A long time ago.... (A decade, even)... there was a website of miscellaneous written stuff called I Drank What?, which featured many things written by, among other people, Cindy Sites Wooley (only Sites back then, a decade or more ago), who had worked on and written for Tangents magazine, and Chris DeLisle (two awesome people, both of whom Facebook now helps my slack ass to keep up with; thank you FB!)
BTW, Tangents went away at one point but now is back again - hooray!! Here is the NEW iteration: http://tangentsmag.blogspot.com/ Anyway, I also wrote some stuff for IDW: mainly poems, a few articles, a story or two, and the occasional review. Not many reviews, though. For, you see, I am long-winded -- or rather, long-typed?/keyed? Yeah. In college, I *wanted* to be able to write the 8-9 page papers we were assigned, but in my OCD way I'd end up with 14 pages, still only 2/3 of the way finished with what I wanted to say, at 4 am, glaring at my peacefully sleeping roommate who double-spaced her paper to bring it up to 8 pages. So. very. maddening.
Thus, it came as no surprise to me that I could not for the life of me write a paragraph-long review of ANYTHING. My fellow writers (and happily, also the editors), however, were very very surprised nigh unto alarm. This is one of them, although not, I believe, the longest one. (The longest one, a paen to Die Hard, actually made their eyes glaze over and their faces sag a little. But I can't locate it right now.) This review is from July 2001. ___________________________________________________ Exhibit Review: “Mi Barrio/My Neighborhood” at Gallery L
One of the latest things to go cosmopolitan in Charlotte is the Main Library uptown. In recent months, I’ve noticed a big change there, namely that the big room that used to be the Virtual Library has now become a seriously suave gallery, with the ultra-hip, New York-style name of Gallery L. So far, I’ve seen two pretty neat things there: a Warhol exhibit, and the exhibit I’m reviewing here, called “Mi Barrio/My Neighborhood”. It’s an exhibit of a graphic novel and various other art created by 13 teenagers in a predominantly Hispanic part of Hendersonville.
The novel uses a combination of drawings, some black & white, some color, and photos. There aren’t many words: mostly a collage of pictures and images loosely tell a story of gang life, from riding high to dying. This is then followed by a page that declares women to be “Man’s Best Hope for Peace” and shows some of the girls that were involved in the project. Some comics and miscellaneous collage-style pages follow, including a really cool one about the “New Girl Order”. The novel is in Spanish, reading from one side, then when you flip the book over, the words are in English, which is a really good way to do it. The kids have done an amazing job of integrating the drawings and the photos, and the composition and placement is excellent, like when there’s a line-drawing of a man pasted into a photograph of a rear-view mirror. I also like the way certain drawings, like the buildings, are repeated throughout the comic so skillfully, with different portions of a larger drawing in different sizes. Although the gang story is really simple and almost stylized, it works well that way, and artistically it is really well-done.
Various pages from the novel were put up on different walls of the gallery, so it really hits you first with the collective atmosphere of it all, of gang life and teen life in general. And since the gallery is laid out so that you have to walk around walls and partitions to see it all, the pages were shuffled even more so you therefore had to pay more attention to each frame, which enhances the experience. Copies of the novel are provided free at the entrance, though, so you can then read it in order and see it the way they put it together. Besides the novel, the walls of Gallery L held some more collage-type pictures, and a lot more miscellaneous pieces of art by the kids who worked on this project: such as self-portraits, neighborhood scenes, some drawings of a more religious or mystical/fantastical nature, and even a few comic strips.
Out of the miscellaneous art, most was really good and impressed me with the kids’ talent – and a few drawings actually blew me away with the skill in technique and composition. But the creativity of all of it, especially the graphic novel and collage pages, really impressed me in and of itself. This exhibit reminded me of how it was in high school, of the kids who were into art and whose talent I admired and envied. There is often so much talent in the kids around you, and so it’s really important for teachers, counselors, and society as a whole to not let down kids. Everyone needs to encourage and listen to kids, to recognize how unique and impressive they are, and how important it is for them to feel pride in accomplishment. This exhibit reminded me how cool most kids already are, at that age – at any age – as people who matter.
“Mi Barrio/My Neighborhood” runs through July 22nd, and it’s definitely worth a trip up to Gallery L.
Okay, so....Hola, to whoever? whomever? may be reading this.
(giggle -- sounds like the following sentence should be "If you're reading this, it means the monster caught me and devoured me with his slavering fangs. Tell my mother I love her....")
Anyway, I used to enjoy (or I remember it that way, at least) the school assignments wherein the teacher would require us to keep a journal for a week or whatever, and we either had to write a minimum of (2? 3? I don't remember the number...) paragraphs -- OR if you wrote a poem, it counted as a complete journal entry -- per day. I had half entertained using this idea for / as my blog, but then I quailed at the thought of making people bored or something. So many bloggers are so productive, prolific, and witty on a daily basis, you see, or at least a weekly basis...it's intimidating.
However, eff that line of thinking. For one thing, as a friend of mine typed on his most excellent blog The Ramen Stand, "Who cares if nobody reads this thing, ever. This is for me...Never feel as though I HAVE to post. Relieve pressure. This is for fun." So, thank you, Nate Bezner, for inspiring me to give blogging another shot!
So, I guess I'm sort of proclaiming, at least to myself, that writing something in this blog and posting it, hopefully daily but at least once a week, will be mainly what this is all about: writing exercise + therapy. But also, a place to store a few links or lists or random reminders about things, here and there. We'll see.
Thoughts in my head one minute, blank slate the next moment...ADD is not helping me be a writer right now.
However, I always wanted to do random things on a blog (a decade or so ago, I dreamed of having my own website - but this is MUCH easier). I wanted to make lists of things, recommendations of things, etc.
Here are a few things I highly recommend that you, dear reader, check out / try, etc.
~ Listen to old radio detective shows, like Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Pat Novak For Hire and Line Up. A) they totally RULE, and B) they are great company / background for when you're doing chores, or walking around the block, or driving, or trying to fall asleep, or wrapping gifts when it's Christmastime, or waiting for an appointment, or whatever. I especially particularly recommend the following Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar episode "The Royal Street Matter".
* Put blueberries in your chocolate ice cream - tastes great, especially if it's dark chocolate flavor.
> Any time you're near a fountain (of reasonably large size - not a water fountain that you drink from), especially if said fountain shoots streams of water in arcs, try to keep your eyes on one droplet of water from the moment it shoots out of the nozzle, up into the air, over the top of the arc, and down again into the pool of water. Of course, you can't really latch your eyes onto just one droplet of water without binoculars - but do try to keep your eye fixated one piece of the water's stream, as specifically as possible, up and over.
This will freeze the water for a surreal few seconds, and it will feel like you're looking at stop-motion photography -- but in real time. Like this!
It may sound goofy, but if you try it, I'll bet you'll find it diverting and possibly even fascinating, as I do.
+ If you like the book Jane Eyre, and you are at all geeky or a fan of fantasy or sci-fi, then you owe it to yourself to read Jane Slayre. It is SO well done, and I really enjoyed looking through both books simultaneously and seeing which parts of Jane Slayre were word-for-word the same as the source material, and which bits were much the same but slighly altered to fit the situation.
Also, if you were always a little (or a lot!) turned on by Mr. Rochester, I suggest you check out the book Jane Eyrotica. Yep, it's what it sounds like. ;D
* Any Bryan Ferry and/or Roxy Music fans in the metaphorical house? You should know, if you don't already, that the Bryan Ferry Orchestra put out a CD of many Ferry and Roxy songs RE-DONE AS 1920s JAZZ TUNES. Yes. They. Did. The CD is called The Jazz Age, and it is SO awesome!
To wit:here is "Virginia Plain", by Roxy Music:
and here is "Virginia Plain, by the Bryan Ferry Orchestra:
So...there are a ton of other things that I notice and enjoy, which I'm not sure that everyone has taken the time to notice and enjoy. I plan to revisit this topic quite a bit. (I'm also one of those people who delights in using a jukebox to play Amateur DJ to the entire restaurant.) When will the next post be? Who can say? To quote Dirk Gently: "Pray God I am not too soon!"
(Okay...wrote this one actually today, unlike the other two I posted today, which were not actually written today. It appears that I sort of wrote it once before already (entitled I Hope Perfectionism Falls Down the Stairs and Gets Gout). Well, too bad. I wrote it today (okay, technically, since it is after midnight, it was in fact yesterday...) and I'm posting it not-today-but-feels-like-today-because-I-haven't-gone-to-bed-yet.
Ah, OCD...it makes for some interesting sentences.)
So....
I have some things I have to "work
out", personally, and I always mean to get around to writing,
and I think better when I can write it down, so...
"Problem solved!"
It may not be interesting to ANYONE but
me, however, writing it here and there results in
= collecting paper = too much, so am
now going to be doing sort of diary/website/etc
on this blog. Probably no-one reading
anyway; suits me fine if it's just me & maybe a friend or two
peering at it.
The thing is...
when I am away from a screen or paper
(really I hardly ever have written anything on a screen, only some
poems in the college computer lab a lifetime ago --
still, as mentioned b/f, there is too
much paper)
anyway, I come up with insights, minor
"voila"s, etc, bits of things -
so many thoughts and it's hard to hold
them if i don't type with closed eyes they will disintegrate
i will get hung up b/c the thoughts
they are such a tide
so yeah, I was upstairs and having
thoughts i wanted to put into a blog, like
"indecision kills"
Grr - I came straight downstairs and
started typing, with my eyes closed == but I had already lost the
thoughts as I began to type.
I know that perfection is my enemy, and
so is form and expectation (and sometimes self-in(tro)spection)
I wonder if i am the only one who write
(types) "blind" - out of sheer necessity?
i know the distraction element is so
incredible in my mind at any given time
One thing I listened to was radio remix
- tonight's show informed it somehow but how?
I remember that the in between times of
life informed was what i was going to type about yesterday
all swept away now by new thoughts but
what were they? they are leaking out of my head the more seconds pass
that i am away from their original conception
radio the man was talking about bit
bits various flotsam and jetsam and puts them together well that is
what this blog is going to be b/c that's what
it was meant to be
we'll see
but anyway there are things in the
emails to retrieve
and yesterday I was thinking about the
in between moments of everyday life and maybe how I am, when in those
in-between moments? But I can't remember exactly.
GAH! so frustrating!!!!!
I've written a thousand opening
sentences for blogs, in my head, but they never stay long enough for
me to put them IN the blog.
This will be the next blog entry anyway
- screw it.
(this was actually written, I think, sometime early in 2013??? Apparently it was a Thursday)
(btw love MGee & NCIS in general so title is a nod to that)
Blank page - aaaaugghh!
So: Freewriting...
- humidity sucks - "too much information/runnin' through my brain" - what is most and least interesting to write here, what's good enough or not enough? - Fascinating cat : will he wink back? - sky gets dark so fast, once it starts - where do all the thoughts go when you try to chase them around and corral them they dry up, disappear? puff of smoke - if I open up something in my brain just right, a torrent comes out - thought torrent - if it could just leak it directly through the pen but it's not a pen it's my fingers on keys; if only one of my fingers could double as a pen; stupid brain full of thoughts at all the wrong times then they hide if torrent is required! It figures, those klutzes; still better to at least spill some thoughts - they get SO majorly backed up in me then fester yes sit around and mildew- not good precious must get out and shake thoughts loose always think better flows better when I'm moving don't know why - "movin' on from town to town" - aha: all the songs that have moving in the title maybe I'll make into a list; could make another blog called Free Space "watch this space" always a new different list or observation or just random words - btw I highly recommend magnetic poetry even if you have no room on the fridge just attach something magnetic to the wall - "over me, over you/over everybody" - heavy the laptop is, and such a weak battery, so not actually as portable as I'd imagined - still a vast improvement over monitor and stays-in-one-place PC - was listening to a good episode of either Talk of the Nation or Charlotte Talks, on NPR, about technology of maps on phones and soon even in the lens of your glasses; it could cut you off from the world maybe - got to be careful of that - it is so important to walk down to the pond, tiny and polluted though it is, just to see maybe one frog, hear six or more frogs' enormous and eerie voices, and see tadpoles actually jump just a bit out of the water coming to the surface to get food. A better memory would help, in re: how thoughts flow so much better when I'm moving mustn't wreck the car after all when brilliance (okay maybe more like inspiration) hits or when epiphanies occur - still working on the "perfect" dictaphone set-up for car. "Too much information/ drivin' me insane" - how odd, the sheer volume of ideas that someone has already had, thus the feeling 'it's as though this song was written for me!', 'how did he know I'd feel that way?', nothing new under the sun and all that rot yeah yeah, but sometimes it's the juxtaposition of when you hear the song just on the heels of what your see or when you think of the song just as you've heard words the song describes or leads to the words pointing a path down the runway straight into Sting's voice and tight bass and guitar and that perfect sax climbing and dipping over and over.... It's hard to just stream, let all words out, not self-edit especially hard to hit right keys when eyes closed so it's a good thing I took typing in high school (do kids even take typing anymore?) helps to have your hands hover above the board, hit the keys as they were trained to do long ago - my grandmother knew shorthand; looks like hieroglyphics to me - lots of things we're losing as I grow older, as people go away and years pass - we lose shorthand, languages, some arts and crafts - one major thing we are losing or have lost is to take time to do a thing or make a thing - when there was no shortcut to cooking or cleaning it wasn't maybe better quite, but more real - it's so hard to remember to Be Here Now, but, of course, it's not always due to technology...I used to burrow deep inside my own soul not just inside my mind it was like I took my mind and therefore my self down into the pit of my stomach so that only a warm husk of a body was sitting in the seat it was there to hold a place to look at but vacant because my entire soul was locked far within the interior well, sightless no sound no awareness of surroundings of people of furtive looks of snickers - but of course also losing awareness of the good parts I would especially do this when in church youth group functions...funny how much nicer, healthier, less 'dangerous' an environment you can get amongst a bunch of D&D-playing drama-geek gamers than you sometimes do on a youth group mission trip. Satisfaction, that's what I need to work on: yes, work on Being Here Now, and on being satisfied and not always questing after more or better, or wondering if I'm missing something- must get out of my own head more often!
Yikes -- 10 pm and no dinner yet -- so this is the end of this blog. Happy Thursday to all, and to all a good night.
Perfectionism is the enemy, as I pointed out in my First Blog Ever:
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a sh**ty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.” ― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Well - sigh - it turns out that I am even more scared of not doing things perfectly than I thought I was, because it's already...
all the things...
is it that I...
[WARNING: VERY LITTLE CORRECT PUNCTUATION TO FOLLOW; ALSO, TREMENDOUSLY LONG RUN-ON WANDERING JAMES-JOYCE-MEETS-E-E-CUMMINGS STUFF FOLLOWS]
dammit got in front of the screen and now can't think of earlier thoughts - why don't I have a better memory?
may thus be making this blog private or semi-private or something to that effect
see i feel hesitant sometimes re: posting pontification / journal entry type stuff; don't want to sound self-involved -- have been advised that... or not advised exactly...it's just that you see SO may negative comments on things you see on the web, anywhere (trolls, etc). one tries to be clever on fb which translates most often into being scathingly witty -- but then if you think about putting yourself out there to be scathed, well........
So I was originally going to do a carefully balanced blog (representative of my scattered nature): sometimes frippery, other times making a point (but never being dull or self-indulgent gods forbid), and some times a list, or here or there a poem - I could see it all in my minds eye; however i have a long history of thinking "i see it in my mind's eye wait a minute the reality isn't looking like my mind's eye aw never mind" however in this case that will simply result in more ruttin' paper cluttering up our condo when I have already have QUITE ENOUGH PAPER already, thank you! (i means i'm not a candidate for Hoarders yet, but there is at least one room of this condo that begs to differ......) Thus the need to keep my diary on screen -- see, I write not really to show anyone but more as therapy. i mean, I do think i'm a good poet and i will show people my poetry usually but for a long time now the only way to try to sort out how i really feel when i am frustrated and flummoxed is to write it out - spill it all out onto the page and then try to make sense of it. Unfortunately, when actual paper is used, you have to physically keep track of the paper, and i am hideously disorganized.
Anyway, it occurred to me that I get enthused about a project or idea or way of living or new personal fad, then it turns out to be harder or take longer or just not turn out to be what i expect so i quit and say never mind - or something overwhelms me and i literally hide in bed or at least avoid - I am very good at mental/emotional dodgeball and it's not good for me.
One of the biggest things that sends me running is stuff along the lines of politics/injustice - such a big messy tangle of things like tons of cat hair trapping dust in loose nests connected by long human hairs and some lint - cat owners can picture it well - JEEZ. Anyway, reading about prison unfairness links to corruption and racism and poverty and selfishness and they link to discrimination and genital mutilation and sexism and repression and it just goes on and on and on......and i get so often torn between wanting to fix it and feeling like i just can't stand to draw another breath if i have to keep facing the awfulness of it looming, so i run and hide & am therefore totally unhelpful in fixing said problem.
P.S. interesting: this spell checker just flagged "pontification" but entirely missed "excpecte" (I type haphazardly when I am trying to type fast). Hmmm.
