Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
donna: behind every strong woman there is another strong woman
My wolf-eyed queen. I remember seeing you for the first time, walking down the halls of that great British monastery in your Italian leather thigh-high boots. I remember women's studies class became like a holiday in which we would raise our hands faithfully like good old patriots raise the flag. Breaking into offices to do more work at 4am when the library had closed. Laughing at almost everyone all the time and loving it. Ah, ten years ago — ah, now 12 years ago. Shelves have landed on my head. You almost scared my Californian lover to death with your earthquake-causing romps. I have been pregnant with your love-child, been married to you. You put me on the New York VIP list, and ever since I have been in love with the wit, the charms, the brains, the unpolished perfection of laughter gone wild, lived free and open...
Let's do it all together. Yeah, let's do it all imperfectly.
To the queen of love letters and the details of words, the secrets of my depths are entrusted to you, my love.
Let's do it all together. Yeah, let's do it all imperfectly.
To the queen of love letters and the details of words, the secrets of my depths are entrusted to you, my love.
For editorial services including copyediting, proofreading, and production, please contact: Donna Capato
It's 5am. I just got off the phone with one of the world's most famous beauties. She is stunning, really — one of those people who looks as enchanting at 2am with smeared eyeliner and boxers as they do on the silver screen and glossy magazine covers. Ah, the fiction of it all, the fantasy wrapped-up in the empty calories of strangers' sperm. How much we swallow in one lifetime. Me, drinking from the sweet rivers of a woman's nectar. How intoxicating is the taste of the creator, her soft, warm, hard, woman flesh, her woman's intuition, her soul in a swirl underneath the flesh and bones. There is so much more underneath the flesh and bones, between the flesh and bones. We roll around together and talk of being queens, of having lost our power and how to regain it or having more power than we know how to handle, sharpening ourselves into the rising. I have to become harder, she softer — we balance out each other with wolves' eyes.
Emotions are not limited to the rich or the poor, to the spiritual or the logical — the conscience does not fit within the science — the way that we feel inside rarely reflects the outside. I think we can have it all. Let's try. Ok, now. Let's go to sleep first. I love you. I love you, too.
Emotions are not limited to the rich or the poor, to the spiritual or the logical — the conscience does not fit within the science — the way that we feel inside rarely reflects the outside. I think we can have it all. Let's try. Ok, now. Let's go to sleep first. I love you. I love you, too.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
if you think there is anything missing, it is an illusion...
I listen to songs on repeat. I find something I love and I play it over and over. Each conversation, each breath, and each glance. Each only happens once. I cry from the joy and the sadness of letting go and of holding on. The girl with no roots, no national boundaries to tie her...family scattered to the wind. She misses her past lives where mama and papa lived in the same village and sisters were on-hand to play, to imagine, to create. She dreams of a time when her best friend returns from Iraq. She watches her love grow with each day circling around lovers as different as the sky and the sea. She is the horizon where they meet — meeting never in more than the conversations she brings them into.
What world is this? Modern plagues of isolation behind these screens. Empty. Distant. The glow replacing the light. She is able to detach from it all she says — disappearing into another haze — pushing away clarity cause the picture may just be too scary - too powerful and/or too scary.
She has given up almost everything to create art — with the hope of sharing it — in hope of returning the energy that all her heroes have given her throughout the years. She has ripened and rotted several times; seasons pass and she matures into her role. But what is that role?
"Standing just outside the circle of light is where you've been living your whole life...you got to step back into the corners of the room where it's really black and launch your attack." Ani sings to her for the thousandth time and this time she swears she is almost there. Slow is beautiful she reminds herself of that when everything in the modern world tells her that anything short of mass production and lightening speed is falling short. She rushes ahead like everyone else, but not really. She skips those five shots of expresso that keep her New York peers running. Forget the cocaine; give me a joint on a lazy Sunday morning in bed with someone who blows my mind before they've even said a word.
It is hard to see society have its way with her. She worries about all the superficial things — her teeth aren't white enough, her body is not thin enough, her skin is not flawless. When will she feel safe, know there is money in the bank, know there is someone to come home to, a job to leave to...
On Valentine's Day she has a gallery opening that looks beautiful and costs her more than it should for the six people that stopped by. The culture and the men around seem to want more than her art. They break her plasma screen and offer her a t-shirt that says "pornothug" as compensation.
It is Valentine's Day and infection fights in her kidneys. The woman she wants to marry is having her one-year anniversary with another woman and the one man she could spend 'forever' with is holding his new baby girl, less than one day old. She comes home cold and alone, she forgot her jacket. She throws-up in the dark over a cold generic toilet bowl. Shaking, she peels off her clothes in a lethargic motion, crawls into bed like a wounded animal, and cries until her eyes are swollen shut and sleep somehow finds her. She wakes up to the tears. A crazy-deep kind of sad...the kind where the tears wake you before the sun does.
She curses emotions and the way we all seem so addicted to each other and how pathetic it is — all these crappy, sad love songs — love's not like it used to be she thinks. Just like artists used to work on songs until they were masterpieces of rock in rock, of rhythm and blues. Now everyone just samples, little pieces of 10 old songs must make a good new one, right? We can sing about being rich or poor, black or white — we can sing a few lines to feed our egos on top of whatever mix they bring us. Just like the cultural phenomenon of piecing 10 different people's attributes together to create the perfect balance of everything we 'need.' I mean, you just can't get it all from one place can you? And you have to have it all, right? I mean, why wouldn't we have it all? When we can. While we can. Maybe because it is like thinking we can just have another plastic bag until we hear shocking truths like there are collections of plastic bags in the ocean that come together in the currents to form masses larger than the United States — and three is more than one, anyhow. Just like those dating reality shows. It amazes me that there is even one, let alone many. The carelessness.
I look at all the fat people, all the little women stuffing themselves with diet pills, the men with steroids. Or we take hormones to change our respective sex. We cut holes in our chests and fill them up with rubber tits.
I shake my head at how sick it all is and then catch myself looking in the skyscraper's reflection glancing along the street to the 'prettiest' girl. I think, "how can you ever find love that lasts until you look like this?" The truth is she knows better. She knows supermodels feel more alone than she does. If you think there is anything missing, it is an illusion. She breathes deep and the love of the universe pours over her. She knows self-love, she knows she knows it. She holds herself close and with so much tenderness. She eats rose petals and blackberries with wamm tea and munuca honey.
She wonders if we are all as super-saturated in lovers as we are in body mass? She walks by bars in the cold shuffle-by and catches glances of hands on asses, cleavage everywhere, men hoping to score another point. Dating becomes as meaningful as video games, becomes as surreal as the real killings we watch play-out on the evening news or each time a women gets fucked in a porn. And the distance between the soul and the body widens with every shady story, with every genetic wish your girl was as hot as me on the dance floor. He tunes-in with a little bitch slappin' rhyme and it's all in good fun.
Work is so stressful, we are all so sad and lonely, insecure, we need to go out and fuck and be fucked. Ah, old romantic living during the fall of Rome — the sequel.
The idea of having one partner to share the whole story with excites her more than anything else she can imagine. She wants that old-fashioned bond, that union. She has set aside the idea of having children of her own so that she may birth herself during this lifetime. This is the first time in centuries that she has had a chance just to raise herself. The idea propels her forward. How amazing it would be to put all that diaper-changing energy into birthing a revolution, in preparing for 2012, for living in the forest, for being primal and wild, for being never tied-down to anyone, tasting every person like the rare and exotic fruit that they are. I have loved. I have had more love, so much more love than I could have expected, hoped for — I have never screamed for love. I don't ever go out to seek love. I am alone until it finds me. I work all the time, Friday nights, Saturdays. I feel like I never get anything done. I do...just slower than I would like to. I miss structure, guidance, company, a place to go other than the living room.
I should have a huge space that I can turn into a center of creation, inspiration, movement. I want a publishing company. I want a media center. I have twenty books inside my mind and this computer - one on the environment, another on mothers, fathers, war, sex, abstraction, primal nature, poetry, uniting in diversity, the meaninglessness of it all and the meaning therein, the hopelessness and the hope therein, the meaning that is actually meaningless, and the type of hope that breeds hopelessness and the distinction therein.
It has been a hard week for my family. One sister calls me crying from small-town England because she can't find a minimum wage job and she is brilliant. The other calls crying from the Middle East cause she is locked in a royal palace — she is the bird in the golden cage and she is brilliant. My mom cries because I am not with her now, and I really fucking wish I were.
So frustrating to be born poor and have to climb so far just to reach a place where no one has anything to say. How often do you speak with an automated response? How deeply ingrained are our programmed responses? I know, the eternal optimist in me knows we all have something precious and rare to say. So I wish we would burn the fat and cut the small talk or even the big talk and just share sound and glances, share eyes and stories, universal and personal.
Two amazing women came over tonight. Beacons of light, beautiful, living heroes. Such a blessing to have them in my home, and yet, I see that I am only half there — closed. We talk about furniture instead of sharing the cool story about how I found two of the same bamboo rocking chairs on two different streets in the same week and now they are sitting in them like a perfect set. Instead, I just say the furniture belongs to my roommate who is never home. They ask me if I am in pain, and I say "yes" and answer a few questions about CAT scans and other tests when really I want to say that it is my heart that hurts the most, that I feel heartbroken from not waking up to look at the same curve of a back and intertwined fingers everyday, that I miss having the partnership that I see in them, that I miss living in a big group house with so many great friends making so much art, sharing so many hugs. Why did you all have to die and disappear? She needs to be held; these beautiful women hold her flesh but she is trapped inside like they say her birds are trapped inside of her. How am I meant to take flight with them?
She is an angel ready to raise hell. Sick of all these Biblical references — looking instead to the warrior goddess who was born of no one's sacred story but her own.
What world is this? Modern plagues of isolation behind these screens. Empty. Distant. The glow replacing the light. She is able to detach from it all she says — disappearing into another haze — pushing away clarity cause the picture may just be too scary - too powerful and/or too scary.
She has given up almost everything to create art — with the hope of sharing it — in hope of returning the energy that all her heroes have given her throughout the years. She has ripened and rotted several times; seasons pass and she matures into her role. But what is that role?
"Standing just outside the circle of light is where you've been living your whole life...you got to step back into the corners of the room where it's really black and launch your attack." Ani sings to her for the thousandth time and this time she swears she is almost there. Slow is beautiful she reminds herself of that when everything in the modern world tells her that anything short of mass production and lightening speed is falling short. She rushes ahead like everyone else, but not really. She skips those five shots of expresso that keep her New York peers running. Forget the cocaine; give me a joint on a lazy Sunday morning in bed with someone who blows my mind before they've even said a word.
It is hard to see society have its way with her. She worries about all the superficial things — her teeth aren't white enough, her body is not thin enough, her skin is not flawless. When will she feel safe, know there is money in the bank, know there is someone to come home to, a job to leave to...
On Valentine's Day she has a gallery opening that looks beautiful and costs her more than it should for the six people that stopped by. The culture and the men around seem to want more than her art. They break her plasma screen and offer her a t-shirt that says "pornothug" as compensation.
It is Valentine's Day and infection fights in her kidneys. The woman she wants to marry is having her one-year anniversary with another woman and the one man she could spend 'forever' with is holding his new baby girl, less than one day old. She comes home cold and alone, she forgot her jacket. She throws-up in the dark over a cold generic toilet bowl. Shaking, she peels off her clothes in a lethargic motion, crawls into bed like a wounded animal, and cries until her eyes are swollen shut and sleep somehow finds her. She wakes up to the tears. A crazy-deep kind of sad...the kind where the tears wake you before the sun does.
She curses emotions and the way we all seem so addicted to each other and how pathetic it is — all these crappy, sad love songs — love's not like it used to be she thinks. Just like artists used to work on songs until they were masterpieces of rock in rock, of rhythm and blues. Now everyone just samples, little pieces of 10 old songs must make a good new one, right? We can sing about being rich or poor, black or white — we can sing a few lines to feed our egos on top of whatever mix they bring us. Just like the cultural phenomenon of piecing 10 different people's attributes together to create the perfect balance of everything we 'need.' I mean, you just can't get it all from one place can you? And you have to have it all, right? I mean, why wouldn't we have it all? When we can. While we can. Maybe because it is like thinking we can just have another plastic bag until we hear shocking truths like there are collections of plastic bags in the ocean that come together in the currents to form masses larger than the United States — and three is more than one, anyhow. Just like those dating reality shows. It amazes me that there is even one, let alone many. The carelessness.
I look at all the fat people, all the little women stuffing themselves with diet pills, the men with steroids. Or we take hormones to change our respective sex. We cut holes in our chests and fill them up with rubber tits.
I shake my head at how sick it all is and then catch myself looking in the skyscraper's reflection glancing along the street to the 'prettiest' girl. I think, "how can you ever find love that lasts until you look like this?" The truth is she knows better. She knows supermodels feel more alone than she does. If you think there is anything missing, it is an illusion. She breathes deep and the love of the universe pours over her. She knows self-love, she knows she knows it. She holds herself close and with so much tenderness. She eats rose petals and blackberries with wamm tea and munuca honey.
She wonders if we are all as super-saturated in lovers as we are in body mass? She walks by bars in the cold shuffle-by and catches glances of hands on asses, cleavage everywhere, men hoping to score another point. Dating becomes as meaningful as video games, becomes as surreal as the real killings we watch play-out on the evening news or each time a women gets fucked in a porn. And the distance between the soul and the body widens with every shady story, with every genetic wish your girl was as hot as me on the dance floor. He tunes-in with a little bitch slappin' rhyme and it's all in good fun.
Work is so stressful, we are all so sad and lonely, insecure, we need to go out and fuck and be fucked. Ah, old romantic living during the fall of Rome — the sequel.
The idea of having one partner to share the whole story with excites her more than anything else she can imagine. She wants that old-fashioned bond, that union. She has set aside the idea of having children of her own so that she may birth herself during this lifetime. This is the first time in centuries that she has had a chance just to raise herself. The idea propels her forward. How amazing it would be to put all that diaper-changing energy into birthing a revolution, in preparing for 2012, for living in the forest, for being primal and wild, for being never tied-down to anyone, tasting every person like the rare and exotic fruit that they are. I have loved. I have had more love, so much more love than I could have expected, hoped for — I have never screamed for love. I don't ever go out to seek love. I am alone until it finds me. I work all the time, Friday nights, Saturdays. I feel like I never get anything done. I do...just slower than I would like to. I miss structure, guidance, company, a place to go other than the living room.
I should have a huge space that I can turn into a center of creation, inspiration, movement. I want a publishing company. I want a media center. I have twenty books inside my mind and this computer - one on the environment, another on mothers, fathers, war, sex, abstraction, primal nature, poetry, uniting in diversity, the meaninglessness of it all and the meaning therein, the hopelessness and the hope therein, the meaning that is actually meaningless, and the type of hope that breeds hopelessness and the distinction therein.
It has been a hard week for my family. One sister calls me crying from small-town England because she can't find a minimum wage job and she is brilliant. The other calls crying from the Middle East cause she is locked in a royal palace — she is the bird in the golden cage and she is brilliant. My mom cries because I am not with her now, and I really fucking wish I were.
So frustrating to be born poor and have to climb so far just to reach a place where no one has anything to say. How often do you speak with an automated response? How deeply ingrained are our programmed responses? I know, the eternal optimist in me knows we all have something precious and rare to say. So I wish we would burn the fat and cut the small talk or even the big talk and just share sound and glances, share eyes and stories, universal and personal.
Two amazing women came over tonight. Beacons of light, beautiful, living heroes. Such a blessing to have them in my home, and yet, I see that I am only half there — closed. We talk about furniture instead of sharing the cool story about how I found two of the same bamboo rocking chairs on two different streets in the same week and now they are sitting in them like a perfect set. Instead, I just say the furniture belongs to my roommate who is never home. They ask me if I am in pain, and I say "yes" and answer a few questions about CAT scans and other tests when really I want to say that it is my heart that hurts the most, that I feel heartbroken from not waking up to look at the same curve of a back and intertwined fingers everyday, that I miss having the partnership that I see in them, that I miss living in a big group house with so many great friends making so much art, sharing so many hugs. Why did you all have to die and disappear? She needs to be held; these beautiful women hold her flesh but she is trapped inside like they say her birds are trapped inside of her. How am I meant to take flight with them?
She is an angel ready to raise hell. Sick of all these Biblical references — looking instead to the warrior goddess who was born of no one's sacred story but her own.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Hope you can join me at my lovers' day gallery show — February 14th...
Art is an Aphrodisiac
Copulating Creatures
Step into the love tunnel
Art lasts longer...
A Valentine's Day Gallery Show:
Cheap Prints and A Collector's Wet Dream...
Photographs by *layla love
(curated by Michael Richardo Andreev)
Thursday, February 14th
7-10pm
Sapphire Lounge
249 Eldridge Street (btwn Houston and Stanton)
212.777.5153
Every inch of wall will be covered with beautiful erotica.
And in the main bar area: Get your Lovers' Day Portraits taken for FREE. You have the chance to be featured in an upcoming show and on: http://www.nyc-artparty.com
**Photographers Layla Love and Becky Yee have professional lighting, glowing backdrops, and great talent — now, all we need is your face. Enjoy the passion of the moment, immortalize yourself in ART, bring a friend, bring a someone you love, bring someone you play with, bring your self-love*
Add a little shoot before or after...
*In the spirit of art as passion, I am scheduling private photo sessions: a great way to explore the love of another, a great gift, a beautiful activity to bring to your day. Self-love shoots available and encouraged.
To RSVP, inquire further: layla@lovephotography.org
www.lovephotography.org
917.687.0435
Saturday, February 9, 2008
It is afternoon. I am sitting on my bed in a small 10x10 room in Brooklyn. I like that it is square. Everything else in my life is asymmetrical and everything about me is round.
The walls are white. On the wall across from my bed, I have my quote from the Times Square billboard I ran during the summer. The rest of the walls are bare. I have a single window in front of me. A stick from a tree from home holds up a cream and brown forest — urban silhouettes of nature to hide the white paint peeling off the brick wall. I could almost jump into my neighbor's living room and introduce myself. I think I would like to. I would like to be a cat woman. I would like to have super powers right now: the power to take the quantum leap from barely surviving to actively thriving.
I need to be out there. I need to publish books and open centers. I need to document, to travel. I need to train my body to become a boxer. I need to drink more water. I need to lose more weight. I have to gain more control. I need to lose more tension. I need to gain more power. I need to lose this debt and I need to gain material wealth. I need to lose procrastination. I need to gain a Zen perspective on the power of "now." I need to lose self-help books and finish my own.
In the hospital, throwing-up, feeling anything but sexy. Contemplating the flux of human relations in this post-modern era where anything goes and often things are gone after a single night or one round. And what has holding power against the modern machine of the dating frenzy amplified by the Valentine's Day plug-in and match-up. Become a whore hobbyist - become something, something you are not now and do it fast — fuck — once you have those wrinkles, you are a dime a dozen in the used-up and thrown away women pile. No, ladies, we don't appreciate with age in this world. So if you want to assure your place in the golden age — to have any value as a woman — you better publish now — put something on paper — make it official - you have a brain — your body — ah, they say you have some something...some look that lures but you are far from refined — action before glamour, you say, and so it has been.
Yet now I am looking for healing — I am looking to rage against the machine — I want to be strong, to run up mountains and on beaches. I need to rise to the next level of my own potential here in my private hell on a Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn. How many other artists are sitting alone in front of their computers planning how to save the world, how to find themselves, how to make Saturday night worth the rest of the week, just how to keep on living. The under-privileged is what I call us. The bohemian dreamers who have risen above the status quo but not quite above the poverty-line (or maybe a step or two ahead or behind that mark) but still starving for the ability to actualize their potential by any means necessary. Then there are all those others.
I head into the city today to go to Callen-Lorde, the only health center for the sexually versatile within this oh so diverse city. I have been dealing with the blue collard bastards at Beth Israel all week. Dealing with their constant drug pushing and Court TV in the waiting room — how the fuck do you tell someone that they are dying and then send them out to a waiting room where they are forced to watch their fellow citizens duke it out on national television for a month's rent and a VCR. Stupid western doctors and their endless bag of tricks. There is little treatment left in the American system — treating means going to the root and uplifting the problem...healing the wound from the inside out. Not here. Here we just get offered a lifetime supply of drugs to numb the pain and details of how we can get laser surgery to cover-up our scars. Forget about even having a little old-fashioned rubbing alcohol to clean the cuts. No no...no room for bleeding hearts or commonsense here — the inside of American hospitals remind me of the commercials they show at half-time during the Super Bowl. Bring the best and worst of technology together, watching humans promote machines, watching us sing along to jingles for the latest fix. We are going to give you a stomach cocktail they tell me Friday night in the ER. I ask what is in it. The doctor replies, "It is just a cocktail; it covers everything, coating everything." I shake my head and say, "no thanks." I have to say "no" politely three times and she walks away with out asking why or offering any further details — she offered it to me — it's on record she and has covered her bases. I am released into the world of follow-up appointments.
The walls are white. On the wall across from my bed, I have my quote from the Times Square billboard I ran during the summer. The rest of the walls are bare. I have a single window in front of me. A stick from a tree from home holds up a cream and brown forest — urban silhouettes of nature to hide the white paint peeling off the brick wall. I could almost jump into my neighbor's living room and introduce myself. I think I would like to. I would like to be a cat woman. I would like to have super powers right now: the power to take the quantum leap from barely surviving to actively thriving.
I need to be out there. I need to publish books and open centers. I need to document, to travel. I need to train my body to become a boxer. I need to drink more water. I need to lose more weight. I have to gain more control. I need to lose more tension. I need to gain more power. I need to lose this debt and I need to gain material wealth. I need to lose procrastination. I need to gain a Zen perspective on the power of "now." I need to lose self-help books and finish my own.
In the hospital, throwing-up, feeling anything but sexy. Contemplating the flux of human relations in this post-modern era where anything goes and often things are gone after a single night or one round. And what has holding power against the modern machine of the dating frenzy amplified by the Valentine's Day plug-in and match-up. Become a whore hobbyist - become something, something you are not now and do it fast — fuck — once you have those wrinkles, you are a dime a dozen in the used-up and thrown away women pile. No, ladies, we don't appreciate with age in this world. So if you want to assure your place in the golden age — to have any value as a woman — you better publish now — put something on paper — make it official - you have a brain — your body — ah, they say you have some something...some look that lures but you are far from refined — action before glamour, you say, and so it has been.
Yet now I am looking for healing — I am looking to rage against the machine — I want to be strong, to run up mountains and on beaches. I need to rise to the next level of my own potential here in my private hell on a Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn. How many other artists are sitting alone in front of their computers planning how to save the world, how to find themselves, how to make Saturday night worth the rest of the week, just how to keep on living. The under-privileged is what I call us. The bohemian dreamers who have risen above the status quo but not quite above the poverty-line (or maybe a step or two ahead or behind that mark) but still starving for the ability to actualize their potential by any means necessary. Then there are all those others.
I head into the city today to go to Callen-Lorde, the only health center for the sexually versatile within this oh so diverse city. I have been dealing with the blue collard bastards at Beth Israel all week. Dealing with their constant drug pushing and Court TV in the waiting room — how the fuck do you tell someone that they are dying and then send them out to a waiting room where they are forced to watch their fellow citizens duke it out on national television for a month's rent and a VCR. Stupid western doctors and their endless bag of tricks. There is little treatment left in the American system — treating means going to the root and uplifting the problem...healing the wound from the inside out. Not here. Here we just get offered a lifetime supply of drugs to numb the pain and details of how we can get laser surgery to cover-up our scars. Forget about even having a little old-fashioned rubbing alcohol to clean the cuts. No no...no room for bleeding hearts or commonsense here — the inside of American hospitals remind me of the commercials they show at half-time during the Super Bowl. Bring the best and worst of technology together, watching humans promote machines, watching us sing along to jingles for the latest fix. We are going to give you a stomach cocktail they tell me Friday night in the ER. I ask what is in it. The doctor replies, "It is just a cocktail; it covers everything, coating everything." I shake my head and say, "no thanks." I have to say "no" politely three times and she walks away with out asking why or offering any further details — she offered it to me — it's on record she and has covered her bases. I am released into the world of follow-up appointments.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Big things come in small packages. Women raise your voices and your hands...in peace symbols and fists*
...If you need to be inspired, look no further. May we all join the path of the righteous. We are all leaders; we just need to actualize this great potential behind our breath.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
