or declare
something or cajole, express, whatever - it's changing how I interact
with people in my real life, and it's the strangest feeling of
confidence I've ever had. It doesn't matter what someone's ABOUT to
say anymore, or wanting to hear something in particular in order to
live out a preconceived outcome --and THAT, in my case, is what's
liberating.

It sounds cliche, but it's all about the moment, not the past or the
future. When a moment becomes a past moment, I am forced to move on to
the next one - this is very, very very important in particular for
stage combat. If you fuck up and stop to apologize, someone will get
hurt. If you have to turn and catch a ball that is being thrown at
your face, you have turn, catch the ball with calm, focused energy --
not turn, freak out, look around the room and get hit in the face.
Calm with energy catchces the ball the first time. Freaked out second
guessing gets hit in the face. I learned this, quickly.

You know some people don't want to be read, and it's impossible to
go around being in that 'open' state that you have to be in in order to
'act' well, but I can see how the ability to read behavior and not
fear it (just take it in and decide how to act or react or not act at
all) is the closest thing to actually buiding an observable skill set
centered around authenticity that I can imagine. It's weird and
liberating. I love it. It's also affecting my internal life, which is
what makes acting school, as one teacher put it, "like a month of
relentless therapy." Emotion is, surprisingly, a physical
manifestation - not all in my head, which is also good. I'm
discovering that having a senstitive bodily instrument isn't a
detriment, it's a huge advantage. The body is a plastic
representation of the mind. Calm mind, calm body, commanding presence.
This is useful.