momanon

“If only I could believe in work. I hate work. Creation is not work—it’s play.”

— Henry Miller, letter to Anaïs Nin, 1942

H.R. Giger, Swiss Surrealist (think Alien)

Fred Einaudi hunger

Gerald Brom

Gerald Brom

I just placed an order for this illustrated novel on Amazon. Set in New York City, the novel is a violent and graphic not-for-kids reworking of Barrie’s classic tale. Brom says, “Foremost, the idea of an immortal boy hanging about nursery windows and seducing children away from their families for the sake of his ego and to fight his enemies is at the very least disturbing.”

Check out reviews: http://www.amazon.com/The-Child-Thief-ebook/dp/B002LUHZ5A

Michael Hussar

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art—write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can; and I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.” — Neil Gaiman Happy 2010 everyone!

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” —Sylvia Plath

Robert Hansen Man-Men 163, 1965

Man-Men
Samantha Neugebauer

Her vestibule of memory,
is the slippery port of call,
where the doberman bark against
the proselytized metallic salts
and sing the failure of Hart’s Line to
entice the

frank breeched man–
short coated and noble–
who cripples the pearly wide
butterfly of her female pelvis,
yet fails to deaden the sobbing
lips which whimper to her midwives
Please Make the boy turn.

Inside her head,
black and lean with pry bar voices,
the dogs echo their woman handler’s command
Come Come Come
but the message’s gooseneck design,
always finishes in the birthplace painfully.

And it is the same as Gaia,
who created both
her equal
and the sickle who gelded him,
her vestibule of memory is both
producer and consumer,
rabid and loyal,
wimpling without prayer,
as the self-inventions turn to a
Bedlam where the woman
pretends in fetal position while waiting for the
man to dock the dogs.

Sylvia Sleigh, 1979

Sylvia Sleigh, Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano, 1977

Hearing and Loss

Hearing & Loss
Samantha Neugebauer

At 160 decibals–
the eardrums burst,
the eyeballs vibrate,
a nimbus of unconscious stars
circle blind.

Slipping out of your bed,
I think, where are your wings?

You played harp so well
I took you as the six-winged seraph and
tearing the wings out your shoulders,
smoothing the feathers from your face,
and licking away those on your feet,
I became the motion capture of the mother Mary
washing the balls of her damned Jesus.

I leave before you wake.
It doesn’t always need to have an afterlife.

Having afterlife is beside the point–
infinity as the point is impolite–
meaning becomes immeasurable
for when once in afterlife,
wouldn’t we ask its purpose too?

I would

like to love you–nay the harpist–
not because I believe our love will outlive us
or that anything will outlive us except
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and a
bomb’s noiseless radiation.

Rather, the value is in the rubbing of one
soul against another.
Bumper cars are only fun because there
is no crash, no combining of steel and brains–
the same is true of souls and love–
if God can’t get inside my head,
neither will you.

At 115 decibals–
the rock show will start,
I will fall against you,
a nimbus of unconscious stars
will circle blind
and
alone,
always the only choice.

Epiloge:
The Experts recommend exposure to
these noise levels only last a short while;
a most obvious request.

In the 3 seconds it takes you to read this title, 8 people will be added to the Earth’s population

“No, I don’t think I will kiss you. Although you need kissing badly. That’s what wrong with you. You should be kissed and often by someone who knows how.”

-Rhett Butler, Gone With the Wind

Sometimes, if I am kissing someone who I don’t really know, I think, this is rather dull. I think about his tongue and my mouth and all the movements. I wonder when it will be over or if we can please move on to things less intimate and more intimate at the same time.

I swear I will never get myself into a situation like this again, but then I eventually do. At one time or another, I’ve thought  kissing was terribly overestimated, but then you remember–or envision–a really passionate kiss with someone, and you think, more passionate kissing would really make the world a lot better.

Also, the world would be a lot better if we discussed solutions to overpopulation, but that is something else…or not since that starts with kissing too. I really think most major problems today are rooted in overpopulation including war for natural resources, food quality and production, and climate issues. Yikes, my posts have no balance in tone.

Selecting a Reader
by Ted Kooser

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.

Percussion
Strings
Winds
Words

There you see her
Sitting there across the way
She don’t got a lot to say
But theres something about her
And you don’t know why
But you’re dying to try
You wanna kiss the girl

-The Little Mermaid

“Unlike the plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases (which) we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution, but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the education of the billions who are its victims.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Acceptance speech for the Margaret Sanger Award in Human Rights

Source: http://www.capsweb.org

–

I don’t mean to pick on the  Duggers, but come on! 19 kids now, 19! Current overpopulation isn’t really the fault of Western Countries, but families like these make me frustrated anyway. I don’t know how the parents can even spend quality time with each of their children. You’ve probably already guessed that the Duggers are Baptists and have decided that God will decide how many children for them to have. This makes me annoyed the same way people who don’t get their kids vaccinated (when they can afford it) does; these people ladle society and take no responsibility for it. It is selfish.

Charm your way across the Khyber Pass

Having just finished my last paper of the semester on the whirlpool issue of–hold your breath–President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s policy proposal to lengthen the public school day and year from the current 6 hour school day to a 7 hour school day and the 180 school year to a 220 school year, and the implications that proposal would have on both the federal verses state control of public schools and the crisis between educating for social efficiency verses social mobility–whew!– I am done my seventh semester of my undergraduate education. Now, only one more to go.

Margaret Bourke-White photo from Time

I leave New York City for Philadelphia in two days, and I could not be more ready to spend a week in a new environment, even if that environment is covered with over twenty-two inches of snow (twice the sprinkles we got here). Someone I know today told me that snow is love, which I found funny, and someone else–this person more frustrated than adoring–updated their Facebook status earlier to say “Snow is Evil. My car is not moving.”

Evil and Love, la-de-da, I guess non-physical things were alive and prospering in the East Coast this weekend, but I don’t feel like opening that can of worms right now since I generally think good and evil do not exist accept as a social mechanism to control behavior….which is fine and probably necessary, though I do struggle with some forms of punishment for “evil” acts. Damn that can…

I think all we do is commit actions and it our societies who then decide where our actions fall on the spectrum (which they’ve created) between good and evil. So, I guess what I am saying is that I am not unhappy that more people are’t amoral since it probably keeps all the cogs and wheels operating. For me, it is self-interest and love of my fellow Homo sapiens that makes me act the way I do. I do not like to hurt people, not because I think the universe or a certain deity has declared certain actions as evil, but because I do not want to make someone else feel pain and I have no desire to harm myself or others. I want humanity to prosper!

They say
this is evil
that is evil
like it is something outside
but there it is
coming out their mouth

End of Semester celebration song!

Also, end to very disjointed post (aren’t they all?)!

Title of post: Vampire Weekend, M79

this life’s too good to last

Total amount the U.S. spends on Christmas each year: $450 billion

I was sad today, so I did the thing that is consistently effective at compressing my problems (and my selfdom). I bundled up and  walked to the American Museum of Natural History, across Union Square and  up 5th Avenue, past Bergdorf Goodman, Gucci, Sephora–the U.S. spends eight billion on cosmetics every year–Prada, Saks, Tiffany & Co., and so many others. I watched the people, wondered what they were thinking, what they were spending, and why. I waited for someone who would walk by an entire store window without checking themselves out in the reflection.

The lights were my favorite part, but I don’t think I really care about getting into the holiday spirit, rather I like the aesthetics that come with the season, the lights, trees, decorations. I like celebrations in general, actually. I like thinking that people are all sharing in something, even if it is a bastard of the Winter Solstice disguised as a birthday bash. I find Christmastime to be evidence that people are generally good and want to be in community with one another, and hyper-consumerism happens to be the way we express that. We might not like our families or share the same beliefs with them, so we need this shove to go be with them, even if we want that anyway sometimes; Christmas saves face. Christmas gives us this purpose to be with people, to have little parties, because people don’t like to do things without purpose. On that matter, I was browsing really silly family Christmas portraits today on Google. Large families with coordinating outfits and big sloopy smiles. Now, that is something that almost brought down my little Christmas hard-on (does a hard-on have a hyphen?). You would think it would be the needless spending and crazy store antics, but I’ve grown so accustomed to it like everyone else, it’s like a muted television, a mess of seemingly sempiternal nature.

Anyway, when I got to the museum, I headed right for the Hayden Planetarium and saw Journey to the Stars again. Whoopie Goldberg’s voice has become the voice of mother universe for me by this point. When I am dying, I hope my last images are of the galaxy instead of white light. I’ll make myself see that. I remember Mike told me at his prom–light chat between the dancing–that the brain makes us see the white light because it calms the body and brain down as it prepares to stop, more like how an old lightbulb will flicker and fight at the end before burning out completely. My mom suffers from nyctalopia, so I wonder if this will affect her last vision at all. Back to the show, I never grow bored of it. I was reminded of how much I like the band Muse the other night, so I kept thinking how great it would be to see Journey to the Stars without speaking and just have Muse’s album Absolution play in the background instead, especially the song “Blackout”, or maybe even James Horner’s song “Casper’s Lullaby”. Yes, that would be very nice. Can there be sound as the lights die inside you too? A fading sound even?

I didn’t feel as sad when I got home and I spent the rest of the day cocooning except for work. In my hibernaculum, I watched Guys and Dolls and listened to the Great Expectations soundtrack. I didn’t feel like seeing anyone or talking. I made a list of things I wanted to go to after I come back from Philadelphia on New Year’s (mostly compiled from my second favorite magazine TimeOut New York, second only to Scientific American), such as the free tour of Steinway & Sons, The New York Botanical Garden Holiday Train Show, the “Art of Stop-Motion” exhibit at the Animazing Gallery, and the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at the Whitney. I have never actually been to the Whitney; it is a little pricey, but I am taking on another job starting in January (walking a kid to school three mornings a week) so I’ll have some more USD. Wayne is staying with me for a few days too, so we will do a lot of this together probably, and we’ll see the Tim Burton exhibit at the MoMa too, at least that is the plan…ah how we plan for the future when we have so little control.

Steve DiBenedetto

I feel like I know what I want now, more than ever, but I am handicapped by feelings of disconnection more and more. I can’t decide if I want to believe in people or hate everyone, which I know sounds extreme, but at one moment, I get annoyed at everyone and the next I think we all have so much in common. We did this little game at my building where we had to take one step forward if we agreed with the statement said, and one guy said, “I want to be in love someday.” It was the only question of maybe thirty questions where the entire population of the room stepped forward. Did I write that on here before? I may have. It really stuck with me. What is love? Baby don’t hurt me! I believe in love because I have loved and been loved, but I think there is no one form of it. I love men, I love my friends, I love long train rides, and surprising interactions. I think we should be in love with ourselves, not in a egomaniacal way, more like an acknowledgement that truly we will spend the most time alone throughout the duration of our life. Even if you marry your high school sweetheart or share a friendship with someone for fifty years, you will be with yourself more. You will know all your secrets, but you will not know every secret, every weird thought, every action, of the people you spend your life with.

I finished a book by Benjamin Cheever last night called Famous After Death; it was a quick dispiriting read, where the protagonist only cares about being famous. People write books, they say, because they are narcissistic. It is the ugly person or intellectual person’s route to fame, where everyone will pay attention to you. Other reasons, of course, are for self-expression and to provoke change, but there is an underlining self-interest in everything, maybe. I don’t know. I think immortality is the best consequence of fame, but it’s not real immortality always. Nebuchadnezzar can tell you that. The original Pennsylvania Station can tell you that. Also, I don’t think people–unless they have an unhealthy obsession–really care about famous people. They might admire them and feel inspired by them, but no fanboy or girl of Lady Gaga, faced with the choice of saving one person from a burning building, would save the pop star over a best friend. That is why I try to value the people in my life as much as possible, because that is what matters. If–no, when–I finish my first novel (thirty is my target age for this) and if it is good enough to be published, I would care more what my friends thought of it than anyone else. No one doesn’t want acclaim, but I think celebrity is overrated and misunderstood. I am not upbraiding celebrities though, because none of it matters and it is just a goal like any other goal. I only think there are more important things than being a roustabout for this fame game. My dirty secret? If I met a genie who gave me the choice, I’d pick wealth over joining the pantheon of famous people any day. Being influential, that is impressive, whether it be on a Jonas Salk scale or just being an ordinary teacher in a public school who inspires his students in some way.

I like interpreting her visage here. I think the “Bad Romance” video is exhilarating! Still, I don’t think her voice is nearly as powerful as Xtina’s.

During the summertime, I had lunch with a former professor of mine who left NYU; she is writing a novel. I asked her what she was going to do when she was done it. Was she going to try to get it published? She took a bite of her burger she had cut up (we were at Pete’s Tavern on Irving Street, where O. Henry wrote Gift of the Magi), and she said she finds it curious that people always want to know what you are going to do. Why do you have to do anything, she asked. Does it have to get published to matter? Does she need some pup from some publishing house to like it for it to have been worth her time? Isn’t it worth it if she enjoyed doing it? I nodded and said she was right. At Starbucks (ah, I dislike their stuff there!), they sell a mug that has all the great writers on it. Is that the goal? To be some grainy portrait wrapped around someone’s morning caffeine? Is that what Dickens had in mind? I don’t think so.

keep your secrets

“As he said good bye he felt again that it was impossible to leave her, even for a few hours. There was only ten years between them but he felt that madness about it akin to the love of an aging man for a young girl. It was a deep and desperate time-need, a clock ticking with his heart, and it urged him against the whole logic of his life to walk past her into the house now—and say “This is forever.”

-The Love of the Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald

My mouth glows

Fireflies are Romantic
Samantha Neugebauer

Fireflies glow for two reasons:
to attract a mate
to avoid a predator.

Alfred Nobel,
the prize man,
gave us dynamite and
told us to be peaceful
yet he knew about
the Lucibufagins in our blood
and how much we like sex.

“We will not eradicate violent conflict in
our lifetimes”
Oh, Obama, Obama, Obama,
I liked you better on the stoop in Harlem
smoking your cig
being idealist.

Though,
people hear what they want to hear:
I love you too
also
Change for America means no more war
What they really said:
You are an interesting girl
also
Afghanistan.

People worry about getting wrinkles
I worry about getting nihilistic;
wash your face every night,
use cocoa butter,
find meaning in another,
humanism or something.

I think sex and war are related,
but I haven’t figured out how.
If you IM me, I jump across
my slippery floor.

Men might want to go to war
because they never possess anything
we woman take you inside us,
you might tear and break and push
but it is us you want to be in,
it is us that brings you again and again
it is us who have brought the lives
for your wrecking.

My mouth glows:
Predator?
Mate?
Both?
Put it in my mouth,
I demand,
I’d rather not create more
armies.

Even though I didn’t know anything about his book, I wished I had written it.

The Booksigning
By James Tate

An ad in the newspaper said that a local author
would be signing his new book at the bookstore today.
I didn’t even know we had any local authors. I was
going to be downtown anyway, so I decided to drop in
and see what he looked like. He was short and fat
and ugly, but all kinds of beautiful women were flirting
with him and laughing at every little joke he made.
Even though I didn’t know anything about his book, I
wished I had written it. A man came up to me and said,
“I hated it when the little girl died. I just couldn’t
stop crying.” “Thank God for the duck,” I said. He
took a step back from me. “I don’t remember the duck,”
he said. “Well, then, I’m afraid you missed the whole
point of the book. The duck is absolutely central,
it’s the veritable linchpin of the whole denouement,”
I said. (I had learned that word in high school, and
now it served me well.) “But what about the little
girl?” the man asked, with a painful look of bewilder-
ment on his face. “She should have been shot a hundred
pages earlier,” I said. “I don’t think I like you,”
the man said, and walked away clutching his book.
I looked over at the author. He was signing a young
woman’s cleavage, and the other women were laughing
and pulling open their blouses to be signed. I had
never even thought of writing a novel. Now, my mind
was thrashing about. The man I had offended earlier
walked up to me and offered me a glass of wine. “If
I may ask you, sir, why were you so rude to me?” he
said. I looked up from the abyss and said, “Because
I am nothing. Because I am a speck of dust floating
in infinite darkness. Because you have feelings and
you care. Do you understand me now?” “Perfectly,”
he said. “Cheers!”

unconnected things

Lucian Freud

–

Lucian Freud

Hell Awaits You!

The list doesn’t leave anyone out, does it?
Dirty Dancers?
I’ll assume that means Swayze is in hell.

Plus, with all us Obama voters in hell, maybe we can change it for the better?

What I am more interested in is what version of hell awaits us? I’ll just take on the great literary ones.

I’ve always been drawn to Dante’s supreme organization:

Phallic much? I am so stuck in the lustful orb!

—

While I adore Paradise Lost, Milton’s hell reminds me of something Ptolemy would try to concoct:

—

When all is said and done though, I’d like to be old-fashioned and go with Revelation. A lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, you say? Let me get my bathing suit!

Interesting fact:

In the film Constantine, the director was inspired by images of the nuclear bombs going off in Japan when he created his hell for the film. He used footage from those tapes to create Constantine’s hell since those bombs create hell on earth; therefore, even if his viewer didn’t believe in the afterlife, he or she would still fear his hell since it could actually happen.

The juxtaposition of the destruction and melodic piano music is eerie.

Also, if you haven’t seen Constantine, it is worth it just for Tilda Swinton’s captivating performance as an androgynous Angel Gabriel.

White Noise & Busy Bees

I value industrious people. I like ambition. I like people who do things, but I think we’ve all been doing a lot of things without much reflection for too long now. I think it is very easy to be busy. Busy is safe. Busy means you don’t have to reflect much. Most importantly, a busy person is very easy to control, so wrapped they are in themselves and their own busyness. All one need do to talk to someone is to stimulate their self-interest for one moment. Once you stop, they stop too. If we are always busy and always exhausted, that is all we are then. Too many of us equate busyness with purpose. People generally don’t like living in doubt and to have purpose makes us believe we are doubt-free. This is why we stay busy, this is why we like religion and horoscopes and psychics and claim to be insomniacs, because we MUST be too important to the universe to be purposeless, to ever be asleep.

Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you’ll be safe, then.
-Ovid, Remedia Amoris

I feel a great deal of the people I interact with are constantly busy and they have been busy for so long they don’t realize there is any other way. When they do have free time, they complain about their busyness on their Facebook walls or they write away messages about their busyness, as if this means anything. I rarely feel like I have a person’s undivided attention, except for when I am in the classroom or with certain friends and acquaintances; however, even the classroom has been polluted. I seethe when I get stuck behind the person in lecture who types online all through class or the one who is pressing his or her stubby fingers on the phone; I watch the energy in their fingers and think of the torpidity going on in their brain. It has become polite to laugh when someone kids that they cannot sit without their phone.

We are so poor right now as a country and I don’t mean fiscally. We are terribly disengaged. We have forgotten how to be citizens. We speak about democracy and American freedom like we had any kind of hand in it, like we didn’t just get lucky to be born in this country (who knows if lucky is even the right word). I forget where it was said, maybe a Michael Moore documentary actually, but he goes, “We are so prideful. We act like we were the ones out there hammering down the railroad, drafting the constitution.” We talk, but we don’t say anything. We state everything in rhetoric of profit and gross and economics, even our educations, even our passions. We fuck language like we do a whore, carelessly, panicky…

38-24. What is that? The outcome of the New York State Senate’s vote on the gay marriage bill. Were we all surprised? Shocked? Appalled? Our status messages and away messages displayed dismay, anger, outrage, but did we ourselves? No. Being gay or liking gay people or voting for President Obama over a year ago does not mean you’ve done your liberal job, that you can cross that off your busy to-do list; it does not give you the right to pat yourself on the back, thinking that the world can be ridiculous, but that you are not a part of the ridiculousness.

I wish Machiavelli were alive. I would love to see his recommendations to the young prince for how to utilize new technology to suppress the masses and stay in power. My advisor, who is very old, a bit batty, and retiring, told us she is disillusioned, she doesn’t want to teach anymore, and it is time to blow something up. I don’t think she meant that literally. The internet is not going to be our vehicle of change; I am sorry. It may inspire, like books have done, but it will be real people, real actions, and real voices who make the final stand. I hear the values of new technology all the time and I agree with much of the adulation, but I also see its many weaknesses. It is a time trap (especially for the young), a pool of knowledge deep with sewage, and an obstruction to real people to people interaction (note: I am talking to a screen right now and not another person).

Slide your right thumb along the words I’ve bolded below on your computer screen–time, knowledge, people– really do it. Touch. I did it too. Can you feel me? Have we somehow connected? Are we intimate at all?

Time, knowledge, and people are things of ultimate value. I think youth is the greatest commodity I possess, and I have no intention of squandering it for a better retirement. We are all writing more than ever, but reading less than ever. The Philadelphia Inquirer is so much thinner every time I go home, I could clean my fingernails with it. They say the newspaper is being replaced by internet news, but the news itself is changing. We read and write to bolster what we already think. We are fed ideas to keep us tight on the right or on the left, because if we had our own thoughts, we might not be easily managed. I am unhappy with President Obama right now, but I am still glad he won. I can sit in the gray of a topic. While I do not blame him for the economic situation, I am disappointed in the health care reform, still unsatisfied with his picks for many of his officials, and angered that nothing has been done about these types of practices:

Salliemae.com

We measure our worth by how much we work. We value others for how hard they work. In NYC, the city of culture, we are just as guilty. We can squeeze in a trip to see the newest exhibit, but we are only half there. Our phone is tucked into our pocket, our leg waiting for the knowing vibrate, and we going over in our head everything that we have planned for the next day and the next day and the day after that. I believe we all want to be fully there, but we have become conditioned to our busyness and we forget what it is like to not be busy at all.  We consume our time wastefully just as we do with our surfeit of goods and products.

Two nights back, I had my biweekly scholars class and Professor George Shulman led a discussion on a range of ancient readings from Thucydides to Homer. This discussion reminded me why I love academia, why I love the humanities, and why I love engaged classmates. We talked about the difference of politics between now and Ancient Greece, which is the place every present-day democracy calls their mother. Yet, we scantily realize we are more a bastard than an actual offspring of that government, not to mention Athena was a virgin goddess anyway (Poor Athena!). These Greeks believed humans were political because we possessed the faculty of language. Active political communities produce self-reflection and self-reflection makes political communities, through this cycle we have a sorta- democratic regime.  Of course, the founding fathers of America really had a republic in mind and not a democracy when drafting the constitution, but that is okay. What is not okay is what we have done with our language, with our political rhetoric, and with our own voices since then. Like the Greeks, Shulman said, “We have somehow linked our military expansion to our virtue.”  Our hijacked language, especially online, is as good as bow and arrow in this new game.

As we write and communicate more than ever, we are more muted than ever. We dither about Lady Gaga, we lament in 140 characters how unfair the NY Senate is, and we think we are doing something. Inner-class conflict has always been one of the most effective tools of oppressive government. Now, we have a class of people living online, not even having conflict with one another, but rather writing about their own conflict  (busyness) they have within their day, their midterms, their jobs, their this, their that.

This woman is topless. She is smoking a cigarette. She is being political. I could only imagine what this person could have done if she had actually had a cause worth fighting for and not something silly like the failed TBNYU occupation last year. Still, as stupid as these people’s motives were (they did decide to come to a private university after all…private schools can hit your knuckles with a ruler or spend their money how they like), at least they did something.

People are constantly busy, but they aren’t doing anything except creating white noise.

I am not saying I am above this; I am only saying what I hear and that is nothing.

I believe in us. I believe it doesn’t have to be this way.

When we question our servitude, we may fall

Gustave Dore’s 1866 engraving of Lucifer fallen—note his angel wings have become bat wings

nothing in my veins but hemoglobin

“All You Who Sleep Tonight”
Vikram Seth

All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above -

Know that you aren’t alone
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.

J.E. BULLOZ, c. 1900

Ruth St. Denis & Ted Shawn

“Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968), who had worked as an actress and dancer in commercial theater, experienced a revelation in 1904 when she saw an exotic poster advertising Egyptian cigarettes. The art nouveau poster combined the erotic and the exotic (features also exploited by the Ballets Russes), and St. Denis seized on these to create a vibrant stage persona and repertoire for herself and the immensely popular touring company she formed” -NY Public Library

“In 1914, St. Denis married a twenty-two-year-old gay man, the ambitious and sexually charismatic Ted Shawn (1891-1972).  Shawn appeared at any opportunity in the scantiest of costumes. In 1915, they founded the Denishawn Dance School.” -NY Public Library

“Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living.”

-Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett

we are not great

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he does not consider himself a “great” person and does not suffer from depression.
Answering a question on how he resists depression, which the questioner said was a common ailment among great people, Putin said: “I do not consider myself a great person, that is why I do not suffer from depression.”
The question was asked during Putin’s annual televised question-and-answer session with Russians.
A nine-year-old girl asked the prime minister about the happiest moments of his life.

“I believe that the fact that we are alive is a happiness given us by God,” Putin said. “We always forget that our life is not infinite. If we remember this, we will understand that each [day] we live gives happiness.”

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20091203/157087312.html

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Esao Andrews

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Why are all the dragons sleeping?

Too many people think children’s books shouldn’t contain anything alarming nowadays

Painting by Thomas Cooper Gotch

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Children may grow up to be hedonists anyway and maybe they are lucky for it

As I am alloy, so are you

Thomas Cooper Gotch

And can incite an itch

Poem 16
Catallus

I will bugger you and face-fuck you,
Cock-sucker Aurelius and catamite Furius,
You who think, because my verses
Are delicate, that I am a sissy.
For it’s right for the devoted poet to be chaste
Himself, but it’s not necessary for his verses to be so.
Verses which then have taste and charm,
If they are delicate and sexy,
And can incite an itch,
And I don’t mean in boys, but in those hairy old men
Who can’t get their flaccid dicks up.
You, because you have read of my thousand kisses,
You think I’m a sissy?
I will bugger you and face-fuck you.

the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age

“Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasty.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.”

-Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her.

-Anis Nin, Henry and June

We all want to be this woman for someone, don’t we? Isn’t that stupid.

mortals in their prime with their desperate hands in the air

René Magritte, pretending to choke his wife Georgette… (1929)

“I love subversive humour, freckles, knees, the long hair of women,

the dreams of young children at liberty, a young girl running in the street.”

-René Magritte

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I hope I feel this way at seventy…

Self Portrait by Mary Oliver

I wish I was twenty and in love with life
and still full of beans.

Onward, old legs!
There are the long, pale dunes; on the other side
the roses are blooming and finding their labor
no adversity to the spirit.

Upward, old legs! There are the roses, and there is the sea
shining like a song, like a body
I want to touch

though I’m not twenty
and won’t be again but ah! seventy. And still
in love with life. And still
full of beans.

Title lyrics: Bad Religion

Making somethin outta nothing

I had nothing at all
Had to knuckle and brawl
They swore I’d fall
Be another brick in the wall
Another life
Full of love
That lost
That’s silly
This Philly
Y’all really ain’t stoppin
The boy with the pen

As of the 2005-2007 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S Census Bureau for Philadelphia:

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Article: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local-beat/Philly-Police-Make-13M-Heroin-Bust.html

Last January, there was a 1.12 Million Dollar Heroin Bust at 1421 Alcott Street, across the street  from the house I lived in from 6th grade until college (1418 Alcott Street),

while I was up in NYU being a Peer Educator for Alcohol & Other Drugs.

Sometimes I feel I should move back to Philly and work there in my old neighborhood,

but part of me sees it as this chaotic hopeless mess, especially when you take into account all the racism, on both sides.

It’s not just the old Irish Catholic men spewing racism. It’s also different racial groups mad at one another for truckloads of things.  One of my best friends from Philly is Puerto Rican and many of her family members hated on blacks, while many of my brother’s friends have been beaten up by black kids for being white. It is sad, because there are a lot of good people too. I babysat for a black family on my block and we always talked about the tension in my neighborhood. The mother of the kids would even tease me that I was fine since I had that “black girl booty anyway”.  That mother and my mother sold American flag pins together after 9/11 to fundraise.

The same thing that is happening in Philly happened in Detroit first, and look how Detroit is now: grim.

I know I am not doing a very good job of synthesizing all this information right now, but I just want to store it all somewhere to come back to later.

What makes me most upset is the comments after another article on the same drug bust. I wish people would stop blaming people for the things they do based on the color of their skin, and think about the socioeconomic reasons that drive people to a life of crime. If you can only afford a lousy education, you are told by people you aren’t going anywhere, and you see your friends making a lot of money selling weed or heroin or whatever, it might look appealing to you too. I know I am idealistic, but all the energy we spend hating could be spent so much more productively.

Here is a sample:

These are  good short videos. In the section about economics in the second video, the woman mentions literacy issues, which is very true, especially because of the drastic decision to dramatically cut library hours and library programs and the threats to close many of the libraries completely in the near future. I remember waiting in line to use one of the six computers in my local library when I was doing applications for high school because my family didn’t have a computer yet. This is true for so many kids, even today. I volunteered at the library during high school and because of the high demand, students could only stay on the computer for twenty-five minutes. Imagine trying to type a good book report in twenty-five minutes and do any type of research. Many people would get aggressive and angry about the time limits. Sometimes, people wouldn’t want to leave the computer, and you would need to confront them or “tattle” by getting a librarian’s attention.

I agree with one commenter who said, “I’m just glad Ben Franklin isn’t alive to see this.”

The first public library in America with circulating materials,

The Library Company of Philadelphia, was chartered in 1732 on the initiative of Benjamin Franklin.

Because we needed another reason to dislike Walmart…

Check out this website (http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/) for real photographs of Americans shopping at our favorite store. As one would imagine, there is a lot of ill-fitting clothing (example), spray paint (example), and the unexplainable (example), but what really struck me was the sayings on some of the t-shirts people were wearing. A lot of people have the fear of getting stuck in the middle of the desert or on a deserted island. I think I would rather that than getting stuck in a place with all these people for the rest of my life.

Here is a sample:

It scares me that someone would ever hand this man a gun.

Wow, where can I find him? I’d like to propose.

Bonerkiller

Does he think women are going to ask him to prove it?

I wanted to show American women can be classy too.