Elegant Movements in the Dark

Tonight marks one night closer to Devil's Night*, and a small handful of days closer to Day of the Dead. This page of the calendar has always proven to be stitched with bad deeds (although, 'artless vandal' as they may appear to the external eye, some of these acts constitute as flirting).

Amidst the fires and mischief, the glass separating the living from the dead thins, and it is always this time of year that dreams flicker visits from characters and entities whom have long since seen their last performance.

Perhaps I welcome it this year.

More than most.

There is something more amply certain under my feet, and thus, I feel the ability to lean. As one does when receiving communion, or a secret: such confidential information passed from between parted lips. It is such laced breath that fills the ink-spill sky of these last October nights that usher in November.

What is it that we shall see drop from the silhouettes of branches as we walk, and what fingers will brush the softness of our cheeks as we sleep? The visitors of the next few nights (who arrive and depart in the fashion of an antique camera flash) arrange themselves in answer. Lean in so that you may hear them: Such beauty displayed in their disembodied gloves that reach for our chins to push them aside and breathe their stories into our earthly ears.



-k.

*= It wasn't until the past few years after getting confused and offended looks at my mention of it that I realized it was a Detroit specific experience and name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Night




(photo credit: MaliciousGlamour on Tumblr. Also: General shout out to the brilliance of http://yvonneconstance.tumblr.com/ - if you do not follow Yvonneconstance, you need to begin right now.)

Snickerdoodle Cookies Warming in the Oven, or, How Ever Did That Blood Get on the Floor?

It is October, the month of unanticipated flames of every sort. The change in light is reason enough to be up to no good and with a well-fitted coat, I accept the challenge. Last night was spent making out in the back seat of a parked car on a side street before getting my hair back in place, smoothing the front of my shirt, and slipping into the door of a dimly lit bar just in time to meet a friend I haven't seen in too long a time.

These days I am convinced that the smell of freshly lit matches follows me everywhere, and that my footsteps on the pavement are amplified simply for suspense.

I've been thinking of the perversion of domesticity, lately. I remember years ago some friends of mine made a zine entitled Perverts at Home that I truly loved. It was photographs of the two of them doing pervy things all during the course of a day in a home with all of its homely duties (doing the dishes, making cookies, wearing aprons...). I fear I may be aiming to replicate this in the next few months (which would be problematic, at best), but throwing caution to the pecan-roasted October wind, and simply stated:

Here is to those of us who know there may be more behind the warm cinnamon of a kitchen that tends towards an over-use use of bleach.


k.



Photo credit: LesNeutres on Tumblr

Hypergraphia Upon Parched Tongue

There is a type of creativity, of the sewing together of thoughts with fine wire, that can only occur with no one around. I can hear the slightly angry mumble of the television upstairs, but it is something different than a person being in the same room or just outside the door. It feels good. Long overdue. I can hear the hum of the light in my room, perhaps more clearly now, having just listened to the antique drum machine for about an hour. (It helps me concentrate, but more so, it changes what I am perceiving around me.)

The fall is beginning to lace itself with the fingers of winter, and it is serving only to remind me of the loneliness of my lost jacket. Perhaps it will reappear. I would like very much to be reunited with it: I fear my stubbornness and childish loyalty to hope may leave me cold and sick quite a few more times before the winter is through with us. But we shall see. The autumn leaves have barely turned their frail faces to us, and there is so much more to hope for.




k.



photo credit: maliciousglamour tumblr; photo of Anjelica Huston

Other Way Around*

And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. -Roland Barthes

Oh, Honesty: How does one go about you? Is it the strum of multiple lives with only one who is privy to all of them? Is it the truths that come out in the middle of the night, when filters have slipped and all parties are left with eyes wide with surprise? Oh, I do not know. What my body craves and what my heart and mind know are best (best? such a strange and utterly constructed idea...) are, at times, so different. Can they be fused? Perhaps I don't want them to be: these lives that I live like mirror shards in a clothes dryer.

(But why do particular shards feel like such strange drag?)

Ah, for it is, my child, for it is: And it only becomes a questionable honesty when the flood of Barthes's light exposes to reveal who actually knows that the dress-up is going on.




(insert the sudden, metallic sound of a large number of lights being shut off at the same time here)


k.

Artwork: The Lady on the Horse by Alfred Kubin. Currently reading Kubin's "The Other Side" as suggested by Joaquín.
*= Ode to the lyrics of the Rites of Spring song by the same name

Study Station Justification

I've been watching Ninas Mal under the premise of improving my auditory Spanish comprehension. The truth is, Ninas Mal is a soap opera set in Columbia that is on the MTV Spanish channel, Tres, and has stupidly catchy pop music and hot women in incredible amounts of lip gloss complaining about their lives. (See picture above for three of the characters. Adela, in the middle, is my favorite character.) The plot is thinly veiled porn, basically: A handful of rich girls do bad things that wind them up in front of a judge that sends them to a charm school run by a strict older house mother. Hair pulling, alliances between the girls that last roughly half an episode , a developing lesbian plot between two of the girls (not just for show!), eye rolls, and of course the forever winning combination of sleepovers with shirt-and-panties-as-pajamas, nighttime escapes, and revenge in the form of cotton candy pink nails gripping a crowbar and having at people's windshields.

In other words: Bone City. Putting my boner to the side, however, it really does trick me into paying insane amounts of attention to know exactly what is going on and helps reinforce verb conjugation and usage.

In other words: Double Bone City.

this is the main video played at the end of each show. I would pay to be the nerd in this video.



k.

B.F. Skinner's Misunderstood Tenderness, or, Just Because I'm Dressed Like a Hot Dog Doesn't Mean I'm Not a Lady Gaga Impersonator

The woman I live with, who together with a friend of mine have an almost-three-year-old, is failing at politely hiding she is bothered that her son calls me "Da Da". He does not call his father 'Da Da'. I've watched over the few months I've lived here while she sits, frozen-smiled, trying to encourage the boy to say "Mama" (as if talking to her), or "Daddy" as if talking to the father. But, without fail, he will come to my bedroom door and announce "Da Da" until I come out. "That's right..can you say Mama??" she says, slightly stressed out. Staring at me he points and proclaims "Da Da".

(pause)

The beauty of their expert eyes for apparitions : children are able to see things invisible to others.



-k.







photo credit: Weegee, who was a crime scene photographer in the 40s and 50s. Entitled "Their First Murder". It's a candid shot of the crowd- mostly kids- that gathered around a murder scene before the cops had arrived. http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=61129  

This is Really All I Have to Say Today.

On True Blood, My Favorite Character Is PTSD Terry

Last night was spent in a leather bar with my friend Basil, whom I've known since I was 17 having met him in the punk scene. Amidst the displays of spanking (it was, afterall, Spanksgiving at the bar), and an occasional brush of the leather utilikilt of a passing man, Basil and I huddled to trade the jewels of our lives as of late.

He inspires me. He always has. He also manages to validate me in a way I can't explain. Not just being from the midwest, but his entire way of living and being in the world.

Needless to say, it was a well needed evening.

(pause)

It is November on the cusp of December. I feel tired and that I'm-never-warm-enough crave that always seems to hit this time of year is in my veins. I can feel the staleness of the ground under my feet while I walk around patches of snow, and I try not and take it personally: Every being has these seasons of internal reflection to build towards change- how could the earth and its seasons be any different?

(pause)

Be well; be warm. Be facing forward with those you love while supporting yourself and each other in being the best people we can be and in having best lives we can have. There's so much going on under and upon our skin- holding and hearing the invisible just might be the answer.


-k.



(photo credit: bootstrapperboy on tumblr)

"Put Those Ballerina Flats On My Shoulders!" vs. "You Really Need to Address This Budgeting Issue"

I've been reading in the way that impairs me, socially, again. I've been reading a few things at the same time, but the book I just set aside to write this is Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. Here's a sentence I just read that I think is just, well, great:

His breakfast was much more frugal than ours: he swallowed two cups of black coffee and then he smoked a wrinkled cigarette that he pulled from his pocket instead of a pack, watching us in the strangest way, as if he were defying us but at the same time didn't see us.

(pause)

Yerba mate may be the solution.

Here I am, 4:33 pm on a Monday at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library. I smell slightly of Heiress, one of Paris Hilton's perfumes. Sometimes I put on the slightest bit of high-femme perfume so that, in my head at least, it comes across as the trace of a lover I just banged for 13 hours and had to start my day minus the shower. (I know it's horrible. Bleached hair and a pair of contacts a color of periwinkle that has been patented for her. Thin and white and cotton-candy pouty when threatened with jail time. What can I say? A bone is a bone).

I feel hungry and slightly crazy, which is an improvement from feeling half-full and entirely out of my mind. (I've taken to photo documenting my downward turn of psychosis over the past 24 hours. Although no one will see these pictures in their context, I will know what they are and, for that, will have a secret, yet shakey, grin when people come across them in plain view.)

I've been thinking about dehydration and blood flow as of late. I've also been thinking of the Body By Jake episodes I would watch as a child (Google Image it) at 5 in the morning just because I thought it was cool that he would tell people to use household products for the workouts: Cans of tomatoes, ironing boards, broomsticks. I would only work out during these parts of the show. Because somehow it made me feel both totally crazy (how do I explain the ever-dented cans of tomatoes?), and exceptionally d.i.y.(How can I tell Jake, through the television, of my brilliant additions of half-opened bags of flour to this ordeal?)

In anycase, I must get back to the project at hand and end this needed detour. I will leave you with this photograph from a rendition of Shockheaded Peter, and a clip from the actual version I saw some years ago that left me, unsurprisingly, fascinated.




After watching the magnifying-glass face introduction, jump to minute 3:18 to watch Snip, Snip below:

snip snip