Category: photography

Pisces come from under water (photo series).

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A month ago, there was a birthday party. The theme was “under the sea” and I was a jellyfish and Ellie made me a crown.

 

 

There are streamers curled and dangling from my tutu but you can’t really see them. Misha’s hair was huge and awesome and we danced to the band for hours. Everyone sang happy birthday to me, Lauren, and Sara, my other Pisces of the party, and we all birthday-hugged each other while they sang.

 

 

And then the singing was over and we all went back to drinking. And dancing.

 

 

What a night!

 

(Thanks to Colleen Dawson for taking these photos. They’re wonderful!)

 

 

Some facet of my Saturday is in this photograph (Sally Mann).

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It’s something about the stance, about looking perfect but wrong with a cigarette; something about that dress, about having a sister nearby with hands on hips and a kid on stilts in the background, about that knotty sideswiped hair and the frills on the side of her stark white dress and her watch

that reminds me of today with Elspeth, buying fabric in National City to make a dress and seeing little kids dance in a Subway where we bought a Sprite and used the bathroom, receiving flowers and wrapping stones in gold wire, drinking coffee with milk and sugar from my tea set, staring at the pinks in paintings, some or all of that is in this photograph, titled “Candy Cigarette” by Sally Mann. (More Sally Mann here, on Artsy.)

(photo via art-folio by michèle laird)

Valentine’s day (photo)!

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as it turns out, i love valentine’s day. misha  & i give each other little presents a lot (little things, just poems or a small round rock), but today we give each other a little present on the same day, and i like that. it feels nice to know that loving is emphasized today, even if it’s all hallmark-ized and hollywood-ized–still, people are remembering to act in the name of love today. i believe in that. i love so many people, my mom & dad & sister, & my grandpa with his broken shoulder & the rest of my family, & my friends in the east & some people out west & various chickens & cats around america. loving people is what i like to do. valentine’s day has gotten dumbed down a little–bad chocolates are dumb & so are teddy bears with hearts in their bellies, but a loaf of bread with a heart in it is not dumb it all. in fact, it is very savory & beautiful. & it slices like heaven.

(bread & photography by misha j.)

happy day to everyone i love. happy happy day.

xoxo

Ack! Hurt back (mine).

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I’m mostly okay today, but yesterday I was lifting and twisting in the truck at the farmer’s market and my back went ping!  on the lower left side. Being hurt makes me very slow and aware of every motion, which I try to appreciate. I feel like Marguerite Duras in this photo–booted and fabulous, but with a scrunched up neck and rickety on the stairs. Also, I believe she has a little beard in this photo, which is most elegant.

 

 

photo by the amazing portraitist, richard avedon, taken in 1993. photo via FANTOMATIK, where you can find artistic photography of famous artists. (swoon.)

“You’re a Genius all the time” (list) (Kerouac).

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Here’s a list that Jack Kerouac titled “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” He enclosed it in a letter to Don Allen, written in 1958. Here are his essentials, each of them so very Kerouac, each of them reminding me to be just as wild as I want to.

 

  1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
  2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
  3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
  4. Be in love with yr life
  5. Something that you feel will find its own form
  6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
  7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
  8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
  9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
  10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
  11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
  16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
  17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
  18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  19. Accept loss forever
  20. Believe in the holy contour of life
  21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
  23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
  24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  29. You’re a Genius all the time
  30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

 

(list via a great new site I just began loving, lists of note. photo of jack kerouac, lucien carr, and allen ginsberg, in the middle of being geniuses all the time, via tumbling dice.)

 

New mini chapbook (mine)!

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I am in the middle of making a new lil chapbook. As always, formatting and photocopying are more traumatic than expected. But it WILL be ready by Saturday. About 5 people in the world are as excited about this as I am.

 

 

If you want one you should come to Agitprop on Saturday at 7pm. Or you can knock on my sideporch door any time after Sunday. Or, I can send one to you in a sort of delicious correspondence barter (you’d have to write me back). I’d do that. I have a lot of stamps.

 

($2 each, or traded for $2 worth of what you got. Photograph & cover design by my farmer, Misha J.)