Goings on at the bao!

Hallo,

yes it's been a whhililileileiellele since forever, but here we is, still baoing. I have three experiences to share.

1) Iron & Wine played a free mill park show for all of the lovely people of chicago. Yes, all of them - there were so many, the city stopped letting people into the show. So I climbed up a girder and sat on top, behind the park ampitheater thing, to listen to Sam what'shisfaceBeanorsomething croon. Here's some pictures:

2) The garden continues to grow. I can hardly believe it. I find myself very attentive to the weather each day - has it rained recently? Is it going to be way too sunny all day? Sometimes we water twice in a day, sometimes we water twice in a week. that's chicago, anyway. but soon, yes soon, there will even be some veggies to eat. We've been talking about preparing the veggies of our labor and taking them for a picnic to that weird abandoned park building just southeast of the bao, next to the 57th street tunnel under lakeshow.

Anyway, here's some pictures of greenery:

aaaand #3) last night Mark the neighbor came by and juggled balls of fire on the roof. He pulled back his hair so it wouldn't light on fire, and it made him look like a sailor.

till next time!

lelz

still T-totalling, how about that?

did it ever occur to anybody back in the good ole angry baohaus days that "for nothing, against everything" and "take it down from the outside" is also a False Binary?
ps. if you have an android phone i just published a new app called Crowd Control - think anonymous, localized text chatting by gps.
pps. not drinking makes other substances more effective in general. also makes me a better programmer. also makes my mood much calmer. shockingly, i'm beginning to understand mr. franklin.

a baohaus update

so, they've FINALLY repainted the baohaus. it was a team of really cool looking, not very professional (bring your kid to work day anyone?) painters, who commented on EVERYTHING they were painting. I know because I went in and introduced myself as a neighbor. They loved the scrawls, they thought the paintings showed great talent (ahem ev), they thought the quote about the kilos of cocaine was nice, and they were under the weird impression that all of this was accomplished by one (1) male-bodied person. heh.
random quote: "some of the stuff he wrote was DEEP, wow!"
so it's a nice ending in my mind.
also, i finally rescued that door, cuz i figure they've definitely assessed the place by now, and they still haven't changed the lock on the back door. so the squid is back upstairs (daryl put it down again a while ago, long story).
lots of loooove
lelz

how far does the analogy between body and house extend?

"For the spirit dies not; the soul is in the body, and without a soul it cannot live. The body, when the soul forsakes it, is not. For the body is the house of the soul; and the soul the house of the spirit." - justin martyr, 150-160a.d.

"This body is not a home but an inn, and that only briefly." -seneca

"You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body." -c.s. lewis

"Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
These rebel powers that thee array;
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?"
- from sonnet 146 - shakespeare

"The body never lies." -martha graham

i like my house clean and my body dirty
i wander in and out of my house and stay firmly (mostly) in my body
my house is open to almost all, my body is...mine. sometimes yours if i say so.
i want a house with no walls and a body with strong fibers and
don't want my skin to be too thick but these days i'm careful about hyperstimulation cause i've sensitized myself carefully.
i want my house to be safe always and locked at night, and my body to be safe and capable of trusting itself to unsafeness, unlocking itself, trusting to someone else's control, able to be bruised and scratched and used and then to recover with aching grace.
i want my body to be well and i know my house will always have tensions and small problems. neither is a machine.
i want my house covered in art, life, stuff, my body to reflect my life but not to be as readable as what's on my bookshelf and my walls...i want my body to be able to feel naked and my house to never be too empty.
i want both to be built with care, fed with goodness, capable of housing many or few
i want to sometimes let the house of my body be quiet and still
i want fur on the couch but not in my cunt
i don't want couchsurfers in my body's spaces, but i want to be open to casual engagements
i want everyone who comes through to mark my house, for the smells to always change
but i want my body to be my smells, never too estranged from my own influence and control,
i want to push my senses' boundaries, open my hips as i stretch, walk and feel my legs stretching and walls bowing (bäoing?) and dissolving so that i can
communicate with my body and not just my words...
with spirit, across walls and bodies, and not just with words...
i exceed my body's dead boundedness and my body cannot be contained by my house.

"Every [person] is the builder of a temple, called [their] body, to the god [they] worship, after a style purely [their] own, nor can [they] get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones." - thoreau

my body in my house,
my house in my body,
maybe i'll get a bäohaus tattoo for our upcoming bodymod day.

"Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home." -j.winterson, in "gut symmetries"

you can lick my face anytime

here's my soupy soup
i thought about sending this in an email but for now i'm putting it here until i decide that it's okay to press the send button (these things can mean a lot and for some it might be toooooo much)

wow wow wow
i have warm burbles of love for all of you
i'm on the edge of tears - IN A NICE WAY, i must say
such that my eyes are always a little warm
and the edges of my vision blurred and soft so our world is a little dreamy
and my skin a little prickly
i feel fizzles between us
and though i am ZONKED, i like it and i like you
yes YOU, i'm looking at you
pretty mess-maker, joy-dancer, toe-wiggler, happy glowworm
at YOU life-good-maker, family-friend-lover
to whom i am grafted

i would briefly like to thank the universe
and its chaos
for coalescing to bring us-me-you here
THANKS ENTROPY (or rather let's measure ourselves on the spectrum thereof)!
you are a treat
you smell goodbad
you are nastytasty-tastynasty

aw shucks
i wanna hide in my hair
but i totally want you to get underneath it too
and we can live in a little tent
of my SAMSONITE hair
because i am so proud of you, to be with you and near you
because you are strong and beautiful and enticing and so so smart
so there you go

soupy-sappy-lovelove
you can lick my face anytime

a moment before.

readying
sweeping cleaning washing moving stacking chewing
transforming
the living room, once close and warm, is now echoy and the floors are aching for moving feet.
wondering, too,
and missing and loving
and aching and sneezing
and building and painting
making nests as we clear out hollows

"[the bride] walks to her husband's home, never looks back or she'll turn to stone."
i mean,
fuck some patriarchal short-sighted family-breaking family-defining bullshit,
but i think there's something about not looking back
after all, our history is in our skin and our skin is dead until we begin to dance.

tonight i will be gray with lust and love,
spirit-filled stone,
concrete and fantastical.
and we will dance and dance and if you doubt for a moment and turn, you will join my ranks.

b brought up a good point--
to be in nature is quite a thing,
hard to believe that it was always there and will be there whenever we want it,
or perhaps pause to wander with our eyes and hearts,
and in the mean time the city holds for us so much, something like tonight,
something like multitudinous explosions,
social experiments,
a different souvenier to take into the woods.

and like wide-eyed rabbits, strong branches, sharp thorns, tufts of grass, furry humans,
we can love many a stranger if only for a moment

my favorite part of spring is jumping.

snippets of the bäohaus now available on the interwebz! share with friends, family, and remember the state of our house from faraway.

in other news,
today was my first day of school. (sounds of my life)
it was dumb and also interesting--"global warming" and "environmental history of the earth."
in the semcoop today i stood at the counter talking to dana and seeing hannah and someone said, do you have any books to buy?
i put down the book i'd accidentally picked up
and replied, "no, i have a lot of books. probably if i could take all the words they contain and scramble them up enough, i'd have all the books here. so i don't think i need any more."

this past weekorso has been like crawling through a brightly-lit tunnel,
keeping my peripheral vision open and my blinders put away,
this refrain of not-getting-back-to-something-old, i'm doing-this-a-new-way,
and neonomads and buddies and
sometimes searching searching for lost objects in a house that is an organized, sparkling disaster zone.
(i mean disaster in a good way, like "catastrophes" like ice dams opening up and creating the channeled scablands. like close calls that make you realize how much you stand to lose. like catastrophic departures that put enough distance between you&you that the missing starts to hurt and then watching your love grow as independence flourishes and autonomy learns to coexist with codependence like gabe and vlad asleep with their paws wrapped around each others' disastrously furry bodies.)

today this happened to me:
i was walking by the sem co-op, on the phone with z, and boarded over the curb and almost went sprawling. dana was walking by and paused-laughed and i yelled "oh shit." ten feet later, i heard,
"you just cursed in front of a church!"
me: uh...(looking around for a church and all i see is the sem co-op but okay)...oops.
he: want to be friends?
me: sure. what's your name?
he: here. (offers me the piece of paper he's holding) do you have an email address?
me: yes...but can we be friends without email?
he: just read it. all my info is there.
me: okay. what's your name?
he: just read it.
me: i'm eliot.
he: bye!

friendship is complicated these days,
complicated like the scablands and globalization and kissing,
a crumpled-typed note addressed to "nice ones,"
pink soup.
complicated like dreams i'm not sure i want to share in case they come true
photographs that i'm not in because i remember the feeling of a body behind a camera
and check-ins and sometimes honesty that hurts
like face wash that stings and you know it's doing something
(unless it turns out it's bleach and acne is not as bad as corroded flesh)
and anyway, what is that makes one shiny?
in the end, no one wants to be alone but we're so good at being lonely.
as soon as i say, "i don't know you," we are something to each other and
i have been taking pleasure in the weaving and woving and wivening of threads and stories,
delighting in the doing-being-becoming-brilliance of my buddies
because if i am enlightening myself, it is because i am surrounded by sources of light.
and in these days which are waxing and waning by the hour,
my hunger for artifacts is checked by a growing taste for kombucha
or if those things aren't causal,
they're correlated by event C, the walls and floors and bruises and glittery eyebrows and earfuls of facepaint and long breakfasts and cowboy coffee
and these bits of being here and also not-here. mostly here.

my bike is sad today, but i am not.

oh and,
skillshare/potluck/d.i.y.seder at the bäo tonight! if you weren't invited and are on this blog, you're invited
now.

screaming in the tunnel under the metra is a beautiful thing

it is so good to be home.
last night, z shared a thought, something like
relationships are getting comfortable in the routine of someone else's patterns.
(this idea extracted from her actual words, which are alonso's words revoiced: "and perhaps you never know anyone as much as you know the rhythms you fall into when you're around them.")
stambam said, yeah, like comfort.

i love missing things,
leaving in order to return
("the return makes the leaving less nervewracking")

but also, when i would sit by the river and make necklaces or paint gourds or think or cry, i wondered whether i was missing being comfortable (rhythms of synchrony), or people (sparks of connection), or a culture of bäo (in which i am something which elsewhere it becomes hard to sustain)...
i concluded that my feelings of saudade were all and none of these things,
and one night over caipirinhas and candlelight az and i articulated our wonder and pleasure at what the bäohaus has become for us (in part)--
(i speak for myself now, my voice inspired by others,)--
a place where we've allowed and pushed ourselves open,
to transform each other, ourselves, allowed ourselves to be(come) transformed,
and celebrated (and respected--maybe respect is not so far from celebration?) community, togetherness, and the benefits reaped from breaking down walls and norms,
and seeking seeking finding building autonomy from codependence, independence and self-reliance through safe-sane-consensual-communicative relationships,
an alternative (to) education (born in the midst of a sometimes-suffocating academia),
(and of course a refrain of
fostering playfulness,
opposing racism, sexism, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, structures and institutions which keep people so bound up that they can't see their ropes and our teeth become too dull to chew-spit-talk a way out,
making music, art of all kinds, encouraging self-expression,
care)

these things, i think, are awesome.
and we (i, i think we) marveled at how these things have also inspired-empowered-educated us, and perhaps other bäos, to build-create-question-challenge elsewhere (or perhaps this is what brought us together--it's hard to say exactly.)

anyway,
it's good to be back here,
but it's not the place i left, exactly, not just slipping back into rhythms of comfort
(although good hugs are good and knowing how the stove works is a nice perk and having a bed that doesn't get rained on...is different)
i think there's something about returning to this space
that makes me want to rip my skin off,
spit on my best friends,
apply and translate and stay awake late and get up early,
bomb the world and rebuild it (using principles of anarchist permaculture this time)
and learning learning listening listening changing always.
to me, the bäo is not static. not closed. never the same. never dead. somehow still home.

for a long time i defined home as a place to return to,
but it's funny to find my definition shifting--
realizing that i've taken the bäo with me, and that it's spread like seeds
created like a collage, modeled on junkheaps, collectives, birdsnests, and sidewalks.

thanks for a fab potluck last night...i'm thrilled in this moment and looking forward to taking chicago (the world?) by glitterheatdirtstorm, again and again and again.

(and i would love to hear your words-thoughts-images,
in life or internet,
about what this house is, has been, could be for you,
since these walls have been built, lived in, pierced, and patched together by all of you.)

for the good life is out there somewhere, so stay on my arm you little charmer

from my journal at 7:30am today, or 8pm on monday 4 u, 

dunno if it will be interesting at all

what IS interesting, is that it is RAINING

not as hard as it did i'm sure during winknight's stay in summer 05, but wow i was soaked earlier walking to and from dance. i haven't seen a rain like this in... who knows. certainly not in washington nor in pune so far. so june or july in chicago. it's wonderful except that the water on the street is full of ambiguous matter.

ok ok.

i'm at home [in hyde park] talking to justin on gmail, skype, phone or something. he is at the baohaus, i have to go soon [to india? somewhere permanent, so there is an urgency] but i want to see justin before i leave but i project that he is reluctant or doesn't think it is important [or like seeing me when i'm about to leave would just open up new wounds or something so it's better not to see each other at all... a familiar train of thought for me]. i go there and find my vest/package, sand, no rock, cigarette wrapper from cigs i bought in bombay. justin is kinda sorta in the other room[i originally typed 'kinda aorta'!].. i don't think i actually physically see him. [second or third dream where this happens! i havent seen justin in weeks]. i go through give away boxes of clothes and take a striped shirt from ali. 

SWITCH

i'm wrapping electrical chords around irons, playing "like a virgin" by madonna, britney, and christina [remember that vma performance where they kissed and it was scandalous?]. then scene change to wearing wobbly high heels (like from the kingfisher swimsuit calendar model reality tv show) at a dilapidated opera house. amulya mandava is claiming something about rewriting/organizing some great music masterpiece of orchestral music by a composer i don't like but i can't remember who, now. the stairs are difficult. i hear someone say "it won 2 tonys". when we get to the lobby i'm with granny, granddad, and mom. the opera-food-place is baking $3 cookies and granny remarks that they're finally baking their own, and needs to throw something out. 

SWITCH

in a mildly dilapidated grand building [the opera house after being abandoned in 50 years? which reminds me of the train station in bombay... marble floors and nice stairs, but dirt and funny smells everywhere]. i'm finding anastasia and ali, they're in class or something. i'm doing something with blue ink. it's raining and coming through the roof. i pee while walking down the grand-ish stairs [same scene as walking down stairs in opera house, only no high heels and i'm with a&a] . i'm not wearing pants. there might be more. a&a are nonchalant, not interested in me.

then? the interview with the nice couple, how they met. through craigslist. a cute ad. they have fun! they do such n such! then i see he has a computer. on the side of the building. it is big, about 3 feet tall-- looks like "tsunami dream" comp of my dad's. outside, still colonial bombay architecture, 

THEN do i go to the part where i am part of a murder scheme? i waylay someone (the target?) by reading something to them, and then a guy down the street shoots them. i move on and question the ethics of what i just did. maybe that person was hannah because i also dreamt that i read a long sentence from a yellow paper that was my high school transcript with multiple clauses, conflicting imagery, weird vocab, also claiming that india was in africa. hannah said "what does that even mean?" ad we're like yeah wtf i dunno. 

also at some point i'm stretching in some kind of gym class and my legs look more like granny's and a little diamond-like shaped (like harlequin babies) and some dude shares that he used to know a kid who had it who could never poop. but that when he was a kid his poops were too watery. maybe the kid with weird skin died? or had some other strange ending. 

============

that's the end of my journal entry. wow it was boring, but i was so excited writing it this morning. i can pretty much clearly identify where all of these images situations and feelings come from in my conscious life, so in a way, i thought that sharing this with you all lets you know how my unconscious is processing the stuff i'm seeing thinking feeling and talking about. instead of writing those things down directly. home, love, place, bodily discomfort, language, death, buildings, art, where the fuck i am/am i.

overheard at the baohaus

"i definitely dreamed last night that ethan was weeping in the bathroom."

...

"wow, this is going to take a long time to get back to america. we kept seeing people on houseboats. this feels really uncool."

"should i stop?"

"it feels unpleasant to my ears."

...

"your butt is different."

"your butthair is different? it totally is though. different colors, different shapes, different sizes...it's okay, though. we can still be buddies."

...

"what an idiot. baby, you like fire? you like fire?'

...

"it'll probably be like me manhandling a little bit and her manhandling a little bit...and between that, we'll be fine."

when history cas voms it moves on without a pause

a truly delightful description of the baohaus abode from the mac website.

"On a quiet street just steps from 57th Street Beach and dotted with classic early 20th-century architecture, 5487 [that is, 5491]’s deep, red brick blends with its surroundings, yet its facade stands out: Stately, white Romanesque columns support balustrade-lined balconies, providing a sense of arrival and contrasting with the softly molded corner sunrooms anchoring both sides of the building."

to summarize: quiet, classic, early 20th-century, deep, red, stately, white, Romanesque, balustrade-lined, softly molded.
ha
to me the baohaus is not virginal or quiet but full, winding, loud, and seductively decrepit. mmm. but perhaps you have better words.

summupance

an update:
welcome to meghan/m.t.raptor to this box of bundling and bed of buddiness.

tonight i sprouted
and flew.
biking [in the rain] is so good (, even if it's down 55th street.)

my buddy sav is moving to washington d.c. it is strange to see a buddy diasporating. maybehopefully she will join the blog.

tonight is full of swirls
the baohaus is dark and full of cats.
and me.

love to all who are here and elsewhere.
a

the rolling ball and being behind, in front of, and on top of it

it is quite possible
that this couch,
in the halflight of our living room,
has powers to suck people in.
i have experienced this.

onto other squidling topics...i feel my tentacles tingling a little.
the past few days have been somewhat immemorable. a few moments:
watching some kids at weiser concoct vegannaise out of olive oil and tofu and stuff.
smearing menstrualblood-ish dye into my hair and scalp, blood everywhere.
scavenging and cooking (of epic proportions) with hausmates...a cacophony of smells and delightz.

tuesday night i bedecked myself for rocky horror at the roots collective. sporting a new(old) leather vest and black-and-white striped tights and a full head of black curls, i reexperienced how fucking hot tim curry is and raised my voice in praise of cultfilm genderbending. wow. we played combat kissing in the yard and i weaved home on my bike, clicking away and hoping no cars got in my way.

then i dreamt that i went to a music festival somewhere in indiana! there were lots of groups of students and their teachers. food for students was free but they only had banana muffins and teacher food (cheese) cost 2-5 cents. i didn't have any money. then there were some anarchists, all scruffy men, organizing some kind of action.

i have been sprouting collard greens and catnip in the house and it is so so ready to be planted in the garden so that's what i'm off to do now.

sorry this is boring. sometimes (but only occasionally, if you live in the baohaus), life is boring.