NEW ORLEANS GYPSY

Pistol Packin Mama

What a hilarious gloriously perfect New Orleans day.  We were in the Barkus parade!  And discovered that Rosarita loves little kids and senior citizens.  I mean loves them.  Which totally works for me and my agenda to give old school custom made oyster & K&B & creole tomato beads to only the sweetest truest folks on the parade route.  Yeah, we had fun.  I didn't think a dog could eat that many Milkbones!  But I knew we could walk from end to end of this town - ah, Carnival.  Time to hit the streets, walking Spanish down the hall.

Coushatta

Ow a fever can't believe we made it there and back.  Especially after all that Krewe Du Vieux - what a big wild ride, how f'in great all the bands.  And how nice, January 21st, emancipated, collected, a day I've been waiting for a long time: finally all of my things, what of them I have, are in one place.  Finally those journals, sodden, heavy weights waiting rotten flung into the dumpster.  And now home unpacking wispy memories of a time when I was barely on this planet.  Remembering the barely felt that almost burnt me , beat me down.  But we drove laughed smoked and hot earl grey tea from the thermos hollered along to Jayhawks and kept each going, I honestly know how.  And that Ryder truck was huge, those roads were sure wet!  And I truly deeply madly love Louisiana wetlands, it's the most beautiful mystery I hold in my hands - leaving makes me shake and sweat, returning makes me breathe.  Egrets and fog, Texas is gone, all of my books, what I have now, spread on the floor.  I'm going to go to sleep now, love with the letter Z

 

We begin to begin the begin we beguine!

Oh oh oh oh oh it's that time! 

76% Of Full

I keep getting Sylvia Plath.  As yet another wave which comes from where I know ebbs.  My dog was in the backyard of my childhood home, my new dog!  I was listening to Belle and Sebastion, "If You're Feeling Sinister".  She was underneath the crabapple tree, from far away I saw her dark shape down there chewing a stick, where the lily of the valleys were planted.  I still love my mother.  I still love my childhood home.

The wave ebbs and I allow myself a glass of Chianti.  We walk in the dark that is cold on the surface while underneath it is sub-tropical, because I have a warm bed to sleep in.  Warmth is always only ever a moment away when there's a warm bed to sleep in, situated in a warm home to close the door on, settled in a warm room painted mermaid blue.

Owls take me.  Quarter horses take me.  Pecan trees, spoons, books take me.  I'm coming to terms with my bitch against intimacy with people.  It's like a, it's when the, for then and only, walk to the park and let the dog run.  In a mad dash make it to the gate and dodge this way and that and run.  Parades begin tomorrow!  It will be chilly but inside there is sun.



"Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest."   Albert Einstein

The Day After Tomorrow, Today

Today I'm not crying like yesterday because today I am not devastated with sorrow over missing my Annie.  How does that happen, the demands of grief?  How over 2 years later does it hit like a Mack truck - her absence?  I'll tell you.

When we agree to love a layer of the hard shell that loss coats our organs with dissolves.  By accepting the new dog, for example, something protective but ultimately deadening melts.  The heart is tender under there, it just is, that is it's nature.  The shell dissolves with love, softness radiates, and pain.  Can't love without pain, ultimately.  Not in a masochistic way, not in a "woe is me/pity party" way, nor am I implying that I don't know what love is (it is not, in and of itself, pain).  But with the decision to accept and allow another dog (home, yard, friend, dream, kiss, opportunity) into my life, the truth of having loved and lost, the memory of the illnesses and blood, more importantly the memory of Annie's specific intelligence and energy ... it aches.  There is an ache.  It's not all ache but the ache is there.  If you have survived loss and at the same time remained open to life you know what I'm talking about.  It's not where we want the heart or mind to stay but it is a wave that flows through. 

The other morning, chilly New Orleans winter morning, early (we get up early in our house), foggy and humid outside, I was at the fridge, near the stove, with it's stovepipe vent, and noticed clouds coming into the house.  Wisps of ghostly foggy clouds were traveling down our stove vent and circling me, standing there, breathing me in.  We breathed together, the clouds and I, closed our eyes and felt the real life, embraced.

In my sadness over Annie's absence I was desperate to find a photo of her.  Most of them, what remain, are in Austin in storage.  But then I hauled the box out of the back of the car that I'd recently retrieved from Lee's garage.  I'd forgotten what was in it but it was full of photographs that had survived the flood. 

I now remember where that box was in my house in Gentilly (I couldn't remember yesterday - was it in the garage?  How did it manage to survive?) - it was in my bedroom closet.  That I had to pry open with a crowbar, it took a good 10 minutes.  At the top of the closet on a small shelf: photo albums, Cathouse memorabilia, letters, Polaroids.  Untouched by water untouched by waste. 

They've been sitting in Lee's garage since then because I had no other place to put them.  This was an issue for those of us who were exiled: you could go to your house or apartment and perhaps spend a week pulling remnants out of the wreckage and cleaning them with a bleach and lavender solution, but where to put them?  I could only save what I could carry, really, not that there was much to save but given some time and space it was possible to save more.  It was much like evacuating - value judging the pieces of your body and history and humanity, deciding right there and then in the hot heat of Louisiana Octobers and the rash raging of a million broken hearts, deciding trash trash trash try to save trash trash trash trash save trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash.  This one box of photos went to Lee's, it was the one space she could offer me, just a cardboard box, a Kellogg's Corn Pops box, not big really, dumped into the back corner of her outdoor shed with no climate control and molding but relatively safe.  You take what can be given, you accept it with thanks. 

In this box I found photos of Annie, and myself when I was a singer in a rock and roll band across America - singing in Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, Detroit, New York, Iowa, New Mexico, California, Montana, New Orleans.  Windows into the past, windows into what is contained in this body, my body, my passed.  Peeling some clumps of photos apart, some damaged from the elements and neglect and disaster's patterns, the smell of mold, a hint, toe curling, of what the entire city reeked of, gray and deathly, for a long long time, and still does, on certain nights.

I also pulled out a journal written since then and opened to the page of the last night of Annie's life and the first day after her death. "Who will I be without my Annie, will I even exist?"  I was in Texas, miserable, sick in the chest, praying for clarity, praying for relief from the loneliness, praying to find a way back in.  And ArtInAction began then, out of that, I wrote, "Am I planting the best seeds for me, for my future, by taking such risk?  This art project I am launching - it is vital, it is necessary, and it begins with me.  It won't end with me but it does begin with me.  I have faith that this action I have initiated is going to lead me somewhere true and good."   And then home a week in the trailer while it rained I wrote, "So here, out in this interior city, city of interiors spilled, in this interior, what can I make?  What must be made in this gutted and stripped place?  How full is my empty?  Do not be afraid."  Do not be afraid, everything speaks,  do not be afraid

Build the fire high build the fire long

Wild horses couldn't drag me away.

Because We Are We Remember Helen

"Crisis + Paradox = Revolution" A new scientific formula by The Perimeter Institute's most radical physicists

"Simply producing work is not enough and it only produces work that is simple, which doesn't do much except decorate.  And who in this post post-modern world can possibly be interested in work that only decorates?  There's far too much radical work being made by artists affected by and responding to the environmental crisis, the crisis of racism, sexism, classism, hunger, poverty, homelessness, trauma, the crisis of over-population, the crisis of faith that is the human plague upon this planet.  Intelligent, conscious work coming from these challenging times is doing fantastic things to traditional canonical binaries, which historically have been great at perpetuating patriarchal constructs (that tell us that  white, autonomous men are"the artists" and that their system of commodification is the only legitimate measure of "art's" "value"). I only mean I need to be where the action is. 

Because it's easy to make things when life is easy, there's nothing to it.  It's when life is pain and honest stories need to be told that the real making begins.  Who cares what the comfortable, unblemished, inexperienced person who has never had to face real hardship has to say?  I mean I think it's blasé.  People who have walked through the fire and lived to tell the tale are prehistoric and they make the most validating empowering examples for me - plus if you've got no scars you've got no stories. 

I'm not saying that suffering is an ideal state or that one should remain static, inert within it - by all means, flow - anything else wouldn't be healthy.  How a natural eco-system manifests, absorbs, reacts, responds, and grows from crisis is what I'm talking about.  That crisis is natural is what nature tells us and who am I to fight nature?   I am interested in the work that comes from persevering through genuine struggle - that comes from honestly being in nature - everything up until then is just hocus pocus (or as my friend Zora Neale used to say "jive")." 

And you and you and you yes you and you too!  I'll have one of those and that and this and that and those and yes and yes!  How good it is always to run around the fire so hot so broad surrounded by sulphur and chill and family the family of this city this now this place of strength of grit and truth and bravery and our own special language.  How good it is to walk as close up to the fire as possible and watch where she put the stick from the river in and put my own things to burn in and hug and kiss and know what it is to really live.  How good it is to dance and sing and raise a glass and listen and know that here we are really living.  How good it is to honor and bless and respect and hear and stand and remember and be remembered.  How charming to be joyous from a true place of bounty of earned wisdom of peace of strength of friendship of this here where if you're not here there's just no way you can know.  How true to walk and witness and pray and open eyed and heart with no shame with no regret with no shadow of shame hanging over the head, to sing and stomp on this ground where my people and animals and loves and journals and guitars and books and clothes and cast iron pans and elders and grocery stores drowned.  How good it is to be honest, to be there for the streets and empty houses and piles of garbage and desperate children and cold men and women living underneath the freeway, to hear them, to be enlightened by them, to see the light in pain, to not ever have run away.  I'm so glad I knew enough to know that I needed to come back, to do this work, to build and gut and carry and call and feed and hold and embrace.  This city is still an embrace that envelopes me.  Our hearts are open wide singing a slave song, a call and response, a song of important things, a song of charity, of sorrow, of joy.  We are the keepers of the flame, we are in that number, and we carry on these traditions that this world will not survive without and we do it for you and you and yes you too, I promise.