NEW ORLEANS GYPSY

High and Low Relief

(Evie eats my pancakes)  A sudden and clear urge to run on a beach just consumed me.  Was it the memory of the beach with Jonuel, misty and water-swept, resurfaced, that triggered this?  Or a photo of Matthew McConaghey (sp?) running his idiot body with his dogs on some tropical sandy shore?  If so I really must stop visiting E.com because it's only making me want things I cannot have.  I mean I could go run on the Lake Ponchatrain beach but when I was there last week all it did was depress me with the trash washed up and greasy water and creeps.  So there's that, wanting something while not being able to attain it and what am I going to do about that?  First a morning with Odem at our Blue Fence and then a drive to the country to hang out with the Donaldsons particularly Evie whose youth and beauty are like a beach to me, I'll run on her if she'll let me.

Feel like a movie?

I think most people drive around all day being vexed by images of mortality and vitality.  All they're wondering about is how they're going to die and who they're going to sleep with, or variations on that theme - what job they're going to have, whether they're tall enough or skinny enough or smart or fast enough or make enough money, all of it plays into these two bookends.

Our culture is the first in a couple generations that attempts to have funerals with no bodies.  We just disappear them.  If you read the death notices in the paper today you'll notice that most of them are going to involve some type of memorial event, sans body, sans corpse.  Also most likely without the gloomy stuff that comes with having a corpse in the room.  But the way to deal with mortality is by dealing with the mortals.  And you deal with death, big notion, by dealing with the dead thing. 

We're very good when it comes to cats and dogs, we just don't have a clue when it comes to our people.  We have them disappeared without any rubric or witnesses or anything like that.  And then we plan these "celebrations of life", the operative words du jour.  These celebrations are notable for the fact that everybody's welcome but the dead guy.  This, to me, is offensive and I think perilous for our species.  There is an intellectual - an artistic and moral - case that can be made for not only fruit and flowers in a bowl on a table but also a dead body in a box. 

You cannot trust

men who will treat you differently than they do women they don't want to fuck.  Or vise versa.  These are the men who do not know how to be a friend to women and no matter which end of the spectrum you're on ultimately a man who can't be our friend can't be trusted as far as you can toss him.  On top of that they're usually pretty dumb as they think they're actually putting one over on us - thinking we don't notice how attentive and kind they are to girls they think are hot, how preoccupied and short-tempered with girls they don't.  It doesn't matter how kind you are to him, how connected you are, how much in common or how compatible - if he doesn't want to fuck you you won't be his friend.  

Women, I dare you to purposely make yourself unattractive and see how different the world is, see which of those "pals" of yours stops calling, stops telling you how amazing you are, stops coming to your gigs or posting flirty shit on your Facebook wall.  I dare you to gain weight, be poor and unable to buy new clothes, be angry, be tired.  Of course you won't - who wants to live in a world where men don't curry to our needs?  But the dynamic is toxic, it's transparent and depressing and it will catch up to all of us and men, they'll just keep on with the artifice and pretty women will keep catering to it, happy to be on the winning end, and less pretty women will suffer and the game will never end.  This is even true of "ugly" guys too, by the way - they ALL think they're god's gift and they all treat women in accordance to how fuckable they think we are.

Of course there are exceptions.  Gregory Good is one, Andrew Donaldson another.  I know a few more here and there - men who really listen, who truly care.   The rest?  Silly boys, women of merit won't ever trust you and what that means is you'll get your heart broken because frankly those hot chicks?  They're as base as you are and if you fall out of favor, well - you're out.   Unless of course you look like Brad Pitt and they'll all fall all over themselves to get to the top of your list so it works both ways, doesn't it?  Sad ...

I had a vacation once

1.  The traveling, where or whenever, a gift

2. Welcome to my cedar shake

3. The Watermill Center

4. Schizophrenia/avant garde

5. Swimming pool

6. Chocolate mint

7. Dreamy/s

8. Cold white wine/soprasetta

9. Pines/cornfields

10. Misting/beach

11. Yesterday's chicken/Fresca/drums (African and Brazil)

12. Leading to the sea, the sea, the sea, the pull and salt, rocks and shell bits, surf, children, dogs

13. James Taylor's in the Crab Shack

14. A lobster roll perhaps? 

15. Sacred native burial ground, where we found the swamp and lily pads, look!  Deer!

16. Grey Gardens

17. Pollack's studio

18. and perhaps more swimming

19. Daily om, green grasshopper in the crook of my arm

20.  Hummingbirds fly to Jonuel

21. Following the sun/Caetano Velosa

22. Fire/transition/conversationings plus a Barry Manilow dance-off

23. Gravel and grass

24. A small warm beach with candy-striped umbrellas, heiresses biking, let's hit them!

25. Hydrangea, crab, lemonade, melon

26. Steinbeck wrote here

27.  Allan Kaprow's "GAS" 1965 here

28. A baseball game, balloon ascension, a buffet, a poetry reading, nature walks and a tea dance

29.  Ross Bleckner, violet sky and wild waves pulled me off my feet

30. I found my true love, is it really Andrew McCarthy???

31. Leaves and spiders, I skimmed the pool

32. The Hamptons Jitney, not my favorite thing

33. Degrees

just apples in

ahh, inhale.  What I have been doing, and writing on paper again, preferably with a pencil no less.  I rarely miss writing here - this life in now is so physical.  Simple in its truth, stretching in morning light, every evening walks on broken abandoned wharves to the cool honeysuckled river banks.  Except the honeysuckle's pretty much out of season now, how clean and sweet in my face every morning and twilight, even with a face full of tears, those buttered petals were before they bowed. 

My Crows came back with Cody's passing - my partner, truly, that cannot be sniggered at - no, not "just a cat" but a deep soul and seer who watched me for 17 years - so many photographs I have of him watching me - cool and straight - he is becoming surely something even more magnificent - perhaps the man who will save the world from other men.  I rest easy in his absence because I have no regrets - he and I loved eachother deeply for 17 years and we both knew it - what more is there than that?

And the crows came back strong - and the copper pennies as well.  The work I am doing is as intimate as a copper penny between index finger and thumb, rubbed.  My new series of photographs tell that story - and the pennies themselves tell another one - there's endless streams of information flowing - I immediately think of Burroughs - and my winter walks with him around his grandparents' building in Detroit - finding that wooden pallet with his last name stenciled on it, blasted away in the center by a shotgun, I'm serious, I found that.  And covered it with blood red red and left it behind when I left.

Lighted masts pass over my window, the river's right there and that is a glorious thing.  Especially now as a train pulls in the opposite direction.  My musics are real and free.  For example at twilight the air burst out in song as the calliope wheezed through "Wonderful World".  How do I not stop and cling to the fence peering up river at the whirling waters and cathedral spires?  I didn't did not and then improvised my own lyric, "Plastic bag in grass, dog's wavy tail, barbed wire sky, train on the rail - and I think to myself - wonderful world."  I live in the city where Louis Armstrong wrote that and that is no accident. 

Then there's Portugal and Jamaica - my second and third homes - and then eastern Poland with her mothers and gardens, still Russian in demeanor - and then the river cutting through Prague, the rivers of people in Barcelona.  These are my places but more than ever I'm aiming for India.  Yes, India, where I migrated I've been told, after Greece, where I made sense of crow's wings rhythms to tell the people something.  We become what we are still and I like this becoming I am.  "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL" he tells me in all caps at least once a day.  And you are.

Quintessential Nomad

One of my views, Bywater Art Loft, I'm moving in today.  Happy New Year!  It's transient, it's static - fragile, iron tough - tragedy and comedy - a pretty great adventure all in all.

My Afflictions

1. Lettuce water
2. Wainscot
3. Forks or goblins
4. Plums in the puddle
5. A most certain, strange, and true discovery of a witch, 1643
6. Henry V's St. Crispin day speech
7. Germans can get pregnant from the sound of David Hasslehoff's voice
8. Things, red
9. Around the age of nine, my friends and I spent inordinate amounts of time designing and drawing top secret spy hideouts, an activity undoubtedly inspired by an overdose of our favorite spy: James Bond 007. These hideouts usually, but not always, came in the form of smallish, artfully disguised command centers for top secret spy stuffs, the creation of which required whopping amounts of concentration on the parts of our teensy-weensy nine year old brains.
When finished designing and rendering our islands – a task which typically took about 45 minutes – we'd go outside and attempt to play the worlds we'd just made, applying our fanciful creations to the real world around us. So my bike becomes the helicopter. The area of dead grass in the corner of the yard becomes the helipad. The tree house becomes the mountain. Matt's bike becomes the fishing boat ... and I think you're getting the general picture. At first this is a raucous delight but, in a matter of minutes, the whole thing disintegrates because, after all, the backyard is never going to measure up to these kick ass cool spy maps we've drawn. How could it? How could anything in the backyard begin to approximate the elaborate underground control centers of our spy islands?
10.  Arts, ephemera, wunderkammern, gothika
11. Coraline
12. Late Mangeshkar
13. Earnst Haeckel
14. Stillborn and cloven hooved, desperata ferro, bird man in a monkey suit, partial skeleton
15. Kitty Wells
16. Welcome to the Underground
17. It's easy to fall behind with modern poetry
18. Let's play the Swan of Elegance!
19. Agence eureka
20. Your daily art
21. Automata/automaton
22. A stroke of luck
23. Ribbons in snow
24. Socio-political milieu
25. Many other things involving words
26. Symbols, signs
27. the way droplets of water on the head of the red-veined darter magnify the facets of its eyes
28. Why do we yawn?
29. Anatomical jewelry
30. The unconcealment of truth is a poetic process
31. There was a time when
32. fundamentally composed of time and space
33. Degrees

 

Long Moon Night

Late evenings, after supper, in the winter when it got dark early and was cold all the time, my mom would ask me to skate with her.  I was probably 8, 9, 10 and our neighbors had built a skating rink in their backyard.  I would help put the plywood up and watch the hose and shovel the snow off in exchange for being able to skate whenever we wanted.  Mom had been a figure skater as a teen and she almost got in the Ice Capades but her parents wouldn't give her permission.  She could skate backwards, do spins, and other modest tricks and this always impressed me because with us she'd never expressed any interest in athletics.

The Berents rigged clamp lights in the trees that would illuminate the rink. which was a long rectangle taking up most of their big backyard.  We'd skate around for an hour or so with the moon the snow and quiet.  Outside the rink was black, shadowy, wet and inside was phosphorescent like a flash bulb, powdery, warm.  I don't recall conversations before during or after these adventures - it's almost as if I dreamt them.  But I can picture our skates at the back door dripping from their pegs, a purely iconic Northern image, and I know I didn't dream this, I know that life dreamt me. 

French being spoken by 2 adults and one child at my window at dawn

The Lost Year
(Man, it was terrific)

Go ahead and say yes to sorrow, stop trying to murder it with a contrivedly positive attitude.  Do not  under any circumstances act as if you"chose" any of it and never ever act so presumptuous as to tell someone else to "act as if you chose this".  Experiments in fake abundance are banned.  Embrace the randomness of your traumas, ridicule those who think otherwise, exposing them as shucksters out to dull the sparkly vagaries of human experience with empty promises.  Pain is fantastic, the gateway to compassion.  Grief is abundant, the pool of enlightenment from which enlightened people drink.  Secrets of angels live in there, not in the bouncy cheeriness of pep-talkers.  You are God like this, or good, or evil, all equal, nothing is the only thing really.

How I spent my Lost Year.  Belly up to a bevy of local pubs, finally surrendered to cigarettes, lost bills, lost lipstick.  I watched people go from hot to cold to hot and I watched my share of pool games played by tousled skillful boys.  There were jokes and remembrances of things past.  I was unapologetic and brimming with bullshit.  Streets I walked alone at night you wouldn't visit in the full light of day.  Risks upon risks, stupid and pissed, paved my path to emptiness.  I didn't want to go home and if I did I brought strangers.  We'd dance to hip hop and smoke on the back porch while the sun came up.  Adding to their confusion, I wouldn't even kiss.  I wasn't in this for sex, that's for damn sure, this had nothing to do with craving human connection, being lonely, or feeling unloved.  I offered my year to the Gods and Goddesses of Existentialism and yes, I understand their philosophy of non-suicide.  I offered it to the Gods and Goddesses of Structuralism and that resulted in an even better party.  The Gods and Goddesses of Post Modernism said sure, fine, but the flip side, Elizabeth?  Isn't it time you got to the flip side?

What can I say, lads and lasses, it was 12 months crafted and performed with utter conviction: I didn't believe anything but acted like I did.  It could only last so long, sure, but I did it with wit and grace, that letting go, those awkward and impervious days.  Let me tell you how it began, what kind of things have to happen to a woman of my wisdom in order for this level of self-indulgence to have been maintained -

Night Moves

Hot damn I was out in what became cold Gentilly air, hanging with boys not in school, chatting up the unofficial Mayor Of Gentilly (Krewe of Dreux meets at his house), commiserating with the women about the never-ending battle to heal from The Storm.  Then I got to the other work: weaving plastic strips through metal mesh to make a gigantic signifier of a wall that moves like water in the wind and light.  The 3:00 freight pulled by.  Some crows, the sky.  Pretty much 3 blocks from People's and Mendez where I realized almost exactly 2 years ago I was hanging from that dead dead tree hand-painting it bubble gum pink.  Same deal: ladder in the car (except now it's a truck), baseball cap (instead of Saints it's DrawAThon) and heartwarming conversations coming from the glory of being home, above all else, finally only home.  And I think that's not half bad, really, that I'm consistent, that I'm allowed to still be home, that I'm still working at the thing that I love: giving it away.  It's all on a larger scale but it's the same path, turn the page.