What's typical after three hours and forty minutes of late French new wave is to smoke a lot of cigarettes, but that option's no longer open to me. So instead, I let myself get picked up. Which, as the story unfolds, is as much like continuing along in a cafe scene as the smoking would have been. I'm not easy to pick up; or, I am, if I'm in exactly the right mood and you do exactly what this guy did. He was bold. He wasn't even fully in his seat before he was chatting me up, and after the film, although I turned my back to him, didn't make eye contact when he said goodbye, and took a very long time fixing up in the toilet, etc, he was waiting for me when I headed for the street, and straight asked me for a drink. I had an hour to kill before going to Brandon and Alli's for dinner. I suggested the House of Shields but he said the Pied Piper.

At the bar I ordered a beer and he had a Coke. Who drinks Coke outside of the French movies? He continued to be bold: He said he thought Veronika and Marie loved Alexandre in the same way, and for the same thing: Alexandre fucked them really well; then he said he himself had noticed this very problem: when he fucks a girl really well, and he means really well, he said, then the girl falls inordinately in love with him. This had the immediate intended effect of distracting me from the subject of the conversation to private considerations of whether or not he could fuck me really well, and he knew I was distracted, he knew what I was thinking about, and he asked me, what are you thinking about? Then he named Alexandre's primary charm with women as his smooth conviction about what he wanted with them. Except my Coke-drinking companion kept saying that Alexandre was "convicted". Really he was describing himself and his own bold manner. He talked about the knee socks I was wearing and this gave him the opportunity---which he made, and took---to put his hand on my calf, feel my leg and talk about it! Bold! More than bold! Offensive! I let him! We hadn't been in the bar 15 minutes. Isn't this amusing? But I know someone just like him, thank god; I am on to this game. And he had lots more to play before the hour was up. He analyzed and correctly conjectured my Meyers-Briggs. I asked a question and he told me I was going to have to earn that information. He made me laugh. He insulted me and he flattered me. As it always turns out in a city as small as a French new wave film where everyone shows up at the same cafe at the same time all the time, he's the ex-lover of someone I know by proxy.

At 8 o'clock I said it was time to go. When he told me he didn't have a job I told him he had to pay the tab. I let him walk me part-way to my dinner party. Very beautifully, however, just as in the best after-dark rain-and-Gauloise Paris street scene, the real narrative begins when I leave the street for the party, kiss my friends and tell them the story of the last hour. They know I'll never have another date with this man and they know why---something he could never guess, is aside from anything he did or said or didn't say or didn't do, and which information is the most basic first exchange you make with a new person: his name. If you know me well, you know what it was.

Oh, the film? The Mother and the Whore. It's playing next month at the PFA, definitely don't miss it.

"The vast tower transcends traditional notions of architectural programming. Disposed diagonally as well as horizontally and vertically, it is more like a city than a typical office building. Conceptually, it comprises three visually discrete structural forms that merge in a single, nonhierarchical high-rise. The building’s relentlessly sensual, undulating mass blurs visual and spatial boundaries between surface articulation, decoration, structure, and enclosure, epitomizing Díaz Alonso’s original, distinctly figurative architectural vocabulary."

m.o.

“The operating principle that seems to work best is to go to the landscape that frightens you the most and take pictures until you’re not scared anymore.”

TMI?

I have been enjoying the worst bout of PMS of all my womanhood, which began at age 11, if bleeding is to be the marker. 10 days of being out of sorts with my body, everything's swollen to pitch, to say nothing of 'irritable bitch'. This morning I grew nauseous and almost fainted in Target (but WTF! was I doing in Target?!). I did manage to get myself home, but only in time to lie down for three hours of migraine-grade headache. There was an afternoon poet-xmas-birthday thing to go to; I was an hour late, and weak, and sweaty, but happy to see my fellows! Poet A is having a work crisis; Poet B saw Poet C in the hospital yesterday. Poet D didn't introduce me to famous writer (obviously, not a poet) E, but it wasn't on purpose. I support Poet F 's dislike of his terrible neighbors, he has real reason to. Poet G gently reminds his partner to check her calendar every month when she's feeling blue, but not, he was sure to say, when they are having a fight. Poet H says take calcium and magnesium, it really helps. There was one baby, at least one grandma. My stomach hurt, I couldn't eat the food or cakes. I didn't drink, which, given the season and the poor tires on my car, is a real blessing. Music being played by several humans in the front room of what truly is a railroad operation/house. I'd never been to that part of Albany before. Actually, maybe I'd never been to Albany before! I was reading Under Albany before going to target/almost-fainting/getting the migraine /going to Albany Can I blame all this on Silliman? That just wouldn't be fair. Or it would be; my physical misery aside, it was a sweet afternoon and a lovely party. It's nice to say Merry Xmas and Happy Birthday Nick Robinson.

----midwinter day----

i want the toaster AND the hotplate AND the hairdryer AND the microwave oven AND the mercedes behind door 7 AND the beefsteak AND the custard AND the chocolate AND i deserve it

in general, people deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. The notion that the toaster is desirable conflicts with the knowledge that you just passed it up, so you banish the notion.

the little battering ram that could

first off, gossip is the laziest locomotion.

Is poetry a sustainable resource?

Has anyone seen Zabriskie Point lately? I can't stop thinking about it, or rather, I can't stop thinking about the last 15 minutes of it, I wake up in the middle of the night and lie awake plotting a four-thousand-point-radiating-star course of action and watching the Zabriskie Point end-game replay in my "mind's eye" over and over again. My mind has no use for eye! what it needs now are four (thousand) hands.

This mental-viewing-slash-cheap-metaphor Zabriskie Point thing happened to me once before, I suddenly recall. At the very moment the Space Shuttle Columbia was burning up over Texas, someone I'd never met before was in an airplane bound for San Francisco and when that plane landed my whole life did a Zabriskie Point. Equidistant from this thought is the one about running into an old friend AT THE MALL last weekend. Jesus, was that just last weekend? I was buying stockings. That was four thousand lifetimes ago, at least.

what is it alice notley said? i never tried to be anything other than a poet

At the Latin American Club---of all the spots in all the spots of all the world's watering holes/spots----just earlier than now---Max Heller, Contact Zone Coordinator for the CPT (Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater, in residence this Friday at CCA/SPT) said the most amusing of all things, considering we'd only known each other 8 (albeit 8 long, intimate) hours: "That is so Suzanne of you Suzanne!"

What this means is that I finally am, in fact, Suzanne. Put a penny in the slot and etc

track 11 of the gramaphone best of 2006 on repeat play, which is what kind of distorted telos? it's the pretty but inaccurate bridge that seems so inadequate to a new body trying to rest after such a long, long bridge of rest-less agency, which took me so far from there to this strange new unordinary here---put a penny in the slot and make an artificial light shine?---

somewhere nearby i have a picture i took on a grassy lawn in san diego a lot of years ago: atop a decorative garden-stake glass-and-wire sculpturette of a grasshopper, is a real grasshopper, shiny, glossy, wet, with papery translucent newly discarded skin just about to drop--do i feel like that? not really. but it's in my mind to share it with you. i feel something even better than that. you can get from there to here in nothing flat.

Dear Ones,

I am taking a break and will return in the new year if not before. Please wander the bare archives, and remember!

"Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine."

Yours,
SS

Last night I tried to open my mind. Afterwards, I fell asleep and dreamt I ate most of the petals of a cream-colored flower tipped or edged in brown. Someone told me the flower was of hallucinogenic property. I was scared but the sky became the most silvery-rose-blue untouchable breatheable lacey-cloud luminesence I have ever seen! It was bright and soft. I was walking on a road alongside a mountain, it was something simultaneous to sunrise and to dusk. Later, in what felt like a medieval village, the sky was the black-brown head of a scaley elephant, where the moon would be, its red and yellow eye.

"Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine."

"I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, and what is more by erasing all the traits, even the most apparent ones, the ones that mark the tone, or the belonging to a genre (the letter for example, or the post card), so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately, as soon as any third party would set eyes on it . . . "

Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, 1987

at the movies

an Action!

Near-wet pastures graded by censure.

The insulated & thick proclivities of active duly workers, arrays chained ankle-to-ankle behind clear flat gelatinous plates, pushing the damp hands through The wet slots in the structure and into heavy, leadened fur-lined glo ves to manip

ulate the modeling proce

dures inside the enclosure:


“I” given the distillation—I
or a hand speechless. eye on your—

Awe—specific to speech
-sources of transmissive

Disgraces, discharges
viz. Spirit a

mouth Chaste
with Disturbance tryes

aswerve up the matter for
branches, Olive, gloves sets

up a water, sets up a matter for
clear locution of

One compossible
but not together

shores up sultry shores up
desultory besotted Valley

of Sand
purrs

“pleasure”
purrs “message”

purrs I as a yes and able
Mirror

to press “my send” huh
my gratitude against—

flesh— According to
to terrible elements Tangible as place—

as Act. at every during The
night now irrespeakable

sundials Repurposing
signs of life

unhrld firm thighs bleed off center-
course, sand-

blasting sticky rhyth-
mms of Force “Consensual” dis-

curse Trap doors leading
being the sticky signs of

future lesions Letters
by sortie advance

panting
easements

spurt accessive
portions

forming high
slits

to fuck all
in

the lesion split.
Let this stand in for I

I was, I was absolute high

sticky
digits

sighs under Awe;
the flowered slick heav-

ens Silty kittens
oh spartan gifts of—

standard living.
wet Issue, sticky,

Licks Irre-
versibly Night

in the middle
of toward warbling

Of. Oh. Ou les silky
milk, kitty. come prick me with that

H.D. : "honey is not more sweet than"

Valie Export, Ontological Leap, 1974

it's never too early for the holiday spirit

no more poetry readings. i'm fucking tired.

tonight after work and after shrink and before driving home to oakland i stopped at the rainbow grocery and had the really good fortune to run into one of the loveliest and sweetest of all poets anywhere, cedar sigo, who works there. we had a hug and kiss in the oil and vinegar aisle and a quick hello of what are you doing? cedar said he hadn't been working at the store all that much and has been writing a lot, and he said, you know, the amazing thing about poetry is it will never betray you, the more you give your life to poetry the more poetry gives its life, and gives life, to you. [or he said something very close to this]. this kind of encounter is what makes all the expense and commute and suffering and overbusyness and overcommittedness of life in the bay area exquisitely, infinitely, everlastingly wonderful and good. thanks, cedar. i kiss you.

which practice?

to fully experience one's desire to cause pain to what's pained you, without acting on that desire, or to no longer feel at all the desire to cause pain to what's pained you? is the latter an exchanging of internal experiencing of pain--you hurt me--for compassion for the agent?

but did we co-opt the agent anyway? in which case, as joseph beuys:

"If you cut yourself, bandage the knife."

i'd like a tshirt that says "constitutionally unable to outgrow my naiveté"

hm. there's a lot to be said about this:

Action, yes

.............

and, new work here.

"I have a kind of tiny space in which I can breathe and survive."At a meeting point between art and carnival, Eva Basdekis walks, wearing multicoloured boots which conceal the site of her latest work, entitled I Trust You. "Sometimes you feel quite strange because you walk through crowds of people and they don't know," she explains, "It has to do with the fact that it's on your foot and it will fade out and it doesn't have any value for the market." Using a form of violent embroidery, recent performances in Sheffield, Munich and Bristol saw Basdekis using needles and coloured thread to sew portraits - the Mona Lisa and Mickey Mouse - on to the soles of her feet. The intense, detailed, iconic-ironic result demands close-up examination (and at her Sheffield performance, closed circuit television provided just that). Each piece of fleshly embroidery is done scrupulously, slowly, methodically, literally stitching the traditional and the transgressive together.Unlike a tattoo, an embroidered picture on the skin isn't permanent. But neither does it disappear instantly. After the performance, Basdekis lives with the embroidery on her foot - or in the case of Art Is Beautiful, the palm of her hand - for several weeks, then pulls out the stitches as they become loose. In this way, the embroidery has a life extending far beyond the period of its public exposure. After her performance at Sheffield's Site Gallery in December 2006, Basdekis, alongside her former mentor, Franko B, took part in a public discussion, during which one audience member commented that watching the stitching of the foot was less painful for the viewer than observing Basdekis having occasionally to flex her entire leg in response to "pins and needles". "I am trying to communicate the feeling of obligation to obey the rules," Basdekis comments later, "Repetition is a ritualistic and productive routine-gesture that helps me to indicate the power and violence of authority. I am trying to keep myself deadpan as the alienation becomes more clear. At the seven hour performance at the Site Gallery I was thinking at the same time how insane what I'm doing is.. I try to express the anaesthetisation of the body, of the human being, of the society. I felt quite tired during my performance…it was not so much the pain or the "pins and needles" but this tiring and upsetting obligation to the rule."Evangelia's embroidered images deliberately polarise the over-exposed extremes of fine art and popular culture. "Sometimes I feel contaminated by my education," she reveals, "Mona Lisa is important because of institutions and museums and the way they make you think. When you stitch Mona Lisa you translate a masterpiece in a very low way - a craft, but I have to observe very strict rules to repeat it that way." Basdekis' Greek upbringing didn't include formal embroidery, although she remembers its popularity in traditional Greek homes. The application of embroidery on the sole of the foot, however, does consciously refer to darker aspects of Greek twentieth century history: the falaka tortures (beatings on the soles of the feet) inflicted on political prisoners during the years of military dictatorship between 1967 and 1974. But Basdekis uses violence on her own body to open new possibilities."When I stitched my hand for the first time I released a kind of energy that would last a long time," she says, "Usually people think of self harm as a hidden wish for suicide. But for me suicide has no power. For me to harm yourself expresses control of the body. In my country it's sinful to harm the body. It's a kind of rebellion against that religious thinking." Citing 2005's Art Is Beautiful as a turning point, Basdekis also refers to the importance of two earlier performances. In the case of Tama Art, Basdekis - on her hands and knees - proceeded through the centre of Athens and entered the municipal museum, where she remained kneeling in the position of prayer. The proceedings drew crowds of puzzled onlookers, and took the unwarned museum staff completely by surprise. It was, Baskdekis believes, "Bold to do it in an urban landscape. I used all the city in a different way. I made the viewers use the city in a different way. I decided to go into the museum without any permission. The people in the museum, they could see me praying - that's what Tama means - with 100 people watching, and the museum staff didn't know what to do, how to behave. It was my idea to make it a parody. All that kneeling at the museum made me feel like a piece of work in the museum! People were so quiet - like in church - and afterwards so excited. It was amazing."In We Are The Revolution - a direct reference to Joseph Beuys' work from 1972 - Basdekis videoed herself wearing Mickey Mouse ears, repeating Beuys' phrase having inhaled helium gas from a balloon, undermining the confidence behind the statement. "Beuys changed the rules," says Basdekis, "But I was asking what I was doing. Could I change society? And so, by using helium, I gave myself a cartoon voice.."Besides providing an unnerving quality, Besdakis use - indeed, sense- of humour reinforces the transgressive intentions behind her work. She has previously related her performances to the function of the clown, fool or jester in history, whom she sees as "eerie, insane..marginal in the palace…that he remains without a punishment is evidence that he (his truth) has not any power (over the king, authority)". Basdekis' transgressive actions therefore embody pessimism and rebellion, mysteriously made to unfold in a fixed continuum she sees as "the only time and space I can breathe as a proper Evangelia." She continues, "I feel quite free and original because I believe in what I'm doing. It's my manifesto. I don't have any sense of what the viewer thinks. But it's amazing how liberating it feels when you're doing that - you do the most right thing in the world."During the year she spent being mentored by Franko B, Basdekis seems to have become reassured about the direction of her art. Franko offered her "A kind of philosophy about art and life. I'd been wondering why I was an artist and he put the question in a different way. He said okay you are an artist but why do you have to keep on doing it? He told me don't put pressure on yourself. For Franko B the first is to be a human being and an artist next."Asked about the symbolic value of her body in performance, Basdekis replies: "All my gesture is symbolic - Mona Lisa on the flesh rather than on the canvas. I am considering the body as the subject for torture or action. You take your time to release truths from your body - out, out. I don’t know if it's a kind of therapy. My statement is you take your time to bring out your reasons." And for the onlooker? Basdekis smiles: "I don't look for emotional involvement - it's just the mind."

Bob Dickinson is an arts reporter/producer for the BBC Radio 4 Front Row programme

last night i am now irreversibly in the middle of toward morning of, Anselm (jesus but he's a cute one) read/said (to effect of)
"I was distant because I distrust my face"

& Craig Goodman's video of Cliff Hengst's fantastic performance "This is a song about you". [title?] Did anyone else catch Anselm's midstream lift from? Does it come from elsewhere? I feel certain he said, as Cliff did on video 15 minutes prior, "You were eighteen when you found out it was true."

none too soon, really—

"For to be faithful to this situation means: to treat it right to the limit of the possible. Or, if you prefer: to draw from this situation, to the greatest possible extent, the affirmative humanity that it contains. Or again: to try to be the immortal of this situation."

I am always wrong: there are many things more important than poetry.
this article is disturbing in too many horrific directions. war on drugs what?
it bleeds towards advert.

fischli&weiss, busi: giant video billboard of a kitty lapping milk.
ou les silky milk, kitty? are you going to prick me with that?

Last night: Small Press Traffic's season-opening presentation of Kevin Killian & Karla Milosevich's Celebrity Hospital. The best advantage to being a poet in the Bay Area, given cost-of-living, lack of living-wage, and the absurd bourgeois attack [especially from INSIDE many local arts organizations] on everything this city once held up and dear and good, must be the opportunity to participate as cast member in or audience to one of Kevin's poets-theater productions. Twenty-five cast members/characters (three of which, Mac McGinnes pointed out, were luxuriously brought in only in the last 10 minutes of the play [deus ex exposé?]) all poets, artists, and neighbors playing: under-over-cover "celebrities" getting/giving lip/lipo at the corner of Madison and Wisconsin in a faux LA, and everyone suffering from the mispleasures of Stockholm syndrome & "Apodyopsis: the act or condition of sexual excitement caused by exposure to medical procedures." Hello the rack on Jaclyn Smith and the Dr Baldwin on Wayne [Gretsky]. Are you going to prick me with that?

i didn't know how, and i didn't know i wasn't supposed to.

“…hypocrisy plays an important role in the realization of human societies, permitting human beings under stress to feign having certain properties which they abandon as soon as the stress is removed. This is why in a human society a social change takes place as a permanent phenomenon only to the extent that it is a cultural change: a revolution is only a revolution if it is an ethical revolution.”

i sleep, change location, feel confused. can't get the 'inner hug' Tammy calls what the cigarette gives. The sound of Talking Heads' "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel" is the exact sensational state of my absent-inner-hug-inner-nervous-system. The apparatus is working overtime but i'm so boring it looks like barely breathing.

D.U.I.

I should've gotten one, and I didn't. I'm dying for a fucking cigarette. Since I was fifteen and a half with a learner's permit in the San Fernando Valley, I've talked---yes TALKED---my way out of---a dozen tickets at least. So the pure irony when tonight, at age 39, way past nubile and pouty, I was pulled over for doing 50 in the 25 zone, and the docile and doe-eyed act [I was too drunk to properly speak] is the one that worked. No flashlights in eyes. No stand up out of the car. Just a long wait and receipt of a faux ticket issued as "warning"---I don't have to go to court or pay any money. And a fatherly suggestion that the pink slip [which I handed over thinking it was the registration] be stowed "in a jewelry box, or at the bank, somewhere safe." Fuck the motherfucking Oakland police. I love the police.

which means can't speak

photo: Alli Warren

Today's event/collaboration/intervention at the Presidio--- guerrilla poets theater staged invigoratingly under cloudy skies & light wind, afront a dry field surrounded by what could be barracks and under the sign of Army [Re]Education Center---the performance of Brandon Brown's The Persians by Aeschylus, a literal translation [caveat aplenty] of The Persians, by Aeschylus---was the moving, important, actually radical and radicalizing True Intervention I've been longing to encounter---all my life.

Arriving to the field for the performance [quickly resited from the original locale, bunker Battery Marcus Miller, when construction obstructed just access], Brandon, Alli, Sakkis, myself up the cement pathway could see crossing the long field in boots carrying provisions and looking [anti-]days of heaven Judith and Brazil, everything from that moment on looking somehow extra---wild, de-institutionalized, open, actual.

You who don't live in the Bay Area, do you know the difficulty in getting to the Presidio from any points not already Presidio? the war was Over There, and we collectively counter-pointed. All in attendance, the players and the audience of ---twenty-five?---so collected & by playing and listening having spoken! so fantastic.

Brandon, forgive me giving just the barest few of the opening lines here---[in today's event spoken by inimitable Dana Ward]---anyone not present deserves at least the tiniest taste of:

NARRATOR

'ts been a few years since we went
to fight with Persians. I meant to
fight with Greeks. No, I meant to say
t's been a few years since we went
to fight with Axes, since we're Allies.
If this is confusing, it's because I'm saying this to you in
Greek. In fact we're Greeks, because we're

speaking Greek. But isn't it as
if we were Persians, making this
speech about fighting with Greeks? All
the more rich I'd venture since we're
making the speech in Greek. That's what
Persians do after all in The
Persians. Speak in Greek 'bout fighting
with Greeks, or rather against them.

We, the Persians, speak Greek so well
we know that they, the Greeks, call us
"barbarians" so we go a-
head and call each other barbar-
ians, since we're speaking Greek, one
Persian to another. What will
we speak about? About fighting
Persians and Greeks. I meant Persians...


it continues gloriously for something. ie, not for naught. Poetry's for something! isn't it grand. Thank you Brandon for writing such a stunning play, leafy and intricate and dazzling without dazzling, in its melodic, disarming, suturing, painful rich & edible accuracy, and for casting it--uh, brilliantly--and to Judith for all her particular work organizing and logisticizing, & the nonsites collective for instigating and supporting--as Alli Warren once said to someone who loves her, 'it's great to be alive and to know you and to be eating this apple'

The Persians by Aeschylus, by Brandon Brown
Cast: Taylor Brady, Brent Cunningham, Tanya Hollis, Dan Fisher, Cynthia Sailers, John Sakkis, Lauren Shufran, Suzanne Stein, Dana Ward
Organizational Tactics & Action: Judith Goldman

More info, more resources: here.

nature is a small town snoring this morning.

i'm to go be a persian elder in the presidio today and won't be home til evening.

mood terrible here. i went to a spectacular reading last night but was assailed afterward by evidence of the patriarchal privilege, in the form of my many young men friends' [and the male-identified women who top the rest of us alongside them] hyper-articulate discourse. it's enough to put you to bed to nature.

i'd like some watermelon juice, if you get around to it.

the road you're on doesn't run through here

Something's been missing and I didn't even realize it had gone missing. The person maybe most kin to me in all the world called today after many many months unanticipated and unorchestrated [an accidental] silence, and the timbre of my friend's voice awakened a part of me I hadn't even noticed had fallen so silent. Has it ever happened to you?

Tragedy can befall slowly without our ever noticing. Stay vigilant to each other, friends.

there is no cure for the quitting of smoking.

except for this gratuitous and inacccurate sentence: "Think J.H. Prynne, Peter Seaton, Tao Lin, Bernadette Mayer, Taylor Brady, Linh Dinh." I like Ron Silliman yesterday.

Monday, July 23, 2007

How to Have a Peaceful Life By H. H. Sri Swami Satchidananda The ultimate quest of the entire world is peace. Only in peace do we have joy. Not by acquiring things, not by doing things, not by earning or learning, but by dedication. Your entire life must be a sacrifice. Think for the sake of others. To such a person, peace is guaranteed. For this, you don't need to go to a monastery or sit in a cave somewhere—because it is not in renouncing actions that you will find peace, but in renouncing your attachment to the results of the actions. A truly dedicated person is the king of kings, the richest person in the world. Who is the richest person? The one who wants nothing. There is only one cause for all mental problems, worries and anxieties: selfishness. Restlessness of mind is caused by disappointments. Only selfishness can cause unhappiness. To maintain your tranquility you must keep your mind away from duality—pleasure, pain; profit, loss; praise, blame. If you can keep your mind away from duality, you can still have ideas and perform actions, but they won't affect you. When you renounce your attachment, there is nothing to shake you. It is the feeling of possession, of clinging, that disturbs the mind. Test all your desires and actions. Ask yourself, "Is this going to cause restlessness to my mind?" Which should you choose, peace or the other thing? Peace is worth preserving more than anything else, even at the cost of your life. Actually peace is God. Dedicate your life in the name of God or humanity and your mind will always be clean and calm. You will reflect your true nature always. That is the goal of all the different paths: to keep the mind clean and calm. If you lose your peace, you won't be able to help anyone else, let alone yourself. Still, many people ask, "How can we do all these things for our own peace when the world is so full of suffering?" Normally, we think of the world first. But Yoga believes in transforming the individual before transforming the world. Whatever change we want to happen outside should happen within. And if you walk in peace and express that peace in your very life, others will see you and learn something. 11:25 PM - Add Comment -

When faced with a terrifying and daunting task ["literature"] I am fully capable of laying myself down and falling straight to sweaty, immediate sleep, which is what i did today, at 5 pm, for twenty-five deep, dreamful, sunny, luxurious, sultry minutes.

Walking around the lake earlier today at a pace designed to deliver me from my fears, I was reflecting on the motherfucking awfulness that next week I will have to return to my full-time job. I complain often about the awfulness of Being a Poet and Having a Full-Time [non-academic, okay?] Job, and it has not been lost on me that there are Some People who Don't Like It when they have to hear it. It is distasteful to suggest that one might prefer to stay home reading and thinking and writing all day, and even more impertinent to suggest that one should not only have to Wish To but should Get To! It was not implied, but stated directly to me once [by a friend with a trust fund and no day job] that perhaps I thought that jobs like the one I had were "beneath" me. Listen up people, I'm a poet! NOTHING is beneath me. Our labors are the lowest of the low, the lowliest.

I was the cleaning person for a stockbroker lady two years my junior for six months once, and it was more manageable in polite society to articulate the scrubbing of her toilets than it is to squeak up, "I'm a poet." But if you're reading this blog, you're a poet, and you're already on your hands and knees and you know it. You've written this post fifteen thousand ways come and from Sunday.

[But don't believe the hype! the heart is always right!]

hi mom!

Tonight my yoga teacher said she read this on the back of a motorcyclist's t-shirt, while driving up hwy 5 from los angeles:

Don't believe the hype! The heart is always right.

Remember that faraway time before the Mission was swarming with money babies in cheap oversize sunglasses puffing american spirit organics? Whenever I hear the phrase 'don't believe the hype' I think about my now-ex-husband riding in the back rack of the 14 Mission with two dudes and a boombox who were shouting it out with Public Enemy: DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE! when gunshots were fired into the bus windows from both sides of Mission Street.

but it is still true, it's true!

Don't believe the hype! The heart is always right

sitemeter shows san diego is reading this blog, I think it's my sweet mom. Hi Mom! This post is for you.

hiatus

i think i've found a way to de-archive and reiterate in the space that demands constant keeping even while its mode is self-erasing

"nothing will have taken place but the place"

i'd like to know by which standard of value this one determines 'the good', and thus be educated in understanding a system of value that posits a 'fake-good'. i'd especially like to know how to market this criteria towards my own "good", and also begin to achieve a product-by-which i can both master and enslave myself. in poetics, no less. in poetry, no more. i want a steadfast system of value [ie, Money] by which i can rate my own goods. is Good Money binding? perfect-binding? priced-on-demand?

Good Luck.

"the fantasy of weaponization is merely the reality of asymmetric warfare"

i just heard the unmistakable sound of a horse trotting by.

just please don't spam me

Welcome to Earthlink LiveChat. Your chat session will begin shortly. Not at home and you want to read your email? With EarthLink Web Mail you can check your email from any computer with an internet connection! 'Santoro M' says: Thank you for contacting EarthLink LiveChat, how may I help you today? suzannestein@mindspring.com: i'm not getting my email. a friend sent several, and i sent myself several, they never arrived. i had some mail arrive many hours after it was sent. Santoro M: Sure, I will be glad to assist you. Santoro M: I am sorry to inform you. suzannestein@mindspring.com: thanks Santoro M: We are currently experiencing problems involving Webmail and it's inability to access the mail server. We apologize for the inconvenience and are currently working to resolve the issue. Thank you for your patience and understanding. Santoro M: We are currently investigating the cause of authentication failures when trying to log into Webmail. While there currently is no time frame for a resolution, the issue is being worked on. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience and understanding while we work to resolve the problem as rapidly as possible. suzannestein@mindspring.com: but does this mean i'll get the mail eventually or not? Santoro M: Yes, as this is an authentication failures. The issue will be same with all the email applications. Santoro M: Let me inform you, our engineers are already working on this issue and I am happy to say the with in few hours the server will be up. suzannestein@mindspring.com: and, why isn't this problem listed or reflected on the website as an email outage? suzannestein@mindspring.com: so the mail will all come thru? Santoro M: Yes, let me tell you. Santoro M: We have made special arrangements for you, so that all your valable email messages are saved. suzannestein@mindspring.com: really? how do you do that? i hope you're making special arrangements for all your customers suzannestein@mindspring.com: what about my invaluable email? Santoro M: I mean all the email messages. Santoro M: If you have any issue in future, please fell free to write back to me. I will be glad to help you. suzannestein@mindspring.com: ok, how do i contact you in future? Santoro M: You can reach us again. Santoro M: http://support.earthlink.net/chat/ Santoro M: And ask for me. Santoro M: I will be glad to help you. suzannestein@mindspring.com: ok, thanks santoro. i will wait for my email. Santoro M: My pleasure. Santoro M: You are really cool and very cooperative and understanding. suzannestein@mindspring.com: good night. Santoro M: Thank you for all your patience and understanding that you have shown while we were chatting. Santoro M: It was pleasure assisting you. Santoro M: Have A Great Night! Santoro M: Take Care! Santoro M: Bye! suzannestein@mindspring.com: my pleasure Santoro M: You are welcome. suzannestein@mindspring.com: ciao Santoro M: You are really cool and very cooperative and understanding. Santoro M: Thank you for all your patience and understanding that you have shown while we were chatting. Santoro M: If you have any issue in future, please fell free to write back to me. I will be glad to help you. Santoro M: It was pleasure assisting you. Santoro M: Have A Great Night! Santoro M: Take Care! Santoro M: Bye!

my latest escape fantasy is the one where the head-hunter calls me up and offers me an Interesting Job where I work half the time and earn twice the money, and live in a town where I pay two-thirds the rent for one-and-a-half times the space.

I think I'd like to move to London. Anyone with advice, suggestion, conversation, helpful thoughts on how, where or how to live, where or how to work, please backchannel.

Infectious good mood *
Valid during several months: This is probably the most agreeable influence of all in its effect upon your mood and in the way it makes your life work. It is extremely good for all types of relationships, whether professional, personal, social or intimate. You feel optimistic, eager and outgoing, warm and friendly to everyone you meet. This time is also lucky financially. You may have a sudden windfall, although this is not the usual manifestation. You are inclined to indulge yourself and to spend money, especially on lavish or beautiful objects. In many respects, self-discipline is at an all-time low at this time, but it usually is not needed. Celebrations held at this time are unusually successful, for you at least, as is any kind of entertaining or social occasion. This will be due partly to your infectious good mood.

The interpretation above is for your transit selected for today:

Venus Conjunction Jupiter Venus Conjunction Jupiter, exact at 22:19

activity period from 13 July 2007 until beginning of October 2007.

WHO KNEW?

well, surely you did, but I've been so sweetly, safely in the sand.

this media feeds my already-considerable paranoia.


By the way, I had a new yoga teacher Saturday. He said advanced yogis can achieve miracles, such as be in two places at one time. POETS! Advanced yogis are poets!

this looks like heaven to me

it seems to fulfill all my domestic fantasy.
i wonder how long i could stand it.

let us know, katie.

intuition: immaculate perception?

i keep hearing myself say to myself, as if to someone [everyone] else, "dude, you're harshing my mellow."

wtf? i've never said such a thing in all my life

[on the other hand, i'm well-acquainted with "wtf?", in life and in acronymic interweb lingo. deplorable speech patternings or irresistible absorption into the centrifugal body? it must be pms. i felt so soapy-eyed and weepy in the shower this afternoon, thinking about It's a Wonderful (this plot synopsis is empty) Life. It's not even December! WTF!]

CHANGE YOUR MIND

"wrestling mat, sternal retractor, skeet, saltwater pearl, cast self-lubricating curl bar, cotton socks, binding straps, titanium ice screw, carabiners, two laser disc players, and two laser discs"

"Vito Acconci in his 10-Point Plan for Video maps out four possible strategies for video-mediated performance and the resulting audience relationships: “build myself up: viewer as believer” (referring to Undertone), “tear myself away: viewer as witness” (Air Time), “take you in: viewer as partner” (Theme Song), “give myself over: viewer as surrogate” (Command Performance). "

aside from the generalized despair and ennui, i'm fine thanks

I’m still trying to understand the blog form. Am working at it’s possible to not front in a flat space. Or the object as other than indicating/advertising apparatus. Which would be making the space porous, but I'm not so sure this is about comment boxes or link streams. A portal is a portal if it deepens the space.

this form allows you to stop anywhere and begin again anywhere It's all contingency and evaporation. it's news. which surely is news to no one but me. so the static elements are the parts most porous, they don't disintegrate, they remain. so tone remains. but not speech. to continue this thought, tomorrow, according to this form, is to erase it.

I swam a lot yesterday and this morning. into the pool, out of the pool. it’s a nice measure. then back into the pool.

last night I sat in the window of a café ‘in town’, in the little downtown, watching all the people coming by. so many young people, it really is a college town. I am just old enough to call the younger people ‘young people’. two pretty girls, one very especially pretty with dark brown curling hair light skin dark eyes, dark brown cat-eye glasses, lots of mascara, light orange lip gloss, black patent leather sandals, patent leather handbag with metal snap-clasp tucked into her chair, just on the other side of the window from me, playing chess. I thought, all the men I’ve ever crushed on would want this girl, so, not for that reason alone, but for myself also, I was fascinated. or i was fascinated so i invented my desire as theirs. am I covetous or desirous? I can never tell. both. her clean hands, her mouth, the way she lit and smoked a merit ultra. on her upper left arm, three thin white scars. all the girls her age & style of suffering were into ‘cutting’ when they were teenagers. she was just this style, but coming ahead of it in the coolest possible luminous & kind of sultry, salty way. not a tan blond in four-inch braided wedges like most of the other girls passing by. all her skin looked touchable—I think that was the thing about her. she was cool, but the opposite of untouchable, all reserve and invitation.

"(Poems have sex in uncomfortable places.)"

that's jack kimball @ tykes on

i will agree and further, as poetry's fucking in incompossible means, ways, & paces [& places]

click to play

thanks due

to Michael Nicoloff, who reminded me that a computer is a MACHINE with an on/off switch

poets going away

[click to play]

i sent kate upstairs to see this; she responds with this.

|

I ride in the free car share every weekday morning. I walk two blocks down my street to a gas station where people and cars line up together. Three people makes a carpool, meaning faster access to the bridge and no tolls; everyone wins.

There are several usual approaches to the bridge from my car-share pickup spot and I have come to categorize driver personality and temperament based on choice of approach. No route is significantly or consistently faster or slower than any other, although sometimes one approach will bypass traffic whereas another one will not—but it’s not clear by pattern over my months of car-sharing which will be better on any particular morning based on what set of circumstance.

The most obvious and direct route to the 580 westbound toward San Francisco from Oakland is a right turn out of the gas station onto Grand, a right turn onto 27th, a right turn onto Harrison and a left onto the 580 ramp—this person has a lot of faith in the formal structures of the social to best provide fast no thinking timely arrival to the workplace, they believe this will always be the best way, it’s direct, and probably no one has ever shown them another route.

The less obvious but more popular method is for those who like to feel they’re the wiser, sneaking past others and getting ahead in a cutting sharp corners kind of way. They're in a hurry, they're fast, they're me-first. It's not unusual for a bossy passenger to enlighten a driver by directing them this way. It involves a double right out of the gas station up Perkins, & a couple of zigs & zags up and down some hills past a lot of apartment complexes, which residential streets then turn you out at exactly the same Harrison Street on-ramp the first method gets you to.These drivers show the same faith in main-highway mechanistics as the first group. They do shave about 40 seconds off their drive--as long as there aren’t too many other cars taking the back-door right onto Harrison at the same time.

The silliest way is to backtrack east on Grand to the Grand Avenue 580 entrance. The morning commute is not a go-east-in-order-to-get-west practice. These people need divorce lawyers.

There’s the straight shot, all-the-way-down-Grand-Avenue approach. It's grittier the further west you go on Grand, more abandoned, more dilapidated, more industrial, more shopping carts lying on their sides, more pedestrians likely to be enduring grueling hardship in their daily lives when it comes to those little luxuries we all take for granted, you know, the eating and sleeping kind. You have to deal with stoplights but not so much with other drivers. You take a Hwy 80 onramp straight onto the toll plaza. [Because this is my own favored route, I'm ill-equipped to comment on personality displays. Anyone care to diagnose?]

This brings me to the rarest and until today my least favorite of all methods of getting onto the San Francisco Bay Bridge heading west into the city. This one mimics the Grand-Avenue-all-the-way, but just a few blocks before the Grand Ave under/over pass swing onto the bridge the driver will suddenly make a left onto a wide quiet signless treeless mostly carless street, and drive a long long way through [south? west? southwest?] Oakland, finally arriving at the 880 north. The thing about this approach is that you have absolutely no indicators of the degree of bridge traffic, or accidents, or anarchy, or anything, not anywhere along the route, there's no sense of anyone rushing or even moving, and when you get up onto the 880 you're not only right on top of the maze and the toll booths, but you slide along next to and past all the other backed up traffic in your own private Hwy 880 carpool lane, right until and through the toll plaza. This driver is patient, stubborn, sure, doesn't have to see to know, has lots of faith, moves at a steady pace, and feels triumphant winning the game at the very last. They're the ones you want to fuck and love on, for sure.

last night

one tall, one small, no [a.k.a. "French"] goodbye, the bodies of two I love best in all the world, moving fast away from but towards something, how lucky the something they're coming towards! even if it's just their own empty apartment.

Kate reading from ms. German Sonnets for Ted Berrigan, exciting to hear lyric generosity of the namesake through this very unlike line, fractured then restored all the way other.

No decent photos of Maggie but the video is coming.

encounter is terrible distress, that's the nature of it.
why would we think to want it another way?

"There's no story in Dallas," Godard just said in Room 666, "Sometimes that's what I like about Dallas."

Thank you for waiting. I didn't know you were listening.

For those of you who have not seen my flickr page--a small bird died on my bookshelf I don't know when. My mother was visiting, the bird perched horizontally clutching pages of a misshelved book surprised me, low bookshelf, it must have thought it was standing upright, it was very all the way dead, more than a few days dead, when we took it out. We buried it on Grand Avenue in front of my apartment building. My mother said to absorb negative energies I could put an egg into each corner of the room for 24 hours, after which time I would have to collect the eggs and take them somewhere far away to bury them. The feng shui book said to absorb negative energies use fresh clean sea salt in all the corners for 24 hours, and then take the salt to the ocean, or if living inland then flushing the salt down the toilet was okay. The salt in the corners of the room [and around the bed and in the bookshelf] kept me awake all night, and the next night I slept 9 hours. The little bird must have been frightened and confused, it lost its way. My desire for salt absorbing the negative energetics gone stagnant in the low corners of my apartment and the death of this bird are in no way equated. It's just an accident that looks like a terrible magic. I think the salt did something though. I feel better, the apartment seems better. The part of the bookcase where the bird died is the same, however.

i caved

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