Wit*ness

the invisible mother

2012-01-06T16:48:00.000-08:00

‘This was a practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding, often under a spread, holds her baby tightly for the photographer to insure a sharply focused image.’- The Hidden Mother

so it goes...

Real pop culture is talking items...read Tom Robbins if you doubt

2011-12-27T09:33:00.000-08:00

Pop culture pervades in Vegas. It seeps into the fabric of everyday despite resistance. So, when my youngest asks during a Pitbull song "what does you know you want me mean?" It means a dress is talking, or a cape, or boots are talking to you saying it is cold outside and you know you want me. Yes, I may want you Lanvin cape. Only if you give me everything tonight. I don't want you on layaway cuz we may not get tomorrow.

It just does not turn out like you thought it would...but it turns out

2011-12-19T18:52:00.000-08:00

Gravity
If It Kills Me
Stupid
Fix You

Contra Mundum: against the world

2011-12-14T13:56:00.001-08:00

"Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness." Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

photo: Daphne Guinness (in her Diamond body armor), as Tom Ford says, is the most stylish woman alive.

let's start this Cinderella long cold winter cubist style

2011-11-30T15:20:00.000-08:00

"For this is the truth about our soul,...our self who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable."

Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway...man, I miss the books that are molding in Costa Rica.

He buscado por todas partes la ciudad soñada

2011-11-30T14:47:00.000-08:00

Rilke was mistaken in asserting Christ was not devine. Maybe right in his assessment of His love for Mary. May the shape of my life come closer to His.

You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

remembering, rainer maria rilke

maxyourutils

2011-11-11T19:14:00.000-08:00

utils:(economics) a hypothetical unit measuring satisfaction

I read a book today, again. My mom and I have both read this book. There is a passage we identify as our own where the daughter tells her frail dying mother, "'Mother, I know you've always wished I'd take a gentler horse.' She opened her brown eyes, flashing in dark circled settings, squeezed my hand harder, and said, 'No, I've always loved you on the wild one." I will tell my mother not of horses. But of coyotes who are coydogs...and how I longed for two clear clear tranquil eyes as hers. Genetics are hard to overcome, so they say.

take gentle care of yourself

2011-07-21T16:46:00.001-07:00

And our mansions of white may end up looking like the above. But...how amazing is that?

The rose is obsolete

but each petal ends in

an edge, the double facet

cementing the grooved

columns of air -- The edge

cuts without cutting

meets -- nothing -- renews

itself in metal or porcelain --

whither? It ends--

But if it ends

the start is begun

so that to engage roses

becomes a geometry--...

Somewhere the sense

makes copper roses --

steel roses--

William Carlos Williams "The Rose"

i raise my snowcone to his hand on my arm and to last doors

2011-07-02T19:50:00.000-07:00

blessed independence day. always loving this boy: opening doors for me. smiling doing a tri in the vegas june. him. so i wore my fourth of july Vans for him. not for america...we just got back from living in costa rica. but for his blessed life (except the cheap a$% goggles), for all his open doors, for the gift of free agency.

deven..."I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door."— Czeslaw Milosz, from “City Without a Name” in New and Collected Poems, trans. Milosz, Robert Haas, Robert Pinsky, and Renata Gorczynski

love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation

2011-07-02T19:26:00.000-07:00

Distance original disobedience/Against the coldness of force/Intellectual grasp/Scene for what follows/Do not touch me/It is by chance that she weeps/Her weeping is not a lament/She has a voice to cry out/No community can accompany her/No imagination can dream...--Susan Howe "The Non-Conformists Memorial"

modelcouture: Anna Selezneva “Hors la loi” Vogue Paris (clipped to polyvore.com)

i don't interpret "do not touch me" by Jesus...but i myself say it often.

pro*whoa dropped today

2011-06-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

"hey grandpa, stand up!"- Nikka at the Cosmo

"This is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed."
— Jorie Graham

tell you i lost my mind again

2011-06-09T07:49:00.000-07:00

Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one. --Gertrude Stein

commitment

2011-04-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

still dig her. "because you are her" -- hollie

things change

2011-03-20T18:11:00.000-07:00

but their eye color changes in sync. a lil more brown, a lil more green. despite their soul differences, they are connected.

at the bull fight

2011-03-20T17:00:00.000-07:00

he falls asleep during the 4th bull, despite the section of trombones and jello vendors. she carries him through the unfamiliar crowd. the older kids on roller coasters, bumper cars, Vortex. she sees a woman she knows who also has three kids, "where are the kids?" "oh, we left them at home." silly her. and he is four and silly. thank the moon, sun, stars that he is only four so she can carry him.
"Intense love always leads to mourning." Louise Gluck in The Triumph of Achilles

the posse

2011-03-20T16:46:00.000-07:00

made this years birthday party easy...instead of mom instructed kid games it was truth or dare and "can we have some money?" a little lonely, but easy.

more than flesh and bone

2011-03-08T04:53:00.000-08:00

twelve years ago today began the contractions that by march 9 at three in the afternoon produced The Girl. eyes wide open. "i think so many thoughts that make me so happy...like getting a henna tattoo and opening a bakery!" --The Girl yesterday at the beach

because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me

2011-02-27T04:28:00.000-08:00

A day at Playa Conchal with the kids reminded them how ideal Costa Rica is. It also leaves her weary hair very dry and this is no place for the weary kind. A hot olive oil treatment while she lay under the sunset and the hair soaks up some natural strength should do the trick. Alas, having missed the studies in college on the habits of ANTS she did not know that P. megacephala showed a significant preference for olive oil. She arose to a swarm of ants in her hair and skittering around her shoulders and down her back. Dream fulfilled. And in the end... they are more powerful than us. link

gold in my mouth

2011-02-25T11:04:00.000-08:00

Quiero dormir un rato,
un rato, un minuto, un siglo;
pero que todos sepan que no he muerto;
que hay un establo de oro en mis labios;
que soy el pequeño amigo del viento Oeste;
que soy la sombra inmensa de mis lágrimas.

da Gacela De La Muerte Oscura-Federico Garcia Lorca

The Girl has grown into a wry conscientious objector (en pointe: biting a guitar she does not know how to play during a party in Avellanas). Living in Central America has stripped her of any a priori definitions of "cool" she had. However, preteens are still preteens no matter where they have spawned from. She manages to take the best of all she has learned and apply it to the sticky situation of gossip, boys, beauty, spanish, amigas. And her best, is, well, the best.

The principal of the school said that The Girl handles each and every situation with complete poise and wisdom. The P.E. teacher said, and I quote, "Your children have been such a blessing to the school. She came here and has made all the boys want to be better men because she is such a strong yet loving girl."

If nothing of me is left here in my sleep, those kids are the gold in my mouth that will speak forever.

inside, outside, upside down

2011-02-05T06:24:00.000-08:00

"Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

my own enemy

2011-01-28T08:50:00.000-08:00

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy. J. D. Salinger
Only I would do this to myself...so I made myself run another 5 miles. Whereas the loved ones in my life make me avocado facials, shell gardens, and ceviche.

on becoming a Banana tree

2011-01-26T10:57:00.000-08:00

"Each and every tree on the earth, when grown old, makes its trunk portion very stronger and the more it is old, the more its trunks get stronger & darker; the trunk portion color too becomes dark brown. But the Banana Tree trunk portion gets whiter, the more it grows; Also, the inner portion gets more softer and smoother than the outer side of the tree. Also its inner portion is pure white, wherein other trees are of brown or black. This signifies to the human, that the more you grow, one should get cleaner and softer in her life."

my front garden inspires me.
link
photo

Read more at http://www.articlealley.com/article_225547_15.html?ktrack=kcplink

alpha and omega

2011-01-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." -Pynchon

depends on who is doing the asking. "they". who defines the questions? depends on what one hears. "mom, what plant produces a starfruit?" "what time do we leave? what do we wear? what time do we leave?" "mom, where are my shoes and what's for lunch?" "who is god's god?" "why are there different languages" "why are my teeth different than everyone else's" "why did you tell that guy to 'shut-up'...'i didn't, i said...' 'yes, you told him to shut up." "what does dip-ship mean? didn't they say there was no such thing as a wrong question (via Mr. Wallace 9th grade?)

up for some fire dancing?

2010-12-07T19:49:00.000-08:00

"that does not rise in smoke or dies with the fire."
Donald Revell (claudia's one)

photo

re-mapping for boards and bikes

2010-12-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

"Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of the human brain to change as a result of one's experience, that the brain is 'plastic' and 'malleable'. The discovery of this feature of the brain is rather modern; the previous belief amongst scientists was that the brain does not change after the critical period of infancy. The brain consists of nerve cells and glial cells which are interconnected, and learning may happen through change in the strength of the connections, by adding or removing connections, and by the formation of new cells. 'Plasticity' relates to learning by adding or removing connections, or adding cells."

photo

jellies pervade

2010-11-24T21:27:00.000-08:00

Most jellyfish undergo two distinct life history stages during their life cycle.

1. jellys on my arm lovin madonna and thinkin' i was rockin jellys on my hot desert feet in jr high

2. jellies at the shark reef with offspring/love

the second stage is the magnum opus. werd to second stages. (yeah, that's an AC/DC fake tie and yeah he got mistaken as a girl 3 times)

This Is How We Do It

2010-11-24T20:36:00.001-08:00

This Is How We Do It !!!!!!! by Montell Jordan

Remember a couple years ago I cracked a full tooth outta my grill while noshing at a Christmas party (it has been the source of traumatic nightmares where all my teeth fall out in my open hands). I found that tooth last night in some drawer. Just in time for this weeks implant. In honor of the only implant I get, momma's gunna make that tooth into jewelry. And you won't miss the ghetto gap much. West side...i'm gettin a gold screw in alternate too.

link

outta this world

2010-11-24T20:10:00.000-08:00

body and soul

We then, who are this new soul, know,

Of what we are composed, and made,

For th' atomies of which we grow

Are souls, whom no change can invade.

The Ecstacy by John Donne

Cuz that's my only mission

2010-11-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

Prince - Right Back Here in My Arms

my love. deep in the jungle.

2010-11-18T19:50:00.000-08:00

liken some Jihae

you can leave if you can't accept the basics...where is my swan costume???

2010-10-25T14:40:00.000-07:00

toast to the prima ballerina assoluta...because she has been voyeristically busy. rap link. harley link.

how to tie pointe shoes

If there were anywhere but desert

2010-10-14T16:49:00.000-07:00

"It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak." Edmond Jabes (silence speaks and bougainvilla grows)

negative capability via Keats (being nothing to be all), Lavish Absence (the female form of Waldrop), or Christ in the desert fasting for forty days.

photo

an agenda for Making myself at home

2010-10-14T16:10:00.000-07:00

...how 'bout some salvation mountain now and a bit o' Christo in 2014?

Waiting on the shelf in Costa

2010-10-14T15:49:00.000-07:00

Marie Claire Italia October 2010

"Mermaid's tongue, Milkmaid's ulcer. Courtesan's powder box. Ballarina's musk. With its marvelous pinkness, the glow from Conch Shell's long, smooth, folded aperture saturated the cave.' ~Tom Robbins, 'Skinny Legs and All,' p. 54"

even have it written on your t-shirt

2010-10-02T15:57:00.000-07:00

photo

"We would not accept the yoke of Christ; so now we must tremble at the yoke of Caesar." --Fulton John as quoted.

speaking of Caesar, I Blame Coco's song "Caesar" is worthy. she references the milgram obedience experiment in which Milgram summarized in "The Perils of Obedience" that "the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."

chemical ro

2010-10-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

"...brain areas active in love are different then the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke." Economist

robert palmer was onto more than models with guitars and red lipstick. addicted to love...thats gunna inspire my halloween costume.

mermaids get all the press

2010-10-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

In Irish folklore Selkies are seals that can shed their skin to become human, and can return to seal form by putting it back on.
photo

Potential Selkie perfectly paired with wellies, crochet dress, furry overcoat.

movie. Save the Selkies!

photo

all in?

2010-09-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

then Mary took a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and annointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair, and the house was filled with the odor of the ointment.

if thats the case and hair is holy, then this scarf (or turban) is the only alternative to shaving the head. washing this hair over and over. or the fence sitter alice dellal: half in half out.

photo photo photo

three three

2010-09-19T15:17:00.000-07:00

we do it in threes.
the age christ died: 33.
the year He died: AD 33 (allegedly)
april 3? resurrection after 3.
birth of three (civil contracts)
ciao age 33, i wondered if it would be
the end of me.
nope, on to 34. whoopee!

strange bedfellows

2010-09-19T15:08:00.000-07:00

linds and i cliff jumping together (after taking the bar exam)

trust...three times over (photo)

I will be rocks, I will be water.

I will leave this to my daughter.

lift your head up in the wind.

When you feel yourself grow colder

wrap the night around your shoulders

and I will be with you even then

"Rocks and Water" by Deb Talen

wunderkind

2010-09-10T09:57:00.000-07:00

Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Carson McCullers The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

jen kao good job on the macrame calflets.

for the love of sharpies

2010-09-09T21:48:00.000-07:00

"It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence...he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share" (Charles Olson Projective Verse) and this is the purpose of putting the Self aside.

once we have a bird on our shoulder

2010-09-09T21:40:00.000-07:00

photo

"expressing something being struggling" although "any one could come to be certain that he was clearly expressing something". certainly struggling.

Look at what a thousand blue thousand white

Thousand blue white thousand.

Blue thousand white thousand blue thousand.

White thousand blue wind today and two arms

Blowing down the road.

Anne Carson, Plainwater

more is more baby girl

2010-09-01T14:38:00.001-07:00

fingers (jr high), mouth (alex), nose (soccer), drink (cheer/hiphop), white hirachis and sundress (my converse and skinny jeans, tv (blackberry texting)...

"The greater part of natural truth is hidden in processes too minute for vision and in harmonies too large, in vibrations, cohesions and in affinities...they are possible only because they follow objective lines of relations in nature herself." Ernest Fenollosa Poetics of the New American Poetry

pura vida

2010-09-01T14:30:00.000-07:00

this chick took my board and boots.

they had been taught by their mothers

2010-09-01T14:12:00.000-07:00

Vana and Vanessa 1980.

Jouissance is a critical concept as a source. Dora, the hysteric woman, like Medusa, haunts patriarchy. She explodes the Law of the Father as her words come to us in twisted form rising up against the author of her story...but finding passionate joy in voice.

a fact is a fact is a fact

2010-08-31T10:38:00.001-07:00

my frame allegedly encourages pedophilia, thus you will not see me in australian porn.

people...it is often irritating to listen to the repeating they are doing.

Not Until I am a Lion, I say

2010-08-31T10:06:00.000-07:00

Gertrude Stein delivered her last living specimen from her hospital bed, "What is the answer?" she inquired, and getting no answer said, laughing, "In that case, what is the question?"

Nothing Prepared

2010-08-31T10:03:00.000-07:00

"Not reaching the summit was, in the end, a delicate victory." Helene Cixous from Firstdays of the Year.

Havasupai truth

2010-08-28T17:12:00.000-07:00

"I entered the mystery and the mystery ignored me," Brenda Hillman says with no heartbreak. So, the woman is left with a glorious sense of zero. Like Mother Earth, that ever changing yet radically inconsolable She, I am finding power in that concept of negative capablility: being nothing so you can in turn be everything. As the waves come in and go out. I do not know what I am looking for but I am willing to let most everything disentegrate for the seach. Imi loa. Now the focus becomes tallying the cost of what it means to be forever in this position.

Proactively eager to see what the harvest will be.

riding a wild horse...my kingdom for a horse

2010-08-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

"And since I want to be alive until I'm dead, I listen for sounds that, in Spinoza's terms, are identical with that part of my nature that orients me towards the world. Louis Zukofsky expresses it sweetly in response to L. S. Dembo's question in an interview conducted in 1969:

Q. Where does the idea of love fit in ...

A. Well, it's like my horses. If you're good enough to run, or you feel like running, you run. If you want to live, you love: if you don't want to live, you hate, that's all. It's as simple as that ...

Zukofsky's work is filled with horses, epic horses, Homer's horses, Ovid's Lenti, Lenti Noctis Equi (1) , Richard the III's 'A horse! A horse! my Kingdom for a horse.'"

my Claudia Keelan "Estatic Emigre". she knows.

wolf spider is of the same web. same lips at least.

under the shadow of a broad rimmed hat

2010-08-25T19:38:00.000-07:00

...But I can tell you what I saw

Nude #13 arrived when I was not watching for it.

It came at night.

Very much like Nude #1.

And yet utterly different.

I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.

It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,

but as I came closer

I saw it was a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones.

And there was no pain.
The wind

Was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.

Anne Carson "The Glass Essays"

cleansing wind, scrubbing sand, clean white bone.

georgia smiling.

that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded" man

2010-08-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

"--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all."
The Great Gatsby by that wily F. Scott Fitzgerald.

trouver

2010-08-24T16:41:00.000-07:00

where is that casa nola? it must be close. sooner rather than later.

Polyculture Shock

2010-08-24T16:06:00.000-07:00

"The native peoples who inhabited these lands long before us worshipped the Earth; they were educated by it. They didn't require schools and churches -- their whole world was one." --Michael Ableman, organic farmer, Goleta, California.

There is a concept in chaos and complexity literature called a "sweet spot". There exists a sweet spot between chaos and order, gas and crystal, wild and tame. In that spot lies the powerfully creative force of self-organization (aka "order for free") where we organize based on our strengths. In a polyculture (of more than one love) we breed not just one crop, but all the difficulties and joys that come with multiple crops. Seek that sweet spot where all of our abilities to perform, or even exceed performance, flourish next to each other.

Biomimicry...the whole world is a church.

fridge love

2010-08-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

"They were talking about him at lunch, said Richard. (But he could not tell her he loved her. He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought.)...He had not said "I love you"; but he held her hand. Happiness is this, is this he thought." Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"

There are things we know we need to say but we cannot say them. It is as if language is expendable in order to connect. Even in our utmost desire to connect there is a gap, even in marriage, where solidute is diginty. "And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect..." The connection comes from mudane things like reaching to hold a hand. Or fridge food writing.

wicked beast

2010-08-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

i have a whole motion on defining what "wicked", "bad", "phat" means. but the wicked beast of inspiration calls me back.

i'll take my exhileration piecmeal

2009-03-05T20:43:00.000-08:00

from the Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway

negative capability: zero

2009-02-01T11:52:00.001-08:00