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Everywhere twilight is beautiful. Rain is beautiful everywhere. It is always beautiful everywhere it is.

Interesting phenomena: there's people who won't talk to me now that I'm going home. There was the group that wouldn't talk to me because I wasn't back. Now there's a new group that won't talk to me, as soon as I figured out how to go home. You think I'm imagining it? It's only good that I don't care.

I remember once my brother saying to an ex who thought it wise to try to make me feel bad for publicly going after a guy who was publicly beating his dog. My ex was embarrassed or something and didn't think it "proper" to embarrass people, be they dog beaters or pansy-ass boyfriends. My brother said, "You don't get it, she's always going to do what she needs to do. You don't tell her what she can and can't do, it's just not possible."

Funny, that ex? He makes art that's confrontational, the kind of post-modernist stuff that gives post-modernism a bad name, like taking a crap and putting it on china and sitting in a bookstore at a table with a linen tablecloth and the crap and the china and silverware. This from the man who was mortified that I would verbally emasculate a dog-beater. It's a topsy turvy world indeed.

Headphones

"We women have forgotten more about cruelty than you men can remember. What we cannot tolerate are lies!" Queen Elizabeth I

Ovo "Miastenia"
Vetiver "Double"
Patsy Cline "I've Loved And Lost Again"
Safiye Ayla "Saatlerce Basbasa"
Shirelles "Only Time Will Tell"
Kirby Sisters "I've Got The Craziest Feeling"
Jana Hunter "All The Best Wishes"
The Upsetters "Red Hot"
The Mind Expanders "Mandala"
Asha Bosle "Achchch Ji Main Hari"
Blue Stars of France "En 1920"
Lizy Mercier Descloux "Torso Corso"
Wire "The Champs"
Gal Costa "Nao Identificado"
Bird Snow "Field On Water"

Nap

I can't stay awake, it's that drugged feeling of wanting to wake and not being able, and I am asleep. I am entirely oblivious to the world around me to the extent that it feels like I'm just asleep. Then I'm struggling to wake as we do when we are exhausted but have got to get up; I'm literally fighting to open my eyes. And step by step I become aware of my situation. 1. I am in an airport with my dog Annie. 2. I am wearing a heavy camel-colored wool winter coat and an eye-mask. 3. I can't wake or stand up and I want to.

The plane is boarding. I don't even have my boarding pass. I fight to be awake enough to at least take off the damned eye-mask. Annie's on her red leash, just by me, just with me, the way she always was when she was alive. I struggle to get to the check-in desk and am able to pull out my i.d. and to identify myself and where I am going. I'm leaving Austin. I fall asleep again and fall down. This exhaustion is exhausting. I don't know that I can make it to where I wanna go. I have to get on that plane, y'know. My dog & I have got to get out of Texas.

I fall down and people help me get back up again. I keep apologizing. Nobody speaks directy to me. "I'm sorry I'm sorry," and I'm propped against the desk. Annie's amazing, this is before her tumor appeared and she's herself - a brave calm dog. Can you take a dog on a plane? I honestly cannot remember; I've lost my conception of how the world works. I'm being asked my address in Austin and I can't remember. Where did I stay? Someplace forgettable. I am nauseous and ridiculously feeble. What's most terrifying is my consciousness of my vulnerability. It just can't be possible that I can't take Annie on the plane. She'll sit at my feet. We'll get away.

I struggle to wake and get the eye mask off. Where's Annie? She's not here. Oh. No. She's dead. But Cody's there in the nook of my arm. I am equally happy to wake and grief-stricken over the absence of my dog. I am equally ready to work and terrified that I won't have the strength that I need to get my life back.

here there everywhere

Austin is making it really easy for me to leave, I tell you what. But don't let my Austin friends hear me sayin that cuz they'll be hurt. I'm not tryina dog anyone for liking what they like; I'm just expressin myself.

Talking with a friend today about our Austin experiences - finding similar tales of weird inter-politics, as she put it, "They're so defensive and need so much reassurance!" I wonder if cuz Austin bucks the Texas trend of "Don't Mess With Texas!" they've got a sortof cultural malaise, an inferiority complex, and have to just talk a whole lot to get validation? And consider the whole "Keep Austin Weird" campaign. Any contrived effort to keep something uncontrived is sorely misguided. Sadly, sweetly naive. Anyhow -

what do I know? My experience here has been utterly influenced by having been heartbroken and traumatized and also from having lived in and having been loved by New Orleans for over a decade (and Prague, and before that Detroit, before that Philly, New York City, and Chicago). Austin just can't compare. Not that it's without charm it's just ... it's not New Orleans. Which may very well be why so many people love it and have good lives here. I know amazing beauties here, with inspired lives. And I am grateful grateful grateful for everything I have received from this place - I will always have a very soft spot in my heart for this city. I am not initiating some debate here or wanting to hold anyone's hand but this is how I feel:

Austin is a young city. The "personality" of this place has been grafted upon it by bodies, by decisions, versus seeping out of the environment and into the bodies that decide to live here. It's just a matter of history - there's not enough of it yet. And that might make for a very charming and easy place to live, for sure. I just need deeper veins, pungent waters, mineral-rich air. And then of course I need to live where men aren't walking around on stilts or wearing thongs to the coffee shop, hell-bent on being "characters".

(duh, I know: the Bywater, right? Whatever. A guy on stilts in the Bywater is IN THE BYWATER, not on South Congress at Jo's, in a neighborhood no real freaks could afford to live in. Context is everything. At least for me.)

I Am In Love With

The way he says oysters - it just kills me. And I'm not talkin 'bout Ballzack I'm talkin 'bout ZACK LEBLANC BABY!

Just Like That

I am going to be exhibiting at the Dougherty Arts Center in Austin in August. A group show with three other artists. This exhibit will land on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaks.

My piece will be a site specific installation primarily comprised of the names of the dead and missing of New Orleans. My vision for the work is only beginning to materialize. But I will be engaging the evacuated community that has relocated to Austin. We will build something, including levees, and "destroy" it. Our bodies will be in the piece, part of it, building & unbuilding, the entire time.

And then the beginning of September I'm back home to New Orleans. I am conceputalizing and will build public art projects in the environment. I am going to work with the help and support of community and political organizations. I just received sponsorship for this project from University of New Orleans' anthropology department. I will live in this balloon trailer the entire time I'm there. Except when Cody and I evacuate to the Hot Springs.

Then end of December I am going to drive my ratty old car up to Michigan to run wild-eyed through the snow and build absurd fires to watch alone while eating fish I bartered spoons for from the hairy ice-fisherman who will come to the door with his falcon on his shoulder. They will both eye me suspiciously as I will be wearing an enormous coat made of mirrors and will always be drinking a root-beer float. Ice cream in winter? I am the luckiest woman in the world.

"You can't punch a baby and you can't eat a planet but girl, I never took you for granted"

A new plan emerges, a few new doors have opened. If I can somehow get my hands on a better car, this road could be sweet. Even if I don't, this road will be sweet:

- Can go back to New Orleans after my exhibition here in August. Can go home to live for a little while. No strings, no bs drama, just a lil trailer in a lush backyard so I can be at home to get my head together.
- Can go up to northern Michigan and live in a cabin on a lake, with fireplaces and everything, through the winter.
- And can keep on applying applying applying for these residencies I'm on fire for.

I'm so turned on by the fierce energy coming out of New Orleans right now. My friends are just tearing it up, everyone's just tearing it up right now. Music, art, homes, babies, weddings. I'm so there.

I only wish, now more than ever, this is a wish I've had for a long time, that the Jazz Fest organizers would give everyone an opportunity to enjoy the experience: provide half price or free tickets on a certain day to kids, seniors, locals. They've always had the capacity to do this, now more than ever, what with the major underwriting & superstars playing for peanuts. Just some grassroots efforts to bring the people who really are the ones who "need it most" into the fold. Provide shuttles for folks trapped out here, or free satellite broadcasts for evacuees to watch. All it would take is a little imagination and savvy money management.

An Avid Dream Of Transformation

(The truths of storytelling are not the truths of reportage, they have to come alive in the imagination of the viewer and in order for that to happen they have to come alive in the imagination of the storyteller.)

- Bullwhackers
- These women had to be survivors because of, you know, the abuse.
- An ambitious production
- Make it look like an accident
- Umbrage
- Burned & burned
- The Black Hills were stolen from the Sioux
- 13/16
- Mine the miners
- Death by knife
- Martha Jane Burke
- Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
- New language comes from a real place in the soul
- Eyelash
- Persimmon
- Dahlia
- Cold cream
- Beholden to no human cock-sucker!
- Most moral codes are elevated expressions of economic necessity.
- Cohabitation of the primitively obscene with an ornate presentation
- Freighted
- Let's not queer our hustle
- Laconic/Lacanic?
- Obscenity protects by not giving facts
- Lost eyesight
- Create a theatrical version of reality
- How to be, regardless of defects of character or inner demons
- People unable to turn wishes into passions, natural disaster attracts them. First they idolize then destroy. They want to appropriate the value of the people who live lives of passion.
- Community is the secular version of religion
- "You can't think your way to right action, you can only act your way to right thinking."
- Peaches
- Pray over it
- Ambulators
- The benign version of yearning
- Reason is 17th
- Encounter all of the materials that are trust-worthy then forget them.
- Precious to give ourselves in imagination, take joy in respecting integrity, treasure difference.
- Walking around with a secret
- Is my way less noble than any other?

(History is a lie agreed upon. So in this case, the women of history were voiceless, simply the instruments of men's will, and kept drugged, one way or another, 24 hours a day. Society always tells us that when they're imprisoning people outside of prisons they're doing it for that person's own good: hence: hysteria (a beautifully evolved word). So hysteria is behaviour of the essence of being a woman and if its the essence of being a woman it's crazy. So she's hyterical which means she's "being a woman" which means we drug her. Opium. The hysterical woman was made to further the illusions of every man she came into contact with which is the essential truth of the constructed Western Woman.)

- He was just a hustler
- Truths swallow eachother up
- Get to the most general universal -via- being rigorously specific
- Attraction
- The "American Story" is original sin reenacted
- The violation of the sanctity of another person's heart is the unpardonable sin (via Hawthorne)
- There's all kinds of cannibalism.
- A high falutin' term: psedo-speciation
- To distract the populace from any spiritual unease is to give them a more convenient object upon whom to focus their anxieties.

("The spiritual need in every person must be answered on a nightly basis. If that need can't be accomodated in a quiessence of spirit it's accomodated in anxiety and the proper receptacles for anxiety are drugs, gambling, sex, and alcohol.")

- $6.57
- That sad tale
- The fundmental dynamic of humor = things survive (Freud)
- When one member suffers all the members suffer
- What's the verdict?

(Pick a road to go down. And keep going down it. I haven't been down ANY road I haven't found interesting. You just have to know how to look. What allows you to look and to see is humility. Which doesn't require of the road that it conform to your expectations or your previous expreience of roads. Then the definition of a road begins to expand and so - uh - you know - uh - I never think of what I'm gonna write at the beginning of the day. I pray and I sit down. And - uh -)

- The illusion of control is fundamentally at variance with the going out of the spirit which is what you do when you create
- "Visions come to prepared spirits"
- It's not by any virture that I've received a gift
- The muse does know where to find me
- Keynote, struck

sometimes I need a hug

I'm writing here too: myspace. Yep, I am.

My head hurts. Does your head hurt too?

Love,
Queen Pillowtop

Romance

Squinting against the barrage of light, in the distance I believe I can make out a few moving forms, frames made skinny, elongated against the ricocheting brightness of the reflecting water, I have not binoculars or spotting scopes left but either woud be worse than useless, staring into this already painful light. Are those refugees I see, implicit in the shimmer of shadows against light? They could be soldiers, I suppose; they might even be you, my dear, leading our lieutenant and her men on an unintentional wild-goose-chase, but I think not. It might have been a herd of cattle, up to a few months ago, but most beasts hereabouts have been killed and eaten since, and the few that remain are closely watched and not allowed to wander.

Refugees, then; a pre-echo of the coming front, the very image of the deep, soughing trough before the great wave falls, an in-drawn breath before the scream; a rush of dead cells in these arterial ways, a scramble of dry leaves before the coming storm. Bared and broken trees line their way, the splintered stumps, the pale heart-wood naked to the air; hacked, torn down for camp fires as though by massed gunfire. They stand, grown but broken, in imitation of their fretful mutilators.