Summer 10

I think we'll be checking this out this summer. About this time, I'll be begging for any excuse to leave the Arizona lowlands. I'd like to visit a very good friend in Orange while I'm out, but it may have to wait for another time if I can only make a weekend of it. Since middle school I have referred to her as my favorite person in the world. One of my dad's many exes from the 90s, she made a lasting impression on me that almost no one else has other than my grandmother. How much of a drive is it from Long Beach to Santa Ana anyway? Looks close.

I met Pam when I was just starting the 7th grade. I was so shy and unsocialized. Over the next few years, I began fighting constantly with my mother about how unhappy she was with my "new persona" which essentially meant I started listening to punk and goth and dressing as you do when you're in that position. While my mother was trying tactics like chipping away at my confidence with insults or threatening to send me away to a school for bad girls (although I didn't drink, smoke or date, do they admit kids just for wearing black?), Pam and I would sit up at night when I was at my dad's on the weekend and talk about everything, from her own hard times in school and life, to the many things we had in common, a love for certain music, classic movies, creaking old houses, ghost stories, tales of the unusual, general hijinks. She blew my mind because she was a functioning adult, a responsible mother of two boys much more well adjusted than I, yet she was completely cool and fun and happy to come right down to my level as an equal, never acting like her wisdom was greater than my common sense even though it obviously was. She let you find a point by yourself but she shared her experiences first.

Anyway I didn't immediately realize it but knowing her and how difficult her life was, yet observing her constantly wizened yet fun-loving nature steeled me against my own problems. I realized that it was right that I could be whomever the hell I wanted and that the observations of the morons at my school and in my family meant nothing because I was the one who had to live my life and face all of my own consequences. I can't even pinpoint exactly how much she helped me at this time, but I hope I've made a dent in it since we started emailing again last year. We fell out of touch after she and my dad broke up.

Some people just have something about them that everyone wants. Pam is a concentrated example of this. Everyone who meets her seems magnetized by her depth & hilarious personality. I wouldn't be surprised if she secretly found her many friends and admirers to be somewhat draining, always wanting her and to be around her, sucking up her charm and vitality, and still more since she's found herself beset with illness in the last year. That's why I want to give her as much of what I have to give, some small token of exchange for everything she did to improve my life when I most needed it. There's no measure or repayment for that.

Brittany to ze (M) show details 9:28 PM (2 minutes ago)

holy shit. i just listened to ted hughes reciting the hawk in the rain - heavy! & good. even with a cadence similar to burns. i have, obviously, always paid attention only to plath, but i have a feeling that once i focus on him, i'm going to fall in love all over again with a dead guy. and he fine, too.

--

I read The Bell Jar in high school and found a large book filled with black and white photos of Sylvia in a leotard, contorting amidst printed lines of poetry, I don't remember what poems exactly. I have been sort of transfixed with her ever since as a tragic yet incredibly real figure, and how she became the brightest star in 20th century poetry due in part to Ted's careful editing and promotion of all of the raw work she left behind.

I almost don't want to go there. It's a strange feeling. Sometimes I avoid things that I feel will become intense for me because it's so traumatic. People, books, etc. Inevitably I am rarely able to actually avoid something, which just sort of stains it all from the beginning with anticipatory dread, "I think this is going to hurt..." Haven't we all had relationships that we knew we should not, but could not resist? And they turn out exactly as predicted. I've sensed this potentiality physically, asked myself why I was holding back from something I wanted, only to realize afterward that it was probably some sort of evolutionary self-preservation attempt! Maybe in another several thousand years, that'll kick in.

--

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs,
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner's endurance: And I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth's mouth, strain to the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.
That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside-down,
Falls from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon trap him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart's blood with the mire of the land.

Ted Hughes, 1957

Brittany to ze (M) show details Feb 27 (4 days ago)

elsa lanchester, wife of charles laughton. i like her. you may recognize her as the bride of frankenstein.


great lip shape. anyway, here i am watching her on dick cavett in 1974 or something, and she is making my day. she talks shit in that matter of fact, "sorry to disappoint, but this is how we did it in the day, bitch" way - have we talked about isadora duncan? that famous dancer who died even
more famously in nice in the 20s. she was very showy and wore a very long and flowing scarf as was the fashion...so she seats herself in her boyfriend's little sportscar with her long scarf and they take off down the road and the scarf is fluttering away, all the way down to the wheel axle (ok, first i spelled that axl because it looked right - too much GNR) where it becomes wrapped and pulls tight! breaking her neck. i need to think of a clever name for deaths resulting from pure vanity, as with "slipping away" during lipo and such, but hers is an incredible example.

ANYWAY, duncan evidently ran some performance school for girls at the time and elsa lanchester attended as a young child. when dick made some remark about "omgs it's so weird to know someone who knew isadora duncan, she's so like famous," elsa says, "that untalented bag of beans?" thank god for keepin it ril.

--- --- ---

i think in future i'll just copy emails between myself and my biff of ages, m, to this blog in place of writing anything new. letter-writing is (unfortunately) over and electronic communication makes one so PROLIFIC and is so easy to lose. how absurd will it be to buy books of letters as you would now by truman capote or fitzgerald, sylvia plath, but for this generation's relevant writers, if there are any. i wouldn't know. they'll be printed copies of emails! it's so weak. why does modernity make life more lame? and it lets you live longer too, to absorb more reality tv and more novels written by mormons about vampires. too unpleasant. time to google old photos of axl rose!

The 90s: what a bad time for jeans! I do love a hilarious mismatched couple like this, though. And is that a swatch?! Damn, I hope so.

Best yet: fake Axl! Awesome costume idea.

You might notice the absence of images of short shorts or oversized white Nikes - you're welcome.

historically-minded webcomixx: the only kind

i love kate beaton's comic, "hark! a vagrant" so goddamn much that i don't even know what to DO! every time i read it, i feel a rush of admiration (she's so smart/funny and we like the same stuff!), then jealousy (why didn't I think of this!!) then back to admiration & more jealousy. one thing i just noticed while browsing the archives: no civil war comics! can it be? an historian or whatever she is, and no boner for the american civil war. that's not even possible. she is canadian, though.

visit here: hark! a vagrant.

this paper that has plagued me is due on thursday. i received the assignment two weeks ago, or something. tonight i changed my topic. making my own life so hard like this. but the new topic is so much easier for me, i instantly wrote the paper and now all i need to do is find more sources and remove all the "fuck"s and "shit"s from the rough draft. i take it quite seriously when someone asks me to write in my own words. but lord, what i have learned about the mexican war. someone, ask me. please. i love to talk about things no one else cares about.

No Productivity Sunday

I love this set by John Olson, done for LIFE in I guess about 1970. I tried to find it in the archives on their site and can't. Lots of photos of Kanye and Lady Gaga, though. PASS. Rockstars with their parents:

Looks at Elton's mom! Could you die? I could. Look at her smile! She's so excited about her boots and her badassical son!

I saw the young Crosby on a '69 episode of Cavett recently (did I post about that already? sounds like something I would do) and was amazed at how very young he was. Probably 23! Joni Mitchell said, "Doesn't he look like a lion?" in her dreamy way.

And sweet little Grace Wing Slick with her extremely respectable-looking mother.

The Zappas. I dig that lavender. Ideas!

While I'm at it, more Grace. I luh that crazy bitch.

I wish I could find a good clip of Janis finding herself unable to not take little shots at the vapid & dreadful Raquel Welch on Cavett. Oh, here we go.

The Royale

So I met Miss Lil for the first time last week. She's been working at The Royale for 3 decades, and still closes the bar 5 nights a week by herself. I wonder if she carries a gun. She watches over the place like a hawk and is obviously prepared to handle any bullshit at any time.

Surreptitious photo of Miss Lil. Check her out! Her hair was impeccable btw.

The amenities.

After trying to crash a birthday party there and finding the bar full of visibly trashed, sometimes aggressive patrons, we bailed for friendlier territories...

...Where Cindy made a lucrative discovery -

Only to give it back in a fit of good samaritanism when the guy who lost it returned and started inquiring about some lost money, talking of hard times and being a single dad. Well, sort of. Whatever makes Cindy feel better. HA

It's pouring outside. I can't go out there. I expressed this issue to a pal who is from a place where they do have weather. She asked me if I think I'm some kind of witch vampire who will melt in the rain or something. I said, yeah.

procrastinacion

instead of deconstructing abolitionist principles of the 1830s, i am going through my flickr account, updating tags. i thought i would share this hilarious photo of my dad in about '69. i keep meaning to print this out for him, for a couple of reasons. one, to ask him what in the god hell happened to that fruit basket lamp of my grandmother's. it is almost ugly enough to fit into my decor. and two, to ask him why he thought a blue sweater would ever go with those leather pants.

i can recognize just about every item in this picture from my grandmother's house, except that lamp of course. the mirror and end tables are in my house. that entire nativity set on the card table behind him was eventually destroyed by fighting cats, only to be replaced piece by piece, year after year. that's his senior portrait to the left, and his second wife to the right. two more would follow her (including my mother), and i think he's working on number 5 now. one more and he'll have caught up with this fool.

sex, fire, murder, & edgar allan poe

almost in that order!

ever heard of the witch of staten island? i hadn't, and i'm guessing a lot of other people haven't either owing to the fact that i found ONE relevant result for this on google. one! even i have more of an internet presence than that.

this case caught my interest partly because it was, at the time, the case of the century (i would say trial, but there were multiple, and all botched) excepting the whole lizzie borden fracas, and partly because my special man EAP opined on it on multiple occasions.

polly bodine is alleged to have brutally axe-murdered her sister-in-law and infant niece while her brother and their husband/father was off at sea in 1843, then burned their house down to cover her tracks. the description of the corpses is still pretty grisly considering the delicate and vague way these things were documented at the time. housefire-baked brains, dude. because polly was a fallen woman, she was demonized in the press as some sort of fang-toothed prostitute who randomly expels dead babies in jail (i think they just didn't know she was pregnant. she lost the baby after being arrested) among other creepy practices. a series of famous names weighed in on the scandal at the time - poe said he hoped they didn't try her in staten island, because the barney fifes out there would fuck it all up (they did) and pt barnum is the one who began calling her the witch of staten island. then, while she was on trial again in nyc, he had a wax statue fashioned in her image and put on display, except they used plenty of artistic license and the thing came out looking more like some halloween decor.

she was found innocent. the whole case was rather mysterious, from evidence to motivation (the house was lightly burglarized and polly was seen pawning some of the shit that had gone missing before her arrest - but she apparently had plenty of her own money. spite theft?) not included in the article i will link was some commentary on the part of her brother, the man whose wife and child had been hacked to pieces on christmas eve. he said, and i paraphrase, "ey! i can get another wife, and i can get another child, but can i get another sister? no." needless to say, modern cold-case types have decided that polly was the one who killed them and that the retarded 19th century court system is to blame for "vindicating" her. no one else was ever suspected, obviously. much of this i learned from a bowery boys podcast. the rest you can read here.

meanwhile i have not worked on this paper i'm supposed to write. thanks internet.

weekendery

my routine of late: downpours, cats, thrifting, sushi, bed.

knitting! gotta learn!

here. demasiado $$, however.

i am making progress with this thing. i need someone to do some hand-lettering for me for my next one. i keep trying - i suck. all i know is it's going to say LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT'S SHARK WEEK. i love 30 rock, i love shark week, i love embroidering. this, will be awesome.

i had an extended conversation last night about sharks and crocodiles and why they are scary. these supernaturally fucking evil badass creatures freak me the hell out. particulary the crocodile "death spin" - dude! you know what's a little scarier than that? the death spin executed by an albino crocodile.

NO

FUCKING

WAY