THIS. IS. ME.

PISCES: Heaven is where we go when we die. Pisces, when you get there, it will be full of every drug imaginable, and no hangovers. There will be rainbows and small, really well made salads and soft, furry kittens that never get old. You will be able to collect whatever you want and distribute it among your friends, who will be there too. Everyone will loll around on many white pillows, and smile with unspoken gratitude for your generous presence because they will all be under the impression that heaven is something that you made happen specifically for them. The production design will be impeccable. There will be small, precious, delightfully surprising finishing touches on everything, even the drawer pulls. When you reach for a little mint candy pillow from the cut crystal bowl, you may be certain that there is no fecal matter on it. Dolly Parton will be there and let everyone take turns resting their heads on her bosom in between sets. Can we jump off a bridge together, Pisces?



from Philebrity horoscopes.

Latina Enough

Here is the audio file of the Latina Enough show, where I was interviewed by Arianna Martinez on Neighborhood Public Radio (installed at the Whitney) about being a Latina in the U.S. Latina Enough is a photo and interview documentary art project, where Latinas are asked five very simple but very revealing questions:

1) Do you consider yourself Latina? Why?

2) Has there ever been a time when you didn't feel Latina enough?

3) Describe a time when you felt too Latina.

4) What would you describe as your most Latina moment?

5) What if anything do you identify as [besides Latina]?

The interview was structured so that I would respond to a question and then clips of other respondents answers to the same questions were played, which was totally interesting for me because I got to hear the breadth of other Latina womens' experiences. I went into the project with a degree of fear and ambivalence because I couldn't honestly say that "Latina" would be a a label that I used to describe myself often or an identity that I felt like I fully owned, but in listening to some other womens' responses I heard a similar ambivalence towards the very fraught term "Latina," I heard my own dissonance and identification.

The final incarnation of Latina Enough is going to be an installation including audio of the interviews and photographs by Molly Stinchfield. More details to be announced.

p.s. in re-listening to my somewhat nervous yammering in that interview I heard the statement drop from my mouth that I started the Ladies' Misbehavior Society, which ignores the fact that the group was co-founded by Annie Maribona (fellow Latina) and Claire Sanberg. My deepest apologies in advance.

picture above from Nikki S. Lee's hispanic project

Corporation for Public B.S.

I'd been hearing what I thought were rumors about the Republican takeover of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, though until recently I hadn't noticed very much of an ideological shift in PBS's programming, so I hadn't had a real reason to believe the rumors. But a quick google search reveals that it's true: in 2005, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's funding apparatus was basically handed over to the right wing on a silver platter. Eric Alterman's piece in The Nation is really informative on the matter. Yes, Bill Moyers (American Hero) had been fired and then eventually reinstated due to Bush administration pressures, but once this grave wrong had been righted, I thought things were copacetic again. The only channel I get at home with any clarity is PBS, so I end up watching it pretty regularly (just as in Philly the only TV I had was NPR, so I could tell you what was on at almost any hour of the day, even though NPR is basically loathsome too). If you're a regular watcher, you'll probably have noticed the quite odd law-enforcement turn the channel's taken, the FOXnewsification of PBS has been slow but insidious. Two weeks ago, I watched stupefied as Frontline informed me of the dangers that Mexican immigrants pose to national security, an argument whose rhetoric has always struck me as positively hilarious. A deep voiced authoritative sounding narrator states, "Just one illegal alien crossing the border undermines all of our national security efforts, yet more than five hundred aliens a day manage to pass the border patrol." When has a Mexican immigrant ever turned out to be an operative for a terrorist cell? In reality it's more like, "We must keep our borders safe from all these illegal Mexicans who might mow all our lawns and bus our tables!" The tone of this Frontline special was positively alarmist and the last thing I'd expect from a channel like PBS, except it was actually worse than anything you'd hear on an infotainment channel like Fox because PBS documentaries are cloaked in pseudo-factuality and trumped up "accuracy."

I'm Psychic, Yo

Apparently, I'm 'putting literature in the quite the wrong place.' (originally linked from Silliman's blog under 'literary tattoos')

For more literary tattoos, click here.

Le Coeur et la Couronne

They're not as photogenic as one would like them to be, but they're really quite snazzy in person.

Cinema is an unhappy art....

Don't you love the European auteurs who can get away with saying shit like that without having to qualify it with knowing irony. Andrei Tarkovsky could say this with real sadness in his voice; he spent much of his life as a filmmaker being censored by the Soviet state-controlled studio, Mosfilm. Although to be fair to Mosfilm, films so strange as Tarkovsky's Solaris or Stalker would have never ever been produced, much less released by a Hollywood studio.

Last night, Brandon and I watched Stalker, Tarkovsky's 1979 science fiction film about a man who's selected from birth to be people's guide into a dimension called "the Zone." On the expedition chronicled in Stalker, he leads a scientist and a writer into the Zone to have their deepest wishes fulfilled in "the room" at the heart of the Zone. It turns out neither the man of science nor the man of letters has any respect or admiration for the mysteries of the universe.

When I went looking for Tarkovsky interviews on the internets, I came upon a European Screenwriters website, one of the links was "Copenhagen Cycle Chic"–a blog of pictures of fashionably dressed women on Dutch bikes, the bicycles of my unaffordable dreams. Enjoy.

A Conundrum Wrapped in a Riddle

Friday night I was reading and article about Kenny Goldsmith in Bookforum and I came across the following:

Goldsmith’s current reading is focused on his work in progress, a rewriting of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project for twentieth-century New York. The parallels abound—he’s using Robert Moses for Haussmann and Robert Mapplethorpe for Baudelaire.

Three years ago, I wrote a long poem titled B using The Arcades Project, which draws parallels between turn of the 21st century New York and 19th Century Paris. I sent the manuscript out to a few presses and never got a response; I am young and wrote this poem when I was even younger, before I went to Temple, even. It's hard to get a press that doesn't know you to take a chance on a long manuscript by an unknown young poet. So it's been sitting in my apartment, many of my friends have read it, some have not. I thought, "Well, maybe someone'll publish it when I'm older or something....." (cue sinking feeling). But this Goldsmith thing is really upsetting, not because I anticipate great similarities between the end results of our work (we are vastly different poets with vastly different projects), but because it royally sucks to get retroactively scooped by someone older and more famous than you. I just feel like no one would take a chance on publishing B once this (sort of) famous guy publishes his.

Enter Brandon's argument: publish that shit yourself! Enter my money preoccupations: I can't afford it! But can I afford to let this work go permanently unread? I turn the question over to you dear reader: what should be done? Does it even matter if I get scooped?

Summer Time and the Livin Is Easy (hopefully)

First off, I haven't been posting. For that, I'm sorry. I've been alternating between tired, woozy, content, dissatisfied, restless, etc. so much that I haven't had to time to clear the mindspace and commit thoughts to paper (internet).

In the interim though, I bought a bike and started bike commuting to work, got those Apollinaire tattoos that I'd been talking about getting for so long, collected several fabulous Springtime vintage dresses from various thrift shops and church sales, typeset my chapbook which is coming out soon, so soon, on Michael Nicoloff's olywa press (which I will announce here officially once it's been printed), did a reading with Khalil Huffman in Providence, was interviewed on Neighborhood Public Radio as part of Arianna Martinez and Molly Stinchfield's Latina Enough project (I'll post a link to the archived show once it's up), and started working on a tan.

My goals for the summer are try to: convince myself that the world is an ok place by virtue that at least there's seasons, two of which are warm, to go hiking and to the beach, and to try to take current events less personally (I currently take them quite personally).