LOVER

Jouissance/Haunt Me

Elsie Carlisle "Pu-leeze Mr. Hemingway"
Darondo "True"
The Lonesome Sisters with Rayna Gellert "One Morning in May"
Dusty Springfield "The Look of Love"
Julia Lee "Blow Top Blues"
Folk Implosion "Cabride"
King Kong Ding Dong "It's My Birthday"
The Maytals "Pressure Drop"
Charles Brown Superstar "Beestung remix"
Felt Tip "Love Is All"
Algerian Radio "Evaporating Borders"
Johnny Cash "Missouri Waltz"
The Daisy Chain "Unhappy For Me"
Au Revoir Simone "Hurricanes"
Camera Obscura "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken"
Telephone "Dans Ton Lit"
Lizzy Mercier Descloux "Hard Boiled Babe"

This morning off Springdale the graves of the poor were singing - so I got lost in another cemetary today. When I came home I had to throw my body in the pool, to come back into my skin again. The water in there when you splash it at twilight becomes tiny glass birds that shatter against the walls they try to fly through. I'd like to live in that water, holding time inside my mouth like a coin of salt, sugar. A medly of vegetables wrapped in a tortilla, a touch of too-sweet lavender honey upon his cheek, I have a pile of gifts for her and him, you, me.

Because inside it's upheaval: the guts of the past months of my life are puked out on the floor - yes: I move again. And I can't think straight, I'm having a hard time separating what I'm going to take w/me while house-sitting, what's going back with me to New Orleans, what's going into storage until next Spring. It's hard to think past the layers of lessons and losses that fill the New Orleans heart. Ah, it's not over, not by a long-shot, for us New Orleanian girls and boys. Isn't someone coming over with pineapple juice, to rub my shoulders, make me laugh? No? Well I'll just manage just fine without that.

And I don't believe my city's disappeared, I don't believe it's being gentrified, my friends who are living there are keeping it wholly alive. There's so much propaganda flying around about her - the way I see it, if you're not there you just don't know. I don't know. Which is why I'm going back. When are you going back? Everything is fiction and it's all true; the stories in the water are the color of the sky when I burn it to the ground at night. And I swallow it and my mouth fills with burnt marshmallow that I savor and savor and savor now.

Girls Just Wanna

I am completely infatuated with resin. I want to encase everything I own in it. Everything.

Jerk someone from one location; fling him in another. The elements in one location define the other. But sometimes the shock of transition is so great that definition does not begin. He had abandoned words. He listened, carefully, to the giant, but not for meaning. He examined the words for tone and voice quality, the same way he searched the giant's face, the same way he watched the huge body, shoulder, arm, or knee, shifting as he talked. He was trying to pick out, in the firelight, the hints of emotion he could relate to. He found a few. Then a few more.

KEEP UP WITH ME!

Coo Coo Face!

Dear Diary,

Hello all of you thousands of people who "hit" my site every day. I know that this blog is changing the world as we know it, by its very nature, and because I can "publish" this as soon as I click the "post" button I know that I am connecting to people in a way that I could never have if I'd had to write this out long-hand, go to Kinko's, xerox it, and put it in the mail to all of you, my loyal loyal followers.

In light of my appreciation for the value of this context and every little blip and beep expressed within it, I want to tell you about my day. Ah, my day. It began with the glorious baptismal experience of having every errand I tried to run while wrestling my tiny hot airless air-condition-less loud old car in typical Austin shazbat traffic thwarted by circumstances I could not have predicted. Every single errand. Thwarted. Every.

When I got home I had a message on my door from "Management" informing me that no, they will not be refunding me the (gigantic to me) doubly-paid security deposit that both FEMA & I both paid on this apartment, because? Long stupid story. Though I think I may have changed the outcome of their attempt at highway robbery by writing a scathing letter with FEMA & City of Austin lawyers cc'd and threatening to tell The Austin Chronicle, who will be interviewing me this weekend, a sad bad story of the big bad corporation ripping off the poor possession-less Katrina evacuee. Ex-hausting, right?

So with a submission deadline staring my sweaty, finger-nail chewin', dark-getting-darker eyes down, I hop on the trusty computer to get my images ready for sending. And for some reason my normal facility for the process of preparing images has deteriorated to the point where what normally would take me, oh, a half hour, has now taken me 3 hours. 3 hours. Time I could have spent swimming or catching up on the World Cup or packing, how about that? Packing to move in less than a week! Yeah, I could've been packing but no. Mistake after mistake after mistake and all of a sudden I am not a talented artist with a mind for the digital world. Nope. I'm a dunder-head who doesn't know the difference between a jpeg and a tiff.

There you have it, my wonderful emotive evocative bloggage that I know has not only knocked the bar for the quality of your own bloggage waaaaaay up but it has also clicked the scales a notch or two over away from "evil" toward "good".

Truly and sincerely,
Yours forever and ever-more,
Miss Tyfied Shanked

"Once they see something they want they won't stop until they have it!"

I can laugh at this, and have been, repeatedly, all day long, and will continue to, genuinely, well into the dark and stormy night. Can you laugh at it too? I hope so, for your sake, I sincerely do.

Run Lola Run

I was asked, "Why all the words, written or cut out, crossed out or spray-painted, what is the purpose of language within your work?" Because I was underslept I babbled. What I tried to say was it's all about the push and pull between what might be and what is, what was and what is, what is and what will or will not be someday. And that if I am anything I am just a girl that's always been held captive by the power of language, used for good or evil, used carelessly or diligently, selfishly or faithfully: roses in vases left on the doorstep or a flat-tire when you head out for work: either way it's got me, language. It's always been this way. I make pictures with them to enact what I think is possible and to illustrate what I think is not. I make poems, essays, and stories for the very same reason. I make pictures and stories because anything is possible and anything is not.

And what can I say, I've not got a long worn wooden table to eat homemade bread and wine at. I don't have a closet full of jewel-colored dresses and I don't have a Subaru station wagon. Despite that poverty I think I am awfully attractive but I realize that they might not. From their side of it I might look dangerous or unkempt, a lone wolf, a loud crow. It is possible to stand me on the edge of the Pont Neuf bridge and watch all of the mystery in the world tumble across my face and my eyes? Just when it seems they can't get any darker they go a shade darker and it could open your chest wide and I could climb in and we'd have an adventure, just like that. I imagine, always, that kind of amusing, suprising surprise. And while we're all butting up against our daily cracked and shredded wishes I know I am not the only one who thinks this way. We wouldn't think it if we didn't think it could happen - it would never get written if it could never happen.

Vessel

Like embroidery, loop upon loop crossed over and loop again. Some call it fidgety - others? If they're like me they'll call it awake, you know? The opposite of dead.

I wore shoes that lent me an air of authority. Lipstick, hair, push-up bra. A woman made up to move in a world that's so stilling. What it is, when you get down to it, is we have tools to keep us moving against a great magnetic field pulling the body back down to the earth, hard. I don't want to be still is the moral. I don't want to be still yet.

So here I am, feet unshoed, up, relaxed. What do you make of that? Words and entries, spells spelling, keep me moving, moved. I'll always make something of it, I'm sure. I might even make what you need, precisely, exactly, if you want me to.

Yes, that Erica Jong

"I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown. I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: Turn back, turn back; you'll die if you venture too far."
– Erica Jong

I always equate those 70's writers with cheap paperbacks, small fonted, dog-eared and smelling attic-y even when they were new. And I categorize Philip Roth, Erica Jong, Stephen King as "those 70's writers" (interesting trio, eh?).

When I was studying in Prague I had a few days of flu-ey ache ick blech. And my friend, young man, young handsome man, brought me red cherries and Erica Jong. "Good flu reading," said my young handsome boy who used to humor me when I came up with crazy ideas like forming the Anti-Kafka Brigade in Prague of all places.

So I have to confess, I hear "Erica Jong", I think of Prague. I don't remember a word she wrote. But I remember lying on my hard Czech bed, spitting cherry pits into a paper cup, sweating, and those yellow flimsy pages I'll forever link with the name Erica Jong.

Ace In The Hole

During my 8 hour ERV training for my DRO preparations today, I was informed that it might be tough for me to get any action because ERV teams are two-member and most of the ERV teams are married couples, which is preferable, making them easier to dispatch. Ok, well, I'm a renegade.

And when I was under the hood my supervisor asked, "Your daddy taught you that?" After I said, "No, I taught myself," I got to thinking, while strapped in the back after I aced my road test, what did my dad teach me? Actually hands-on teach? And the only thing I could come up with was backgammon. Not that he didn't try to teach me how to golf, being impressed by my raw talent on the driving range and all. But backgammom, I took to that and the general gambling gambols he passed on in the basement at the poker table.

And from that, this: "The difference between a professional and an amateur? A professional knows when to quit." So two things, three if you count the 6th sense you inherit from your ancestors who make a life out of risk. Four if you count my proclivity for driving, cars, and engines - he raced them and built them, afterall. But I coulda got those talents from any of my blood, really, I've no sure proof there's a straight line from that to my pop. So backgammon's the sure bet, backgammon it is.

La fiévre qui brule l'intérieur tellement lumineux de moi

I don't worry about making art. It's the one thing I do not worry about. Can I will I? Not worried. I do, however, worry about money, getting the money to make the art, and making the money to stay safe.

Now. It's not like I'm Rauschenberg or Kiki Smith, not Pipilotti Rist or Annette Messager or Marlene Dumas but I work steadily and I think I get steadily stronger at it. Will it take care of me, really? Will my listening to these cave echoes and sky calls, will my following the trickle to the river in the next town over the ridge down that ravine through the pines lead me to a safe place? I don't think about this all the time but lately. I'm safe as a human being who can do it, will I ever just be safe? And doesn't this question rub and bristle against my very premise as a visual artist? And isn't that tension the marker that I really mean it?