miércoles, noviembre 29, 2006

Cats on computers (haiki)

1.
swiftly typing hands
I must trample your keyboard
Or I am no cat

2.
The sound of paper
beneath my paws, tail in air
sniff my butt now, please

3.
Baring razor teeth
coiled in wait for human flesh
working prey is stalked

Eating soup with a fork (haiku)

My day yesterday.
Metaphor, reality?
Decide for yourself.

sábado, noviembre 25, 2006

Black face and the buoyancy of breasts

Skinny dipping in the wild is one more reason to be thankful. Thankful for the wonderful women that come from afar, and share in epicurean exuberance, women who aren't afraid to get mud on their hands, and jeans, and... faces.

This was not a new discovery, the hot springs nearby, but I. insisted that the fine, sulphurous mud would do wonders for our skin, and out souls. Indeed. We managed to muster the gumption to soak after indulgence, (yes, us, indulgent) in a picnic overlooking the ocean, of pancetta, beet and mustard greens, an orange and beet salad, wheatberry, cranberry and fresh mint and parsley salad (left from a prior meal, with the wheatberries cooked in a deliciously intense stock, and the mint from my front garden, and parsley from K.'s backyard) blue gouda, fig chevre, what was left of the taleggio, mascarpone, hummus and pita, and fresh apple and persimmon.

Celebrating the bounty of the earth, the season and the sisterhood. There is something. There is. After the Japanese tourists made there way back down the hill, we slipped nakedly into the hot water, made plans for future travel (France, Virgin Islands, Mexico), revelled in the joy of the moment, and rubbed silky silt in black beards, (exploring multiple gender personalities) and then covered our entire faces, and the milky white skin that floated to the top, slimy with bubbles, and soft to the touch, before standing in the cold clay, in the waning sunlight, and finally parting.

It was spectacular, and I can't wait to do it again. I. cried because the only family she has near her is me. I didn't cry because the glow of female companionship lingers. I'll cry another day, but not now.

miércoles, noviembre 22, 2006

Blogging under the influence...

Or why I am thankul this year.

I must say, a lot has happened in these last two years. Two Thanksgivings ago, I was blogging away in anxious expectation for my two lovely friends, K. and B. (accompanied by B.'s jolly good hubby) to descend from the northern regions of the state, and partake of (and participate in) my maiden turkey voyage.

There was a garden, and vegetables. There was sadness and loneliness and misunderstanding too. There was a recently re-elected president whose shadow cast itself in telling, and ominous ways over our collective psyche, we just allowed ourselves to ignore that for a fleeting moment.

I am thankful. Still, and despite all that has happened since then. I am thankful, in spite of my accumulating debt (through no fault of my own) and I am thankful in the face of recent loss. I still have so much more than I deserve. I know this. We all do. If we are sitting, writing our thoughts, reading others' in a free place, not behind bars, or hidden under make-shift shelter, or with hunger pangs in our stomachs, the kind that won't go away because there will be no supper tonight, or tomorrow or the next night. If we are able to take a bicycle, and ride it for the joy, or because we prefer it over the use of the car that we let sit in the garage, if we are able to pay for the half hour at the internet café... We are fortunate.

I am fortunate. I have love. It is sitting curled up in a huddled orange ball in the corner. It is coming back in ten minutes with my other K. who knew I needed a break for a few minutes. It is arriving in an hour when the organic free-range turkey, with its escort makes its debut on the scene. I feel thankful for that. For the friends who believe in me, for the students who came to class,( and brought their twin sister;) and thanked me for the job that I do. I am thankful because I am healthy and able to care for others, and I still do. I still do.

I am thankful that I can write words that excite, or incite, or reveal, if only to a precious few. I don't care. Today, that is enough, and I am grateful for that. And for my dear friends in CR, who have no reason to keep in touch, but do anyway, and for the girls of summer, and the East Coast crowd, and my mentors. There are so many reasons, and the pointlessness means less today, and the ennui, the misinterpretation, the oblivion, is not eradicated, it has to be there, always, just a little. If it weren't then I couldn't be so thankful for the respite today. And the champagne that is chilling, waiting for its creme de cassis...

Thank you.

jueves, noviembre 16, 2006

Ilana sobre las ruinas

I found a picture of myself today, floating about, in the ether. It was taken by the brother of my dead friend, or of my ex-lover... not the same connectors, but the same individual.

Not the person who named it, though, Ilana sobre las ruinas. Rising from the ruined pile of rubble, milenary ruins, Ilana, always walking, traipsing, climbing over the ruins. Ilana always creating the ruins, stumbling up, and over, and back down again, to conquer the already conquered, to unravel the already destroyed.

The black skirt was one that I often remember. It still hangs hopeful in my closet, hopeful of some miraculous cure for age, and wear, and tears in the fabric of its inception. It will be in tatters, like the Stones, tatters, and tatters, and tatters, like circles and circles and circles, but not ruins.

The city is a ruin, and the ruin ciudad eats at us, eats us away, into nothing. I wonder why my French is not better. I think about the extra hours of sleep that I had no right to take, and the language, the tongue that was traded in their place. And I am angry.

Mostly at myself it would seem. Angry that there is no real justice, no point, no beauty. That work becomes a stand-in, a fixative, a paso en falso... it works to fill the void, of the voided human detritus, devoid of anything real, or meaningful, or meaningless. They are all words, and I begin to understand, perhaps, the madness that had to come, and Derridá, and the choice of the signifier over the signified, and the Bustrófedon, and Trotsky....

I always had a soft spot for Trotsky, though I can't really explain it.

Back then, perhaps in that very same skirt, under that very same sky, I walked over the ruins. I wandered the streets in search of something. I let myself sink into the city, the pulse, the push, the paved impunity. I went to his house, Lev Bronstein Davidovich.

We construct museums to mean what they never meant in life.

I watched a film, about his assasin, Mornard, or Jacson, or Mercader.

The names that pile up on top of themselves, the years that pile up on top, and the images, superimposed over time to mean absolutely nothing. No marcha de la humanidad. No progression in any sense but the ephemeral note, bare, brazen of a piano, in stillness, in night.

The screen flickers, and I search, over layers and oceans and bodies of ruin, over death in its meaningless or meaningful roundness, completeness, saturated, and plucked bleeding from the vine, intertwined with ivy and cornhusks.

Bent bodies, a pick-axe, a chisel, a game of metonymic distress, destreza, dexterity. And I search out the names of those that came before me, and I think about that time I was told, you can count on me, not one two three, but really, count on me.

And how those words seemed so childish, but wanted to sound so grown, and how I was the cause of ruin, and heartbreak, and how it can all mean so incessantly little, when the night's curtain comes down.

domingo, noviembre 12, 2006

Ek(bo)- frasis

PM - Saba Cabrera, Orlando Jiménez
A short film, noir, not because of its genre but its subject matter, its material, gray-scale celluloid, its setting, night. This film was quashed by the (post)-revolutionary censors, and, to this day remains hard to get one's hands upon. If I were to choose a select qualifier, innocence, not irreverence would be my choice. There is no implicit critique, no blatant protest, there is simply life, a life that ceased to exist, upon the imposition of sameness. There is nothing so tragic as the loss of difference, perhaps the censors knew this, and feared not for the content of the film itself (which, if described as libertine, or counter-revoultionary, could only be done so by one who has not indeed witnessed it) but rather its capacity to evoke a world that was quickly evanescing into the recesses of memories (or the fantasies of mythical midnight Havana for those of us to come).

Here are the words that came to me, trance-like, in the semi-darkness of the classroom, with breath held, and eyes trained on a flickering screen.

Noche conguera
grados de gris
guayaberas
granosa imagen
de luz difusa

cadera cadente
candente
espirales exuberantes

silbando, dehilvanando
el humo entre
labios gruesos
güiro
desgarrado de gestos
escotes
y razones
contrastes latentes
irreverentes, constantes...

decadencia
de cadencia
de cada encía
sonriente
luz blanca
la larga, negra, noche
habanera.

sábado, noviembre 11, 2006

Infernal Affairs

Alls I am saying is, that shit rocked!

Er. Yes, indeed that was a spectacular film whose display of gratuitous violence accentuated the glory of its protagonists rather than overshadowing it.

It has been ages, ages, I tell you, ages since I have been to the cinema, and even longer still since I have thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of a film for what it was.

Ok, here is where I bow my head in demure shame, yes, I know, I shouldn't, by all virtues of my outward appearance, love mystery/thriller/action flicks, but... I have always had a soft spot for the Mafia... and Scorsese... what can I say? (And I promised a certain somebody that I would cry, in his honor, while he got drunk in mine 10,000 miles away, because of our ultimate pointlessnes in the universe, but I failed miserably, sorry.)

The Departed was so worth the $8.50 ($8,50? I didn't pay, but I think that was what it cost). To mention only a few, Jack Nicholson was back inside his Redrum self, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheehan, Mark Walhberg, Matt Daemon... Big surprise of course, was Leonardo DiCaprio, who was not only great, but was GREAT (which is no small feat, for him, let's be honest). The weaving of music, especially Mick Jagger's voice (Mick... whose nominal significance was not lost in a sea of Micks and Guineas) worked to enhance the film's feel of its own era. And yet, it meant to be nothing more than it was. It didn't try to make detailed commentary about the race relations in the Boston of the late 60's, it didn't try to provide some transcendental message, it just was, inside itself, an encapsulated universe.

It was the perfect combination of engaging entertainment, and ephemeral art. That is, the spectator is rapt, not solely because of the graphic and active nature of the film but because of the intelligent unfolding of information, hidden, and then revealed in surprising ways, she is released, upon its closure from any responsibility to continue engagement. Boom. IT is over, and that my friends, is the end. We are departed. Beautiful.

Sure, it recalls Billy Bathgate, and Donny Brasco, Goodfellas, The Usual Suspects... (most especially, and to name only a few). There is no heist, no overarching goal, just the perpetuation of power, dominance, and the scrapping for survival... But its perfection lies not in its originality (it is a remake, of a Japanese film), but rather in its mastery of the form.

miércoles, noviembre 01, 2006

Notification...

I have so much work that I can't see straight. I am losing sleep, and failing to functional perform my daily tasks, or at least those which get shuffled to the back of the pile. I walk, irritatedly past the sigh in the window at a neighbor's house, "Yes on proposal 85," it states, "protect our daughters" and I think to myself, "Protect our daughters? Our daughters? Who are these people??" And then I remember the big fat American flag plastered in their window, and the thought makes my teeth curl. If I am not misinformed (which is always a possibility), this is the proposed ballot measure that the religious rightwing nutjobs (to quote Kerry, quoting a parody of himself) tried to slip through last time around about parental notification for any type of "surgical procedure". Now, we all know that this is a euphemism for abortions, as any teenager who falls down, tears a ligament, and needs surgery would likely not hesitate to call parents for help, economic or otherwise... unless their parents were the authors of such accident. Without even getting into the ethics of abortion vs. right to lifers (ok, if you oblige a child to be born against its will then at least have the decency to support state-funded programs that will make its life possible and more than sheer misery) there is still a basic, and tragic flaw in the notion that "parental notification" laws are in place to protect anyone, beyond controlling and abusive parents.

Let us suppose for a moment that I lead a moral and ethical life (and by I, I don't mean myself, but for argument's sake...).
I perhaps don't believe in abortion, but I understand that what I believe to be right doesn't give me the right to impose my belief on someone else's body. Or perhaps I believe that abortion is a good thing, because, birth control as we know it, though bent on pumping hormones into women's bodies and fiddling with their chemistry for the majority of their adult lives, is nevertheless fallible, and if I am spending hundreds of dollars a year to not get pregnant, it might stand to reason that I don't actually want to have a baby. Perhaps I am even a married woman, who doesn't cheat, lie or steal, but who doesn't feel that children are a relegated responsibility. It all matters very little because what this "parental notification" aims to do, is to target society's most vulnerable members and co-opt their agency in life decisions.

I am a parent (now I am speaking as me). I have a little girl. I was a little girl, and then a teenager, and if anyone knows the dangers of sexiness in a society that hyper-sexualizes its girls from early childhood, it is me. That is why, I, as the moral person that I am, will maintain an open line of dialogue with my little girl throughout her lifetime. Does that mean she will tell me everything? If she's anything like I was, the answer is "hell no", but will she be able to come to me for the big stuff? Will she weigh in with me when she is struggling over a question as enormous as whether or not to have a child? I sincerely hope so. And if that isn't a belief in "family values" I don't know what is. I am a progressive thinker, a liberal (oooh, shudder, shudder) but I don't want my little girl to come home at age 15 pregnant any more than anyone else does... the difference is, that I would hope that she would feel safe enough in our home to talk to me, to seek my help, and to make the choice that she needed to make.

But that is my little girl, and I am a parent with the wherewithall to help her, and a solid, moral foundation in pedagogy and child-rearing. What about those parents that don't? What about those parents that neglect their children because they didn't really want them in the first place, or because they are self-centered assholes, or religious fanatics. Last I heard, biological urges are still biologically equitable, that is, even if my religion tells me it is a sin to rub up against that body, my body will still ask me for that... That is how this and other species perpetuate themselves, lest we forget. So, what happens when a little girl, a 17-year-old little girl knows that she can't possibly go home to tell her parents what is happening in her life. Maybe she was at a party, and she drank too much, and she doesn't really know if you call that rape, because she can't really remember it all that well... or maybe she has a steady boyfriend who swore that it was ok, as long as they were engaged, or maybe... maybe the very same person that is meant to protect her has abused her, has beaten her, or sexually molested her? We are telling these girls, no, you don't get to seek protection from the storm. There is no safe haven, no path out of mysery for you.

What this sort of legislature aims to do is circumvent (once more) a woman's right to defend herself. If you could go home and talk about it with your parents, if there were safety, and solace wouldn't you choose to tell them? If going home is so frightening to girls whose parents are bigots, and zealots, and holier-than-though thumpers of empty books (because if they were to actually read the words and the sentiments of the bible and other sacred texts they would be hard-pressed to find support for their arguments, and their wars) so frightening that they feel the need to legislate their daughter's compliance, don't we have a moral conundrum?

I would wager, if it were legal in this state, of course, that the over-all impact of such legislature would be negligible for women of means, girls whose families have money, and education, and a reputation to uphold. But encroaching on anyone's access to healthcare, whatever the reason, will inevitably fall hardest on those who are already least able to defend themselves, from life, and the environmental hazards of poverty. One more squirmish in the war on women...