LOVER

mississippi

- Hiccups
- Orangina
- "Band Of Outsiders"
- Singapore, August 1989
- the cold hard truth baby
- Carpool
- Seersucker skirt
- If you said you were than you should
- Beseler 100% Ozone Safe! DustGun 100
- Vacation? Vacation!
- I found a heart made of stone on the beach this morning. When I took it out of my pocket at home it was broken in half.
- Gun-shy guy
- Unopened letter
- as well as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir
- She's not afraid of you
- Gladiolas blooming pink
- Sill lined with glass bottles
- What are you gonna do? People just disappear.
- Vial
- Pawn-shop plans
- Limited Seating, Reservations Required

Adolfo Quezada's prayer:

"God of the Wild, you are different from what I expected. I cannot predict you. You are too free to be captured for the sake of my understanding. I can't find you in the sentimentalism of religion. You are everywhere I least expect to find you. You are not the force that saves me from the pain of living; you are the force that brings me life even in the midst of pain."

R.I.P SIF

When something dies that you love, when something you love dies you should have to bury it. Have to cut a hole into the earth made of clay with a black shovel you hold in your own hands. Black immutable clay, impossible hands. Alone. At twilight. Alone.

Sif, who was only ever sweet, who only came into my life as the truest constant endearing thing, has died. She has always been with me it seems and I am halved without her. When a loved one dies your capacity to feel joy shrinks a little. Over and over until you disappear.

Her sweet round paws, round green eyes, round body, her all-over roundness steadily filled the hole in my heart until I actually took for granted that hole was gone. She transcended its boundaries and permeated, radiated, became linked with my total history. Now she's gone, the hole's multiplied.

So she lived in my life and died in my arms. She's gone, really away, can't get her back, can't give her all the affection I ever denied her, can't give her all the treats I never gave. My bottom instinct is that I did not love her as much as it seems or nearly as much as she loved me. So now she's in her grave in the backyard where I will try to grow things that will never replace my little girl.

copyright infringement (mirror mirror)

"It's difficult to hear that what we reject out there is what we reject in ourselves and vise versa. But that, in a nutshell, is how it works. If we find ourselves unworkable and give up on ourselves then we'll find others unworkable and give up on them. What we hate in ourselves we'll hate in others. To the degree that we have compassion for ourselves we will also have compassion for others. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all theose imperfections we don't even want to look at. Compassion isn't some kind of self-improvement project or ideal we're trying to live up to.

There's a slogan in the mahayna teaching that says, 'Drive all blames into oneself.' The essence of this slogan is, 'When it hurts so bad it's because I am hanging on so tight'. It's not saying that we should beat ourselves or others up. It's not advocating martyrdom. What it implies is that pain comes from holding so tightly to having it our own way and that one of the main exits we take when we find ourselves uncomfortable, when we find ourselves in unwanted situations or an unwanted place, is to blame.

We habitually erect a barriar called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blame is a way to protect our hearts, to try and protect what is soft and tender in ourselves. Rather than own that pain we scramble to find some comfortable ground.

This slogan is a helpful and interesting suggestion that we could begin to shift that deep-seated, ancient, habitual tendency to hang on to having everytihng on our own terms. The way to start would be, first, when we feel the tendency to blame, to try to get in touch with what it feels like to be holding on to ourselves so tightly. What does it feel like to blame? How does it feel to reject? What does it feel like to hate, to be cruel, unforgiving? What does it feel like to be righteously indignant?

In each of us, there's a lot of softness, a lot of heart. Touching that soft spot has to be the starting place. This is what compassion is all about. When we stop blaming long enough to give ourselves an open space in which to feel our soft spot it's as if we're reacing down to touch a large wound that lies right underneath the protective shell that blaming builds.

Buddhist words such as compassion and emptiness don't mean much until we start cultivating our innate ability simply to be there with pain with an open heart and the willingness not to instantly try to get ground under our feet. For instance, if what we're feeling is rage, we usually assume that there are only two ways to relate to it. One is to blame others. Lay it all on somebody else; drive all blames into everyone else. The other alternative is to feel guilty about our rage and blame ourselves.

Blame is a way in which we solidify ourselves. Not only do we point the finger when something is "wrong", but we also want to make things "right". In any relationship that we stick with we may also find that we want to make it "righter" than it is, because we're nervous. Maybe it isn't living up to our standards so we justify it and try to make it exptremely right. Or we come up with some dogmatic belief and hold onto it with a vengeance. If we just can't stick with a situation any longer then it goes over the edge and we make it wrong because we think that's our only alternative. Something's wrong or something's right.

We start with ourselves. We make ourselves right or we make ourselves wrong, every day, week, month and year of our lives. We feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good. We don't want to be wrong because then we'll feel bad. But we could be more compassionate toward those parts of ourselves. If we look into the very moment of anger or aggression we might see that this is what wars are made of, race riots are made of: feeling that we have to be right, being thrown off and righteously indignant when someone disagrees with us. The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller. Wanting situations and relationships to be solid, permanent, and graspable obscures the pith of the matter, which is that things are fundamentally groundless."

Pema Chodron
"When Things Fall Apart/Heart Advice For Difficult Times"

Rowr

- "Ma you got a big ole butt. Big butt big butt big butt. I'd like to see you dance with that thing." 5 yr old kid to his mom in a dressing room overheard & shared via Kim.
- Me & Louisiana festivals (Smoked Meat/Peach/Shrimp & Petroleum)
- "How do you celebrate petroleum?" Meesha
- Art Brut "Let's Have A Fight!"
- Barbara Manning "I Mean Nothing"
- Hot Snakes "This Mystic Decade"
- The Evens "Mt. Pleasant"
- Honeycomb "Sittin' On A TimeBomb"
- A-Lines "Nothing Personal
- Dean Carter kicks Elvis' ass any day.
- The Raincoats
- "Girl don't kid yourself, you were AMBUSHED! You need to get a blowtorch and fry their asses!"

Today I, Elizabeth Anne Underwood, treated myself to my very first ever ever pedicure. Oh. My. God. The woman was especially indulgent with me as she laughed and said, "You are tomboy! First time!" And I'm high high high. I swear, why's it gotta be so hard for people to just be nice to eachother? Why do we ALL always fuck it up? Because we're DUMB, because we should ALL regardless of gender be down at KTM Nails getting frickin' pedicures sitting in those massaging chairs with breezy not-too-cold a/c blowin' iced coffee in the palm relaxing. I'm convinced this would cure the world of its ills or cure us of our capacity to inflict ills. Either way, you know where to find me now every 3rd Saturday of every month from now until I die. And given the endorphines released into my torrid blood-stream via this pedicure I gather I'll be living till a happy goofy healthy 129.

PISS'N VINEGAR!

- my nights alone painting in the studio reading filming writing whatever picking my goddamned nose walking the streets alone biking alone traveling making music alone, toasting my pets, talking to the walls, I don't care. The joy the power is in the motivation and what's driving me is a pure clean sense of what I will not have in my life anymore, the old dynamics I cannot keep stimulating, and the big windy sense of what it is that's glorious up ahead for my spirit my work my true friends. Now excuse me while I fill up a couple few Hefty bags of obsolete archaic shit and carry them to the curb.

- Hal Hartley
- Plain yogurt w/bananas & pecans
- Abandoned tennis court
- He said my "fineness"
- I'd give my eyeteeth to go to Texas with you; I could ride in the back of your truck like a sack of onions and sleep in the shed with the lawnmower!
- Simple requests/complicated dramas
- Protagonist
- Rain scream
- Circus: Finger Twirler, NYC, 1953
- Skip James
- The context of religious life

and the holy ghost

There's firemen walking up & down the street here; do they know I'm burning? Up all night pulling ropey mucous out of Sif's face. Her struggling to breathe, little chest pulling & pushing, it is strange to love something. This morning at the vet's for 2 hours and the vet loves that little cat too. We're shifting our treatments; she's such a strong fighter; it's not over yet. "Any tortoise-shell cat that's that sweet - I love," he said and cut me a deal on the chest x-ray. Though with each visit I see my New York trip, my San Francisco trip, Mexico trip, Berlin, just fade away. & those people that want money from me can wait. That's ok. Give me back my pyrex pie plates; remember how I supported you all those months? And that student loan knocking knocking? Way I see it, school's not out yet. & the days I have coming for vacation will still be sweet if I never leave Gentilly. There's photo shoots, films, books. I don't want for a thing except for my animals to be happy. & I swear that little girl is happy, such a vamp, flirting with the vet, I swear. It's powerful, the spirit of kindness, of pure simple aliveness. I dip my hand in and drink. You blink and it's just gone. Did you open your mouth wide enough? The trace the taste of gone.

it wasn't the mice it was the men

- Cold cereal
- Charles & Ray Eames
- Cleaning clean
- "It's like fate."
- Don't think about kissing these lips. Kiss!

STILETTO

"We proceed on the assumption that the true and the good, and just possibly the beautiful, coincide. When they do not, we demand an account. The urge to unite "is" and "ought" stands behind every creative endeavor." Susan Neiman

The idea that the gap b'w "is" & "ought" generates metaphysics, a film about good in evil and vise versa, I'm interested in following this thread out. It's an old story to be sure (hello Flannery O'Conner! Hell, hello Homer!) but calling me out. The thing about my film is this: I don't want to show a story of what has happened - I want to conjure up the story of what will. I realize that w/film I can have anything I want - can create the world as I see fit - indulge the unfulfilled desires - ask the unanswerable questions - allude to an answer. It's amusing to me that I've never looked at creative art this way before! It's the idea of a moving flowing narrative that brought me to this realization. So ... a LOW song, a comfort, a searing pain, a road-trip feeling, a modern chisel. A beautiful/ugly human being. The ghosts, tapdancer, the ghosts smoking cigarettes, setting fires, laughing their heads off. Ghosts have heads. Ghosts in the dingy. Tapdancer sparkling by the bed. The bed.

and then there's this

With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person, which almost went unnoticed last week. Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Pokey," died peacefully at age 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin. They put his left leg in ....