I just thought I would wander back and see who is still here and what is up. I am mostly on Facebook, Twitter, my blog, and various wikis these days, but I have not forgot you. How are you?

Here's a little poem, a favorite of mine, in honor of National Poetry Month:

SELF PITY
(D.H. Lawrence)

I never saw a wild thing

sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for itself.

So.....

Would any of my LJ friends be interested in participating in a multi-author creative writing project which I am currently firing up?

Using a wiki, it is basically a kind of cadavre exquis done in lexicon style which creates and describes an alternate universe, the Kalié Archipelago, a mysterious group of sentient islands surrounded by an unnamed and mostly uncharted ocean.

It's an excuse for a bunch of creative people to write a lot of hypertext and see where it all goes, but I would also like to take it seriously and see how far we can push it.  I have not developed the idea further than the above sentence.

I took part in a project like this years ago (The Green Lexicon, master-minded by Malcolm Gin, which unfortunately no longer seems to be online) and it really turned into something, but to get it rolling it needs a solid core group of about 5-10 experienced writers who are interested in getting their lines all tangled up and complicating each others' work.

Any takers?  More details to come....

*tap tap*

Hello?  Anyone out there?  Can you hear me?

Does this thing still work?

*pause*

I've missed you.

I know I have said this before, but now it is time for business: I am back to blogging after a year of writing, making art, riding, taking art classes, and micro-blogging about it all on facebook.

My motivation: Tomorrow is the opening reception for my first ever group show as a visual artist, and I feel like it is time for me to stop being all hermitlike and start getting more Out There. I am nervous as hell-- the gallery is wonderful and the curator has been a dream to work with. I am in awe of the other artists, and am already feel that topsy-turvy feeling. It is time to get out of my shell. Also, I have missed you guys!

The exhibit is at Brickbottom Gallery. If anyone local wishes to come to the opening, check out the gallery website for info-- I will feed you baklava and champagne and dance around you when you arrive! If you can't make it tomorrow, we are having a free early music concert at the gallery on December 12th!

Here is one of my mixed-media pieces (pages from an altered book) which I've mounted in a dark shadowbox frame:

My favorite Christmas song, thanks to dear Balthazar in that fourth verse:

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone cold tomb.

My gothic heart just soars.

Snow is pouring down here in Upstate NY, and I wish I were home to walk about amid the soft flakes in Mount Auburn cemetery.

Merry Christmas to all! 


Unrelated Note:  Do any of my Boston area friends have *coughcough* Word for Macintosh software which I could *coughcough* borrow?

(Lemons) Pear Appears

If it's there, it's something --
And when you see it,
not just your eyes know it.
It's yourself, like they say, you bring.

These words, these seemingly rounded
Forms -- looks like a pear? Is yellow?
Where's that to be found --
In some abounding meadow?

Like likes itself, sees similarities
Everywhere it goes.
But what that means,
Nobody knows.

—Robert Creeley

The blur you see is Parvati in bad girl mode, trying very hard to steal my Humbolt Fog cheese while I hold her back, and being far too hell bent on dairy products to mug for the camera: 



Oh, she does like that cheese.  See the predator's determination!

The other weekend, I did some modeling for the lovely Ivana George.  This is just a preliminary image. It is going to be part of a larger installation. I kind of threw my guts into the role. :-)

Aside from having to scrub the verdigris body paint off my body afterwards,  it was a wonderful weekend. I sort of forgot that I had painted my nails red, but I think it works.

I want to do stuff like this more often.

Older News:  Kali is doing very well, has her appetite back and is eating like a very tiny truck-driver, and no longer seems inclined to hide in corners being sorrowful.  I am still going to cat-proof the attic with window screen material and a staple gun though, per panjianlien's suggestions. 

A brief stressful trip to the vet basically revealed that she was having a reaction to the antibiotics. After screening her to make sure there was no possibility of infection, the vet took her off that medication.  We also determined that she was past needing the painkillers, so now she is back to just the tummy medicine and the appetite-perker-upper.  We've also added very low doses of Prednisone and she seems to be improving.


Provincetown:  Was glorious, though terribly crowded.  I've found though that if you just avoid most of Commercial Street it is manageable.  I spent another day trolling the art galleries on the East End (a lot of summer resort kitch interspersed with some texcellent paintings by contemporary artists, including a show of contemporary Chinese painters, and abstracts by Jeannie Motherwell).

NYC:  Heat wave. I cooled my heels at the Turner exhibit at the Met and in the park and stayed at the funky Carleton Arms.

Maine:  A long bike ride for me along the coast of Southern Maine. Stayed near Higgins beach where I hung out with a surfing labrador puppy (yes, his big people trained him to jump on a surfboard).  Much fun ensued.

Last Weekend:  Did a photo shoot with the lovely Ivana George who dressed me up as the statue of Liberty being tortured and interrogated while bound up in scraps of an American flag.  It was remarkably fun, the only down side was that the green body makeup was bitch to take off.  I will post one of the photos later.  She is using it for a larger installation.


In Current News:

• I really need a new job. This place is driving me around the bend. I have never in my life felt so much like a minion running around in a gerbil wheel, pushing around paper and spending more time documenting what what my job is than I spend actually doing it. I REALLY REALLY need to do something different with my life.

• I am shamefully out of touch with drglam and lyonesse-- must do something about that ASAP

• I'm going to a poetry slam this evening with  d_roneous