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Monday, June 27, 2011

Of interest

It occurs...
The story, the store with the grape soda pop in the machine opened by the grand daddy. Fields of cows (now fields of townhomes.) While driving through them, excitedly bouncing up and down to Bette Davis Eyes in the backseat. Hey...Bette Davis Eyes reference...that's a CD to be listened as an adult to on the way out to Aldie, and beyond, to those NOVA places where one can dream of being the type who grew up among the horsey kinds of girls...North Carolina. (Before the teacher in NY who would hate the accent.) Old Tanglewood chapel. A man following three persons (woman, girl, younger sister) maybe during and definitely after the wasp that crawled into the soda pop can. Searing pain and the leggy thing flies off. So many tears! The puffy, painful lip. The fierce geese, driven by a lust for Fritos, terrifying the children (oldest aged six) and the mother laughing...The old locomotive train...Sweet the Sting
A live version of Sweet The Sting
Oh, okay, again, with pictures of fruit.

Nice sometimes

to listen to
Warpaint - Undertow
and so was Mary Prankster!
Mary...
She turned to American Studies...
Oh Mary
~~~~
(And this one girl said...other races and sexes in other times. Like a boy in a tent or teepee, being sung out of his body by a medicine woman. Not so nice, maybe. She really didn't need a boy carrying a fever to others among the people. Very hot, until finally nice to fly out of the body. Chew some xylitol gum; it will kill bacteria on the teeth. Time to go bye-bye, then.)
Hmmm, iieee's good to hear sometimes too.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Life's a beach

Woke up late and felt icky but there were some travel plans. Snarl of traffic and no air conditioning in car but many icecubes in the cooler. The tops of the wrists (not just the inner wrists) are nice places to apply melting icecubes. PCH and Malibu and more traffic and finally...less traffic. A town with many shops in Spanish. A bright little restaurant served inexpensive food, like ceviche on a tostada, and the little tacos with lots of meat between two small tortillas. Pacific Ocean is still really cold. Some patches of sand felt softer than others. Flying overhead were some pelicans and people on strange contraptions that kind of looked like flying go carts--they resembled little airplanes, and made noise. They were in a small squadron over the beach and ocean. "Iceplants" was a new word I learned, while walking on some dunes and looking at flowering vegetation. Mischevious seagulls stole a plastic bag of snacks from two girls but then they called their little dog and the gulls dispersed and the girls got their snacks back. When we left we drove by such a dejected looking older man, with a tattered sign about being homeless and how anything would help. I got out of the car and gave one gold Sacagawea dollar. "It's only a dollar." "A dollar is nice..." "I'm sorry," I said. "Sorry?!" Somehow, he seemed to draw himself up a bit, almost as if indignant at the word. "Thank you!" he said, with some force. "You're welcome," I said. I thought it was good he could draw himself up like that...I didn't know how he got homeless. People have theories about how persons "bring it upon themselves," but I didn't need to know at the moment. I thought about what "you're welcome," means. "You are welcome." On the beach I reflected on how it feels to lie on different kinds of sand, while feeling the colder air above you, and hearing the ocean behind you. Some kinds of sand feel more hard and uncomfortable than others...I was glad to not be homeless and have to sleep on the beach, even though sleeping on the beach could possibly be enjoyable.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Overcoats

I do recall hearing about how people jumped out of windows during the Crash of 1929, but Hard Times has some startling descriptions. Like this:
"I remember for the first time motoring under the Michigan Avenue Bridge, under those streets, where the Tribune is, and seeing not hundreds, but thousands of men, rolled up in overcoats, just on the pavement."
--Julia Walthar on page 193

Monday, June 20, 2011

Retrieved

from stacks of old books and paperbacks and reading for the first time.
"No matter that others suffered the same fate, the inner voice whispered, ‘I’m a failure.’” Studs Terkel-Hard Times

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Things change

Like the high school I went to is probably much less homophobic today.
When I was in Peru in '99 Meredith Brooks' song "Bitch" came on, and the people I was talking to, young people in their early twenties, my age at the time, kind of had a hard time with the lyrics.
"She's saying "soy una puta? Why would she say that?"
I tried to say, sometimes when you say the word "bitch," it's different. It's like...como una mujer muy fuerte.
Very confused stares.
Maybe it's not so hard to imagine now, though.
Transcript from 2007 about NYC considering banning certain words.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Questions to ask

I enjoyed seeing the Pacific Northwest for so many reasons, mostly love of the landscape. I was also pleased to see that a writer for the local weekly took the time to ask some questions and wrote this piece on Sonja Fry's work with female veterans.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Something(s) from a past

For some reason I had the desire to learn more about the actress that played Anne of Green Gables in the movie.
Screen test
What a life.
Just think.
If you'd been born in a different place, or were a different sex, you might've had completely different cultural references...
Bizarre, eh??
Years later interview
Truly it is strange.

So what to play

The road trip was such fun
But for now it's done
Does the money want to come
Does the break
Daylight is coming to mind

Friday, June 10, 2011

So Good!

Cats...Implement Weaponry...How Babies Are Made (I actually learned from that last book.) This cover actually made me laugh, in spite of the terrible topic, which is saying something. Insects and Mules...
Oh Awful Library Books, I shall have to view you more often.
Quaaludes...ha ha ha ha ha ha...
Pop Tops...Passionate Knight...Naughty Librarian...
Rather a shame I don't have an MLS.
Even more a shame that the jobs for them around here are getting slashed.
Ride Baby Ride
Yossi Beat The Evil Urge

Some things to do

i.e. goals I suppose
read things by Monica Furlong
maybe collect some books. if possible. if they are hard to get.

Shoot, a lifetime of choices

There are some to be had...like to continue breathing, give coins to the solicitor (so lucky! when there's a choice, if you don't have the requisite amount, you can give what you are able to at the moment.)
Some other choices have to do with glamour vs. friendship for some people. Do you get dazzled by glamour, ever? Even for a smidgen of a second. Some people are decorated. It's profitable for others to decorate them with heroism, for this or that. They get coated with fondant, silver balls, sparkle dust, sugar crystals. Very nice, and almost everyone likes it. But usually it's more satisfying to have a friend then to take the arm of a walking cake.
Is a stranger ever like "the friend you never met yet."
(I got that idea from a story in I Thought My Father Was God about a woman who allowed her disabled daughter to be taken off to a frat party, by some guy coated in condiments, to the consternation of her 13 year old son. It worked out okay in the end for them. It was a disturbing story. At the end I saw she was from Lexington, Virginia. I went, oh, that makes sense. I attended a very few--like maybe two--in that very town. They were, more or less "safe." But so? So what if some of the soldiers were "nice?" Some of them weren't. And so? What's to be done?)

Thursday, June 09, 2011

seems fitting

that I should discover Ms. Maier on a day when I seemed unable to get Ms. Bush's snapsnot eyes and song out of my head...

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Music is for so many kinds of times.

So I looked at this other version of Gimme Shelter that has some video...It's interesting, isn't it, to see depictions of these people from other times. There was another time, I think, where things were different. This is before the person I am now was embodied in this strange body I've not always completely been comfortable with. It was different in other times.
I have interest in certain people.
It's like the certain people came up to me
They sort of...sort of...whispered in my ear.
It seems like that sometimes.

Another little dream

There was a dream about going to the house I lived in as a very small child. I tried to explain to my sister what it was like to live there as a young child, since she didn't really live there...she found a dog. It danced with us...she took it to it's family and we hoped it would be okay. In the dream there was a school across the street and it was a school where one learned Sioux languages. This is not how it was in real life, but in the dream I was like, oh, yeah, that place looks familiar, I grew up by that school...

idea

Idea for a graphic project based on something that annoys me:
So, there's this one thing that happens sometimes that truly annoys me.
It truly has annoyed me when this person says stuff that goes like, I'm super great because I, like, hacked away at granite while other people were, like working for four hours in a library.
Um, so tiresome, this comparision. I don't know why I have subjected myself to watching it or hearing it. It's soooooooooooooooooooootiiiiiirrreeeesome.

TIRE. SOME.
Tire some.
tire some
tire tire tire tire tire

Tiresome. Like still having to pay off credit card interest on tires I had to buy years ago when all my tires blew out for some reason.

Therefore the graphic artist idea is...whenever this comparison and this phrase floats out of the mouth of the one saying it, what happens is, a BIG FAT KNIFE comes out and STABS THE BIG BLOCKY LETTERS of that boring, boring, boring comparison....

Monday, June 06, 2011

Weird left coast moments

So after a sunny (they called it rainy) winter, you might cross a lawn with a bunch of yellow leaves on it, on a cooler day, and be like, Wow...it looks like fall, it feels like fall, and it's actually April.

Surely...

I understand, people are interested enough to click on these stories. Afterall, I did, too.
But surely some people can find better things to be "deeply pained and saddened" about than Congressmen tweeting photos.
~~~~~
I wonder how Kate Bush got the idea for Army Dreamers?

Tal vez a veces

Tal vez a veces es mejor communicar como un nino o una nina de cuarto anos mas o menos...entonces, realmente, es necesario de mejorar su conocimento de otra idioma? Quizas es mejor a conocer la idioma como alguien quien tiene cuatro anos. Es sufficiente. Bastante. Es mejor, porque se puede estar o sentir muy sencillo o claro o algo como eso. Y se puede pensar en tener solomente un pensimiento muy claro, y ese pensimieto es:
No. Quiero. Estar. Enferma.
Esta bien.
O, Quiero Estar Muy Sana.
Esta bien tambien.

Oh song

It's like I got it in my head from somewhere and need to hear it to get anything done today.
Gimme Shelter Rolling Stones
There's one with army/marines stuff: Gimme Shelter
There's a school project about the war in Vietnam: Gimme Shelter
Perilous, removed, different, same.
~~~~
Once not long ago I visited an exhibit about flight, and the person I was with pointed out a picture of military jets. He'd seen some flying over a place where he was gathered with family members once, and they all thought they looked cool.
"Did you ever see one of those flying in real life?"
"Yeah, maybe. It seems like I might have, but I don't know."
"You don't remember?"
"For some reason, no. It seems like I could have, but I always feel like I'm not as impressed by that stuff, and maybe even if I see something like that, I unconciously don't bother to remember it. I wonder if it's too much bitterness about military stuff interfering with my life, or something. "
"But couldn't you just admire it for what it is?"
"Sure. I could even point and say, look isn't it cool, how it's designed. But that doesn't mean I could fool my brain into thinking it was important enough to bother to remember it."
It was a strange little conversation.

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Stages of life....

Big paperback Little House on the Prairie was the bunk bed in upstate New York portion, but maybe the bed was not bunked.
~~~
I'm Down was actually read quite recently as an adult but some of it sort of seems to harken back to Renton around 1986-ish. In actuality, the whole Little House series and some Shel Silverstein (A Light In the Attic?) was some of what was read.
~~
Captives of Time was sometime between 1989-1991 on a long stay in Monterey.
REALLY wonder what compelled Malcolm Bosse to write that book. Wish he were around to ask.
~~~
Spark played as background music for at least a portion of this post.
~~~
Hmmm, found myself reading about Scott O'Dell as Tear In Your Hand (but it was off Tales of A Librarian) played.
**********
"Scott O'Dell's ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean off La Jolla, California. When the ceremony was completed, the boat turned back toward shore. At that moment, a pod of dolphins burst from the water. Forming an honor guard, they leaped and played, escorting the boat of mourners. The dolphins did not leave until the boat entered San Diego Bay."

That's beautiful.