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For the record, when painting walls a rich red, you need to do three coats to get a RICH red. That third coat was crucial. I don't know what I was thinking. You're looking at a 2.5 hour third coat of red. Now it's time to sort of put my house back together, then got out of this toxic place and see if my writing brain is still functioning . . .
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|  Here I go again.
I’m on the final push of My Almodovar Makeover 2009. When I’m done with this last Red Project, I’m hanging up on My Makeover until January. I put two coats of red paint on this area yesterday. My exhausted body really wanted it to be done, and in a futile gesture of hope, I took off all the tape and said to myself that two coats of paint is enough EVEN THOUGH I KNEW DAMN WELL THAT IT NEEDED A THIRD COAT. So this morning, I got my aching body out of bed and re-taped the walls and ceiling to apply the third coat. Here I go.
Punkabella absolutely loves My Almodovar Makeover. She dive bombs the drop cloths, gets tape stuck to her feet, and climbs the ladder at every opportunity.
Speaking of the ladder, up I go even though every inch of my body is screaming at me to STOP ALREADY. I'm ready to be done with this project for a couple of months.
When I’m done with the paint, I get to sew curtains. And it’s almost time to pull the heads out of the butts of the Automated Reindeer! The fun never stops.
Speaking of My Almodovar Makeover, who wants to see a photo spread of what I’ve done so far this year in a single installment?
Poll #1485810 My Almodovar Makeover Photo Spread Poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9Do you want to see a full photo spread of My Almodovar Makeover (the 2009 project)? | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | I sat down a while ago to write a very short entry about Cal's defeat of Arizona earlier this evening. Then it morphed into a much longer meditation on the fact that sports, even if they seem like a silly waste of time to those who have no passion for them, are no worse -- and no better -- than any other kind of investment in narrative. And then I eventually worked my way back around to say how delighted I was with today's result. But all that typing, five paragraphs worth, was lost when my application crashed before I could post or save what I'd written. I'm taking that as a sign that I should be wary of putting too much stock into the affairs of mortals. Still, I'd rather have them continue than find myself in some ascetic posture that is really a case of making a virtue of necessity. Because the messiness of love provides richer instruction than the crisp, clean reality of those who forego all interpersonal entanglements. Bear up! | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I have winter. It's only seven o'clock and it already feels like the middle of the night. My body clock is pretty convince of this, and is sure that cocoa, sofa and pTerry Pratchet is the way forward. This is a bit of a bind, as I have to go out and be social this evening, and turning down social engagments because you're hibernating seems to cause offence.
It shouldn't be hard to explain, or even to acknowledge to myself, that the reason I feel sleepy, introvert and homebodyish is because it is cold and dark and currently still blowing a storm. I'm not ill, I'm not depressed, there's nothing wrong, I'm just going along with the general ebb of energy nature is in at the moment. From a Pagan perspective it makes perfect sense; the time between Samhain and Yule is a time of darkness and quiet, of conserving energy, of reflection. Then things get a bit better with the Sun's return, and after Imbolc you can come out of hiding and get on with the new projects you set your sights on at Yule. Try explaining that to someone with no familiarity of nature-based philosophy though.
Of course, my current posting to Haywards Heath and the hour-to-hour-and-a-half commute each way it entails isn't helping, but that's a temporary inconvenience that will come to an end in a couple of weeks. I get like this every year, and every year I try and force myself to be social, which more often than not ends in upset and drama. So, this year, I'm acknowledging the ebb and going with it.
So, if you don't see much of me over the next month or so, I'm perfectly alright, I'm probably just asleep. Under the stove. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| I have two Movie Memoir pieces that I want to write this weekend:
- A piece in response to A.O. Scott’s article on exposing to children to more “difficult” cinema.
- A piece in response to 2012 (which I saw yesterday and loved for the pure fun of it) and my lifelong love of disaster movies.
But first I have to paint another red wall and two more doors. Then I’m calling it quits on painting until January. So my full KDD Writing will be back soon.
In the meanwhile, I have to mention that while I was at the movies I saw this commercial for Levi's jeans:
Beautiful and touching isn’t it? In case you didn’t recognize the voice, that voiceover is the actual voice of Walt Whitman singing the praises of America. Too bad this sentimental look at America doesn’t mention that Levi's has closed down all their American production and put thousands of people out of work. How dare they produce such an egregiously self-congratulatory and hypocritical advertisement exploiting the dead poet Walt Whitman and all the American workers the company put on the unemployment rolls.
As a native San Franciscan, the original home of Levi's jeans, I grew up wearing nothing but Levis. Levis continued to be my only “jean of choice” throughout my adult life. I was devastated when they went global and closed down American production. And for the record, their jeans got shittier when they closed U.S. production. No longer could you buy a standard pair of 501 jeans (the same ones I’d been wearing for over thirty years). Now they constantly have to have new jeans with new numbers and new styles (all shitty) which produced in places like China. Yet, they want us to believe that they care about Americans. The only thing Levis cares about Americans for is our credit cards, our cash, our participation in the profits, our money which buys their products that are produced by cheap overseas labor.
It’s no surprise that so many companies have gone global in their production. It’s one thing to put people out of work and outsource labor. It’s another to produce such egregious lies in advertising your product. Shame on you Levi's. Fuck you and your big lying exploitive ad. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| 
Artist: Les Baxter
Album: African Jazz
Year: 1959
Stile: jazz
Bitrate: 320
Size, Мб: 63
NOTE : is one of the most fantastic exotica albums
( info, links ) | | comments: Leave a comment |
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Dear World,
I have been hit by the Ton Of Bricks. I don’t know where they came from, but they seemed to arrive with the dirty wind beating my windows last night, and then there was the issue with the shower and how it wouldn’t turn off so I spent all night listening to DRIP DRIP DRIP DRIP.
I want to sleep. Oh, how I want to crawl under the covers and just spend a day sleeping. Instead I work.
Last night, when I wasn’t listening to the water drip in the shower, I fell into dreams of my grandmother’s house. My childhood was stacked up like a deck of cards and she slapped them down on the table playing a losing game of solitaire and smoking a Bel-Air cigarette. That was my face buried under the Queen of Spades. I wanted to grab it, keep it, share it with my daughter, but the cards kept falling and I couldn’t grab my face from the pile.
I have run myself into the ground, but I’m going to keep running. Until I fall.
I have a million words for a million things I want to tell you circling through my head. Instead I yawn.
Oh world, I would love to make a comeback but right now I can’t even count my fingers.
Oh world, I need to cut out of here and watch the end of you. Let’s face it. I’m only capable of doing two things today – sleeping or watching a movie. I’ll opt for the movie and hope that watching the world explode will keep me awake.
Bye bye exhausting world.
KDD | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| 
Исполнитель: Адо
Название альбома: Веди себя хорошо
Год выпуска: 1996
Стиль: поп-рок
Битрейт: 320
Размер, Мб: 72
пожалуй, самый известный альбом группы Адо
| | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Tags: | bugs, csi wii, fck, lj_cares, lj_photophile, notes, rte, writer's block | | Subject: | LiveJournal Major Notes: Notes, Tweaks, Bug Kills, LJ_Cares! | | Time: | 01:53 pm |
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Notes augmented
We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!
Product tweaks and bug kill
- In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
- If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
- The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
- If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
- If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
- Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)
New FCK fixes rich text editor!
- We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
- When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
- RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
- An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
- The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers
LiveJournal Cares
We’re pleased to introduce you to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.
In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.
Papered in postcards
A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.
Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!
Photos of the week
We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.
You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!
( Read more... )
Curtains
We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week! | | comments: 116 comments or Leave a comment |
| Url: http://www.mi2n.com/services/mi2n_press.php3
With a dozen years at the forefront of music PR, Mi2N announced the launch of MI2N-PRESS. MI2N-PRESS provides a complete PR solution for independent artists, labels and music companies, including professional press release writing and the option to combine the service with selected Mi2N Music PR marketing packages.
Everyone knows that the music industry isn't just about music; it's about business as well. Now, more than ever, artists must be able to successfully express their unique brand and convey news about upcoming performances or the release of a new track or CD to their target audiences. As the leading music news source and major online artist marketer, Mi2N has over a decade's experience working with people on both sides of the PR sector and knows what it takes to get results.
"Online PR has proven to be one of the most effective and affordable ways for independent artists and labels to reach out to new fans and industry professionals," commented Eric de Fontenay, Mi2N's Founder and Editor. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| COLLAGE
I picked up some old Aperture magazines at Bookman’s for five bucks to use for part of the big B&W collage I’m working on. (I’ve decided to make a great big huge poster size black and white collage.) The thing about Aperture is that they are really great art magazines with excellent photography and essays. It’s a shame to cut them up, I always them front to cover before I take my scissors to them. I found this issue from Summer 1996 that focuses on different kinds of communal living in the United States. Fascinating stories and photo essays.
GYPSY CULTURE
( I couldn’t find any images by Cristina Salvador. This photo by Rana Halprin is the only image of California Gypsies that I could find. )
Of particular interest to me was a feature on gypsy culture by Cristina Salvador – “American Roma: The Hidden Gypsy World.” It’s amazing how many myths and prejudices continue to circulate about gypsy culture. Gypsies (Romani) were originally from India (with possibly some African) and have been wandering without land for centuries. Here is a telling fact. During World War II, the Nazis exterminated the same percentage of the gypsy population as the Jewish population, yet there was never any trial or attempt at reparation for the gypsy holocaust. The essay in the book gives a lot of the history and ethnography of gypsy culture, but then focuses primarily on Romani subculture in the Los Angeles area. Particularly noteworthy is how, because of their extreme outsider status, the Calfornia Romani have been able to preserve their native language. Over 90% of gypsy children are raised speaking their native language Romani. Language death is evidence of the death of a culture, so while gypsies have continued to be an ethnic group subject to mass discrimination, that very discrimination and marginalization have allowed them to maintain their cultural integrity. Interesting stuff.
BUSHVILLE
Homes in Bushville. Bottom right is Bushville after it was leveled by Giuliani.
I found another article of interest about a settlement built by homeless people in Tompkins Square Park in the 1990s. Reading about these people who carved out a sense of home and community in the middle of an urban landscape and how they inscribed culture and color and individuality on their space is a testament to human will but also a sad commentary on how divided this country is between the haves and have nots, how that “American Dream” is no dream at all for a lot of people in this country. What was striking to me was reading about this community from the 1990s and thinking about how that kind of “homeless presence” has been eradicated from the urban landscape. We don’t see these kinds of homeless communities anymore. They have been erased by redevelopment and “urban renewal” (e.g. corporate interests). The first thing I thought about when reading it is: “I wonder how long it took Giuliani to destroy it.” It turns out that Giuliani had Bushville leveled in 1997. This interesting article talks about the further marginalization of the homeless in the new post-Giuliani era (a system of erasure that could be applied to almost all major US cities). Needless to say that there was no way I could cut up these photos and destroy this archived legacy of these peoples’ homes. I had to keep them and the article in tact to honor these people who have already been socially dismembered. To cut up the historical document of the place they tried to carve out for themselves but then was destroyed by Giuliani’s fascist empire would have been a crime. So I’ll keep them in their original form.
Here’s a really good descriptive 1993 article from the New York Times that delivers an excellent portrait of what life was like in Bushville.
More on Bushville can be found in Morton’s book Fragile Dwelling.
DOCUMENTARY: TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE
Speaking of War Crimes, I finally got around to watching the documentary Taxi To The Dark Side. Dark Side, indeed. This documentary details with clear, sickening documentary evidence the Torture Industry that thrived under the Bush administration. It is utterly appalling and unfathomable to me that human beings could do the things that these people did to other human beings. Sickening also is the complicity of the government, that the government legislated the practices of torture and murder. What a bunch of monsters – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, the fuckwad Bush, and the especially scary John Yoo who masterminded the language that gave the Bush administration free reign to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and allow torture. Focusing on the brutal murder-by-torture of an innocent Afghani taxi driver in the Bagram prison in Afghanistan but then expanding to document torture practices in Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo, the film exposes how the United States government promoted the heinous and inhumane practice of torture. The movie is exceptionally grueling to watch. After watching it, I find it even more unfathomable that these motherfuckers got away with murder. They are so clearly guilty of horrible acts of violence against humanity. It is so clear that the ideology of Nazi Germany and the ideology of the Bush Administration were not far removed. That whole administration needs to be tried and convicted for war crimes.
I should note that I wanted to see the movie because the cinematographer is the same cinematographer who did The Wrestler, and her work here is equally incredible. I am a firm believer that a documentary is beholden to good filmmaking and needs to be well constructed and put together with mastery of the art. It is not enough to simply document events; a documentary has to be an exercise in good thoughtful innovative filmmaking, and Taxi To The Dark Side certainly is that. But wow, it’s very hardcore.
THOMAS DEMAND
 Thomas Demand, Corridor
Speaking of War Crimes, I’ve been meaning to tell you about Thomas Demand. He is catalogued as a photographer, but really his work is a crossover between photography, sculpture and assemblage. The premise of his work is utterly fascinating to me. He finds images in the media, many of which are archival materials from some kind of violent history, and then he recreates the scenes with paper sculptures and then photographs them. The photograph of his replica model is the final art product. In recreating media images that have saturated our mass consciousness, Demand is addressing how the media turns horror into artifact, how significant events become things/objects once distilled and packaged through the mass media machine. Somehow the horror and humanity of a particular historic moment becomes erased through the repetition of media representation. The actual event becomes its media representation rather than an event that had real effect on real people.
 Thomas Demand, Archive
Demand’s pieces manage to be chillingly detached, clinical, and void of human presence, but they are also creepily eerie and laden with a kind of invisible horror. This disturbing tension is most apparent in relation to his pieces “Corridor” and “Archive.” “Corridor” is a reconstruction of the hallway outside Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment . “Archive” is a recreation of Leni Riefenstahl’s film archives. Reifenstahl made propaganda films for the Nazis which disseminated Nazi ideology to the masses and helped condition the German public to accept the extermination of whole populations (e.g. Jews and gypsies) as something humanly acceptable. Dahmer murdered seventeen men and boys in the apartment that Demand depicts. In both of these instances, Demand studied every detail of the media representation of the location, and then he created a model out of paper. Look closely at the images and note that the doors don’t have handles, the lights don’t have switches, and you can see cracks and gaps where the paper comes together. It is this emptiness and the leaking spaces between paper that is so unsettling and echoes with the horrific history of the events that have been contained by clinical representation. I could write a ton about Thomas Demand, and maybe someday I will.
I have a couple of other things I wanted to add to this Media Update, but I just ran out of time. Off to work, and then to chug away on new memoir piece.
Have a nice day, and see you soon. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| | I was overwhelmed by my viewing largess tonight, getting to watch the Cal men's basketball team play for the second time in a week in November. And next week I get to see them take on my father's alma mater Syracuse in Madison Square Garden! Even though that I know that these opportunities are coming my way because Cal was ranked in the pre-season poll and realize that their visibility will make this season a struggle in ways that last year never was, I'm excited. Tonight they shook off some of the rust evident on Monday and won going away against a team with a good deal of talent, much of it imported from Indiana after Kelvin Sampson's brief tenure there ended abruptly. And the cushion they carried through most of the second half gave me the chance to see some of their less familiar players showcase their skills. Most impressively, our undermuscled 7'3" center Max Zhang demonstrated that he knows how to play the game the right way, setting nice screens, blocking shots and following misses on the offense end with a sense of purpose. If he can "strengthen up" over the course of the season, he could be the difference-maker this otherwise short team needs. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | I ended up spending all day working on putting my house and art studio back together. Not done yet. But I LOVE IT SO FUCKING MUCH. My PURPLE WALL IS AMAZING. I wish you could all come over to see it. When I'm done with this makeover, I am going to get so much kick ass art and writing done. I need to clean out my psychic space and make it a thriving creative environment. Sometimes this is necessary to clear the art and writing airways. Photos later. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
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