these are totally some of our friends

http://farmpunk.blogspot.com/

more soon. dance camp is intense and great and weird and there are many more specific things to say, like today i spent 5 minutes curled up sucking my thumb and then moved about it, like floating interviews and learning release again and again and again, my first aerial class today was so fucking hard i thought i might cry, getting inspired by this amazing studio art-space collective and super down-to-earth creators. more. i am dancing till tired then scheming and planning. i have ideas. i wanna hear yours too.

also i am kind of lonely here, moments between busyness, wow where are my friends and my cats? maybe i will make some friends; maybe the ocean.

mugged by the muggy

it's been awhile--

my skin's a little browner, my tummy a little emptier, my room a little messier, a couple projects finished, a new couple projects in utero, my thoughts tumbling around like damp clothes in this broken-dryer-wet heat,

in the mornings, i stumble out of my bed (sort of like sheets left on the floor of a sauna) and put on the minimals and walk to the lake. so the first apprehension of my day is engineered, clear--i count to ten before i can dunk myself into the icy water. then i take a deep breath and count to ten again. and then i breathe for a little while. and then i dive--

this morning i sat on the porch swing with my coffee

and noticed a tiny spider hanging on a web
between the ropes of the swing

she must have built that home last night
while i dreamed of clay bodies

while no one was watching, she began to wait

and i watched her crawl around and didn't want to ruin the intimacy

(the promise of my silence, our tacit agreement that our shared story would turn out a particular way, that is,

enduring)

i didn't want to break our moment
by being the one to point out that

her home couldn't stay there,
that her home would be folded in upon itself

within the hour.
(and then that i might be the one to do it, to undercut
the optimistic fantasy that drove her to create a home.)

the man who supports the weight of his white crippled dog as they walk through the ally walked through the ally with his dog. the biker who lives in the house with the garden rolled his bike out, strapped on his helmet, and squinted at his watch. a car-driver in a car drove by. things went as they do, the listeners listening and the coffee-drinkers drinking their coffee and the bikers biking and the wakers waking and the sleepers sleeping.

LB wrote, "'i didn't think it would turn out this way' is the secret epitaph of intimacy."

(and i wonder, how do i change my living to avoid that--

not to say cynically, authoritatively "i knew it would turn out like this,"

but to think that in our intimacy, nothing is sure or promised or forever,

and this is okay and good and beautiful because it is)--

and to the spider, what i might have wished i could say was:
"i'm sorry i cannot be seduced by your web
but my aesthetics of attachment are not careful enough
for us to flourish together. it doesn't have to make sense."
but the quietude was tempting and i intimated with my breath
...it doesn't have to make sense.

last week my brother was here, what a quiet charming fresh young mind,

we adventured around and i felt my spirit of adventure returning,

to the MCA to live on metal mobile islands, biking, bäoing, sitting by the lake,

a sip of a beer is an illicit transgressive simple delight,

the world is not so hard, it is good, and the days flow by filled with ideas that are sometimes followed through till completion and sometimes the sketches are left behind.

and these days have been days of making and unmaking,

tinctures pickles lentils paintings drawings beginnings plans truths quietudes stories bread zines

promises obligations burdens annoyances aspirations falseness messes stresses desires pressures expectations stories bread zines

i'm finding great satisfaction in these small projects which have become daily rituals, and though sometimes the process is painful the reward is always great. i am content being alone and together, quiet in groups, fermenting and bubbling in my desires and allowing them to slowly unwind as i bike up, down, back, forth, through the prairie and the froth and the broken-dryer-air.

for now, that's all. i'm thriving on air and memories and presents and futures and glasses of water and icy mornings and the sparest of intimacies and the occasional loaf of hot hot bread.

food for thought i saw a putty catapult

i have a "midterm quiz" in art history this afternoon. 25 minutes, 8 pictures (3 minutes/picture which is also a SI unit called the "overhead rush", OR for short, that is to say every minute you spend staring desperately at a painting on an overhead trying to remember the nationality of its artist is 1 OR) and one of the artists is george grosz, who has an interesting quote:

My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop... A day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society. -Grosz

lots of goodies on the baohaus calendar, which is to say, if you're at all bored in the next week, drop me a line.
love
lelz

a draft, unposted, then established in quiet moderation

HONK bam PIEUW PÃO PÃO não? nãOOOO bing bang BEEP pheeeeeeew
a few short notes, since i'm still gathering my thoughts.
- i got a harmonica for christmas and it's been glued to my hand, mostly making up songs and "oh susanna" and "clam crab cockle cowrie" and some country, some classical sometimes, sometimes something like samba noises...
- i've gotten too good at saying "não falo portugues," people don't really believe me...
- i saw a great exhibit by sophie calle at the museum of modern art in rio.
- 18 hours in brasilia: anarchists, cerveja, and a testing of boundaries (subtitle: the impossibility of intimate straightness)
- the meeting of eyes, the exchanges of gaze, people giving directions, the enthusiasm of strangers, a number of friends and the usefulness of "oi"

Fanfare for Ms. E. F. C

Meine Dame Und Herren und everything in-between or beyond that spectrum,

I give you Em Le Fay
Erstwhile Englishwoman in the County of Fyfe (after the Thane thereof)
Scholar and Soon-to-be Asset Manager
Cross-Atlantic Nomad
All-Around Encyclopedia of Minutiae
Former Co-President of the Dramatic Society
Receiver of a Glass of White Wine
and
my friend, Former Citizen of My Heart

Quoth the Economics Student, "It's not like I'm going to be happy anyway, so I might as well do a job that makes me a good deal of money. Then I can retire and do what I like." Quoth the Follower of Dr. Johnson and Adam Smith, "It's hard to do a thing you love, why ruin it? Get out, while you can." Quoth she, "No one around me has got their head screwed on right."

I give you Em Le Fay
Wearer of Sensible Winter Coats and Good Jeans
Attendant of Assessment Pools
(which I gather are rather like group auditions)
Applicant to the Financial Giant J.P. Morgan Stanley
Half of Matt and Emma
Recaller of the Tiny Details of the Political Machinations of the Alma Mater
(and Extensive Recounter thereof)
Drinker of Blue Drinks
Giver of Earfuls
Former Partner-In-Crime

I can't really remember half the people she mentions in conversation. My mind is going is my excuse. That time I puked so hard vessels burst in my eyes cleared away most of 2004-2005. Don't mind me, I'm listening.

She says, "You know, [insert favorite teacher here] once told me that she was worried about you. Sort of unsure of where you would end up. Of who you'd be." I open my mouth to speak as this is news to me, but these days it's hard to get a word in edgewise. The last time we saw each other, she was but two days out of the removal of her wisdom teeth and still talked my ear off for nigh on seven turnings of the hour. I think, "We're not all that different, you and me, scrabbling for happiness on this unhappy plain."

I think, "Remember the evening when we were at school late and no one was around and it was pouring (like it is tonight) and we ran out onto the field made of ASTROTURF and dumped cans of Coke onto their precious and expensive lacrosse/field hockey pitch in an act of nascent radical violence? Before we knew those words? And how we howled in the night and ran giggling back inside to the stares of our less-bedraggled classmates and winked at each other for the offense we had committed? Do you remember? Well, do you?"

Exit Em Le Fay
Helena to my Hermia
Shylock to my Bassanio
One Half of a Pair of Strange Little Girls
Citizen of My Heart

BAO!

seven feet, four inches, five hundred and forty pounds

a quick shoutout (from my realm of pittsburghian sneakitude and snowaccrued) to the new squids and inkful mammals in our midst...heather [can fly], margaret inglosolunbe/terr[or]ence, and foxfur-beee[ankh]uh, welcome to this strange dwelling which perhaps you might return to enough to call some kind of home.

tmo's post about being home resounded a lot with me--the sneakitude, the stars, the weight of rules, regulations, and roofs in the name of "love." (here's a thought, snatched crudely from politics is not a banana: we kill each other more than we kill our enemies, and that's a problem.)

my attempts to break through the layers of gardentalk, jobtalk, schooltalk with my mother have resulted in the repeated prod: "whew, you like these deep conversations. i just want to enjoy your company while you're here." i turn over and over in my mind what kind of "pleasantry" is possible when every domestic conflict is a painful-to-watch-[for-me] spectacle of miscommunication, money money money and a desire to feel attached and together, gone about in all the wrong ways (faith, malls, movies...)

concretely, then,
i've been chilling with the lelster a lot, finding our way around the quiet pittsburgh nightlife scene (funny, since the last time i was here pittsburgh was full o riot-ready cops) looking for the loud queermos whose voices don't quite echo as far as the suburbs. on thursday we went to lawrenceville, in and out of bars too loud for talk and we played a game of pool at remedy. yesterday, we organized a meeting of families, went to the warhol museum and saw this exhibit on shepard fairy (OBEY/andre the giant has a posse/etc.) i wonder if my sneakers will ever be in a museum. my parents/sister had bought tickets to the pittsburgh renaissance choir (a gay men's choir and gay women's choir) show, which turned out to be a spectacle of charity and money and balding white sweatervested gay couples. i watched the ASL interpreter and learned the signs for "king" and "lord" and "christmas day." then i darted off to explore lawrenceville some more, danced a little to gaga et al at brillobox and then had a beer with some gorgeous drag queens at blue moon.

so-though,
as easy as it is to be critical, i've been struggling to find optimistic reframings. i've been fighting regret, refusing to entertain the concept in myself and rooting it out in others....regret (and the resulting shame, guilt, self-pitying, self-hatred, loss of agency, complaining, sadness) seems to me to invite a sense of paralysis. life is not as easily accessible and editable as a google doc. in lieu of existential "back" buttons, i'll keep you updated on my campaign against regret.

6. somehow half my clothes are too clean and the other half smell like pee and come. hmmmm.

7. i miss the baohaus already.

8. i hope you are all alive and in touch with your vitality. to new squidlings: post without thinking, don't wait for the "right" idea to strike and instead strike with something bumpy and malformed. (anyway, that's how i like it.)

love,
elz
(soundtrack: something bollywood...)