And Beyond

Been seeing some kids' movies; Toy Story III last night. They're so meta that it's a little sad. Layers on layers and never the true, the blushful quest story or whatever. Simulcra babies in 3-D never getting near the source. (BTW never would have written something like this if it weren't for hearing/reading Rick's work.)

The Superhero's Love Interest

She's got a pretty good job,
And she's good at it, despite
The sexist boss and the corporate overlord.
Her lover packs some weight,
He's got some money and a sweet place,
High over the city, hell of a view, but she doesn't see it
When the camera catches him
Stiffing a waiter or shoving her cat.

She doesn't know about the superhero's secret,
But she doesn't laugh behind his back.
In the morning, in the elevator,
Sometimes they lock eyes,
And it's weird, but not in a bad way.
She never asks about the bruises.

That doesn't stop her girlfriend
From speculating about that skinny guy
Who's always getting into some kind of trouble.
The love interest shrugs. "Maybe he's in Fight Club,"
She says, licking some salt from the edge of her glass.
"Maybe he goes to a dominatrix," her girlfriend giggles.
The love interest gazes at the band, setting up, and murmurs:
"He doesn't have to. I could do that for him."

This Is the End, and, Nice Hair.

Bret Easton Ellis and mix tapes just go together like chocolate and peanut butter, or sunglasses and hangovers. Saw him read last night: funny, charming, thoughtful, generous. Didn’t disrespect any wimmen movie directors that I heard. Like the meta on the new book. Know what it’s like to not want to let go of characters; keep stabbing at that vein. One thing that struck my vein was him saying a trigger for American Psycho was his “disappointment with the world of adults.” That’s common to our generation, but now that I am fully adult, I’m simply disappointed with myself. Cut out the middleman, no pun intended.

Mix Tape #3

I’m going to save that song for the end—
You know, that sick swoop inside you
When the chemicals have all been pissed away
And you’re hollow again. A holy feeling,

That’s one of the funny things about hangovers,
That whiff of rebirth. Pain means you did it again,
You’re still alive. We’re set up to get off
On this cycle: Tension, explosion, end.

So you start the tape with taut beats
And flutters. Then move into noise.
I’m good at putting these together, good
At knowing how to end. You get tired

Of being good at knowing endings.
You’re not so much looking for a big surprise
As for that thump, barefoot, dancing
On the ground, and—-take a look around--

These are the ones left with you,
This is what you are hearing now,
This is the place you have ended up,
This is what you came here for.


Wanted to top this up with a stirring epigram and was looking for that Baudrillard canard about culture growing like hair and fingernails in the grave and found this memorable quote instead: “Baudrillard: Full of shit, but will get you laid.” Discuss for your next class. Sportswriters do indeed rock.

Running Over

No poems about cats, but this one came in while I was running this morning. Maybe it is about cats. I see one, anyway.

Two of Cups

Open

Balance can consist
In one
Hand open,
Accepting
The other's cup.


I don't know; too newage postery? But that's what you get some days. Also thinking about Rilke's two solitudes. The two cards in the tarot deck are always about balance, but this one is traditionally about love, which has always been for me more a ride than a balance. So it's a card that needs some internal reconciliation. Maybe some friend who gets science has an interesting idea or two about equilibrium and velocity and cool words like that. Feel free to enlighten me.

Lovage

The guy one plot over in the garden said I can have all the thyme I want from hin. This is a dangerous offer, as I have never been able to grow the quantities of thyme I want, though I discovered a good-condition plant under a comfrey today.

I am a bad, bad community gardener. My plot is the ghetto, the trailer park, the wrong side of the tracks, what you will. Weeds and things gone to seed and real plants compete and climb over each other like some vision of lost souls in Hell painted on the wall of a Northern European cathedral. It's my bad luck that the head of the Rules Committee has the plot right next to me. She stands like the Wall between Pyramus and Thisbe, between me and the Source of Unlimited Thyme. She's got her eye on me.

I think writing poems about plants is subversive because it's what people fucking EXPECT old lady poets to do. This year the lovage and caraway went to seed, and BA sent me a recipe for aquavit.

Bolter

It's the closest action
They have to manage an escape--
Send the thick shoot out
From the center, stalk
Charged with the mission--perpetuate.

Sudden, intense heat, or the
Conviction that heavens will open
If only they reach, starts them bolting.

The lettuce was first to go,
Its frills turned bitter,
Then caraway, coriander, dill.
Even the fennel, licorice-cool,
Bronze, imperious, shook its feathers
In anticipation of the end,
Raised a crown of golden pollen
That stained my face as I bent close
To taste it; soon solidified into seed.

"I have never seen so many plants
Bolt so soon," I remark to the woman
Working the plot next to me.
She hums assent, abstracted,
And scans the sky for planes.

Submission

If I weren't on an oxytocin high (oh for heaven's sake, it's not that, it's just my love for humankind and puppetkind), I wouldn't consider it, but here I go, thinking it might be a good idea to submit some poems here and there. It leads me on a hunt through the year-old and older, and leads my husband to yell at me for not spending the time on doing novel revisions instead. I know, I ought to, but once in a while I need to feel like I have some skin in the game.

I doubt this one will find a home anywhere literary, but I have a feeling there may be someone out there who will like it. It's part of a series about Lilith.

IV. Desert Companions

“Dance with the pretty witch.”
—Faust

Only one writer got it right: The man was made of earth
But I was made of fire. Under the blazing sun
I tend my lions, wreathing their necks with chains
Of flowers my touch alone can make bloom here.
They groan and purr under this soft restraint.

Ostriches speed by, their fancy feathers bouncing;
They need no adornment. Nor do I; wings and hair
Are enough to inspire a gaping glance if anyone came near.

I seek out a shady cleft of rock
When it’s time to nurse the serpents.

The circles around the eyes of the owls
Glow like stars above me in the night.
We screech to each other in delight.

Image: Oh roar a roar for ouroboros...

How's Your Albatross, Baby?

Unlike other times when I've had to learn the hard way how much I suck at something, when it came to photography, I had never had a doubt: Epic Suck. (Wasn't someone just talking about Monica Lewinky's birthday? Well.)

But when Favorite Cousin called, neither of us let that stand in our way. He writes about just about anything and everything for a Florida zine run by about the nicest guy you could want to know. FC was slated to write about the PIL show, and asked if I'd come along and take photos. Even on his worst day, FC is a better photographer than I am, but disability issues make taking photos at a show like that just about impossible. (Overall, it's pretty crappy trying to go to a club when you have mobility problems. It didn't seem as bad when we went to Drive-By Truckers together a while back, but this one was really damned uncomfortable.)

Uncomfortable for me, too. I'm writing something that has a photographer character, so I couldn't resist trying it, even though there might as well have been no film in the camera. I was up front there with the real photographers who were all doing those moves out of Blow-Up or something, with the big, big real lenses, and I'm like, fuck if I know how this thing works, what I'm seeing. I'm going to do something really stupid and Mr. Lydon won't realize I'm a nice half-Irish lady and will spit on me.

I tried, truly. But you can see for yourself.

I'm pretty good at embroidery.

I think it's fear of tech, at base. I grew up in a world of don't-touch-that-you'll-break-it when it came to anything that wasn't organic. Men were the only ones allowed to touch electronic equipment. I was unclean. Suppose I ought to shake that, though I don't know if there's time left. Plus, I'll still have the problem of not being able to separate my vision from what is there to see in reality. I am also invisible in photos for the most part. Part of that is people don't actively seek to take pictures of me, and I'm uncomfortable with it, but even the law of averages in some of the crowds I run with don't catch up with me. Invisible woman. Maybe I'm a vampire? And if I am, maybe I can make some money off it, cool.

It was a great show nonetheless, very shamanic; he reminded me of Patti Smith that way. He knew how to shape the energy, though few were riding his wave. It's a DC thing. We don't get swept up and under so easily.

I felt like I was beginning to get rid of the albatross. Several, some with whole names and personalities, and some just shadows.

Thank you, FC. But I must never, never touch a camera again.

To continue in the freeloader vein, DH brought home from work a review copy of Maggot by Paul Muldoon. Most of the poems are too hard for me, but there's a translation of Baudelaire's Albatross I like very much. It opens with a fragment of a BBC report of seabirds dying from eating plastic cigarette lighters, thinking they are squid. Gives a whole new meaning to "pour s'amuser." And it ends: "again and again he's dragged down by the weight of those wings."

Photo: Don't ask, don't tell.

Joanie on the Pony

Ace of Swords

Liberatrice

We’ve all been burned, waking with the vision and the need to
Hunt the one who must hear, petition at the gate, battle
Inquisitors, don improper garments, shatter the strategy.
“Sire, this is your sign, take it.” And my hand closes on air.
Pulse race slowing, the sword’s weight palpable still on my palm.
Escape equates to heresy. With heralds and hoofbeats we
Rush into engagement, but the voices that guide us don’t shout.


The ones who hang out drumming and hooping on Sundays will get this one. I've always wanted to do something with some of her trial narratives, maybe sometime. A close initial reading might reveal an unexpected gift. After she jumped out of the tower that time, they told her another escape attempt would mean an automatic conviction of heresy. She replied that wanting to escape was perfectly reasonable.

New Moon Co-Opted by Commodified Ersatz Supernatural Beings

New moon, bright sun, and I'm blue as hell.

My daughter broke down crying in the car the other evening when she heard on the radio news that the oil had reached Florida. I don't know what to tell her.

I'm infuriated when I hear people talk about the seafood or the tourist industries. Yes, but what's happening here is on such a larger level than that that it is inconceivable. Global emergency, worse than bombs, and we're all moving dream-slow, like we're wading through, um, oil. Our lives have changed forever, you know.

Writing is going nowhere and feels like it never will, just a colossal waste of time. But what else will I do with myself? I drew a card and waited for voices last night, but after 12 hours of writing for hire and being treated like the maid, there was nothing left.

I was talking to a woman I like yesterday evening and noticed for the first time the scars on her wrists. Of course I'm too polite to ask. But sad.

Tests said I'm still anemic, which means more and worse tests.

I will go pull weeds and stomp on ants now.

My friend is here for the weekend and my daughter is healthy.

Here's astrologer Jeff Jawer's bite-size bit:
The New Moon in Gemini sows seeds of ideas that can excite the intellect and spark a variety of connections and conversations. Mercury, Gemini's ruling planet, forms supportive sextiles to philosophical Jupiter and inventive Uranus, setting off brainstorms of innovation and originality. The Capricorn Full Moon Eclipse, though, insists that we come down from the clouds of possibility and commit to doing the hard work necessary to make real changes here on planet Earth.

The Secret to Endurance Can Be Yours

How can you run for three hours without an iPod, is what people seem to want to know most. I did a trail half-marathon in a leisurely 3:22 yesterday, walking the last mile and a half because of knee pain (might be IT band again, might not; a few days will tell). I still want to attempt the 50k before I'm 50, which gives me a year and a half. (And at my pace, it might take a year and a half to run it.) But if the IT band is back, I might be stuck with 10-milers forever. There are worse things.

I also saw two copperheads.

So I run through pain sometimes, and there is a lot of pain, there's no getting around it. My great discovery arrived by accident, as they do. I found that through my alternating of three basic thought patterns is associated long, sometimes painful runs with pleasure, sometimes great pleasure. First there's the union with the earth and what it gives: In my polymorphous perversity simply putting my right hand down on one of the Grandfather rocks on Bear Island can make my head spin happily. Then there's the association with creative pleasure; writing poems and prose in my head when I run. The third secret--and there must always be three--was recalled to me recently by the wise counsel of a friend who recommended: "Next time you're standing around in line or traffic getting impatient and angry, think about the last orgasm you had."

TMI? Well excuse the fuck out of me. Did you happen to see the sign up top that says "blog"? TMI is intrinsic to the medium.

My ongoing games of "who would you do" on the trail keep me in the moment; when the moment becomes too painful, something similar to my friend's advice gets me out of the time and place that's troubling me. Of course, a man would be the source for that advice and arguably would find it most useful. It's a little more difficult for women. Oh, that's not what I meant. I mean women are more apt to ponder not only the event itself but those precipitating and succeeding it, i.e., "well, that was fun, but I'm still mad at him nonetheless," or, "will that be the last one ever?" or, "why couldn't it have been with this or that person, instead?" or, worst of all, my sisters, and you need to STOP this, "was I too fat/loud/silly/strange/etc." At that point, one needs to cycle back into living in the moment, and touch a rock or something.

Sometimes I also think about landscaping or health care policy.

But never baseball.

Photo: from the NPS website, Bear Island, where the rocks are like none other.

Fan de Psyche

Nine of Pentacles
Pagoda

At the advent of the Third Emperor
My comfort was unmatched:
Even the screech of the pea fowl an
Unbridled proclamation of the security
Of my position. The Second Emperor,
A man of peace, extended
His policy to my person.
Sometimes I smell
The next city burning.

I walk the garden,
Jewel-green beetles hop and
Dragonflies hover beside me.
My path has become uneven, rocky,
Riddled by tiny holes I now understand
Are made by snakes.
The old palaces may burn, and my birds,
And even my books, but in this empire
I will not be very much alone.

I was looking for my Kenneth Rexroth 100 Poems from the Japanese for some kind of epigram to kick that one off with, but all I could find was 100 Poems from the Chinese. So I started casting around online, and still didn't find anything, but check out these poems that fell into my hands:

2 poems by Yosano Akiko (1879-1942):

Another look like his mixed me up again—
you really do play tricks on me,
don’t you, gods of love.

Yesterday felt like a thousand years ago,
at the same time
I feel your hands still on my shoulders.

Poem by Takai Kito (1741-89):

A tumble, fall, crash,
then silence—
cats in love

And a Rexroth translation of a Geisha song:

When it’s the man I love
he goes by and doesn’t come in
but men I hate —
a hundred times a day.

Carry Wood, Chop Water

Ace of Wands

The Rood and the Road

That thick club
You ease against the earth—
One touch of damp
And it comes alive!
The peasants gasp and scatter,
Spreading rumors of miracles.

And our eyes meet again,
Like every time, in every town
We’ve done this trick.
We work as one. We’re good,
Aren’t we? And then we run,
Fleeing the bishops and burghers.

Contrary to all caution,
The older, the easier.
Between bouts, I’ve wondered,
On long winter travels, why
We keep it up, keep going around,
Keep coming back. For us, now,
The miracle is not in the wood,
Nor in the sprout, and not
In the bread and coins tossed our way,
But in that look, just after,
The dizzying venture into the other’s eyes,
A world ever new.

AWwwwwww writin poetry at work, I'm tellin.

Sparks and Flares

Not to get all Stevie Nicks on you, but a NYT review of the new Robert Hass selected poems throws in the "Randall Jarrell[’s] definition of a poet as someone 'who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.'"

Despite predictions, no lightning struck this weekend; no poetry struck me either, not even a filthy limerick. But I might have opened up a whole new level of reality, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially when your nose is poised over the corner of a credit card on a breezy summer's day. Not that I'd know anything about that.

ATTENTION X-MEN and comics in general fans, a special announcement of a new publication: I once wrote a comic with this guy, about a pharmaceutical factory/prison colony on Mars. Good times. This is what he's up to now--creating a new series of The Futurians.

So, to give thanks this weekend on what appeared to me to be not only the best but the biggest PDF ever, in so many ways, not in any order: the giant popping and unfolding wavy fan thing by Quentin; Sparkle Pony memento mori; Idea Dome for letting us worship the mind and use the LED hoops; Ludo O'Dillo's Pub and Celtic Cinema for providing a bench out front for me to lie down on in an "anemic" crise (some young women passing by asked my friends watching over me: "Is she real?" and crept forward to investigate; I mumbled something about a performance art piece evoking my Irish heritage, but no one ever hears me); the woman in the white bikini under the black light; Dan Van for the birthday cake; the black snake I almost stepped on while out running Saturday morning; the DC Burner Choir for giving me a chance to play; Elvis for the water; and all the people who grow things and understand the ley of the land.

Photo: Luna moth, pre-flame, University of Maryland.

I Like to Drink It with a Little Salt and Lime

Got a shit ton of pay work tonight but my husband wouldn't let me use the laptop unless I wrote something for myself first. He is not my patron, nor does he patronize.

For My Patron

I could create cathedrals
From my breath, my fingers spires,
Ribs a nave before the altar heart.
My patron trusts stone.

I would use clay, scrabble
And mound the firm earth,
Shape it under a layer
Of slip, supple as flesh.
My patron has no faith
In this substance; he specifies
Block stacked on block.

I tried to respond to some of the interesting comments folks have been leaving, but blogger did some weird error thing with the comments recently. Perhaps it will calm down. I do really like to hear the comments. I also need to write about 20 different things, but the bell just rang--back to the pay work!

When Doing It Wrong Is Right

Writing poetry is such a weirdass thing to do. And reading it to other people even more so. I'm always like WTF? Then I go to something like the Cliff Lynn/Rocky Jones production last night [would give a link but it's pretty much wholly facebooked] and I get it. It's everything ELSE other than creative pursuits (and playing and hanging out and food and love and, OK, healing too) that is a weirdass waste of time. Why do we do anything else?

I think it has something to do with coming to poetry pretty late in the game. I wrote a couple poems in college, but was known as a fiction writer/journalist. Then in 1995, I was home from work for a week taking painkillers and it reminded me of some feelings and I wrote a poem. Then there was a day in July or August, 2006 I think, and I was running on the C&O towpath and a poem came into my mind. It gave me something to think about while running, because I don't wear an iPod. Then that just kept happening. My poems are old-fashioned and I'm probably doing it wrong.

I'm so creepy and dull about poetry, I have no training or academic background, don't know what I'm talking about, as worth listening to as a right-winger saying "I know what I like!" I'm also slavishly, sometimes ickily devoted and promotional to people who run readings and do presses and such, because it can be so fucking hard and I want to just be a Big Fan and say how wonderful they are.

Having said all that, sometimes I'm on target in spite of myself, and I bought a book by Le Hinton last night, and if you don't do it too, you're doing it wrong.

They also let me read a poem in time for me to get back to DC and get the fishnets on in time for the fundraiser. And to dance to some DJs who were also doing it wrong in the best way possible.

Here's the poem, which happened because I was at the beauty shop yesterday and saw a sign that said "your hair can save the earth." They're filling oil booms with hair. And I was reading this at the same time; Oniony but sharp enough to have fooled several major news outlets, and therefore me, until I could get to where I could check it out.

Beauty Shop

Is it a myth that hair and nails
Grow on in the grave? These vain snips,
Dyed buttercup and crimson, may
The multitudinous seas incarnadine.
The engineers are looking for
A way to stop the bleeding. Been there.
Their defenses booms and concrete,
Like fighting fire with counter burns.
The seas, like us, contain multitudes,
We suck up the oil,
The fish suck up the oil,
The soil sucks up the oil,
And so it is that I suck
Up a blot of old Dick Cheney.
When I die, I'd prefer to be burned.

Ant Essence

The Singing Acupuncturist gave me a great gift last night, a whole bottle of Ant Essence. Chinese herb blend--real ants in it.

She asked me to think about what I desire, and I could barely muster up a puff of laughter. I get a glimpse of myself in the mirror and think: "You? Desire? Ludicrous." But that last word is too melodramatic. Let's substitute "inappropriate." Bureaucratic language is what's required to dry me up entirely. Cough and the dust scatters.

I lie awake in bed feeling every joint and tendon adjust in tiny increments to each position I try, like I'm in a 3 a.m. yoga class. This will mean I'll be falling asleep over my computer at work tomorrow. Pay work is like some horrible abusive relative who's had a stroke and now I have to take care of and feed and change if I want a place to live. The minute I have a thought of my own she's up there screaming like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford combined.

The 3 a.m. parade begins: I have said and done and even worn all the wrong things, I have not done anything I'm supposed to do, there is such a pile of things I must do that even if it were not absurd to have desires I would never be allowed to pursue them, I have nothing to give and no one wants it anyway, no one has anything to give me and I wouldn't be able to accept it anyway. "You're supposed to be counting your blessings and thinking about how lucky you are," hisses Joan Crawford, hanger in hand.

The Singing Acupuncturist calls this "self-lacerating." This is Saturn conjunct Sun, with a particularly tricky Mercury retrograde for icing. As usual, my daughter is the one exception. We have been laughing for days over a comic called Johnny Boo that she got at free comic book day. It's a comic about being bored.

I'm able to think of one desire I might be allowed and might fulfill: To go into the woods. Though I might encounter a Beltway's volume of WASP Labrador-walkers and Latino commuters and half the Sidwell Friends cross-country team, every trail in the woods feels mysterious and alluring to me. I am eating ants and stepping on ants and hoping to conjure up ant power.

Photo: The air conditioning went out in our apartment and the guys are here fixing it and here I am with a big old picture of Adam Ant in shiny party pants up on my screen. That freon will make you see some funny things.

Psychic Haul Video

Open the bags and show you what I got this weekend with my daughter in NY:
1. Little red notebook from Kiosk.
2. Physical contact with Hart Crane's bridge, which Davetree turned me on to so long ago. Long ago for me, not for him of course.
3. Physical reassurance that a friend is doing OK--just OK, but OK--when I ran into her by chance outside Carnegie Hall.
4. Great concert by the Whitman kids. Not-so-great Mary Poppins. Almost did a bait-and-switch on my daughter in the tkts window and told her they only had tix left for Fela!, but she's too smart to fall for that shit nowadays.
5. Cupcakes with Hot Friend E.
6. More $5 fake pashminas.
7. A poem about the Marina Abramovic exhibit. Let me inflict the former upon you now.

The Butterfly on the Bicycle Seat

Show them what you're made of, girl!
Show them all--what's underneath,
What's inside--they'll always pay for that.
Show them the pile of bloody bones,
The rotting doll--at seven you knew
The meat on your own bones,
That day on the beach, you saw
The end of the piece, every bit cleanly bleached.
And the encircled figure sketched
In dried-blood-color lines,
Its reach not the ideal of man's capacity
But evidence of the master scientist
Performing experiments in endurance.
You know, the one with the pin.
Seven years later, with your own blood,
You wrote: "I began to paint my dreams."

It's a little from things in the exhibit, but the part about the DaVinci is imaginary. I don't much like Salvador Dali, but I'm really fascinated with his bizarre vision of Millet's The Angelus, and it got me thinking of a different perspective on a famous image. It's probably still too awkward for now. Can we blame it on the notebook?

Photo: The artist from the artist, used without permission. If I'd picked up a Mary Poppins image I'd be in jail for sure. I'm racked with guilt as it is. If you look here tomorrow and there's no picture, it's cause guilt won.

The Rest of Us

Five of Pentacles

Showing Respect

Mourning has a hierarchy
No less than any social construct
And it's just; don't upset them
When they've had enough.
It's often to the same preacher
Who proclaims: This is the time
For you to remember and to share
That falls the delicate duty
Of pulling the prodigal aside,
And in the shelter of a brotherly arm,
Whispering: Don't make this about you, now.
I've seen a few whose doors
In life were thrown open,
In death, rest behind a velvet rope.

The circle of kin can be forgiven
A preference for hired mourners--
Who know the dress, the decorum,
The proper pitch for the wails--
To the peculiar, the peripheral,
The ones they never could understand
Why they always kept showing up.

Special Offer Extended--Tell Me to Fuck Off Thru April 14!

The new deadline for finishing my book manuscript is April 14. New moon. So many stupid work interruptions. I'm furious frustrated over not being able to write what I please. I want to write about a very good writer who died but it just doesn't seem right even if I could. I want to write about Massey Energy but that could take years. And I really want to write about Erykah Badu, but the perspicacious Wanda Sykes has pretty much said it all.



PS: Perspicacious is a good thing to call someone. Someone called me it in a letter to the editor once. It was then I discovered that it doesn't mean sweaty.

Hazy, Ask Again Later

I found a playing card, 7 of spades, near the railroad bridge when I was running, so I'm obliged to write about the 7 of swords. Can't ignore a cosmic demand, even if the offering is so rusty it creaks.

Seven of Swords
The Reader at the Fair

The reader may not want
To discourage or dismay;
She may want you back.
She may want you
To tell all your friends,
Share your wonder, even with a few.

So we know strategies,
Cloaks against the gusts.
Ensuring continued patronage
Means creating diversion:
It may be out of balance,
But it's not a lie.

How else to answer the questions,
Does he love, and Will I live,
And the one they're all pealing out
Nowadays, What must I do
To say, to show, to be
My true spirit, my art, my self?
They falter, and tell me
All the ways it's impossible
To reach what they desire.

The card says this:
The wind comes in from the left coast,
The one traditionally given dominion
Over illusion and intuition. This is
Your path, though not always taken
In such elegant boots. Flags signify
A freshening trend.

Two points of upright, practical counsel
Ought to be enough: Get some
Fresh air and exercise.
Do you want to know more?
Of course you do. Take these five points too:

We are all hustlers and barkers.
Not one of us is worth the earth we plod over.
So, if the spirit moves you, dance.
If the spirit moves you, steal.
Steal with joy.

Shout out to one of my favorite poems, by Robert Bly. Image from the superlative serennu website, for all your seriously ephemeral needs.

Man-Size

She looked like a greyhound with a litter of Labradors up there. All the handsome men from her film leapt and waved and hooted, and she stood off to the side, accepting some hugs, in it but not of it.

I loved Near Dark and I don't know that I've seen a better vampire movie since. Insomnia had me up and watching Point Break at 3 a.m. the other night. It's an anti-distaff version of Showgirls, really, that bad, but in the middle of it all there's a ridiculous, overlong bravura chase scene on foot that still leaves me shaking my head. And her usual male ensemble--all charming whenever they're in motion. They parkour, they surf, they even fly, because they can. Even Keanu is less like a robot for a change.

I don't get out to too many current movies anymore, but I'd say Hurt Locker was the best I saw last year, that and Anvil. She had the writing (which killed Point Break, which was supposed to be that holy grail of productions, Tapping the Source) on her side for once. The rhythm was astonishing. Whenever someone started losing their cool, it would build, and then you're watching the El Greco St. Jerome military shrink go kapow or something. The image from the film that was used in the promotion, of the circle of IEDs and wires, is more than documentary; it's iconographically chilling somehow, it reminds you of something ancient and horrifying, the dust and the wires and the shapes in a circle emerging from the earth.

Anyhow, the Oscar award to Kathryn Bigelow was accompanied by scattered commentary that she only won because it was a "male" genre, and that a true feminist triumph would only be realized if a woman won for doing a "womanly" genre (romantic comedy. That's ours. Tell it to Wilder and Cukor. We don't get horror, action, war, western, disaster, or even Biblical epics! It's so not fair!).

So Bigelow is not a "real" woman; Johnny Weir is not a "real" man; President Obama is not "really" black, on and on. After a bit of this, I have to wonder why it seems to be so much easier to question the person than it is to question the rules of admission to the club.

Back to my cave to try to finish this thing. No, not that thing, that other thing. And that thing too. Plus I have to go let clients insult me and tell me what an awful, awful writer I am. I have been insufficiently demoralized, and I've got some catching up to do.

Photo: Near Dark. Headline: PJ Harvey, Kleenex.