writing (done when one is supposed to be) writing (other things)

It’s dark under the door                              no one can hear us.

Steam overheats the room, windows’ thrown open, dream

the dead of winter.

Shut out and suffocate the avenue’s approach, a wide swathe of sound. Parade
of motorcycles,                         rafters shake, the trucks

this sturdy 1906

begs the question, just when will the house fall down?

Cat, we are alone here—
just us and hundreds of authors of thousands of words.

You seem to want to extinguish yourself.
I’m over that game.

I want to be joyous—want                          (to say that aloud?)
to trapeze ‘til morning.

furniture

I thought I was doing okay

but I miss you tonight as

iTunes shuffle decides to play a medley of songs designed

to bring me to tears.

I haven’t written on this blog in four months.

A lot has happened, has changed.

I decided to stay in tonight to work. It is cold outside. & I want to be in my room. I wanted to be social tonight but I think it is better to be here, get a few things done. Write, make some sketches.

I like my room. There is still a corner full of things that need a home and I need to replace these milk crates with a proper bookshelf. I also need a real bed, not just a mattress on the floor. But I like it in here. I want to be in my room. I want to spend time at home. It feels like a place I can live now. A place where I can be alone.

I got a jade plant and a pothos plant. I put up one of my photographs beneath the chandelier. What I really need now is a comfortable reading chair.

Blah, blah, blah.

It’s not really about the furniture.

It is just about space and grounding.

Feeling the furniture is on the ground and in its place and that it will be there at least for a little while…

until,

REVELERS CELEBRATE

Caption of photo taken by John Michillo / AP: “Revelers celebrate the passage of a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in New York State outside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher St., Friday, June 24, 2011, in New York. The measure passed, 33-29, following weeks of tense delays and debate”

My comment on the Washington Post slideshow “New Yorkers and Same-Sex Marriage” ::

Journalists should do some interviews with their subjects before writing bad captions. The (very attractive) people workin’ it on the street (as seen in the photo above) were NOT outside the Stonewall Inn celebrating gay marriage. These were people dancing with the DRAG MARCH.

The Drag March started in 1984 after organizers of (the more mainstream) Pride March 25 decided to downplay drag and the drag community. So, a new march was started to welcome those who are more marginal and fringe within the already marginalized LGBT population. The march is a challenge to the idea that in order for the marginalized queer community to gain acceptance, less acceptable queers need to stay out of the parade.

To claim Drag March revelers as gay marriage revelers is just simply false. Many in the Drag March may support gay marriage but many of us (myself included) feel that gay marriage is not THE cause to (1) put all of our energy into and (2) that is going to gain acceptance for all queer people. I am glad it passed mainly because I have friends from other countries who may now have a way to stay in NYC. But really, who is going to gain acceptance with this? It is still about hetero-normativity and so many of us who were at the Drag March just do not fit this bill. The Drag March is a hedonistic march, celebrating ourselves when so many would like to shame us. Please don’t use our hedonism to support gay marriage. And journalists… you’re sloppy. Do your research! Thank you.

Keep us OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND.

More soon. For now, I’ve got to wash some of this glitter out of my hair.

hoy

Moon as big as the Burger King sign
(wanted to somehow use that line first)
Wish it were that night in Cleveland, now

Wish I could leap where I feel stuck
Wish I were three days ago
when everything seemed like it was growing
luminous and possible

Today inert
my body feels crazy
wants to be wanted
uncontrollably

wants to matter, to feel like it has affected someone, like they couldn’t take it

I want to close the door
I want someone to walk through it.

I want to be alone in the Sunday morning I woke up to
where I was asleep & awake
a strange dream of car noise, no car noise,
cars as the sea water crashing on a shore
marking time as collapsed geometric space.

nobody had noticed

From where? Five or more points to begin. But who is counting?

I just returned to my studio from the library with a bag of poetry.

I left because I couldn’t sit with my sadness any longer. But
I didn’t just want to leave it. I wanted to not be sitting, with it. I wanted to be walking and breathing in the air, the smell of cut grass.

This morning I woke from a sad dream. If you are awakened by the sorrow of the dream, is it then a nightmare?

I had made a note the other day about wanting to write with ecstatic energy.

In my dream, I was bounding from my room, down the hall, into the kitchen. It felt ecstatic. Only to find my mom sitting behind a table, facing me, bathed in sunlight, peeling potatoes. I asked her what was wrong with the sense that if she was there in my kitchen something was wrong. She said, ‘nothing.’ I wrapped my arms around her shoulder and told her I could tell something was wrong. She finally told me that Nancy (my aunt, her sister) had been dead since the ’90s but that nobody had noticed.

Recalling the dream, I took it as the reason for my sadness. I am not sure that is it though. I think it was looking at a calendar I have from January 2008 & remembering sleeping over at g’s house for the first time. Feeling sad about things I have done to hurt him, places where I have not been my best. But that too was not really the cause of my sadness. I hold on and look longer. See my tendency to be sad about being sad. Find how I want to be held in certain ways, to be sexual, to be attended to. How I feel inadequate and insecure. Find how I feel lighter inside when I say, oh, I am feeling insecure and inadequate and I am putting all these other things on top of it

to hide it.

I see where I haven’t been able to stay with feelings, how I have been making them something else, or using other things as shields to hide from them. It doesn’t take away the sorrow. But it is sure better than feeling sad about feeling sad. Pulling away layers, getting to it.

*

To balance, here are things I am excited about:

Drawing!
Rob Halpern (who I listened to on Monday)
Joy Ladin (who gave an amazing reading last night)
Yoga
Self attention

Morning fragments

Rain & remnants of last night’s snow.

Wrap of brown rice & egg, whole grain mustard & roasted green pepper.

Set a piece of cloth to soak overnight in a bowl of acorn & water. Looking rather brown. Though I am hoping the tannin will blacken as I read it would.

Long walk in Prospect Park yesterday collecting rotting acorns. Why are my projects so often off-season? Found some quiet, some turtles, a willow tree.

Intense sex dreams about g. last night. Frustration.

Finally caught up on some correspondence. Wonder how I ever maintained my by-letter-only-friendships as a child. I had so many of them.Wish to return to it.

Work in an hour. Just getting to writing, then work.

A piece of some writing from last week:

I hear gulls’ wailing
I know the ocean is there
or the garbage.

Funny the birds mean
expansive body of water
or a parking lot of K-Mart
where we bought the Easter dress for Kelly’s Bat Mitzvah.

I was the thirteen year old
white trash girl hiding in the flower dress,  fake pearls
singing Like a Virgin in the karaoke booth.

I’ll brag about it now—           leave out the mob of boys who egged me on,
perched to see the girl, falling.

Podcast: Interview with Nayland Blake

I am trying trying trying to get out the door… It is a beautiful day out! Before I leave, I will post this link to listen to a wonderful interview with Nayland Blake.

Curator Grady T. Turner interviews Nayland Blake at The Art Student’s League

The things he says about responding to garbage on the street… grumbling about why don’t people take care of their stuff, the streets, etc… then deciding that if he doesn’t like it, he should do something about it… It reminded me of walking down Grand Ave yesterday to my studio. There was an older woman, maybe in her 60s, digging up the dirt around the trees on her block to prepare for a spring planting. When I passed, she looked up and we made eye contact. I said good morning. She replied, “good morning, dear.” And we both meant it. And I felt really happy to have had that fleeting connection. It made me think about how I would like to know my neighbors more but I don’t know how to do that. I have fears and there aren’t many spaces for interaction. I thought how she was doing this thing for her street and also just putting herself out in the neighborhood physically. I felt optimistic about life. For a minute or two.

survival, postures post #1

This is a wall of my new studio.

I finally removed all of the items from my storage unit. It was mostly my studio housed in storage for 6 months… and while many of the people housing stuff in storage have recently lost a home or are between residences, I can guess that many storage units are filled with THE STUFF WE WANT AND CAN FORGET BUT WANT NONETHELESS.

These storage spaces lure us in with a free month of rent and then make a killing off of how difficult it is to shed THINGS & how time-consuming it is to move these THINGS particularly in a city such as NYC.

Boxes on the left = binders filled with writings, essays, papers
Boxes on the right = binders filled with negatives

As an artist, I deal with material objects. I make things. I value things. I hold on to them and try to take care of them. And maybe that makes me a hoarder.

Today, I bought some new shirts and a new pair of pants. I also bought a lamp and a small folding table for my studio. G. is making me a desk but I need something in the meantime (plus I can use this for extended desk space in the future.) I’ve been in the studio for 5 hours now. I sorted things. I spent some time reading and thinking. I bought a few things online, most notably a chalkboard. I want to write and think about my survival, posture.

I am running out of steam though. Which is exactly where the question of my survival, posture lies. What do I do with my time? What fuels me and what drains me? What distracts me and what challenges/moves me?

How does it feel to sit at a computer? How does intense concentration feel? Which happens most often? & why?

I had to sort these boxes. In the next couple of weeks, I  will build shelves to hold the box contents.

These comments and questions may feel a bit scattered but I see them as all intertwined. How do we make our spaces? How do we live/work in them? What takes up our time? How much time do we put into sustaining our spaces, ourselves, our relationships? How much time is spent in distraction? Where is that necessary and helpful? When is it taking me too faraway from the working/living that may be difficult (particularly in an emotional sense) but necessary…?

I was thinking today: Is a fast-paced, busy lifestyle like the one I associate with living in the city (like the frenetic pace of NYC itself) sustainable? Does it require working hard to make money to buy space? Does it mean the maintenance of our minute-to-minute lives is taken care of by paying others to take care of it? I do not have children taken care of by a nanny (on the contrary, I am a nanny). I do my own laundry. I do my own shopping. I do not have someone else walk my nonexistent dog. I usually take public transport not a cab. But I do buy my groceries from the store around the corner… often in packaging that drives me crazy (plastic, throwaway)… To me it feels like I am not thinking through my relationship to my consumption. I do VERY often rely on others to cook and feed me. What would it take to make different choices? Buy my food seasonally from nearby farms. Freeze or dehydrate fruit to prepare for the winter. Cook food for my week. Buy in bulk using glass, reusable containers. It is not so much that I think this will save the world. It is more so that I feel like it will slow me down and bring a more thoughtful relationship to what sustains me.

In other news, Cleveland now has a Hopstop.com utility. Also, all Clevelanders I’ve tried to joke with about it have no idea what I am talking about. I was kindof proud. Cleveland’s on the map now! I will be traveling home to Cleveland during the weekend of March 20th for Kate’s Spaces Gallery project Survival Postures.

Hmmm… I now have to clean myself up to go meet E, N, & G for dinner! Very exciting! There is MUCH more to write about the Survival Postures Project and it will be my focus for the remainder of March. I am also excited about posting writing to my blog since it has been awhile.

Mas adelante…

Pennant String #1

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Pennant String #1 (I WOULD LIKE THE WORLD / NOT TO CHANGE SO THAT I / CAN BE AGAINST THE WORLD – Jean Genet)
Mixed Media Sculpture, 2011

Here are some images from a recent show at the Chashama Project Space in Chelsea.

poets CA Conrad & Stacy Szymaszek read tomorrow night!

poetry reading (feb. 2nd 7-9pm)

We are proud to present a night of poetry with CA Conrad and Stacy Szymaszek curated by Angela Beallor and Grey Vild.

wed, feb.2.11
7p-9p

CA Conrad is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Books, 2010). CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He invites you to visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com and also with his friends at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com

—

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Stacy Szymaszek is the author of the chapbooks Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (2008), Stacy S.: Autoportraits (2008), from Hart Island (2009), and others. She also authored the book-length collections Emptied of All Ships (2005) and Hyperglossia (2009).

Szymaszek’s work encompasses a variety of voices and personas, eros, and queer identity. Hyperglossia references ancient Egyptian healing and makes use of wordplay and anagrams. Szymaszek commented in an interview with Susie DeFord for Bombsite.com: “‘Hyperglossia’ refers to the narrator’s attempt to tell her autobiography post–head trauma [.…] She’s not able to use language in a socially acceptable manner, and, through the book, her language is structured as close to the way the mind works as possible. She honors the nonsense, the nonlinearity, the ruse, the erroneous.”

Szymaszek has worked at Woodland Pattern Book Center and is artistic director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City.